Kyle Wilhelm This is so cool: Australian lizards on verge of evolutionary leap: From eggs to live birth? http://j.mp/9qXdUb

• Adam Cowan

  It's still a skink, and it is still laying eggs. Skinks in the mountain lay thinner shelled eggs compared to skinks on the coast. When scientists
  figure out how nothing became something, and something became life, then
  maybe I will put so...me
  stock in evolution. If people approached evolution with same
  skepticism as they have with Christianity no one would believe in it.
  
  When it comes to the basic questions of life, how did we get here, why are
  here, what's the point of life, etc., I find no better answers than what
  is written in the Bible. God made us for his glory and we are to serve
  him.
  
  Evolution says we are here by chance, no more than a highly evolved animals, and the whole point of life is to survive and pass on
  our amazing good looks.

  
  
• 

  Anthony Clatts

  I will now defeat you until you cease to respond(I will return periodically for your ignorance if it notifies me)
  You are holding on to an notion... God made this God did that. There is absolutely no evidence for God and more importantly the...re is no consistency in man's concept of God(too many religions and Gods).
  This is because, _Man made God_
  
  The modern study of Biology is ONLY based on evolutionary progression through genetic exchange and, you said it correctly, chance mutation.
  You are saying that you KNOW more than the entire foundation of the
  subject, Biology.
  
  If there is a creator(not the arbitrary word God which means anything you want it to) out there it is terribly
  unlikely that the Bible can tell us very much about that being. In fact
  the Bible says very little about what exactly God is supposed to be.
  
  If you researched it you would find astronomical amounts of inconsistency
  in the Bible with the study of reality. I can give you many examples but
  I'm running long here and you might not actually have the ambition to
  debate me.

• 

  Adam Cowan

  ‎@Anthony, no need to debate, I am right :)
  
  I don't claim to be more intelligent than the majority of the scientific field (there are many creation scientists who hold a biblical world
  view), in fact, they all have higher I.Q.'s than me. In... my opinion the Bible does a better job of answering the tough questions in life.
  
  You are right that there is no scientific evidence that there is a God,
  apart from this creation, the moral conscience found in every person,
  and of course the Bible. The existence of God cannot be proven or
  disproved. As far as who God is, I will limit myself to what the Bible
  says, and what I can learn from creation. I take the Bible at face
  value, no weird interpretations, just what it says on the page.
  
  Biology is not based on evolution, for evolution is a theory, a man made idea
  that tries to explain how everything got here. Like God, it cannot be
  observed, proven or disproved. I find evolution lacking for many
  reasons. For starters how many mutations are actually beneficial. A
  mutation is a loss of information not a gain. I have not come across a
  mutation that actually changes the organism into an entirely different
  kind of animal. I see many changes in species, but no leap from
  reptiles to birds, or wolves to whales. That brings me to the second
  major problem, no missing links, they are still missing. There should
  be an abundant amount of fossils and current transitional organisms, but
  few doubtful examples exist.
  
  I do disagree about the Bible being a reliable source of revelation. I believe it tells us all we need to
  know, and can handle, abut God. I will admit there are some hard
  questions about the Bible, and some apparent contradictions. If you are
  determined to see them, then there is no point explaining, but if you
  wish I will do my best to address any contradictions you find.
  
  I am a skeptic at heart, and don't like to accept the status quo.
  Becoming a Christian, and staying a Christian is only by the grace of
  God. Up to myself I would slander and put down Christians, but the more
  I study, and the more I read, and the more God works on me, I know what
  truth is.

  
  
• 

  Scott Steimling

  Adam, you poor ill-informed, brainwashed kid... the bible offers no answers to real questions, just fables and stories handed down amongst desert
  tribes until groups of people gathered bits and pieces together, and
  then haggled over what wa...s
  truth and what was not in fashion at that moment. How can you believe a
  story book assembled by committee, and reinterpreted time and time
  again until you can no longer know what the original said?
  If your god was so perfect, he wouldn't have left such a shoddy handbook that man could screw up so badly, now would he?
  And as for "When scientists figure out how nothing became something" -
  that's how your god came about... man created something (god) from
  nothingSee More

  
  
• 

  Anthony Clatts

  Nonsense, you said, "evolution... Like God, (it) cannot be observed, proven or disproved."
  "God" is an ambiguous term which is entirely up to an individual person's interpretation and thus their imagination. "Evolution" is a term for the
  pr...ocess
  which is observed in fossil records, genetics and has consistently been
  shown in practice to exist most obviously in the process which viruses
  and bacteria quickly adapt and survive despite our immune systems or
  antibiotics etc. You said the study of evolution is the opposite of the
  practice of observation and gathering evidence.
  
