Question for Evolutionists - your view on....

a reply to: VVV88

Evolution does not invalidate a creator.

Agreed, though creationists don't always seem to concede this.

In other words the model and it’s “results” are nothing more than a mathematical representation of a theory...it is not fact or a Law.

It's not a complicated model, with lots and lots of variables, trying to predict what will happen in the future. It's a straightforward, testable proposition: environmental factors acting on heritable differences give rise to evolution and speciation. Evolutionary theory doesn't try to predict what species will evolve in future; evolutionary biologists happily concede that Nature is far too complex for us to second-guess in this way.

I struggled to understand how the analogy given in the paragraph that ends with this sentence relates to what we are discussing. The point is that we know evolution occurs because we have the evidence — we even have evidence of evolution in historical time and the spread of heritable traits through populations, changing the phenotype of the species concerned, sometimes leading to speciation. There are the obvious genetic relationships between species, well illustrated by such phenomena as ring species, which are living illustrations of how speciation occurs over time.

The theory is the theory of natural selection, in which a mechanism is proposed by which this occurs. This theory has been proven. In theory, of course, no theory can ever be proven — but this one has always been borne out so far. Over more than 150 years, 100% is an impressive hit rate. Even Einstein hasn't done better in terms of objective validation.

By all means believe in a Creator. Understand, only, this: the discoveries of science show us that this Creator must have operated in certain ways. He must have started with the laws of physics, and once He created them he operated entirely within them thereafter — or, if He did not, He must have some very fancy tricks (and some very interesting reasons) for covering His tracks. In particular, once He seeded this planet with some kind of self-replicating entity (possibly nothing more than a twisty bit of protein that could make copies of itself), He sat back and watched the process of evolution unfold according to His laws. Kind of cuts down on opportunities for Him to play with His toys, but perhaps He likes it that way. Besides, creating the universe must be tiring work; the Bible does say that He rested afterwards.

a reply to: Answer

What the hell are you going on about??? I wasn't the one making a claim of undeniability??? Fallacy much??

In fact, I made NO claims, hence, no need to provide evidence...

All that aside, I only have to provide history as substantiation that all paradigms are proven false in one way or another eventually. So to claim anything as undeniable aside from a thinking person's consciousness existing is foolishness and the true bloviation...

Jaden

a reply to: Masterjaden

I only have to provide history as substantiation that all paradigms are proven false in one way or another eventually.

I think you mean 'propositions', not 'paradigms'. Has the proposition 'the sun will rise tomorrow' ever been falsified?

originally posted by: GetHyped
a reply to: Masterjaden

By all means enlighten us with your explanation for biodiversity, then.

lol...I made no claim other than that the undeniability of the "Broad Strokes" is foolish...lol..

I love people incapable of rational thought attempting to claim a monopoly on "real" scientific truth..

Jaden

a reply to: Astyanax

No I meant paradigms...

The paradigm is the modern understanding of reality. Throughout history it has always been proven wrong and the current believers of those paradigms have always thought that THEIR understanding of reality was right.

I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything.

I'm merely pointing out the fallacy of trusting the current paradigm because of faith placed in the authority that establishes that paradigm.

Whether that authority be religious or scientific/religious.

Any time anyone claims anything to be undeniable, a wise person would look to see how truly undeniable that claim is(virtually no claim is undeniable).

In fact, that is one of the most basic premises of the scientific method.

Jaden

p.s. unfortunately, that concept pisses off people on both sides of an issue, because the reality is that most people don't care about real science and only care about getting other people to believe like they do, and the authority that controls the paradigms REALLY doesn't care about real science and they often prevent the people who do from really doing true science. That goes for both scientific paradigmic authorities AND religious paradigmic authorities.

a reply to: Astyanax

In principle I agree with all you said. Still of a bit of a disconnect between what I consider (as a non-scientist) fact vs theory but I suspect that is due to semantics and world view biases on my part. That last paragraph is rather open minded for an Evolutionist

originally posted by: VVV88
I was following a couple of ATS evolution threads closely and noted that the commenting evolutionists continually referred to any one questioning evolution as “Creationists” and used it is a derogatory label. In fact, some on the other side of the argument cited they were NOT supporting a God based argument but that the science was not settled and were arguing from a skeptic’s perspective.

