What physical mechanism brought about humans’ different and unique characteristics?(Science, please tell me how we came to be the only race of animals that builds skyscrapers and gets haircuts. Why don’t monkeys design SUV’s and drive them because they can haul their kids to soccer practice. Why don’t dolphins try to enjoy their lives more by participating in a vast array of activities and hobbies like us? Why are we different and wear clothes,when all other animals are the essentially the same (eat, sleep, mate, take care of young).)
Modern science cannot show us this mechanism. Therefore, any scientist or evolutionist who says they believe in anything is by faith, just like a religious person. Future science could show the answer to the physical mechanism? Yes, in the same way future archeology and science could show the answer in spiritual/Biblical mechanism. Since I see evidence of non-physicality in action, just like I see evidence of physical mechanisms, I consider the spiritual answer we have in the Bible, which can be observed, just as sound as well-calculated, scientific answer. Am I wrong here? What are your thoughts about who has more faith?
Btw - you seem to have missed the point that it took 250,000 years from the evolution of modern humans to get where we are. Our technological progression has risen exponentially. All we had was the ability to originate and express complex ideas.
What physical mechanism brought about birds’ different and unique characteristics?**(Science, please tell me how they came to be the only animals have wings, feathers and fly. Why don’t snakes migrate through the skies and fish live in trees? )
Modern science cannot show us this mechanism. Therefore, any scientist or evolutionist who says they believe in anything is by faith, just like a religious person. Future science could show the answer to the physical mechanism? Yes, in the same way future archeology and science could show the answer in spiritual/Biblical mechanism. Since I see evidence of non-physicality in action, just like I see evidence of physical mechanisms, I consider the spiritual answer we have in the Bible, which can be observed, just as sound as well-calculated, scientific answer. Am I wrong here? What are your thoughts about who has more faith?
We only know how to do these things because we have the ability to learn from past generations (and I doubt there are any individuals who could, for example, build a skyscraper all on his or her own). We have that ability because of our language and social structures. And we have those because of our unique evolutionary history - just as all other organisms have their own unique evolutionary histories and are capable of feats which we are not.
As for dolphins enjoying their lives…how do you know they don’t? For that matter, how do you know that each and every one of them hasn’t already figured out the Meaning of Life, knows all there is to know about quantum mechanics, and generally have everything all figured out? If you don’t know that, then I would be very careful about assigning any uniqueness to our own intelligence. Skyscrapers and haircuts show what we can do with our intelligence, but such abilities are not proof that we alone are intelligent.
Quite a leap in logic there: we don’t know one specific thing, so everything is a belief! Tell me, have you ever been to the Himalayas? If not, how do you know they exist? Is Africa something you “believe in”?
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The difference, of course, being that only you can perceive whatever non-physical evidence you claim to. Physical claims can be independently verified. I can go to Africa, if the desire arises, and see for myself that it exists. Therefore, I do not need to have any faith that it exists. I cannot, however, experience whatever spritual happenstance you have experienced. And I have experienced none of my own. Therefore, I see no reason to accept that they exist outside of whoever experiences them.
There’s a scientific position that requires no faith at all; I’m not sure if there’s a similar religious position.
The scientific position which doesn’t require faith states that:
I don’t know what you mean by saying that the spiritual answer is as “sound” as the scientific answer: they’re apples and oranges. Certainly, the theory of natural selection is a sound scientific theory, whereas creationism is an unsound scientific theory; conversely, creationism is a sound creationist idea, whereas natural selection is an unsound creationist idea.
As for your attempt to show that evolution requires faith – I don’t understand what you’re getting at here. Do you really believe that science has no falsifiable theories on why monkeys don’t build skyscrapers? Have you never read anything about linguistics, about tool use amongst primates, about paleontology, about comparative neurobiology? There’s a plethora of data in this field, and while I don’t know that anyone has studied this specific question (similarly, nobody has studied the question of why capybaras don’t write sitcoms), that doesn’t mean that there’s not enough data to provide a strong hypothesis.
Someone has to be first. Whichever species is the first to become intelligent will think it must be special. I’m not being flippant, it’s just logical. One species was the first to walk on land. Over millions of years other species may have evolved similar features in parallel. Evolution takes a long long time.
Time is a factor that you are not including in your analysis. It took perhaps billions of years for single-celled organisms to evolve into multicellular plants. It took hundreds of millions of years for animals to evolve. It took apes tens of millions of years to evolve from rodent-like mammals.
