My good friend and writer of the wonderful Minority Report blog went to America oh, a few decades back and came back with the memory of a car bumper sticker that read “Subvert the Dominant Paradigm”. Genius. It took me until Islamophobia in the West assumed the rhetorical position of Nazism before I finally began to understand its full meaning.
I don’t usually like to chuck away dominant paradigms. One of them is the paradigm of an unshifting ground beneath your moving body. It’s kind of helpful to go about one’s daily life knowing that when you plant your next footfall, you will not end up spiralling through space or falling to the earth’s core.
A more obvious example would be the idea that what goes up, must come down. Assuming of course that whatever it is doesn’t exceed the escape velocity of the earth’s gravitational field of about 25,000 mph (you can tell I remembered that and didn’t have to google it - I’m using imperial measurements). And what goes down, usually goes down pretty quickly and depending on the height it starts from, breaks. It’s what stops most people stepping off the top of buildings to avoid having to take the stairs. Combine that with the first paradigm and you have the ability to walk to your nearest bus stop without questioning the world around you with every step.
A less sensible paradigm is that all Muslims are terrorists. Let’s face it. I’ve just strengthened that bond, just by juxtaposing those two words, haven’t I? I mean, don’t most people now think “terrorist” first, when they hear Muslim, even if they don’t actually feel that way? It’s a lousy paradigm and one which after just a little pondering, proves itself to be a construct of media hype and government agendas.
A more controversial paradigm, but one which is most strongly associated with extremists is evolution. Extremists like Dawkins for example. I think evolution is broken. I’ve tried to understand it, but it makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever.
Evolution doesn’t explain how life started.
Evolution doesn’t explain how incredibly complex systems came to be after a series of incremental, random mutations in genetic code. I remember reading an explanation by Dawkins of how an eye could evolve in stages. It all made sense until you worked out the odds.
It’s like saying that enough earthquakes would eventually create magnificent architecture or more accurately, that an earthquake would introduce a positive genetic enhancement to the Sydney Opera House.
It’s like saying that flying enough aeroplanes into enough buildings would eventually cause buildings to strengthen against such attacks by themselves.
It doesn’t explain how fish came to the land. Assuming that we have finally rejected Lamarckian dogma for the twaddle that it was, then organisms cannot know what will be a useful mutation and should not be able to pre-adapt so that their organs are already fully formed before they leave their old, watery environment to make their home on dry land.
Even natural selection doesn’t always mean “survival of the fittest”, otherwise you wouldn’t get animals protecting the weak amongst their own.
How did they know they were meant to be almost 50% as strong again to withstand gravity? How did their gills become lungs? How did their fins, disconnected from their spines in the case of the closest possible match, become connected to their spines and form new bones to become feet? How did the open excretion systems turn into complete kidneys, miracles unto themselves? How did their skin adapt to cope with ultraviolet rays? And why didn’t the alleged transitional forms die out as interim models, with partly formed organs as not optimal for sea or land? And how did the mutations, hundreds and thousands of them, all happen in a single lifetime?
Bollocks.
Someone explain why the fossil record shows not a single transitional form, despite us now having gazillions of fossils to study from all over the world.
Someone explain why evolutionists and paleontologists come up with so many fakes in order to posit a missing link and always fail? Why so much fraud in the name of science?
Someone explain why the fossil record shows species appearing as if fully formed, without any predecessor forms?
Someone explain the Cambrian Explosion!
Someone explain why the “tree of evolution” is almost upside down, with no intermediate forms alive today and with the current forms unchanged in some cases for millions upon millions of years.
Someone explain why despite repeated experimentation on drosophila, not a single useful mutation has ever been observed?
Someone explain why every time a species has any kind of mutation, it is always to its detriment?
Someone explain why so many evolutionists are fundamentally dogmatic and extreme by nature.
Look, I’m no scientist, I posit no alternative and my current scepticism is in no way related to my religion. I’m also definitely not in the same boat as guys like this. Evolution is scientific, clearly, lots of clever people buy into it, but they haven’t communicated it very well.
