Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for July 10, 2011

This explains the Casey Anthony verdict.

No, unicorns float. Didn’t need a stupid boat. However, all of the fish that weren’t in the boat drowned.

Liberty U. students: there’ll be a quiz later.

Excellent! Comments from the faithful? No?

Like.

“No man shall know the day, the time, or the hour…” but then, what man knows where to find his socks?

¶ Score another for Doonesbury! What an excellent skewering of those stupid, mindless, pandering politicians meddling in education. This is an example of the problem with state or community control of the schools.¶ No one of any sense denies Darwin’s theory of natural selection. It is as reliable as our knowledge that the Earth is round and revolves around the Sun. Anyone who denies natural selection should—on that basis alone—be voted out of office. After all, we wouldn’t elect someone who insisted that the Earth was flat, would we?

Now if the DNA didn’t keep telling us we aren’t closely related to our “ancestors” and there wer just some other ancestor]s we could be related to everything would be all worked out. and there were two unicorns on the ark. What do you think they ate to stay alive for 40 days? ;-)

No, it does not take a lot of faith to believe in evolution. It happens to be based on that science thing you mentioned, and lots of it.

Easily.

Absurdly simplistic and offensive to numerous Christians.

I don’t agree. I think that faith can be a belief that is proved by what surrounds us. Science — for me — is not a foe of faith… it’s a (or can be a) proof. Me? I mean “real” hard science, not some of this other stuff some of the “faithful” are trying to pass off to kids.That sort of stuff is delusion and frequently (these days) political, manipulative and NOT IMO faith. Faith is personal. No agenda. Just is.

This explains why GT worships those who rule by apartheid

ProfessorChaos: Welcome to the discussion of evolution! This must be your first time, as that is a beginner’s position, and if you have presented it before, and had it answered, then bringing it up again as if you haven’t is bearing false witness. Which God frowns on (even if you do it because you believe He is too weak to win without trickery).

It is easy to do experiments in the lab that demonstrate evolution: take a population of some animal (fruit flies work well; they are cheap and breed fast) choose a criteria, such as eye color or wing shape, kill more of the ones that don’t have it than do, and in not too many generations you will have mostly ones with that characteristic.

That this can lead to new species has been demonstrated in the field, and is clearly the case with different but clearly related species, such as horses and donkeys, where random mutations (in this case due to duplicated chromosomes) caused speciation to occur.

We don’t know everything about evolution (nor do we claim to), but we know much more than nothing, and that knowledge allows us to do much more than, “God made it that way” ever could.

…in Europe we keep wondering WHY creationism has such an important place in an advanced society like USA. Here, in spite of being the cradle of the Catholic Church, for a long time an enemy of evolutionism, the issue is non more such, and the same is true for Luterans and other varieties of Protestants. I mean, evolutionism explains “how” and NEVER attempted to explain “why”, and the same is true for the “beginning of”, which evolution does NOT explain or pretend to. The idea of a “creation week” is not pious, it is just USELESS – call it BigBang or God’s sneeze, science studies the follow up of an unjustified “first moment”, and religion speculates on the “before” and “why”. No reasons to fight over, realy. Why is it so important over the pond?

…said "But I do think that creation should be mentioned as a an alternative. If isn’t based on science, it doesn’t belong in a science classroom.

Poppycock. You really need to rediscover the scientific meaning of “theory.” It means “a hypothesis that has been tested so many times and been proven true that we’re very comfortable using it as the basis for other scientific work.” Gravity may have laws, but gravity itself is a theory. So do you think we need to teach alternatives to gravity, such as “my god straps everyone to the ground with giant invisible electromagnets”?

Do the Louisiana high schools teach the alternative theory of a geo-centric universe too?

…science said we’d never be able to fly….science said E=Mc hammer….science created nuclear bombs….. evolution said that there were superior races,therefore inferior races… science is causing global warming…. bloodletting was once science …. as was frontal lobotomies… and the sham wow

… we really need to teach an alternative to evolution

…. homer simpson peed in the swimming pool and the flat earth instantly became round

Eve Killed adam And they dated jupiter

…the Beatles begat the monkees

… that’s all I have to say about that

these people think that flintstones was a documentary. you show a fossil at them or show carbon dating results, they say its magic. they are some people who believe that the earth is the center of the universe, that planets are perfect spheres, that gravity is not constant.

I checked out a few “creationist” sites, and all I can say is if you honestly believe the Earth is only 6000 years old then God bless, and be careful driving a vehicle or operating heavy machinery.

Science works by forming theories based on data, and then predicting what other data will be found in the future, the theory is correct. Every since Darwin, all data collected has supported the theory of evolution. Evolution is a much better established fact than, say, the existence of King Solomon, or Pericles, or Alfred the Great, or any other number of historical facts. The mechanism driving evolution, that is separate matter. It comes down to the choice between Natural Selection and Supernatural Selection, or a mixture of both. Supernatural Selection could be undetectable in the fossil record, so science does not absolutely refute the possibility of a measure of supernatural influence on the course of evolution, but the data can be fully explained without it. Science has nothing to say about things that are undetectable and immeasurable. Where there is no evidence one way or the other, science must be mute. Intelligent design or what ever you wish to call it is not disproved by science, any more than mathematics and geometry can prove or disprove that a sunset is beautiful. Which is precisely why theories of supernatural influence not based measurable physical evidence have no place in a science classroom. A philosophy or religion class, or even a “cultural history of science” class, sure. There is another possibility as well. That there is a God, who made the universe and the natural laws that govern it, who was skilled enough to create that universe so that the regular, uniform, and constant working of those laws would, without any periodic supernatural interventions, accomplish the purpose for which he created it. Most of the founding fathers believed in this sort of God, and seldom made a distinction between the laws of “Nature and of Nature’s God.” This is called Deism. Deism credits God, but not the particulars of the narrative given in the Bible or any other ancient story. Nevertheless, in a science classroom, only science should be taught.

AWESOME

Don’t know much about Buddhism, do you? Nor about religion. Einstein was religious, so was Darwin. Were they not scientists? Socrates, Plato, Epictetus were religious in their way. Were they not philosophers who sought the truth? Ever been to a Unitarian Church? Blind faith in unsupported authority is NOT the same thing as religion: though, alas, some religious people think it is.Faith is not opinion. Faith is action. I put you in an airplane with a parachute, it does not take faith to believe the parachute will work. That’s just an opinion. Faith is jumping. The more you know about your parachute, the stronger your faith. Faith isn’t ignorance, faith is closer to knowledge. Scientist have faith in the scientific method because there is so much evidence that it works.(I like this distinction: Relgion is about trying to do what God wants you to do. Magic is about trying to make God do what you want Him to do. Listen to most public “prayers”: are they religion or magic?)Trust those who seek the truth. Doubt those who find it.

Always wondered what opened mindedness and acceptance of other peoples beliefs looked like on the left.

Thanks for the fish

Do you want science texts written by politicians instead of scientists? Do you want history texts written by politicians instead of historians? Then get out there and vote Republican in 2012!

Wish I had had teachers like Mr. Stiller in high school. But then, I wish I’d had a whole different experience in high school anyway. Loved this strip…

Who says natural selection invalidates the existence of God or some other like higher power? I firmly believe in the existence of both!

@briancrook — “After all, we wouldn’t elect someone who insisted that the Earth was flat, would we?” I would not be so sure of that. We have people in office who don’t believe in natural selection and climate change, it’s a small step to a flat earth. Of course if they get the notion to disprove gravity, they may decide to jump off the Capitol dome and do us all a favor.

