Winstonm, on 2011-March-03, 19:21, said:
The bible supports the idea of concrete impossibilities being performed:
Yes, it does, but not in Mt 18:19. That is about the power to forgive sins, or not. Also, incidentally, there are 4 or 5 people in the passage, not two, the "two or three witnesses" and the "two disciples". The dangers of quoting out of context.
You would have done better with Mt 17:20. This makes it clear that the likelihood of God answering your prayers is tied directly to the faith and holiness of the one doing the asking. Indeed, God is not "required" to answer any prayer, but he is much more likely to answer if you are particularly holy. The sad fact of the matter is that many, if not most, of "professed Christians" struggle to have real faith, in much the same way that the disciples struggled to have real faith. But at any rate, the message of scripture here is that one should look for a small number of very holy individuals who perform many miracles. Even the Apostles failed to perform a miracle because they lacked sufficient faith.
Winstonm, on 2011-March-03, 19:21, said:
And yet you support the idea of miracles but are offended by the idea of evolution by natural selection being taught in public schools?
I'm not anti-evolution. I just don't think that one should have an argument between adults by indoctrinating children. That is dangerous ground. I was merely refuting Passed out's statement that teaching "science" in science class means you have to teach evolution, there is more than enough science to go around.
Further, evolution is on the second tier of scientific theories for three reasons. (1) It lacks predictive power. (2) Key elements have yet to be tested. (3) It is unlikely to be properly falsifiable in the time-scale of our lives, since the majority of evidence has already happened, and the emergence of a new species is likely to take an experiment lasting at least hundreds of years.
Regarding (2), it is clear that the current "dogma" of evolutionists, that mutation causes new genes causes speciation, cannot be true as it stands. Mostly, because it takes too long. Studies with e.coli bacteria have shown that after 20,000 generations, there was not a single new gene. For a higher animal like a human this is a huge problem, as 20 000 generations of ecoli is about a decade, 20000 generations of humans is roughly the entire lifetime of our species. Of course, its not clear that its strictly scalable. The essential problem is that most organisms have incredibly sophisticated ways of repairing damage to the genome. Estimates suggest that fewer than 1 in 1000 mutations will actually be allowed to continue, most being eliminated by enforced cell death. All of the classic examples of evolution, like the butterflies, are only changes in gene expression. That is, there is an allele that already exists that is made more common by selective pressure. To date, science has produced not a single example of a viable mutation. And we have tried quite hard. More troubling still is that evolution does not seem to be the gradual process that is theorised, the fossil record has periods of great stability followed by rapid change. Finally, less than 2% of the human genome actually codes for proteins in the Human body. We don't really understand at all what the other 98% does. Moreover, we are finding out all kind of interesting things about DNA all the time. For example, it is possible for mental states to affect gene expression, particularly in the immune system. Lonely people build more bacterial defences, but fewer viral ones. It seems possible that experience could affect the genes that are expressed in reproduction, and reduce a large fraction of the apparent randomness in evolution. E.g. Perhaps if you are often hungry you express genes for a smaller size in your offspring.
In light of these various issues, its naive to imagine that evolution as currently professed in popular science is "correct". It is almost definitely "wrong" in the sense that evolution is definitely not gradual, is probably not as dependent on random mutation as thought, and may indeed depend far more on RNA than DNA.
Compared to High energy physics, where our theories compute quantities to ten or more significant figures, and a difference in one part in ten to the fifteen deviation from the theory can be an "anomaly", it really doesn't look that impressive.
. Chemistry is better, but still can seldom predict things to better than 1%. Evolution is still a theory in massive flux, and arguments among biologists about its mechanisms are ongoing. Now, that doesn't mean it didn't happen, because it certainly did, but it seems weird to put it on a pedestal as a supreme scientific achievement when we only understand a tiny bit of how it works.
The physics is theoretical, but the fun is real. - Sheldon Cooper
Help
