If there is an element of faith an evolutionary scientist adheres to, it falls along these lines:
I believe empirical evidence is more reliable than anecdotal evidence.
I believe reason gets to the truth faster than mere faith.
I believe that many it is human nature to jump to conclusions with insufficent evidence so skepticism is an essential preliminary stance.
I believe that without the strictly adhering to guides of evidence, reason, skepticism, it is difficult nigh impossible to arrive at knowledge of anything.
I’m being somewhat facetious in equating the above to something like a “Scientist’s Creed” but I think there’s a nugget of truth to this. How can anyone prove the above statements of faith are true (without using the tools mentioned in the statement). Often a believer in the scientific method must first prosethelyze the believer in the supernatural before a meaningful debate can occur.
I will point out that Evolution- fact that it is- does NOT explain the Origin of Life on Earth. It only explains how that life- wherever it came from- evolved and changed.
And this had absolutely nothing to do with the original statement. The original statement, for the third time, is about whether or not people who support evolution do not, to some extent, rely on [trust, belief, faith… pick your own word] in one way or another.
Second, Stranger agrees with me:
This was the complete crux of my thought (I purposely avoided the use of the word “argument” - please remember, I didn’t put this in great debates.)
I’ve no doubt that every single creationist argument, both in favor for creationism and against evolution, can be shown to be false. Can I do it? No. Can you? I don’t think so. Neither does Stranger.
For clarity, I’m not arguing against evolution nor in support of creationism. I’m arguing that while you can stand there and tell me that creationism is complete bunk and evolution is a hard and fast fact, you make that statement with the [trust, belief, faith, whatever] that any apparent discrepancies can be resolved.
Take isochron dating. How many here can give me the complete ins and outs of how it works? Can you tell me about the situations, in detail, of why it fails when it does fail? Can you give the math, off the top of your head, for fitting the line to the data points? If you can’t, then I can fathom an argument that claims the math used in isochron dating is faulty. Now, you can’t argue against that off the top of your head, but yet I’m guessing you’d sure as hell [trust, believe, etc.] it can be refuted. That is all I’m saying.
If you’re trying to say that acceptance of evoution depends, to some extent, in simply having a degree of trust (or “faith”) in the scientific community, you’re still wrong. You can choose to trust scientists if you want to but you don’t have to. Scientific findings are all completely reviewable and open to scrutiny or criticism. You never have to take anybody’s mere word for anything.
Your attempt to find some sort of symmetry between the “faith” of creationists and the general trust in the scientific community by those who accept evolutionary theory is not really valid. The science is still testable and falsifiable. Creationist faith is not.
Asked and answered. The answer is that no one has full knowledge of every arcane aspect of evolution, but one does not need faith to discover the full truth about all of it. All one needs is a library card.
If what you are saying is that one must have faith that the work of other scientists is sound, then yeah, I suppose you could call that faith. But unlike religious faith, you can verify the veracity of that work any time you choose.
Actual scientists don’t spend much time at all refuting creationists. They mostly ignore them. They don’t ignore them because of religion; creationism is not religion. They ignore them because this pretended science is entirely made up of misunderstood principles, pretended facts and out and out lies.
The arguments are all old, tired, and just plain incorrect. In order for the speed of light change to have accomplished the things that Creationists say it did, light would have to increase and decrease in a nearly random fashion, for six thousand years, and then stop changing by even the smallest fraction at the precise moment that humans began to accurately measure it. What a load of obvious lies!
People acclaimed by the creationists to be scientists take fossils, and paint them to make them look like they think they should look to support the psychotic pseudo science of creationism. They charge foolish people to see the “proof” of this lie, and have no real concern for matters of faith. The mainstream of clergy among the sects that support this exercise in lies are afraid to speak out, because it would make their church less popular. Or, they fear that intelligent people cannot have both understanding and faith.
Sorry to have to bust your bubble, Seige, but the fact is that I am only being a tiny bit facetious when I call it the work of Satan. It isn’t, but only because Satan need not bother with it, there are knaves, fools, and dupes enough without him. Creationism is a political lie, told for the same reason that political lies are always told, to gain secular power and fame.
And it is not science that is threatened by creationism. It is Christian faith that is the victim. Unquestioned accession to the authority of the priest class is the hallmark of creationist theory. Don’t examine the world you live in, take the word of religious authority on the nature of truth. Science is not harmed by that, since science requires observations of repeatable phenomena, by multiple experimenters, and review by other observers outside of the control of the first observer.
So, don’t worry about the evil of creationism, unless you are a Christian, and have some shred of concern for the freely held faith of others in the Lord.
Tris
“Stoning non conformists is part of science. Stoning conformists is also part of science. Only those theories that can stand up to a merciless barrage of stones deserve consideration. It is the Creationist habit of throwing marshmallows that we find annoying.” ~ Dr Popper ~
Not necessarily; it could merely be the case that one is familiar with the majority of such arguments, is aware of their failings and doesn’t expect anything fresh to appear on the menu. To call this faith is to dilute the meaning of the word unacceptably, in my opinion.
