Do you accept the theory of evolution? - Part 1

[Lighthouse]

Bill Nye 'The Science Guy' Slammed By Creation Museum, Pastor Ray Comfort

Georgia Purdom, who is identified by AiG as having a Ph.D. in molecular genetics from Ohio State University, argues in the video that evolution is a "historical science" that has not been observed directly, while creation can be verified by the Bible.

"Do we start with man's ideas about the past, who wasn't here during the supposed billions of years of Earth history, or do we start with the Bible -- the written revelation of the eyewitness account of the eternal God who created it all? Rather than being inconsistent as Bill Nye states, observational science confirms the literal history and genesis," she said.

That she can't see the tremendous contridiction in that statement is mind blowing to me. Oh, and the other guy in the article is responisble for this little gem.
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[Brita21]

I firmly believe in evolution... There is proof right in front of our faces, and I accept that people have the choice but in my opinion about christianity, any person could've wrote the bible.... I don't believe in any part of it. Its just a story to me. Evolution is taught in school, religion is not.

 

[Brita21]

If you believe that god is real you might as well believe superheros are real too. Its the same idea.

 

[Thundercrack85]

For those of you not familiar with Pastor Ray Comfort, he's the man who said that the banana is evidence for creationism, because it easily fits into our hand, and let's us know when it's ripe by turning yellow.

I'd say he's hands down the greatest mind in the intelligent design movement.

 

[Piper Maru]

I forgot all about the banana man!

 

[The Slang]

Again, talking about "God's game", and him using us as pawn.

Who's to say there is a game or that God even has a purpose? Humans do things by purpose. God is not human.

What if He creates because he has to? What if He creates because we have to happen?


Doctor Evo, I understand your point. I still don't share it.

If I routinely ignore your little Creation babble, you routinely have ignored mine : Perspective. I am talking from the point of view of a human being from the day he was born, to the day he dies, and all the experiences in between these two.

The act of creation matters not in our lives, from our perspective. We don't choose option A or B based on how we were born or created. Creation could have happened, or it could not. None of these two options will change anything about our lives, so it doesn't have to be taken into account. It should even be ignored.

Again, illusion of free will is free will : nothing exists other than the things we can experience. Therefore, if a choice presents itself to us, and we experience the freedom to choose our option, we are experiencing free will. The same thing would not happen if you choose option A, B, both, none.

Whether it's all written or not never mattered, because you can never experience that sense of not controlling your own life, and letting things happen to you while sitting back and not being able to do anything about it.

You make those choices at those times. God doesn't.

Sorry to butt in but I've followed your conversation and I think you are failing to see the flaw in your argument.

Suppose I make a robot and I program it to ALWAYS choose left over right in any situation where it has those options; but imagine that I gave this robot the belief that it has the ability to decide for itself. The robot will occasionally encounter situations where it has to choose between left and right and it will always choose left, while believing that it came to this decision on its' own. Now, does that robot actually have the 'choice' to turn right?
From it's perspective it does and will merely always choose left, but as the creator I know that the robot does not have the capability to choose right. So the robot actually has no ability to act outside of it's program, even though it may consider other options as part of it's program.

This would be the same in a situation where God creates us knowing every decision we will ever make. If at the moment of creation God knows absolutely (without any possibility of error) every decision I will make, then despite the fact that I believe there are other options, I have no ability to change the course of events God has chosen to create.

It's impossible for an omnipotent God who knows everything to make a mistake or act unintentionally. In this scenario, God is responsible for the actions of all its creations and there is no freewill.

 

[Bill]

Why are you guys arguing about the intentions of someone who doesn't exist, and didn't create us?

It's fairly pointless.

It's arguing hypothetically. It can be fun, but this is getting to be like arguing with a wall. Or like arguing with a Creationist.

 

[Mandalore464]

Edit : Deleted

 

[Bill]

OK, last attempt on my part too, because I'm also repeating myself endlessly post after post.

Your analogy doesn't work. Like you said, you programed your robot to choose left over right. You designed his thought process, and planted the decisions he would make inside his "brain".

God didn't program us to choose left over right. He gave us birth, knowing that we would one day choose left over right. He only creates our "life". Not what happens in it. We ARE choosing left over right.



You're talking from a human perspective. You cannot even start to comprehend whether God has "intentions" at all. He's too far out of our reach.

Stick to what your human mind can actually experience and interpret. Your perspective.



Thank you, that's exactly what I've been saying. God is responsible for letting things happen. He's still not the one making them happen.

And there is free will from the man's perspective, which is the only perspective we can actually understand, and therefore, the only one we should trouble ourselves with.

As far as I'm concerned, I chose to wear black today. Whether God created me or not, I still experienced that choice, and picked that option out of all the other options I could have picked. I couldn't care less whether God knew I would or not.

It still felt like a choice, and free will is absolutely, totally indistinguishable from the "illusion of free will". My perception is all that matters : if it felt like a choice, and there is absolutely nothing that can disprove it was one, then it was one.




I think it's fun anyway, it's just that somehow in this case we are just unable to see eye to eye on the matter. The way we approach things is too different, but perhaps we should have started this debate by formulating a precise definition of what we consider this God is and what he is / isn't able to do. It would have limited its scope.

And let me repeat again that I played Devil's advocate in this game. I don't believe in God, much less Creationism.

I will now shut up and let this thread go back on tracks.

I don't on either myself. And you play devil's advocate well. And you're right, the characteristics of the God in question should have been outlined. From the Christian standpoint, God does have a plan or overall purpose and his characteristics are outlined. Talking from a Deists' perspective, we would have to dig into what the characteristics of that god may have.

But, this debate should have taken place in the Atheism thread. Unfortunately, the resident Creationists seemed to have taken a hiatus.

 

[Mandalore464]

Edit : Deleted

 

[The Slang]

I was working under the impression that this god:
*created the universe
*is all knowing of everything past present and future
*and that it had a decision in the act of creation and the content of the creation (therefor intelligent).

Going by this, God intentionally predetermined every decision we'll ever make at the moment of creation.
Though the beings in this universe would believe they have multiple options to choose from -like the robot from my analogy- they don't. They are acting out a sequence that is scripted because this God cannot by its nature create a being without simultaneously programming its' every thought and action.

Knowing everything, it would be impossible to create something without also determining its every action. It can either create something that will act out one sequence, create something that will act out another sequence, or create nothing.

I don't accept that the illusion of choice is identical to actually having a choice.

 

[Doctor Evo]

I think it's fun anyway, it's just that somehow in this case we are just unable to see eye to eye on the matter. The way we approach things is too different, but perhaps we should have started this debate by formulating a precise definition of what we consider this God is and what he is / isn't able to do. It would have limited its scope.

And let me repeat again that I played Devil's advocate in this game. I don't believe in God, much less Creationism.

I will now shut up and let this thread go back on tracks.

I do enjoy these discussions. I love to debate and argue, and it's rare that I can find others who share that enjoyment, so I appreciate it. I just couldn't see it going anywhere else.

 

[Ash J. Williams]

You and the website provided completely ignore the act of creation. That's the critical point. God is essentially setting into motion a predetermined chain of events with that single act. At least, that's the crux of the argument being made.

The act of creation wasn't mentioned in the post that I replied to, so cut me some slack. It doesn't hurt to address side issues as long as they are not only relevant but help to understand the big issue.

 

[Doctor Evo]

The act of creation wasn't mentioned in the post that I replied to, so cut me some slack. It doesn't hurt to address side issues as long as they are not only relevant but help to understand the big issue.

Right, but the argument loses all meaning when it's framed that way. It seemed like an almost intentional omission of the most critical component of the argument is all. I wasn't trying to be rude.

EDIT: And to your credit, I think I recall one or two people omitting that particular detail on this board as well.

 

[Breogan]

If you believe that god is real you might as well believe superheros are real too. Its the same idea.

Wait, what!? I thought Superheroes were real and evolved from these guys ...????

Don't tell me it's all been a lie

 

[Doctor Evo]

Wasn't sure where to put this, but I figured it might be at least somewhat appropriate. Interesting nonetheless. Might we have to reconsider the suitability of Lamarckism, at least in part? Seems like this lends itself to the field of epigenetics.

Crickets 'Forewarn' Unborn Babies About Spiders

ScienceDaily (Feb. 24, 2010) — Just because cricket moms abandon their eggs before they hatch doesn't mean they don't pass wisdom along to their babies. New research in the American Naturalist shows that crickets can warn their unborn babies about potential predator threats.

Researchers Jonathan Storm of the University of South Carolina Upstate in Spartanburg and Steven Lima of Indiana State University placed pregnant crickets into enclosures containing a wolf spider. The spiders' fangs were covered with wax so the spiders could stalk the crickets, but couldn't kill them. After the crickets laid their eggs, Storm and Lima then compared the behavior of those offspring to offspring whose mothers hadn't been exposed to spiders. The differences were dramatic.

