Its a fair question. I fancy myself a skeptic on all things, even my own faith beliefs. Just because I disagree with passionate ID proponents on what I believe to be religious belief clouding their judgment regarding the subject of Evolution doesn't mean I'm not skeptical in regard those who argue for a straight up material Universe. If you've followed my posts in many of the threads regarding religion you will find I'm as critical on those who would deny any role of faith or the metaphysical. When it comes to "fundamentalists evolutionists" I agree that there are some who treat evolution too dogmatically and I think part of the problem with this debate is that too many people are treating the subject as a faith. I don't believe Evolution is absolutely proven and I don't take it on faith that Evolution only that the evidence out there and the scientific method shows it to be the most likely explanation. I think if more people treat it that way then the debate need not be so divisive.
Rhester and Svpernaut; Fair enough. If that's what you believe that's what you believe and who am I to change that. In all respectfulness though I find your views sterile and limiting. I'm not a Christian and I doubt I will ever become one, not because I think Christianity is bad but because it doesn't resonate with me on a spiritual level and also because I find views like yours more prevalent in Christianity and other mono-theistic religions. While I think pure rationality is ultimately limiting I find it difficult to accept that as rational beings we must subsume that rationality to following a literal faith belief without question. It does bother me that Original Sin was the eating of fruit of the tree of knowledge. If we weren't meant to ask questions why give us curiousity or our brains to begin with. Why would God us in his own image expect of us to be unquesitoning followers with no will of curiousity. Most of us don't want our children to be blind followers but hope they grow up to become independent individuals who can think on their own. I apologize if this comes off as a slam but I'm stating my own views and not drawing you into a debate about the rightness or wrongness of one's faith.
I’m sure you flatter yourself that you are his opposite, but you are TJ’s moral equivalent. You are an apologist for your cause just like he is an apologist for his. You use the same kind of low rhetoric and you show the same fear of facts and absolute refusal to deal with logical arguments. You don’t have the knowledge make any kind of reasoned or ethical argument, and you’re too lazy to look up any facts and learn anything, so you resort to misrepresenting the other person’s position and calling them names, and for laughs you call your position the scientific one. Where in this thread have I made an argument based on creationism, for example? Nowhere, that’s just another lie, another bit of sleazy misdirection from an utterly unprincipled debater. You and TJ are two sides of the same coin. And as such you have nothing intelligent or useful to offer to any discussion so before I get delayed again you get to join you moral kin TJ as the second person on my ignore list! You beat bigtexxx, in fact, who I was sure was going to be my #2, but you’re even worse and more worthless than he is.
instant classic before you get up on your moral high horse, just take a look at who went personal with the name calling first Grizzled, your M.O. has been well documented by others in this forum, your pseudo-intellectual talk doesn't fool many around here anymore
Get off of the name calling and finger pointings already, you're turning a very intersting topic into a junior high lunch room. Sishir Chang, I understand where you are coming from in the toughness of "blind faith" as many people (including Christians) struggle with this constantly. God gave us free will but does that mean he set us up to fail? There is an inherant curiousity about us there is no denying that, but did God know from the get go that Adam and Eve would fail? Building upon that one of the most "thought intensive" questions in the Christian faith is if God knows everything including the future, do you really have a choice in the grand scheme of things? There is a whole "matrix-esque" feel to it, but there are just somethings our minds can't fathom, regardless of how smart we think we are. It takes a lot to have complete faith in any higher being, but all I know once you reach the point where you truly have no worries in your life and you know you can take anything life can throw at you... your life is much more calming and peaceful. I'm far from a perfect Christian and I don't do nearly as much as I should, but when it comes to my faith it is as rock solid as one could get... and I believe that's what truly makes a strong believer. I wish more people could feel the way I do about life and the world we live in, having no worries and knowing that regardless of what happens you'll be okay is a comforting feeling to say the least.
