h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Why would a God need to be made through evolution? A God wouldn't need to obey the rules we do

There doesn't have to be a "versus".

Creationism is the method by which God put this whole thing in place. Evolution is the method by which he keeps it ticking over and makes improvements.

That was simple, wasn't it?

If you accept that there is a divine agency behind all of this then any process, law or theory that man can divise or observe must be intentionally part of the divine plan. In other words, if we can spot it going on then it's meant to be there. This takes, as a point of faith, that God is omniscient and omnipotent as well as perfect. So...we have evidence for Evolution and therefore God meant us to find that evidence. It is not a test of our faith it is a signpost. God is slowly, thropugh the medium of scientific research, showing us how his creation works.

You can take that one of two ways - either you can say "Aha! I take Science as my Faith and ignore God" or you can applaud The Man for the genius of His creation. Of course, this does tend to trivialise the entirety of scientific endevour because now it's essentially God's way of pointing stuff out and saying "Ain't it cool?".

I'm taking this middle stance because of the dangerous extremism that exists on both sides of this arguement. The scientists who refuse to admit that there are "more things on heaven and earth" than they can explain easily and the religious folks who manage to ban the teaching of evolution as a theory are BOTH wrong.

I refer to the earlier comment that people worked out the age of the earth by adding up the ages of the people in the bible.

Yes, it was scientific. It was an attempt to determine the age of the Earth using the best means available. These days, we have more accurate dating techniques and we know that the planet, and the universe, are far older than we first thought. This does not meanthat we are right - it's always possible our messurements are not accurate - it means that we are less ignorant than we were.

My own personal belief system leans towards Lamarkian evolution rather than Darwinian but I am willing to concede that since I can't disprove the existence of God I therefore can't disprove the possibility that He created the world and everything in it.

And since you can't disprove the existence of an omnipotent hippo in a tutu, that shows the universe was created by that?

The Bible tells us one thing, science tells us another. So there is no way we can believe in both. You might claim God made evolution, but then why did he want us to believe in all that Adam N Eve stuff? Makes him loose a lot of credibility, then why should we believe him when he tells us there is a Heaven and such?

Life has evolved into great complexity and diversity because of some simple, not-very-complex processes. If you find that hard to believe, look at fractals; a simple equation iterated creates mind-bogglingly complex, infinite and pretty things.

Now, if creationists are right their God has put everything in place, and had a hand in making every life form that exists. Can you imagine the complexity of such an individual? And more significantly the chances of such a being coming to exist (no matter how). Creationists quibble about coins in rocks and the chances of a protein spontaneously coming together when their unshakeable faith is based upon some ludicrous concept. God cannot be a simple little fractal-like thing because he's all-powerful and all-seeing right?

I am personally all for the omnipotent hippo in a tutu, I bet his/her Sunday services would be a blast.

An omnipotent Hippo in a tutu would be a God. We also have no way of knowing what God looks like. Since God is omnipotent, he might well be a hippo in a tutu.

God did not want us to believe in all that Adam and Eve stuff. The first time we find out what God wants us to believe is when he issues the 10 commandments. All of the Adam and Eve stuff was written much earlier, I suspect, and has been translated a lot. You should bear in mind that there is a certain amount of evidence that the events in the Old Testament may actually have happened in one form or another - the Old Testament is the history of a people and a set of rules for living.

As for credibility - since when has the vengeful and angry deity that flooded the planet, destroyed Soddom and Gommoroh etc worried about credibility?

He's God, not an elected official. He could be about to smite you now! Can you imagine God actually thinking along those lines? Seeing the first draught of the Old Testament and saying "Oh no! They'll never go for this! Get me someone who can write believable creation myths!"

Plyus, all of this has basically nothing to do with creationism, evolution or anything else for that matter. Your argument is pure sophistry.

My major concern is that Creationism is being taught in American schols to the exclusion of all alternative points of view. Darwinism, increasingly under attack from modern biology, is still only a theory. While the scientific comunity agrees that evolution is the model that best explains the progression of species from their ancient past onwards it is by no means a Law. It is still open to interpretation and attack. That's why it's still called a Theory of Natural Selection and a Theory of Evolution. If you take this as a de-facto law you are being intellectually lazy and missing the whole point of Science's strengths - which is also a strength of this Guide: peer review.

Interestingly enough, there is still an awful lot of ecclesiastical debate going on prompting me to look closely at the parallels between religion and science.

How is Darwinism "under attack from modern biology"? There are many arguements within the scientific community about species definitions, Lamarkian adaptation to the environment (albeit in only a limited sense, e.g., Heat Shock Proteins) and all sorts. The overall theory of evolution is pretty damn solid at the moment.

The Earth revolves around the Sun is also a theory. Most things are and I agree that this is a strength of science.

I'm the guy who isn't too keen on Evolution remember?

About the hippo, I was just trying to say that assuming you can't disprove something is a stupid reason to believe in it, or be agnostic about it.

And how do you know that everything in the Bible is made up, except the part about the 10 Commandments? Seems to me that is wishful thinking. Besides, the 10 Commandments have also been warped several times.

It is true that some of the things in the bible have happened, but that does not mean there was any divine force behind it. Like the flood stories being created by the creation of the Black Sea. That shows there was nothing divine about it, even if it wasn't wrong.

I'm very keen on Evolution. I'm doing this to play Devil's Advocate; trying to argue as much mid-ground as possible.

