Evolution and the Bible. Confirm or contradict?

[pelathais]

Originally Posted by Sheltiedad

This discussion brings to light one of my own concerns with religion. It seems that the less intelligent you are, and the less time you spend thinking about things, the more likely you are to get saved and stay saved...

Doesn't it say something about things when being smarter, more intelligent, more street-wise, etc. actually decreases your chances of being saved?

I'm not saying that I am smart, I am just saying that if I was mentally handicapped, I probably would never have questioned certain things and would probably take things more at face value than I do now, therefore would be more likely to be saved.

In one respect I think you're right. (And I don't mean the part about you not being smart!).

But culture plays a big role as well. If you're raised and encultured within a belief system you will tend to be influenced by that for all of your life - intelligence or nonintelligence aside. Also, your natural sympathies for the group and its beliefs will influence you even if you have chosen to leave.

I've seen a lot of "smart" people get side tracked by the YEC arguments and they end up going round and round like there's no way out of the cul-de-sac. I had a rather disappointing discussion with a good friend who is a trained engineer. He was reduced to saying things like, "The sun contributes no significant amount of energy to the earth's system. Maybe a few meteorites, but no significant energy..." when he was trying to defend the canard about evolution being "impossible because of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Even when I asked him for an example of a "solar meteorite" he still stubbornly refused to acknowledge how silly the argument was. He completely refused to accept the idea that photosynthesis was driven by "solar energy."

There's just no reasoning with some people. That particular discussion ended with him yelling at me, "You're a fool! You're a fool!" while we cleared the dishes from the table.

[RandyWayne]

He completely refused to accept the idea that photosynthesis was driven by "solar energy."

There's just no reasoning with some people. That particular discussion ended with him yelling at me, "You're a fool! You're a fool!" while we cleared the dishes from the table.

My arguments usually end when the other side has to start calling on insane amounts of "appearance of age" to keep their house of cards, built on a table of cardboard, which itself is balanced on a giant yoga ball, on the newly polished tile floor. As you can tell, that particular line of defense is a big bugaboo of mine since it effectively ends all debate because of its logical dead-end.
On another site, when the subject of nova was brought up (by me), I asked the logical question "Would God create a star which exploded literally the second or even a few days after he created it? Would He create the actual explosion, like creating a dynamite blast without there ever actually having been a stick of dynamite?" -to which the response to my statement was "Isn't God awesome?!!"
Nuff said.

[pelathais]

Originally Posted by RandyWayne

My arguments usually end when the other side has to start calling on insane amounts of "appearance of age" to keep their house of cards, built on a table of cardboard, which itself is balanced on a giant yoga ball, on the newly polished tile floor. As you can tell, that particular line of defense is a big bugaboo of mine since it effectively ends all debate because of its logical dead-end.
On another site, when the subject of nova was brought up (by me), I asked the logical question "Would God create a star which exploded literally the second or even a few days after he created it? Would He create the actual explosion, like creating a dynamite blast without there ever actually having been a stick of dynamite?" -to which my response was "Isn't God awesome?!!"
Nuff said.

The thing is, folks should feel free to express such religious rapture; but they should not call it "science."

And I agree with your earlier statement about the appearance of age. What proof do we really have that God didn't create us all 20 minutes ago complete with all our memories and the "evidence of age?" For me, the only counter to such a notion is the morality that I expect from a just and wise God. My expectation of honesty from God leads to me accept, with honesty, the evidence of the reality that surrounds me.

My arguments always end up with me thinking, "well, if prayer is really a two-way conversation with God and you pray all the time, why don't you know the answer?"

[Praxeas]

Originally Posted by RandyWayne

My arguments usually end when the other side has to start calling on insane amounts of "appearance of age" to keep their house of cards, built on a table of cardboard, which itself is balanced on a giant yoga ball, on the newly polished tile floor. As you can tell, that particular line of defense is a big bugaboo of mine since it effectively ends all debate because of its logical dead-end.
On another site, when the subject of nova was brought up (by me), I asked the logical question "Would God create a star which exploded literally the second or even a few days after he created it? Would He create the actual explosion, like creating a dynamite blast without there ever actually having been a stick of dynamite?" -to which my response was "Isn't God awesome?!!"
Nuff said.