I’m with you on all but two key parts of this. You continue to represent ID as a creationist position which is by simple definition simply wrong. I have to wonder why you continue to do this. Let me explain this to you using your own example one more time. If explorers travelling trough an unexplored part of the Brazilian jungle find a stone pyramid, is it reasonable and scientifically sound to say that this structure doesn’t look like anything that could have grown naturally here and that it may have been designed and constructed by intelligent beings? Of course it is. It’s entirely reasonable, and ID is nothing more than this. It acknowledges the lack evidence supporting vertical evolution and the lack of progress on the theory over many decades now, and it looks at other factors like the jumps in the fossil record and the timelines and the problem of where the first life would have come from, and it asks, could some form of intelligent design be involved? Who the designer might be has many different possible answers, just as the question of who designed the pyramid does. So you can see that those who try to pigeon hole it as one theory or say that it’s simply a creationist theory are simply being silly, or they feel threatened somehow by a broader scientific inquiry that questions their long held beliefs. The second part that I have a problem with is the suggestion that vertical evolution is the most likely theory. This may even be true but given that there is very little evidence to support it at all it’s hard to claim that it’s much more likely than extraterrestrial causes, for example. There may well be as much or more evidence for alien visitation and a better argument for it too, but my main point is that vertical evolution is very far from a proven theory, and not much more than pure speculation, so it certainly should not be taught as “truth” in the schools and to the extent that it’s taught at all in secondary school, which isn’t much, other possible theories should be identified too.
I have to constantly fight to keep these seperate because there are so many creationists who hijack Intelligent Design. In fact it seems to me that there are more of these than intelligent design people.
This is a post full of principals of evolution in action. There is a whole lot more evidence for evolution than there is for any other hypothesis. Of course it still may be incorrect, and is far from proven, but you misrepresent the facts.
I'm curious. Do you think every detail of the life of Jesus the NT, like the virgin birth, the miracles, resurrection and ascension etc., is to be taken literally? Do you think they are historical, physical facts? Or are they elements in a story used to get a point across like the death of Judas?
I agree that there is a group of creationists who seem to be trying to hijack ID in a manipulative way. (As I said in another thread, Christians should have no need to be manipulative. If you believe that your faith is true then honest pursuit of the truth is no threat. Indeed the principle of inquiry and deeper questioning is very close to the heart of Christianity. It’s not about compliance to a set of rules, after all, it’s about relationship, a personal spiritual journey and relationship with God. Not all science is good science, however, so some discernment is required, as it is for everyone.) In the Canadian context the ID debate isn’t a big issue for anyone at the moment, at least not in my circles, but in the US, from what I’ve heard, what you say could well be the case down there. The extreme politicization of this issue makes it very hard to get at in any kind of thoughtful way and it makes it very frustrating.
Vertical evolution or horizontal evolution? (Macro and mico are sometimes used in a different way which is why I use the other names.) Horizontal evolution, essentially genetic drift through natural selection, is a well established and understood phenomenon. The kind of mutation that would cause an organism to become more complex is a much different matter however. Do you have any good links on macro (vertical) evolution you'd like me to look at? Everything I've seen or heard about has been very speculative to say the least.
Lol. So for evolution you ask for proofs and research and facts. But for ID you just know it's true because you "think it through" and it "makes sense". Nice...
I appreciate how important the difference is. In my mind I look at the overall change genome over the past 100 or so years of evolution history vs. the estimated 3.5 billion years for life on earth. Under those boundry conditions I hope you will accept that even if every element of evolution were 100% correct it would be impossible to have replicated them in that period. So, with that in mind I'll give you the closest thing that I can think of off the top of my admitedly limited knowledge base. This would be the evolution of the modern garden rose. Wild roses have 14 chromasomes and one layer of petals. They bloom once a year and give 2 or 3 flowers per bush. They look like this; or They are difficult to cross-breed with the 28 chromasome modern roses which have infinately more complex flowers, bloom many times a year and in much greater numbers. On the extreme they look like; or Here is a page detailing some of the difficulties of breeding the modern rose with the antique roses. I appreciate that this falls far short of what you are probably looking for. It does fit the bill in a couple of ways in that the number of chromasomes are altered, and the resultant flowers are much more complex than natural flowers, and they are not viable when combined with the original species. I ask that if you require full speciation as the boundry condition, you should at least accept the question as being unresolved until a suitable period has passed (say 100,000 years?), and unless I've missed something accept that no evidence contradictory to these principals has as yet been discovered.
You will note that I never mentioned "Creationism" at all in that posts. I said that I believe that religious beliefs are clouding their judgements in regard to Evolution. YOu're presuming that automatically is Creationism when I believe that extends to other ID theories because of a faith belief that complexity is impossible without a guiding intelligence even if there isn't physical proof of such a guiding intelligence. That to me amounts to a religious belief and not science which by nature has to presume the negative (ie no intelligence) until there is proof of the positive (an intelligence). It doesn't rule it out that it could be true but until physical evidence is presented its faith. I've already responded to your arguments regarding the lack of evidence regarding Evolution many times before and so have many others and you remain unconvinced. This is your belief and you are open to your belief. I will maintain my position that Evolution warts and all is still the most likely theory regarding speciation but as I've said before this isn't a belief that I stick to out of faith. If someone can independently prove the existence of God using the Scientific method or find a spaceship from the time of the Cambrian explosion or even just some test tubes I will agree that those things make ID more plausible than Evolution.
At this point I think we’re getting pretty far off topic but I think we could start another thread on this. I’ll leave that up to you but I would be happy to answer your questions there. In anticipation of that I’ll ask you a question too. Do you believe in levitation or any of the other “miracles”, for lack of a better term, that monks do?
Interesting. Another example something like this would be the example of ring species. You get a variation in a species through natural selection as you go up a mountain, for example, and the conditions the organism needs to survive in change. This change can be significant enough so that the ones at the top lose the ability to interbreed with the ones at the bottom, although the ones at either end can still interbreed with the ones in the middle. And I do appreciate the problem of observing much change given the time lines that the theories suggest, but this isn’t the only problem. There are significant problems with the fossil record, both in terms of the absence of intermediate species and the sudden appearance of many new life forms at various points. Theories have been developed to try to explain this but you have to admit that they are highly speculative. I’m glad people are still working on these theories but I also think that it’s perfectly ok and good science to explore some other theories too, and to that end I don’t think we should be presenting vertical evolution as “truth” in the schools and denying the viability of every other theory. But of course on top of these scientific considerations, and almost obliterating them, are the politics of the two warring fundamentalist groups.
Well, I’ll admit that many engineers have looked at architectural drawings and assumed a lack of guiding intelligence, but I don’t think that that’s a requirement for good science. In fact I’m pretty sure it isn’t. Do you consider archaeology a science? It would be pretty silly for them to assume nothing they discover was the result of intelligent design. With the state of genetic engineering these days you also can’t assume that a given plant doesn’t have a component of intelligent design either. There is no religion to archaeology or genetic science, though, at least on in their ideal form. It really comes down to an educated assessment of whether the structure is a random creation or whether it shows signs of intelligent design and construction, and that’s not a decision based on religion. It’s based on hard science. As for the lack of evidence, it has been proven many times that there is nothing even approaching conclusive evidence in support of vertical evolution, and yet you’ve seen the extreme resistance displayed here by some to any other theory. This alone is perhaps the best reason to make sure that other theories are taught. You are free and welcome to stick with evolution as your favourite theory, though.
I think that much of the resistance is from the fact that they are always arguing with Creationists. This is much more interesting, as the response from the opposite side isn't always 'because I believe it is.' I would be interested to hear how the aforementioned gaps in the fossil record are interpreted in your scheme of things. The first thing that comes to mind would be that the planet has died several times over and been repopulated by the intelligent designer?
ATTN: I believe this should end this discussion; I just saw god, and he does, in fact, look like an ape. Well, a bonobo to be precise. ....unless I was actually looking at a bonobo. OH **** THERE'S A BONOBO IN MY REFRIGERATOR BRB TTYL
