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A Debate of Evolutionism vs. Creationism
- Thread starter Luxormaniac
- Start date
lol, I remember that. I woke up brother once because I was laughing so hard at the whole "peanut butter disproves evolution" concept.
Well obviously Arceus created Pokemon and my Bulbasaur evolved just the other day so I'd say they both exist.
I'm glad to see some resistance has developed in this topic, but the only point that really made me second guess myself is the "How can you be 100% sure" argument. Science has more ground to stand on, being an imposing structure built on fact and reinforced with further advancement whereas religion is a crumbling sanctuary marked as "Holy ground" That nobody can have permission for a permit to demolish. The fact that we're understanding more about our world and finding our own answers is enough for me to believe that Creationism is entirely off the mark here.
And you've got faith that the evidence has been interpreted correctly. All science is based upon faith to an extent, much of what was considered indisputable scientific fact a century or two ago is hogwash today.
Also, I'm not trying to discredit evolution theorymon, simply stating the obvious. Evolution is a theory, and will likely always remain a theory. It's the best theory we have for how we came about, but just because it appears to be the best idea we've got doesn't mean it's guaranteed to be the correct one.
dear god have you thought about writing a book (or even reading one)..
I believe in evolution. To an extent. It seems like a reasonable way to explain the world, so it's something I am comfortable subscribing to.
There is no God.
Faith doesn't mean "believing in something that isn't fact". Brain put it more eloquently than I could have in the post I linked to earlier:
http://www.smogon.com/forums/showpos...1&postcount=75
Read his response to Mr. Goodbar for why it takes faith to believe that God is trying to trick us or our senses are deceiving us (or rather, me, because you would be part of the illusion too), but it's not faith to "trust" the evidence and assume nothing other than what we sense.
Brain said:
Why is this topic even open? If we're going to debate whether or not the theory of evolution is correct, we might as well start topics on whether or not it's actually the tooth fairy placing money under your pillow. The evidence is overwhelmingly against creationism, and to claim otherwise in the face of such evidence makes you willfully ignorant and/or a troll.
This is a false statement, at least on the micro level. Scientists have taken animals with a short lifespan (such as flies) and put them into different groups. After a few generations of being in different groups, the flies will refuse to breed with those from the other groups, indicating speciation.
Fishin said:
This is a false statement, at least on the micro level. Scientists have taken animals with a short lifespan (such as flies) and put them into different groups. After a few generations of being in different groups, the flies will refuse to breed with those from the other groups, indicating speciation.
If this is the case, we can't say anything definitive about the dinosaurs, our moon, or the history of the Earth itself, since, like evolution, they all fall under a branch of historical science.
Creationism and evolution can coexist if you believe that God created humans and animals but allowed those animals to change over time. One doesn't have to be proven over the other. This seems more like a God exists vs. God doesn't exist thread. I am glad however that I know that a force beyond our physical universe exists and I call it God. I have had an experience with a ghost and I have a friend who can see auras and who had psychic abilities as a child. She has also talked to a ghost. These things reinforce my belief that mankind has only reached the tip of the iceberg in what we know. Have you ever heard of the Miracle at Fatima? What do you think of that? How could the big bang exist without a cause? I know God could exist without a cause since cause and effect is a rule that can only be applied to our physical universe. Since God is not physical he can override this rule. I guess we'll all find out someday when we die what this universe is really all about (unless reincarnation is true and we keep being reincarnated.)
May the Force be with you.
May the Force be with you.
What leads you to believe that the period (if you can call it that) prior to the big bang (where your "cause" supposedly came from) was like our physical universe at all?
It wasn't an argument; it was a factual statement. He is holding on to an outdated belief, an outdated mode of thought. Humanity has moved on and it is time he follows. Creationism is as dead to science as logical positivism is to philosophy. The debate was settled decades ago. Unless he has new arguments to offer in support for his position that have not already been discussed and destroyed ad nauseam, there is simply no debate to be had.
I will spare a few words on method, however, and on why this debate should not exist. (This is mainly directed at those who base their creationism on the Judeo-Christian scriptures; "intelligent design" is another issue, although most if not all of its advocates are biblical creationists hiding under its vagueness.) Attempting to argue for creationism (i.e., special creation, not simply a belief in a creator God) from a literal interpretation of 4000-year-old religious texts strips them of their context. You are trying to place on these documents an interpretation based on modern society, a society that has seen a multiplicity of breakthroughs in literary, scientific, religious, and philosophical style since those books were written. Do yourself and your religion a favor and stop applying it in ways for which it was never intended; stop forcing modern contexts onto premodern texts. You are perfectly willing to do this with other religious books (e.g., the Iliad and Odyssey), yet cling violently to malformed understandings of the Biblical canon. In doing so you commit a grave disservice to your religion and betray an ignorance of intellectual history. Christian apologetics died with Søren Kierkegaard, special creation with Charles Darwin; it is time to move on.
