Question About Evolution

Post Reply New Topic

No, it isn't the denying of evolution that is wicked, but knowing that it is true and saying otherwise for nefarious purposes such as self-aggrandizement that is, if not exactly wicked, at the very least not very nice to your fellow man.

And if one doesn't know it is true, then one has to be either ignorant of the evidence, too stupid to understand it, or insane. Those options cover all the bases as I can see it.

Evolution is most definitely NOT a religion. That has been shown time and time again, just as it has been shown that intelligent design is NOT science. Science and religion should never be in conflict if they are talking about the same reality. Conflict arises when some try to make science into religion, and yes there are some nutjobs who do that (I am NOT one), or when others try to make religion into science (THAT happens a LOT more often).

That's just Dawkins adapting C.S. Lewis. Assuming the Gospels are true, either Jesus was mad, he was malevolent, or he really was the son of God.
If you say you don't believe in evolution, you are either ignorant (most likely), stupid. insane, or deliberately misleading people for your own benefit.

Dawkins nailed it because his celebrity status transcends our disagreements, he embodies objectivity in full, and there's nothing that I can say against evolution, or anything you can say for it that matters when Dawkins is brought into the picture. Dawkins agrees or disagrees, and that ends the issue.

Sagan made that point as well(emboldened above). Reread the biblical creation myth as dethroning paganism, which is its intended purpose, and it all makes sense.

1.) Be it the irrelevance of the sun to dispel fertility cults(he planted vegetation on the third day prior to bringing about the "lights" on the forth day?),

2.) to the non-mentioning of the sun and the moon and the stars, a big F*** you to every pagan culture that worshipped them, and demeans them further by titling their function as being there only to separate days, months, years, and seasons... Thats IT!

3.) From the destruction of their circular and cyclical perception of the world, by way of setting an origin point, that reality(and Time and Space) had this starting point, and progressed forward along this linear trajectory of history(and preferably, progress), and that life hasn't always existed infinitely,

4.) to introducing that God(or anything) is above nature, foreign to every pagan because all of their Gods had natural beginnings within the confines of naturalism... from the Samarians to the Greeks, Vikings, Egyptians, and every ancient culture. It baffles the pagan mind then, it baffles atheist in 2012.

That is the point of the biblical creation story, the point of Adam and Eve, the point of Noah's Arc, the point of many of the stories in Genesis in general. They are here rupture the pagan norm which kept humanity in the dark. These ideas are revolutionary, we are not to be hostage to the Gods of the mountains who may cause landslides because they are jealous or annoyed with you, or the goddess of fertility who may not have sympathy on our behalf. We conquer that mountain, and we discover inferto fertilization. Noah planted a vineyard, wine was not given to us by the Gods(dionysus)... nor was fire, or agriculture. It is a very humanistic text... God centered, but in hope that we as a species might progress.

Last edited by MarketAndChurch on 04 Nov 2012, 5:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

So you're saying the Bible is just an attempt to be as controversial as possible?

It uses the Adam & Eve narrative which it borrows from other ancient near east fables to demonstrate that conscience is not enough to make a moral world. The only ancient near east account which has the creation of woman I might add.

It uses the Noah's Arc narrative which it borrows from other ancient near east fables to demonstrate that getting rid of all the bad people is not enough, perhaps it is built into the human and the only way to then bring about change is for God to come down and literally reshape a group of humans to then take his ethics. Because an invisible unknowable cannot affect human behavior as people can affect others. We are social creatures, the text understood this 3000 years ago, 1500 years before it was even written down as the Torah.

For one it shows that we are not to run from the world, but to elevate it. If it has pagan roots, who cares, what we do with it is what matters. Pagans can and have been ethical, but their systems and ideologies have never produced anything half the intellectual and ethical weight of the torah, frankly nothing has in 3000 years.

And unfortunately, most acts of ethics and goodness throughout history have been controversial... you were not controversial to think that the Jew was a species that needed to be exterminated in Germany, the human is not inherently good and movements to combat slavery, rape, and murder have never been effortless.

MarketAndChurch, may I question why you have ignored my post regarding the evolution of hyracotherium up to modern day equus?If you responded to said post and I haven't seen it, I apologise and request that you point it out to me.

I think that people who argue against evolution aren't really appreciating the time scales involved. Noticing that current species have been with us for "all of recorded history" is just showing how short recorded history really is compared to how long life has been on this planet.

no I have a night shift on the weekends and a mourning shift mondays, if i don't get to you and kurgan and anyone else, I'll reply in full tomorrow evening. Its my weekend, I'll get to you in full soon.

All righty then.

We never needed a Judeao-Christian worldview to progress as a species. In fact the science which in modern times gave us all our technology was invented by the Ionian Greeks, which was a Pagan culture. Thales was actually the man to try explain natural world without resorting to gods, spirits and deities to explain them. So you've got that backwards, it was actually the act of embracing naturalism and rejecting supernaturalism that allowed us to progress, not the rejection of naturalism. In fact, positing natural explanations for natural phenomena is what started science. Christianity actually held back progress for 1000 years during the Middle Ages.

No, it wasn't the Greeks. It was the later Europeans, like Francis Bacon, who was considered the father of modern science and empiricism. And he was a devout Christian. The Greeks came up with a bunch of BS and it wasn't based on empiricism, or any kind of method that resembled the modern scientific method. Bacon is also the father of the scientific method.

Yes it was. Early scientific methodology might have fallen short of the Baconian method but if it wasn't for the Greeks, then the Baconian method wouldn't exist. They were actually the first to introduce a concept of empiricism that was based observation. The Greek physician Hirophilos (335 - 280 BC) was an early pioneer of the scientific method and performed experiments for his medical research. Also during the Islamic golden age, it was actually Al-Hazen was the first to come up with a scientific method that resembles the modern one, even before Bacon, and he was a Muslim. One of the reasons why the renaissance, and then subsequently the scientific revolution, happened in western Europe is because they recovered scrolls, which contained the writings of the ancient greek philosophers, from the east during the crusades.

Let me ask you a question, do you think that Archimedes discovered the law of buoyancy by accident?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_scientific_method

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herophilos

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Haytham#Scientific_method

Last edited by Jono on 05 Nov 2012, 3:20 am, edited 1 time in total.

the greeks certainly did invent geometry and we got algebra from india as far as i know.

there was also plenty of philosophy that later inspired calculus and the very mindset of the scientific method.

it is all connected and none would happen without the other.

Hippocrates codified some of the scientific method as well, with his emphases on observation and discussion.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6p5jnqEyUs4[/youtube]

It doesn't have 'holes' in it. Evolution is a proven fact now. The process of evolution however, is so complex and varied that it has not all been recorded and analyzed. This is where the 'holes' so many people come from.



We know for a fact that there was no life on land for nearly a billion years. We also know for a fact that fish and humans share a large amount of genes which point to a common ancestor. The statistical chance of one gene being evolved independently between species is astronomical. Fish and humans share approximately 90% of our base genetic makeup. Those are thousands of genes. The chances of thousands of genes evolving independently and appearing in two different species and those genes sharing the same function in the organism are just so infinitesimal its absurd to consider it a possibility. On top of that, add the fact that every other species in the planet share the same damn genes and statistically its an impossibility.

Fish evolved the first set of lungs. Take a deep breath and thank your inner fish.