It's funny that you call "creationist" a derogatory label, yet you put the word "evolutionist" in the title and don't think twice about it. Evolutionist is just as derogatory as creationist if not moreso as it implies that the science that backs evolution is pure faith. It's not. Since creationists DO believe out of faith, the "ist" at the end of "creation" makes sense. I don't understand why it's considered derogatory, but I have personally gone out of my way to stop using the term because folks have gotten upset about it. Instead I just say "evolution denier" because that fits the bill and better explains the position. It's not strictly creationists that deny evolution, it's a small amount of ancient alien theorists and others as well. BUT biblical literalists are definitely the primary group that denies evolution, however it is only something like 30% of Christians at most.

So my question to evolutionists is do you see everyone that questions evolution (and let’s cut to the chase, evolution to mean modern man biologically evolving from simians via randomness and natural selection) as backward, ignorant, anti-science troglodytes? Or is that sentiment reserved for just those that believe in a six solar day universe creation, young earth and humans/dinosaurs cohabiting world view? Or do you also include those advocating a broader intelligent design argument where evolution/adaptation occurs but that it was “guided” when it comes to the “evolution” of modern man?

Do you see anyone who denies creation as heathens who hate god? I've been accused of that numerous times for defending science even when I don't even mention god or religion at all.

It's one thing to question evolution, it's another to flat out deny it without reason or basic understanding of the theory. This constantly happens in this section. There is a war on evolution, and IMO anybody who tries to attack a position of science without first learning how it works is intellectually dishonest. Most of the time, this is the case. The term "ignorant' usually fits as does "anti-science". When I see the term creationist I think of the literal 6 day creation story believers, dinos living with humans, etc, although I believe it can technically mean anybody that believes life / the universe was created as well. Generally it is used in reference to "Young earth creationists," who are the main adversaries of evolution.

I do not dispute the idea that both creation and evolution could be true. Most religious folks that believe in creation accept evolution as fact and just think that it makes god greater. I never understood why it conflicts with folks worldviews so badly, but then you realize that they are mostly fundamentalists who have more faith in literal translations of ancient texts than god himself, it makes more sense. They are loyal to the text, which IMO is very irrational, considering the amount of authors and stories from various time periods that were all compiled together in a single book, and the numerous translations of it. I just don't understand how anybody could take a book like that and declare it all 100% absolute infallible truth, rather than take each story one by one as it's own story.

I just don't understand the flat out denial. They will never use rational arguments that talk about the science, They will assert straw man definitions of evolution and red herrings, hoping to trick people into agreeing with them. I just don't get why they hate evolution so much that they will blindly attack it without reason or understanding of how it works. They don't formulate arguments they just deny and dismiss any scientific evidence that gets posted here. On the contrary they have no problem agreeing with science when it benefits them personally, for example all the working technology that it has led us to, making our lives better, including computers and internet that they use to voice their anti science position.

a reply to: Barcs

I just don't understand the flat out denial. They will never use rational arguments that talk about the science, They will assert straw man definitions of evolution and red herrings, hoping to trick people into agreeing with them. I just don't get why they hate evolution so much that they will blindly attack it without reason or understanding of how it works. They don't formulate arguments they just deny and dismiss any scientific evidence that gets posted here. On the contrary they have no problem agreeing with science when it benefits them personally, for example all the working technology that it has led us to, making our lives better, including computers and internet that they use to voice their anti science position.

