OK, so let's test the science advocates out here.............

by NotaNess 40 Replies latest watchtower bible

• 

  AlmostAtheist

  I searched around, but I can't find it now. There was an excellent CSI parody script (very short) that seemed so apropos. I'll try my best to recreate it here:

  Detective: We've got you cold on this one, Tommy. You're goin' down.
  Tommy: Did you actually see me shoot him?
  Detective: Well, no. But we have your fingerprints on the gun.
  Tommy: Did you actually SEE me touch the gun? No? Then you've got nuthin'.
  Detective: We also have your blood-stained clothes. The spatter-pattern is consistent with a close-range shot in the abdomen. Your victim was shot in the abdomen at close range.
  Tommy: Did you SEE the blood spatter on me? No? Your so-called "evidence" sounds pretty shaky to me, Boss.
  Detective: Yeah, I guess you're right. You can go.

  The point is that evidence can be used to reconstruct past events, even if no one saw them happen. We accept that idea in almost every facet of our lives. We don't speak definitively about everything -- we can't say if Tommy was wearing a hat when he shot the man, or if he liked extra-cheese on his pizza -- but the evidence available CAN tell us something. (You didn't have to see me type this post to accept the idea that I posted it, for instance.)

  At the very least, evidence can be used to discount theories. If the theory is that the victim was stabbed to death, the evidence of gunshot wounds would tell us that theory is wrong. Maybe he used a gunpowder-laced, bullet-shaped knife? Possible, but far less likely than the "gun" theory.

  This helps to explain why scientists don't often speak in absolutes. The world just doesn't work that way. It's all about likelihoods, not "truth".

  Dave
• 

  nvrgnbk

  The question that keeps popping up in my mind when I read these debates is:

  Where is God now and what is He up to?

  We were not there to see what happened or when or why or how.

  But we are here now. Where is He and what is He doing?
• 

  Paralipomenon

  To put this another way:
  
  If Jesus existed, where is his skeleton?
  
  Think of simple math here, how many fossils have been discovered in the world? Given the estimated time frame of evolution, what percentage of the world's animals that ever existed became fossils?
  
  Demanding fossil proof of an evolutionary change is akin to me asking for Jesus' skeleton.
  
  However science may be able to offer more proof with DNA analysis of fossils. Recently they genetically linked a Tyrannosaurus Rex with today's chicken. Nobody set out to prove that those two were related, they were just shocked to discover it true.
  
  Bone structures don't show links, but DNA does. The more research they do into this, I think they will be able to start linking ancient creatures to not only each other, but their modern day equivalent.
  
  The key difference here is that science is continuously working towards an answer. Creationism seems stagnated. It's fine to demand science to prove their theories, but Creationism is deemed as fact without any evidence other than "well science hasn't completely proven us wrong yet".
  
  Look at history, time and time again scientific advancements have disproven blind faith.
  
  We look back at people that were scorned for thinking the earth moved around the sun. People that taught that the earth was a sphere rather than flat. That the eclipse was a sign that God was angry.
  
  I don't know that science will prove evolution as the ultimate answer, but I do know that it will be science that provides a definitive answer before faith.
  
  Mainly because faith doesn't have that great a track record.
• 

  daystar

  Para

  If Jesus existed, where is his skeleton?

  This is a beautiful response to this.

  (The rest is not in response to you, Para.)

  I had an honest laugh at the subject title of this thread as well. I wonder what sorts of people are anti-science? I mean, you're actually against using process and intellect and research in an attempt at exploring our universe?

  You'd rather take, seriously, at face value, and rather blindly, a book written over a span of thousands of years, by people with no access to basic scientific advancements like telescopes, microscopes, etc., than adjust your thinking about things based upon what we've learned as a species about our world by more objective means?

  You'd rather go on believing that the earth is the center of the universe, I suppose. Science is by no means infallible, but at least there is more honest dialog and peer review in the process, and much more likelihood of accuracy than otherwise.

  I'm so sorry that uncertainty terrifies you so.
• 

  AlanF

  NotaNess wrote:

  : Show me a significant find where one species is in transition to the next.

  Hopefully, Abaddon's post will have shown you why this is a nonsensical request, but I'll add my own two cents.

  Evolutionarily speaking, all species are 'in transition' at all times. That's because evolutionary change is continuous. Continuous change means that there are no identifiable boundaries. The ring species that Abaddon mentioned are a case in point. One cannot identify a boundary in the geophysical distribution of the Herring Gull, except where the easternmost variety meets with the westernmost variety. There, a definite boundary exists because the two species cannot interbreed -- even though when you travel from west to east you can't identify a boundary.

  The same thing happens in time. A population gradually changes into another such that, if the old and the new could be placed side by side, they could not interbreed, even though one could not identify a clear boundary from one population to the next through time. Again, this is because of continuity.

