Evolution Debate ...

[peapod]

more compelling logic for intelligent design

1. This fountain is elegant and complex.
2. The ducks are more elegant and more complex than the fountain.
3. If X is more elegant and more complex than Y, then X is more likely to be designed than Y.
4. The fountain was likely to be designed.
5. The ducks were more likely to be designed

They stole that logic from here


Villager: We have found a witch, may we burn her?
Crowd: BURN!! BUUUURN HER!
Bedevere: But how do you *know* she is a witch?
Villager: She looks like one!
Other Villagers: Yeah! She looks like one!!!
Bedevere: Bring her forward.

(a young woman is pushed through the crowd of villagers to the platform. She is dressed all in black, has a carrot tied around her face on top of her nose, and a black paper hat on her head. She talks funny because her nose is closed by the carrot.)

Witch: I'm not a witch, I'm not a witch!
Bedevere: Er,...but you are dressed as one.
Witch: THEY dressed me up like this.
Villagers: No! nooo! We didn't! We didn't!
Witch: And this isn't my nose, it's a false one!

(Bedevere lifts up the carrot to reveal the woman's real nose, which is in
fact rather small.)

Bedevere: Well?
One Villager: Well, we did do the nose.
Bedevere: The nose?
Villager: And the Hat. But she's a witch!
Villagers: Yeah! Burn her! Burn! Burn her!
B: Did you dress her up like this?
Villagers: NO! No, no, no, no, no, no...
One Villager: yes.
Villagers: yes. yes. yes. A bit. yes. a bit. a bit.
Another Villager: (hopefully) She has got a wart...
B: What makes you think she is a witch?
Villager: Well, She turned me into a newt!!

(pause)

Bedevere: a newt?

(long pause)

Villager: I got better...
Villagers: BURN HER anyway! BURN! BURN! BURN HER!
B: Quiet, quiet, quiet, QUIET! There are ways of *telling* whether she is a witch!
Villagers: Are there? What? Tell us, then! Tell us!
B: Tell me. What do you do with witches?
V: BUUUURN!!!!! BUUUUUURRRRNN!!!!! You BURN them!!!! BURN!!
B: And what do you burn apart from witches?
Villager: More Witches!
Other Villager: Wood.
B: So. Why do witches burn?

(long silence)
(shuffling of feet by the villagers)

Villager: (tentatively) Because they're made of.....wood?
B: Goooood!
Other Villagers: oh yeah... oh....
B: So. How do we tell whether she is made of wood?
One Villager: Build a bridge out of 'er!
B: Aah. But can you not also make bridges out of stone?
Villagers: oh yeah. oh. umm...
B: Does wood sink in water?
One Villager: No! No, no, it floats!
Other Villager: Throw her into the pond!
Villagers: yaaaaaa!

(when order is restored)

B: What also floats in water?
Villager: Bread!
Another Villager: Apples!
Another Villager: Uh...very small rocks!
Another Villager: Cider!
Another Villager: Uh...great gravy!
Another Villager: Cherries!
Another Villager: Mud!
Another Villager: Churches! Churches!
Another Villager: Lead! Lead!
King Arthur: A Duck!
Villagers: (in amazement) ooooooh!
B: exACTly!
B: (to a villager) So, *logically*...

Villager: (very slowly, with pauses between each word) If...she...weighs the same as a duck......she's made of wood.

B: and therefore...

(pause)

Villager: A Witch!
All Villagers: A WITCH!


(they do consequently weigh her across from a duck on Bedevere's largest scale, and she does indeed weigh the same as the duck.)

Witch: It's a fair cop

 

[Hard-Luck Henry]

I'd say you've both summed that up pretty well, so no more needs to be said. I would point out though, that we also share 60% of our DNA with bananas. I believe that particular experiment has been attempted innumerous times before; to no avail, thus far. :roll:

 

[no1important]

*Genesis 1 tells us that the first man and the first woman were made at the same time and after the animals. However, Genesis 2 states that the order of creation was as follows: man, then the animals and then woman.

*Genesis 1 sets forth six days of creation, but Genesis 2 speaks of the "day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens."

*Genesis 1 states that the fruit trees were created before man, but Genesis 2 indicates that the fruit trees were created after man.

*Genesis 1:2-5 asserts that God created light and divided it from darkness on the first day, but Genesis 1:14-19 says that the sun, moon, and stars were not made until the fourth day

*Genesis 6:19-22 says that God ordered Noah to bring "of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort...into the ark." However, Genesis 7:2-3 states that the Lord ordered Noah to bring into the ark the clean beasts and the birds by sevens and the unclean beasts by twos.

