Demigod Forums
I think we should be clear with this:
Denier: doesn't buy the entire premise of global warming, usually citing the data to be wrong. Conspiracy between scientists and politics.
Skeptic: Doubts that global warming is human made, or that CO2 is the issue.
LOL - you need to read some of the responses under this very thread.
What? Psychoak is saying I'm a dick?
You doubt that I don't speak this language as well as you do?
If your point is that we don't have all the answers, I agree with you. You don't either. None of us do.
Mathematically? What the hell? Mathematics have nothing to do with this.
Uh, just about everything. No it doesn't. What do mathematics have to do with this?
Complex things(The watch) are made by complex things(humans), here we agree. However if you go an say humans are created by complex things(gods) you fall into an infinite regress. Because who created god?
1. Don't attribute "god" to anything I said. Oh yes. You're a intelligent designist and lets not pretend: an intelligent designer is god, maybe not the christian God, but a god nonetheless.
2. You are also subject to "infinite regress" in any theories you propose (see above). Go read on occams razor. YOU predispose an complex(intelligent) being. A complex being invariably needs a complex being to create it. We have a theory that tells us how simple things evolve into a complex being. Contrary to your intelligent designer there is evidence for simple things(amino acids, fossils) and for the change of species overall(fossil records). And please, evolution is about life. Not the cosmos.
3. You are arbitrarily and irrationally picking a demarcation point (biology) so as to try to divorce yourself from the "infinite regress." I've often pondered why it is so obvious to evolutionists that an internal combustion engine was designed and built, yet so inobvious to them that a biological machine was. I think it comes down to a bias against highly-advanced nanomolecular composite materials (skin, bone, etc). In other words, if I were made of metal, wires, plastic, etc. and spoke in a monotone robotic voice, you'd think I was designed and built. The difference is the materials used, and the technology in the materials. Or maybe... that we have evidence that the internal combustion engine was build, but that humans were created by God is pulled out of someones arse. There is NO EVIDENCE. The theory of natural selection has a fact: species change over time(fossil records)-> the theory of natural selection tells us how it went.
Evolution is NOT random chance.
Evolution is most certainly based on random chance. Yes, there is a mechanial process operating over that random chance (natural selection), but the basis is random chance. If you don't know that, then you don't know your own theory. My own theory? Yes I know that. YOU CLAIMED otherwise, YOU claimed that the animals just randomly appeared.
An animal didn't just happen randomly. It adapted(succesfully) to its enviroment and in the process changed.
LOL. Because you say it did? Sounds like magic. Tell me exactly where the magic happened.
Evolution can be most certainly observed. A good example are bacteria. You put a bunch of E.Collis(the most populous species) in two containers. Then you slightly change the enviroment of one of the containers. The bacteria will adaps and after some time reproducing will be genetically different than the bacteria in the container that did not change.
Nope. No evolution took place. Why did it not take place?? This is evolution. Maybe you don't understand evolution is well as you think...
Why does information need a mind?
Fine, show me another precedent for how information came into being. Besides your making the old infinite regress fault again: you predispose a mind a complex being. I to the contrary told you exactly how information came into being without saying: god did it, a wizard did it. I told you how that was, namely DNA evolved. "better" DNA was passed on while bad DNA died out. And yes we begin with randomly chosen DNA(note here: very primitive DNA, DNA evolved like animals and was very prmitive in the beginning).
In fact, the fossil record shows all life appearing instantly. NO NO NO. The fossil records do not say that at all.
It most certainly does. Again Where? Because I just googled fossil record and I found a nice tree of life.
When? 6000 years ago??
No. If you want to discuss the bible or creationism, that's fine, but you are talking to the wrong guy. I'm not the guy to be talking to on that. Your into intelligent design which is the same as creationism which has strong roots in christianity. Maybe it's not a christian god but it is god.Anyway you still did not answer my question. WHEN DID THESE SPECIES SUDDENLY APPEAR?
There isn't a "tree of life" to be found in the fossil record. Yes there is. Cite your sources.
I'm not citing any sources, because I am literally halfway around the world from all of my accumulated information on this subject, and it's not my job to spoon feed you this stuff anyway. If you want to know more about the fossil record, do your own research and reading. Look up the most famous cambrian paleontologist in China, read what he has to say about the fossil record there. Look up what Stephen J. Gould had to say. Why the hell do you think Stephen J. Gould proposed his theory of "Punctuated Equilibrium?" Because there isn't a tree of life in the fossil record, and he's trying to explain it, that's why. For that matter, like I said before, look up what Charles Darwin himself had to say on this. You're evading my questions. Nowhere is there a fossil record to be found that says species just instantly appeared. Any creditable sources that is.
And you know what? I googled this Stephen J. Gould... twice, and guess what.
