Rejecting evolution does not equal rejecting science

Faith & Science Conversation
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Good point.

Darwinism is largely viewed as pan-adaptationism which means nearly all changes in organisms are driven by positive selection. Darwinism was abandoned when it became clear that most changes in the genome are fixed by neutral drift, not selection.

I would also suspect that Darwinism means something entirely different in the YEC community. Given how often they call Darwinism a religion I have very low expectations for their portrayal of the theory to have a strong resemblance to the scientific reality.

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@Patrick_S

Wow… what to think when someone describes the god they believe in as the greatest murderer as well as the greatest liar…? Can we assume the usual description of a hateful god who rules by fear and demands obedience sacrificing all rationality and integrity in order to save ourselves from himself – making cowardice the greatest of all virtues? At what point in the attribution of all the worst qualities to their god does this become something that sounds more like devil worship than anything else?

My answer to that is the essay by Albert Camus called “The Myth of Sisyphus” where he explains that defying such an evil monster is sufficient justification no matter what torments he sends to us and no matter how hopeless it is.

However… in all honesty one does encounter occasional atheists who do not understand this and push the idea that evolution is driven by natural selection rather than variation. This certainly fuels the way reactionaries who equate evolution with social Darwinism.

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“Darwinism” is a weasel word. It’s more an ID thing than a YEC thing – it has the effect of obfuscating just how much of the theory of evolution they accept and how much of it they reject.

Most of my friends who have heard of the “Scientific Dissent from Darwin” believe that it’s a list of three thousand scientists who are YECs. In reality, most of them are old-earth and some of them even accept universal common ancestry. (I understand that Michael Behe is a case in point.)

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First off, we atheists aren’t immune to error or ignorance.

Second, even if most changes are due to positive selection this in no way links evolution to Social Darwinism. We can point to all of the naturally occurring diseases caused by microbes, but no one says we should intentionally infect people per the tenets of Social Kochism.

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The list also includes people who fully accept the modern theory of evolution. Here is the statement they signed:

“We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”

If you think neutral drift is also an important mechanism then you would agree with that statement, and you would also accept the modern theory of evolution. In fact, there were people on the list who fully accepted the theory of evolution and felt duped when they were presented as people who reject the theory of evolution.

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Yes, we did:

:grin: Reasoning like a YEC.

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Why are YECs not being totally inconsistent and even hypocritical when they do that.

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That’s a really, really good question.

We could add uniformitarianism to the list of inconsistent positions. YEC’s will often reject methods like radiometric dating because they claim the laws of physics could have been different in the past, but their own explanations rely on the laws of physics being the same in the past.

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One problem here is the assumption that decay rates are constants, like the speed of light in a vacuum. They may not be.

But that is not the only assumption made with radioactive dating methods. Another is that there was 100% mother element and 0% daughter in the original sample. A third is that none of either leeched in or out over time. That is a lot of assumptions for a rock dug up after a thousand years or more. I’m sure there are more problems with these dating methods that haven’t even been thought of yet.
https://www.cs.unc.edu/~plaisted/ce/dating2.html

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It’s a theory. Ever hear of them in science? I didn’t claim it was factual, like some do with their pet theories.

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That is one man’s opinion. The reality being that this is a conflict between two religions with different gods trying to explain our origins, which by nature are outside the realm of science.

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That is something coming from a moderator at a supposed Christian forum. Feel free to disbelieve the truth and mock it. At least the choir can benefit. Jesus and the apostles all took Genesis to be history, not a fable or a parable.

2 Peter 2
1 But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction. 2 And many shall follow their pernicious ways; by reason of whom the way of truth shall be evil spoken of. 3 And through covetousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise of you: whose judgment now of a long time lingereth not, and their damnation slumbereth not.
4 For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment; 5 And spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly; 6 And turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrha into ashes condemned them with an overthrow, making them an ensample unto those that after should live ungodly; 7 And delivered just Lot, vexed with the filthy conversation of the wicked: 8 (For that righteous man dwelling among them, in seeing and hearing, vexed his righteous soul from day to day with their unlawful deeds;) 9 The Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptations, and to reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished: 10 But chiefly them that walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness, and despise government. Presumptuous are they, selfwilled, they are not afraid to speak evil of dignities. 11 Whereas angels, which are greater in power and might, bring not railing accusation against them before the Lord. 12 But these, as natural brute beasts, made to be taken and destroyed, speak evil of the things that they understand not; and shall utterly perish in their own corruption; 13 And shall receive the reward of unrighteousness, as they that count it pleasure to riot in the day time. Spots they are and blemishes, sporting themselves with their own deceivings while they feast with you; 14 Having eyes full of adultery, and that cannot cease from sin; beguiling unstable souls: an heart they have exercised with covetous practices; cursed children: 15 Which have forsaken the right way, and are gone astray, following the way of Balaam the son of Bosor, who loved the wages of unrighteousness; 16 But was rebuked for his iniquity: the dumb ass speaking with man’s voice forbad the madness of the prophet.
17 These are wells without water, clouds that are carried with a tempest; to whom the mist of darkness is reserved for ever. 18 For when they speak great swelling words of vanity, they allure through the lusts of the flesh, through much wantonness, those that were clean escaped from them who live in error. 19 While they promise them liberty, they themselves are the servants of corruption: for of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage. 20 For if after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again entangled therein, and overcome, the latter end is worse with them than the beginning. 21 For it had been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than, after they have known it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered unto them. 22 But it is happened unto them according to the true proverb, The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire.

