by skyman 49 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
Foreward thanks for your post. I agree with you totally. You made the point well both has holes and both sides need to be aware of this. Onething the Scientist will sooner or later know by provable facts the Creationist will never bend to facts because they have faith.
As for Dannybloem's comment
This is not really what scientists are thinking at the momentYou need to do a Google search. Maybe not all of the scientist are thinking this but A LOT ARE
And of course, somewheres down the road the facts will prove one or the other right.
It is currently immpossible for them to produce anything more than "I believe" because there just isn't anything. Now this isn't to say a giant horny unicorn won't rampage california for never believing in him, or agents killing us to keep the secret quiet, but for right now it just it's unfalsifiable. It has been unfalsifiable since the beginning thoughts of God, so a logical step past this way of thinking is to get over it already. There has been nothing more than wishful thinking and vague explanations that out of God-thought and it seems to be more of stubornness and emotion than actual facts. This is reliance on emotion over rational facts is a major contributer to the Us vs. Them attitude that has caused so much heart ache. It is damaging to human advancement to hold on to something that hasn't been anything more than text and emotions rather than observing and applying something that has learned and advanced since the beginning of mankind.
But I don't blame humanity for going into this form of thinking. It was practically inevtiable. We are bound by evolutionary intentions which are formed by natures blind (yet forceful) directions. Won't believe how animalistic our emotions are, from love (reproduction) to hate (Needing an idealogy or a group to be a part of and an external idea or group to ensure their survival over the opposers). I feel personally that we have come to a time that we can identify these simplistic ideals of ours and have the ability to overcome them. It's just denying humanity not to imo.
There is no better explanation to the question of who created God other than he never was created he has always been. However, this always creates an opposing viewpoint that is just as valid (If not moreso) than their baseless claim. Why can't nature and the universe and the collection of multi verses always be? Why do they need a creator? It's actually more logical for a mindless force to always exist rather than an entity that has strict human intentions to be the leading force for a universe that is devoid of human thought except one small miniscule place that is litterally nothing compared to the infinite cosmos.
Now we are talking thanks.
Hello foreward,
I appreciated your post. I wanted to respond to a couple points, not to nitpick, but hopefully to clarify or add footnotes to what you wrote.
It is stupid for creationists to deny that species can adapt. ; We as humans adapt everyday to changes in our world, so yes evolution does exist and I think that if god exists and created us, he did this ;with this possibility of change, sometimes necessary to survival.
I'm sure you're probably aware of this, but just as a footnote for any nascent evolution students out there, adaptation by an individual to changing circumstances is very, very different from biological adaptation. So technically, the fact that you and I can "adapt" to a new environment has nothing to do with evolution. Biological adaption means that the physical organism actually changes (across generational lines - not within an individual).
My only argument for creation is simply the intelligence which seems to exist behind everything
It is true that many things seem to indicate intelligence, inasfar as they seem like things we might design given the same engineering problem. But nature is very large and very diverse, and there are many examples that strike as as weird, wrong, or even cruel. Surely flies whose young hatch inside the mother, devouring her to death, represent a strange and twisted mind, if indeed one was involved in the design process.
To me, it makes better sense to say that if an intelligent mind was involved, it was in setting up the framework of life, of which evolution is one basic design principle.
No one has a leg to stand on. Proofs are rare. It's just hard for me to believe it all came out of chance.
I just want to remark that chance is only one half of the evolution equation. It is true that the present diversity of life could never have come about by chance. But that is not what evolution is proposing. We use "chance" to describe the genetic changes that happen, which we cannot predict, seemingly at random.They very well may be controlled by very definite rules which, if completely known, would allow us to predict them. But at any rate, that point aside, this so-called chance provides the genetic diversity from generation to generation, but the exact opposite of chance, namely the cold, hard fist of reality, does the selecting.
Think of it as a two-part machine. One part spews out widgets of varying shapes and sizes. The other part tries them out and throws away everything that doesn't work well enough.
Anyway, like I said, I just wanted to add a few points for any beginning evolution students out there who might not know these things yet.
SNG
skyman and seattle,
Can't get too technical here, actually my earlier post is about as technical as I can get in the evolution dept...LOL.. sorry.
Just wanted to add that what I meant when I said
We as humans adapt everyday to changes in our world, so yes evolution does exist
included the assumption which you wrote
Biological adaption means that the physical organism actually changes (across generational lines - not within an individual
We are in constant movement or evolution. Individually, when we live things our genetic composition is altered in the process and can be passed on to future generations. It might not be perceivable, but I think it happens. This probably affects character traits more than anything, but it's still in the realm of evolution.
I do agree with your clarifications, and yes nature sometimes has a twisted mind, the reason why I never take a man's word as gospel, especially men who claim to speak for god.
mark
Individually, when we live things our genetic composition is altered in the process and can be passed on to future generations. It might not be perceivable, but I think it happens.
