can believers accept evolution?

[HumbleThinker]

The Earth is said to have four corners, an ability to see the entire earth from a mountain, a circle, immobile, etc, all of which perfectly aligns with what we know about the ancient near east cosmology. Do I really need to pull out the verses that state this? The arbitrariness here is that you will claim that these verses are metaphorical or that they mean something else other than their plain meaning, yet this same measure will not be applied to those verses that you claim must be taken literally. Another example is meteorology. Meteorology cannot be true because the Bible claims that God Himself makes it rain and frost. You can claim that it is being metaphorical, but then you will have to present a measure for calling it metaphorical and then demonstrate that the verses you claim must be taken literally do not also fall into this measure.

Yes, the earth is said to have four corners.  I have read those verses.  And for the record, you have no idea what arguments I would provide.  You are trying to assign values to me so that you can have something to knock down.  It's rather amusing to watch you assume that you know what I am thinking or what I will say, when in fact, you don't know beans.

 

The Bible uses observational terminology, just like we do.  We still use expressions like "the four corners of the earth" in normal conversation.  We also use phrases like "sunrise" and "sunset."    It is observational terminology and no one is expressing a cosomology in using those terms.

 

The ancient people knew the earth was not flat.   Peoples from eastern and european cultures going back to ancient times were sailing around the world long before Columbus.  The "New World" was not new at all.

 

The ancient people were not as stupid as people like you presume.  They had, in many cultures, an advanced understanding of engineering and physics that often surprise people.who have been led to believe that ancient people were ignorant of science.  Part of our problem in figuring out how the pyramids were built, how the Romans built the Pantheon is that we have made a lot of false assumptions about what the ancient people understood about their world.  Heck, the ancient Egyptians were using the mathematical concept of pi in pyramid building thosands of years before the Greeks codified it as a mathematical concept.   And when I say "thousands" I mean that the pyramids were already  "ancient" when Abraham visited Egypt back in Genesis.

 

As for meterorlogy, I have no problem with meteorology.   And the Bible does say that God sends the rain.  Jesus said that God causes the sun and the rain to fall on the just and unjust.   Was Jesus wrong about that?   Jesus said that God clothes the fields and feeds the birds.   Jesus presented His Father as being intimately involved even in the day to day management of created order.

 

To you that is a problem, but for Jesus whom you claim to believe in, it is not a problem.  Are prepared to challenge Jesus on the fact that God sends the rain?

In other words, you are looking past the "plain reading" on verses that talk about a flat, immobile earth. Good. Now apply this uniformly instead of arbitrarily and your argument will be stronger whether you agree with my position or not. In what way are you determining that "the four corners of the earth" for instance is an expression and not an accurate representation of their cosmological beliefs because the plain reading is that the earth has for corners? An alternative of course is that it could be both; to the best of my knowledge, the English Bible is the origin of that phrase.

Ancient peoples certainly did know that the earth was round, but these peoples largely came to this conclusion after the Old Testament times. A spherical earth was not philosophized until somewhere around the 6th century BC and not strongly supported by calculations until somewhere around the 3rd century BC, both by the ancient Greeks. Before that, it was an almost if not completely universal belief across cultures that the earth was flat and quite often a disc. Civilizations with much greater technical achievements than the Jews (ie. the Egyptians) still believed in a flat earth. Their astronomy had not developed far enough to determine that the earth was in fact round.

And I never said the Jews or any other people were stupid, but they were largely pre-scientific, which doesn't negate or is negated by the fact that the Jews had bronze, for instance, or constructed many great structures. Since the Jews were pre-scientific, they of course had to rely on observation. But observation also leads to extrapolation that reaches farther than one's observation. One can observe the sun moving and ourselves not moving throughout the day, so it is a natural conclusion for a person who does not know science to think that this shows that the earth is immobile and that the sun is mobile. But none can possibly observe that the earth has four corners for example or that the earth is circular instead of a spheroid or that is was round as opposed to flat. These were all extrapolations based on basic observations such as the seeming flatness of the ground they walked on, the flatness of the horizon, and even such experiences as ships not coming back that went over the horizon (they must have fallen off the earth!). I'm sure there are even many astronomical observations they could have made that would have seemingly supported a flat earth.

