well, one tennant of scientific rationality is empiricism. science confines itself to what can be observed and documented. i'm not so sure naturalism, as you've described it, is foundational to scientific thought so much as a parallel that's difficult to avoid. science looks at what can be observed, either directly or through measurement devices. science doesn't confine itself solely to the natural world: just look at sociology and anthropology: investigations in those disciplines are modelled on scientific reasoning. yet, popular discourse scoffs at them as even less scientific.

as for evolution, my personal view is this. any explanation of things is going to seem kind of supernatural, especially if you haven't heard it your whole life. creationism makes sense to people who've been around it a lot, and evolution is the same. big explanations are always a little mystical because they describe things that happen outside out realm of immediate experience. but a good scientist knows his or her theories aren't truths. theories are constantly refined. what we think we know about evolution will undoubtably change again and again as time rolls on. does this mean it's a waste of time to inform yourself on the progress of science? i guess it depends on your goals and the levels of participation you believe you deserve. personally, i think anyone involved in making political decisions, including voters, has an obligations to understand pertient scienctific knowledge on its own terms (that is, being able to understand what a projection or an inference is vs. a deduction or observation). but of course, i can't make that happen, so it's merely a piece of advice i give people.

in my view of things, scientific thought is one where tentative statements dominate. if you're only interested in Absolute Truth, you basically have two options: knowing very little, or keeping your head in the sand (knowing a great deal and examining none of it).

I'm impressed at how well this conversation has progressed.

I'll point out that when we say "atheism is a religion" it's generally in response to one who has claimed that title and is acting irrationally. Otherwise, it's not really an issue.

As an example, there was a fellow I worked with who got mad at me for not working on a particular Sunday morning. He asked why and I told him that I did not work on Sundays for religious reasons. Now, realize that he was in his forties and I was just a young buck, in my late teens. He turned the whole thing into a hostile questioning session in which he demanded to know how I could believe in God when there was so much suffering. To my mind, that's the kind of bizarre irrational reaction merely to the fact of one being religious that leads me to say he had religion...just of the sort that says there is no God.

I had a conversation with a person with interests in US west-coast pre-columbian artifacts, which I didn't even know existed until then. The artifacts are little stone knives, ends of pestles, stuff like that. A lot of people are trading and selling them apparently.

What's interesting is that the artifacts may have a link with Pacific Island aboriginal/native peoples. My suggestion that a few islanders might have gotten caught in a storm and drifted up with the ocean currents to the west coast of the US caught his attention. His reply that this culture also had colonies/artifacts much further inland and much more widespread, in ancient times much in advance of any previously publically advertised settlements including American Indians, caught my attention.

You may be onto something there, but maybe the connection was in the past, not the future. But then, no one who has come after, including native tribes of the US northwest, even have a clue how to reproduce some of the artifacts (some are made from unique geologic materials which are amazingly difficult to work) - they just picked them up and used them, or are trading them around now (according to my acquaintance, who knows more about it than I). If there are some genes (dna) from those early "elves?" still in the genepool, they just might pop up again. Maybe you have some, and they are thunking you on the head, metaphorically speaking!

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_contact]

BTW this is a practical reason for resisting bigotry and repression. Such abilities should not go to waste, for our own good! Especially not just because some greedy little ****** wants to be the center of attention. I always try to show the practical reasons behind my rampant desire to choke the little bigots and oppressors out-of-hand.  

not to mention that's totally inappropriate for the workplace.

In the case of DNA, I would assume that the necessary sequence of bases to produce a functional protein would suffice as a unit of information.



The development of the eye in a single organism from birth to adulthood is controlled by DNA, proteins, and other various chemicals in a pre-programmed manner - the DNA already contains the instructions to create the eye. It's not magical - it's well known and studied, and we have some idea of how it works.

The development of the eye over millions of years is not, however, already in the DNA of what we believe to be the first organisms and therefore must be created somehow.



Your DNA is unique, yes - but it is still derived. You're a combination of your father's DNA and your mother's DNA, with the traits from both being combined somewhat randomly.

If this derivation were not true, and your DNA was truly created randomly every time with no rhyme or reason to its creation, you wouldn't even be identifiable as human.

Your DNA controls your development from conception to death. Since your DNA was combined from two humans - and because that DNA contains the information to make a human, the result is that you're human.



Easy - the amount of information in human DNA is HUGE. Larger than an entire set of encyclopedias - by some estimates, larger than 400 sets!

Now, each of your parents is going to have a different set of information.

Now, if you were to randomly combine all of that information billions of times, what are the chances that you will get an exact duplicate somewhere? Very, very slim. Slim enough to be next to zero.



These tests are called "mathematics" and "logic," and they don't care whether they're being used by religion or science. Many religions have used them. Whether you agree with their use is another matter .

Indeed, since we have many texts and artifacts from our religion, we can indeed apply tests to see if they match up with each other and form some sort of test of reliability.



I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. How does the possible incorrectness of a different religion relate to our current debate?



Religion. Which of course is my point. Science didn't create the conflicts, because science doesn't (or shouldn't) make claims beyond what is observable. It's the religion of naturalism making conflicts with Christianity in this case.



mmk, how is it not simple?



Agreed. Except for the part claiming that naturalism is a "parallel that's difficult to avoid."



100% agreed. Unfortunately, many of our science textbooks go beyond those confines.

We see bacteria evolving new traits by mutation constantly, both in the lab and in nature. All that hoo-ha a few weeks ago about about Andrew Speaker was the result of Mycobacterium tuberculosis mutating over successive generations into a form which is resistant to antibiotics. Drug resistant staph evolved the exact same way. Creation of new traits by mutation isn't just an observed fact, it's the root cause of a growing medical crisis.

At any rate, a minority trait in a species becoming a majority trait due to natural selection suddenly favoring the minority trait is evolution. It's completely disingenuous to dismiss peppered moths because the variation was preexisting; how do you think the variation got there in the first place?



Congratulations. You've managed to fit a strawman distortion of evolution and a misrepresentation of the time scales at which evolution operates into the same paragraph.

