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Evolution doesn't try to claim anything about any religion, or about the origins of life. Science as a whole prefers to just ignore religion unless threatened by groups like the DI, who want to alter scientific reality to adapt it to their dogmatic and theological standards.

However, there is a theory, known as abiogensis, that explains the origins of life from inorganic material. It is complicated and a field where study is ongoing. More later
So evolution cannot prove the origin of life as yet.

The big bang theory leaves a question, even when based on the principle of evolution as in, What contracted to create the big bang,?? where did it come from. No records seem to show how it all started, it just states that this bang just happened...it's like a bullet being shot,..or a bomb detonated, it dosent tell us where the components of the bomb came from, or how it was built or who detonated it, it just starts by saying "The bomb exploded, then from it pieces of it fell into the ground, and evolved into etc..etc.

In order to model what came before, or even the cause of the bang, we do need a new physical theory. This should be a few more years in comming, although there are a few beautiful contenders at the moment.

So evolution cannot disprove the the terms of creation, as of yet.



This is abiogensis, and it requires a rewrite of what you believe life to be.

For evolution to occur in an organic system, you need that system to be able to replicate itself. From there, evolutionary processes and mutations (copy errors) can take you from the simplest organic molecule (that replicates itself) and end up with any lifeform you care to mention, given enough time and the right situation.

These first molecules can be formed through basic chemical processes. I can go in depth again if you want, but think that there are some ideas already outlined earlier in the thread.

The dangers inherent in mixing Science with religion.

There is an important fact that is vital for all Christians to understand in order to avoid damage to both your religion and to science. The two must have a solid wall built between them and be kept indervidual. When combined fully, nothing good can come.

Firstly, for science to be true science, you have to doubt everything. It is no good to simply accept that one thing is the truth and then try to find out things using that as a base, unless you have evidence that thing is true in the conditions you are concerned about. If you don't test and question absolutely everything, you can't claim that your work is scientific.

One example of this is rat running. This is where you do an experiment, usually in psychology, where you put rats in a maze and see how they behave. Say, you read a report about rats that says they always display behaviour A in conditions X. You think about it, and decide to test whether that behaviour changes if you change to conditions. So, you want to run the rats in condition Y, to hopefully get a new behaviour, B.

However, you don't have access to the original experiment. So you have to make your own rat run and put in your own rats. So you test conditions Y, and sure enough, you get behaviour B. So, is that good science?

No. You could have gotten different rats to the original experiment, who always display behaviour B. You could have made the run slightly differently, so that a different condition, that you didn't mean to change, has affected the behaviour. You have to test both your new data, and the validity of the original data for your experiment to work.

This problem tends to crop up a lot in poor science, normally the kind of science funded by companies to get quick results for advertising, or where you need to be shown to be getting new information quickly to get more funding. After all, who wants to go back and recheck an old, proven theory?

That leads me back to the main point. You need to doubt all sources. I mean, sure some theories have been shown to be very, very precise by endless experiment, but that doesn't mean that it will hold for your equipment. You need to check everything and make no assumptions about which model your experiment follows. After the fact you can check your observations against theory to see where they fit, but you can't use theory to select your results.

In religion, doubt is discouraged. You are not allowed to doubt certain facts, such as biblical dogma or that what your religious leader says goes as fact. Many early scientists, such as Galileo, got into lots of trouble because they were willing to doubt the church.

See, in those days, the Catholic church had adopted a particular scientific theory as part of their dogma. The geocentric theory of the universe; basicaly that everything went around the Earth. Catholic theologians and schollars found biblical support for this, and found scientific support for it as well. To be honest, at that time, their evidence was very strong and probably the best theory possible. Even though it did require a lot of fiddles to both science and the bible.

Then came better evidence. We observed and tested the universe to a new level. Copernicus put together these new facts into a new and better model, that of heliocentricism (the sun at the center of the solar system). However, this was not acceptable to the church, as it broke their dogma. His theory was also not fully complete, so he was easily ignored.

When Galileo came along and completed and improve the theory, he was told that it was very nice, but couldn't be claimed as fact. You could say that it was what the universe looked like, but not what the universe was. The Church had a stranglehold on Truth, and that was what was True, regardless of what the universe had to say about it.

As the evidence piled up, the church was forced to withdraw this. They couldn't just wave a theological debate at the sky and change it. They had to accept the way the universe was, and that meant changing the absolute Truth of scripture again. The void has never healed totaly, and the case is still quoted today, just as much as a landmark US supreme court judgement.

More recently, when the big bang theory was put forwards by Georges Lemaitre, himself a Catholic priest, the Pope was quick to seize upon this rather attractive and well based concept as a moment of biblical creation. Lemaitre himself urged the Pope not to make such a mistake. The theory was far from proven, and if the Church was to adopt it as dogma then have it disproven it may not bounce back again. The science was fast moving and had sharp edges. The church being attached to that edge would have made it as vulnerable as any untested theory in physics. Lemaitre may have been a priest and theologian, but he kept that side of his life seperate from science, where he was willing to question everything.

See, for a true scientist to be religious, he has to still have this doubt about everything. He can never be 100% certain about anything (although you can be 99.99999% certain, that last 0.00001% can come back to bite you in the arse later unless you admit that there are still uncertainties). So, a true scientist can not believe in God 100%, or they are leaving themselves open to the idea that some things are beyond question, and hence damage their own science. If they do have this belief, then they have to take special pains to keep it distant from their secular works.

