Before you go, could you just address these?Originally Posted by Swa
Do you believe in a flood event in or about 2348 BC?
How old do you believe the earth to be?
a) about 6010 years old.
b) about 4.5 Billion years old.
There are no wrong answers, so go right ahead and answer, you know you want to.
a2
Join the Great Facebook Deactivation from 1 September 2012
How do you know when a Republican is lying? When he opens his mouth.
How do you know a creationist is lying? When he opens his mouth.
"If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution."
Robert Sewell.
How do you know an evolutionist is lying? When he starts to think.
Are you referring to the word "bara"? It is used to refer to humans and other things. A Scholastic account of creation and change is consistent with Bible's version.
I think a clear distinction between creation and change/evolution will benefit discussions surrounding these issues. Also, I think the main difference between the way people see evolution/change is the distinction between existential inertia and existential conservation.
Existential inertia implies that once something is created it will tend to remain in existence without some cause that is needed to keep it in existence.
That is probably the "type of evolution that these guys" believe and I don't. I am curious, do you believe this view?
Existential conservation implies that once things are created they cannot continue to exist for an instant without an active cause preserving it in being.
You can't trust a meta-ethical moral relativist since such a person can abuse reason to justify any act.
Gen. 1:1 - "In the beginning God created..." - The word "bara" here refers to either "creation ex nihilo" (out of nothing) or "creation ex materia" (out of a formless or void state, to shape or form).
Gen. 1:21 - "... created the great creatures of the sea ... and every winged bird..."
Gen. 1:27 - "... created mankind..."
Gen. 2:3 - "... all the work of creating that he had done."
Gen. 2:4 - "... the heavens and the earth when they were created,"
- Here the word CAN refer to creation out of nothing but...
Gen. 1:25 - "... made the wild animals..."
Gen. 1:26 - "... make mankind in our image"
Gen. 1:31 - "... all that he had made"
Ps. 104:24 - "... made them all; ... There is the sea, vast and spacious, teeming with creatures beyond number"
Ps. 121:2 - "the Maker of heaven and earth"
- The word "asah" here means to "do" or "make."
Although "bara" is used for God's creation it would be contradictory except for the first sentence to view it as creation ex nihilo because it's used interchangeably to refer to those things that are both created and made and even used together. The few instances where "bara" refers to humans it's used as a concept word like making a clearing in a forest and not to refer to God's type of creation.
So you believe in the same molecule to man evolution but that everything is kept in existence externally? That is simply theistic evolution. My view is that of creation from other matter or genetic material and not genetic mutation (guided or unguided) over generations. With regards to existence I believe it's more like a thought that manifests as reality when required.
Sure, I don't think any of this is incompatible with a Scholastic view of change and creation.
I don't think my view is compatible with "theistic evolution". More specifically, the views that "evolution is a tool used by God to develop human life" or "God's method of creation was to cleverly design a universe in which everything would naturally evolve" are not things I support. This to me is more like deism and not classical theism.
To me, the concept of "creation from something else" does not make a lot of sense. Creation to me is simple making something from nothing. Making something from something else is just an example of change. I guess we just have to disagree about this and move on. Anyway, do you think that once something is made it remains in existence without a sustaining cause?
You can't trust a meta-ethical moral relativist since such a person can abuse reason to justify any act.
This is the part I don't understand. You believe in evolution but don't seem to support any version I've heard of. Theistic evolution is either that God (1) tinkered with evolution along the way, or (2) created things to naturally evolve without intervention, or (3) created things knowing the ends; this would imply no free will.
I just see creation as a process of first making the material and then shaping it. It could have been created to remain in existence or to be sustained in existence. The law of entropy suggests to me that it is self sustaining but continually running down much like an old clock with a wind-up spring.
I found the following graph from your link: http://www.pewforum.org/Science-and-...Evolution.aspx
Very interesting article on random patterns in nature, fractals are such an awesome example of how a simple algorithm can produce amazing patterns that seem designed
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterns_in_nature
Classical theism, not "theistic evolution".
Classical theism in a nutshell is basically that if God exists:
1) God exists necessarily, in other words, God could not have not existed.
