Evolution is a Religion.

Evolution is a theory...proven to what degree? Fact? Perhaps..... About as much as the Bible has been scientifically proven perhaps?
Theory of evolution has more holes in than the Bible does........

Don't think so....?
"STASIS AFTER APPEARANCE IN THE FOSSIL RECORD"
Link:
www.genesispark.org...

"DATING ROCK LAYERS"
Link:
www.genesispark.com...

"Evolution Encyclopedia Vol. 2: Chapter 17 Appendix Part 2"
Link:
evolution-facts.org...


Thas just for starters. Not even a tenth of the "holes" in evolution....and thats not even touching the concept or theory of "Primordial Soup".....or teleology....

Darwinism/Evolution is more an "inspiration" rather than a theory. Darwinism or 'neo-Darwinism' are simply placeholder�s for whatever theory will follow. Watch in the next year or two as support for 'neo-Darwinism' collapses, you will find nary a biologist who won�t claim he knew all along that there was no real evidence supporting the old views.

Watch closely the discussions of teleology, and you will already note some of the waffling by scientist that uphold to Darwinism and neo-Darwinism. Some of the ideologues are already trying to imply that teleology was always part of �modern� neo-Darwinism. Similarly natural selection is beginning to become all types of fitness based selection, random mutation is becoming all sorts of variation processes, and genetic determinism is becoming genetic influence.

The hold Darwinism has on scientists is simply the result of the need to conform. The greater the degree of uncertainty surrounding evolutionary hypotheses, the greater the need to conform.



regards
seekerof

[Edited on 9-10-2003 by Seekerof]

Originally posted by Seekerof
Satyr...lets get to the heart of this shall we....seems we are betting around the philisophical "bush" here....
Is the Theory of Evolution 100% empirical fact? If not....guess what? Faith has its role.....just as it takes faith to believe the "primordial soup" was were it all started for us/mankind, etc.

Math deals in empirical's...science, on the most part does not.

Actually, science is empirical by nature. All inconsistencies are methodically removed from the equation. Those that can't be eliminated, remain theory until proven beyond the shadow of a doubt, or accepted as the best explanation. All of the "best explanations" are subject to change, when/if someone comes up with a better one. This is where religion differs the most. There is no change. There's not even consideration of a better explanation.

Science - the study of the physical world and its manifestations, especially by using systematic observation and experiment

Your definition of science must be different than mine.

Really Satyr?
That requires a defintion of "empirical" then wouldn't it?
I mean, geez, science proves the omnipresence and creation of God everyday...does that fall under scientifically empirical?

"Sciences as witnessing to God's existence"
Link:
www.nd.edu...

Excerpt:
"Among all these approaches to God, one particularly significant for the man of our present civilization is provided by science itself. The sciences of phenomena -- though they remain enclosed in the field of experience -- bear testimony to the existence of God in a double manner. Here, as I previously noted, it is not a question of what science itself tells us, but of the very existence and possibility of science.

In the first place: if nature were not intelligible there would be no science. Nature is not perfectly and absolutely intelligible; and the sciences do not try to come to grips with nature's intelligibility taken in itself (that's the job of philosophy). They rather reach for it in an oblique fashion, dealing with it only insofar as it is steeped in, and masked by, the observable and measurable data of the world of experience, and can be translated into mathematical intelligibility. Yet the intelligibility of nature is the very ground of those relational constancies which are the "laws" -- including that category of laws which deal only with probabilities -- to which science seen phenomna submitted; and it is the very ground, in particular, of the highest explanatory systems, with all the symbols, ideal entities, and code languages they employ (and with all that in them which is still incomplete, arbitrary, and puzzlingly lacking in harmony) that science constructs on observation and measurement.

Now how would things be intelligible if they did not proceed from an intelligence? In the last analysis a Prime Intelligence must exist, which is itself Intellection and Intelligibility in pure act, and which is the first principle of the intelligibility and essences of things, and causes order to exist in them, as well as an infinitely complex network of regular relationships, whose fundamental mysterious unity our reason dreams of rediscovering in its own way.

Such an approach to God's to existence is a variant of Thomas Aquinas' fifth way. Its impact was secretly present in Einstein's famous saying: "God does not play dice," which, no doubt, used the word God in a merely figurative sense, and meant only: "nature does not result from a throw of the dice," yet by the very fact implicitly postulated the existence of the divine Intellect.

But science offers us a second philosophical approach, which, this time, relates to man's intellect. The sciences of phenomena, and the manner in which they contrive ways of knowing and mastering nature -- ceaselessly inveigling it into more and more precise observations and measurements, and finally catching it in sets of more and more perfectly systematized signs -- give evidence, in a particularly striking manner, of the power that human intelligence puts to work in the very universe of sense experience. Now the intelligence of man -- imperfect as it is, and obliged to use an irreducible multiplicity of types and perspectives of knowledge -- is a spiritual activity which can neither proceed from matter nor be self-subsisting, and therefore limitless and all-knowing. It has a higher source, a certain participation in which it is. In other words, it necessarily requires the existence of a Prime, transcendent and absolutely perfect Intellige, which is pure Intellection in act and whose being is its very Intellection.

This second approach is a variant of Thomas Aquinas' fourth way.

To conclude, let us remark that our knowledge of the created world naturally reverberates in the very reverence and awe with which our reason knows the Creator, and on the very notion, deficient as it is and will ever be, that we have of His ways.

By the very fact that science enlarges our horizons with respect to this world, and makes us know better -- though in an oblique way -- that created reality which is the mirror in which God's perfections are analogically known, science helps our minds to pay tribute to God's grandeur.

A number of the most basic notions and explanatory theories of modern science, especially of modern physics, recoil from being translated into natural languages or from being represented in terms of the imagination. Nevertheless a certain picture of the world emerge from modern science; and this picture (unification of matter and energy, physical indeterminism, a space-time continuum which implies that space and time are not empty pre-existing forms but come to existence with things and through things; gravitational fields which by reason of the curvation of space exempt gravitation from requiring any particular force, and outwit ether and attraction; a cosmos of electrons and stars in which the stars are the heavenly laboratories of elements, a universe which is finite but whose limits cannot be attained, and which dynamically evolves toward higher forms of individuation and concentration... ) constitutes a kind of framework or imagery more suited to many positions of a sound philosophy of nature than that which was provided by Newtonian science.

Furthermore, at the core of this imagery there are a few fundamental concepts which, inherent in modern science and essential to it, have a direct impact on our philosophical view of nature.

In the first place I shall mention all the complex regularities (presupposed by statistical laws themselves), and the mixture of organization and chance, resulting in a kind of elusive, imperfectly knowable and still more striking order, that matter reveals in the world of microphysics. It make our idea of the order of nature exceedingly more refined and more astonishing. And it makes us look at the author of this order with still more admiration and natural reverence. In the Book of Job Behemoth and Leviathan were called to witness to divine omnipotence. One single atom may be called to witness too, as well as the hippopotamus and the crocodile. If the heavens declare the glory of God, so does the world of micro-particles and micro-waves.

In the second place comes the notion of evolution evolution of the whole universe of matter, and, in particular, evolution of living organisms. Like certain most general tenets of science, evolution is less a demonstrated conclusion than a kind of primary concept which has such power in making phenomena decipherable that once expressed it became almost impossible for the scientific mind to do without it. Now if it is true that in opposition to the imobile archetypes and ever-recurrent cycles of Pagan antiquity Christianity taught men to conceive history both an irreversible and as running in a definite direction, then it may be said that by integrating in science the dimension of time and history, the idea of evolution has given to our knowledge of nature a certain affinity with what the Christian view of things is on a quite different plane. In any case, the genesis of elements and the various phases of the history of the heavens, and, in the realm of life, the historical development of an immense diversity of evolutive branches ("phyla"), all this, if it is understood in the proper philosophical perspective, presupposes the transcendent God as the prime cause of evolution, -- preserving in existence created things and the impetus present in them, moving them from above so that superior forms may emerge from inferior ones, and, when man is to appear at the peak of the series of vertebrates, intervening in a special way and creating ex nihilo the spiritual and immortal soul of the first man and of every individual of the new species. Thus evolution correctly understood offers us a spectacle whose greatness and universality make the activating omnipresence of God only more tellingly sensed by our minds.