I would just like a scientist to show me where I’m going wrong. Nicely. Without doing a Dawkins on me and my religion. When I see Islamophobic frauds like Aayan Hirsi Ali selling their books on Dawkins’ home page, I kind of wonder about the agenda, you know? Lying cow!
The same fuckers that call Islam a religion of terror are eager to back the random idea of evolution with missionary zeal. That makes me suspicious.
Subvert the dominant paradigm!
{ 25 comments… read them below or add one }
Yakoub/Julaybib/Drown 01.28.08 at 10:39 pm
“It?s like saying that enough earthquakes would eventually create magnificent architecture.” Not quite, because useful mutations survive precisely because their useful. If you don’t believe in evolution, then remember to recommend your granny not to bother having a flu jab next autumn. After all, she can’t die from catching a newly evolved flu virus if there is no such thing as evolution. Otherwise, read Origin of Species. And ignore that silly man Harun Yahya. That’s not science, it’s bad polemic.
shahid 01.28.08 at 11:16 pm
Neither of my grannies has been alive for a very long time.
Natural selection is not mutation. That’s what a flu virus does. It selects to fuck us over. All the old ones keep popping up again.
I’ve read Origin of Species. It’s rubbish. Darwin actually thought that natural selection caused speciation. We now know that’s rubbish. Have you read it?
Neo-Darwinists think that mutation does the same job. Mutation is never useful. Mutation is by definition a random change to the genetic code. And of course, we know what that does. Please show me some evidence of a useful mutation. It would be great to see.
(See how uncomfortable people get when you try to subvert the dominant paradigm?)
I’d happily believe in evolution if it made any sense. Another blogging friend of mine said that I don’t buy evolution because I believe in Allah. I explained that I used to believe in evolution before I tried to make sense of it. He was rather surprised, but to his credit, he believed me.
I’m not a scientist, but I respect science. I’m ready to believe in evolution if I can make sense of it or understand it, but I am suspicious of anything that has such a large and powerful lobby behind it. I’m also not proposing a scientific alternative, but I am dubious about the existing one.
Human beings have not evolved one iota in around 7 million years and there were zero humans before that. Discuss.
David Eastman 01.29.08 at 12:32 am
Most attempts to see evolution in action simply fail. The reality is there is no human understandable dynamics that “explains” natural history - it isn’t observable.
Yes, the industrial revolution and the plight of red Peppered moths against darkened polluted bark is easy to grasp. Yes, if you pack 1000 niggers in a ship then the ones that survive 3 months later will be the fittest. But there is no way to deduce steps say, from sea to land. Its like deducing observable steps from a cave painting to a car manual. Or worse, deducing those steps by attempting to make small changes in the cave painting.
I’m happy to accept evolution - yes - on faith. I will never see proof in my lifetime. Anyone telling you to go read Origin of Species to gain enlightenment is not being helpful. I see the fundamentals, and the idea it is still a brave and extraordinary theory. But it isn’t useful in the everyday world.
shahid 01.29.08 at 12:46 am
I understand that evolution is not observable - neither is quantum theory and I gleefully accept that.
It is the stuff that is observable that I don’t understand. You see, I used to accept evolution on faith too, but I’m far less of a scientist than you. And now I would like to understand it, I approach it from a position of scepticism, but not blind fundamentalism.
The peppered moths thing though, wasn’t that just natural selection within pre-determined genetic boundaries? Surely they didn’t mutate, there was just a larger ratio of the darker ones because they camouflaged better and didn’t get eaten?
I’m not so rigid that I won’t read Dawkins either (I have done, he’s scary!). Maybe I should read all this stuff again. After all, I did temporarily think the moon landings were faked too until I read all of the evidence. It’s just better to be informed I guess.
Yusuf Smith 01.29.08 at 9:34 am
As-Salaamu ‘alaikum,
You’re right about evolutionists being dogmatic. They are also intolerant, as are a lot of non-religious people who often believe that only religious people are intolerant. Example: when the FreeBSD operating system project decided to change its “daemon” (red figure with horns and a pitch-fork and a smiley face) logo, people complained about f***ing religious bastards etc when in fact it may well have been putting people off, so it was a matter of effectiveness and making the system better, not just kowtowing to intolerant people.
shahid 01.29.08 at 1:11 pm
Oh and the point about Harun Yahya - I don’t take him seriously because he misrepresented Darwin on the complexity of the eye. I don’t take kindly to people misrepresenting others. Like Dawkins misrepresenting Islam for example.
