Just going to pop my head in here. With a bit less blatant hostility and a bit more patience all around, this thread could be somewhat more pleasant to read. Yes, I know it's a frustrating topic to discuss, and I know it can be especially hard to change an interlocutor's mind. But debates aren't always about convincing your opponent; they can be just as much about growing yourself, and convincing whoever happens to be in the audience, or on the fence.

Aniihya first:

Aniihya wrote:It isnt proven to be a fact, but just a theory.

From Essential criteria of scientifc theories:
"In practice a body of descriptions of knowledge is usually only called a theory once it has a minimum empirical basis, according to certain criteria:
"-It is consistent with pre-existing theory, to the extent the pre-existing theory was experimentally verified, though it will often show pre-existing theory to be wrong in an exact sense.
"-It is supported by many strands of evidence, rather than a single foundation, ensuring it is probably a good approximation, if not totally correct."

Therefore, if evolution is a scientific theory, it has met quite stringent conditions. Don't write it off. A scientific theory needs to meet more pinpoint conditions than a philosophic theory, which is in turn far more strict than some idea you picked out of the floating clouds of green smoke.

Aniihya wrote:You disregarding of the fact that there are no answers yet to the questions:
1. Can you prove that there is a god? and
2. Can you prove that there is no god?

proves your laughable ignorance.

To elaborate on this point somewhat, here's a link to Argument from ignorance:
"Argument from ignorance... (where "ignorance" stands for: "lack of evidence to the contrary"), is a fallacy in informal logic. It asserts that a proposition is true because it has not yet been proven false, it is "generally accepted" (or vice versa). This represents a type of false dichotomy in that it excludes a third option, which is that there is insufficient investigation and therefore insufficient information to prove the proposition satisfactorily to be either true or false."

There are actually two kinds of atheists, separated into weak and strong. Just as theists know that there is a god or gods, strong atheists know that there are none. The position of the weak atheist, the third option, has been ignored. It's usually confused with agnosticism, and it is the understanding that there is simply not enough evidence to assert the existence of deity with any amount of confidence. [edit: agnosticism is the belief that it is absolutely impossible to have that kind of knowledge, and thus differs from weak atheism somewhat.]

The burden of proof rests both on strong atheists and theists, both true and false. Even agnostics have to trouble themselves with proving that human beings can't know metaphysical truths. The default, neutral, unassuming position, is more like a child that has never heard a thing about God or gods, and thus doesn't have any reason to form a belief either way.


Now Painkiller:

The Painkiller wrote:Okay, where the hell does 'meaning of life' even come into this? That ain't a question for science, my dear, that's a question for philosophers who would rather waste time on such pointless questions than on topics actually worthy of discussion.

Actually, I think if you believe that life has some definite objective direction or purpose, and you hold quite strongly to that position, it would be ridiculously hard to simultaneously believe in evolution by natural selection. It would cause cognitive dissonance. It's not uncommon for biology students to have existential crises in the process of learning about the mechanisms of life.

It might actually be necessary to explore difficult philosophical questions, such as the rather unfortunate fact that meaning is personal and subjective, in the process of explaining evolution. I don't think this is a tangent.

Everything does not come from nothing.

I don't consider this rather limited bubble of space-time, called the universe, to be everything. Everything is quite a bit more inclusive, being the totality of all things. It is the universe plus everything else. It has no boundaries whatsoever, and is thus, by definition, infinite.

Can I actually call "everything" a thing, as well? Since everything includes all things, it would have to include itself, like "the set of all sets, including itself". It might be more accurate simply to recognize that everything can't actually be a thing. And if it isn't a thing, isn't everything also nothing? At the heart of your perplexing statement, which is by no means proven, is the question: what, exactly, is a "thing", anyway?

By the way, good job on the high effort post. I'm a bit saddened that it got ignored due to the ad hominem attack on your lack of official scientist status. It was both thorough and on topic. The only criticism I can think of is that it might have been more effective had you staggered the information over the course of several posts. You don't need to show all your cards at once. Well, perhaps you can still say more about it. You've presented all the facts: there is room to explore the implications and significance of the archaeological data, and why other theories would be inadequate.

I have to agree with Dealing With It, since he has taken a more rational approach with it. And that with the burden of proof for strong atheists and theists is so true. Although I am a theist myself, I know that agnosticism is closer to a truth than strong atheism and theism since the truth is uncertain.

Btw, as one said before evolution as a whole remains a theory because facts dont change, even though it seems to go in the right direction.

Mr_Doomed wrote:I have an English teacher who says that the most scary people are the ones who "know" that they are right.

