On the subject of ID. You think the ID folks twist things? I live near the "Creation Museum " (look it up, it's < 10 miles from my house) and those ID whack jobs think dinosaurs and man existed at the same time, that dinosaurs were in the Garden of Eden (like it actually existed and isn't a parable to explain our origin to primitive minds), and that "reed rafts" floated the animals from continent to continent after the flood (as if the whole world was flooded and not just a region that may as well have been the whole world to Noah and his family). They believe the Genesis story literally and use their ID view to explain that there weren't as many species back then, but they still refuse to accept that it took more than six days for life to develop. They even have some strange ideas to explain why the stars managed to get so far away from us and that they aren't really as far as we think they are. Of course, every one of these ideas goes against the established laws of physics and especially against Newton's 1st Law of Motion.

Keep in mind that ID is muc more along the lines of Deism, while what you are talking about is without a doubt Creationism.

Honestly though I find that the idea of a big bang creating the universe and then that life just somehow "started" and then evolved over billions of years to be ridiculous. Like I said earlier, has anyone ever actually observed macro evolution? Also, from what I've seen, the fossil record doesn't show much evidence of transitional forms. I have not done extensive research on fossils though so someone here may be able to refute me.

I just think that it is very foolish to act like Evolution is the final answers to all of science. To say that is essentially to destroy the very essence of science. How many times throughout history has the common and popular scientific theory been refuted by some guy who simply said "I don't think this is true, I wan to see for myself". If it weren't for Galileo we might still be thinking that the sun revolves around the earth. We should never completely accept a theory as the truth, because throughout history those theories that people believed to be implicitly true, laws, infact, have been refuted. For instance, Abiogenesis. The idea that life could spring out of a piece of meat. People believed in that idea for somehting like 1500 years until one guy decided that he wanted to try this thing out for himself. It turned out that everyone before him had been using wrong experimental techniques by letting bacteria and such get into and on the meat or liquid.

Another example is the doctor who discovered that you should wash your hands after touching dead people. His ward in the hospital had the highest death rate, so he looked to see what was different about his ward from the others. He realized that his ward was the first ones the doctors visited after performing autopsies in the morgue. He tried to make all the doctors wash their hands before coming ot his ward, but none listened and the scientific and medical community rejected his idea. It took another couple hundred years before anyone actually started implementing his ideas. how many lives could have been saved if the scientific and medical communities hadn't been so stubborn?

My main point is, dont call any single theory scientific fact, because it isn't and doing so will get you into trouble.

Essentially, it is ridiculous to exclusively accept one scientific theory as the truth. New evidence is constantly being found, and so to become intrenched in

oops, I didn't mean to have two conclusion things....so yeah....sorry about that.

ok, you say i'm nit-picky, I will continue, but i will try to be fair aswell.

macro evolution is one of those made up ideas which non-scientists talk about.

You would be correct to say that we haven't tested evolution on a scale of millions of years, (though the experiements which have been performed have been repeated)

Now it is true also to say that all science is biased by the mere human performing the experiment, I've heard of a great example; male researchers looking at apes and talking all about dominance and agressive behaviours, and it took a few decades for a female researcher to come into the field and start studying the effect of female apes in the study group - which it was determined were very important to reconciliation.

So you may claim that the biologists studying evolution are biased by their believe that the earth is ~4 billion years old. Or that tehy are all atheists and thus have been forced to come to the conclusion that 'macro' evolution occurs because that's the only way of explaining a thing without god.

I think you'll find on the first point of the age of the earth/universe is not questioned by anyone who isn't reading a literal interpretation of the bible (and there it seems fair to move the burden of proof onto those individuals) On the second point i'd like to point out the faulty assumption that only atheists are interested in biology - lots of theists also want to understand how the body works, (because they see it as a temple to God, or they want to heal, or simply understand God's work) It is possible that a majority of scientists become atheists by studying the workings of biology... but i'm aware of no such statistic.

I will admit that the general conscensus among biologists is that evolution is a useful theory. This may bias their opinions, (whether atheist or not - as i think i've agued that some christians believe God is smart enough to think up evolution) however given that science by standard is skeptical by default scientists are tasked with questioning their theories at every step.

Thus some scientists may find a flaw in the theory of evolution and come up with an ingenious way of altering the theory to suit new information when it becomes available.