Yakoub/Julaybib/Drown 01.31.08 at 10:07 am
I accept evolution because, considering the body of evidence (which is the point about Origin of Species) alongside geology and various other sciences, there isn’t anything approaching a convincing alternative explanation for biodiversity. What I don’t accept is the old hocus pocus of “Abaracadabara, God created the universe in the blink of a third idea and fossils are just there to ensure atheists go to hell.”
What bugs me about Harun Yoyo is how he demonizes the person of Darwin and tries to implicate his ideas as being central to Western materialism. ‘Darwinism’ - the cultural impact of Darwin’s ideas, is far more complex than that. Eg. the Darwin vs God thing promoted by Dawkin lovers makes more sense if you check out the story of the professionalisation of 19th century science and the marginalisation of Wallace, the person who came up with Natural selection at the same time as Darwin.
The debate is more cultural than scientific, IMHO, but not as portrayed by HY.
Unfortunately, the best source for this is in the OU teaching materials for level 1 humanities and thus not easily accessible! But there is quite a bit on Wallace online and in print.
lwtc247 02.07.08 at 3:35 pm
Evolution SHOULD be observable, that?s the precise reason why there is so much faking of fossils. It is sorely needed to give a morsel of evidence in a total vacuum of evidence.
I don’t accept it’s a ‘brave’ theory because I contest it’s based on ignorance and a wrongly placed hatred of the wrongdoings of man within the setting of an organized religion trying to negate God when the problem lies with men.
They say crocodiles have remained the same for thousands of years (maybe millions) why did they not evolve when the terrain and their predators did?
@ Yakoub/Julaybib/Drown
What body of evidence? There IS an alternative one that totally avoids the numerous massive caverns in evolution theory and that is creationism. There is science in the Qur’an relating to bees and genealogy. Why don’t you accept god did it ‘in the blink of an eye’ or otherwise? Is it that you think God might have found it difficult?
There is NO connectivity between all (I believe I am right in using the word ‘all’ here) species and ancient species. There is no plausible explanation for mutation. There is no plausible explanation for warm and cold blooded animals. There is no explanation of conscience. There is simply NO evidence at all. There is scriptural evidence however that has stood the test of time of thousands of years.
Shahid. I’ve been inspired by your post to write a post of my own. Please have a quick gander for a further statement of my opinions on this issue.
http://lwtc247.wordpress.com Thanks.
David Eastman 02.10.08 at 10:57 am
Well, if we lived long enough evolution would be a little less opaque. Most theories are based on some empirical evidence and a bit of a punt. From “I reckon Man U will win the league” to black holes all follow this pattern. There is always some initial unknown - otherwise why bother?
I’m not aware that crocodiles ever had any predators so I can’t comment.
David Eastman 02.10.08 at 11:34 am
Comments re-re-directed from here:
http://lwtc247.wordpress.com/2008/02/07/evolution-a-look-at-the-mutation-twaddle/
There are a lot of particles passing though the Earth (and us) all the time. “Mutation” is not an intelligent design facet, its usually just cell damage. Cells do no look to be struck by stray particles.
There has been plenty of research on different types of mutation, but forget this. As soon as you trying to work backwards you are fucked. Can you play a game of Monopoly backwards, from the end to the beginning, by throwing dice and hoping you hit the same results? Yes, but it could take a vast amount of time. Yet the game itself was both random, unique, and varied. The fact that you can’t easily intuit earlier times in the game from the method of transition does not disprove the existence of the game.
A lot of the questions asked in this article imply that evolution is “directed”, much like the game of monopoly. The fact that some creatures exist in a niche is just the flipside of the missing ones that didn’t make it. The ground under my car is dry after a rainstorm, but it would be hard to deduce the vehicle shape and purpose from this fact.
