Adam; this is just a minor hijack brought on by one of my pet peeves.
The correct expression for the above is:
“I assume you disagree with Tom and me,…”
That’s because “I” is the nominative and “me” is the accusative form of the first person singular pronoun.
Back to the thread!
Ben: Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Dr. Fidelius: I was waiting for your entrance into this thread.
Forgive me, but that sentence is confusing. Are you saying that the very existence of the universe, is proof that it could have formed out of nothingness? 
“Life is hard…but God is good”
Ok, to review from the top:
David:
It is my understanding that to qualify as a creationist, one must believe the earth is only 5760 or so years old. I don’t believe that. I was presented with enough evidence by the time I was 10 years old not to believe that. However, I conclude that 1)there is a creator, 2)Humans are a special creation. We DID NOT descend from apes. I do not deny the evolutionary process on this planet, only contend that it does not include humans. We are of a different origin.
David:
Is the issue of whether or not there was a creator part of this discussion? Please clarify this for me.
Ben:
and Hardcore:
Help me out. I’m confused here. Evidence is not the same as proof? Evidence is only a component of proof? I don’t see the distinction you guys are making. Enlighten me.
Harcore’s response was to my request for a ‘direct, verifiable link from humans all the way back to the first organisms’. He did not, nor has anyone else provided that information. I will need this in order to accept what is known as the ‘theory of evolution’.
Let me save you some time. NO SUCH VERIFIABLE LINK EXISTS! You may find fossil records here and there, interpolate, surmise, deduce, guess and assume, but you can’t prove it. So, what are you left with? That’s right. You bridge the gaps in the evidence with nothing more than…belief!
So what we’re left with is:
Creationism and Evolution are beliefs (religions)
One is no more valid than the other.
:::
The argument from “improbability” is probably (no pun intended) the most common fallacy in critical thinking.
Take a deck of cards. Look at them each in order. The chances for the cards being in that specific order are 52! or 8.07 x 10^67 to 1. Clearly an event so improbable must have been preordained. You would have to shuffle the deck once per second for 2.55 x 10^60 years to get that exact order! thats 50 orders of magnitude greater than the age of the universe (about 1.5 * 10^10 years)!
The obvious fallacy in that reasoning is that the deck had a 100% chance of being in exactly one of those states. All states of the deck are equally improbable. After you’ve read the deck, the probability of it being in that order is exactly 100%.
Life is definitely here now. Therefore the chances of it having developed on Earth are exactly 100%. It happened. Applying the probability argument after the fact is just utter and complete nonsense.
Against stupidity the very gods / Themselves contend in vain.
batgirl did, you’re right about that. keller, on the other hand, asserts that dinosaurs never actually lived, that their fossil bones and footprints were made by God, that dinosaurs never actually lived at all. You call THAT thoughtful? SHEESH!
[quote]
a secular humanist who is fond of quoting biblical verses What
hypocrites! I think you’re referring to me here. (If not, my apologies.) But I do quote the the Bible for a very good reason: To point out its flaws, to show that it was written by men under their OWN inspiration and not by divine instruction.
Be back tomorrow.
When all else fails, ask Cecil.
ARG220 wrote:
Okay, then put it like this:
What are the odds that one or more universes started from absolute nothingness, which happened to be set up in such a way that one or more forms of life of some sort could eventually arise on one or more planets in one or more of those universes, and that on at least one of those life-bearing planets an intelligent tool-using species arose which was capable of asking “Why are we here?”?
Well, I belief that mankind sprung from the Blessed Road Apples of Her eternal Pinkness and Horniness, the Invisible Pink Unicorn. Where is the “proof” of your God? Where is the “proof” of your evilution? Since none of the rest of you have any proof either one way or the other, all our beliefs are just a matter of faith. And since they are a matter of faith, I demand that mine be placed on the same footing as the rest of yours. I want IPUosity taught as a viable possibility alongside your Creationism and Evilution. I am sick and tired of my children being indocrinated with anti-unicorn books and teaching in the public schools. This country has gone into a moral decline, and if IPUosity was just allowed its rightful place in the public schools, surely America would benefit from the greater spirituality. How can children be expected to learn that we’re really all alike, or our proper place in the universe, if they never are taught that, in the end, we’re all just shit?
And don’t forget, it is the decline in good old-fashioned IPU values in this country that is responsible for our spiralling divorce rate and every single school shooting (even school shootings caused by IPU worshippers).