Gould's greatest contribution to science was the theory of punctuated equilibrium which he developed with Niles Eldredge in 1972. The theory proposes that most evolution is marked by long periods of evolutionary stability, which is punctuated by rare instances of branching evolution.
This is an accepted theory. This does not in anyway dispute evolution. Species will not change when there is no evolutionairy pressure to do so, they will be relatively unchanged for long periods of time when then the enviroment does not fundamentally change. You're are totally misreading this to suit your own needs.
What you see is organisms appearing instantly in the blink of an eye fully-formed, remaining steady-state and unchanging for millions of years, and then going extinct. What the fuck? No they don't. Where did you read this?? This also quite ridicilous. Why would they even appear instantly in the blink of an eye?
Like I said, I'm not here to spoonfeed anything to you. You either know the subject you are trying to argue, or you don't. My recommendation is to be as informed on a subject as possible before having an opinion on it, or arguing or debating it.
I am informed, you to the contray claim things and then don't back them up. BACK your claims.
What I just stated to you is not controversial. Charles Darwin himself was aware of the problem, and even wrote about it. Where?
LOL. See above statement. BACK YOUR CLAIMS.
Even if he said that then that doesn't mean life appeared instantly. It means fossil records are a tricky thing since you know... they are millions of years old.
Right. Anything that doesn't support evolution can be dismissed with a wave of the hand as being a "tricky thing." But if the fossil record HAD supported evolution, the tree of life, etc. boy, you'd never hear the end of it. No. It means that the fossil records aren't flawless since they can be destroyed by natural procceses easily. YOU CLAIM that species suddenly appeared which is immensly stupid.
Now, it is perfectly fine if you like stories, and if you want to believe in stories. Just don't ever confuse stories with science, and don't ever try to pass off one for the other. Just stories? Bull****. If you were to have a letter of the head paleontologist that stated (within the context!) that these are stories which I strongly doubt this is still no argument against evolution.
Right! Nothing is an argument against evolution! I understand that. No this means that a single opinion does not invalidate evolution, it is no evidence for or against. This is all irrelevant though because you don't BACK YOUR CLAIMS.
however where you to have a group of people in a wide range of Black mixed enthinicy white and you were to shoot more than relatively more white people than black(or try harder to kill white people than black people) than the species will slowly evolve(by reproducing) to be darker skinned.
LOL. If you believe that, and apparently you do, then I guess this discussion is over. YES, we agree that the statistical population will change from mixed to black, but NO, no "evolution" takes place, you are simply killing off all the whites and leaving the blacks! NO I DID NOT. You did that in the first experiment. That was no evolution. Now if you read it carefully you would see that I changed the experiment so evolution would take place. Goddamnit fucking read what I say. Given this situation and all else is equal then the blacks are optimally adapted to their enviroment(which is quite unrealistic but whatever) so there is no selective pressure to change. Where darker skinned people more likely to survive (and the whiter skinned less likely) your gun rage then the population would slowly evolve to be darker skinned(after reproducing). SERIOUSLY I FUCKING REPEATED MY WORDS.
You can do the exact same thing with nonliving things. You can have 5 white rocks and 5 black rocks. You can then destroy the 5 white rocks, leaving only the 5 black rocks. I guess you must be jumping for joy at this moment. You just made a new discovery, didn't you? Non-living things evolve just like living things do, apparently! LOL!
Haha. No. Do rocks reproduce? NO. Evolution needs reproduction. Please for fucks sake try to understand the theory instead of insulting me of not knowing my own theory.
Next time answer all my questions and don't select out of my answers. Thank you.
I get a kick out of creationism (or intelligent design) arguments. I also get a kick out of the attempt to state that 'because current theories don't describe how life can be created spontaneously, life must have been created by some entity'. In other words, the scientific conclusion is not yet clear so you just inject, well, "God did it" into the argument. That works fine philosophically, but it's complete BS in the context of science. They key thing to remember is science doesn't know everything *yet*.
It takes time to flesh theories out. Sometimes they get rewritten, such as the conversion from Newtonian Gravity to General Relativity (to the 'M Theory' Hypothesis, which happens to have an interesting explanation for the Big Bang). Adding a 'God' or any kind of creator simply adds nothing to a scientific discussion, because you must try and solve the problem assuming it arise from natural causes - because that's what science is. Even if Evolution is wrong, that does not automatically mean Creationism is right. All it means is that we need to go back to the drawing board.
However, there are reports of species bifurcation happening right now. And there are experiments going on right now to see if ice crystals actually provide the proper geometry for gathering and binding neucleotides. Even if these experiments falsify whatever hypothesis they are based on, science still cannot concede defeat to a creationist point of view and in essence, 'give up. It is required to find a natural course of events.
