You are much more polite, I give you that.

But, what are you talking about?



KT

KT wrote:
Might want to check the odds on that one...

Odds are calculated using Probability theory. We don't have enough data to accurately predict the chances of life forming. So saying the odds are high or low is nonsupportable.

Same is true of evolution...does that stop ya'll from asserting it?

That outer space is full of wizzing debris from other galaxies and beyond, and there have been an enormouse amount of astreroid hits witnesses in a relatively short amount of time.
The five(7?) massive strikes on Jupiter for example, and the one which created the gulf of mexico around the time of dinosaur by-bye time.

That is, if one believes in dinosaurs and science or even a round earth....
Good thing Einstein and Teller didn't live in the times of Copericus and Galileo.

More like you don't have a computer powerful enough to spit out the number:p

Why don't you tell us the odds of all the right the proteins coming together to form a simple cell...then surviving somehow.

I say it's a number too large to comprehend.
One that is said by statisticians as *never* happening.


KT

Oh, and somehow plants have to form too.

Anybody ever reproduce photosynthesis in the lab yet?

KT

This guy seems to think the odds are a bit beyond what I proposed...

"Roger Penrose, a famous British mathematician and a close friend of Stephen Hawking, wondered about this question and tried to calculate the probability. Including what he considered to be all variables required for human beings to exist and live on a planet such as ours, he computed the probability of this environment occurring among all the possible results of the Big Bang.

According to Penrose, the odds against such an occurrence were on the order of 10^10^123 to 1."

http://www.creationofuniverse.com/html/equilibrium03.html


Stupid liberals.

Mul,

I went in the website you linked, and it constantly mentions Allah rather than God:

"20th-century science has come up with categorical evidence that the universe was created by Allah.", etc...

I thought that was quite funny for a neocon to acknowledge Allah...

Aurel

KT, read this. Please.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/abioprob.html

In fact, you need to spend some serious time on the entire talk origins web site. You might not agree with what's there, but at least you'll have a better understanding of what the mainstream scientific community thinks.

Mul and Snowman - read this one:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-misconceptions.html

Mike

Again and again the exception instead of the mainstream scienctific position is quoted to establish veracity. These people are the unsupported fringe in scientific circles. A statician has, calculated the chances (Including what he considered to be all variables required for human beings to exist and live on a planet such as ours), have you read any of the peer review comments or critiques? I'll bet you didn't! None of his peers have written any supporting appraisals. Biologists have yet to publish a complete set of requirements for life, and yet this guy knows them all already. Amazing.

All total bs. These are not our words against evolution, they are the words of an evoloutionist. And they are a total misrepresentation of the words of people like Mul and me.

Why don't you come up with someone that is intelligent, to support your arguements?

Why is there so much ego on both sides of this argument? Why must one side be wrong? Why can we not discuss generally, what we believe individually, in a respectful , academic like climate?

I really do not care which side is correct. I would however enjoy an intellectual, unemotional exchange.

flat
You will find neither an intellectual or unemotional exchange in a thread about religion or politics since answers are formulated before the question has been even read.

It is unfortunate, really.......

actually I've learned some things about the bible as posted by some of the more thoughtful writers here But have been equally bemused by others, and horrified by the misapplication of well-accepted scientific theories. But it all is part of the process.

As for unemotional, I don't think you can get that. This is a topic that is near and dear to people's hearts on both sides. The other thread on "is there god, yes or now" is about as close as you can get to a level-headed discussion.

Mr Physics, go look at a biology 101 textbook. Human embryos are nearly identical to fish embryos, down to the gills. "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny."


Evolution is selective breeding over time (geological, Grand Canyon forming time) where traits desirable in a particular environment win out and are passed along. That's how you go from a wolf in the wild to a sled dog in Alaska to a yappy toy dog in Beverly Hills. Why is this so hard to believe?

Or did god create the yappy dogs? Were they on the ark?

I hate yappy dogs.

Does that make me religious, or anti-religious?

Hello I am back SmileWavy what did I miss?

anyhoo, not mine but a good read;

Ten Things to Remember
about Evolution & Creationism
by Kelly Graves

Sometimes, you can lose sight of simple, evident truths. But no matter what school boards might say or the amount of attention the media give to creationist beliefs,
some things are important to remember.

1 Remember what the two sides want. Creationists — even in the guise of intelligent design, even when they use scientific language — want to prove that a supernatural deity is behind all of existence.

Evolutionists want to use rigorous logical methods to generate theories that fit facts. Most will do this even if their personal opinions have to change.

If a creationist were to offer irrefutable scientific proof that a Judeo-Christian anthropomorphic personification were the only mechanism for species change, evolutionists would have to change their theories to accommodate this proof. (This would have to be a whopper of a proof!)