First, fruit flies may be fast breeders (the reason they're used for so much genetic research in the first place; for the same reason, when we need to study genetics in mammals, we use mice), but not fast enough for speciation to have occurred in the century or so since we've started breeding them. Maybe it could happen if there were a decades-long program to produce a new, viable species of fruit fly, but to my knowledge, there hasn't been. Fruit fly reproductive cycles take about a week at minimum; compare that to bacteria, which, given a ready supply of nutrients and the right environmental conditions, have life cycles measurable in hours.

Second, evolution does not occur through gross anatomical changes across single generations. If a fruit fly ever mutated into a butterfly, that event would do more to damage evolutionary theory than all the creationist argle-bargle in history ever has. Evolution is the accumulation of small changes--the kind which can and have been produced by mutation, even if it happens rarely--over many generations, with natural selection providing the filter which makes the process nonrandom even if the mutations are.



How is it "questionable"? The fact that beneficial mutations are rare is already taken into account by evolutionary theory. You need a great number of generations of beneficial changes to accumulate, but they do happen (by your own admission, no less), and natural selection is biased in favor of beneficial mutations.

Most mutations, incidentally, are neither harmful nor beneficial. The vast majority take place in "junk" DNA which codes for no proteins. Even a mutation on an active gene might not produce any real benefit or disadvantage, at least not to that organism. It may become harmful or beneficial later if environmental conditions change; the peppered moth is a good example of an animal where a mutation introduced a disadvantageous change in some individuals which eventually became advantageous due to outside factors.



Um, yes, unless you care to argue that MSRA evolved resistance to the entire penicillin family at once.



Fortunately, we don't have to use our imaginations. The fossil record shows present-day species evolving over time. The record isn't perfect, unfortunately, but it's good enough to demonstrate conclusively that evolution happened.



Science isn't about finding "the truth", let alone the "absolute truth". It's about trying to find the best possible explanation given current evidence. If the evidence changes, then the explanation will too (it doesn't always happen immediately because scientists are human, but it does happen). I can't wait to hear how this is somehow worse than the theistic method, which is to claim to know the absolute truth, and when new evidence proves you wrong, deny the new evidence exits (or misrepresent and distort it until it supports your position, which amounts to the same thing).



Frankly, I think the theists who denounce science as the enemy of religion are right. It is. Science has muscled religion out of its primary turf, which was to explain the natural world. Darwin did the most damage, because without a naturalistic explanation of the origin of life, even those who were extremely skeptical of traditional religion really had no choice but to accept at least an disinterested Deistic entity.

Now, as far as I can tell, the only thing religion can do that science can't is take the edge of death, emotionally. And Christianity has even screwed that up by adding the concept of Hell. And please, no yammering about forgiveness. The fact that it supposedly exist at all ought to scare the daylights out of a true believer, especially since the Bible and Christian theology is very clear that everyone deserves to go.



This is technically true, but also useless. I could invent a worldview where gray rocks were created by elves last Tuesday, but white rocks were created by leprechauns a hundred trillion years ago, but that wouldn't be particularly useful. The scientific viewpoint not only is consistent with the evidence and itself, it has actually produced improvements in human endeavors completely unmatched by religion or anything else. The same basic scientific principles which underly radioisotope dating underly PET scans and nuclear submarines; what has the religious worldview produced that compares? Last time I was at Home Depot, I didn't see any faith-based lightbulbs.



There's no hard and fast line, especially since the last time an entire major theory collapsed in a heap all at once was...well, it was when Darwin kicked the legs out from under creationism, actually. Hypotheses are typically discarded as soon as evidence comes along which they cannot explain, though usually there is an attempt to reconcile the hypothesis with the new evidence first.

Of course, what you're actually trying to argue is that evolution is too difficult and complex to really be likely; that is, bluntly, nonsense. The fact that it's too difficult and complex for a layman to wholly understand means nothing--I don't see theists (directly) arguing against nuclear physics, orbital mechanics, or quantum theory on the same grounds. Evolution has been observed in nature, it has been observed in the fossil record, and the predictions made by evolutionary theory have been consistently borne out by the facts. The fact that the mechanism by which millions of species came into being is complicated is no way an indictment of that mechanism; indeed, the only reason I can see that anyone would be surprised by that is because he has an emotional investment in a much simpler (in the "easy to understand" sense of the word) explanation.



Not only is this absurd on its face, it's predicated on a distortion of Occam's Razor, with which I deal below.



First, "simple" is a common distortion of the principle of parsimony. Occam's Razor doesn't actually say "the simplest theory is right". It's the theory which accounts for all the evidence while introducing the fewest new terms.

That said, it should be instantly obvious why God violates parsimony, but I'll spell it out anyway: an omnipotent, omniscient, intelligent force which exists simultaneously within and outside the universe, whose existence cannot be accounted for by a single piece of evidence anywhere in any science, is obviously a new term, and an unnecessary one, because cosmology, physics, chemistry, and biology together can explain the origin of the universe, life on Earth, and the complexity of living things without invoking Him.

Furthermore, an evolutionist would be fairly generous in calling God only a single extraneous term. In the single observed instance of intelligence so far in the universe (three if you want to be generous and count chimpanzees and computers as intelligent for the purpose of argument), a great many other elements had to exist first. That leaves you three choices:

1. The prerequisite elements for God to exist also exist, or at least existed at one time, adding an unknown number of extra terms.
2. God appeared out of nowhere by an unknown mechanism, adding at least one extra term.
3. God has always existed and exists "just because". Unfortunately that exact same argument can be applied to a naturalistic universe, which has the not insignificant advantage in that the universe can be observed to exist.

This ignores the fact that an omnipotent, omniscient being would be far more complex than a human, chimp, or computer and presumably would have more prerequisites for its existence (it also ignores that omnipotence is logically impossible, but this doesn't seem necessary for Creationism as I understand it anyway).

In all cases, you're adding at least one term besides God: you're assuming the universe has an "outside". Some cosmologists do hypothesize this, but that is in no way proven, and it's not particularly helpful to you anyway, since they believe what is outside are other universes, and any interaction between universes, if possible at all, would be accompanied by pretty spectacular disruptions of space time.