The one major arguement the creationists put forward is that life is 'irreducably complex' - basically saying that nothing as complicated as life could have randomly come together without something else at work.

However given that the something else must by definition be more complex, how do you escape the question of how God could have arisen without himself having a suitable powerful creator? (this goes back to the question of the prime mover and away from the evolution issue, but basically if you're going to allow that God is an exception to the rule that everything must have a creator, why not allow that exception to the universe itself? - or put the other way, who created the creator? that he created himself, or always existed does not satisfy the question)

Back to irreducibly comlpex: that there are hundreds of billions of molecules randomly smashing together means that some are bound to form complex bonds.

Of those bonds most are unstable and therefore short-lived. It is a given that some will be more stable, and they will continue to exist.

If you look at something simple like a salt crystal, once you have a smal seed the pattern not only becomes stable, but it grows, the same pattern starts to recreate itself (in the right chemical enviroment, ie you need more of the components of salt in the area to create a larger salt crystal) So not only do things which stable last long, but they also start to self-replicate. (i use salt crystals as an example because it's the simplest one i can think of) This is part of the natural order of things.

How simple things naturally form more complicated pattern which start to replicate themselves is cool, and most of what i'm saying is basic chemistry. From there it's not a hard jump to say life was created by random chance (for me)

thanks. =) That was an incredibly good post.

Again though, have scientists ever been able to create a living cell inside a lab(not including cloning, of course)? I'm not super into Bio or that sort of stuff but it just seems to me that if a human cannot make a protein, how much less likely is it that random chance would be able to do it?

I see your point about God needing a creator, but I think that it's missing the idea that God is simply God. I will elaborate.

The basic idea of God is that he created the entire universe, basically he lives outside the laws of the universe that he created. If God were limited to this universe, he would have to live under the laws of this universe, but for all we know God could have created a dozen universes all with completely different laws of reason and logic. See what I'm saying?

But are you not curious as to how such a god came into being? How can you not be satisfied by vague answers to the creation of the universe but be satisfied by the vague answers to the creation of a god?

I, for one, would be much more interested to know how God came to be than a mere universe.

Here's a site which has some good examples of intermediate fossils. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section1.html

abgemacht, you aren't getting what I'm saying. You are viewing God as if he lives inside this universe. Although he would exist in the universe, a God would most likely not ONLY exist in the universe that he created. If God lived inside our universe and was limited to said universe like we are then he would be bound by our laws and he would need a creator. However, this is not the case. He created the rules of this universe, so he does not need to function under those rules because he is superior to them.

btw this is classic example of people on here being way to nit-picky. (@abgemacht)

Oh, Jman, transitional forms i'd forgotten about that one.

I don't think that's really an issue either, (as far as i'm aware) there is a big hunt in among geologist/whichever scientists are interested to find new fossils which add to the picture, that doesn't mean there are all these missing transitionals, just that it's hard to find fossils at all and so we're always on the lookout for new ones...

When it comes to transition between species, i think the coolest, or most interesting for us to look at, is the similarity in dna between the great apes. (there are 5 of us: orangutans, chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas, humans and bonobos, all very similar in appearance: http://sheppardsoftware.com/content/animals/images/mammals/Apevsmonkey_greatapes.jpg)

Genetically we are very similar aswell, though humans have 23 chromosone pairs and all the other have 24. (and a chromosome is very important, as the difference between a pair xx and a pair xy causes the difference between male and female... oh and you get one of each chromosome from each parent, so you get an x from your mother, and either an x or y from your father... though i have a cousin who has a triple chromosome xxy - which is incredibly rare, and has mesed up his sexual development - and destroyed his faith in medical science... by the way most chromosome triples or deletions result in the failure of the development of the embryo. i suppose since xx works, and xy works, it's not too surprising that xxy isn't fatal) anyway, when it comes to apes a lot of our genes are the same. It can be shown that in the 23rd chromosome (in humans) we have a lot of genes which in the other apes are split between the 23rd and 24th chromosome pairs.

Ok, so this isn't proof of anything, but it points to a previous ape which had 24 chromosomes and due to a mutation (which aren't that rare, most either do very little or cause the embryo to fail to develop/die) two of the chromosome pairs merge. (keeping most of the genes which had been split onto the two pairs...)

now i don't really know what defines a chromosome, or a gene, heres a picture: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4b/Chromatin_Structures.png i think the words chromosome, gene, etc shouldn't be thrown around with such gusto by lay people who don't now the difference, but I think i haven't messed it up soo much.

