Candid, threats of death or bodily injury are not allowed on the SDMB. Do not issue such threats again. I’ll also add that the entire tone of your post is far more suited for the BBQ Pit than for IMHO. Please remain aware of which forum you are posting in.
I’ll give you this: that post must’ve been candid.
I graduated (on time) which is why I’m smart enough not to blow all my money on coffee. 
Nah, liberalism is too inconvenient. I try to keep things simple. My slogan is “Let the gays marry the animals, and then let their kids save the rainforest!”
Don’t forget water! One of the things we need most and we’re surrounded by water,… with **SALT ** in it!
Bravo!
That has got to be the funniest thing since Oolon Colluphid’s “Where God Went Wrong”, “Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes” and “Who is this God Person Anyway?”
I swear you’ve got the Douglas Adams gene.
– ponders –
… Nope, still no God.
And you know “Pi”? That’s just a compiling glitch.
And teeth. What is the function of cavities. Couldn’t God have given us teeth that didn’t decay or that could heal themselves. Hell, I’d even settle for a third set of teeth in my thirties, when I realized how important it was to take care of them.
That’'s right! What the heck is it with pi, anyway? How come something so easy to describe just trails off into an infinite, nonrepeating number? Talk about sloppiness!
What, are you saying that if you were all-powerful, you’d never sit down, kick your feet up, and have a beer?
And as proof that idiocy can evolve across the political spectrum, here’s this gem of an exchange.
On the contrary, an omnipotent designer need not be constrained by such concerns as efficiency or standardization.
But, again, you must therefore concede that evolution produces “poor designs”. Certainly, I do not believe that, and my point with my original post is that you really cannot deduce anything, one way or the other about the designer (or, the presence of a Designer) by looking at the designs. If you rule out an “intelligent designer”, then you are left with evolution, and you pretty much have to accept that evolution produces all these allegedly crappy designs, making it a pretty crappy process. The point is that no matter what we mighty humans might have designed via the benefit of hindsight, these “unintelligent designs” do, in fact, work, and work quite well.
Species die out for a variety of reason, many having more to do with bad luck than bad design. You think we’d be here if it weren’t for that great big meteor 65 milion years ago? Dinosaurs were incredibly successful, and even today, their progeny species outnumber us hairy, furry ones.
And anyway, haven’t you ever heard of planned obsolesence? We humans do it all the time, and we are allegedly “intelligent desingers” in our own right!
Sitting down and kicking back only feels good because it’s relief from tiredness or stress (or avoiding tiredness and stress), which are conditions an omnipotent being would not experience. Much like there’s no benefit from medicines, when one has no disease or illness.
If I were omnipotent, I would not sit down and kick my feet up, any more than I would take penicillin when I have no infection. There’d be no reason.
I found Tuckerfan’s post on Unintelligent Design, well written, clever and witty, but…
Is “God” a victim of human fallibility?
I think it’s safe to say, that virtually all Judeo-Christian faiths generally accept the notion that the Judeo-Christian Bible did not magically appear (like the Universe) but was created by humans… Could it be that those who attempted to document and transcribe the “play-by-play” of the origins of the universe just got it wrong? “God” knows not of “time”. The concept of time is a human invention. For those that believe, God is “all time” and “all creation”. Thus, expressing durations in days in weeks is human conceptuality and could not possibly exist in the Creator’s vocabulary.
The Bible’s depiction of all creation: all “non-human” life first, then human life, is generally accurate (despite that notion that it does make the Creator a slacker with poor design sensibilities). I think the global community of respected anthropologists, paleontologists, and archeologists would agree (in general) to that idea.
Out of the five books in the Old Testament, roughly ten chapters are devoted to “explaining” creation. That’s a pretty big “gloss over” in my view, but I think that’s fine.
Why would I state “that’s fine”?
Glad you asked!
The “Theory of Evolution” is a pretty big gloss-over too. It’s a largely unobservable phenomenon given what’s required: observations over thousands, if not tens of thousands of years to substantiate any of it as fact, leaving the bulk of this theory as something yet to be scientifically proven. It’s a nice idea, it’s a nice concept, it’s revolutionary, it’s ground-breaking, it’s thought-provoking, but it still just a theory. We humans now write and speak of it as established scientific fact, and this is a fundamental misperception and misconception. I don’t personally know when the term “Theory of Evolution” was coined, but Darwin’s book was entitled “The Origin of the Species”, and was specific to human evolution, not creation.
