Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Fun with Polls What do you believe in?

Well, I got involved in another forum a while back where the question of evolution vs. creation was discussed, and I was kind of surprised at the results and the ensuing arguments. So, I thought I'd ask you what you take for granted, just to be able to compare things.

Edit:
It was pointed out to me that I forgot an option: That you don't have to believe because there's enough proof for ID. Sorry about that. Last time I discussed that topic, I was told that it's quite easy to prove the progress of things (like how creatures changed over time), but incredibly hard, if not impossible, to either prove or disprove the existence of a Creator. Which is why I forgot this option. Sorry about that. I did not mean disrespect to any fraction.

A very interesting poll, Mellie.

Personally I think it's a good thing to be careful before you say that you know that something is true. Yes, there are some things that are so overwhelmingly probable that it is quite all right to say that we know that they are true. It is, for example, overwhelmingly probable that the Earth is round. The members of the Flat Earth Society are fighting an uphill battle if they want to change school books so that schools teach children that the roundness of the Earth is an unproven theory.

Other things are harder to know, and various religious statements definitely belong among those. I have an old relative who once said, when I was a kid, that even if she had grown up among heathens who had never even heard about God or Jesus or the Bible, she herself would nevertheless have been not only a Christian but a Pentecostalist, because God would have spoken to her heart and revealed the truth of Pentecostalism to her. I remembered thinking that that was a bold statement of hers, because she had grown up surrounded by Pentecostalists who had taught her that Pentecostalism was the only revealed truth of God. To herself my relative is a Pentecostalist because Pentecostalism is the revealed and hallowed truth, but to me she is a Pentecostalist because she has been brought up to believe that way, and she has lived in a massively Pentecostalist small town all her life.

But while it is easy to poke fun at some religious beliefs, I also think that many people are too uncritical when it comes to various claims made in the name of science. For example, what exactly do you mean if you say that you know that the Big Bang really happened? A point I tried to make in my recent "The Big Bang and the Universe" series in the Off Topic folder here is that astronomers themselves don't fully understand the Big Bang and can't fully describe it. Astronomers themselves don't really know what the Big Bang truly was. So if you answered that you know that the Big Bang really happened, are you sure that you know what the Big Bang really was?

I want to underscore, however, that I personally haven't heard of a single astronomer who rejects what I would call "a Big Bang universe". Such a universe is one that came into existence at a certain time in the past and has been changing and evolving ever since. The way I understand astronomy, there is a massive amount of evidence that the universe is between ten and twenty billion years old (the current best estimate is 13.75 billion years) and that it has been expanding and cooling ever since it was "born".

Similarly, there is a massive amount of evidence that life on Earth has changed and diversified because of evolution. However, in the same way that astronomers don't understand the details of the Big Bang, biologists don't know how life on Earth actually came into existence.

As a non-religious person, I don't think that God has anything to do with either the emergence of life on Earth or the beginning of our universe. But I don't know that God wasn't involved, and I won't claim that I have such knowledge. I will, however, definitely say that I believe that no God was involved.

And of course, since I grew up close to people who said that only Pentecostalism was the only revealed word of God, so that, by extension, God himself was really a Pentecostalist God, I will always ask, "Which God?", when people say that they believe that God created the universe. I will always wonder if they mean the Jewish God or the Muslim God or a Hindu God or the Baptist God or the Mormon God or another God, maybe even the Pentecostalist God, and then I always want to know how they can know that it was their own God and no other God who created the universe.

Ann

I had a hard time choosing between your options. I had a problem with your definition of Intelligent Design:

The problem is the phrase "everything evolved."

That is not how the people I know who subscribe to Intelligent Design would describe it. Most of them do NOT believe that people and animals evolved from more primitive creatures through a process of natural selection over millions of years. Their beliefs are much closer to creationists, i.e. God created man at a specific time less than 6,000 years ago, in his own image. They accept the idea of evolution on a small scale, as long as it applies to animals and not humans. They accept the existence of fossils, but dispute their age as given by scientists.

I finally chose to say that I "believe" in evolution. That is not to say that evolution is a religion (even though some of my students claim that it is). I have not personally examined the mountains of evidence that went into developing the Theory of Evolution, but I believe the scientists who have spent their lives studying the evidence, and they have come up with the best explanation they could. However, my belief in evolution does not rule out a belief in God. God does not have to personally direct each breath we take; He has set up a mechanism so that our bodies usually breathe on their own. He also does not have to personally direct each raindrop; He has set up certain conditions that bring about rain. So it is conceivable that God could set up the mechanism of evolution and use it to create humanity. Many Christian denominations accept this and have no conflict with the Theory of Evolution.

