Seems like an effort to spark an attention-diverting brouhaha where none exists, to draw attention away from real issues like Barry’s sub-par “campaign kick-off” attendance, HHS mandate controversy and the numerous examples of his campaign’s “dick stepping” moments. Virtual bread and circuses for the pearl-clutching set.

Oh, but if an evolutionist ever says he finds no conflict between evolution and the Bible, he’ll be dubbed a believer in Intelligent Design and thus a Creationist — and all Creationists believe (they do, jut as the anti-Creationism Police) the entire universe was turned from nothing into the fully formed Whole we see now, in just 144 hours.

I remember when natural scientists would actually debate Creationists back in the 60s, but after losing every time, they refused to debate further.  They shifted gears and declared the science as settled, and began personally attacking creationists as  flat-earth deniers.  Sound familiar?

Prior to these debates, “gradualism” was the theory held by natural scientists, slow change over long periods of time.  This is what I was taught in school.  But the geological evidence doesn’t support this.  The formation of the Grand Canyon, the formation of coal/oil/natural gas (do you think there is enough organic matter being trampled underfoot to create the oil reserves that we see today?), petrified forests, even the numerous inversions in the stratigraphic record point to a catastrophic flood.  Natural scientists changed their model and came up with “punctuated equilibrium” (see Steven Jay Gould), long periods of no change punctuated with short periods of abrupt change.  But that still doesn’t explain why we don’t see evolution occurring today, or why there isn’t evidence in the fossil record.  It takes more faith to believe in upward evolution of a single cell into the plethora of life we see today than to believe in a Creator.
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Radiometric dating is another indicator.  Have you ever seen the mathematical derivation of this? 
It’s tough to find. The
derivation yields two equations with three unknowns.  Natural scientists
assume no daughter element at initial time.  Bad assumption. 
Further, no one can account for contamination over time, or how energy
(neutrinos, cosmic rays) affects the rate of decay.  Huge variations are seen by this
method, for example (one of many) volcanic rocks
produced from lava flows which occurred in Hawaii in 1800 were dated at
160 million to 2.9 billion years old.  And yet radiometric dating is gospel to natural scientist.  C14 is another method that, when examined closely, supports a young earth theory better than an old earth theory.  Yet that too is often cited as “proof” of evolution. 
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Other questions still can’t be answered by natural scientists, like the decay of the earth’s magnetic field.  If we were to go back in time, the magnetic field would be seen as increasing in strength.  Yet a magnetic field induces an electric current, and within 50,000 years the induced current within the earth would be strong enough to fry everything on the planet’s surface.  How does one model this over 5 billion years?
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Like Smitty said, the Biology crowd has no repeatable experiments to
prove any evolutionary theories. None. Zero.  Yet evolution is somehow a fact.  How did that happen?

” Yet a magnetic field induces an electric current…”

A changing magnetic field induces a current.  If the Earth’s poles were routinely swapping north for south you’d have a point.  Otherwise you don’t.

And yes there is geologic data that indicates the poles do shift, just not that often (last changes estimated to be about 750,000 years ago.)

I have no problem with the idea that creation, even via mechanisms such as promoted by various sciences, are entirely God driven.  But you do yourself more harm than good when you use false or faulty arguments to refute the efforts of others.

It is best that you truly understand what you are attempting to say, especially when it is copypasta.

Yes, and what often gets lost in the shouting match is that there are several different theories of just how evolution happens; we don’t know which one is closer to the truth (or at least we don’t have enough data to positively say which one) — it may be a case of multiple strategies occuring.

And in none of that is there any evidence of the presence of a divine originating essense, or lack thereof.

I find it ridiculous and annoying that either camp would like to pigeonhole people into Group A or Group B and then brand them.  I really don’t see  how either belief need infringe upon the other.

Hate to burst the “can’t we all just get along” bubble here but Christianity and the ToE (Theory of Evolution aka Darwinian Evolution) are incompatible with each other.

Many people, even Christians, tend to favor theistic evolution because it is the easy, moderate, centrist position.  However, it is intellectually untenable because Scripture is vehemently against naturalism.  NO WHERE in Scripture is there even the slightest hint that God used evolution as a method of creation.  In fact, writers throughout the Bible anticipate the theistic evolution meme by going out of their way to use language that eschews materialistic naturalism. 

Probably the most central theological tenant of Christianity can be summed up in a simple but profound statement in 1 Corinthians where Paul writes: For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. (1 Cor 15: 21-22).

Paul is covering two critical points here:

1: Death came into the world after Adam sinned.
2: The “death” to which he is referring is both spiritual and physical.

If Adam only died spiritually when he sinned then Christ would only have had to die spiritually (that is, be cut off from God the Father as we know he was when he was crucified).  God the Father could have cut off communication with Jesus without seeing Him crucified but Jesus had to also physically die as a way to save us from permanent physical death.

Another way of putting this is that if death occurred before Adam sinned, then Christ died fruitlessly because death was never a punishment for sin but was simply the method that God was using to create His world.

So when Christians agree with the secularists about God using evolution as a method for creation, then they are tacitly admitting that Christ died for nothing.

