Organized religion is...

[Tikker]

Ok, so if I'm hearing you correctly... what you're saying is that apes and humans come from a common ancestor, but that somewhere down the line there was a mutation that affected the species differently, whereby one species evolved into apes, and the other one, humans. I understand what you're saying if this is the case (not that I believe it though). That goes against other theories that say man evolved from apes, which is even harder to believe since there are no "missing links." I still have a hard time believing in even the split, because that means we are all just God's scientific experiment. The bible says man was formed in God's image. So that would be like saying God evolved from something else too? This is all so very confusing. It's an easier concept to grasp to just think in terms of "God created us..." and call it good. lol

you're not quite grasping the concept

a species doesn't just magically transmogrify into a different species
basically, natural selection works such that traits that are more valuable to survival are selected for

a good example would be a breed of moths in england

they initially were a pure white butterfly, and their natural camoflauge was the white bark of the birch trees

as the industrial revolution progressed, and more and more smog and shit was pumped into the air, the trees started to absorb all the coal dust and whatnot, and the bark darkened

roughly 2% of all the white butterfly's had imperfect colouring, and would get jabowned by birds, cause their darker wings stuck out against the white bark


progress 50 years and the trees are getting darker and darker
now the white butterfly's are getting jabowned cause they stick out, and the darker ones survive

today, 95% of the species has the darker wings, with the white being rare

it's not like all the white ones turned dark, it's just that nature has positively selected the darker ones



does that make sense?

[Evermore]

.... one of the world's greatest businesses

This is true, just look at how much money all the various televangelists have made by bilking people out of their savings.

-Arlos

This goes way beyond the holy rollers Arlos.

'fact it is one of the reasons I dont go to church anymore

[Narrock]

Ok, so if I'm hearing you correctly... what you're saying is that apes and humans come from a common ancestor, but that somewhere down the line there was a mutation that affected the species differently, whereby one species evolved into apes, and the other one, humans. I understand what you're saying if this is the case (not that I believe it though). That goes against other theories that say man evolved from apes, which is even harder to believe since there are no "missing links." I still have a hard time believing in even the split, because that means we are all just God's scientific experiment. The bible says man was formed in God's image. So that would be like saying God evolved from something else too? This is all so very confusing. It's an easier concept to grasp to just think in terms of "God created us..." and call it good. lol

you're not quite grasping the concept

a species doesn't just magically transmogrify into a different species
basically, natural selection works such that traits that are more valuable to survival are selected for

a good example would be a breed of moths in england

they initially were a pure white butterfly, and their natural camoflauge was the white bark of the birch trees

as the industrial revolution progressed, and more and more smog and shit was pumped into the air, the trees started to absorb all the coal dust and whatnot, and the bark darkened

roughly 2% of all the white butterfly's had imperfect colouring, and would get jabowned by birds, cause their darker wings stuck out against the white bark


progress 50 years and the trees are getting darker and darker
now the white butterfly's are getting jabowned cause they stick out, and the darker ones survive

today, 95% of the species has the darker wings, with the white being rare

it's not like all the white ones turned dark, it's just that nature has positively selected the darker ones



does that make sense?

Yes, but...

A lot of species have color-morphing abilities, but it's used as a defense mechanism to hide from predators. Some examples of species that utilize this are Chameleons, skinks, and some insects. It's not necessarily attributed to evolution.

[Naethyn]

If god is omnibenevolent and also omniscient then how could he create humans knowing they would fall to sin?

If god is perfect and always has been perfect then how could perfection create something more?

[Harrison]

Mindia, that has nothing to do with what he just said lol

[Arlos]

Ok, so if I'm hearing you correctly... what you're saying is that apes and humans come from a common ancestor, but that somewhere down the line there was a mutation that affected the species differently, whereby one species evolved into apes, and the other one, humans. I understand what you're saying if this is the case (not that I believe it though).

Close, but not quite exact. You've got it right that we both came from the same common ancestor. But there wasn't 1 single mutation that effected the species differently. Hrm, how to explain this clearly. I'll try, but no guarantees, despite what you said, I'm no professional writer.

Basically, Gorillas can trace back their specific line to 1 specific animal of that ancient species, call it Animal A, and that 1 animal is basically their "ultra-great Grandparent". That one specific Animal A had a unique mutation in their DNA, and passed it along to their children. It might have been incredibly minor, so minor as to not even be noticeable, but still, it was a change. Now, lets say that ultimately Animal A had 100 grandkids by the time all was said and done, and ONE of those grandkids had yet another mutation that would ultimately lead to Gorillas. That 1 grandkid is an ancestor of Gorillas, where those other 99 would not be. Continue that pattern for millions of years, and the cumulative effect of all of those mutations would result in now being so different as to not be the same species as Animal A was, it's now a Gorilla.

