To People Who Believe in Evolution and Not ID

In My Humble Opinion
21

Your friend needs to read a few science books, because first of all the world being created and the universe being created have little to do with each other - earth began almost 10 billion years after the universe, and we now know tons of planets are out there. No one knows the odds of the universe being created - but once it came into existence, with the known physical laws, not much else involved chance.

So let’s tackle evolution. I wonder how well he understands evolution. Not very, I suspect. We share 99% of DNA with the chimps, so I assume he is wondering about molecules to man, not chimp to prehuman (or, more accurately, ancestor of both humans and chimps to both.)

Here is the analogy I used, Say you had a massive combination lock, consisting of 1,000 sublocks of ten numbers each, and to open the lock you had to get every number right - and in sequence. The chance of coming up with the combination is 10 *1000, really, really huge, so if some guy said he opened the lock without the combination, you’d know it couldn’t be chance - and wonder if he had supernatural powers.

But there is something I didn’t tell you. When each dial hits the right number, it makes a click. With this information, opening the lock becomes trivial, right?

For evolution. the click is one of our ancestors who happily had evolved to fill a niche, starting with very simple one celled animals and moving to fish, pre-mammals, mammals, and then us. Each change between species was very small, just like one dial, and each was successful, just like the click.

The analogy does break down in one respect. As has been mentioned, evolution was not trying to create us (or anything.) Lots of intelligent species could have evolved, we just happened to. So, there would actually be millions of correct combinations to my lock, not just one.

So, I think your friend was assuming one giant step, while in fact there were thousands or millions of baby steps.

22

So? Many people had already responded. Did you think they were all wrong and only Kolga had the correct answer?

23

EDIT: This reply was written due to sleep deprivation and sucked. I’ve deleted it.

24

:smack: Never mind, you didn’t follow what I wrote there…

25

One mistake in the OP is treating science and religion (reason and faith) as if they were equal choices, and you either “believe in” one or “believe in” the other. Many religions people think this way, and they’re wrong.

Another mistake is the monkeys-and-the-typewriter thing. The monkeys don’t have to type out Hamlet perfectly, with no mistakes. All they have to do is type something that can be recognized as “Hamlet.” We are not a perfect species. Every one of us has defects that we inherited and possibly some new ones. So we are all imperfect approximations that are just close enough to be called “human.”

Creationists seem to think that we are the perfect culmination of the history of life on earth . . . and how likely is that? What they ignore is the fact that we’re quite imperfect in many ways, and we could have been imperfect in many other ways. The likeliness of that happening is much greater.

26

I don’t see them as equal choices. I just wanted to ensure the topic wasn’t derailed by IDers; I was specifically looking for answers to ID-advocates. I would agree that evolution is well-established enough that to not believe in it indicates either a lack of scientific education (which I have, but I still believe in evolution) or a delusional outlook.

For posterity, I should note that both kolga and panache45 apparently disagree with Richard Dawkins:
“You cannot be both sane and well educated and disbelieve in evolution. The evidence is so strong that any sane, educated person has got to believe in evolution.”

As for the query of Stickler, I do appreciate the answers of the people here.

27

Yep, I do disagree with that wording. “Believe in” something, in my opinion, implies faith - you believe in things you do not see or experience, but you have faith that they are true. Evolution, as has been stated before, is a fact, although AnnaKareninja clarifies an important aspect of science - evolution is both a fact (as in, change in organisms over time is well-established) and a theory (as in, how that change occurs over the course of existence). You don’t “believe in” facts - they are what they are.

28

Believing in evolution is just as silly as believing in gravity: Both are real regardless what people believe.

Believing in Intelligent Design, on the other hand, is the only way for it to exist. It shares that quality with fairies, Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny.

29

Dawkins is allowed to have his own opinions. I pretty much agree with him but it’s not like you get kicked out of the evolutionist club if you’re not as atheistic as Dawkins.

30

Quibble: William Thompson, 1st Baron Kelvin, was a leading physicist of the day who “proved” that the Earth could only be 20-40 million years old, not old enough for the vastness of evolution Darwin required. This discouraged even Darwin.

