Does this sound like any Christian group you know about?

[QueenMeabhOfConnaught]

Please help!!!

I rather put my foot in it with another Mum and to avoid a repeat (and because I'm too embarassed to ask her directly) I'm wondering if anyone knows what Christian group this sounds like:
(1) doesn't celebrate Christmas or Easter;
(2) doesn't agree with the theory of evolution.

Sound like any group you know? Or maybe it could one of several million - I don't know!!

definitely not URD, i worshipped in a URC Church for yeas- full complement of celebrations.

the local Brethren were moderate- tv etc but no meals with other people etc. could well be them, or JW. or a lot of small sects.

none of the theologists i know consider JW or Mormons amongst the true christian pantheon, due to some of their more esoteric beliefs- but that doesn't mean they're not christians just that they don't fit a narrow definition, iyswim.

apologies for lack of punctuation etc... baby feeding

I'm sure there is more evidence of creation, I know there is, but those were the first few that I found and it was late.

Evolution can't exist in the space of time that evidence is showing the age of the earth to be - that's why the age of the earth is being pushed back on a regular basis as shown in one of those links. Evolution can only ever be a theory because no one was there to watch it all happen, no one saw the big bang and no one saw life suddenly appear. Same is true of Creation, but it fits the time available far better than evolution can ever.

erm you can see evolution/natural selection happening. Antibiotic resistance in bacteria springs to mind.

As this thread has turned into an evolution/creation thread, I feel compelled to pitch up because Martian Bishop expects it of me.

But I'm not bringing any transitional forms with me, so don't ask.

btw yurt1, that's adaptation, which no creationist I know would dispute. We just dispute that there is evidence for any creature adapting so much it becomes another species altogether, creating DNA it didn't have before.

Arggh!

TinkerbellesMum, I take your point about the age of the earth and the time it would take evolution to populate it with all the species. So yes that works. If it could be shown that the earth was young then evolution wouldn't be sufficient to explain us.

I'm still looking at the links, but part of the problem is that I'm not qualified to judge the evidence. I can usually understand what they are saying (on both sides) but I can't check their claims to know if they are real or just plausible sounding stories.

It seems to me that mainstream scientists have nothing to gain by pretending that the earth is old whereas creationists do have good reason to want the opposite.

I also think that any mainstream scientist obviously faking stuff would be leapt on by the others who wanted his funding etc

Suebaroo, I have evolution filed under 'likely, but not proven' because I have problems with the idea of creating a completely new species.
Not that drastic change isn't possible given huge amounts of time. I'm sure it is. My problem has always been that many changes may be bad for the species while they are still incomplete. For example a person might take a lesser paid job because in the long run there was potential for advancement, but evolution/natural selection has to be based on what is best right now.
There are some fairly convincing explanations for how that would work out, but I'm keeping it mentally filed that way until there is some way to settle it.

Not that a disproof of evolution would make me believe in god. It would just mean we still didn't know where we came from. God isn't a plausible explanation for the universe.

greyriverside, ah, you see I find it fairly plausible, but that's neither here nor there, you make a very valid point that disproving evolution doesn't equal proving an Almighty God.

I'm just not that impressed by the trickier bits of the notion of evolution. And whenever there's headline evolutionary news, it always rubs against my sense of the ridiculous.

There was a 'find' a couple of years ago and it made headlines with evolutionists getting all excited because they'd found a fossil of something that could survive in water and out of it. Which just struck me as a bit silly, as you can collect frogspawn and have a whole colony of creatures like that, and we call them amphibians.

So I suppose for me, the reason I get a bit :/ about this debate is it doesn't prove what either side is thinking it might.

Did we evolve? Given the realities of genetic mutation, I find it deeply unconvincing. But if we did, it doesn't really impact the origins of that process. And if we didn't, it doesn't mean we were created by God, it could be distant aliens or something.

pheh. I know what I believe, and yes, it's special creation, but it's not a hill I want to die on.

I haven't had a chance to read through the links yet, but I'm afraid statements like "it is suppressed by mainstream scientists" and "Mainstream science won't publish it" are the kind of thing that really get my goat. Scientists do not suppress proper scientific evidence which goes against their way of thinking. What they do, very regularly, is ignore rubbish pseudo-science that has not been done properly. They don't usually take the trouble to publicly refute it, as they don't see any need. But that is not "suppressing it".

