What is your take on evolution/old age earth?

[highwaystar101]

Slimebeast said:

highwaystar101 said:

Slimebeast said:

I don't believe in current evolution theory.

We've gone through some things before, things i have problems with. Like the lack of evolution in bacteria and even some higher order species (like that fish that hasn't changed in 70 million years or something, forgot the name). The lack of skeletons from humanoids puzzles me.

And I don't trust the guys who reconstruct and interpret these monkey skeletons and postulate human evolutionary trees. Too amateurish. It's too much global warming hoax over it all.

There's the mystery of the conscious mind which evolutionists can't explain.

The mystery of the rapid evolution of human culture and intellect, and it's complexity. How stuff like our interest in art & music etc are explained.

The mystery of human altruism and morals. Even Dawkins admits that it's very mysterious.

Plus I'm a Christian so obviously I have a problem with Darwinian evolution without divine interference. If I wasn't religious maybe I would have just ate it all up without having done any deeper studies.

I'm sorry but your logic doesn't work. By your reasoning an theory can't be valid unless it answers 100% of the questions posed to it.

Well I've got news for you, the world doesn't work like that, and if that were the case you would have dismiss pretty much all science.

Science is the search for an answer, and something like most fields of science evolution doesn't have a simple answer for everything; so we have to research, find and interpret evidence, and discover the answer; this has been an ongoing process for the last 150 years. No one is going to say the current model of evolution is 100% complete, and I'm sure everyone will happily admit that there are things we just don't know about.

What we do know is that a lot of evidence supports the theory of evolution, we know it has happened and we know it is happening. We can't explain all the details, but more than enough evidence exists to show that it does happen.

Applying your logic to another situation could be done with gravity. We know gravity exists, but don't know everything about it (not by a long shot). Does this mean that gravity doesn't exist because we don't know everything about it, despite enough evidence existing to prove its existence? No. Of course not.

Yet you've applied this same logic to evolution.

In my opinion you have a restricted view on reality.

So just because science is limited because of technological reasons, time, physical reality and whatever, you just resign and stop to ponder about our existense?

I don't work like that.

I have reasons to believe in a God, based on stuff we've gone through before and other stuff I haven't told you.

A human individual makes up his or her world view through experience, knowledge, observation and by logically putting it all together in your intellect, okay?

I can't wait for the 1000th monkey skeleton to be found which would prove beyond reasonable doubt that we in fact evolved from slime, through chimps to humans without any unnatural events or divine intervention, and meanwhile just "trust" the palenthological community based on a few fracture skulls and rely on their human error and bias. I'll be long dead by then.

Same with these what I choose to call "mysteries", unanswered phenomenons of reality that are very important in existential thinking and your world view. (big bang, something-out-of-nothing, the concept of the conscious mind, abiogenesis, absolute morals, etc etc all these questions that science has no answers to).

I simply can't wait for "hard" evidence for the above important phenomenons, I have to make up my world view now, based on the knowledge I have, the knowledge that we have today. And my conclusions are that God exists, he is reveled through Jesus and the current evolution theory doesn't fit very well with that. And without hard proof I have no strong reasons to believe in something that contradicts the rest of my world view.

Yes science is limited by certain factors, all fields are. But the range of the limitations is what is important, having limitations is not an absolute state.

For some fields we can only merely speculate on what is occurring due to a lack of evidence caused by extreme limitations. Other fields are limited, but not limited to any major degree, so we have enough evidence to come up with a reasonable and logical explanation. Evolution falls under the latter.

Yes we have a lack of fossils the further back through time you go (as in hundreds of millions of years) for various geological reasons, that is a limitation; but that limitation does not hinder the fact that enough evidence has been collected to show that evolution occurs.

Even so, we will work hard to overcome that limitation so that we can better define and understand the concept of evolution.

The answer is not complete, but it's good enough to understand what happens. We just always want a better one.

If I can suggest some reading, Isaac Asimovs The relativity of wrong.

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Palaeontology goes through an extremely rigorous peer review process with nothing being accepted without hard evidence, and takes years of dedication by millions of people around the world, and has done so for centuries. I don't know why you seem to think that it is guess work with an error rate of 99%.

And I don't "trust" these people, I am occasionally sceptical about claims I hear made, and I certainly don't think they hold all the answers. But I am willing to give them credit for their hard earned expertise.

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I've said it before Slimebeast, and each time I'm a little worried about offending, and I apologise if I do. But I shall say it again anyway. I think that you have been presented with enough evidence for evolution over this website (and through other sources I imagine), and I know that you're a very bright person and fully understand what you are being presented with, but you find it conflicting with your faith. As such, whenever I debate you I always feel as though you feel as though you are compelled to refuse evolution, regardless of what you are presented with. Your last paragraph pretty much summed this up for me.