Evidence for evolution, Installment 5: Lake Tanganyika, etc

by seattleniceguy 109 Replies latest jw friends

  • Abaddon
    Abaddon

    tijkmo

    abaddon...i believe in a creator...as such EVERYTHING is explainable either by something he did or by something he did not do.

    Whether you believe in something means precisely nothing as regards whether that is true or not. You believing it doesn't make it true. Sorry to highlight that so, but you seem to think it is a relevent or interesting argument. Other people have similar beliefs in creators that contradict yours to the extent of being mutually exclusive. Some people believe women are inferior. Others that Hitler didn't direct the Holocaust. Belief in the context of faith unsupported by evidence means NOTHING beyond the skull it takes place in.

    If you are a presuppositonalist it will be impossible to have a logical argument with you, as if you find it difficult to prove an opinion is correct you'll just say some tired equaivalent of 'god did it', without any evidence to support the assertion, and believe that that proves your point. Could you please clarify this point so I don't waste any time talking to someone there's no point in talking to? If you're willing to conceed that you might be wrong (as I am), then there is a point to this discussion.

    .for you to convince me otherwise you will have to do better than call me childish cos that dont scare me

    I pointed out that ALL you do is make assertions without any evidence to support them. I see this as childish. Deal with the reaction you get; if you did anything other than make bland unsuported assertions you wouldn't have your behaviour commented on like that.

    And what precisely is adult about saying 'but that doesn't explain X' when it is obvious you have no knowledege of what the explanation for X is in detail? What do you think you bring to this discussion? "I am right and I don't have to prove it" (this is not anything you have said verbatim but is a portrayal of your attitude as thus far espoused) is not the attitude most people would value in a discussion, yet this attitude what is apparent in your responses.

    At least the Boreans checked their facts. You just repeat yourself. Can you be something more than an empty vessel or a clashing cymbal?

    Anyway, how can I convince you of a subject you know nothing about? It is like me trying to convince you whether it was correct to use 'ho theos' or 'theos' if you had no knowledge of koine Greek in particular or grammar in general. Whether I could overcome any preconceptions you had would have NOTHING to do with whether 'ho theos' or 'theos' was right.

    ultimately it does come down to faith...

    you were not around in the 'beginning' and you did not come up with your beliefs by yourself..someone told you..someone influenced you either in person or by books etc

    And you differ from that by what? Let me see, you weren't around in the begining, you did not come up with your beliefs by yourself, someone told you, influenced you etc.

    Oh, I do know the difference. There's a difference in between believing in things because of faith and believing things because of evidence. I can produce evidence for the specific claims I can make. Where is your evidence for the specific claims you make? Where is your proof that your beliefs aren't just primative myths, believed in with as much fervour as any other primative myths are believed in by their adherants, but still as wrong?

    Right now, based on what you've said, there is nothing to seperate the validity of your beliefs from those of a stone-age shamen with a bone through his nose. This is entirely a product of the competence of the argument you are presenting; if you want that to change you must argue differently, don't get sore with me.

    but a lot of what they said is hypothesis or conjecture and conveniently unprovable..but you have faith that what they tell you is true...but it may not be..just because it is unprovable is no guarantee that it is correct

    Please be specific. There is a lot of what "they say" that has very little conjecture in it and stuff that is very provable. If you persist in making vauge allegations about a subject (that it is more readily apparent with everything you type) you know very little about, it simply isn't worth the time discussing it with you, as you do not return the time and trouble taken, not the respect shown you.

    As an example of the lack of respect you show, you criticise science using terms like 'conveniently unprovable' when this discription fits your presuppositionalistic attitude perfectly. Did you think people don't notice this double standard?

    You act like you have proved something when you haven't proved anything other than your ability to sit at a keyboard and type your opinion. What have you proved? NOTHING.

    interesting that in the section below you put a 'comment' of mine in quotation marks as if you are directly quoting something that i said which if i had said it would make me an idiot..but clearly i did not say or even imply anything of the sort so your resorting to this kind of deception greatly weakens your argument

    You said;

    'and thats not right before my eyes...in order for it to be right before my eyes it would need to be happening all around me'.

    My intention with the quotes was to paraphrase your attitude as displayed by the above verbatim quote, and to question your logic of using NOT ever having seen something as a determinator of whether it ever happened. I am sorry you took it the wrong way

    Will you now explain how your use of not seeing something as an indicator of whether it ever happens can be applied consistantly to other events you have never seen happen?

    • And is your lack of answer to all the other questions because you are preparing answers?
    • Because you are so confident of your rightness you won't answer?
    • Or because evasion is the only way you can handle those questions?
  • tijkmo
    tijkmo

    • And is your lack of answer to all the other questions because you are preparing answers?
    • Because you are so confident of your rightness you won't answer?
    • Or because evasion is the only way you can handle those questions
    no maybe yes ...tijkmo of the uninteresting class (who secretly likes evolutionists to quote the bible to him to back up their argument)
  • AlmostAtheist
    AlmostAtheist
    who secretly likes evolutionists to quote the bible to him to back up their argument

    Proverbs 18:13 - "When anyone is replying to a matter before he hears it, that is foolishness on his part and a humiliation."

