He can’t help himself. Since one of the Lekattian Principles is that order (any kind of order) must and does come from intelligence, to him, you really did say what he claims you said. If lekatt drops two toothpicks and they land parallel to each other, he deduces that an intelligent force guided them, because where there’s order, there’s intelligence.
Connection to reality? None.
Well, SM, I guess it’s the “weren’t there before” bit that I take issue with.
Are you - and others - really saying that someone like me who doesn’t believe in common descent (i.e. that all living creatures originally come from the same life form, whatever that might be) is akin to someone who believes that the earth is flat?
And in direct answer to your question who doesn’t believe in common descent apart from those who believe in a flat earth, well, me for one.
Have you truly met no others that fall in that category? I’d be interested to know.
SentientMeat didn’t say anything about the flat Earth.
I haven’t, but that’s mainly because nonacceptance of evolution is, in the developed world, an almost exclusively American phenomenon.
You think that humans, birds, horses etc. existed simultaneously with dinosaurs? And with early amphibians? And with the first fish and plants?
No, but you would have to believe that God was and is continually creating new species, since they keep dying out and new ones keep appearing. I genuinely have not met many people who choose this over evolution from one life form being caused by God.
Priceguy, you’re quite right of course re flat earth/new earth. Must be the Guinness!
I believe in neither and I’m a Brit.
SM wrot: 'You think that humans, birds, horses etc. existed simultaneously with dinosaurs? And with early amphibians? And with the first fish and plants?"
Yes, I do.
Does the fossil record rule this out?
100%?
Kent Hovind and Duane Gish have each expended a considerable amount of energy “disproving” evolution as a fact and a theory in books, lectures, web sites, and other fora. Their attacks have included a number of egregious errors that they have actually been compelled to withdraw or retract when confronted by the evidence. Following which, they have each repeated the “errors” (now recgnizable as lies) in subsequent lectures, books, etc.
Is this not wicked?
There are people to whom the concept is either mind-bogglingly huge or complex–a person who can hardly expect to live to 100 attempts to grasp events that take hundreds of thousands of years. There are people who find that their religious beliefs contradict the concept either of the notion of evolution or the time required for evolution and choose to accept the belief rather than investigate the information.
In addition, (partly due to interference by religious groups and partly because text books tend to be pretty dumb in a lot of ways, anyway), a huge number of people are never presented with the actual facts regarding evolution and the distorted picture they receive does not make sense to them.
Yes.
The positions are akin.
Evolution “mind-bogglingly huge or complex”?
I know you put this forward as resistance others might have to the notion (not your own experience), but tigers, giraffes, moths, mosquitoes, stick insects, etc. all descending from the same life form is one of the simplest notions I’ve ever encountered. The sort of thing a pre-school child could understand, even if not the sort of thing a pre-school child would necessarily believe.
Dizzying!
Yes.
Inasmuch as we know anything 100%.
No; the fossil record doesn’t rule it out (as such); what the fossil record does is utterly, totally, completely, fail to support it. 100%. While at the same time, strongly supporting a completely different picture.
But it doesn’t rule it out; unless we examined every cubic inch of the Earth’s crust, we can’t say for certain that there isn’t, somewhere, a fossil elephant in the same stratum as, say, a fossil triceratops, or even single a fossilised blade of grass in the same stratum as a Pterosaur; we just haven’t found anything like that. Ever.
That we have actually found a huge amount of other material, all painting a very consistent picture of common descent - of eras when certain organisms simply weren’t around, makes any other conclusion somewhat perverse.
Sevvie, if the positions are akin, why do so many intelligent folk not believe in evolution, while hardly anyone except a nutter (and perhaps Cecil) believes in a flat earth?
Back tomorrow.
Which is the beauty of it. The term in science is elegant.
I might add that the newer sciences of DNA, entirely independently of the fossil record and all other forms of taxonomy, compels the same conclusions. Although not without some surprises.
Yep.
As a matter of fact, that is exactly the evidence that most of us note when we point out that (prior to the religious retrenchment of the late 19th century) evolution had already been established as fact prior to Darwin’s effort to explain what was occurring and how it occurred.