They killed Socrates.

How can someone prove that something doesn't exist if it doesn't exist?

I don't think you should ever make the assumption that something doesn't exist, just because you don't have evidence. Withholding judgment is sometimes the best you can do. But if you really must prove something doesn't exist logically, you can do so under some conditions.

Essentially, you must exhaust all possibilities, save one. In your case, you have two possibilities: either God exists, or God does not exist. If one of these possibilities were invalid, the other would be certain. This is known as "the Law of the Excluded Middle". Anyway, to invalidate one, you need to show that it is internally contradictory. Practically speaking, this means that you carefully define the properties of God, and see if any of the properties contradict one another. If they don't, you're back where you started -- with two possibilities. If the properties are inconsistent, and God is internally contradictory, you are left believing God doesn't exist.

The exception to this rule is quite complex, and easier to understand if you have some prior training in formal logic. I can't overstate the value of this exception, since it changes the God debate entirely. A theist who uses this -- "paraconsistent logic" -- is on a foundation a thousandfold more sturdy than one built on blind faith. As well, it is useful for categorizing everything that you can't explicitly prove or disprove.

There are logical systems that can handle contradictions, basically by adding more values, sometimes by radically reinterpreting the nature of Reality, and sometimes by abandoning the limitations of "truth" altogether. When I say "reinterpreting the nature of Reality", I mean no longer believing that the One True Description of Reality must be consistent. An internally contradictory God can still exist, if you take paraconsistency seriously.

If you are curious, I won't link this, but the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has some pages on paraconsistent logic (and dialetheism, a particularly relevant application).

Hope this helps.

One more post, as I brought this subject up with my science professor and he made a good point:

Imagine a car. They are everywhere, and everybody has one that they use every day. But we never really think about how they work and what it takes to keep them running. We know there's four tires, and engine, and a gas tank, but have you ever really thought about them? There are thousands of individual components in your car that fit together just so, to make your car run. If you're missing even one little piece: a cylinder, a gear, an oil filter, a bolt, or one of a thousand other little parts, then your car will not work.

I'm sure you can see the comparison that I am making. Animals and humans are incredibly complex, even more so than a car. The human body is made up of many different organs, which all have a specific purpose. Those organs are made up a different tissues, which have a specific purpose, and those tissues are made up of cells, which have a specific purpose and in themselves are incredibly complex. And those cells are controlled by DNA, which is made up of thousands of base pairs of four different chemicals, which all have to be arranged in an incredibly specific way or they won't work.

A car will not appear in nature, ever. No matter how many millions of years of erosion and lightning and wind and rain, you will not find a car in the forest. You won't even find a crankcase, much less a screw. Why? Because a car has a designer, somebody who sat down and thought out every way to fit the pieces together in the right way. Just like animals, there are thousands (and probably more) of different car body types, each of them highly specialized. Some for speed, some for rough terrain, some for mileage, some for looks, etc. Same with tires. And like animals, a lot of car designs have 'died', while some have thrived. And with all these different car types, the one thing they have in common is a designer.

Now, I know that a car is a machine and not living animal, but the comparison is a valid one. A body essentially functions as a machine, especially on the cellular level. These facts can only point in one direction: that every living thing has a designer of some kind. Even something 'simple' such as a cell is too complex to appear in nature.

As long as we're throwing around Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Monkey_Theorem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objections_to_evolution

Also, it's worth noting that water destroys DNA and other proteins, so there is no way that DNA could have survived on early earth, much less mutated and reproduced.

In my belief humans werent made to be perfect. If we were meant to be perfect, either everyone would have a shit ego that sees itself as better than others or people wouldnt have a purpose. What would you do if you didnt have to eat or drink, could fly, could reproduce asexually, were immortal etc.? I would definitely kill myself since I would be bored as hell. We were crappily "designed" (as the Christian defines it) for a reason: To have problems and work together to solve these so that we could create a better world with progression in science and technology. Religion is only contradictory to science depending on what religion it is. Therefore my belief has a creation story that goes no further than the creation of the universe and our planet. Otherwise we mainly believe as we have speculated in the past thousand of years that we might have evolved or progressed as beings throughout time. We dont fully agree to the evolution theory since it has shown flaws (in form of the theory being edited in one or the other way) in the past 100 years. Whether people want to believe in the existence of deities or not is out of the question right now, since there is a burden of proof on both sides. The topic is "Evolution vs. Creationism" and not "Theists vs. Atheists".

I don't see why the concepts of creation and evolution can't go hand-in-hand.

