Do You Accept Evolution as a Fact?

[Rogerioandrade]

SpokenTruth said:

Rogerioandrade said:

In that sense, then should people decide to live either by the social/cultural standards dictated by science and its theories or by the social/cultural  standards dictated by religion and its "myths" ?

I dont think so. I don´t have any problem living with both concepts and ideas and using one integrated to another. Neither any of my close christian, buddish or muslim friends and/or work partners.

This is exactly what I said before: people prefer to be divisive and to polarize science and religion instead of trying to understand that , although different in essence as human knowledge, both are necessary for mankind in their own way and people can live with both ideas, if they´re smart and tolerant enough for that.

I think you've misunderstood me.  I said they are not opposites or enemies for a reason.  They can co-exist.  Tolerance, as you said, is key. When I said they shouldn't be mixed, I didn't mean on personal level, I mean as a combined construct.  When you mix the two as one, you produce a product that weakens them both.

Using the Bible as a scientific guide, point of reference, etc...is not how science works.  Science does not start with a conclusion and then try to find pieces that fit.  Doing it that way means you can make up anything and then find correlations to fit it and call it truth.   For example, the Bible suggests the Earth is 6,000 years old.  If you start with that as your conclusion, you can make up any theory you want for how....but worse, you'd have to ignore voluminous data suggesting otherwise.  And then stop.  You'd never revisit it.  Never learn something new.  A fundamental fact is science is the willingness to accept new data to revise knowledge.  If you "know" the answer already, you close out any new data, any new facts, any new knowledge.

To further get my point, when people first began to try to date the age of the Earth, they didn't pick a value first and then go look for proof.  They developed methods to determine how old things were and then applied those to get an age.  The intent wasn't to prove the Bible wrong but merely to answer the question, "How old is Earth?"  

Science is 'ask question, discover answer'.  Religious based science would be 'answer given, discover correlations'.  Science isn't about finding out what you know (Biblical answers) but what you don't know.  Science isn't about testing to get the answer you want.  It's about getting the answer regardless of the results.  It's a lead by the question policy whereas religious based would be lead by the answer. 

This is why you can't mix them into one product.  You alter the very fundamental concept of scientific inquiry.

That´s not the point.

I´m not saying that I´d use one to prove things on another or vice-versa, and I´m not saying that we should mix them at all.

What I´m just trying to explain is that it´s possible to live with both, and it´s possible to find parallels between them. A simple example is that, in a certain way, the history of the creation in the Bible is just a smaller version of the scientific evolutionary theory. I´m not mixing them, I´m just saying that there are certain ideas that are not opposite at all in both religion and science.