In high school I remember reading about an experiment. Some years ago a scientist did an experiment and proved life can spontaneously be generated. If I remember right, he took some meat and put it in a sealed room and a few days later flies spontaneously appeared. Do present day scientists still believe that or was that scientist wrong? I figure because he was a scientist he would have used the proper procedures and couldn’t have been wrong with the data he ended up with.
No one in modern science thinks complex multicellular organisms emerge in days from non-living matter. However, creationists seem to believe in such things.
The entire reason for having the scientific method is that humans are fallible. One of the most exciting things in science is figuring out why a theory is wrong. If you want to hear protestations of infallible bare assertions you should search out material from creationists.
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I’m sorry–I’m having difficulty getting this to play. It says to “try again later.” I’m looking forward to it! Thanks.
How did the original single cell organism come into existence? By what internal functions did it obtain the ability to nourish itself? What did it eat? What is the average life span of most single cell organisms? What caused the first one to live long enough to multiply? How did it get its ability to multiply? Was that first organism the father/mother of all living things? If so, how do you know? If it died before it multiplied, how long do you think it took for another organism to spontaneously appear? Repeat above questions for this organism………Oh. How do you know after the cell divided that both of those lived. Good chance they died; there wasn’t anybody else to eat, unless the second one ate the first one. But then that would probably happen the next go-round so the next cell would be all by itself until it divided….this is starting to sound like the circle of death rather than the circle of life.
No one knows. However, we do know that modern species share a common ancestor.
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The probability of your card hypothetical is so large, I’m going to call BS on your claim that it has actually happened. UNLESS, the decks were improperly shuffled, or some other non-random act.
I’m wondering if you are then suggesting that EVERYTHING that happens has roughly the same probability of everything else that happens. If you believe that, I am not sure we can have a productive dialog.
If you DON’T believe that, then SOME things are more likely to happen than others. Some things are extremely more likely and some extremely less likely. Now we are definitely within the realm of mathematically producing the probability of some events. Which brings us back to 1 in 10^26… which brings us back to mathematically impossible. Get back to me when you get your cards to shuffle - but I want to see the original footage of the video. Your drunk uncle’s story about playing Texas Hold Em doesn’t count.
That said, “why”? Why did these inanimate proteins put themselves together and magically come to life? To my knowledge, this has not been able to be replicated in any lab, any where. Some may call this peer review… and using those guidelines, the claim is deemed unsubstantiated, or unrepeatable… and not given any credence.
Scientific disciplines work by consensus. If you come up with an interpretation of that data that 99.9% of other experts in your field dispute, it isn’t a valid interpretation. It’s actually the same in theology. If you propose a Bible intepretation that 99.9% of Christian theologians and Bible scholars dispute, it isn’t orthodox. You can go start your own cult, but don’t be surprised if Christians aren’t too thrilled about you labeling your interpretation a Christian position. That is how most scientists feel about a miniscule minority labeling flood geology a scientific position.
A person’s Christian worldview should not affect how they interpret empirical data. The scientific method is designed to mute worldview biases. If people are following it properly, it won’t matter if you do your measurements and tests as a Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, or Pastafarian.
Of course not. But scientific consensus is not a popularity contest for theories, nor is it presented as such in the article. It’s a rigorous vetting process to see if hypotheses can be falsified and other experts can get similar empirical measurements and test results and draw similar inferences from the data.
He should not have included scientific errors. The thing about facts is they can be checked. YEC don’t really respect facts though, so it makes these conversations difficult.
Again we are not talking about individual scientists, we are talking about scientific consensus. Do you believe that we can get some things right? Do we know the speed of light? Do we know the earth is round? Do you grant that some scientific facts are knowable and have been established as true? All science is provisional to some degree and all knowledge can be deepened and refined. But that does not entail that nothing is certain. No epistemology grants you the kind of certainty you seem to imply exists.
