Evolution vs. Intelligent Design discussion
"Inherit Darwin" a new play
email me at donlmilne@yahoo.com and I will send it to you.
Nathan wrote: "I teach ITW every year to my students. email me a copy of the play if you would be so kind. Thanks.
Can you send it to me on Goodreads, or do you need another email address?"
Send me an email at donlmilne@yahoo.com and I will reply with the play as an attachment. I have had a number of colleges request a copy of the play so far. The fact that this fall is the 150 anniversary of On the Origin of Species makes it very topical.
I enjoyed the play, RGB you should try it.
Mod
Sounds like a horror story -- Satan Herself in defense of the indefensible, and Al "I have nothing to do with evolution OR the internet" Gore distracting anyone from anything like a reasoned dialogue.
Of course a reasoned dialogue takes no time at all: "Is there any evidence for intelligent design?" "No." "Is intelligent design an inconsistent hypothesis, requiring an explanation for the appearance of the intelligent designer?" "Yes." "Isn't it completely absurd to imagine that an intelligent designer would hang out around Earth over a time frame of four billion years, inserting a gene here, a new feature there? Wouldn't they (if their goal was the creation of new intelligent species) simply design an intelligent species? Wouldn't they get bored?" "Yes, yes, yes."
End of the play's dialogue. Good job!
rgb
Then you should not have a problem by reading it.Also it is Gore's pesonality used, not himself.
Mod
http://www.ideacenter.org/
which was founded by university students who "happened" to be Christians. It is relatively honest -- it openly acknowledges that the students are interested in finding evidence that God created the Universe and personally intervened in the creation of animal species culminating in humans.
Its argument can be summarized (and they do so summarize it!) in one line.
Evolution cannot produce complex biological structures.
Note well that this is an assertion. What they mean is that in their completely uninformed opinions, unsupported by either mathematical analysis, computational experiment, or the observation of nature, they believe that evolution cannot produce complex structures.
All the rest of their arguments are contingent upon this assertion. If in fact evolution can produce complex structures (whether or not it is strictly Darwinian evolution -- there is more than one mechanism for variation in the "reproductive variation plus natural selection" and not just "mutation" of single genes) then there is nothing surprising about the fossil record.
So what does the evidence say?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/...
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/...
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/...
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Intell...
and my personal favorite, as it directly refutes this assertion (and the trivially related argument that the complex structures that occur serve specific purposes):
http://www.genetic-programming.com/hu...
I personally have worked with genetic algorithms, and know from direct experience that they are capable of searching the extremely complex space of possibilities to find amazing solutions to enormously difficult problems, solutions that are far more complex than any human can produce, even working very hard and with the most advanced mathematical tools!
In summary, the basic assertion of ID is simply not true. Evolution can produce so-called "irreducibly complex" structures without external intervention. This has been observed in nature, demonstrated in the laboratory, and directly proven using computational simulations of evolution.
This is not the only problem with the ID argument, of course. The biggest single problem with it from the beginning is that it is a perfect example of:
a) An argument from ignorance, a "God of the gaps" theory. Organisms exhibit complexity. It is not easy to understand how this could happen, therefore it must have been God! (Dragonrider, are you listening?) This has been used from the beginning of time to explain nearly everything: The complex earth exists (therefore God). The stars exist, and they are so far away and high that we don't see how they could have gotten there (therefore God). Lightning is powerful and mysterious (therefore God). Disease and death are tragic (therefore God). Life is complex (therefore God). The problem with teleological arguments is that each and every one of these problems has been explained by science in purely natural terms and the explanations verified by experiment and observation.
b) The mind-projection fallacy. Inferring a cause without any direct or indirect evidence that the cause inferred exists. Intelligent design is an example of a "fairy solution". Take any phenomenon that you don't understand (again, pay attention DR). It doesn't matter what it is -- it can be why the moon shines at night, why roses are red, why things seem to fall down. Then assert as the cause of the phenomenon "Invisible fairies ___ (fill in the blank -- cause warts, if you like). You now have a perfect example of an assertion of an invisible cause, one that you know is there only because of the effect that you've attributed to it!
How do you know that invisible fairies exist? Well, warts happen, don't they? Roses are often red?
Species are complex and have complex components. So they must have been created by invisible fairies. We don't see them because they are invisible. Count the fallacies, really. Begging the question. Non-falsifiable, non-verifiable. Confirmation bias (one would never postulate this unless you wanted to believe in fairies, since the fairies are invisible and there is no real good reason to think that they are there at all).
c) Confirmation bias, in fact, is important enough to warrant its very own paragraph, as it is the one real sin in the process. If it were not for confirmation bias, one could perfectly reasonably form the postulate "Intelligent life created individual species" and consider it as an explanation for the fossil record. One could then consider the evidence above and use some common sense and determine that while it isn't logically contradictory, it is a highly implausible explanation for a process that took place over four billion years and in niche ecosystems all over the planet from the deepest trenches of the ocean to tops of the highest peaks.
It is the prior belief in God and the intense desire for the God you believe in to be the cause that causes the sin against simple reason. God is a "universal cause". Anything you don't understand, it is so easy to say: God did it, God makes it so. Because God is invisible and inscrutable, this is the perfect solution for the lazy. (Are you listening, DR?) It takes work to discover bacteria as a cause of disease, to measure the size of the visible Universer, to determine the ages of the rocks, to reconstruct the fossil record, to study the mathematics and genetic record of evolution. It is much easier to just say "God did it". God doesn't have to be understood.
rgb
So instead of complain, just email Don and ask for the play. It already looks like you have too much time on your hands.
To sum that up in one world would be "wow". But then someone said this, "He added: "Of all the parasitic organisms, only a few have evolved this trick of manipulating their host's behaviour.
Why go to the bother? Why are there not more of them?"
The real question is what did this allegedly evolved from?
Mod
Sure. It raises a ton of interesting questions. Try answering them using God as the source for this "intelligent" design. What possible purpose is served by a fungus that takes over ant brains? Is God just amusing Itself by making strange things just to prove that it can?
On the other hand, evolutionarily it makes perfect sense. Fungi (like many other species) often make neurotransmitter analogues or biologically active chemicals targeted at other organisms. In some cases these chemicals may have co-evolved with other species in a commensal or symbiotic relationship. In others they are clearly evolved to help predators manage prey or prey to defend against predators in an evolutionary process that continues to this day as predators evolve defenses against the toxins evolved by their prey to help them survive their predators (iterate forever). Snake venom, for example, is both -- snake venom is a rich chemical cornucopia of molecules that do things like act as a neurotoxin and block various pathways (elapid venom in particular) or act as a hemotoxin that sends prey into hemolytic shock (many vipers in particular the US pit vipers). Other molecules help pre-digest a meal obtained with the venom -- I have watched as a copperhead ate a sunfish that was way too wide for its head. It bit and held it until the venom paralyzed the fish, then worked its fangs along the length of the whole fish, literally injecting it systematically with venom. It then started to swallow it from the head end.