I do not believe, moreover, that science fosters a particularly optimistic view of nature. Every progress in evolution is dearly paid for; miscarried attempts, merciless struggle everywhere. The more detailed our knowledge of nature becomes, the more we see, together with the element of generosity and progression which radiates from being, the law of degradation, the powers of destruction and death, the implacable voracity which are also inherent in the world of matter. And when it comes to man, surrounded and invaded as he is by a host of warping forces, psychology and anthropology are but an account of the fact that, while being essentially superior to all of them, he is the most unfortunate of animals. So it is that when its vision of the world is enlightened by science, the intellect which religious faith perfects realizes still better that nature, however good in its own order, does not suffice, and that if the deepest hopes of mankind are not destined to turn to mockery, it is because a God-given energy better than nature is at work in us."

In short, being I could supply more scientific "empirical's" pertaining to "scientific proof" that 'a' God or ID agent exists.....your basically saying that science is empirical by nature and thus what? Evolution is as observable as God's creations and workings are observable?

"Intelligent Design: Scientists' Observations"
Link:
ic.net...

"Everything That Begins To Exist Has a Cause"
Link:
www.geocities.com...



regards
seekerof

Seeker's quote seems to imply that science's empiricalism is proof of God?

herm.....
I imply alot....
Feel free to say what I think you wish to say....
I can take it....
If I am wrong...then explain why....whats the difference between science being used to "empirically" prove evolution, natural selection, etc...... but science can not be used likewise to prove the existence of 'a' God or ID agent? Is not science involved in this also....principle's of science, etc.?


regards
seekerof

Actually, I might agree with you, in part. I think evolution is a fact in principal, but I suspect that it could be also a manifestation of the creator. I don't like either/or scenarios....

Originally posted by Seekerof
Really Satyr?
That requires a defintion of "empirical" then wouldn't it?
I mean, geez, science proves the omnipresence and creation of God everyday...does that fall under scientifically empirical?

Only for people who really, really, really, want to believe that. To me, it's a horrible thing to simplify and degrade the biggest mystery ever. Men wrote the bible, with the only words they had in their vocabulary to try to describe a concept more complex than they could ever find words to explain. Therefore, they did a damn poor job. It'll never cease to amaze me how many people can't see that, as clear as day.

Oh yeah....

Main Entry: em�pir�i�cal
Pronunciation: -i-k&l
Variant(s): also em�pir�ic /-ik/
Function: adjective
Date: 1569
1 : originating in or based on observation or experience
2 : relying on experience or observation alone often without due regard for system and theory
3 : capable of being verified or disproved by observation or experiment
4 : of or relating to empiricism
- em�pir�i�cal�ly /-i-k(&-)lE/ adverb

#2 is kind of a oxymoron in itself, isn't it?

Yes Satyr.....
#3 as well:
"capable of being verified or disproved by observation or experiment."


Think maybe with all those acclaimed scientists and ID and creationist folks can take this on? Seems "empirical" may get a new definition once this is answered!
Link:
www.us.net...


regards
seekerof

[Edited on 16-10-2003 by Seekerof]

I found a wonderful site on evolution and the ICR's mission to deceive.

First read this. It's a statement from a xian who is not against evolution, because he's also a scientist. Being a scientist, he finds it impossible to deny what he's learned.

www.holysmoke.org...

Then dig into some real truths.

www.holysmoke.org...

Some of these idiots will even claim that dinosaurs were loaded onto the Ark!

BTW, here's proof of evolution.

www.holysmoke.org...



[Edited on 10-21-2003 by Satyr]