Creation vs. Evolution
- Thread starter ledhed
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Thanks for making my point.
What kind of conflicting experiences are you talking about though?
I don't quite think I fully back your point, elements of it perhaps but on the whole I would disagree with the statement, 'How can you be an agnostic(There might be a god) with a leaning towards atheist(There is no God). I respect anyone's view if they don't believe there is a god. But at the same time, this is not something that any of us can be in the middle of the road on. It's like science. It either works or it doesn't. So, Joey D, how would you define your stance?'
As I said, you can simply not be sure, and therefore invalidates that statement. i will refere to my presonal experience as had you asked me; god or no god? when I was 12/13my response would be along the lines of 'I don't know'.
I was brought up a christian, my family where christians, I went to a church of england primary school. At the age of 6 or 7 I was a christian. A few years later in high school I was no longer sure, I was particularly interested in science, the knowledge, the way things worked, big bang, evolution, they didn't agree with the bible (or perhaps my understanding of the bible). Which should I believe? I choose science because it made sense, you would do an experiment, and it would work obeyed the rules and laws of science. By the time I was 15 I had decided that it was in fact science which held the most truth and from then on was an atheist, the more science I learn and understand the more it cements my stance on the matter.
So with that I hope you understand what I mean when I say you are not sure which you believe, perhaps this is what joey is talking about when he said he is leaning towards athiest, as he said he is discovering things and it is changing his understanding, for many people it is not as simple as you belive in god or you don't.
As for the conflicting experiences, I mean someone who stongly beleives there is no god, and then they have a car crash (or some other very bad inncident) and they believe it could have been divine intervention that saved them. They now are not sure whether it was divine intervention or just a random chance that they survied. This one experience may conflict with their lifetime experience of scientific method and understanding and may leave them unsure on which to believe, if the person couldn't decide whether it was divine intervention or not how would they go about choosing.
Now I know it was a poor example, I personally can't think of many experiences that would make me change my stance on whether or not I believe in god. The reason i mentioned the divine intervention is because it was the only one I could think of, but perhaps since you could think of other examples, non the less it doesn't change the fact, that you can be unsure of which camp you are in.
I understand I wasn't very clear about my point in my earlier post and for tha I appologies, I am aware I am not the most articulate person at times.
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I had a life changing experience, but in the opposite way to how it's normally viewed. Mum's a christian, I went to Sunday school a CofE first and second school. Yet about 4 years ago coming up to my GCSEs I first came down with Glandular Fever and just never recovered (ME and had Liver and Spleen problems) along with the delightful world of depression, I was put on some quite nasty tablets (Amitryptiline) which sent my in to quite a horrible little world for a few months. My big turning point was when I tried to self harm (blunt knives ftw), it woke me up, along with support from Mum and Dad (to whom I probably owe my life) we went to doctors and I was put on another AD (Fluoxetin) this one worked, I'd say I've still got it, I don't think you can ever trully be cured of it, I just feel it always lingers there, I can control it better though. Throughout the time I was asking for Gods help, anything, a path I could take, anything, yet nothing ever happened, I was never religious as such, but I never really thought about it long and hard. Given my experience I find it impossible to believe that an all knowing, all powerful God can exist, I never will either.
Year.Zero
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Of course it is. . .
Nope:
A fireman goes to a burning building. He sees flames erupting from a hole in the roof. He doesn't know what it's like inside, and there's too much fire and smoke to see into the windows. And the windows are still intact.
Since he doesn't know what the conditions are inside, there are two possibilities:
1- the fire is burning up the house with oxygen being sucked in from the roof,
or
2- the fire is craving oxygen because the hole burnt through the roof is too small.
This is where there's a middle of the road you said didn't exist. He could think it's burning on oxygen being sucked in, but leaning towards the fire craving oxygen. In that case he has to approach with caution and consider either possibility equally, though in his (dangerous) situation he will be assuming the worst and hoping for the best.
Where there's any argument for 2 of any possibility, it's absolutely possible to think one thing but lean to the other—not everyone is absolutely certain of the parameters or possible outcome.
