by chuckyy 81 Replies latest jw friends
Some Creationists and ID'ers certainly share the same mind set.
Can you argue otherwise? http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/ is a good example of a Science Blog which gets persitant attacks by people who would CERTAINLY be witch burners in a different age.
If it floats, it is a witch, LOL.
And my classification of someone as an ignorant silly is not hasty. It's fact based so can be quite rapid at times (the duck paradigm is quite effective), but quick and hasty are two different things.
The Scotsman:
Life comes from life
That's true. It's one of the defining features of life, that it copies itself.
it always has.
That's obviously not true. Life had a beginning. There was a time when there was no life, now there is life. Like everything else in the universe, life began.
Now if you can show me life that came from something lifeless - ah then I will sign up to Evolution.
As Satanus pointed out (and as someone always points out on these threads) the question of the origin of life is not about evolution.
We can get into all the little details, evidence for this and that etc etc
And we need to if we are to understand the subject at all. Once we do take the time to get into the details and examine the evidence, we find overwhelming evidence that evolution occurs and that all life on earth had a common ancestor which was very simple compared to the complexity we see today.
But bottom line - for evolution to be true, life at the very start "must" have come from something without life.
Again, that's not true. Evolution would still occur even if life had no beginning. However, that's academic as we know that life did have a beginning - as did everything else in the universe. For your hypothesis to be true, something would have to exist that had no beginning. What's more it would have to be at least as complex as anything now known to exist. This is clearly a far more ludicrous proposition than the one that requires nothing more than a single autocatalytic reaction to have occurred once in the whole vastness of spacetime.
Now, I am off to eat a banana!
Good. The sugars in it will provide instant energy while the potassium will help you maintain your electrolyte balance, You should then be in an ideal frame of mind to begin studying evolution and the origin of life itself. See http://talkorigins.org and don't come back until you're finished.
For me the evidence of evolution is overwhelming. Human chromosone 2, endogenic retroviruses (ERV), redundancy (human foetuses with gills, human body hair, the coccyx, snakes with pelvises, whales with leg bones, flightless birds, non functioning eyes), unnecessary complications aka. unintelligent design (eg. sinuses, wisdom teeth, backwards retina, appendix, tonsils, shared opening for the trachea/oesophagus), elephant, horse and whale fossils showing missing links, virual and bacterial mutation and evolution, the wide variety of dogs, cabbages (cauliflower, brussels etc.) and pigeons through artificial selection, the difference between the races through mitochondrial-DNA. There is no escaping it for me, humans did not descend from "demigods" but rather from "lower" animals.
The God hypothesis is too wishy-washy for me. How is saying that God made Adam from dust and Eve from a rib any different from saying that Mbombo vomited the world from his stomach, that Marduk created the world from blood or that Atum masturbated the universe into existence?
The idea that God exists eternally holds no water for me. Why the default, natural state of the universe should be an intelligent being escapes me. In addition, the idea that He is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, when correlated with the existence of suffering and evil shows one of 3 things:
1) He is powerless 2) He is evil and doesn't care 3) He doesn't exist
The retort of free will has never made sense to me, because the majority of suffering is NOT caused by the exercise of free will, but by random occurances (Katrina, tsunamis, earthquakes, genetic deformities). In addition, new-born babies don't seem to have much free-will at all. The idea of God handing over power to the Devil for 6000 years to vindicate His name and prove that His way is the best way is at best deficient, at worse pure evil.
To me, theism is just an excuse not to accept our insignificance in the universe. Religion elevates the importance and ego of humans to cosmic proportions, science cuts us down to size and shows us how small we really are. To me, religion doesn't give life meaning, it merely replaces real meaning with false hopes.
According to the National Center for Science Education Ring Wing Christian Legislators have been submitting bills trying to get creationism as science. Their main fault is the confusing theory and hypothesis.
Designs---have you seen the documentary Judgement Day: Intelligent Design on Trial. In 2004 they tried to slip some ID stuff into science class. It touched off a huge controversy. They were defeated. Score for science. But the part I found particularly interesting is that the judge that heard the case was appointed by Bush II, and recommended by Santorum. He also believes in creation. So there are still people with integrity, and we must keep them. Here is part one. The rest is available on youtube also.
Was that Kitzmiller v Dover school board?
ID died that day, it just doesn't know it yet.
Yeah, Cofty that was it. But the details are fascinating. I understand many things, but when it comes to expressing and explaining, and arguing it, I have a hard time. To listen to the transcript of the court hearing (dramatized, but the real transcript) the beauty with which they argued the case taught me on many levels.
NC
This is also a really good video of Ken Miller explaining his case against ID in which he describes his evidence at Dover.
Believers should remember that Ken is a christian
I'm going with evolution.
That happened in my backyard Cofty. (your video)
NC