Also, it's just a debate, guys. Some of the posts on here are just.. eh. Chillax.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Monkey_Theorem

This is actually an argument used to philosophically support the concept of complexity from randomness. No idea why you posted it.

Also, it's worth noting that water destroys DNA and other proteins, so there is no way that DNA could have survived on early earth, much less mutated and reproduced.

No it doesn't. At least not immediately. Not only does a basic knowledge of biochemistry tell me this but I've personally worked with purified viral DNA stored in sterile water. But then DNA degrades gradually in anything, depending on what buffer you're using. Where the hell did you get this idea from? Also, what makes you think that early Earth was one great big sea of pure water?[/quote]

While it's mathematically true that an infinite number of monkeys typing for an infinite period of time would accidentally reproduce Shakespeare, the problem is that the universe is finite. If you'd read further:

"Ignoring punctuation, spacing, and capitalization, a monkey typing letters uniformly at random has a chance of one in 26 of correctly typing the first letter of Hamlet. It has a chance of one in 676 (26 × 26) of typing the first two letters. Because the probability shrinks exponentially, at 20 letters it already has only a chance of one in 2620 = 19,928,148,895,209,409,152,340,197,376 (almost 2 × 1028). In the case of the entire text of Hamlet, the probabilities are so vanishingly small they can barely be conceived in human terms. The text of Hamlet contains approximately 130,000 letters.[note 3] Thus there is a probability of one in 3.4 × 10183,946 to get the text right at the first trial. The average number of letters that needs to be typed until the text appears is also 3.4 × 10183,946[note 4], or including punctuation, 4.4 × 10360,783.[note 5]

Even if the observable universe were filled with monkeys the size of atoms typing from now until the heat death of the universe, their total probability to produce a single instance of Hamlet would still be a great many orders of magnitude less than one in 10183,800. As Kittel and Kroemer put it, "The probability of Hamlet is therefore zero in any operational sense of an event…", and the statement that the monkeys must eventually succeed "gives a misleading conclusion about very, very large numbers." This is from their textbook on thermodynamics, the field whose statistical foundations motivated the first known expositions of typing monkeys.[2]"

The chance of acids accidentally linking up to produce viable DNA is so statistically small as to be considered impossible.

Second, even though you can store DNA in sterile water, any water at the beginning of the earth was definitely not sterile. And yes, every science text that I have read has stated that life started in the oceans, presumably where DNA began. But DNA and RNA are extremely fragile, much too fragile to survive outside of a cell.

I have found no basis to believe that macro evolution occurs or ever has occurred. The alternative is a creator of some kind.

viper45,

viper45 wrote:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objections_to_evolution

I think you meant to link to Conservapedia's page on evolution. The link you provided actually dismantles objections to evolution. For instance, here is a response to your particular objections to evolution, on that page, that you linked. It even references the Watchmaker Analogy.

The chance of acids accidentally linking up to produce viable DNA is so statistically small as to be considered impossible.

I'd like to see some more maths. What's the likelihood of water molecules accidentally linking up to produce snowflakes on a cold day? What's the probability that a supremely intelligent and supremely powerful personality intentionally built life by exhaling?


Aniihya,

Aniihya wrote:Whether people want to believe in the existence of deities or not is out of the question right now, since there is a burden of proof on both sides. The topic is "Evolution vs. Creationism" and not "Theists vs. Atheists".

Normally I'd agree to move tangents to new threads, but it is actually quite difficult to come up with an interesting and relevant non-theist creationist argument. Nobody is talking about aliens seeding the planet Earth with life, or a hyperdimensional highschool student creating our universe as a science fair project. Rather, this thread is clearly about intelligent design, the belief that natural selection working over billions of years is still not sufficient to explain the diversity of life, and hence a Creator God is needed.


Sneakers,

Sneakers wrote:I don't see why the concepts of creation and evolution can't go hand-in-hand.

For an atheist, creationism isn't even an option. Otherwise, I believe the Catholic church's official stance is just as you say: evolution is guided by God. Humans are still #1.

I think that reading conscious purpose into evolution misunderstands the theory; however, belief in guided evolution shows less human prejudice than denying evolution altogether.

dealing with it wrote:or a hyperdimensional highschool student creating our universe as a science fair project.