This brings us to the Creationist elephant in the room: Creationists typically argue by attacking evolution, because with the exception of the Young-Earth biblical literalists, they concede that the empirical evidence for God's existence is zero. Instead, the implied assumption is that if evolution can be upended, then creationism wins automatically. This isn't even slightly true. Even if evolutionary theory collapsed tomorrow (Note: it won't), the default assumption isn't "an all powerful invisible man did it". The assumption would be either some heretofore unknown naturalistic process or intelligent processes originating within the universe (in other words, aliens) were responsible for observed present-day and fossil variation, because, as I mentioned above, the universe can be observed to exist. Bluntly, anyone who wishes to prove the Judeo-Christian God created life on Earth first has to prove the Judeo-Christian God exists as well.

welcome to our discussion, RedImperator. thanks for taking up the evolution debate; it was wearing me out. that said, i disagree with some of the things you've said about religion. i don't think science needs to conflict with all religion, only some traditional religious ideas. also, i think Colombus did more to hurt Christian ideas than did Darwin. evolution is an idea people are still arguing against, but Colombus "discovered" half the planet the bible never mentions, seriously underminging the legitimacy or at least thoroughness of biblical history. maybe one can argue against evolutionary theory and, in his/her own mind, make valid points to dismiss it, but it'd be impossible to convince many people that North and South America are in fact not here. maybe like all our fossil evidence, it's just the devil's work. or maybe, and please shoot me if this is the case, the Mormons are right.



i already quoted entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem somewhere in here.



dolphins!!! okay, here's a serious contribution. we're intelligent, okay, but what is that intelligence? i guess i can see why it's so easy to believe in a god that created human beings, because we seem so different than other animals. at least to ourselves. a drengin might look at us similar to ant colonies.

personally, i don't see intelligence as anything all that special. by that i mean, while it's a unique evolutionary trait on earth, it's not spectacular or supernatural or evidence of some higher force. not at all. the basis of human intelligence in my view of things (which is strongly influenced by the American Pragmatist school of philosophy and particularly the ideas of G.H. Mead) "intelligence" boils down to language. it's not specifically language, but symbols. gestures are the basis of symbols, and Meade observed dogs repeatedly engaging in "conversations of insignificant gestures."

dog A barks and growls at dog B. dog B growls back and arches her back. dog A arches her back and barks again. if you know dogs, you know that after enough of this, one dog will stop the show and either bite or back off. Mead realized the dogs were conveying information to each other at about the same level as a light switch communicates "information" (signal) to the light. compared to human language, it's an incredibly simple form of communication.

human beings still have insignificant gestures: scowling when angry, yawning when bored, eyes widening when enthused, staring when enamored. sure, eventually we learn that these gestures are in fact significant and watch out for them at least sometimes in our selves and others. but that's not what Mead means by "significant."

the Swiss linguist Saussure is notable for his contribution to linguistic theory that eventually led to the structuralist school. he pointed out that there's rarely if at all any necessary relationship between the sound, spelling, or script of a word and its language, and the object or idea the word itself describes. he called this distinction that of signifier (word or symbol) and signified (object or concept).

this is important to Mead's notion of significance because, with the dogs, growling = fight escalation, and growling always means fight escalation. on the other hand, the human repitoire of gestures was virtually infinite -- because most of our gesures are symbolic. Mead's idea of the symbol is similar to the Platonic ideal except it's not divine. human beings socialize each other to understand certain 'ideals' when we use our words. person A asks, "do you have a chair?" person B replies, "no, but you can sit on that bench." this is because the gesture or signifier 'chair' points to an object or ideal of 'something to sit on.' but what if person A were then to reply, "no, I need it to tame that lion over there." so chair isn't just defined by its intended use, but in this case also by its typical or ideal construction, which in the case of European chairs also turned out to be useful for keeping large animals at bay (at least in the cartoons).

Mead was a naturalist and believed the theory of evolution to be mostly accurate. the ability to use symbols gave human beings a great advantage in the wild. animals can be observed to use spatial reasoning. apes shake trees to dislodge nuts and fruit; they've even been observed throwing rocks at their food to do this. some chimps know to crack the shells of nuts with basic tools, and amazingly it seems to be cultural knowledge. while the same chimps on one side of a river break open these nuts by smashing them with one rock in a natural groove of another rock face, chimps on the other side of the river refuse to do this despite the same materails available, even after observing chimps from the first side of the river.

chimps have not been observed to move rocks from one site in order to dislodge food at another site. it seems that for chimps, "rocks = food harvesting tool" is only the case when both the rocks and the food are visibly present. it's not a memeory thing: lots of animals are observed to remember certain types of things. for Mead, it boiled down to the significance humans carried for the term "rock."

how could you put that meaning into other words? i'm not sure you could. at least part of the meaning of a rock is the use to which it's put, and the thing is, when a human carries the memory of 'rock', part of what we carry is information to outline potential uses of a rock. indigeounous peoples around the world can tell you volumes about the properties and potential uses of local rock varieities. a big part of being human is 'talking to yourself.' what this behavior represents is the ability to manipulate symbols overtly (in your head). we can say, "if i bring this rock to those trees, i can use it to knock the fruit from the high branches." even if we don't always use words when we imagine such actions, we use symbols.

it's likely some of our evolutionary anscestors had some of these abilities to varying extents: evidence of increasingly complex tools before the development of anatomically moden humans strongly suggests this. but i think what made H. sapeiens unique was a new turn in the evolution of primate language. i personally believe that we learned to symbolize the abstract. in other words, we learned to create and use symbols for things that don't exist in the physical and observable world.

evidence of ceremonial burial is has not been documented in any of our evolutionary predecessors, nor has art making. our tools became exponentially more complex. and if the way we treat each other is any hint, we probably exterminated or interbred with all our sapient primate competition, since at least half a dozen species of upright primate all went extinct right around the same time we came onto the scene.

