Experts
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Agree
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Evolutionary Biologist, Writer, Atheism Activist
Agree
The Darwinian world-view [...] is the only known theory that could, in principle, solve the mystery of our existence. This makes it a doubly satisfying theory. A good case can be made that Darwinism is true, not just on this planet but all over the universe, wherever life may be found.
Psychology Professor
Agree
It's natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer. But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the earth. Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's highest callings. Our own bodies are riddled with quirks that no competent engineer would have planned but that disclose a history of trial-and-error tinkering: a retina installed backward, ... goose bumps that uselessly try to warm us by fluffing up long-gone fur.
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United States President
Agree
I believe in evolution, and I believe there's a difference between science and faith. That doesn't make faith any less important than science. It just means they're two different things. And I think it's a mistake to try to cloud the teaching of science with theories that frankly don't hold up to scientific inquiry.
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US Vice President, Democrat
Agree
[Regarding Intelligent Design] I refuse to believe the majority of people believe this malarkey!
U.S. Senator, Republican
Agree
I happen to believe in evolution. ... I respect those who think the world was created in seven days. Should it be taught as a science class? Probably not.
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World's Largest Encyclopedia
Agree
Advocates of intelligent design argue that it is a scientific theory, and seek to fundamentally redefine science to accept supernatural explanations. The unequivocal consensus in the scientific community is that [evolution by natural selection is true and that] intelligent design is not science.
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Neutral
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Law Professor
Neutral
Although I insist that God has always had the power to intervene directly in nature to create new forms, I am willing to be persuaded that He chose not to do so and instead employed secondary natural causes like random mutation and natural selection.
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Disagree
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Meteorologist
Mostly Disagree
Twenty years ago, as a PhD scientist, I intensely studied the evolution versus intelligent design controversy for about two years. And finally, despite my previous acceptance of evolutionary theory as "fact," I came to the realization that intelligent design, as a theory of origins, is no more religious, and no less scientific, than evolutionism.
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Largest Christian Church
Disagree
In the Catholic perspective, neo-Darwinians who adduce random genetic variation and natural selection as evidence that the process of evolution is absolutely unguided are straying beyond what can be demonstrated by science. Divine causality can be active in a process that is both contingent and guided. Any evolutionary mechanism that is contingent can only be contingent because God made it so.
President, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
Disagree
Given the human tendency toward inconsistency, there are people who will say they hold both positions. But you cannot coherently affirm the Christian-truth claim and the dominant model of evolutionary theory at the same time. Personally, I am a young-Earth creationist. I believe the Bible is adequately clear about how God created the world, and that its most natural reading points to a six-day creation that included not just the animal and plant species but the earth itself.
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Political Commentator
Disagree
"In my book Godless, I showed that Darwinism is the hoax of the century and, consequently, the core of the religion of liberalism…."
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Arguments
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If you
agree, then you
necessarily
disagree with:
Did complex life evolve through the process of natural selection?
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The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy increases over time, or that a closed system moves from an ordered state to a random state. Critics of evolution suggest that life itself is prima facie proof that evolution is flawed, since the opposite appears to be happening - life has evolved from primordial soup to sophisticated creatures like ourselves. Defenders of evolution say that this objection is based on a misunderstanding of entropy.
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In making these arguments [against evolution, Granville Sewell] simply ignored the vast literature addressing [the issues], so as to give the impression that logical fallacies obvious to you or me have somehow eluded our benighted colleagues in the life sciences. It is an arrogance typical of the ID movement; armchair philosophers believing they can refute in a day what thousands of scientists have built over the course of a century.
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But the second law of thermodynamics--at least the underlying principle behind this law--simply says that natural forces do not cause extremely improbable things to happen, and it is absurd to argue that because the Earth receives energy from the Sun, this principle was not violated here when the original rearrangement of atoms into encyclopedias and computers occurred.
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If you
agree, then you
necessarily
disagree with:
Did complex life evolve through the process of natural selection?