    Do you see any way to apply that scripture to this conversation?

    Dave

  • seattleniceguy
    seattleniceguy

    Abaddon, thanks for your related points regarding isolated species.

    Dave, I really liked your concluding paragraph:

    If this sounds like faith, then it is a faith in the process of accumulating evidence and making conclusions from it. It isn't faith in "evolution", it is faith in the process that when followed points to evolution. As it happens, the process has a good track record of coming up with answers that seem to be correct, so it seems to be a reasonable thing to place faith in.

    I suppose in the end that science is the belief in cause and effect, that things that happen leave evidence, and that if we rationally consider the evidence, we can determine how things happen.

    When I was just waking up from my Witness daze, I was astounded by the propensity of Witnesses to throw the entire notion of cause and effect out the window when it did not suit them. Normally logical people would simply declare that 1 + 1 did not equal 2 in some cases. I wondered how it was possible for anything to be accomplished in a world in which you could not count on fundamental laws working.

    SNG

  • Midget-Sasquatch
    Midget-Sasquatch
    ...if i did experimented i would be excercising control of the experiment and setting up the procedures as i presume Mr Lenski did...the point about evolution is that it was not done in the comfort of ones own lab.

    Very valid point you raised there. If the experimental conditions needed to be very constraining to yield the desired results, then its not a very good model of whats happening in nature. All experiments, to an extent, forfeit being completely natural, so that we can get data that can give us usable answers.

    The experiment I was thinking of in particular was very simple though. They simply grew batches of bacteria in broths extracting samples every so often and freezing them. The variable was the kind of carbohydrate source put into the liquid broths the bacteria were being grown in (e.g. mannose or lactose etc.). So the conditions that were being changed were so simple that you could expect something like that in nature. Again, its not absolute proof of evolution, but its a strong indicator, that lines up well with other lines of evidence.

  • Qcmbr
    Qcmbr

    At the end of the day we really don't have many facts at our fingertips - we have lots of evidences for things but still no absolute knowledge.

    Things to consider:

    Time and space isn't constant - it is a product of where we are and what we are observing and what is observing us and our relationship to the observer.
    Events are not cause and effect on the quantum level - heck events even seem to occur followed by the cause.
    The universe appears to be made of mainly invisible matter but no one can see it.
    No one knows how life started - no one has been able to recreat life. No one has ever seen life spontaneously emerging.
    No one knows what gravity actually is (maye the watchtower was right !! JK)
    No one acually knows what consciousness is.

    There are plenty of good solid ideas about the above, there are plenty of evidences for the theories etc.. but at the end of the day evolutionists are in the same boat ..why?

    1/ We have only been studying data for a few years in relation to the process we are trying to explain (we have tiny fragments of the whole picture - I read once that all the fossils ever found would only cover a few hundred square feet)
    2/ We can never go back in time to say with any finality what actually happened so even with evidence we are still making a judgment based upon current evidence.
    3/ Creationists and anti creationists are pushing a religious agenda - for or against God and evolutionary processes somehow become a proof for or against God - if God exists he never said what process He used and so the creation / anti creation arguement is actually a bit of a daft sideshow (IMHO).
    4/ Evolution cannot be proved because we cannot recreate the exact conditions on earth and then start another experiment for several billion years to see the outcome. This is a one shot wonder and we are inside the experiment.

  • AlmostAtheist
    AlmostAtheist
    At the end of the day we really don't have many facts at our fingertips - we have lots of evidences for things but still no absolute knowledge.

    This is a reasonable statement, we can't really know much of anything. I wasn't kidding about the brain in a jar thing. Everything COULD be an illusion.

    But the "we can't really know" argument isn't applied evenly. The same people that happily accept we landed on the moon and the holocaust really happened and Shakespeare really lived and wrote the plays that bear his name suddenly start using a different form of reasoning when the topic of evolution comes up.

    A well-documented, well-researched, well-supported explanation of how species originated, one that doesn't contradict observable evidence. One that can be shown to be taking place around us at this very moment. This is the idea that gets ridiculed and disbelieved. But the largely-unsupported idea that Shakespeare existed is swallowed without a cough.

    I'm all about being skeptical. But how honest is a person being with himself when he applies one level of skepticism to things he doesn't care about (Shakespeare) and a completely different level when it comes to things he "believes"?

    Dave

  • upside/down
    upside/down

    Dave try this...www.i-cynic.com

    It's a hoot... and now back to the thread...

    u/d

  • Qcmbr
    Qcmbr

    Actually - I don't believe we've been to the moon, there is strong evidence that the plays of Shakespeare were written by Mr Bacon though I will stand 100 % in my conviction that the holocaust was a real event though of all three scenarios I find it the hardest to understand.

  • El blanko
    El blanko

    Abaddon:

    Are you a gay flying nun?

    Yes.

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