Well, if you’re going by my proposed “Merv scale” the confidence that there is reality outside of my head was pegged as 99%. So you’re a little more sure of common descent than you are of reality itself. Good to know where your foundations are!
I think this is consistent… as long as we accept the possibility that Evolution still exists even in a non-physical Cosmos…
Hey @SuperBigV, in addition to all the excellent BioLogos posts that will sent your way, you might benefit from an overview here (which links back to about 10 articles from BioLogos).
The summary is simple. Now that we sequenced both the human and chimp genomes, and we have discovered and sequenced several other ancient hominids, it is very difficult to imagine evidence that would overturn the common descent of man. It is hard to imagine any scientific theory that would simultaneously explain everything we know without relying on common descent.
The evidence, therefore, is very strong. In science, though, nothing is for certain. Maybe our imagination is impoverished, and something truly dramatic will alter everything. Honestly, given what we know now, it is hard to imagine what that could be.
Indeed I would say that the advent of genetic sequencing is showing up manymore interspecies rekationships that this is becoming one of the strongest contenders to support evolutuion theory.
Yet my question to the anti-evolution people is why evolution should be seen as threat to belief in God. I am supposing it must be because if they feel its apparent conflict with the two stories of creation in Genesis (yes two stories) questions the reliabiity of scripture. Such fears I think are not as great as they are imagine them to be. It is I think instead belief in some historical unfallibility of Genesis that makes Christain faith a laughing stock that will do more to undermine Christian faith far more than denying Genesis as history.
There is is too me no conflict between the scientific acceptance of God as “evolver” rather than instant creator. It shows a God of patience and humility, who gives freedom and carefully waits for life to unfold. The arising of humanity in time, gifted with free intelligence is no less marvelous than the Genesis stories
It also to my mind helps explain better the pain and suffering in creation as a consequence of freedom rather than something God inflicts on creation because of human sin. Which do we really want to believe in, diseases that have evolved accidently in evolution, affecting all of creation, or disease and death engineered and inflicted upon innocent children and other forms of innocent life just because of human sin? I think the latter makes God look like a evil tyrant and not a God of Love shown to us in Jesus Christ.
I have been in the habit of telling lay Christian people who ask me this (they know I was a biochemist) that either we have common ancestors with other apes or God went to a great deal of trouble to make it look like that’s what happened. In addition to the fine resources at Biologos, I wrote a blog post a few years ago that is one take on the issue. It includes a figure of an aligned segment of human and chimp DNA. The Art of the Soluble: Transposable Elements and Common Descent of Humans and other Primates
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You realize that an immaterial reality still exists outside your head (figurative, because you don’t have a physical head) as a consistent and firm creation of God. Also, @gbrooks9 the laws of science still apply: because real life is ordered and predictable, and science is how we organize our knowledge about that order and predictability… BUT whether or not evolution actually “happened” is another matter. Who knows. But it doesn’t matter because no one was “there” (to channel Ken Ham) except God, and now the world appears exactly as if it did happen.
To answer the question @SuperBigV: 100% solid within the context of science. No future discoveries will put it into doubt. The above alludes to my post here on the existence of God.
[quote=“pacificmaelstrom, post:16, topic:5369”]
You realize that an immaterial reality still exists outside your head (figurative, because you don’t have a physical head) as a consistent and firm creation of God.
[/quote] [my emphasis added]
I say ‘real’. You say ‘not real’. I say ‘material’. You say ‘immaterial’ … Let’s call the whole thing off! 
All we’re doing here is applying different labels to the same things. There is nothing to be gained except confusion when you reverse the agreed upon meaning of words.
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[quote=“Mervin_Bitikofer, post:17, topic:5369, full:true”]
Don’t put your failure to understand on me. Read about it.
Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. In Genesis it says God “created.” It doesn’t explain “how”'nor could it have done so–given the complete lack of scientific understanding available at the time. I have never understood why those who take Genesis literally would rather believe he “spoke” the world into existence rather than using science to create not only a world that would support human life (before human life existed) but then create a human that could live in the place he built. I find that science strengthens my belief in the Bible and that it supports many events that otherwise would have to be accepted as “magic.” But it only does so if you are willing to accept the fact that those who wrote the Bible were writing so that those in their generation (with no scientific understanding) and generations to come would understand the content of that message if not in the same way, in the same context.
Look at it this way: find a better, peer-reviewed alternate model of speciation and you will win a Nobel Prize for Science.
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Sort of related to this, just read a review of Mukherjee’s book, “The Gene: An Intimate History” and will be putting it on my short list to read. Review is here:
That book is not endorsed by scientists. Many of us think he gets major things wrong. Please do not consider it authoritative or accurate.
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Thanks for the input. What do you think of his first book about cancer?
I read through the comments on the review, they give a pretty good overview of the critics view, but still appears to be a good book for the lay audience who do not really grasp or care about the arguments about the finer points.
So regarding The Gene, this is a very good and accurate review:
Given how horribly wrong he gets thing in this book, I am doubtful about his book on cancer. I cannot comment specifically on it though.
One thing that strikes me about this is how poor public treatments of biology often are. Biology is a challenging subject, but the public people claiming to explain often so severely dumb it down that it ends up just being wrong. I’m not sure the best way deal with this.
We could never know. Evolution is fluid, in that, even if they discover something that refutes evolutionary models. They just include, rewrite, no recant and create a new evolutionary model 
We could never know. Evolution is fluid, meaning even if they discover something that refutes evolutionary models. They just include, rewrite, no recant and create a new evolutionary model
Pretty much. That is what science does, attempts to integrate new information to provide a better understanding of what is happening without clinging to erroneous ideas. Contrast that with some YEC adherents, who instead do the opposite: they ignore, distort, and misrepresent information that does not fit their narrow interpretation.
You hit the nail on the head, and I suspect most here agree with you.
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“better understanding”? My friend, the “science” you are referring to is nothing but assumption and conjecture based on nothing but biased presupposition that quickly eliminates the supernatural in order to promote the natural, but in reality is even more supernatural in it’s origin 
A pretty good description of YEC “science” I agree. I would have more respect for Ken Ham were he to say the flood was a combination of miracles, than I do for his attempt to explain it in a materialistic and pseudo-scientific way.
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The multiple cases of Ring Species … where the terminal ends of a unified population are essentially incompatible with each other … is the PERFECT PROOF from Science that Evolution is real:
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continuity between the sub-groups proves they are all part of a “common ancestry”.
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the incompatibility of the terminal ends proves two groups from a common ancestry CAN become two different species.
Frankly, it’s CASE CLOSED.
I read the Emperor of All Maladies, and as far as I could tell, it was a good account. It has more to do with the history of approaches to cancer therapy (and the politics) than the research oriented ideas about how cancer originates and new targeted approaches that prevail today. I’m not an oncologist - my closest approach was two years in med school during the '70s, and I spent the last 10 years of my career working on a human tumor suppressor, which gave me impetus to read the cancer research literature.
I think the clinical practice of oncology in the past was pretty far removed from the research world of today. He did a pretty good job on the history of the former (it’s shocking now how primitive were the early ideas in chemotherapy.) It’s certainly not a book about how to be an oncologist today or to understand current ideas about cancer.