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Imperial Forum → Politics → Evolution vs Creationism
Now you're just being dismissive. I'm not at all being narrow-minded, it is quite the opposite if I'm taking a holistic view.
If you said a fairy put a spear in to the waters and that's how America formed, I would laugh and dismiss it.
But I would still respect the opinion of people who believe it.
They just need to accept we don't teach about fairies in our classrooms.
"Acolyte, thar isn't tangible proof. However many scallywags have encountered ghosts an' such an' science has yet t' disprove that ghosts exist or any other form o' life after death, Ya horn swogglin' scurvy cur, by Blackbeard's sword!"
So? Subjective experience =/= evidence. Most people probably aren't lying when they say they've encountered ghosts, but what did they actually see? Something totally paranormal, or something they, personally, could not account for, to the best of /their/ knowledge and understanding? There's no evidence ghosts exist, maybe a handful of unexplained encounters are out there, but evidence of ghosts this does not make.
"To th' public knowledge, scientists have yet t' determine anythin' tangible about alien phenomenons. If they do exist then that opens up a whole new notion on th' creation/evolution theory."
It wouldn't alter the position of science one bit. Perhaps Biblical Creationists would have to go back to the drawing board, but the discovery of organisms not native to Earth would have zero effect on the abiogenesis study or the theory of evolution. In fact, alien life could possibly even augment the universal propositions of science.
"It's not unproductive considerin' these thin's happen, I'll warrant ye. People see thin's, assume that they be real an' it turns out that thar be endless possibilities because thar's another person in a hospital room observin' them. That basically means that unless ye can prove 'tis not happenin' t' ye, then it very well could be happenin' t' ye an' that could mean that thar is a God observin' ye or a doctor or an alien or a manbearpig"
This is why science makes use of tools for taking measurements of the phenomenon being studied. If it can not be observed by anyone who happens to pay attention, and it can not be measured, it probably does not exist independently of your experience. Moreover, individual perceptions of reality, even in cases of "consensus reality", do not alter the /actual/ nature of reality. Reality exists, independently of our perceptions of it, avoiding reality would yield nothing scientifically valuable.
Like V.Kemp, I can not respect creationists for their views. For all of their arguments attempting to destroy evolution, they fail to answer the problem that evolution was originally proposed as the answer to.
Linnean taxonomy had been in practice long before the evolution hypothesis was conceptualized, meaning even before Darwin's time, naturalists were classifying animals in a hierarchial structure that resembled a family tree, hinting at the interconnectedness of animal populations and their geographical distribution. Their reason for this classification in the absence of evolution theory was that the features of complex organisms, in terms of their structure, design, and appearance, also somewhat resembled a family tree. In other words, you could take any feature of an organism, and trace it through multiple layers of complexity across other related lines of animal species. The features will never jump from one branch of the tree to the next, they could only "go" in one direction. An explanation was needed for this puzzling coincidence, and Charles Darwin happened to conceive of a solution.
Where, then, I ask, is the creationist answer to the problem of explaining the observations made from Linnean taxonomy?
Yes. I am dismissive of anyone who holds a position with NO evidence supporting it who contends that their view is the truth, not the position with ALL the evidence supporting it. Anyone who isn't is narrow-minded. Your faith is lovely. It's touching. But it's not evidence that you are correct.
Come on there are no creationists in here anyway, just idiots who want to say they're open-minded.
V.Kemp: "Come on there are no creationists in here anyway, . . ."
A stark contrast to just a few years ago.
Yeah, I remember those days. I don't think i've played since 2004 and haven't been active in this forum (or here at all) for 99% of the time since. We had a few creationists. Some of the stuff they come up with was absolutely hillarious. They were SOOOOO into it. And the off-the-wall stuff you can come up with when your belief is that God made everything that exists in 6 days a few thousand years ago is pretty limitless.
So we're not descendant from Adam? 
@Genesis
Not exactly. There is such a thing as the Y chromosmal Adam (YcA), and the mitochondrial Eve (ME). But they are not our common ancestors (only the /most recent/ common ancestor of all living humans), much less the very first humans ever to roam the Earth. They also were not a couple, in fact there were many centuries removed between their existence, with the ME arriving first. For an elaboration on this subject (with a focus on the mitochondrial Eve), see: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/mitoeve.html
which is further evidence against a literal biblical interpretation of creationism. emphasis on literal biblical.
creationism is about as irrational as believing every end had a beginning.
Even the Vatican accepts evolution as fact.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26747166/
lol Since when does the catholic church have any credibility?:p
But anyhow, nobody can prove that there is or isn't a God. That's just common sense =p
Spidermanbearpig: "But anyhow, nobody can prove that there is or isn't a God."
