Creation or Evoloution? Big Bang or Big Belief -- which is it?

[legoboyvdlp]

I certainly see no relation either....

[MIG29pilot]

That didn't have anything to do with KL-666's points.

[KL-666]

Hello Mig,

If you write your own thoughts, not reacting to anyone, then it is better not to attach anyone's name to the text. Else they will think you react on something they said.

Btw, Interesting that you start with:

It's not a matter of belief

and you end with:

Therefore it is a matter of which is more logical, believable, and sensible

Kind regards, Vincent

[MIG29pilot]

It's not a matter of belief in that it's not a matter of choosing this or that theory and going with it; It has to be belivable in that believability mean logic and rationality.
@IAHM-COL I find creation easier to believe statistically because it is easier for me to belive that there is a 50/50 chance that something impossible but reasonable happened than it is for me to believe that there is a 10*18 to the 1200 power (or something like that) chance that something totally illogical happened. And as one or the other must have happened (unless the universe does not exist) I stick with Creation.

[IAHM-COL]

@MiG29
That you believe in Creation is perfectly fine with me. As in all matters of belief, the argument stops there. Belief is subjective and unarguable.

That statistics is a tool to come in your support. That I find suspicious. Your numbers aren't quite clear where they came from --but that is not the point.

The point is that the field of statistics covers 2 broad areas: The first one is descriptive statistics. The second one is inferential statistics. Neither of them are tools to support belief. They are more rather tools to quantify uncertainty.

Let me give you examples. My grandmother taught me in Catholicism. Among things we are to believe is that Mary - Mother of Jesus - conceived him being a virgin woman. It does not matter how much I crash numbers. Statistics won't help me for that belief. Also, we are to believe that Jesus, after being crunch to death beyond all reasonable doubt (death, death, death, period) on the hands of Roman soldiers -- three days later rose from his thomb, move the rock away and such resurrected. Statistics won't help me for that belief either. But statistics can not disprove it either, because belief is from a completely different semantics. Basically, one thing has nothing to do with the other. It belongs to a separate argument.

Likewise, I don't see how statistics can come in our help to believe or disbelieve in creation. Per example, how many times had we ran the experiment of creation of the universe, to reach an statistical conclusion that it goes by God's hand and not other way (explanation) around?

Creation is perfectly fine for our belief. Rather untestable for a Science. In belief you don't have uncertainty, and thus, you do not need statistics to quantify such.

[SkyBoat]

Well, what an interesting topic to show up in the forum, but what a fun one to discuss. Few of you know that I have training both in theology and science, so I bring a distinctive perspective to the topic. Over the course of forty-plus years in the ministry (although I served in institutions and not congregations/parishes) the topic of creation and evolution has been one of my favorites to study. And as an amateur astronomer, it is even more relevant to me, personally.

I have been asked many times how, as a person of faith, how I can reconcile what is written in the first chapters of Genesis, with what secular science says about the universe being both very big and very old? My answer, which I have developed for many years, is remarkably simple, if not altogether satisfying to those who hold to a literal reading of Genesis, or so they think and then interpret it as requiring the universe to be very small and very young.

My answer is this: I believe that God is a God of truth, and that when Jesus said, "I and the truth and the way and the light," he was confirming for humanity three of the key attributes of the creator. Would then, this Divine create a universe that appears to have one set of observable attributes, that is, old and big, and then, deliver to us a book revealing the Divine one's creative act that is a direct contradiction to that which is clearly observable once we achieved the technology to discover it? That, in essence, ends up being the work of a deceptive god, not one who is Eternal Truth.

The only way to resolve this conundrum in my mind is to take a leap of both religious and scientific faith and look at both as the truth, because it is the only way to untie this Gordian knot.

The solution ends up with some very strange bedfellows and it unsettling to all, but then this kind of paradigm shift, being so historically radical, always is. My solution is the end of both "Scientific Creationism" and "Intelligent Design." I have read extensively about their beliefs and assumptions regarding both the creation story and the role of God in creation and I find them wholly inadequate. In this I am largely in agreement with Frances Collins, discoverer of the human genome, who as an atheist, went through an unexpected conversion and to be a Christian but one quite outside the boundaries set by the two groups mentioned above. His book The Language of God is a compelling story of understanding how modern science can be integrated with modern Christian hermeneutics (interpretive understandings).

What then of Genesis?

The biblical literalism, practiced especially since the rise of American Fundamentalism in the late 1800s and flourishing into the modern day fundamentalist and evangelical movements, and their interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis as a literal seven-day creation is simply wrong because it creates unresolvable faith paradox and nowhere in the Holy Scriptures is there a commandment or law that supports such a stance. Plus, it is wrong on two levels. First, it is wrong because from observation we know the universe is both big and old, and it is no longer relevant to believe in a literal seven-day creation, but second, it is wrong because in Genesis there are two creation accounts. Yes, two.