Well, the shooters weren’t real IPUers. Or, wait…::flipping through 101 Religious Rationalizations::…is that supposed to be “the IPU works in mysterious ways”? Or maybe “it’s all part of the IPU’s plan, Blessed be She; think of all the good that came out of it! Sure, forty-one people died, but if I hadn’t stopped to watch the TV when the shootings were on the news, I never would have noticed the toe-nail clippers, and if I didn’t see them I never would have been able to give myself the pedicure that kept my hangnail from getting really nasty. May Her hooves never be shod!”
CalifBoomer:
There is a significant difference between saying that you demand a specific unbroken chain of physical, fossil evidence over billions of years and claiming that “one [belief] is no more valid than the other.”
There is substantial evidence for the concept Darwin’s Natural Selection. You even accept a fair amount of it, yourself.
However, you then go out on a limb to demand more evidence that is more readily apparent to you for the exact same process occurring in humans. That is not the way that logic works. Occams Razor indicates that if we want to decide that humans (alone) did not come into being in the same way that all other creatures did, we should have good reasons with substantial evidence to indicate why that one species was created separately from all other species. (The reasoning should also provide sufficient reasons why the fossil record shows a line of species that clearly diverged from the normal Pongid line and appeared to develop in the direction of the Hominid, but that that line died out with no cause to be replaced (magically) by the Hominids. It should also deal with the genetic similarities among the various Families and should address the increasing body of evidence that many human social activities (up to and including war) are carried out within the various Families of Great Ape.)
Sorry. They are not “equal” beliefs. If you want to make the case for special creation of humanity within a scientific framework, the burden is on you to show why the current evidence should be ignored. That is the exact purpose that DavidB started this thread and I have seen no such evidence.
Tom~
CGI test
I believe that we are the result of an alien experiment, gone hopelessly wrong.
This is my first post on this board.
I would like to recommend a book to all the evolutionists and maybe even a few creationists who are sincere in their questions. The book is “Abusing Science” by Philip Kitcher (MIT press, 1982) I don’t know if it’s still in print. It is a devastating attack on Creationism, showing how creationism fails miserably as a scientific alternative to evolution and how most of its attacks on evolution are based more on sophmoric debaters tricks than on a genuine desire to uncover the truth behind the history of life on earth.
Kitcher shows how, if the creationists standards for proof were followed, every single science known to mankind would be invalid. In addition he devastates numerous specific creationist objections to evolution, showing that they are not only false, but that they are based on willfull ignorance and misrepresentation.
For instance creationists constantly cite the second law of thermodynamics without mentioning that it applies only to closed systems, which they surely know. He also shows that creationism fails to offer any coherent alternative to eveolutionist explanations of numerous phenomena. For instance the standard explanation for the existence of marsupials in Australia is that they crossed by a land bridge from South America to Antarctica to Australia, where they were isolated by continental drift. The Creationist theory, if it can be called that, has the Marsupials being pursued by More Advanced mammals from Noahs Ark, in a mad dash to safety across a land bridge that suddenly vanished behind them. (How a Koala could outrun a Tiger is unanswered by creationists). This is one example from what is a very enlightening perfect concise defense of the theory of evolution.
Also the book serves as a handy intro to general philosophy of science, as Kitcher must articulate what counts as a scientific theory in order to show that evolution is one and creationism is not.
I urge everyone in this debate to read this book immediately!
Having an open mind means you put out a welcome mat and answer the door politely. It does not mean leaving the door open and with a sign saying nobody’s home
CalifBoomer wrote:
Science does make a distinction between proof and evidence. It’s mostly semantic, much the same way that ‘theory’ has a much different meaning than in the vernacular. It’s very difficult to actually prove something to science. At best, one can merely demonstrate that, given all the evidence, it is extremely likely. This, along with the use of the word theory, gets misused by non-scientific creationists all the time.
Again CalifBoomer:
You’re right. How silly of the scientific community to try to explain all these fossils we do have, without waiting for the entire record to be discovered.
One hallmark of a ‘good’ scientific theory is that it is predictive. And while it might not be perfect, evolution has done a good job in fitting new discoveries in neatly with existing knowledge, especially as evolutionary theory has become more and more refined.
Let me ask again why you are able to accept evolution up to the point of humans, but not beyond? Where do you draw the line? Austrolepithicus? Or Homo habilus? Or Cro-Magnons? Where does non- human evolution stop and divine creation begin?
It’s not how you pick your nose, it’s where you put the boogers
Sorry I had to disappear for a short while – real life intervened.
Anyway, it appears that most of the stuff I would have replied to has been answered by others. For example, most of ARG’s questions, CalifBoomer’s question about theistic evolution, etc. I’m going to try to hit some high (and low) points that I don’t think were addressed, but I can’t promise to catch anything. If you think I missed something, please feel free to repost it to me.
