Great. Not saying you are wrong...I just though I was right :)

Here is one item I have found in my resources that might be of interest.

Atomic clocks, which have for the last 22 years measured the earth's spin rate to the nearest billionth of a second, have consistently found that the earth is slowing down at a rate of almost one second a year. If the earth were billions of years old, its initial spin rate would have been fantastically rapid--so rapid that major distortion in the shape of the earth would have occurred. a) Arthur Fisher, "The Riddle of the leap Second," Popular Science, Vol. 202, March, 1973, pp. 110-113, 164-166. b) Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratory, Earth Motions and Their Effect on Air Force Systems, November 1975, p. 6. c) Jack Fincher, "And Now, Atomic Clocks," Readers' Digest, Vol. III, November 1977, p. 34.

Also a link which I'm sure may spark a bit of controversy since it is from a Creation Science Research site. It tells what I have heard elsewhere. I will attempt to find the information in another source which which you will be more confident in.
http://www.icr.org/pubs/btg-b/btg-115b.htm

Kind of off the subject but still related, how do Christians explain dinosaurs and such? Do you beleive that man was created first and just hid from the gigantic beasts? If so, what killed off them but not the humans?

Several things:

First... Where are the dinosaurs? OK, The problem with translated text is that you miss out on all the original rythyms and sentence structures and WORDS the writers originally used. Dinosaurs ARE mentioned in Genesis. They just aren't described as "Dinosaurs". Looking at the original text, the writer describes "Large Lizard creatures" that roam the Earth.

-Second: Carbon dating can definitely have its flaws... ever try dating a cigarette you just smoked? Yeah... it's millions of years old.

-Days: In the Bible, It explicitly states that God's days are not the same as ours. Also, (this also goes with the BIG BANG) time is relative. We have proven over and over that gravity and speed affect time. Now imagine the universe when God sets it in motion with the big bang... Can you imagine how much gravity was at that initial point? It was tremendous. So, at that point in the timeline, one "day" was a long ass time ("Days" is a liberal use of the words, since it would still take a LONG time before there were 'our' days). As the universe expanded, days began to slow down since the gravitational forces became spread.

-Another thing... Everytime GOD interacts with someone in the bible, it is through nature... So, why is it hard to say that God didn't just set us in motion with the big bang and everything since then (including evolution) did happen because of his original planning? When a clock maker makes a clock, he lets a person buy it. Maybe the clock will glitch here and there, but for the most part, it works on its own until it basically collapses on itself (dies) and needs to be replaced.

A GREAT book on these subjects is The Science of God by Gerald L. Schroeder. Amazon's summary states "Schroeder (Genesis and the Big Bang, LJ 9/15/90) is an Israeli physicist and scholar of Genesis who maintains that a properly understood Bible and a properly understood science provide consistent sets of data. In recent decades, scientific discoveries in cosmology, paleontology, and quantum physics do not demonstrate or prove the activity of God, but they do remove conflict with that activity. Rapprochement occurs when believers read the Bible on the Bible's terms, avoiding literalism, and when scientists realize that science is powerless to pronounce on a purpose for life. Schroeder is very lucid in explaining difficult scientific concepts, such as the passage of time according to the theory of relativity, and religious data, such as the original Hebrew words. Schroeder's careful and responsible handling of the data on origins from science and Genesis 1, combined with a fresh, judicious correlation between the two, is compelling. Highly recommended.?Eugene O. Bowser, Univ. of Northern Colorado, Greeley"


Check it out... he's written several books on the subject and, even if you reject what he is saying, it is damn interesting.

Very interesting Mac God. This was the theory held by Benjamin Franklin and many around that time. Believing that God was the master clockwinder. I have learned that just swallowing what all those "authorities" in my religion say has not been the best route for me. Many of those would disagree with that theory but so far as I can tell it makes a lot of sense to me. Thanks for the reading suggestion.

