Re: Atheists support evolution because evolution supports their worldview

Suzanne wrote:
"Eric Rowley" <none@xxxxxx> wrote in message
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Suzanne wrote:
"Rupert Morrish" <rupert@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Suzanne wrote:
"Mark VandeWettering" <wettering@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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On 2008-08-27, Suzanne <shiloh7@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Mark VandeWettering" <wettering@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

<snip>

I know a lot of people skim through something and they
pick out what they want to, and then they may not pay
attention to the rest. On this occasion, I carefully sat
down to contemplate fully what he was saying in the
excerpt. I noticed seriously the last sentence. If someone
did not notice it, then I thought it was important that I
speak to that, in order to be fair to Darwin's own words.
But to answer your question, I believe that the level to
which I was "listening" to what he wrote was to be very
fair and thorough, so maybe I was listening on a different
level than you were.

It also appears to be a different level to the one Darwin
was on when he wrote it.

Before speaking about what this seems to say in the clip
that was provided, I did ask opinions as to what Darwin
was meaning. There were no takers at all. This might not
apply to you,

Well I wasn't involved in the discusion untill later. :-)

but many that criticize are people that feed
only on what other criticizers say. For some criticizers
this means that they appear to be passive-aggressive. I had
said that I was interested in what people thought that
Darwin was meaning and I am listening to what people say
that they think he is meaning as well.

Maybe not. I don't think you should
criticize someone for their being thorough and paying
attention to all that he said. It was important to him. As far
as my choice of words, I don't think that I said anything
that is hard to understand concerning what I felt that he
was trying to tell people about his ideas about evolution.


"Origin of Species" doesn't mean what you said it meant. Darwin was
arguing that special creation didn't make sense. He argued that the
descent with modification model of evolution makes much more sense.
It explains more about what we see in the world.

Mark is presenting the basic over all thing that he sees
in what Darwin is saying. I think he has missed some
of what he was saying.

Mark ignored the questions that I asked. I did not
ask for an over-all opinion, but specific questions.

It explains what you see and what he sees, but not what
others see that see things differently, Mark. Things can
be like those pictures with hidden pictures in them, and
that is why it is helpful to talk with others, and bounce
your ideas off of them, and vice-versa. No man is an
island unto himself. It's helpful to hear how others view
something.

And that's why Darwin spent 20 years writing to nearly every naturalist
in
the world, many of them clergymen, to find out what they were seeing. If
you read OoS you will find frequent acknowledgements to those who were
able to fill gaps in Darwin's knowledge.


If he had talked to people that had a special
way of putting things, he might've seen what they see
in addition to what he thought he was seeing. The way
he saw things, if he said the creation didn't make sense,

No, he simply said what he thought the evidence showed had happened.
That
some interpret the creation myth in the bible to contradict the evidence
is not his problem.

He did tell what he believed about what evidence he had,
that is true. But he clearly allowed a provision for things
being "intelligible" if all of the species existed in the
beginning as varieties.

I think you are misreading that.

Read it carefully without applying your own preconceptions,
nowhere does he say that all species existed at the beginning!

You really need to go back in the thread and see
the questions that I asked. I am not interested in
being corrected about my supposedly preconceived
ideas. When I read something I don't have preconceived
ideas, if what you mean is that I am biased against Darwin,
which I suspect is what you are saying. And in answer to
your statement, I do see something different than what you
see. It's Darwin's wording, not any bias on my part. He spoke
of things *created.* If he meant "evolved," or "produced,"
that would be a different matter. I explained that in the
creation account whole varieties came into existence when
God spoke the words. It seems strange to me that someone
as intelligent as Darwin would have used the word "created"
in a work he wrote,

Why is that strange?

He's contrasting creation (which he says doesn't fit the evidence)
with evolution (which he says does fit the evidence.)

since I am sure he would be aware of
people who believe the creation account in the Bible is the
way things came about existing.

Of course he was aware of that, that's why he mentioned
that in his opinion it didn't fit the evidence.

