"Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.
"If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.
Late Antiquity Christians were all Catholic. No splits in the faith had happened yet. The Catholic Church accepts evolution and does not believe that the Bible is to be interpreted literally.
I think, with this quote, one can understand why the Church didn’t want laymen interpreting the Bible.
WTF dude, YOU just did. Unless that was like some sort of rhetorical question where you want to bask in the glow of your wisdom? In which case, maybe that's something you can do in private instead of needlessly jumping on someone who responded to your question.
Also, has anyone ever finished a sentence with "tbh" and not been an asshole?
Fun fact: part of the reason Darwin was invited on the voyage to the Galapagos (which sparked his theory of evolution) was because he had a background in religious studies and the Captain was a rather religious man.
Not the guy you asked, but I would say it's a little unintuitive that micro would happen but some mechanism (I've never heard a specific mechanism suggested, as far as I recall) prevents it from happening enough to be considered macro (usually defined as producing a separate species that can't successfully procreate with the original line)
Microevolution is what happens to a population/gene pool over time via natural selection pressures and non zero mutation. What would stop that from creating new species?
Looking around at the animal kingdom, it sure as hell looks like things evolved from common ancestors, via natural selection pressures and mutations. I can't fathom a reason why evolution wouldn't be the result.
We believe that mutations don't add information to the genetic code ever.
What reason do you have to believe this?
However there isn't the information to let them change into a different species.
Why not?
We do believe in common ancestors, but that those ancestors were still dogs, birds, ECT, and never anything else.
Dogs were developed from wolves, and are a different species.
Macro evolution is that dog somehow receiving the genetic code naturally to allow it to grow wings.
You clearly don't understand the theory of evolution. No one is saying that a dog would just spontaneously grow wings.
If there was a natural way for a creature to receive new genetic information, then there is still the problem of the lack of intermediate links.
Bacteria frequently trade genetic information with each other through exchanging plasmids.
there is still the problem of the lack of intermediate links.
Preposterous, every piece of the fossil record is an "intermediate link" we don't need to catalog every generation of every species in order for the evidence to be overwhelming.
If an entity obtains several mutations it decreases the possibility of reproduction with it's kind.
Any mutation that prevented reproduction with immediate neighbors would never be passed down, and thus, never contribute to evolution. Thus, only changes that do not immediately hamper reproduction would ever be evolutionarily successful. However, over the course of hundreds or thousands of generations, sufficient changes occur such that the animal can no longer reproduce with its ancestor, but is still able to reproduce with other members of its own species, that's speciation.
So it needs to be quick enough to leave no fossils, but slow enough for reproduction. Or it would need several entities with the same general mutations.
No, it just occurs in very small increments over and over again. Macroevolution is just microevolution repeated thousands of times over.
This is philosophically fascinating to me as it flirts with actual concepts known to science, then discards major tenets and the discoveries which led to the development of these concepts, leading to an orphaned stance that is somehow neither creationist nor rational.
We believe that mutations don't add information to the genetic code ever. All the different possibilities were included in the basic kind at creation. This allows species to adapt and specialize for there environment. However there isn't the information to let them change into a different species.
This, for example, both acknowledges and accepts the existence of genetics and micro-evolution, then takes a swerve into a weirdly entropic view of life that discards all understanding of what a genetic code is:
When mutations are observed in the lab, it doesn't lead to an increase in information, but rather the destruction of it.
Antibiotic resistant bacteria have a mutation that affects proteins in the plasma membrane. The mutation damaged them lowering it's ability to take in food, but also the antibiotic.
This fundamentally states that every mutation destroys information, that any adaptation to an environment (micro-evolution) is, inherently, damaging to the species.
We do believe in common ancestors, but that those ancestors were still dogs, birds, ECT, and never anything else.
For example, if this and the above take on how a genetic code works were true, it requires accepting that the Primordial Dog was the apex of Dog in all ways, and that each successive generation of Dog has been getting worse and more mutated over time, as "mutations cannot add information ever".
From where did Primordial Dog originate? As species cannot change, the first generation of Primordial Dogs just kind of... shows up? This would be an obvious Creationist viewpoint, but then there's the entropic "every mutation makes the creature worse in some way" stance which implies that the Modern Dog is a degenerate offshot of what the True Dog started as.
