I saw we gotta go Old Testament on these idjits. It’s Smitin’ Time!
Even if they do, there are two byproducts of metabolism that I can think of that would not make such an arrangement very comfortable. Expect a scenario such as this.
Do you really think there is no reason to accept evolution other than because someone rejects Christianity or evidence from a Christian?
Because this is what the Pope has to say:
http://www.ewtn.com/library/PAPALDOC/JP961022.HTM
Do you really think that the Pope accepts evolution because he’s “anti-Christian,” or do you think that maybe it’s because, quite simply, evolution makes sense and there’s a ton of evidence for it?
eta: FWIW, I was first taught evolution by a Catholic Sister - she didn’t seem too biased against Christians either. It’s just that she, ya know, had like degrees in science and stuff.
Has a Christian in the history of debates EVER produced ANY evidence that you will accept? I seriously doubt it. And yes, you did completely miss my point.
Also, your points about design flaws assumes that modern medicine has completely discovered every single thing about the human body. THe arrogance of atheists is appalling. In the REAL world, we have a long ways to go. Science can’t even freaking explain the placebo effect. And lately, now there is doubt about cholesterol and clogged arteries directly causing a heart attack event.
And if the wind pipe is such a huge design flaw, how come most of us are not killing over? Hmmm, funny, we spend every day eating food, and the vast majority of us never have a problem with food going down the wrong pipe.
I’m not going to gamble my eternal destination on man made reasoning that still has a LONG ways to go. I will gamble it on a living God who changes people’s lives.
Now I could easily spend a chunk of my weekend addressing your other comments, but I rather go enjoy my day instead of wasting it here. You just cleaned your claws for nothing, friend. But I will address your “cleaning my claws” comment. It clearly proves my point that atheists will never seriously consider any Christian evidence. They come to a debate merely to rip a Christian to shreds. It’s your form of worship. Sad that you are on the wrong team.
Because the darkness hates the light.
You do know that “It may look like a flaw, and we wouldn’t have designed it that way, but since God did it must not be a flaw even if we don’t understand why He made it look like one” is not a very strong argument, right?
And one of the strongest points FOR a natural development of a body part or system is the fact that it works just well enough just often enough that we don’t all keel over and die. A designed system would not have such failure points, but an evolved system would be expected to have them.
(Added- and my “eternal destination” is going to be decided at Judgement by how well I treated the other people I shared this world with. If “belief in one particular origin myth” is 50% of our final grade, we are all fucked.)
This is a disingenuous statement- several of us have answered some of your questions and assertions with facts and data (and no acrimony or snark), and you have ignored it. I try to take your arguments seriously- and I address them with good stuff (like the recurrent laryngeal nerve), but then you ignore me and complain about all atheists.
I may be invisible to him, as I am not an atheist, but still believe his arguments are a load of codswallop. Creationism is bad science and worse theology.
Of course not, because Christianity is scientifically baseless. Christians don’t provide evidence, because none exists; just a book written by ignorant barbarians and empty assertions by true believers.
Nonsense; there are plenty of flaws that require no more understanding for us to know they are flawed. Such as most or all of the ones mentioned in this thread.
Oh, please. Nothing is more arrogant than religion. The believers take baseless incoherent nonsense created by primitives, assert that it’s true, and try to force everyone to submit to their fantasy.
You’ve said this (or something like it) a couple of times in this thread. It appears you don’t want people to consider your arguments, you want people to accept them. You’re employing a mode of argument that is immune to reason.
For example, consider: “X is true, and anyone who disagrees, disagrees only because they are a liar”. The person making this statement cannot ever be persuaded that X is not in fact true (quite regardless whether this is actually the case) - they are going to receive two kinds of responses:
-Agreement, which reinforces their certainty that X is true
-Disagreement, which they categorise as predictable lies, which reinforces their certainty that X is true.
It’s not good to be in a position that is unassailable by even truthful disagreement - you’ll never know if you’re wrong.
You do realize that multiple Christians in this very thread have been thumping you upside the head for not accepting reality because you think it conflicts with your religion? Of course, I’m sure you’re enjoying feeling persecuted, but you might want to climb down off the cross. We’re going to need the wood for BBQing.