This is exactly why I asked
for opinions as to what he was meaning.
--
The last of the excerpt from Darwin's work that Mark
quoted is what I was asking about. I will show you
what it said, and it is visible still in this post above,
but my questions are not visible that I asked about it:
Excerpt Mark wrote out:
"These are strange relations on the view of each species
having been independently created, but are intelligible
if all species first existed as varieties."
--
What he says is that each species seems to have started off as
a variety of some earlier species and then evolved to become a
separate species, some variety of which might then have evolved
to become something even further removed from the first.

I have only been speaking about the above sentence Mark
quoted from Darwin.

Ok, he doesn't actually mention evolution by name, but if
a species starts out as a mere variation of another species
and ends up as a separate species then it has changed, and
that change is evolution.

Nowhere does he say that all species started out at the
same time, just that each one started out as a variety (of
some other species).

Yes it does. "having been independently CREATED, but
are intelligible IF ALL SPECIES FIRST EXISTED AS
VARIETIES."

Yes, each species started its existance as a variety or breed
and differentiated from its parent or sister species. But they
didn't all do it at the same time.

He did not close off that possibility
at all. Darwin kept an open mind, I believe, and he was
showing that he did. John Wilkins and some of the others
in this newsgroup felt that I had not been true to what
Darwin had actually said that was not hearsay, and so I
am being very careful out of respect for what they have
said, to be true to what Darwin said, and not say anything
about what someone alledgedly says that he says. I think
that since he is the one that wrote the work, his last
sentence in the excerpt that was provided was totally
ignored. It is from that portion that I got some of the
opinion that I had previously addressed.

he probably didn't understand the creation account.

He probably understood it better than you. He had, after all, considered
an ecclesiastical career.

No, I'm not saying he didn't understand religious matters,
I am saying that there was something in the creation account
that he could not explain, by what evidence is available to
him.

He wasn't trying to explain the creation account, he was
trying, quite successfully, to explain the distribution
of species in nature.

Sure, in the rest of what he wrote, but not in this
one sentence: this is an "if" clause.

Two "if" clauses actually!
"On the view of" appears to be just a different way
of saying "if we take the viewpoint that"


His ideas are based solely on evidence he was able to
determine. But in the creation account if you will, the
meaning of "kinds" might've bugged him, as to what exactly
it means (as it does a lot of folks). I believe that he was
allowing for the possibility of something he didn't know
how to explain which is that of things being created suddenly
by great varieties,

No, he was quite clear, all the evidence pointed towards
life starting as one or just a few different kinds, varieties
of which gradually evolved into different species, varieties
of which gradually evolved into even more different species,
etc, etc.

Yes, in the rest of what he wrote. Not in the "if" clause
though.

Yes, partly at least.
He's got varieties turning into separate species, how does
that happen except by evolution.

Besides, that sentence was the summing up of the entire book,
it's obviously meant to be read in the context of the rest.

rather than forming singly as species are
supposed to form in evolution. He said, (Darwin said...)...
"These are strange relations on the view of each species
having been independently created, but are intelligible if all
species first existed as varieties. In the creation account God
spoke and whole varieties of life filled the seas. He spoke and
the land was suddenly filled with varieties of life. He spoke
and the air was filled with varieties of life. He spoke and the
creeping things came into being in varieties of life.

I'm curious about what exactly you mean by this, and exactly how
it differs from "independently created" species?

I'm pretty sure that when Darwin used the term Variety it meant
something like Breed, except that breed implies breeding, so that
in a farmyard one would see breeds of cattle and in nature one
would see varieties of moose.

So at first I thought that you meant that during creation week
God created, or ordered the creation of, not just a standard dog
but poodles, afgans and collies and I didn't understand how you
thought that helped your case.

Then something else you wrote, that I can't find at the moment,
made me think that you were talking about Kinds, ie not lions,
tigers and housecats but just a single generic feline?
But I couldn't understand why you would call that a variety.

Then I thought that maybe you meant the generic kinds but with
the separate species somehow preprogramed into the generic
original, but then I still don't see where the varieties come in
to the picture and besides the specific species wouldn't have
existed in the beginning which you seem to be insisting on reading
into Darwin's text.

