Ph’nglui Mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!
The human body was too complex to have evolved on its own! It must have been created by God!
Except all the bad/inefficient stuff like vestigial organs, our stupid nervous system that has things like piss-shivers, hiccups, and the fact that our main pleasure center is also where our excrement comes out. Our immune system that for many people ends up attacking their own body, or over-reacting to otherwise harmless substances like pollen. Or our teeth that naturally would all rot out by the time we were in our 30’s or 40’s if it weren’t for modern dentistry. Or… oh you know, the fact that we’re nearly naked, pink, fleshy gross looking mammals, kind of like the naked mole rat.That must be the result of “the fall of man” and an “imperfect world” because of “original sin.”
If you’ve ever wondered why a video game controller isn’t also a garbage bin, congratulations, you may be a creationist.
You know, if I were God and I wanted to prove a point, I’d just implant the *memory *of a flood in the brains of Noah and his family. It would achieve the same purpose, and be much simpler from a logistical standpoint.
Oh look. Tentacles.
Tentacles everywhere…
There is a professor who teaches at one of the universities in Florida… James Lett: he wrote “A Field Guide to Critical Inquiry”. He is also the author of Lett’s FiLCHeRS Rule (Falsifiability, Logic, Comprehensiveness, Honesty, Replicability, and Sufficiency). Here’s the link if you haven’t already read or bookmarked it…
If I were a god and wanted to prove a point, I’d just make people born understanding what I want them to understand.
But if there were still bad people, and I wanted all those bad people to die, why bother with a flood? I’d just have them fall down and die, perhaps painfully, if that was my wish. Why make all the animals and infants and babies and unborn drown too?
In other words, why does a being with godly intellect seem to have the limited imagination of primitive humans? Oh right, to work in those mysterious ways…
Is that where the expression shit-for-brains comes from?
If you were God, would you want to prove a point?
If you were God, would you have created brains and families and memories?
If you were God, what purpose would you want to achieve?
If you were God, how would you determine what is simpler, and would logistics be a consideration?
It doesn’t matter what you would do if you were God because you are not God and you are not saying that you will ever be God.
And, yeah, the “If I were God” line of reasoning bugs me, but, of course, it wouldn’t bug me if I were God …
Of course it matters.
If a mortal human can out reason, or out design, etc… any religion’s God, then it’s a damn good bet that that God is a pretty poor concept and will generally necessitate a retreat to the “mysterious ways” bastion.
Seriously, what is up with nearly every durn atheist response sauteed in sarcasm? Atheists will focus on the minute negative while completely ignoring the extreme positive. In other words, there are thousands of human functions that make living possible and pleasurable. Look at the wonders of sex, a beautiful physical action that bears emotional bonding. I guess we just got lucky on that one with evolution huh?
Why yes, original sin does bear a factor as it brought death into this world. Death is ugly and disgusting. Why didn’t those random lottery winning elements create a deposing corpse as something beautiful, instead of gray rotten flesh, like a beautiful rainbow of colors? It’s all random, it could have happened right?
The physical realm certainly did change as seen in Genesis 3:16-20. Pain was increased in childbirth. Thorns and thistles now grown. Whether God did this purposely as a punishment or it is just a reality of sin, I can’t say, but it certainly explains why the body is in a process of “dying” from birth.
BTW, I don’t know about you, but my colon is certainly not my main pleasure center. LOL
From an engineering perspective, which was your earlier point, sex is horribly engineered. Ever heard the phrase ‘the playground between the sewers’? And that’s just ONE of the myriad poorly engineered aspects to sex in humans. Of course, since we weren’t engineered and instead evolved, it makes perfect sense.
-XT
This is a legitimate line of inquiry, as we are limited by our human minds, imaginations, senses and experiences we cannot help but define God in our own image. This leads to all sorts of logical contradictions.
What kind of response do you expect when you make an assertion that is ridiculous on its face and which everybody has already heard a ton of times? “Gee, I hadn’t thought of that?” drewtwo99’s tone was sarcastic, but he also gave you a thorough response that contains a bunch of sensible counterpoints to your statement. Gagundathar and iiandyiiii offered some other examples. In response, you have… nothing.
They’re ignoring nothing. They’re making an entirely sensible response to your statement. You said humans were designed with “fore knowledge,” and they’re pointing out that our “design” actually contains a bunch of flaws that an omnipotent being could have easily corrected. The existence of those flaws is a very strong piece of evidence that we did evolve gradually over time and that nothing was designed by an all-knowing being with a goal in mind.
There’s no luck involved. Sex feels that way so you will keep doing it.
So if we are nothing more than random evolved animals, our emotions and feelings are nothing more than chemical reactions in the brain. Personality and talent are meaningless. You also have to believe that every human being is not a unique creation with a distinctive personality. When you tell your wife or kids that you love them, it is only because it sounds good because in reality, you know that any sensation of love is nothing more than chemicals.