I’m not looking to argue. I simply want to take my stand on the side of the Creator. The writer of Doonesbury did not do his homework without extreme bias and closed-mindedness, nor present his case without cruel sarcasm; we who believe and know the God of Creation need to beware of doing the same. That’s all I’ll say and go back to the spirit of the quote from C.H. Spurgeon: “Defend the Bible? I would as soon defend a lion! Unchain it and it will defend itself.”

Faith is the belief in things you can’t observe; Science is learning about things you can observe. Science requires absolutely no faith, in fact the best scientific practice is completely void of faith.

@3hourtour;“evolution said that there were superior races,therefore inferior races”? what are you talking about? give me an example of a superior race & an inferior race.are you thinking of “survival of the fittest”? Somebody pointed out to me that this referred to the fittest for the conditions at the time. change the environment, then who is fittest may become someone else.Those birds in England who gradually, over time, turned greyer, to blend in with the soot-covered walls of buildings – suppose we painted all the buildings the brightest, neon-est colours we could find? – then grey would no longer be the optimum colour for survival. Parrots would be better off. Did you ever see what a rainbow lorikeet looks like?I’m rambling. I’m done.

@ProfessorChaos

I don’t know what Scientific Method you were taught, but Evolutionary Theory fits in well with what I was taught in my research methods courses and science classes. But then, most scientists have moved past Baconian theory (largely due to the need to account for behavior that is not visible.)

lol lol lol . . . GT opened the ‘worm can’ this morning!“Faith” and “Science” – two different ‘tools’ with two different objectives for understanding the universe. You don’t use a telescope to fix your car. You don’t use a socket wrench to observe Jupiter.Also, we must distinguish between evolution, which is massively supported by morphological, paleontological and genetic evidence . . . and the ORIGIN of life of earth – abiogenesis – which is wildly open to speculation.

Facebook?

Hey Prof, which takes more faith, that Mary had a baby that is or became God, or that she was screwing around with her boyfriend? Oh ye of little faith! I find it easier and more faithful to believe in evolution than in mythology. Yet I enjoy mythology and could spend hours studying it. Literature has come a long way but we still have our mythology.

RE: Barbaratoo…Nice thing is that — apparently — all of us are descended from unicorns… at least “us pretty ones…” ;)

Couldn’t ol’ Noah have left the flies behind? And the mosquitoes?

Even before I clicked on the comments I knew today’s strip would summon multitudes of opinions. I will keep mine to myself because it wouldn’t change anybody’s mind anyways and why should it.

How did Noah get the Koala bears to and from the unknown Australia, and where did he get their only food…eucalyptus leaves?And given enough rain fell to raise the level of the oceans over 5 miles (in order to cover Everest), that would dilute the salt water enough to kill off most of the marine creatures, but not enough that the freshwater fish could survive. So how did Noah save all the fish and marine mammals like whales?

Ahh…there’s nothing like evolution to get a good conversation going. This strip is going in my collection for presenting on exam days in class. (I’m a professor of evolutionary biology and teach the evolution class for our biology majors.)

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Normally, I’d play a bigger role in the conversation here, but my internet is not behaving itself lately, and I went for a 40 mi. bike ride this morning, so I’m late to the party. But I can see I’m not needed anyway. The scientifically literate posters are doing a great job with the conversation.

And so God spoke quietly to Darwin and set him a task. “You are chosen to disclose to common man a small part of the magic of the cosmos and My master plan. Show them the way of change and name it Natural Selection, for God is Nature and Nature is God”

Classical Pantheism has no problem with the union of monotheism and science. it also recognizes that time is relative and artificial…what is 6000 years when reality, for the individual, is limited to one lifetime.

then there are the non-Christian scientists that regard the evolutionary theory of Darwin as the Noah story being attacked here. They believe in Sudden Appearance as opposed to the arrival of a new “animal” by the slow change of one gene mutation at a time. Craig likely knows about them. Please don’t believe that only "crazy Christians " don’t follow the naturalist priests who “sell” Darwin like he was always right no matter what.I was suggesting Noah and family ate the unicorns for sustenance. The way Christ devoured the myths with his life. ;-)

Craig also might talk about the non-Christian researcher who, on a lark tested dinosaur bones for DNA ad found some. The NEWSWEEK (hardly a Christian mag) story had her saying she was the first to try it because everyone always KNEW they’d never find any DNA. That story was three years ago at least and the research seems to have been buried by the “objective” naturalist community.

I find Trudeau can be quite condescending at times. I know he’s criticizing the school administration but he comes off as anti Christian

Please don’t think this is not a religious battle. Try reading anything related and you here how Nature did this and nature did that and natural laws. Now substitute “God” for that and think of a Christian writing it and you will realize this is nature worship as much as the religious right’s non-Biblical Flintstones history.Sagan’s suggestion that there were dragons in Eden and his non-Christian take does fix on the point needed. The Bible says they died (You shall eat dust) with Eden when an “Angel with a fiery sword” (meteor) crashed down from heaven and closed Eden (those well-documented lush forests where they dwelt) and there have never been any discoveries of human bones with dino bones.

“Absurdly simplistic and offensive to numerous Christians.”

You’ve just defined “comedy”.

And I see no reason why an all-powerful God couldn’t use evolution to create everything in the six days (or millenia since a day is as a thousand years to one existing across at least 10 dimensions).

if evolution is such a fact why is it called a theory? And why do we still have apes on the planet?

As for Noah, the Bible says the world (related to his created man) was destroyed, that would have been around the Middle East at that time and there’s plenty of evidence of Major flood in that region at roughly that point. (some suggest the melting ice age glaciers) A man’s years could have been measured a good deal differently at that point and the large boat could have been constructed with the same engineering skill of the Egyptian pyramids. The Irish Rovers long ago explained the unicorns. ;-)

And I hardly suspect Gt wanted to flood his comments section by running this on a Sunday when it would only be the afternoon in most places before the “other side” was heard from.

As the DNA comments. the tests showed we are more closely related to the chimp than the so-called hominids. Cro and Nea. have only about half the genetic material related to us that we do (“BUT they look so much like us. They MUST be related.”) Rather than discard the theory or call for major revision like Sudden Appearance the priests of naturalism now say, with no evidence whatsoever, that we and the Chimps broke off the “tree” far earlier then they realized. Problem: no related hominids that far back even close to the Cro or us have been discovered. No Darwinian “slow mutations” to build to us. But, hey, just because you have no scientific evidence of a theory doesn’t mean it isn’t true. One might say Darwin is their Bible and if you don’t buy Noah the you also have no reason to buy Darwin.

It takes a degree of reasoning to believe in evolution; it takes a lot of faith to not believe in evolution. All of the evidence is pro-evolution; none in the other direction. Placing your bets where the evidence points is what science is all about. Also, the Noah story was borrowed from a Sumerian story 2,000 years older about an ark-builder named Ut-Napishtim.

Unicorns eat dinosaurs.

Many creation myths around the word follow the same course, planet covered by water, dry land emerges, life emerges from the sea, and yes evolves. ONLY “Genesis” creates a god in MAN’S image to suit the demands of a small middle eastern tribe bent at the time they wrote the “book” on conquering the world and making themselves the “chosen”. Take away the six days idiocy, put in the sciences actually supported by all those mythologies, and you have “faith” in a provable development of life, but still no real “answer” to the first instant of life, and that is the mystery still to science, and the terrifying fear that is the basis of religions.

The arrogance of most Christians is that they equate one of “God’s” days with one of ours. What if one of God’s days was, oh, equal to 10 billion years in our measurement of time? THEN there might be something to the whole creation thing… MAYBE…. just sayin’…

Good questions. I’m not going to claim to speak for all scientists in my responses to some of them since some of your questions are fundamentally non-scientific. That is, they’re concerned with subject matter that is outside the scope of scientific inquiry. In any case have a look at my responses below.

