How many of you are able to discuss the evolution/creation debate without getting upset and emotional about it

Question

The debate over evolution and creationism is a hot topic in this category, there is no question about that. What I would like to know is why do so many of you people get all bent out of shape the second someone brings up the subject? It seems to me that the ones blowing their stack are trying to compensate for not having a good point to make. What do you think?

Answer 1

You're probably right. It seems that on this subject and a lot of others, everybody is polarized and have extreme positions. I'd like to see a lot more reasonable exchanges of ideas and less attacking and hatred. I've been called names by people who don't agree with me. We need to prompt each other to think our positions through, not just put each other on the defensive.

Answer 2

I wrote about a 20 page paper on the subject last fall for my Religion and Science class, and I did not include any personal anecdotes or emotional appeals. I think that is my evidence of not being emotional about discussion evolution and creationism! I try to avoid discussing it with people who do get bent of shape or resort to name-calling, because nothing ever gets accomplished. It's like the saying goes, "don't teach a pig to sing - it's a waste of your time and it annoys the pig."

Answer 3

If there was an actual debate, that would be one thing. But a debate requires that both sides have some actual facts to present. It gets pretty tiresome to see knowledgeable people present reams of obvious scientific evidence, only to be told, in effect, "Well I'm not going to look at any of that. It can't be true because it contradicts my personal guesses about the meaning of the Bible". End of "discussion". Hey, here's a novel idea ... do you suppose that just possibly your personal interpretations of the Bible might simply be WRONG? Especially considering that they contradict not only clearly demonstrated scientific facts, but also the biblical interpretations of a great many other Christians! Unfortunately, the bottom line for such people is that their biblical interpretations are infallible, and therefore it must be reality that is wrong. How can you debate that??

Answer 4

hey - only athiests should be arguing against Creation ...


And - the athiests have a great hollow day they celebrate and can pull away from all others if we don't agree with their desire to be like their mothers ... Apes or monkeys ...

AS SCRIPTURE PLAINLY SHOWS IN MANY PLACES ... let me elaborate one -

"A FOOL has said in his heart - there is no mighty one ..."

Therefore ... if you do not want the athiests to pull away their national Hollowday from you ... Namely "APRIL FOOLS DAY" ON April 1st ... then you should allow them to believe their mothers are Apes and Chimpanzees ... or some little ameba that learned to speak = though no other species ever learned to speak ...

Why don't the bees speak to us or our cats???? Why not man's or Ape's best friends ... the dog ... why do they just drool and jump up and down when a treat is presented????

Why do they not speak as well as us???

Ahhh ... maybe they need another BILLION FREAKIN' YEARS TO COME ABOUT WHEN WE ALL STARTED FROM SOME LITTLE SMELLY AND STINKIN' AMEBA????

Get real Athiests ... and I for one - do not care if you take the FOOL out of April ... then you will no longer exist and what will occur to evolution then????

Think about this one fools ... IF ... AND ONLY IF ...

Say an ameba landed on earth ... WAIT ... could not have landed - cause it would have been created somewhere else....


Ummmm - say that ONE ameba (screw the spelling - you know what I mean) came about ... how did this thing have the knowledge before it just appeared ... to reproduce????


Oh - I am horny ... and it was reproducing ???? Trees, grass, frogs, lizzards and snakes - deer and rats ... all with the same genetic codes ... and all from the very same ameba - man ... I would I was so bliss .. I would be overdrawn like a billion bucks and living like a king in a place where monkeys do not live ....

Man - what fools will believe - I think I said enough ....


Peace;

Aintmyfault
.

Answer 5

my son when he was younger brought tis up to me after school one day and we had a long discussion on it. we both agreed after a couple of hours that with God any and everything was possible. there is no reason to believe that the two could not go together. after all God not only created the world but He created science. i have never in my life gotten upset over this silly topic. it's just that people start fightiing about it without really thinking what they are fighting about.

Answer 6

I can get into the debate without getting emotional. I take a page from Mary Lowrey's book. If I took apart a watch, put it in a paper bag and shook it for 6 billion years, when I opened the bag I'd still have parts. Look at the world around you, the flowers, the trees and the animals. Can you really believe that all this started from some cosmic belch?

