Do *ANY* creationists understand evolution?

@Intrepid,

Intrepid wrote:

I don't believe in a young earth. I also don't believe that it was chance evolution that brought everything to where it is.

P.S. - I didn't bail out. I just forgot about this thread.

That's ok, I forgot about it too.

Can you be more specific about where you see "non-chance" happening in the process of evolution.

I suspect that you are not a typical "Creationist" of the type I meant when I gave this thread its title.

1 Reply

@rosborne979,

No, I guess I would not be typical.

I have a hard time fathoming that a big bang occured and life just happened to evolve from that. Everything just happened to be perfect in that the right things grew to feed the life. That every part of the beings grew at the proper rate. That everything was created by a simple micro organism. That there are so many species. etc. I don't pretend to have any answers but there are many questions not answered.

I can certainly see how things can evolve. I just don't buy how it started in the first place.

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@Intrepid,

Intrepid wrote:

No, I guess I would not be typical.

I have a hard time fathoming that a big bang occured and life just happened to evolve from that. Everything just happened to be perfect in that the right things grew to feed the life. That every part of the beings grew at the proper rate. That everything was created by a simple micro organism. That there are so many species. etc. I don't pretend to have any answers but there are many questions not answered.

I can certainly see how things can evolve. I just don't buy how it started in the first place.

Considering what a tiny speck is Earth, in the vast scheme of things, it should give pause that we are the only proven intelligence in existence. Hard to imagine a planner wasting that much space just to plan an imperfect species in a precarious situation that could be wiped out at almost any moment.

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@Intrepid,

Intrepid wrote:

I can certainly see how things can evolve. I just don't buy how it started in the first place.

Is it then accurate to say that you do believe in the theory of evolution? Because abiogenesis is just not something that evolution addresses, despite the common misconception.

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@Robert Gentel,

Quote:

Because abiogenesis is just not something that evolution addresses, despite the common misconception.

Additionally, it appears (from the sorts of remarks we get here) that the creationist propaganda machine puts a heavy emphasis on the question of whether or not a "big bang" is plausible. Cosmic origins are also something which is irrelevant to a theory of evolution.

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@Setanta,

Is it wrong to speculate a creation theory that is followed by evolution?

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@Intrepid,

I don't think it is wrong to so speculate. But to me it doesn't make any sense why one would do so. Billions of years of life, with no humanlike intelligence present. No discernable plan evident. Suddenly, humans appear, and because humans have plans, it is decided by some that all life must have a plan. They speculate there must be a super power, a god, to guide life. But, no evidence to suggest it, other than an enquiring mind. I just don't see how a god is any more than a desire to put human values into a situation that does not require any.

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@Intrepid,

No, and i wasn't saying that it were wrong. I was just pointing out that it is not relevant to try to tie a theory of evolution to cosmic origins, and, as RG points out, it is not relevant to tie it to abiogenesis. A theory of evolution doesn't "care" where the cosmos came from, or how life arose--it is only concerned with the process which leads from simple life forms to more complex life forms.

I suspect that creationists bring up "the big bang" (a term coined by a Belgian priest, by the way) and abiogenesis because they find it easier to argue against those ideas than they do to argue against the data underpinning evolutionary theory itself.

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@Intrepid,

Intrepid wrote:

I have a hard time fathoming that a big bang occured and life just happened to evolve from that. Everything just happened to be perfect in that the right things grew to feed the life.

Based on what we know about the biological process of evolution, it would be more accurate to realize that "everything wasn't just perfect to feed life", but that life adapted itself to fit the available conditions. We already know that life on this planet started with very simple forms capable of filling a large part of the available environment (an environment which is currently hostile to life as it now exists).

Intrepid wrote:

That every part of the beings grew at the proper rate. That everything was created by a simple micro organism. That there are so many species. etc. I don't pretend to have any answers but there are many questions not answered.

No offense, but this seems like the old "it's too amazing, I just can't believe it" argument. And while I agree that it's amazing, history and new understanding continues to support the fact that things did indeed derive from natural processes. Everything we discover supports it, and nothing contradicts it.

Intrepid wrote:

I can certainly see how things can evolve. I just don't buy how it started in the first place.

There are mysteries that science hasn't yet answered, and many things it probably never will answer. As to "what started it all", I doubt science will ever even attempt to answer that because it backs up against the question of "knowing" itself, and how the human mind perceives reality; areas of philosophy rather than science. But that doesn't mean that everything can't be purely natural, any more than it can be. We simply don't understand reality outside of our physical world (before the BB).

Science is very good at describing the natural world and understanding how it works, and so far, as deep as we probe or as far back as we extrapolate, nature behaves consistently. We find unknowns, but we don't find anything which breaks the mold. I predict we never will. The Universe is consistent within itself.

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Well if they did then they wouldn't be Creationists!

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@rosborne979,

That's a two-parter.

Part 1) No, I haven't seen any creationist on A2K who demonstrated an understanding of evolutionary theory.

Part 2) There are very few creationists who understand evolution, but Kurt Wise is one of them, judging by Richard Dawkins's description.

Edit: Oops, I had no idea how old this question was.

1 Reply

@Thomas,

Ah yes, Kurt Wise, this is the guy who spent months of his life cutting up a bible with scissors.
This was from the article:

Quote:

Kurt Wise doesn’t need the challenge; he volunteers that, even if all the evidence in the universe flatly contradicted Scripture, and even if he had reached the point of admitting this to himself, he would still take his stand on Scripture and deny the evidence

Here we see an entirely different problem of the human psyche, not ignorance but stubbornness, or delusion or possibly worse.

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@Intrepid,

Intrepid wrote:

Is it wrong to speculate a creation theory that is followed by evolution?

Depends on the theory. If it's the one with the Garden of Eden, Adam's rib turning into Eve, the snake and all the animals being made in a couple days less than 10,000 years ago then I'd say it is.

1 Reply

@rosborne979,

Quote:

We already know that life on this planet started with very simple forms capable of filling a large part of the available environment (an environment which is currently hostile to life as it now exists).

Additionally, the first big extinction event was the nearly total destruction of those life forms when other life forms arose which produced oxygen as a waste gas, and therefore poisoned the atmosphere (from the p0int of view of the first forms of life) for most then living life forms.

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@Robert Gentel,

Robert Gentel wrote:

Intrepid wrote:
Is it wrong to speculate a creation theory that is followed by evolution?

Depends on the theory. If it's the one with the Garden of Eden, Adam's rib turning into Eve, the snake and all the animals being made in a couple days less than 10,000 years ago then I'd say it is.

Then, according to my thinking, it is not wrong since I don't advocate that the above is a product what actually happened.

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@Intrepid,

You can imagine but speculation really requires studying and understanding cosmology. Imagining is something that can be a precursor to a learned speculation, sometimes being more of a hypothesis and then a theory, which is where the creationists and IDers go off track -- the total body of factual evidence makes up a theory, in evolution's case, starting with Darwin (not ending with him). Imagining or speculation cannot make up a scientific theory. The IDers are imagining design with paltry, flawed speculation, mis-interpreting fossil evidence among other transgressions.

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@Intrepid,

Intrepid wrote:

Then, according to my thinking, it is not wrong since I don't advocate that the above is a product what actually happened.

Then you are not a Creationist with a capital "C". So I guess we still haven't found a Creationist who understands the basics of evolution. I don't think they exist. Anywhere.

Does anyone else find it interesting that accurate knowledge of evolution is "coincidentally" exclusionary to Creationism. If you were a Creationist, and you did attempt to grasp evolution, would you be forced to lose your Creationism, or would you simply be incapable of grasping the science? Apparently the two thought processes are completely exclusionary. From a psychological point of view, that's pretty cool.

1 Reply

@rosborne979,

Yes, there are!

The reason I don't belive it is because it has more questions than answer for example as I asked at another post If people evolved out of monkeys a few million years ago like scientists say they did than where are all the people? Reproducing at the rate we are wouldn't there be way more people by now? And another thing why don't humans keep evolving out of monkeys, if they did at one point why did they stop all of a sudden?

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@AnswerMan,

Sorry Mr. AnswerMan, but you don't get it either. Maybe someone here with more patience can fill you in.

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@rosborne979,

AM is stalking around the evolution threads posting Bible quotes and nonsense like this -- should we even bother? He's trying thinks he's going to change the site name to Able2Snow.

1 Reply

Do ANY creationists understand evolution?

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