The problem with this is that, by experience, all the lists of questions brought forth by people who think evolution has no answer for them were already answered, sometimes the questions were answered even hundreds of years ago.
Speaking of eyes, why do you look at the straw in the other party’s eye, but do not consider the rafter in your own?
BTW I did mention my disappointment with the good number of democrats that do not believe in evolution, bringing this to attention is only one small way to deal with them, I think I would not be a happy doper knowing the massive rafters I would have to deal if I was a Republican.
Isn’t the real element to believing either evolution or a Creator
desire for knowledge vs. fear of knowledge? Or maybe just denial?
I think the point of the quiz is to make people THINK for once!
How flipping hard is this to understand?
Looking at something like “Jesus Camp” (shuddering) and seeing videos
explaining that Earth is 6,000 years old and humans rode dinosaurs
like horses? I mean, how much denial is possible? We CAN prove that
fossils are 65 million years old and Pangea was once the only available
continent Earth, can’t we?
Although films like “Jesus Camp” IS proof enough to believe in Evolution for me.
Evolution isn’t instant, and, clearly, all Humans don’t evolve simultaneously either.
That’s amazing! I did not realize that; in fact I was thinking just yesterday that’s it’s only been a couple hundred years since Darwin was born…
I think if you look back over my post you’ll see the list of questions to which I was referring would be one generated by evolutionists–not creationists and their ilk. Any good scientist (and this is one of the reasons creationsists are lousy scientists) admits to any number of currently unanswered questions within their discipline. That’s why unanswered questions are not a litmus test.
FWIW my party affiliation is the Correct Party. Members can be found within assorted other political parties.
You are a very fortunate person indeed. May you continue to find your significance within your chosen affiliation.
I believe they have some allies in the nutty Islamic fundamentalists. An amusing alliance, if ever there was one.
Not sure what the point of the quiz is. Everyone with a clue knows the human body is hopelessly flawed, but that fact certainly won’t convince any Creationists/IDers, no facts will.
No, it’s a front, there are very few IDers who aren’t also Creationists. ID was devised just to sidestep the issue that religious ideas should not be taught in a science class.
I think your understanding of the division is a little off too. Answers in Genesis (the main Creationist website) definitely teaches that natural selection is a fact; they need it so that a small number of original “kinds” can become the millions of species we see today.
In fact, they need natural selection to work incredibly quickly and then to dramatically slow down for the modern age.
But hey, no problem: everything was on super fast-forward during the Flood. :rolleyes:
This sounds at least as much like an ID answer as an evolutionary one.
“Because it protects the fetus” makes it sound like there is a reason behind it.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a creationist. I do not believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis. I think that the modern theory of evolution thru natural selection is the best available explanation for the origin of species.
That having been said, a scientific statement ought to be falsifiable. How would the idea that “pregnant women evolved to get morning sickness because it protects the fetus” be falsified?
What is the evidence that this specific adaptation arose thru evolution? Is there fossil evidence? How has it been demonstrated that this specific adaptation arose thru evolution?
Or are we assuming that the explanation is true because we believe in evolution based on other evidence?
Again, I would request that, if possible, we stick to this specific adaptation. I don’t care what you think about who Cain married or how many animals fit on the Ark or whatever. This specific adaptation.
Is there a rule that says one can not say hundreds instead of “200 years ago”?
I think we agree more then you think. The OP questions have an answer. I did say specifically that “all the lists of questions brought forth by people who think evolution has no answer for them were already answered”, that is based on previous SDMB postings of ID defenders. I know that there are questions with no answers in evolution, but this is not the point of the current exercise. **Tagos **gets it.
If one uses the falsifiability definition of science, then one cannot provide a scientific demonstration that x arose through evolution, or indeed demonstrate that anything in the past happened as you say it. History can’t be scientific by that definition, and that question is basically historical.
Yes, a perfectly designed car could run on cakes. It could run on whatever you want. It’s perfectly designed.
This does not follow. You’re conflating the concept of absolute perfection with perfection of design. A car could be perfectly designed and not run on cakes because the ability to run on cakes is not part of the criteria of judging the successfulness of a car to serve it’s intended purpose. That is, if we take two cars that are completely identical in all ways, except one can run on cakes and the other cannot, the first is not more perfect that the other they’re, from a design perspective, identical, because they both fit the design criteria equally well. The only way that the ability to run on cakes makes one better is if you add that to the requirements, but now you’re fulfilling a different set of criteria and, obviously, the perfect design that fits that will be different; you’re moving the goal posts.