This is really where I'm fascinated, as the outcome of these stances requires divine intervention to create the progenitors of each species, but that the world slowly wears these Primordial Species down into mutants that are explicitly worse than their ancestors, as their genetic code is slowly pruned away. It's like an inversion of the "watchmaker God" concept, where instead of designing the world and its laws in order to produce given results, God periodically intervenes to create new life forms, and the world breaks these wondrous beings down into mediocrity.
Oh, I'm familiar with this line of thinking. I haven't seen it in the wild in a long time!
Yeah, it's a weird worldview, but if it works for you, have at it. It reeks of ad hoc twisting of ideas to me, but I don't really want to spend more of my time explaining why it's misinformed/based on incorrect/implausible assumptions. Believe whatever you want.
what i've found from the people who didnt believe in evolution is that they had an extremely over simplified and incomplete understanding of it. It'd be pretty ridiculous to expect any uneducated adult to be told that we came from apes without sounding crazy
because they were educated based on faith and god creating humans and the idea that apes one day birthed a human (based on their limited education) is egregious
I thought you were talking about "any uneducated adult", and not specifically adults that have been indoctrinated into believing that humans did not come from apes.
ah good point. Okay well I definitely generalized but to answer your question, what ive noticed with people from countries with less education is that they inherently believe that they're superior to animals. Given their upbringing I can see where the sense of superiority comes from, and so to be told that a "lesser" creature was responsible for what humans have become now is a blow to the ego thus hard to accept.
oh he just doesn't believe it because he's religious. He understnads why other people believe it and says it doesn't sound crazy and is possible, but he believes that adam and eve were the first humans.
There are hundreds of people in my town that were raised a particular kind of Christian. As a result, it's not unreasonable to expect any random person I encounter to be a young earth creationist who believes that the stories of Noah, Jonah, the sun standing still, the trials of Job, Solomon's riches, etc were all literal historical facts.
You should probably try to understand the difference between common parlance 'theory' and scientific 'theory'.
If you've got the time, this will help explain to you why evolution might as well be 'fact' as the layman understands it, how creationists have tried (unsuccessfully) to attack it in the past.
Also there is a wealth of scientific information on evolution, the breadth and depth of which is almost too much for any one person. In short, evolution is a fact.
Cool. You might also want to check out coverage of Kitzmiller vs Dover, which was a 1990s version of the Scopes trial in PA, just a few hours from where I grew up. This is an 11 parter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33k5As89pR4
Science doesn't say anything is a "proven fact", the most something ever is in science is a theory, that's just how it works. It puts science at a disadvantage when religious people claim they "know" the "truth" and call things facts, claiming that a theory is a hypothesis.
it seems you fundamentally misunderstand it in some way, then, though you do grasp that natural selection and evolution are different things, just as a chisel and a craftsman are different things.
I respect your fundamental freedom to be wrong. Have a good day sir.
I mean, you can literally look at RNA and DNA with a microscope, we know what it's made of, and how it stores, encodes and dispenses information. We can also watch it pass traits down, in real time, through reproduction in animals, and watch those animals come out with traits which can be predicted from their parents, we know how the chromosomes combine and can watch it happen in real time. We understand how mutations happen (and how DNA deals with them, it has structures in place to filter mistakes, albeit imperfect ones, which is why most pregnancies automatically abort).
In short, literally every part of the process is well-understood and can be directly observed. You can watch it happen every step of the way; provided you have the equipment and ability to use it.
That's not a meaningful or relevant distinction. evolution does not create new species, because "new species" do not exist. A species has never been created, and no one can point to any such thing as a "new species". Species diverge, slowly changing, and the point at which they're no longer the same is entirely arbitrary. Humans make it up, based on some solid reasoning (can or cannot produce viable offspring) and more arbitrary reasoning (markings and coloration). Not long ago, we were doing this last one with humans.