And that's a tenet of science: it's not either working or not working—it has to be tested and analyzed to determine any of that first. And I think that's the point Joey D is still at.
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Given these basic definitions, you may forgive me for saying that it is slightly disingenuous to say that macroevolution 'has never been directly observed', since the timescales we are talking about make 'direct observation' impossible. But you'd be completely wrong to say that if macroevolution cannot be directly observed, then it cannot happen. The genetic relationships observed across all three kingdoms of life would beg to differ... with that said, I'd love to see an explanation for the sequence similarity seen in the protein cytochrome c (shown below) across many species that doesn't involve the common descent model of speciation (i.e. macroevolution)...
I have to hold my hands up and say that my opinion hasn't been swayed one bit in this thread, and hence I'm probably one of the main culprits of not being 'open-minded'. But that said, I am careful to avoid expressing 'opinions' in support of evolution, since I strongly feel that opinions count for very little in the face of hard facts. I've always felt that facts can change opinions, but opinions themselves can only serve to embolden opinions, not change them. Hence why I try not to challenge 'opinions', but will always challenge misleading or incorrect statements that are being touted as facts.
I certainly never tried to say "because we haven't directly observed it, it cannot happen." I was just saying it is a theory till it is directly observed, much like Einstein's laws regarding deformation of space-time from a mass.
And you certainly are one of the more stubborn ones in here, as you felt the need to discuss what directly observed means. Its not a bad thing, it just comes across as a bit anal retentive perhaps? And it appears you feel the need to prove creationism wrong, rather than just offer facts.
I just like to sit in the middle and point out there is no sure footing for either platform, and even less when one side views the other.
And Sureshot, I was just slightly irked by your statement of "If you are offended, just leave." That was all.
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On the contrary, something only can become part of a theory after it is observed, because a theory is an attempt to explain facts. What you are describing is a hypothesis, or a prediction made by a theory. The hypothesis that living things are biochemically related was made over a hundred years ago and has been proven beyond all doubt (see the diagram I posted yesterday). The hypothesis was correct, the observed facts proved it correct, and the facts were incorporated into evolutionary theory accordingly.
I'd say that one thing any discussion of science requires is clear language, clear definitions and attention to detail. You may call that being anally retentive, I call it stating my case clearly. If you don't make it clear what you mean, then is it any wonder that confusion arises, especially when the statements you are making are, at best, factually inaccurate. And if by stubborn you mean consistent, then I'll take that as a compliment.
I try to do both. I do stick to the facts as far as they are known, and I am trying to use them to show that certain key aspects of creation theory are wrong - plain wrong. Not all aspects of creationism can be proven wrong (like the theory that God exists, for example), but other fundamentally important aspects of creation theory - that evolution doesn't occur and that man is not biochemically related to all other species - are completely wrong. That's not opinion, that is just offering you the facts. The example I showed yesterday - which I hope you had a look at - was a multiple sequence alignment of just one protein, cytochrome c, but from many different species. Regardless of the mechanism by which this fact came to be (i.e. either by design or by common descent), the simple fact is that humankind is not only biochemically related to other species, but is extremely closely related to many (Notice that there is no difference between human and chimp cytochrome c whatsoever). That is a cast-iron case of Evolution Theory 1, Creation Theory 0. Evolution theory predicts that humans should share DNA with all living things. Creation theory predicts the opposite. In this case, the facts support evolution theory unequivocally.
To paraphrase Richard Dawkins, in a debate where two opposing viewpoints are held with equal vigour, the truth doesn't necessarily lie half way between. It is entirely possible that one argument is simply wrong. And to quote Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits, "Sitting on the fence is a dangerous course/You could even catch a bullet from the Peace-keeping force." I have no problem with someone who weighs up both sides of the argument, but it is simply not true that 'there is no sure footing' to demonstrate evolution. I agree with you on creation theory, though - that stands on very shaky ground indeed.