I'm not going to go round my views on Christianity and Evolution again, since we already had that thread very recently, but science just doesn't work that way.

I'm a Christian and so is DH, and both of us have sciencey background (he's got biology degree) - we both did a lot a lot of reading on the evolution / Creation debate while we were students - admittedlty 10 years ago so not up with anything new, but I have to say that all the Creationist 'science' we read was utterly unconvincing, flawed and unscientific - to us, (as students not experts mind) used to critically analysing scientific papers and questioning evidence.
As I say this was a while back but FWIW, IME Creationist science is unreliable.

SueBaroo but organisms don't strive for speciation, it just happens because populations get split up for so long (or are geoographically too far apart when they meet- think ring species) that when they do meet they can no longer mate producing viable offspring.

Species/speciation is not a necessary part of evolution - it just happens. I've always found it quite dull to be honest. For example I used to work on a subspecies of the house mouse called Mus musculus domesticus - well we called it a subspecies, other people called it a species - Mus domesticus (vs mus musculus, or mus musculus musculus). I always thought that particular discussion pretty dull and not that important. The interesting thing was what was happening at ground level.

There's plenty of evidence for speciation events after say the last ice age. It's kept friends of mine in work for years.

The reason paleontologists got excited about the fossil showing an animal that could survive on and off land would have been because it would have been the oldest. One such finding that caused great excitement was \link{http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v426/n6962/full/nj6962-104c.html made by this guy}. The finding, which he made whilst I was lucky enough to be taught by him was actually revolutionary because it changed what was known about the evolution of tetrapods (although gawd knows it was almost 20 years ago so I can't remember the details).

Greyriverside- remember that natural selection doesn't strive for the 'best' - energy efficiency has to be taken into account too. Say for example birds- they have a 'better' (less toxic) way of excreting waste that our urine. So why haven't we evolved to do it? Because in energetic terms it costs more to produce the bird's uric acid. They need to fly so don't want to be lumping around water to produce urine to it's 'worth' going that extra bit to produce uric acid. It's not for a mammal. You also said "My problem has always been that many changes may be bad for the species while they are still incomplete". This is a misunderstanding of natural selection which takes place at an individual level (gene level if you're totally reductionist). Natural selection has no concept of a species.

link again

yurt1, yes, I don't suggest that there is any rational process behind the kinds of adaptations we're talking about. I just think it's an enormous leap (of faith, ha ha) to go from species adapting to their situations to them becoming something new entirely.

And, while I understand the reasons why evolutionists get excited about things like that, and understand about the reclassification of mislabelled fossils etc (wasn't that guy on a Horizon programme a while back?) - on a lay level, these things are no more sophisticatedly presented than many of the more simplistic creationist arguments (of which, I grant you, there are some shocking examples).

Anyway, I'm not quite sure why I end up on these threads, lol, there are some much more passionate creationists on here than I. I might give myself a ban.

But they don't suddenly become something new entirely. Most speciation happens because a population gets split (eg along comes an ice age) then where you had one population you suddnely have two or more all merrily pootling along "adapting"(or not- lots of changes are just random from drift), then when the ice age disappears the populations meet again and hey presto no longer mate. Voila speciation. Nothing 'big' or major happens at any time.

I'm not sure what your criticism in the second paragraph is about. Natural selection is a simple process - it doesn't have to be hugely sophisticated. When you're working on fossils you are basically working with morphology which is pretty crude. Extraction of ancient DNA may change the way things are done, although I think for fossils that old you're going to struggle to get anything out that isn't contamination.

I think Per might have been on Horizon, he was on Tomorrow's World years ago. For people working in the field it was a big discovery.

I did look briefly at some of the creationist links above and it was clear that generally they weren't understanding natural selection/evolution. I can't judge the 'young earth' theory as I'm no geologist but I would find it bizarre that if a geologist found something that exciting they would partake in a conspiracy of Science just to protection evolutionary biologists. Geologists and evolutionary Biologists barely speak to each other professionally. They won't be going after the same research funds etc etc. And given the basic errors they've made in interpreting natural selection I would be stunned if the young earth theory hadn't made similar mistakes.