*Genesis 8:4 states that, as the waters of the flood receded, Noah's ark rested upon the mountains of Ararat in the seventh month, but the very next verse asserts that the tops of the mountains could not even be seen until the tenth month.

*Genesis 8:13 states that the earth was dry on the first day of the first month, but Genesis 8:14 reports that the earth was not dry until the twenty-seventh day of the second month.

Even the Bible (written by man) can not figure out the so called "creation theory".

 

[Cosmo]

Again with the bible, no1important ... you can't use such a biased source to support your arguments. Not everyone believes in your bible, it's tenets or even its origins. You have to do better than that. I've studied the bible and you can find support for absolutely anything in that book ... I used to find all kinds of quotes to support being vegetarian, in fact. It's ambiguous and contradictory to the point of being nothing more than a collection of stories about nothing and everything.

So please, again, don't quote scripture at me. It carries no weight. Or go ahead if you enjoy doing so ... but it's a waste of your time.

 

[Reverend Blair]

Er...I think you'll find No1 agrees with you Cosmo. All his examples contradict one another.

 

[peapod]

:lol: :lol: :lol: Hey cosmo, no one important is okay, he's what you could call a "normal" christian...he does not try to shove his beliefs down anyone's throat...plus hes got some good UFO stories....and most important Hes got a awesome fishing website :wink:

 

[Cosmo]

Sorry No 1 ... It was before my first coffee. Knee jerk reaction to quoted scripture -- which I can control after my first coffee!

 

[Jay]

Now we know not to discuss the Bible before 11:30....

 

[Dexter Sinister]

It could have just been having fun making the different lifeforms.

Only to blow them away? Thirty or more times? That doesn't sound like a being worthy of unconditional admiration. That's more like a kid with a magnifying glass burning ants in the sun.

You’re making assumptions of the nature of a creator and its plane of existence. There’s no reason to suppose that it would be subject to the same time dimension that it created for us, so there’s no reason to suppose that there needs be any regression.

There's no reason to suppose there's no regression either, you've just chosen "the buck stops here" point at the first step. Completely arbitrary.

So what, in fact, *can* we suppose about the nature of this designer? You seem to be taking the view that its nature is by definition unknowable, which seems a pretty useless hypothesis to me, and at best a retreat into mystic nonsense. If the designer transcends human comprehension, then for all we know it may be evil and just tolerates a bit of goodness here and there, or what we call evil it may call good. It may be a homicidal maniac in human terms, which wiping out life 30 or more times certainly suggests, as does much of the description of its behaviour in the Old Testament, assuming it's the same being. You can't be selective when listing the good and orderly attributes of the designed universe in order to demonstrate your claim. There is certainly order, but there is great disorder too. I'm sure you'd agree, for instance, that not only is there evil (at least in human terms) in the universe, it's also unpredictable and falls upon the good and bad (again, at least in human terms) alike. But if the designer's nature and purposes are inscrutable, how can we possibly know what is actually good or evil? The designer, as you've described it, to me renders the whole concept of a designer incoherent and pointless.

...anything with even a little bit of a head start would be vastly ahead of us on the technological scale

Not necessarily. Maybe they didn't develop in that direction. There's no reason to assume other intelligent beings will develop technology as we have. Maybe they're all gardeners and philosophers who don't care much for physics. Maybe they live in water like dolphins and can't do combustion. There's no way of know anything about them, until we find them or they find us.

As for the probability of intelligent life, I heard within the last year on Quirks and Quarks, a scientist explaining why he believed intelligent life is an inevitable product of evolution.... there’s at least one scientist who does believe that evolution will necessarily produce intelligence.

He was merely hypothesising, which is certainly one of the first steps in any scientific process. He may be right, of course, but he doesn't yet have the evidence to demonstrate his point in a scientific sense. What a particular scientist believes is irrelevant, really. What matters is what the evidence shows, and it doesn't show that. Yet.

 

[manda]

Re: RE: Evolution Debate ...

Now we know not to discuss the Bible before 11:30....

I'd say at least noon.

I have no idea what to believe. There is much to support evolution, but everything had to start somewhere.

I believe in God, but much that man attributed to him has been scientifically disproven, thus beleive in him yes, the bible...not so much. I just figure once I slide into the grave sideways with my body and life thouroughly used and enjoyed, I'll bug the big fella for a minutes of his time to ask my questions and make sense of it all :idea:

 

[Dexter Sinister]

Re: RE: Evolution Debate ...

