Imagine

[ted]

Of course!

I should have known that a thread dealing with the Lennon song Imagine would turn into a creation/ evolution debate....

How could I not see the connection??

t.

Touche!

I plead Marie's line from The Aristocats:

"A lady doesn't start fights - but she can finish them!"

Good one.

I was kidding, by the way. In truth, all threads here turn into creation vs evolution eventually.

It's the nature of the beast: All threads are created, but then evolve into many shapes until evetually reaching a point of critical mass, thus begins the process of returning themselves to their original elements- creation vs evolution.

Maybe there is truth to the coexistance of creation and evolution after all?

t.

[secondeve]

Of course!

I should have known that a thread dealing with the Lennon song Imagine would turn into a creation/ evolution debate....

How could I not see the connection??

t.

Touche!

I plead Marie's line from The Aristocats:

"A lady doesn't start fights - but she can finish them!"

Good one.

I was kidding, by the way. In truth, all threads here turn into creation vs evolution eventually.

It's the nature of the beast: All threads are created, but then evolve into many shapes until evetually reaching a point of critical mass, thus begins the process of returning themselves to their original elements- creation vs evolution.

Maybe there is truth to the coexistance of creation and evolution after all?

t.

True - it's unavoidable. Sorry I had a go at you for getting off topic the other day, by the way. It is kinda unavoidable, as you say - and anyway, I was being hypocritical.

Nice thread theory! Think Why So Blind will be convinced?

[ted]

True - it's unavoidable. Sorry I had a go at you for getting off topic the other day, by the way. It is kinda unavoidable, as you say - and anyway, I was being hypocritical.

Apology accepted- except I can't remember what you are talking about!

Am I on here too much when I can't remember why I'm getting yelled at or when???

Nice thread theory! Think Why So Blind will be convinced?

With God, all things are possible.

Hey, wait a minute.....you pulled me off topic again!

t.

[secondeve]

Hey, wait a minute.....you pulled me off topic again!

t.

Ah, so my evil plan is working - if only I knew what it was.....

[ted]

Ok, enough of this! I'm heading to bed.

JL, sorry for my bit of play in your thread. I did make a serious post in here somewhere on this page or the one before, if you want to check it out.

SE, good night, and God Bless.

t.

[Giaour]

There isn't a single scientist who has died that is not 100% convinced that Heaven, Hell and God DOES exist.

Scientists will someday know the truth either in this life or in death.

[billie]

There isn't a single scientist who has died that is not 100% convinced that Heaven, Hell and God DOES exist.

Scientists will someday know the truth either in this life or in death.

Amen, G! And they'll bow their knee and confess He is Lord!

[secondeve]

1. Carbon dating is based on the "steady state theory", which is totally debunked, as is obvious from man's activity alone, the amount of carbon in earth's atmosphere is not steady, or even close to being steady.

As well, it uses the principle of the "half life", or the length of time it takes half of the intial radioactive substance to decay, and it is assumed that the half life of a particular element remains the same for all situations. The problem here is, man himself disproved this theory with the creation of the atomic bomb. Which brings a radioactive substance to a "critical mass" at which point it all decays nearly instantly, even though it has "normal" half life of "thousands or millions or billions of years". This in and of itself proves that rate of radioactive decay is in fact dependant on environment. Making it an unreliable source of dating.

2. there are also numerous instances of objects of known age being drastically "over aged" by carbon dating and other forms of radioactive dating. Including human remains of known age being estimated to be as many as ten to 100 times as old, or more, as their actual known age.

1. What you have just proven is that, unless man takes it into his head to interfere with the half-life, it stays the same. Otherwise we'd have uranium radiating poison all over the joint at the drop of a hat. And by whom, exactly, is the steady state theory "totally debunked," apart from your good self? If it had been disproven by someone scientifically respectable, I doubt it would still be in use.

Oftentimes when athiest friends have asked insulting questions of Christians, the reply has been along the lines of, 'We're not all completely stupid. We don't believe this because we're unintelligent.' This is a defence which is demonstrably true. The same must be said of scientists. They don't use the methods they do, nor do they continue using them, because they are stupid. So, logically, there must be another reason - something to do with their having intelligence.

One thing which should be blatantly obvious about scientists is that, once they discover that a given theory is bunk, they step up to the plate and admit it. That's part of the whole point of science: accepting the limitations of human knowledge. Unless you turn out to be a word-respected scientists in the area of radio-carbon dating or can submit evidence of someone who is debunking its use, you're essentially a conspiracy theorist: 'Ah, yes - they all know it doesn't work, but they keep saying it does because there's a plot afoot - a plot, I say! - to promulgate ancient scientific methods with no benefit to the academic community!'