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I don't mean to co-opt your story myself, here, but the simple beauty of the 'mysterious ways' gambit is that a religious person could always point to your story and say "The evidence is right there - clearly God guided your parents and doctors and you yourself to find the solution to your problems. You just didn't see it because He works in Mysterious Ways."
There's even a rewrite of the infamous Footsteps poem where God says that the single set of footsteps in the sand are from when God carried the person, not from the person making his own way. You just can't lose with a spin doctor like that!
So the story of the Story proves the story. I'm sorry, I'll never buy that as valid rational thinking. As I've said numerous times, rationality is mankind's best tool, and I can't imagine deliberately avoiding using it.
On the subject of atheism, I consider myself a 'technical agnostic'. I am fully atheist and see 0% evidence that a supernatural power exists in any form. However, since I am open to real evidence of something existing, and there is no logical way whatsoever to prove that something does NOT exist, I cannot deny the logical possibility that there is a supernatural power. There for I am technically an agnostic.
I just see no reason at all to seriously consider the existence of a supernatural power since there is no evidence at all that compels me to think one is necessary to explain the physical world in which I live.
Joey D
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I think maybe is a stance though because as I've said this is a realm with a lot of theories and ideas. Nothing has really been proven yet. Even when I study human evolution it's presented just a theories because there is nothing set in stone and things change all the time.
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I wouldn't say that nothing has really been proven yet. Granted, theories do change all the time... but many of the core facts do not. If you look at any one species and trace back it's evolutionary pathway, it is not long before things start to get complicated - and it will be a very long time until the exact details are fully known. But there is still plenty that can be said with a much greater degree of confidence. Yes, there are plenty of hypotheses bounding around, but notice that they are always constrained to be consistent with the available evidence and (therefore) with current theory...
Creation theorists would have you believe that the human species has no common ancestry with anything. How we come to share the same genes and proteins as other species is a bit of a mystery, if you follow Creation theory to it's logical conclusion. That we do share many of the same genes as many, many species is 'set in stone'. That is an unmistakable fact of biology, and was accurately predicted by evolution theory before modern techniques were available to provide the evidence.
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Question: "Does God exist?"
Christian / Muslim / Jew: "Yes."
Atheist "No."
Agnostic 1. "I don't know. Not enough information."
Agnostic 2. "I don't know. Not enough proof."
Agnostic 3. "I can never know. God's existence, by his own nature, cannot be proven."
An Agnostic can quite reasonably say that they doubt God exists, but they don't actually know for a certain fact, and acknowledge that they could be wrong, as opposed to an atheist, who might say with conviction that God definitely does not exist because they have no faith in his existence (or perhaps they have faith in his nonexistence).
You don't always have to have an answer, or opinion, on everything. Sometimes it's better to keep an open mind until some event or fact convinces you one way or another. And on that note:
Touring Mars
Sometimes it is true. You have to make a decision based on gut instinct, and follow through whether you're right or wrong. But that guy in Under Siege 2 also had a point when he said "assumption is the mother of all :censored:ups". Sometimes it's better to wait until you can make a more informed decision. As the old army saying goes: "In war, anything you do can get you killed. That includes doing nothing.". Agnostic is at least as reasonable a standpoint as atheist or believer. Agnostic isn't a middle ground. It's not someone who says half a Hail Mary each night, just in case. It's just someone who admits that they don't actually know what the truth is.
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There's a somewhat important difference between "things change all the time" and "things are refined all the time".
Creationists and IDers love to portray it as if scientists regularly throw out everything they thought they ever knew in favor of the theory du jour, but in plain fact this is simply not the case. The number of actual revolutionary ideas in the study of evolution is minimal, and in fact boils down to the original idea of natural selection itself. Virtually everything else in the valid scientific world has been much more in the nature of refining our understanding of it rather than invalidating what has been done before.
Many people have a deep need for stability (even the appearance of it) and those people tend to gravitate towards faith, because there is little danger that what you can only believe on faith is suddenly going to be proven wrong. Some of those people, particularly those with a political agenda, justify it by strongly overstating the "uncertainties" of science.