I have no idea what to believe. There is much to support evolution, but everything had to start somewhere.

A true statement. Evolution isn't about how it got started though, it's about what happened after it got started. There's no inconsistency between evolution and the existence (or otherwise) of a designer. The designer, for instance, could have set things up so that life began from a series of random groupings of assorted chemicals and then natural selection controlled the process from there, randomness and natural selection being the techniques provided by the designer.

The essential point I've been trying to make all through this discussion is that a designer is neither a necessary nor a useful hypothesis, because it doesn't explain or illuminate anything, it's just a catch-all rationalization for things we don't understand.

 

[Extrafire]

No 1,

I don’t really want to get into this, because it’s a topic for a different thread and it would take a vast amount of time which I don’t have, but I’ll make a brief reply. I did this once before on a different thread but I guess you must have missed it, so just for you, one more time, a few clarifications:

Genesis 1 tells us that the first man and the first woman were made at the same time and after the animals. However, Genesis 2 states that the order of creation was as follows: man, then the animals and then woman.

First thing to realize is you’re only making a cursory examination of the Bible and that you’re reading it in English which has lost something in the translation from the original ancient Hebrew. There is only one creation account and that is in Genesis 1. All others are references to that account as can be easily deduced from the verb tenses in the original. In Genesis 2, it is more like “and God HAD created the animals…” a reference to an event that had already happened, not a description of it happening.

*Genesis 1 sets forth six days of creation, but Genesis 2 speaks of the "day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens."

Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Genesis 2 does not contradict that.

*Genesis 1 states that the fruit trees were created before man, but Genesis 2 indicates that the fruit trees were created after man.

Again, Genesis 2 was a reference to the prior creation of fruit bearing trees in Genesis 1. (Hebrew verb tenses)

*Genesis 1:2-5 asserts that God created light and divided it from darkness on the first day, but Genesis 1:14-19 says that the sun, moon, and stars were not made until the fourth day

Genesis 1:1, again: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” That’s when the sun, moon and stars were made. The primordial atmosphere was opaque (Gen.1:2 “…..darkness was on the face of the deep…”). When it cleared enough to become translucent, differences between day and night were visible from earth, but the sun, moon and stars didn’t become visible until it became transparent.

A quick superficial reading of the Bible can result in you confusion, but in-depth study will clarify it.

 

[Extrafire]

Dex,

Only to blow them away? Thirty or more times? That doesn't sound like a being worthy of unconditional admiration. That's more like a kid with a magnifying glass burning ants in the sun.

If you’re going to create life on a planet that is still being formed by occasional bombardment, bacteria would seem to be an appropriate lifeform. They are life, but not worthy of any consideration. I personally blow lots of them away every time I blow my nose. That doesn’t qualify me for any kind of admiration, nor does it provide a reason for denigration.

There's no reason to suppose there's no regression either, you've just chosen "the buck stops here" point at the first step. Completely arbitrary.

Not completely. It’s obvious that a creator would have to be far superior to us so it’s highly unlikely that it would require the type of regression that we would need.

So what, in fact, *can* we suppose about the nature of this designer?

There are some things that can be supposed such as its intelligence and power, far superior to ours, its transcendence of our 4 dimensional space-time continuum and so on. Beyond that there are other attributes that can be deduced from religious texts, but I’ve been avoiding that because it’s not the topic of this thread, and it’s a subject that would take up far more time than I have available.

It may be a homicidal maniac in human terms, which wiping out life 30 or more times certainly suggests,

Nonsense. Killing bacteria can in no sense ever be construed to be homicidal. You’re using ridiculous exaggeration in order to debase my point, and you’re better than that. As I said, there are a few things that we can deduce about its nature from the nature of its creation, but for more than that, a case would have to be made for a particular religion, and I’m not about to do that.

There is certainly order, but there is great disorder too.

A great many scientists are awed by the beauty and harmony of the universe, both atheist and deist. I really haven’t heard of any who discuss disorder in the universe.

I'm sure you'd agree, for instance, that not only is there evil (at least in human terms) in the universe, it's also unpredictable and falls upon the good and bad (again, at least in human terms) alike.

Evil being the absence of good?

But if the designer's nature and purposes are inscrutable, how can we possibly know what is actually good or evil? The designer, as you've described it, to me renders the whole concept of a designer incoherent and pointless.