Quite a lot of the things in the bible are made up. Quite a lot of other things are allegorical, metaphorical or otherwise not meant to be taken literally. Some of the content of the bible is true. Some of it isn't. I can't say how much is one or the other. What I am hoping to prompt, somewhat clumsily, is a non-extreme reaction to both sides of the debate.

I am still concerned, by the way, that people are willing to take Creationism as the be all and end all of the arguement and will pay no credance to Evolution as even a remote possibility.

The thing is, evolution works quite nicely as an explanation for how we all got here etc. It's a good theory. I look forward to it being tested some more because this inevitably does two things:

One: it helps expose people who will not see outside their own little box.

Two: it is the cause of excellent articles in New Scientist and other like minded publications.

I don't think you understand. Peppered moths DON'T UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES REST ON TREES! They never have; they never will. They spend their time on the ground. Huxley created false evidence based on a lie. I'm not the one smacking of desparartion, here.

Some of you ought to examine your fossil records. You may have noticed that biologists are the main gurus of evolution, not geologists. I don't have time today, but tomorrow I will provide some example of why.

In order to begin to find anything relevant in Creationism, you have to make the assumption that there is a God... in which case, it's a circular argument.

Evolution, on the other hand, has evolved over the years, and the evidence has increased, so it gets stronger all the time.

If there was any scientific evidence to support the theory of creation, then it would be worth entertaining. But since all it has is bad logic, why are we even discussing it?

Did anyone in this arguement see the terrific series Testing God, which gave the arguments both philosophical and scientific and both for and against the existance of a god. It really was very good.

God came out quite well, on a number of points.

As for evolution - it works, it happens ,we can see it happen. And (if some of the evidence put forward in this documentary is correct) if the was a creation act (which no-one can disprove) some things can only come about through evolution, particularly intelligence, so if there was an act of creation, then evolution must have been the tool for that creative process.

The question is no longer how?, but why?

It always seems to boil down to the question of how you go about proving or disproving the existance of God? That in-turn, spawns a whole bunch of definitions of what is God, and if we delve further we begin to ask what is IS?

Well, I have another one for you:

Is the humand mind capable of comprehending God?

i.e. is it possible that God is something so extraordinary that we, being mere mortals and limited by our intellectual capacity, could not identify God even if she was in our midst all along?

After all, how many can say they can comprehend the absolute vastness of the universe? Not large, big, gargantuan, humongous, but VAST!? And IF God created this, how can we then comprehend God?

Yeah, were always too anthropomorphic. I hate to dispell any illusions Xanatic but i'm afraid that God is definately not a Hippo. God is a God, whatever one of those is. Granted it might look like a hippo, or a man, or a face flannel, but god is and cannot be any of those things, because God is God, and Gods very nature makes her somethng very different.

We must be able to identify God - we've given it a name. That implies a certain degree of identification ( although I doubt anyone but Moses would be able to pick Him out in an Identity parade, and then only from behind), as would the term "Act of God", which also implies an ability to associate certain actions with Himself.

Comprehending God? Yes. I think so. We have a word, gnosis, which means (something like) "direct experience of God". If we have a word for it, there must have been a need to describe the experience. Again, direct knowledge implies that it must be possible to understand the experience and be able to relate it in meaningful terms.

If we are God's creation, it may be that we have an inbuilt capacity to understand and comprehend not only our Creator but His works too. There is even an arguement floaring around out there that the human mind is specifically adapted to experience religious phenomena. Are we born with a part of our neural wetware devoted to getting messages from the Divine? Interesting possibility, I think.

For those that are interested, the above relates to the study of Abduction Experiences, which apparently have much in common with certain types of religious vision. Both have links to sleep paralysis and temporal lobe epilepsy; it has also been suggested that this tendency might be an evolutionary path that allows humans to co-operate on large scales and subsume individual identity in favour of a mass ideal - a religion, for example. Mind control as an evolutionary advantage? Cool.

To actually get back to the question (I've been doing some pretty diverse reading since this topic started) if the creator wanted us to continue without knowing Him, we wouldn't be capable of recognizing that there is the possibility he exists in the first place. Since we do recognise him, in a variety of forms, it suggests to me that we would be able to comprehend him albeit in a manner limited by our own perceptions and preconceptions.

There. Did I hedge enough?

It seems to be a battle with the human ego; we cannot allow ourselves to think that we are unable to comprehend the things around us, and at the same time wanting to be recognized by the divine.

Both reasure us of our importance. After all, if God decided to communicate with monkeys instead of us, (perhaps because they are much nicer to each other and this planet then we), then we would not seem that great, now would we!?

God does communicate with the monkeys. They just haven't let us in on their little secret yet.

Josh,

I'm not sure who this Huxley guy is, but it was Kettlewell who did the 'classic' observations of the peppered moth. Whilst myself and others would admit that the study was flawed in some respects, the overall conclusions from the study are sound. A book by Michael Majerus (a well respected Cambridge Genetics Prof.) re-examined Kettlewell's work and updated it with current knowledge. He found that moth survival does indeed depend upon camoflague colour. However, he did admit that better experiments were needed, the picture is incomplete, but nowhere near wrong.

The moths do rest upon trees. Though Majerus found that they were more in the canopy and smaller branches than the trunk. The only person to report that the moth were probably glued to the trunks is demonstrate the camoflague is Prof. DR Lees. He was not trying to debunk the original study. He is an old Professor of mine at University and he has studied these creatures and industrial melanism all of his life.

Ste

...glued to the trunks is demonstrate...

Should be,

...glued to the trunks to demonstrate...

Mind control as an evolutionary advantage?????

You people are beginning to scare me.