However, it is impossible to believe in both the Theory of Evolution ("people and animals evolved from more primitive creatures through a process of natural selection over millions of years") AND the literal word-for-word truth of the Bible. If you insist that every word in the Bible is true, you must believe that the world and everything in it was created in seven days. I will not argue with you because I will never change your mind. If you believe that the Bible was written by inspired but imperfect humans and it is colored by their perceptions and the ages that they lived in, then it is possible to accept evolution as the means by which God brought about creation. And if you are a complete nonbeliever, you will have no conflict at all.

I do not mean to argue religion with people, and this is not the place to do it. I also know that I have not expressed this as well as I would like. But I felt that the options listed in the poll did not really fit and it bothered me enough that I had to comment.

Heh - but I believe in fractions

sorry, I know I should resist temptation but.... the devil made me do it.

c.

Shame on you, Carol, for that infraction!

PJ

Just feeling fractious, Pam.

c.

*sigh* If you find any typos, you may keep them. *grumbles*
Note to self: factions, not fractions...

Lara, I really am apologising now. It's one of my many weaknesses - never ignore a possible one-liner.

As for typos - I believe I hold the record for more typos per line than any FoLC out there.

c.

I've said know rather than believe because I think that evolution doesn't NEED my belief to be true.

It works, if you do the right experiments with bacteria you can see it happen over a few weeks, it's pretty obvious that it is NOT intelligent in any sense of the word (compare the structure of the human and octopus eyes for one of many examples of where vertebrate evolution went badly wrong), and, in short, it's just something that's there.

It's a combination of natural forces that occasionally manage to come up with something beautiful, and also produces endless horror stories like drug-resistant superbugs, BSE, AIDs, etc.

It doesn't need my belief. It doesn't need me to like it or hate it. It's just there. There may or may not be some sort of supreme being that got the ball rolling - I doubt it, but I have no way to know - but whatever may have started it, the process itself is NOT intelligent.

Originally posted by Marcus Rowland:

Marcus, I'm with you - like you, I think that evolution doesn't need my belief to be true. In fact, I strongly believe that evolution doesn't need my belief to be true. So I believe in evolution.

But I wholeheartedly agree with you on this: what is true is true, quite regardless of whether I or anyone else believe in it or not. In fact, that is a constant source of wonder to me: the universe it what it is, and it doesn't give two hoots about whether or not I know, or can even remotely imagine, what it is.

Wow.

Ann

Belatedly remember to post this - those eyes work better than yours do, or would if they were the same size!

I believe that we're all part of God's great big science experiment. He started it with the Big Bang (or whatever caused the universe to be created), and he "tweaks" it now and then. It gets to be an amusing thought when I think of a great big hand poking at genomes and such. (Think of Monty Python...)

This is where I subscribe to the great giant cloud, for lack of a better phrase coming to mind. It's all the same god/supreme being. It's just different names and faces. For instance, if you ask 10 people to describe 1 particular person, you'll get 10 different descriptions. In this case, you get many descriptions, including multiple beings on some cases, but they pretty much boil down to the (mostly) same tenets as far as morals and ethics go.

My argument for this is that it's God. Who's to say that his day is 24 hours? If you look at just our solar system, a day can be 176 Earth days (Mercury), 117 Earth days (Venus), 24 hrs (Earth), 24 hrs 40 min (Mars), 9 hrs 55 min (Jupiter), 10 hrs 33 min (Saturn), 17 hrs 14 min (Uranus), or 17 hrs 6 min (Neptune). And of course there was no one but Him to witness it. His day may be an eon or two!

Now, mind you, these are the thoughts that go through my lil head. They amuse me. I shall never attempt to sway anyone's decisions... that's how religious discussions got banned at work for awhile. *whistlse*

But where does that differ from creationism?

They claim that all animals were created as described in the bible and brought forth offspring of their own kind, with a rather lax definition of "kind". (As in, all felines might or might not be of the same "kind", as are all equines and so on.) They claim that the world was created a few thousand years ago because, if you add the ages of the men from Adam to now when they sired their firstborn sons, you'll come up with roughly that number. They also usually claim that the world was created in 7 days as described in Genesis. If you lool up a few sites with that kind of belief, you will find that the people there refer to themselves as creationists or even creationist scientists.