and among those abstract concepts was the soul or spirit or atman or any of a the thousands of other names that have existed for it. i don't deny it's there; i just deny that it's supernatural. modern social scientists have their equivalent terms: self, actor, agent and subject. each of the social-scientific terms brings slight emphasis to different aspects of what it describes, in the same way that 'soul' brings Abrahamic ideas to bear while Atman brings Vedic ones. they all still recognize 'free will' (or at least the ability to make choices) and the "unique individual unit" nature (as a self-aware or reflexive being).

i previously explained in this thread (i think in pretty good detail) how the 'self' develops in Mead's views. of course, i don't imagine i've changed anyone's beliefs. however, there's a popular myth that "science" can't answer Life's Big Questions. i'm going to come back to what Life's Big Questions really are in a minute, but for now i'm talking about questions of creation and origin. where did everything come from? big bang theory. where did humans come from? theory of evolution. why am 'I' 'me'? well, there are at least a half a dozen theories on identity development. i prefer to try and integrate them, but there's little agreement on how to even do that. the problem here is, we're trying to understand ourselves (and everything) with our own senses and anthropocentric biases. i doubt we'll ever have perfect answers or know everything. in fact, i think that would pretty much suck. that'd be the end of history.

science isn't even all that new. it's just an inherited European perspective, because we gringos were stuck in a Dark Ages for centuries. what do you think the Renaissance was a rebirth of? scientific reasoning has been with people for a long time, it's just that Europeans had to relearn it and make it explicit. you don't see this kind of heated argument in many other cultures. many traditional, religious peoples, when confronted with scientific knowledge and ideas and arguments that contradict their beliefs, usually do the equivalent of 'smile and nod.'

i think there have probably always been people who simply didn't believe in God or The Gods or anything supernatural -- throughout all of history. they probably kept to themselves mostly, paid homage where and when expected to in order to fit in, and othewise went about their business. but this "believe the Right thing or else!" mentality is, i think, a unique thing to the modern world. maybe some individuals are just emboldened by today's science, which will assuredly all be outdated at least a little someday. maybe it's also a unique part of American/European/Near-Eastern, or Judeo-Islamo-Christian, or whatever part of history.

but i know one thing for sure. scientists are not ethicists -- at least, the two things aren't the same. many or not most scientists are also ethicists, and least with regard to doing their work and not breaking ethical prescriptions. but ethics is still a realm in which the traditions offered by religion may be vital; but it is also one for which the opennes to change offered by science and modernity in general must be integrated. sexism, racism and homophobia are detrimental to complex, advanced societies in obivous ways. i find examples of religious people with modern, progressive senses of ethics, who embrace scientific knowledge, and yet who still identify themselves with traditional religious terms (all religions).

in fact, my best friend, who's also Christian, said science was the best and most difficult test of her faith she could imagine.

The Americas are an embarrassing omission, but the Bible never explicitly draws a map of the world (literalists do have to deal with the part where Satan takes Jesus to a mountaintop and shows him the entire world, implying that it's flat). On the other hand, the Bible devotes an entire book to human origins. Worse, that book contains the justification for Original Sin, which is not a doctrine that can be easily thrown out even if you aren't a literalist. I think that's part of why you see Young Earth Creationists but not Pi Equals Exactly Three "Christian mathematicians" or America Doesn't Exist "christian geographers" (the other being that evolution is complicated to explain and easily misunderstood or misrepresented, as this thread and countless others across the Internet show).

Regardless of whether it was Darwin or Columbus or Galileo or Mickey Mouse, however, I think the fundamental point stands: religion is drastically weakened when science usurps it in one of its fundamental roles.



I think I read that somewhere when I was browsing through the thread. I find that in these sorts of debates, a great many things need to be repeated.



That's fascinating; could you perhaps recommend a good introduction to Mead's ideas so I could peruse them myself? After I'm finished with the huge backlog of books I have already, of course.



My view on religious ethics can be summed up thusly: any system of ethics which puts an invisible man in the sky ahead of individual human beings is junk. This doesn't mean that religious people are bad by any stretch of the imagination; the overwhelming majority of them are just people trying to get by in the world as best they can without hurting anyone else. But religious ethical tenets, Biblical ethical tenets specifically, fall into one of three categories:

1. Good, but reachable by nontheistic ethical systems (i.e., help the poor, forgive others).
2. Arbitary, but if they harm anyone, it's only the person following them (i.e., no gay sex, don't eat pork).
3. Actively harmful to society (i.e., kill gays, make women second class citizens).



The way I see it, a scientifically literate Christian has only three choices these days:

1. Become a Deist and hide in the corner behind the Strong Anthropic Principle
2. Deny reality
3. Accept that religious belief in based on faith, not reason, and get on with his life

The third has the advantage of being not only intellectually honest, but theologically correct. I find myself wondering sometimes if the theists who are constantly turning mental backflips trying to prove God exists actually understand the point of the Doubting Thomas story.

WoW-Somehow I just knew I wsn't really the smartest person on the whole planet. That's ok, I didn't really want to be. I think the wisest course of action would be to unite under the Human banner; face the difficult challenge of population control by regulating births; do away with poverty by careful redistribution of assets; and give each and every Human conceived the support and education necessary to allow each individual to grow, learn, and contribute to the limit of their abilities; while maintaining individual freedoms and Human Rights across the board without fail. I'd be a simple soldier in that Army in a heartbeat, if that's all I could do.

My practical reasoning is shaky, but who knows (HONESTYLY) whether or not that child starving to death in Africa is the one that had the unique potential to help discover a way to make nuclear waste harmless? Who knows if among those persons being blasted into pieces by religious fanatics there was one that had the potential to scientifically turn mountains of garbage into recycled, useful materials? Who knows if one of those others throughout history (and I can name only a few possibilities out of the literal billions in the past - Jean de Arc, Einstein, Loyola, Jesus) had a different type of intelligence that was necessary for us to have, but we ignored it or let it go to waste, metaphorically speaking?

Perhaps the depression and sense of uselessness that many perceive in societies worldwide is not because they are disappointed individually so much as they can't see any rational end to massive ignorance, and perhaps they have first-hand knowledge of it's inevitable consequence. Is it really that important to keep-on-*uckin like the Bible says? Or is it more important to conserve each individual's potential, nurture it, and give it free rein; in a society with higher principles, ethical behavior, and the wisdom to demonstrate leadership by teaching ALL children basic principles of behavior that are a universally beneficial foundation? Without racism, bigotry, and repression?