First, your logic assumes that because humans are God’s favorite creation, at least inside the Christian paradigm, that he necessarily designed us perfect; that does not follow, at least not without some support.
Second, even if the first part is true, you’re still conflating absolute perfection with perfection of design. The fact that there are imperfections in humans does not mean that human design doesn’t fit whatever the design criteria were perfectly.
Finally, even if God did create us and created us perfectly, that doesn’t imply that humans are still perfect. At least within the Christian paradigm, it would is generally believed that the fall of man and subsequent events resulted in imperfections being introduce into man, aging being an obvious example.
I may be mistaken, but AFAIK, ID does not require omnipotence. Yes, the Christian God is generally believed by most Christians to be omnipotent, but ID itself does not assume that.
So your solution here has necessarily taken into account all possible repercussions and consequences? Beside the fact that it’s already been stated that absolute perfection isn’t an implication of ID, even if it were your logic doesn’t follow. There could be complicating things like filtering out substances would require additional mechanisms that would otherwise not be needed and the purpose can be served just fine by existing ones. Perhaps there’s other reasons why they affect the baby so the baby can’t just be made immune but, quite frankly, I don’t know enough about pregnancy to speak competently on that subject.
So… let’s try an analogy. A perfect knight is unkillable, so we give him plate armor. Simple solution, right? Not really, because it has drawbacks like weight, limited motion and agility, limited line of sight. But if you remove the armor to gain those advantages, he obviously becomes very vulnerable. The ideal solution depends upon how much you value the various criteria; any solution is inherently imperfect because not all of the criteria are optimized, but the final solution can end up doing a pretty good job at most of them.
That’s exactly the sorts of trade-offs that are going on in ID, except there’s billions of these sorts of trade-offs and they interact in very complicated ways. Beyond that, we don’t know what criteria a potential intelligent designer may have valued when designing except through inference by what we actually see.
Has any proponent of intelligent design every said specifically and directly “the human body has no flaws” or words to that effect? Certainly the ones that I’ve read and listened to have said no such thing.
The outline of intelligent design is that all life forms evolved from a common origin, but that the designers exhibited direct influence at certain times in the process. Advocates of intelligent design generally acknowledge that natural selection has taken place and accounts for some features of living things. Hence none of the items on the quiz are in any way opposed to intelligent design. The quiz is mental masturbation and nothing more.
Opponents of intelligent design will impress no one if they only make up weak arguments for the purpose of shooting them down. They should, instead, confront the arguments that real people are actually making.
While it is true that there are few IDers who do not also believe that God did it. The point I’m trying to make is that ID does not necessitate the Christian God or, for that matter, any god. It simply asserts that there are some things that could not have arisen through the process of evolution alone and, thus, must have been designed by an intelligence.
I also don’t think that assigning a malicious motive to ID is productive and using it to discredit ID is a logical fallacy (ad hominem, I beleive). The truth value of ID is independent of the intentions of those who proposed it.
I’m not arguing the AiG perspective because from what I have read there they generally propose what is commonly called a Young Earth Creationism approach. What they say or believe doesn’t seem relevant to the discussion at hand to me.
Yes. One example is Fred Hoyle, one of the first prominent proponents of ID. He was an atheist while young. He became an astrophysicist and worked on models of the formation of stars and the nuclear reactions inside stars that produce the heavier elements. His eventually concluded that the laws of physics were fine-tuned to permit the formation of stars and the production of the correct mix of elements for the formation of life. Later he studied questions related to evolution and the origin of life and concluded that an intelligent designer must have been at work there as well. Hoyle became a deist, but never had any interest in Christianity to my knowledge.
Another example is Anthony Flew, a philosophy professor from Oxford University who was an outspoken atheist for most of his life. He recently became a deist.
Time then to dispose of the old chestnut of “Which God or Goddess?” to use then the modern equivalent:
Which or what intelligence?
I agree, what good evidence is there then for ID?
There was a huge thread discussing the evidence in favor of ID, not impressive at all. Even the courts in the US have rendered decisions where they agree that ID has no right to be in a science class.
True enough. ID is technically separate from Christianity and Creationism.
It’s just that when you said ID is a very different thing from YEC, I thought that was a little misleading. The ID crowd will never contradict the YEC crowd; because they’re usually the same people, and their whole motive is to use ID as a wedge to open the door for creationism. ID is just a whole bunch of Creationism-supporting ad-hockery.
I know, YEC is off-topic. But you said that YECs don’t believe in natural selection; I was simply correcting that and elaborating on why, in fact, many do.