If intelligent species are going to evolve, it will take a long long long time. If multiple species will become intelligent, then there could easily be tens of millions of years between such evolutionary landmarks.
ANY species that is the first to become intelligent will notice that it is alone. We happen to be that species. It doesn’t mean we’re the last or only species that can evolve to be intelligent. There is no need to suppose a non-evolutionary cause. There is no reason to assume intelligence must develop in other species simultaneously. There is no reason to assume that we will exist as a species forever. There is no reason to assume that other species will remain unintelligent. Maybe dolphins will start building periscopes one day and find that there are no other intelligent creatures on the planet, and one of them will ask “why don’t mammals build periscopes, why are we the only intelligent species? I know – religion!”
They enjoy themselves obviously. But not while doing complex and creative things such as painting or sculpting or playing complex games such as chess. They are content doing the same things over and over again (chirping songs, playing tag, ect.). We are not.
We’re you there 250,000 years ago? No, but you have evidence that it (evolution) did occur back then. I have written evidence from multiple sources saying that something different occurred back then. What’s different about this?
We are head and shoulders above the rest of the population. To say evolution created this perceived imbalance requires faith.
There are many different types of birds that can fly. There is only one type of “animal” that predominantly walks upright. This discussion is about more than these trivial things.
Birds have ONE unique characteristic, we have a million different unique characteristics. Incomparable, sorry.
Modern science cannot definitively show us the mechanisms that wrought these differences. Prove this? Please. It would be easier for you to show me a cite showing me how we broke through the mold to start building bridges out of rocks. Pick any unirque characteristic you like and show me how we got it.
Did one of the earliest human beings fall into a pit of radioactive sludge and accidentally trigger his brain to grow? If this did happen and you show me proof, then that would be enough to erase faith from my argument. But science has none of these types of answers, so…
Unfalsifiable? Don’t you realize that that is what I am saying about the origin of humans? It is not proveable, there is only evidence, scientific and spiritual. And there is no way to disprove
any theory. That’s what levels the playing field between science and spirituality.
Future science can provide evidence for both scientific explanations and Biblical explanations. If we found a tomb labeled “adam and wife eve”, that would be good proof for the Creation story and if we found 100 different fully preserved, full skeletons and brains of the different human variances, then that would be good proof for the scientific explanation.
I said i see evidence of non-physicality. It’s not a trick. It’s an observation that everyone is capable of making. We are different and our science cannot explain it. That’s evidence, however small or conclusive, that something else is going on which is not physical.
Why am I wrong?
Please, be as hard on my logic as possible, I really want to test my line of thinking here. Thanks.
We have broken these language and social structure barriers. How? You mean to tell me that a couple of partial skeletons and a theory of evolution are going to show how we started to communicate through language?
They enjoy themselves obviously. But not while doing complex and creative things such as painting or sculpting or playing complex games such as chess. They are content doing the same things over and over again (chirping songs, playing tag, ect.). We are not. As for the quantum mechanics, this discussion goes much deeper than intelligence. This discussion does not concern intelligence, because it is not objectively quantifiable. I only said those skyscraper examples to prove a point of “how did we come to this point”?
I can say within a small degrees of freedom (even though i have not seen the himalayas) that the himalayas do exist. How do I know? It is impossible to coordinate as many humans beings to trick me into thinking there are the himalayas, if indeed there wasn’t. All the people in the world who have seen them would have to be in on the joke, while keeping it a secret from everyone who hasn’t been there. This = impossible. However, there is no way for me to draw the same conclusion about human-kind. I proved that there was the himalayas without seeing them because i observed human behavior. There is no observeable evidence to say how we got so creative, so i can’t say either way… The reason i think this one question is so important is because it is the only observeable thing that implies something non-physical. If we don’t come up with a fairly definitive scientific answer to the origin of humans, we have to reserve the Bible to be a very possible answer as well as evolution.
Well, if the logic and reason assumption is wrong, then evolution and science are wrong, as well as the Bible. Again, they are on the same playing field. If the assumptions are correct, then again we have them both as equal candidates for the real answer, keeping in mind that both can equally be wrong still. However, Evolution and science assume that all that exists is physical, and the inverse for the Bible. And the Bible has a good reason to assume this (given unexplainable humans), just like science has a good reason to assume their side (some bones and carbon dating).
exaclty, both sides’ soundness and unsoundness cancel each other out to be equal in probablility.