Actually, this is a really critical point. Nothing that you do in your life, short of intentional genetic manipulation or damage, changes your genes. So, for example, if you cut your finger off, your children are not born with a missing finger. Likewise, if you change your tastes, your new tastes are not passed onto your children, although the genetic predisposition that originally spurred you to change would presumably be passed to them as well. But as far as we know, none of the choices you make in your life cause changes to your genome. So unfortunately, you cannot "help" evolution to occur in a particular direction.
Interestingly, the concept of evoultion that you are describing is almost exactly the same as Lamarckism. From wikipedia:
Lamarck's own theory of evolution was in fact based on the idea that individuals adapt during their own lifetimes and transmit traits they acquire to their offspring. Offspring then adapt from where the parents left off, enabling evolution to advance. As a mechanism for adaptation, Lamarck proposed that individuals increased specific capabilities by exercising them, while losing others through disuse. While this conception of evolution did not originate wholly with Lamarck, he has come to personify pre- Darwinian ideas about biological evolution, now called Lamarckism.
[Edited to add the following paragraph]
So, in Lamarck's world, giraffes have long necks because they wanted to reach the leaves at the top of the trees. Actual effortrs of individuals, he believed, were passed on to offspring. In Darwin's world, we know that this is not the case. Giraffes have long necks because the ones with progressively longer necks were favored by the environment over their short-necked peers, and so on. To put this all in context, evolution could conceivably happen through many different mechanisms, Lamarckism being one possibility. That's why Darwin's theory is called evolution by natural selection. As it turns out, there is no evidence whatsoever for Lamarckism, and bountiful evidence for Darwinism.
Hope that helps!
SNG
Evolutionary theory is focused on populations, not individual organisms. The genetic variability that is the bread and butter of evolutionary change is a shared property of breeding population and the physical morphology of "average" individual members of a population may change over time as certain variants become more common or less common in a population. Adaptation is a process by which a population (over successive generations, through natural selection) achieves better success in survivability and reproduction in a changed or new ecological context. A new population that splits off from the general gene pool, which has as its founding members atypical members of the original gene pool, and which must adapt to a new ecology which favors some of these atypical traits, will inevitably drift to a different morphology over time -- especially since the two populations do not interbreed (thereby allowing the new population to better approximate the source population). Thus they are split and develop on their own trajectories. Now, should members of these populations ever be brought together again and if there is a reproductive barrier (e.g. if they cannot interbreed), then the populations are permanently independent from each other and should be recognized as seperate species. Voila, speciation has occurred. That is the essence of evolution in a nutshell.
foreword wrote
:::No one has a leg to stand on. Proofs are rare. It's just hard for me to believe it all came out of chance.
SNG replied:
::I just want to remark that chance is only one half of the evolution equation. It is true that the present diversity of life could never have come about by chance. But that is not what evolution is proposing. We use "chance" to describe the genetic changes that happen, which we cannot predict, seemingly at random.They very well may be controlled by very definite rules which, if completely known, would allow us to predict them. But at any rate, that point aside, this so-called chance provides the genetic diversity from generation to generation, but the exact opposite of chance, namely the cold, hard fist of reality, does the selecting.
You see, SNG, I only told you yesterday on the GUID thread it's useful to learn something about random processes and probability distributions in Nature to refute the randomness fallacy, and here we go - you have to deal with it again ;-).
foreword,
1)
SNG, has already touched upon the problem you've raised, but be careful when you talk about purely random processes in the Universe. It's ok when you say the movement of gas particles is largely random. But most processes described by the theory of evolution are not that random. They have specific probability distributions. In other words, there is only a certain limited amount of randomness involved. The border between pure randomness (total enthropy) and strict rules is a fuzzy one. Most phenomena have both characteristics but probability distribution rules can nevertheless be viewed as fuzzy rules.
For instance you could claim that the frequency of phone calls to a big office is a random process, therefore you'd find it difficult to believe that there is some pattern to them. But it's interesting to know that phone calls frequencies are well modelled by the Poisson distribution. So there you go - you have a statistical rule. It may not be fully deterministic - you cannot say that the exact time of the next call, but you can say how probable it is that the next call will be within the next minute. And it's not necessarily 50%-50% probability. Sometimes it is 99%. Samelogic can be applied to some biological phenomena.
2) ::It's just hard for me to believe it all came out of chance.
No wonder. You are a human. "Making sense" and beliveing is one of your fundamental surviving techniques. Ever wondered why we have all those "constellations" of stars named after divine heros with all the stories attached to them?
Pole
yes randomness is a funny thing
The movement of gas molecules is random. This randomness can be used as a start and from this you can find the laws of thermodynamics.
because of this randomness air will flow into a vacuum container when opened, and the flow can be calculated. But is is just based on randomness.
In the evolution process it may be possible to calculate some things also, but the problem here is that the influences, then number of external parameters in the formulas are to large.
Danny