So I'm still left wondering what you meant?

You are just playing with words, it's still independently
created species, which Darwin apparently found unintelligible
in view of the patterns he saw in nature, even if each species
is created in several (independently created) varieties.

Playing with words? I didn't write the words Darwin
chose.

No, but I think you wrote the meaning you read into them.

He does not say "unintelligible," he says
"intelligible."

"but are intelligible if..." implys that the alternative
("each species having been independently created") is unintelligible!

He doesn't say "evolved," he says
"created." ...or, he doesn't say "independently produced," he
says "independently created."

Why would he say evolved or produced when refering to divine creation?

He does say "if all species first existed as varieties."

Yes, but that isn't a collective first existance with all species
starting at the same time, it's individual first existances for each
species (at different times for each species).

Each and every species started its existance as a variety
(of some previous species).

As a matter of fact it makes it worse, since there would be
no reason to expect even varieties of the same species to
fall into a nested hierarchy.


Well, there was lots of energy, but almost none of it was as cold as
visible light. Then, after 300,000 years, it got dark again, when the
universe got cold enough for hydrogen atoms to form. It didn't light up
again until the first stars started shining, millions of years later.

Creation science lines up the creation of light before the
creation of the constellations, the sun, the moon and the
stars.

But after the creation of the earth!

Of course it was after he created the earth. That was
the order of the creation account.

The light first created is the energy you are talking
about which would be the whole spectrum of the
electromagnetic radiations.

You're just saying that because it makes the Bible seem
correct, there is nothing in Genesis that implies that
the light is anything more than the normal sunlight,
starlight and moonlight that we have now, just unattached
to the celestial bodies.

I am not just saying that to make what I am saying
fit what the Bible says!

I didn't say you did, I was suggesting that you said it
to make the Bible seem to fit the findings of science,
there is no mention in the bible of x-rays, radio-waves,
gamma-rays or even infrared or ultraviolet light.

It plainly says that God
created light on the first day of creation and that he
created the heavenly bodies on the fourth day.

I see it (though admittedly there is no evidence for this
view either) as God creating some sort of immaterial glow
in the vicinity of the newly created/uncovered earth, sweeping
the glow into one half of the sky, to separate night from day,
and then a few days later he collects thew glow together and
squeezes into balls, like making snowballs, to form the sun
moon and stars.

I don't think that you understand what I am talking about.

I don't understand why you write that here?
I had stopped talking about what you were saying and switched
to talking about how _I_ understand that part of the Bible,
that's why I started that paragraph with "I see it as..."

The whole spectrum of light is visible light and invisible
light, the latter of which includes such things as radio
waves, gamma rays, X-rays, cosmic rays, for example.
This kind of light is an energy. It's not an immaterial glow.

But light is immaterial, not nonphysical but immaterial.

Of course, as an atheist, I have no problem with the story
not being consistant with the real world.

As someone that believes the creation account, I have
no problem either with the creation account being
consistent with the real world.

But it isn't.
All the real world evidence points towards the earth being
10,000,000,000 years younger then the Big Bang.

But see, Darwin didn't know
some of these things that we know now.

Nor does it matter. The Origin of Species is not a refutation of
Genesis,
it's expounding a theory that accounts for biological diversity.

It very much matters concerning the total thought that
I expressed. It was Darwin that addressed a situation
where life could have been varieties "in the beginning."

He didn't say that!

He said "intelligible IF all species FIRST EXISTED
as varieties."

If he had written "all humans first existed as fertilized eggs",
would you insist that he meant that we were all conceived at the
same time or would you have understood it as it was meant, that
each human started their individual existance as a fertilized egg
at some individual point in time?

Now, wait a minute. Let's talk about literalism for a minute.
I do not strain at a gnat and swallow a camel to be literal.
But if the Bible says that a man built an ark, and then
it actually gives a description and measurements, and then
tells in detail many things about that event, why in the world
would someone not take it literally, it is written literally. The
flood story, for example is written so very literally that if
someone ignores that, they do it a disservice.