As I understand it, the kind of faith that a scientist needs in order to perform his function is faith that:
-Things can somehow be reliably observed
-The observed evidence means something.
Again, to call this faith braodens the definition of the word sop much that it applies to everything and therefore becomes meaningless.
Or to put it another way; if my next-door neightbour tells me he has orange pixies in his shed and I check and find none
then the next day he says there are green pixies in there and I check and find none
then the next day he says there are pink pixies in there and I check and find none
then the fourth day he says there are purple pixies in there, am I really exercising faith when I tell him I’m not going to bother checking today because he’s a nutcase?
Then I ask you to define the state of thinking something to be true which you have not verified for yourself to be true. As I pointed out above, you can pick from any word you choose.
Also, I’d like you to define “doesn’t expect”. To me, that sounds like a certain amount of, oh, I don’t, faith is involved that nothing fresh will appear.
My argument isn’t that evolutionists have faith, but rather they exhibit the same [insert your word] as do creationists. If faith to you means that one must accept something without the ability to prove it, then use a different word: trust, acceptance, gut feel.
I don’t even remember the argument the creationist page I was reading was making. I believe it had to do with the Grand Canyon and its formation or some such thing. I started to look up the reasons why this argument wouldn’t hold water (heh) and the arguments spun into advanced geology at which point I gave up. It was at that moment that I realized that I take much of the arguments in favor of evolution on faith.
The creationist, when faced with the mountain of data that supports evolution, can dismiss much of it with the same thought I had about the creationist argument: “Wow, this looks compelling, but to try and understand why it is wrong would take weeks. I’m certain (evolution, creation) is right, so I’m not going to bother. I have enough other facts to support my stance that understanding this one point isn’t necessary. I’m certain it can be refuted.” Obviously the difference is that given enough time, you will find that evolution is proved to be true while creationism can be shown to be false. But without spending that time, you have done nothing more than the creationist.
All analogies will break down eventually, which is why I don’t usually like to argue with them. I’ll leave the pixies in your neighbor’s shed.
No, no and no. All creationist arguments requre the assumption that God exists. The existence of God is not something that can be proven scientifically. Creationist arguments REQUIRE faith. While some people arguing for evolution might exhibit some such tendancy, there is nothing about science (eg, evolution by natural selection) that REQUIRES faith.
Unless you mean to say that inference or induction is faith based. I don’t see it that way, especially when the person well admits the basic premises on which inductive conclusions are based upon.
My experience is this: creationists don’t generally seem to know much about what they talk about. Their claims have, in my experience, turned out to always be bogus, be they misunderstandings or lies. In short, their arguments are almost never trustworthy. I am therefore skeptical of them in the same way that if a certain baseball team kept punching me in the face everytime I met them, I would make a reasonable prediction to protect my face whenever I encountered one of their members.
You can call it faith, if you want to, g_under_p, but all you’ll have done is render the word utterly useless by trying to apply it to everything, regardless how different the things in that set of everything actually are. So faith just means ‘when someone thinks something that they may not have fully verified’; OK - I have faith that I’m going to drink a glass of water and go to bed now (because until I’ve verified that I actually will follow through these actions, it’s all faith, right?). Might as well call it marklar.
One last thought, before I go to bed… I don’t mean to be unkind, g_under_p, but I’m not entirely convinced you’re not a creationist. Ahhh… maybe it’s nothing.
I, for one, make no such statement, at least not with any such faith as you claim. I do, however, make the statement that whether a suitable resolution exists for any given problem helps the creationist argument not one bit. As I said, even if it is shown that evolution does not provide a satisfactory explanation for a given natural phenomenon, creationism does not get to win by default. Even if the whole foundation of evolutionary biology were shown to be false, creationism would not win by default. Without demonstrating that creation “theories” explain observed phenomena as well or better than existing evolutionary theories, creationism remains complete bunk regardless of any faith, lack thereof, or lack of necessity for, on the part of “evolutionists”.
However, there are different levels of fatih or trust. (Generally) you trust your spouse not to cheat, your local gas station to give you a gallon of gas when the pump reads 1 gallon, your bank to not take your money and send the whole company out on a cruise, closing the bank. You also have ways to follow up on those people to be sure that they are continuing to earn your trust, be it a bank examiner, the county auditor examining the pumps each year, or whomever.
In the case of evolutionary scientists, you have all the literature that is published regarding the interrelated sciences, with other scientists reviewing and criticising the findings. Even if you cannot follow the arguments, they are available to you if you took the time to learn their languages. Beyond that, there are any number of popular magazines that produce summaries and digests of those arguments, often written for the understanding of the layman.
In contrast, the faith that is demanded by Creationist literature is that of accepting a particular system of belief. In other words, instead of trusting that many people, each being criticized by their peers, will eventually produce sustainable claims, you are asked to trust people whose work is simply approved by others who hold the same beliefs. Where are the critics of Creationism aside from the scientific community? The scientific community polices itself. It can hold some errors for a few years if the evidence is unclear, but eventually enough evidence is built up by critics of the original claim to either sustain or refute the original hypothesis. Just as you “trust” the local gas station (while reading the papers to be sure the county auditor is not taking bribes), you “trust” scientists (while reading the digests and summaries to discover what criticisms have been lodged against any hypothesis).