To paraphrase famous atheist Douglas Adams 

“‘Oh dear,’ says God, ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.”

Christians need to bear in mind that we have two things going for us in this debate:

1. Scripture is valuable and should not be set aside just because you think it is out-dated or doesn’t speak to current scientific conventional thinking.  The Bible has been affirmed time and again as correct on matters of science. It is not going to change the mind of a secularist of course but it should be relied upon as a foundation for any believer. If Paul says that there was no death before Adam, then don’t just abandon this foundational truth because some anti-Christian materialist says you should.

2. Everyday the ToE is further disproven.  The work of people like Stephen Meyer in the realm of ID should be an encouragement to any Bible believer that we have the high ground.  

People should also keep in mind that the ToE doesn’t speak to abiogenesis (the creation of life itself). It only attempts to explain the complexity of life.  Evolutionists have no answer for where life itself came from.  Furthermore, they have no answer for how the INFORMATION found in a “simple” cell originated. There is a factory floor found in a single cell more complex than that of any Toyota or Ford factory on the planet and yet the materialist’s view is that this could “evolve” in the primordial soup by chance (or by necessity as is the current thinking).

I prefer to follow Paul’s teaching that Adam’s sin happened in a world that up until then, had not seen death. Liberals and secularists don’t buy Paul’s position, but I do.

 That’s a good point. I, personally, think that all fields of scientific inquiry and testing should be conducted with an open mind, and a clear one, free from any preconceived notions one way or another.

But unfortunately, that’s not the way the world works. People tend to dig in their heels in search of proving their own pet assumptions, rather than objectively setting out to find the facts, whatever they might be. As a result science and learning suffers.

Sorry, but the brouhaha is real, and I feel that it’s you who digress.

Anyway, Carson’s disagreement with evolution is thinly stated here, and in a video where he debated Dawkins and Dennet back in 2006, he elaborates slightly more.

But, does he disagree with it in toto?  Or simply with its purely natural causative position?

In that video, Francis Collins also chimes in, and I feel that the ‘skeptics’ of the Darwinist premis make the more viable points regarding.  Feel free to comment on the video as well.

A TE, or ‘theistic evolutionist’ perhaps, but definitely NOT an IDst.

” … there are several different theories of just how evolution happens”

Essentially, natural or directed.  I feel that both are valid operatives, and am thusly open to both.

” … it may be a case of multiple strategies occurring.”

Uh, strategies?  Yes, if you are referring to the ‘political’ motifs involved.

“And in none of that is there any evidence of the presence of a divine originating essense, or lack thereof.”

 Actually, the only religion outside the monotheistic ones that teaches creation is, maybe, some Hindu sects. A look at the Greek and Norse myths, among others, reads a great deal like evolutionary theory, albeit dressed in symbolic form. The gods, although of immense power, are beings with a definitive beginning, usually a birth, however unusual in circumstance.

I’ll let the fossil records of Mammoths and Mastodons speak for itself. Evolution doesn’t mean what you seem to think it means. It just means the ability of a species to adapt to a changing environment. It doesn’t mean that a troop of chimpanzees somewhere in darkest Africa might some day turn into human beings.

Nor does it mean our ancestors were ever chimpanzees, or gorillas, etc., way back in the past. We just had a common ancestor, and somehow different groups of that ancestor’s descendants evolved differently.

And somewhere far back in the distant past, probably millions of years ago, all life evolved from some very simple form of life, call it a one-celled organism or amoeba, whatever you like.

Life feeds on life, and different sets evolved in such a way as to feed sufficiently, some on grass, some on fruits, and some on the life forms that fed on grass and fruits. That’s the laws of nature, and of the jungle. Nobody created or made it that way any more than anybody has to make you stop and get a hamburger when you’re out somewhere and you get hungry. You just do it instinctively. Or maybe just because you want to. Or you might decide to wait until you get home, whatever.

Rabbits evolved to eat grass due to its abundance, and after so long, as the grass started getting scarce and the rabbit population expanded, some rabbits evolved into other kinds of animals that fed on the rabbits. That’s a simplistic way of looking at it, but its a pretty concise way of defining the process, as I see it.

The argument over evolutionary theory is a side show anyway since it assumes life already exists before it “evolved”.  Most of us have participated in conversations or sat in classrooms where it was clear that the person professing authority on the subject of evolution was either purposefully or ignorantly conflating the ToE with abiogenesis. 

I don’t really care about these people’s opinion on Darwinian evolution since there is an infinitesimally small likelihood that life could have arisen by chance from the prebiotic earth in the first place.  

Abiogenesis, the notion that life arose spontaneously, has been shown to be a probabilistic impossibility and getting more impossible as origins research moves more into the realm of information theory.  In 1913 Arthur Holmes did the early radiometric earth dating research and he pegged the earth’s age at 1.9 billion years.  Today it’s estimated at 4.1 Billion.

What’s the reason for the increasing estimates of the age of the earth over the last 100 years?  Is it that radiometric dating is getting more accurate?  Hardly, it’s actually just as dubious in its accuracy as it ever has been.