The evolutionary model is built on multiple converging lines of evidence that have not been disproven for 100 years. Instead, it has successfully predicted even more evidence, which continues to be found. Unlike creationism, it is a completely falsifiable theory, but one which has not been falsified. The lines of evidence include comparative anatomy (whales, bats, and monkeys have the same bones in their upper limbs), embryology and development (genes turn off developmental pathways that are seen in their ancestors and related species at points in embryonic development), the fossil record (faunal succession), comparative DNA evidence (shared genes between species indicate common descent), species distribution (for example marsupials in Australia), evolution observed (for example in antibiotic resistant bacteria), the predictive power of the model (fossils of Tiktaalik were found exactly in Antarctica where the evolutionary model predicted a transitional form between fish and land animals would be found), and nested heirarchies of traits (shared traits between species are arranged in a bush-like way based on shared ancestry). Here is an 11 minute video that lays this all out nicely: What Is The Evidence For Evolution? • Stated Clearly
The geology of the Grand Canyon is well-studied. Some Christian geologists have written a nice book about it called the Grand Canyon, A Monument to an Ancient Earth. Experts in geology agree with the evidence in that book. Experts in geology do not agree with the Institute for Creation Research or Answers in Genesis. They ignore important data and actively hide other data. Maybe someone can find the infamous thread about their misleading photo to prove their point.
A blog post cannot do justice to whole scientific disciplines. None of this information is hiding. I think if you stop limiting yourself to creationist websites for information, you will find that it is pretty easy to learn about what creationists lie about.
That’s great. But it is possible to make films that build people’s faith without lying about science, and that should be our goal as Christians.
I think if you honestly look into this, you will find it’s not true. I and many others used to be where you are. It’s not lacking an open-mind that got me to accepting evolution it was taking off creationist blinders that refused to consider facts about the world that didn’t fit my preconceived ideas. The facts are there.
Yes. But only from people who don’t understand how evolution actually works, because it is a terribly inadequate analogy. A better one is that the population of Latin speakers eventually gave rise to the populations of French, Romanian, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian speakers. No Latin speaker gave birth to a French speaker. The change happened slowly over many generations at the level of populations.
I don’t think you actually understand what you are talking about. People with PhDs in genetics frequent these boards, so maybe have a little humility about what you don’t know. If you have a question, it can get answered. But please be careful who you decide you are educating.
I hope you decide to look into some these areas a little more closely. But if not, that’s fine too.
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You can do the experiment yourself. Take a standard deck of cards, shuffle them, and then deal them face up, one by one. The order of cards you see before has a probability of 1 in 8x10^67. This will be true every time you repeat the experiment.
You are claiming that there are specific proteins life has to have in order to get started, yet you haven’t offered any evidence to back this claim. This means your calculations are meaningless.
Why does hydrogen and oxygen combine to make water?
No one has ever seen a deity create life in a lab. So do you reject that concept as well?
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Got it a little confused. Actually it was the common belief that flies spontaneously arose but the first early scientists proved that wrong. Interesting history with modern parallels. Interestingly, evidently the church had no problem with spontaneous generation of flies and mice:
https://webprojects.oit.ncsu.edu/project/bio183de/Black/cellintro/cellintro_reading/Spontaneous_Generation.html
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Sorry you can’t see it Randy. Just tried it on my end again and it seems to work fine.
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I’ll try another screen thanks!
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How about my next post? Got any ideas on that one?
I’ll leave that to God as far as ultimate cause, but no idea as to mechanism and no desire to spend time with fool’s errands. Looks like a fertile field of research.
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I’d like to jump out of the loop for a sec… it seems I might have wandered into the midst of a bunch of evolutionist (and atheists?) - not the forum I thought I had joined. It’s all good, but I’d like to circle back to my OP, and also include some of the replies to my OP and my replies to those replies.
FIRST, the OP is about the review of a movie and I disagree with the basic premise of the review. I feel the declarative statements in that review are poorly supported or not at all - some stuff was just straight up wrong. (The movie says it’s about competing ideas of the passage of time, not Intelligent design vs Evolution.) The movie, IMO, also repeats: this is “what it looks like based on the data”…this is “what we believe”…there “are still questions to be answered”. I disagree with the premise of the review that this movie is somehow ‘bad’ and ‘full of lies’…Like I said, I’ve been to the Grand Canyon numerous times, including a single day rim to rim hike and traveling down the Colorado River from Lee’s Ferry to Diamond Creek (included some amazing side trip hikes in the GC)…the Grand Canyon I saw with my own 2 eyes is the same Grand Canyon that is shown in this movie. All the layers are perfectly flat and stacked one on top of each other. In fact, THAT is was got me interested in this movie to begin with. The dialogue in this movie matched my personal experience. This is not to say there may be some place here or there may signs of erosion in the layers that I did not see. But I have seen A LOT of the Grand Canyon and everything I’ve seen corroborates the beginning narrative of the movie - perfectly flat layers stacked on top of each other.