Because they have pigeon holed themselves there..
They have been fooled into believing the Bible must take precedence over reality, biblio-idolator, Bible worshipers. Creationism is a system of faith, a sort of religious denial of God in favor of a belief in man above nature. Their imperfect and inherently corrupted theology does not have the authority to override Nature nor what God has very clearly written in Nature, in the rocks, in the sky, in life, indeed the Universe. Man cannot make principles, he can only discover them.

Science as Thomas Paine described it, is a form of "natural theology" in which we would study the Creation, Nature, to learn more about the Creator God. Of course, some of those discoveries have proven embarrassing and humbling for us, such as discovering the Creator's inordinate love of beetles. And to this very day, many believing Christians who are scientists, whether professional or amateur or just fans of science, continue to study the Creation for that same reason.

originally posted by: Elementalist
*giggles*

Wit runs rampant in ATS I see.

If there is evolving, there certainly is devolving. There is always an opposite to anything, in a duel universe.

The body ADAPTS over time, genetically to its external environment. Saying evolve is saying spontaneous upgrades. Nothing is spontaneous.

Adaptation is the genes, relating and changing to survive the external environment. There is a difference, even if your pretending there is not. One is genes at work, the other is magic spontaneous.

DE evolving is going backwards in physical form, downgrading. .. this is poor diet, lack of muscle use, breath work etc. The things that feed and power genes.
Over time the body being fueled by garbage artifical foods, acids for fluid, and this relates to lesser human bodies.
(Weakness, laziness, lack of energy, lack of mental processing Etc)

Evolution is and always will be a theory. Adaptation is what happens when genes change for the entire body to thrive, in an external environment.

Check out Bruce Lipton works. He is a genealogist, biologist, where Darwin was using theories and was nothing special..

The body wants growth, it must adapt to changes within it's external environment to do so,. Some how genes really arrange themselves to make this so, and such, the body change.

To his own...

I just wanted to point out that this post is EXACTLY the type of behavior all of us have been describing that is detrimental to the cause of truth seeking or religious promotion. You obviously do not understand the very basics evolution, and it gets frustrating for people to have to constantly correct people on false claims. Why wouldn't you learn about a subject before attempting to debate it?

- There is no such thing as devolving. Evolution is not linear.
- Evolve is not "spontaneous upgrades." It is the passing down of favorable traits over time in a given population.
- Individual lifetime choices DO NOT affect long term evolution as it rarely changes DNA inherited by offspring
- Scientific theories are based on evidence, and rigorous experimentation.
- Long term adaptation = evolution. Short term adaptation (one individual adapting to tough circumstances) is not.
- Evolution has come a long way since Darwin, so invoking his understanding of evolution is like referencing Isaac Newton in regards to black hole physics
- Evolution has nothing to do with the body wanting something. Traits evolve because certain mutations are helpful to survival making the trait dominant within a population.

You pretty much hit every single faulty argument about evolution in one post. Thanks for justifying precisely what all of the supporters claimed about intellectual dishonesty. Educate yourself on the basics of evolution, then come back and try again. There's no point in spreading willful ignorance.

originally posted by: Masterjaden
The paradigm is the modern understanding of reality. Throughout history it has always been proven wrong and the current believers of those paradigms have always thought that THEIR understanding of reality was right.

You mistake "proven wrong" for "shown to have more involved than originally thought". Did Einstein's relativity cancel out Newton? No, it expanded upon it. Most science is like this. Just arbitrarily stating that it has always been proven wrong is silly. Science is a method of learning facts. As new facts are learned theories are upgraded to include these new facts and the implications involved. It's not like you are suddenly going to find out that evolution is absolutely wrong. That's pretty much impossible based on the mountains of evidence behind it. If we learn new things about other dimensions, and one day prove that god or another entity actually influenced mutations to assist the evolution of man, that doesn't mean evolution has been proven wrong. It would just expand upon the causes.

I'm merely pointing out the fallacy of trusting the current paradigm because of faith placed in the authority that establishes that paradigm.

