Homestar Runner Wiki Forum

Well? (Title taken from a thread in a GameFAQs board I saw long ago.)

[Edit by InterruptorJones: Changed the title 'cause it was getting on my nerves.]

[Edit by furrykef: InterruptorJones is no fun. (The old title was: "Cretinism versus Evilution")]

Kef, what are you talking about?

speak english

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its friday night and im home all night (all night)
and saturday night doesnt look much better (oooahhoo)
and nobody likes me coz im a loser (hey! you're a loser)
and everything is going to go my way someday, someday
everything is gonna go my way someday

"Creationism versus Evolution" warlord.

Yes, Warlord. The implied joke is that Evolutionists say that Creationists are stupid, while Creationists say that Evolutionists are evil.

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You spelled "evolution" wrong. It's E-V-O-L-U-T-I-O-N.

Ingiald, I think he meant it as a joke. Like Evil-ution as in evil.

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Oh. Anyway, my opinion:

Even though I'm Christian, I personally beleive in evolution, but I beleive that it was controlled and overseen by God. My mom, grandparents, and uncle are all Creationists, and I don't mind. What I do mind is when people say: "If you beleive in evolution, you're going to Hell". I don't like that.

Exactly. If you look again you'll notice "Creationism" was also (intentionally) misspelled. Cretin-ism.

natural selection (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection) - yes

The idea that we used to be monkeys - no

I am not sure how this sits with my religious beliefs, but I don't see how you can deny that it exists. So, what does that make me then?

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i'm a eveolutionist. my family's a bunch a scientists, and to quote my mom: there are scientists that beleve in creationism, but they are sure stupid scientists. no offence to creationists or creationist scientists.[/quote]

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Pangolin (Pan-gol-lin) - Adorable photomanipulated artichoke.

i guess i belive in both

the scientific evidence is there

but the biblical evidence is there too

also, to people who say "Do i look like i am coverd in hair?" yes you do, look at your arm, it is coverd in thin blondish hair

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its friday night and im home all night (all night)
and saturday night doesnt look much better (oooahhoo)
and nobody likes me coz im a loser (hey! you're a loser)
and everything is going to go my way someday, someday
everything is gonna go my way someday

or blackish hair

I'll try to tackle this while I'm at work tomorrow morning. If you've been following the Religious Affiliations thread, you already know I've been reading a good book that deals with this subject somewhat. I'll be happy to share the things I've read, along with my own thoughts on the subject.

Oh, while I'm posting I suppose I could mention that I'm a Creationist.

Evolution. Very simple. I mean, Creationism doesn't make sense (due to the fact that there are TWO different Creation stories in the Bible). One of them says that God created man first, then the animals. The other one, He created animals first, and then man to rule them.

-Teh Coach

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pm me if Coach Z rocks.

Ghost Coach Z avatar!

Yeah, um, maybe you should catch up in the Religious Affiliations discussion. Contradictions in the Bible do not equal a false bible. That's kinda like claiming that contradictions in the 9/11 report mean that the attack never happened (and there just ain't enough tin foil in the world for that hat). So somebody screwed up when writing the story. Doesn't mean the story's completely devoid of fact. There are far better arguments to be made, here.

("InterruptorJones, Professional Devil's Advocate Since 1982!")

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Thank you, Jones!

I was about to go search for some obscure fact-laden article to slam down. I might anyway.

I'd also like to mention that if anyone is going to cite anything from the Bible, they'd better put their references in the post. Many of us base our lives on the Bible and read it all the time. It personally bothers me when I see people drawing conclusions and making stereotypical statements when they themselves are ignorant.

Not that I'm saying you're ignorant. Just cite your verses.

J.

I totally agree, and I like to think of myself as a Jesus Freak. At least I hope Jesus sees me as a Jesus Freak...

Anyway, adaptation and natural selection are factual, I believe.

I find it hard to believe that we evolved from monkeytypes.

I wonder...If we originally came from monkeys, why haven't we changed into something else throughout the past couple thousand years of recorded history?

Evolution is simply life's way of adapting to changing environments.

Natural selection, on the other hand, was Darwin's attempt to explain the development of species apart from God. In a nutshell, it means that human beings are cosmic accidents.

I certainly allow that Christians who believe in evolution are not necessarily wrong. However, the theory of Natural Selection contradicts the Christian faith by denying the idea of a Creator and a divine plan. The Scriptures tell us that God created us, and if God is in any way involved in the process (whether through evolution or a more distinctly supernatural way), then the process cannot be called Natural Selection.

I wonder what the evolution of The Cheat looks like?

Anyone who says that scientists who believe in creation are stupid scientists is an arrogant, closed-minded bigot. No offense.