There is data for science, just like there are written manuscripts for the Bible. There is a lack of data for science and a lack of data for creation. Each sides’ lack of data is the other sides’strength, to an extent.
I was talking about observing the actual written manuscripts of the Bible which is evidence of the Creation thoery. I was not talking about evidence that the Bible is true.
Remember that this discussion is not about intelligence.
Yes, I happen to agree with your statements about the first species to be smart and all… but why are we so far ahead? Or, how did we get so far ahead? There is not a creature in sight that comes as close to us in complexity,how?
Granted, this is where the weakness of my observation shows itself, but it still begs these questions, which have no scientific answers and which point to the possibility of a creator.
The evidence for science is significant, but the lack of evidence is also significant. That’s not to say that a lack of evidence is proof of errancy, but I as a thinking and creative human see this lack of evidence, and then I look over and see the Bible which is an amazing book on any scale of measurement. It is logical to wonder and concern myself with this and this is what I want to voice to all of you. I am not trying to discredit science but rather gain some credit for the Bible and Creation by showing the shortcomings of science.
Actually, there is a way to disprove a theory- you test it.
Spirituality is unfalsifiable. What test could there be for the existence of God? What outcome would yield a result that means there is no god?
No, it wouldn’t. I’ve already seen one in Tenn.
No, it wouldn’t. the scientific explanation would have a whole bucket of worms to contend with as to how this improbable find could have come to be. I’d say this would be evidence of an attempt at fraud.
What is the evidence? How can I make the observation? Where do I look?
That’s a huge jump. Why does it follow that if science cannot explain something that the necessary conclusion is that it must be supernatural?
For time, lightning couldn’t be scientifically explained. Yet it doesn’t seem to follow that therefore until lightning was scientifically explainable that it was a supernatural phenomenon. Oh wait a minute, it was a supernatural phenomenon. I think that quite a few gods were given as the cause of it. I wonder which divine explanation was the right one?
Diamonds are different from granite, water is different from thermonuclear radiation, birds are different from fishes, etc…
What’s the big hoopty?
And further, other animals, besides human animals, do have cultures- Culture, which can be defined as the presence of geographically distinct behavioral variants that are maintained and transmitted through social learning, was long considered to be a uniquely human trait.
Your conclusion is not inferrable from your premise.
premise: Humans are not other animals.
conclusion: God must have made it so.
As I said before, you are showing what we do with our inteligence, nothing more. Dolphins, chimps, birds and whatever else may simply do other things with theirs. That we can play chess implies nothing about our relative intelligence.
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What’s different is that there are multiple lines of evidence which all point to evolution being true. There is but one, non-independently verified source for your “something different”.
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What evidence do you have that it couldn’t? Just that it hasn’t been repeated? The civilization of ancient Egypt hasn’t been repeated either - doesn’t mean that other humans weren’t capable of performing similar, if not identical, feats.
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You haven’t observed many birds, have you? Did you know, for example, that many songbirds are capable of producing two notes simultaneously? Humans can’t do that - indeed, no other animal can. Just one of many uniquely avian traits.
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I said nothing about partial skeletons. Our ability to communicate in the first place is an evolved trait. Other animals do this, so you can hardly find this surprising. A combination of factors allowed us to turn this “simple” communication into an ability to form abstract thought - something which we may or may not be unique in. Again, my point is that we know very little about how, or if, animals think. You claim that we are unique, but you have not demonstrated such. Because dolphins do not build skyscrapers does not mean they lack intelligence, nor does it mean they lack the capacity for individual thought. Our “uniqueness” may well be a consequence of our defining the rules.
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We need do nothing of the sort. You have created a false dichotomy: if we can’t explain it using current knowledge, the Bible must be true by default. Whether evolution as we know it happens at all is completely independent of whether the Bible is a true record of God’s actions.
When I observe a bird, I see that it has one unique characteristic that stands out, wings. I maybe can figure out one or two more unique things about them such as how they all fly off a telephone wire in perfect harmony without any observable “signal”. These are unique, but that’s about it i’m afraid, two things.
Now think of a bird observing us driving around in cars, playing tennis, sculpting, weightlifting, getting haircuts, ect. Come on buddy, this is not even comparable from an observation standpoint. Humans are contrastingly different, no matter how you try to compare us to them, get this in your head.
We are past this fact at this point in the thread. We are at the point of my last post with FranticMad.