In the mid- to late-18th century, there was a lot of interest in a new science that sprang up: geology. By the time that Darwin was writing, 50 - 75 years later, the identification of rock strata and the dating of those strata were well under way. As the rocks were being cataloged and dated, fossils began to be identified withing those rocks. One of the facts that was noted was that that fauna (and some flora) that was discovered always showed up in the same rock strata. Trilobites were never discovered in higher, newer layers in which dinosaurs were discovered. Humans were never discovered in lower, older layers among dinosaurs. (There are a few species that have been found across multiple layers, but they are not scattered randomly; they appear in one layer and “exist” until some later layer, then disappear.) Even among the “types” of fauna that have been discovered, there are indications of development. Changes to the shapes of skulls, jaws, hips, legs, ribs, etc. take place in an orderly fashion, where a new feature will appear in one rock stratum among one type of animal and then appear in a more developed stage in an animal that bears the characteristics of the earlier animal in a later rock stratum.
Are there some apparently out of order specimens? Yes. However, the record for resolving those discrepancies in which it turned out that there was no contradiction of the orders of ages is very close to 100%–to the point where it is resonably presumed that the others will be resolved, as well.
(Creationists like to point to fossilized trees that extend through multiple layers, but the explanation for those has been known for a long time: a tree buried by, say, volcanic ash, will be fossilized in an upright position, actually becoming harder than the ash/pumice/stone surrounding it. As the surrounding stone wears away, new deposits surround the tree and it begins to extend “through” the sedimentary deposits.
Name them. Name anyone who has good, supported reasons to not accept evolution. Evolution has such a plethora of evidence that there are really only four reasons to reject it, and those are the four Dawkins mentioned: ignorance, stupidity, insanity and malice.
Wait… are you accusing Cecil of believing in a flat earth? Do you have a death wish or something?
Dinosaurs are only found with dinosaurs or simple mammals, not with humans, horses, elephants or indeed almost anything found today.
Surely we would by now, after literally hundreds of thousands of fossil discoveries (heck, you can go down to most British beaches and do your own study!) have found an instance of something dying near another thing it lived near?
Either God is deliberately misleading us, or different species lived in different times.
Actually, I was the one that compared your denial of evolution to belief in a flat earth. They are both ridiculous, religiously inspired positions that are contrary to the evidence. Both use the same strategies to defend their views against a vast body of scientific work. Both reject the value of Occam’s Razor and layer supporting arguments with convolution upon convolution when confronted with evidence that can’t be denied. Rather than offer their own evidence, the majority of their work consists of misinformed attacks on the evidence conflicting with their view.
bodswood, I’d go out on a limb and concede that you aren’t wicked but Dawkins still has three more reasons for why you are the way you are.
Just to be clear, bodswood, you believe that humans co-existed with dinosaurs but you don’t believe that the Earth is 6000 years old?
bods’
“if the positions are akin, why do so many intelligent folk not believe in evolution, while hardly anyone except a nutter (and perhaps Cecil) believes in a flat earth?”
Good question. Although the merits of the arguments are akin, pro flat-earth arguments are:
Whereas, pro non-evolution arguments:
Why most significant? A tension is set up between what some religions tell intelligent people and what science tells them. The tension is irreconcilable. Accept one, or the other.
Given that choice does religion offer? Comfort, security, commmunity, ordered shielding against life’s woe and injustice and many believe a connection with the divine.
Contrast science. Dispassionate, evidence-based order in the empirical world.
You expect people to surrender an identity for that? Could you imagine that sacrifice, could you do it?
I think a short summary of bodswood’s beliefs could be useful for this discussion. At the very least it will be entertaining. I wonder how he feels about The Great Flood, accuracy of carbon dating, deism, and factual accuracy of the Bible among other things. Also, how have these views changed over the course of this thread?
I disagree with Dawkins and Priceguy as to the beliefs of some intelligent people for the reasons I’ve stated above and the alternative reason others have also noted.
So obviously, the real point of this post is to point out that I meant to write:
“Given that choice, what does religion offer?”
previously.