The sunfish just folded up and slipped down into the snake. Its venom had -- in a matter of minutes -- digested its bones and softened them to where they just slumped over.
Similarly the zombie fungus can easily be explained in terms of evolution. It has no purpose; it merely survives and reproduces or it doesn't. If a fungus mutated to produce a chemically active element that affects the brain of its prey and thereby was successful at reproducing, the new strain of an existing fungus has every opportunity for further mutations to fine tune the effect and cause the ant's brain to act in ever more favorable ways for the fungus's survival.
This process is hardly unknown in the world of mammals. Rabies is a classic example of a species that has evolved a reproductive mechanism that relies on its effect on the brains of its victims. The later stage of rabies damages the brain of its mammal victims in the specific ways that make it violent and erratic and likely to bite other animals, including ones it ordinarily would fear. This serves no purpose for the animal, of course, but it perfectly serves the need of the rabies organism to be transmitted from saliva to the bloodstream of a new animal in order to maintain the chain of infection, just as the cold virus causes you to sneeze.
No argument for intelligent design explains any of these -- sure, one could design any of these behaviors, I suppose, but why would one do so, especially behaviors that were expressed in species that were extinct for a hundred million years before the only species you were supposedly really interested came around? Imagine a world without rabies. Seems like it would still work pretty well, doesn't it? Just a bit less suffering all around, a sane choice for an intelligent designer who wasn't a whimsical sadist.
And then, there is the one of the all-time great arguments against intelligent design: The human appendix. Here is an organ that is evidence that we are a transitional form from a prior species that used the appendix for a purpose (as a reservoir for repopulating the gut with "good bacteria" following e.g. cholera that mostly wipes them out) into a future species that will probably not have it, because it has become a net liability as our diet and medical practice has changed.
rgb
I just went to the Creation Museum today. So I actually do have some answers, plus some questions.If you read genesis, you will find that in the begging, nothing was dangerous. That includes predators, disease, famine, venom, poison, etc. God said, this is good. But then Adam and Eve, our ancestors, did something that would change the world. They sinned. This made the world dangerous, and all the evils that you see today are caused by this.
Ok, time for some question.
1. Helium is a gas lighter than air and it also a fact that it is escaping our atmosphere. So after a few billon years, why do we still have it?
2. Why do some fossil have intact blood vessels in the their bones?
3. About 4 million tons of salt enters the Sea each year. So after 1 million years, how much salt has entered the sea?
4. How did the bible know that snake use to have feet?
If you want some pics I be glad to sent them. :)
-DR
Girl4beluga wrote: "I've always wanted to go to the creation museum"You could do with a good laugh could you?
Mod
If you read genesis, you will find that in the begging, nothing was dangerous. That includes pr..."
You mean you went to the Christian equivalent of Harry Potter world, an elaborate lying fantasy constructed to try to convince impressionable young minds that a Bronze Age myth that has been refuted a thousand times over by evidence is true? That's bad enough, but the real tragedy is that you were completely suckered in by it. I bet that when you go to the movies and see dinosaurs talk that you come out thinking "Wow, talking dinosaurs!" instead of using your common sense.
As for your questions -- you do know that you can find the answers out for yourself if you ever take your head the rest of the way out of the sand, right?
But heck, at least you're asking. So if you wish you can learn something. In particular, you can learn (since these are all questions being advanced by the supposedly "authoritative" Creation museum) that it is lying both directly and by implication. Perhaps it will make you feel a teensy twinge of -- something -- uncertain about all of the lies that you currently believe. But no, you're no doubt so well defended that a little thing like facts will never get in the way of your belief. If they coulda, they already woulda, right?
1) Helium is the second lightest element and is the second most abundant in the observable universe (roughly 25% of the Universe's mass is helium, 73% or so hydrogen, and 2% everything else put together), being present in the universe in masses more than 12 times those of all the heavier elements combined. Its abundance is also similar to this in our own Sun and Jupiter. This is due to the very high binding energy (per nucleon) of helium-4 with respect to the next three elements after helium (lithium, beryllium, and boron). This helium-4 binding energy also accounts for its commonality as a product in both nuclear fusion and radioactive decay. Most helium in the universe is helium-4, and was formed during the Big Bang. Some new helium is being created currently as a result of the nuclear fusion of hydrogen in stars greater than 0.5 solar masses.
On Earth, the lightness of helium has caused its evaporation from the gas and dust cloud from which the planet condensed, and it is thus relatively rare—0.00052% by volume in the atmosphere. What helium is present today has been mostly created by the natural radioactive decay of heavy radioactive elements (thorium and uranium), as the alpha particles that are emitted by such decays consist of helium-4 nuclei. This radiogenic helium is trapped with natural gas in concentrations up to seven percent by volume, from which it is extracted commercially by a low-temperature separation process called fractional distillation.
2) A quote from a Nova interview with Mary Schweitzer, the actual scientist who made the discovery. Bear in mind that she has an enormous vested interest in this, which will be discussed next:
Q: Many creationists claim that the Earth is much younger than the evolutionists claim. Is there any possibility that your discoveries should make experts on both sides of the argument reevaluate the methods of established dating used in the field? Carl Baker, Billings, Montana
Schweitzer: Actually, my work doesn't say anything at all about the age of the Earth. As a scientist I can only speak to the data that exist. Having reviewed a great deal of data from many different disciplines, I see no reason at all to doubt the general scientific consensus that the Earth is about five or six billion years old. We deal with testable hypotheses in science, and many of the arguments made for a young Earth are not testable, nor is there any valid data to support a young Earth that stands up to peer review or scientific scrutiny. However, the fields of geology, nuclear physics, astronomy, paleontology, genetics, and evolutionary biology all speak to an ancient Earth. Our discoveries may make people reevaluate the longevity of molecules and the presumed pathways of molecular degradation, but they do not really deal at all with the age of the Earth.
Second, it is not yet a slam dunk that the tissue found is from dinosaurs at all. First of all, as she repeatedly says in this and other interviews, she "isn't equipped to do DNA studies" of the tissue (which I find specious, personally -- I'm sure there is no shortage of volunteers and local sites that would be absolutely thrilled to do so with and/or for her) and so there is no DNA evidence that the tissue is from T-Rex at all. It has been proposed in the literature that all that she has discovered is bacterial contamination of the sample where bacteria have grown in the bone matrix to conform to its shape -- something that happens even in non-fossilized bone, once the vessels have gone away. DNA studies would, of course, instantly reveal this, but Dr. Schwietzer, currently basking in unprecedented levels of funding, has been strangely uninterested in doing any of the research that might prove that her samples are not dinosaur tissue.
