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?

I am genuinely shocked that people take the bible literally. Is there no questioning of it, at all?

IMO it is vital to critically analyse everything, including the Richard Dawkins types.

Personally, I buy the evolution argument - the evidence is just too strong to deny it. The intricacy of the relationships between plants animals and all other life forms blows my mind the more I think about it. Evolution by non-random selection seems to me to be the best explanation. Creationism denies too much that is factual to be a valid discourse.

I actually think the evolution theory is in its infancy and does not quite join up yet, but so far, it makes sense.

What are the holes in the Theory of Evolution that people keep mentioning?

Kif, yes the the Bible is a text of religion and if religious people said "don't mind us. the things in here are not meant to apply to the physical world" that might be okay.

However, many religious people do claim that it applies to the real world. Some in a milder way and some more extreme.

You get things like wanting to teach creationism instead of science in schools or wanting to cut funding for research. After all if you believe that the universe was made 6000 years ago then all those archaeologists and astronomers must be faking it all. Some think medical research is insulting to god because he can cure us if we pray. Even claiming that believing is the same as science (not saying anyone here is) would be damaging to young minds that are learning how the world works.

I'd like to say 'live and let live' but once it comes outside the churches it becomes a problem for us all.

Strange to say, I agree with Onagar (it does happen occasionally....

I'm a Christian, but also believe that the scientific theory of evolution is a reasonably accurate description of how the current species on earth came into existence. Like any scientific theory, it is subject to improvement over time as new evidence comes to light, but overall I don't think it is going to be proved wrong, just some details still to be sorted out.

Science should be taught in science classes, and should be used to determine things like research funding. Religion should be taught in churches etc, and to some extent in RE classes in schools, and should not be a deciding factor in other decision-making.

My O-Grade biology teacher taught me something which was far more important than the syllabus itself - he was a committed creation-believing Christian, but he taught us the O-Grade evolution syllabus exactly as specified in the books. He also said "Personally, I do not believe this, but it is accepted scientific teaching. If anyone wants to know about my own views, come to Scripture Union after school". He could separate out what was appropriate for a science lesson, and what was religious faith, and did not try to push one onto the other.

Some things that sit strangely with evolution:

• It contradicts the second law of thermodynamics. Wiki defines this as "entropy of an isolated system ... will tend to increase over time" - Entropy means 'disorder' or 'randomness'.

Give or take a few meteorites, the Earth-Sun system is isolated. Yet we have gone from very high entropy (nothing here but slime and rock) to low entropy (lots of different distinct species of flora and fauna etc etc).

• Single celled organisms are the most successful organisms on earth. Survival of the fittest is steering us towards more and more specialised (but basically less robust ) species.

• Some characteristics - like the giraffe's long neck - you can see developing slowly over time. Others - like the structure of the eye - will be pretty useless in all the intermediate stages until they 'work'. So you need more than one mutation to happen at once - combined with the organism learning to make use of the advantage.

• Lack of intermediate species - both in what we see today and in the fossil record.

Sure there's other stuff ...

Physics isn't my strong point, but I don't think entropy means randomness in that way - any system which tend to replicate itself will increase over time, not decrease.

Single celled organisams are the most numerous, and are found in the largest variety of habitats. But that doesn't make them the most successful in every single niche - for many niches, a multi-celled organism is the fittest, and evolution has moved towards the existence of both mult-celled and single celled organisms to fill the different niches.

Eyes - there's plenty of intermediate forms, all of which are advantageous - from a few light-detecting cells, through shallow pits, rudimentary lenses etc up to the very specialist vertebrate eye. Also, octopus have similarly specialised eyes, which work differently - convergent evolution at work!

kif: see my five misconceptions link above. It addresses the second law of thermodynamics and lack of intermediate species nicely.

Sod it, I'll relink

I htink people under-estimate or more likely cannot conceive of the time-scales involved in evolution-they are BIG

from wiki
The basic timeline is a 4.6 billion year old Earth, with (very approximate) dates:
3.8 billion years of simple cells (prokaryotes),
3 billion years of photosynthesis,
2 billion years of complex cells (eukaryotes),
1 billion years of multicellular life,
600 million years of simple animals,
570 million years of arthropods (ancestors of insects, arachnids and crustaceans),
550 million years of complex animals,
500 million years of fish and proto-amphibians,
475 million years of land plants,
400 million years of insects and seeds,
360 million years of amphibians,
300 million years of reptiles,
200 million years of mammals,
150 million years of birds,
130 million years of flowers,
65 million years since the non-avian dinosaurs died out,
2.5 million years since the appearance of the genus Homo,
200,000 years since humans started looking like they do today,
25,000 years since Neanderthals died out.