It's not about authority, it's about peer review scientific research papers. Science is working toward a greater understanding of how things work. You may hit a few bumps in the road, but you will eventually get there. Proof of this is the numerous pieces of technology that have been figured out using the scientific method. Sure, they aren't perfect, but it improves each generation, kind of like evolution except the improvement of technology is almost guaranteed.

Any time anyone claims anything to be undeniable, a wise person would look to see how truly undeniable that claim is(virtually no claim is undeniable).

In fact, that is one of the most basic premises of the scientific method.

Most evolution supporters do not claim it is 100% undeniable or that the theory as it stands today is absolute. Scientific theories propose hypotheses as well as facts, so there are always some aspects of a theory that are still up in the air.

a reply to: peter vlar

Thanks!

a reply to: VVV88

That last paragraph is rather open minded for an Evolutionist

That may well be, but I'm not cutting this deity of yours any slack. If He exists, He's pretty limited in his actual capabilities — far from omniscient or ompnipotent, and the record of science tells us also that if He exists he is far from benevolent as human beings understand benevolence; rather, He appears to be heartless, selfish and sadistic. If, in the face of the evidence, you want to go on worshipping Someone like that, I'd say it was your funeral.

And going by the record, I wouldn't be expecting any favours from Him after the funeral, either.

a reply to: Masterjaden

No I meant paradigms.

'Paradigm' means 'example' or 'pattern'. You meant 'proposition (concerning the nature of reality).'

I'm merely pointing out the fallacy of trusting the current paradigm because of faith placed in the authority

And who would you say was doing that? Because those who put their confidence in scientific observation and experiment certainly aren't. We don't operate on faith.

Any time anyone claims anything to be undeniable, a wise person would look to see how truly undeniable that claim is

So how are we doing with 'the sun has risen every day since the world was formed'?

a reply to: VVV88

Again, the question is not related to an argument of evolution vs. intelligent design but how you evolutionists view those that “question” ape-to-man biological evolution.

Last part first: those who "question" ape-to-man biological evolution are not, in fact, "questioning" ape-to-man biological evolution but are denying evolution all of evolution and all of biology. They are putting forth the proposition that mankind is somehow different than every other organism - a special creation just for man - apparently. All apes evolved from some earlier ancestor that was not an ape. The question, when put in those kind of words is implying that man is not an Ape when in fact Mankind is an ape, specifically one of the Great Apes, cousins to Gorilla, Chimpanzee, Bonobo, and Orangutan.

The other answer is when somebody says: "I am having trouble agreeing with evolution because I don't understand how X could happen" then that person is not necessarily a creationist, but just someone who doesn't understand evolution. Maybe nobody knows how X could happen yet.

On the other hand, if somebody says: "I am having trouble agreeing with evolution because the world is only 6000 years old" or "because the eye" or something else that indicates that evolution is impossible because it seems to contradict his belief system, then it is extremely unlikely that that person is anything other than a creationist of some flavor or other.

Intelligent Design is indeed a "flavor" of Creationism, constructed out of whole cloth in an attempt to hide the identity of the intended 'Intelligent Designer'. Not all Creationist believe the world is only 6000 years old, but all Intelligent Designers are most definitely Creationists. Finally, someone proposing that evolution happened for everything except mankind is most certainly a Creationist.

Panspermia on the other hand is just a complicated infinitely regressive abiogensis hypothesis, not an alternative to evolution, and not a Creationist hypothesis. Panspermia alleges that life was planted on earth from space, either by accidental chemical accumulation or by an intelligent agent aliens. If it was intelligent agent aliens then they would have evolved on their native planet just as we did on ours. In either case, evolution is not questioned by panspermia.

originally posted by: VVV88
Again, the question is not related to an argument of evolution vs. intelligent design but how you evolutionists view those that “question” ape-to-man biological evolution.