Good words raeanna... The movie Stigmata sums my feelings on the subject... I was raised strict Baptist.. but college changes people and the movie definitely sums my feelings up now...

In the words of Bill Nye, The Science Guy:
Please Consider The Following:

The Big Bang is a THEORY (which is better than a hypothesis but has not been proven) because it can't be proven, no one was there.

It has become a postulate, which we know from geometry to be a theory that is accepted as fact. The Big Bang is accepted this way for the same reason it is a thoery; it can't be proven, no one was there.

Therefore people that dismiss religion solely on the basis that it is religion, MUST dismiss science for the same reason; science as well as religion is an explaination of nature, it was created by man.

Nature created neither science nor religion, nor do either COMPLETELY explain nature. Nature being the natural world, etc...

Thank You For Considering The Previous.

very true

Re: The creation of the universe.. Evolution or Religion..?
 

Why not? Micro-evolution is in effect around us every day. It is observable fact. Is it so hard to imagine that over the course of 100 million years these small changes could amount to much larger ones?

It's likely... but one thing science proves time and time again that the likeliness of something happening that extreme (to push evolution forward) is sooo minute, it's basically impossible. And for it to happen OVER and OVER is another impossibility that is incalculable. A way to relate the kind of 'luck' evolution would have to get from beginning to us was described this way:
Fill Texas up with nickels up to 8 feet. Paint the side of ONE nickel red. Now, the chances of every step of evolution getting us to where we are now would be the same as you randomly picking that RED nickel everytime you tried.

Your analogy is flawed in that evolution does not have a presupposed goal (ie - find the red nickle). It is a series of subtle shifts in genotype that expresses due to environmental pressure. As I said before, you can watch it in action (peppered moths being by far the best example).

Now if I had a fish in my hand and said to myself: "I want this to become a human in a million generations.", then yes, the odds are improbable in the extreme. But that is simply not how it works.

Yes... but the chances of things evolving the way they have and the massive amount of variation-that was what my analogy was for...the chance of that happening over and over is so small that anyone looking at it logically can conclude that it wouldn't be likely or possible. Yes, it's possible to flip a coin 10 thousand times and get nothing but heads, but what is the chance of that happening?

Well, there are no odds. It is random occurance that has brought us to the point we are at (if you have to assign odds to it then probability is 1). If there was no adaptation (evolution) we would not be having this conversation, because there would be no life left on the planet.

The chance of lightning hitting you is unbeleivably small, but if you are struck by lightning you do not dispute the fact because of the odds.

yeah... but you're not realizing that evolution isn't gradual! It's these sudden birsts! Look at the fossil record... for these to happen consistently, its like getting struck by lightning consistently in everywhere you go... it just doesn't happen unless you are carying a tire rod ...

It's not really that sudden. We are talking about periods of 10's of thousands of years at a minimum. It does come in bursts, but that is a factor of the earths environmental conditions (namely the ice-age cycle and extiction level events such as meteor strikes and large volcanic eruptions).

Yes, evolution has flaws, but what do creationists have? a book.
a book written thousands of years ago when people were even dumber than we are today. The bible was written in an attempt to explain the ways of the world before they had any other methods (science). So sure, there are loopholes in the theory of evolution, but it is still a lot more justifiable than creation.

Also, although it seems childish, the x-men movies opened my eyes to a certain possibility. They mentioned that every so often in the evolutionary chain, a mutation occurs (the mutants). To me, this explains the missing link. I now believe that there isn't really a missing link, but it was an inexplicable mutation in the evolutionary chain.

A series of mutations is all evolution is.

you have a one in two chance of it happening, each time.

I think debaser made a lot of the points I was going to make so I'll instead breifly address Otaku.

You're right, a one and two chance each time, but in order to address combined probability you have to multiply independent probabilities. So for the flipping of the coin 10 thousand times and only getting heads the probability for this is (1/2)^(10,000). A very small number.