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Just out of curiousity, what do evolutionists believe happens to you when you die?

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This is a non-scientific question, if you’re asking about what happens to what is commonly called the “soul.” For that reason you’ll get different answers from different scientists. Religious scientists might offer you the same sort of explanation that you’d get from anyone else holding the same faith that they do. For the scientists that are hard core materialists, you might get an explanation something like the following. The “soul” is an epiphenomenon that is a by-product of the biochemistry of life. Therefore, when that biochemistry ceases (death), the epiphenomenon does as well, much the same way that after death movement, speech, thought, etc. cease. In this formulation, the “soul” has no separate existence from life.

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Are we all just dust in the wind? What’s the reason for our existence?

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These are also non-scientific questions, and, again, the range of responses you would get from scientists would depend on their particular faith or lack of any. The critical point to keep in mind is that the question itself is not one that science can answer. One way of thinking about this is that science is about how things happen (from a purely mechanistic perspective), whereas the philosophical/religious questions you’ve posed are teleological questions.

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Since evolutionists don’t believe in a superior being and creation was an accident, what’s the meaning of life?

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The premise of this question is false. Not all biologists think there isn’t a superior being. For some clear examples google Ken Miller and Francis Collins. However, for those biologists who do not think there is a god as normally talked about by Christians (a concious entity that loves and cares about us as individuals, etc.), you would probably get a range of answers, some of them quite complex and informed in part by their understanding of humans evolutionary history. A more philosophical approach to your question might be an existentialist response, i.e., that we invest our lives and actions with meaning by deciding what is most important to us. In any case, it is important to keep in mind that biologists are not monolithic in their personal beliefs.

It depends on what you mean. Certain aspects of evolution are fact, e.g., we can demonstrate in the laboratory, without too much effort that evolution takes place in all organisms. So, in the sense that we know for a fact that mutations take place in organisms’ DNA and that some of these mutations have effects on the organisms’ ability to survive and reproduce, leading to certain genetic variants being more common than others, evolution is a fact.

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Before I answer your question about “theory,” I need to clear up some confusion that has cropped up on this thread. In common speech a theory is a conjecture, and idea that may or may not have support. In science theory is used very differently. It is reserved for ideas that have so much evidence supporting them that they are accepted by the community. A non-biological example of this is the theory of gravitation. So, yes I do teach evolution as a scientific theory because the scientific community has agreed that there is so much evidence supporting the idea of evolution that it deserves that status.

I think it is hilarious. I think creation myths from various cultures should be taught in school. I learned quite a few in high school, ’back in the day", when having a well rounded education mattered and learning how to think for yourself was actually important. The difference was, back then it would have been laughable to have the Bliblical creation story e taught in Science class. I had a Humanities class that studied early civilizations. It was interesting to find out that the Great Flood story appeared in a number of cultures.

Since when is a scientist (or cartoonist) qualified to teach religion? Next thing he’s going to start teaching Home Economics, Phys Ed and Auto Mechanics.

Why does there have to be a reason for our existence? (Other than the fact that we do seem to exist).

I don’t like your religion either, Mr. Trudeau.

Good one, GBT.All of you sanctimonious fools on both sides of this argument missed what is truly brilliant in today’s strip — the double-edged satire. Anyone could have written (and many have) a sendup of creationism — it practically writes itself. By including the line “Please stop — I’d like to get into a good college,” GBT parodies the inordinate fear of even discussion of faith that seems to motivate, for example, most of the comments on today’s strip.

An example of evolution? I’m sure anyone with a background in microbiology could name a more recent example, but I believe it is widely accepted that HIV did not exist 100 years ago. Where did it come from? Unless someone is out there still creating species and somehow “dropping them in”, it evolved, almost certainly from a similar virus that infects monkeys and apes.

Wow! Thanks Mr. Trudeau for stirring “the pot.”

education in any state has to tread carefully. can we talk about the deity story in a class about religions of the world?

Oh gawd I love Trudeau! Too freakin’ funny. You rock, Garry! You’ve been cracking me up daily for decades. LOL

Not all of us. Don’t lump.

You’re correct, I was speaking too loosely. That’s why I said that if what one means is evolutionary change along the lines of what you and I have both been talking about that it is a fact. The theory is how the change takes place, i.e., natural selection or for that matter genetic drift. Both can be considered theories of evolution in the sense that they have explanatory power for the facts and that they are both backed up by experiment.

Mr. Trudeau, thank you, thank you, thank you, from someone whose son is condemned to learn science in Louisiana.I especially liked the comment about the evidence massively supporting evolution. There is proof of evolution all around us. For instance, did you know that elephants are evolving away from tusks due to poachers? Or that fish in the Hudson River are evolving to handle toxic waste?http://www.cracked.com/article_19213_7-animals-that-are-evolving-right-before-our-eyes.html(Cracked.com isn’t a science site, obviously, but it is easy to read.) There are additional items there dealing with evolution, the most interesting being these:http://www.cracked.com/article_18723_the-5-strangest-things-evolution-left-in-your-body.htmlhttp://www.cracked.com/article_16117_6-formerly-kickass-creatures-ruined-by-evolution.htmlI don’t expect evolution deniers to go to any of these links. Their minds are made up. It might help the rest of us with counter arguments in the face of those who are still open minded.

Yes… to some extent, it is. Embarrassed yet, kid ? How are your feet feeling after that stomping, and yelling, and demanding respect for your beliefs? You need to go potty, baby? Hmm? Want Momma to take ya?

Don’t they? How many of “them” do YOU know?Honest question. Willing to answer?Ignorance IS a very embarassing thing, ain’t it?

Music is mathematics, too… just framed in a different shell… and it sounds much better on iTunes or Pandora.

Sorry. are you responding to this one? Sometimes these threads are hard to follow. I just want to make sure I’m answering the right question, and in context.“Yes… to some extent, it is. Embarrassed yet, kid ? How are your feet feeling after that stomping, and yelling, and demanding respect for your beliefs? You need to go potty, baby? Hmm? Want Momma to take ya?”That it?

Let’s not forget that the infallible Christian bible has two distinct creation myths that are mutually contradictory. In the first (Genesis 1:25-27), humans were created after animals and man and woman are created simultaneously. In the second version (Gen. 2:18-22), man comes before animals and man comes before woman.

“All the springs of the great deep burst out, the windows of the heavens were opened, and rain fell on the earth for forty days and forty nights” (Genesis 7).

Mr. Spiller’s simplistic distinction between science and myth blurs the imaginative elements of scientific theory.

The scientific equivalent of Noah’s Flood is our modern “atmospheric river” (AR), a vast air current that transports water vapor around the earth. This AR can be 300 miles wide and can hold 15 times the water flow of the Mississippi at its mouth. If an AR hits a mountain range (as it did east of Sacramento in 1862), it can turn into an “ARkStorm,” dropping ten feet of rain in a month (the biblical flood took forty days) with blast winds of 125 m.p.h.

Pretty clearly, the authors of the Bible would have used our ARkStorm theory had it been available to them, just as they would have used Darwinism. Instead, they had to rely on the latest archeology from Mt. Ararat (where Noah’s ark was thought to have landed).

Note that their more “scientific” modern counterparts are happy to borrow from the biblical imagination and name their theory ARKstorm.

Christianity has been used to promote a lot more hatred than Darwin’s theories ever have.

Well Mr. Trudeau, hope you and your mindless trolls enjoy your little circle jerk. Why is it so much easier to deny him than to admit you want to do things he says are wrong? After being a fan of yours from the very beginning, I’m through. good luck in your future. You’ll need it.

Hee hee

How many innocent unborn children did God murder in the Flood?And why do Christians say they hate abortion providers, yet worship the greatest killer of innocent unborn children in all time?

To deny biological evolution (the change in life over time) is a fact is to deny the fossil record. Very well, there are many who deny the fossil record. To deny either natural selection or genetic drift as a mechanism of evolution is a different matter.

You’d think Intelligent Design theorists (evolution was guided) would find as much common cause with the Darwinists against the Young-Earth Creationists over the age of the universe (and life therein) as they do with the Young-Earth Creationists against the Darwinists over the existence of a Guiding Hand. If there are ever flame wars and shout-fests between the two (mutually-exclusive) God factions, I’m unaware of them. It seems to me that, when push comes to shove, the “Scientific Faithful” are Faithful first and scientists a distant second.

Do I? (tick tick tick tick tick) No I really don’t. Much as this may annoy you — I am, too. My existence is not something I define by what I believe either. DANG! Guess that’s the first bjg “oopsie” for you.Swing and a miss!! (That would be a baseball reference for those of you feel/live so… outside of the world that other “uneducated” but potentially sports-savvy people live in.)I have to guess my search for a “proper education” left me out of the loop on the “proper: response” to obviously limited, but self-described “educated” fools and their … assumptions.What to do? What to do?Poor me. I guess I’ll just have to shuffle along and do as best I can in the “general populace”… (chuckle) to “keep up” with people as “smart” as you… eh?Tough going.Have you looked up the hill lately to see who’s waving back down at you? Hmm?Poor me. Sigh.I guess I’ll just need to learn how to suffer with dignity, and you can learn how to wave back.There I am. Yellow jacket, by the big rock.

Hey, Bassrox- It’s the absurdly simplistic view of fundamentalist Christians that is offensive to any rational person.

The REAL issue to consider is why do “Christians” in Louisiana insist kids go to THEIR theocratic “madrassa”, but condemn (and fear) the same thing being taught in the Muslim world?

Why? Why does someone with a potentially 0 – ignorant belief offend you? Seriously. Your potentially-ignorant belief doesn’t offend me or worry me in the slightest. Why do you feel threatened?

It’s still “to be, or not to be…” right?

Whether you are religious or not, the universe exists. All science is trying to do is understand how the universe works. You can believe in science and still believe in God. The fundamentalists have a problem with science because they believe the universe was created in six days. But most people don’t believe that. Personally, I think that a universe that is growing and changing is more fascinating than one that is static. The Noahs Ark story is a good morality tale but has no basis in fact. How did the polar bears get to the Ark? What about the kangaroos and bison? After the waters receded, how did they get back to North America and Austrailia?

Something I think would be useful for this discussion is the Creation/Evolution continuum from the National Center for Science Education:Creation / Evolution Continuum“Many — if not most — Americans think of the creation and evolution controversy as a dichotomy with “creationists” on one side, and “evolutionists” on the other. This assumption all too often leads to the unfortunate conclusion that because creationists are believers in God, that evolutionists must be atheists. The true situation is much more complicated: creationism comes in many forms, and not all of them reject evolution." – From the articleWhen discussing evolution science teachers should take the position of “agnostic evolution”. “The term agnostic was coined by “Darwin’s bulldog”, the nineteenth-century scientist Thomas Henry Huxley, to refer to someone who suspended judgment about the existence of God." – From the same articleThe reason why this position should be the stance taken by educators is that the presence or absence of a creator shouldn’t be the topic of discussion in a science classroom.For those that disagree with my position I’d like to know where you would fall on this scale. I am a high school science teacher and though my personal beliefs would put me as a believer in “Theistic Evolution” I don’t accept that I should force my beliefs on my students.

Interestingly, you can read this strip as a comment on the absurdity of requiring a teacher to teach things he/she thinks are absurd. Imagine an evangelical minister being given the task of teaching a class on Christianity, but the law requiring him to also present Islam to the class, and to show no favoritism to one over the other. His presentation of Islam would probably as distorted and offensive to Muslims as this teacher’s presentation of creationism is to all but the most simple-minded of Christians (who might think he is doing it justice). I prefer what I heard one minister say, “You can take the Bible literally, or you can take it seriously, but you can’t do both.”

I have a question for those commenter who propose that all surviving land animals were present on a man-made ark:If all surviving land animals were at one time in the same place why is there such a variety of where animals can be found now? Why are marsupials found South-East of Wallace’s Line but placental mammals are found North-West? Is this a result of Noah cruising around and dropping off certain animals in certain places?

Because I have had Christian fundamentalists assault me at a school board meeting, follow me home, and try to set fire to my house. For Jesus’ sake.

What state do you live in? I’m in Texas and have given testimony before our State Board of Education, but have never had anything like that happen.

“So I guess what you’re saying is that people that believe in creation are stupid. That’s nice. Does that make you feel good?”

The question wasn’t addressed to me, but I’ll go so far as to say the people who don’t believe in evolution are ignorant. That’s OK, though, everybody’s ignorant, just on different subjects.

If that ignorance is willful, that’s a failing of a different order of magnitude. “No one is blinder than he who will not see”, to borrow a phrase.

I absolutely agree with you that creationism and the bible are not bound together. But neither are evolution and atheism or evolution and abiogenesis. where would you place yourself on this scale? Creation Evolution Continuum?

Scientifically, why do you not accept the fact of evolution?

“The Mis Measure of Man.”There was an article in PloS about “The Mis-Measure of Man” recently. The Mismeasure of Science: Stephen Jay Gould versus Samuel George Morton on Skulls and BiasAs much as I respect S. J. Gould it looks like he may have been guilty of the same errors as Samuel George Morton.

Given that an offspring’s DNA is a mixture of two parents, and given that mistakes can happen when an offspring’s DNA is made, and given that means the offspring’s traits will differ from its parents, which means that some of the offspring of a generation will be better equipped than others to survive long enough to raise their own offspring, the real question becomes: How could evolution not occur???Can one of the anti-science religious fundies answer that?

Oh. I believe that many have. Don’t you find that to be true? Maybe I just “more enlightened” friends.

I don’t hear that… really. Somehow, we got here. Everybody’s trying to figure out how it happened and someone… might — correctly — guess the answer. Dang? What we do for arguing then?

Here’s a thought – could we discuss evolution and creation without mentioning the Bible? Without the bible generally people don’t have a reason to dispute evolution. Maybe you prefer one of these other anti-evolution positions?Forbidden Archaeology – Michael Cremo (Hare Krishna)Red Earth – White Lies- Vine Deloria (American Indian)

“…supported by no scientific evidence whatsoever,” says Trudeau. He lied, as the Left would say. Of course there’s “no evidence” – if you automatically throw out anything that contradicts your preconceived beliefs. Evolutionary processes may be a “theory” as some have said, but the acceptance of evolution as a “fact” is wholly a matter of belief.

@Spaghettus1 and @fritzoid finally got to the real debate about Evolution – macroevolution, not microevolution. All the earlier examples have dealt with micro-evolution in which one species – as a species – adapts to its environment. It does not become a new species. And Great Danes and Pekignese are still dogs. No one here has yet identified – though some have postulated – any organism that has developed from one species into another.

Frankly, I see the greatest weakness of (macro-)evolutionary theory is that it suggests miniscule changes through genetic change eventually resulting in divergence of species. Theoretically, over time, a given change might convey some environmental advantage, but it would not of necessity invalidate the parents’ or unchanged siblings’ advantages. So what one would expect to find is many versions of each species co-existing at any given time, as one – or more – gain evolutionary advantage. And what, in that theory, would predict that there would be any succeessive sequence of mutations to take a species from, say, a forleg to a wing? (@fritzoid, you totally missed the relevance of your answer to @Katelyn Evans, unless your German ancestors were a different species than Homo Sapiens.) There certainly isn’t any support for that kind of speciation in the fossil record.

