The Origin of Life: Common Descent or Common Design?
The question of origins has been debated for centuries. Darwin suggested that the scientific evidence favor the claim that we share with apes a common ancestor, while creationists argue that the same scientific facts can be explained by a common design approach.
The question is: Which of these opposite explanations makes more sense? Sean Pitman, who has investigated this topic more deeply than most of us, has written an article dealing with this topic. The title is: “Homologies, Phylogenies, Sequence Space and the Theory of Evolution.” It starts this way: …
More: https://adventlife.wordpress.com/2014/02/07/the-origin-of-life-common-descent-or-common-design/
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Death Before the Fall? by Cliff Goldstein
Michael Dowd, author of Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World, describes himself as an “exuberantly born-again evolutionary evangelist” whose melding of evolutionary theory with Christianity has taught him to celebrate “14 billion years of divine grace and creativity.”
What particularly excites him, he writes, is that “death, more often than not, is a cosmic blessing.” He continues: “Perhaps there is no more alluring portal for discovering the benefits of evolutionary spirituality than death understood in an inspiring new way. Thanks to the sciences . . . we can now not only accept but celebrate that Death is natural and generative at every level of reality. Death is no less sacred than life.”
More: https://adventlife.wordpress.com/2014/01/16/death-before-the-fall-by-cliff-goldstein/
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1.8-million-year-old skull shakes mankind’s family tree by Jeremy A. Kaplan
Dmanisi skulls 1-5 show remarkable differences — and remarkable similarities. (M. Ponce de León and Ch. Zollikofer, University of Zurich, Switzerland)
Some had protruding foreheads, others had short, squashed faces. Some had enormous jaw muscles and big teeth, while others had enormous heads to hold bigger brains. They had one thing in common, however: They were family — our ancient family, that is, from around 2 million years ago. …
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Gary Gilbert, Spectrum, and Pseudogenes
In October of 1992, Spectrum Magazine ran an article written by a young physician, Gary Gilbert, in which he attempted to justify his loss of faith on the basis of the existence of pseudogenes.
“Pseudogenes are regions of DNA that have codes very similar to known genes, but often have stop codes in every reading frame, so that no protein could ever be produced from the code they contain. They were presumed by evolutionists to be copies of protein-coding genes that, through the process of evolution, have been mutated so extensively that they are no longer functional. …”
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Vatican Honors Charles Darwin
Some religious leaders may take issue with Charles Darwin and what he represents, but the Vatican has announced that it is officially on board with evolution. A leading official declared yesterday that Darwin’s theory of evolution was compatible with Christian faith, and could even be traced to St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas. “In fact, what we mean by evolution is the world as created by God,” said Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi [Times Online]. Both St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas recognized that life changes slowly over time, Ravasi said, and that was a step towards comprehending evolution. …
More: https://adventlife.wordpress.com/2013/02/05/vatican-honors-charles-darwin-by-eliza-strickland/
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Carbon-14 Dating Dinosaur Bones
Why is science apparently ignoring scientific evidence which yields a relatively young age to dinosaurs bones? Instead of 65 millions years, the date obtained from testing a significant number of dinosaur specimens, the dates resulting from these tests range between 30 and 40 thousand years.
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Hawaii & the Ring of Fire
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Catastrophic Plate Tectonics Explained by
Dr. John Baumgardner
Former Geophysicist, Los Alamos National Laboratory, presents multiple scientific lines of evidence pointing to a catastrophic plate tectonics theory of origins. Instead of engaging in the Pangaea versus plate tectonics controversy, he combines both theories into one based on catastrophism. … More: ===>
Pangaea or Plate Tectonics?
Watch the videos, read the comments, and decide!
Here are some comments by bloggers:
1. Is the Earth Expanding, or drifting apart as held by the Pangaea Theory? Neal Adams proposes that there was a Pangaea “super-continent” in the past, but that the change to is due to the Earth expanding, not continental drift and tectonic plate movement. … More:===>
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https://adventlife.wordpress.com/2012/07/02/pangaea-or-plate-tectonics/
Michigan Conference Responds to Story About Their Disinvitation of the LSU Choir.
The following memo has been confirmed as an official communication from Jay Gallimore, president of the Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.
To: Michigan Conference pastors and teachers
From: Jay Gallimore
Subject: Michigan Conference position on La Sierra recruiting on our campuses.
We have been getting questions recently concerning the Michigan Conference refusal to allow La Sierra, which teaches theistic evolution, to be allowed to recruit on our academy campuses. More: ===>
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Tennessee Bill Allows Creation in Science Classrooms
A new pro-creation education bill that passed the Tennessee Senate 24-8 last month and 70-23 in the House last year is on the governor’s desk. Many think it likely that this bill will be signed into state law by governor Bill Haslam today (April 10, 2012).
“These bills sound very innocent,” said Eugenie Scott, executive director of theNationalCenterfor Science Education. That’s intentional, she said. The legislation has been crafted to be legally bulletproof. More: ===>
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Intelligent Design, Evolution Clash in Courtroom.
Evolution and intelligent design are the subjects of an ongoing wrongful termination lawsuit inLos Angeles, and it’s driving liberals nuts.
Former Jet Propulsion Laboratory systems administrator David Coppedge, who by many accounts aggravated his co-workers for a number of reasons, has sued JPL, claiming that his demotion and subsequent firing were because of his views on creationism, intelligent design and gay marriage. More: ===>
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Walla Walla University
The Collegian Debates Evolution vs. Creation. The Collegian, the school paper for Walla Walla University, just published an entire spread on the topic of evolution vs. creation with authors (primarily students) from multiple departments contributing. … most of the articles seemed to undermine the importance of teaching the validity of a truly literal six-day creation week – despite the historical position of the Church that the literal nature of the six-day creation week is “fundamental” to the faith of Seventh-day Adventists. … Clearly, La Sierra University is not the only Adventist school that has been challenged by the issue of origins. … More: ===>
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Two Adventist Universities Promote Six-Day Creation
The Seventh-day Adventist Church officially holds, as a foundational truth, …Yet, the teachings of modern evolutionary scientists have made significant inroads into our church schools. The majority of scientists in some of our schools, like La Sierra University, have long been teaching our young people that Neo Darwinism is not just a popular competing naturalistic theory inimical to the Adventist perspective on origins, but that it is in fact the truth story of origins that life reeally has existed and evolved on this planet, in a Darwinian manner, over hundreds of millions of years of time. And, LSU is not alone. Several of our “Adventist” schools have started promoting the perspective of popular naturalistic science to one degree or another contrary to the historic Adventist position on origins. More: ===>
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Dr. John Sanford Lectures on Inevitable Genomic Deterioration, by Sean Pitman
Dr. John C. Sanford, well-known scientist, Associate Professor atCornellUniversity, and inventor of the “gene gun”, recently lectured atLomaLindaUniversityon “Genomic Entropy” or the inevitable genetic deterioration and eventual extinction of humans and pretty much all other living things within a relatively short period of time. In other words, random mutations build up in the gene pools of living things far far faster than natural selection can get rid of them. This generally accepted fact of modern science strongly implies, therefore, that we have devolved, not evolved, from an original ideal state. We are all heading downhill, genetically, very rapidly in fact, toward complete genetic meltdown … “ More: ===>
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