That does, however, sound very much inspired by the Suzumiya Haruhi books :v

Dealing with it: There are some theists who do not believe in intelligent design nor creationism. Many scientists think that evolution is correct... to an extent. By the way, I wrote that earlier since it was started to go in the direction "Whether God(s) exist or not?" and not "How everything came to be.". For me there is a clear difference between these two but some people see them as the same. Lets say we have a theist who neither believes in intelligent design nor creationism but still believes in the existence of a god or multiple gods. For him you can either discuss one or the other topic but if someone views them as equal then they probably are so focused on antitheism that they see all topics on religion as "Why religion shouldnt exist." Get my point. This topic is clearly "Evolution vs. Creationism" and not "Religion in General" or "Vague Religion Thread".

[quote}Evolution is not incompatible with religion, if this is the thing that's mentally holding you back.[/quote]

Exactly. Just like transhumanism is not incompatible with religion. -Transhumanist here.

viper45 wrote:While it's mathematically true that an infinite number of monkeys typing for an infinite period of time would accidentally reproduce Shakespeare, the problem is that the universe is finite. If you'd read further:

It's a good thing then that neither evolution nor abiogenisis, rely solely on random chance.

Molecules obey very well understood laws and combine in certain preferences to form stable states. These molecules form chains if left to their own devices which create the first RNA/DNA.

Random chance within evolution is applied to mutations within the structure of early proto organisms and later, changes in the DNA itself. These changes are then subject to natural selection, which is the non-random, almost ratcheting effect which brings about the change in the population. Most changes will do nothing to affect the organism. Detrimental changes will likely kill the organism off, preventing it from propagating the trait, and in a small number of cases, a positive trait will emerge which allows it to survive better and spread this beneficial trait to the next generation.

EDIT:
Someone did get a grant to do the "monkeys on the typewriter" experiment, it churned out a lot pages filled with "F"s and a smattering of other letters. Monkeys, it turns out, are horrible randomness generators and they concluded that no, they would not end up with Shakespeare.

As far as experiments go, I am quite fascinated by digital life. Avida, for instance, is fun to play around with.

There are a lot of fascists in science these days. I can relate with Creationists because I have to deal with the same condescending dismissals when I bring up aquatic ape theory, mimetics, the cell as a quantum system, or a peaceful a gynocentric stone age. Some scientists have forgotten that there is NO SUCH THING as scientific orthodoxy. The very concept of orthodoxy is antithetical to the spirit of science. Creationists do good work when they poke holes in evolutionary theory. Even if they're wrong, they expose inconsistencies and problems with the theory prompting it to advance in both depth, complexity and predictive power.

That being said, I do have a problem with Creationists who are just trying to legitimize their own particular religious programming. If you want to look for evidence that life was designed, I can take you seriously, for this is a totally rational possibility. However, if you are just looking for a Jehovah signature in the corner of the cell nucleus then you are twisting science to serve your own strain of viral irrationality. Dogma is just another form of orthodoxy and has no place in science.

I find it strange that most critics of creationism attack creationism and tip-toe around religion. There are many examples of this in the thread. Many posts end with, 'don't worry science is compatible with your <insert superstition here>.' Science is compatible with Theism, the belief in Diety free of dogma. Einstein himself was a theist. Religions differ from theism in that they make specific predictions about the nature of God and the various crazy things God has done. By making such predictions religions expose themselves to being disproven and most can be disproven with one word: DINOSAUR.

This is a problem that is close to my heart.

I am a Missouri Synod Lutheran, raised in the church and on the teaching of God and the Bible. I am a firm believer in Christ and the Creation of the Universe. BUT....

3 years ago I married a paleontologist- a dyed in the wool evolutionist. I mean this guy is like Darwin's love child.
But that's what I love about him. He is so intelligent and so analytical. This man's scientific mindset offers a new level of creativity that I had not experienced much.
I mean I grew up in a religious household, yes, but my parents were very smart, and I also did very will in school, especially science and math. I am a writer and pride myself on being very creative in my own way. But to find this creativity out of such structure was very refreshing. It got me thinking.
Why would God create this beautiful, complex world, give us the ability, drive, and knowledge to be curious about it, and then not have it make any sense?
I believe that Evolution is real. It has been happening since the world was created. It is a perfectly imperfect design. And by that I mean it fits into the randomness and chaos of the universe so well, and yet it is so complex, specific and precise. I mean just to think of every living thing that has ever existed; those creatures had to have specific genetic codes to even have skin, muscles, ectoplasm, whatever. How could those things come to pass, that many times over and with each little environmental niche so perfectly filled without someone working the puppet strings?
Yes mutation is random, but just because something is random doesn't mean it happens for no reason and out of no design.
God can take credit for Evolution. In fact, I think that God is Evolution. They are two sides of the same coin, and that coin is called life. God is the why and the who, evolution is the how and the when.