Answer 7

To Dagah,
Just wondering what are the major scientific problems with evolution? Have you studied science or are you just taking the church's word for it?

I find most people who bash evolution haven't really studied it much.
Cheers, no offense.

Answer 8

There is certainly no good going to come from blowing a stack. I do not believe in evolution. It does make me a bit sad that so many children are taught that it is a proven fact. I just try to get folks to look a little deeper into the matter and to look outside of the things taught by the public schools. God bless!!

Harvard's Stephen Jay Gould put it this way"Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless." In other words, Throughout the geologic layers, which supposedly formed over eons - the various kinds of fossils remain essentially unchanged in appearance.They show no evolution over long ages. Paleontologists call this "stasis."
Wouldn't a fossil record, showing all animals complete when first seen, is what we'd expect if God created them whole, just as the Bible says?
Austin H. Clark, the eminent zoologist of the Smithsonian Institution, was no creationist but he declared:
"No matter how far back we go in the fossil record of previous animal life upon the earth we find no trace of any animal forms which are intermediates between the major groups of phyla.
This can only mean one thing. There can only be one interpertation of thisentire lack of any intermediates between the major groups of animals - as for instance betweenbackboned animals or vertebrates , the echinoderms, the mollusks and the arthropods
If we are willing to accept the facts we must believe that there never were such intermediates, or in other words that these major groups have from the very first, borne the same relation to each other that they have today."
.British science writer Frances Hitchens wrote" On the face of it, then, the prime function of the genetic system would seem to be to resist change ; to to perpetuate the species in a minimally adapted form in response to altered conditions, and if at all possibe to get things back to normal. The role of natural selection is usually a negative one : to destroy the few mutant individuals that threaten the stability of the soecies.
Why aren't fish today, growing little arms and legs, trying to adapt to land? Why aren't reptiles today developing feathers?Shouldn't evolution be ongoing?
Evolution Is not visible in the past, via the fossil record. It is not visible in the present, whether we consider an organism as a whole, or on the microscopic planes of biochemistry and molecular biology,where, as we have seen, the theory faces numerous difficulties. In short, evolution is just not visible. Science is supposed to be based on observation.
L. Harrison Matthews,long director of the London Zoological society noted in 1971:"Belief in the theory of evolution is thus exactly parrallel to belief in special creation - both are concepts which believers know to be true, but neither up to the present, has been capable of proof.
Norman MacBeth wrote in American Biology Teacher:
"Darwinism has failed in practice. The whole aim and purpose in Darwinism is to show how modern forms descended from ancient forms, that is to construct reliable phylogenies(genealogies or family trees). In this it has utterly failed...Darwinism is not science."
Swedish biologist Soren Lovtrup declared in his book Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth:
I suppose nobody will deny that it is a great misfortune if an entire branch of science becomes addicted to a false theory. But this is what has happened in biology;for a long time now people discuss evolutionary problems in a peculiar" Darwinism" vocabulary -- "adaptation","selection pressure","natural selection", etc.--thereby believing that they contribute to the explanation of natural events.They do not, and the sooner this is discovered, the sooner we will be able to make real progress in the understanding of evolution.
As natural selection's significance crumbles, the possibility of God, creation and design is again making a wedge in scientific circles. In a 1998 cover story entitled"Science Finds God" Newsweek noted:
"The achievments of modern science seem to contradict religion and undermine faith. But for a growing # of scientists, the same discoveries offer support for spirituality and hints of the very nature of God...According to a study released last year, 40% of American scientists believe in a personal God---not only an ineffable power and presence in the world, but a diety to whom they can pray."
Author David Raphael Klein may have said it best:
"Anyone who can contemplate the eye of a housefly, the mechanics of human finger movement, the camoflage of a moth, or the building of every kind of matter from variations in arrangement of proton and electron, and then maintain that all this design happened without a designer, happened by sheer, blind accident-- such a personbelieves in a miracle far more astonishing than any in the Bible."



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Answer 9

I still don't understand why there's an evolution/creation debate in the first place. They really don't address the same issue at all.

Answer 10

Both are based on assumptions. The only real question is which set of assumptions are correct. And I'm only responsible for speaking what I see as the truth, not for making people believe it, so there's no sense in getting upset over it if they don't.