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Re: Evolution/Creation debate



I don't know that statistics has anything to do with the matter,
otherwise I would deliver you a lecture on the "null hypothesis."
Knowledge of what people are doing, on the other hand, has a great deal to
do with the rationality of beliefs (whoever said that beliefs have to be
rational?). I suggest that you familiarize yourself with the speculations
of Freeman Dyson and John Maynard Smith. Also, see the letters in the
current issu of Physics Today. And brush up on your organic chemistry!
But a question for someone who claims religious views. Would the
discovery of life on Triton affect your view of the "bible as truth"?
The corollary question, of course, is whether any factual discovery could
affect such a view.
Regards,
Jack


On Tue, 3 Sep 2002, Steve Clark wrote:

I agree with Daniel. I am what might be best described as a
fundamentalist Christian. I believe that the Bible is meant to be taken
as truth (although not in the scientific sense). But, I also look at
the evidence and find a very old earth. As my good friend Fritz
Schaefer told me once: When I get to heaven, God may say to me, "When I
said seven days, I meant seven days." Until then, I think the earth is
very old, and so creation seems to have taken a very long time.

Where does that leave me on the question of evolution? My best guess is
it might have happened that way, but in my limited knowledge, the
evidence doesn't look at all as strong as the biologists would have me
believe. I'm not even sure that the question can be answered by the
methods of science. After all, how would one go about showing that the
theory of evolution (life starting as some muck in the primordial soup
and continuing up the ladder to us) is wrong? In the statistical sense,
what would be the null hypothesis? And what if you show the null
hypothesis to be more likely than evolution?

The evolutionists require a tremendous amount of faith to come to
accept the doctrine of macroevolution, and still have the problem of
"what makes something alive?"

The biologists take the "theory" of evolution more as a "model" than a
true explanation. And when taken in that light, it becomes as good a
model as creationism. After all, how many times do you hear the
biologists say that a creature is the way as if it were designed that
way? (Example: The elephant has very large ears so it can cool itself
better. That sounds like a design decision to me.)

My point through all this is that there is way too much controversy
about something that seems very miniscule in the grand scheme of
things. There really is no conflict of religion and science, and in my
opinion, they complement each other quite well. As Galileo said,
"Religion teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go."
{Paraphrased}

Steve Clark, Ph.D.


On Monday, September 2, 2002, at 09:21 PM, Daniel Price wrote:

Mr. Tarara's comment:

It seems to me that part of the problem with communicating much of
this
to the public (in fact to almost anyone)is the difficulty in _really_
understanding large numbers, long times, and what statistical
probabilities really mean. Having any conceptual grasp of just how
long
1.5 billion years is and how many reproductions have gone into the
evolutionary process is almost impossible.

What ultimately makes the two approaches (strict creationism and
macroevolution) irreconcilable is that both rely on what are
essentially
irrefutable premises; the former posits an omnipotent deity (so that
anything which occurs could be, under this belief system, attributed to
said deity), while the latter assumes that given enough time, any
event, no
matter how improbable over a brief interval, is likely to happen.

Hewitt, in the introduction to Conceptual Physics, suggests that
educators
introduce science as a search for an explanations of the workings of
the
universe, while religion is the quest for its origin. Under these
definitions, religion and science are not at all incompatible, at
least to
my admittedly agnostic mind.


--Boundary_(ID_BFZ3e8RJiDMGrOc4wMCt6g)
Content-type: text/enriched; charset=US-ASCII
Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT

I agree with Daniel. I am what might be best described as a
fundamentalist Christian. I believe that the Bible is meant to be
taken as truth (although not in the scientific sense). But, I also
look at the evidence and find a very old earth. As my good friend
Fritz Schaefer told me once: When I get to heaven, God may say to me,
"When I said seven days, I meant seven days." Until then, I think the
earth is very old, and so creation seems to have taken a very long
time.


Where does that leave me on the question of evolution? My best guess
is it might have happened that way, but in my limited knowledge, the
evidence doesn't look at all as strong as the biologists would have me
believe. I'm not even sure that the question can be answered by the
methods of science. After all, how would one go about showing that the
theory of evolution (life starting as some muck in the primordial soup
and continuing up the ladder to us) is wrong? In the statistical
sense, what would be the null hypothesis? And what if you show the
null hypothesis to be more likely than evolution?


The evolutionists require a tremendous amount of faith to come to
accept the doctrine of macroevolution, and still have the problem of
"what makes something alive?"


The biologists take the "theory" of evolution more as a "model" than a
true explanation. And when taken in that light, it becomes as good a
model as creationism. After all, how many times do you hear the
biologists say that a creature is the way as if it were
<italic>designed</italic> that way? (Example: The elephant has very
large ears so it can cool itself better. That sounds like a design
decision to me.)


My point through all this is that there is way too much controversy
about something that seems very miniscule in the grand scheme of
things. There really is no conflict of religion and science, and in my
opinion, they complement each other quite well. As Galileo said,
"Religion teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go."
{Paraphrased}


Steve Clark, Ph.D.



On Monday, September 2, 2002, at 09:21 PM, Daniel Price wrote:


<excerpt>Mr. Tarara's comment:


<excerpt>It seems to me that part of the problem with communicating
much of this

to the public (in fact to almost anyone)is the difficulty in _really_

understanding large numbers, long times, and what statistical

probabilities really mean. Having any conceptual grasp of just how
long

1.5 billion years is and how many reproductions have gone into the

evolutionary process is almost impossible.

</excerpt>

What ultimately makes the two approaches (strict creationism and

macroevolution) irreconcilable is that both rely on what are
essentially

irrefutable premises; the former posits an omnipotent deity (so that

anything which occurs could be, under this belief system, attributed to

said deity), while the latter assumes that given enough time, any
event, no

matter how improbable over a brief interval, is likely to happen.


Hewitt, in the introduction to Conceptual Physics, suggests that
educators

introduce science as a search for an explanations of the workings of
the

universe, while religion is the quest for its origin. Under these

definitions, religion and science are not at all incompatible, at
least to

my admittedly agnostic mind.


</excerpt>

--Boundary_(ID_BFZ3e8RJiDMGrOc4wMCt6g)--

Steve Clark, Ph.D.
Physics Instructor
Starr's Mill High School
193 Panther Path
Fayetteville, Georgia 30215
770 486-2710
clark.stephen@fcboe.org


--
"What did Barrow's lectures contain? Bourbaki writes with some
scorn that in his book in a hundred pages of the text there are about 180
drawings. (Concerning Bourbaki's books it can be said that in a thousand
pages there is not one drawing, and it is not at all clear which is
worse.)"
V. I. Arnol'd in
Huygens & Barrow, Newton & Hooke