2) God has no limitations, God is not limited in perfection, in power, in goodness and in knowledge.
3) Nothing can come into being or continue to happen without God creating it and sustaining it in existence.
Such a view does not necessarily negate free will.
Entropy does not suggest existential inertia. At best it describes the natural ends of interacting substances to result in an increase in entropy.
Natural patterns (not random patterns) are pretty and interesting.
You can't trust a meta-ethical moral relativist since such a person can abuse reason to justify any act.
Look Techne I realise that you are missing being able to comment in PD but come on now. Why do you continue to do this? Perhaps take it to PM or something.
The box said "requires Windows7 or better" so I installed Linux.
I suppose random patterns is a bad way of putting it.
But these patterns do stem from random mutations governed by natural selection.
Mutations are not random. And the concept of natural selection "governing" stuff" does appear to make much sense. Perhaps you have a better way of putting?
You can't trust a meta-ethical moral relativist since such a person can abuse reason to justify any act.
Mutations are random, some are meaningless, some are harmful and some are beneficial, in which case the trait becomes more common.
Random mutations governed by natural selection is key to evolution.
You think jesus controls mutations?
Or do you just want to argue?
For the love of baby jesus riding a dinosaur, read:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection
And then come back and spew shyte.
Wait, I'll quote it here so don't have to click.
"Variation exists within all populations of organisms. This occurs partly because random mutations cause changes in the genome of an individual organism, and these mutations can be passed to offspring."
Another source:
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/evo101/IIIC1aRandom.shtml
Read the heading where it says "Mutations are Random"
Rofl
Last edited by CoolBug; 07-07-2012 at 08:16 PM.
Coolbug, the random part in random variation is not really random when it comes to mutations. Professor Dan Graur writes in his article “Single-base Mutation” in Encyclopedia of Life Sciences that mutations do not occur randomly throughout the genome. The direction of a mutation is not random. The only way variation is seen as random is that it is random relative to the effect variation has on fitness.
The major problem with this is that the precise meaning of fitness has not been settled. There is still a major debate about what exactly fitness is supposed to mean. Without a proper definition of fitness, we can’t really say what natural selection is. Also, without a proper definition of fitness we can’t really make any sense of how variation can be random relative to fitness in the first place.
What makes this worse, a proper definition of "random" is needed. There is no agreed definition of randomness, however, one can perhaps make sense of the concept as an absence of ALL order or ALL predictability or the opposite of ANY order.
Suppose there is something that behaved in a way that could only be described as random, something that changes in a totally unpredictable manner. Let’s take an electron with spin Sz=+½ as an example. One moment it is an electron with Sz=+½ around the nucleus of hydrogen in laboratory on earth, the next moment it is moving towards the sun and randomly changes to a proton of carbon and then inexplicably moves back, the next moment it is some gold nugget on its way towards Mars. Suppose you want to measure Sz, you could never in principle know or predict whether it would suddenly change into a gold nugget or a proton or fly to the sun or Mars and back or just be Sx=+½ or Sx=-½ or not change at all etc. One can argue that such an electron behaves in a random manner as there is no way to predict any kind of behaviour.
Contrast this with an electron that behaves in an indeterminate manner. Let’s take the electron with spin Sz=+½ again as an example. From experiments we know that Sx is indeterminate and that the electron is free to be either Sx=+½ or Sx=-½ upon measurement of Sx. We are able to predict that it will be either Sx=+½ or Sx=-½ even though it is indterminate before measurement. The freedom is determined by something that is part of the electron, some property of the electron. One can say that the electron has certain dispositions, there is order (either Sx=+½ or Sx=-½, not pure radmoness) in the freedom of an electron. The freedom is not random, it is merely indeterminate. So while randomness entails indeterminism, indeterminism does not entail randmoness. One can have indeterminism and order and one can have indeterminism and randomness but one cannot intelligibly argue to have pure randomness and order or orderly randomness.
At best, one can say mutations are indeterminate.
You can't trust a meta-ethical moral relativist since such a person can abuse reason to justify any act.
Okay, you win
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