  Scott Steimling, "man created something (god) from nothing", nice one...
  I also want to address, "how nothing became something"... This is not the
  kind of argument I would posit... The universe appears to itself be
  eternal as matter can not be created nor destroy but only fluctuates in
  form. The very dynamic and relative chaos which fuels change and motion
  in the universe seems to have to last forever. the only assumption that
  can be made from the evidence is that the universe truly has infinite
  dimension. It is difficult to understand how the universe can fluctuate
  forever but it is even more difficult as you said to understand how
  "nothing became something". In fact your theory of a Christian God is
  exactly that nothing which became something.
  
  Here is where i think my trouble most directly lies so i will go directly to that,
  "I will limit myself to what the Bible says, and what I can learn from
  creation. I take the Bible at face value, no weird interpretations, just
  what it says on the page."
  If you take the bible at face value you aren't questioning it as much as you should. Much more than that, you
  are believing in God based on a book which was written by men not God
  himself. Most troubling is that you have not personally experienced God
  and God's decisive directive. I say, God is a desire not a direction.
  You enjoy the practice of believing in God but don't actually have real
  verification of it. You MUST go to the Bible to talk about Christianity
  and that book is a hoax dare I say a joke when seen from the perspective
  of how religion resides in the human social conscience.

  
  
• 

  Adam Cowan

  ‎@ Scott, You got me, I am brainwashed, biased, and I do have presuppositions, as does everyone. I have chosen to study to the Bible
  and use it as my lens through which I see life. Your history of the
  Bible sounds more like the history of...
  the Koran. I don't know if you've heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls or
  not, but google it. Many of the Hebrew texts from which the Old
  Testament is translated are copies dating from 900 to 1100 A.D. When
  the Dead Sea scrolls were found in the mid 1900's the age was determined
  to be around the time of Jesus, and earlier. That's a 1000 years of
  hand written copies in between these manuscripts. When the texts are
  compared it is striking how little variation exists between copies,
  despite a thousand years of history in between.
  
  As far as bits and pieces of stories handed down the textual evidence does not back up
  this theory. The many (almost 6000 Greek texts of the New Testament
  alone) are remarkably similar. I should know, I own a Greek NT equipped
  with a Textual Apparatus that shows what manuscripts were used, how old
  the manuscripts are, and how much of the NT is contained in the
  manuscript. I might concede that the Old Testament was oral tradition
  handed down, but once it hit print it did not change. As far as oral
  tradition for the NT, not likely at all. The NT was written over a span
  of 50 years, (the OT is roughly a 1000).
  
  As far as man's interpretation, well yes, that will vary, but not the words on the page.
  We can both read Moby Dick and the finer points of our literary
  analysis may differ, but we will most likely agree on the plot and main
  characters. Regardless of our interpretation the words remain.
  
  The Bible claims to be the Word of God in many places. True, men did write
  it, but under the influence of God. As such it takes on the
  characteristics of God, it is true, and reliable.
  
  As far as man creating god(s), look at Greek, Roman, Norse, Native American, etc,
  mythology. When men create god he turns out a whole lot like himself.
  
  My goal in all of this is not to argue about who is right, I already know I
  am :) , but to understand and remember how I use to think, and to
  present a defense of the Christian faith. In all seriousness these are
  questions of life and death. How we answer them determines how we live
  and how we understand this life. 

  
  
• 

  Adam Cowan

  ‎@Anthony, My apologies, we are knee deep in this topic and have not defined our terms well enough. When I use the name God I am referring to the God of
  the Bible. Though the Bible is not a complete picture of God is does
  give many attrib...utes of Him and tells us some of what he has done, what he is doing, and what he will do.
  
