The really big lie which is being promulgated by the evos is that the dialectic is between evolution and religion. That's BS. In order to have a meaningful dialectic between evolution and religion, you would need a religion whicih operated on an intellectual level similar to that of evolution, and the voodoo doctors down in Haiti would probably not be interested.
The real dialectic is between evolution and mathematics. Professing belief in evolution at this juncture amounts to the same thing as claiming not to believe in modern mathematics, probability theory, and logic. It's basically ignorant.
Evolution has been so thoroughly discredited at this point that you assume nobody is defending it because they believe in it anymore, and that they are defending it because they do not like the prospects of having to defend or explain some axpect of their lifestyles to God, St. Peter, Muhammed...
To these people I say, you've still got a problem. The problem is that evolution, as a doctrine, is so overwhelmingly STUPID that, faced with a choice of wearing a sweatshirt with a scarlet letter A for Adulteror, F for Fornicator or some such traditional design, or or a big scarlet letter I for IDIOT, you'd actually be better off sticking with one of the traditional choices because, as Clint Eastwood noted in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:
God hates IDIOTS, too!
The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.
Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.
For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.
In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.
All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.
And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.
Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.
Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.
And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record (despite the BS claims of talk.origins "crew" and others of their ilk) to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:
Guys, we need flight feathers, and wings, and specialized bones, hearts, lungs, and tails, and we need em NOW; not two years from now. Everybody ready, all together now: OOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....
You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.
But it gets even stupider.
Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.
Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).
Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:
1. It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could see or hear them, they wouldn't be witches...) The best example of that sort of logic in fact that there ever was was Michael O'Donahue's parody of the Connecticut Yankee (New York Yankee in King Arthur's Court) which showed Reggie looking for a low outside fastball and then getting beaned cold by a high inside one, the people feeling Reggie's wrist for pulse, and Reggie back in Camelot, where they had him bound hand and foot. Some guy was shouting "Damned if e ain't black from ead to foot, if that ain't witchcraft I never saw it!!!", everybody was yelling "Witchcraft Trial!, Witchcraft Trial!!", and they were building a scaffold. Reggie looks at King Arthur and says "Hey man, isn't that just a tad premature, I mean we haven't even had the TRIAL yet!", and Arthur replies "You don't seem to understand, son, the hanging IS the trial; if you survive that, that means you're a witch and we gotta burn ya!!!" Again, that's precisely the sort of logic which goes into Gould's variant of evolutionism, Punk-eek.2. PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...
3. PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.
4. PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.
5. For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.
The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.
And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:
They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:
ASSUMING that Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happens, then the rest of the business proceeds as we have described in our scholarly discourse above!
Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.
I ask you: How could anything be stupider or worse than that? What could possibly be worse than professing to believe in such a thing?
What do you believe which explains the available but obviously incomplete information about our existence?
Reading this thread.
Oh you mean the "proven" science of Evolution the facts of which can be found in museums throughout the world? That would be to literally believe the scriptures in the Old Testament that transcribe ancient folklore that was handed down from generation to generation verbally well before recorded history. Now that is DUMB and quite Anti-Science in my view. Since Creationists, such as yourself, don't have the FACTS on your side, your apparent tack lately seems to be to make utterly absurd absolute statements founded purely in emotion and devoid of all logic and facts.
For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together.
I ask you: How could anything be stupider or worse than that? What could possibly be worse than professing to believe in such a thing?
Making assumptions about evolution that are not reflected in the fossil record i.e. misrepresenting the evidence of mutation and adaptation by declaring that various intermediate traits are "antifunctional" until they arrive at some contemporary form.
That would be worse. That would be stupider.
In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.
Part of your problem is that you are bad at math. This isn't the correct application of probability theory to the issue at hand. Your conclusions are going to be wrong if your premises are false.
Luckily for you, "God only hates idiots" so being ignorant of mathematics doesn't automatically put you on the hate list. Of course, if you continue to blindly assert these things without boning up on the statistics and probability theory, then maybe you are an idiot.
Very good summation! A bit long, but it was worth the read. Most responses to your post were expected - so typical.
Dunno. Earth orbiting Saturn pretty much fits the bill...
Like Carl Sagan said about the "theory of gravity" (That's right - it is also a THEORY). See, we have no idea WHY gravity works. We know it does (or else we would all be flying off the earth now from the rotational inertia). We haven't found a gravity wave, beam, or particle....but we still have gravity. In the same vein, we HAVE evolution. It happens all around you all the time. To deny it is to deny reality. It's obvious from your post that you know less than nothing about evolutionary throry....so, I'll give you the primer. It doesn't happen "because you want to fly - you evolve wings". Even a simpleton can do better than that. Here's 2 examples.
Example1: Mosquitos. Back in the 50's, we discovered DDT and began spraying mosquito infested areas with it. It was 99% effective. Several years later, the effectivity was down to about 50%. Why you ask? The mosquitos evolved. See the first applications killed 99% of the mosquitos in the area. The 1% that survived were naturally immune to it's effects - just by pure chance. Well, these 1% - being the only mosquitos left alive, mated and had little mosquitos. Since both parents were immune to DDT, the odds of the offspring being immune, due to genetics, was much higher. After several repeated sprayings, only the mosquitos capable of surviving DDT were left alive. The more they sprayed, the more immune the mosquitos became. They EVOLVED. Example2: is using anti-biotics. When pennecillin was discovered, it destoyed many, many bacteria. Today, it does not have the same effect for the same reasons I stated above. The bacteria that were immune to pennicillin survived and the ones that didn't - perished.
Now, to deny THIS reality is the mark of an idiot.
Now, if you want to argue Intelligent Design (which, given it's name is obviously way above you), you might be able to convince some that, even though evolution exists, it was caused by God. But, that argument requires considerable thought, knowledge, mathematics, ans skill.
turns out there is a very powerful mathematical FACT that provides short cuts for evolution and also explains why we tend to see punctuated equilibrium and other kinds of discontinuous change in the fossil record.
The new insight is called "neutral networks". It turns out that in DNA there is a lot of what is called "degeneracy" ie that there are typically many different strings of DNA that code for exactly the same protein. Indeed for a 30 codon gene (ie a tiny one) a typical number of identical genotypes per phenotype is on the order of 25,000.
further, in a 30 dimensional space, many of those 25,000 genotypes will be connected in a chain a single mutation apart, forming a "network" of genotypes that all produce the same phenotype (ie protein).
a population will typically start with an original "founder" founder genotype, but under mutation mathematically it is clear that the population will entropically disperse across the "neutral network" of phenotypically identical genotypes. Since the neighbors on the network are "adjacent" the probability of a move on the network is quite reasonable.
Now imagine a "better place to be genetically" that is unfortunately a long distance from the original "founder" genotype. As you point out, the probabality of sya 20 mutations happening SIMULATANEOUSLY to go from point A to point B is extremely unlikely. But the population will NOT remain concentrated at the founder location in genotype space, it will fill the whole network. All it takes is ANY PART of the network to be near point B and migration by mutation becomes feasible.
now imagine network after network that represent fitter and fitter forms. Imagine (as is very likely mathemetically) that these networks are at some of their locations adjacent or near to other networks. this produces a highly favored and rather quick road for evolution.
I've been studying evoloution pretty seriously for a year. I came into agnostic on such key questions as "has there been enough time". Neutral networks provides a likely answer, that yes, there has been enough time.
Interestingly of course, those networks are a MATHEMATICAL reality a priori to physics and that have been there since before the universe existed! food for thought for those still looking for room for a deity.
Yours in Truth,