David Turell: 'Natural selection' is actually circular reasoning: who survives, the fittest. How do we know they are the 'fittest'? They survived. 
 
> This is a very old and cheap canard! A dead duck. In a sense it is true. There is no harm in a tautology. It is a truism. But it is not circular reasoning. - George, I must apologize. I have had no formal training in logic as used in philosophy. My training in logical thinking came in medical school and thereafter, using Occam's razor. To me logic is working from point A to point B and finally to point C and treating the patient. The tautology above to me is circular. You start at A and end up at A, no advancement in understanding the underlying issue. To me that is circular, but as I consult the dictionary, it is obvious you are correct. It is a tautology.
 
> David Turell: As an example of large jumps in evolution, the scientists have no explanation for the 'Cambrian Explosion' in animal development.
> 
> Here is an explanation that seems more than adequate to me, 
> quoted from wikipedia:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion#Uniqueness_of_the_explosion
&am... 
>. [i]The rate of diversification seen in the Cambrian phase of the explosion is unparalleled among marine animals: it affected all metazoan clades of which Cambrian fossils [/i]have been found. > 
> Whatever triggered the early Cambrian diversification opened up an exceptionally wide range of previously-unavailable ecological niches. styles and forms.
> 
> There is a similar one-time explosion in the evolution of land plants: after a cryptic history beginning about 450 million years ago, land plants underwent a uniquely rapid adaptive radiation during the Devonian period, about 400 million years ago.[/i] - I have bolded the critical portions of the material you presented from Wikipedia. What I read above is not an explanation, it is a description of the Cambrian event and later the 'plant bloom' in Darwin-speak, the vocabulary used by Darwin researchers. It does not explain in any way how evolution went from Ediacaran forms, multicellar sheets of relatively undifferentiated cells, to extremely complicated organisms with multiple organ systems in such a short geologic period of 10 million years at most, with some simple bilateral forms as an intermediate step. And from no sex to sex. The best way to appreciate the magnitude of the jump is to read Gould's "Wonderful Life". - As an aside, Gould used the book to push his point about contingency in evolution. If Pikaia ( the tiny fish with a notoccord) had not appeared humans would not be here. Conway Morris has turned that conjecture on its head by going to China, finding other Burgess Shale equivalent areas and finding other fish similar to Pikaia, showing that evolution will create mutiple attempts at the same solution, a process he calls convergence. Gould always had an agenda, but he and Niles Eldredge at least clearly recognized the enormous gaps in the 'tree of life' fossil record, and invented the term 'puctuated equilibrium' to "explain it". By that I mean, giving something a name seems to explain it. The same thing happens in medicine. But nothing is explained. - Just as nothing is explained by the material from Wikipedia. Of course the 'niches' were empty. The animals didn't exist to fill them. Actually over 50 phylla appeared and 37 have survived. Wikipedia talks all around the key issue. If it is a chance purposeless and directionless process, it didn't follow the Darwin rules by proceeding so quickly. My guess is that the answer wil be found in the current work on regulatory RNA processes and epigenetics, which drive evolution to respond to environmental challenges, not depending on mutations, most of which are deletereous anyway. And my question still exists, where did the information come from to manage all this, that must exist in the DNA/RNA codes? Inorganic chemicals creating the information for life? Hardly. - I hope you will respond to the problems in 'homologous' and 'analagous' analyses of body forms, and to the lack of a biochemical evolutionary tree, although I think convergence is the answer to the biochemical. - And finally, the tight controls over research grants in science results in supression of renagade ideas. Peer review doesn't permit renagades. I did hear once by email from a young scientist working to get a Ph. D. in Darwin studies, who was a secret doubter, and asked me to guide him to some critical material. He indicated how secretive he had to be.

I tried to read your article, but it is in very small print, and changing the View menu to enlarge the text size has no effect. Any chance of you updating the HTML so that the type sizes are not fixed? - I appreciate you efforts to read the article. It is published to the web on the Raleigh Tavern site, a discussion club from Tomball College. I have papers published there, as a member of the group by invitation, but have no control over the site. It is in my documents and I can email it to you as an attachment. I'd love to get it on this site, but this message area only allows 10,000 words, I believe. Try my website: www.sciencevsreligion.net as it is also published there and might come through better. - > As far as I could ascertain, the version of "Intelligent Design" that you espouse is very different from that propounded for instance by the defendants in the Dover trial. Judge Jones in his judgment on that trial made it clear that they were young-earth creationists. - You are quite correct. I arrived at a conclusion that some force of Intelligent Design existed, from my studies of cosmology, long before I looked at Darwin. As a student of Medicine, I accepted the Theory without question, until I began to read up on the subject, in preparation for writing my second book, encouraged by the publisher who had accepted my first book. In due course I found Dembski and Behe's publications, and have actually had a personal discussion with Behe at a meeting in which some Discovery individuals were present. I followed Dover closely. It is true that the Dover trial involved school board members who were young earth proponents, but many of the participants were of my mind, accepting the science but wanting the controversies in the scientific community also presented. Note that I am Jewish and have no Christian ax to grind as in the Discovery Institute.
 