Anyway the point is not we are descended from Apes, it is we are one of the great apes. (related in the same way dogs, wolves, foxes, and dingoes are all canines or polar bears are related to grizzlies, or cats to lynx, pumas, and lion-tiger hybrids) The point is that whatever we are descended from it had different genes, it must have due to mutations, we can track some genetic material back (in homo sapiens) over a million years (though there is always some corruption in genetic samples, and million year old ones are harder to get) It seems pretty likely that there was once one Ape species, which oer time seperated into the 5 different ones we now see. (and that one Ape species probably had 24 Chromosome pairs, and then a mutation caused our anscestors to merge a Chromosome - this sort of mutation has been seen, so it's a process we understand, and given that we're guessing about what happened in humans) By the way, two species is 'technically' defined as being different if they can't mate and provide fertile offspring. (as horses and donkeys can mate but they produce infertile offspring...) it is a technical definition, but it is also a measure of the genetic drift between indivuals.

If two groups are seperated (by say geography), their mutations will be different, the ones which don't kill the offspring will survive and spread within a group. (this can be done in the lab, or you can imagine how humans if we colonise different planets will not be in contact with each other as often - but given that most great apes live in different areas it is easy to imagine that gibbons and chimps don't come acoss each other that often: http://sheppardsoftware.com/content/animals/images/mammals/Apevsmonkey_distribution.jpg )

Anyway, once you get a mutation which swaps the order of two chromosomes
ABC mutates to ACB (say) then when two animals mate they pass on one of each of their chromosomes to the offsping: giving the child ABC (from the unmutated parent) and ACB (from the mutated one) now the child will pass on randomly on of his A's (the first chromosome) then randomly a C/B, (the second chromosome) and lastly randomly a B/C - giving the second generation A C/B B/C which equals either ACB, ABC, ACC or ABB, now the last two can't produce viable offspring (they don't have all three chromosomes... so they are missing a whole segment of genes)... these kinds of mutations (swapping the order of genes) don't change the individual species that much, but they will seperate them from being able to reproduce (and hence mix their dna) with those who don't have them.(once you have enough swapping mutations, you'll have lots of other little mutations, so the two species will also have some other differences... like horses and zebra)

anyway, beyond the technical definition of being two species now, not being able to mix the genes within their pool means they will continue to diverge (develope their own mutations and some of them will develop some traits which will be an advantage that the other species oes not posses... ipso facto: we developed bigger brains, which allowed more complex communications and the development of culture...)

@Jman: Em, this doesn't really address your concerns about the creation of life, and the improbabilities of such, but i think it deals more with the hows of genetics and how a species could (if we assume enough generations are allowed pass) become unable to mix their genes and eventually gain new traits which they wouldn't share... (emphasis placed on the could, in experiments we've only tested this with simple organisms which have shorter life spans, and therefore pass hrough multiple generations much faster... but in theory it works.)

sorry about the typos in the above ^

@jman you said "If God lived inside our universe and was limited to said universe like we are then he would be bound by our laws and he would need a creator. However, this is not the case."

that is great, best arguement i've heard against the whole prime mover paradox/question. (possible the only good one, but also very well phrased, i like it.)

If i was to go on a rant about the big bang i'd tell you the science on the is much hazier than evolution. (i don't like some of the cosmology i have studied) however i think there is a deist/pantheist prespective which identifies God with the Universe, thus God/Universe may always have existed or may have been able to create itself.

This is close to my view, however your explaination is fantastic.

I don't see how asking about the creation of a GOD is nit-picky.

I fully understand the god you're talking about is outside our universe. Are you saying anything out side this universe inherently has no rules? Maybe they're different, but why can't there be any? The way you're explaining it just seems like God is a lazy excuse not to think, which I know isn't the case for a lot of people.

@ Jmann,

Additionally, would this god of yours just create the universe and then be done? Or, would he continue to influence our lives (through events like Jesus and Floods)? If you claim he simply created the universe and then disappeared, I could see your point easier. But, if this god continued to influence our lives, then there are no absolute laws in this universe, because God could change anything at anytime.

Sorry if you've answered this question, but there have been a lot of posts.