Seriously, anyone who looks at nature, and sees the hand of God, then uses that as an argument for Creationism, needs to have their ass kicked.
I present the following as evidence for my title:
- In case the link titles don't tip you off, this isn't pretty
Exibit B: The 5 Most Horrifying Bugs in the World
- Okay, science (mankind) has to take some blame for the Africanized Honey Bee, but it's not as if there was some deep genetic manipulation happening, it was simple cross-breeding.
How do they fit into "God's perfect creation"?. Or were they, like T-Rex, herbivorous before The Fall?
Later,
9 people have spouted off:
Pardon the cliche, but that stuff was stranger and nastier than most of the sci. fi I've read or seen. I'm not a big horror fan, but that does include several Steven King books. Natural selection is fantastically and ruthlessly creative.
If creationists are people who think some old man-like creature blew into some dust and made a (poor) copy of himself, yeah, I agree they're nuts.
But while I believe in evolution (the fact that there are people who don't astonishes me), at some point (i.e., Big Bang) everything exploded into the state it's in. Where'd that stuff come from? I understand what made it blow, but where'd it come from? At some point people just have to leave things unanswered or invent (or borrow) something to explain the unexplainable.
It looks like your choice is to shrug your shoulders at what is surely the most important question we have (where’d it all come from?) or accept a mythology. Some people don’t recognize that it is a mythology, though.
That is pretty much my operational definition of a creationist.
as for "where did it all come from?" (in reference to the entire universe) I don't see why this question is particularly important in an everyday sense. Cosmologists have several hypothoses about what happened before the Big Bang, some even indicate that "before the Big Bang" may be meaningless. What makes them scientific is that there are proposed experiments to test them. Without those proposed tests, they would be pure speculation. Given time and popularity speculation becomes myth.
"At some point people just have to leave things unanswered or invent (or borrow) something to explain the unexplainable."
you've just described how myths get started. Notice there's no requirement that any of these explanations be actually true.
My choice is to say "I don't know, and neither do you. I'm okay with that."
"Where'd that stuff come from?"
In Hume's Dialogues on Natural Religion, his character Demea (the mystic) argues that "god" is that which, when properly understood, cannot fail to exist. I've sort of adopted that as my working model for how the universe began, without referring to it as "god." The universe "started" with something which could not fail to exist.
Proving that such a substance/thing exists (and cannot fail to exist) is another matter, so this is still pure speculation.
I like myths. Not because I believe them, but because they're good stories. Then again, I studied Medieval English lit. Myths have power. I like it.
It bothers me when people who should know better take them to be literally true. And it pisses me off when some of those people try to insist that I need to do so, too. That is who I rant about.
Okay, I looked at your bugs. The reason God created them was so that pesticide manufacturers could thrive. The next question would be why God created pesticide manufacturers, which would be to get rid of these freaks of nature. I think it's the circle of life or something.
:P
Spout off: