I'm already disgusted enough as it is by some of the things I've read so far that I am still not convinced I want to dignify them with a response, and anyway a lot of you will have read things I've said at OCN on the same topic, but anyway..
I'm with
gotfrag in being consistently appalled at the apparent total lack of understanding of the process of evolution. His intitial summary was good but I think it needs to be clarified that the ancestors did not "die out", at least in the geneological sense. Evolution is hardly quantum physics so it's really amazing that so many people get it wrong. In any case there are surely hundreds of websites on it so I'm not going to go into a lot of detail.
A race is. A slight change occurs in the DNA of ONE member of a species. Either this gives him an advantage, or a disadvantage, over the rest of his species. If it's an advantage he'll most likely mate more frequently and pass his genes (and thus his advantage) on to the next generation, who in turn will do better than their peers. After a few generations advantage will be present in a certain percentage of the population and you could argue that they are a "different race". In the meantime, other members have had other "advantages", which they have also mixed with the rest of the group. So we may have three or 20 slightly different groups of creatures - the "original" race has not died out, but rather "diverged".
Of course the slight changes may be bad, in which case the animal is more likely to die earlier and not mate as often. That change gets rejected and does not influence the rest of the gene pool.
Remembering also that at each point, the generation has the advantages passed onto it from its parents, and its own unique little change. Now multiply that by 100,000 generations and you end up with differences such as monkeys and humans; multiply it by 100,000,000 generations and you get differences such as fish elephants and sea lions.
We never "came down out of the trees". Our mutations caused us to diverge in different directions, and one of those directions was life in the tree-tops. Another was life in Sky-scrapers.
Anyway the point is, over thousands of generations, tiny changes at each link in the chain (i.e, at each generation level) modify the members until they may end up as totally different species. The old race has diverged into two, or 10, or whatever.
How about this: You start with 1,000 cyclists riding as a group. Every 10km or so there's a fork in the road and 1/3 of the cyclists split off and follow that fork instead. Each fork behaves exactly the same way so that after 100,000 km there isn't really muh of a group left on any of the forks - and the riders are all in totally different places. Whatsmore, they're all in different places from where they started, as well. The road is the process of evolution, and the riders are different species evolving out of a single race.
That's a rather course summary but I hope it helps somewhat.
Now here's the problem that Man has.
We're so mind-fucked on equality and all this other fucking shit that we've created a society where even our most fucked-up, ignorant, idiotic, grotesque, obese, and generally all-round useless specimens can still pass their polluted genes onto another generation. So we never get rid of the "bad egg". Thankfully some people actually have standards so a bad gene will never take over, but in nature it almost never has a chance to begin with.
Now I'm sure that that's actually confused more than it's helped, but whatever..
wine4all said:
I have resolved this argument in my own mind and found peace from the discovery. Now I just try to share what I have found with those around me since it is God's desire that none perish in Hell and He has commissioned all Christians to spread this truth to all who will listen. Besides, Heaven will be more interesting with Gonzo than without him!
I have resolved this argument in my own mind too and I now I just try to share not having to believe in some desparate no-hoper's last fantasy. Religion is a fantasy constructed for people who can't handle life on their own; who need a "big brother" to hang onto when the going gets rough. Sure it's a nice idea; it'd be a nice idea for me to find Rachel Leigh Cook in my bed tonight but taht doesn't make it any more likely to happen.
"Oh but how can you explain where the universe came from then?" Who said I needed to? Just accept it as one of the things that we're not yet advanced enough to know. As
flavio pointed out, lightning used to come from Zeus; now we've figured out what actually happens. Given time, we'll figure out how the universe got here and then we won't have to bother with any of this nonsense about God anymore.
wine4all said:
God has no beginning and no end, no physical form which we can comprehend. That is one of the reasons that He is diety in the highest. [/b]
That is also the reason that he makes such a convenient answer. By completely eliminating anything that could possibly challenge His credibility, you make a nice big deep patch of sand for you to stick your head into so you never have to worry about what the truth may actually be. Infallibility is God's main weakness. If he was really as perfect as He needs to be, he would have created a universe that didn't need a creator to account for it.
And another thing. As
LivingtooLive (nice spelling btw
) pointed out, God also likes to change the rules of the game so that he can remain infallible. It used to be that there was never any chance of life on other planets, but now that it's become much more likely, suddenly the Church is okay with the idea (although Jehovah's Witness still aren't). Same with homosexuals - God loves them too now, I believe - correct me if I'm wrong. Point is, at each poin where evidence may challenge the existence of God, the rules are changed and suddenly God's okay again.
The good thing about this though is that eventaully He'll get modifed out of existence...
How many of you remember the episode of "Lois & Clark" which had H. G. Wells come bacl from the future? Of course by then they all knew that Clark was Superman; H. G. Wells made the point that they had figured everything out, except for one question: "
how on Earth could she have been so STOOPID???" That's about how I feel towards Christianity.