Since we're trying to be specific here I would like to point out that we aren't evolved from apes since we are apes.
I find it interesting that even after the film, people are still bashing each other and quarrelling instead of actually talking about it. Just like in the discussion after it was on. I thought that it was good that Koppel was kind of attacking them and making them defend their findings. Although their findings are interesting and should be looked in to, I think they did at best an ok job of defending it but only cuz of the guy who was there with the director. The director pretty much threw out his qualifications and thats it. I enjoyed that a lot more than a group of people stroking their ego for making this discovery.
Whatever it is, it's not a poem. That's not being very precise. It's like saying we are not different from cats and dogs since we are all mammals.
Mammals, Apes etc are all names we as human introduced. so we say something is a mammal or an ape etc. We once said that Humans are not apes. that is ok, but we are genetically and evolutionary similar to apes. so if we say we are either apes or we are not apes does not matter since how we call it doesn't chance the evolotuonary and genetically similarities.
Yet, I've repeatedly shown that I'm willing to change my mind as soon as God proves himself. Well, logically, in a specific context, a binary statement is either true or untrue. I don't see any fuzziness there. I don't see how you can criticize me using facts and logic to explain natural phenomenons when you believe in baseless speculations and fairytale. Once again, there is nothing in the theory of evolution that supports a deity. Darwin does not believe in God in the sense of a personal, supernatural deity. He saw no evidence of the existence of God, and that's why he didn't believe in it. Let me put it this way: I think I'm God, and so I am if you cannot prove I'm not. "Materialisticly fundamentalist point of view"? As opposed to your fantasized and deluded point of view? What is the fundamental nature of reason? What's the purpose of reason? Without the basic instincts, reasons are meaningless. Reason is what makes your species survive, reason is what makes you, as an individual human being, happy. People take drugs, jump off buildings and do all kinds of horrible things to themselves and other people, what's the reason in that other than it makes them feel good? The question of "purpose" is not a complex question at all. Why do humans exist -- because evolution selected us to exist. Sometimes the simplest answer is the right answer, and in the case of human being's existence, evolution is so far the best and simplest answer. Stop labeling me. I use the term "contradiction" like anyone would, e.g. 1 is not 0, God either exists or it doesn't. I question my assumptions all the time, that's why I think God most likely doesn't exist, but do you? You see obviously contradicting things as natural and reasonable. This would be rather strange to me if I didn't know you were a religious person. Great, more useless labels. It's very very rare to see an atheist who believes with 100% certainty that God doesn't exist. Even Richard Dawkins in his book "The God Delusion" stated that he himself didn't believe with 100% certainty that God didn't exist. I don't exclude everything in religion. I agree with the things that make sense in the teachings of religion. In other words, when religion agrees with science, I will agree with religion. The only fundamental part of atheism is to believe in the most convincing theory based on facts and logic. I call that lying-to-yourself or double-standard. Truth is truth, you cannot believe that on one hand, human beings evolved from bacteria, and at the same time, God created Adam and Eve as human beings who then went on and bred the rest of the humans. Not right away, I was very open to religious views for a while, most of my best friends are religious. I even studied bible with JWs for 3 months. In the same way that you can disprove that I'm not God. Whatever, now can you prove that I'm not God? If you cannot, does that mean I'm God? First of all, I've repeatedly stated that I don't know with 100% certainty that God doesn't exist. Therefore, it's wrong for you to charge me for absolutely ruling God out. I've also said many many times that my belief depends only on facts and logic, and if God turned up today, then my facts would change, and so would my belief. I see no contradiction anywhere. The problem is that you keep trying to match atheists with your own religious patterns. As I said before, the only thing fundamental about atheism is facts and logic. This is what makes us different from you religious people. I did abuse the notation here, sorry about that. The origin of all life forms is just some chemical compounds. It's a zero sum game when it comes to the existence of God: either he exists or he doesn't exist -- unless you are willing to admit that God is dead now. Ok, if you are not going to interpret bible literally, how do you interpret it? Where does your understanding of what's acceptable or what's not come from? What makes you look at a passage in the bible and think "Um, I cannot interpret it literally, that just cannot work"? I don't know what Dante's Inferno is, but the Declaration of Independence surely roots in the basic human instincts of pleasure seeking. Everything has an objective cause -- from the chemical reactions in your brains to the chemical reactions in your bowels. There is nothing more or less than that. There is no such thing as a soul, or God, or spirits, or ghosts, or devil. Is this clear enough to you? Gosh, do you even read what I wrote? I said that based on all the information I have, I believe the odds of the sun rising tomorrow is far far far far greater than the sun not rising tomorrow, Where is the faith in there? What else am I supposed to believe that's more reasonable? Believing something is not always the same as faith. About as much as a monkey jumping on a keyboard and producing Shakespear I guess -- and that's possible, but extremely unlikely. Actually, you were the one who brought up statistics. If you could give me the probability model of the universe, I would be able to predict not only the odds of you having brunch with you relatives today, but also the odds of you having brunch with your relatives in the next decade. No I don't, I see probability at work. That's a joke, science knows a lot about the origin of the universe, but in the big picture, it still knows diddly-squat (which is still more than what religion knows though). Anti-matter (if there is such a thing) is only a theory, now there is other theory about dark energy which accounts for 70+% of the mass of the universe. There is also the theories of big crunch and big freeze, and no one has been able to prove or disapprove neither. There just isn't enough data. The fact that we don't know squat about the big bang means that we don't know how many times it's happened, and what happened with the previous big bangs if there were any. Maybe there had been many many big-crunches, who knows? Gee, "it will never happen" is just a phrase for something that's extremely unlikely to happen. I've said many many times that I believe that God most likely doesn't exist, but I've never said that I believe God doesn't exist with 100% certainty. The probability of God performing a miracle in front me is so low that I would not expect it to happen at all, and I would be really surprised if it did happen. On the other hand, I firmly, i.e. with 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999% certainty that God doesn't exist. That's not faith, that's just logic and reason. With 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% certainty, I believe that there is a purpose to your existence, i.e. to make yourself happy and make your species survive, and you are not here to serve or please a God that I believe with 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% certainty not to exist at all. I regard superstition as a character/knowledge flaw. I regard double-standard and not being truthful to be a character flaw. You've never met me, and you cannot possibly know anything about me other than my views expressed on this forum. Furthermore, you cannot accuse me of being conflicted when you willingly believe in obviously contradictory theories at the same time. Belief in Heaven is a mental drug, it can make people feel good when they are about die or when their loved ones die (I used it when my great grandmother passed away), but it can also be used to deceive people into doing terrible things. Remember 9/11, and those mass cult suicides?