If an evolutionist were to offer irrefutable proof that life is an unavoidable and expected consequence of the nature of physical reality, and proof that life requires neither intervention nor design, most creationists would still believe in creation. (Many would argue this is the case today.)

2 Creationism is in retreat. Every week, new scientific discoveries are published in peer-reviewed journals. These discoveries reinforce or refine the theory of evolution and negate the idea of created life. This has been the case for five generations.

Remember that the amount of media attention an idea gets is not a measure of its validity. Keep your eye on the real debate, not the ratings-driven coverage in the popular media.

In this debate, creationists will point to some hard-to-explain biological fact as the ‘final proof’ that a deity is necessary because no imaginable mechanism could cause such a complex feature. But, inevitably, the feature is explained by evolution. So creationists step back, point to some smaller, less-obvious, more-complex feature as being the real final proof.

Then the process repeats itself. This has been the case for five generations.

3 Intelligent design is a public relations campaign. ID is not a scientific theory. It’s a religious movement with good press.

It did not start as an honest attempt to explain the unexplainable.

It did not start as a scientific movement.

It started when people who believed in the supernatural needed to defend their beliefs.

It is a retrenchment position in defense of an ancient superstition, and it operates by appealing to uncertainty and to culturally-induced elements of superstition in all of us.

4 Intelligent design avoids peer review. Creationists generally do not put forth their claims for scientific peer review. They can’t: the idea of divine creation is not promoted by a single mainstream scientific group.

Tens of thousands of scientists believe evolution is the best explanation for life. Only a tiny handful of scientists believe intelligent design is a viable notion, but (with the help of other superstitious people) they make a lot of noise.

Individual scientists (some of of high repute) may support intelligent design, but they are few in number, and sacrifice the esteem of their peers when they do so.

Similarly, a few individual scientists (some of high repute) believe in anti-gravity devices, time machines, perpetual motion, yogic levitation and similar things. Revealingly, these individuals also avoid peer review on these topics.

When you see respected figures who endorse creation, remember that the real lesson is about personal opinions, and how they can be expected to vary statistically within a large population. Just as some person somewhere always wins the lottery, some scientist somewhere supports every invalid idea.

5 If life was designed, an idiot did it. This is, of course, an exaggeration, but it serves to make a point: for every example of what looks like beautiful design, you can find dozens more examples of very poor design.

The human eyeball is an engineering mess. Heart attacks and cancer exist because they occur principally after we have passed on our genes and so these problems are not selected out. Yet these and countless other inefficiencies could be easily eliminated by a moderately-intelligent designer. The designer didn’t eliminate them, so either the designer has unknowable motives, or the designer doesn’t exist.

If the designer has unknowable motives, then you can’t use designer motives to argue for the designer’s existence (see number 6).

This should not diminish our wonder at the marvel of life, but rather increase it. Survival is the imperative, and species will find their ways to it through astonishing paths.

6 Creationism is not falsifiable. Evolutionary theory is. Although proponents of creation certainly offer scientific-sounding predictions, these predictions ultimately reveal a misunderstanding of the scientific method and of what falisfiability is. And, almost universally, the predictions are based on a-priori assumptions about what a designer ‘would do’ (see number 7). This is the event horizon of a black hole of anthropocentrism that admits all kinds of specious arguments (for only one example, see number 8).

Some student creationists argue that industrial-design principles are found in nature, thereby proving that evolution is invalid. Among their other failings, they confuse falseness with falsifiability.

The root of falsifiability is the statement: “If X is true, then my theory is proven wrong.”

Creationists can not make this statement. They can never admit their creator does not exist. When X is true, creationists must retreat to Y, or to Z, or to anything that prevents them from admitting that no creator is necessary. They do not have a falsifiable theory: they have ‘faith’.

7 Debates within evolution do not invalidate evolution. Yes, evolutionary scientists often argue. But that very argument is the engine that drives the development of understanding. Without informed debate, progress would stop — not just in biology, but in every field of human endeavor. So just because Richard Dawkins takes the occasional swipe at the ideas of Stephen Jay Gould doesn’t mean the theory of evolution falls apart.

Scientists embrace the arguments, and are never happier than when contradictions arise in a theory, because they know truth lurks behind the contradictions.

Can some new idea invalidate evolution? Yes, of course. It’s only a theory.

But as theories go, it’s a persistent one. Five generations of scientists have contributed to it, developed it, and refined it. Their results have been checked again and again and again.

Something could knock evolution off its hard-won perch, but it would have to be big, radical, well-documented … something truly revolutionary.