Second, do not claim to “know” how all of this got here. I do not “know”, I “believe”. The second verse to that song is NONE of you “know” how all of this got here, either. You “believe” also. It’s the assumption that your belief in your theory somehow puts you on some higher intellectual plane that is off-putting. I can continue to sit here and put as many holes in your beliefs as you can in mine. - As far as being on some kind of higher intellectual plane, I doubt it. But I’m not just smart, I’m a good mechanic, a good athlete, run 5 or 6 10ks every week, I’m an excellent cook, a crossword puzzle - come to think of it, all kind of puzzles wizard, next week I am hiking the GC rim to rim and back (yeah, IN AUGUST!) I try to be a better person every day and in general am good at everything I attempt…at the same time, I believe in God’s eyes, we aren’t much different. (Matthew 20) This is the exception I take with the movie review and subsequent besmirching of my reply to it. It is also my opinion the Theory of Evolution is a lie from Satan. The Bible clearly states God created man after His own image. It clearly states the living things He put on this Earth reproduced each after it’s kind. I believe the Theory of Evolution discredits God’s Majesty. I also believe Genesis IS a literal written history. I also do not believe the Bible jumps from a narrative account to poetry and back - the notion is illogical and inconsistent with the written language (the film covers this).
So, back to my original thought behind this long comment: you don’t have to believe what I believe. That is part of the free will God gave you. But if you feel that your contrary beliefs are somehow ‘intellectually superior’ to mine (because NONE of us KNOW), you are only fooling yourself. Sadly, I see some of that in the replies to my comments.
I believe we are all God’s children, that makes us brothers and sisters. As such, I love you all and wish you well. May God bless you with the wisdom to find and follow His path for you in this mortal life!
But they all believe that a complex single cell organism can come to life in a moment from non-living matter.
Creationists have the logical conclusion that the Almighty God who has all knowledge and wisdom did create all matter and life from nothing. Each and every part of creation shows that it took unfathomable knowledge, understanding and wisdom to create it.
You can do the experiment yourself. Take a standard deck of cards, shuffle them, and then deal them face up, one by one. The order of cards you see before has a probability of 1 in 8x10^67. This will be true every time you repeat the experiment.
*How many times with that order be cards separated by suit and in alpha-numeric sequence? Answer: 0 *
I’m sorry this concept is so difficult for you to grasp. Alas, I do not know how to simply it further for you. The probably of your card shuffle, and the sequencing of amino acids - although very different values - come to the same result: well beyond the accepted standard of possibility.
You are claiming that there are specific proteins life has to have in order to get started, yet you haven’t offered any evidence to back this claim. This means your calculations are meaningless.
Are you suggesting that the “original” life cells were not made of proteins? Let me Google that for you then: All cells are made from the same major classes of organic molecules: nucleic acids, proteins, carbohydrates, and lipids
Why does hydrogen and oxygen combine to make water?
I think you’re misinterpreting “living water”. Water is inanimate.
You are also confusing the unique attraction of the oxygen molecule with a complex structure of a protein
It’s an open forum. Some of the people participating are not Christians. Some are. The Christians fall on very different places on a spectrum. BioLogos is a Christian organization that promotes the evidence for evolution, so it shouldn’t really surprise you that the forum is mostly people who think evolution makes sense. The people who wrote the article you referred to are Christians.
Right. So, if you say that, and then don’t deliver, can you see how scientists might be ticked off?
Are you a geologist? Seeing something and understanding why it is the way it is are not the same thing.
I don’t think you are clear on what is meant by erosion. The standard consensus is that erosion created the Grand Canyon as a river cut through the rock over millions of years, not that it was created in a cataclysmic flood four thousand years ago. The layers of rock are the signs of erosion.
Also, to quote text from someone else’s post, select the text you would like to include and hit the gray quote button that appears. That way, the person you are interacting with is notified.