Oh, I know a geologist who is also a creationist. But I know nothing about rock except that it's hard.

Again, I know that the 'lots and lots of time' thing comes into play with the idea of a new species developing. I'm not suggesting that poof! there is suddenly a whole new type of creature.

I have some Baptist friends who dont really celebrate Christmas (not sure about Easter), they are in Northern Ireland. Wonderful Christian people, salt of the earth, but I find their views extreme. I too am a Christian.

However, even though I find their views extreme, it does make you stand back and ponder a little about how watered down we make the Bible to be i.e slithering into our own modern day culture and assuring ourselves thats Gods laws, teachings etc was only meant for the good old days, or the Middle East culture.

Yes, they are extreme and the take the word litteraly, but if I am truly honest, it is because it is a challenge to me, a hard path to follow and I would rather bend and lapse the rules to 'fit' in, iykwim.

So who is in the wrong, the extremist who wants to follow Gods way, or me, who wants to re-write the Bible for my own easy path in life?

Just a thought. Oh and lets face it, Christmas is man made, a date we set to celebrate Jesus' birth, and ditto Easter, we set the date to celebrate His death and resurrection. I like to celebrate these dates, but it shouldnt be a worry if people chose not. There is little room in this Godless world we live in for such real celebrations, and it has become ridiculously over commercialised and all consuming materialised rubbish, causing millions of families stress and further debt problems.

Really, it is the extremists that probably keep us plodding Christians on the straight and narrow anyway. I love to chat / debate with my Baptist friends, cos no matter how heated and insistent I become, the Holy Spirit puts me right in the end, anyway

Yurt1, you're right to say "Natural selection has no concept of a species" That's my perception of things getting in the way. I know better really.

I do accept that evolution is probably true and I want it to be true because I think it's elegant. In any case there are a lot of people much more knowledgable than I who are sure and who have nothing to gain by inventing it (and as we've said they wouldn't get away with makng it up)

I just wish I could go back in time and follow through one example (ameoba to monkey) and see how each step worked out.

If asked by others to explain it I stumble over the idea that every single step along the way must be either beneficial or neutral for the organism.

Ok if a disaster has wiped out most of the predators then any predator no matter how disadvantaged would do well, but that still sounds a little weak when saying it out loud. I'm looking for the definitive explanation/argument.

No every step isn't beneficial - as someone has already pointed out most changes are not beneficial. They're quite the opposite. It's just that when you add a selection pressure then you'll get a change in frequency and variation that's already present might become beneficial.

Take for example some plants growing merrily away. Along comes a mine and some slag heaps. most of the plants die- a selection pressure has been introduced- the plants need to be able to cope with certain metals. A few in the population happen to have this particular adaptation so they survive and reproduce. That variation may already have been there, but it only became something that altered survival with a change in the environment.

CJD is another example. It's known that us humans come in 3 forms when considering ability to avoid prion diseases. Lets call it AA (susceptible) BB (not susceptible) and AB (in between). I think all the people who have died from nvCJD so far have been AA. Had BSE been a bigger problem it could have (still could) have wiped out all/most AAs. There would have been an advantage in being BB (or vegetarian). That's a bit hypothetical as it seems to be less of a problem than it might have been, but I always think its neat.

I thought Christians belived in the Bible. So how can you not believe in the creation if you beleive in the Bible?

Angelstar, it is perfectly possible to believe that God created the Earth and at the same time that he used evolution to do so. In this case, you take Genesis as a symbolical and allegorical account of the wonders of creation rather than a factual description. This is my standpoint for one.

In the same way as most Christians take the Song of Songs to be allegorical - otherwise, it's just about sex and a bit difficult to explain what it's doing in the Bible.

I have been told off by so many stricter Christians for seeing Genesis as an allegorical account, only to have them then turn round and say of course you can't take S of S or the nastier psalms of David literally, I must understand that they are symbolical.

Well, actually, though there are many layers of meaning to S of S, it is also about sex, and I don't see why that's out of place in the Bible at all. When god said 'go forth and multiply', He wasn't recommending basic maths.

As I lived in the Outer Hebrides for 10 years, I have to say this sounds like the Free Church of Scotland.

Dont do Easter, Christmas, any other festivals and total disdain for modern science, evolution, cosmology etc ,,,,,

Just my experience!