Do You Believe in God?

I don't have any creationist talking points because I have never read a book on it besides the bible. I am asking honest questions about things that don't seem logical to me.

I tried to make that plain so a scientist could understand.

I thought the rods and cones or variations of this type receptor were classified as a photoreceptor not a chemoreceptor, an organism that had a mutated photoreceptor that was sensitive to light would have to pull off some very specific mutations to discover specific wavelengths (for the sake of discussion red, blue, yellow)- Unicellular organisms don't have photoreceptors that do this, neither is their any evidence that mutations would produce it, cones that we can observe are specifically functional toward the primary color wave lengths. (that is the best I can do without googling something, but I am more interested in the logic of a mutated unicellular organism that is light sensitive mutating distinct cones that can detect specific wavelengths in visible light. That sounds more extreme, "the reason the cones evolved is because the wavelengths were there, they just needed to find them."

What would cause the pigment cone and the neurological structures to co-evolve? That is like saying they communicated according to need.

Eyes vary greatly between insects, you still want to use variation and common organic building blocks as a proof of a continuous sequential event.

We can observe variations and mutations and understand the basic organic building blocks; but that has nothing to do with how a bees eye evolved from your light sensitive unicellular organism. All that happens without producing significant new complexity.

I respect you as a scientist, you know far more science than I would ever be able to understand, that I am certain. But you seem irritated because I am asking you to fill in the holes here at to how these things originated.

You don't know if a bee's eye evolved from a unicellular organism you believe it did because you observe the similarity in the building blocks and you observe variation in species.

What you skip over is like a jump over the Grand Canyon, and that is how these unicellular photoreceptors mutated until they were specific to light wavelengths they preciously could not detect. Is there a unicellular organism that you have observed that evolved into anything with color receptor cones? A bacteria that sees color?

I respect all you know but I think you presume things happened this way and I don't think you observed it. That is just an opinion.

And please leave God and creation out of it. I don't think there is any way creation is a science issue, I don't understand why people label it Intelligent Design and try to make it a science issue. That is illogical to me.

So Euglena can detect light, that is great explain one more time how the nerve bundles developed sight. I don't think you can assume that if a simple cell can detect light that it has to evolve.

I am sure you are more intelligent than evolution, can you go to the lab and mutate a Euglena until an eye cone is formed? Or does only long periods of time do that?

Same old evolution stuff... the variation of an insects vision will always promote adaptation, of course the bees with better vision do better, adaptation is no proof of macro evolution. It takes much more than that to leap from light sensitivity to a bees eye. We need evidence of gradual linear complexity occurring, at least in any other science it would be expected that it could be tested and observed.

Chance causes everything in macro evolution. What happens when Amino acids are mutated in a lab? Are proteins made of left hand or right hand Amino Acids?

Do you really call it science when you say 'just what the pc happened to be sensitive to' that's a great coincidence. Do better than that... tell me how the photosensitive receptors that only distinguish light selected the specific wavelengths that correspond to the primary colors to form cones. You keep saying that the primary colors are what they are because by chance those are the cones that evolved. The pigments, the cones and the light wavelengths all formed separately independently and have to match perfectly. There is no way that any cone could know what wavelengths were in visible light prior to formation.

I don't think God is in any gaps or creation theory.

How many transitions did it take for the dinosaur to fully evolve into a bird?
I didn't ask for every single transition to be perfectly fossilized.

Give me a number in your estimation and then I will tell you what is a reasonable number of fossils to expect.

No, googling, but it wasn't random, it was specific and intelligent, with purpose.

I know you are more intelligent than I am, but I am not sure you are as open.

You only know what you have been taught but still look outside the box of orthodox macro evolution, I have shared my questions with brilliant 'creationists' and they give me the same illogical creation science.

I would rather a 'creationist' just say I believe, and stop trying to use the same approach as the evolutionist, which is to assume too much IMO.

 

There is evidence of "eye prototypes" all around us. Nature on earth is an amazingly big and diverse world. There are colonies of single celled spores acting as if it were a multi-cellular organism with spores performing specialized tasks despite having similar dna. Despite voluminous books, we've probably only scratched the surface.