  When I speak of evolution I am usually referring to macro-evolution as the
  theoretical engine that creates new kinds of animals and originated in
  the first living cell. Variation within kinds of animals is also
  considered evolution, and with that type of evolution (micro-evolution),
  I have no problem. What I do not believe, due to lack of proof on many
  levels is one kind of animal changing into another. I do not see birds
  changing into mammals, or even transitional organisms whether living or
  preserved in the fossil record. I know evolutionists have a few
  favorite fossils, but if evolution is truly the process by which life
  comes about then would there not be hundreds, thousands, or more fossils
  that show the progression? The example of viruses and bacteria doesn't
  really prove evolution, unless those virus and bacteria mutate into a
  new kind animal all together. At this point you may say, "of course you
  can't see viruses and bacteria changing into new organisms, it takes
  millions millions of years for that to happen." To which I say, "you
  can't observe evolution then?" If you can't observe the actual process
  where it matters most, then is it really observable science? To me it
  is clear that evolution is in the same boat as God, neither can proved
  with science.
  
  As far as the universal being eternal matter I totally agree with your point about God. Yes God has no beginning or
  end, He is outside of time, and space. He is not creation as pantheism
  would teach, but he is outside of creation. So who created God? An
  eternal God doesn't really answer the question of origin, any more than
  more than an eternal universe. I am limited by time and space, so I
  won't begin to pretend to have a satisfying answer to this problem. For
  now I will exercise faith, I think I can wait the rest of my life and
  ask God when I see him how the whole eternal thing works. For now I
  will ask, which is more likely, an eternal purposeless universe giving
  birth to matter and life, or an intelligent being framing the universe?
  
  I will agree with you again on my lack of an actual experience with God.
  I will admit that it would be easier if God would just pull back the
  clouds and speak. It doesn't make sense that God would make us and then
  not communicate some how. He could reveal himself to us on an
  individual basis, or talk to us all at once, but he has chosen to use a
  written word instead. unlike conversations which are forgotten and
  remembered wrong, written words do not change. If God so choses to
  reveal himself directly to me, great. Would you believe if he had? How
  would I know it was God, and not my imagination, or an evil spirit? If
  two people have contradicting revelations who is right? There problems
  with a written word, but I think a spoken word would cause more. I do
  place a lot of stock in the Bible, but only because I have seen it prove
  true again and again. I no longer approach it doubting, but expecting
  to see harmony and truth. 

  
  
• 

  Scott Steimling

  ‎"use it as my lens through which I see life" - distorted as necessary to preserve the power over the ignorant masses
  
  "As far as man creating god(s), look at Greek, Roman, Norse, Native American, etc, mythology. When men create god he turns ...out a whole lot like himself." - and yet your god claims to be the blueprint for man... where is the difference from all the other gods?
  
  Your devotion is certainly strong... but I continually wonder how people
  that consider themselves educated can believe in such stories. Lots of
  writings? Perhaps, handed down over time. Over a wide time span? Yes,
  it takes a lot of work to create legend.
  
  If you are short on experience with god communicating directly, visit your local mental
  health inpatient facility. You will find many residents there who have
  been in daily communication. How can you prove that their experience is
  false while others are not? The symptoms are the same, just a matter
  of degrees
  
  
• 

  Anthony Clatts

  Alright you say evolution is not observable and yet God's creating everything is least observable of all. I am very likely going to major in a
  genetics field and have already studied the subject on several levels.
  Firstly we have to realize...
  that life is estimated to have existed around 3.8 billion years ago on
  Earth and possibly longer elsewhere in the universe... The original life
  forms which have been preserved in fossils for example show that these
  organisms where vastly different than the organisms which exist today.
  There have been vast periods with different kinds of animals inhabiting
  the Earth and in earlier times mammals didn't exist let alone anything
  like a human. there is no evidence that a God just came by every once in
  awhile to give Earth a new creature but evolution makes perfect sense
  out of this situation while also being backed up by genetic timeline
  figures and genetic similarities between certain species.
  I find not believing in evolution to be far more offensive than believing in God.
  For God there is little if conflicting evidence either way. With
  evolution you have to be a fool to disagree with it and not have studied
  how biology works and has been studied.
  
  "When I use the name God I am referring to the God of the Bible." and when other people refer to
  God they mean something totally different and yet believe it the same,
  fervently. How can you explain the difference in conviction and mystical
  experience when there is supposed to be only one God which speaks to
  all mankind? You can't answer that adequately I know...
  
  Also unanswerable,
  
  If God is infinitely powerful why does the Devil need to exist and do
  "evil" things? If God if infinitely knowing than why does it say in the
  Bible that God regretted making man and thus committed genocide against
  man except for one family which then had incest and repopulated the
  earth. If God is omnipresent than why do bad things have to happen at
  all...
  
  I also want to say I was raised Christian and grew up looking for God. My gigantic curiosity combined with the inexplicable
  lack of definition and destination associated with believing in god led
  me to philosophy, science and art. In the end it made me believe
  especially in myself because it wasn't really there.

• 

  Belinda Clatts Hang in there Adam-my son is awesome and intelligent- however, I too use the Bible as the lens through which I see life.

  
  
• 

  Adam Cowan

  ‎@Scott, I don't know if you are aware of the lens through which you see life. You rule out the supernatural and see Christians as insane. I do find
  that funny because some of the greatest, and most influential men and
  women of history ha...ve
  been Christians. Even the fathers of modern science, like Newton, were
  Christians and based there science on an orderly world that follows
  rules.
  
  In a nutshell here is the Biblical Worldview. God created everything perfect, including Adam and Eve, who were made in his image.
  He gave them the world and told them take care of it. There was only
  one thing they could not do, and they ended up doing it which sent the
  whole universe in a tail spin. Obviously the world is no longer
  perfect, including people. We broke it, but God promised to fix it.
  This promise is fulfilled in Jesus who became man (for it was man who
  messed up), and bore the consequences for us, which was death. Because
  he never broke God's laws, death had no power over him, and he rose
  again. Those who believe that Jesus was who he said he was and follow
  him begin to taste of the glory that is to come. Right now we only see
  of glimmer of the future kingdom. One day everything will be restored.
  
  You ask how I know God isn't talking to the insane people, well I don't,
  but if what they claim God is telling them doesn't match up with what he
  has already written, then keep the strait jacket on. That is the
  beauty of a written word as opposed to a spoken word. The Bible is the
  standard by which everything else is measured, that is how my mind
  works.

• 

  Adam Cowan

  ‎@Anthony, I stand by my statement that macro-evolution is not observable. I know of no one living who was present at creation of this world, save
  God, and he recored that bit of history is in Genesis.
  
  How do you know life began 3.8 billio...n years ago? Which dating method would like to put your trust in? They
  all come up with different answers, plus each dating method is built on
  assumptions. One has to assume the rate of decay is constant, one has
  to assume there was no lead in the rock to begin with. There are too
  many variables. Carbon 14 dating has the same problems as radiometric
  dating.
  
  I do not know much about genetics or fossils. I don't think there is a vast difference between the animals in the fossil
  record and the animals of today. I would also disagree that there was a
  time with no mammals, but I need to do more research in this area.
  Just a thought here, how do fossils form? A rapid burial caused by
  catastrophic events? How about a huge flood covering the earth laying
  down tons of sediment burying large numbers of animals quickly? Maybe a
  flood in Noah's day really did happen.
  
  You ask some very tough questions. I am impressed. Many people put little thought into
  anti-god, anti-christian, and anti-bible mindset.
  
  There is only one God, and there is only one way to be right with him. Sincerity is
  nice, but doesn't help. God does not call us to be sincere, but to
  repent. I find it odd that we are so eager to paint man as just, and
  God as the villain, yet we all quickly admit how horrible men can be.
  The Bible describes man as completely depraved. We can do nothing good
  apart from his grace. Once we realize we have offended a holy God we
  have the right view of ourselves. Once we understand what God had to do
  in order to forgive us we have a right view of God.
  
  When you touch on the problem of evil you hit the nail on the head. To me this
  is by far the most difficult question facing Christians. You will find
  no answer that completely satisfies. God is in charge, and Satan is a
  dog on a leash. God has given him a measure of authority, but he can
  only go as far as his chain lets him. Satan choose to go against God,
  but will never win. How can he, he is not God. The best answer I can
  give to this problem is what God decided to do in order to conquer evil
  once and for all. He took the entire punishment upon himself at the
  cross. In order to forgive us it cost him his son. Here is the God of
  the universe coming to this earth, taking on flesh making himself lower
  than the angels he created, and dying?!? Does not make sense. God
  deserves to be served, but he served us as an example. When I struggle
  with the problem of death, suffering, and evil, I meditate on what God
  has done.
  
  I am surprised you didn't find glimpses of God in philosophy and science. Especially in Plato. Finding God is no easy
  task, but at least he has confined his written revelation to one book.
  It is true that over 2000 years, a totally different culture, and a dead
  language compound the problem, but I believe God made it as easy as
  possible. Some truths are only found through much digging and
  searching.
  
  If you truly search for God, you will find him, but if you are anything like me, I doubt you will find God, he will find you.