Or Chick tracts.
I would prefer that evolution in the natural selection sense had its own word (I’d also prefer dark energy, dark matter, chaos theory etc to have less misleading names) but I doubt this is the cause of Creationists conflating all these things.
IME, one of the most common things for a YEC to say to me when we’re discussing evolution is “So you think the universe came from nothing?”
…when the philosophical question of why anything exists at all has nothing to do with any sense of “evolution”. Creationists lump it together because they lump everything together that is considered contrary to what they believe.
And it’s not hard to see why they do that.
If you want to believe in some mythology, it’s easier to swallow the line “Evolutionists prefer to believe ABC, but we believe XYZ” than “Our beliefs are contradicted by science in area A, and separately in area B, and considered irrational in philosophical area C, etc”).
I absolutely effing prefer that.
Heh, don’t feed me straight lines. 
The thing is, for me the ineffable isn’t any kind of orchestrator or director or grand puppetmaster. It does not dictate human behavior nor does it go around smiting people. Really, for me, it’s more just the collective life-force with which everything is infused; and by “everything” I mean plants, creatures (of which we are one kind), fungus, archaea – hell, who knows. It may be that our scientific definition of “life” continues expanding to include many unexpected things. I feel that all these things are connected in a way that is not unlike the idea of the “collective unconscious.”
I point this out only because I like to remind people that it is possible to be spiritual without being “religious.” Technically, I’m what you call an animist, though. Not really deist except for convenience’s sake. (Pagan rituals are more fun with statues and stuff.)
It’s more that;
(YE) Creationists are to a guy with only a hammer,
as
Scientists are to a guy who has a a complete tool set and knows how to make bespoke tools.
Add in that, your answer to every question is “God did it!” and you don’t realize that almost all of your questions are, in fact, compound.Question: “Where did life come from?”
Creationist: “God did it!”
Scientist: "Well, right off the top of my head, do you mean the first replicating molecule, or the first ‘living’ organism, or are you asking about the diversity of species (and I’m certain I could go on)?
'Cause it isn’t a question with a single, simple, answer!
(Oh, and, the answers to those questions are: Chemistry and physics, abiogenesis, and evolution . . . not the theory, the theory explains the observed fact of evolution.)"CMC fnord!
…And when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
With all due respect, the basic premise of this position is incorrect as it rests on an equivocation and strawman fallacies. Statistical randomness, unknowable effect due to the complexity of variables, does not mean pure randomness, causeless effects. The “random” in random mutations is closer to the former. More precisely, it simply means that our DNA changes due to external factors (ie. radiation), from its imperfect replication process, etc. I would suggest visiting Berkeley’s Evolution 101 page or read anything by Gould where he argues that if evolution were rewound it would occur differently.
Now the latter case of randomness does exist on the quantum level, but that is beyond the scope of this thread.
[QUOTE=Mijin]
IME, one of the most common things for a YEC to say to me when we’re discussing evolution is “So you think the universe came from nothing?”
[/QUOTE]
I remember having this discussion with a 13 year old with a head proudly full of the god stuff. It wasn’t hard to show him that “God” isn’t a satisfying alternative to “so the universe came from nothing ?”, because it just moves the causeless effect one step back.
So he moved to another tack : “and what was there before the big bang ?”. He took my “I have no idea, nobody does and nobody *can *because before the big bang there quite coinceivably was no time for things to happen, and no space for them to happen in” as an admission of defeat. That’s the problem with 13 year olds. And religious people. Admitting ignorance is too much for them to bear. They’d rather “know” bullshit, whether it’s about where we come from, what happens after death…
I think the OP may be confused on what a “win” condition is …
Roll a six-sided die once … the results are random … but evolution don’t care about that, she gets to roll the die 10,000,000 times … her “win” condition is rolling a 3 just once … there is a small chance she’ll “lose”, but the odds are near certain she will “win” … it’s not magic, it’s statistics !!!
One can’t roll the die until there’s a die to be rolled … not sure what that argument means …
I agree that there exist uninformed dullards spouting errors on the internet who happen to be atheists (who exist along with a wide diversity of their more religious counterparts). The existence of idiots who disagree with you is not evidence of your own correctness.
Well, quite, and especially if you cherry-pick them for the express purpose of trying to discredit everyone on the other side of the fence from you.
I’m pretty sure there are so many variables with that approach that you still wouldn’t be able to predict the outcome within a greater than a 1/38 chance.
The point Kobal2 is making is that the event is not truly random. If you could measure the ball’s movement and the conditions in the environment precisely enough you could predict exactly where the ball would land. Saying we can’t measure these factors is not the same as saying they’re immeasurable.
This is essentially the same fallacy the OP made. He doesn’t understand how evolution works, therefore he concluded it’s not understandable. He can’t personally see a species evolve, therefore he concludes it doesn’t occur. He doesn’t have the scientific background to evaluate the evidence, therefore he concludes the evidence is meaningless.
It’s a misunderstanding of science to think it has to be clear to laymen. Science requires that its claims be backed up by evidence and experiments that anyone can examine, repeat, and verify. But nobody promised that science would be easy. Some of this evidence and experiments require you to study the subject for years before you have the background knowledge to understand them.
One of the corollaries of this is that modern science, such as evolution, the big bang, dark matter, quantum physics, etc., cannot be disproven with arguments using only a junior high school level of discourse.
For decades, creationists argued that evolution violated the laws of thermodynamics. The implication is that biologists are too stupid to have passed junior high school physics! Guys, if it was that simple, the theory would have been dead on arrival, and Darwin would have been told to go away on day one!
(Even Answers in Genesis has said for creationists to stop using that particular argument.)
Effable shmeffable, as long as there’s pi.
The world’s biggest idiot can say the sun is shining, but that doesn’t make it dark out.
I have never understood how some complex organs in the body with the small parts, I’m thinking the rods, cones, lens, cornea, and retina of the eye and the inner workings of the ear (hammer, stirrup, tympanic membrane, cochlea) are WAY to complex to just be from random chance.
Many organs are pretty amazing if you look at them from an engineering aspect. The heart, liver, spleen, brain, kidneys, stomach, etc…
THEN, you put all those amazing organs together into one body.
That was exactly what Darwin remarked on in The Origin of Species (well minus the “random chance” bit) – the human eye does look staggeringly complex. But he then went on to explain how such a structure as the eye did evolve, with examples from nature – there are examples of every intermediate form between “light sensitive patch of skin” and “hawk eye” out there.
Yes hundreds of millions of years of evolution can result in some pretty complex structures. But they also have plenty of flaws and are suboptimal in some ways.
And again we can see different complexities of these organs in nature.
Go to college for four years and get a degree in biology. Then you’d understand it.
Like I said, nobody said it would be easy to understand. But it is understandable if you make the effort.
This, too, was one of Darwin’s insights. If you only concentrate on the good and wonderful, then that could be an argument for evolution or for creation. But when you look at the junky bits, the stuff that doesn’t work well, then you get the subtlety of the theory of evolution. It explains what the theory (sic) of creation cannot.
As Stephen Jay Gould said, look at hens’ teeth and horses’ toes. Look at the finger bones inside the dolphin’s flipper, and whales’ pelvises.
And, most telling of all, look at the clear evidence of the heredity of species, where you can very plainly see how there are lines of descent, as Darwin saw with his finches.
Darwin was a darned observant old cuss!