Cookiesmom's aquaintances are, as far as I can tell, creationists.

I would say that all creationists believe in Intelligent Design, but not all believers in Intelligent Design are creationists.

And, I think it is equally true that all atheists believe in Evolution*, but not all believers in Evolution* are atheists. (Case in point: theistic evolutionists, who believe in both Evolution AND Intelligent Design!)

I found an answer to the question (How does Intelligent Design differ from creationism?) on, of all things, "Yahoo Answers!" I thought this person did a fairly good job of explaining it:

"Intelligent Design is the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as the result of intelligence" (Dr. William Dembski). Or, the definition on IntelligentDesign.org: “The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process...” That's it; it says nothing of who the creator is and how he/she/it/they did it. Intelligent Design encompasses every "creation" story, even aliens seeding life on this planet (directed panspermia). Theistic evolution also fits under that umbrella (the creator used evolution to create). The God of the Bible is just one possible candidate. Some creationists (like those at Answers In Genesis) don’t like the ID movement because they say it divorces the Creator from the creation.


* NOTE: When I say "Evolution" I am not referring to what is commonly known as "microevolution" (changes within a species). Everyone, including creationists, acknowledge the existance of microevolution. I am referring to the theory of "macroevolution" (the idea that the changes seen in microevolution eventually produce new species.)

I don't agree with that. Because ID means that everything did some evolution (at least microevolution) according to Gods great plan. Quite a few creationists (like those on AiG) believe that Microevolution without any special sort of guidance took place, for all animals evolved from those Noah took with him in his ark. And since there's no place in Genesis where it's stated that God made animals change according to that great plan of His, they probably won't even argue that point.

Your definition of Intelligent Design sounds more to me like creationism than ID.

ID doesn't say anything happened according to God's great plan, because ID doesn't say anything about God at all. ID makes no attempt to identify the designer.

Microevolution is indisputable. Bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics is a form of microevolution. Everyone agrees that microevolution happens. Proponents of ID would say plants and animals were DESIGNED so as to give them the greatest degree of adaptability to any ever changing environment. Creationists and theistic evolutionists would say GOD designed life that way. Evolutionists (what they used to call "Darwinian Evolutionists", although that phrase is becoming less popular) would say that it was an incredibly fortuitous chain of random events which resulted in life having this amazing ability.

Now, if you are talking about macroevolution, then the belief that this happened according to God's great plan would be theistic evolution.

Some proponests of ID do not believe in macroevolution. (This would include the creationists.) Others *do*. They believe that certain features of life were designed, but once the design was in place, early species did evolve into later species. (This would include the theistic evolutionists). But either way, although the subgroups of creationists and theistic evolutionists believe in God, ID does not attempt to identify the designer. Some proponents of ID are agnostic, while others believe not in God (or the God of the Bible), but in some sort of impersonal intelligent force or power.

Fractious factions!!! (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Well, you know what I believe, Mellie. I did have a hard time picking an answer though. While I do believe that God created the earth, I'm not entirely sure I think it was literally done in 7 days. I ended up picking the one about I don't have to believe because God doesn't lie. But I was hmmming the whole time, but, you know, I had to see how people were voting.

Marcus, what the heck is that thing? Octopus??

I guess I malphrased my statement. Make that into this instead:
"Because ID means that everything did some evolution (at least microevolution) according to some creator's great plan - be it God, Allah, Quetzalcoatl, Pastafarian or {insert creator name here}."

Also, isn't there a clear line between creationism, ID'ism, theistic evolutionism?

Not really; they sort of overlap.

Creationism is usually used for those who believe in the Biblical creation story. Young Earth Creationism teaches that the earth was created by God approx. 6,000 years ago, in six 24-hour days.* Old Earth Creationism (OEC) looks at the word for "day" in the Bible and notes that the same word is used elsewhere for "period of time", thus the 6 "days" are taken to mean 6 divisions of time which could each be millions of years long. Some OEC proponents believe the earth is old, but life is young; others believe God created life over the course of the earth's long history.

The main difference between OEC and Theistic Evolution, as I can see, is that OEC says God created the various species uniquely, while Theistic Evolution says the species evolved but that this does not mean God was not involved. Although, even in Theistic Evolution there are differing points of view as to how involved God was. Some say He actively guided the process of evolution (thus, it is not "random"), others say it *is* a random process, but that God, in his infinite wisdom, is the creator of the process itself, and knew in advance what the end result would be. Either way, theistic evolution believes that evolution is the tool God used to create mankind.

