Glad that most of the dialog is respectful.

Oh, this is SUCH a good quote!

You use the word “maybe” a lot.

Basically, we have a bunch of stuff in the ground with no history (other than the Bible, which you discount) to tell us how it got there. Every explanation about what happened in the past without eye witnesses is a guess — it may be correct or incorrect; it may be a very good guess, but it is still a guess.

All of the arguments from evolution about evolution insist on the fossil record showing ages of the earth. They got their long ages from looking at layers of the earth, and assuming that one layer equaled one year. They still more or less use that same assumption, although they add to it circular reasoning — they “know” what age a fossil is by what layer of rock it’s buried in, and they “know” the age of the rock by seeing which fossils it contains. More recently, they’ve added in radiometric dating, which we’ve already discussed, which has its own assumptions and problems.

But, back to the original issue — that of the origin of the human races. The other day, my children were watching 101 Dalmatians, and that made me think about the different breeds of dogs. There are huge dogs like Great Danes, and tiny dogs like teacup poodles. There are dogs with sharp, pointed muzzles (like Collies), and dogs with short, squatty muzzles (like pugs). There are dogs of all different colors, fur length (or even hairless), curly or straight fur, as well as spotted and single-colored dogs. Then there are the wild dogs, like wolves, coyotes, and dingoes. Creationists and evolutionists alike agree that these were all originally the same species, which diversified into the several species (although they would disagree about the time line involved). If this huge genetic diversity could arise in canines, why could not a much lesser degree of diversity (skin color, hair color and texture, eye color, nose hole, femur length, etc.) arise in humans, without the need for multiple human ancestors? Check out pictures of dog skulls to see a little bit of the intra-species variety that exists in dogs.

Also I do agree with what you are saying about women feeling they deserve to be paid to stay home for a certain length of time with their children. Many years ago when we were in a lawyer’s office signing papers to buy our farm my husband remembers seeing a sign on the lawyer’s desk that said something like this: “Everytime someone gets something he doesn’t pay for, someone else pays for something he doesn’t get”. Now isn’t that the truth!

Marilyn

Proverbs tells us to train up A child in the way he should go, it doesn’t say train up YOUR child. I believe every parent has a responsibility to their children, but to tell them that we are the only ones who can teach them is farce. that means, if your children attend school, you are disobeying the word.

get grace people, and get free.

“”The reason for opposition to scientific accounts of our origins, according to Lewontin, is not that people are ignorant of facts, but that they have not learned to think from the right starting point. In his words, “The primary problem is not to provide the public with the knowledge of how far it is to the nearest star and what genes are made of. . . . Rather, the problem is to get them to reject irrational and supernatural explanations of the world, the demons that exist only in their imaginations, and to accept a social and intellectual apparatus, Science, as the only begetter of truth.” What the public needs to learn is that, like it or not, “We exist as material beings in a material world, all of whose phenomena are the consequences of material relations among material entities.” In a word, the public needs to accept materialism, which means that they must put God (whom Lewontin calls the “Supreme Extraterrestrial”) in the trash can of history where such myths belong.”"

Here’s the full article.

http://www.origins.org/articles/johnson_unraveling.html

There are far more capable people than me, such as you, to debate this issue. They debate because they have strong views and because they have the ability.

Lewontin did not become a ‘materialist’ because of his environment. He was born a ‘materialist’. Yet he argues that environmental factors are more relevant than inherited ones.
It’s a very entertaining debate, views are entrenched and
the debate will go on and on and on.

I find it odd that you complain that God has not revealed Himself. Even Richard Dawkins, one of the strongest atheists I’ve ever heard of, admits that when one looks at the universe, one has a sense of awe and wonder, and that it makes one want to worship a Creator! (He said this in “The God Delusion” debate.) He more or less admitted to having to struggle to be an atheist, when viewing the majesty and splendor of (I would say) creation. Yet he remains an atheist, because to admit otherwise would mean he would have to bow to the Creator, which he will not do. His pride prevents him from accepting the solution which even he admits is natural.

So, I take issue with your assertion that God has not revealed Himself, when even Richard Dawkins admits it… yet refuses to admit it.

As regards the “infinite” monkeys typing — we are not dealing with an infinite amount of time! The law of entropy states that we are wearing out (or may I say, “waxing old, as doth a garment” — Ps. 102:25, Heb. 1:11 — isn’t it odd that the ancient Psalm writer knew about the second law of thermodynamics? and that the writer of Hebrews [who was living at a time in which the scholars of the day thought that the universe was eternal] quoted this true statement as well?). This link also gives the likelihood (or rather, the lack thereof) of life arising by chance — the late Sir Fred Hoyle is quoted:
Now imagine 1050 blind persons [that’s 100,000 billion billion billion billion billion people—standing shoulder to shoulder, they would more than fill our entire planetary system] each with a scrambled Rubik cube and try to conceive of the chance of them all simultaneously arriving at the solved form. You then have the chance of arriving by random shuffling [random variation] of just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends. The notion that not only the biopolymers but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial soup here on Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.

There are a few things I’d like to say about “every conceivable molecular structure” being formed from a “primordial soup”. First from this page, in talking about patterns, and the possibility of things evolving due to chance: A good example of this can be found in the exclusively ‘left-handed’ amino acids found in proteins (coded by genes in DNA built with exclusively ‘right-handed’ sugars), even though synthesizing amino acids in a laboratory produces a 50/50 mixture of left- and right-handed forms (a racemate). In living organisms, not only are hundreds of amino acids which compose an average size protein exclusively ‘left-handed’, they have also managed to avoid all the other kinds of non-peptide reactions amino acids would have undergone in a hypothetical ‘primordial soup’. A racemate is worthless in building enzymes and other biological materials. Therefore the useful outcomes can be specified. Of the astronomically large number of possible reaction products, a minuscule subset is purposefully generated in living cells.

<a href="http://creation.com/refuting-evolution-chapter-1-evolution-creation-science-religion-facts-bias"Professor Richard Lewontin, a geneticist, said, “We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfil many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”

Secondly, something very interesting was recently pointed out to me. Based on the fossil record and evolutionists’ presumptions, evolutionists declare that Prokaryotes are … the only life on Earth for most of its history — from 3.5 to 1.5 billion years ago. Protists joined them at least 1.5 bya, and animals and plants were latecomers at less than .55 bya. Now isn’t that interesting? Supposedly bacteria, which can reproduce every 20 minutes under ideal conditions (but probably take longer to reproduce under most conditions — probably hours, perhaps days), were all alone for some two billion years, then came protists (other tiny things with fast reproduction times) for another billion years. So, for about 3 billion years, reproducing every day (probably several times a day), these billions of bacteria, with all their potential for rapid mutation, with their rapid reproduction… did nothing… produced nothing… evolved into nothing. Yet, all of a sudden, 500 million years ago, BOOM, they start evolving into an explosion of plants and animals with such a vast variety of features, colors, and types to boggle the mind. How is that possible? Essentially NO CHANGE for 3,000,000,000 years, and then within a fraction of that time, suddenly change of every sort imaginable (yet with no undisputed transitional fossils). That’s just intriguing. You’d *think* that there would be a lot more change in all those years with all those fast-reproducing bacteria, but there’s not. Yet there *is* (supposedly) even faster change with much slower reproduction times, with humans evolving from protists in about 1/6 of the time that life supposedly evolved from non-life.