Why Evolution?

Wait... are you actually disputing that science is only concerned with observable phenomena? That would certainly throw a wrench into this discussion!

Please stop shifting the burden of proof, Grizzled. I asked for evidence that your designer/engineer even exists, and you respond with this?

As for your ill-conceived, non-responsive argument: as you should damm well know by now, evolution does not deal with the origins of life, but the origins of species. Second, we have observed people building cities, so it is perfectly rational to conclude that an ancient city found by archaeologists is human-made. We have NOT observed even the existence of extraterrestrial life, not to mention intelligent life, further not to mention intelligent, extraterrestrial life terraforming entire planets and seeding them with life at various points in time. In short, your analogy is crap.

I'm not sure if you're projecting or what. I'll just say once again that ad hominem rants don't substitute for evidence.

 

Grizzled, any reason you didn't respond to this post?

Do you understand the importance of falsifiability for scientific theories? Do you understand what this has to do with what does and does not constitute scientific evidence? These are very basic issues that you seem to be ignoring, even though I'm sure that you are intellectually capable of grasping them.

 

Grizzled has to be a troll. That's the only explanation I can think of for his posting style and erm, arguments?

If not, then whoa. I love the handwaving, goalpost-shifting, and ad hominems. 100% pure awesome.

 

Let’s briefly review some maybe grade 6 level science. Large portions of science deal with non-observable phenomenon. If that’s news to you then you’ve got some very fundamental problems. If it isn’t news to you but you blurted out your comment without giving it 2 seconds of thought, then you still have some very fundamental problems. One of the most obvious branches of science that deals with non-observable phenomenon is the part of the theory of evolution that we’re dealing with here, the theory that beneficial mutations eventually lead to the creation of more complex and higher level life forms. Absolutely no one says that this has been observed. Real evolutionists claim that it is such a slow process that there is no reason to expect that it would have been observed in recorded history, but, in one of the most bizarre claims I’ve seen, you have claimed that the theory of evolution is “only concerned with observable things”!?

Up to this point I had been assuming that you had some kind of basic knowledge of science and that you were one of those people who just lost his head over this issue, but clearly that’s not the case. You clearly have no idea what you’re talking about. You’ve been talking out of your ass the whole time. I suspect that you’ve been thumbing through a high school science text and pulling out terms to throw into your posts, but because you have no idea what you’re talking about nothing you’ve said makes any sense. I haven’t read past the first couple of nonsense points of any of your posts, but I can’t think of anything you’ve written that’s been valid, and much of it has lacked even basic common sense.

Moving on then, this becomes a different phenomenon now. We’re not talking about an educated person who has somehow become crazed with the religion of evolution anymore. What we have instead is an uneducated person who doesn’t even have a basic understanding of the principles he’s talking about, but who has somehow become a rabid religious evolutionist. There are fringe crackpots on every issue, so I’m not sure if anything can be generalized from this, but maybe there is an argument to be made that more than one theory should be taught in school just on principle alone. A little bit of education can go a long way against this kind of ignorance and fanaticism.

And to continue my tradition of responding to two nonsense points before giving up on the post...

Are you so dense that you don’t understand the point I made?? You don’t need to know who the designer is to be able to determine that something has been designed. And more specifically, if you don’t know who the designer is that doesn’t prove that something hasn’t been designed. There is no logic at all to that claim. Once again your suggestion is utter nonsense.

LSD, once again, just STOP! You clearly do not understand the very basics of what you’re trying to talk about. You also clearly have big issues around this subject, so maybe back off and think about that a bit. I take no pleasure in aiding and abetting in your difficulties here, so I will stop responding to you in this thread now. You’ve lost it. Get help. I’m done with you.

If anyone else wants to ask questions or discuss this issue further I'm still open to that.

 

What a coincidence, I happened to catch this movie the other day

Flock of Dodos

Pretty good, it's a little different than this conversation as it's more intelligent design v. Evolution and not so much why evolution is singled out.

There are quite a lot of intelligent designers that use the same argument Grizzled likes to use about, well, designers. Good stuff.

 

Your argument is absurd. A non-observable phenomenon, by definition, has no effect on the natural world. Otherwise, it would be observable. Do you dispute that science only deals with the natural world (after all, it is derived from natural philosophy)?

You are either very confused or intellectually dishonest. When I say the theory of evolution is only concerned with observable phenomena, I don't mean that the theory of evolution is an observable phenomenon. A theory is an organized representation of many phenomena.

Let's not forget the impetus for this little back-and-forth: I challenged the scientific merit of your intelligent design hypothesis on the grounds that there is no evidence for the existence of your designer. Your reply was essentially that there doesn't necessarily have to be observable evidence for its existence, to which I replied that such a hypothesis is untestable and therefore unscientific.

Now, you will likely reply with something along the lines of, "Well macroevolution (or whatever euphemism you use in favor of concrete ideas) hasn't been observed either, so the theory of evolution must not be scientific itself!" The distinction you have continually failed to grasp, though, is that one theory (evolution) produces concrete, falsifiable predictions, while the other (intelligent design) doesn't.

Furthermore, your characature of the theory of evolution once again betrays your complete unwillingness to even attempt to understand it. You've been told by a number of posters (not just evo-zealots like me) that evolution has no teleology. Complexity is not an end of evolution.

If that weren't enough, it turns out that we have indeed observed the evolutionary changes you describe. Remember the e. coli study? The one you keep dismissing as "interesting, but (insert hand-waving)" or something along those lines? If that's not an example of increased complexity, I don't know what is (maybe you could help me out by defining what you mean by "complex and higher level life forms").

Is it really an efficient use of your time to write two paragraphs of nothing but ad hominem attacks in lieu of responding to my actual arguments?

This is very disrespectful on your part. I have attempted to answer every point you have made (a laborious task to say the least). The least you could do is afford me the courtesy of acknowledging mine.

No, but to prove that something was designed by something you have to at least establish the existence of that something. Your hypothesis specified an agent, extraterrestrial terraformers. If you can't provide evidence for their existence, you need to cut that part off from your hypothesis and go with a more general intelligent design theory.

Utterly non-responsive and nearly incoherent.



I'll end with something I wrote a few posts up because you continue to ignore it and it goes to the core of your misunderstanding of what science is and is not:

 

I don't think reality is relative unless you are traveling at high speeds, that's what Einstein would say. But look, religion doesn't cause people to reject evolution, it's actually those who interpret religion literally that causes a problem with evolution.

But here's what I think the real reason some fundamentalists reject evolution. It's not the age of the earth or anything like that....it's the idea that we are in fact animals and not gods ourselves. That we came from a monkey. If you feel that humans are the greatest thing on the planet and that is because god ordained this fact and created us in his own image...then that's going to really clash with the idea we had a common ancestor as the monkey.

I am amazed frankly that all life is coded by the same exact molecules. DNA didn't change over a billion years. The same code of life - no other structure. All life is coded the same way.

Amazing.