Edited December 8, 2013 by HumbleThinker

[OldSchool2]

 

 

 

 

 

And increasing randomness in any system doesn't lend itself to the stable construction of long proteins and amino acids: the building blocks of life that must also all be L- isomers in order to function.

 

 

"Randomness" can decrease locally at the expense of the larger system.

 

 

Resulting in the formation of long, unbroken protein chains of only L-isomers?

 

Sure. there is no law of physics which prevents such a thing.

 

 

"... The law of increasing entropy is an impenetrable barrier which no evolutionary mechanism yet suggested has ever been able to overcome. Evolution and entropy are opposing and mutually exclusive concepts. If the entropy principle is really a universal law, then evolution must be impossible.

 

"The very terms themselves express contradictory concepts. The word 'evolution' is of course derived from a Latin word meaning 'out-rolling'. The picture is of an outward-progressing spiral, an unrolling from an infinitesimal beginning through ever broadening circles, until finally all reality is embraced within.

 

"'Entropy,' on the other hand, means literally 'in-turning.' It is derived from the two Greek words en (meaning 'in') and trope (meaning 'turning'). The concept is of something spiraling inward upon itself, exactly the opposite concept to 'evolution.' Evolution is change outward and upward, entropy is change inward and downward ..."

 

http://www.icr.org/article/51/

 

Entropy can decrease locally at the expense of the larger system.

 

How? By an intelligent agency?

 

"Remember this tendency from order to disorder applies to all real processes. Real processes include, of course, biological and geological processes, as well as chemical and physical processes. The interesting question is: 'How does a real biological process, which goes from order to disorder, result in evolution, which goes from disorder to order? ....'"

[gray wolf]

The earth is not a closed system.

[OldSchool2]

 

Elaborate on the fact that evolution isn't the same as natural selection -- although I think that Darwin assumed the latter was a corolary to evolution -- or that increasing entropy still doesn't favor the construction of long, complex molecules that only occur in nature as L-isomers (as opposed to the mix of L- and R- isomers produced in lab experiments trying to recreate earth's primordial soup of life)?

 

And a human divergence "branching" from a common ancestor between chimps and humans still suggests a progression between them that doesn't account for our close relations to other forms of life.

Thanks, I'm pretty sure I understand what you mean now. Natural selection is a mechanism of evolution ...

 

Claiming that natural selection, which is observable today, is related to evolution doesn't validate the latter.

 

And claiming that humans and chimps are a pas de deux of branching evolution still doesn't allow for other life forms to "cut in".

[OldSchool2]

The earth is not a closed system.

 

I can't think of any natural physical system that doesn't interact with other systems.

[gray wolf]

But the argument that the system goes to disorder describes a closed system without energy input.  Indeed if it were truly closed, disorder would increase.

Edited December 8, 2013 by gray wolf

[HumbleThinker]

 

 

Elaborate on the fact that evolution isn't the same as natural selection -- although I think that Darwin assumed the latter was a corolary to evolution -- or that increasing entropy still doesn't favor the construction of long, complex molecules that only occur in nature as L-isomers (as opposed to the mix of L- and R- isomers produced in lab experiments trying to recreate earth's primordial soup of life)?

 

And a human divergence "branching" from a common ancestor between chimps and humans still suggests a progression between them that doesn't account for our close relations to other forms of life.

Thanks, I'm pretty sure I understand what you mean now. Natural selection is a mechanism of evolution ...

 

Claiming that natural selection, which is observable today, is related to evolution doesn't validate the latter.

 

And claiming that humans and chimps are a pas de deux of branching evolution still doesn't allow for other life forms to "cut in".

 

I guess there was a miscommunication because I wasn't trying to validate either by pointing out the natural selection is a mechanism of evolution; I was just trying to make your statement more accurate. Natural selection really isn't observable per se (though I may be using "observable" differently than you are), but evolution as the change in allele frequencies is. Natural selection is on of the mechanisms by which this happens, allowing us to observe evolution, and there certainly is evidence that natural selection is a valid mechanism of evolution, but at least in the sense that I use the word observation, it isn't really observable. It's like the difference between saying you see the effects of an action and saying you can see cause and effect or the process by which the cause led to the effect. Does that make sense?

