Made from Monkeys or from Dirt

by Satanus 47 Replies latest jw friends

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  Abaddon

  Anyone can create a god out of nothing; where do you think they all came from?
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  Mr. Kim

  Abaddon,

  I understand what you are saying!
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  Dansk

  Anyone can create a god out of nothing; where do you think they all came from?

  LOL! Now THAT'S something I definitely agree with!

  Nice one, Abaddon!

  Dansk
• 

  AlanF

  Hi Abaddon,

  As you realized, I certainly do think that acupuncture works, sometimes and for some people. I didn't know, though, that people had figured out why it works, so thanks for pointing that out.

  About a year ago my wife was going to an acupunturist to help out with fibromyalgia symptoms. At first, it seemed to help, but after a few treatments the effectiveness was gone. About that time she also developed a prolapsed uterus. The acupuncturist did some kind of treatment that caused prolapse to retract for a little while, but of course it was temporary. Finally she had a hysterectomy. She hasn't gone back for the fibromyalgia symptoms because the acupuncture no longer does anything for her. She has also found that things like aspirin and ibuprofin don't do much for her headaches. Obviously not all medicines and treatments work for all people.

  You make many excellent points in your responses to Dansk.

  Hi Dansk,

  : When you speak of evolution, do you subscribe to the teaching of birds evolving from reptiles, man from apes, etc?

  Well, that's somewhat of a loaded question. I'm not dogmatic on anything about evolution except one thing: plant and animal populations have evolved through time. By that I mean that the fossil record documents that various species that once existed are no longer here, and have been replaced -- time and again -- by new species. This continual replacement, sometimes in fits and starts such as during and after a mass extinction, is by definition evolution.

  Coming up with mechanisms for this 'fact of evolution' is a whole nother story. Darwin's ideas have been modified and extended into something that appears reasonably workable, but is still far from complete. Darwin's original ideas, it turns out, were generally too simplistic. Evolution is a lot more complex than Darwin envisioned. No surprise; a discoverer of a great new principle in science rarely gets it completely right first time around. People like Stephen Jay Gould have extended the concept of "natural selection" by ideas such as "punctuated equilibrium".

  More philosophically, I allow intellectually that some sort of Supreme Creator or whatever could have made life on earth -- but obviously such creative works would have to result in what we see today -- an appearance of having evolved by 'descent with modification'. But I tend to think of these speculations as metaphysical and not of much practical value.

  I certainly think that the fossil record documents the evolution of man from apelike ancestors. A careful look at the fossil evidence tends to convince all but dyed-in-the-wool creationists, who are not concerned with evidence anyway. I think that the jury is still out on the postulated evolution of birds from dinosaurs, but I do think that both -- and mammals as well -- evolved from reptilian ancestors. Perhaps this was as far back as the Permian, when a great deal of evolution seems to have been occurring. For example, there are a great many fossils of creatures called synapsids, which have characteristics of both reptiles and mammals. When these critters first appear in the fossil record, they're very much like reptiles, but by the end of the Permian period, when something like 90% of animal species went extinct, they were much more mammal-like.

  You can read my personal research on this stuff here http://www.geocities.com/osarsif/index2.htm in the article "The WTS View of Creation and Evolution".

  : I really don't know. I can accept adaptation, where something changes, such as forms changing sufficiently in a species to give them separate species status but keeping them in the same genus, and which is what some people term 'evolution'. But from one species to evolve completely from another is something I find difficult to comprehend. I'm open to presented evidence...........

  You're suffering from exactly the same kind of ignorance of the facts behind evolution that I still suffered from when I still retained most of my JW ideas. When I first started reading and posting on the old talk.origins Usenet list in 1991, I was still convinced that something was very wrong with the notion of evolution, and I read a number of skeptical books. But when I set forth these skeptical ideas on the t.o list, a number of good people set me straight by educating me and pointing me to good sources. I quickly realized how ignorant I was, due to my having accepted JW ideas all my life.

  For example, with a skeptical eye I read some material about how evolution can be observed in the way genetic material mutates, and that there is a sort of "molecular clock" in the mutated genes that can help biologists figure out when and where a particular lineage split. A case in point is figuring out when the lines leading to modern man and chimpanzees split from a common ancestor. I also read a skeptical book on evolution called "The Bone Peddlers", which pooh-poohed the idea of a molecular clock. The author pointed out that the "genetic distance" between various species of hominids and hominoids, like man, chimps, gorillas, orangutans, etc., is quite a bit less than that between various species of frogs! Therefore, he argued, there must be something drastically wrong with the theory of a molecular clock and with the notion of evolution itself. But a t.o regular pointed out to me that this was just as it should be, since frogs had been around for some 250 million years, whereas apes had been around for at most about 20 million years. Boy did I do a doubletake! Since then I've learned time and again that criticisms presented by creationists and others are usually easily refuted by people with a good knowledge of the facts.

