dusqi

That's because for many (most?) literal Bible followers, creationism denies (macro) evolution, which has a lot of objective evidence in its favour. If someone disagrees with this, then I'm sorry but I find their view laughable, however I don't want to debate it again because we've done that before.

Then become a scientist.

I respect this, it is a brave document. The fundamentalists are worried that if they acknowledge that some aspects of the Bible are untrue, then people will start to question other parts that they won't tolerate being questioned, such as homosexual marriage. Sadly this forces them to accept myths like Adam and Eve as fact. So for the Catholic Church to officially come out and say that parts of the Bible are inaccurate, they're risking a lot. I must admit that I'm surprised, since I thought the new Pope was rather fundamentalist himself. This does come from UK Catholics though, and in the UK trying to deny evolution in favour of Biblical tales really is laughable. So the Church has a difficult time either sticking with the Bible as completely factual, and being laughed at and ignored, or admitting that some of it is wrong and risking having other parts of it questioned.

People spend way too much money on DVDs. The amount of "poor" people I know who have collections of 200+ DVDs is stupid. I look at their rack of DVDs and think "there's ÃÆââ¬Å¡Ãâã2,000 right there." They just feel "poor" because they only ever have ÃÆââ¬Å¡Ãâã20 to spend at any one time, and that's because as soon as they get ÃÆââ¬Å¡Ãâã20, they can't resist buying another DVD. ÃÆââ¬Å¡Ãâã950 a month seems like a good enough amount to afford a small house Matt :) Not that I've worked it out properly like Rizla suggests.

I found this comment the most humourous:

There's no quick fix.

I kinda like the feeling you get when you solve a statistical problem. The feeling of knowing that your answer is correct, the most efficient, 100% right, and that the job has been finished and can be moved on from. I don't like it enough to enjoy the whole process of getting to the answer though.

Civ is a great series, however I shall not buy the new one partly because it takes up too much time once I get started and I need to be doing other things, and partly because the concept was good but I don't think there is any need for 4 versions of it (and expansion packs), I think they're milking it.

I applaud that you've given some thought to the matter! Keep your eyes and mind open to all possibilities, because this type of question is not something you can just decide and then move onto the next question. It's a life-long question.

The "emo" group are not to be confused with genuinely depressed people who may self-harm for other reasons than to "fit in".

There's nothing like high prices to get people to change the way they live. In the long run this will help everyone. America will find other ways to get around that use less fuel (technological solutions, public transportation, walking???) and thus reduce its dependence on unstable middle eastern countries, and it'll do the environment some good also.

Congratulations to all those who got what they needed in their GCSEs!

I tried GoogleTalk today, and the quality of the conversation was high. Not as high as a phone conversation, but significantly better than Skype for example. GoogleTalk had 5 bars in the corner of the conversation window when the connection was best, which went down when the connection was poor - much like a cellphone does. This was useful, because if you saw the number of bars drop, you knew that the other person probably wasn't able to hear you, so you could repeat what you just said.

My opinion is that online items that could be sold for real-life cash should be considered to be so by the law... and thus someone using a bot to get items from another person, in a game where bots are not allowed and in which by playing they have agreed not to use, should be considered by the police to have stolen items to the value of whatever they'd sell at. However, in terms of actually policing people who steal, the police are unlikely to take any action if a laptop gets stolen in real life, so they probably shouldn't go far out of their way to bother about mmorpg items either. In terms of internet freedom, I don't think that it could ever be restricted effectively. Firms still put their money on strange Pacific Islands to avoid paying taxes, and criminals still escape to south american countries to avoid justice, so I don't think that much of a world restriction could be implemented when the whole world is concerned.

Ludovico Einaudi - Le Onde Current classical composer, this piece is a piano solo piece.

The Butterfly Effect was a very average movie from what I remember. I respect the idea of a butterfly effect, where something small can make a big difference through the other changes that it sets in motion - but I saw no reason for The Butterfly Effect to be so unrealistic with a guy who could go back and change time. Why not just have the film based more in "real life", where it starts out with a big change, and then goes back in time with all the little changes that occurred to make it happen?

