Biblical Creationism

I don't understand how you could hope to provide a biblical alternative to natural selection, given that natural selection is not a theory or a philosophy, but a principle derived from observation.That is to say, scientists talk about natural selection not because they're atheists or they like the theory, but because natural selection is what happens. The fit survive to a greater degree than the non-fit.Why would you make up a fiction to replace the facts? It's like trying to come up with a biblical alternative to saying "the sky is blue". It's exactly the kind of biblical substitution for intellect that turned me off to Christianity in the first place.

Not so. I simply asked why it's better to replace something that is observed and confirmed with something that has not been. You don't seem to have a response to that, yet.Sorry if you found my tone "unusual". It had been my hope to come off not as bellicose but inquisitive. I don't understand how the thrust of your argument appears to be a refutation of natural selection given that this is a plainly observed phenomenon. To the contrary.Natural selection is an observed principle of populations; that is, those individuals in a population who possess traits most suited to their environment persist to a statistically greater degree than those individuals that do not. As a result they tend to leave more offspring than those who are "selected against."There's nothing theoretical about this because it's not a theory. It's an observation. It happens. You can watch it, if you want.If you feel this is in error then I challenge you to cite a source and prove me wrong. It happens when you respond intelligently to rebuttals to your argument. We're still waiting for that.

It's "Crashfrog", please. Using my name will help me know when you're talking to me. You're wrong right off the bat. Natural selection isn't a theory. It's an observation that explains why organisms don't reproduce at random, but rather, better-adapted organisms leave more offspring.That's it. Everything else you're talking about is evolution, aka "Darwinism", of which natural selection is a part. You could get your terms right, at least.You still haven't addressed what thought process replaces observed phenomenon, like natural selection, with unobserved, made-up stories about supernatural entities. Cretainly not a rational one.

You mean, you have to convince yourself of what you're trying to prove so that you can see the proof? How does that make any sense?Here's an experiment for you - believe in evolution. There, see? Proof of evolution! After all, you believe, don't you?Circular reasoning at it's finest.

But I prayed. I didn't get a response. And this was when I really, truly believed in God.How come it works for you and not for me?

What, my future unbelief? Remember I totally believed at the time. So, was God punishing me because I wasn't going to believe in him in the future?That hardly seems fair, does it? Especially because I stopped believing because of unanswered prayers (among other things.)[This message has been edited by crashfrog, 08-08-2003]

But I'd never not believed. But I wasn't one of those people that believed out of habit, though. Basically I believed as strongly as you do.Anyway the fact that the Bible says things like this is what suggests to me it may all be a sham - that the authors of the bible may very well have understood what a huge pill they were asking people to swallow, and thus anticipated the responses of people just a little more reasonable than the majority of believers. Yeah, pretty sure. And who would know better than me?

Ah, but remember, I only stopped believing because God wasn't answering prayer. Up till I noticed that I had no idea I was going to becomne atheist. I expected to be a believer all my life.See, you can't judge me at the time for what I was going to do in the future. At the time I believed as strongly as you because I planned to believe forever. But it was God's own actions - or the lack of them - that made me stop believing.Anyway, you either believe or you don't. You can't half-believe. So "believing strongly" is really rather meaningless. Given two persons of faith, identical in every way on the exterior, what test would you use to determine which had the stronger belief?If you have to wait for one of them to stop believing, then there's no test that can tell a strong belief from a weak belief at any given instant.

That, and the larger "bad things happening to good people" problem. I had never heard a solution that wasn't either blaming the victim, wishful thinking, an argument from ineffability, or simply faulty logic.But basically what started me on that path was my refusal to believe that if God had a plan for me, that plan was to fail at everything I tried to do.Oh, well. if Christianity works for you, that's great. Atheism works great for me. We're both happy, so no big deal, right?

Why? If I die and God's there, I'll just change my mind. After all I still have free will when I die, right?

My old church, which I have come to regard as very fundamentalist, didn't really believe in Original Sin. What they believed was that Adam's sin introduced sin into the world, and that all humans are sinful, but it's not like we all have to pay the price for Adam's specific sin - we've got enough of our own already.Does that help, at all?