No, the reason, IMO, is that mathematicians have been running the math and the math doesn’t favor an earth as “young” as a few billion years in order for life to have evolved spontaneously. In fact, mathematician Dr. Dermott J. Mullan ran the numbers and estimated the likelihood of life forming on its own by chance is one in 10^79. 

In other words, pretty much impossible.

Not that long ago biologists thought cells were like globs of gelatin, but as we have learned that cells are incredibly complex, the math has not been favorable to chemical evolutionists. The problem is that DNA research is outpacing their 19th century notions of “simple” life.

Living systems, even the simplest ones, are based upon symbolic language structures of extreme complexity. There is no hint in the laws of chemistry and physics that matter on its own can ever generate symbolic language regardless of the time allowed. Researchers are realizing this and turning to other more “plausible” solutions.

Gould’s “punctuated equilibrium” was an early, although mostly unserious alternative, but since then “panspermia” (the seeding of life from another planet via comets, meteors, or even aliens) and “multiverses” have been proffered.

So okay, these “scientific” notions are deemed persuasive but my belief that a being of power created this planet and the life on it is seen as nutty?  I’m supposed to believe in alien seeding of life and not in God.

As the article quoted, “I don’t have that level of faith”.

I’m talking about what they would call him. Obviously it has no resemblance to what he would actually believe. I thought I made that clear.

I’m pretty much familiar with all that PT.

I’m not sure about the Greeks.   I know Odin used the body of Ymir to make the Earth.  But, I will agree that most or almost all deities sound more like angels or other lesser powers than Ultimate.

But I do not want to say Jehovah is proven by the proof that there is a Creator.

As to the rest, check out Quartermaster’s reply below.

Adaptation, sure. Macro-evolution, no.

Ask yourself this: Can you build a tower to the moon?

Depends on the ‘they’ in question.  And since ID and Creationism has been so widely conflated as one-in-the-same, a Darwinist will use either (or both) terms interchangeably.

But an ID’st does not necessarily hold to Biblical doctrine, just inferential design inferences.

I hold to ID (as a hypothesis), but am not a Creationist in the 6000 year sense.

Exactly. I remember when ID first appeared in I-can’t-remember-which-magazine I read about it in. It was obvious to me that it was offered as a way that — as Richard McEnroe points out above — people on either side of the literal Genesis-vs.-militant Darwinist divide could find common ground.

As I recall it was the Darwin side that attacked it as Creationism-in-disguise, and that uproar is what drew the literal-Genesis Creationists to use ID as a cudgel against the Darwin side. A Grade-A Charlie Foxtrot.

No, you haven’t explained anything. Your first mistake is. To believe the perpetual meme that has been around since 1981 that Gentrys rocks were primordial. They were not. They were quite a bit younger and in fact from igneous intrusion into older granites and sedimentary formations and even older volcanic action. When asked about these misconceptions on Gentrys part about the geology of his samples he had no answer except that a supernatural event must be responsible.
The trial you referred to w in 1981. Wakefield did an investigation in 1988 that made Swiss- cheese of Gentrys starting premises. He didn’t understand the geology of what he was claiming. Since then, further research points to radon being responsible for the halos anyway.

There is no “proof” either way.  I thought that was obvious, and inferred by your use of quotation marks.

The evolutionists used the fossil record as “proof” to promote evolution.  When creationists began to ask questions, they get your answer “Hey, whoa, you can’t use the fossil record!”

And that was my point earlier.  The evolutionists, when challenged, continue to introduce new hypothesis, but all from an atheistic world-view.  And they hold to these by faith. I’m OK with that, it is just they don’t call it faith while mocking mine.

 I’m not sure what building a tower to the moon has to do with anything, TW. Are you referring to the space program?

But you are right about Odin creating earth out of Ymir’s skull, along with waters of the earth from his blood, plants and grass from his hair, etc. He also created the first man and woman, if I remember right, from a couple of trees, I think the Ash and the Elder.

But he wasn’t  conceived as what a Christian might call the “cause of all causes”. In fact, he himself was born, and was the grandson of the first of the Aesir gods.

Extant Norse myths even state that there is an unknowable supreme being, superior to Odin or any other of their known gods. Here, however, you have to be careful, because Snorri Sturleson wrote this well into the Christian era, and it might have been a method of preserving the fading memories of the old myths in a way that reconciled them to the widespread and dominant Christian theology at the time he wrote it.

A lot of what we know about the old pagan cults is shadowy at best. For example, some of the old rivalries, like between Ares and Athene, might have been based actually on real cult rivalries, each vying for ascendancy over the other. This is even more true of the Norse religious cults, which did practice human sacrifice, but much of what we “know” about them is conjecture and speculation.

Also, angels, while godlike beings, are merely messengers, servants if you will. The Gods are independent minded in nature, with wills of their own. Hermes is closest to the aspect of angels, but even he has a dominant aspect.

Living systems, even the simplest ones, are based upon symbolic language structures of extreme complexity.

Horse, meet cart, and kindly step to the front.

My apologies…I didn’t intend for it to sound like a bad thing.  In my opinion, this is such an emotionally charged subject because we are talking about matters of faith (on either side of the argument).  Like you posted earlier, it would be good if all parties admitted this at the outset.