> The idea that alternatives to Darwin's 1859 theories are not open for discussion is also nonsense. You yourself have cited the Altenberg conference. There are many ideas now discussed by biologists that are not part of Darwin's original thesis. He knew nothing of the actual mechanisms of genetics. - You are quite correct about Darwin and what he knew. Neo-Darwinism tries to incorporate genetics and the new knowledge of DNA and now the very new discoveries of the regulatory role of RNA. But you are wrong about open discussion of controversies outside of the Darwin community. My paper discusses some of the battling within the community, but the movie "Expelled" with Ben Stein, which I have not seen, covers other egregious examples of supression. Ben Stein is a highly regarded economics guru in this country and very fair-minded. The material he was shown convinced him to do the movie. The Richard Steinberg episode,when he was editor of the Proceedings of the Smithsonian, comes to mind. My point is simply that the Altenberg Conference is within the community of 'accepted scientists' who are 'allowed' to criticize.

"Darwinists" is a propaganda term used by creationists for evolutionary biologists, which seeks to suggest that they are believers in an ideology, instead of basing their knowledge strictly on evaluation of evidence, which is the case. - Which is not the case in my view. I am not a young earth creationist, but I use the term Darwinist because I have the sense that much Darwin research is scientism, as defined by George above. I define creation science the same way, squeezing findings to justify ideology. I believe the science of cosmology. I accept the evidence that life started on Earth 3.6-3.7 billion years ago (possibly as early as 3.8 bya, but the Greenland findings are in dispute). Evolution occurred, no doubt. Geologic aging by layers and by isotope tie together beautifully. I've hiked the Grand Canyon and had lectures from a world-recognized leading Grand Canyon geologist from U. of Manitoba, and what he teaches is perfectly believable. There is an evolutionary 'tree of life', made up of a few 'nodes and tips' as described by the late Stephen Jay Gould. He admitted there were huge holes in Darwin's theory. - Remember I started out as a blank-slate agnostic, and I still don't think much of organized religion. If you are interested please read my paper on teaching evolution in American schools. http://www.raleightavern.org/Turell2005.htm It will explain my reasoning about Darwin, and why I think the theory falls short.

The passion stirred by religion cannot be ignored, even if it is irrational. The hard earned lesson is tolerance. We must learn to accommodate the Muslims, even if we do resent feeling intimidated. Bloody warfare can be the price for speaking your mind and doing as you choose in religious debates. - I'm just as tolerant as I can be, but just what kind of accommodation are you proposing for the 5% radical Muslims who follow Wahabism and want to take the world back to the 7th Century? Religions have fostered all sorts of wars in the past, and they are still doing it. Moderate Muslims, whom we can certainly tolerate as part of our society, cannot control their fringe elements, but Muslim governments that foster terrorism should be held accountable.

40. God is the Father, and Jesus is only a man 
> 41. God is a single person with the Holy Spirit as the power of God 
> 42. We can obey the commands that God has given us. This is why some people in the OT were righteous. - These are the only questions with which I can be in partial aggreement. 40) I don't know if God is our father, but Jesus was only a human man, about whom his followers created a religion. 41) I don't know if God has personality, but I believe 'God' represents some sort of intellectual power. 42) I think we can follow the ethics presented in the OT. - How do I support my first statement for #40. Jesus died a Jew, believing the theology of Judaism, although granted that he was trying to reform a religion that was becoming corrupted. As a Jew he had to believe approximately as we do now. Specifically we do not accept the concept of Hell. Kaballah used mysticism to study that issue and describe several states of afterlife, but not a state of fire and brimstone. Hell appears to be an invention of christian religions.

I've just logged onto BBella's latest post: "I can prove whatever I choose to believe with whatever I choose as evidence to prove it with." Exactly! Among our contributors, though, David and George have examined the scientific evidence before them and have simply come to opposite conclusions. I think there are many people who genuinely approach the God question with an open mind (Edinburgh4 says he started out as an agnostic) and find an answer that satisfies them. Once the decision is taken, the BBella process sets in. This may even be my own case. Perhaps deep down, confronted by so much evidence for so many theories, I have chosen to believe that it won't be possible for me to form a belief. But of course I'm not even sure about that! - This is an interestng comment from the Guardian quoting Lord Winston attacking Dawkins: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2008/sep/12/robert.winston To my mind Dawkins deserves all the criticism he gets.


> If God gave his only son Jesus to die for us so that we can be saved and we reject that, God has no obligation to accept our attempts at salvation.
> 
> how shall we escape if we ignore such a great salvation? Heb 2:3
> 
> Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved." Acts 4:12
> 
> Islam say God has no Son, nor does he have need of one. - I find this preposterous. There are over 4 billion people on Earth who choose other religions. If we are all God's children, those ignoring Jesus are condemned? My concept of God is that He has room for all of us. The Christians I know do not think the way Edinburgh4 is presenting it. The Catholic Church has two paths to Heaven: Divine grace for Catholics who practice the religion properly, and natural grace for the rest of us, who are moral equivalents. I live in an area with a majority of Christians who are Fundamentalist and/or Born-again and no one discusses their religion with me in the manner presented.


> The picture of Christianity that I have put together from your posts is as follows: We are all sinners, but God loves us unconditionally. God will show his unconditional love for us by casting anyone who doesn't believe in Jesus into eternal torment. As for the future of those who do believe, it is possible that they may be saved. - Your confusion mirrors some of the reasons that Karen Armstrong, a former nun, left the church, and wrote "The History of God", 1993. She found the illogic of the theology and the concepts of punishment 'frightening'. Interestingly, at the time she produced the book she preferred Jewish or Muslim sevices, although I have no idea if she joined a faith.