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SOMEONE OPENED A WINDOW AND LET A BREATH OF FRESH AIR IN. Wait…Nope not just a breath…A HURRICANE…I CAN FINALLY BREATH AGAIN:)
I’m not too proud to admit that Genetics was not a major area of study for me, I know I may not have as much knowledge on the subject as others. I’ve already stated: math is my game. That said, “PhD” does not impress me. As I have stated earlier, academics are usually wrong more than they are right…it’s part of the progress of knowledge, no? I don’t care PhD, MD, MS, BS, or ABC: 64 million is A LOT. This will not shock you, when the rubber meets the road: it’s the engineers I trust, not the “scientists”. Just curious, has it been proven God does not exist? I have not heard that is has happened (in spite of herculean efforts and tons of wasted tax dollars)…so, if God hasn’t been disproved, then God made everything hasn’t been disproved isn’t too big a stretch. On that note, you mention the scientific method. So if one were to conduct an experiment - but before conducting that experiment a viable conclusion is completely removed from the possible outcome - is that good scientific method. It should be obvious that I’m not suggesting that an experiment mixing and acid with a base and ruling out it will turn into a cat is bad scientific method. But I am suggesting that “ruling out the existence of God and His creation” as a possibility of how all of this got here, when there is at least some evidence he does exist, IMO, is bad scientific method.
“That is how most scientists feel about a miniscule minority labeling flood geology a scientific position.” - pretty sure that’s how a lot of scientist feel about Christians. Period…just sayin’.
“scientific consensus is not a popularity contest for theories, nor is it presented as such in the article.” I’m thinking you can’t be referring to academia
“YEC don’t really respect facts though, so it makes these conversations difficult.” This language is not only condescending, but an unfair and untrue characterization. Philippians 2:3
Your counsel of humility misses the mark (and is a little bit passive aggressive)…of course, if we are true Christians, we all acknowledge we could have a little more of it (humility). But you’ve misinterpreted my comments, I feel I’ve made it pretty clear from the get-go, these points are what I believe. You can believe them too, or not. That’s also fine.
You language analogy misses an important flaw in evolution - there are several critical points in ‘evolutionary history’ where things “just make what they need”. Which is why the watch missing some parts is a good example. A person can point to a dog and say canis - then the other guy points to the dog and says perro…and pretty quickly they figure out that both words mean dog, and depending on where they live they adopt one. Or adapt it…but that is a very far cry from an amoeba saying, “hey man, I need some food and nothing to eat is close…I know! I’ll grow a tail and swim to the food!” Yes, I realize that’s a pretty simplistic interpretation - but big picture, that is exactly what evolution tries to tell us happened. The reality is, that amoeba would have starved to death…and all the other amoebas around it that also didn’t have food. Soon enough the entire evolutionary process will have to start all over again. There are just too many roadblocks for evolution to be “proved”…
“A blog post cannot do justice to whole scientific disciplines. None of this information is hiding. I think if you stop limiting yourself to creationist websites for information, you will find that it is pretty easy to learn about what creationists lie about”
You seem like you may have some reading comprehension issues. The review barely rebuts the data shown in the movie at all, the two rebuttals are weak and unsupported. The comment about the GC not being perfectly flat layers is completely false. I’ll be there in 2 days and I can send you the pictures myself…but you’ll have to wait until I finish my hike because there’s no signal from the bottom of the GC. That said, you don’t even know me - how could you even possibly presume that I have not looked at ‘evolution websites’ and found them lacking with all of these and other questions? That is a serious question. I find the “what creationists lie about” to be off putting. Creationists don’t own the monopoly on lies - if you get my meaning.
“It’s not lacking an open-mind that got me to accepting evolution it was taking off creationist blinders that refused to consider facts about the world that didn’t fit my preconceived ideas” So the very first chapter of the very first book of the Holy Bible, Genesis, is one of the lies Christians tell? Hmmm…I gotta leave you on your own with that one, sister… but you may try checking out Matthew 24:24
Gotta run…have a great day…and pray about this. God loves you. Matthew 7:7-8
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Most people here do not think that science is the only source of truth about the world. I certainly do not. I also do not think the evidence for evolution minimizes God or the truth of the Bible. But there is lots of evidence that interpreting the Bible literally and insisting that the earth is 6,000 years old and a global flood covered the entire globe 4,000 years ago does not comport with reality.
