Is Evolution a Dangerous Idea? If so, why?

The idea of evolution is no more dangerous than any other idea which has helped us build civilization. As a tool, it can be used or misused.

For some religious believers, evolution may seem dangerous because it goes against their interpretation of the Bible. And "interpretation" is the key word, here. But evolution is merely one of the products of the study of God's creation.

Here's a question for the believer: "Is your interpretation of the Bible equal or superior to that of God?"

There are many conflicting interpretations. Hmmm-m-m! And how many can be right? Only one, and possibly none!

Far greater than any "danger" from evolution, is the danger of interpretation and the ego which makes one so attached to any one idea. Such ego is bad for civilization, and more importantly for the believer, bad for salvation!

The Search for Truth
Okay, scientists might shy away from the "T" word, but every discovery of science is a relative "truth." It is certainly more true than some other hypothesis or theory.

The search for such "truths" requires humility or restraint. One should not jump to the easiest conclusion. All the good scientists use a certain amount of humility or restraint. Too bad they sometimes forget their humility. The same goes for the believer. Answers cannot be found if you think you know it all before even looking.

Delusion!
Science is in the business of studying reality and it is batting close to 1000 (a baseball term used to indicate perfection). For a believer to diss science is to ignore reality. And what does this spell? Pure and simple -- d-e-l-u-s-i-o-n!

For the biblical literalist, the Bible is without error and should be taken literally. But even the literalist does not adhere to this mandate 100% of the time. Take the story of Adam and Eve, for instance. God said that Adam would die on the day he ate the forbidden fruit. Okay, so did he? Not literally; not physically! He and his mate were escorted out of the Garden of Heaven and, according to Genesis 5, Adam lived to the ripe old age of 930!

Adam and Eve did not die physically; they died spiritually. And the resurrection? So many feel that this will be their own bodies being exhumed to live in bliss forever. Is this delusion? If the death in the Garden was spiritual, wouldn't the resurrection also be spiritual (not physical)?

Making Sense
A lot of people can't make sense of the Bible, so they give up. A lot of people merely believe it blindly and don't care what it means. Either approach is a loss.

The literal timeline derived from Genesis and other sources took Archbishop Ussher of Ireland to the interesting conclusion that humanity and the cosmos originated 4004 BC. Ussher was a brilliant scholar. Many of the dates he uncovered are still used by historians or close to them. Even Sir Isaac Newton tried his hand at a biblical timeline, because back then this was important work.

But today, we know better. Science shows that Homo sapiens is at least 200,000 years old and that the universe is something like 13.7 billion years old.

Remember the warning: don't ignore reality (don't be deluded).

If reality says that man and the cosmos are far more than 6000 years old, then believers should not cling to the erroneous notion that the Bible says everything is only six millennia old. In other words, we should remain humble! The Nazarene teacher emphasized this point time and again.

One thing long puzzled me, ever since I first heard it in my Southern Baptist minister grandfather's church: How could anyone live to be nearly a thousand years old? Simple answer: they didn't.

But the Bible says...? A clue to what it really says may be found in Genesis 5:2, where Adam is described as a group, both male and female! "Adam" was another word for humanity (thousands or millions?). Methuselah the man may have lived for only 60 years, but his eponymous tribe lived far longer.

And as outrageously long as each of those early patriarchs lived, their ages do not add up. In order to reach the minimum age of humanity, those ages need to be multiplied by some factor.

And the clues are in Genesis. You just have to be humble enough to see them.

In God's creation, there is plenty of room for evolution and billions of galaxies.

QWelcome on board. Im g;ad youre here because Weve made space for theistic evolution but whendoing so, the theistic evolution fans must be ready to explain how their evolutionary mechanism works . Science has developed a multitude of mechanisms that respond to means of adaptation to environments in change. If theistic evolution follows a similar pathway, why bother? It seems just like a bit of a force -fit of a worldview without a mechanism. Get what Im talking about?

For example, if the environmental changes that occur are bunched up into cyclic and some catastrophic, the evolutionary changes that occur are matched to these changes. Catastrophic changes (Like the "big 5" extinctions) gave rise to entirely new suites of organisms that ruled for a pweriod of time until the next big extinction. As much as we can see (from the Pleistocene'Holocene "big extinction" we can see the appearances and disappearances of entirely new gene lines (We cant see back into the fossil record but we play "clock work"games with existing critters genes and STR's)
So How does theistic evolution enter the discussion besides saying "Me too"?

Why challenge them with that question? Where does it lead?

But Science having developed a multitude of mechanisms that respond to means of adaptation to environments in change does not explain anything except that Science has developed a multitude of mechanisms that respond to means of adaptation to environments in change.

fm's whole post is banal. I get what he's talking about. He's flattering himself. Again.

His simple argument works for football and fragrance bottle shapes. Henry Ford's --"they can have any colour they want as long as it's black" hasn't worked out for psychological reasons. Look at the physiognomy of house design in different cultures.