I recently watched the movie, The Grapes of Wrath. Henry Fonda was a good looking young man in that film. He no longer exists. So am I suppose to believe that there can certainly be another Henry Fonda human being? Someone who looks, talks, acts, and thinks just like him? Sorry, I’m going to go with the route that is more plausible. Henry Fonda was a uniquely created human being and there will never be another person like him just like there will never be another person just like me.
You can’t say that with other animal species. I’ve had cats and dogs all my life growing up. And guess what, they pretty much all act the same and look the same.
What the hell does this have to do with anything?
Yes, that’s right. Dogs all look the same because humans played no role in their development.
I’m sorry, I would just expect a bit of respect for someone’s different belief sets instead of being rude and throwing it back in their face. It’s called maturity. Look it up. Instead, it’s nothing more than an intimidation tactic to make the Christian leave, and then you can gloat, oh he’s running away. haha. Exactly what happened in this thread.
If you’ve heard it a thousand times, why even bother responding?
But couldn’t a reality have occured where sex was extremely unpleasant for human beings but needed for procreation? You’re going to have to at least admit that evolution gave you the winning jackpot on that facet of life!
Italicized part:
Perhaps if you would (pertinently, see my remarks to the bolded part) cease your incessant, counterfactual and misleading butchery of the theories you seek to criticize, atheists (and the rest of a scientific community thoroughly fed up with this sort of antics) might extend you the courtesy of not treating you like a blundering buffoon.
In short: Display common courtesy, debate fairly, and you shall receive in kind.
So long as you insist on doing the opposite, expect snark and ridicule. This is a general rule of discussion most anywhere.
Bold part:
Aaaaaugh. No, no, no.
Evolution is, in its very essence, completely antithetical to randomness! Why is that so preposterously difficult to thump into people?
Mutations are, insofar as I recall correctly, more or less random, but their survival most certainly is not - making their randomness irrelevant! Only mutations favourable, or at the very least not harmful enough to hurt chances of reproduction, survive. This filtering mechanism makes evolution the absolute opposite of random - in fact, it insures that over time, any given population will adapt to its environment or go extinct!
Underlined part:
Hate to break it to ya, Geep, but your main pleasure center, provided that you’re male, is your prostate. This is not up for debate. Neither is it up for debate that your prostate is most easily reached “through” your colon.
If you want to be taken even remotely seriously while arguing teleology, you’re going to have to have a criterion for disproof. If we’re absolutely perfect apart from major design flaws that are explicable in evolutionary theory and are not so according to an omniscient benevolent design, then that should qualify as satisfying the null hypothesis. If your proposal has no criterion where it could be disproved, it is not even wrong.
You try talking to someone who tries to substitute fairy tales for science and see how long you can keep a straight face.
Without gratification, metabolically expensive actions are generally not engaged in with great frequency. Genes which code for greater sexual activity tend to out-compete those which code for lesser sexual activity. No mystery involved.
Original sin, being imaginary, only plays a role in the world to the extent that its believers act on it.
As for why a corpse doesn’t smell good, as with our OP, you are simply proclaiming your utter ignorance of the topic you’re expounding upon. Rather obviously, the evolutionary fitness of a corpse is zero. A corpse has no reproductive capabilities, because it’s dead. Genes only have selections pressures acting on them if they are heritable. That’s the same reason why selection pressures have given us relatively-healthy young while the older you get, especially once you pass your peak reproductive years, the more maladies pile up.The claim that women’s vaginas and/or pelvieses would be wider if God didn’t change things (as revealed by the scientific treatise, Genesis) is… an interesting idea. But no. Fossil evidence reveals that hominid pelvises aren’t ideal for childbearing.
To say nothing of the ideological disconnect in worshiping a Monster God who didn’t just punish a couple of naked hippies for eating a fruit that a talking snake told them to eat, but decided that, yeah, it’d be a reasonable thing to punish all of their descendants, in perpetuity.
Even while our cognitive profile is undoubtedly the result of the complex interactions between neural geography and electrochemical interactions, that does not mean that there aren’t variations. Besides, the mind is what the brain does, and neural interconnectivity and geography varies extensively between individuals.
The idea that love is ‘no more real’ than anything else is true, but it’s also no less real. Reality, as it’s been said, is whatever doesn’t vanish when you stop believing in it.
Any cat or dog owner on the planet who pays attention will know this is nonsense. Not that it matters.
That would not have worked too well… humans (and pretty much every other animal) have a strong desire for sex because that trait is a successful one- people (or animals) who WANT to have sex tend to have more sex, which means they have more offspring, which means the genes responsible for desiring sex are propogated into the population.
Keep in mind that this trait pretty much just had to evolve once- in our extremely distant ancestors- and it probably stuck around just because it’s so beneficial.