The scientific method does not consider supernatural explanations. So, by definition a conclusion that invokes a supernatural explanation is not scientific, no matter how “viable” it is.
There is no need to rule out the existence of God to do science. You just can’t appeal to God or miracles for an explanation to count as scientific. As I said, science can’t explain everything.
What you are describing is a fundamental misconception of what science is and what kind of answers the scientific method can establish.
Creationists rely on persecution narratives to distract from their abysmally inadequate theories. In reality, Christians in science do just fine, and the vast majority of their unbelieving colleagues don’t really care one way or another what they do on Sundays or who they pray to.
I am betting you have very little experience in academia. Publishing and research funding can be political sometimes like anything else in human society, but peer review and scientific consensus are real things that have value all the same.
You are more than welcome to believe as your conscience directs you. I assume that by taking the time to engage here, you think your beliefs might be compelling to others. All I am saying is that there are some very scientifically literate people here with genuine expertise. Throwing around a bunch of YEC website propaganda and third grade science will not be compelling to anyone. You will need to up your game and become much better informed about what you are critiquing. If your goal is just to tell people what you believe in your ignorance of how major fields of science work and what is known, then fine.
Oh really. Do tell.
I see you do not understand the language evolution analogy at all. Communicating across language barriers has nothing to do with how Latin became French. There was never a language barrier in the evolving population of speakers. Every child spoke the same language as his parents.
You’re right. That’s ridiculous. It’s also not what the evolutionary model says happens. You can’t critique something you don’t understand.
Is this what you are referring to?
Here we are told that the layers are flat with no erosion or significant channels, that geologists have abandoned long ages for the canyon formation since it couldn’t be stable over millions of years, that remnants of giant lakes are found that once dammed water before failing and violently carving out the canyon, and that a massive erosional feature near the bottom of the canyon, known as the Great Unconformity, has been observed all over the world. A bit later in the film, we are informed that the layers of the canyon preserve a succession of marine ecosystems, each washed in and deposited by flood surges. Conclusion? “The only explanation that makes sense is a global flood!”
Many who watch this movie will think: “These men are Christians and scientists, so it must be true!” Yet it doesn’t take much digging to discover that evidence of erosion between layers in the Grand Canyon is abundant, including now filled-in river channels as much as 400 ft deep. The so-called “abandonment of long ages” actually means that while some geologists think the carving took over 70 million years, others think it formed over a shorter period of about 6 million years. The giant lakes turn out to be speculation, with no actual evidence of their proposed size. Attention was drawn to the widespread occurrence of the Great Unconformity, but no mention was made of the two-mile thick sequence of tilted rocks below the Great Unconformity that has remarkable similarities to the layers above – all somehow deposited before the great flood.*
This thread discusses some pictures of not perfectly flat layers from the Grand Canyon:
There are more details on how flood geology fails to explain the geology of the Grand Canyon, including a nice diagram of the (not perfectly flat) layers in this article:
Feel free to point out all the lies you feel mainstream science is telling.
I am a Christian. I belong to an Evangelical missionary organization. I work for an NGO that supports minority language Bible translation. I don’t have anything against Christians or the Bible. But, if a Christian says the scientific evidence supports an interpretation of Genesis that insists the earth is 6,000 years old and was created in 6 literal days and no death occurred until Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit in the Garden, and all life on earth was destroyed in a global flood 4,000 years ago, I would say they are either very mistaken or lying. That’s not what the scientific evidence supports. Whether you are lying or mistaken depends on what you know. Now, you can say scientific evidence be danged, I believe it anyway because I believe it is what God requires of me. That’s fine. I can respect that. I totally disagree with that idea of God and Bible interpretation, but whatever. It’s the claiming evidence that doesn’t really exist and misrepresenting and trying to discredit or hide the evidence that does exist that I find beneath the Christian witness.
I don’t think any rational definition of false prophets or false Messiahs fits “scientists” because they are not claiming to speak for God or to offer salvation on behalf of God. To imply listening to scientific consensus is listening to “false prophets” is simply bad exegesis.
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