If you have a Bible in the house, grab it and follow along. Genesis chapter one is, shall we say, incorrectly versified. That is, verse 31 is not the actual end of the chapter from a logical point of view. The end of the chapter actually is chapter 2, verse 3.

Chapter 2:4 is an amazing verse:

This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in that day that the Lord God made earth and heaven (New American Standard Bible)

What??? The next verses also describe the creation of the earth in that ONE day. These verses have been generally ignored or interpreted as a recap of Chapter one, by both scientific creationists and intelligent design proponents, but it does not really hold up to scrutiny.

A note to any of my Jewish readers: I spell out the Hebrew names of God in the next paragraph. I alert you out of respect for your beliefs regarding this matter--SkyBoat

And the reason is that in Chapter 1 the word for God is the Hebrew word Elohim, in the second chapter, beginning with verse four the Hebrew term is changed to Yahweh-Elohim. This is not a mistake, and since that name is used consistently throughout the remainder of the chapter, it very strongly implies that it was written by a different author, and hence, at a different time.

The case for a literal interpretation of Genesis Chapter 1 as a seven-day event now cannot be held as a standard for creation, because it is impossible to decide if it or the account in Chapter two is the literal creative event. Why then, would a God want a literal view at all of these accounts? The answer is a God of Truth would not expect to create such an unresolvable paradox, especially once these beings, whom were given the capacity to contemplate their very existence in the first place and that had been writing creation stories in virtually every culture for millennia, trying to both quantify it and assign meaning to it in the form of what we now call cosmology, would finally develop a technology that would allow them to see beyond the limits of their naked eye and peer into the darkness of the great starry dome above them.

In short, a God of Truth would not create a Universe and a Holy Scripture, one of which would end up being a total untruth or more bluntly put, a lie. Therefore the only resolution to the paradox is for the believer to restructure his or her hermeneutical assumptions about the scriptures as a whole, which, granted is a huge step of faith, but necessary if one is to realize the new truth presented in the first two chapters of Genesis in that God as creator is presenting to the ones created a statement of unimaginable beauty of a process that allowed people over thousands of years to understand that in the creative act itself, a relationship with the Divine is simultaneously being established.

The sheer beauty of this story, almost without peer of any other creation myth (most of which are quite violent and humans are often almost an afterthought, rather than a purposeful act of love of the creator), is that when freed from the shackles of literalism becomes a statement of timeless truth in a universe that is as beyond comprehension in its size and age as the Creator is in beyond comprehension in the act of creation and the deliberate establishment of relationship with the created who inhabit this planet. The seven-day Genesis story and the one-day Genesis story give us anchors, archetypes from which we can begin to understand that relationship and a point to understand what history is. It in no way limits us, however, from learning from the sciences just not of astronomy, but from paleontology and evolutionary biology.

As part of my interest in astronomy, I have also read some in the area of quantum physics and am a particular fan of Howard Susskind and his string theory. Quantum theory actually is quite relevant to this conversation because it deals with the structures of the universe from the very smallest to the very largest, and the discovery of the laws that govern it. It would take a much longer post to go into the particulars, but I want to share a story from his book, The Black Hole War (Little Brown & Co, 2008:

Then I saw a towering structure in the distance. It hovered. It loomed. It soared. King's College Chapel is God's house in Cambridge. It physically dominates Cambridge's many houses of science. How many generations of science students had prayed, or at least pretended to pray, at that cathedral? Out of curiosity, I entered its hallowed interior. In that environment, even I--a scientist with not a religious bone in my body--found a certain hollowness in my belief that nothing exists but electrons, protons, and neutrons, that the evolution of life if no more than a computer-game competition between the most selfish genes. "Cathedralitis," the awe inspired by a cleverly assembled pile of stones and colored glass windows; I am almost, but not quite, immune to it ... It was hard to think in purely optical terms of the morning light as it filtered through the stained glass. So with a slight case of cathedralitis, I sat down on a bench with a good view of the impressive interior.

pp. 276, 278

Here, Susskind has an encounter with a man who is also in the chapel, who happens to be Mormon. The man tells him the story of Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saints and who was killed for his faith. Susskind, fascinated by the story, goes on to relate:

But that morning, neither Stephen [Hawking] nor black holes were on my mind. King's College Chapel had left me with an entirely new scientific paradox to obsess over. It had nothing to do with physics, except in an indirect way. It was a paradox having to do with Darwinian evolution. How is it possible that human beings have evolved so powerful an impulse to create irrational belief systems and onto them with such tenacity? One might have thought that Darwinian selection would reinforce a tendency toward rationality and cull any genetic disposition toward superstitious, faith-based beliefs systems. After all, irrational belief can get one killed, as it did Joseph Smith. Undoubtedly, it has killed many millions. One might expect that evolution would eliminate tendencies toward following reckless leaders on the grounds of faith. But it seems the opposite is true. This scientific paradox has provoked my curiosity for the first time in Cambridge. Ever since, I've been fascinated by it and have spent a good deal of time trying to unravel it.

pp.281-282.