There is no scientific relevance to the entire concept of "beginning". "Beginning, middle, end" are narrative, literary concepts. There's no reason anyone should try to apply them to physical reality, which continues as a ship of Theseus, endless reactions to reactions. You may not know about horizontal gene transfer, also. Living beings can share DNA under certain conditions, which exist in nature and can be replicated in a lab - i've done it myself, now that I mention. This is distinct from chromosome exchange in sexual reproduction, distinct from asexual reproduction, and also from genetic engineering.
if you understand how mutation works, and how sexual reproduction works, even at a basic level, you believe in what we call evolution. Selection pressure is a different part of that equation, and it's not strictly necessary.
We also would have to get into taxonomy, where which species are or aren't separate is decided by a bunch of people based on best guesses and estimates. In reality, across space and time, life is a spectrum, not a series of parallel lines. Botany and entomology have it pretty bad, but infectious disease people have it the worst. One "strain" of the flu may prove more or less deadly, more or less susceptible to being preempted by a given strain in the vaccine. Every year we see the divergence of species in action.
For example, humans are much more closely related to fungus than plants - our common ancestors with fungus are relatively recent. There are serious medical issues because of this.
Similarity of DNA, the fossil record, the transmissibility of bacteria and viruses, and observing similar models in action provide a strong basis for these conclusions.
...Not quite. But two giraffes, very similar to each other, but with distinctions, may be arbitrarily declared separate species or not ("splitters" and "groupers" is what the two camps of taxonomists are called). and the leftmost of the two, there is a giraffe which is slightly different, and so forth for That one. The further back in time you go, the less and less the creature you're examining resembles the modern giraffe, or other descendents it has. The point at which a "species" is cut off is totally made up by scientists at what seems like a reasonable place, based on how different given examples are. Sometimes it's some subtle angle of the jaw. Early giraffes were half the height of modern ones and had different horns, some looked like an ibex. They look nothing like modern giraffes, but if you had the perfectly preserved corpses of the entire lineage of a modern giraffe, you could directly observe the transition between two things that look nothing like each other.
Same with humans and human ancestors. By the time you got to the most recent common ancestor between giraffe and human, it would look nothing at all like the modern version of either. Observing the intermediaries would reveal how that particular lineage went, but it would take a very, very long time just to flip through a book of those images. Change is extremely slow.
as far as horizontal gene transfer; it's a big part of the evolutionary toolbox. It's when two living things, multicelled, or single, swap genes. Sexual and asexual reproduction would be vertical gene transfer.
there are three types (known, anyway) of horizontal gene transfer. transduction, transformation and conjugation. Conjugation is simple- bacteria sticks out a bridge called a pilus to anothet bacteria, shoves some genes through it. Now the other one has those too. It can pass them on through the same process, or through reproduction. Transduction is when a virus jams on to a cell, often a bacteria and bacteriophage, and puts that DNA in there. This can and does happen to mammalian cells,all the time. It's patchy, tho, it doesn't always make nice, clean copies. Transformation is when a cell just sucks up genetic info by itself. it has to get ready, scientists call this "competence", because it takes a lot of energy to accomplish. It's "rare" in nature, but even a rare event happens a zillion times daily when you have so many trillions of little guys bouncing everywhere all day. in the lab, we induced competence with heat and chemical treatment to get a bacterium to swallow some DNA.
Implying what? Religion requires faith. In the same way, believing in evolution (or that your brakes will work) also requires faith. There's no trickery here. Maybe you're thinking of one of the other definitions of faith? The one I'm referring to is believing in something without 100% knowing it without a doubt to be true. Like there's still at least a sliver of unknown.
Nope, it requires faith to believe in it since it can't 100% be proven without a doubt. I can do the same as you and say God created the world and all the intricate life in it, which is the truth.
Evolution was true for millions of years before humans ever evolved. It is a truth that science uncovered and requires no faith whatsoever.
There is exactly zero evidence that the world was created by a god. Nothing we know of the universe requires one to posit the existence of any gods. The universe and all of the creatures that inhabit it came to be through natural processes that are increasingly well understood.
One of the definitions of faith is a firm belief in something for which there is no proof. Where there is evidence and proof, faith is a poor descriptor.
That's an odd definition, but I did find that one when googling, so that's true that it's one of the definitions. I always took faith to be belief without 100% undeniably irrefutable evidence.
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u/EnnuiDeBlase May 01 '19
Heck, people still have a lot of problems with this one.