::Reads the title, slaps forehead and groans:::fungah:
Do you have any further comment? Why don’t you contribute?
This is an excellent article. It helped improve my understanding of evolutionary biology, and was an entertaining read. A warning: don’t read the comments unless you want to slap your forehead and groan.
This speaks for itself, I don’t even have to read the link.
THis is a stupid thread thats only looking for a fight. I shouldn’t HAVE to contribute to it, in any intelligent and/or reasonable world.
No, it’s not. That’s the article name, so it was wholly appropriate to title the thread for it… Read the article, and address the issues. So you’re a creationist, I’ll assume. If you address the issues, nobody is going to bite your head off. If you weren’t interested in this sort of thing, you shouldn’t have posted in the first place just to “groan” at the title.
Also, I certainly didn’t create this thread to provoke anyone. If I was a provocateur, I would take a position that would be offensive to both creationists and evolutionists. Say… posting an article on the “aquatic ape” theory, and endorsing it.
The Creator of Forum Warz can’t be all that bad. 
What does Evil Trout have to do with anything?
meh, people can believe what they want to believe…i prefer to believe in Jesus and what the bible tells me, other people can believe in what science tells them.
different strokes
The only things I believe in are money and my trusty side arm. >ll(
I’d say that view belittles every single advancement of knowledge ever made by anyone. Scientific knowledge isn’t relative. Granite’s made of the same molecules whether you believe in Jesus or Ray Bradbury.
People are free to believe whatever they like. How can you possibly tell people that they MUST believe something because you can prove it? Thought police? If someone chooses to put faith over science, that’s their choice and however much that rattles you, as part of a democratic society, you must respect that choice.
To put it in another perspective: I prefer to believe that most people out there are good, well-meaning citizens of our world, despite constant evidence to the contrary. I prefer to believe it because it makes my life easier and more comfortable. If you want to argue that I should face up to reality, I would tell you that my way of thinking is better for my own well-being, and I prefer it to what is largely considered “reality”. Am I stupid for doing this?
One of the problems of “creation vs. evolution” is that the two are not mutually exclusive. As far as I see it, evolution is simply the methodology of creation. No, I don’t believe that Genesis is meant to be taken verbatim to be the truth. I prefer to see the greatness of God in science itself, and there are plenty of fervently religious scientists who take a similar view without having to disparage science or religion.
The problem is <b>not</b> which one to believe or which one is “better”. The problem is when people tried to push creationism as a <b>science</b> to drive it into a <b>public secular education system</b> by calling it intelligent design which is just stupid ok
The thread should have been named “15 Answers to ID Nonsense” because creationists are not necessarily proponents of ID
That makes more sense, certainly. Creationism isn’t a scientific theory since it isn’t provable, and science can’t tell anyone how the whole thing got started. (E.g. if there was a Big Bang, how did that get started?) I’m fine with keeping creationism out of science class.
do Jews believe in the whole earth is 6000 years old thing? i mean obviously if you’re not practicing you probably don’t, and if you’re orthodox you do, but on the whole?
Actually, it’s not that simple. Even in Orthodoxy (which I follow), there isn’t a consensus there. Plenty of commentators try to deal with the idea that the world is exactly 5768 years old, and while there are a lot of adherents to that, there’s a growing momentum towards seeing the world as its apparent age of billions of years old while still being guided by God. It’s controversial but by no means a tiny movement. And it isn’t recent, either; centuries ago prominent and mainstream rabbis were proposing ideas involving the world being “created and destroyed” many times over, for example, or the idea that each day of creation represented a thousand years.
The Jewish Press, probably the biggest North American Orthodox newspaper, has a continuing battle in its letters column about this. 
Can I QFT? Is that still cool?
I’ll fully support that line of thinking. Biblical literalists irk me more than anything.
I’m an evolutionist, but my view of creation goes like this…
Imagine you could travel back in time to the era when man had just invented writing. How would you describe the Big Bang, the formation of the solar system and the beginning of life and evolution on our planet, to the people who lived back then? If you used the terms and knowledge we have at our disposal nowadays they would never get it. The only way to even have a communication about those things with those people would be going (very) metaphoric. Which is what I think the bible sounds like.
Now, I don’t want to imply alien visitors, time travelers or any kind of invisible friends with that idea. I just like to fantasize that someday hardcore creationists would look at Genesis less literally, like I do.
I understand your line of reasoning and I toy with the idea of subscribing to it. The problem is how do we know what’s a metaphor and what’s not? Those hardcore creationists dig their feet in the ground so hard because, and I assume, that it’s an all or nothing deal. If your taught your whole life that something is the complete and perfect Word of God that you should live by and some guy comes around teaching in the school’s a theory thaht puts doubt on that…that’s something like a personal attack on your faith. At the very least, from personal experience it can make you more than a tad bit uncomfortable.
So I understand why the homeschooling movement has gained more traction in Christian households, even though I think it’s a rather extreme response. Better for their kids to never be confronted with something which could cause them to even think they see a chink in the Biblical armor and turn away into damnation. That’s a siren song of course, because they’ll find out sooner or later but it’s understandable.
The problem with those that say the Bible is the Word of God and should not be violated is that very few of them actually read the book cover to cover and understand all of the rules. How many people wear two different types of fibers in their clothing? They go to Hell. Eat lobster? Go to Hell. Et cetera.
But do they really think everything in the Bible is literal? That’s when you get people coming at them with verses in Leviticus about how you have to stone to death people who curse their parents.
Judaism has always held that the Bible is a template or “manual” to life rather than an always literal retelling, and there’s a wealth of oral information which tempers or totally changes the meaning of many things. The commentators run the gamut from almost-absolute literalists to rationalists like Maimonides who say, for example, that angels don’t actually exist. And all of them are accepted and discussed. I will say that most of the commandments in the Bible are at least followed to a reasonable degree by Orthodox Jews (for example, I don’t wear wool and linen in the same garment, nor do I eat seafood).
I should also note that the Old Testament itself makes absolutely no mention of either Heaven or Hell, which is something that very few people know.