Evolution v Creation
Offline That is the logical fallacy of the false choice. If evolution were completly and totally disproved and rejected tomorrow that would not confirm creation. Creation has been discarded and rejected in favor of evolution. If evolution is wrong it does not make creation correct. <P>
As for intelligent design, I would like to meet the idiot who designed the human eye when most humans need corrective lens.
<P>
And the idiot who designed the human back has never had to live with mine.
<P>
If life is an example of intelligent design, it must have been designed by an apprentice who washed out after this, his first attempt at design.
Jews stole the land. The owners want it back. That is all anyone needs to know about Israel. That is all there is to know about Israel.
- Login to post comments
Evolution is a fact. But you are right in that even if it were debunked it would not make godsperm real or surviving rigor mortis real.
This is just desperate theists retrofiting after the fact after rational people have put reality to them and their own egos won't allow them to consider if they are wrong, which they are.
Unfortunately this seems to be part of human nature. Dawkin's moth would rather fly into the false placebo of the lightbulb, than see that the moon is what it should really be guiding itself by.
"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."Obama
Check out my poetry here on Rational Responders Like my poetry thread on Facebook under Brian James Rational Poet, @Brianrrs37 on Twitter and my blog at www.brianjamesrationalpoet.blog
Yep. False dichotomy indeed. As brian mentioned, evolution is fact, but supposing for the sake of philosophical discourse that it were disproven, there are a couple of things to consider:
1) The very act of disproving evolution would provide evidence for how life got here. That is, there would have to be some monumental scientific discovery, probably the single largest scientific breakthrough in the history of man, for evolution to be overturned. That kind of discovery would necessarily give us information which we could use to determine how life got here. Whatever the answer turned out to be, we'd at least be started down the path to its discovery.
2) As you mention, disproving one possibility does not prove another possibility unless there are really only two possibilities. With life, there is simply no way to reduce it to an either/or proposition. Maybe life is a culture that is being actively manipulated by space aliens from another universe. If evolution were to be disproven, space aliens would be at least as likely as the Christian god, if not more. At least there are mathematical theories about how other universes could exist.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism
Atheism Books.
Not to mention the false dichotomy between Theism and evolution.
This is true - evolution doesn't strictly contradict Theism in general, altho there it does contradict a literal reading of the Old Testament Bible.
The main problem, as I understand it, is that it severely weakened what had been one of the strongest arguments for a God, by showing that 'design' does not require a designer.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
Previous paradigms or models of science have been challenged and disproved in the past, like the one time univerally held theory that the earth was flat.
Evolution was the scientific paradigm of the 20th century. So it's to be expected that most scientists accepted it.
But it's all political now. Most scientists today would lose their jobs if they didn't fit into the mold of certain politcal beaurocrats. I know of one Evolution teacher at Stanford Univerity who was suspended because he became convinced of creation after watching the video presentation"ORIGINS" by A. E. Wilder Smith.
"Nature" (1997 issue), stated that of the top 1,000 American scientists, 39% of then denied or questioned Evolution. And that was 11 years ago. I suspect the numbers are even higher now. But as I said, its all political and control.
The more we learn about biology, chemistry, astronomy, neuro-science, etc, the more we realize that Evolution is impossible. Evolution as a scientific paradigm, is dying. It is being replaced. The next paradigm will be "Creationism," but unfortunattly, the credit will go to extra-terrestrials, not God.
The Devil always wants to take the credit away from God.
39%? That sounds like a bullshit number to me.
I found this.
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/news/file002.html
And this.
http://ncseweb.org/rncse/18/2/do-scientists-really-reject-god
But I was unable to find the one you're referring to.
Wow, you really have no understanding of science do you?
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
Actually, evolution was first formalized in the 19th century, but yes, modern evolutionary biology (which is grounded in the Neo-Darwinian synthesis, largely as a result of discoveries after Darwin) was formalized in the 30s. However, today, evolutionary biology is for the most part an arm of molecular biology (which is what I do). This is to be expected since the it is the unifying principle behind all biological life and is therefore heavily incoroporated into the processes of genetic analysis. Without it, the entire discipline would not be possible. A lot of these organisms are very hard to study in the laboratory. Today, molecular biology (which is the largest and most productive arm of the discipline) is dependent on evolutionary biology. It is more important now (in the 21st century) than it ever was.
This is my discipline. I can testify to the fact that we employ evolution all the time in biological research. We would never get anything done in molecular biology or in genetics and proteomics without employing evolution. It's not going anywhere. Biology is the most tightly unified discipline of any of the three major arms of science. Genomics has become very integrated with cellular and molecular biology. We no longer talk just about genes, we talk about the mRNA and rRNA products (transcriptomics), the protein components that result (proteomics) and the epigenetic inheritance that results from the activation and inactivation of certain genes(epigenomics) and the molecular feedback loops occurring in the cell as a result (cellular metabolomics). Historically (“historically” in molecular biology means “in the last 10 years” ) genomic analysis has used a combination of protein threading analysis and homologous analysis to analyze the structure and function of genes for organisms that would otherwise be hard to study in the lab. As cytology becomes heavily integrated into genomics, more and more of molecular biology will need to directly refer to evolutionary biology (there's no other way to accomplish research). As study of embryogenesis and developmental biology becomes more heavily integrated into molecular biology and proteomics, it too will need to refer directly to molecular evolution. Biology is the most tightly integrated of the three major arms of scientific inquiry, and as more and more of it becomes integrated, students of biology will need to know more and more about evolution. Students of molecular biology and genomics/epigenomics certainly need to know about molecular evolution and homologous analysis if they want to accomplish any meaningful research. To put it another way, as biology becomes more tightly integrated, in about 20 years essentially every journal article dealing with any arm of molecular or developmental biology will refer directly to evolutionary principles and analytical techniques. The only way to untangle evolution and biology is to destroy the entire discipline of biology. When I first studied this subject, I needed to know just as much about evolutionary biology as evolutionary biologists do. That will be more true for students today.
You have a citation for that? Because I have every journal of Nature going back before 1997. I can find it, unless you are lying. But I sure as hell do not intend to sift through every journal published in 1997. So find it.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism