I'm afraid that when we find life on other planets, creationists will claim god created them too. Even if its microorganisms. Lol.
Creationists should be disregarded to the same extent as those people who claim gingerbread comes from witch houses.
Haha probably, BUT, it'll prompt the very difficult question, "so why'd God go to the trouble of creating life on another planet if he wasn't going to make a full show of it like he did here?" While it'd be easy to weasel out of (much like our resident creo weasels out of everything), I think it could have an impact among the more intellectually honest of the crowd.
Well what if they have their own religion with their own gods. Contact could be interesting, I mean if we make contact and their god is Zeus, that shit may make me think twice about my atheism.
They would just define it as non-life or take up the panspermia idea and say it came from earth. The more loony ones may say that the devil did it.
Or somebody could say that God put the micros on another planet simply to confuse "human wisdom", just as he placed fossils of dinosaurs on Earth for the same reason.
this is an interesting question, but for creationists, evolution ( meaning the development of new genera by means of natural processes, including mutation ) is not really science. it's more akin to alchemy. we simply do not see credible evidence that certain complex systems evolved, Dawkins' antic demonstration of the evolution of the eye -- love the shirt, btw -- notwithstanding. evolution is part of the mystery of Life. the mystery of Life is no more clear now than it was in Darwin's time. it's all a matter of speculation. some theoretical constructs are more compelling than others, but none are testable, so we are left with a mystery that may never yield to science-based conclusion. we cannot recreate the multiplicity of factors that may have contributed to the emergence of Life with enough certainty to say: This Is How It Happened. saying "this is how it could have happened" is not a satisfactory explanation if a creationism model isn't allowed to be posited as an explanation, because a creationism model is how it could have happened. a couple of years ago in an old, similar thread, someone said that Urey-Miller proved that a naturalistic process could have begotten the rudimentary elements from which Life was built. you cannot imagine how absurd that is to anyone who understands that the factors that Stan and Hal were playing with were only slightly more alike the actual factors that were present than Cheese Whiz and Silly Putty. it wasn't real science then and it isn't real science 60+ years later.
"The mystery of Life is no more clear now than it was in Darwin's time. it's all a matter of speculation. Some theoretical constructs are more compelling than others, but none are testable, so we are left with a mystery that may never yield to science-based conclusion." This is simply untrue and ignores the progress made in organic chemistry over the last 100+ years. Evolution is observed in short lifespan organisms. DNA wasnt known in Darwins time to cite one massive contradiction to your meme. DNA is God. DNA is the only thing which replicates itself in its own image.
Ladies and gentlemen, The God of the Gaps, in all its splendor. Not to mention the fact that saying evolution can't be tested and therefore is not a valid answer (but creationism somehow is?) couldn't be farther away from the truth.
It always amazes me that some religious people accept some theories yet deny others (evolution especially) it's like when they read their holy books and just follow certain parts of it. I am not saying you have to agree with every hypothesis science presents but don't deny universally-accepted theories like evolution.
Cool!!! "An extinct species of assassin fly that lived during the age of the dinosaurs has been discovered inside a translucent tomb of amber. . . . "Dikow identified a few features that set B. bruckschi apart from its living cousins: flattened antennae, a V-shaped eye structure, spiny hind legs and bristles covering its piercing mouthparts."