Me and Mad4u689 first saw each other on the rs boards back in 2001, then when they closed in November, I followed her to the Runescape Trivia Boards (which probably most of you don't know about) and also around the tip.it boards. Then in 2003 we both started frequenting the tip.it IRC channel - #runescape - where we really met each other properly and started talking. We "officially" started having a long-distance relationship in January 2004, and then she came to England in the summer where we met each other just for a day. Now we've been together over 18 months and we're going to meet again properly - tomorrow :D She invited me to her house to stay for 22 days! We'll spend lots of time together and I'll meet her friends.. and we'll also do lots of touristy things :P It's going to be awesome and we're both so excited and nervous.. so we thought we'd share it with one of the main sites that's helped us to meet =D We plan to update this post with pics of things we've seen and places we've been to also :P

It depends what the God wanted.

This is the first I've heard of it, and so I admit that all I know is just from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion Presumably you are referring to the claim that all life sprang from this one organism during the Cambrian explosion, suggesting that there was a divine influence placing the organism on Earth. This is part of what Wikipedia has to say on the subject, as I said before I don't claim to be an expert at all:

Very cool Matt. I'm also impressed that according to the BBC article, only 1 person was arrested.

But... I look around... at what we've discovered... and no matter what the 'odds' are (how do you even create the "odds" of life evolving intelligently?), I see the evidence that evolution did occur, no matter how unlikely it is. Maybe a creator set off evolution by creating the first unlikely spark of life, or maybe it did happen completely randomly, but evolution did occur.

Random chance causes "intelligence" from time to time. Put a cat in a box with a string that can be pulled to release the catch on the door, and it'll randomly blunder around the box until it eventually waggles its paw near the string and the door opens. Repeat this 10 times over and by the 10th time it'll straight away waggle its paw at the string as soon as it's put in there. The cat seems intelligent, but in fact it doesn't have any insight into how the string works - it just knows that waggling its paw at the string will let it escape from the box. It's the same thing with elements and intelligence. It's not as if intelligence has appeared from nothing. "Intelligence" is just the result of putting all the elements together in a certain way, which makes them work in an "intelligent" manner.

I agree with you - the evidence for mundane elements randomly turning themselves into simple life seems a bit more sketchy to me, and I haven't looked into it much. This is why I don't strongly disagree with evolutionary creationists, who say that God started life off and then evolution occurred. What I completely disagree with is pure creationism - the universe being created in 6 days, with humans all set up and ready to lead all the other animals. It seems obvious to me that humans have evolved from apes and there is a wealth of evidence to back this up. This is where I come back to Insane, who said of me earlier: I try to accept all religious views, however I just don't consider evolution to be something that religion has something to say about. Religion is good at questions about beginnings and endings, and I consider evolution to be as factual history as the Romans were.

Gravity is also a theory. Would you jump off a bridge? Okay, some hard evidence. Look at this picture showing the evolution of humans from apes. Viruses like AIDS are passed down through generations by adding a DNA copy of themselves to the host's genome. So you'd have the information to make a human, as well as the AIDS virus information. However, not all viruses like this will cause death, some are harmless. Approximately 1% of human DNA is composed of these viruses which have added themselves to our genome (some 30,000 viruses). The arrows on the picture show when some of these viruses added themselves to our genome. All branches after the insertion point (those to the top right) carry the virus. Once a virus DNA has inserted itself into the DNA of an organism, it will be inherited by all descendents of that organism. Thus showing that we are descendents of apes. The chances of us randomly getting the same inserted viruses in the same DNA spots as monkeys, but no other organisms, are extremely low. This comes from: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc ... troviruses There are 29+ other evidences for evolution there.

As you know, creationism is all about how the universe was created in 6 days, with all the animals and humans set up in it ready to go. As opposed to evolution where life started off as single celled organisms and then diversified and became more complicated over billions of years with billions of trial and error tests. This post isn't about whether there is a God or not, it's about whether life (through a God, or lack of a God) started off through evolution or not. Your post simply addresses the problem of the beginning of evolution. In my opinion, the beginning of evolution is a philosophical question at the moment where religion can have something to say if it wants. But evolution itself is a fact.