Count Dookkake said:
Here is your main probem.
The situation you described is exactly how science is supposed to work and is the main reason it is a better tool for understanding reality than religion ever has been or is likely ever going to be. Scientists are expected to support their claims.
The sooner you get around to reading "The Greatest Show on Earth," the sooner you will understand this and stop being so easily mocked.
The main problem is that now we are getting into the realm of opinion.
And no, I'm pretty sure I won't stop being mocked.
Presco said:
My goodness. It was fun for a while but now you just sound crazy.
How come? What more would you like me to present? I'm actually giving you discussion and examples, instead of just saying "No! That's not true! That's insane!" as you are right now.
Pandaman said:
there's no point in talking to you then, you're hopelessly broken. stability is not a positive trait, your banking everything on being right out of the starting gate.
look at it this way.
there's a lottery, if you get all 7 numbers correct[out of 100], you win. the winning numbers are always the same but you can only see the numbers you've gotten right.
religion picks 7 numbers and sticks with them for every draw.
the odds of religion winning on the first draw:
1 in 16,007,560,800
the odds of religion winning in the long term:
0 in 16,007,560,800
science picks 7 numbers, plays, discards the numbers that were wrong and plays again.
every time science plays, it gets more and more numbers right, keeps the right ones and trying new ones. eventually science is going to get every single number right and win. its inevitable.
the odds of science winning on the first draw:
1 in 16,007,560,800
the odds of science winning in the long term:
1 in 1
if your religion was true, the ultimate conclusion of science would be your religion. but it certainly doesn't look like things are headed that way.
if religion doesn't get them all right the first time, it will never win because its too stubborn to admit it could be wrong. it'll stubbornly cling to the 2 numbers it guessed right and miss the bigger picture.
Sounds like a very unfair analogy. It implies religion can't get more evidence to it's favor, which it had happened many times in history, even though it happens more often being interpreted for science with more acclaim. And if religion is so doomed by only having the same viewpoint over and over again, shouldn't it be long gone by now? How many lottery rounds have passed by now?
Besides, how about this analogy: If you are religious, and it turns out to be wrong, you at least led a respectable life with morals tought by said religion. If you are not religious, and religion turns out to be true, even if you also led a respectable life with morals, then it won't fare well for the one who isn't religious.
Lesath said:
You appear to at least understand that evolution, at least defined as changes in allele frequencies over time, does occur. You also appear to understand that the variability of inherited traits serves as a strong pillar for evolutionary theory.
Mutation (as well as recombination) contributes greatly to genetic variation within species. It does not, however, occur in absence of natural selection. Loss of function mutations in DNA that code for critical proteins, if not lethal, tend to be incredibly damaging to the fitness of an individual organism. This is why most accumulated mutations are either neutral, or contribute to some gain of function.
The molecular foundation of evolution is fairly well-understood. If there is a specific aspect you find lacking, feel free to state it, with as much specificity as possible. I will try to address it to the best of my ability.
Thank you for the nice response.
One problem I have seen was in the method of dating the fossils. Fossils's age are determined by measuring how much radioactivity in the carbon has left and dissipated when the animal died and as the material decomposed over time. Using the half-life of the materials used (the time it takes for the unstable parent element to die down to the stable daughter element), and comparing them to the decay rates of isotopes, you can use various chemicals to determine an age for the fossil, either carbon 14 or radiometric dating. But how do you know the amount of radiation the original animal had?
And say the various elements weren't composed instantaneously, but inserted at different times via influxes of deposits over a period of time? The Earth is alive, and volcanoes, weather, unstable atmospheres, and sunlight being blocked erratically by those events would influence the amount of radiation being dissipated. It's an innovate way of dating things, but what it's trying to date is not stable in any way, and the process to date it requires a stable 'crime scene'. Imagine trying to find out where a dead person was by it's smell.
Another problem is the issue of complexity. Evolution deals that creatures get more complex as time moves on, they get new abilities, such as more powerful systems like the brain, the immune system, and others that if explained by resulting from evolution, it would mean it originated from less complex systems. So how did the genes, by trial and error or by gradual progression, upgrade themselves like that? Processes like photosynthesis (when and how did early life learn the ability to convert light to oxygen (and this is ignoring the question of how life came about)), how the ability to have instinct came about (natural selection only explains how it would have spread, not how it came about), and other phenomena like knowledge, morality, and various creatures' (including us) werefare for others. In other words, the vastness between 'us' and 'the brutes'.