It seems the majority of people here are evolutionists and while I have not read through all the posts, it seems like most people believe that this is a "debate" over beliefs and not facts, so here is a thought to imagine:
An obviously hypothetical scenario: You are the only human being on the planet, nothing even remotely resembliing your intelligence has ever walked the planet. One day, you decide to take a walk and on your trip you find a watch. You cannot recall ever making this watch and no animanl has the mental capacity even close to the level needed to build said watch. Obviously the only possible explanation is that the watch came into existence of its own accord.
By now your probably laughing at me and saying "What a crackpot". But if we are able to assume that living beings that are infinitely more complex than this watch came into existence without the influence of some greater being, through random mutations that 99.9% of the time are harmful rather than beneficial, who are we to say the watch formation didn't happen of its own accord.
An obviously hypothetical scenario: You are the only human being on the planet, nothing even remotely resembliing your intelligence has ever walked the planet. One day, you decide to take a walk and on your trip you find a watch. You cannot recall ever making this watch and no animanl has the mental capacity even close to the level needed to build said watch. Obviously the only possible explanation is that the watch came into existence of its own accord.
By now your probably laughing at me and saying "What a crackpot". But if we are able to assume that living beings that are infinitely more complex than this watch came into existence without the influence of some greater being, through random mutations that 99.9% of the time are harmful rather than beneficial, who are we to say the watch formation didn't happen of its own accord.
I'm not quite ready to enter the debate, but I'm just wondering what the hypothetical chances of abiogenesis ("something from nothing") are compared to creationism ("intelligent design" by a "creator God"). Both sides of the spectrum use the "well, the chances of your idea are so ridiculously small that my idea is much more plausible" argument (which is a fallacy either way), but both sides are also hard pressed to present their numbers.
Which is why I'm asking (and yes I know the best numbers either side can get are purely speculation; there is no way for accounting for every factor that can go into the calculations).
And X-Act came up with a proof proving God exists iirc (though I don't think he posted it), which I'd like to see if possible.
Which is why I'm asking (and yes I know the best numbers either side can get are purely speculation; there is no way for accounting for every factor that can go into the calculations).
And X-Act came up with a proof proving God exists iirc (though I don't think he posted it), which I'd like to see if possible.
Complexity does not imply design, nor are people created 'perfectly', as the watch in your argument apparently is. It doesn't prove the existence of God, certainly not a Christian one - if there was a creator, who's to say that it's not dead?
This is a prime example of the old, long debunked arguments that I was referring to. Paley's analogy, in all its various iterations, fails many times over.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmaker_analogy#Criticism
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CI/CI101.html
http://www.update.uu.se/~fbendz/nogod/watchmak.htm
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CF/CF002.html
http://angusjohn.newsvine.com/_news/2008/08/29/1802561-a-refutation-of-the-watchmaker-analogy
and so on...
Read Heidegger.
Also, abiogenesis does not claim "something comes from nothing". That is a strawman.
"God is dead" - Nietzsche.
I'd like to remind you that I never claimed that this proved the existence of any God. I never even said if I believed in creationism. I just find evolution has too many flaws, for people to consider it a fact.
The argument is that because people disagree, he is therefore wrong. Ideas stand on their own.
There are many differences between this an the theory of evolution.
The main difference is that the watch isn't a self-replicating system. No parts of it are self-replicating. A biotic organism is generally self-replicating, and is made up of smaller self-replicating parts. You don't assume maximum complexity from the start, as Paley's analogy would imply. Advanced biotic organisms came from simpler organisms. Eventually, you get down to things simple enough to justifiably say "It's highly likely that this could arise due to chance alone.". A watch has no such reducible complexity.
Plus, the quote is "God is dead - we have killed him with our science". Nietzsche was saying that modern science has eliminated the need for a god, because we can explain the origin of species and the origin of the universe and so on without reference to supernatural forces.
Also, dear Eris, someone brought up Paley's Watch? That argument was considered crap even in Darwin's time. What next, "What use is half an eye?"?
BAM_UR_DEAD, if you go back through the thread there are a number of links to talk.origins articles on abiogenesis. Some of them present ways it could have happened. There aren't probability calculations, but it's certainly a sound way of it happening - there's no particular reason to think it couldn't happen that way.