2. This contradicts what you said above about the method being utterly inaccurate because, in your estimation, there is no such thing as a stable carbon half-life. Unless there were such a thing as a stable carbon half-life, it would not be possible to say that a dinosaur bone - which has no known age, outside of what carbon dating gives it - was however many times younger than said dating had earlier claimed. Either there is some merit to the method - and you were lying or exaggerating above - in which case this claim is possible (though not necessarily likely); or the method is utterly unreliable, in which no such "over aging" could be reasonably ascertained. Which is it?

Interesting that you should bring this up. There was an actual display [of horses] at the college I used to go to with the remains of various individuals of each species.

5 progressive species eh? How do you know that? I saw the hooves on the skeles, and the shapes of their heads,e tc. I am not convinced that they aren't seperate, unrelated species. Else, "evolution" would have to make some very big leaps all at once. Going from toed to hooved. Going from an animal the size of a large dog to the size of well...a horse. One would need an over-active imagination to see any ancestral connection between the creatures.

You seem to be imagining that one day, each and every pregnant eohippus gave birth to an entirely new species, all in one go, rather than certain foals having slightly different traits due to a gene warping here or there, that trait becoming useful in the environment, ensuring the warped gene is passed on to more offspring, eventually resulting in the new horses outnumbering and overtaking the old ones.

Besides which, if you keep down this line of logic, you're just going to end up saying that similar species aren't related. If eohippus wasn't related to Prezwalski's horse, perhaps lemurs aren't related to monkeys? What you're doing here is attempting to debunk the entire idea of genus in zoology. Is it just me, or does that seem almost foolishly ambitious? You must know -I can't comprehend how you couldn't - that people have bred odd dogs like dashunds and chihuahuas from bigger, different-looking dogs. If you put a bichon frisse next to a labrador in a dog museum, would you think they were the same creature? Presumably not, if the same Why So Blind lived in the future and these dogs were extinct - based on the different head and muzzle shapes, life expectancies, size, temperments, fur, that kind of thing. Here and now, though, you know they are related; you can see how that kind of thing happens, by breeding and over time. Yet you won't accept that the oldest horses are, in fact, related to horses? How odd.

when a designer knows something works, he is more likely to re-use that same concept or design, or a derivative of it, in other projects, and when he knows it doesn't work, he doesn't use it.

The idea that just because I have 5 fingers in my hand, i must be related to any organism that has 5 bones in a limb is just ridiculous. Need I also add that it contradicts your above argument about horses, since in the above example, evolutionists claim that horses lost toes over time to get hooves?

Here's a better way to phrase my original point: horse hooves are hooves. Most of the bones which make up the five digits above and to the side of the hoof don't do anything; they're residual. They gave up toes, but kept the bones. Why would God put those bones there, when they serve no purpose? Ditto for dogs.

As to the "did they look like cavemen" argument.

No, they didn't.

In every case that I've ever seen, the purported "hominid" has been crushed beyond recognition, to the point that it must be glued back together like a jigsaw puzzle, etc. Break an egg and glue it back together, and you will have somethign that still doesn't much look like an egg.

Or there is really only one or two bone fragments discovered, and the "archeologist" supposedly deduces the entire skeletal structure from a stray tooth or finger, etc.

Most times when people say there's however many ancient copies of the Bible around, what they mean are bits of papyrus and ostracon, pottery shards with writing on them. Obviously, the number of broken bits of the Bible aren't where the current version comes from - whole ones survived, too, though not as many. In fact, if it weren't for the whole copies, the little bitty pieces would be inidentifiable - and they sometimes are anyway. The point being, people don't just dig up random bones and claim to know what it belonged to just by looking. They have more complete or full version of the same skeleton to compare the fragment to. If it is clearly recognisable - then yes, we know there was another skeleton like those ones we found earlier. If not, it goes in the miscelaneous box. The same with the Bible pieces.

Is that a fair analogy?

Also, most of the primates have 50 chromosomes, not 48. Showing a fundamental genetic difference between them. Though they share some genes (thanks to the modularity of genetics), they are fundamentally different in their overall genetic structure, inspite of similarities between individual genes here and there.

97% genetic similarity counts as "between individual genes here and there?" You live in a world of weird maths, my friend.

Selective breeding does not create new genes, it simply removes some of the old genes, leaving behind a population of psuedo-clone individuals suffering from severe genetic bottleneck. Which is why most "Top breed" dogs suffer from severe malformities. German Shepherds have bad hips, etc.

The reason most top breed dogs suffer from health problems is because they come from a small, comparatively inbred genepool, or did at a specific point in the past. Look through a dog book and you'll see entries under certain breeds to the effect of 'health problem x is being bred out.' Creating the breed, the potential gene pool is smaller, which leads to health problems. Once there are more dogs and they are being bred with outside stock again, the trait can be removed or lessened.

Come to think of it, if you believe in genetics enough to talk about it - and, presumably, in the concept of inbreeding - how can you think that the world descended from Adam and Eve in the first instance, and later from just one family - Noah's?