Third, your question (by implication) suggests that it is impossible for the material to be soft tissue that was preserved for over 60 million years in a fossil, so the fossil must be younger, in spite of the fact that the fossil is dated in lots of objective ways that demonstrated directly that it is not.
I suggest that your thinking here is exactly backwards. Here we have a sample that we know is 70 or so million years old, and it has what appears to be preserved soft tissue from a T. Rex (although as noted it is not yet certain that it is). If so, it would be evidence that in fact fossilization can preserve soft tissue if the conditions are just right, which in turn would cause scientists to look for that mechanism.
It is already known that tissue preserved in an air and water tight seal can last for tens to hundreds of millions of years -- I'm sure you've at least heard of the movie series Jurassic Park and the supposed extraction of dino DNA from blood from mosquitos trapped in amber. The movie is a bit of an extrapolation compared to what science has been capable of so far, but it is plausible -- that's what made the movie so popular. Many kinds of "traditional" fossilization may not have the right conditions for preserving soft tissue (fossilization itself is quite rare -- 99.999999% of all animals that die leave no fossils at at all and are simply recycled, and soft tissue fossilization is the rarest of the rare, so to speak -- bone and the moderately protected contents of bone is far more likely to be preserved than a jellyfish).
However, it may be that among the trillions of fossils formed over billions of years, those conditions are sometimes realized. For example, I could imagine an animal falling into a hot mineral spring and drowning, sinking to the bottom in an environment too toxic and hot for decay bacteria to survive in, and relatively quickly remineralize the outer bone to create a seal. A sort of "natural canning" process that creates a soft tissue remnant preserved in what amounts to a crystal glass. The question then is: is there any further evidence for preservation of soft tissue in the fossil record, and what are the kinds of fossilization that it appears to be associated with?
The answer appears to be that there are indeed other examples, and that there are indeed specific sorts of processes that are more likely to preserve it than others:
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.or...
Again note that we have multiple ways of dating the fossils, and that these methods agree. No one doubts their age except people eager to "prove" a Bronze Age myth at all costs so that they can replace actually learning any math or science (which is hard work) with the "interpretation" of a single book in the Bible. I personally don't find it particularly implausible that soft tissue could be -- rarely -- preserved over geological times when the conditions of fossilization are right. It certainly doesn't suffice to prove that the tissues and the fossils are young.
Note well that you are going to be in a real bind if you try to argue that. Why do you think that they must be young? Because you think that certain chemical and biological processes must proceed at certain rates. But if that is true, then you have to accept that all of the other clocks used in the dating process are valid clocks.
The problem is that you are assuming that the decay rate for things like protein and DNA is always going to be short and at the same time are assuming that the decay rate for the nucleotides used for radiometric dating is always going to be variable -- that is the only way the organic "clock" and the nuclear "clock" could disagree and yield a low age for the fossils.
The evidence, on the other hand, is the opposite. Chemical decay processes are enormously variable in their rates because they are chemistry. Coal or oil can remain stable for billions of years, even though if you ignite them in an oxygen rich environment or just expose them to air and bacteria and weathering, they either burn (disappearing in minutes to hours) or are consumed (disappearing in months to centuries). Plastic chairs isolated from heat and ultraviolet and oxygen remain flexible and intact for a long time -- change the environment and they depolymerize and become brittle and flake apart quickly. Can tomatoes in a sterile way and they last for years. Stick them in the same jar with water and just one bacterium and nothing resembling a tomato will be left in a year.
Nuclear processes, however, are completely isolated from their environment. The nuclear force has a range of around 10^{-15} meters -- one hundred-thousandth of the size of an atom. The only place nuclei come in contact with anything that can affect their inner processes is in the hearts of massive stars, where they are squeezed close enough together to fuse. Nuclear decay rates are never observed to vary at all, over geologic time (where we can look back in time by simply looking out at the stars). So of the two clocks, the radiometric clock is the reliable one. The preservation of soft tissue for geologic time is at most surprising, but hardly impossible or inconceivable. What is inconceivable is the variation of nuclear decay rates, given the evidence.
You might also enjoy reading this little article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence...
just to do a slam dunk on the notion of an "intelligent" designer.
3) The salt question is a silly one, and I've already given you the answer in previous replies. However, I'll give it again. The ocean's salt content is in dynamic balance because of precipitation and subduction at continental plate boundaries.
Now, let's do an exercise in simple arithmetic. Let's suppose that the ocean started out fresh, and that the four billion tons of salt a year you postulate have been entering the ocean for 10,000 years. Sounds like a lot, right? We have to use scientific notation and everything. 4x10^16 kg (give or take) of salt!
Now let's divide by the volume of the ocean -- 1.5x10^{9} cubic kilometers. Now a cubic kilometer is a billion cubic meters, so this is 1.5x10^{18} cubic meters, and a cubic meter contains a convenient 10^3 kg, for a total mass of 1.5x10^{21} kg of water.
Now, what percent of the ocean should be salt? Come on, you can do the division...
rgb
Mod
4) The bible nowhere states that snakes had feet.
But if it had, so what? Lizards are like snakes with feet. Some snakes have rudimentary feet
http://shanghaiist.com/2009/09/18/sna...
Boa constrictors and Pythons have spurs that are remnants of legs. This was likely to have been known in Bronze Age Mesopotamia when the Genesis myth was being written, don't you think, given that both snakes are prevalent throughout the region?
And then finally:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/...
Note well that this fossil was found near Jerusalem. How implausible is it that other fossils like this were discovered by Bronze Age farmers and "explained" by their shamans with a myth? How implausible is it that the myth would involve a flood (to explain how the bones were buried in rock mixed in with shells and fishes)? Truthfully, it would be amazing if fossil remnants like this were not found over the thousands of years of farming and goatherding in the eroding mountains, and since humans have to have a story for everything they see it is inconceivable that no story would have grown up to explain them.
Now, if you could get your head out of the Bronze Age, and think sanely for just a moment about the primitive tribes that inhabited it -- tribes that probably resembled nothing so much as the Taliban of today, insular, superstitious to a fault, cruel, disease-ridden, appallingly ignorant -- you might conclude that one shouldn't really take any of the myths they created to describe the things they saw that needed "explanation" too seriously. If you thought just for a moment about the historical development of sound methods of thinking and knowing about the world, you might realize that before the invention of "philosophy" and formal logic and mathematics in the general timeframe of 1000-500 BCE, human knowledge had nothing like a sound basis.