 

And can you explain what you mean by the last sentence, because I clearly still do not understand what you mean by "claiming that humans and chimps are a pas de deux of branching evolution still doesn't allow for other life forms to "cut in"."

[HumbleThinker]

 

The earth is not a closed system.

 

I can't think of any natural physical system that doesn't interact with other systems.

 

After correcting my misunderstanding of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, which is what you are appealing to, it only applies to isolated systems. In thermodynamic terms, the Earth is in fact a closed system, but not an isolated system. I venture to guess that in laymen understanding like ours, we utilize the term "closed system" to mean "isolated system," thus making "the earth is not a closed system" a true statement. But this inadvertently ignores the difference between closed and isolated systems and can lead to confusion when we start appealing to technical laws using popular terminology. It can also lead to confusion between people that are each using the terms in two slightly different but important ways.

 

Isolated systems exchange absolutely nothing with their surroundings, while closed systems can exchange heat and work but not matter.with its surroundings. The Earth clearly exchanges energy with the sun, and only rarely has matter enter its system as meteors or whatever. Thus, you are also correct to the best of my knowledge that there is no known natural physical system that does not interact with its surroundings. The only possible exception to that statement is the universe itself, which by its classical definition has no surrounding by which to exchange anything with. Thus isolated systems are essentially just ideals that can serve as good models in the same way classical Newtonian physics utilizes the ideal of a perfect vacuum to allow for approximating.

Edited December 8, 2013 by HumbleThinker

[alphaparticle]

 

The earth is not a closed system.

 

I can't think of any natural physical system that doesn't interact with other systems.

 

Right. The law only perfectly applies to completely closed systems but there are systems which are close enough for our purposes. Thermodynamic laws are statistical laws about how ensembles will act. The second law states that the amount of energy available to do work over time decreases in closed systems. But, the earth, subsystems on the earth in particular, are definitely not closed systems. For instance, the surface of the earth actually gets quite a bit of energy from the sun. There are spots in the ocean warmer than surrounding areas due to vents fed from the heat inside the core of the earth. I am sure you can think of other examples. But it is because of this sort of thing that attempting to argue that biological evolution violates the laws of thermodynamics does not work. I would focus on a refutation that could at least get off the ground.

[alphaparticle]

 

 

 

 

 

 

And increasing randomness in any system doesn't lend itself to the stable construction of long proteins and amino acids: the building blocks of life that must also all be L- isomers in order to function.

 

 

"Randomness" can decrease locally at the expense of the larger system.

 

 

Resulting in the formation of long, unbroken protein chains of only L-isomers?

 

Sure. there is no law of physics which prevents such a thing.

 

 

"... The law of increasing entropy is an impenetrable barrier which no evolutionary mechanism yet suggested has ever been able to overcome. Evolution and entropy are opposing and mutually exclusive concepts. If the entropy principle is really a universal law, then evolution must be impossible.

 

"The very terms themselves express contradictory concepts. The word 'evolution' is of course derived from a Latin word meaning 'out-rolling'. The picture is of an outward-progressing spiral, an unrolling from an infinitesimal beginning through ever broadening circles, until finally all reality is embraced within.

 

"'Entropy,' on the other hand, means literally 'in-turning.' It is derived from the two Greek words en (meaning 'in') and trope (meaning 'turning'). The concept is of something spiraling inward upon itself, exactly the opposite concept to 'evolution.' Evolution is change outward and upward, entropy is change inward and downward ..."

 

http://www.icr.org/article/51/

 

Entropy can decrease locally at the expense of the larger system.

 

How? By an intelligent agency?

 

"Remember this tendency from order to disorder applies to all real processes. Real processes include, of course, biological and geological processes, as well as chemical and physical processes. The interesting question is: 'How does a real biological process, which goes from order to disorder, result in evolution, which goes from disorder to order? ....'"

 

Intelligent agencies can do it, sure. In fact I would not be opposed to speculating that God took an active role in setting up the conditions for life to arise at all. But aside from that, whenever you have something that sets up a temperature gradient, say, suppose you have a heater in the corner of the room, or a freezer, it's possible for there to be a system in the room that actually reduces entropy. You can think of 'naturally occurring' analogs to this. I gave some examples above so I apologize for repeating  myself.