There wasn't a worldwide flood. Floods happen all the time, and
geologists
know what sort of evidence they leave behind. That evidence isn't
everywhere at any time - the world was never all flooded at the same
time.

What does this have to do with the excerpt of Darwin's
writing that we were discussing?

Why are you asking that?
It was you who brought it up.

I didn't bring up the subject of the flood as an
argument, is what I am saying. I brought it up
only as an example of when someone should
pay attention to details, rather than sloughing
on by something as though the details did not
matter.

There wasn't a flood and there wasn't an ark. Genetic bottlenecks happen
frequently - for example when a small population becomes isolated or a
few
individuals reach an island. The founder effect leaves distinct evidence
in the DNA of the descendants of those small populations. The evidence
that is there indicates there was a genetic bottleneck in humans, but it
was a few thousand individuals 75,000 years ago, not 5 individuals 5,000
years ago. Unless you are prepared to claim that an average
post-diluvian
generation was 2 years, and that the ark was a thousand times bigger
than
its already impossible size?

Do you know anything about mitochonrial DNA? How much
of the things you mention above have you actually compiled?
The ark: 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, 45 feet high.
The QE2 is 1132 feet long, 236.2 feet high from keel to
funnel, etc.

But the QE2 wasn't made out of wood, with bronze tools,
by one man (and his sons?).

I was responding to the statement made to me that
the ark supposedly was an impossible size.

For a wooden vessel it was.

The
dimensions of the ark were not an impossible size
for housing a family and some animals,

Not if "some" is a farmyard full of goats and chickens.

It is if it is 2-7 of all kinds of animals on the entire
earth.

and it also was not impossible to float,

Without pumps it would be even in still water,
in a storm it would be even with pumps.
Wooden boats leak!

and it also was not impossible to build. Especially since when Noah
first heard the instructions it was close to his
being one age, and then when it was completed, and
when the flood began it was a hundred years later.
In 50, 60, or 200 years, Noah could have completed
the task. His sons would be big enough to work when
they were at least teens.

Also, there is a structure upon Mt. Ararat that
has these dimensions, and astronauts saw it from space.
It's commonly called "The Anomaly." It's rectangular like
a shoe box.

Most likely of volcanic origin.


The literal
story says that Noah let out two birds, one a raven and the
other a dove. Then today we find out that the Aztec Indians
have a flood story clear over here in the Americas that says
there was a man named Nu who saved animals from a
world-wide flood and to test to see if the waters had drained
off enough, he sent out two birds. Just exactly like what the
Bible says.

There's no surviving account of this myth from *before* the arrival of
christian missionaries. I wonder why that is?

How can you verify that the Aztecs had Christian
missionaries centuries ago? I don't think that you
can.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardino_de_Sahag%C3%BAn

Can you verify that this man told the Aztecs about
Noah's ark? It's not in the article.

He was a missionary, that was his job!

I think that their
legend of the ark and Noah was older than when
this man went there.

But can you verify that?

Did anybody write it down before the missionaries started
telling the Aztecs about Noah's ark?

(I don't think the Aztecs had writting.) ;-)

Also, the Bible has surived. That is an account.

But not necessarily of the same event.

What you are saying is not very clear. The flood
legends of the ancient people of the earth predate
the times when missionaries came to America.

But I don't think they were extensively documented
until later, so we can't say for sure that they weren't
affected by the Bible.

Are you familiar with the Greek Septuagint? It is
the translation of the Old Testament that was made
by the Jews, themselves, for the Jews that lived
abroad who no longer spoke the Hebrew language.
This was translated by their scholars which may
have been the Sanhedrin. It was translated into
Greek from the Hebrew about 300 years before
the birth of Christ. It contains the same story of
the flood of Noah that we have in our Bibles.

Two translations of the same book containing the
same story? So what?

So the story is ancient, not modern. Some claim that
the Bible was not even written before the 7th
Century, A.D.

I really, really think you misremember.
If you check back up the thread I think you'll find
it was 7th centuary BC.

