Hands up who believes in creationism/doesn't believe in evolution?

[MrsWobbleTheWaitress]

I know a lot of Christians who believe in evolution, so I kind of had this rather naive idea that people who didn't believe in it were very few and far between. But I just discovered someone I've known a long time, and respect a great deal, doesn't believe in evolution.

So who else doesn't? How common is it?

What frustrates me about this is that people who say that they "belive in evolution" don't really understand it - sentences like "how anyone can deny we evolved from apes i just cannot fathom!" just make me go because it is such a simplistic understanding that you may as well believe in creationism

I think most religious people would believe that evolution is a process which was designed by an intelligent creator being, whose purpose was to create a spiritual being (humankind) capable of love and relationships

intelligent creator being

Fantastic! I want one, where can you get them?

"The thing that really bugs me about this is the self-certainty of people who've in many cases barely any post-16 science education to build their conclusions on."

Don't worry about me, I managaged to aquire 7 years of post 16 science education.

I don't think that any critical thinker needs a sciencce degree in order to be able to accept that the theory of evolution is credible.

Morning Paper - no one needs to 'believe' in evolution. It's a fact, it's happening as I type.

My dh is a physicist and we are both Christians. Part of what led my dh to believe in God was what he saw as he studied his subject.
I believe that science and religion can walk hand in hand and do not have to be at odds as long as you show respect to both.
What I have grown to realise is that scientific fact is only so, for as long as nothing new is discovered that then replaces it. This doesn't mean that I think that what is known now about evolution is nonsense I am just open to things changing as we learn more.
I do think that it can be a little bit arrogant of people on both sides to believe that they truly have all the answers, by which I mean the extremes- evolution as fact and that what is known now will never alter, and creation of universe in 6 days, and history being a few thousand years old. I like to allow for a bit of fluidity.

We watched a talk by a guy called Rob Bell on a dvd called Everything is spiritual. He is a Christian and looks at the incredibly big and the incredibly small things in our universe. I asked my dh about how accurate the science was and he said pretty much spot on apart from he got the name of some infinitely small proton wrong. It opened my eyes to how much we do and don't know.
To bring an arguement down to some of the basics just doesn't give the topic the justice it deserves.

I believe in intelligent design and also the Theory of Evolution as the best arguement to explain how the last millions of years have occured to lead to today.

There are some scientists who are aware of more than we know as a lay people, and they believe in God. If they can reconcile these ideas then so can I. I am not trying to be wooly, I just don't see why it has to be so black and white, but then again that is how I see much of my faith. There is room for much more than we can comprehend.
If I can, I may get dh to explain how he sees things.

"I don't think that any critical thinker needs a science degree in order to be able to accept that the theory of evolution is credible."

There are two usages of the word 'understand'. There is 'could stand up and explain convincingly and logically to someone who had never come across the idea before'. The other usage - which I think is caught in the term 'credible' - is when you hear something so many times you accept it as the truth.

My point wasn't that evolution wasn;t credible. My point was that it is ignorant to point and laugh at people who question prevailing orthodoxy.

So - a challenge . Explain evolution - including the evidence .

Sorry to Xpost Sirius - your post was better than mine!

lowenergylightbulb - yup, also 8 years of post 16 education here too (6 years in higher)

bitterandtwisted... - genesis etc wasn't written by 'god!!

as for the dinosour bones being buried by the devil. gosh he was ever so clever to bury them in the exact spots where we think they might have lived (jurassic coast etc)

semantics and all that - i don't see how you can call accepting evolution as a 'belief'. we 'believe/don't believe' in abstract concepts (religion/the supernatural). you can say you don't 'believe' in evolution but it won't make it go away. i could not 'believe' my washing machine is on but its still there, droning out the tv!

As I said further back evolution is not 100% proven. Some things never are.

I think of it like a crossword puzzle. You can pencil in a word if you are not sure yet it is correct. You can pencil in the next one that links to it. At some point you could have 20 words all matching the clues and each other. It's still 'possible' that every one of them is wrong, but the more you add the less likely it becomes.

So the Theory of Evolution has 1000s of clues pencilled in which fit together. I'm always careful to say it isn't proved and there is plenty of room around the edges for more to be added, but I don't think there is any serious doubt as to the broad principles.

About not being able to do experiments on it. You can with natural selection and people have so we know that works for a fact. What you can't do is watch a species become another species since that would take too long.