I haven’t actually described the designer, merely tried to show that it is within the realm of possibility and probability. I haven’t been trying to make the case for any particular religion’s description of the creator, only a generic creator, as I mentioned above.

He was merely hypothesising, which is certainly one of the first steps in any scientific process. He may be right, of course, but he doesn't yet have the evidence to demonstrate his point in a scientific sense. What a particular scientist believes is irrelevant, really. What matters is what the evidence shows, and it doesn't show that. Yet.

Did you catch that show? Maybe you can remember it better than I, but it seems to me that he had good reason for his ideas. As far as hypothesizing is concerned, that’s all we can say about abiogenesis too.

 

[zenfisher]

I don't think Dex ( and I don't propose I am speaking for him) was talking about wiping out bacteria. Let's try something a little closer to home...Neandrathal man or any number of prehominids or protohumans. Why would a caring compassionate designer wipe out these species ? How about the countless mammalian,reptilan,ampibian, avian, etc species that have disappeared from this planet. Are they merely the snot of some god's proboscis ?

 

[Dexter Sinister]

... bacteria would seem to be an appropriate lifeform. They are life, but not worthy of any consideration.

What makes you think they're not worthy of any consideration? They're a pretty serious lifeform, vital, and sometimes fatal, to every other lifeform on the planet. You know the mind of the designer on that? You're implicitly assuming the designer doesn't value them any more highly than you do. They're still by far the dominant life form on the planet, in terms of sheer numbers, the habitats they occupy, and probably in terms of total biomass too. Suggests the designer's rather fond of them, doesn't it?

I deny using ridiculous exaggeration to debase your point. I'm raising what I consider to be legitimate concerns about the values and activities of the designer you're postulating. You can't, by your own logic, possibly know what value the designer places on any particular form of life, you've simply anthropomorphised it so it agrees with you on the matter of bacteria.

If the designer's goal is to create life on a planet, for instance, doesn't it make sense to wait until the formative bombardment's stopped so life has a chance, instead of having it get wiped out dozens of times? If we can't hold this designer to even elementary logic like that, the cosmos has to be completely incomprehensible and we've no hope of ever figuring anything out. I think you're sinking into mystic nonsense.

 

[Extrafire]

Re: RE: Evolution Debate ...

I don't think Dex ( and I don't propose I am speaking for him) was talking about wiping out bacteria. Let's try something a little closer to home...Neandrathal man or any number of prehominids or protohumans. Why would a caring compassionate designer wipe out these species ? How about the countless mammalian,reptilan,ampibian, avian, etc species that have disappeared from this planet. Are they merely the snot of some god's proboscis ?

They are all lifeforms on a planet where there is no life without death. It is the natural fate of pretty much all larger lifeforms to eventually go extinct. Scientists estimate that even without the influence of mankind, there would be at least 1 species going extinct per year. They weren’t wiped out by the creator/designer any more than I would be if a tree fell on me. They just reached their end. You seem to be assuming that a caring compassionate designer would only create a world where no life ever died.

 

[Extrafire]

What makes you think they're not worthy of any consideration? They're a pretty serious lifeform, vital, and sometimes fatal, to every other lifeform on the planet. You know the mind of the designer on that? You're implicitly assuming the designer doesn't value them any more highly than you do.

Use a little logic and reality here. They serve a vital purpose, without them other life couldn’t survive. They are tools that serve a purpose and are completely expendable, as individual organisms, and even in great numbers.

They're still by far the dominant life form on the planet, in terms of sheer numbers, the habitats they occupy, and probably in terms of total biomass too. Suggests the designer's rather fond of them, doesn't it?

Suggests the designer finds them useful, nothing more. But you raise an interesting point. They are most definitely the most successful organism on the planet. Since evolutionary theory believes that all other life descended from them, the question arises; why? Couldn’t be survival of the fittest, all other life is inferior when it comes to survivability. Is there any evolutionary advantage to any other lifeform over bacteria?

I deny using ridiculous exaggeration to debase your point. I'm raising what I consider to be legitimate concerns about the values and activities of the designer you're postulating. You can't, by your own logic, possibly know what value the designer places on any particular form of life, you've simply anthropomorphised it so it agrees with you on the matter of bacteria.

I’m sorry, I really can’t believe that your tack is anything but frivolous.

If the designer's goal is to create life on a planet, for instance, doesn't it make sense to wait until the formative bombardment's stopped so life has a chance, instead of having it get wiped out dozens of times? If we can't hold this designer to even elementary logic like that, the cosmos has to be completely incomprehensible and we've no hope of ever figuring anything out. I think you're sinking into mystic nonsense.