Its actually quite hard to work out how the pyramids were built. Indeed, some thought they were built by aliens. Trying to look at the remains of something (even a designed object)and then working out how it came to be is not easy. We don’t really know all the tools that ancient Egyptians had. We can guess, but our guesses our heavily biased on what we see now and our current experience. Should you berate historians for stating that man built pyramids when we are not entirely sure how? Should we assume the Egyptians were in fact space aliens because of missing evidence?
shahid 02.10.08 at 11:54 am
You could probably have chosen a better metaphor than the game of Monopoly. If you have ever played a game with me, you will know that the starting state of the game is perfect order and the end result is chaos.
The observation thing is a conundrum when we are talking about billions of years. It seems a little churlish of humans, whose lifetimes cannot even be measured in mere centuries to ask questions of observation over billions of years, but we do have the fossil record, which is a lot better than it was in Darwin’s time and still leaves a lot of unanswered questions. That then, is our means of observation. So where is the link between man and ape? And in seven million years, why do we observe no wider changes in the human fossil record than can be accounted for by natural selection alone?
My issue is less with the theory of evolution (which is a brilliant theory), than with the dogmatic and sometimes fundamentalist and downright hateful and scary positions adopted by its leading proponents.
Dawkins and other leading atheists would like to see religion wiped out. Every day, when I witness more Muslims murdered in other parts of the world and more demonised at home, I can’t help but point my finger, at least some of the time, at Dawkins himself.
After all, wasn’t it Social Darwinism that resulted in Hitler almost succeeding in wiping out an entire race?
lwtc247 02.11.08 at 8:45 am
Hi David @ February 10th, 2008 at 11:34 am
I am not saying mutation does not exist. There is probably a lot of evidence to suggest it does, although I’ve never looked at the specific research papers which indicate this myself. What I am saying is there is a very large leap indeed between a cell mutating and speciation. And questions remain as to how did the ability to mutate or/and the cell itself initially come about. Are today?s animal cells that much different from those of millions of years ago? Where is the evidence (not fake fossils) of missing links for any species? If mutation and speciation are correct, how can one say the process isn’t by design? I don’t think one can. Can you prove randomness is godless?
If one challenges at the concept of time, one can also argue there is no randomness, as immediately after a random event, then one can argue that event had to happen - there was no choice. This line of arguing inspires Physicists to dream up multiple and simultaneous infinite universes even more preposterous in my view than accepting a greater power did it.
I don’t think you have adequately addressed the specialisation of the biological world. Where are all the other variants that didn’t make it? There must have been quite a few yes, especially given the highly specific flora and fauna we see today. Where is no evidence. Human fossils show distinct and overlapping species not mutants of one line, and I believe this is common for ALL species. Where are the DNA evidence to support supposed transient species? How did these supposed transient species mutate so differently that they could be physically distinguished and yet have been so similar that they competed for the same resources and therefore in the same space. How could mutant differences not be bread out. How did sexual replication come about from simple cell division?
I too find the analogies a bit strained, but at least there is proof that the pyramids exist and a strong generally accepted thesis (reincarnation belief) why they were built, but there is no evidence for godless evolution, and evolution itself is also dodgy. Chinese people can still breed with African people despite the major physical difference becasue they are the same species, so why have homosapiens not mutated into unbreedable lines? Adaptation has occurred just about all theists and atheists agree on that one ‘Black’ Africans, White Eskimos, Common ancestor from Africa or Mesopotamia, but speciation is a different matter. I believe evolutionists are erroneously using adaptation and repackaging it as speciation.
It’s clearly a fascination debate and only improves with continuous dialogue, but I feel belief in evolution-cum-spun-Darwinism is the least sustainable.
How did crocs get to be top of the food chain in the firat place?
DE 02.12.08 at 2:26 am
If god does indeed throw dice, thats fine. The mechanics of whatever theory works can be controlled by a higher being, its only the mechanics that evolution describes. And that no designer is rquired - that doesn’t stop one from frunning the show.
I often wonder where the giraffe with the neck half as long as the final version got to. But then, there are no other animals that look much of anything like giraffes. The way that the world looks to me, I’d expect to see a half way giraffe. But that says more about me than giraffes. The proof of the pyramids existing are relative to our understanding of history. Add a few millenia and they will cease to make sense.
The development of language throughout the world (I’d recommend Guns, Germs and Steel for a description of this) is a minor clue to the evolution of a complex process. Technically (and by using some of your arguments) language is too complicated to exist because there was no one available to design it. Trying to follow the remanants of language transition is often impossible - while there are hundereds of related languages in, say, Papua New Guinea, there are plenty of missing links. There are a few weird offshoots like Basque. One assumes that transition points just died out - or were quickly superceded. Only in todays society do we make efforts to protect dying languages.
(I assume that homosapiens have been around long enough to mutate into unbreedable lines.. and they aren’t here of course. )
lwtc247 02.12.08 at 5:30 pm
I’d agree. A higher power can always be attributed as being at the seat of it all, which is why I find it astonishing that people reject the probability of God. While being astonished, I often guess that such people blind themselves to see only the evil acts of man who falsely rides under the banner of religion or God, and therefore that it is God who is to blame, simply it provides a pretext for them to reject the fact of mans slavery to God and the responsibilities that brings.
Re: language is too complicated to exist because there was no one available to design it. From an gradual process of starting from zero up to today, yes. It does certainly appear to impossible. How could speech develop without vocal chords? And in the absence of speech, why would vocal chords have existed in the first place? It cannot have been a kind of internal thought “damn, I wish I could speak” that forced the growth of vocal chords and to say that vocal chords developed from a mutation is surely pushing the boat out very far. From my understanding of monotheistic theology we were endowed with various powers of intelligence and communication rather than having to proceed from point zero.
Thanks for the reference (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel) If I get time I’ll get a copy, I notice the GG&S book has been made into a documentary on PBS, you can go here http://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/show/index.html to read about it (inc transripts) - time to torrent I see.
God says “We have the power to shape you and change you”, which seems obvious if you believe in All Powerful God in the first place, so it makes me wonder, surely we are we not told this just to point out the obvious, but to help us embrace biological change as a God driven force? Africans, Eskimos, Chinese and Incas all came from one origin, however the difference is on the religion side, man got where he is today by gradually diverging from an initial fully formed man, whereas man got to where he is today from primordial soup on the evolutionists/atheists point of view, so there is some overlap.
But I still contest there is not one single piece of evidence or reasonable description of speciation, how a functioning cell could occur even if one was aware of the properties of lyotrpoic liquid crystals. And then, to go from a cell to self-propagating cells, then to multicellular multifunctional animals and then to specialist animals, but perhaps GG&S and the Dawkins book which proposes how an eye is formed, may make me think about it again, but I can see how it would contradict a godly influence over the whole matter.
“One assumes that transition points just died out - or were quickly superceded. ” - But that’s one big assumption, and in my eyes just one of many big assumptions that are needed to explain the origin of life from primordial soup.
As for homo sapiens, there are suddenly appearing skeletal remains which suggest suddenly appearing lines of homo sapiens, yet other hominids are independent of us. The further back you go, the more independent lines you see and there is NO trace of homo sapiens, which is utterly bizarre as we are the ones credited with intelligence, yet there are no intelligently preserved bones before a certain period of time. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/timeline/0f0dab976edd7664d2a520c6d8837e42.png
Occams Razor would lead us to accept the existence of God, and reject the evolution hypothesis at this time, and science too demands we reject the evolution hypothesis as it is counter to the evidence.
Jake 02.17.08 at 1:42 pm
The problem with evolutionary theory is that lots of people buy into it without fully understanding it. This is what often makes it’s explainations seem unclear and often a bit dogmatic. However if you read some decent books on the subject you may become more convinced.
I think people often reject evolutionary ideas since they don’t want to think of man as just another animal, or as a biologicla machine or whatever. This is similar to how people rejected the idea of the earth going round the sun and us not being at the center of the universe.
I don’t think believing in evolution is really an alternative to spirituality, it only explains the “how” and not the ultimate “why”. And yes there are lots of holes in the theory, as you would expect given it’s relative infancy and the huge questions it is trying to answer, but to me it makes a lot more sense in believing that God created the world in 7 days or a similar religious explaination.
shahid 02.17.08 at 7:40 pm
Jake, that’s a pretty patronising comment.
Why don’t you recommend a “decent book on the subject” (I’ve read Darwin and Dawkins, perhaps you know some better proponents of evolutionary theory, eh?)
I don’t object to evolution on any of the grounds you cite. I object to it on the scientific evidence. There are no intermediate forms between ape and man. None. Zero. Nada. Zilch. Null. It is impossible for an organism to evolve from quadripedal to bipedal locomotion, as any interim forms would be inefficient. I believe there has been a proof of this.
I’m not dogmatically against evolution, perhaps that’s why evolutionists have such a problem with me.
StefZ 02.22.08 at 7:54 pm
@Yakoub/Julaybib/Drown
“I accept evolution because, considering the body of evidence (which is the point about Origin of Species) alongside geology and various other sciences, there isn?t anything approaching a convincing alternative explanation for biodiversity”
= not a very good reason to accept any theory/ explanation of anything
but, sad to say, that’s the way a lot of people think - WTF is wrong with saying ‘I don’t know what the answer is’?
FWIW I strongly believe that Darwinism, of whatever flavour, is a non-starter but that doesn’t mean for a second that I have faith in any organised religion and it makes me laugh when programed droids assume that I have religious faith simply because I reject Darwinistic Theory (which isn’t really a theory in any testable/ falsifiable way)
which is a tad hypocritical of me as I suspect I am the person shahid is referring to in this line…
“I?d happily believe in evolution if it made any sense. Another blogging friend of mine said that I don?t buy evolution because I believe in Allah. I explained that I used to believe in evolution before I tried to make sense of it. He was rather surprised, but to his credit, he believed me.”
StefZ 02.22.08 at 8:04 pm
and BTW
peppered moths don’t rest on tree trunks during daytime
the moths on the tree trunks in the pictures in the textbooks were glued there
and even if that wasn’t the case the peppered moth fairytale wouldn’t prove very much any way
and it’s fair to ask if Darwinism explains so much why do people keep referring to same old, discredited ‘proofs’ time and time again - vestigial organs which aren’t really vestigial, glued-on moths, finches’ beaks, hoax evolutionary trees for horses etc etc - all nonsense and all guaranteed to crop in conversation with pro-evolutionists
shahid 02.22.08 at 11:37 pm
Yes Stef, you were the person I was referring to! Sounds like you recall the chat. You’re certainly no hypocrite. We take almost identical positions.
DE 02.25.08 at 2:20 am
Where are they speaking transitional English? Where are the playing transitional football? Why is it easy to hear music from the 90’s, and music from the Baroque period, but little between? Its fair enough to ask for evidence of transitions - but that doesn’t imply that the lack of them has any meaning. A neat line of evidence is pure blackboard simplicity for school kids.
Sometimes when reading about evolution I’m reminded of the classic Gary Lasrson picture of two cows not answering a ringing phone; one saying: “Well, there it goes again … and here we just sit without opposable thumbs.” A phone is evidence we have opposable thumbs, but that doesn’t somehow invalidate cows. Treating evolution as a vector - i.e. we went from here to here - doesn’t make much sense. Seals are vague evidence of a creature that is happy on land but ill equipped for it, but whose to say they will “evolve” feet? Are they travelling “from” someplace “to” somewhere else in an evolutionary timeline? Well maybe, but they don’t live that out. If the seas get too cold, maybe they will spend more time on land. But looking at seals, I don’t think they give a toss.
shahid 02.25.08 at 7:00 am
Picking on language is a cop-out. Language is not protected by a profoundly complex code. What are codes used for? You know this - codes are used to protect information. Languages are not protected and that is why they are constantly mutating, some would say not for the better. However, we do have fossils for languages. We call these fossils “books” and more recently “film” and “television” and we can trivially pick out mutations and interim forms through these media.