The Mac God's logic is flawed in other respects that debaser pointed out. If discussion flares up again, I'll be here to help articulate these arguments.

This has been mostly about evolution. Now I believe evolution is how we became what we are. ever since that star exploded and became our solar system. Hey, were all related. We are stardust if you will.
But did the universe start at some point? Is it possible that the universe just came to be? That is, was there a time before time?
thinking about this I started to consider the circle of time thing. How can time start or end? I don't belive things just appear out of nothing.
So religion can explain these things.. based on nothing.
Where does this god or whatever come from?

as for evolution, First there was just molecules trying to be like the "noble-gases"(im from sweden.) like helium and such. They find systems wich lead to cells,, and from there they adapt,, and become more complex.. and that is evolution.. One day us humans might not have hair you know.. the process has started.. LOng ago

i would prefer to belive in creationism, but i read one to many science books, and i just couldn't lie to my self any more.

I believe in God....A christian god....an all knowing omnipotent god... for many reasons of which the following are two......

One is the theory of the uncaused cause.........or "Theos" to the ancient philosophers....Before the first cause (or event) there was some thing that caused the first cause. (is that circular enough?) Before existence something existed......

Secondly there is the paradox of belief....If you believe in god and there is no god you sacrafice little but, if you don't believe in god and god exists you sacrafice your eternal soul. From the first example you can see that waiting for the last cause could be a very long time.

Knowing the unknowable seems like the ultimate attempt at futility.....Imagine a circle that represents the whole of human intelligence....The larger the circle the larger the border of the unknown becomes.....soon no man can know all there is to know...soon after that all mankind cannot know all there is to know.........

Good luck trying :-)

Mac Gods logic is flawed I feel.
the laws of probability break down for very high numbers. For example, there are thousands of roullette wheels spinning around the globe as you read this. They have spun constantly 24 hours for say the last 50 years. Now taking the number of spins into account (billions) you would have expected an unbroken run of at least ONE of the even chances (high/low . .red/black . . odd/even) to be have reached a reasonably high figure by now . . . I undertstand that 26 reds in a row is as much as has ever been witnessed.

The point being that whilst 100 reds in a row are 'theoretically' expected given the large number of spins to date, in reality, the 'abnormal spikes' or deviations do not proceed past a certain point . . despite you doing the matematics to 'prove' to yourself that they do.

Conversely, whilst it is statistically unlikely that you will ever win the lottery . . 'someone' always does . . . . . every week!

Whilst I am robust enough to make up my own mind . . . its this kind of subtly 'threatening' language in attempting to instill fear in people (in particular primary school children), based entirely on your own philosophy, that causes atheists to lose respect and tar religious folk with the same brush. We have nothing to fear except fear itself . . . . . . . I never understood the term" are you a god-fearing man?" . . . . . . . . where's the free will? No-one wants to live in fear . . . real or imagined.

The reason for my dime explaination is only for scientific probability... Science itself says that anything remotley possible will most LIKELY not happen... especially over and over. Yes, it's possible to throw 10000 heads or the roulette wheel, but would you bet on your friend doing it? Or yourself? I think not... Or would you bet on someone who created a machine that could always throw heads?

unfortunately yours is flawed, we are not talking about a period of 50 year, we are talking about billions (~14.9billion) and we are not talking about just this planet, which some people have the audacity to think we are the only planet out there. We are talking about the chance that on one of the billions of planets over the billions of years something occurred.



Lets see you wanted 100 reds on a roulette wheel 1 spin every second for 50 years. Roughly 2.6x10^7 spins

In roulette there are 38 out comes 18 black 18 red 2 green rights?

18/38= .47368 ya I think I can do that. Let me have a bit to write program to see if I can get 100 'red' in a row with in 2.6x10^ spins

this should take me 30 min to run or so

Missing my point Dilbert! Your programme will run the numbers and tell you that, given the number of roulette tables in the world and the fact that there have been probably 1000s spinning constantly worldwide for many many years . . . then in 'theory' there should have been 500 reds in a row by now . . . . but there hasn't . . there have only been 26 because your tidy little theory of probability does NOT apply for very large samples . . . . . its the 'law of high numbers' . . probabilty calculations do not work for large numbers.