Those are the questions I struggle with. The concept of "my God is bigger than your God" isn't the correct motivational factor for eventual success, I know that much so far.

Now go back and tell Archonsod that. I'm rather tired of having to explain to evolutionists their own beliefs.



Which is why I try my best to use specific terms rather than more general terms like "evolution" - which is really a much too general term to be useful.



It doesn't take a genius to figure out that a creationist would believe that the creator would be able to create variation.



Maybe the time scales I'll let you have, I dunno about it being a strawman.

It seems our history remains unobservable.



Well, a few questions:

1) Do the mutations really happen often enough, especially in animals with longer life spans?

2) Do the mutations necessarily create new information? After all, many "good" mutations may change or destroy traits, especially when the existing traits are undesirable in the current environment.

I actually haven't followed the information argument completely yet; I hope to find somebody who has a degree in information theory sometime so I can more thoroughly examine this and how it affects the debate.

I'll be blunt with you: Currently, creationists have been focusing not on whether a mutation is "good" or "bad," but rather on whether it creates new information.

Currently, that's what they believe - but I have my doubts. They claim that, while a "good" mutation may be possible, a mutation that increases information is not.

However, I do wonder if it's really true. From what I can tell, there's no law that really states that a gain of information is impossible, despite their claims. But I really do need to get in touch with an information theorist to make sure.

3) Is there a way to test what happens over millions of years? IMHO, science is all about testing stuff - if we can't test our hypotheses somehow, we're on shaky ground. So far, our tests have been extremely limited by the large time scale required.

3) Okay, we have an explanation of what might have happened: Is there a way of proving it really happened that way?

In other words: We may have shown it's feasible, but that's not the same as showing it really happened.



Calling it a "record" assumes the theory is true before we apply it. This is called "begging the question." How do we even know this is a record at all? Why not some other explanation, like the result of a catastrophe?

"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts." --Sherlock Holmes, "A Scandal in Bohemia"



Many people certainly treat it that way, insisting that other beliefs are ridiculous.



Guess what? Different people believe different explanations better fit the evidence.



You'll have to continue to wait, as I'm not interested in what you call the "theistic method."



Yes, some religions try to explain the natural world - but I disagree that all religions do. In particular, I don't believe that was the goal of Christianity.



Very well, if you believe ignorance is bliss, feel free to ignore what our religion truly teaches.

Strange, though, that I am not allowed to use strawmen, but you want to have the right to all the strawmen you want.



So, the fact that you're amazed at technology is proof that men came from molecules? You're accomplishing nothing here but inflating your ego. Yes, we have great and wonderful technology. If you ask a Christian, they'll tell you that it's amazing how God's world works and how he has allowed us to create these wonderful things.

Actually, for most Christian people, science is an exploration of God's world. It can in some ways be viewed as an extension of religion.



And from what I can tell, the idea of molecules turning into men introduces a lot of "terms" aka assumptions.



I never claimed to believe "parsimony" as an unbreakable principle. Occam's Razor is a guide, not an absolute truth. It's possible for it to fail.



I have yet to be convinced that cosmology, physics, chemistry, and biology together can explain all this without invoking new terms - in fact, a lot of new terms. I find assumptions all over the place. So I'm going to disagree with this.



It is believed that the exact number of prerequisites to be precisely zero. Indeed, the concept of requiring a prerequisite is nonsensical, since it requires the existence of time, and it is believed that God is not bounded by time.



Again, nonsensical, since it is believed that God is not bounded by time.



I think we both agree that the universe exists. I'm not sure where you're trying to go with this argument.



If you say so.

Mind if I make your job harder for you? Instead of defining omnipotence as infinite power, how about we just define it as enough power to control the known universe?



Well, the common counter to the "fine tuning" argument is that an infinite number of universes exists - which pretty much assumes the same thing.



Interesting. If what you say is true, then perhaps the young-earth biblical literalists may be onto something?



Actually, I do not believe there is a "default." The "default"s you present assumes that the "default" must be something observable. Although this rule about defaults may be in your own personal philosophy, it's not necessarily in mine.



Reason is based upon faith. Faith that the laws of physics won't change. Faith that logic and mathematics are sound. Faith that our axioms are a reasonable reflection of reality. Faith that our observations are reliable.

I believe that reason is built upon faith, and that they are not mutually exclusive.

I want this explanation. If you could sum that up in a book you would be one rich man. Of course you cannot half-ass it. I don't want you dropping the creation of the universe ball at the big bang because of course that is just the formation of galaxies and the expansion of matter and energy in the universe not the creation of it. I also want to get an explanation of the life on Earth that can be recreated in a lab as well. I am pretty sure no one has yet created a model earth in a jar and created life where there was none but if they have please point me to that study. As far as the complexity of living things goes, it all rests on the convention you choose to define life by, and not everyone has the same definition. For argument sake I am going to stretch this a bit to the complexity of the universe and again I want to be pointed to a good answer for why it is so complex.
Now I am not going to make this easy on you either. I don't want theories and hypothesis I want facts and proof.

Do not be so quick to respect every belief, there are some [[censored]] up religions out there, the ones I'm refering to are the racist ones and ones where the teaching leads to violence.

Be careful also no note that some religions are "spined" and used for other purposes not actually meant by the religion at all.

My physical body will become dirt, yes. But my conscious existence? Why isn't it possible that I won't exist in a different form upon death of my physical body?

If the only reason I exist is because of the unique makeup of my DNA and genetics (in other words my consciouness is strictly tied to my physcial brain and there is no seperate "me" as in a soul or whatever), then how do you explain twins with the same DNA? Ok weak argument, as I suppose even twins have some differences in DNA. But, if I were to make 10 exact clones of myself, they would be 10 different people right? So despite 10 of the same DNA, brain structure, brain electrical field, etc., they are 10 different conscious entities capable of being in 10 different places and taking 10 different actions at the same time. Now how is this possible without seperate "souls" or whatever? If it was completely random for me to come into existence because I happen to be equated to the exact DNA, electrical field, etc. of a white male human born January 10, 1981, why wouldn't a paradox occur, if an exact clone was created with the EXACT same brain structure, etc. (assumming this is possible). I mean no body would think that at the moment my clone was created, that I would suddenly become two different people right? No, in effect their would be Stan A and Stan B. We have the same genetics so we have the same limits, potential, medical problems, etc. But we would be 2 completely dfferent people who could end up totally different because of the randomness of our lives.