To illustrate my point, here are a few people who just happened to believe in creation who also happened to be great scientists:

Galileo, Blaise Pascal, Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein. Shall I go on?

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Wait wait wait...I think I confused my scientific theories. I thought Natural Selection was that "survival of the fittest" thingy...

Man...do I look ignorant now, or what.

I think I need to delete these posts and start over!

Survival of the Fittest is just part of the equation. Random mutations is the other. Some mutations give creatures a better chance to survive in their environments than others. But the point is that life continues to evolve in a completely random way.

The theory of evolution goes back to the time of the Renaissance. Darwin did not invent it. Darwin only explained a way that life could originate APART FROM DIVINE POWER. Oddly enough, he himself was Christian and died in the good graces of the church.

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Because it isn't enough time. 1000 years is a blink of an eye compared to the 4.57 billion year history of Earth that scientists suggest. According to this theory, the first single-celled life appeared around 3.6 billion years ago, and it took two more billion years just for that to evolve into more complex single-celled life. Of course, things sped up as dramatically as life proliferated, populations spread apart, conditions changed, and so on, so it needed only one more billion years to get to multicelled life. But it never sped up so much that a population like ours would evolve greatly in a couple thousand years. Though I'd suggest that in some ways we have evolved, but not to the point we became a different species. We've been evolving all this time after all, bit by bit. It's a gradual process; it's not like someday we just give birth to a superman.

Now if there were something more like 20,000 years of detailed, recorded history, perhaps we could actually see such change.

Now according to the theory of Natural Selection, we'd just as easily evolve BACK into monkeys (completely random mutations, remember?) as to evolve into some sort of superman. Besides, he was Kryptonian, not human.

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I wouldn't think that de-evolution is "just as likely". While mutation is random, yes, I would think "survival of the fittest" ensures that the trend is towards advancement or, at worst, stagnation. It just means that the trend is less uniform.

It's like having a graph that goes upwards, and by adding a random factor to each point you get a more "random" zig-zaggy graph that nevertheless exhibits a positive correlation.

It's worth pointing out, here, that the only person on this list who lived during or after Darwin's life is Einstein. Since evolution wasn't even a theory in their time, the argument that they didn't believe in it doesn't seem terribly profound. And Descartes wasn't a scientist, justsoyaknow.

Anyway, I'd really prefer that you list some sources, here. Einstein's famous quote, of course, was "God does not play dice with the universe," but I'm not sure of the context.



You've got this a bit backwards. The mutations are random, but evolution is not. In the long view, only the mutations that are best suited for survival are passed along. So they only way we'd "de-evolve" would be if it were advantageous to our survival.

While perhaps humans could in the next few million years evolve physically to something more ape-like, it's definitely a stretch to suppose that we'll "de-evolve" intellectually, since our intellect is perhaps most key to our survival, on the basest level. Smart people survive and pass on their smarts. It's not something that's likely to get "bred out" of the species, unless evolution dictates that other mutations (like, um, hairier knuckles?) are far more important to our survival.

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This is a great site about topics like this.

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I think I may have mentioned it in the other thread, but Penn & Teller did an episode of their show Bullsh*t! about Creationism. They really take the "Intelligent Design" folks to task. Head down to your video rental store and rent the first season DVDs. It's a great series.

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IJ:

Descartes WAS a scientist, as well as a mathamatician. He may be more famous as a philosopher, but he also did experiments as well. In fact, his whole philosophy was meant to justify and give credibility to his experiments.

The theory of evolution did exist in their time. Darwin's theory of natural selection did not. Of course I will concede that without DTNS, evolution would not have been very convincing.

And my point is that it closed-minded bigotry to call a scientist stupid just becuase you don't agree with his/her worldview. A better criterium for judging their intelligence is their contribution to the scientific community. Albert Einstein, for example, contributed a great deal to our understanding of physics. To call him stupid just because he believed in creation is stupid in itself.

I guess at this point, IJ, I would ask if you agree with this kind of closed-minded bigotry, or if you are simply trying to correct some minor errors you believe I have made in my argument.

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I seriously resent the implication. I didn't call anybody stupid. Nobody called anybody stupid. And somehow because I pointed out problems with your argument (some of which you effectively countered, some of which you did not), it's implied that I believe that scientists who believe in Creation are stupid and thus I'm a close-minded bigot? Ugh.

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From what I read over at the Religious Affiliations topic, and from what I've studied, this sits just fine with your religious beliefs.

I believe in Creationism ie the whole Adam and Eve story, but I also believe that us as well as all the other species have the ability to adapt. What to make of neanderthals, cro-magnon man etc, I'm not quite sure yet.

I never said the Bible was wrong. I just said that you can't take it literally. Sorry.

-Teh Coach

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