And your repetition of ‘nuhn uhn!’ is simply to hide the fact that you can’t actually show how I was wrong. There is no evolutionary reason why humans would have evolved so that they smelled corpses as being good or that corpses would have a pleasant aroma, either. That it’s mathematically possible does not enter into the issue, which you seem to be confused about as your focus on “randomness” demonstrates. Of course, yet again, necrophages have a very good reason to have corpses smell good, and it’s a reason that’s evolutionarily sound. Humans have a very good reason to avoid rotting meat.
Your new dodge that it is somehow “arrogant” to realize that cancer is bad and a ‘design flaw’, and that we can’t say that there are design flaws because perhaps at some unspecified point in the future we can come up with fixes for those ‘design flaws’ and therefore they don’t count? That doesn’t, I think, require further comment.
You also seem not to understand what a flaw is. You are actually arguing that having one tube for food/air, that can become clogged and kill you is not a flaw if “most of us” are not “killing over” (that’s “keeling over”, by the way). Cribs with the bars spaced further apart than a coke can can have infants heads become stuck and can result in serious injury or death. And yet, many people were raised in just such a crib. That doesn’t mean that the bar spacing isn’t a design flaw. (Of course cribs, unlike people, actually were designed, but I digress)
Ahhh, the traditional internet post about how posting on the internet is a waste of time and you’re going to abandon your argument, but that’s just because your argument is so awesome that you don’t need to stick around for it.
Plus bonus points for more imagined persecution and yet again ignoring that lots of folks believe in Creationism, you’re hardly the first, you’ve brought nothing novel (at all), including the belief that having your fairy tales discounted in favor of reality somehow reflects some sort of anti-Christian bias. Plus double secret bonus points for equating science and religion and claiming that showing your many errors must be “worship” instead of, ya know, a way to amuse myself by eviscerating awful arguments on the internet.
Duh.
Your 300x50x30 is in cubits, which I converted to feet (at a conservative 18" per.) Your number of species seems to be based on outdated info. Not refuted but cast into serious doubt. (Terry Erwin).
As for food and waste, if I were a non-gigantic beetle I’d be very happy to have 4 sq. inches of decaying suet and seed to sleep on and share with my wife for 10 months.
Finn, my comment was a standard SDMB nitpick, and relies on divine intervention to keep the animals from eating each other or getting stepped on, to travel across oceans, to not madly reproduce, etc. The story is adequately absurd even if all the beetles fit comfortably.
You don’t have a valid point. You are asserting something without evidence.
And in any case, Christians can be right about specific issues. I mean, a Christian can give directions, or explain calculus. But they, and all people who support religions, have yet to be right about their supernatural claims.
You aren’t seeing this right. We have evidence for design flaws, lack of knowledge of other things doesn’t make the evidence of design flaws disappear.
Imagine that you have a deck of 100 cards. You overturn 99 of them, and they are numbered from 1 to 99. You don’t know what is under the last card, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t understand what the other 99 show. You’re imagining that the flaws we know about aren’t going to be flaws because of something we will discover in the future. But they are already flaws now.
Of course. Because we wouldn’t be a successful species if we evolved with a wind-pipe that killed the vast majority of us.
These are flaws, not guaranteed killers. Imagine you have a car, and because of the way the struts for the windows are arranged, your blind-spot is larger. You may drive that car for ten years and not crash, but you’re more likely to crash (from changing lanes into someone) than if you had a car that had more visibility.
Can you understand that specific problems with our bodies don’t mean that we’ll all die tomorrow. It means that more of us die than need to. Which is evidence that an intelligent creator didn’t put us together.
God doesn’t change people’s lives. *People *change their lives because they believe that God is there and watching them.
Running away when you can’t answer questions doesn’t make you win. It just lets you convince yourself that you won.
Atheists tear Christians to shreds because Christians who argue that there is evidence for God’s existence are always wrong.
You are leaving the debate because you can’t face that fact. Honestly, if you just said, “I feel God’s presence and I know I can’t prove he exists, but it is enough for me.” no one could fault you. But instead of that, you’re pretending that you actually do have evidence.
The side that can back their claims with evidence is the light, dude. The guy who runs away rather than answer simple questions is seeking refuge in the darkness.
Fair enough.
We could use a nitpick tag.
Great point and seemingly largely ignored by both sides.
My God requires faith from me ergo if I prove He exists then he ceases to do so. Seems that, on the internet at least, that more atheists and weak deists understand that better than many self proclaimed Christians. As Blake illustrated earlier in this tread with this old joke:
"The argument goes something like this: “I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”
“But,” say Man, “the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.”
“Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t though of that” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic."
As I am limited by that also science is limited by what we can actually observe.
As for now our ultimate orgin is described by the big bang in most scientific circles.
We cannot see all the way back to the big bang much less to what may have come before.
The only proof I can offer of Gods existence is subjective.
Again the only proof of Gods existence I have is subjective so I guess you know what comes next. The witnessing, but before I begin I would like to point out that the only kind of witnessing that some of the members of the board have a problem with is the religious kind.
FinnAgain was witnessing when he noted that as a science teacher he sees the efffects of ignorance everyday and Voyager was witnessing when he related his observation of the effects of artificial selection while breeding dogs.
I can take thier subjective evidence and make it objective for me personally by becoming a teacher or by breeding dogs.
And you can take the subjective evidence I offer and apply it to your own life and see if it works for you if you so desire.
Ok hang on here we go. My proof of God.
By doing the things asked of me in the New Testament of the Holy Bible I have enriched my life iimmensely. Specifically “love your God with alll your heart, mind, body, and soul.” and “love your neighbor (your fellow human beings) as yoursefl”
The rest of the instruction found in the New Testament concerns how to keep those two commandments.
Thats it!!
If you used reason to arrive at your present position, then that is exactly what you are doing.
If you didn’t, well, that is what everyone has been trying to tell you.
Wow. What circular ‘reasoning’
Do you feel you need a God? If so why?
I’m an atheist. But I do follow the basic tenets of Christianity. Do unto others… and so forth and so on.
I do not need Christianity to tell me these very basic facts of life.
Not because I fear the wrath of some God, but because as a moral, just and kind person it’s what you do. Many of any faith seem to think the only way to be ‘righteous’ is to fear what some God may do to them if they don’t worship He/She/It. That’s not a God that I can accept.
This makes me a bit afraid of those that seem to need some higher power just to be a good person.
I don’t fear the laws of man or some imaginary God. I don’t have to. I can be a good person all on my own.
If I’m wrong, so be it. I would not want to meet a God that would punish those that can be good without fearing or loving Him/She/It.
To answer Hamsters (among others) arguments of who created God or that it is more reasonable to believe that the universe came from nothing than to believe that God did or there was no place or no time for God to exist prior to the big bang et al.
These are old arguments and my personal belief is that God is infinite.
After all something is infinte even if that something is nothingness…right?
These discussions get surreal rather quickly.
What is nothing? Have we ever seen it? If somehow we create a true vaccum someday will you be able to see through it to the other side?
But surely someone as intelligent as you can see how nebulous that is. I have enriched my life immensely by reading a physics text.
If you want to offer the New Testament as proof of God, then it has some much more specific and testable claims, and I solemnly assure you they would make me an instant convert if they were true, rather than being proven false a thousand times a day.
Matthew 21:21-22 says that anyone with faith will get ANYTHING he prays for, and even gives examples — such as casting a mountain into the sea, or killing a fig tree because it didn’t bear fruit out of season — to show that the request does not have to be noble or unselfish, or even of any use. It just says “anything.”
And in another passage at the end of Mark, it says believers will be able to handle snakes, drink poison, and cure sickness. The technical term for people who test these verses is either “corpses” or “bereaved parents,” depending on the context.
Those are promises made by Jesus Christ himself, and they are easily tested, and they don’t work. All of Christendom prayed for deliverance from the Black Death, back when there were no liberal commie atheistic professors to sway the simple faith of the peasants, and they still died at exactly the same rate as Jews, Muslims, and pagans.
Religion doesn’t work. If it makes you feel better, swell, but don’t try to say it’s empirically true, because it’s demonstrably false.
The foundation of our understanding of evolution and genetics is based on the works of Gregor Mendel. Who was an Augustinian Friar. So, by definition, anyone who accepts the concept of genetics, must agree with evidence (and argument) produced by a Christian.
You’re also continually ignoring the fact that there are, in this thread, more Christians arguing in favor of evolution, than are arguing against it. Again, if the atheist position is founded purely on oppositional defiance to Christian opinions, atheists would be arguing against evolution.