Instinct, genetically programmed pleasure its all pretty much the same thing although the praying mantis doesn’t have the brain to abstract the notions of what it is doing. In any case all organisms that undergo sexual reproduction seek out sex. Those that don’t wouldn’t be around anymore. If somehow we were intelligent praying mantises I’m sure you would be writing on the message board how elegantly designed we were such that we get to meet with our maker after such a moment of divine ecstasy.
And that evidence would be…?
The components in our body which keep us alive can be found in the apes that evolved in parallel with us and in our common ancestors.
We’re very complex, which is not surprising for release X after a billion year design project. But chemicals affect us, which you’d know if you’d ever seen someone’s personality change for the better when an imbalance got corrected.
I just wrote a column, to be published this month, which explains everything. You see God and the angels designed everything with some bio-CAD software, which, like all CAD software, was full of bugs. My column has him chewing out his CAD salesman, the devil. Look at how it screwed up the plumbing, he says, and the species synthesis tool came up with this weird output it called a platypus.
The Devil finally agrees to fix the problem, but God decides to ship what he has because he is going on vacation the next day.
Makes a lot more sense than original sin, if you ask me.
Or if you’ve ever gotten stressed out or frightened and continued to feel on edge a few minutes after the danger passed.
That’s a silly argument. We are what we are regardless of whether or not we evolved, were made by a god, or were manufactured (complete with false memories) last week by aliens.
Nor does our brains functioning with chemicals and electricity make feelings any less feelings. You’re indulging in the fetish that if we understand how something works, then it’s worthless. Thoughts and mental faculties and feelings can’t be meaningful unless they are a mystical black box created by a supposedly incomprehensible sky fairy; knowing how they work and where they came from makes them “meaningless”
If someone had the necessary genetic and brain state data on file and could build a human brain, sure. We can’t do that; we lack the technology and the information necessary to recreate him is lost.
No; it’s just that we’ve heard it all before. Again, and again, and again.
There is no such evidence.
BTW, a friend of mine from MIT went into the priesthood and is now an astronomer at the Vatican. I don’t reject anything he says about astronomy. There is at least one evolutionary biologist who is a devout Catholic. I don’t reject what he has to say either. I only reject illogical arguments not backed by evidence.
The answer to your question is printed prominently near the top of every page at this site.
Wait - earlier you were telling us that our perfect bodies are proof that we were designed by God. Now you’re telling us that our imperfections are proof of design? Make up your mind!
That’s an unlikely proposition in regards to this debate, as the majority of Christians world wide have no particular objection to the theory of evolution. If the atheist position were dictated solely by reacting against what Christians say, most atheists would have to be Creationists.
Somehow evolution is supposed to make us perfect even though we evolved from earlier beings that also weren’t perfect and evolution only works with what’s at hand.
GEEPERS I’m not an atheist, but I’m on board with the snark. This thread started with a link to woefully ignorant arguments like this:
The thermodynamics argument for ID is so wrong, it’s impossible to take any list with it seriously. You waded in with:
…which is essentially a reiteration of Irreducible Complexity, already thoroughly refuted and mocked since it’s inclusion in the first post of this thread. Your examples are even worse than the examples in the usual examples trotted out of the eye and feathers. Virtually every living thing on Earth has some kind of immune system, down to single celled viruses. Trace it back far enough, and you find the very first example of chemical warfare.
Then you reject the rejection with this:
No, people are rejecting the arguments because they’ve been thoroughly debunked and several counter examples provided. I listen to Christians when they’re discussing a subject they know. My Catholic grandfather taught me how to carve. My I go to my Catholic co-worker when I need a gas system designed. I don’t reject them when they’re discussing a subject they understand, but I’m not about to listen to your arguments on ID until you come up with something better.
Aw, crap. I’m doing this while watching two different TV channels, and I misread your post. Twice. My apologies.
I’d say Gagundathar called it in one.
I almost feel bad for folks who start or join threads of this nature here on the 'dope, as it’s just a feeding frenzy. One or two posters, especially ones handicapped by such an overarching lack of understandings of even the basics just get swamped under a tide of facts and snark, and they just are so out of their depth even trying to respond when they are so obviously ignorant of even the basics being discussed. Hell, on this subject, most of them probably don’t even know as much about their own RELIGION as the majority of 'dopers responding, even if most of those 'dopers are ‘atheists’.
I wish I could help out…I LOVE a good argument and love taking opposing positions just for the fun and enjoyment I get out of it, even if I’m not all that good at such debates. Sadly, I couldn’t do it with a straight face, it’s just so ridiculous and there is so little to work with, while the evidence on the side of the ‘theory’ (which is actually many, many different theories in many, many different disciplines of science) is overwhelming. Even if we limited the discussion to just one vertical topic (say cosmology, geology, biology, evolution…any ONE of those or the other disciplines with theories that ID or Creationist types try, weakly, to attack based on their supposed faith) the amount of data that can be brought to bear to disprove pretty much anything and ID/Creationist can think of is staggering. And most of us in these threads are far from experts on these subjects (though a surprising number of 'dopers ARE).
The best thing folks who want to keep a completely faith based view of the world and don’t want to be troubled with any of those uncomfortable fact thingies can do is…keep it to yourself. Don’t try and project that out…certainly not around here, of all places…unless you like getting your ass handed to you, after several 'dopers have taken large, meaty bites out of it. The only way to ‘win’ is…not to play.
As (I think) Finn said earlier in this thread…this is just not any fun. 
-XT
Exactly correct.
You’re engaging in a very common logical fallacy here, called a “straw man” argument; you are arguing against a position that nobody is arguing for.
The fact that humans are the product of evolution doesn’t mean people aren’t unique. In fact, people ARE unique. Almost everyone in the world is a totally different mix of genes, and even people who share the same set (e.g. twins, triplets, etc.) will have different life experiences, and so will develop in different ways. All people are different, to some extent. You are not quite like anyone else who has ever existed in all the history of the human race. Evolution takes nothing away from that.
Yep, pretty much. We’re machines and the more we learn about how we work the more that becomes obvious. In the next decade we should have pretty much as good a grasp on hour our brains work mechanically as we do our digestive system now(which still has some interesting gaps, but is generally pretty well understood).
Wait, what? Where did that come from? Personality and talent may be emergent properties of a collection of biochemical properties, but that doesn’t make them meaningless. Meaning is granted to things we find meaning in, not by some outside agency, supernatural or otherwise. You may find the drawings of your four year old meaningful, and be completely unmoved by Monet’s Water Lilies. That’s up to you. There’s no supreme arbiter of meaning who says things that come from natural processes, like rainbows or sunsets, can’t be meaningful.
Again, this does not follow. I can take the same package of Lego bricks and build a million different structures from them and even though they come from the same base elements and they’re structured in a certain way, they can be unique and distinctive.
Just because it’s all happening in your head, how on Earth does that make it less real?
A human being is the end result of a massive number of variables, and they change throughout their lives. Genetics, diet, upbringing, being in the right place at the right time, other human relationships, etc. These can’t be perfectly replicated and no one has said they could be. Any Henry Fonda clone would be a different person because it would be impossible, given the uncertainty principle, and the unidirectionality of time, to have “another Henry Fonda.” Is the absence of some intangible “soul” of Fonda’s which would make this cone different? No, it would be some differences in experiences and physical environment which would make them different.
Scientific understanding of the world is underpinned by the assumption that we’re living in an objective, deterministic reality. These assumptions are on pretty firm ground because everything we’ve been able to learn about our reality or predict using this set of assumptions have borne them out. If there is some “creation” force out there, its effects are extremely subtle and no evidence of it has been discovered up until now. Certainly the claims of various world religions which all say they’ve got the revealed truth of a supernatural being who did X to Y on Z date have all failed to stand up to scrutiny.
Enjoy,
Steven
Going with an 18" cubit, and an ark 450’ x 75’ x 45’, and allowing 4 sq. inches each for 1 million happy beetle couples… I think you could store them all in the front 5 feet of the ark, in racks spaced six vertical inches apart.
These guys, among others, will ask for a room upgrade.
4 square inches is only 2 inches on a side. Many, probably most, beetles won’t fit in such a space. But even if you are correct, you have just used over 1% of your space for a single family of one of the smallest animal orders. You have dozens of other families in that order, so by the time you finish with the insects you will have used over 5% of you space. Double that to allow room for food an walkways and you have used 10% of your space.
And then you get to start on all the other arthropod orders such as the arachnids and crustaceans. By the time you have finished with the arthropods, you will have used at least 20% of your space.
Then you move onto the other invertebrates such as molluscs, earthworms and so forth. By the time you have got in all the invertebrates, over 75% of your space is gone.
Only then can you start on the big animals such as the frogs and lizards.
You won’t even get a chance to even consider working on mammals and birds.
The whole concept is just silly. A zoo needs hundreds of acres of space to maintain a collection of just a few hundred species, and it can import food and water. You are proposing to maintain a millions of species in three thousand square feet. Self contained.
By having an IQ which is higher than room temperature… in Celsius.
Let’s try on for starters: it is a design flaw to include the air tube and the food tube in the same structure, such that a mis-swallowed piece of food can result in death. Finn 1, God 0.
Or how about: it is a design flaw for humans to crave sweets, starches and fats because our ancestors used to have an evolutionary advantage in hoarding such nutrients, but we are not at health risks by doing the same. Finn 2, God 0.
Having cells which are prone to cancer and which kill their host in amazingly slow, gruesome ways is a design flaw of massive dimensions. Finn 3, God 0.
And so on.
That may, perhaps, be the shittiest and most diningenous metric I’ve seen in a long, long while (and I just snipped your ‘which universes have you designed, eh, eh?’ bit, so that’s saying something). As the OP has already proven, we’re having a tough time convincing some Creationists that the Flintstones was not historically accurate. Trying to convince Creationists, or as you’d like to re-brand them, Cdesign Proponentsists, is a fool’s errand. If they knew the facts and could apply the logic, they wouldn’t need convincing in the first place.
Second, as I’m blasphemously secure, having the aforementioned facts and logic on my side, I’m rather amused by your trying to claim that reality is “a viewpoint” .
Where to begin… I could point out that you lack a basic working understanding of the null hypothesis and the burden of proof. But instead, I’ll simply point out that, of course a tri-omni God is logically impossible and thus is concretely disproved. You are of course left with a number of choices which involve a God which is only dual-omni, but that’s hardly in keeping with what seems to be your theology.
You really, really need to read up on evolutionary biology before you try to critique it. To begin with, what selection pressure do you contend back pain causes you to be subjected to? At what point in human history was said selection pressure sufficient to fix the allelic frequency one way or another? Barring that, prove that your back pain has a genetic component. Prove that such a component is not a result of drift or a bottleneck. (Even if your claims were accurate they’re still irrelevant, as we do know that children suffer from far fewer structural maladies than elderly people, and I’ve already explained the reason why to you).
Further, your rhetorical trickery is blatant. First you claim that our perfection is proof of Creation, now you claim that our imperfection is proof of Creation. As most Creationists do, you’re arguing backwards from a conclusion and trying to find facts to justify it, rather than looking at the evidence and then formulating hypotheses to explain it.
As for why I both debating with “Christian” arguments (there are horribly, neutron-dense Creationist arguments among all three monotheistic faiths and beyond), like I said, I enjoy the chance to clean my claws.
And no, I didn’t miss your point. Evidently you don’t understand the subject you’re holding forth on, hardly novel for a Creationist discussion evolution, and so you don’t realize that by pointing out that corpse-scent is not in fact random, that I refuted your example. (Of course, were you a necrophage, corpses would smell pretty awesome to you, but I digress). Further, you have provided zero evidence, let alone “pro-Christian” evidence. Even if you had provided evidence of Creation, it would not be “pro-Christian”, it would be “pro-Creation”. It could just as easily have been J.R. “Bob” Dobbs who Created us, or Odin, or Cargo Cult dummies, or…
You’ve fallen into an obvious mental trap whereby not only are you employing a God of the Gaps dodge, but you are also assuming that if you can punch holes in reality and disprove evolutionary biology, then your particular Creation myth, out of the thousands which have appealed to humanity over the years, must be correct.
Ugh.
To begin with, there are most likely roughly 5-8 million species of beetles. That means enough space for roughly 10-16 millions beetle pairs, not counting young, waste, and nutrients. To follow, you seem to have invented numbers for the size of the Ark, it was 300 x 50 x 30 in the myth. If we assume your “racks six vertical inches apart”, that are then arranged horizontally in direct physical contact packed in as tight as possible, with beetle enclosures occupying 100% of the (assumed for this problem to be entirely vacant) internal volume of the Ark, that still doesn’t give us enough volume for the beetles, and that’s assume that we’ve superglued the pairs together and they don’t feel like moving around all that much.
It’s a fairy tale. That’s all there is to it.