So, if I am mearely 100% tied to my brain and electrical field, and that's it, then how do we account for twins and clones being 2 different people???

Here is a good one for you cobraA1. Why does God allow Satin to exist? If Satin is the reason 80% of will end up in Hell for eternity, then why didn't God (all knowing and all powerful) destroy Satin after the Garden of Eden incident? Why did God even create Satin knowing who Satin would become (assumming God knows everything right from the start which I don't think you will argue with me)? Why would God create a person knowing at the precise moment of creation, that person would just end up in Hell for all eternity? Wouldn't it be better for said person to not be created? Anything is better than eternal damnation correct? Why does God insist on creating people who will end up in endless misery??

As much as I don't believe aetheism, I have to admit that it makes a whole lot more sense than a God who eternally damns people.

Your bacteria example is a two-edged sword. As you have pointed out that fruit flies doesn't breed fast enough for them to evolve to another group (like something close to a butterfly for example) in our lifetime yet bacteria does reproduce millions and billions of generations in a short time. (a lot more generations than the so call ape/man ancestor.) Yet when examined how much they mutate it shown very little progress. The "resistant to antibiotics" example is nothing more than someone cutting/shooting your tires on your car to resists you from moving. Thus with bacteria reproduction rate so high is very easy for "random mutation" to break the antibiotics hold. There are many more ways of breaking something than creating it.

There are clear examples, especially bacteria with it's extremely high reproduction rate, that random mutation + natural selection does work in nature but is still far from proving that "Mutation Creation" is true. Bacteria is the best evidence so far (with it's millions/billions of generations) what is and isn't possible with evolution.

That's another reason why I keep coming back to compassion, honesty, strength, courage, intellect, and responsibility - using those as standards to make an evaluation, it should be obvious that any religion that depends on even the smallest bigotry, the slightest lie, the least weakness as an excuse, use of fear, promotes ignorance, or shifts blame somewhere else - it's obviously [[censored]] up. It would be wisest to avoid them and all their works, and all their members. I know which one(s) you might be referring to ... the words "knock-off" or "copycat" come to mind, right along with "hypocrites" and "devil-worshippers".

P.S. - There is not, and never was, any "devil" or "satan" ... just psychotics trying to force others to do what they want; through the use of fear which depends on ignorance to succeed. IMHO Anyone that believes in satan, anyone, is a devil-worshipper in my book. Quote from "Shogun" film -> "The Devil lives on your lips, Jan Roper"

P.P.S. - oops! did I say that?   

I find it funny that atheist tend to not look at the way things were at one time.



So it was good for the poor villagers of Chad to take in the poor starving refugees from Darfur? ALL those poor folk are now starving. It would have been better for the people of Chad to kick out the unfortunate folk from Darfur. Yet most would call that bad. Help people if you can man but don t kill you and yours doing it.

To forgive is literally to forget. While I forget little things all the time, I dont forgive the big things... I prefer to just come to an understanding. I forgive and Understand cause I don t want to have a heart attack or other stress related illnesses.



I would not eat pork in the conditions the Jewish people were living in. They had to use sand to clean there "dishes" with. The micro organisms that live it pork can be quite deadly and sand doesn t kill micro organisms.

At that time you wanted to make as many humans as possible. Does homosexuality produce more people? Nope, so they outlaw it to promote breeding. Its rather effective.




This is harmful maybe harmful in OUR society but not in ALL societies.



So what your saying is that religion should be pigeon holed like science was pigeon holed? You do know that Science comes from "religion" right. Monks used to do more science it the past then lay people... such as the monk Mendel. Do you know that chemistry started as alchemy? Heck going to a psychologist at one time was considered to no better than going to a psychic and that was less then a hundred years. If science can change its mind should not other disciplines too?

If this is a "good" one, I'd like to see a bad one. It's commonly believed that Satan was an angel, and that God gave angels some free will, just as he gave humans free will. If a person goes to hell, it's because of their own choosing.

In addition, God has been known to take what was originally evil and turn it around to be used for good: A man who was sold by his brothers became a leader of God's people, and an unbeliever can give birth to children who believe. Evil is often just temporary.



Well, some form of "satan" exists in most religions, so most religions would disagree with you. In addition, believing something exists is not equivalent to worshiping it. I'd say your logic is way off base here.



This is why modern creationists are starting to use information theory rather than the old "good vs bad mutation" argument that was used in the past.

Here are some notes about the current lines of thinking about mutations among creationists:

-The first thing to note is that creationists are unlike molecules-to-men evolutionists in that creationists do not necessarily believe that all traits are the result of a mutation sometime in our history. Since they believe in a creator, they can also believe that the creator created many traits.

-The second thing to note is that a mutation that may provide an advantage against a drug may place the bacterium at a great disadvantage otherwise: For example, the mutation may break a molecular pump that pumps in chemicals that are helpful to its survival. It may be that the drug that kills the bacterium is also pumped into the cell this way. Therefore breaking of the pump will create a bacterium that is resistant to the drug - but severely crippled under normal circumstances.

-It must also be noted the difference between something being feasible and something actually happening. Even if information gaining mutations are theoretically possible, that doesn't necessarily prove that all life came from single celled ancestors. It only shows that it may be feasible, not necessarily that it happened that way.

-On a last note, I'm unsure of my definition of the word "information." While it makes sense to me, it's possible other creationists are using a different definition. I still need to study the issue a lot more.

EDIT, added later, I replied at the same time as chadwbaker:



I agree that I would not eat pork under the same conditions the Jewish people are living in, and IMHO that's the reason why God told them not to eat pork. This law was IMHO changed later in the New Testament when methods of cleaning dishes were greatly improved.

