Posted on 07/24/2003 1:55:39 PM PDT by Mr.Atos
I was just lisening to Medved debating Creationism with Athiests on the air. I found it interesting that while Medved argued his side quite effectively from the standpoint of faith, his opponents resorted to condescension and beliitled him with statements like, "when it rains, is that God crying?" I was reminded of the best (at least most amusing)debate that I have ever heard on the subject of Creationism vs Evolution, albeit a fictional setting. It occurred on the show, Friends of all places between the characters Pheobe (The Hippy) and Ross (The Paleontologist). It went like this...
Pheebs: Okay...it's very faint, but I can still sense him in the building...GO INTO THE LIGHT MR. HECKLES!!
Ross: Whoa, whoa, whoa. What, uh, you don't believe in evolution? Pheebs: Nah. Not really. Ross: You don't believe in evolution? Pheebs: I don't know. It's just, ya know, monkeys, Darwin, ya know, it's a, it's a nice story. I just think it's a little too easy.
Ross: Uh, excuse me. Evolution is not for you to buy, Phoebe. Evolution is scientific fact. Like, like, the air we breathe, like gravity... Pheebs: Uh, okay, don't get me started on gravity.
Ross: You uh, you don't believe in gravity? Pheebs: Well, it's not so much that ya know, like I don't *believe* in it, ya know. It's just...I don't know. Lately I get the feeling that I'm not so much being pulled down, as I am being pushed.
Ross: How can you NOT BELIEVE in evolution? Pheebs: [shrugs] I unh-huh...Look at this funky shirt!!
Ross: Well, there ya go. Pheebs: Huh. So now, the REAL question is: who put those fossils there, and why...?
Ross: OPPOSABLE THUMBS!! Without evolution, how do YOU explain OPPOSABLE THUMBS?!? Pheebs: Maybe the overlords needed them to steer their spacecrafts!
Pheebs: Uh-oh! Scary Scientist Man!
Pheebs: Okay, Ross? Could you just open your mind like, *this* much?? Okay? Now wasn't there a time when the brightest minds in the world believed that the Earth was flat? And up until what, like, fifty years ago, you all thought the atom was the smallest thing, until you split it open, and this like, whole mess o' crap came out! Now, are you telling me that you are so unbelievably arrogant that you can't admit that there's a teeny, tiny possibility that you could be wrong about this?!?
Pheebs: I can't believe you caved. Ross: What? Pheebs: You just ABANDONED your whole belief system! I mean, before, I didn't agree with you, but at least I respected you. Ross: But uh.. Pheebs: Yeah...how...how are you gonna go in to work tomorrow? How...how are you gonna face the other science guys? How...how are you gonna face yourself? Oh! [Ross runs away dejected] Pheebs: That was fun. So who's hungry?
And Gould is right. We forget that organisms are very well designed. Take the example of the bat. It is a mammal so its descent according to evolution is from mammals. However, its way of life, of feeding requires flight and excellent sonar. How could it live without one or the other? Answer is it could not, not for a single generation and we know that the huge number of mutations necessary to accomplish both would have taken millions of years - as Neo Darwinists will admit. But that is not the end of the problem. For flight you need muscles, for flight you need wings, and for flight you need very light bones - none of these features is found in other mammals. Therefore the bat could not have arisen by chance since so many of the features we see in it were necessary for it to survive even for one generation if they were not developed all at the same time.
Sure. If a bunch of new code (not a copy/paste) suddenly "showed up", this would differentiate the ID theory from the TOE. So, for example, if there was a large change in morphological features in a short (geologically short) time period in the fossil record, this would tend to be predicted by ID over TOE. Even the PE version of the TOE doesn't handle well a big change, where many morphological differences at once show up. So, if such a situation occurred in the fossil record, it would be better predicted by ID than TOE.
See #2142.
Well, for one thing it has been experimentally verified repeatedly. No "infering" required.
No, it also explains my examples at 2102. It also explains the existence of "junk" dna.
So has Evolution.
OK, let's review: You claimed evolution embraces Marxism. I asked for evidence. You posted a quote snippet from a Marxist author which asserts that Darwinism & Marxism "form one unit".
PatrickHenry also mentioned Jerry Bergman's ICR article that tries to link Darwinism with late 19th century laissez-faire capitalism, and remarked how creationists have tried to blame evolution for both capitalism AND communism AND Naziism, all at the same time. Your response was to claim we:
My, my, all that from PH's 2029! (Or was that a generalized screed against my posts as well?)
Anyway, then I proceeded to analyze Pannehoek's full argument here and here, and found it a hopelessly muddled collection of plausible speculation and ad-hoc leaps joined by logical fallacies. In fact I concluded that his comparison of Darwinism and Marxism was "a cargo-cult justification for Marxism".
Your reaction was to characterize my contextual analysis of the quote you relied on as:
I'm calling you on this. I say it's intellectualy dishonest of you to characterize my analyses of your source Pannehoek's quotation and article as being anything that could be construed as supporting Marxism, being anti-God, or being anti-conservative.
You have practically charged me with being a Marxist. Prove it.
Of course, the problem is, to break a code you have to understand the language that the cipher has encoded. And of course double or triple pass encoding makes it even tougher. The real question then, is this: is it possible to tell if there exists an encrypted message, or just random noise? That is, would it be possible to parse a "junk" DNA sequence and determine that yep, this here is a piece of bona fide encrypted code -- without knowing the key, and being able to determine it is something encrypted and not random junk?
It's called Liberation Theology. This is mostly associated with the Christian Marxists in South America.
Nope. See here.
Reading closely, you will see that "the literature contains many instances where a speciation event has been inferred". In fact, only by redefining "speciation" from "those critters that cannot interbreed" to "those critters that don't choose to interbreed, most of the time" have any experiments "proved" anything. In other words, the original definition of speciation was changed because the experimental evidence did not fit the desired result. As it now stands, all the different dog breeds can be considered separate species. Joy oh joy. When the results don't get you were you want to go, redefine the constraints.
Excluding plants (which are pretty easy to evolve), the experiments with animals have been pretty much restricted to flies. Almost all the experiments "infer" that eventually speciation (in terms of the original definition) would occur, but getting flies to the point where two subpopulations mainly choose not to mate is considered conclusive evidence by most biologists. The TOE balances upon experimental evidence such as this. One of the most telling statements is: "The fact of the matter is that the time, effort and money needed to delimit species using the BSC is, to say the least, prohibitive. "
So does ID. IThey're called "bugs". Of course Microsoft would call them "features", but what the hey.
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