Humans can trace back the same sort of family tree to that same species as Gorillas can, but our "ultra-great Grandparent" from that species is an entirely different creature than the Animal A I mentioned above. Ours was, oh, Animal Z, which had a completely and totally different mutation than Animal A. The important bit in all this is that the point of divergence; ie where the 2 species started moving completely apart from each other, is marked by the point where no one from either "ultra-great grandparent" had kids with the other. So, no kid, grandkid, great grandkid, etc. etc. etc. of Animal A ever met and had kids with any kid, grandkid, great grandkid, etc. of Animal Z.

That goes against other theories that say man evolved from apes, which is even harder to believe since there are no "missing links."

Well, technically that common ancestor was a kind of ape, just not of any kind that still exists today. But beyond that you are right in a way, Humans in no way evolved from any ape species that is alive today at all. We are cousins with them, but not descendants. By looking at how much DNA we have that is absolutely and in every way identical with a given species, we can get a rough idea of how long ago we shared a common ancestor.

I still have a hard time believing in even the split, because that means we are all just God's scientific experiment. The bible says man was formed in God's image. So that would be like saying God evolved from something else too? This is all so very confusing. It's an easier concept to grasp to just think in terms of "God created us..." and call it good. lol

Ahhhh, but we're not God's Science experiment. When you get the ingredients together to bake bread, and mix them up just right, and do every step just right, you know exactly what you're going to get when you're done, correct? A perfect loaf of bread, just like you planned and wanted, and it was hardly a science experiment.

That's what my parents believe God did. He wanted to create humans, and create them in His image. So, he set about going through all of the steps He felt were necessary in order to go about creating us. It's just that his ingredients were things like The Universe itself, gas clouds, stars, supernovae, comets, bacteria, cosmic rays striking ancestors causing mutations that would lead to us, etc. etc. etc. According to their belief, we are in no way random; those mutations may APPEAR random, and that is the best guess that science can make to them, but they believe that each one of them was guided by God's will, because each of those steps were necessary for him to bring us into being.

And, in many ways, just like people can watch cooking shows today, and ooh and ah over the cool recipes, they believe that God intended for us to be able to figure out at least part of HIS recipe for Humans and all other life, so that we could marvel at how it was done. Cause really, the underlying processes are pretty amazing, and there's been some pretty beautiful results along the way, wouldn't you say?

I know quite well it would be much simpler to belive that he waved His hand and *POOF* we appeared out of nothing. However, I think we both know that simple doesn't necessarily mean correct. I mean, if it did, the Butler really WOULD always have done it.

-Arlos

[Narrock]

Well Arlos, you certainly present a well-thought-out argument, and I in no way discredit it. If I had taken Bio, Chemistry, and Physics, I might be able to better understand what you're trying to convey. The extent of my "science" education was 3 Anthropology classes, and a Geology class w/lab. I had a hard time dealing with some of the concepts in Physical and Paleo-Anthropology. Some of what they talked about is similar to some of the concepts you're presenting here, and it's not really that I don't *comprehend* what they are saying, but was rather more of a feeling of disbelief. It is interesting, that's for sure, but I'm not buying it at this point.

Is your discontinuation of a belief in God attributed to your science education? Why isn't there any mention of this in the Bible? I mean, it says in the bible that man was created by God, in His image, from the ground, and then He breathed the "breath of life" into man. That hardly sounds like a parable to me. There's no mention of a common ancestor, and that God maybe started with something else and then perfected it into humans. Now, I know and understand, that it is indeed difficult to comprehend the idea that a God constructed man from the earth and breathed life into his nostrils. But I believe it. It's also hard for me to understand worship of the sun, the earth, the elements, the seasons, astral travel, and witchcraft.

[Arlos]

Well, much of the creation story in the Bible just says "God did this" and "God did that", but there's very little mention of any kind of "how". We both know that the Bible does use allegory and parables in order to convey specific teachings and messages; I mean, when Jesus told the story of the Prodigal Son, he wasn't relating actual events, he was telling a story to convey a message, correct? My parents (among many others) believe that much of Genesis is allegory. They believe the message, the God created everything, that he gave life to Humanity and so on to be absolute truth, but that He left out the details of HOW he did it, because He wanted us to work on figuring that out on our own.

Such belief about the allegorical nature of Genesis is not unique to Christianity, by the way. In one of the religious threads we had recently in one of the other forums Ganzo, who's knowledge of the old testament I know you respect, stated he believes Genesis to be allegorical as well.

As for human beings coming from Dirt, in a way there is a literal scientific truth to that. Have you ever heard of something called a Stromatolite? What a Stromatolite is, is the rock-like leftover from a huge colony of a type of tiny microscopic organism called a Cyanobacteria. Now, based on Scientific evidence, types of Cyanobacteria were among the very very earliest forms of life to appear on the Earth, and they formed those Stromatolites. We can find those rocklike structures in parts of Australia that are several billion years old. According to evolutionary theory, almost everything alive today can trace its ancestry back to those primitive cyanobacteria. So, in effect, human beings can trace their lineage back to an organism that effectively made part of the earth... ie, dirt.

