I don’t get what the big push is about evolution. It’s at least as plausable that we evolved over millions of years and that life was conjured out of thin air and we were created from dust.
"I dont get what the big push is about evolution." 2 posted on Monday, February 23, 2009 2:00:00 AM by utherdoul
It's delayed adolescent sexual anxiety and maladjustment to conventional morality. The percentage of people who get most hysterical about pushing the atheistic version of Darwinist materialism is about the same as that of those with obsessive-compulsive disorder and those suffering from masurbation anxiety. The facts about this have been suppressed so as not to embarrass left-brained dorks at prestige universities who go in for compulsive obsessions in hard sciences. But it is sexual and masturbation anxiety which drives the emotional hysteria behind this movement to make kids spend hours upon hours studying graphs of imaginary prehistoric hominids and gargantuan ape men. Although it's unclear why this in particular relieves the anxiety.
It would require more research into what brought on the anxiety and when the obsessions, cathexis, and fixation on pictures of large ape men set in.
It continues to be debated because people who do not grock science continue to offer non-scientific arguments.
>>I dont get what the big push is about evolution. Its at least as plausable that we evolved over millions of years and that life was conjured out of thin air and we were created from dust.<<
And vice-versa.
Actually, that is not true. It is, frankly, literally impossible for something like DNA and it’s actual functionality to evolve. Throwing more years and adding zeros to the “odds” number just doesn’t help. Eventually, the number is effectively “zero”.
I do know that if my chances of winning the lottery were 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 I wouldn’t buy a ticket.
I swear that if we could develop a microscope so powerful that we could actually find a manufacturers serial number on a strand of DNA some evolutionist would say the number “evolved”.
The serious heat in the debate is generated by the extremes on both sides, whose religious beliefs are threatened by the possibility even that evolution and non-evolutionary processes might co-exist. I suspect that most folks -- especially those who believe in God -- are not particularly uncomfortable with the possibility.
Of the two sides, the "evolution is false" position comes across as the least rational of the two. The mechanism for the accumulation of mutations over time is a very plausible one, especially given mankind's increasing knowledge of genetics.
The problem with the "evolution is everything" position is more subtle, but also unscientific: it lies in the area of pre-excluded hypotheses -- the starting assumption is that (say) an intelligent design hypothesis is a priori invalid. (You can see this argument on any number of FR threads). Here, too, the problem with this approach is highlighted by mankind's increasing knowledge of genetics: the very existence of the biotech industry demonstrates that it is not scientifically sound simply to exclude a "design" hypothesis without question. Genetic design is an established fact, with a growing set of methods and tools to accomplish its aims. Of course, the scientist who offers a "design" hypothesis must still provide evidence suitable for accepting or rejecting the hypothesis -- but the hypothesis itself is not invalid. (In a scientific sense, we're talking about the difference between validation and verification.)
But again -- at root the real heat in this particular debate tends to center on religious, rather than scientific issues. If you scratch the surface of an ardent Creationist, you're likely to find a person who is seriously worried that "evolution is true" implies that there is no God.
On the other hand, the existence of people like Dr. Dawkins suggests that there may be very little separating their scientific beliefs from their militant atheist ones. For them, the opposition to a "design" hypothesis seems more rooted in the fear that it implies the existence of God, than in any purely scientific objection.
Because unlike the Bible, it is based on solid research.