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Critics of the theory of evolution point to anomalies and gaps in the fossil record. Advocates of evolution say that if evolution was false, we would see vastly more contradictory fossil evidence.
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The distribution of fossils in space and in time are exactly what you would expect if evolution were a fact. There are millions of facts all pointing in the same direction and no facts pointing in the wrong direction. British scientist J.B.S. Haldane, when asked what would constitute evidence against evolution, famously said, "Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian." They've never been found. Nothing like that has ever been found. Evolution could be disproved by such facts.
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The fossil record is something that Darwinists have had to explain away, because what it shows is the sudden appearance of organisms that exhibit no trace of step-by-step development from earlier forms. And it shows that once these organisms exist, they remain fundamentally unchanged, despite the passage of millions of years-and despite climatic and environmental changes that should have produced enormous Darwinian evolution if the theory were true.
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If you
agree, then you
necessarily
disagree with:
Did complex life evolve through the process of natural selection?
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There are two contradictory accounts of the age of earth. One is the scientific account, which claims that the earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old. The other is a biblical account, which claims that the earth is approximately 6000 years old. The scientific position is that there is overwhelming evidence for their view, while Christian Science points to contradictions and anomalies in that position.
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Is there any possibility within the limits of science as we know it, that this earth is between 6000 and 10000 years old? The answer is no, not unless somebody has fooled with the laws of chemistry and physics. ... To accept that the geological evidence could tell us that the earth is as old as it is and yet that the Earth was actually created 6000 years ago requires that [the] creator [is] a charlatan, and I don't reject that on scientific grounds, I reject that on theological grounds.
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Nearly a dozen natural phenomena which conflict with the evolutionary idea that the universe is billions of years old...
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If you
agree, then you
possibly
agree with:
Did complex life evolve through the process of natural selection?
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Currently, Earth is the only planet in the universe known to have life. The ongoing SETI program monitors electromagnetic radiation from outer space in the hope of detecting an intelligent signal.
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Indirect Arguments
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If you
agree, then you
necessarily
disagree with:
Is the earth approximately 6000 years old? (as opposed to 4.5 billion)
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Radioactive dating works by measuring the presence of a particular isotope in some material, and then extrapolating the material's age by estimating the abundance of that isotope when the material was first created and knowing the isotope's rate of decay. Such isotopes are said to have a half-life, meaning that exactly half of the isotope will decay over a certain period of time.
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It has become increasingly clear that these radiometric dating techniques agree with each other and as a whole, present a coherent picture in which the Earth was created a very long time ago. ... Many Christians have been led to distrust radiometric dating and are completely unaware of the great number of laboratory measurements that have shown these methods to be consistent. Many are also unaware that Bible-believing Christians are among those actively involved in radiometric dating.
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...exciting new developments in RATE projects are confirming our basic hypothesis: that God drastically speeded up decay rates of long half-life nuclei during the Genesis Flood and other brief periods in the earth's short history. Such accelerated nuclear decay collapses the uniformitarian "ages" down to the Scriptural timescale of thousands of years.
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If you
agree, then you
necessarily
agree with:
Is the earth approximately 6000 years old? (as opposed to 4.5 billion)
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Christians are divided as to whether the Bible should be read as the literal word of God, or whether there is room for interpretation, taking into account the time and context in which the Bible was written.
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[Fundamentalism] accepts the literal reality of an ancient, out-of-date cosmology simply because it is found expressed in the Bible... [It] is dangerous, for it is attractive to people who look to the Bible for ready answers to the problems of life. ... Without saying as much in so many words, fundamentalism actually invites people to a kind of intellectual suicide.
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I also believe science is such that these are theories of humans, so if it’s a choice between God’s clear word and humans’ reason, then I’m going to take God’s word over it. That’s why I am a young-age creationist as opposed to an old-age creationist.
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If you
agree, then you
possibly
agree with:
Is intelligent extraterrestrial life common in our galaxy?