It's all a stupid argument. Evolution can be either random or intelligent design and I do not know why people can not understand that.

The debate should be random chemical reaction based on fundamental laws, or intelligent design using fundamental laws.

Evolution is one answer to how it all happen, not why it happen.

a reply to: Masterjaden

So you make a blatantly false, unsubstantiated statement about the validity of evolution and when asked to explain what, if not evolution, was responsible for biodiversity you draw a blank?

K.

a reply to: Astyanax


Well, if you are referring to the Bible, have you read it in its entirety? What I got out of it concerning God's character is that actions have consequences so use your free will wisely....OT. And reconciliation, forgiveness, and redemption....NT.

As far as God and his agents working in and through the world, just because science can't measure it doesn't mean it isn't happening..same goes for "an afterlife".

originally posted by: Astyanax
a reply to: VVV88

Evolution does not invalidate a creator.

Agreed, though creationists don't always seem to concede this.

In other words the model and it’s “results” are nothing more than a mathematical representation of a theory...it is not fact or a Law.

It's not a complicated model, with lots and lots of variables, trying to predict what will happen in the future. It's a straightforward, testable proposition: environmental factors acting on heritable differences give rise to evolution and speciation. Evolutionary theory doesn't try to predict what species will evolve in future; evolutionary biologists happily concede that Nature is far too complex for us to second-guess in this way.

I struggled to understand how the analogy given in the paragraph that ends with this sentence relates to what we are discussing. The point is that we know evolution occurs because we have the evidence — we even have evidence of evolution in historical time and the spread of heritable traits through populations, changing the phenotype of the species concerned, sometimes leading to speciation. There are the obvious genetic relationships between species, well illustrated by such phenomena as ring species, which are living illustrations of how speciation occurs over time.

The theory is the theory of natural selection, in which a mechanism is proposed by which this occurs. This theory has been proven. In theory, of course, no theory can ever be proven — but this one has always been borne out so far. Over more than 150 years, 100% is an impressive hit rate. Even Einstein hasn't done better in terms of objective validation.

By all means believe in a Creator. Understand, only, this: the discoveries of science show us that this Creator must have operated in certain ways. He must have started with the laws of physics, and once He created them he operated entirely within them thereafter — or, if He did not, He must have some very fancy tricks (and some very interesting reasons) for covering His tracks. In particular, once He seeded this planet with some kind of self-replicating entity (possibly nothing more than a twisty bit of protein that could make copies of itself), He sat back and watched the process of evolution unfold according to His laws. Kind of cuts down on opportunities for Him to play with His toys, but perhaps He likes it that way. Besides, creating the universe must be tiring work; the Bible does say that He rested afterwards.

That was one of the most eloquent replys I've read from you.

a reply to: VVV88

Well, if you are referring to the Bible, have you read it in its entirety?

No; have you? I've ploughed through vast and thorny tracts of it, though, and found some gems, too, like the one about the Philistines being cursed with haemorrhoids for stealing the Ark of the Covenant. Reading the Bible as an unbeliever can be a fascinating experience. You can see what's going on more clearly that way. If, for example, you construct an alternative account of the rise of the prophet Samuel and his disposal of the old Eli the high priest, his guardian and mentor, using only the data given in 1 Samuel but looking at it from the viewpoint of someone sympathetic towards Eli, a terrifying picture of Samuel emerges.

A desire for reconciliation, forgiveness and redemption would imply that one was sure God is good, and that it is good to reconcile oneself to Him. I fear the Old Testament is full of evidence to the contrary — detailed instructions for carrying out genocides, the entire Book of Job — while the New Testament is all about God sacrificing Himself in human form, to Himself (possibly in some other form), in order to redeem humanity from the crimes committed, ultimately, upon Him. I have a strong feeling of moral discomfort about all that.

But we're drifting way off topic. We'll be on theodicy next.

(Oh, and thanks, Randy!)