What fm specialises in is reducing complexity to banality and then larding it up with certain types of words to try to restore the complexity as an illusion. A bit like a witch doctor's mumbo-jumbo.

For example



means that increases in radiation from nuclear events are not a problem because species would adapt to the increase. Same with global warming, whale extinction, wars and economic meltdowns. Hence there are no problems at all. Evolution can match changes within certain limits. Thus, doom-mongering is an affectation from a scientific point of view. An expression of lack of confidence in Life. Motivated by perceived self-interest and each self-interested position has equal validity unless people are not equal.

There's nothing scientific about fm's ideas despite the patina which takes in the weak minded.

I take it that you are one of the "God started it off and then let everything go by itself". I suppose thats a reasonable approach if you need to maintain some semblance of control . However, most science doesnt really care about stories started around campfires which then grew into "big book "mythopoeia. Its interesting that we have a pretty good historical understanding about the creation of God.

If fm would try to read Walter Bauer's Orthodoxy and Heresy in Early Christianity he would discover how good our understanding of the creation of God actually is.

But I fear such theology is way over his head. The only reason he thinks that sexual licentiousness is not at the root of these discussions is that he has been brought up a good Christian and the problem has been sorted out to a reasonable extent for him seemingly without him being aware of it.

There's no way evolution theory could sort it out.

It's a bit like discussing football without reference to money. Pathetic.

Science is in the business of studying CONCEPTS and IDEAS. It is not even possible to study the reality. Reality can only be lived. Science only pushes the frontiers of ignorance further back.

If you think science has the answers then you are as deluded as the believers

Your computer isn't real? It's only a concept?

If science doesn't provide the answers for our reality, what does?

I think the danger is more in science denialism than in evolution.

How about a brief comedy break? (If your answer is 'no' then just keep scrolling.)

"You fuckety ******." Such eloquence. Give 'em all the exposure they want, I say. The higher a monkey climbs the more he shows his arse. (I've a feeling I'm quoting someone there, but can't think who...)

Eugenics, Race purity, Transhumanism, and a whole host of lousy ideas do come from Evolution because most people nowadays cannot make the leap from E. to the applications of E.

I think a great Evolutionist and stunningly brilliant man makes my case, C S Peirce
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C S Peirce ('The American Aristotle") was an evolutionist but he hated this aspect of it


"The Origin of Species of Darwin merely extends politico-economical views of progress to the entire realm of animal and vegetable life. The vast majority of our contemporary naturalists hold the opinion that the true cause of those exquisite and marvelous adaptations of nature for which, when I was a boy, men used to extol the divine wisdom, is that creatures are so crowded together that those of them that happen to have the slightest advantage force those less pushing into situations unfavorable to multiplication or even kill them before they reach the age of reproduction. Among animals, the mere mechanical individualism is vastly re‰enforced as a power making for good by the animal's ruthless greed. As Darwin puts it on his title-page, it is the struggle for existence; and he should have added for his motto: Every individual for himself, and the Devil take the hindmost! Jesus, in his sermon on the Mount, expressed a different opinion.
[6.294]
Here, then, is the issue. The gospel of Christ says that progress comes from every individual merging his individuality in sympathy with his neighbors. On the other side, the conviction of the nineteenth century is that progress takes place by virtue of every individual's striving for himself with all his might and trampling his neighbor under foot whenever he gets a chance to do so. This may accurately be called the Gospel of Greed. "

Todays Democratic party came from "The party pof Lincoln" (The GOP" as Johnson said, on the signing of the Civil Rights act.
"Were gonna lose the SOuth for another generation"
So, at about that time all the racist thinking built into the old Southern Dems, became racist bigot GOPS.

All is malleable as a marshmallow, even science and politics

PS , a lot of the semiotics tuff that Dan Brown got for his books was derived by Peirce. Ive visited his house in Milford Pa several times as a kid because my Grandfather was a believer in shamanism of the Leni Lenape Indians (and my grandfather was a recent convert to Christianity from Judaism and the Kabal crap)

During the atheist/deist wars we once had here, referenced by setanta on another thread, yesterday, one of the deists went to another site and recruited believers to try and overrun a2k with Christian posters. We might be experiencing similar to that right now.

How about we ask, Is it true or not ? Because a good idea can be used badly too.
And because I've studied E. for a couple decades I have to caution you that there are MANY E. not just one.
Darwin did NOT hold for an evolution of the non-living universe but E went in some forms to that tenet.

I believe that you hqve very little idea of what youre speaking. Darwin's theory never became the only mens of evolution.

We call his theory, "natural Selection",
ranst Mayr ws probably the most recent author/scientist who lited out the many types pof evolution of LIFE.

Trying to meld some kind of theories to account for the phyical woprld misses a fundamentl point. The universe follows specific laws of physics, not biology.

"Criticall Zone Analysis" is a newer form of multi-phase cause and effect relationships between the living and non living world. It goes beyond the old "Gaia" hypothesis and analyzes the ''spheres in terms of the many interacting laws, including biology .

I did not have any idea. What a nice thought that we are so much loved.