...Continued

Correlation does not imply causation, Runner, and you've been told this many times before. People have generally been getting smarter too, but should we relate that to the teaching of evolution?

"Do not ask why the old days were better than the present; for that is a foolish question" (Ecclesiastes 7:10)

<<The missing link is just that.>>

What missing link are you talking about? You don't even know, do you?

Fossilisation isn't exactly common; finding fossils is even rarer. If fossilisation is so prevalent though, then why don't we find fossils of animals migrating from the ark?

<<Multiple frauds have been uncovered and will continue to be produced.>>

Multiple?

Name one other than Piltdown man?

I could name quite a few from Creationists if you'd like?

Piltdown man was exposed by scientists and was no longer used after it was exposed. Creationists, on the other hand, are still using their hoaxes as evidence.

<<The ridiculous notion that we came from apes has led to nothing more than racism and fantasy.>>

Ahhh.... the old “Social Darwinism” argument.

'Social Darwinism' is nothing more than a metaphor, and racism has been around a lot longer than evolution.

Evolutionary theory shows us that long-term survival is strongly linked with genetic variability. Social Darwinist programs advocate minimising genetic variability, thus reducing the chance of long-term survival in the event of environmental change.

Evolution shows how things are – not how they should be.

I like how Creationists distance themselves from bad Theists by saying that religion isn't bad – people are. But then contradict themselves by trying to imply that because 'Social Darwinism' is evil, then so is evolution. Amazing!

But this has probably all gone way over your head. In the next thread, you'll be back with one of your childish, uneducated and pointless little rants; telling people that evolution is stupid – or something along those lines.

So until then, how about you go play in the sandpit with the other kiddies while the rest of us talk about big people stuff? Okay?

Run along now...

Sancho,
In your haste to talk about your beloved spaghetti monster, you totally missed a key point in what I was saying. I didn’t ask the ABC to report on creationism in the first place. They did this off their own bat. What I was saying was that if the ABC is going to report on an issue, they should do it properly, fairly and objectively. Unfortunately, on the continuum from hatchet job to balanced and accurate journalism, the ABC was too often sliding towards the wrong end of the scale. Are you happy with your tax dollars being spent this way?

Also Sancho, don’t get sucked in by AJ’s nonsense about not being allowed to quote people, or that quoting implies dishonesty. Inserting quotes into a comment is standard form within many types of writing. You’ll find it in newspapers. You’ll find quotations in academic pieces. People quote one another in the Bible. Lots of people do it on this thread. You do it. AJ does it himself.

AJ,
When you talk about the law of separation of church and state are you talking about an American law, an Australian law, an international law, or just something else you’ve made up in your head?

Relda (and other skeptics),
You speak of the post-modern world being sceptical. I heard there was even some discussion of including scepticism as an Olympic event. However, our world class sceptics found their skills amateurish, feeble and undeveloped when faced with such mystical ideas as animals morphing into one another in times distant past. To quote Modell from the Barry Levinson movie ‘Diner’, “I don’t buy the whole thing. They’re saying that millions of years ago there was a swamp. And in the middle of this murky, disgusting, boggy-water swamp, there’s an amoeba. Now this amoeba meets another amoeba, and they have a kid who’s a fish who crawls onto land. And from one lousy amoeba millions of years ago, that today there’s some guy with a winter coat on a corner somewhere yelling, ‘Taxi’. Where’s the connection? How could that possibly be?”

George,
"Christians can learn a lot from their practice".

I agree. I was raised within the Catholic faith. But even as a very young child, I was aware of hypocrisy in action all around me. I don't subscribe to any particular belief/ideology these days. I've explored both Taoism and Buddhism too, which often seem similar.

As a result of the latter, I have come to appreciate the practice of vipassana (insight) and metta bhavana (loving kindness) meditation. Teach these techniques to children everywhere and I'm pretty sure we would arrive at a world where a whole generation of people, everywhere, might experience peace and fellowship. Not as a result of being told what to do, but as a result of personal discovery.