No wonder since you close your eyes, cover your ears and sing "LALALA" every time you're presented with it. What an absurd notion. The discovery of Genetics, let alone DNA itself massively increased our understanding. It most certainly is not. It may have started out as speculation, but then that speculation is tested. So far, after 100+ years of testing, evolution has withstood every single test. You Sir have NOTHING. False. It's all testable and evolution would be very easy to disprove if it was wrong as it makes rather specific predictions which have ALL HELD TRUE. The DNA evidence alone utterly destroys any notion of creationism. Look up retro viruses for example and how they spread throughout the species. 1) This isn't evolution 2) So what? Knowledge always comes down to degrees of certainty anyway. And even so, if we can conclusively show that it CAN happen, then the particular implementation really isn't that interesting. It certainly destroys your god of the gaps argument either way. Creationism isn't a model (look up what a scientific model actually is) and it can't be an explanation for the data when it's at odds with the data. In the experiment, naturalistic processes led to a creation of amino acids. That is what one would call prove. The fact that it did happen proves that can happen. Once again this only goes to show that you didn't bother to look at the evidence that you were presented with. For crying out loud, at the very least you could have read the Wikipedia article. Is it too much to ask to inform yourself on a subject before making claims about it? Furthermore, no matter the process, we KNOW that amino acids CAN form, because they DO EXIST everywhere in space where they're obviously not the product of living organisms. It was and it is. They might have gotten the early atmosphere wrong, but that doesn't make it non-science. Science is how we can tell that they got it wrong. And once again I'll put it to you that if you do the same experiment with the best estimate of the early atmosphere that we have today, you also get amino acids. It has been done. So if you don't think the Urey-Miller results are relevant for the early earth (fair enough) then why do you keep harking back on it instead of looking at those experiments that are relevant? Ah right, I forgot, you don't care about facts or truth, you're a creationist after all. It's the same reason why creationists ignore al the human fossils that have been found and classified over the last dozen or so decades and instead only seem to know about the fraud that was piltdown man. Yeah, you keep telling yourself that science isn't science. Maybe it helps.
More good stuff from actual scientists doing actual science . . . Male or female? First sex-determining genes appeared in mammals some 180 million years ago "The Y chromosome, which distinguishes males from females at the genetic level, appeared some 180 million years ago. It originated twice independently in all mammals. Scientists have managed to date these events that are crucial for both mammalian evolution and our lives, because the Y chromosome determines whether we are born as a boy or girl. . . . "A very long time ago, the X and Y were identical, until the Y started to differentiate from the X in males. It then progressively shrank to such an extent that, nowadays, it only contains about 20 genes (the X carries more than one thousand genes)."
Cant be true. that doesnt agree with the one science book which is the culmination of all human knowledge. the Bible is all you need because it is all we can ever know.
The People Who Saw Evolution "Peter and Rosemary Grant are members of a very small scientific tribe: people who have seen evolution happen right before their eyes. . . . "And yet they can’t truly be finished with their research, because evolution never screeches to a halt, or reaches a final, optimizing moment. Evolution isn’t progressive, linear, deterministic, and destination-driven. Evolution never retires. " 'We never reached an identifiable point of diminishing returns, or experienced a sense of completion,' the Grants write near the end of their book. '[O]ne conclusion we draw after 40 years is the same as the conclusion we drew after 20 years: Long-term studies in ecology and evolution should be pursued in an open-ended way because for many of them there is no logical end point. Darwin’s finches have much more to teach us.' "
or how the creationist I know thinks evolution works ... have they seen a monkey give birth to a human baby?
Somehow my link didn't attach to this, leaving my post meaningless. This is what was meant to be there http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/...in-our-early-oceans-before-the-origin-of-life
Adding to God's perfect creation? That shouldn't be possible, since evolution isn't real . . . Scientists Create the First Life Form with 'Alien' DNA "When biologists talk about the letters in the DNA alphabet, they are actually talking about nucleotides: molecules that bind together to make up the DNA double helix. Normally, these molecules are made up of four letters: A,T, C and G. But scientists at the Scripps Research Institute have managed to add a single pair of artificial 'X' and 'Y' nucleotides to the genetic code of an E. Coli strain, reports The New York Times. And thus far, the bacteria appear to be reproducing normally and passing on the new X-Y pair to their offspring."
Dragons. http://www.richarddawkins.net/news_...st-dinosaur-ever-discovered?category=Science# Fossilised bones of dinosaur believed to be the largest creature ever to walk the Earth has been unearthed in Argentina, palaeontologists say. Based on its huge thigh bones, it was 40m (130ft) long and 20m (65ft) tall. Weighing in at 77 tonnes, it was as heavy as 14 African elephants