Evolution is a bit like these threads on the TFP . . they meander off course and then come back on topic . . . in a random and unpredictable way. . . . by your logic, a thread on 'Evolution' . . if it continued long enough, would 'eventually' touch on the topic of 'australian beaver cheese' . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .but by my reckoning I suspect that no matter how long the thread runs . .it will stay roughly on topic, swerving off down the odd dead-end every now and again but never drifting too far . . NO MATTER how long the thread runs.

hmm..

ok, first, i don't feel like reading the whole thread atm
and second, i don't have any sort of long, involved, researched and thought-out ideas on this (unlike some of you, which i admire)

but regarding the original question/post, it seems like 2 totally separate things here.

because, We, as humans, are NoT _The Universe_
we are just some animals living on one of god-knows-how-many (yes, god with a small 'g') - planets in this vast space...

neways...when i think of 'evolution' i think of, for example, how we as humans, &/or the other animals, came to be on this planet.

when i think of how the Universe started, i do not think of evolution, rather, the big bang, or whatever other theories there may be.

so i guess, i think this should've been two separate discussions, in order to keep things more clear.

dunno, that's just my 2 cents.

:)

Youre right about this thread... it meanders off course until one of us puts it back on... and the ONLY reason we now would touch "austrailian beaver cheese", is because you DIRECTED us to that and not because of chance... (I never knew there was such a thing)

I guess by mentioning australian beaver chees I actually proved myself wrong! Doh!

lol...

On the evolution and probability theme . . . . . . consider that the earth has been around for hundreds of millions of years (or whatever) . . . humans have had the technology for sending signals into space (or receiving them) for the last 50 or so! Now even if we are all around for another million years before we die of disease our wipe ourselves out by war or we are hit by a meteor . . that 'million years' timeslot (during which we have capability to send and recieve) is relatively a blink of an eye in the great scheme of things.

Now assuming 1000 other planets evolved intelligent life at various random 'million year' timeslots in a similar way over the countless billions of years . . then it would actually be a miracle if 2 such evolved planets coincidentally co-existed in the same time frame . . . hence our sense of being all alone.

I believe our lives are all story book fiction. Nobody really knows the truth to anything. There is no logic to answers nor is there any real answers to logic. I think evolution was created by a wondering mind. Evolution has many faults found in the history and everything to this point makes no sence at all. God is something like a character in a story. He is a superhero as some put it. He is like a Santa claus in our society, He is a way to make death look good so no one will be scared anymore. I believe that there is no God nor is there any clear signs of evolution.

. . . . . . well I cant see any signs of God but there are plenty of jig-saw pieces to build a picture of evolution . . a few of them might be in the wrong place but its pretty convincing . . you dont need all the bits to see the picture.

I have never seen a tiger . . but I beleive people when they tell me they exist . . . . . . . . . not so with God . . other than as a concept or idea in your mind. Even religoius folks dont think God 'actually' exists other than as a relative concept.

OK... so you say that mostly seeing is believing... Well... have you ever seen the wind? No, you've seen the effects of the wind... not the wind itself... much like 'God'... the effects of god are a controlled direction of life... called evolution...

the speed and strength of the wind can be precisely measured, and predicted (to varying degrees). It is moving air. No-one disputes the existence of the physical phenomenon know as 'wind'.

God is not so easy to pin down. A better analogy would be to pick another abstract concept . . . . . like 'love'. You can say Gods is like love . . . . . . . neither 'really' exist outwith the minds of humans.

no... you missed the point... a lot of people base their beliefs on seeing... well... you can't see the wind! no matter how you slice it...

the best way, combinfing the best of both worlds, faith and science, if i had not lost the faith that is how i would be.