to wonder how people can not believe in Evolution .......

[cookielove]

After a discussion at work which actually started about a childs' dress (day nursery) leading onto the duggars and then religion, it came clear to me that several of my work colleagues do not believe in evolution and not only that but also dinosaurs not existing

Now i can understand the more religious people not believing as Evolution and adam and eve clash, but for those who were not religious how can you not believe in Evolution. Its proven.

I mean really how can people not believe in Evolution or dinosaurs.

I quote one of my work colleagues 'well there's lots of dinosaur toys so they must have been real' .... WTAF?

Please tell MN that you believe in Evolution, and dinosaurs ......

Wow this has moved on .....

You could say that it's 'evolved', cookielove.

The creation story in Genesis is a metaphor for evolution, IMHO. The events happen in pretty much the same order, though the timescale of a week is metaphorical. Not bad for something written so long ago without access to the science we now know.

I think the "a bit thick" arguments are rather, well, poorly evidenced perhaps.

I used to work with a creationist Physics teacher. He had a first class degree in Physics (not that easy to come by), certainly and without question understood the subject matter. He taught (very effectively) the evidence for the Big Bang, and (more rarely given his specialism) about Darwin and evolution, but completely and utterly believed in a 6 day creation.

I have no idea how was able to reconcile the Science and the creationist beliefs. I suspect he didn't, and they occupied two parts of his mind. I understand that a little I think, as I have a religious faith myself, as well as an extended Science education, and I think the two things are like viewing the world from a different perspective perhaps. Rational and irrational? But they don't collide in the way that my colleague's two worlds did.

I found him very interesting. Wrong, but not thick for sure.

Genesis is a very poor metaphor for evolution as it doesn't match the sequence of events at all. Genesis starts off with fruiting plants on the land (prior to the creation of the sun and the moon but we'll ignore that), and then life in the seas and birds in the air, and only then came land animals including humans.

By contrast, the fossil evidence is pretty clear that life really took off first in the seas followed by plants on the land then land animals then birds.

In other words, Genesis' version of events is about as wrong as it's possible to be.

You can read it that way - I used to. However, introducing vegetation before creating the sun wouldn't have worked too well

And in Genesis 2 God makes Man before any plants, and then the animals after that... and only after that gets around to Woman by rather dodgy means.

Creation myths, love 'em, buy one get one free!

Oh yeah, I'd forgotten that not only does Genesis not agree with evolution, it doesn't even agree with itself.

Indeed, if anything the first and foremost gender is female.
Males are more of an afterthought in evolution.
Nobody understands very well why they have to exist (ie the need for sex), although parasites/diseases are often blamed.

But the genesis does suggest some form of evolution but it should not be taken as anything other than a metaphor.

I suppose it's because religion isn't at all logical and is based on faith rather than on proven science...

Re the question early on about "well, why aren't other species as well evolved as humans?" Surely they are??? A bird does a pretty good job of being a bird, a worm makes a pretty good worm and bacteria and cockroaches are a hell of a lot better adapted at surviving than humans are.

I also at the way religion starts of saying "This is what happened", then moves to "Well, now that we know it didn't happen this way this is just a metaphor for what happened".

This thread has just reminded me of a young earth creationist I used to live with. We were discussing that people in the Old Testament lived to hundreds of years old. She said earnestly that that was because the Flood was the first time that it rained, and so before the Flood it was always cloudy. This filtered out the harmful rays from the sun and so people aged more slowly, hence living to 800.

She was very bright and got a First in maths with very little trouble.

I think the writers of Genesis did pretty well really, in breaking up creation/evolution into sections (even if not exactly the right order), making a basic attempt at biological classifications etc.

There are loads of metaphors in the Bible - Jesus used them a lot to explain things to people in a way they could get hold of.

I'm not a biblical literalist so am quite happy to accept some discrepancies, as the overall message is more important IMHO. If the accounts in Genesis vary then does it matter? Or is it more interesting to see what they have in common?