Imagine if Newton was hit in the head with the apple, and went with a thought that because he couldn't see what is pulling everything down, it must have been God, who is invisible and everywhere and all powerful, who pulled it to the ground. If that sounds ridiculous to you, it's an analog of what creationists are trying to say. For the record, Newtonian Gravity is quite wrong in a very fundamental sense - It assumes the force of gravity has infinite propagation speed. It does, however, provide an accurate enough description of gravity at earthly distances, field strengths, and speeds, so it's quite usable.
In short, creationism and ID are not science. They try to invoke a conclusion (a creator) to explain the deficiencies in current theories. That's all well and good, but a 'creator hypothesis' is just an idea until you can create a model of it to upgrade it's status to 'hypothesis' so you can run experiments.
He misread - I did too, for a moment, and I speak english. Upon scanning it again, I'm not quite sure *why* I misread it but I had to go "No, wait, this is WTMB, I really can't see him being a creationist" and re-read.
Jonnan
LOL! And you can prove that scientifically? Boy, the stuff people promote in the name of "science."
Why isn't it obvious to you that mathematical (statistical) odds and probabilities have a lot to do with whether complex machines will arrive through chance?
I said that animals SUDDENLY appeared (geologically-speaking, of course).
If you think that applying a filter to a population is evolution, then we will just have to agree to disagree on what evolution is.
LOL. You never explained how information comes into being without a mind.
LOL. This is your "explaination" for how information comes into being? Your "explanation" is tantamount to saying "it just does" LOL.
One of your many problems is that this is simply all conjecture. None of it is science. Do you even know what the scientific method is? Alas, so few "scientists" do....
LOL, I guess I can't help you then. If you are hell-bent on finding pop-science references to support your iconic "tree of life" - something that Darwin himself said didn't exist in the fossil record (he was hopeful that it would eventually be uncovered), more power to you.
We don't disagree over the date. What's the latest accepted date? 1.5-2 billion years ago? Whatever you say the date is, I agree with you. I never said otherwise.
Then we will just agree to disagree.
This is an accepted theory....You're are totally misreading this to suit your own needs.
LOL. I *TOLD* you it was an accepted theory. You are the one who had to google the man to find out what he said, not me.
I'd love to know what I'm misreading. I own the man's books. I've read them. I've also read his papers and his letters. He is adamant, over and over again, throughout his career, that there is no tree of life in the fossil record. This is why he came up with punctuated equilibrium - to try to explain why you can't see a tree of life. His theory is that life remains "steady state" and unchanging for millions of years (that's the "equilibrium" part of his theory), but from time to time this equilibrium is "punctuated" by fast, rapid evolution THAT OCCURS SO FAST IT IS NEVER DETECTED IN THE FOSSIL RECORD. That's his theory.
The problem with his theory is that it is just yet another attempt to make it so that evolution doesn't have to be proven. It is an attempt to get around the fact that, by his own admission, there isn't a tree of life in the fossil record.
LOL, I BACKED UP MY FUCKING CLAIMS, I SAID THAT DARWIN SAID IT! Now, if you are too misinformed on the subject to know that Darwin said it, and too lazy to go to a library and read what Darwin said, that isn't my problem!
Right. So when evidence doesn't support evolution, you make an excuse why it "doesn't count." This isn't science, this is dogma. Pure and simple.
Actually, that isn't science at all. What you are promoting is naturalist philosophy, in the name of science.
Eh, after a certain point pointing out Psychoak's deficiencies as a debater no longer even qualifies as an ad hominem - I think it's the suave way he wipes the foam from his mouth. His arguments will consist of a dozen quotes picked out of context, and when you look at the source there's a 50% chance the actual sentence he quotes will end ", but this charge is easily disproven by (insert four obvious incontrovertible facts here)". Other times you might have to look so far as the next paragraph.
There are people around here that I disagree with but pay close attention to (Willy the MailBoy is probably the penultimate example), but Psychoak? Leave it be and ignore him.
Jonnan
Oh, mostly because creationist apologists have gone to this well too many times - it's the original creationist argument that gets repackaged each time it's debunked, after being applied to RNA, DNA, Amino Acids, and Proteins so far at different times stating that the odds would require lifetimes well over the age of the universe . . . each time an actual experiment has shown the time frame for them to rise naturally was more in the realms of things that are longer than an egg timer but shorter than a sports stopwatch.
Mathematics are important for understanding things better once you understand the mechanism, but pretending you can disprove what has obviously, y'know . . . happened at some point, via your l33t m@th sk1llz. Well, hasn't worked yet.
Poker with a creationist "How could you have won - my hand could only be beaten once in a TRILLION TRILLION YEARS!!!" - "Dude, it was three deuces, just calm down . . ."