Which brings up another point. That some above have talked about “denying” the fossil record, and @fritzoid says that people who don’t believe in evolution are ignorant. Well, thank you Mr/Ms Open Mind. Viewing the same evidence you believe with a different mindset doesn’t make me ignorant of that evidence. Creationists, especially of the young-earth variety, will look at and study the fossil record from the perspective of what massive ocean flows would do to the bodies of organisms suddenlly flooded out, and to the land masses suddenly inundated by those same ocean currents. That is not ignorance, my friend. Just a different starting point.

Good!

(ahem, could you folks when replying to someone’s words, just add a phrase of the original comment in your own post? This topic is awfully interesting but it is difficult to follow the points being put across (and the creative insults) as some of us have more than one post on this thread.) My tuppence’s worth I’ve added earlier i.e. creationism isn’t science so doesn’t belong in a science class. Just out of curiosity, ProfessorChaos, what is it you are a professor of? (I’m an engineer, IT security, that sort of stuff, in case you ask). Oh, and when I die, I hope to be of some use as compost. One guy I heard about was cremated and asked to be made into egg timers. Not sure if it is possible but at least he asked.

@Anthony 2816, it’s because the defective DNA is still the same species.

Eryx said, about 1 hour ago@BaileyBecause I have had Christian fundamentalists assault me at a school board meeting, follow me home, and try to set fire to my house. For Jesus’ sake.(sorry, my post/response thing is not working worth a darn) __That is NOT friggin’ right…ever. Are you okay? Are you safe? Do you have backup?

Thanks for the lesson in plate tectonics. I have read other, non-religious, studies that put the separation much more recently. Still, further back in time than the standard Biblical calculations. I do not have a problem with that.

You’re replying to ProfessorChaos’s comment:Once again, I have to remind people that creationism and the Bible are not bound together. You can believe in creation and not the Bible. There are scientists that are open-minded enough to believe in creation over evolution. Have you ever read what what they have to say?—-___Yes, I have. Is there any chance in the world that I could give you their names right now? Nope. None. It’s been a while. I did not find their claims/arguments to be… credible.And, in response to your statement: you can believe in the bible and not creationism, too. Believing in one does not negate belief in the other… necessarily.

Again, evolution is a demonstrable fact. What causes it and drives it, is a different matter. Evolution is perfectly compatible with the statement “God made the world, and everything that has happened since that creation is in accord with the will and intention of Divine Providence.” Darwin posits a mechanism that explains evolution without recourse to supernatural influence. Just as Benjamin Franklin, at al., demonstrated that lightning behaves according to certain consistent laws and does not require God picking out targets and blasting them. He calls that mechanism “natural selection.” God made the laws, he thought, and the laws worked out the selection. He was not an atheist. Herbert Spencer coined the phrase “the survival of the fittest” to explain capitalism. Competition in the marketplace, said Spencer, destroys the weak, lazy, and stupid. This makes for the improvement of society, he thought. Darwin applied some of the principles of Spencerism to biology. Oddly enough, Darwin’s “Biological Spencerism” is now called Darwinism, and Spencerism is called “Social Darwinism.” Modern thinking rejects the Darwin-Spencer idea that any of this is “progess.” No biologist today would say that horses are any more “perfect” in their way than dinosaurs were in theirs. Natural selection offers a useful explanation of how living things change over time. None of this, of course, has any bearing on the question why, in a larger sense, any of this happened at all, or presumes to interpret the “meaning” of it all. Arguing over the truth of stories written millenia ago for completely unscientific purposes is like arguing over whether there really was a “good Samaritan” who helped a man beaten by robbers. The story may be true or not in the historical sense. But that is irrelevant to the Truth of the story in a religious or spiritual sense. I know people who believe BOTH the Biblical account of creation, AND the scientific explanation of biology. They consider BOTH to be true, but true in different ways, and at different levels. Just as a color can be BOTH a lovely shade of blue, and light reflected off a chemical pigment as precise X wavelength. It isn’t one or the other, it isn’t “really” one and “only” figuratively or “only” subjectively the other. It is BOTH, just approached from different angles. You can describe the creation of a book in terms of a writer’s imagination or in terms of papermaking, printing, and bookbinding. These give you two different answers to “how was this book created” or even “who created it”: the writer and the printer. In the cartoon, if the class was intended to teach the trade of printing, and the teacher was required to spend time on the art of English composition, we would think it ridiculous. A printer can create a beautiful book even if he can’t read the language the book is written in. A writer can compose a wonderful novel who has never seen a printing press or knowing the first thing about operating it. Biology is a discipline that contains certain information and methods, and not others. Let biology teachers stick to their own discipline. Laws like the one that Trudeau spoofs try to force teachers to compare apples and oranges and ask adolescents to determine which in their opinion is the “true” fruit, and which the inadequate copy of the other.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.):theory: 1: the analysis of a set of facts in their relation to one another.

That evolution (change of species over time) has occurred is a fact. It has been directly observed in the small scale, and is evident in the large scale from the fossil record.

That natural selection through random genetic mutation is the main force driving evolution is the “theory” (in the sense of hypothesis or assumption) which, if not absolutely proven, is nonetheless the consensus of the vast majority of those trained scientists whose business it is to look into these things. And, as Anthony suggests, it would take divine intervention for natural selection NOT to have been operant to great degree. That natural selection is the only factor in how species have arrived in their present form after billions of years of evolution has not been proven either, but it’s the only factor which has been identified that stands up to scientific scrutiny.

Teaching the Theory of Evolution is teaching the analysis of how how biological evolution occurs and functions, not merely that evolution itself is just a “best guess”.

@ProfessorChaos: So tell me, if you’re so quick to dismiss evolution as “just a theory”, I’d like to hear your alternative to gravity – after all, gravity is “just a theory” as well. @everyone insisting “god did it”: please provide good evidence for the existence of your god.

Schools are not trying to teach Genesis, they are trying to teach Intelligent Design, which are two different things.

Evolution requires order to spontaneously emerge from chaos, when everything we observe in the universe points to the opposite as the norm.

Evolution is a theory like gravity is a theory. Or do you believing in intelligent falling? Those who wish to to reconcile religious dogma with accepted scientific understandings are on a fools mission. You are reduced to a “God of the gaps”; retreating from each supernatural explanation to another as science explains more of our world through the application of logic rather than “God’s will”. Those who insist that creationism or intelligent design supernatural explanations backed simply by beliefs rather than evidence deserve equal consideration with scientific knowledge are willfully ignorant. To characterize those who accept scientific findings as true to be liberal speaks volumes about so-called “conservatives” that choose to deny the most plausible understanding of reality available, namely science.

dsom8, Great Danes and Pekingese are all dogs, true, and are the same species as wolves. It has been said that dogs are basically genetic silly putty.

Wolves and coyotes, however, are NOT the same species, although they can interbreed without muling.

The fossil record indicates that canids arose in what is now North America. Coyotes are believed to be the “oldest” species of canid now surviving. The fossil record combined with the geologic record suggests that a portion of the coyote population spread to northern Asia at a time when the land bridge was open, but became isolated from their original home when it closed. Over time they evolved into wolves, and spread throughout Europe and Asia, but were able to return to North America when they were linked again. Larger and stronger than their cousins the coyotes, who remained relatively unchanged during the intervening millennia, wolves displaced them throughout the continent, except for those prairie and desert areas to which the coyotes remained better adapted.

women didn’t evolve from unicorns, but from leeches

Whew! Are we there yet? Thanks to Garry T for providing fodder for such a spirited exchange. I doubt if anyone’s mind was changed, but it was a helluva ride! Thanks to all of you for keeping it civil. Love and peace to all!