evolution isn't just survival of the fittest,
there has been random mutation of DNA over a massive amount of time leading to new genes/proteins/life-forms. Survival of the fittest is the process by which the variants that are more or less suitable are rejected, or expand to fill a particular niche to which they are more suited.
I am not religious any more, I have no belief in a creator, but as a scientist I am awestruck by the minutiae of our bodies and cells profoundly grateful to get a chance to study just a teeny-weeny corner of development in detail. The complexity of what is going on inside us all the time is mind-boggling, but I find it a lot easier to believe that it came into being incredibly gradually over time than it was all created instantly by someone waving their magic wand (or godly equivalent).

bacteria are the most successsful? really? I'd say insects were pretty successful
and mice, and rats

humans too, come to think of it...

kif - AMumInSoctland and RubberDuck have pretty much addressed your points. I think my examples of evolution earlier go towards the single celled organism issue - survival of the fittest only applies within the particular conditions that apply at a point in time.

CatIsSleepy - by number, variety or weight micro-organisms are the most succesfull by a significant margin.

Re eyes (sorry more wiki but thought this was interesting, there seem to be alot of misconceptions about eye evolution and they are always touted as an example of so-called intelligent design when infact they evolved like everything else)

'Certain components of the eye, such as the visual pigments, appear to have a common ancestry ? that is, they evolved once, before the animals radiated. However, complex, image-forming eyes evolved some 50 to 100 times[1] ? using many of the same proteins and genetic toolkits in their construction. [2][3]'

and

'The first fossils of eyes appeared during the lower Cambrian period (about 540 million years ago).[7] This period saw a burst of apparently rapid evolution, dubbed the "Cambrian explosion". One of the many hypotheses for "causes" of this diversification, the "Light Switch" theory of Andrew Parker holds that the evolution of eyes initiated an arms race that led to a rapid spate of evolution.[8] Earlier than this, organisms may have had use for light sensitivity, but not for fast locomotion and navigation by vision.
Since the fossil record, particularly of the Early Cambrian, is so poor, it is difficult to estimate the rate of eye evolution. Simple modelling, invoking small mutations exposed to natural selection, demonstrates that a primitive optical sense organ based upon efficient photopigments could evolve into a complex human-like eye in approximately 400,000 years.'

My ds is a creationist (he's only 4 bless him) He asked where the universe came from so I told him there were two big theories, one that God made it all in seven days and one that there was a big bang. I asked him which he thought was true and he said 'the God story.' Why??? I asked 'The story about the big bang is just ridiculous mummy'
No doubt when he's older he'll get a job teaching Science at one of those academies run by religious loons

well ooj, I'm sure bacteria are very successful

but I am better at baking cakes, so ner to them

CatIsSleepy - to add to your big numbers,the universe is 33 Billion Years old and there area a Million Billion Billion stars in the universe. There are Trillions of events occuring every second around each one. Million to one events are common place.

It all depends on your definition of success. Single celled organisms may have the number, the variety and the weight. But they don't have high salaries or job satisfaction.

And as Cat points out they don't have cake.

There's so much that we just don't know - and much that I guess we may never know.

That's what makes being a scientist such fun. Not being afraid of not knowing everything, but continuing to find out as much as is possible. It doesn't take any 'faith' at all.

Survival of the fittest is steering us towards more and more specialised (but basically less robust ) species.

No, it doesn't 'steer' us anywhere. There's still vastly more single-celled species around - just that over the long course of time a few of us multi-celled oddities have sprung up. And many have gone extinct.

Humans will probably out-survive many other mammals because we are generalists, with the ability to artifically adapt our environments. But bacteria will outlast us.

"bacteria will outlast us"

And the cockroaches.

Actually, as a complete random aside, does anyone know if it's an urban myth that cockroaches can survive nuclear armageddon?

Crap, no it's a myth. Now fruit flies... they shall outlast us... hardy little buggers, fruit flies apparently.

ooj, I love those big numbers, they blow my mind

as an aside, i know there was a thread about it the other day, but I am loving that series about the solar system with Brian wotsisname D-Ream fella, it's utterly fascinating

I think they can survive most things.... I heard a comment recently that it'll be cockroaches, Lemmy from Motorhead and Courtney Love in the post-Armageddon world, as they have all proved their ability to survive huge quantities of deadly chemicals...

Creationists should be banned from teaching. If you were a card carrying christian, would you want your children taught by an atheist who preached atheism?

Evolution is fact. Creationism is fiction.

Why on earth should creationists be banned form teaching? As I said earlier, the biology teacher who taught me evolution was a creationist who didn't actually believe it. But that didn't stop him from being a good teacher, or prevent me from going on to study it at university.

The only problem is if people won't teach the syllabus they are being paid to teach, or if the syllabus is being twisted to include things that should not be there, for religious reasons.

My DS is taught be Christians, atheists and whatever else - all decent people with their own views.