re: #587 Iron Fist

Old earth “creationist” will do, because I do believe that the universe was created. Microevolution does exist. The existence of a mule pretty much proves the existance of a common ancestor to both the horse and the donkey at some point in time. That far I’ll follow.

But the notion that everything that uses DNA evolved from a common ancestor? No, I don’t buy it. That is a huge leap of faith that I cannot take. Although I don’t see why that would necessarily preclude creation. It would prove, beyond any doubt, that there was at least a primordial Eve for all living things on earth. Why couldn’t that first “Eve” have been created? How else was it brought forth from the ooze?

I stay quite on these threads, for a number of different reasons. This is one of them. While you may say evolution doesn’t mean there isn’t a god, in practice most of you argue it from a position that comes across as saying there is no god. If that’s what you believe, more power to you, but that isn’t a step that I see as logical. “Everythng just happened the way it happened” is as unsatisfying as saying “Everything just happened the way God wills it to happen”.

I don’t believe either of those expressions of faith.

Why couldn’t ”Eve” have been created from dust by a deity, separate from great apes? How about the fact that they share thousands of artifactual retroviral DNA sequences, which were spliced into the same places in the 3 billion bas pair genomes of their common ancestors before they evolutionarily diverged into orangutans, gorillas, bonobos, chimpanzees, and humans? That evidence is statistically prohibitive of the independent creation option, and it is checkable and re-checkable at will.

Your objection has to do not with healthy scepticism, but with visceral revulsion at being related to apes.