Of course, you yourself have just demonstrated -- again -- that you are too stupid or too lazy to do simple arithmetic and prefer to simply parrot a display you saw in an organization devoted to the avoidance of arithmetic. "Creation Science: The Science Without Arithmetic". No wonder you all want it to be taught in schools.
Next time you think about how amazingly big four billion tons a year is, remember your last problem with arithmetic and think about this: The sun converts this much hydrogen to helium than this every ten seconds and will burn a total of roughly ten billion years at this rate as a main sequence, hydrogen-fusing star.
Seriously, Dragonrider, I still haven't given up hope for you. That's why I take the trouble to answer your absurd questions and point out your amazing laziness and willingness to uncritically accept the lies you're being fed -- well, are in truth going out of your way to feed on, if you are going to the Creation Museum, US capitol of lies, so to speak -- instead of to a real museum, a real school, a real University where real people do real science.
I'm not even looking for higher math here. Sure, sure, it would be simply peachy if you would trouble yourself to learn things like algebra, geometry, trigonometry and calculus, because then you would at least be capable of understanding how we know the age of the Universe and things like that. But at the very least, learn to do arithmetic. You can use a calculator if it makes your brain too tired to do it on paper or in your head, it's OK. If you don't learn to do arithmetic, how are you going to balance your checkbook or get a job at Wal Mart (where you can look about you, especially on a day that the air conditioning fails or the toilets stop up and you have to clean them, wondering how they got all of Earth's ten million or so species packed away inside an ark of the same volume with a single window around two feet square).
I keep hoping that one day you wake up, whack yourself on the side of the head and go "How could I have been so stupid! They have been lying to me all along and I fell for it!"
On that day, you might even go on a bit of a tear to learn all of the many things that so far you are religiously avoiding because if you study them you will be forced to confront over and over again that the myth you have been raised with and force fed is a lie. Astronomy (proves the lie). Geology (proves the lie). Biology (oh my does it prove the lie). Chemistry (proves the lie). Physics (proves beyond any reasonable doubt a billion times over that Genesis is a lie). History (proves the lie). Anthropology (proves the lie). Archeology (proves the lie). Linguistics (proves the lie). Sociology (proves the lie). Ethics (proves the lie). Philosophy (proves the lie). Mathematics and logic (are the fundamental basis, the tools one uses to prove the lie).
What's left for you to learn that is "safe"? Basket weaving? Divinity school, devoted to pretending that it isn't all a lie, or that it's OK for Genesis to be a myth (lie) and for Jesus to somehow have missed that and still be the Son of a mythological cruel and wicked Bronze Age deity for whom there is no evidence? Going to a religious school where they teach a lying "Creation Science" curriculum where you will be ostracized if you actually point out that their arithmetic doesn't work out?
You can continue to let yourself be seduced by the story you have been taught, or you can permit yourself to doubt that story and consider the possibility that it is not true. If and when you ever decide to do the latter, you can systematically investigate the claims and let nature speak for itself instead of insisting on the truth of a Bronze Age document written by humans. Humans lie, are mistaken, tell stories. The rocks and the stars have a story to tell as well, and they do not lie.
You will also discover that -- where you are now grasping desperately to hold onto the handful of claims made by the charlatans and liars that don't hold water if you spend fifteen minutes investigating them without bias or just plain do the damn arithmetic -- there are ten thousand positive results, backed up by observational evidence and consistency with the known laws of physics and chemistry to support the age estimates of the earth, the sun, and the Universe in general. You find a web page with 30 or 40 lies on it and immediately believe it without question. Why not look at the 300,000 or 400,000 articles written per year in the various journals of science, why not visit a real museum, a planetarium, go on a fossil-hunting expedition, watch the discovery or science channel programs on astronomy or cosmology?
The day that you do, you will learn the real truth, and when you do that I expect that you will become very, very angry that institutionalized lying is both tolerated and protected, that young children can have their head filled with lies simply because those lies are part of an organized religion's dogma.
I certainly am.
By the way, it would be simply lovely if you would perhaps acknowledge that I have met the "challenge" of your questions, especially the uber-silly ones of the impossibility that the sun could still be burning, that the sea should be too salty. As you can see, the sun's lifetime is consistent with its energy production mechanism, and the salt flowing into the sea every year is completely inadequate to explain how salty the ocean is right now, given the salt removal mechanisms that are already identified! In fact, most of the ocean's salt was leached out of the seabed when the oceans originally formed, and the salinity has been in dynamic equilibrium for billions of years.
But even if the salt removal mechanisms all stopped working tomorrow it would take millions of years for the ocean to become appreciably saltier just from salt transport from rivers into the sea -- more than enough time for its inhabitants to evolve to meet the challenge. After all, there are a trillion billion kilograms of seawater out there, and they already contain a few billion billion kilograms of salt. Adding a few trillion kilograms more a year to it increases its salinity by maybe one ten millionth of a percent.
I think I've posted this before, but here is an actual scientific website that discusses the ocean salinity, in terms you can probably understand:
http://www.palomar.edu/oceanography/s...
Oh, wait, it is a U.S. Geological Survey publication, put up on an actual University website. That means that it is part of the Great Satanic Conspiracy of Scientists, all of whom are well-known to be liars, cheats, and sinners. You can't trust them, I mean us. Of course it does correct your three order of magnitude error in the amount of salts that flow into the ocean in a year, but if you're not going to do the arithmetic yourself either way, what does it matter?
What must it be like, I wonder, living in a fantasy world where you think that something like this is possible, that all of those University professors are lying. I wonder -- how do you think we all manage to "fake" each and every lab course that our students take so that the results come out to support our Satanic Ends? We must really work overtime, shortening our meter sticks, bending the springs in our watches, altering the concentration of the acids in the bottles. Think of all of the paleontologists working with the nuclear physicists to "salt" the concrete into which they've stuck old chicken bones with radioactives just so that we can lie about their age. Good thing there are Creation Scientists around to catch us out in our Diabolical Lies, huh.
Not.
Now, you have to ask yourself -- did the people who posed this "problem" on the Creationist websites simply not bother to do the arithmetic with their absurd claim of a 10,000 year old earth? Do they not understand how really big the ocean is? Don't they know anything about subduction and tectonic plates and the motion of the continents (or are they trying to pretend that none of these things exist, and that earthquakes are all directly caused by God's Will and not the grinding of plates as they move)? Have they never actually looked at the deposits of salt in oceanic silts? Do they not understand that "If the salt in the sea could be removed and spread evenly over the Earth's land surface it would form a layer more than 500 feet thick, about the height of a 40-story office building"?
