Question for evolutionists

[Into the Night]

Do you have faith in the Constitution

No. It simply is.

or the Judicial system

No. It simply is.

or your spouse

No. She simply is.

Do you have faith in gravity

No. It simply is.

or that the sun will come up in the morning?

Yes. I assume the Earth will keep on spinning, just as it did yesterday to create the same phenomenon.

Would they also qualify as a "religion"??

No. While the future sunrise is based on faith (the other items are not). There are no extending arguments from it.

You aren't too bright.

Atheism IS a religion. It is based on faith, and has extending arguments from the initial circular argument.

[Into the Night]

I believe in both Evolution and Creationism;; because how do we know that the physical forms we now have are the end result of God's plan.

Mankind has been "evolving" over the centuries.

A lot of people are taller then they were 100 years ago. Now this could be attributed to better diets, through natural selection, or other variables.

A lot of people are now living longer then they did 100 years ago and this could be attributed to better diets, natural selection, better medication, less dangerous jobs, etc..

Just because we now look the way we do, does not mean that this was the intended goal; just like our ancestors (regardless of how one may think evolution fits in) don't appear to be where we were intended to end up.

I know that this is just a simplified explanation and that others may agree or not; but it's a view and a start; because maybe we did start out as something in a primeval ooze and over millennium, we have only arrived at a half way point.

And all that is fine. You might look at your sig line though. That is known as Pascal's Wager...a fallacy.

[Into the Night]

Oh please Adam and Eve were 90' tall.......

It is unknown if Adam or Eve were 90 feet tall. To me it seems unlikely. Such large life forms would have great difficulty on land.

[Into the Night]

Not necessarily, as the "scientific" approach to the origin of human life is faith based regarding that the "scientific method" will eventually figure it out.

Science isn't a 'method' or a 'procedure'. Science doesn't figure anything out. Science is a set of falsifiable theories.

Assuming that we actually DO synthesize life in a laboratory, is that indicative of the Theory of Abiogenesis or the Theory of Creation?

....while "creationism" is wholly faith based that essentially requires no "proof" beyond what is revealed to the individual upon death or the fabled "end of days" or what is interpreted through theological scriptures and historians.

Where we eventually figure it out. Same difference.

In other words, never the twain shall meet, but sometimes they call (or should call) each other on the phone.

Neither the twain shall meet, because they are mutually exclusive theories. One of them MUST be False.

[kudzu]

No. It simply is.

No. It simply is.

No. She simply is.

No. It simply is.

Yes. I assume the Earth will keep on spinning, just as it did yesterday to create the same phenomenon.

No. While the future sunrise is based on faith (the other items are not). There are no extending arguments from it.


Atheism IS a religion. It is based on faith, and has extending arguments from the initial circular argument.

You're dead wrong.

Atheism is, in the broadest sense, the absence of belief in the existence of deities. Less broadly, atheism is the rejection of belief that any deities exist. In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities.

[USFREEDOM911]

And all that is fine. You might look at your sig line though. That is known as Pascal's Wager...a fallacy.

Not necessarily; because I see it as thus:

If I spend my life believing in God and when I die I find that He doesn't exist, then I've just wasted my time; but if someone spends their life denying God and when they die they find out He does exist, then they've just wasted their life.

[DarthPedant]

Actually, Occam's Razor could be used to justify the existence of a god or gods as well. It can be argued that the diversity of life is simply created by such an individual, as well as the existence of life itself.

Of course. You can misuse Occam’s Razor all you want.

Not even technically. The Theory of Evolution doesn't even mention it. It simply assumes one exists.

Well, it may turn out that something recognizably like evolution by natural selection was involved in the formation of the first replicators from the get go, and some research in abiogenesis is along these lines, so I think my ‘technically’ is defensible, but this is just quibbling. We’re in agreement that abiogenesis is outside the scope of evolutionary theory as it stands.

Not biochemistry at all. There is no 'bio' yet!