I’m completely lost when we humans argue amongst ourselves about whether to choose or teach Creationism or Evolution. To my mind, they are two distinct things, although they are incorrectly view or positioned as opposing “like-for-likes”. Seems to overlook the concept that one is an “event”, the other is a “process”. If we were arguing about two different processes to explain one phenomenon, or two different events, now at least we would be in the same conversational ballpark.
I’m not advocating the instruction of Creationism or Intelligent Design in public schools, but isn’t spoon-feeding “The Theory of Evolution” as a universally accepted schema for creation just as bad in that respect? Why is it that we do not view science as another faith, or even another religion? One meaning of religion does not have a classical spiritual context at all: a cause, principle, or activity pursued with rigorous repetition, zeal and conscientious devotion. Does that not describe the scientific process? Well, it does to me.
T. S. Kuhn masterfully describes the high degree of human subjectivity and fear (that’s right: fear) that drives the scientific process in his essay “The Structure of Scientific Revolution” (that’s some essay). When you look at a history of science from the 18th century perspective, it reads much like what happened inside and outside the Catholic church in 13th century (but in fairness, excommunication from the Church in those days was a little more extreme- back then it was a death warrant in some societies where it was ostensibly legal to kill someone for that). If you haven’t had the pleasure, I highly recommend reading it. Kuhn is not a Creationist, so there should be no concern for that. He was a philosopher and an historian by trade. T. S. Kuhn: an extremely bright individual, to be sure.
The whole concept of absolutism, absolute truths is yet another human invention (not one of our better ones). Absolutism is any form is unfortunate and reflective of intellectual inflexibility and being closed minded, rather than one who is insightful and open to all possibilities. Isn’t the notion that those that believe in Evolution (because we lump that under “science”) somehow means “bright”, “intelligent” and “open-minded”, “well-informed”, and those that adopt Creationism are “low-witted”, “close-minded”, “unintelligent” and “ignorant”, rather ridiculous? It’s puzzling to me, that’s for sure.
We live. We die. And in between, we struggle and yearn for meaning in our existence. We grapple these with weighty things looking for “a purpose to this all”, when in the end, there probably isn’t a “purpose”, or even a purpose to finding purpose. The Bible, Creationism, the desire to bring the material world to heel, all of this stuff is a manifestation of the eternal struggle to answer the question gnawing at all of us, a question we may never know the answer to: What is the origin of life? (forget about how life might evolve!) How did we get here? Where did all of this stuff in the “universe” come from? Where does the “space” for outer space exist? And, so on.
We are nothing more than “we are”. Everything else we make up. Planes fly. I can use plastic cards to agreeably carry stuff out of somebody else’s building and put it in my own. Iboprufen definitely works on my headaches. Internal combustion engines and computer chips can be massed produced. Sure, that’s the “stuff of science” (so we say).
All of that is all well and good, but so what? None of this gives meaning or purpose to our existence. What do we humans do then? We use words, symbols, spiritual metaphors to conjure, to explain, to settle, sooth and redirect a soul that senses that there’s no point to any of “this” at all.
In closing, some thoughts from Andy Partridge of XTC fame:
Welcome to the Garden of Earthly Delights.
Welcome to a billion Arabian nights.
This is your life and you do what you want to do,
This is your life and you spend it all.
This is your life and you do what you want to do,
Just don’t hurt nobody,
'Less of course they ask you,
In the Garden of Earthly Delights.
As one of the most churchified people on this board, let me chime in and say that intelligent design is a blight on the church. It is propagated by people who don’t know what they’re talking about and who have equated “evolved” with “randomly and pointlessly living”.
The intelligent design movement is inherently philosophically flawed, because they insist on drawing spiritual conclusions from physical evidence, which is almost completely impossible.
No, evolution produces adequate designs, as that is all that is necessary. If they were poor for their purpose they would not survive. But why would an omnipotent designer produce designs that were less than optimal?
Are you saying an omnipotent designer went to all the trouble of designing all those species, and completely forgot that 99% of them would die from the absolute certainty that large meteors would hit the earth? Or to divert said meteors? Or just didn’t care?
We do that so things die early, to sell more product. Are you sure you want to make that analogy with your god? Are you really comfortable with admitting that your god has the motives of a user car salesman?
Darwin’s quote was actually “Survival of the fit” not “fittest”
It brings a whole new implication to the statement. You don’t have to be the best to survive, just good enough.
(I haven’t read teh whole thread yet, so apologies if this is redundent)
God was prepared to abandon the Jews on the occasion of the golden calf, and did destroy all of humanity barring Noah et al with the flood. I don’t believe anyone can deny that the Jewish/Christian/Muslim God has a cruel streak.
Apparently, heaven, God’s own home, isn’t perfect either.
If heaven is so perfect (i.e. a place devoid of wants, desires, sin as Christians would like us to believe) then how could Lucifer (who lived there with all the other angels before his downfall and supposedly God’s most beloved angel)
even be capable of sinning against God (Lucifer wanted to become His equal and take over the universe or smething)? Also why didn’t God simply kill Lucifer instead of banishing him to this planet? Why not Jupiter?
To start, the full title is “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.” and can be found here. It is most certainly NOT specific to human evolution, but to all species (if that was what you were trying to say). Also, to note, your understanding of the term “Theory” is obviously flawed and I recommend you read up on what it actually means when used in science. Here is the Wikipedia entry.
As for the rest, you are wrong, wrong, wrong. Evolution is one of the MOST observable and scientifically proven FACTS around. You see it everyday. You are thinking it only applies to humans and or animals over thousands of years, but in reality, it is in everything around us. Asian Flu? Evolutionary adaptive traits of viruses. Ever heard of antibiotic resistence? Yep, survival of the fittest bacterium. Kudzu over-running the USA? Evolutionary fast-growth traits of a plant introduced to an area with no natural inhibitor. Evolution can be tested, observed, held up to the light, tossed around - and everytime it comes down to the truth that evolution IS. It exists.
But evolution IS. It exists. It has been proven over and over and over again as true. If one chooses to teach ID, then why not allow voodoo doll charms 101 to be taught?
Again, evolution IS. It exists. Thus, when you teach something that tries to counter evolution, you are essentially trying to argue that 1+1 = 3 and thus you look stoopid. You obviously have never actually read, studied or contemplated evolution beyond the surface statements. Obvious because what you have written here goes against true understanding of evolution. Here’s a shocker for most Creationists (maybe not you, but you’d be among the first): Darwin never said we evolved from apes. Go ahead, look. He didn’t. And when you find out what he did say, you will see that evolution isn’t exactly what you think it is. That it doesn’t work the way you think it does. And thus your arguments against it are flawed.
And lastly, can someone answer me this: Does it have to be God that was the Intelligent Designer? Or would religious folk accept that we could be the petri dish experiments of the Thraglon Compendium from Omnicron-Persei-8?
-Tcat
Hmmm… I think I fully understand what “theory” means in the context of science, but thanks for the tip. Nor was I trying to explain what a theory is. T. S. Kuhns cleared that up for me when I read his essay (way more that Wikopedia (although Wikopedia rocks). All theory is based on some degree of subjectivty. One school of thought in the pursuit of “science” is “not to love one’s theories”, because is the goal is to develop a theory, so it can be broken.
Often, what we say is a an “evolutionary” process, is confused with “lifecycles”. It is true that mutation is a part of the what we think we know about the evolutionary process, but mutation doesn’t extend to evolution being proven scientific fact. Nor does observing mutation in the “evolutionary” process does not explain the origins of life. Even Darwin himself understands that there are many problems with his notions and devotes an entire chapter to that (Chapter 6 - Difficulties on Theory).
There’s nobody alive today that can tell me that the key geological periods where we believe, us humans believe life as we know it began to take shape (i.e., Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian periods) were observed and documented by humans, save fossils and other geological records that we speculate about and muse over, but certainly do not add up to it being proven fact.