Hi, Jar.
jar writes:
Abiogenesis is irrelevant to discussing the FACT of evolution.
I don't mean to belabor this too much, since it's not really on-topic, but I think it's relevant to the discussion of people's motivations to accept or reject a Creator-God.
That Genologist is talking about abiogenesis is kind of your fault. You wrote this in message 8:
jar, msg 8 writes:
Down through history many attempts have been made to explain the facts seen; there is the "Parent" myths where everything is the product of the union of two gods; the "Orderer" that finds Chaos and lines everything up and the "Travel" myths where life emerges from some other realm, under ground, the skies, a cave.
They were all attempts to explain the FACT of Evolution.
I don't see these as attempts to explain the fact of evolution. I can agree that they are attempts to explain facts that evolution explains better; but I think it's more accurate to call them attempts to explain the fact of the origin of life, rather than attempts to explain the fact of evolution.
I would argue that, while abiogenesis and evolution certainly are distinct concepts academically, we really can't deny that acceptance of the latter very frequently influences acceptance of the former.
That certainly was the case for myself, anyway. I certainly didn't set out specifically looking for an excuse to reject God so I could be free to behave however I pleased: rather, careful study of the evidence for evolution convinced me of the fact of evolution, and gradually led me to accept a smaller and smaller role for God in the inner workings of the universe.
So, for me, the two ideas kind of came as a tandem, package deal: acceptance of one contributed substantially to my acceptance of the other. Of course, now that I understand both, I realize that they are actually distinct concepts, but we're not really talking about how distinct the concepts are academically: we're talking about how the concepts interact with one another on a sort of "psychological landscape." And, in that case, evolution and abiogenesis are clearly linked.
There certainly are a lot of interesting things to discuss about how and why people accept one worldview or the other, or attempt to compromise between them somehow. Unfortunately, I don't think any answer will be meaningfully generalizable, so it seems that this discussion could only be about specific case studies, like mine.
Personally, I want to chime in with NoNukes: that first question, about how the omission of evolutionary education might impact society, is much more interesting. Can we discuss that here? Or has it been deemed off-topic?
-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)
Darwin loves you.
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