Evolution is BS and based on guesses

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Salad, you are woefully ignorant about science; but then it doesn't surprise me. When I was at university, the Muslim students were forbidden to attend the classes on evolution by their religious leaders. Gotta keep the Muslims dumb and not asking too many questions - it might make them question their faith.

I was not aware salad is Muslim since most of the people I encounter who deny the reality of evolution are fundamentalist Christians, but it goes to show that any particular religion is not the problem. It is the fundamentalist style of interpretation that is flawed. But since Muslims share the same creation myth as Christians, my argument from the last post still stands.

The reason I say the fundie style of interpretation is flawed is that such an interpretation limits God's power and also leads to internal and external inconsistencies. I am not familiar with specific quotations from the Quran, but I know that a fundamentalist interpretation of the Christian Bible contradicts itself many places and is also falsified by the evidence of the physical world.

Any spiritual teaching is ineffable, cannot really be shared with words but only realized or experienced. But all we have to write with are words so we use things like metaphor to try to point to spiritual teachings like a finger pointing to the moon. When people take metaphor to be literal fact, besides being silly they also miss the whole point of the original teaching. It is confusing the map with the territory.

So many negatives in one sentence. This is nearly unparseable.

Ok. I give up. I can't parse this sentence.

No evidence exists which would cause someone who doesn't believe in evolution to change their views. Therefore, a rational person would not believe in evolution.

(this is not an opinion I hold, this is the opinion seemingly expressed by salad, above).

Reading that post, I think it is almost certainly a Poe.

Yeah, I did not fail to notice that too (a triple negative - "no/disprove/not"), but I did not refrain from deciding only to include *one* snarky comment in my first post in this thread.

As a rule of thumb in English, multiple odd-numbered negatives resolve to a negative meaning, while multiple even-numbered negatives resolve to a positive meaning.

As such, I will provide a non-erroneous rebuttal of salad's claim by stating that there isn't no lack of absence of evidence to disprove evolution not being true.

Amen.

Thank you all for the parsing assistance. I was in over my head.

In principle, muslim's should actually be more open to evolution that christians because apparently, the Quran doesn't have a specific timeline, unlike the bible. Ironically, there was actually a medieval muslim scholar and biologist by the name of al-Jahiz, who came up with ideas about natural selection in the 8th century during the so-called Islamic golden age, which is quite a few centuries before Darwin.

Science isn't based on proof, but on evidence. You might also want to check out what a theory means (hint: It doesn't mean what most people think it does). While there are intelligent people who do not believe in evolution, you shouldn't automatically agree with them just because they're intelligent. There were intelligent people who clutched to the Aristotelian world view long after Bruno, Galilei, Copernicus, and Newton had debunked it. Some of the most intelligent people in the world believed in the aether right up until WWI. As recently as the 1980s, there were also brilliant scientists who said that there were no such thing as plutoids, exoplanets, or the Oort cloud.

Birds do not stem from lizards, but from dinosaurs. Dinosaurs had feathers, had high intelligence (compared to other reptiles), were probably warm blooded, and were more developed than any reptile still alive today. They didn't die out per se, but developed into birds, just like Windows NT 4.0 developed into Windows 2000--or Peugeot 307 developed into Peugeot 308. We have hard evidence for microevolution, but not macroevolution. If we go by Occam's razor, it makes sense that microevolution leads to macroevolution, though.

Disrespecting evolution is disrespecting God's algorithms.

For the record, they still do.

Robert B. Laughlin: It is ironic that Einstein's most creative work, the general theory of relativity, should boil down to conceptualizing space as a medium when his original premise [in special relativity] was that no such medium existed [..] The word 'ether' has extremely negative connotations in theoretical physics because of its past association with opposition to relativity. This is unfortunate because, stripped of these connotations, it rather nicely captures the way most physicists actually think about the vacuum. . . . Relativity actually says nothing about the existence or nonexistence of matter pervading the universe, only that any such matter must have relativistic symmetry. [..] It turns out that such matter exists. About the time relativity was becoming accepted, studies of radioactivity began showing that the empty vacuum of space had spectroscopic structure similar to that of ordinary quantum solids and fluids. Subsequent studies with large particle accelerators have now led us to understand that space is more like a piece of window glass than ideal Newtonian emptiness. It is filled with 'stuff' that is normally transparent but can be made visible by hitting it sufficiently hard to knock out a part. The modern concept of the vacuum of space, confirmed every day by experiment, is a relativistic ether. But we do not call it this because it is taboo.

