"Computer animation"?
What on earth were you attempting to say here?
Posted on 05/02/2003 10:26:29 AM PDT by Remedy
Oh, "we all know that", do we?
What have you got, a dozen mice in your pockets?
Oh? Where? Be specific and precise.
It is not convincing because laws of nature have to be violated.
So you say... Which ones?
It is not convincing because its supporters deliberately ignore and suppress evidence.
Yadda yadda yadda. Examples?
It is not convincing because supporters cannot defend their own assertions.
You're big on the broadly general accusations, and non-existent on the support, I see. What "own assertions" can we not defend, please?
Let's see if you've got anything better than empty accusations. Your reputation is riding on the quality of your responses.
And to avoid the usual creationist tactic of posting a link to a scattershot list of 234,858 attempts to throw things at the wall in the hopes that 1 or 2 might stick, give us your single *best* example, in your own words, in response to each of the questions.
That'll not only save everyone (including you) a lot of time, it'll let us dismiss you once and for all if your "best" examples are shown to be misfires.
Unsupported presumption, but I'll let it slide.
God is the Causer and Sustainer of the universe and therefore the Uncaused Cause.
Errrnnt!! Conclusion does not follow from the premise. Thanks for playing.
Sure, his origin wouldn't be via anything *in* this Universe, but you've hardly "proven" that he therefore could exist without a "Cause" of some sort, from somewhere *other* than our universe.
That should be self-evident (although *you* managed to miss it), so let's go with an illustrative thought experiment. Let's say that 50 years from now, Einstein's great-great-grandson Fred figures out the holy grail of physics, the TOE (Theory Of Everything, which ties together and explains all physical laws). Along with winning the Nobel prize, he wants to put the idea to a practical test, so he rents time on the best particle accelerator of the day, sets the equipment just right according to predictions of his TOE, hits the "commence" button, and *poof*, successfully creates a brand new universe independent from our own, complete with its own space-time system. Cool. He names it Universe Betty, after his inspirational wife.
Now, ponder the situation. Is the following statement a logical conclusion?
If Fred created time and the Universe Betty, He must have existed outside of time and the Universe Betty. Although everything in the Universe Betty must have a cause/beginning, Fred is the Causer and Sustainer of the Universe Betty and therefore the Uncaused Cause.Is this really true? Is Fred thus an "Uncaused Cause"?
Hell no.
Just because someone/something can manage to produce a new universe from whatever/wherever they currently reside when they decide to boot up a universe, that in no way proves that they must be an "Uncaused Cause". It only proves that if they have a Cause (and as far as we know, everything *needs* a Cause), it lies somewhere *else*.
Russia, China, Europe, Cuba, North Korea, Canada ...
Should I continue or do you begin to get the picture.
There is a clear and present correlation. To continue to deny the facts before oneself is to remove ones credibility as an honest broker of truth.
Of course it can.
New capitalist businesses arise from entrepreneurs.
Organisms with novel new mutations are the "entrepreneurs".
What brings a whale from a land mammal, or a bird lung from the reptile respiratory system....
Evolution.
Wondering if a pool without maintenance would last 10 yrs, 100 yrs, 1000 yrs, 100,000 yrs, 1,000,000 yrs, 1,000,000,000 yrs?
Niches are subject to disapperance in short periods of time. Consider the number of recorded extinctions in our lifetimes. "Nature" has her work cut out for her!
The ratio of new life forms to extinct life forms is BAFFLING!
"Computer animation"?
What on earth were you attempting to say here?
Oh, such deep, deep thoughts. So, now, Fred is your 'causer' and he has a cause, so that proves what? Disney's "circle of life"? You can believe that nonsense if you want. I don't have enough groundless faith for that. The Bible takes much less faith than that gobblety-gook.
It is positively amazing to me what intellectual pretzels some people are willing to emulate -- just to avoid the obvious.
Actually, "macroevolution" is what people call it when small evolutionary changes continue to accumulate over time to the point where large differences have taken place. For example, see post #401, which shows 50 steps small enough that they could each be called "microevolution", but cumulatively they are enough to turn a fish into an elephant -- over 500 million years of accumulated changes.
For a good introduction to evolution in general, read Introduction to Evolutionary Biology
and consists mainly of wild-assed extrapolation in the complete absence of supporting evidence.
You have been wildly misinformed. For starters, check out 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: The Scientific Case for the Theory of Common Descent with Gradual Modification
The title is slightly misleading. It's not 29+ *pieces* of evidence for evolution, it's 29+ *independent lines* of evidence for evolution, each of which has literally countless evidentiary observations which support evolution.
God claims to inhabit eternity. By definition that would make Him eternal. A concept that science has given us further incite into.
By reading the book of Job in the Old Testament, one can begin to see the consistency with which science has begun to line up with scripture. One can also learn God's perspective on your "special pleading" issue.
Many of the errors and misconceptions of science could have been quickly resolved by a scholarly read of the Bible. Most landmark scientific discoveries were inspired by Biblical literacy. You know the names, times and places.
God rewards the diligent student. Becoming literate in the Bible will not hurt you.
Yes, exactly.
Check out the February 2003 issue of Scientific American. In it, you'll find an article demonstrating that a mere "week of accidents" (evolution let loose on a circuit design problem) is "more intelligent than all the electronic engineers in history".
It produced a cubic signal generator circuit that a) outperformed the best ever produced by human circuit designers, b) should easily win a patent, and c) is so sophisticated that no one's been able to figure out how in the hell it works yet.
There are thousands of highly intelligent scientists in Universities, at Pharmaceuticals and doing private investigative research.
Not all of them working on the same problem, of course...
One of the strengths of evolution is that in effect every single organism everywhere is in effect a test case simultaneously working on the solution to the problem, "how to better survive and reproduce". It's like the most massively parallel computer in the universe, and it's been operating for a billion years now. No wonder it's come up with a bunch of really slick results.
And billions of years of unintelligent events are supposed to be more capable of creating chemical experiments with billions of successes just to produce a simple organism.
Notwithstanding your wild overestimate that it takes a "billion successes" for just a "simple organism", the answer is, yes.
Heh. There is some irony here in that the hard drive in your computer was very likely "designed" by sifting random data with evolutionary algorithms. While some types of engineering are not efficiently done this way, other types have become sufficiently complex that it is more cost effective to let a supercomputer sift garbage with evolutionary algorithms in the hopes that it will "discover" a better design than to let engineers actually design it. Evolution may be "baloney", but it still randomly "designs" better components than humans can, and more technology is being designed like this every day.
I don't want to be critical, but as a programmer you should know that "evolution" is in fact a common and valid mathematical model of system dynamics that is actually used quite a bit in some applications of computer science, particularly in engineering applications.
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