Serious question to the creationists

CanadaJohn said:

When you're a pure creationist, you don't have to explain what you believe because it's a matter of faith. Faith is believing in what can't be explained or rationalized in human terms.

For me, I'd have to say I'm a creationist who believes in evolution. Some way, some how, our universe and those beyond had to have been created by some power we don't and likely never will understand. As humans, we don't have any concept to explain something starting by simply appearing. I do, however, strongly believe in the evolution of all living things on earth. All living things evolve and adapt to their environment in a Darwinist survival of the fittest. And for this reason I don't believe that God "created us in his image".

Click to expand...

CanadaJohn said:

When you're a pure creationist, you don't have to explain what you believe because it's a matter of faith. Faith is believing in what can't be explained or rationalized in human terms.

For me, I'd have to say I'm a creationist who believes in evolution. Some way, some how, our universe and those beyond had to have been created by some power we don't and likely never will understand. As humans, we don't have any concept to explain something starting by simply appearing. I do, however, strongly believe in the evolution of all living things on earth. All living things evolve and adapt to their environment in a Darwinist survival of the fittest. And for this reason I don't believe that God "created us in his image".

Click to expand...

Ben K. said:

ID proponents generally don't believe in material speciation. CJ sounds more deistic.

Click to expand...

Crovax said:

How is that different from intelligent design?

Click to expand...

csbrown28 said:

CJ, Thanks for joining the conversation....There seem to be a lot of those that believe as you do. They know life can't have started on it's own therefore god must have done it. The evidence of evolution is pretty hard to deny so it's incorporated into the creationist belief system. Now, don't take that as a derogatory or inflammatory statement, just as my observation.

As far as explanation goes, you are correct most don't need an explanation, they just take it on faith, but it would seem that Creationist Christianity wouldn't exist without those that attempt to explain away the apparent discrepancies of creationism....

Take for instance....

The Genesis flood: Where did all that water come from? Where did it go?
How could the Genesis flood form the Grand Canyon?
How do you explain the universally consistent radioactive dating results obtained with different radioactive elements, and the consistent correlation with objects of known age?
What scientifically factual information supports the creationist contention that the universe is only a few thousand years old?
How can the astronomical evidence that the universe is billions of years old be explained, without resorting to the preposterous assumption that the speed of light was millions of times faster in the past than it is now?

Now you can believe creationism by faith, but what do you do when your children (or other family member if you don't have children), questions these obvious inconsistencies? Just tell them it's faith and not to question it? Sounds brutally authoritarian. I suspect that you have heard and answered these questions before.

Click to expand...

CanadaJohn said:

No offense taken. I don't try to explain away those things I don't understand. And as a person who isn't at all religious, I have no dogma or "teachings" to validate or explain in order to believe what I believe.

As for faith, I use that as a religious term. As a person raised in a Catholic family, in Catholic churches and schools, I became a person for whom faith as a concept was not something I was prepared to accept. In fact, I always remember that one of my teachers in elementary school wrote on my report card that "John should learn to take more things on faith" and my parents, to their credit, took that and said it was a wonderful note and they were proud of me although my teacher pointed it out as something I should change, perhaps because he got tired of me always questioning things.

Click to expand...

csbrown28 said:

While this doesn't exactly fit in this category because it's a question about evolution, the answer I expect to get is based more on ideology than evidence, thus I ask it here....

In the interest of full disclosure I freely admit to my bias as a person who believes that evolution explains the wide diversity of life on this planet (not to be confused with how life began). I think it explains things like vestigial organs, viral DNA markers and why bone structure in creatures that have bones are so similar.

On to my question....

First, I need to lay out my assumptions about what the creationist believes. Not being a creationist I want to make sure that my assumptions are fair.

Generally speaking the creationist believes that god created all life in it's present form. Relatively recently this idea seems to have morphed into the idea that god created "kinds" which I can only assume means that birds have always been birds and fish have always been fish and anything that appears to be between two species, take a bat for instance, is not a rodent that evolved wings, but has always been a bat. So while birds may have evolved into other "kinds" of birds, they have always been birds.

