Letters to the Editor
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NaR
Well said.
I am one of the "assholes" so let me explain where I am coming from.
I disagree with religion and make no bones about it because ultimately religious rightwingers strive to make their beliefs all important, while the religious left strives to make my beliefs non-important.
I am obliged to politely listen to people blaming me for hurricanes and earthquakes, glorying in the thought that I will burn in hell for all eternity, and who are quite frankly anti-evidence. If I do not, I annoy my "allies" on the religious left who frankly see me as being sub-human but are too "nice" to admit it.
Your post on this subject is something I can respect, because it is not the brand of religion that I am fighting against. It is simply what you believe.
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Beautifully put!
Tell us what your god *does*, tell us how and when he/she/it does these things, form a testable hypothesis or else SHUT THE HELL UP, moron. There is nothing more to be contributed by another dim-witted "theologian" bleating about the "dogma" of scientific veracity and making special pleading for his stupid pet superstitions
I couldn't have said it better. Yet another clueless dimwit fool who thinks he can collapse differences between Darwin's evoolution via natural selection (which requires NO external agents) and "God". Following in the footsteps of that bozo "Physicist" Frank Tipler (The Physics of Christianity) or Stephen Unwin in his book, The Probability of God: A Simple Calculation that Proves the Ultimate Truth, who tries to recruit Bayesian statistics to bring mathematical grist to the religious mill.
This is aberrant nonsense which would be more apropos on the pages of the 'Free Republic' or some other Right site.
People need to grok these are two radically different ways of approaching the world: one based on testabilty and reproducible experiments, the other based on accepting doctrines without question.
When this buffoon and his clones, cronies provide tests of falsification for their absurd claims I might be more inclined to pay listen.
Btw, for anyone who doubts natural selection and chemical enzymes can't do everything (rendering all gods redundant) they need to get hold of biochemist Jacques Monod's excellent Chance and Necessity and read his chapter on 'Micro-cybernetics'.
Oh, another thing, it is not possible to “disprove evolution” unless one of these geniuses can alternatively account for basic genetic as well as macro-evolutionary supports that we behold.
In the case of the latter, we know humans and chimpanzees have the exact same cytochrome c protein sequence. In the absence of common (evolutionary) descent, the chance of this occurrence is conservatively less than 10^-93 (1 out of 10^93). Thus, the high degree of similarity in these proteins is a spectacular corroboration of the theory of common descent. Furthermore, human and chimpanzee cytochrome c proteins differ by ~10 amino acids from all other mammals. The chance of this occurring in the absence of a hereditary mechanism is less than 10^-29. The yeast Candida krusei is one of the most distantly related eukaryotic organisms from humans. Candida has 51 amino acid differences from the human sequence. A conservative estimate of this probability is less than 10^-25.
"God" has NO place in evolution, and all efforts to integrate this unncessary agent into Darwin's theory translate into nothing more than pseudo-science, no different from what "physicists" like Tipler have generated with his physics of Christianity, to use physics to account for resurrections, ascensions, virgin births etc.
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"Many Christians insist the Bible is the literal word of God."
But none believe it. You can see their unbelief in the things they covet, the poverty they permit, the near perpetual war they adore.*
One does not wage war after war after war unless one adores it.
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In reading all these letters...
It's good to see that neither atheists nor Christian fundamentalists have a monopoly on snide condescension.
It seems that angry dismissal is the preferred mode of discussion and debate in modern American society.
Does it cost so much to allow for respect of opposing viewpoints? When you dismiss the possibility of intelligent argument for the opposite side, you come off as defensive and threatened.
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Show me the money
Time is the god that evolutionists worship. This does not mean that their faith is not true. Maybe it is.
But whether one argues that God created the bombadier beetle or Time created it, it is an act of faith.
The minor changes that natural selection makes are reasonable and supported by evidence.
But the changes required to turn dust into the unbelievably complex creatures all around (and including) us are difficult to imagine.
Have you observed a peacock lately? Observed not only the way it fans its incredibly gaudy/beautiful tail feathers, but the way it shakes them like its beating a drum? Observed the silly crown on its head? Maybe one can come up with an implausible story as to how natural selection would result in such a creature, but I think it is more plausible to believe it to be the creation of a whimsical God.
The biggest problem for evolutionists and one that is too often glossed over is the transition from non-life to life. Given time, they say. Well, given time, the various car parts in a junk yard are not going to become a car. Just so, what exactly was the mechanism that allowed the little inorganic car parts in earth's primitive junkyard to combine and become alive? How did those inorganic car parts capture and then utilize energy, (from the sun or elsewhere) to come alive? And then, not only to come alive, but to become conscious of being alive? And to become creatures with aesthetic and moral sensibilities? Maybe science will someday provide some good answers. But so far, a God who loves beauty and who created us in His image is still the best reasonable explanation.
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Not a problem at all
The biggest problem for evolutionists and one that is too often glossed over is the transition from non-life to life.
Actually, this isn't a problem at all, since evolution has nothing to do with the origin of life. The theory is only concerned with what happens when life replicates with inheritable characteristics.
As far as the peacock goes, I believe a lot has been written about why some birds have ridiculously overdeveloped features. It has to do with reproduction and female preference.