When placed into a terrarium with a hungry wolf spider, the crickets born of spider-exposed mothers were more likely to seek shelter and stay there. They stayed hidden 113 percent longer -- and as a result had higher survival rates -- than offspring from mothers that hadn't been exposed to spiders. Another experiment showed that the "forewarned" crickets were more likely to freeze when they encountered spider silk or feces -- a behavior that could prevent them from being detected by a nearby spider.
The results suggest that "the transfer of information from mother to offspring about predation risk, in the absence of any parental care, may be more common than one might think," Storm said.

And it appears that this effect isn't limited to lab-reared crickets. Storm and Lima collected pregnant crickets from the wild -- some from habitats where wolf spiders are common, others from places where spiders are scarce. Babies from mothers caught in spider-rich habitats tended to be more cautious around spider cues, much like the lab-reared crickets.

It's not clear from this study exactly how cricket mothers influence the behavior of their offspring. It's possible, the researchers say, that stressful events like predator attacks trigger the release of a hormone that influences the development of the embryo.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100217114703.htm

 

[Thundercrack85]

It is rather annoying that people call Evolution darwinism, when a lot of other people's work went in the theory.

 

[Doctor Evo]

It is rather annoying that people call Evolution darwinism, when a lot of other people's work went in the theory.

The thing about Lamarck in particular was that the examples he used were often demonstrably fallacious, and were far less subtle than they perhaps should have been. Of course, using his mechanism as the primary basis for evolution would have been a mistake. It wasn't until recently that people began to realize that despite the shortcomings of his proposed mechanism, it may not have been entirely inaccurate, in some sense or another. Now we have fields such as epigenetics which, while nascent, may ultimately prove valuable in our understanding of evolution (though there are still some who seem to dismiss its value almost entirely).

Funnily enough, one of the main criticisms of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection was the lack of a mechanism for inheritance. It wasn't until later that he proposed such a mechanism, and when he did, he totally borrowed components of Lamarckism!

He was wrong, of course, as he was about many things. But I do believe that he may have been the first to propose natural selection as the mechanism for evolution (he wasn't the first to recognize that evolution occurs), and natural selection has remained the dominant evolutionary mechanism since. In that sense, I don't think it's completely inappropriate to call evolution by natural selection "Darwin's theory." There is also Neo-Darwinism, which was the result of something called the Modern Synthesis, and that can be attributed to the work of quite a few brilliant scientists other than Darwin.

 

[Thundercrack85]

Well, it's not like Darwin was right about everything either.

Hell, Alfred Russell Wallace came up with natural selection first. He's the main reason Darwin published his book when he did.

Wallace never got his due. Creationists don't even slander him.

I know more about the history of evolution than the science behind it. Which is kind of odd. But useful in these kinds of discussions.

 

[Doctor Evo]

Well, it's not like Darwin was right about everything either.

Precisely, but one could argue that he laid the foundation/framework for the theory of evolution by natural selection, even in the face of immediate weaknesses.

Hell, Alfred Russell Wallace came up with natural selection first. He's the main reason Darwin published his book when he did.

Well, Darwin actually came up with it first, IIRC, writing and speculating about it as a young man during his expedition on the HMS Beagle. Letters to colleagues show that his ideas predated Wallace's, though Wallace's ideas (Wallace wrote Darwin) ultimately caused him to publish first, yes.

It's also of note that their proposed mechanisms were slightly different, and they emphasized different processes.

Wallace never got his due. Creationists don't even slander him.

HA! Well, as a side-note, it turns out that Wallace was a proponent of the idea that human intelligence had an origin that wasn't purely of natural origin. That is to say, that humans had a divine origin.

But yes, Wallace deserved more recognition than he got.

I know more about the history of evolution than the science behind it. Which is kind of odd. But useful in these kinds of discussions.

Absolutely.

 

[Shemtov]

How is the question of free choice vs. predestination a LOGIC-BASED argument against Theism, again?

 

[Thundercrack85]

I never put much thought into it.

But then even when I was a deist, I assumed God (or whoever was upstairs) didn't care what people did one way or the other.

If he did... you'd think he'd you know, do something about it.

 

[Shemtov]

Let me make one attempt to explain the free choice vs. predestination question:
Let's say you have a son or daughter. You're in a restaurant, and they want a drink the restaurant has many kinds of soda. You've known your child all your life, so you know they'll choose let's say, Pepsi.
Did s/he choose it, or did you control him?

 

[Thundercrack85]

But unlike God I can't see the future. And, what if the restaurant only serves Coke?

 

[Piper Maru]

Just make sure you don't choose diet coke, otherwise you'll be sent to the bowels of hell to suffer for an eternity!