Bear in mind that to double the ocean's salinity at this point, one would have to dissolve this much salt from all of the world's continents which would drop the height of all of the continents by several hundred feet, would it not? This alone means that it is absurd to believe that salinity is not in equilibrium or that the salinity of the sea can be explained by freshwater runoff without a process of dynamic removal and replenishment.
Are they ignorant, stupid or deliberately lying when they post a silly question like this as if it supports their equally silly myth-based belief? One of these days you will be forced to mentally acknowledge the fact that one of their "objections" is not only wrong, but so wrong that it seems almost malicious in its wrongness.
That's the day I fervently await. The day you wake up and look at the world around you for the first time without seeing it through the filter of all of the lies you have been most systematically taught.
rgb
The sad thing is, Dragonrider won't actually read your posts rgb. He/she will just say, "Nope! Bible, Bible, Bible, Bible..."
Ha...and said that many times it sounds like babble, babble, babble...
Mod
However, I continue to study the cognitive disconnect. Understanding it is critical to solving the problem. As things stand, if/when I finish Axioms and publish it, it will simply bounce right off of the mental armor of institutional lies and unreason that kids are being taught at a young age.
Some people manage to break free and learn to use their minds. Others do not. How do they manage it? Small children figure out the fact that Santa Clause is a myth in spite of carefully faked evidence. Those same small children continue to believe in Jesus without evidence of any sort.
I'm ready to start believing in supernatural telepathic transfer processes between parents and children, or a critical period of brain formation during which certain worldview memes are "imprinted" on humans like following mama is on baby ducklings.
I just can't understand it -- the evidence itself is perfectly clear. The reasoning upon the evidence is laid out for every person to see and understand. There is nothing hidden, no possibility for it to be a lie, no serious chance that it is mistaken. Against this evidence there is a book that everybody knows was written back when our ancestors where slaughtering sheep and waving their ribcages at the sky in order to attract good luck and avert bad luck as if there was a causal link between dead sheep and rainfall or plagues. It tells fantastic stories of magic that nobody alive has ever seen. It is only one of many such books filled with fantastic stories.
Dragonrider has no trouble recognizing that all the rest of them are filled with myths and not to be believed. She can see quite clearly that only the accident of her birth is responsible for her belief in this one -- absolutely nobody who isn't brainwashed into believing in Genesis could possibly look at actual evidence and conclude that the earth is 10,000 years old, for example.
And yet she cannot break free from her early imprinting. How do they do it?
Humanity has no hope of survival unless and until we learn how to solve this problem. People who cannot think for themselves in this particular way are the easy prey of demogogues and warmongers, unscrupulous politicians and scheming priests, and even worse, there is always the possibility of a true believer arising who hears voices telling him to rouse the masses to a jihad, a holy war against the unbelievers. Anybody this irrational is perfectly capable of becoming a mass murderer the instant they think it is God's will; after all, if they didn't think mass murder is OK when it is God's will they would read:
Exodus 17:16 For he said, Because the LORD hath sworn that the LORD will have war with Amalek from generation to generation.
Numbers 21:3 And the LORD hearkened to the voice of Israel, and delivered up the Canaanites; and they utterly destroyed them and their cities: and he called the name of the place Hormah.
Numbers 21:21 And Israel sent messengers unto Sihon king of the Amorites, saying,
21:22 Let me pass through thy land: we will not turn into the fields, or into the vineyards; we will not drink of the waters of the well: but we will go along by the king's high way, until we be past thy borders.
21:23 And Sihon would not suffer Israel to pass through his border: but Sihon gathered all his people together, and went out against Israel into the wilderness: and he came to Jahaz, and fought against Israel.
21:24 And Israel smote him with the edge of the sword, and possessed his land from Arnon unto Jabbok, even unto the children of Ammon: for the border of the children of Ammon was strong.
21:25 And Israel took all these cities: and Israel dwelt in all the cities of the Amorites, in Heshbon, and in all the villages thereof.
21:32 And Moses sent to spy out Jaazer, and they took the villages thereof, and drove out the Amorites that were there. [Brick Testament:] Massacre of the Bashanites
21:33 And they turned and went up by the way of Bashan: and Og the king of Bashan went out against them, he, and all his people, to the battle at Edrei.
21:34 And the LORD said unto Moses, Fear him not: for I have delivered him into thy hand, and all his people, and his land; and thou shalt do to him as thou didst unto Sihon king of the Amorites, which dwelt at Heshbon.
21:35 So they smote him, and his sons, and all his people, until there was none left him alive: and they possessed his land.
and of course Numbers 31, Numbers 33:
33:50 And the LORD spake unto Moses in the plains of Moab by Jordan near Jericho, saying, (33:50-53)
"Drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you."
God tells Moses to exterminate the residents of Canaan and destroy all of their religious symbols and possessions.
33:51 Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, When ye are passed over Jordan into the land of Canaan;
33:52 Then ye shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, and destroy all their pictures, and destroy all their molten images, and quite pluck down all their high places:
33:53 And ye shall dispossess the inhabitants of the land, and dwell therein: for I have given you the land to possess it.
33:54 And ye shall divide the land by lot for an inheritance among your families: and to the more ye shall give the more inheritance, and to the fewer ye shall give the less inheritance: every man's inheritance shall be in the place where his lot falleth; according to the tribes of your fathers ye shall inherit. (33:54) "Ye shall divide the land by lot."
Is it OK to gamble?
33:55 But if ye will not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you; then it shall come to pass, that those which ye let remain of them shall be pricks in your eyes, and thorns in your sides, and shall vex you in the land wherein ye dwell. (33:55-56)
But if the Israelites don't kill them all, then God will make them pricks in their eyes and thorns in their sides. And he will do unto the Israelites as he planned to do to the inhabitants of Canaan.
33:56 Moreover it shall come to pass, that I shall do unto you, as I thought to do unto them.
Deuteronomy:
2:24 Rise ye up, take your journey, and pass over the river Arnon: behold, I have given into thine hand Sihon the Amorite, king of Heshbon, and his land: begin to possess it, and contend with him in battle. (2:24) "I have given into thine hand Sihon the Amorite, king of Heshbon, and his land: begin to possess it, and contend with him in battle."
2:25 This day will I begin to put the dread of thee and the fear of thee upon the nations that are under the whole heaven, who shall hear report of thee, and shall tremble, and be in anguish because of thee.
2:33 And the LORD our God delivered him before us; and we smote him, and his sons, and all his people. (2:33-35)
"And the LORD our God delivered him before us; and we smote him, and his sons, and all his people. And we took all his cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain."
At God's instructions, the Israelites "utterly destroyed the men, women, and the little ones" leaving "none to remain."
God's 29th Killing
(2:36) "The Lord our God delivered all unto us."