  Of course, the situation is a good deal more complicated than I've described, but you're in kindergarten as far as your education in evolution, so I've kept things simple. Here's a bit more complication:

  Creationists are quick to point out that the rule in the fossil record is that populations tend to be static for long periods of time, and are then "instantly" replaced by some other population related to, but significantly different from the earlier one. This happens because large populations that exist in stable environments do indeed tend to be static. But environments change, and small sections of a population sometimes become isolated from the rest, where the new environment forces evolutionary change. When the environment changes yet again, an original population can die out and be replaced by the formerly isolated one, giving the appearance of abrupt change.

  For a good introduction to how many transitional species really exist, see "The Transitional Vertebrate Fossils FAQ": http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional.html

  AlanF
• 

  Odrade

  Hey AlanF, does that mean if I were to meet one of those gorgeous, strapping, musclebound cavemen, we would NOT be able to produce beautiful hairy children? Damn that speciation.

  ;)
• 

  stillajwexelder

  on my knees I swear to you I will provide all the proof you need - videos, photos, links etc if you do 1 thing first.

  PROVE TO ME CONCLUSIVELY GOD EXISTS
• 

  stillajwexelder

  Scientists no longer say electrons move in orbits. They now speak of orbitals "the region of maximum probablity of finding the electron"
• 

  Leolaia

  For anyone interested in understanding evolution I would also recommend reading about historical linguistics and dialectology, for the process of language change is largely parallel to that of biological change. Even the most die-hard creationist would not think that Spanish and French (which are today distinct languages) were separately created by God fully formed at the Tower of Babel thousands of years ago. Everyone has a basic understanding that they came from Latin and that they developed into separate languages through a process of gradual change. Languages are similar to species -- they are populations of mutually intelligible (=interbreeding) speakers -- and linguistic variation is analoguous to genetic variation. A truism in linguistics is that diachronic change is evidenced synchronically in language variability, and there are different social and ecological selective pressures on the frequency of certain variants. Variationist sociolinguistics is a branch of linguistics that studies the differences in frequency of linguistic variables according to different social criteria (gender, age, social class, ethnicity, regional background, social network, or any other kind of identity category), and frequently sociolinguists uncover evidence of language change in progress.

  There is a very similar phenomenon of ring species in language. Because regional variability is gradient, mutual intelligibility runs along a continuum in which the neighbors tend to be intelligible but the geographical ends of the continuum are not, which complicates the whole definition of what constitutes the boundary between languages. A great introduction to this is found in the following paper:

  http://www.let.rug.nl/~heeringa/dialectology/thesis/thesis01.pdf

  To quote an excerpt:

  If we travel from village to village, in a particular direction, we notice linguistic differences which distinguish one village from another. Sometimes the differences will be larger, and sometimes smaller, but they will be cumulative. The further we get from our starting point, the larger the differences will become." For the most part the villagers of two successive villages will understand each other's dialects very well, but the longer the chain, the greater the chance that dialects on the outer edges of the geographical area are not mutually intelligible. "At no point is there a complete break such that geographically adjacent dialects are not mutually intelligible, but the cumulative effect of the linguistic differences will be such that the greater the geographical separation, the greater the difficulty of comprehension."

  Here is a map of the phenomenon in the Netherlands from this paper:

  

  I had a professor once who was able to simulate this in a half hour in the classroom. She divided the class into several groups and then put a map of France and Spain in the overhead projector and wrote a Latin sentence on the board. Each group represented a certain location on the map. Then she would superimpose on the map different isoglosses for each sound change or grammatical change. An isogloss is the geographical extent of spread of a linguistic change. If your group was within the isogloss, then you would modify your sentence to reflect that change. She went in chronological order over a period of almost two thousand years covering all the different slight changes in pronunciation and grammar that arose in one place or another and spread outward from village to village. When she put the last isogloss over the map, she then had each group pronounce their sentence. And you can literally hear the very slight gradual change as moved south from Paris to Madrid. The Pyrenees area sounds really halfway between Spanish and French. But nowhere can one draw a clearcut boundary between the two languages. The boundary is conventionally made at the political border between the two countries, but in reality French and Spanish belong to the same language continuum and could be thought of in some sense as the same language. But that doesn't mean that a Parisian and a resident of Madrid are going to easily understand each other if they happen to have a conversation together.
• 

  5go

  5go

  Very goo. Now, could you express all of that w your own words and edit it down a bit? You don't actually expect someone to read all of it, do you? Then again, maybe i'm just getting lazy.

  S

  Sorry with the perimeters that I was given no. The evidence is there you just have to read it all. F or me to do it in my own word with evidence wouln't be much shorter, and I am lazy too.