2 Peter 3
1 This second epistle, beloved, I now write unto you; in both which I stir up your pure minds by way of remembrance: 2 That ye may be mindful of the words which were spoken before by the holy prophets, and of the commandment of us the apostles of the Lord and Saviour: 3 Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, 4 And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. 5 For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: 6 Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished: 7 But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.

Matthew 24
37 But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. 38 For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, 39 And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.

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In human growth from conception, from the first cell onward, every cell is human. How many changes must have happened just from single-cell to multi-celled life forms, much less changing kingdoms?

And yet none of that dealt with my statement. Increasing raw energy causes an increase in entropy, not a decrease. So, how is the 2nd law of thermodynamics not a problem for naturalism?

If Darwinism was abandoned, and I agree that much of it was, then why is it still taught in classrooms and colleges? Even Haekel’s embryo chart and the horse evolution chart still show up, and they have long been discredited.

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Scientific theories are not guesses or hypotheses. Scientific theories represent things we accept as factual because they have not been disproven despite many tests and attempts to do so.

If you don’t understand how the word theory is used in science, check out this article:

Precisely. I’m wondering what you are doing here. It doesn’t appear you are learning anything or convincing anyone, which makes this thread a waste of time for all the people participating.

Please, don’t cut and paste Bible verses at me or others. I’m aware of what the Bible says. We interpret things differently.

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I don’t know if you realise this, Patrick, but there is one essential piece of information that this article you have cited leaves out.

It doesn’t tell you how big the discrepancy is.

The variation that this study reported in the decay rates was a fraction of one percent. This falls far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far short of the billion-fold variation which you would need to squeeze the observed amounts of radioactive decay into a fraction of six thousand years.

This is typical YEC rhetoric. They take tiny discrepancies and tiny variations of a fraction of one percent, blow them up out of all proportion, and claim them as evidence that hundreds of thousands of high-precision measurements are consistently out by factors of a million or more. I’m sorry, but measurement simply doesn’t work like that.

In any case, as I said, the amount of accelerated nuclear decay you would need to squeeze 4.5 billion years’ worth of evidence into just six thousand would have raised the Earth’s temperature to 22,000°C.

Isochron dating does not make these assumptions. It comes with a built-in cross-check to test for them.

Furthermore, in other cases, such as uranium-lead dating in zircons, these are not just assumptions but direct consequences of the physical and chemical properties of the crystals themselves. Newly formed zircon crystals cannot contain lead because the lead atoms would not fit into their crystal lattices. For the same reason, if anything did happen to leach out over time, it would be the daughter isotope (lead) rather than the parent (uranium) for precisely the same reason. This means that the U-Pb age of a zircon crystal is a lower limit. In other words, the real age of the zircons would be older than the age reported by uranium-lead dating. This does not help the YEC cause at all.

Again, that is not an assumption; it is a direct consequence of the physical, chemical and crystallographic properties of the sample.

Once again, this is a problem that I see time and time again with YEC arguments. You see that science has nuances and subtleties and assume that gives you carte blanche to hand-wave away anything and everything that you don’t like as “just an assumption” or “just an interpretation,” or even to simply make things up. I’m sorry, but it doesn’t work that way.

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Kinds are simple. Animals that come from a common ancestor are the same kind. Any breed of dog is part of the wolf kind, along with wolves and all related animals. Cattle, bison and buffalo come from the cow kind. Bears come from the bear kind. Now compare it to the Linnaeus system and families.

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Many things were once falsely explained by the supernatural. Epilepsy was once called the “Sacred Disease.” We didn’t know anything about the brain and were helpless to treat the disease. So good to have medicine now instead of exorcism! . .

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Interesting indeed! . I suppose that it’s only when you proclaim they’re the same kind.

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The energy that is found in our planet is stable in the sense that there have been sources of energy found in sun, other heat sources, water and chemicals to provide life for billions of years.

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