One might ask why, in all of this purported "evolution", none of the dogs has learned how to fly, or grown fins and gills, etc?

This is an impossibly silly question. I will explain it once.

Evolution isn't magic. It doesn't give each species the best of everything Nature has to offer if only they sit up nicely and say "please." As happens from time to time, genes mutate, which leads to a new trait in a creature. A gene might mutate to make a rabbit shorter, for instance. This gene is then passed on. Say being shorter proves, by accident, to be an advantage - you are harder for prey to see. You are more likely to survive and breed, passing the same gene on to your offpsring, who find the same advantage in it, and pass it on again. That warped gene just gave the rabbit a better chance for survival, which means more offpsring, and, in a competitive environment, rabbits who are bigger are more likely to get picked off - which leaves behind the shorter ones.

That's how it works. Little changes over millions of years, one change at a time, not all bunched up. You ask if dogs could learn to fly, as though you're being clever. You're not. Think about how silly that question sounds. You're talking as if evolution is a mystical panacea. It isn't. Take the time to learn about how it really works.

The fact that many "species" of big cat can breed with one another (Tigons and Ligers), as can almost all big dogs, also proves that they in fact are not even truly seperate species, just isolated families within a species.

And yet while horses and mules can breed, the offspring are sterile. And some big cats have the same problems, too.

The only thing that can be said about archyopterix with any certainty is that it has some physical characteristics of both birds and reptiles. To say that it is a genetic, ancestral link between the two is simply grasping at straws, since you also need a "proto-archyopterix" which would bridge the gap between reptile and archyopterix, and you'd need a "neo-archyopterix" which would bridge the gap between it and birds.

The fact that it 'has some characteristics of birds and reptiles' qualifies it as a link, I'd say. Why not a link between the neo-archypoterix and birds? Why not a link between that link? Split hairs that fine and you'll turn up nothing. Essentially, you're putting a qualification on 'link' that can never be satisfied. Dinosaurs had feathers, they've found recently - a mudpid full of dinos with the skin still on, and feather imprints around each and every one, regardless of species. The shape of bones in s velociraptor resembles that of birds - any Jurassic Park-watching ten-year-old could see that.

No, this is not evolution. Put a catfish in a big pond, and it grows bigger, then put it into a smaller pond and its growth is stunted. Put its offspring in a little pond, and it doesn't grow as big, take it out of the little pond and put it into the big pond sometime later, and it resumes growth. This is ADAPTATION of an INDIVIDUAL to its environment (specificly the high or low quality and quantity of food available.) But it is NOT evolution, which requires fundamental genetic change to the species from generation to generation.

A species of moth in England was nominally white. Occasionally, the genepool threw up black moths, which lived very short lives generally, as they stood out against the white trees of their habitat. When industrial smoke turned the trees black, however, the black moths thrived; the white moths became the scarce, genetic abnormalities, as it was now they who the birds could see clearly on the trees. And when this was realised and the smoke was stopped? Thind reverted. A species-wide change on the basis of a rare gene and the environment. Sounds like evolution to me.

Edited September 6, 2006 by secondeve

[sweetycakes]

One of the songs that inspired me growing up was Imagine by John Lennon..it was a song that crystalized his vision for the world. Imagine no heaven...no hell below us..above us only sky. I think of the song as a benign view that he developed as a result of things he had read and derived from comparative religion theories of Joseph Campbell and the Beatles' visits with the Maharishi. The dream Lennon had of people living in peace and simply sharing the world is what the song implies as if religion had never existed in the first place. A common goal that I would hope most people generally seek. Religion has driven people apart and caused division and intolerance in the world and the search for God and truth seems to have been lost in the confusion. Imagine a world that got it right and never invented religion but lived in virtual harmony! Is'nt that was Jesus would have wanted for the world anyway?-He was just a guy like Ghandi who spoke of brotherhood and loving one and other. Those are concepts even an atheist can grasp! This whole idea of being "saved" is up to us..we can save ourselves!

The lyrics of this song don't represent a benign view of the world as you say, I don't think. Lennon's involvement in the occult is well known and well documented. Here are just 2 examples. In the first webpage, look at the right-hand side for the 28 minute video preview and watch that. This shows no benign view. Lennon's slot is about a third of the way through the video clip.

http://goodfight.org/

See also this webpage:

http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Evils%20in%...oll/imagine.htm

Regards

[Rebmilc]

JUST A GUY LIKE GHANDI! Oh come on John wise up. If you read the historical records you will find that Ghandi wasn't as nice as hollywood would have you think. He wasn't so Holy. There is evidence of his having had villages of his own people massacred, and by the way, he had a penchant for young boys.

Lennon had a hatred of Christianity and showed it by regularly urinating on nuns from hotel windows.

You have a right to your opinion, but don't hold people like lennon and ghandi up as some sort of role model that we should attain to, because frankly it isn't historically correct.