2:34 And we took all his cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain:
7:1 When the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou;
7:2 And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them:
7:3 Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.
20:16 But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth:
Joshua:
6:21 And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.
8:22 And the other issued out of the city against them; so they were in the midst of Israel, some on this side, and some on that side: and they smote them, so that they let none of them remain or escape. (8:22-31) Joshua kills all the inhabitants of Ai, burns their city, and hangs their king on a tree, he kills some animals and burns them as a "peace offering" to his God of war.
(8:22) "They smote them, so that they let none of them remain or escape."
(8:24) "When Israel had made an end of slaying all the inhabitants of Ai in the field ... all the Israelites returned unto Ai, and smote it with the edge of the sword."
(8:25) "All that fell that day, both of men and women, were twelve thousand."
God's 33rd Killing
(8:26) "For Joshua drew not his hand back ... until he had utterly destroyed all the inhabitants of Ai."
8:23 And the king of Ai they took alive, and brought him to Joshua.
8:24 And it came to pass, when Israel had made an end of slaying all the inhabitants of Ai in the field, in the wilderness wherein they chased them, and when they were all fallen on the edge of the sword, until they were consumed, that all the Israelites returned unto Ai, and smote it with the edge of the sword.
8:25 And so it was, that all that fell that day, both of men and women, were twelve thousand, even all the men of Ai.
8:26 For Joshua drew not his hand back, wherewith he stretched out the spear, until he had utterly destroyed all the inhabitants of Ai.
8:27 Only the cattle and the spoil of that city Israel took for a prey unto themselves, according unto the word of the LORD which he commanded Joshua.
8:28 And Joshua burnt Ai, and made it an heap for ever, even a desolation unto this day. (8:28) "And Joshua burnt Ai, and made it an heap for ever, even a desolation unto this day."
Did the city of Ai exist after Joshua destroyed it?
(8:29) "And the king of Ai he hanged on a tree until eventide."
8:29 And the king of Ai he hanged on a tree until eventide: and as soon as the sun was down, Joshua commanded that they should take his carcase down from the tree, and cast it at the entering of the gate of the city, and raise thereon a great heap of stones, that remaineth unto this day.
10:24 And it came to pass, when they brought out those kings unto Joshua, that Joshua called for all the men of Israel, and said unto the captains of the men of war which went with him, Come near, put your feet upon the necks of these kings. And they came near, and put their feet upon the necks of them.
10:25 And Joshua said unto them, Fear not, nor be dismayed, be strong and of good courage: for thus shall the LORD do to all your enemies against whom ye fight.
10:26 And afterward Joshua smote them, and slew them, and hanged them on five trees: and they were hanging upon the trees until the evening.
10:35 And they took it on that day, and smote it with the edge of the sword, and all the souls that were therein he utterly destroyed that day , according to all that he had done to Lachish.
(Basically, Joshua conquers everybody and commits genocide and murder on everybody he conquers, right down to the last man and woman and child.)
All that separates a true believer from being a mass murderer is a "prophet".
rgb
Mod
There are then speculative theories for abiogenesis:
a) Extraterrerestrial, sometime in the first maybe 6 billion years post BB when there would have been at least some population 1 stars (with a high metal content). Life gets started somewhere and spores are dispersed throughout galactic volumes as the star(s) it begins near eject their end-of-life planetary nebulae. These spores are near enough immortal to be able to piggyback enormous distances on tiny fragments of dust and "seed" new planets that have suitable environments.
b) Terrerestrial, sometime in the first half-billion years after the earth cooled enough for it to survive once it formed.
c) A supernatural being created it.
There is no direct evidence for any one of the three.
The probabilities favor a), I think, but if it is true we're likely to find evidence for it as soon as we get out to the Oort cloud and look for life among the enormous amount of stardust leftover from previous generations of stars out there, or perhaps on a comet that has visited the Oort cloud sooner.
Possibility b) is not implausible. Experiments have shown that a lot of exotic chemistry is possible in exotic environments and catalytic environments that would have existed in the first billion years after the earth cooled and free water appeared. Evolution is so powerful that it alone could have bridged the abiogenetic "gap" given any sort of start. The earth is clearly a very excellent environment for life and evolution to proceed.
Possibility c) has the disadvantage of having no evidence at all -- a) and b) have at least conceptually possible physical pathways wherein they might have occurred, and we can form models and test the various hypotheses or look for concrete evidence to support them. It's a bit more difficult to imagine a concrete model or concrete evidence for c) -- the only thing it has going for it is the usual "gap" -- we haven't explained abiogenesis yet with plausible, evidence supported models in the a/b categories, so c) is possible as the universal we-don't-really-know explanation.
After abiogenesis, the evidence is ubiquitous and compelling that there wasn't "micro/macro/monkey" evolution, there was just Evolution, a process of reproduction with natural variation and natural selection. When there is little or no selection pressure, it proceeds slowly and is more of a "drift" around a local optimum in an ecological niche than a force producing new species. Whenever the environment changes suddenly and radically, selection pressure increases and the rate of evolution speeds up as there is suddenly a strong morphological fitness gradient towards forms that can survive in the new environment.
The natural variation is likely to be produced by a wide range of mechanisms. Cross-species hybridization, mutation, gene multisomy, re-expression of "fossil" DNA, radiation, chemical stress, food stress, environmental stress, thermal stress. Look what people have done with the dog in only a few hundred years, exploiting its range of variation. Look what has been done with corn, rice, wheat, barley, domestic animals in general -- all in a matter of thousands to tens of thousands of years. Nature is lavish in its provision of mechanisms for genetic drift, and of course modern organisms have very probably evolved to evolve better -- over time species that were "too stable" would have been gradually eliminated as they couldn't keep up during times of rapid environmental change.
So micro versus macro is more a matter of environmental pressure and local ecological stability than it is any difference in mechanism. Monkeys evolving into humans is just silly. Our ancestors were homonids like monkeys. From all evidence, they were almost identical to species like gorillas or maybe chimpanzees (where we share common ancestors with the latter as recently as 5-10 million years ago).
I personally think it would be interesting to breed chimpanzees and gorillas for intelligence and linguistic abilities and see just how long it takes to evolve a new species of homo chimposapiens. Even without meddling with their genes, I'll bet it would take less than a thousand years of serious selective pressure to increase their linguistic and problem solving and tool making abilities tenfold.
rgb
Mod
rgb
the idea that there are actually 6 evolutions in the theory of evolution.Huh?
14Then the LORD God said to the serpent: "Because you have done this, you shall be banned from all the animals and from all the wild creatures; On your belly shall you crawl, and dirt shall you eat all the days of your life.
The Earth is around 6,000 years.
You should take your class on a trip there and hold a protest.