The fossil record shows us absolutely no interim form for human beings. Variations within the species yes, but no transitional speciation from ape to man. Every time we think something might be an ancestor, we find parallel (or sometimes earlier) skeletons of the supposed descendant species, invalidating the evolutionary position.
Your music example is again a little unfair. Music too has a code. The code protects the form and that is why it is still possible to write music in the style of Bach. You could try to mutate Bach into something else, but it invariably sounds shit. Ergo, it’s not a useful mutation. That’s the point I think.
By the way, if you want evidence of a species uncomfortable on land, you need only study the human couch potato.
shahid 02.27.08 at 11:56 pm
I should add (do I really need to?) that I don’t believe Allah dropped creatures fully formed onto the face of the planet out of nothing… and if I can believe in quantum mechanics, there is nothing intrinsically stopping me from believing in evolution.
By the way, why are there so many frauds perpetrated by evolutionists?
G 03.06.08 at 11:49 am
I am not a scientist, religious but understand, at deeper levels, that both have the same root of wisdom (as can be seen in modern quntum physics & ancient meta physics; both tunneling into a singularity)
I am autistic & don’t understand social dynamics but some math seems like common sense.
If you read the ancient texts, like the old testament (book of Pharaohs; of which Christianity / catholisism / Jewish faith & Muslim faith are, to a some extent, derived from), then it is clearly written how humans & other life forms were created. They were created by the “Gods” or if you read more carefully (book of Enoch) they will tell you there names, where they came from & how they got here. Enoch himself left with them on their ship, if you really are interested in quntum stuff then you should know that because of the speed he left that he could have only been with them a few years and on this planet time that could be thousands of years.
I feel sorry for the Dawkins / Darwin / Hawkins ’s because they are searching for a question that only time & space could comprehend, let alone the answer! ie one would have to be as old as time and as large as space to be able to compute it. Considering that time & space was created from nothing / no where and then both promptly existed forever in the same instant, how could one even ask the question, let alone understand the answer?
G 03.06.08 at 12:05 pm
I forgot to mention, I do belive in a force of intelligence & creation (”God”), but belive it to be neutral, not of humanoid type judgement, just sheer awareness & power & it wouldn’t understand human concepts like good vs bad / light vs dark because it exists in everything, indeed we ARE it.
I also belive in various God / Goddess forms that live in spirit realms & sometimes transgress to ours; this is a different kettle of fish from the concept of “God”, which tends to mean the ultimate force & power in the universe (like God is in everything -meta-physics- / all life within a single atom -quantum-physics-)
However to say that the ultimate one force in life is a God, to me, is rediculess because it immediately cuts the balance of light/dark, male/feminine etc, etc, etc out of the equation & smacks of human sexism & role confusion, for example the largest bodies in our solar system are sexless, ie planets & if consciousness is embodied within its physical self then planetary consciousness is very God like & power full, but still subject to the one force / spirit that humans like to name God; or in ancient times, the Goddess.
lwtc247 04.10.08 at 7:42 am
I have no reason NOT to believe Allah dropped fully formed creatures on the Earth. It’s my understanding (although I fully accept my Christian upbringing may have me mashing up ideas here) that Adam and Eve were created in Paradise and were sent to Earth as part of their punishment. If that is so, then certainly humans were dropped o the earth. From the so called fossil record, it seems like the modern day humans are separate from what one could call apeoid species. Modern theory has it that Neandertals and modern humans were present at the same time.
As for other animals being dropped on the earth? Well I don’t think there is anything to go on there. I think the Islamic take on the creation of Life forms was that they were created from water (man from clay). Was that water on earth or somewhere else? It’s hard to say.
Dropping fully formed animals on the earth seems daft because we are utilizing out human limitations of imagination in terms of transporting these animas from space, whereas it is obviously not beyong the power of God to just instantaneously put them there.
While mentioning the fossil record (and I’m not a palentologist) it seems strange that there are few if any reports of the skills of cows dataing back over the years, or dogs, or any other animal. Frm this one can be forgiven that such animals could well have been dropped on the earth.