Well, fossils do an excellent job in telling us "what" they once were, and "when" they existed already. Series of fossils with transitory morphological forms can tell us "how" morphologies evolved over time. And remember, since evolution acts on populations, rather than individuals, reviving an extinct organism doesn't prove or disprove evolution unless you stick a bunch a reserve and observe the population for a variable amount of years, depending on whether you merely wish to observe changes in allele frequencies (which can occur within a lifetime), or actual speciation (which can take many lifetimes).
Having a living creature in front of you will do a lot more wonders than just depending on logic that was really built using clues as foundations. Fossils, their look, their location, and the results of the age tests give clues to what they were, but it is a far cry to seeing them alive in front of you. Seeing screens of the desktop of various computer operating systems in succession can give you clues as to how they have evolved, from the Macintosh 128k to Windows 7, but it's not until you try them out that you see how different they worked and behaved.
Modern evolutionary theory attempts to explain how current variation amongst species came to be. It does not, however, attempt to speculate or suggest how life first arose. For that matter, neither does intelligent design.
Huh? Intelligent design does explain how it arose, by being created by God. It's a simple explanation. And I know evolution is not part of the study of how it came into being (like I mentioned above), but how it came into being would bring insight on how evolution started as well.
Mgoblue201 said:
Christianity was divided the very first moment that it came into being. The divide between Peter and Paul was part of it, but it goes deeper than that. The very nature of Jesus Christ was debated until his deity was ratified centuries later. You can either think that people commit heresy or they are divided because they are simply guessing and none of it is true. There are many righteous and good people on both sides of many religious divides, so to call people heretics because they have a different idea on a very fuzzy religion is ludicrous (and it is very unclear; the Bible never once even explicitly mentions the trinity). Therefore, they're divided because there is no truth, and they're just guessing.
Try not to bring the behavior of people practicing religion and science, that is even more off-topic than this conversation. And what about the trinity? How did it came to be in this conversation? That's not my religion. And besides, there is always a truth, and debate comes from what their own intentions are. For example, a well known King of England dismissed the church of his time, and created his own church that would let him get a divorce, because the last church didn't allow that. It's very shortsighted to say they are "guessing", since as you said, it goes deeper than that. Especially since that's what part of science is, "guessing".
Except we know from other sources that the Jews clearly had a wrong view of the universe. From Wikipedia: "Two different cosmologies can be found in the Talmud. One is a flat Earth mythical cosmology resembling descriptions of the world in the mythology of the Ancient Near East. The other, resembling ancient Greek astronomy, is the geocentric model, according to which the stars move about the earth." And they're both wrong. Any attempt to absolve the Bible is merely a defense mechanism. The Bible must be true, therefore everything must be interpreted to be true, no matter how much it waters down or makes irrelevant the book.
What? What does two pagan views of the world have to do with what the Bible teaches, since the Bible teaches that pagan views of the world were wrong? And isn't one of driving forces of Christianity was that the Jews didn't conform to the new ways Jesus taught?
Meanwhile, the ultimate test is how people actually thought of it at the time. People once interpreted the Bible as meaning flat Earth...until the spherical Earth slowly gained acceptance over time. People interpreted the Bible to support geocentrism...until it was discovered by men that the Earth goes around the sun. If the truths of the Bible can simply be reinterpreted after the fact, then it is useless, because it can mean anything. It lacks all standards of evidence. Therefore, it cannot convince. Any belief about the Bible is simply wish fulfillment of what one wants to believe about it.
No, it can't really mean everything. For example, evolution is incompatible with the Bible. If God guided evolution, it would mean he guided humanity to it's present state of imperfection and decay, when the Bible says otherwise, The Rock, perfect is his activity, for all his ways are justice. A God of faithfulness, with whom there is no injustice; righteous and upright is he. They have acted ruinously on their own part; they are not his children, the defect is their own. (Deuteronomy 32:4, 5)
You missed the point of what people are trying to say. No one is trying to disprove gravity. I don't know where you got that notion. What is true is that merely observing gravity doesn't tell you what it is. You may say that it is self-evident that gravity is the force that tethers you to the ground, but that doesn't mean it's a force or a pull or an existing thing of any kind, therefore that explanation is scientifically inert. The point is this: what you think is self-evident, what you think you can directly observe, tends to be wrong. Once again, Einstein only proved his theory by observing the indirect effects of the sun's gravity. So I am saying that the people who don't believe in evolution despite the overwhelming fossil and genetic evidence are like people who don't believe in general relativity. Therefore, it is the creationists who essentially don't believe in gravity, not me.
That's a great way to spin it to your favor. But they are still at opposite sides of the spectrum. Gravity is self-evident, but you say the process is not. Evolution's process are said to be self-evident, but it itself is not.