Other people are more comfortable in changing their thinking to fit new data, and those people tend to gravitate towards the sciences or at least non-religion.
Danoff
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The trick here is that it cannot be proven - ever. Even if we were able to go to another planet just like ours but without life, plant the seed of life, wait billions of years, and saw humans just like us wandering around, it still would not be proven that that is how we arose.
There is no amount of evidence that will suffice. It will be a theory until the end of time, but the term "theory" in science should not at all be confused with the colloquial use of the term "theory". When most people use the term "theory" casually they're actually thinking "hypothesis" as TM pointed out earlier. That leads to a great deal of confusion.
A scientific theory is essentially a model that fits all of the facts available with the intent to explain those facts. A hypothesis is a model that has been proposed, but has not yet been demonstrated to fully fit all available facts. Another confusion is the difference between scientific "law" and scientific "theory". I'll let wikipedia describe the difference:
"A scientific law attempts to describe an observation in nature while a scientific theory attempts to explain it."
The law of gravity attempts to describe the motion of a particle in a gravity field. It says nothing about why gravity exists. Evolutionary theory could not be more accepted scientifically. I believe (and I could be wrong here) that the corresponding law to evolutionary theory would be natural selection - a description of the flow of genetics. There is also a related law of inheritance.
Evolution has been verified time and again with countless evidence, and has accurately predicted new evidence over and over again. It honestly doesn't get any better than that from a scientific point of view. And that's because science relies on induction, and logically speaking induction can never actually prove anything.
Year.Zero
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This is now the second time you've (intentionally?) drawn a conclusion completely different from testimony.
What I said was, if someone doesn't have the necessary information to make a decision, how can they make a decision?
Some people just require less information to make their decisions.
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Thank you for catching me on my sloppy use of the word Theory, you are completely correct. I guess I was just saying that we don't have direct observation of macro evolution, though we do have a decent amount of indirect evidence to support it strongly.
I'd say that one thing any discussion of science requires is clear language, clear definitions and attention to detail. You may call that being anally retentive, I call it stating my case clearly. If you don't make it clear what you mean, then is it any wonder that confusion arises, especially when the statements you are making are, at best, factually inaccurate. And if by stubborn you mean consistent, then I'll take that as a compliment.
Consistency can come across to some as blindness to new ideas though. I don't think that is the case at all, as you clearly address all matters with thought out responses, which is why I am enjoying this discussion because its informative and intelligent. Though, I am typically considered absurdly precise in my wording by my room mates, and here I see even more care with word choice and description. While I can see the point in picking one word over another, most people in general do not discern much between similar yet different words.
I do agree with you on this. Creationism, if taken at face value, with our current understanding of the universe, is quite broken. However, a person of Faith can explain we really don't know as much as we think we do, or this or that. One of my neighbors, strongly believing the world was no more than 7000 years old or something, insisted things that seemed older, such as rocks and fossils, where just there to test man's faith. Logic does not apply to the matter of faith well.
Like I said though, I do agree that Creationism looks quite broken when science is applied. Why do you think I had/have issues with my own faith when it is insisted Creationism is the only way?
Depends on what you call evidence I guess. For those of faith, the book and words of a prophet mean far more than any empirical data. For those of science, data and man made observations take precedence. When I was religious, describing faith sometimes felt like explaining the color Orange to a blind person. As a person of logic and science, explaining the logic behind evolution to a religious person felt like dealing with a 2 year old that answers every question with "why?"
So, to you, the evidence to evolution seems solid, but to a person of faith, it just seems crazy because it goes against their first choice for information.
And I know full well the dangers of fence sitting, but its what I do best. I'm indecisive by nature, but it does have its benefits in many matters, such has settling matters for friends. In this matter of science and faith, its helped me cleared up some of the confusion for different parties.
Joey mentioned earlier that religion was created to explain the universe, and I can fully agree with this, at least in regard to early beliefs. They started out just to explain how things work, but later developed much more. Probably as man became more aware of his surroundings and the world, as you can see an increasing desire to make each person seem more important than just another animal on the planet. The feeling of insignificance that can accompany thinking about how big the universe is now can be overwhelming with many, so they seek a higher purpose, something more. Religion solves this very well, if not with its own oddities.
