What about the other side?

All my life I've been a huge science buff. It wasn't until recently that I came into my faith. Even more recently, the past couple of months or so, I've been questioning all of the things I learned in high school. I've been discovering sturdy cases against evolution, among other things. Why, then, is evolution taught in schools as the end all be all without addressing the arguements against (non-religious) it? Why do we feel we need to shelter our children from the cases against what we as a society generally accept?

Because evolution is though in biology classes and biology is a science. It requires scientific evidence for a theory to be taught in such a class. There is a lot of evidence supporting evolution and very little to none for creationism. I will happily debate this with you. I don't see the need of teaching a totally unproven theory as a good alternative to a very proven theory.

[Edited on 9-4-2004 by amantine]

I firmly believe in Evolution. I also firmly believe science has some sort of mental block saying against "I don't know", so it latches on to one theory and touts it as the absolute truth, because there's no better explanation. It's the belief that permeates all thinking: "If you are wrong, I must be right." Once disproven, it becomes self-evident it was incorrect, and anyone who beleived it was a fool.

Ahh, but I'm not saying teach about creationism, just the pitfalls of evolution. When presenting evolution, go into the scientific evidence against it.

For example:

The science of probability has not been favorable to evolutionary theory, even with the theory's loose time restraints. Dr. James Coppedge, of the Center for Probability Research in Biology in California, made some amazing calculations. Dr. Coppedge
"applied all the laws of probability studies to the possibility of a single cell coming into existence by chance. He considered in the same way a single protein molecule, and even a single gene. His discoveries are revolutionary. He computed a world in which the entire crust of the earth - all the oceans, all the atoms, and the whole crust were available. He then had these amino acids bind at a rate one and one-half trillion times faster than they do in nature. In computing the possibilities, he found that to provide a single protein molecule by chance combination would take 10, to the 262nd power, years." (That is, the number 1 followed by 262 zeros.) "To get a single cell - the single smallest living cell known to mankind - which is called the mycroplasm hominis H39, would take 10, to the 119,841st power, years. That means that if you took thin pieces of paper and wrote 1 and then wrote zeros after (it), you would fill up the entire known universe with paper before you could ever even write that number. That is how many years it would take to make one living cell, smaller than any human cell!"

That would be mathmatical evidence, which is what all of science is rooted in.

Homology is the similarity of structures between different types of organisms. Some have argued that these similarities are evidence of one common ancestor. However, as Sunderland points out, when the concentration of red blood cells is used, utilizing the ideas of homology, man is more closely related to frogs, fish, and birds than to sheep.
But now, with the development of molecular biology we are able to make a comparison of the same cells in different species, which adds a whole new dimension to homology. Unfortunately, for the evolutionists, molecular biology does as all other evidences do: presents greater argument against evolution theory.

In molecular biology, proteins of the same type in different organisms can be tested for difference in amino acid makeup. The figure resulting is converted into a percentage. The lower the percentage, the less difference there is between the proteins. Dr. Michael Denton, in experiments with Cytochrome C, a protein that converts food into energy, and hemoglobin, found the following.

This would be evidence against it on the biological level. There are several others, too, but I don't want to just post a bunch of quotes. My point is there is scientific data out there that at least needs to be addressed by evolutionists. I was never told in school that there was any scientific basis for debate on evolution; scientifically speaking, it was fact. That just isn't true, though.

(Soruce for quotes taken: www.megabaud.fi... )

EDIT: I do recognise that some of the cases presented on that website are weak, but not all. I'm not blind

[Edited on 4-9-2004 by junglejake]

You'll find (if you search) that the "17 evidences against evolution" don't hold up.

www.talkorigins.org...

Shrinking sun:

1. The shrinking-sun argument contains two errors. The worst, by far, is the assumption that if the sun is shrinking today, then it has always been shrinking!

That's a little like watching the tide go out and concluding that the water level must have fallen at that rate since the earth began. Therefore, working backwards, much of the land must have been under water a few weeks ago! Since careful inspection shows no signs of such a flood, the earth can't be older than a few weeks!

The second law of thermodynamics: www.talkorigins.org...

Failure to understand that in thermodynamics probabilities are not fixed entities has led to a misinterpretation that is responsible for the wide- spread and totally false belief that the second law of thermodynamics does not permit order to spontaneously arise from disorder. In fact, there are many examples in nature where order does arise spontaneously from disorder: Snowflakes with their six-sided crystalline symmetry are formed spontaneously from randomly moving water vapor molecules.

You can find all of them through the search function on TalkOrigins:
www.talkorigins.org...

[Edited on 9-4-2004 by Byrd]

I was going to say strong, but that wouldn't have been the right word. I used sturdy because the information holds up to scrutiny, at least as far as I've been able to research. I figured here people would at least attempt to disprove it, and I would be interested in the arguements of how.

As far as my religious side, I'm torn on the issue. I haven't been able to find this 5000 year old date in the Bible anywhere, and people I ask for scriptual info on it ususally just give me a blank start. In genesis it says that God created the heavens and the earth over 7 days. But what was a day to God, before the Earth even existed? 24 "hours"? Why? I've believed that the creation could have been a gradual thing, with 6 "stages" so to speak, and evolution was just God's means of bringing to this earth us. To quote Futurama: "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."

However. Evolutionists can not even begin to explain how the alleged evolutionary mechanism in living cells operates. The fact that the galaxies of stars are shooting out into space away from each other indicate a common point of origin. One of the most basic laws of science, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, states that things in nature always tend to dissolve and breakdown, not grow more complex as in evolution.

And another arguement I need to get into a little more detail about:

Evolutionists postulate that life began eons ago in a primordial soup of organic chemicals involving an extremely complex process culminating in the creation of a living cell. The only problem is that oxygen would have destroyed the would-be cell in its early stages of development. So evolutionists have also postulated that the earth's atmosphere once upon a time contained only methane, ammonia, and water vapor � but no free oxygen.

Unfortunately, for the evolutionist, recent scientific discoveries have proven conclusively that no such atmosphere ever existed. (See, e.g., "Oxygen in the Precambrian Atmosphere" by Harry Clemmey and Nick Badham in the March 1982 issue of GEOLOGY.) In other words, evolution could not have even started.

These, I think, are valid points to be considered in the debate on evolution.

Oh... creationists also confuse evolution (how things developed) with abiogenesis (how life got started) and cosmological theory (Big Bang.)

None of them explain each other. How time starts doesn't explain anything else. Galactic motion doesn't explain how/when/if complex protein molecules form. Molecular chemistry doesn't explain how cell walls form. And how cats changed from the African wildcat type to the modern housepet doesn't explain how time started.

Oh... the 6,000 year old figure was compiled by Archbishop Ussher.
www.religioustolerance.org...

He calculated the Earth was born on October 22nd, 4004 BCE. Others since recalculated it.

[Edited on 9-4-2004 by Byrd]

The article calculates that approximately 1031 self-replicating molecules were being formed every year, using data from well known academical magazines.

You didn't just use the second law of thermodynamics, did you? That law is for a closed system. Is the earth a closed system? Ofcourse it isn't, it gets new energy from the sun.

I don't know who claims that molecular biology disproves evolution, but it is not right. Molecular biology evidence for macroevolution. How do you explain the retroviruses in DNA?

[Edited on 9-4-2004 by amantine]

...and I take it you're unfamiliar with anaerobic bacteria? Not all life forms need oxygen. Some die in the presence of it.