Feel free to correct me, but please, let's not get caught up in minutia . If something I've said fundamentally changes the nature of the creationist argument, feel free to correct me, but please, answer the question. I am truly curious.

If this were a conversation, I would await correction before proceeding, but I fear that the thread would kick off a debate about evolution in general and I would never get to ask my question.

So.....

When looking at rock strata we find that fossil organisms get simpler and simpler as we go back in time. When rocks are dated correctly all over the world we find that different species appear at the same time, thus when you go back certain species don't exist at all. How can the creationist explain that?

Even if you try to demonstrate that dating methods are wrong, how can you explain strata all over the world where there are no mammals, no birds, no lizards, but only much simpler forms of life?

Click to expand...

csbrown28 said:

So I guess you weren't really the kind of creationist I was hoping to hear from. It's all good. For the record, I'm not asking that you or others "explain away" anything, just that whoever answers the question explain their point of view.


I suspect that I won't get any takers who will answer the question as straightforwardly as I've asked it, instead the answers will question the question or, as you've pointed out, call it faith.

-Cheers

Click to expand...

Dittohead not! said:

Evolution explains how life was created in its present form. So far, we don't know exactly how it began, but we're working on that one, too. Evolution does not explain why life was created. As homo sapiens, we tend to think we're the end result of evolution and therefore the goal the creator had in mind, but that might not be true. Evolution is still going on, after all, and we don't know what life might be like in another few million years.

Asking whether life evolved or was created is to me like asking whether a modern automobile was created or evolved from simpler machines. It's not an either/or answer.

Click to expand...

csbrown28 said:

While this doesn't exactly fit in this category because it's a question about evolution, the answer I expect to get is based more on ideology than evidence, thus I ask it here....

In the interest of full disclosure I freely admit to my bias as a person who believes that evolution explains the wide diversity of life on this planet (not to be confused with how life began). I think it explains things like vestigial organs, viral DNA markers and why bone structure in creatures that have bones are so similar.

On to my question....

First, I need to lay out my assumptions about what the creationist believes. Not being a creationist I want to make sure that my assumptions are fair.

Generally speaking the creationist believes that god created all life in it's present form. Relatively recently this idea seems to have morphed into the idea that god created "kinds" which I can only assume means that birds have always been birds and fish have always been fish and anything that appears to be between two species, take a bat for instance, is not a rodent that evolved wings, but has always been a bat. So while birds may have evolved into other "kinds" of birds, they have always been birds.

Feel free to correct me, but please, let's not get caught up in minutia . If something I've said fundamentally changes the nature of the creationist argument, feel free to correct me, but please, answer the question. I am truly curious.

If this were a conversation, I would await correction before proceeding, but I fear that the thread would kick off a debate about evolution in general and I would never get to ask my question.

So.....

When looking at rock strata we find that fossil organisms get simpler and simpler as we go back in time. When rocks are dated correctly all over the world we find that different species appear at the same time, thus when you go back certain species don't exist at all. How can the creationist explain that?

Even if you try to demonstrate that dating methods are wrong, how can you explain strata all over the world where there are no mammals, no birds, no lizards, but only much simpler forms of life?

Click to expand...

csbrown28 said:

On to my question....

First, I need to lay out my assumptions about what the creationist believes. Not being a creationist I want to make sure that my assumptions are fair.

Generally speaking the creationist believes that god created all life in it's present form. Relatively recently this idea seems to have morphed into the idea that god created "kinds" which I can only assume means that birds have always been birds and fish have always been fish and anything that appears to be between two species, take a bat for instance, is not a rodent that evolved wings, but has always been a bat. So while birds may have evolved into other "kinds" of birds, they have always been birds.

Click to expand...

Goshin said:

I believe that whatever the details of how life came to be on Earth, God was in charge from the beginning and all unfolded according to His will.

