15 Questions For Evolutionists

Came across this series of videos today 15 Questions For Evolutionists where a group of fundamentalist Christians pose 15 great debate topics on the theory of evolution and offer intelligent and reasonable expressions of their view on the matter.

Regardless of their belief system they do offer up some very pertinent questions and poke holes within the theory of evolution, and upon watching I thought, what would the great minds at ATS have to say in response to some of these questions and responses?

So far I have found the series informative and enjoyable, and believe many others will also, however do note, I do not have any kind of religious agenda here, this post is merely a extension of my natural curiosity, therefore I would prefer it if peoples response's were directed at the specific questions themselves.


The 15 Questions are

1. How did life originate?



2. How did the DNA code originate?



3. How could mutations create the huge volumes of information in DNA of living things?



4. Why is natural selection, a principle recognized by creationists, taught as ‘evolution’?



5. How did new biochemical pathways, which involve multiple enzymes working together in sequence, originate?



6. Living things look like they were designed, so how do evolutionists know that they were not designed?



7. How did multi-cellular life originate?



8. How did sex originate?



9. Why are the (expected) countless millions of transitional fossils missing?



10. How do ‘living fossils’ remain unchanged over supposed hundreds of millions of years?



11. How did blind chemistry create mind/ intelligence, meaning, altruism and morality?



12. Why is evolutionary ‘just-so’ story-telling tolerated?



13. Where are the scientific breakthroughs due to evolution?



14. Why is evolution, a theory about history, taught as if it is the same as this operational science?



15. Why is a fundamentally religious idea, a dogmatic belief system that fails to explain the evidence, taught in science classes?

I don't no but if it was god and he existed why do millions of children die each year of starvation? Why are millions of innocent people afflicted with cancer ect? Why do thousands of children get sold as sex slaves each year? Why do clergy men molest children? Why has religion started more wars then any other reason??? why do manchester united continue to be successful???



No all loving all knowing god would let such horrific things happen. It was chemistry biology, physics with a dash of pure luck that made this world and all life upon it!! Show me your God and I shall be humbled!!!


I cnt wait for aliens to finally be discovered so people like this will FINALLY stop holding the planet back from its true potential!


Just my 2 cents..... One love

Sigh... another one of these threads. It is getting extremely tiresome. Neither side of this is EVER, going to convince the opposition. Please don't perpetuate a never ending "Am Not!!!" "Are too!!!" battle. The two sets of evidence are completely irreconcilable with one another. Please just stop.

I'm up to number 1 and you're already wrong. Evolution has nothing to do with the origin of life hence why would you ask an evolutionist about it?

Ask a scientist studying Abiogenesis if you want the latest information on that field, but somehow I think you don't want it at all. You really just want knowledge and evidence to go away and leave your religion alone.

reply to post by KtruthD

I don't no but if it was god and he existed why do millions of children die each year of starvation? Why are millions of innocent people afflicted with cancer ect? Why do thousands of children get sold as sex slaves each year? Why do clergy men molest children? Why has religion started more wars then any other reason??? why do manchester united continue to be successful???

While this is a bit off topic, I'd like to respond.

First off, I definitely understand where you're coming from - these are all ugly truths. But the fact of the matter is that they do nothing contrary to what the bible claims - even believers are not to be sheltered from the world (we are taught to endure and persevere), and pretty much all of these examples are based in the free will of man.

WE are responsible for crafting the world as we want to see it - and there honestly are enough resources and enough wisdom in this world for us to address all these issues.

Unfortunately, as a whole - we choose not to. Blame where blame is due, my friend. I don't like living in a world of free will given out terrible decisions, but I'd like living as a puppet on a string with no will of my own even less.

Take care.

Wow, so far not a single response to any of the questions, great going

KtruthD - do you really want my response to those questions or are you just venting at the fact their christians

Osiris1953 - So because other people have already discussed this topic your saying I shouldn't, sounds like your the one who needs to stop

polarwarrior - haha whats my religion? why don't you tell me what evolution is then? tell me, enlighten your fellow man

*sigh

science is still evolving and get bigger and stronger every day.. religion is not.

Just because lots of people follow it don't mean it is the correct thing to follow. I read somewhere that by 2035 atheism will be half of the worlds population if it keep growing the way it is.

It's not a case of proving we are wrong but its a case of proving your are right. Where is heaving, did Jesus part the red sea? did he really feed all them people with a fish and a loaf.... C'mon you really think that is possible?

You do realise this was written in the day that people thought witches where real and that if you sacrificed your son/daughter for the god you where looked on as a brave man, you could kill you neighbour for having sex!!?!??!