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? Who watches the watchmen? In science, you know.
If you believe in evolution, you do so in faith. When and if it ever becomes proven fact. Then you may take it as fact or truth. I doubt that day will ever come since no one has observed it taking place. No one has seen one animal turning into another.
The same way with God. Whether you believe in God or not, you do so on faith only. No one has proven or disproven the existence of God. Only the agnostic position is truly correct.
Those that insist on calling evolution fact, even though it is known as the “theory of evolution,” are being dishonest with themselves. It doesn’t take much critical thinking to understand this is wrong.
As for the creationists having good arguments, yes, they do. Intelligent design is the most likely creator of this world in my opinion.
This is simply a lie.
The Theory of Evolution is the current understanding of how evolution, the noted and recorded fact, occurs. You have posted in these threads long enough to know that you are playing word games and simply trying to distort expreessions for your own comfort.
I wonder how your god feels about your dishonesty?
Do you support toleration for slavery? Robbery? Murder?
Why should we tolerate dishonesty?
Religious beliefs we should tolerate (although not the substitution of religion for science in the classroom), but even the largest number of believers in this country recognize as a fundamental law, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”
Just because people reject your poorly-supported opinions doesn’t mean they’ve forgotten you have a right to it.
I may be of the opinion that Fargo is the capital of North Dakota, for instance, and obstinately refuse to believe firsthand testimonials of people from Bismarck, encyclopedias, atlases, maps, globes, and Wikipedia. I may maintain my opinion with the fervency of an extremist despite all evidence to the contrary, and should suffer no punishment for it. That’s where the right to an opinion ends. My right to an opinion does not obligate anyone else to consider it an alternate but viable view on the capitalness of North Dakota. I do not have the right, for example, to compel geography teachers to tell schoolchildren that while most people consider the capital of North Dakota to be Bismarck, others consider that to be a theory and believe that Fargo is the capital of North Dakota.
No, it had nothing to do with uphill rivers. If I ever come across specifically what it was, I’ll post it. The exact argument is completely irrelevant to this topic. Please try to understand what it is I’ve been trying to say. This is the second time you’ve asked me to provide creation examples for you to refute. That is entirely not the point of this thread. This IS NOT A CREATION VS. EVOLUTION DEBATE. I really wish the mods hadn’t moved this here.
True. I’ve never said this wasn’t the case.
To which was replied:
Are you trying to tell me that you know absolutely every last detail in support of evolution and have personally verified the results yourself? Because if you haven’t, then you are trusting that others have and the results are indeed valid. But yet you just said “No” to the use of the word trust. What would you call it when someone has not personally verified the results that they accept to be true?
And I never claimed this shouldn’t be the case. As others have pointed out, and I’ve understood for a damn long time, the failure of one does not mean the veracity of the other. In this case, you’ve shown creationism to be false because “Their claims have, in my experience, turned out to always be bogus”. Fair enough. That does not mean evolution is true. But I’m guessing you accept evolution is true. Have you verified, personally, all information in support of evolution? If not, you have exhibited a certain amount of trust that the facts upon which evolution is built are true. THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THIS. NOT ONE SINGLE THING. But, by the same token, when a creationist does this same thing they are vilified and told how ignorant they are. Yes, all the facts both in support of evolution and against creationism can be researched. But to really understand them all would sometimes require a PhD and years of study. Most of us stop when we reach a certain level and accept the rest as fact. Can you honestly tell me you know the complete theory of isochron dating? But yet I’m assuming that once you learned some of the facts you accepted its usefulness and moved on, dismissing out of hand any creation arguments against it.
You’ve said this twice now. And as I’ve said over and over, pick your own fucking word. I don’t care what you call it. I asked you to define what you call someone who accepts as fact something they have not personally verified.
I guarantee you it is nothing. I’m an atheist. Can I prove that to you? No. My arguments, while using evolution and creation as the vehicle for attempting to make it more understandable, really can be detached from evolution vs. creationism. This is the last time I will address any personal attacks you make. If you want to get personal, take it to the pit. In here, we are discussing whether or not a certain level of blind trust is required by everyone, including those who support evolution.
To Darwin’s Finch - Are you telling me you don’t believe that all arguments made by creationists against evolution cannot be refuted? Seriously? And I totally agree that this is not an either/or argument. But then again, this is not about evolution vs. creationism.
To tomndebb - We agree that pretty much all the facts and conclusions about evolution can be understood if someone chooses to invest the time and effort to do so. Further, we both agree that as with so many other things, we accept a certain amount of things in our lives that we just can’t verify for ourselves. Your last statement was my entire point. We trust the scientists and the scientific community. Why is this so hard for people to understand?
To lekatt - Get the hell out of this thread. This is not about evolution vs. creationism. Please. If you want to argue against evolution, start your own thread.