However, if I remember correctly, they were told to break non-metal pots (so they would never be used again) and use a fire to clean metal pots with. I don't think they used sand.

In fact, the reason IMHO for changing God's laws around in the NT was not because God was any different, but because humanity was different.

No doubt it is, and everyone needs something to believe in, and a way of accepting the unknown. I'm glad you didn't go spastic. Of course I didn't expect you to, just a little paranoia on my part wondering if a fanatic was lurking and has packed their bags to come murder me as a way of proving the Ten Commandments are true. It seems to be a common reaction fanatics have to having the basis of their bigotry and hatred that sustains them in their self-induced misery yanked out from under them.

My reasoning goes something like this, though. "Put this interpretation of God up on a pedestal, dictate the rules for behavior, and in the next breath add in a psychological misnomer - If satan can do it, so can you."

It may not have been meant to be the destruction of their own religion; but such a simple-minded mistake, with the probable intent of forcing compliance through fear and playing upon ignorance, is a perfect example of how bigotry, repression, and other similar behaviors are self-defeating. My intent was not to downplay anyones beliefs, but to suggest that simply believing something that isn't true and "passing on the misery" to millions of others is not going to work! Armaggeddon is only true if people are foolish enough to buy the sales pitch ... and I don't. All the misery people try to explain by dreaming up psychotic images of a devil could all be erased by just having the truth explained to them in childhood - instead of having been psychologically and emotionally exploited.

It makes sense to me, and it took many years of searching and trials to see a little of the truth.

"You may say I'm a dreamer,
but I'm not the only one,
I hope some day you'll join us,
And the world will live as one."
[John Lennon, The Beatles - "Imagine"]
P.S - Here's a place to read the actual lyrics to the song before you start sniping   
[ http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/theosbournefamilyalbum/imagine.htm ]

often enough for what? survival? if that's the case, the answer is" sometimes. species do die off, and in some cases it's because of environmental change. i guess technically speaking, most species die off; some completely, and others give way to slightly different species better equiped to a changing environment.



does putting the same old words in different orders result in new ideas? does ordering 1s and 0s in different sequences result in new computer programs?



i think they're lost in their own metaphor. genes aren't information in an important sense. information presupposes a receiver. genes aren't a "message" because they weren't written by an entity for anyone's viewing pleasure: at least, not in a secular view. i'm sure there are people who believe that gene's are, in Frank Herbert's words, the language of God.

in a secular view, genes and life are mere happenstance. not particularly encouraging, perhaps. maybe it seems far fetched, but if you think about how large the universe is, it was bound to happen by mere chance somewhere - and i'm not even convinced the circumstances for the creation of life's basic building blocks are so rare.



a good scientific response isn't "that is not possible." a good scientific response is "there's no evidence of anything like that."

what exactly is your consciousness? is it the thing that perceives? because i don't think your sense organs are your consciousness. is it the thing which remembers? lots of people remember the same things. do you think you're more than just your memories? maybe you're the thing that choses and acts. except the chosing acting thing doesn't seem all that special; it seems everyone has one that might as well be exactly the same: differences in choice can be explained easily enough by differences in memories.

if "you" last after your physical body dies, did this "you" exist before your physical body? that would mean this "you" has some kind of otherworldly knowledge, because everything you know including who and what your are comes to you in this world through physical senses. so if everything you know "you" to be is a product of this world, why wouldn't it die with your physical body?

the mind and the body are one and the same. sure, a change to the body of an adult might not have an ultimate change to the mind. but people who are born with qualitatively different bodies live different lives and have different minds. this is obvious with persons born with brain defects; but think about someone born blind, deaf or both. can you imagine being born without a sense of pressure (sub-sense of touch)? what about being born with one skin color or another?

who you are is very much a product of your body. i can't imagine what exactly you would be without embodiment. maybe you'd be some ghostly thing with incoporeal senses and all that -- but as i said, there's no substantial evidence of anything like that at all.



i can and will, but not in this reply. i have to go to bed. how it is Monday allready?

Just wanted to say, to whomever suggested reading about Baruch Spinoza - Thanks! I finally got around to reading up a little more on this fellow on Wikipedia [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza ]. I bookmarked it when it was mentioned and got back to it this a.m.

It's also very interesting to me personally because I had at least considered what seems to be a major portion of his thoughts ... and here I am what? 340 years later. Although I'm not overly anxious to accept anything at face value, it does seem to be more than just coincidental.

Anywayz, whoever it was, and whether in this thread or the other religious-flavored one [ anyone cared to share the truth about heaven and hell ], or wherever ... Thanks Again! I didn't forget.  

i'm at a bit more leasure to reply to your request in a manner that is, well, leasurely.

the problem with trying to familiarize oneself with many social thinkers is that they tend to have very disorganized thoughts. if you're up to the challenge, Mead's own Mind, Self and Society is the place to start. other more synthetic/introductory workss are certainly available, such as Goerge Herbert Mead on Social Psychology (Mead & Strauss).

what sort of presentation you receive of Mead's ideas depends on the disipline. he's been a significant influence in philosophy, sociology and social psychology. he's considered the founding ideologue of the sociological school of symbolic interactionism. an introductory book to this would also probably give some good coverage. i'd recommend my introductory book, except i re-sold it and can't remember what it was called. on the philosophical side, Mead was most pertinent to the American pragmatist school, but i'm not familiar enough with this pedagogy to tell you if you'd learn much about Mead by reading up on American pragmatism.

unfortunately, but not suprisingly, the stuff on wikipedia is very superficial.

First, showing it's feasible is half of constructing a valid hypothesis (and, incidentally, it's far more than what any Creationist has ever accomplished). Second, see above: there is a way of confirming it; in fact, it has been done so. Repeatedly.



Bzzt, wrong again. The fossil record was known before evolutionary theory; evolution was hypothesized in part to explain the otherwise unexplainable diversity of fossils. Evolution was tested repeatedly and borne out. Other explanations, and I cannot emphasize this enough, failed. Flood geology (and let's be honest--when you hear "catastrophe", that's what almost everyone means) is wrong at nearly every turn--virtually every prediction it makes, if not every single one of them, has turned out to be wrong.