(Another important fact the early evolutionists were unaware of is the discreteness of alleles discovered by Mendel. Today we know that if a dominant mutation conveys a 20-point rise in IQ, then 25% of the mutant’s grandchildren will have the 20-point rise. Early evolutionists may have thought, instead, that all the grandchildren would have a 5-point rise. This latter possibility fails the facts and, again, dismayed Darwin when pointed out.)

Thus, Darwin succeeded almost in spite of himself!

31

As atheistic? How can a person be more atheistic than another?

32

Dawkins wrote a book called “Climbing Mount Improbable” to address this exact issue. If you google dawkins climbing mount improbable you get a number of references including a wiki link, an Amazon link and a youtube link to Dawkins discussing the point (I assume - I can’t access youtube here).

Rather than me try to explain it, I’ll let him. But the short answer is that the argument of your friend Mac misuses probability theory. This is not uncommon in many areas well apart from evolution - probability is highly technical and it is an area where it is a bad idea to assume that one’s instinctive conclusions are correct.
He has also written a good explanation of what it means to say that evolution is a theory as opposed to a fact. While in principle, evolutionary theory can be disproven but not proven, for all practical purposes the abundance of evidence is so overwhelming that the distinction is captious and there is no longer any point disputing that evolution is a fact.

33

I wouldn’t respond to him. With such a profound lack of understanding of even the most basic biology, physics, logic and mathematics… I wouldn’t even know where to start to re-educate him; nor could I imagine being friendly with someone so… stupid.

Besides, I’ve already done my part in debunking cretinists back in the day, and that’s one war zone I’d rather not go back to anytime soon. They won’t listen. There’s nothing to gain in trying, they’ll just keep on doing what they do… and even if you do manage to explain something, they’ll just go hunting for the next thing to throw at you. Goes something like this; Personal experience -> argument ad populum -> Probability -> irreducible complexity -> Kalam -> Craig’s reiteration of Kalam (now with more infinites) -> Modal ontological arguments … It literally NEVER STOPS. Any retarded idea that pops up on a ID website is going to get thrown at you by hundreds of people.

34

First, Dawkins is just another person. He’s intelligent and educated, which counts for a lot, but everyone’s allowed to disagree with him.

Second, words can have multiple meanings. Dawkins is using ‘belief’ in a different sense from how the people posting here are using it. We’re using it in the sense of ‘have faith in’, as opposed to ‘hold as accurate based on the balance of the evidence’, which is the sense Dawkins is using.

We’re using the ‘have faith in’ sense because of the thread title, which is (apparently) trying to use both senses at once: You can only believe in ID based on faith, whereas people believe in evolution based on the balance of the evidence.

35

I don’t see the difference between how Dawkins used it and how I used it. Here’s how he used it:
“You cannot be both sane and well educated and disbelieve in evolution. The evidence is so strong that any sane, educated person has got to believe in evolution.”

Here’s how I used it:
“To People Who Believe in Evolution and Not ID”

36

Thanks for making that point.

37

This.

Your friend apparently doesn’t have the basic knowledge and tools to understand evolution. He might be smart, but he simply doesn’t have the grounding in science and math to let him understand this issue. He’s probably been taught all his life that the Bible is God’s Inerrant Word, and that anything that contradicts the (Christian) Bible is simply Satan trying to deceive mankind. And womankind, too.

The only real question that remains is whether he’s just ignorant (which can be cured) or ignorant and stupid (which goes clean to the bone). Ron White has a routine about “you can’t fix stupid”, and he’s right (as well as being funny). IS your friend capable of learning new things? Does he, for instance, read for pleasure? Or is he set in his ideas? If he’s determined to never learn anything new, then my advice is to quit trying. And you might consider not associating with him as much, because I’ve found that stupid seems to be contagious.

38

Hey, that had to be an act of God! And I bet Jerry O’Connell would agree with me.

39

It’s been said already, but I think it needs to be said very clearly again:

Evolution is not random

The whole point of Darwin’s original theory is that it’s not random. The kind of argument from monkeys and typewriters that your friend proposes is far off the mark.

40

Also: we think we have a fairly good idea about how planets and stars are formed, and even if we didn’t, we have detected unimaginably many stars and IIRC thousands of planets, so they don’t appear to be very unlikely.