As I said before I found that leap from small scale to large quite hard to swallow, but if you accept the small changes what could prevent the larger ones? they would accumulate over time.

if we evolved from monkeys/apes....why are there still apes on earth? what made some evolve and some not?

tanmu: they're our distant cousins, not our ancestors. Different branches of the same evolutionary tree.

onagar, that's what people thought about Newtonian dynamics at the turn of the century. "Good to have the laws of motion sorted - bar a few details around the edges'.

Newtonian dynamics is good - but it's not right. And no one could have guessed the whole crazy relativity malarkey that brought it into the 21st century.

If anyone's studied chemistry or biology - it's unbelievable how as soon as you 'understand' a reaction or a process, you turn the page and the book says "... but it's not quite that simple..." and goes on to explain the next level 'down' of what we think is going on when two proteins interact or when a signal passes down a nerve.

This is what Young Earth Creationists use for "evidence" that what they think is true (my friend sent me this to help "convince" me she was right).

We've not seen much of them recently - I'm just not up for the fight!

And on a very slightly related note:

hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/

Kif it's a fair point and that's why I wince when some say that is is 'proved'. It is important to be sceptical.

(I'm still not sure about New York. Okay, I've seen it on TV, but I've also seen the Dalek home world on TV )

Still we do have a lot of reasons to consider it probably true. Any new theory would incorporate some of this one since we know the natural selection part does work.

On the other hand the reasons for thinking creationism must be true are that someone once said so in a book.

Thinking about it those creationists who claim that god created the evidence to trick us have admitted that the evidence is there.

Well, I for one don't buy evolution. There's so much that we just don't know - and much that I guess we may never know. I think it takes as much faith to accept evolution, with all that is still unknown or not yet understood, as it does to believe in intelligent design. And plenty of intelligent, well educated people believe in intelligent design....so you can't dismiss everyone who does as ignorant.

why not let people believe what they want so long as those beliefs aren't harming anyone? Why the ridicule?

I must really be in the minority here, because I actually believe in the Bible and take what it says about creation literally

Oh weegiemum. I love conservopedia. Look up 'liberal' or 'feminist' for a really good laugh

tanmu82, you have dismissed evolution, but thought that it claimed we were descended from the same apes that are here now. Is it possible you'd change your mind if you looked at it closer.

There is NO doubt that evolution occurs. None. It happens all the time, in very short timescales.

The argument is if this is a complete explanation of how life on earth emerged.

I think one of the reasons that people find it difficult to accept is the odds involved. Two points here - low odds can come up, and low odds will almost certainly come up given a large enough expanse of time and space for it to occur in. And the expanses of time and spaces in the universe are almost unimaginable for most people.

But I made the point below - the Bible is a text of religion. The origin of the species in a text of science. It makes no sense to measure the former on 'proof' or the latter on 'godliness'.

Tanmu82 - the problem is that I think your views DO cause harm. You may well be perfectly intelligent and rational in other parts of your life, and I know many intelligent people who share these or other religous beliefs. The problem is that when they are given the same weight in debate over who we should structure our lives that rational ideas are.

There is a significant movement - that I have no reason to believe you are part of - that are using religon and post-modernism to impose and antidiluvian pre-enlightenment view of the world. This is why Creationism needs to be opposes, as it is one of the tools that is being used to do this.

My colleague is a proper creationist and will not get into any discussion regarding evolution.

I believe in evolution but I think the doubts come in when you do stop and look at how amazingly things work in the world, it's just too much for our feeble minds to comprehend that 'it just sort of happened' rather than someone/thing must have created it. IYKWIM?

tammu82 - re: apes, say you have a species that likes trees and lives on the edge of a plain. Some of the tree apes will live on the edge of the trees. This provides a selective pressure for characteristics that favour conditions on the plain. Eventually you get a group of apes more adapted for the plain than the trees. But you still have the apes in the trees.

Another thing about the odds. If you started with the chemicals that make up a man and threw them in the air how likely is it that they would form a chartered accountant?

The thing is that it didn't do it in one go, but in one tiny step at a time. The reason the resulting animals (and us) are successful is not because it cleverly made successful animals, but that the choices which led to unsuccessful ones died out.

That 'rule' of survival of the fittest is observable. We also know that animals vary through the generations.

Since we know that the variations that make it easier to survive will do so and therefore get to breed it seems we know that natural selection is true.

I no longer believe in god full stop and it doesn't bother me where we came from.

As long as children get cancer and good people die young I can't believe in god despite being bought up in the church, church schools etc.

And how can all the religions be right as there are so many?

To use a more close at hand example. In areas where multiple antibiotics are used to treat Tuberculosis Multiple Drug Resistant Tuberculosis has evolved. Non drug resistant TB is still around.