Susskind, in my assessment, unawares, unlocked the door to his spirituality and search for meaning in his life. What I would say to him, if we were to sit in the chapel at Cambridge, or at a coffee shop on the campus at Stanford where he is a professor is, "Leonard, perhaps, evolution has selected religiosity in the human genome for a very good reason. That is part of what it means to be human, to constantly search for that which is beyond, transcendent, and provides a basis of meaning that materialistic science has no satisfactory answer for. Or, perhaps, according to the anthropic principle, it was hardwired at the Big Bang, because nothing in quantum mechanics, the Uncertainty Principle, String Theory, or bit-theory excludes the possibility of Divine force, whether there be one or multiple universes, a single planet with life, or a universe teeming with life."

I close with this. We live in a time, just over 400 years after Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter (1610) barely a century more than Einstein wrote his papers on relativity (1905-06) and a mere 86 years since Edwin Hubble stood at the Hooker Telescope atop Mt Wilson Observatory above Pasadena, California and in 1929 announced to the world that the universe was not only expanding, but the Milky Way was but one of millions of galaxies.

It has only been in the last ten years that the best calculation of the age of the universe is now 13.8 billion years old. It isn't a guess. It's based on a calculation of what is called the cosmological constant and a direct extension of both Einstein and Hubble's works and the refinements made possible by countless dedicated astronomers, space satellites like the Hubble Space Telescope, as well as new generation earth-based observatories that have what are called adaptive optics and interferometry, some of which already have better eye-sight than the Hubble, and more of them are on the way.

There is now 0% doubt we live in an old, and very large universe. There is also now 0% doubt that the forces observed in the stars and their evolutionary cycles are in fact the building blocks of every atom that makes up you and me, recycled cataclysmically in supernova explosions over that 13.8-billion-year period.

I think, as a person of faith, we live in the most exciting period of the confluence of science and faith in the whole course of human history. In it I see the entire Judeo-Christian tradition blossoming into a new sense of intimacy with the Divine, a metamorphosis of sorts, casting off the constriction of the old ways of looking at creation and welcoming new ways of seeing an infinitely cleverer and creative God than we ever did or could imagine before.

Respectfully,

SkyBoat/Dr.David

[jwocky]

Oh my, this board has a tendency to take on spontaneously the biggest questions, mankind can ask on a very casual way. But fine, that is one of the side effects of free speech and thus totally in order here.
Personally, I can't vote because what I think, is not in the list either. So obviously, one point is already clear: The list of options seems to be quite incomplete.
Lets bring, just as food for thinking, another example: We build a new plane for FG ...

Now, in the beginning, someone makes a 3D model, some basic animations, a quite standard FDM and so on. One could say, this is an act of creation.

However, over time, some things don't work or need improvement. Users ask for this or that expansions, for additional functionalities. And things start to develop. As we know, not always in a linear way. Now, we coudl claim, to do all those little changes over time is an act of creation too or we can claim, it is an act of evolution. If our planes would randomly write those new versions however, in an act of procreation, we could observe evolution at work.

However, even if our planes would procreate in generations always with little changes, we would still retain the option for another manual change. We wouldn't always wait that evolution produces what we want, we would intervene and manipulate the ongoing evolution to get a result faster.

Thus we would never end up with a complete creation only or evolution only model.

To transfer this thinking example on the universe, we only need to keep in mind, there is no conclusive scientific evidence for the non-existence of God, flying green spaghetti monsters, aliens or any other form of manipulative entity, Lets bring just one example, the aliens:
The simplest self-replicating peptide is 32 amino acids long and the chance it would be pop up randomly is about 1 in 10^40. That is extremely unlikely but ... then, the Milky Way alone has about 100 billion of starts and each of them has at least a chance on one or more planets in a distance that would allow biological life to thrive. Thus if on each of those planets happen some billion random protein combinations, the range of 10^40 doesn't seem to be entirely impossible anymore, and given, that once self-replicating are in the game,t hey will mutate, even much lower probabilities become at some point more like an inevitability. The perception problem is, that humans always think, because it happened here, it wasn't accidental, it had to be a plan behind it. By all means, this is the Earth, the coolest thing since long before sliced bread. But in reality, Earth is a planet somewhere in the outer nothing, sharing alone this spiral arm with some other million planets. There are probably millions of planets that could carry life and once the step to life is made, development is inevitable. So the chance that out there in the universe exist other species who think, their planet is the coolest thing ever, is actually quite high, given all factors, nearer to a certainty than a mere probability (given the number of protein reactions/billion years multiplied by 100 billion stars under the assumption there is on average only one habitable planet per system).
However, having said that, there is always the door open for manipulation. If I would have the possibility to fly to a young planet and would introduce there some protein from good old earth, what would happen? Replicating peptides that are already quite complex? They would do the same thing as they always do, they would replicate and develop over time into similarly complex structures as they did on Earth. Adapted to the new circumstances, because evolution would also apply its filters, but basically, it would be still something like before. So, some billion years, later, some people on that planet would sit in a forum and have to discuss creation or evolution because their scientists would be confronted with the very same numbers as we are now and, that's the fun part, they would be as unable to detect any possible manipulation because the originally introduced self-replicating peptide is long gone and they would have nearly no chance to find some remains with still intact DNA to isolate this foreign peptides.