Jonnan
There is no difference between science and methodological naturalism (aka scientific naturalism) philisophically or practically. I don't think you can deny that the philosophy of science works extremely well. Feel free to point out where you think the difference lies. Moreover, please explain how you think ID/creationism is science.
To help you out a bit, I'll explain the scientific process to you, as it is very simple:
You make an observation, you identify a possible cause, you model the relationship between this possible cause and effect, you use this model to make a prediction, and do an experiment (or make new observations) that tests the prediction. If your prediction was correct, you publish. Once others have used your model to make some different predictions, and experiments to verify them, your model becomes theory.
Where are the models for ID? Where are the predictions? Where are the experiments (or new observations) the verifies the predictions? Please post some links here, I'm curious to see where you are getting your information.
Kudos on an interest on the 'real' science of sciences 
. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as an armchair scientist, unless you're putting together mathmatical models for dark energy or building dark matter detectors in your basement.
Unfortunately, you're falling into the same trap. You are basically saying that universe had a beginning that is beyond our understanding in a scientific sense. Well, in physics, it is very possible using the current standard model to explain that, from time to time, a universe can arise from quantum fluctuations. Such a universe will have certain properties, like a net energy of zero (as our appears to have).
In other words, this is your statement: "Well, we get back to this point, and since science can't explain it [yet], it must have been done by God". Whether it's an apple falling or a universe being created, not knowing the cause yet is no reason to invoke "God". Should you do so, you've added no information to the scientific process, because science must still tackle the problem as though it arised via some predictable mechanism, and it must continue to do so. It can never assume that a problem cannot be solved. You can think of it as a limitation in the philosophy of science if you like, but it must keep trying to solve a problem until it finds a model that describes it with extreme accuracy. Unless we can one day measure God (or his influence) somehow, he will never factor into science.
Agent of Kharma, would you be so kind as to define "evolution" for us? because nearly all of your criticisms so far don't make any sense with the definition most of the world uses.
And ZehDon, where did God come from? wherever He came from, the Universe may as well, and if He has always existed, then so could an endless chain of Universes, each at some point triggering the creation of the next one. God is an acceptable answer to how the Universe came to be, certainly, but it's not a necessary one.
Yay for that link! I knew about the general area, but didn't know that discipline name. Bonus: the page introduced me to "Ga" as a unit of time, 1 billion years. Hopefully it won't take too many decades for Stardock TBS games to handle Ga-level timescales...
Good point here, but I should clarify that invoking God as an answer in a scientific sense is premature at best.
For all the idiot evolutionists in the thread. I specify idiot because not all evolutionists are idiots, so don't take offense unless you are one. Stating that evolution is not proven is not an endorsement of creationism, intelligent design, or any other alternate theory, fairy tail, whatever you want to call it. It's a simple statement of fact. Jumping up someones ass because they state a simple fact is rather silly, I've yet to see Karma even imply that he's signed on to other theories. I'll admit to currently being in the intelligent design camp through weight of information, but claiming anything to be proven is preposterous. Fact and theory are not synonyms.
The problem with abiogenesis is that it's entirely unrelated to the spontaneous appearance of life, it's the spontaneous appearance of biological compounds. You create billions of them every day, what abiogenesis has proven is that under the right conditions, something besides a living creature can create basic things like sugars and amino acids. Neither of these are living organisms, they're not even complex enough to rival a protein. To get from there to even the simplest of single celled organisms is a massive step that has yet to be shown. A simple comparison would be to say fire burns and produces oxides, so the presence of oxides without fire proves that fire can start without an energy source sufficient for ignition.
In essence, the creation of biological building blocks is now proven to be possible through observation and experimentation, but the creation of life is not.
You doubt that I don't speak this language as well as you do?
Ignore Jonnan, he's nursing a sore rectum because he can't admit that the post office loses billions on package shipping. I don't see any corollary between your responses and what language you speak. My being a native english speaking individual doesn't have any bearing on my being an asshole either. You're rude, dismissive, and throw insults while ignoring arguments. Perhaps the argument ignoring is partly due to your language skills, but your posts are too well put together for me to buy that. If you were arguing points, you'd be an enjoyable read, but just being a dick is kind of boring.
OH GOD. such moronicy. Evolution is proven.
You know off course that "life"is just the combination of several biological compounds: ie the selfreplicating molecule.
P.S. Oh that I'm rude against ID'ers has nothing to do with language problems, having problems wording my posts has.
See? You're a dick, and you ignore the arguments. No wording problem at all.
The problem with many of your arguments is that you often treat adverbs and adjectives like they're tranny whores and you're a seriously badass pimp. Abiogensis is most certainly realated to ideas about the spontaneous appearance of life. But maybe your selfish gene is showing and you're not willing to give a mere macomolecule any status in a theoretical framework that tries to explain the apparent tendency towoards complexity reflected in Terrra's fossil record.
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