Here's a grab bag of questions for you:

1. If there was a Flood (or a "catastrophe", as you put it), why are animals from different biomes found in the same locations?
2. Continuing from that, why are animals found with other animals from the same biome in the same layer of rock, while animals from different biomes are in different layers?
3. Why are plants, which are not motile, found above animals, who presumably could have tried to run away?
4. Why are more mobile animals not found clustered at high points, in sheltered areas, wherever they might have run from a catastrophe, but instead distributed more or less randomly within their ranges?
5. Where are the physical signs of a catastrophe? Where are the enormous piles of debris on the continental shelves that would have been deposited by withdrawing floodwaters? Where's the impact crater from an asteroid or the transmuted elements from a nearby supernova?
6. Why did the catastrophe wipe out dinosaurs, giant amphibians, synapsid reptiles, and many giant mammals, but left some mammals who fill the exact same niches?
7. How did all the animals represented in the fossil record live at the same time without stripping the Earth clean of all plant life--going by known fossilization rates, the number of extant large animals would have been in the trillions had they all lived at the same time.
8. Why were there so many different animals adapted to the same niches living at the same time?
9. Why are stone and metal human artifacts, which should be at the bottom of the fossil record since they can't move on their own and don't float, universally at the top?

This is just what I came up with off the top of my head, and only covers paleobiology and a little bit of geology. Given a few hours, I could come up with a much longer list.



First, I am not responsible for the actions of others. Second, calling ridiculous beliefs ridiculous is not the same as claiming to know the absolute truth. I don't know the "absolute truth" about cars, but if a car salesman told me a rusted-out Trabant was a brand new Maserati, I wouldn't need to know the absolute truth to know he's:

A) Lying,
Delusional,
or
C) Unaware of what a Maserati actually looks like.



So what? Different people believe the moon landings were faked, the WTC was blown up by Donald Rumsfeld, the CIA is sending mind control signals through the cell phone network, and leprechauns are hiding under their beds. In fact, if you looked hard enough, you could probably find people who believe all four of those things.

This is why we have logic and the scientific method to begin with. Those are the filters by which beliefs can be sorted into "accurately describes reality" and "fantasy". If you can logically prove your beliefs, do so. Otherwise, admit you can't and we'll both get on with our lives--"Well, I believe..." or "Well, other people believe..." isn't a rebuttal.



Strange, since you seem to be practicing it.



It may not have been the primary goal, but all Western religions do try to explain the everyday world as well as the supernatural one. Europeans had a coherent theory of the entire cosmos, and science came along and blew it all up.

And of course, if Christians aren't concerned with how Christianity describes the universe, why all this fuss and bother about evolution to begin with? Why does it matter if Christianity isn't trying to explain the natural world?



Ignorance my...well, there's probably a profanity filter, but you can get the idea. I went through eight years of CCD (like Sunday school for Catholics) and was taught theology at a major Catholic university by a Ph.D.-holding Augustinian monk. I was a devout Catholic for the first 22 years of my life.

So yes, I know all about forgiveness, the Catholic and the Protestant variants both. And after all that, I still don't see how God can be benevolent and loving and merciful and forgiving--and then torture you forever if you don't do as he says.

And at any rate, your selective quoting, while cute, snipped my main point: religion is supposed to make death less terrifying, and then Christianity went and added something even scarier to keep the plebes in line.



You'll kindly point out the strawman. Are you disputing Hell exists, and that Christians believe you'll go there if you don't follow the rules (believing in Jesus, incidentally, counts as a rule)?



The point, which sailed so far over your head it's in orbit, is that the scientific method is demonstrably superior to any other for the purpose of describing the real world because it's the only one which has produced actual real-world results. It's not just a matter of opinion that the scientific viewpoint is better--it's a demonstrable fact. Atom bombs, poison gas, and germ warfare would be equally valid examples of real world results--I just picked positive ones because I liked them better.



Ah, the final page in the Creationist playbook: when all else fails, claim science relies just as much on faith as religion. Sadly for you, it doesn't. Yes, a materialist atheist has to say, at some point, "I believe certain things even though I can't arrive at those beliefs through reason alone"--Hume proved this almost 300 years ago. But so what? So do you. So does everyone--it's useless to believe the laws of physics will change tomorrow because there's no possible way to react in advance to something like that, whereas it's useful to believe they won't change, because you can take actions (such as, say, eating food, or not stepping in front of a speeding train) which will be beneficial if they don't. As for assuming our observations are correct, again, what's the point of assuming otherwise? You can believe you're a brain floating in a tank all you want, but it's not going to stop the rent check from coming due every month.

Faith in God takes it to a whole other level. It is not necessary to believe in God. And unlike the laws of physics, logic, and mathematics, God cannot be observed to exist. By the same standard of evidence we apply to everything else, God has been invented out of whole cloth by humans, because death is scary and the world is complicated and God fixes both those problems. Jesus Himself draws a distinction between believing in Him and believing in the physical world; if it takes just as much faith to believe the sun will rise tomorrow as it does to believe in the Risen Christ, then what's so special about being a Christian?

Oh gee whiz, I wonder if you're going to try to back me into a corner and say, "Well, um, the universe just exists." Well, here you go: the universe exists because it exists.

Before you organize a victory parade, though, you might want to consider that tacking on God to the beginning just pushes "X exists because X exists" back one iteration, and as I mentioned to Cobra, the advantage X=the universe has is that the universe can be observed to exist. God cannot be observed and is not necessary in modern cosmology, so He's out. If you care to argue otherwise, you can meet your own challenge and provide the proof--I guarantee you that you'll be the one to get rich if you can do it. The speaking fees alone will make you wealthy beyond your wildest dreams.



It hasn't, though many of life's precursor chemicals have. Scientists haven't achieved controlled, net-energy-gain fusion in a lab, either--I suppose that's proof that the Sun shines because space fairies are shoveling in coal.



The universe is so complex because if it wasn't, you wouldn't be here to ask the question. For more information, look up the weak anthropic principle and stop wasting my time with pointless philosophical questions which have nothing to do with evolution.