Dan S de Merengue,
"quote Modell from the Barry Levinson movie ‘Diner’, “I don’t buy the whole thing. They’re saying that millions of years ago there was a swamp. And in the middle of this murky, disgusting, boggy-water swamp, there’s an amoeba. Now this amoeba meets another amoeba, and they have a kid who’s a fish who crawls onto land. And from one lousy amoeba millions of years ago, that today there's some guy with a winter coat on a corner somewhere yelling, 'Taxi'. Where’s the connection? How could that possibly be?"

As above, so below. Have you ever seen documentary footage of the first moment of forming of a human embryo? The first cellular division? Not too dissimilar to what you describe?

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

T S Eliot
The Four Quartets

Consciousness/evolution is a strange and wonderful thing and moves forward at a slow pace. It has taken billions of years to get where we are today though, to our minds, it appears like no time at all. Children, for example, don't experience time in the same way as adults. This understanding is explored by C S Lewis in the Chronicles of Narnia, for example.

Awareness is an amazing thing, of which knowledge is but a minor facet.

relda,
>> magic (i.e. the supernatural)<<
This is a different understanding of the term ‘supernatural‘ than what I understood K£vin had in mind, namely the divine, the part of Reality that is transcendent (Kant), i.e. not accessible through our senses, directly or indirectly via instruments or mathematics (so e.g. the Multiverse if physicists will agree to accept its existence, would still be accessible indirectly through our senses, i.e. through mathematics, hence not the Transcendent Reality).

Of course, the existence of such Reality beyond the physical is disputed by atheists especially if they adhere to a strict distinction between the subjective and objective that today has become blurred even in physics (QM). Also, in Buddhism, as I understand it, there are those who accept a divine realm accessed by mystics, and those who do not; again a distinction that is clear only if one completely separates objective and subjective reality.

God‘s answering your prayers on a strictly personal level (e.g. of a student before exams) can be explained by psychology so there is no need for Him to interfere in a way atheist would dismiss as magic, hallucination or superstition, in spite of the fact that the person concerned experiences this as real. The same for illnesses that can be influenced by the patient’s attitude, conscious or not. (ctd)

(ctd) Theodicy and miracles, God's interference in the physical world, are a different matter. I do not think God needs to "interferes in the laws of nature" if by the latter you mean the laws established/discovered by science. Nevertheless, there seems to be a possibility of explaining God answering our prayers by “interfering” using the ambiguities built into QM (there is now a rich literature on that, e.g. by John Polkinghorne).

There is also mystical experience, which can be accepted as real, especially if you do not stick to the strict distinction of the subjective and objective: You and I can doubt that there could be a photo of, say, an apparition of the Virgin, but we shouldn’t doubt that in the "established" cases it was a deep and lasting experience for those involved. The difference between “established“, mystical, cases and mere hallucinations is given by the lasting impact on the lives of those who experienced them. Also, the form of such experience depends on the cultural background of the person who experienced it (hence the Virgin in the case of Bernadette of Lourdes or other Catholic mystics). These things are nicely explained in the paper by V.V. Raman that I mentioned before.

K£vin,
most of what I have learned, and appreciated, about Buddhism came from a late friend, a Chinese who converted from Buddhism to Catholicism, (he actually started as a Buddhist monk who then went to Rome to study theology, somehow did not finish, and married). He showed me a Buddhist perspective of Christianity, and vice versa, perspectives that do not have to be as hostile as in the writings of D. T. Suzuki on one side, or of some Christian scholars of previous centuries on the other.

Christianity and Buddhism/Taoism represent two complementary approaches to the divine: Christianity with its emphasis on THEORY, i.e. scripture and theology informed by Hellenic rational sophistication (that begot science and technology) and Buddhism with its emphasis on PRACTICE of vipassana and metta bhavana (leading to peaceful coexistence of different world views). I think these Yang and Yin approaches need each other.