And obviously it's impossible to calculate probabilities for special creation via supernatural power, but it falls victim to Ockham's Razor more than probability. It's far more parsimonious to have abiogenesis occurring as a result of already-well-understood chemical processes rather than as magic. Particularly because those pesky scientists start asking questions about how the magic works.
why would you ever subscribe to a belief that the odds of life are "for sure tiny?" last time i checked the odds of the right number of ingredients/conditions*size of the universe was considered reasonably probable by stephen hawking himself
his proof was for 1 or 0 gods. it is kind of implied by the language if you think about it but I'd like to see it too.
I think you are misunderstanding what I meant in several ways, so I will expand on it.
1. My point was merely that there aren't many creationists on this forum, so few people are actually going to debate this.
2. The argument is not that because people disagree, he is wrong; I was simply stating that his ideas are outdated, period.
3. His ideas are outdated for a reason, the same way that Herodotus is now outdated in historiography and Plato in philosophy. Both were revolutionary for their times, both served their purposes well, but they have been replaced by understandings of the world that are more useful for certain purposes, new ways of thinking. Pre-Kepler it would be perfectly reasonable to argue for Ptolemy's geocentrism, pre-Einstein for Newton's gravity, pre-Darwin for creationism (perhaps). In the future these ideas may well be overthrown; ideas are reactionary, constantly being revised and updated in the light of new ways of thinking, new arguments, new evidences, expanding bodies of knowledge.
4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzynRPP9XkY
5. One of the main requirements of a scientific model is that it make valid predictions and produce results. Evolution does both of these spectacularly well, creation can not and does not attempt to do either.
6. Ideas cannot be separated from their context, which is exactly what he does in arguing for creationism. They do not stand on their own; they are not atomistic. Creationists (and they are not always alone in this) confuse the language-games of science and religion (see point 5).
There's a scientific principle that my Physics teacher told me about a couple of days ago (can't remember its name >_<). Basically it said that things with the very slightest possibility of happening do happen on account of the endurance of time. If you multiply 10^-100 times Infinty, the outcome will be a number and thus a possibility. It's like a scientifical Murphy's Law; things happen, however unlikely, because they can happen.
Directly from the Wikipedia Microevolution page:
Regarding abiogenesis, it makes perfect sense. Let's assume that sometime in the billions of years in the history of the universe it might be possible that something came into existence by chance, and that something - not even a something that could be called life - could reproduce itself. It could happen in any corner of the universe, but let's just assume that it happened on Earth, which has been dated to 4.5 billion years of age. Since this thing's repoductions can reproduce themselves, its growth will increase exponentially, and after a million years there would obviously be a pretty damn big number of them. If you accept that microevolution is possible - which, as Deck Knight pointed out, has been proven to happen - then it only makes sense that these microevolutions would add up over time, what with so many of these things that can copy themselves. Millions or even billions of "microevolutions" add up to macroevolution, and eventually bigger things come about. It didn't have to be humans; these creatures could have been made of fucking Wolfram and Crackerjacks and it wouldn't have made a difference. The reason abiogenesis seems so unlikely is that it seems so unique, that we seem so unique...but we are merely the first creatures on Earth that could understand what was going on. And that doesn't make us special at all; of course we would be the product of this thing, since it was the only thing that could make more of itself!
Looking at abiogenesis from a macro point of view is futile, but to me this whole topic come down to "of course we exists; we are the only things making more of us!"
This doesn't even have the "controversial" tag that so many wikipedia articles on this topic seem to carry.
Regarding abiogenesis, it makes perfect sense. Let's assume that sometime in the billions of years in the history of the universe it might be possible that something came into existence by chance, and that something - not even a something that could be called life - could reproduce itself. It could happen in any corner of the universe, but let's just assume that it happened on Earth, which has been dated to 4.5 billion years of age. Since this thing's repoductions can reproduce themselves, its growth will increase exponentially, and after a million years there would obviously be a pretty damn big number of them. If you accept that microevolution is possible - which, as Deck Knight pointed out, has been proven to happen - then it only makes sense that these microevolutions would add up over time, what with so many of these things that can copy themselves. Millions or even billions of "microevolutions" add up to macroevolution, and eventually bigger things come about. It didn't have to be humans; these creatures could have been made of fucking Wolfram and Crackerjacks and it wouldn't have made a difference. The reason abiogenesis seems so unlikely is that it seems so unique, that we seem so unique...but we are merely the first creatures on Earth that could understand what was going on. And that doesn't make us special at all; of course we would be the product of this thing, since it was the only thing that could make more of itself!
Looking at abiogenesis from a macro point of view is futile, but to me this whole topic come down to "of course we exists; we are the only things making more of us!"