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I wouldn't say that's always true either. I think that some people accept different information or are willing to accept different information as evidence. I accept things as evidence that Danoff, Duke and Famine would almost certainly say is coincidence, mis diagnosis, or just the way nature is setup. And of course that's their right. But at the same time, they have chosen a side.
My conclusion was simply that there are some people that if they don't have the evidence for "whatever" in their hands or can't point to it then they won't be satisfied that "whatever" exists.
I guess it's just a personal thing to me that I really think that this is one of the few things that people should have a definite stance on. Keep an open mind all you want, but if scientific evidence is going to be what convinces you, go with a conclusion on the available evidence. And yes, I know what conclusion that will lead to.
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That's an excellent analogy. And the scientific explanation - orange is visible light with a wavelength of ~610 nm - may be factually correct, but captures little of the essence of what it feels like to see colour.
This is also true - however, a core reason for being involved in this discussion at all is just what "evidence" should and should not be discussed in detail in biology class. For me, the science is plenty to be going on with rather than also being forced to talk about Noah and the Great Flood as well. As you rightly say, for me the 'evidence' is more than enough... but I was lucky enough to be shown it and educated in such a way that I was able to understand it and learn about biology and evolution for myself. Ironic that I never studied Biology at school since it was completely optional, but Religious Studies were compulsory...! And yet Creationists still insist on forcing educators in Biology class to teach things which in my view have literally nothing to do with biology at all.
Pako
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[random thought]
Sorry for injecting this random thought into the thread, but a conversation I had with my wife on the way to the hardware store today got me thinking, which is great about this thread. Phylisophically speeking, why are humans appearently the only species with self-awareness? This question lead to another question, why are humans so further evolved than every other living creature on the planet when we all evolved from the same single celled organism? Science can guess at these questions and can even speculate that humans are not the only self-aware species and it can also be further argued that humans are not more evolved, but rather just evloved differently. In really examining our advancements, I just don't see how evolution could be the evidence for our advanced knowledge and self-awareness.
[/random thought]
Sorry for injecting this random thought into the thread, but a conversation I had with my wife on the way to the hardware store today got me thinking, which is great about this thread. Phylisophically speeking, why are humans appearently the only species with self-awareness? This question lead to another question, why are humans so further evolved than every other living creature on the planet when we all evolved from the same single celled organism? Science can guess at these questions and can even speculate that humans are not the only self-aware species and it can also be further argued that humans are not more evolved, but rather just evloved differently. In really examining our advancements, I just don't see how evolution could be the evidence for our advanced knowledge and self-awareness.
[/random thought]
Joey D
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I personally do not believe humans are more evolved, we can not sit down with say a dog and find out what they are thinking. It's very hard to tell what makes other species tick if you will.
Species also could not have evolved the same way because they all would have been competing for the same resources in the same environment.
Species also could not have evolved the same way because they all would have been competing for the same resources in the same environment.
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I was watching a programme on Octopus the other day, I think you can add them to the list. They tested it with a mirror (in the wild, she was very helpful), and after a while it realised the other octopus in the mirror wasn't actually another octopus, it moved it's tentacles behind the mirror to find what was there. That along with finding it's way through a maze and getting the top off of a container, finding the exit to the room and then squidging (how does an octopus move out of water?) itself to the edge of the boat and plopping over the side, it was one of the best documentaries I've seen in a long time.
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Octopodes have excellent visual intelligence. This is mostly because they can't feel what their arms are doing half the time, so they have to observe their own actions. They learn everything by themselves as well, their parents die before they are born. They are certainly the most intelligent of invertebrates, and if they could live much longer lives (not even the larger species live more than a few years), who knows what they could be capable of? They certainly have the ability to manipulate objects with their arms.
As for self-awareness, maybe initially they don't. But they can certainly learn things, like you said.