I'm sorry but we have progressed as a society some in bad ways some in good but believing stuff that was written by people with them things happening outside your door must drive you a bit nutty and also quite scared.

Yes their are hole in the theory of evolution but wasn't there a huge hole in the standard model of physics called then Higgs Boson, just because we haven't found it yet does not mean it does not exist.

The bible is a finished product , written, finished, complete. So just because the Christian religion is written and finished when a man of science looks at it we find a tone of holes/improbabilities/impossibilities, but consider science is no where near finished yet ( unlike the bible ) then Christians/Other religions have the audacity to try and pick holes in it? lets wait until science has finished and then you try to pick hole in it like we do with the bible.

You can post as many videos of many religious groups that claims to be the right one or try to prove evolution wrong but that fact is you cant, because to do that you need scientific evidence the type of evidence that we have to show that we came from ape's, not just words. Evolution is science and Christianity isn't it's just, well.. hear say, very very old hear say.


"Safety in numbers"

All I can say is that everything in life is based on personal beliefs.
Where one person believes, another person doesn't.
You can't blame everything on God.
If you believe in good than you must believe in evil.
There is not one without the other.
So there's the reason behind your questions about why things happen.
It's not that God allows these nasty things to happen, it's that there is an evil, too.

I honestly feel that those people who think that everything originated "out of luck" have alot to learn.

BUT: this argument has been hashed and re-hashed on here for years.
It's never going to change, there always ends up being a large amount of unnecessary comments...
And people usually don't bother to have an open mind.

The largest question you must ask yourself is..."Why does it matter to me?"

reply to post by definity


What do you think about them teaching evolution in schools when the videos suggest that evolution requires just as much faith as does believing in an intelligent design

Personally I couldn't care less about the fact they're Christians what I do find interesting is how people latch on to "certainties" and perpetuate them as truth

Originally posted by Allis1
reply to post by definity

 

What do you think about them teaching evolution in schools when the videos suggest that evolution requires just as much faith as does believing in an intelligent design

Good question!
I don't think you need faith in believe the holes that are currently in evolution, I think its more of how can we fit this puzzle together why isn't this work let try this or that, just a matter of time and money to be honest. Since Evolution was created around 150 odd years ago there was literally not much evidence around. 150 Years later it is nearly the most popular belief around so think of how many holes would be left in another 150 years, or even 150 after that.

Where as actual faith in religion is a case of just believing without ever needing to need proof, you belief is your proof, also the number of people that believe with you is a huge benefactor as well as you social groups and your up brining and environment.

reply to post by definity


I know you probably won't watch it but one thing I found quite interesting in the last video, is how they discussed how a humanist movement is growing mimicking that of a religious one, having humanist chaplains, engaging in ceremonies, even quoting a speaker saying that humanism shall rise through the proselytizing of children via the school system, checking out there website they even have a choir haha

Humanist Webby

Now whether people think thats a good or bad thing is a personal opinion,

Originally posted by Allis1
1. How did life originate?

Not related to evolution but abiogenesis. I think the RNA world hypothesis has received very strong experimental support, considering it was already done in the lab and all that..

2. How did the DNA code originate?

There's no such thing as "DNA code".

3. How could mutations create the huge volumes of information in DNA of living things?

By increasing the genome size and so forth..

4. Why is natural selection, a principle recognized by creationists, taught as ‘evolution’?

It's not. It's part of it, but not the whole thing.

5. How did new biochemical pathways, which involve multiple enzymes working together in sequence, originate?

Different pathway, different origin. Question needs to be more specific.

6. Living things look like they were designed, so how do evolutionists know that they were not designed?

Overwhelming evidence supporting the fact that they evolved naturally.

7. How did multi-cellular life originate?

Many origins.

8. How did sex originate?

Many origins.

9. Why are the (expected) countless millions of transitional fossils missing?

Invalid question. All fossils found are transitional.

10. How do ‘living fossils’ remain unchanged over supposed hundreds of millions of years?

A few species have remained anatomically similar for millions of years. Their niche has remained stable.

11. How did blind chemistry create mind/ intelligence, meaning, altruism and morality?

Over billions of years in a trial and error process called evolution.

12. Why is evolutionary ‘just-so’ story-telling tolerated?

Invalid question.

13. Where are the scientific breakthroughs due to evolution?

Like modern medicine? Like modern agriculture? I don't know. Everywhere.

14. Why is evolution, a theory about history, taught as if it is the same as this operational science?

Invalid question.

15. Why is a fundamentally religious idea, a dogmatic belief system that fails to explain the evidence, taught in science classes?

Invalid question.