8 If life has been created, we have a big problem. Creationists maintain that inexplicable complexity can invalidate a theory.

But a god — who by definition must be infinite in every attribute — would be not only irreducibly complex, but inexplicably complex. A god would be far more complex than an eyeball or a mechanism for clotting blood.

Creationism doesn’t explain complexity. It just pushes it out to where we don’t have to worry about it.

But creationism creates all kinds of other problems. Where is this god? Where did it come from? If the universe is finite, how can it contain an infinite being? If the being is outside the universe, then where is it? Do other infinite beings exist?

A little organic complexity is much easier to explain than an infinitely complex extra-universal entity.

cont

9 Creationism avoids the issue of mechanism. If evolution holds, we know roughly how it works. The mechanisms by which life arises are inherent in the theory.
If creationism holds, we still don’t know how anything happened, except that we can say, “Some god did it”. (Let’s not even go close to the question of whose god this might be.) You can’t cheat by disallowing the mechanisms of evolutionary theory, only to give the steering wheel of those mechanisms over to some unseen entity. Either those mechanisms work or they don’t.

Concede for a moment that a creator exists. Point to any complex biological feature, and ask how it came into existence. If it did not arise through natural pressures on slowly-changing populations (which are obviously insufficient to cause change), then how did it come about? Did mammary glands just pop onto the torsos of the first female mammals? For that matter, did the mammal itself just pop into existence? Did some old being sit down with clay, make a man, and breathe life into it?

You can see how rapidly this gets ridiculous. Once you stipulate design, you must stipulate a mechanism to effect that design, even if that mechanism is spontaneous appearance through mystic intervention.

Where is this mechanism?

10 Remember you can’t have both worlds. What biological features of species are complex enough to warrant design?

If one feature in a species has been designed, then why not a slightly-less-complex feature? And an even slightly-less-complex feature? This is almost proof by induction: if one very complex feature has been designed, it follows that all features must have been, no matter how simple.

(Just a slightly hyperbolic aside: you have to wonder where it would stop. If differences between species must be designed, then so too must differences between individuals. One could as well argue that god has gone to the trouble of giving you lots of hair, while your wife’s former high-school boyfriend is now bald by divine design. I don’t know how many people believe this sort of thing, but I do know quite a few of them personally. Some of them I don’t know run countries.)

Directed change would mean all observations that point towards gradual biological change are false. It would mean that the hand of god is the only means by which change could take place. See number 9.

Above all, remember this …

Creationism is a truly exceptional claim, staggering in its import. It cannot be proven by someone who says, ‘I see something I don’t understand, therefore an infinite being must exist.’ That only demonstrates the limitations of human understanding.

In fact, creationists should be able to offer stupendous, irrefutable proofs.

They can’t.

Zuffen;
2 Thoughts...

1) First the big issue that I have with the "creationists". I agree that many "Creationists" don't seem to know much about science and argue pretty unreasonable points. Since they do make the wilder claims within the Christian community, they also tend to get more press which is unfortunate. I went to listen to person make what would be widely considered to be a "creationist" presentation at my church and walked out during the intermission because of many of the very issues that you mention. (Incidentally, it was based on the idea that certain fossils have been found that travel vertically through the different strata -- thus showing that the different strata were put down at one time -- ie. during a great flood. If anyone knows anything about this subject pro or con, I be interested in seeing it.) It didn't dim in the least though my belief that God created the Universe. It just also confirmed in my mind that within that Universe there are people (both believers and non-believers) who don't seem to know how to use the senses that God gave them to good affect.

2) The big issue that I have with the evolutionists (including the pieces that you quoted above) is that they seem to spend far more lines on "negative debating" what they claim to be the evolutionists view rather then focusing on addressing any questions posed about their own position. Kind of like when politicians running for office spend more time telling you stupid their opponents views are rather then putting forward in a strong fashion their own agenda.

Just my $0.02...

Jluetjen,

good points and it is good to have more civil people in here again....

point number 1) you are not like most people when it comes to this issue as most (assumption) probably stuck around and soaked in what was being said at your church. The issue with the great flood or lack there of is interesting, and can be debated but does little in to prove one side or the other correct. My personal feeling is that the creationist argument is based solely on proving the bible to be correct and thus used as a scientific tool.

Point two) can you clarify what you mean by "negative debating" I can tell you science has been putting forth its ideas and agendas out for the public, science has the option of being found incorrect we just want to see your evidence and testing methods. however just like in this forum some people (on both sides) will espose that that view is stupid and name call etc...

The article was a little acidic but in light of recent attacks on the scientific community by creationists as of late I can see why the tone was a little hostile.