Claiming that the Aztecs heard about
it only from Sahagun the missionary is not the only
way they could have heard about the flood. There are
flood stories from all over the world from people
telling about it, such as the Aborigines in Australia.

There are lots of flood stories, the question is are
there any that are verifiably about Noah's Ark AND
verifiably "uncontaminated" by the biblical story?

Also, it is not the only account. No one has found
the original scrolls of the Torah (first five books)
and the other books of the Old Testament, but we
know they existed because of the translations, in
other languages. The others have the story of Noah
in them.

They're still the same book!

More literal details: Jericho's battle that the Israelites fought
when they finished the wilderness trek of the Exodus gives
great details that should be taken literally and not be ignored.
It says in the Bible that God told them to leave the foodstuffs
and not take them as bounty. In those days, food was very
precious. They did not have local grocery stores with imports
to run down and get on a whim. Crops were carefully preserved.
But they obeyed God and left the foodstuffs in their contained
place. Who knew why? They just obeyed. Thousands of years
later, along came archaeologists and found EXACTLY what
those details of the Jericho story were. They found foodstuffs
still in their containers. They wondered why those had not
been taken, and they looked at the Bible story again and found
that God said not to take them.

If Jerico was destroyed by an earthquake hundreds of years before

Jericho is a city that has layers on top of layers on top
of layers of ancient, ancient times of the city. It was
not destroyed by an earthquake in just one layer, while
all the rest of it was in tact. That makes no sense.

Of course not!
All of the layers below the destruction would already have
been flat, otherwise they wouldn't have built on top of them!

And any higher layers wouldn't have been built yet.

I really don't have a clue what you think you're saying here?

It was only one layer that was destroyed

Are you saying that Jericho was only destroyed once?

Or that only one layer was destroyed at a time?

and it is the layer that the Israelites conquered.

Or not, as the case may be.

Or possibly, when you're fleeing a burning city, you don't take your
whole
pantry with you. And when you're entering a land of milk and honey,
who's
going to bother to dig through smouldering ruins to see if there's any
food down there?

Well, you see, when people had wars in those days,
the foodstuffs were taken before the city was
burned, if it was burned.

That sounds lika a very sweeping generalization,
do you have any evidence that this was _always_
the case?

You have things really backwards. The sweeping
statement is your speculation that all other battles
by other people conquering other cities would not
take the foodstuffs and grain from the city it
conquered. Think about it.

I never said _all_ battles, I am merely suggesting that
there _could_ be reasons other than divine orders why
some food might be left. For instance, setting fire to
the city might make it easier (and safer) to conquer it.

Besides we haven't established that there _was_ a battle.
Just a fire and something to make the walls fall down.

The grains found in
containers were singed but still easily identified.
Remember also that the story tells that although
they were going to inherit "the land flowing with
milk and honey," they still had to conquer it. So
they didn't just step over the border and start
chowing down on milk and honey. Remember, too,
they had eaten manna which grew in the desert, but
it was gathered every day except on the sabbath. In
the wilderness they were allowed to gather enough
for two days, but on other days if they did that it
would spoil.

But all of this is from the same story!
If the bit about the Hebrews taking the city is false
then all the rest is irrelevant.

I think that you don't understand some things. I'll explain.
There are people trying to claim that the Bible is not telling
what is true. It says that the Israelites conquered Jericho.
It gives great details as to what happened and what was left
of Jericho after they had conquered it.

I think you are greatly exagerating the greatness of the details.

The story sounds
to the average man to be too fantastic to have really happened,
since the Israelites marched around Jericho seven times for
seven days, blowing horns. OK, so far? The Bible says that
the walls fell outwards and flat when they walked around
the seventh day seven times and shouted. It says that the
Israelites entered the city, conquered it, left the grain and
the foodstuffs as a memorial to God (in original containers),
saved Raham and her family, then set fire to the city. We know
as a fact that when other battles have occurred against other
cities, the invading enemy takes the spoils for their own people.
Loot, food, etc, has turned up in other places and been found
by archaeologists enough to know that is the trend. The city
is then destroyed by fire, and the Israelites leave.

The city of Jericho then has weeds grow up over it, and dirt
sweeps across it and in sort time, it becomes a "tell,"

If Wikipedia is to be trusted you have misunderstood,
it already was a "tell", all those layers you were talking about
mean that the mound gets higher and higher as houses are torn,
or fall, down and new ones are built on top of the rubble.

which
means a mound...and archaeological mound to be
excavated some day by future archaeologists. The story is then
written down by the Jews.

At some time, a few miles from the ancient Jericho site,
a new Jericho begins in a slightly different spot not far
away. That city exists today, but it is not the ancient city.

Hundreds of years pass and then one day, many centuries later,
after the Bible is printed in many languages, someone makes
the claim that the Bible is not really ancient and that it was
made later. One in here says in the 7th Century A.D.

I haven't seen anybody claim that, try 7th Century BC,
unless you have a qoute.

The tell
remains untouched with Jericho beneath it. Fairly modern
times happen and then the city is begun to be excavated by
archaeological scientists. During the time before it was
excavated, skeptics were claiming that the story was not
true and that the city did not exist and that only modern
Jericho existed and it was not ancient. But one day the
scientists proved that the tell had a vast city beneath it.

The archaeologists began to find things that would thrill
the world. Eventually, up even until the present, they
found that the city (ancient Jericho) was perhaps the oldest
continually inhabited city in the world that they know of
to date. The archaeologists found every detail that was
written in the Bible to be factual.

Can you tally up the details?
All I remember so far is:

Walls fallen, you say outwards, do you have a reference from
the Bible for that?
House on/against/in wall, we haven't established how common
that is, if it was common the writer(s) of Joshua could
have guessed, if it was uniqe for Jericho they could have
heard of it.
Food left unpillaged, many reasons have been given for why
that might have been, especially if the city fell to an
earthquake rather than a seige.

I don't really find that all that convincing (unless there is more).

(Any pictures of the houses in the wall? It would be interesting
to see if the window that the spies were supposed to have escaped
through was there.)

The evidence that what
they wrote is the truth, is all there in the excavation of
Jericho. The archaeological find verifies the supports what
the Bible says. Most Christains had accepted this on faith
to begin with, but for some that doubt or are not believers,
that is helpful news.

after they got into Canaan since they didn't have
a city yet, and who watched the shepherds' sheep
while the shepherds went to see the baby Jesus. : )

<snip>

The bible is not a cookbook. In fact, it's more of an anti-cookbook.
Don't
cook the calf in its mothers milk. Don't eat pork. Don't eat shrimp.

That's funny. An anti-cookbook.
Since they had no refrigeration and may not have
understood about germs, fungui, molds, and such,
they did need instruction. Scientists have found
evidences of red tides in that location often. Have
you ever seen one? I lived in Bradenton, FL one
time when they had a red tide. The fish all die and
float up to the top of the water. It has to be cleaned
up manually if you can imagine. Shell fish were
extremely suseptible to it. I believe that the instructions
had to do with things like that. Each one of those things
had some reason as to why to obey them, most likely.

Most likely, but that doesn't mean that it takes a divine
revelation to figure out not to eat oysters in months
without an R, or in hotter climates skip them compleatly
to play it safe.

Evidently it does take a divine revelation to get some
folks to understand something.

Others are capable of understanding somethings by themselves.

Even, in fact, the revelation
of an archaeological find. But there is more to it than just
that. The Jews were told by God after the flood that they
could eat anything for meat. Now there were new reasons
why there had to be some limits. Because of whatever reasons,
there now were what is labeled "clean and unclean animals."
he word "Torah," means law, but it also means instruction.
I'm not sure people know, even today, why certain animals
are considered clean or unclean, but maybe there is even a
DNA reason. Who knows?

Or maybe the elders/rulers/preists saw a pattern to who got
sick after eating what, even if the pattern was incomplete
and partly faulty, added some rules for economic and political
reasons and made some shit up and these rules were better than
nothing so they kept them and claimed that they were divinely
revealed knowledge. Who knows?

<snip>

Eric


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