That's it really. A few questions for creationists:

1. Why are there no 100 million year old fossils of contemporary animals (give or take the few living fossils)?

2. Why does all the evidence uncovered point to the natural phenomenon of evolution having created all the biodiversity?

3. Why are there reduced alphaproteobacteria (mitochondria) inside basically all our cells?

4. Why are there reduced cyanobacteria (chloroplasts) inside all plants?

5. Why does it appear as if about 1/3 of our genes come from bacteria, 1/3 from achaea, and only the rest are specific to eukarya?

6. Why is the human genome almost identical to the chimpanzee genome?

7. Why do non-African human genomes include genetic material from the Neanderthal genome?

8. What kind of force prevents mutations from accumulating and causing speciation given reproductive isolation of populations?

9. Why is about 50% of the human genome clearly made from viral material?

10. Why is it that we can take a human gene and put it into a mouse and in almost every case it works inside the mouse?

Originally posted by Allis1
reply to post by definity

 

I know you probably won't watch it but one thing I found quite interesting in the last video, is how they discussed how a humanist movement is growing mimicking that of a religious one, having humanist chaplains, engaging in ceremonies, even quoting a speaker saying that humanism shall rise through the proselytizing of children via the school system, checking out there website they even have a choir haha

Humanist Webby

Now whether people think thats a good or bad thing is a personal opinion,

Yeah it does seam that they have copied the structure of current religions, but I spose that structure has worked for millennia, so why change it now?

reply to post by rhinoceros


Nice reply I appreciate the effort, I know some of the questions were shortened so don't really make sense without visiting the website, I wish you had the time, effort and patience to elaborate on some points but I guess that just give's me an initial taste for something else to research in my own time

reply to post by Allis1


1. The origin of life is irrelevant to the biological fact of Evolution. No one is quite sure how life originated on planet Earth but experiments have shown that the basic building blocks of life were all here. Life on Earth is carbon based and at the base level involves simple organic chemistry. The idea that somehow magic, or the supernatural, are needed to create life is absurd and flies in the face of everything we know about life.

2. DNA is a chemical. Life is just a fascinating expression of natural chemistry. The idea that we need to invoke the supernatural to explain it is absurd.

3. Here's the creationists favorite misused word, "information". Most mutations occur via DNA copying errors, some are bad for the organism, some benign and very few are beneficial but when you've got a new generation every so often your bound to get beneficial mutations. The amount of DNA "information" doesn't necessarily correspond to intelligence or complexity in a life-form. For instance human beings have a vast treasure trove of inactive "junk" DNA, while a Puffer Fish has no junk.

4. I used to be a creationist and I never heard natural selection espoused as being a real thing. Oh sure they talk about natural selection within a "kind', whatever the hell a kind is, such as the artificial selection of dog breeds, but they like to pretend that imaginary boundaries exist which somehow prevent new species from developing. These boundaries are never clearly defined and can only be described as supernatural as no natural mechanism has ever been found to stop one species from evolving into another and, in fact, speciation has been observed both in nature and laboratory conditions.

5. I'm not a scientist and honestly a detail like this is irrelevant to the broader reality of evolution. I can tell you what the answer IS NOT, the answer isn't "God just decided to make it that way". Most, if not all, of these questions can be reflected directly back at the creationists, and as a former Christian (and old earth creationist) I can tell you Genesis doesn't have a damn thing to say about biochemical pathways.

6. In the same way that we can know rocks were not designed, or that the coast of Norway wasn't really designed by Slartibartfast. We've studied life in all its known forms, from the morphological, to the behavioral, to the genetic, to the ancient fossils, and what we've discovered is a shared common ancestry. We've also found that when you go back far enough all you find are single-celled organisms, this means that all life shares common single-celled ancestry.

7. Magic isn't the answer

8. Sex has advantages over asexual reproduction which are obvious. An offspring born of two parents tends to be more resilient and adaptable than an almost identical copy. How it originated, I don't know exactly, I'm not a scientist. If you believe the genesis story sex originated when God paraded the animals before Adam and a "suitable helper could not be found" (if you know what they mean).

9. Fossilization is rare. We do have hundreds of transitional fossils. A simple google search would answer their question.

10. Most of these animals are not UNCHANGED, they have changed. They do look similar of course, but then we look very similar to chimpanzees even though we diverged millions of years ago. Most animals which seem unchanged for millions of years have found an evolutionary niche, they survive very well in their current form and environment and thus the pressure to evolve is less.

11. How did a God who was alone for eons before creating life create intelligence, meaning, altruism and morality? Seriously, think hard about this one. How can a God with no peers like himself, with nothing to interact with, be moral, loving or intelligent? Morality, love and knowledge require things besides God to exist, but if they can't exist without God - PARADOX.