  You told Abaddon that you "like permanent facts". That's all well and good in a purely intellectual environment like pure math, but in the real world such facts are hard to come by. Facts are the building stones of theories, but new research always turns up new facts, and so spawns new or revised theories. Therefore good scientists understand that theories, and even so-called facts, are alway provisional to some extent. One of the best statements about this was made by Stephen Jay Gould in the book Science and Creationism. He provides a good point of view on fact versus theory:

  In the American vernacular, "theory" often means "imperfect fact" -- part of a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to hypothesis to guess. Thus the power of the creationist argument: evolution is "only" a theory and intense debate now rages about many aspects of the theory. If evolution is worse than a fact, and scientists can't even make up their minds about the theory, then what confidence can we have in it? Indeed, President Reagan echoed this argument before an evangelical group in Dallas when he said (in what I devoutly hope was campaign rhetoric): "Well it is a theory. It is a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science -- that is, not believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was."

  Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.

  Moreover, "fact" doesn't mean "absolute certainty"; there ain't no such animal in an exciting and complex world. The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

  So when you read about differing ages assigned to different ancient phenomena, always take it with a grain of salt, and most especially take into account the source -- popular media, a solid science journal, a creationist, a scientist speaking off the cuff, a scientist speaking carefully in a peer-reviewed environment. As Abaddon has told you, only by doing a lot of reading and educating yourself will you really come to understand that science is provisional, not at all like religious belief, and is really just the best consensus of the day by those deemed knowledgeable enough to form a proper consensus. However, keep in mind Gould's definition of "fact".

  You told peacefulpete: "... scientists believe they can trace all birds back to one common ancestor." Well not quite. Paleontologists believe that all birds -- like all other creatures -- came from a common ancestor, but they cannot at this time trace them back to one. Indeed, the jury is still out as to just when birds first appeared on the earth. The fossil evidence for birds earlier than Archaeopteryx is so scanty and so controversial that one can make no conclusions. And some recent finds of Chinese fossil dinosaurs indicates that some of them had feathers or feather-like appendages, which further complicates things. A recent Scientific American articles details some of these findings.

  You asked Abaddon how the universe could arise from nothing. Bottom line: no one has the faintest clue. But believers in the supernatural face exactly the same problem, as Abaddon has so well shown. So in terms of ultimate origins of everything, science and religion are clueless.

  AlanF
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  Dansk

  Alan,

  As usual, a really great post. So much food for thought. Thanks for taking the time out to compose it.

  Dansk
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  Abaddon

  As Alan elegently points out, initial origins are anyone's guess. The math used to explain some of the theories is so far beyond the reach of most people it can be regarded as liturgy. But theories there are;

  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1270726.stm

  http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2001/paralleluni.shtml

  The second link goes has a link for the transcript of a really good Horizon (BBC) programme. Essentially the universe was two 'flat sheets' (there weren't enough dimensions for them to be anything other than flat... very flat...), and these rippled with random energy fluctuations (as the stuff that is even there in hard vacuum does in our own universe today), and that in these conditions it was an eventuality (very hard word to use as time didn't work the way it works today if at all) that at some point the random fluctuations would occur so as to draw the two membrance towards each other, and then BING, big bang, and new Universe with added time and a whole new direction, 'up', and apparently another one somewhere. See, lay explanations are funtionally identitical to a Catholic explaining the Trinity!

  BUT, these theories, and other explanations (like Hawkings explaining that the start of the universe is more U shaped than V shaped, i.e., there IS no sharp point) do still require a set of pre-existing conditions.

  The only real hope of resolution is that if some of these theories are correct, then it will be possible to have a proof the theories work when technology allows scientists to experiment around the massive energies they would need to get to in order to prove they work. A pocket Universe in a lab in MIT would convince a lot of people. But that would only prove the Universe worked that way, not where the bloody instigating conditions come from.

  To tell you 'the truth' LOL, you are far better forgetting about where it all came from and look for evidence of how what there is ended up the way it is. At the bottom of every cosmologists and theists stack of answers is 'I don't know' to the question of where the instigating conditions or god, and in that case, god's creator, came from. It's fun to talk about but can go nowhere.
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  Mr. Kim

  When everything is said and done, does it REALLY matter?

  WE ARE HERE---NOW!

  SHOULD WE NOT MAKE THE BEST OF IT?
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  Undecided

  Mr Kim,

  I was talking to my brother today who is also an ex JW and discussing some of the questions I had about the many varieties of life on earth and we just decided to just ignore the questions we couldn't answer and just enjoy the day to day life we can see and feel. What difference does it make if we came from monkeys or not, we all die and don't know if there is anything else or not after that inevitable happening. Just as you said, just enjoy every day as there is no answer for all the other questions of life. I'm tired of trying to find answers to the reason for life and who started it.

  Ken P.
• 

  rem

  Realistically, it probably doesn't matter for you and me, but there are some people for whom it does matter where we came from. I'm glad there are and have been people interested in finding out the truth of this question. Because of their work we are given the chance of a higher quality of life free of many of the diseases our ancestors were plagued with.

  rem
• 

  drwtsn32

  Mr Kim, I was mostly joking, but I enjoyed your answers nonetheless! The question about 'making god out of nothing' was particularly asinine.

  My main point was that just because man cannot reproduce something in the lab doesn't make the theory invalid. Man only has a theory about how black holes form. (A very good theory.) We have never seen a collapsed star turn into a black hole before our eyes, and we certainly couldn't reproduce the birth of a star or black hole in a lab.