Well I don’t know the designers goal, but if it was merely to create life, then you might be correct. But if the goal was to create human life, then it makes sense to wait till conditions are favorable for humans before creating humans. There’d be no point in waiting that long to create bacteria.

 

[peapod]

Funny innit 8O I was just reading this over at the panda's thumb..might has well share it :twisted:

Creationists often pretend that getting criticism that points out their ideas are completely invalid is a validation. It's enough that they can get a scientist into a debate; even if they are hopelessly outclassed, babble and lie and treat a scientific debate as if it were a tent revival, they will afterwards strut and preen and pretend that their participation alone makes them a legitimate member of the scientific community. Dawkins made this point in his essay, "Why I won't debate creationists".
. . .
Intelligent Design creationism is a load of horseshit. What has happened is that the movement has made some inroads solely in the political and legal arenas, where the absence of a scientific basis for the belief is little handicap, and now scientists are rousing themselves to point out its glaring deficiencies. This is not a sign of its growing importance. It's a sign of growing corruption that demands a response. Read the books. Scientists are not coming out and saying that there is something to this intelligent design idea; they are announcing, with near unanimity, that it is worthless crap, junk that has no place in the lab or the schoolroom.
And the reason ID doesn't have any place in the scientific or academic communities is because it doesn't play by the rules of science.

In order for ID to be considered a scientific theory (as opposed to a religious hypothesis), it needs to jump through all the other hoops that legitimate theories do. The two most important things are that it needs to be testable and it needs to incorporate and/or explain every other bit of scientific data that's come along so far (and no, "the devil's trying to trick you" doesn't count). If we can't find ways to scientifically bolster the ID hypothesis, then it doesn't deserve to be considered science, just like every other crackpot idea that's come and gone.

If you pick up a soccer ball with your bare hands and run toward the goal, you might score a lot of points, but that doesn't mean you're playing soccer. Likewise, if you explain everything by saying it's the work of a god supreme being intelligent designer, it doesn't mean you're playing science. This fact needs to be repeated again and again.

Perhaps the most disingenuous thing about arguing tactic of creationists is that they're allowed to keep going back to the drawing board and change their story. By letting them keep retreating long enough to reinvent new justifications for the garbage that they've (as Kevin Drum put it) "reverse-engineered" from the Bible, we're essentially serving as beta-testers for their "horseshit". Each time we point out he tiny flaws in their hypotheses, they come back with a slightly modified version of the same crap.

Which leads me to the ultimate problem with Creationism. Perhaps the biggest scientific rule they're breaking is that they're starting with their conclusions and working backward from there. Science is all about using the facts that are available to us to try to explain the world. Creationists on the other hand are trying to find the facts that support their predetermined view of the world. This isn't science, but they already knew that.

To go back to my half-assed analogy for a moment, by taking the debate out of the scientific community into school boards and local legislatures, not only have creationists picked up the ball and started running, but they're ignoring the real referees and appealing to their friends sitting in the stands instead. So, while arguing our case is probably the best tactic, it's hard to resist the urge to refuse playing with a bunch of cheaters.

 

[Dexter Sinister]

They are most definitely the most successful organism on the planet. Since evolutionary theory believes that all other life descended from them, the question arises; why? Couldn’t be survival of the fittest, all other life is inferior when it comes to survivability. Is there any evolutionary advantage to any other lifeform over bacteria?

Your ignorance of evolutionary theory is vast and unassailable.

 

[zenfisher]

Re: RE: Evolution Debate ...

I don't think Dex ( and I don't propose I am speaking for him) was talking about wiping out bacteria. Let's try something a little closer to home...Neandrathal man or any number of prehominids or protohumans. Why would a caring compassionate designer wipe out these species ? How about the countless mammalian,reptilan,ampibian, avian, etc species that have disappeared from this planet. Are they merely the snot of some god's proboscis ?

They are all lifeforms on a planet where there is no life without death. It is the natural fate of pretty much all larger lifeforms to eventually go extinct. Scientists estimate that even without the influence of mankind, there would be at least 1 species going extinct per year. They weren’t wiped out by the creator/designer any more than I would be if a tree fell on me. They just reached their end. You seem to be assuming that a caring compassionate designer would only create a world where no life ever died.

One person and an entire species is a completely different thing. Bye the bye... I don't believe in a creator or designer so how could I possibly attribute anthropomorphic qualities to a piece of fiction. I was merely responding to your belief of this fictional being.