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MissBabydoll -> RE: God, Darwin, and Kansas (11/11/2006 9:46:04 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: SirKenin
You still have yet to get any facts straight CD. They were right about the pigs and whistle. I will try once more though.
Creationism explains, if not taken to be a literal six days, the stages of evolution from the \Big Bang to the existence of Ubadian settlements. It was simplified to pass it down from generation to generation before the advent of writing in 3000 BC.
The Chaos Theory explains that the world is not random at all. There is nothing random about it. It explains that everything, even though it appears to be random, such as the atmosphere, solar system, economics and population growth actually has order to it. An interesting example is any coastline along the ocean. View it from space. You will see bays. Continue to zoom in. You will continue to see them. Keep zooming in down to the particles of sand on the beach. You will continue to see them, and a mathematical formula will apply. Of course, if you still cannot get this through your head I will provide the equation and further explanation for you.
It is our poorly educated masses that keep this debate going on. It is people like you that do not have the first clue about history, science, mathematics or society that makes these absurd claims and maintains a closed mind, keeping the world from exploring the possibilities and opening us up to new and fantastic discoveries. Of course the fundamentalist right is equally to blame. I know you are trying to excuse your actions by saying there is no God and thus eradicating any sense of accountability. You have already made that very clear. You are not alone. Millions of people do it. However, it is starting to appear that viewpoint makes about as much sense as the theory that we are just here at random.
Bear in mind that the theory of Creation and it's many interpretations has been around for more than 6000 years. The theory of Evolution can not even hold a candle to that. The two can coexist, if people like you would stop being so narrow minded.
The first problem here is the use of the word "theory" to describe both creation myths (anyone's, not just the Christian reading of the first book of the Torah, which is quite obviously a conflation of several oral narratives from different periods of Jewish history) and the scientific body of knowledge known popularly as "the theory of evolution."
First off, as Stephen J. Gould points out, biological evolution is not a theory. It's a *fact*. It's a fact that countless species over billions of years have come and gone, and that life on earth has changed, and that new species have developed out of previous ones. The evidence for this fact is overwhelming: the fossil and geological record, morphology, radioisotopic dating, species distribution, and now genomics--as well as, in real time, microbic resistance to antibiotics and antivirals, and countless lab experiments on fruitflies and other fast-reproducing creatures. Natural selection, the explanation for biological evolution first advanced by Charles Darwin, is a theory. In nearly 150 years since he published *The Origin of Species*, the theory has been tested countless times against observable reality, and found to be by far the best explanation we have. There is still debate among scientists about all the ways in and levels at which natural selection operates--is it only at the level of the gene, or are organisms and even communities of organisms co-evolving?--but no sane biologist now argues that natural selection is not the main mechanism of evolution.
This brings me to the issue of what a "theory" is. The conflation of stories Christians call by the Greek name "Genesis" is not a theory. It is a mythical explanation based on a very limited knowledge of the nature of the physical universe. It is often beautiful and has poetic resonance, because those ancient Hebrew herdsmen, my distant ancestors, saw the same sky and breathed the same air and drank the same water we do, and also had kinship systems and fought and made friends and fell in love and had babies and died, and so confronted basically similar existential questions. The theory of natural selection, on the other hand, is based on and reinforced by a vast accumulation of empirical evidence, much of it not intuitive at all: who would have guessed before genomics that the closest cousin of the hippopotamus was not the rhino or the elephant (which it superficially resembles) but the dolphin? This makes sense, though, if you remember that the cetacea, like the hippo, evolved in rivers (and a few species of dolphins still live in them). And I'm sorry, but the beginning of Genesis does not sound like an account of the Big Bang to me. The ancient Hebrews knew nothing about star formation, or comet bombardment leading to the formation of the oceans, or the structure of galaxies, or the bulk of the history of life on earth, which was fermentative and bacterial, not photosynthetic. Trying to twist words in a creation myth around to make them sound like what we now know and believe about the history of the universe and of life is just an exercise in self-delusion, like all fundamentalist Biblical hermeneutics. I'm a poet and a scholar of poetry, and I think poetry has its own truth, which is not the truth of a scientific theory, which must be observable, testable, accurately predictive, and disprovable in principle. The stories in Genesis do not meet these criteria.
The fact that a person can post on here and say flatly "I don't believe in evolution," a statement as utterly ludicrous as "I don't believe in oxygen," and not be ridiculed shows that education is science and indeed any form of critical reasoning has been crippled by pressures from organized religion, mainly fundamentalist Christianity. This has to stop, or we head into a new Dark Age. No, I am not tolerant of religious views when they bring harm to others, and religious fundamentalism is harmful on a scale that global warming is about to bring home quite dramatically--not to mention the forthcoming overthrow of Roe v. Wade. I will fight the fundies to my last breath, and I will not play nice with them. Will any of you people stand up for the establishment clause of the First Amendment?
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