Pashley said:
Except that, as has become common with you, you are totally and completely wrong. I am not bashing any tenet of Christianty – I am criticizing the unscientific methods used by creationists. As I poitned out to you once already (and you ignored) there are lots of Christians who are not creationists. Hell, the very religion you claim to be a part of, Catholicism, accepts evolution! But I’m sure you’ll ignore this fact again and proceed along with your regular menu of whining and avoiding the issues at hand.
If you claim it is a “theory,” I want to see the evidence. So where is it?
Etc. You have trouble believing. Well, then we should just change all the science because you don’t understand it. I’m sorry, but arguments from ignorance (“I don’t understand it therefore it must not be true”) don’t hold any water in a serious discussion.
At least one other person has responded to this already, but I will add my two cents. Biologists have found life existing all the way from the extreme cold of Antarctica to the extreme heat of underwater vents around 120 degrees. And this is just life as we know it. There is a wide range of “the right distance.” Also, why do you find it so difficult to believe that, out of all the galaxies, all the stars, and all the planets in the universe, at least one wouldn’t be in the right spot?
See above.
How do you know the world was “hostile”? And what’s hostile to you might not have been hostile to them. There are some forms of life to which oxygen is “hostile,” for example.
Some may very well have been wiped out. But see above again. Life forms in some of the strangest places, and hold on in some of what we would consider the worst situations. Just because you can’t survive under water at 120 degrees doesn’t mean no life can.
Of course, if we weren’t here, you wouldn’t have the opportunity to think that. And if there are millions or billions of other planets with life on them, they probably all have people on them “thinking” like you are.
Uh huh…
Tom, some other info on Behe:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/behe/review.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/behe/publish.html
http://www.onthenet.com.au/~stear/bartelt_a_scientist_responds.htm
(I especially recommend the last one.)
ARG said:
Please clarify – are you saying the odds cannot be calculated without divine intervention, or the chance that it would happen is 0, and thus the universe could not occur without divine intervention?
CalifBoomer said:
Nope. There are “old earth” creationists as well. They differ because they accept the results of science when it comes to geology, astronomy, etc., but not when it comes to biology and the like. (I could swear I explained this once already around here in the past couple days. Oh well.)
Then congratulations! You are a creationist!
So all our common DNA with great apes is just a big coincidence, eh? Or maybe a big joke from God? That prankster!
It shouldn’t be – not if we’re having a scientific discussion. Unfortunately, creationists have a hard time with that because they don’t have any science, so they have to hop back to the creator.
Wrong. You bridge it with scientific hypotheses and theories. You bridge it by looking for more evidence. You don’t bridge it with fantasies, as creationists do.
Wrong again. Evolution is science. Creationism is religion.
David, I agree completely that Behe’s statements on evolution are the result of a personal problem he has with accepting complexity through natural selection. I think he is completely out of line in a number of his popularly published works.
(I was particularly distressed to discover that the quote hardcore provided was from 1999. Phaedrus had made a similar statement and I had found numerous examples when I scanned for that sort of material. This indicates that, four years into his “challenge” to Natural Selection, Behe has begun to hunker down and say what he feels he needs to in order to make his point. That is sad–and that is not good science.)
That said, I would still contend that his blind spot does not prevent him from performing other scientific activities that are tangent to the “design” issue. As I noted, above, even Orr has commented that Behe is a competent microbiologist. I think it is perfectly acceptable to point out that on a specific issue Behe and others have wandered away from good science without claiming that anyone who has ever followed that path is incapable of doing good science.
Do we decide that AC power supplies are not functional because a number of Tesla’s other ideas are regarded as a bit weird?
I find spurious opposition to Natural Selection every bit as frustrating as anyone else on this board who has followed its logic. I simply think we go too far when we claim that acceptance of Natural Selection is the sine qua non of every good scientist in every field–even when evolution does not have a direct bearing on their studies.
Tom~
I will freely admit that I don’t know enough about Behe’s work in his field to judge that. I do know that there are other examples similar to this in other fields, though. Peter Duesberg was good in his field, but then he moved a bit outside of it and now claims that AIDS is not caused by HIV. Cary Mullis was apparently good in his field – good enough to get a Nobel Prize! But he also believes HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, thinks astrology is great, and believes he was once kidnapped by aliens in the form of glowing raccoons.
So, yes, it is possible for scientists to, in a way, split their brains. They can work competently in their area while still ignoring the proper scientific method in other arenas. Of this there is no doubt.