ID differs from creationism in that ID does not insist on God as the creator, and ID allows for (but does not insist on) the existence of macroevolution.

ID differs from theistic evolution in that ID does not insist on God as the creator, and ID allows for (but does not insist on) the absense of macroevolution.

ID differs from what I'll call "Darwinian evolution" in that ID does not insist on (although it does allow for) the existence of macroevolution, and, more specifically, ID states that at there are some features of life which appear to have been designed. Well, actually, Evolutionists readily admit that life "appears" to have been designed. Francis Crick is famous for saying, "Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved." Entire books have been written by evolutionists explaining why evolution is an adequate explanation for the appearance of design in life, and entire books have been written by ID proponents explaining why evolution is totally inadequate.

Sorry for the long post. I was a Biology major in college, and I have always found this a fascinating subject!

*edited to add (after reading Terry's posts, below) that not all YEC believers say the earth is 6,000 old, but all say it is relatively young.

Hmmmm. I'm not passionately interested in evolution, which means I have so much less to say about this subject than I have about astronomy. Because of my somewhat lukewarm interest in evolution, I'm even less interested in ID.

The way I see it, however, there can be two reasons for a person to believe in Intelligent Design rather than in evolution. ID can be regarded by its supporters to be an intellectually stringent and highly scientific and coherent way of explaining the world. Or it can recognized as, but not acknowledged as, pure religon dressed up in scientific clothing.

The scientific reason for supporting ID would be that this theory is the one that its supporters find most scientifically plausible when it comes to explaining the emergence and diversity of life forms, more so than the theory of evolution. The way I understand it, that is how most ID proponents describe themselves: they are ID supporters because this is the position that, to them, describes reality in the most scientifically accurate way.

(One argument for ID is that the human eye is so complicated that it could not have come into existence without the help of a creator, so it must have been created from scratch rather than having evolved gradually. I think Marcus was arguing against this position with his picture of a tiny octopus, whose eyes don't resemble the human eyes at all, but work better than ours.)

Anyway, I think it is perfectly intellectually legitimate to be a supporter of ID if you honestly believe that the scientific arguments for this position are better than the arguments for evolution. (Of course I'd expect an honest ID supporter to be willing to reconsider his position if a supporter of evolution can present arguments for evolution that are better than the ID supporter's arguments for ID.)

But if there is no clear dividing line between ID and creationism, then I can't regard ID as a scientific position or a scientific belief at all. Because then the main arguments for ID can't be scientific but religious, and then ID is not a scientific position but a religious one.

Let me slightly amend that. There is only so much we humans can know. It is acceptable, indeed sometimes necessary, to say that you believe rather than know something.

But if you are a creationist, then you believe that the biblical story of the creation is the accurate one. This is not a scientific position, in my opinion. Consider what Genesis actually says about the creation of the world and the life on it:

This is a very weird description of the creation of the "sky", as if it was some sort of bubble of air suspended in the middle of an ocean of water. I don't see how anyone can argue that this is the best scientific description of how the Earth's atmosphere came into existence.

But Genesis contains even weirder statements:

Here in verse eleven, God creates vegetation and fruit trees on the Earth. But now look here:

What is going on here? Well, God creates the Sun and the Moon. But wait a minute. That means that the Earth not only existed before the Sun did, which is contrary to everything that astronomers believe about the formation of stars and planets, but it also means that the Earth was a living planet, full of vegetaion and fruit trees, before the Sun even existed. Okay, but it has been scientifically proven that most kinds of vegetation, and certainly all fruit trees, need sunlight in order to process the nutrients that they need to survive. According to the Bible there can have been no sunlight when the first fruit trees bore their first fruit because there was no Sun back then. But even so we should accept the Biblical statement that life forms that are totally dependent on sunlight existed before the Sun did? What kind of scientific argument is that?

Yes, I know. It says in verse three of Genesis that God created light, even though this light did not come from the Sun. So this light that had no source would have been enough to provide the fruit trees with the light they craved? Oh, but after God had created the Sun, this source-less light disappeared and was replaced by sunlight - not that the Bible tells us so, but it must have happened since the source-less light is gone now, and we have only sunlight left? But that light without a source must have existed and it must have kept the first trees alive and well, since the Bible tells us so?

Really. This is not a scientific argument. This does not make scientific sense.

If the ID proponents can't separate themselves and their beliefs from the beliefs of creationists, then I don't see how the ID people can claim to be supporters of science at all.

Ann