I beg to differ. It is a perfectly valid logical conclusion to deny the existence of the Judeo-Christian God. Agnostics claim it is impossible to know either way, but if this ought to be the position of the agnostic, then shouldn't they also remain neutral on the existence or non-existence of the Tooth Fairy, or Santa Claus, or Zeus, or any of the Italic Gods and every other creature or entity grounded in mythology? In every case, the argument for their non-existence is the same, in that none of these entities can be reconciled with science and have /zero/ evidence in their favor. So why should God be exempt from this logic? The very concept of God is logically inconsistent, and some Christians make it a point to define God as that which cannot be comprehended logically. So why should we consider His existence a remote possibility, if there is absolutely no evidence suggesting His influence anywhere whatsoever?
whoa there acolyte, steady, easy with big words like logically that you're confusing w/ empirically.
empirically, no proof of God - this is science's argument against the existence of God. empiricism, and the scientific method arose as infallible dogmatic litmus test of truth value within the last few hundred years.
logically, there is nothing but proof of the existence of some higher Being, God to some, the Force to others. and herein lies the difference between your blather about Santi Claus and tooth fairy and so on. logically, a Higher Being is a necessity, and irrefutable - whether you're going off Aquinas, Descartes, Hegel, or Anselm, to name a few.
logic and its derivatives are big words, best be left to the philosophers.
@Elysian Thebes
I'm not confusing my terms. I may have wrote the post in haste, but I do not feel I did that poorly of a job.
"empirically, no proof of God - this is science's argument against the existence of God."
Correct, it is also the scientific argument against the existence of the Greek river gods, as well as vampires and leprechauns. Again, why should agnostics give God the benefit of the doubt and not extend this same doubt to other mythological figures?
The rest of your post is nonsense, you can not logically understand something which has been defined to exist outside the bounds of formal logic. There is nothing consistent in the propositions made about God to enable the assignment of truth values. Omnipotence and omniscience alone present self-referential paradoxes that preclude logic from entering anywhere in the equation. It doesn't make any /sense/ if God could create a rock he could not lift, and then lift it; or ask himself a question he did not have the answer to, and then answer it.
There aren't any logically consistent statements about God, and therefore nothing to observe or test that would yield an empirical result. Ergo, based on the fact that the definition of the Judeo-Christian God makes no sense, and there is no empirical evidence to suggest he exists, it is, as stated before, a valid logical conclusion that God simply does not exist.
Is that better?
no, acolyte, you're still making the serious error of taking empiricism/scientific method for formal logic. you may as well confuse arithematic and geometry.
you need to read up on what logic is before we can continue our discussion. that way the rest of my post won't fly over your head.
then there's the part where you rush into qualities (you need to slow down) and bring up judeo-xtian concept of god, which logic doesn't touch on.
Acolyte,
Hold it buddy. For all we know the tooth fairy or Roman gods could exist or have existed at one time. To say that because something has not been empirically verified, isn't logically comprehended, or isn't empirically testable, does not mean it isn't true. It's like saying because we have not seen a black swan, there are no black swans. At a time in human history Europeans would have only experience white swans and theorized they were white, but when Australia was discovered they learned there were black swans. This meant their theory about swans needed to be revised.
This is why verificationism, or the idea that our experiences guarantee our theories are truth-correlative, fell out of favor. Now science goes with falsifiability, which avoids this problem. We don't dismiss that black swans exist, but it's the theory we stick to until it's proven false (finding one in Australia).
Now God could exist. So could Santa Clause or Zeus. We can't disprove they exist, because they aren't empirically testable. Some ideas part of Christianity may be disprovable, but not God himself. Nonetheless, there is reason to prefer scientific theories over the God theory. At least scientific theories give us the ability to predict an outcome, and it does so way better than the God theory does mind you.
I simply just dismiss theories that are
1. Unable to be empirically tested
2. Are complex and are capable of being further reduced
3. Not supported by evidence
4. Not logically coherent
I limit my beliefs to theories that match the scientific criterion for very practical reasons, not because I assert they are truth-correlative.
But it's a mistake to assert that theories well supported by a large empirical database are
1. Truth correlative
2. Exhaust all other possibilities
Those implicit assumptions you are making are false and can be easily slammed down.
accursed finkelsteins
so i guess its decided, we won't believe in a phantom god with unprovable powers, we accept nature functions almost at random by processes beyond our ability to describe but which we look with hope to be discovered over a thousand years
taht is science
Scientific theories don't actually prove anthing, just provide evidence one way or another. Science and religion don't have to be opposites.
> Muppet wrote:
> Scientific theories don't actually prove anthing, just provide evidence one way or another. Science and religion don't have to be opposites.
Yeah science doesn't prove anything, but they can't co-exist. The reason is science has a criterion that eliminates religious theories from consideration.
"Hold it buddy. For all we know the tooth fairy or Roman gods could exist or have existed at one time. "
Thank you for your post! *Continues reading with the next post...*
V.Kemp,
Yes, and there may be cloaked aliens on the moon who will destroy Earth if you don't read my post.
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