You’re free to define words however you want, of course, but declaring that figuring out how to synthesize biochemical molecules isn’t biochemistry like saying synthesizing organic compounds isn’t organic chemistry, when that’s actually a huge part of organic chemistry.

And never will. We can never go back in time to see what actually happened.

I don’t share your conviction that eyewitness testimony is the only way of knowing anything, or that it is even the best way of figuring things out.

Let's say we DO manage to create a living cell purely from nonbiological materials. It replicates, it grows, and does all the functions of any naturally occurring cell. Is this indicative of Abiogenesis, or Creation? It's obviously not a proof of either.

It’s true that demonstrating one way life could have come about through spontaneous processes is not the same as demonstrating that this is the way it did in fact come about, but it would demonstrate that the ID claims that life simply couldn’t have come about through spontaneous processes was in fact wrong, which is really their whole argument. But proof is for mathematics and baking. Science tries to hold all things provisionally, based on the best available evidence.

You can't make something from nothing. You are bringing the Theory of the Big Bang into this, another nonscientific theory, and another religion.

Who said anything about ‘nothing’? I don’t know that ‘nothing’ describes the starting conditions of the Big Bang: I have certainly never asserted any such thing. Nor do I know that you’re correct about your assertion that something can’t come from nothing. You might look at virtual particles, which seem to flit in and out of existence ‘from nothing’, by certain definitions of ‘nothing’.

If you want to deny all the lines of evidence pointing to the Big Bang, and the testable predictions that have come out of that theory, you can do so, but I don’t think you burying your head in the sand is evidence that any particular Cosmological theory is a religion.

True, but not a proof. Natural explanations do not prove the non-existence of any god or gods.

Never said they did. Proof is for mathematics and baking. But they do render prior supernatural explanations superfluous: an unwarranted multiplying of causal agents.

Can you provide a specific example?

Thunder from Thor’s hammer, lightning from Zeus’s spear, hail kept in storehouses by the Queen of Heaven, to pick a biblical example, etc. pick up any decent tome on mythology and you can find dozens more.

Then you acknowledge the fact that atheism is a religion, based on faith, right?

Nope. I have no idea what your definition of faith is, other than that you seem to declare eyewitness testimony as the only thing not faith based. I don’t think your definition of religion as ‘anything with a scrap of faith in it’ is reasonable, either. Nor do I see how an inductive argument to a probability is the same as faith, even if it can’t produce 100% certainty. You have all sorts of assumptions in your definitions I don’t see any reason to accept.

If I get in my car, I have a certain amount of ‘faith’ that other drivers are not going to try to hit me. This is based on their own self-interest, and on the inductive argument that no one has tried to hit me in the past. But I drive defensively in case this is my unlucky day and I encounter some attempted suicide by car.

By your definitions, I don’t see how driving my car isn’t a religion, since it involves ‘faith’ and inductive reasoning. I don’t think this is a useful definition of religion, and I don’t think it reflects how anyone else uses the word ‘religion’.

I don’t know why it’s so important to you that atheism be a religion or faith based. It seems like some desperate need to level the playing field.

[Mott the Hoople]

Simmer down, friend. What disreputable nonsense have I said?

In no way was I attempting to elevate creationism or ID to any scientific status. The question was about incompatibility or accommodation. One could accept the evidence for evolution and still believe in a god just as easily as one could accept the evidence for evolution and be a humanist or be a vegetarian or like sportsball. Evolution doesn’t explore the existence of gods one way or the other, and the question I was responding to was about ‘a form of creationism’, which could include a deistic god that just got the ball rolling outside of the scope of evolution.

But if I were to play angel’s advocate, I might suggest that ID is no less ‘science’ than string theory, which also currently has no plan in place for testing whether or not it is likely to be true (at least last I checked). In that sense both ID and string theory are ‘just a theory’ in the way science enthusiasts cringe when evolution is dismissed as ‘just a theory’. (‘String theory’ also demonstrates that the common rebuttal of narrowly defining what a scientific ‘theory’ means is not carried out consistently, or we’d be talking about String Hypothesis! In the end, theory and law are terms that stick to things for historical/accidental reasons rather than fastidious definition hawking.) In the case of ID, it’s a pretty weak scientific idea because it really boils down to a collection of arguments from personal incredulity: I don’t believe X could have come about by natural means.