So … Christians are offended by truth?

Not all evolution occurs in a timespan beyond human reckoninghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox

There was only a couple of people who came up with the 5700 BC. One man even placed it on a certain date and Time!I wonder why fundamentalists want to diminish their God.To me a God who can create a universe in which not only will life spring up out of non-living matter and then be intricately conceived that that life will adapt to changing conditions is far more miraculous than some little old man sitting in a mud puddle cranking out pigs and chickens, long haired cats, short haired cats and cats without hair.I find it amazing they would settle for such a mundane God.If you want an interesting experience, ask a Christian if they believe God is everywhere (they will answer YES) then ask them if they are God, (they will say either No or No I am a child of God)Then ask them to tell you exactly where God stops and they begin.The Bible was written by the Devil. That is clear as a bell by reading theTen Commandment: I the LORD thy God am a jealous GodThis God created everything. Mathematically this means every God is this God. So Jealous of WHAT??? Jealous of self?Only a lesser God, such as one of us in our unrealized God state could be jealous, therefore the god speaking in the Bible is not the All-Everything God.Notice the bible is filled with prohibitions especially about modesty.In Eden God throws Adam and Eve out because they are dressed, after eating of the Tree of KNOWLEDGE of Good and Evil.This metaphor means Good and Evil are false concepts.I believe the way it works is, does it work or not work?Pee and poop in the stream?>you get doesn’t work Don’t pee in the stream and you get a clean working stream.More people have been killed in the name of religion (which prohibits killing) than likely anything EXCEPT acting on the Coveting of a neighbor’s stuff.First remember there was only Adam and Eve, so all of us come from incest, and if you think God does not condone incest go read about Lot and his daughters.Apparently offering your daughters up for a gangbang and then siring children by them is OK.And for those who say well Lot was drunk, perhaps your equipment works better than mine and evey male I know, but by the time I am so insensible I do not know who I am having sex with, I am not having sex!Just a few thoughts.

So, how do we know that we aren’t bacteria ourselves? We are such a speck in the universe, that we could be a bit of mold in a giant cellar.

First, I will establish the fact that I am a teacher of history, not science. Also, I have read all 200+ comments on this strip, so I know some of what I am about to say has been said before, and some of it has not. 1. Could someone please tell me where I can find the fossil record completely intact? To the best of my knowledge, it doesn’t exist. 2. All science that I have been taught has followed the scientific method and must be both observable and repeatable. Is macro-evolution either of these? Not to my knowledge. Is micro-evolution either of these? Absolutely, or else we would not be here. Micro-evolution does not deny God or any belief of a Fundamental Christian, while macro-evolution does. 3. The earth was – at one point – one landmass called Pangea. It is my belief that this landmass separated during a world-wide flood. 4. It is my belief that Noah carried 2 of every animal on the ark. This includes unicorns and dinosaurs. The reason they are no longer living is simple: climate change.5. In response to the reader who called God an abortionist for instigating the Flood, I answer this way: Since you call God an abortionist, you are assuming that the Biblical account is literally accurate. In assuming this, you should also take the other portions of the story literally as well. This includes the fact that God gave the people a way out (They only had to get on the ark; God did not make belief in Him a prerequisite). Also, God gave them 120 years to make up their minds. The deaths of innocent children were the result of the parent’s decision, not God’s decision. 6. To those that point out that Christianity instigated the Crusades and the Inquisition I reply that these affairs were instigated by men and not by God. 7. To those who say evolution has never been used in the same way, I invoke Godwin’s law: Hitler, anyone? He advocated the use of “eugenics” to “prove” the superiority of the Aryan race. 8. I am a young-earth creationist, but I think the age of the earth is roughly 15,000 to 20,000 years old.8. In the end, what each of us believes is our own personal choice. It is our duty to make informed decisions based on the best evidence provided.I see Creationism and Macro-evolution as theories since neither are observable nor repeatable. How you see it may be different, but it does not mean one of us is “smarter” than the other.

Hey, I learned about Creationism in college! Fortunately, it was in Classical Mythology 215, not in any of my science classes.

We know we aren’t bacteria because of structure, not scale. A bacterium is a single cell. We are each composed of trillions of cells, each of which is structurally similar to a bacterium. If you want to posit the “infinite progression/infinite regression” argument, you’ve pretty much got to go all the way to “Our entire universe is just a subatomic particle making up some gargantuan atom in a larger chemistry” for our relative non-understanding of the largest and smallest phenomena to even allow the possibility.

Professor CHAOS supports master design. Ironic? If they teach creationism in school. Why no prayer in schools?

baslim, I think your creationist of integrity would argue that SN1987A does not exist at all, and never has. God created light already in transit to Earth 6000 years ago, from the place where that supernova would have been 162,000 years earlier. This wasn’t meant to deceive human beings, mind you, any more than all those 60-million-year-old dinosaur bones; it’s just that God wanted to give us a little variety. In designing the universe God was not, as the Deists thought, a draftsman or engineer; He was a Surrealist. He didn’t intend for us to take this stuff literally.

Sure he that made us with such large discourse,Looking before and after, gave usThat capability and godlike reasonTo fust in us unused.

Oh, and remember, before Noah atmospheric water didn’t refract sunlight into a spectrum. All those pretty pictures showing unicorns cavorting under rainbows are filthy lies; rainbows didn’t exist before the Flood, and unicorns didn’t exist after.

It has been applied by anthropologists for over 100 years.

Congrats GT. I think 243 is a new comments record. Fritzy, while you’re at it direct your telescope to the ort cloud so we can see those comets being born that would only have hung around for a relatively little while after creation without it.

But don’t worry if you don’t come up with anything, no one has read all this anyway. And please note God never says he created the rainbow, but that he set HIS rainbow in the clouds NIV. you are arguing with the right wing pols not many Christians who read the Word. If you legit want a Christian take on all of

Cont:

it try Hugh Ross. google him and his degrees and then check out his website. I doubt you will because most of you are as set in your ways as the rightists you so malign, but you are hearing about it, so God speed.

You have to remember that the “Story” of Noah was created by nomadic folks living a simple life before schools, colleges and computers made everything complex. The story was oral for quite a long time and then was written down just like the Indian oral prayers. Us smart people get to argue about very old stories that were memorized by people living thousand of years ago. Don’t even dare to try to analyze the Mormon story.

>“Evolution requires order to spontaneously emerge from chaos, when everything we observe in the universe points to the opposite as the norm.”

Really? Never seen salt crystallise? Of course, overall there is more chaos to produce this local highly-ordered system, but local order is not at all uncommon.

We have localised order on earth, but its not a closed system.

I wonder how many of you who have commented on this have actually read Darwin’s “Origin of Species” and “Descent of Man”. I have. Let me put one of his quotes here, specifically dealing with the post that denied that Darwin believed that inferior races existed.

“At some future period…the civilized races of men will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races….The break [between the highest and lowest “human” species] will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between men in a more civilized state…than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla”

Secondly, I’d like to point out what a literal belief in Darwin’s theory means. A woman named Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood was one of those people who put to action Darwin’s writings. She wrote in one of her books,

“Our failure to segregate morons [the lowest “class” of human beings] who are increasing and multiplying…demonstrates our foolhardy and extravagant sentimentalism… [Philanthropists] encourage the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it…a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant…We are paying for, and even submitting to, the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all"

And speaking of Margaret Sanger, she got racism from Darwin as well.