Another definition that Richard Feynman liked to use for science, closely related to the first, is that science is not the passing on of information from one generation to the next. That is simply culture. Science is the questioning and refining of that information. Science is throwing out all the stupid, outdated or wrong ideas and building new ones up in their place. Science is progress.

Religion relies on us holding the information passed on from the past as dogma. You can't question it. To refine or improve a religion is to go against the teachings of that religion. You can't pick and choose the bits of a religion otherwise you stand the chance of throwing out one of the key parts of the religion. For example, Catholics now want birth control to be advocated by the church. However, this has long been a sin, and even if some of the cardinals and priests finally cave, who says that God will change his mind that quickly? It may cause the whole Catholic religion to become null and void in his mind. Then again, some of the thousands of other minor changes may have already done that.

So, shortened version of the previous writings;

Science relies upon change and doubt to exist.
Religion abhors change, and doubt is a major threat to it.

This tells me that any science that is based upon a religious belief is, at best, pseudoscience, and at worst just religious teachings bound up in technical language. Unless you doubt the facts and evidence that your theory is based upon, then you can't call it true science. Taking anything at face value, without repeated studies and checking all findings, destroys any pretence of science.

Creationism and intelligent design take the idea of creator, without sound and repeatable empirical evidence, and build a psydoscience around it. Simply put, any real scientific theory that went along those lines would be thrown out by peer review as soon as they said it was dependant on non-repeatable evidence. You would have to find a new set of evidence that supported it at least before you could try to defend your ideas.

The main reason that Creationists are not always thrown out of serious scientific debate is that people are still very sensitive about religion and offending or discriminating against people over what is, essentially, an irrational belief. You are allowed to take the mick out of people for supporting a different political party, which they will have very good reasons for supporting most of the time, but not for believing in a different god, which they have no solid reason for most of the time. A bit odd.

People who argue against Creationism often have to point out the simple fact that an untestable God is not acceptable in a scientific theory. This is almost always taken as saying that such a being is impossible in reality, and can't be accepted in any sense at all, and so the person is attacking religion itself. Instead, they are realy trying to defend science from polution with bad method or pseudoscientific thinking.

I wish to repeat that I have never said that being religious means that you can't be a scientist, just that you can't mix religion and science at the same time and call the result real science, as creationists do. You can have faith in God, but you can't use that faith as evidence in your scientific arguments.

Philosophy, and as an extension, metaphysics, is not science. It is pure thought, free of all restrictions and bounds of evidence. Sure, you can apply some of the same rules to physics and metaphysics, and the two can guide one another, but they are not aspects of the same thing.

Pure physics requires evidence. Repeatable, verifiable and observable evidence. It is the method of solving those problems we are now equipped to solve, and to explain the facts that we have now come to know.

Metaphysics requires only a grounding in previous knowledge, and no actual, physical, evidence. It is a method of thinking about those problems we are not yet equipped to solve, by making assumptions and leaps of faith.

There are some theories that straddle the two, for example, M-theory is rather metaphysical, but has a sound grounding in Physics, and the gaps its few leaps of faith have crossed are being closed, gradually, by evidence from the physical world.

The fact is that the line between Metaphysics and true, experimental and theoretical pure physics is the dividing line between science and non-science. Philosophy remains beyond metaphysics, as does religion and all theology.

If you approach this problem from the philosophical side, as I suspect you have, then you are looking at it from the abstract eyes of someone separated from science. The lines of science and non-science are hard to spot for most people who are not used to the strict rules. And here we come to the next problem.

Pseudoscience.

Pseudoscientific studies and ideas are so common these days that people can bearly tell the difference. For example, people come up with very, very suspect 'proof' of a 'theory', and call that science. Dan Brown comes up with some unrelated facts and half-facts and convinces a few million people that he has proven that Jesus had children. This is not science. It is fiction based around the real world. These days, even scientists fall victim to this practice, falsifying results or interpreting them in a way to please their sponsors rather than actually follow true scientific practice. The recent debacle in Korea shows what happens when a scientist cares more for keeping a reputation and getting results than actualy finding things out.

When you cross metaphysical philosophy and pseudoscience, as creationists are apt to do in these days of declining doubt about evolution and the big bang, you get a theory that appears to have a grounding in true science; physics and its fellow natural sciences, but is really a house of cards, built on foundations that only exist in the heads of theologists and philosophers.

Christian science (or to be exact, religious scientists) are not the problem. It is the position of using Christian or religious metaphysics and philosophy to try to create physical theories through pseudoscientific means that causes the vast majority of their theories to be shown as false, and where creationism and intelligent design is now trying to fight from.

To let you in on a more scientific mind, may I direct you to a speach by Richard Feynman, given in 1969 (explaining some of the stories he tells, particularly the one about women) to a group of science teachers. Feynman was the least philosophical scientist I know of, but probably the most scientific. He thought deeply about problems and how to solve them, regardless of what the problem was. He famously helped solve the mystery of the Challenger disaster, by analysing how the management had ignored the mechanics reports of safety faults and corner cutting.

What Is Science?

And a second one, on the dangers of pseudoscience and the dangers of selective reporting, as well as some side notes on scientific integrity, or the nearest to morality that most non-biological scientists will need to get.

Cargo Cult Science

I think I have said more than enough. I hope you can get the jist of this. If not, ask any questions you want.