Now, I have thought of another analogy to try and explain how gorillas and humans can share a common ancestor, yet be completely different.

Lets imagine there is a woman, and I'll just pick a name at random for her (name is unimportant, just need to keep track of it), call her Claire. Now, lets say that Claire had triplets, 3 daughters who all looked exactly alike: Cathy, Tracy and Amy. (again, names aren't important). Now, imagine that Cathy marries a black man, Tracy marries a white guy, and Amy marries a chinese guy. With me so far?

OK, now, lets say that from each one of those marriages, they produce at least 1 daughter. Let us also say that each of those daughters marries a man who's the same ethnicity as her father. So, Cathy's daughter marries a black guy, Tracy's daughter marries a white guy, and Amy's daughter marries a Chinese guy. Now, imagine that this happens again and again for several generations, so that Cathy's daughter has a daughter who marries a black guy, and they have a daughter who marries a black guy, and so on, and the same for all 3 other family lines, so that people who are Cathy's descendants only marry black guys, Tracy's descendants only marry white guys, and Cathy's descendants only marry Chinese guys.

Now, by the time you carried that on for 10 generations or so, Cathy's great * 10 Grandaughter will look and be VERY VERY different from Tracy's great * 10 Grandaughter or Amy's great * 10 grandaughter, correct? Well, even though each of those 3 are now 10 generations removed from Amy, Cathy and Tracy, they're still related to them, and thus still related to the original mother of the family, Claire, correct?

You can look at collective mutation as a very similar but much slower process. Gorillas and Humans can trace our ancestry back up to 2 creatures that may have looked the same as each other (just like, say, Amy and Cathy from my story did), were not necessarily related, just part of the same species, and who each had children that were different from each other, because each mom passed on a different change to their children. Now, change by mutation is going to be MUCH slower than the changes like happen in my example, so to reach the point where the great-great-great-<continue about 50,000 more greats>-grandchildren are so different that they cannot have children with each other, and have a great deal of different charictaristics takes millions of years.

That help it make a bit more sense to you?

As for me and turning away from Christianity... Well, that's something of a complex question. To be honest, despite going through all of the catholic equivalent to sunday school because my parents wanted me to, and even getting to and going to the point of Confirmation, I never really believed, and it just didn't interest me. On top of that, I had a great deal of philosophical issues with the dogmatic stances of the institutional church as a whole. There were numbers of things that the Church said I should believe, and yet I did not. (ban on birth control, among other things.) I also did not like the emphasis on orthodoxy and dogma, it seemed to me like Catholicism, and indeed, every other christian organization, wanted you to accept what they were telling you at face value; active investigation of the whys and wherefores was discouraged.

Now, I've always been cursed with way too much curiosity for my own good, to be honest. On just about any subject I want to know HOW and WHY. In large part, that's why I gravitated so strongly to Science in general, because that's what Science at its most basic level is: looking at the world and universe around us, and answering those fundamental questions. "Why is the sky blue?" "Why do we not go flying off the planet if it's spinning?" "How did the Sun come into being?" "Why do earthquakes happen?" etc. etc. etc. So, beyond Science, when it came to belief and faith, that same curiosity applied. I wanted answers, and I didn't want repeated platitudes, I wanted to understand and find answers I could believe and accept. When Christianity could not supply them, and when I reached adulthood and my parents could no longer force me to continue going to the church I did not believe in, I stopped.

For many years I was an agnostic, and didn't worry about it. Wiccanism had always intrigued me on an intellectual level, though, in large part because of the connections it has, albeit tenuous, to a simpler time for mankind, when we were much more aware of humanity's inter-connectedness with nature and the rest of the world. Such awareness is something many or even most modern people seem to have lost, and my awareness of it is one of the major driving forces behind my rather rabid environmentalism.

Ultimately, once I was back here in Silicon Valley after I left college the first time, I had a friend and co-worker who was wiccan, and I had some long discussions with him about it. (I asked him, he in no way prosletyzed). He recommended some basic books that I might want to look into, so off to the bookstore I went, and started reading. What amazed me at the time is how much so many of the beliefs I had come to independently matched with some of the more general tenets of Wiccanism as a whole. Furthermore, I found that it seemed that in general, the only dogma to the faith is that there IS no dogma; it accepts and even celebrates that everyone is different, and everyone is going to come up with their own unique answers to those questions I had wrestled with, and that the important thing is that each person finds answers that work for THEM, not that they all have to have the SAME answer, which is what Christianity tries to preach, in my experience.

I don't know if that really explains anything to you or not. It's not science that lead me away in any way, it's the same hunger to *KNOW* that lead me TO science. I was, I admit, a pretty precocious kid. I was actually reading before I was 2 years old, and my parents didn't teach me, I taught myself. By the time I was 3 I had read my first book cover to cover, and by the time I was about 4 and a half, after seeing Disney's version of The Jungle Book and Riki Tiki Tavi, I had read both volumes of my parent's copies of assembled works of Rudyard Kipling. (not a kid's version, either, the standard unabriged adult versions, each several hundred pages long). I may be vastly more jaded and cynical now than I was as a kid, but I've never lost that burning need to know and to figure out and to understand. Again, it probably makes no sense to anyone but me, but there you have it.

-Arlos

[Ganzo]

As far as evolution and science goes; they fit perfectly into my faith. It just explains physical aspect of creation.

Concept of "fearing" God is foreign to me. God loves us unconditionaly, and wants only for us to be happy, and to evolve/transcend into higher spiritual state. All troubles are brought to us by us. So don't fear God, fear your own stupidity.

[KaiineTN]

I've never understood the God-fearing mentality personally. I understand that it is to help guide people, for exmaple, thinking that doing wrong will produce results worthy of being feared (in this life or the next), but isn't that generally a negative type of motivation to do good? I try to be a good person just for the sake of being a good person, not because I fear the repercussions of immoral/unethical actions.

I have an aunt that was recently admitted to a psychiatric ward because of severe depression brought on by guilt building up throughout her life. The guilt was obviously brought on because as she was growing up, she apparantly did some things she regrets because they weren't exactly acceptable with her Church/religious beliefs (she is VERY religious).

This is scary, because it seems to me that she created her own self-fulfilling prophecy of being punished for her past actions. She expected it, and because of that, she was miserable and anxious, and eventually that put her down the road of depression.

Fear is a powerful thing.

[dammuzis]

Ok, so if I'm hearing you correctly... what you're saying is that apes and humans come from a common ancestor, but that somewhere down the line there was a mutation that affected the species differently, whereby one species evolved into apes, and the other one, humans. I understand what you're saying if this is the case (not that I believe it though). That goes against other theories that say man evolved from apes, which is even harder to believe since there are no "missing links." I still have a hard time believing in even the split, because that means we are all just God's scientific experiment. The bible says man was formed in God's image. So that would be like saying God evolved from something else too? This is all so very confusing. It's an easier concept to grasp to just think in terms of "God created us..." and call it good. lol

you're not quite grasping the concept



a species doesn't just magically transmogrify into a different species
basically, natural selection works such that traits that are more valuable to survival are selected for

a good example would be a breed of moths in england

they initially were a pure white butterfly, and their natural camoflauge was the white bark of the birch trees

as the industrial revolution progressed, and more and more smog and shit was pumped into the air, the trees started to absorb all the coal dust and whatnot, and the bark darkened

roughly 2% of all the white butterfly's had imperfect colouring, and would get jabowned by birds, cause their darker wings stuck out against the white bark


progress 50 years and the trees are getting darker and darker
now the white butterfly's are getting jabowned cause they stick out, and the darker ones survive

today, 95% of the species has the darker wings, with the white being rare

it's not like all the white ones turned dark, it's just that nature has positively selected the darker ones



does that make sense?

the butterfly experiment in england was fabricated

what really happened is they taped the color moths to the tree to prove the theory

just like that saying ... if the fact dont prove the theoryl, change the facts

[Thon]

how about bacteria strains that are resistant to anti-biotics? the vast majority of the regular bacteria is killed, but enough of the mutated variety survives to reproduce. they eventually reproduce enough so it is the majority.

the Boll Weevil(sp?) beetle which destroyed cotton crops was treated with pesticides, but a small percentage were mutants that could resist it. within a few years they returned in force and couldn't be stopped by the original means.

micro-evolution does occur. macro-evolution is just micro repeated over millions, and billions of years.

[Tossica]

how about bacteria strains that are resistant to anti-biotics? the vast majority of the regular bacteria is killed, but enough of the mutated variety survives to reproduce. they eventually reproduce enough so it is the majority.

the Boll Weevil(sp?) beetle which destroyed cotton crops was treated with pesticides, but a small percentage were mutants that could resist it. within a few years they returned in force and couldn't be stopped by the original means.

micro-evolution does occur. macro-evolution is just micro repeated over millions, and billions of years.

This is truth.

[Drem]

you know it's really crazy but the Koran has a lot of writings about nature that were later totally congruent with science's findings. interesting stuff

[Ganzo]

Heh, i can top that; Zohar, the 2000 year old Kabbalah text states that physical world is made up of vibrating energy

[Drem]

nice. the koran talks about mountains, inner waves under the ocean, how rainclouds are formed, how hail increases the chance of lightning, how sea water never mixes with other sea water but it does mix with fresh water... it's pretty cool