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Well that's because is science there is no such thing as "just a theory". You're using the term theory in its colloquial tense and not it's scientific one. That's why Scientist cringe when neophytes do that. When you have reached the theoretical stage in science you are in heady waters supported by factual observations and often, as is the case in evolutionary theory, by laws of nature.

[Mott the Hoople]

Well, you just busted my chops for saying they can coexist ‘in theory’ right after admitting they can coexist ‘philosophically’... methinks you didn’t read my reply very carefully.

But I don’t know why I should accept such an impoverished view of science. Scientists do examine supernatural claims. Look up the scientific studies done on intercessory prayer. No surprise to us, perhaps, but they found intercessory prayer doesn’t achieve any outcomes better than random chance.

If a god interacts with the world, in theory those interactions can be examined scientifically. Had intercessory prayer ‘worked’ better than random chance, we may not have had an understanding of why it worked, but we’d have learned that it was worth further investigation. Just because science hasn’t (yet) figured out how to make a god detector doesn’t mean that such an instrument would be outside of the bounds of science if one could figure out how to make it.

There are some questions we may never be able to answer because of factors of distance or time, or our inability to make sufficient detectors, but I don’t think science need to cede any territory as being in theory beyond its efforts. Science is the study of reality, and if that reality should happen to include gods or multiverses or m-branes of q-bits in our microtubules, we’d want to know that, whether or not practically speaking we ever figure out how to test for those.


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That's correct but I am using "theory" in its strict scientific definition and not it's common usage as you are. They are indeed compatible belief systems but they are not compatible as science. One is science and the other is not.

[kudzu]

It is unknown if Adam or Eve were 90 feet tall. To me it seems unlikely. Such large life forms would have great difficulty on land.

LOL.. Eve's tomb in Jedda is 90 feet tall.. Of course they giggle knowing its legend.

[kudzu]

It is unknown if Adam or Eve were 90 feet tall. To me it seems unlikely. Such large life forms would have great difficulty on land.

LOL.. Eve's tomb in Jedda is 90 feet tall.. Of course they giggle knowing its legend.

[domer76]

So by that definition: Ice skates are supernatural. We don't know why they create a spot of liquid water where they contact the ice. Bumblebees were supernatural until very recently. We didn't know how they could fly. Gravity is supernatural. We don't know what causes it. We can only describe its properties. Life itself is supernatural. We don't know how it came to Earth.

What a desperate grasp at straws!

[domer76]

Science isn't a 'method' or a 'procedure'. Science doesn't figure anything out. Science is a set of falsifiable theories.

Assuming that we actually DO synthesize life in a laboratory, is that indicative of the Theory of Abiogenesis or the Theory of Creation?


Where we eventually figure it out. Same difference.

Neither the twain shall meet, because they are mutually exclusive theories. One of them MUST be False.

Popper is full of shit.

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25322

[Mott the Hoople]

The Theory of Evolution is not a theory of science. It is not falsifiable. We can't go back in time to see what actually happened.

Well as Ronald Reagan once said "There you go again.".

If I were to go digging into a Morrison geological formation and found a nest of fossilized puppies I would have just falsified Evolutionary theory. Sorry pal but you're wrong again. Evolutionary theory is easily falsifiable in principle.

[Mott the Hoople]

No.The Theory of Evolution, which states that present day life evolved from more primitive life, is not falsifiable. We can't go back to see what actually happened. It is not a theory of science. It remains a nonscientific theory...and a religion.

No, that's not what evolutionary theory says. Evolutionary theory is stated as a shift in allele frequency within a population over time. Evolutionary theory predicts that all living systems had common ancestors and a vast body of fact and knowledge backs that observation up. So sorry...you're wrong.