“We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro

population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members."

My recommendation to you is to actually study what Darwin said in his books. Study what he actually believed. Then come back and argue knowledgeably.

Chaos wrote: " You don’t have to believe the Bible version of creation to believe that there was a master design for life and our existence wasn’t just an accident. It takes a lot of faith to believe in evolution. Science is based on the scientific method, as they taught us in junior high. How can you apply it to evolution? "

It takes no faith whatsoever to understand the INDISPUTABLE FACT of evolution. It only takes a MINIMUM of a third grade education. Smarter students can achieve it with a kindergarten education.

It is totally impossible to believe in a master design. Christians have been trying to find a justification for a designer for 2000 years. They have failed EVERY SINGLE TIME. They have danced like a jitterbugger on crack but still can’t find rationale to jstuify th existence of a being with aseity. Not to be to hard on them though. The mythical god isn’t powerful enough to overturn the problems with the existence of a being with aseity.

Just to clear things up for the scientifically ignorant: THAT evolution occurs is a FACT. HOW evolution occurs is a THEORY. THAT gravity occurs is a FACT. HOW gravity occurs is a THEORY. I hope this little analogy helps point out how ludicrous it is for the scientifically ignorant to harp on about evolution not being a fact, or railing on about evil “evolutionists”. If they were consistent, they’d at least be screaming that gravity isn’t a fact, only a theory, and be ridiculing “gravitationists”.

I’m Christian…doesn’t bother me a bit. It’s Doonesbury. It’s funny. Everybody should just relax, and we should all get over ourselves.

This is a bit long, but I think it explains the difference between a “lay” theory, and a ‘scientific’ theory

Situation. Mr. A and Mr. B had a heated argument. Next day Mr. A is killed.

Lay Theory. Mr. B was seen near Mr. A’s office about the time Mr. A was killed. Mr. B owns a gun of the type used to kill Mr. A.Police say Mr. B is “a person of interest in the case"

Scientific theory.Mr. B enters Mr. A’s office, knocking secretary down, goes into A’s office. Secretary hears 2 loud noises. B knocks secretary down again on the way out. Secretary goes to office, finds A lying on floor with blood on his shirt. She calls police and relates what happened. Police arrest B leaving parking lot. He has A’ blood and gunshot residue, and a recently fired gun in his position. Up on testing, it proves to be the gun used to shoot A.

This is a ’scientific theory that B shot A, because no one actually witnessed B pull the trigger.

See the difference?

The creationists are deliberately trying to confuse the two theories.

@Professor Chaos- It looks like you have science & faith confused. There is plenty of evidence showing that evolution correctly describes how the creatures we see on earth (including humans) got here. It’s universally accepted by any serious biologist, regardless of faith.

There is nothing in evolution that precludes a creator who started the universe and created the laws of physics, etc. BUT, there is absolutely no proof that such a creator exists.

There is plenty of proof that Creationism and Intelligent Design don’t accurately describe how species appeared on earth. Doonesbury is spot on with accusing religious zealots with corrupting the minds of our youth with their fairy tales.

Actually Science is also based on faith. I have faith that scientists have studied how electrons and radio wave work, so I know that my cell phone and bluetooth device will work together. I cannot “See” the process in action, but I have faith that atoms and molecules do what scientists say they do in easily repeatable ways every day and that I won’t just fly off the ground out into space because gravity does not work the same every day.

The Bible is full of fairy stories about physics not behaving the way that it does every day in every thing around me, like water “parting” down to the sea bed for a bunch of people to walk through due to “supernatural intervention” on the part of the “oppressed, but chosen” people. If this sort of thing were possible, I’m certain that it would happen every day now, and mess with any and all of the sciences on this planet.

Those who do not believe that science can lead us to the conclusion that evolution is how things happened on this planet, should all give up their cell phones and houses and comforts and go live in the forest with the chimps and gorillas. Because it is the sort of reasoning that leads to scientific discovery that brings us shelter and housing and increased food production and medicine and everything else that separates us from the rest of the Animal world around us that we have developed over 5 or more millions of years of evolution on this planet as humans. This does not mean that it was not set in motion by a creator, but, since these kinds of miracles are not happening to mess up the grand repeatable scientific plan, we must assume they are stories and not fact and that the creator really wants it that way, not the way of the bible or the koran or any other religious work. Those books, like the lord of the rings are good stories with good moral ground work (and also examples of bad behavior that is immoral and not good to emulate) for us to live by, but we should not expect to come up against talking trees or speaking, burning bushes that don’t extinguish. Know reality from fantasy and you will do well.

“John: Until someone invents a time machine, we’ll never be sure of anything.”Until someone shows up with a long enough tape measure, we’ll never know how far away the sun is.

CCSI: Creationist Crime Scene Investigation

“Hmmm… Given the advanced state of blood coagulation around the exit wound in his chest, a body temperature of 64 degrees, and the fact that the wall clock with the bullet hole is stopped at 3:17, we really can’t rule out the possibility that the deceased died just moments before we got here at 7:34. Or maybe the corpse and clock were created this way. Since we don’t have a time machine, there’s no way to be sure.”

“The whole overwhelming claims and guidelines of evolution can not be proven in a laboratory. Without a time machine, how can we prove that that all life progressed from the sea, from one celled organisms to fish to amphibians to reptiles to birds to mammals to man.(?)”

The fossil record will have to do in the absence of a time machine. Why, in a “created” world, would there be billions of years, with nothing but simple single-celled animals?

“Carbon dating is inaccurate” ..to a degree, but it is certainly accurate enough to tell the difference between 6,000 and many, many millions of years.

How did zebras survive? Are you assuming that the stripes are maladaptive? They have been shown to help confuse predators in a running herd.

I can accept the human eye, because creatures have been sensing light for many billions of years. It took nature a lot longer to get to the eye than it took us to go from the wheel to the BMW, but I think that makes a decent comparison.

Emotion? That’s complicated, but it seems to be something of a crude long-term memory system designed for creatures who’s factual memories were far weaker than ours. The fact that insect behavior is controlled by some of the same neurotransmitters as humans is one of the many small facts that in my opinion support evolution.

The timescale involved makes it all work for me. Life had billions of years at the single-cell stage to work out principles that carried over into the multi-cell creatures, who had a billion years to reach our level. Trial and error is not always swift and accurate, but give it that time frame and an entire earth’s surface to work with, the number of “trials” is staggeringly large.

Even if you believe in creation, you don’t have to deny evolution. Except for time (and really how do you measure time by God’s standard) evolution pretty much matches the bibles order of how things occured.

darwin begat watson and crick, who inturn begat gene therapy, genetic modification and the possibilty of extending life for more than 1000 years. stem cell research is a result of genetic research. Religion is that fairy tale for those people who are afraid of the dark, and best taught in a religous setting. No new books of the bible have been written in 2000 years, what has its writers learned in that time?

CCSI: Creationist Crime Scene Investigation – Pt. II

“Wait! A note was just slipped under the door. It reads ‘I shot myself at 7:00 pm. Signed, the dead guy.’ Case closed, boys. It was clearly suicide.”

^After all, would a corpse lie?

Comment #300. Yippee!

Tudzax2 and Bailey: OK, go ahead and apply the scientific method to evolution. I’ll come back in a few days to see what you have written here to prove evolution.

No one has yet answered me as to where I can find a complete fossil record that proves evolution. For as many faults as people like to point out in Creationism/Intelligent Design, it seems as if those of you who believe evolution aren’t willing to admit any degree of uncertainty to your THEORY.

