You wrote: "Ichneumon, I feel sorry for you. People are not persuaded by insults, sarcasm or bitterness. It turns everybody off, even those disposed to be on your side. And ironically, it tends to discredit your factual arguments. Lighten up."
Reply: Ichneumon has been brilliant in providing factual information, from multiple sources with sound references, which anyone can verify.
I do not see "insults or bitterness" in any of his posts. Perhaps exasperation. He shows clearly that modern humans derive from earlier humanoids, that we Homo sapiens of today came from an earlier species, and we evolved in the general stream of other primate animals. Humans are certainly different mentally, but our circulatory system is identical to that of apes.
Ichneumon and I share one value, I think: We love how evolution, physics, geology, astronomy, biology, biochemistry, paleontology, archeology, and other sciences come together to support evolution.
If you are "feeling sorry" because Ichnenumon has a different world outlook than you, then it is you we should feel sorry for. It is sad that you see the world as needing magical godly interventions to make it 'understandable' to you.
You left out mathematics. Game theory supports the principle of natural selection.
I've never understood the "Thermodynamic" argument. Life is just a slow oxidation reaction, or to put it another way, in the end we're all dead.
And pigs.
I have news for you. Your phrase "magical godly religion" shows a basic misunderstanding of the nature of magic and religion.
Religion involves acknowledgment and love of a higher power. Magic involves the desire to exert power and control over nature. Study of the history of science in the Renaissance reveals close connections between magic and science. Both involve a Baconian desire to control nature and impose one's will upon it.
Control over nature is not necessarily a bad thing, although it certainly is dangerous if wrongly used, but it's quite different from religion.
Magic and superstition tend to be most prevalent when religion is weak or divided, as was the case in the Renaissance, a period when there was a great resurgence of magic and witchcraft, and the present time, when there is an incredible profusion of New Age mysticism and superstition. Taking formal religion out of the schools has not produced a race of cool scientists, it has produced large numbers of credulous and superstitious New Agers. Wicca, crystal gazers, channelers, and celebrity worshippers.
As Chesterton observed, if you take away God, you don't end up with nothing, you end up with almost anything. You end up with Shirley McClain, for instance.