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Scientists continue to investigate whether Mars has ever supported life. Aspects of Mars that make it less hospitable for life are that it is too cold (being too far from the Sun), and has a very thin atmosphere (in part due to its weaker gravity). This would make the planet struggle to maintain liquefied water, which is a necessity for life on earth. In addition, unlike earth, the planet lacks a magnetosphere, without which delicate compounds would be destroyed by solar radiation.
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I believe there is extremely high probability that microbial subsurface life exists on Mars.
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Our sense has been that while Mars is a lousy environment for supporting life today, long ago it might have more closely resembled Earth, but this result suggests quite strongly that even as long as four billion years ago, the surface of Mars would have been challenging for life. No matter how far back we peer into Mars' history, we may never see a point at which the planet really looked like Earth.
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Comments
Collective
Agree
The theory of evolution is supported by the vast majority of scientists. That evolution can work at all in principle is a fact, proven by examples of micro-evolution and computer simulations. Peppered moths in England have evolved from being predominately light to predominately dark, as soot covered trees provided camouflage to the latter, protecting them from predators. Genetic algorithms that run on computers are able to solve problems, which can only work by relying on the evolutionary principles of random mutation and natural selection. Creationists continue to argue that while evolution in small time frames or artificial conditions is true, that "macro-evolution" is false. These are based on: * False claims that there are no "intermediate" fossils. * Outlandish claims that radioactive dating is inaccurate. * Confused claims that evolution is theoretically impossible, with the assertion that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics. Organisms also show the hallmarks of evolution, that wouldn't exist if creationism were true. Why would a creator have created the human appendix, that clearly has no function? Or flightless birds? The theory of evolution has an excellent explanation in these cases - that they are artifacts of former adaptations that no longer were selected for in their environment. The New Zealand Kiwi for example, has no natural predators, which can explain why its flightless. The sheer diversity of life, including bacteria that live in incredibly hot deep sea vents, has a logical evolutionary explanation in terms of adaptation. In contrast, creationists have to invent extremely ad-hoc reasons as to why such lifeforms exist. Why would a God create such creatures? Finally, Creationists generally treat the theory of evolution as contradicting the biblical account of the universe. That is the sole basis for their position. Not science.
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Disagree
Evolutionists continue to treat Darwinism as fact, and forget that like anything else that science tells us, it is just a theory. And unlike other theories that you can readily test, evolution has never been directly observed. It relies on considerable conjecture.
Life is extremely complex. Yet this incredible order is supposed to have occurred just by chance.
How did the human eye evolve? At a certain point, our ancestors had no eyes. Now half an eye, I'm sure we all agree, is useless. This is a big problem. There is no intermediate form, no partial eye, which has any purpose that would be naturally selected for. This problem of "local maxima" is a well known mathematical problem that crops up in engineering. This is when you want to increase the output of a function, but when any small change to the function's input results in a *decrease* in output. In this situation, you're "stuck" on top of the tallest hill in a local region where you have nowhere to go but down. There are much taller hills in the wider region you want to get to, but they are unfortunately impossible to reach without descending the hill you're on. Now, I guess you could have a random mutation that suddenly created an eye (jumped from the top of one mountain to another), but according to quantum theory the probability of that happening is one in infinity.
According to evolutionists, the fossil records show that many species, such as some sharks, have not evolved for hundreds of millions of years. This is an embarrassing hole in evolutionary theory. The earth has changed considerably during this time, yet no evolution has occurred? They try to explain this with the theory of "punctuated equilibrium" (where evolution occurs in bursts between long pauses). You can't find a finer example of ad-hoc band-aids to make a theory fit the evidence than this since Ptolemy.
Creationists could keep picking obvious holes in evolutionary theory all day, but we understand fundamentally that life is not as blind scientists think they see it - a string of random chances. Its is full of meaning and purpose at every level.
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Individual
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Disagree
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gave their takeonit
on 05 Jan 2009
Disagree
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Editorial
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gave their takeonit
on 13 Sep 2008
Editorial Comment
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