Hi Bassrox,It’s not offensive to this Christian. It is absurdly simplistic, as is Creation ‘science’

If you’re a professor, can’t we argue this on a factual basis? If you think that is all so farcical, please fit the fossil record’s billions of years of single-celled organisms into a credible creation story. That would be a stretch.It appears to be a useless argument with you. When you say " It just too fantastic for me", it seems you have set limits upon your world that won’t allow room for evolution. Too bad.

FWIW, I am not atheist, as can be said for most Darwinists.

Baslim, he did state somewhere above that he is a professor of history, although that’s rather broad. He also stated that he beilieves the Earth is about 15,000-17,000 years old, which makes me wonder at what sort of institution he might be a professor (or what sort of institution gave him his accredition).

He also said that he believes Noah had dinosaurs on the ark, but that they were subsequently rendered extinct by…climate change. All of them. The big ones and the little ones, all over the world. So God went to all the trouble of having Noah save them – every species which we have ever discovered to date, as well as every species which might be discovered in the future – only to wipe them out a few millennia later because His thermostat busted. Presumably all the other species which we know once existed but which are now extinct suffered similar fates, whether in the same previously-unrecorded postdiluvian environmental cataclysm or in a series of them. But at one time they all existed at the same time (since species do not change over time), and Noah had ’em all!

Ah, my mistake. I’ll leave it up to broadcast my shame.

Professor, I didn’t name anyone in my post, so why do you think I insulted you? Guilty conscience?And unlike you, I can’t choose to believe just anything. I can only recognize what I believe. My beliefs are the result of evidence, not my own whims.

@ the two supposed ‘professors" on this thread. I attended a religiously affiliated private K-12 school. you remind me of the history and science instructors I had there. They didn’t really know anything about their subject, even though they had a degree from a religiously affiliated university. What am I saying? I’m saying that they got an incomplete education – one that refused to consider anything opposed to the “god did it” point of view – and passed that partial dataset onto us students. Once I started reading on my own and, after graduating, attending a public university, I learned that I was, to be quite honest, screwed over in my education in those areas, as I was never given the full picture. Indeed, some of my high school science teachers actually lied to us about certain areas that disagreed with “god did it” – all with the endorsement of the church. Now, I don’t think they lied on purpose; I think they just were never taught themselves, and they weren’t “brave” enough to read or teach anything that went against the religious “this is the way it is”.

Oh, and did either of you ever give an alternative to the theory of gravity? Or is the theory of evolution the only theory that has to be “resisted”?

Where do you live? The most radical liberals here are all peaceful, hippie-type people. I’m sure most conservatives want nothing to do with the Klan, but the Klan itself does claim to be Christian and backs conservative values. Civil rights are usually the cause of liberals, n’est-ce pas?

God, forgive Gary Trudeau.

What was the first animal to have eyes?

That last comment should read “…refutations of the anti-evolutionists…” A great typist I ain’t.

Thank you Baslim. You’ve been doing a good job carrying the load too. I found an interesting site that makes clear how the flood myth is scientifically completely untenable: corior.blogspot.com/2006/02/part-3-where-did-water-come-from.html

Thank you for your kind words. It’s hard not to get frustrated with folks like PC since s/he makes little or no effort to respond to those of us who have reasonably addressed his/her questions. I just try to keep in mind that even if individuals like PC are essentially unreachable, that there are many others reading the thread that might be more open minded. So I write for them and hope that the trolls will someday let at least a smidgen of reason in.

Actually, I question virtually everything I am taught, and even caught a teacher improperly teaching the motions of the earth in 4th grade. (She was attributing seasons to a back-and-forth wobbling).

I never said God did not create. Who can say he was not the designer of DNA, the one who set the entire universe to spinning in the first place? In denying the existence of evolution, you could be denying the existence of one of His greatest creations. God could make that unicorn fly out if he chose to, correct?

Just because I am not agreeing with you does not mean I am not reading your posts. It means you have failed to persuade me to change my opinion, as I likely will fail with you, so lay off that horse, it probably stinks by now.

^Same here. At least I try, but my patience is more limited than yours.

I have my good days and my bad days as far as my patience goes…..

Now my reply button won’t work. I’m talking about matching Genesis to reality:

I have to admit, I’ve tried to make that fit, too. The ancients who knew nothing of modern astronomy, biology, etc., would have had a very hard time handling the entire truth, I think, so if one were to consider Genesis to be divinely inspired, maybe it contained all the truth that could be handled in a flat-earth, geocentric world. The order in Genesis is near to reality, if I remember correctly, though the meaning of a “day” would need to be very broad, indeed.

Oh, and I have heard a more reasonable explanation of the Noah story , centered around the fact that the known world was flooded. A tsunami or the surge of a very large tropical storm might accomplish that. If it happened near the dawn of man, all or most of humanity could have been hit.

Anyway, on a forum like this we can blend religion and science to make interesting discussions, but I’ll be fighting any religious invasion of the science classroom with my votes and writings.

I probably don’t have the patience to be a teacher of any kind, but my mother was excellent at the high school level, which is the main reason the posts look as good as they do, Craig. Thanks.

One more think I feel compelled to say:

How would those of you in a religious congregation feel if a scientist demanded that your church correct the science errors in your sacred book?

Likewise, keep the religion out of the science classroom.

The one miracle I’d like to see reconciled with physics is Joshua 10:13, when God made the sun and the moon stop in their tracks for about a day so Joshua and the Isrealites would have enough light to slay every last Amorite. It’s hard to imagine THAT being any sort of metaphor.

Strangely enough, there are a number of references to unicorns (although it’s unclear whether these are identical with rhinoceroses, or some other one-horned beast).

They’ve been ruled kosher, though.

One animal that is NOT mentioned anywhere in the Bible is the housecat, and I think that’s highly telling.

“I have known some horses and a good many more pigs who I believe harbored evil intent in their hearts. I will go further and say all cats are wicked, though often useful. Who has not seen Satan in their sly faces? Some preachers will say, well, that is superstitious ‘claptrap.’ My answer is this: Preacher, go to your Bible and read Luke 8:26-33.”— Mattie Ross, True Grit (Charles Portis)

I’ll take your word for it. I was just going with the Wikipedia entry in this case. Like I said, I know little about the rules for kosher. (And my lame attempt at humor failed.)

Ah, the adoring masses. I revel in their rapt attention.

No, but that is a famous picture of Pete with a bloody windmill hand taken for Rolling Stone back in the 70s. I’m guessing you knew that…

I would love to see all of the “evidence” supposedly massively supporting Darwin’s THEORY of evolution. There has never been any scientific proof that his theory is correct. Even the man himself said it was just one theory on the origin of man. Since none of us was there, and it cannot be recreated in a laboratory any theory of life must be held to by faith alone. You can put your faith in monkeys if you want to but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

Most likely you’re right, but now that he knows where to look, it’s a situation of put up or shut up for him. This is the point where trolls always lose the argument because they’re not willing to do the real work needed to make a coherent, informed argument.

Thank goodness we don’t have the Creationists stuffing up our education system in Australia. A very secular country.

Well put. Scientific method bears out the theory of natural selection. It is a big leap of faith from there to the theory of evolution.

@ Jughead Jones You seem to miss the distinction between faith; believing in something with no evidence, and trust; believing in the evidence, even if we do not personally understand it. One never has “faith” in science as it is based on evidence.That said, the evidence supporting evolution is massive, if you think otherwise you have not been paying attention. If you claim to have been paying attention, check your cites.@Bassrox Do not be so narrow-minded; hopefully it is offensive to other beliefs who need magic to explain the world, not just Christians.

what a stupid teacher, poisining the minds of his students. which retard would belive that everything came from nothing for no reason? and there is PLENTY of evidence for creation IF you bother to research it properly…