Re: evolution or creation?

On Jun 27, 1:33 am, John Harshman <jharshman.diespam...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
willie wrote:
This variety of species ,behavior of bees and ants like one
person,
Creator made it and evolution developed. The mathematics worked model
of evolution and found that  the time of living organisms (1,5
billions years) is not enough to create this variety.

Once more, please, and this time in English.

English is probably not our new friend's main language. His e-mail
address is "villie", see? And he writes a decimal number with a
comma. Although apparently he is using Google Groups and an English-
language web browser according to,
X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:
1.8.1.14)

Willie: people often come into this group to discuss different
beliefs. Let us see whether I understand what you are saying. You
seem to agree that life on earth has existed for at least 1.5 billion
years - we could introduce you to people who claim to believe that God
made everything 6010 years ago; I mock them. I'm not really an expert
but http://www.fossilmuseum.net/Tree_of_Life/Stromatolites.htm asserts
that stromatolite fossils in fact exist from at least 3.5 billion
years ago, but perhaps you were thinking of the age of the Earth
itself, around 4.5 billion years, which you could have mistyped.
However, for five-sixths of that time, until less than one billion
years ago, it seems that there were single-cell microbes and nothing
else - the stromatolites being masses of those microbes.

But you are interested in the cooperative behaviour of ants, or bees -
shall we say that the stromatolites were cooperative as well? The
"slime moulds" are interesting, too. I don't know if they are perhaps
related to the stromatolites.

It is quite popular to believe that evolution happened as the fossils
tell us but that a Creator God governed the process. After all, there
is that evidence that the world is very old and has held many
different "families" of living things - it is foolish to reject it.
And it is comforting to think that God looked after living things,
guided them towards better living, and that he was looking forward to
our time.

But is it true? It seems, for instance, that living things have
always made mistakes. For instance, the other day, I read about a new
discovery of a species of animal that livng in shallow water and had
legs. This should have been a step from water, where all large things
lived, onto land. But other creatures had stepped from the water to
the land many millions of years before this, the land was already
occupied. It was too late. So a mistake, arguably - although any
creature that appears as fossils was probably around in the world in
great numbers and for a very long time, so perhaps they did well,
after all. How long have human beings been in the world? As
civilisations?

Another belief is that human beings evolved like other animals but
then were given souls. But again, is it true? Well, it is difficult
to detect a soul. In the old days, I think it was believed that any
living thing that moves has a soul. There is a bible verse or two
where the souls of animals are mentioned, although only to say that we
do not know what happens to their souls upon death. Really, we don't
know what happens to ours - if a soul is a real thing at all.

As for mathematical arguments about evolution, we usually find that
something is wrong with the argument, but each time the questtion
should be considered fairly. But there is a story - I think it is not
true and there are many different explanations but it makes a point -
there is a story that a scientist once calculated the mathematics of a
bumblebee and found that it does not have enough strength to fly. Of
course, it does fly, so the mistake was in the mathematics. As I say,
I think the story may not be true - but one mistake is to have
mathematics correct in itself, but not truly describing the
bumblebee. The fixed wing of an aeroplane is one way to fly, and the
flapping wings of birds or insects are different, and they have
different mathematics.

One fallacy in some mathematical argument is to calculate the odds of
a particular outcome. For instance, perhaps you could say that it is
unlikely that hominins (our ancestors and ourselves) would become
intelligent. Therefore God must have helped us. But suppose that
birds became intelligent instead of us, or squid became intelligent,
or trees became intelligent. They would be discussing how unlikely it
was for them to become intelligent, so a God must have made it
happen. But the independent chances for each of us add up. Or
rather, multiply - it's complicated. So it may be quite likely that
some intelligent being has come into existence to say, "This is very
unlikely!"

Well, that's enough from me now. Willie, are you still here? I think
it is your turn again.

.

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