It depends on the categories you use. Obviously, if your categories only include mammal and non-mammal, then humans and apes are the same. But if your categories include humans, chimps, fish, insects, etc, then it would be inaccurate to say humans are the same with apes. From DNA's perspective, the difference between human DNA and bacteria DNA is only about 10%, does that mean we are the same as bacteria?
Correction! I should have said "There is most likely nothing more or less than that. There is mostly no such thing as a soul, or God, or spirits, or ghosts, or devil.".
You missed my point. We created these categories. And we decide what is a criteria of those categories. But if we include something to a category or we exclude it from the category doesn't change the genetic resemblences they share. So it doesn't matter if we want to call human an ape or not. it is just a name, it changes nothing on the resemblence and differences humans have with apes.
How technical do you want to get? I'm talking about genetic, behavioral, evolutionary etc. But mostly genetic resemblences and differences.
How do you mean give an example? You really want me to get technical and metion all the similarities and differences? why? the point was that saying humans are apes or are not apes does not mean anything because it changes nothing about the similarities and differences. So what do examples of similarities and differences matter?
Because in order to define similarities and differences, you need standards and criteria, and as soon as you have those, you introduce labels and classes -- because you can just classify things based on your own standards. The concept of "similarity and difference" implies labels and categories -- similar things belong to the same category, and different things belong to different categories.
1. No you don't understand evolution. Apes don't turn into humans. If that were true you would have apes today coming up with the same mutations that turn them into humans. We all came from one-celled organisms. Along the path way there were some that mutated into apes, while some mutated into humans. I suggest reading some Stephen Jay Gould. Dinosaur in the haystack is a great book. Anyway he is an evolutionary scientist who explains it far better than I do. 2. It is a poem. Scholars have discussed this plenty. It is written in stanzas with rhythm. It is written in the exact same format as a type of poem that was common at the time. That is like seeing a series of poems from Japan written in triplets of lines with five syllables, then seven syllables, then five syllables, questioning that it is a haiku. It doesn't have to say elsewhere in the bible that it is a poem. The hebrew audience it was written for at the time would have recognized it as a poem. Here is a little bit of it. It isn't my interpretation, but that of people who are far more studied in the field than I am. 3. I didn't expect any answer when I asked the question. I asked the question becaues I had doubts. In fact asking that question entirely changed the way I viewed God, and what I believed God was. You may believe that questioning isn't a part of faith, but biblically it is, and I believe in human nature it is. Questioning is the only way to have growth, and a search for the truth. 4. Einstein was not an atheist. 4. I believe everyone of great faith has asked the hard question, and hopefully changed their perception of God. Mine went from an actual powerful being that sat in the heavens and knew everything and controled what happened, to something much more in line with what Einstein talks about. Something that is hardly a supernatural being at all, except that all the facets of it is beyond human understanding.
You cannot expect me to take you seriously when you, a religious person, tells me that somehow you know more about evolution than I do. I admit that I'm not an expert in biology or evolution, but you are probably not either. Evolution is a gradual process, you cannot expect a single-cellular organism to turn directly into a human being. There would have been thousands, if not more, intermediate forms. Closer to the current human form, humans would have once looked like what today we would call apes. Not all apes lived in the same environment, and that's why they did not receive the same kind of evolutionary stimulus that the ancestors of humans received. This is common sense evolution, I don't need a book to understand it. I'm afraid I don't know enough about Hebrew and Greek to argue about this with you. I'm afraid I don't know you personally and the lack of descriptions of your own personal experience is not very convincing to me. What exactly was the process that you went through? What were your doubts and how did you answer them? Questioning is part of human nature, that's what made our brains grow. But I don't think questioning is part of faith, Victor Hugo once said "There is in every village a torch -- the teacher, and an extinguisher -- the clergyman". No, Einstein is a true atheist. Here is some of the things he said (taken from Richard Dawkin's book "The God Delusion"): The last quote clearly suggests that Einstein believes that humans are here to help each other, not to serve and obey some supernatural god. In 1940 Einstein wrote a famous paper justifying his statement "I do not believe in a personal God", and this statement provoked a storm of attacks from religious people. Here is part of a letter to Einstein from the Founder of the Calvary Tabernacle Association in Oklahoma: I know people who were very promising scientists who gave up their entire scientific career and turned to religion. I feel sorry for them. If your understanding of God was the same as Einstein, you'd be an atheist, like me.
A foppish man about to enter a theatre sees a beggar. He pompously lectures, ""Neither a borrower nor a lender be.' --William Shakespeare." The beggar replies: "Yeah? '**** you.'--David Mamet."
Thousands? I think trillion X trillions is more accurate. So many that we would find millions upon millions of intermediate forms still living. That is if evolution were true. At least that would be true common sense.