Maybe you should give up on me, I'm not easily corrupted. :)
Oh, here is a website, I know how you love links.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/get-a...
Dragonrider,Thanks for that useless link created by uneducated ignorant jackasses. Much appreciated.
That what I believe. Also with all the mythology about them around the world and cave drawing, leads me to this conclusion.http://www.creationists.org/dinosaurs...
I'm pretty sure of them have a PHD.
So, the fact that there are MANY things older than 6,000 years old on this planet doesn't phase you at all? You just ignore those bits?
What can you say about cave drawings then?
Eye witness accounts by many people of creatures that are exactly like dinosaurs in appearance. The descriptions include not only sightings, but people actually hunting and killing them are being killed by them. These stories have been documented all over the world in many different cultures. They exist in the writings of several well-known ancient people, and have been documented by scientists as recently as a few years ago.Dragonrider,
Don't you find it suspicious that they say this but then don't provide any information on who these ancient people are? I mean they've been "documented all over the world" but they don't provide links for these supposed documents. Interesting. Why wouldn't they link the documents? They link the table of contents of one book that could or could not be about what they are claiming it is about. They are blowing smoke up your ass, and you are completely falling for it.
Where did you get the first paragraph from?Are you serious? It's from the link you provided. Did you not even read it?
I find the info provided in that link to be about as plausible as The Flintstones. And as Nathan asked...where are the links for these supposed documents?
Where did you get the first paragraph from?So you linked a site that you didn't even look at? This is a rather common move of the Christian. They type "dinosaurs lived with humans" into Google, then link the first site they find that says "Yup." They never actually read what the site says. Why? Because they don't actually want to do any work. They also don't ever do any research, nor do they want to, to find out if what they already believe is actually true. Pathetic.
Here is an example. I see this link posted by Christians all the time. http://www.godlessgeeks.com/LINKS/God...
This is their proof God exists. If they actually looked at the webiste, they would see it is a joke put out by atheists. But they never do.
There are different groups of people that advocate for intelligent design. Young earth creationists are only a one of them. At the other extreme are ID advocates who can accept the geologically time line as we understand it now, but they cannot accept randomness. ID is not incompatible with much of the theory of evolution, but it seeks to explain an alternative to "live orginated entirely by chance."
Girl4beluga wrote: "Don wrote: "There are different groups of people that advocate for intelligent design. Young earth creationists are only a one of them. At the other extreme are ID advocates who can accept the ge..."I belive your right about evolutionary creationists, but even the bible is againest them. "Lukewarm water is useful to no one."
Too many creationist are Bible literalists. The problem with this position is that there is not one translation of the Bible. If you go back to the earliest Greek, Hebrew and Latin texts available, there are differences. When they don't agree, how do you know which is right? ID advocates have a stronger case when they base their position on science than when they look to a literal interpretation of the Bible.
Young earth creationists can have as big a problem with ID as aethist evolutionists.
Critics like to lump ID and creationists together. But ID is based on science (though not the narrow definition of science from ID bashers) and Young Earth creationism is based on a literal reading of the Bible. A Young Earth creationist believes the earth is only 6,000 years old. Someone can believe in a creator that took billions of years to creat the earth. I guess that makes them a Old Earth creationist, but they should not be lumped together with Young Earthers.
ID by definition says evolution, especially the start of life cannot happen randomly. There is an intelligent designer responsible for the creation of life. This makes secular humanists uneasy. The existance of a God, especially one that has a special relationship to humans (the sons of God) raises too many uncomfortable questions for non-believers - better to believe in the religion of Darwinian Evolution and embrace moral relativity.
But ID is based on science (though not the narrow definition of science from ID bashers)ID is not based on science at all. That was clearly debated and determined in Kitzmiller v. Dover Board of Education in 2005.
Lukewarm water is good for defrosting meat.
But ID is based on scienceWhat science? What scientific evidence is there to support ID?
Lukewarm water is good for defrosting meat.It is also good for washing tattoos when they are new.
ID is a scientific approach to explaining the origin of life, because life created from randomness takes too much faith to accept. It makes more logical sense to recognize a Creator is the cause of the origin of life.
ID is a scientific approach to explaining the origin of life, because life created from randomness takes too much faith to accept. It makes more logical sense to recognize a Creator is the cause of the origin of life.That isn't true at all. It is also illogical. You are saying that life is too complex to not have a creator. However, by definition, that creator would have to be even more complex in order to create the complexity of life. Yet, the complex creator wouldn't need a creator? Idiotic.
At any rate, ID is not science in any way, shape or form. Science makes claims and then sees if those claims can be disproven. What claim is ID making? How did/do scientists set up experiments to see if the claim or claims of ID can be disproven?
ID is a scientific approach to explaining the origin of lifeI'll ask the question again: what scientific evidence is there to support Intelligent Design? Simply using scientific-sounding terms like "Intelligent Design" and "irreducible complexity" does not make something science. Science is a process, whereby one makes careful observations and measurements, formulates theories, uses those theories to produce testable, falsifiable hypotheses and then tests these hypotheses.
On what observations and measurements is the theory of Intelligent Design based? What were the protocols and standards for making these observations and measurements? Can you please explain the basics of the Theory of Intelligent Design in more detail than the statement, "There must have been an intelligent creator"? What falsifiable hypotheses can be drawn from the Theory of Intelligent Design? What experiments have been done to test these hypotheses?
You are saying that life is too complex to not have a creator. However, by definition, that creator would have to be even more complex in order to create the complexity of life. Yet, the complex creator wouldn't need a creator? Idiotic.
That's an excellent point. I'd never thought of that before. No more wasting my time with the ID-guys: just one logical declension. Brilliant.
That's an excellent point. I'd never thought of that before. No more wasting my time with the ID-guys: just one logical declension. Brilliant.
Mod
As Johnson once said in a completely different context:
http://www.flyingsnake.org/
...Thus I refute you!
Ain't evolution wonderful?
Don wrote: "There are different groups of people that advocate for intelligent design. Young earth creationists are only a one of them. At the other extreme are ID advocates who can accept the geologically t..."
Who "can accept the geological timeline"? Surely you can see a world of confirmation bias in your reply. You (or rather, they, since it isn't clear that you endorse this point of view) aren't at all interested in whether or not random process can produce structured content -- if they were, they'd spend oh, ten or fifteen minutes researching things like (try the following Google strings):
self-organized criticality
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-org...
genetic algorithm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_...
evolutionary algorithm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutio...
phase transition
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_tr...
(where a snowflake -- a highly organized structure with long range order -- is built randomly a molecule at a time)
markov chain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_c...
and -- gasp -- actually read some of the literature on all of this. Note well, not a single link above has anything direct to do with biological evolution, and all of the links offer windows into vast fields of mathematical and statistical research and well-known and studied physical systems that prove, categorically, beyond the slightest shred of reasonable doubt that whatever one's personal biases might be it is dead certain that random processes can build structures with "irreducible complexity".