It's not that bees with better vision do better. It's more like if the trait works good enough in its environment on average, then that becomes the predominant trait. If the world was robbed of color the next day and existed in black and white with shades in between, then our fancy eyes will still be around. It's just that over time, we won't notice if those eyes can still see color because we don't need it for survival. But maybe something else will appear in between. A freak occurrence allows someone to see infrared. The thing though is that there are observed conditions for evolution. It's not just one mutation in one person. Usually these traits lie dormant for a while while the genes are being spread around the population. So instead of large booming cities of million plus people, think villages with less than 150. Maybe it'll show up once in a while, but it's there, and when the opportunity arises to either make use of the trait or in the worst case, allow the mutants survival, then it slowly becomes the main trait.

It's also luck too. Location, timing, and outside factors (competitors, prey, co-habitors, stupid humans and its pollution) also play a role in things.

Let's say humans or something with a human-like brain appeared during the dinosaur ages. Would it survive or manage to become the Flintstones? Probably not because the amount of time it takes to raise children and make them smart enough to use tools would be too long in a chaotic and diverse world.

Or maybe at that time there were big hollow trees that allowed proper shelter for those proto-cavemen while blocking everything else out. Over time (a long time) they might become mutually dependent upon each other to the point where if the tree was knocked out by a drastic change in weather, those cavemen would be SOL as well.

So life is nowhere a linear progression as we perceive it in recorded history/science or in our constructs of "progress".

That's one difficulty in understanding evolution but it can also be a really cool trait if you consider that evolution is more of a trunk of science (and highly multidisciplinary) than its undiscovered or sprouting branches.

 

Rhester, you are assuming that the chances of certain things evolving through natural selection ( without "intelligent design") is nil. I have no more scientific expertise in this area than you (perhaps less), so I have to just ask why you are so certain of this? You say it's mere common sense and logic, but I don't see it. Over billions of years and trillions of simultaneous chemical reactions, chance and natural selection can (incrementally) produce incredible diversity, couldn't it? And like any good scientific theory, there are just so many things that it predicts and gets right. That's the part which I can't brush aside.

 

rhester, I'll post more when I get home tonight, as I'm about to head out for the day, but you sure sound like you're channeling Ken Ham and Eric Hovind at times. At least it's not Comfort.

This is essentially what it feels like you're doing (apologies for the video quality, it was a quick search):
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/RxrxnPG05SU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I'd also like to cordially invite you to this event at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. You can ask your questions to the very distinguished panel there. I'll even pay your donation to get in, but get there early since space is limited.

 

If I can follow up on this post Durvasa brings up a good point. You, Rhester, claim that you have little expertise in this area yet are certain that evolution couldn't have occurred. That is frankly an extremely dogmatic position. Your argument boils down to "I don't fully understand it but I know it's wrong."

Now you are certainly free to hold that as a belief but it isn't that intellectually honest to continue to claim that you are being completely open about asking questions.

 

Just to follow on my own post above. This is the danger of mixing science with faith. There is nothing inherently wrong with saying that there really is no randomness and that all things happened according to the plan of a supreme being. That is a faith position. That doesn't mean though that the Evolutionary processes aren't what science is showing how those things came about. The danger is in taking a term like random which scientifically is used in a very narrow context and to then to argue for or against some sort of supreme intelligence.

"Random" in the sense that it is used isn't that everything came about through by accident. It wasn't random that I had peanut butter and honey for breakfast but on a Universe wide context and the beginning of time there is no general reason why I would specifically exist and at that particular point in time and space eating peanut butter and honey. Random just acknowledges that in the chain of causality leading to any event there were several events that occurred not according to any discernible plan for instance through mutation or even just shuffling the genetic deck during reproduction. In the case of what I ate for breakfast that the grocery store happened to have peanut butter on sale when I was shopping rather than pancake mix or something else I could've had for breakfast.

The key point there though is that none of that rules out whether there is an overriding plan created by some intelligence but that such intelligence can not be tested for scientifically. The problem though if one argues that this has to be the work of intelligence then you have to go about proving the existence of that intelligence. In other words, scientifically prove the existence of God.

 

No, mathematically speaking, chance cannot produce the diversity that exists today. One thing needs to be made clear: mutations rarely cause a positive evolution in a cell/organism. The chance that a mutation produces an evolutionary change that benefits the organism is 1 x 10^-150, which is out of the realm of possibility mathematically. Besides, how is one small, positive change going to start an evolutionary chain?

The only analogy I can give is to have a monkey to type a paragraph exactly like you have typed above on the computer. The monkey, typing randomly, will have significant trouble producing the correct words in the correct order.

 

Give the monkey 13 billion years.

 

DNA has been found on comets and such. It is not unique to earth.

I think you are getting caught up on the idea that things happened "by chance" or "randomly". What I am saying is that just like a fart diffuses through the air, amino acids will form a self-replicating protein eventually.

Your fart spreading through the air is technically a random process. But it is happenings through billions of micro collisions that inevitably it spreads out. That is the nature of entropy. Systems tend to move towards states of maximum entropy. And molecules will arrange themselves in the lowest energy states as well.

So protein formation is inevitable, as inevitable as someone smelling your fart. Why doesn't your fart just stay there? It doesn't accidentally spread through the room? Right? I am just using this example to demonstrate why your logic has a flaw.

If you put all the ingredients together in the right conditions, and let it stew long enough, it is a deterministic reality that ultimately the result will be life.

You can say it was an accident. But if you created 10,000 earths and gave them one billion years, they'd all produce DNA at some point. ALL.

 

Congratulations, every sentence you typed was garbage!

If he was right, even 13 trillion years wouldn't be enough. He's just using the tired creationist misconstruction of evolution (large scale single-step mutations instead of small scale mutations that are either "selected" or "rejected" by natural selection). Don't listen to him.

Weren't you ignoring me? You didn't offend me. And I don't plan to put you on an ignore list because I've never had issues with your posts in the Basketball or Hangout sections. But from the manner and content of your posts in this thread, I believe that you were being dishonest and attacking straw men. But you're right in that personal attacks shouldn't be used to point that out, and I will refrain from them from now on.

I will ignore you in this thread, however (which is close to dead anyway).

 

Where are you getting that number from? I suspect there's something very faulty in that calculation, as beneficial mutations have already been observed in relatively small time scales:

http://phylointelligence.com/observed.html

 

The mutation itself does not dictate whether this type of trait will be used or passed on to the next generation. The individuals or the species decide if this is a keeper or not.

If you can imaging a time where the average height was 4'8" for male individuals. One offspring came out with a mutation that made him 6'5" tall (considerably larger than most). This individual grows up to be better in hunting because he has longer legs and can travel longer and faster than the rest of the tribe (more efficient). This individual would also be better at gathering fruits from trees. Guess what is going to happen, one or a few women in the tribe would want their children to have the same traits as this person because it appears to be an advantage.

Having a child with this individual does not guarantee that the offspring will have it's trait but it is worth a try. If in time, you have an ample number of individuals who have this trait and have constantly shown that this is a big advantage to have, the culture will change so that the women will only pick males that are tall. Eventually, what might happen after years is that the shorter ones will be phased out and you are just left with a tribe of people that are tall.

 

Have to admit I was a skeptic, but no longer...

Oil workers spot 'flying spaghetti monster' lurking off the Angola coast

Off the coast of Angola and below the surface of the ocean, a supreme being lives.

Oil workers for BP spotted the tentacled beast near an oil rig more than 4,000 feet deep off the Angolan coast in August. The workers nicknamed the organism the “flying spaghetti monster” in honor of the legendary modern-day deity.

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Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVHlHBqo_Hs

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The National Oceanography Center in the U.K. took a look at the footage and identified the creature not as a divine spirit but as a “siphonophore.” The pasta-like creature is closely related invertebrates like jellyfish and sea anemones.

http://www.chron.com/news/science-e...g-spaghetti-monster-6623506.php#photo-8937312

 

As a pastafarian, I can't stand idly by as the NOC persecutes against my deity and beliefs.

Defund the NOC! Let the truth speak for itself!

 

suspiciously, i got served an ad for chef boyradee