Diogenes
Posts: 80
Joined: July 2006
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Dave, let me explain a little about my background. I grew up in a fundamentalist family. I studied the Bible intently for 20 years. I always had problems with parts of the bible though. I thought if I studied it enough I'd figure out what was wrong with my way of thinking. All my friends and family had managed too, so surely I could. I gave consideration to becoming a minister even. But after years and years of studying the bible, not with an open mind, but with a mind already certain that the bible was true, I could not reconcile the bible with the world around me. Studying the bible is what made me an atheist.
You may be thinking that I attached myself to "darwinism" as a form of life raft, but that isn't how it happened. My mind was already filled with the strawman evolution I was taught about by bible teachers, so I believed it was a weak scientific theory with very little factual backing. "It's just a theory", "the missing link is still missing", "a finch is still a finch", were what my basis for understanding evolution. I stumbled back into evolution by accident, but this time I'd see people pick out a long standing creationist canard, and I'd see someone else completely dismantle it. Time and again I'd see the strawman evolution proposed by a creationist, and I'd see a rational response of "that's not what evolution says, here is what evolution actually says, and here is the scientific evidence to support this position". This prompted me to actually study evolution for the first time (I took biology in a christian school, we kind of just skipped over it). What I found amazed me. Apparently scientists aren't half wits who can't see what is plainly evident to a 4 year old, and apparently they aren't part of an evil cabal dedicated to converting people to their "religion". Understanding what the dual nested hierarchy actually means was somewhat revolutionary for me.
So you see, I have studied the bible in great detail, and I have studied evolution (to a much lesser degree), and even starting with a massive bias towards excepting the bible and rejecting evolution I ended up on the side of evolution. So you'll have to forgive me if I laugh when you say things like "there are no transitional forms" or "species with similar morphologies have similar DNA", as I find those arguments amusing. Could someone who's been on the thread since it's beginning let me know if we got to the Second Law of Thermodynamics or Information Cannot be Created yet, those are my favories.
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:)
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