Posted on 09/24/2001 1:12:24 PM PDT by ThinkPlease
Tonight is the beginning of the Evolution Series on PBS. I thought I'd open up some threads of discussion here prior, during and after the telecast of the episodes.
Here's PBS's homepage for the telecast:
And Here's something from the Discovery Institute, who is evidently irritated about turning down free publicity on the telecast. (They were offered time on the final night of the telecast, and turned down PBS.)
Okay, let's take your thoughts a little further. So then, God created the world is that correct? Then the Bible is true and His statements that he created man, the universe and all living things is correct?
Three things: (1) I believe that is true; (2) Although I believe it, strictly speaking, the third sentence doesn't necessarily follow from the second (as a syllogism, that dog won't hunt); and (3) So what? That doesn't affect anything unless you want to continue to force (what I believe is) your false dichotomy.
If you don't though, the question that needs to be answered is: if God is going around enforcing all these natural laws, how can you leave Him out from creating new species, new life?
It is a large, and erroneous, step to infer from what I maintained to "leav[ing] Him out...". I don't. You say I do.
You go on to speak of "natural laws", etc. Well, natural laws, just like life, were put there by God (I believe; for others, they MAY have been). How God put them there, I don't know. How God put life here, I don't know. And neither do you or Darwin. But Darwin put forth a theory that is or is not supported by the evidence. I have, in the past, criticized some of that evidence. But I would like to be able to hear a refutation of my, and others', legitimate criticism.
And that's the point: You have made your arguments many times. We understand your argument. We disagree with it. Continually restating the argument does nothing but detract from the discussion.
If you wish to point out scientific arguments that buttress your position, fine. But, as I stated above, it's becoming overwhelmingly distracting noise.
Evolution certainly leaves God out of creating man and other species. In fact it is the whole point of evolution and indeed it was Darwin's intention to leave God out of it. Perhaps you personally do not leave God out of the equation, but that does not mean my statement is incorrect. All it means is that like many people you hold mutually inconsistent views.
Always an excuse for not being able to give proof. Instead of giving excuses, how about giving proof of evolution?
Yup, your statement is false because tautologies are proof of nothing. They are just rhetorical deceits.
Where's the proof of the above? There are numerous species that have not changed one iota from the time they have been found. There are numerous species that have lasted tens of millions of years for which we have bones as proof. If evolution were true, this would be impossible. If as you say, even interbreeding populations change over time, we should almost never find fossils which are almost exactly alike from tens of millions of years apart.
Let's also note that if you cannot prove evolution from the fossil record. If you cannot prove evolutionary change over time. If you cannot prove evolutionary change in the present (because of not enough time) then you are admitting what I have been saying all along on these threads - there is absolutely no proof for evolution.
Forgot what you were talking about? You might at least have re-read before posting.
Actually, Godel's statement--not mine--in post 223 which you termed a "false tautology" was neither false nor a tautology. It points out that statistically improbable things happen all the time, even on demand. Every shuffle of a deck of 52 cards is a one-in-52-factorial outcome. That's one out of 52 times 51 times 50 times 49 times 48 and so forth down to times one. Nevertheless, every time you shuffle a deck and deal, you get one such result.
"False tautology" remains an oxymoron.
You are correct in that it is a question evolution cannot answer. It is also a question that intelligent design cannot answer either, therefore there is no refutation
You do not need to have a competing theory in order to refute a theory. All you have to do is to show that the theory is false. If for example one could show that water runs uphill that would refute the theory of gravity even though there was no theory to explain such behavior. Indeed that is how science works. If a theory cannot answer the refutations, it is deemed false and research goes on for other explanations. Science does not say, we must have an answer to everything so even if a theory is wrong we will accept it until we can find a true one. Science rejects theories which are proven wrong. In fact accepting theories that are false is totally contrary to science and if science had followed your methodology we would still be riding horses.
Here's the problem with the above explanation: for change to occur you need mutations. Mutations are necessarily random and occur all the time. Most mutations are bad, but if a favorable mutation occurs - even in a successful species, why would it not be adopted anyway? There are many adaptations that can be helpful even in a successful species - a smarter brain would help any species for example. So why would such a mutation be rejected? None at all. Yet you say that some species are too well adapted to change. Clearly that is not true, there are always improvements possible.
There is also another problem with your explanation - why would a successful species change? There is no reason at all. Perhaps the most successful species ever are bacteria. They have been around since life first started. They are everywhere, even inside our own bodies. Why would they bother to change? There is no need for it, they are now and have always been highly successful. They have survived for hundreds of millions of years. Yet if evolution is true, we must believe that this most highly successful species chose a path more fraught with problems than the one it had already achieved.
In other words, you cannot have it both ways.
It's not an excuse--it's a description of reality--something with which you're apparently unfamiliar.
It is not possible to "prove" any scientific theory--they can only be disproved.
If the first human was truly the only human, would he have mated with his ancestor? Could that happen if they were no longer the same species? If this first human could sucessfully mate with only primates, and his offspring could only mate with primates, and their offspring could only mate with primates- how did they become human? Please advise. I'm confused.
Clearly your statement means that it is impossible to trace evolution through fossils.-me-
Do you always just make up sentences like the one above, devoid of any meaning. Talk about non-sequiters!
Noooo. My statement directly follows from your statement about convergence. Evolutionists have always said that if it looks alike it is proof of ancestry. However, if you are going to say that things that look alike can have completely different ancestries, then you cannot prove evolution through fossils because we can never know whether the similarites are due to ancestry or convergence.
Let me also note, that to anyone who bothers to read Darwin, one will see that the only arguments he makes for evolution are based on homology - same functions, same looks are due to common ancestry. So you have put your foot in your mouth with your double-talk. Heck, if two species looking similar means either homology or convergence how can you tell if one is an ancestor of another? Because your theory needs a missing link? Because you say so? Because you invoke the ghost of Darwin and he tells you the correct answer? Inquiring minds want to know.
Then why do both humans and primates still exist? Aren't the primates sussessful in their environments today?
I may agree with you, depending on how you define "religion". I don't believe Genesis should replace a science textbook. The Word of God supercedes science. However, the scientific method should allow one to test the theory that the universe was designed. Galileo used a similar concept to seek order in the planetary bodies, thus eventually learning that the earth revolved around the sun.
Suppose for the purpose of this argument that God really exists. He's not just someone's belief system. He really exists. And assume God created us. The purpose of science is to discover reality. That reality may well involve God.
Could "science" uncover the truth of that reality, if it automatically precludes evidence that suggests a purposefully ordered universe?
I recently heard about a Chinese scientist who was not permitted to discuss a weakness in Darwin's theopry at an American Scintific convention. He said something like, "In China we can criticise Darwin, but not the government. In American we can criticise the government, but not Darwin." Darwin proposed a scientific theory, but his followers are the ones who have turned it into a religion.
You seem to think that speciation is a clearly defined concept, in which suddenly one generation instantly becomes a different species than the last. That's not the way it works. It's a gradual process, taking many generations. Any given generation is of the same species as its parents and its children, by definition. It just that, over time, it slowly becomes unable to breed with its distant cousins. And, just for your information, humans are primates...
What experiments would you perform to determine whether or not that is the case?
Humans are primates. In fact, they are the most successful primates--the others are under extreme environmental pressures as result, and may go extinct as a result of the success of humanity.
So let me see if I have this straight. The female fish eggs and the male fish sperm just somehow "know" that "there's little opportunity or pressure for sea creatures to become land creatures" so they don't even bother producing fish with little legs. Hmmm. Talk about "fishy". ;-)
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