Biological evolution is simply another very very interesting example in a long line of examples. The only real "mystery" involved is why evolutionary algorithms, especially ones involving "straight up" reproduction with mutation plus crossover followed by natural selection, work as well as they do. Within the confines of the no-free-lunch theorem (a theorem that I'm convinced on the basis of my own work that nature breaks because real evolution is in a slightly different universality class to which the NFLT as currently written does not apply, although no doubt a different one does) evolution works really, really well to find good-to-excellent solutions to complex problems, solutions that are chock full of irreducible complexity.
In fact, to put it bluntly, for problems with really high dimensionality, it is the only game in town -- no other method produces good solutions, consistently, as evolutionary algorithms when the problem dimensionality passes somewhere in the 50 to 100 range.
The dimensionality of problems in ecology are very probably order of 10^3 or more significant dimensions, and in stressed populations maybe even higher as new volumes of phase space are "suddenly" added to the underlying support of fitness to survive. This is, I'm sure, one of several very good reasons that ID is not accepted as science -- it is very clearly religion. The "science" part takes ten seconds: "Hmmm, maybe all the transitions in the fossil record over 4 billion years were caused by the intervention of an intelligence! 4 billion year old intelligent civilizations inserting genes for flying snakes and leaving in genes for the human appendix make absolutely no sense, of course, so I suppose the only `intelligence' that qualifies is a supernatural one, a.k.a. `God' although this is not a religious hypothesis, no-sir-ee Bob! Now, let's look for evidence that this hypothesis is true. Gee, guess there isn't any."
So there is quite literally no reason to believe the ID hypothesis any more than one ought to believe that the appearance and disappearance of species over four billion years was caused by stupid fairies armed with itty-bitty scissors working on the genes or that we are all really just power units in the Matrix, and our belief that the past actually happened at all is a complex illusion maintained by a massive computer that projects false sensory information directly into our minds.
And thus I refute you. Or rather, the bozos that continue to assert this hypothesis as if it isn't obviously religious in its origin and motivation.
Finally, as for "Biblical literalists" -- there is no such thing. Even Dragonrider isn't a Biblical literalist, even though she pretends to be. She merely elides out the parts of the Bible that are so false that not even she can rationalize them and either pretends that they aren't there (something that is relatively easy because I'm sure that she has never come close to reading the Bible cover to cover) or, if pressed, flips off to a fundamentalist website that gives her the "approved non-literal interpretation" that keeps the obviously false statement from being really false, from demonstrating a clear contradiction.
Her deep and abiding ignorance in the reasoning behind things like the earth going around the sun instead of the other way around and the age of the sun and the age of the rock and the distance to (and hence age of) the stars and just plain how many stars there are help her to pretend that the Bible is literally true, but she knows in her heart of hearts that it isn't.
rgb
ID vs Evolution is merely a battleground for Belief in God vs Secularism. If you believe in God, ID can shed light on the origin of life. If you are secularist, than Evolution is a convenient substitute for religion. Man seems to need to have faith in something. Some believe in God, some believe in Darwin.
Man seems to need to have faith in something. Some believe in God, some believe in Darwin.Except that evolution requires no faith, just evidence. Which, of course, there is mountains and mountains of...
ID vs Evolution is merely a battleground for Belief in God vs Secularism.No, it isn't merely that. It is a battle for reason and logic, for the very essence of science.
If you believe in God, ID can shed light on the origin of life.
How, exactly? By simply asserting that God created everything? So, if you believe that God created everything, then believing that God created everything can shed light on how God created everything. Well, I suppose...
If you are secularist, than Evolution is a convenient substitute for religion.
What does this mean? Evolution is not a substitute for religion; it doesn't resemble religion at all. It does not have anything to do with faith, meaning, morality, ritual, community, purpose, happiness, guilt, eternal reward, eternal punishment, etc. It simply explains the mechanism by which we have arrived at the current diversity of life.
Man seems to need to have faith in something.
What is the basis for this statement?
Some believe in God, some believe in Darwin.
No one "believes in Darwin." For one thing, evolution and Darwin are not the same thing. Evolution is a field of science, a convergence of a number of different disciplines, consisting of information gathered over the past 150 years, most of which Darwin has spent dead. Darwin's contributions to evolutionary theory were the earliest and therefore the most historically significant, but they are hardly the most significant scientifically. Evolutionary theory does not, to be sure, begin and end with Origin of Species. Do not make the mistake that many make of conflating Darwin's work and the Theory of Evolution. They are not the same thing. One was the (sort of) first step that gave rise to the other.
And for another thing, evolution is not "believed" as an act of faith; it is understood or not. The process by which one comes to understand evolution is not at all like the process by which one comes to believe in religious stories. One does not simply read Darwin (or have someone summarize select bits of Darwin once a week for them) and then go, "Aha! That sounds nice. I shall believe in that." No, one takes a look at the evidence -- the best and most up-to-date evidence.
Listen. You keep making these claims like "ID is a scientific approach to explaining the origin of life" and "ID can shed light on the origin of life," but these claims are completely without substance. What does any of this mean? People love to say that ID is not just creationism (even though it has been demonstrated and affirmed in court that it is); people love to say, or imply, that there is all sorts of actual science, actual information, actual evidence lurking somewhere in ID. So where is it? Can you answer any of the questions I posed in my last post, #61? Or is repeating "ID is science" all you can manage?
I can say, "Hey, I believe in Terrestrial Planarity. It isn't just flat-Earth superstition. It's science. TP is science. It is scientific. It is backed by scientific evidence. It sheds light on the flatness of the Earth. Scientifically. With science." But this would mean nothing. Science is based on evidence, experiment and logic, not simply the act of saying that something is science.
Evolution vs. Intelligent Design
Books mentioned in this topic
Your Inner Fish: a Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (other topics)Why Evolution Is True (other topics)
The Origin of Species (other topics)
I wanted to use as much of the same dialogue as possible to show how this play can present Darwinism 180% differently. When I was done, I was able to keep about 60-70% of the dialogue. However to avoid any problems using another play's work, I went with 100% new dialogue. The character that represented Clarence Darrow for Darwinism is now a character based on Anne Coulter for Intelligent Design. The character based on William Jennings Bryan for Creationism is now a character based on Al Gore for Darwinism.
I am excited to see the tables switched on Darwinism, using a vehicle that has been used to promote it. I hope to see theater groups take an interest in producing it.
I would be happy to send a pdf of the play to any Goodreads members interested in reading it.