Are you talking about the BB? One thing I don't understand is how, out of that singularity, did we get all these planets and stars and all the various elements and compounds......

[Praxeas]

Originally Posted by pelathais

The thing is, folks should feel free to express such religious rapture; but they should not call it "science."

And I agree with your earlier statement about the appearance of age. What proof do we really have that God didn't create us all 20 minutes ago complete with all our memories and the "evidence of age?" For me, the only counter to such a notion is the morality that I expect from a just and wise God. My expectation of honesty from God leads to me accept, with honesty, the evidence of the reality that surrounds me.

For the record, it was mistaken that I was saying "appearance of age" in the artificial way just described.

[RandyWayne]

Originally Posted by Praxeas

Are you talking about the BB? One thing I don't understand is how, out of that singularity, did we get all these planets and stars and all the various elements and compounds......

The Big Bang is simply the beginning of this Universe. It is the creation event. Out of that matter, the first stars formed. The very first crop of stars were nearly 100% hydrogen. THEY were instrumental in forming heavier elements like helium. Our very own sun is a 2nd (or 3rd?) generation star with its mass being formed from the cast-off remnants of earlier stars. It is also amazing that the predicted amount of Helium in our Sun is within a fraction of a percent based on that model.

[Praxeas]

Originally Posted by RandyWayne

The Big Bang is simply the beginning of this Universe. It is the creation event. Out of that matter, the first stars formed. The very first crop of stars were nearly 100% hydrogen. THEY were instrumental in forming heavier elements like helium. Our very own sun is a 2nd (or 3rd?) generation star with its mass being formed from the cast-off remnants of earlier stars. It is also amazing that the predicted amount of Helium in our Sun is within a fraction of a percent based on that model.

Still does not answer my question though. From that one singularity all the elements and stars and planets formed and some thing the universe is still expanding....all from that one singularity?

[RandyWayne]

Originally Posted by Praxeas

Still does not answer my question though. From that one singularity all the elements and stars and planets formed and some thing the universe is still expanding....all from that one singularity?

From a singularity a million times smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. Which is, by the way, no bigger than the amount of space that a star 10 -1,000,000,000 times the mass of our own Sun occupies when it collapses in on itself and forms a black hole.

[pelathais]

Originally Posted by Praxeas

Are you talking about the BB? One thing I don't understand is how, out of that singularity, did we get all these planets and stars and all the various elements and compounds......

Remember Einstein's famous equation? E = mc2

Matter (or mass) is energy. (E=M). They're the same thing, just in different states like water and steam. I'm being simplistic here, but that's the gist of it. The galaxies and everything else weren't "in the singularity." There was nothing there but the energy. And then, for reasons unknown, the singularity began to expand at a rather rapid pace before going through a very brief period of enormous expansion (lasting 10 to the negative 33 power of a second) and then continuing along in its expansion that we observe today.

As the expansion progressed things cooled down, just the way an expanding gas will cool your refrigerator. The cooling in the early universe allowed the energy to coalesce and subatomic particles formed. This is unlikely to happen in your refrigerator, however. The subatomic particles (baryons, leptons and stuff) then formed hydrogen and a very small amount of helium (I'm skipping some things for brevity).

The hydrogen then formed along "creases" in the fabric of space and began to clump together to form stars and quasars. The quasars (in a process that we don't have pinned down yet) appeared to draw in more hydrogen to produce the first proto-galaxies. In other cases galaxies appear to have formed in the absence of quasars, or something happened to the quasar. The stars would then fuse the hydrogen into heavier elements and "slough" off the produce (along with unfused hydrogen) into the surrounding space. When they got to the heaviest elements like iron and upward - only the blast of a supernova was needed to create things like uranium.

We observe all these processes going on around us today. The dust from which Adam was formed (and you and me!) was formed from elements synthesized in the stars.