Just some early in the morning food for thought.

J.

[legoboyvdlp]

Oh my, this board has a tendency to take on spontaneously the biggest questions, mankind can ask on a very casual way. But fine, that is one of the side effects of free speech and thus totally in order here.
Personally, I can't vote because what I think, is not in the list either. So obviously, one point is already clear: The list of options seems to be quite incomplete.
Lets bring, just as food for thinking, another example: We build a new plane for FG ...

Now, in the beginning, someone makes a 3D model, some basic animations, a quite standard FDM and so on. One could say, this is an act of creation.

However, over time, some things don't work or need improvement. Users ask for this or that expansions, for additional functionalities. And things start to develop. As we know, not always in a linear way. Now, we coudl claim, to do all those little changes over time is an act of creation too or we can claim, it is an act of evolution. If our planes would randomly write those new versions however, in an act of procreation, we could observe evolution at work.

However, even if our planes would procreate in generations always with little changes, we would still retain the option for another manual change. We wouldn't always wait that evolution produces what we want, we would intervene and manipulate the ongoing evolution to get a result faster.

Thus we would never end up with a complete creation only or evolution only model.

To transfer this thinking example on the universe, we only need to keep in mind, there is no conclusive scientific evidence for the non-existence of God, flying green spaghetti monsters, aliens or any other form of manipulative entity, Lets bring just one example, the aliens:
The simplest self-replicating peptide is 32 amino acids long and the chance it would be pop up randomly is about 1 in 10^40. That is extremely unlikely but ... then, the Milky Way alone has about 100 billion of starts and each of them has at least a chance on one or more planets in a distance that would allow biological life to thrive. Thus if on each of those planets happen some billion random protein combinations, the range of 10^40 doesn't seem to be entirely impossible anymore, and given, that once self-replicating are in the game,t hey will mutate, even much lower probabilities become at some point more like an inevitability. The perception problem is, that humans always think, because it happened here, it wasn't accidental, it had to be a plan behind it. By all means, this is the Earth, the coolest thing since long before sliced bread. But in reality, Earth is a planet somewhere in the outer nothing, sharing alone this spiral arm with some other million planets. There are probably millions of planets that could carry life and once the step to life is made, development is inevitable. So the chance that out there in the universe exist other species who think, their planet is the coolest thing ever, is actually quite high, given all factors, nearer to a certainty than a mere probability (given the number of protein reactions/billion years multiplied by 100 billion stars under the assumption there is on average only one habitable planet per system).
However, having said that, there is always the door open for manipulation. If I would have the possibility to fly to a young planet and would introduce there some protein from good old earth, what would happen? Replicating peptides that are already quite complex? They would do the same thing as they always do, they would replicate and develop over time into similarly complex structures as they did on Earth. Adapted to the new circumstances, because evolution would also apply its filters, but basically, it would be still something like before. So, some billion years, later, some people on that planet would sit in a forum and have to discuss creation or evolution because their scientists would be confronted with the very same numbers as we are now and, that's the fun part, they would be as unable to detect any possible manipulation because the originally introduced self-replicating peptide is long gone and they would have nearly no chance to find some remains with still intact DNA to isolate this foreign peptides.

Just some early in the morning food for thought.

J.

Planes don't have baby planes

Sorry.
To change the poll would remove any current results.

[jwocky]

Hummm, no, I don't ask to change the poll, I merely point out, I didn't vote because my take ont he subject is not in the list of options. And about your comment that planes don't have baby planes ... ever heard of a parasite fighter?

[legoboyvdlp]

Hummm, no, I don't ask to change the poll, I merely point out, I didn't vote because my take ont he subject is not in the list of options. And about your comment that planes don't have baby planes ... ever heard of a parasite fighter?

Ah, I see.
But when did you see an F-16 have a baby F-16 which is better than the first one?
Not a parasite fighter.