Asiatic,
Why is domesticating animals not consistent with the idea of human evolution? Ditto musical appreciation? I don't understand (and I did a Biology degree and studied physical and social anthropology and have read a bit of Steve Jones, Matt Ridley,Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins).

I've just reread the first bit of Genesis and am getting a bit distracted by God putting two lights in the sky, one for day and one for night. Scientific geniuses they were not.

Interesting how you are now distancing yourself from your claim that Genesis portrayed events in "pretty much the same order" as science has shown.

Keep shifting those goal posts :)

lashings I had the good fortune to take a course of lectures from Steve Jones - an hilariously funny and helpful tutor. He could probably get a chimp to understand evolutionary mechanisms.

Popcorn, Genesis first states that God made Man and Woman at the same time; the very next chapter (if I'm remembering right) has the rib story, with Woman being born of Man. Plainly there's a huge difference between equality of creation (and he supppsedly created every other gendered species in two sexes at the same time) and the obvious Woman as an helpmeet? Huge ramifications for society ever since.

I have a pet theory on this.

I think there are some people who are scared of the idea of people being cleverer than them and understanding something they don't understand. So it's easier for them to cover up their ears and say I can't hear you! I don't believe you! and then gloat massively whenever they read something on the internet/some shitty paper that they think confirms their worldview - a sort of one-up on these intellectuals they fear.

See global warming for another example of this.

asiatic why have you not answered anyone's questions about where you studied/what your qualification is?

asiatic is not a scientist. there is NO controversy regarding the core ideas behind evolution among scientists.

Is it a question of believing in it though? Surely belief is a verb associated with religion, whereas rational thought belongs in the realm of science and other forms of inquiry. I agree with CrunchyFrog.

Funny enough, from a historical pov, the Catholic Church had far less of a problem with evolution than protestant churches, and even now it is literalist and fundamentalist churches that tend to be Creationists.

This is really, really interesting imo, on the question of other species and evolution. Well, at least one other species and evolution. The whole point of evolution is that it happens in any given species in order to adapt to any given environment so of course it is not going to take place at the same rate in every species.

I can reluctantly understand people not believing in evolution, I think. Because they can't see it. And in a way it is quite a tricky concept I suppose. Maybe it is easier to believe that the alien overlords needed opposable thumbs to steer their spaceships :o

But how the actual fuck can anybody not believe in dinosaurs. What are all these skeletons then? Wonky mammoths?

I think the peppered moth story is quite a good, 'real life' explanation of how natural selection works, I remember doing it in psychology A level :o

I love the Futurama episode "a clockwork origin", it's all about evolution vs creationism.

I'd love some book recommendations please - something simple as I'm crap at science! :)

I agree with the person who said that if you believe that characteristics are heritable then you must believe in evolution.

Not necessarily that evolution is how we came to be, but certainly that it can and does happen.

If we inherit characteristics from our parents
and one characteristic makes you and your children better at reproduction (more children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren)
then you will have more descendants than people who do not have that characteristic
so it will spread
and eventually nearly everyone will have it

Uphill, I think there is a degree of that certainly. Evolution as a basic idea is reasonably straightforward but the detail is quite complex and the timescales are way outside of the range that our brains have evolved to comfortably handle. I can talk about the dinosaurs dying out 65 million years ago but I can't easily grasp just how incredibly long ago that was.

Also, "evolution" is all too frequently used as a catch-all term for the sciences of origins that is often taken to include abiogenesis and even the big bang. That muddies the waters still further.

I have always wondered what creationists think they are filling up their cars with??? Fairy dust???

Faith = belief without proof.

There is proof for evolution.

Therefore, I believe in evolution and think (as the great douglas adams wrote) that 2,000 years ago a man got nailed to a tree for saying how good it would be to be nice to each other for a change.

Becarooo - don't you know the Good Lord made oil so we could all drive cars and wear T shirts in the winter?