The evolution of morality is an easy one, we social species rely on each other to survive, it's a lot easier to work together as a group when you aren't total jerks to each other.

13. Vaccines you morons. Diseases mutate all the time, to stay ahead of the curve you need to know about evolution.

14. No one has a problem with archaeology being taught as science (maybe some morons do). Are the ancient Egyptians also "just a theory" because they are history.

15. It's a scientific fact, like gravity. You can deny it all you want, be my guest and jump out the window, you'll see just how "dogmatic" Newton's theory is. If you have children chances are they are a combination of genes from you and your partner, they aren't exactly like the generation before, congratulations, you've just proved evolution (and probably sinned against God in the process).

reply to post by Allis1


Extremely thorough and detailed answers to each of these "15 Questions for Evolutionists" can be found, point by point, at rationalwiki.org...

Just scroll down a bit, when you get there. Enjoy!

I could hold my own on that debate. I'd need some help with number 5, as I'm not that familiar with enzymes, but for the other 14 questions I could make a fairly solid argument in support of evolution.

reply to post by Allis1

I cherry=picked a few to respond to. I largely avoided the quesions of origins beacuse unless you were there at the threshold of the orgination event then there is just no way to know. Evolution theory does not explain origination, only the way things happened after origination.

1. How did life originate?

Nobody knows for sure. The Bible says God, but there is no proof. Science doesn't know as of yet. Even if scientists generated life in a dish or God came on TV and told everybody he did it would still not be enough proof either way to say for sure.

4. Why is natural selection, a principle recognized by creationists, taught as ‘evolution’

Natural selection is an important part of evolution, but it is not the whole thing. Teaching that natural selection is the same thing as evolution is a sign of a bad teacher. I am curious to how a creationist belives in natural selection. Are you saying that earth started with a population of every single species ever in the first week, and the number of species has only gone down since?

9. Why are the (expected) countless millions of transitional fossils missing?

We find new transitional fossils all the time. Not just human transitional fossils either. There just isn't that many people out there looking for fossils all the time to find countless millions of them. List of Human Evolutionary Fossils

Notice the dates of discovery. The vast majority have been found within the last 100 years. The increased freedom from religious persecution of scientists in the last couple centuries has allowed this and all other fields of science the opportunity to discover the amazing things we know today. Religious influence is still there blocking progress for example with stem cell research.

10. How do ‘living fossils’ remain unchanged over supposed hundreds of millions of years?

They have evolved to be a near perfect fit for their environment milloins of years ago. Most if not all of the examples they give are species that lived completely or largely in water, where the environmental factors barely change compared to the environment on land. Meet the Tartigrade Asteriod impacts, ice ages, nuclear wars, pandemics all thrown in at the same time wouldn't be able to drive them to extention. Long after 99.999% of life is extinct these little creatures will likely be carrying on like its just another day... I argue they are the most advanced form of life as they will be the only life still here when everything else is gone.

14. Why is evolution, a theory about history, taught as if it is the same as this operational science?

Evolution is not just about history is operational right now too. It can hold keys to our future as a species, and maybe allow us to control it (not that we should). You are an evolution from your parents and your children an evolution from you. The differences are so small that they can't seen even over 1000 years.

15. Why is a fundamentally religious idea, a dogmatic belief system that fails to explain the evidence, taught in science classes

Evolution is not a religion or religious at all. The evidence collected so far is what explains the 'dogmatic'
evolutionary theory. The theory changes when new discoveries are made. Thats why the theory can't be disproven because the facts form the theory...

If God came before everybody on earth and said you guys were right about the evolution theory, and it was me who seeded the life and the DNA code deep within to make it happen!! It would still be called the Theory of Evolution. Thats the way science names things.

Most "evolutionists" can not understand why creationists spend so much time actually debating a known body of knowledge.

The term "Evolutionists" ALONE makes me rage.

Before the idiocy of creatonism started out some years ago, no one would call a traditional scientist "Evolutionist". The term "evolution" comes from evolve by the way.

What creatonists try (and obviously, to some extent actually succeed with)...is making it appear as if a belief system "Creationism" and science can be freely interchanged.

One, yesterday, used a sentence which ALSO irked me a bit, he said "there are two thoughts of school, evolution and creationism".

No there are NOT. Those two can not be interchanged. But the religious believers are working towards this as if both are equal - but how can a religious belief be exchanged for scientific observation/findings?

Again..there is no such a thing as "Evolutionism"..it's a word creation some years ago anyone would have laughed about to even use.