Click to expand...

KevinKohler said:

I'm no creationist...but here's a serious question back at you concerning evolution.


It doesn't work. Not logically. No, really....hear me out.

Monarch butterfly...started as a worm, but then at some point,over a period of time, one family, over generations, mutated to metamorphosis into a flying insect. I can buy that, sorta. But then they went and developed poisonous wings. I am told this poison prevents other animals, namely birds, from eating them. And that the process for this happening is that, say, one was born that tasted bad, which was a favorable trait that was then passed on to it's progeny. But wait...how does anything know it tasted bad? Until, of course...they eat it...which is not so good for the butterfly, and it's would have been progeny, yes? So just how DID the monarch butterfly become poisonous, and how exactly DOES/DID that help it to survive? In the end, the only sign that it is are it's bright colors, which, in nature, often means danger. But that completely invalidates the use of the actual poisonous nature, as all it would REALLY need to be is brightly colored, and not poisonous to eat.

No, the idea that these traits came about over time just doesn't jive with logic, as none of these traits would prevent the death of their hosts from another species that isn't already aware of those traits. Nothing eats poison dart frogs because they know they are poisonous...millions of years of passed on internal info sees to that. What started that information? And what good at all is the poison, then? Yes, I eat a poison dart frog, and as a result, I die. But uh...so does the frog. Which now does not live to pass on it's traits.

Click to expand...

LZRD WZRD said:

I don't think you understand how it works. Yes, one butterfly would have to be eaten in order for an animal to know not to eat it again. So that's one less predator for them. That's how it helps them survive. I'm not really sure what your problem with that is.

Click to expand...

KevinKohler said:

So you're saying that across the species, more than ONE randomly developed the SAME mutation? Over time? Pretty far fetched.

Plus, are you also saying that individual creatures developed traits that only serve the survival of the entire species, but not the individual?

Remember, as it stands, evolution as a theory + genetics stipulates that it is a slow process, that the development happens over hundreds and thousands of generations, and is pretty random. Meaning, one monarch butterfly has a batch of kids, from which, only ONE develops a meaningful variation from the herd (bad taste to birds), that was not in the original DNA, that can now be passed on.

Unless such a thing is not so random, and more than one developed the same randomly occurring trait over the various "families" of monarchs. At which point, I would have to say that it was already there, and that our understanding of the info locked in DNA is still very much incomplete. And that evolution might not be quite as evolutionary as we think.

Click to expand...

KevinKohler said:

So you're saying that across the species, more than ONE randomly developed the SAME mutation? Over time? Pretty far fetched.

Plus, are you also saying that individual creatures developed traits that only serve the survival of the entire species, but not the individual?

Remember, as it stands, evolution as a theory + genetics stipulates that it is a slow process, that the development happens over hundreds and thousands of generations, and is pretty random. Meaning, one monarch butterfly has a batch of kids, from which, only ONE develops a meaningful variation from the herd (bad taste to birds), that was not in the original DNA, that can now be passed on.

Unless such a thing is not so random, and more than one developed the same randomly occurring trait over the various "families" of monarchs. At which point, I would have to say that it was already there, and that our understanding of the info locked in DNA is still very much incomplete. And that evolution might not be quite as evolutionary as we think.

Click to expand...

csbrown28 said:

Actually, evolution says nothing of creation, but how life has changed over time. Learning that life may have come about as part of a natural process, rather than a supernatural one, has some fairly important implications.

As far as the either/ or point, while you are right, there is nothing that strictly prevents a third option, there aren't any on the table I know of.

The interesting part, is that if evolution is correct, that really hurts the traditional creationist as it undermines the foundation of their belief. As a non-believer, I have examined the evidence, things that other people have tested, and concluded that there is truth to it, but the wonderful thing is that if it's all proven wrong tomorrow, via evidence, it does nothing to prove that god is real or that my rejection of a god, any god, is suddenly in question.

Click to expand...