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

Holy s**t! You might want to learn something about what you're dismissing. First of all the word "theory" in science doesn't mean the same thing as it does colloquially. It doesn't mean just a guess. It means it's a model of how things work that has shown to be true beyond reasonable doubt. The evidence fits the model and keeps continuing to fit as more evidence comes in. Nothing in biology would make sense if it were false. That's not to say it's beyond question, but you would need some extraordinary evidence for scientists to reconsider it. Sure it's modified all the time, but the basic principles that Darwin discovered still apply.

There might be no evidence that God doesn't exist, but there's no evidence he does exist either. This is different from evolution, which has loads of supporting evidence.

Just because you have a doctorate degree doesn't mean that everything which comes out of your mouth is gospel. Scientists with degrees still need to show their work.

Creationist biologists are very rare and so far have produced no peer reviewed papers to support their conjectures. It's not a conspiracy to oppress them, they just don't know what they're talking about.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophi ... n_of_proof

Anyway, I just found a video that I wanted to share, and this thread is as relevant as any other thread in this section:

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

Personally, I believe Science and Mathematics (as we currently know them) are ultimately myths. Simply our way of conceptualizing things that are far too complex for humanity (and it's very limited cosmic perspective) to fully realize. Our entire world is simply a spec in a cosmic ocean so vast that truly comprehending it would be impossible.

That being said, even though we can only be expected to ever understand an infintesimly small amount about the nature of our universe, that doesn't mean we shouldn't make it our duty to pursue that knowledge. Evolution (as with any other scientific theory for that matter) is part of that, as it will change and be altered (or even possibly dubunked and abandoned someday) as new evidence (and subsequent tests of that evidence) is presented. That's the beauty of science and what makes it distinct from religion.

Saying "God did it" whenever something unexplainable happens is just lazy.

It's entirely possible that we may even one day discover an extrademensional entity in some galaxy somewhere (or even our own) that could be viewed as a God. But there's not a single thread of testable evidence for that. That's why a belief in God it's called "Faith" and not Science. That's why I find it so odd that creationists want to teach it in Science class.

If you truly believed (i.e. had faith) you wouldn't feel the need to disguise your religion as something else. That's why I believe people like Ken Ham (and other Creationist "Scientists") get into fields like this. Deep down they don't actually believe what thier saying but want so hard for it to be true that they spend thier lives trying to prove it despite no actual evidence.

Is this the new fundamentalist strategy? To make the heads of non-believers explode from dealing with your blind obstinance

^^^
I actually had never heard of this Ken Hamm character till the other day when he made the idiotic statement that we shouldn't be looking for extraterrestrial life, as they'd all be going to hell anyway.

It is quite disheartening that there is so much ignorance about evolution even today. Evolution is a fact, it is true, it has been happening since the first primordial chemicals started duplicating themselves. We know a huge amount about evolution today and how it works and we even use that knowledge in the development of antibiotics and other medicines. Denying evolution today is as ignorant as denying the Earth orbits the Sun.

It is amusing how the ignorant say "theory of" evolution. It started out as a theory by Darwin but we have known for many years that it is indeed fact - but the nay sayers like to attach the "theory of" in an attempt to discredit it. Darwin only had the vaguest notions of how evolution worked, it wasn't until the discovery of DNA and more recent decoding the DNA of humans and many plants and animals that we can actually understand the mechanisms of evolution and indeed the evolutionary history of all living organisms to their ancient ancestors in the so called junk DNA that they still carry. We carry around living fossils of our oldest ancestors and can see the family trees and what organisms evolved from what and which animals have particular ancestors in common.

I think the largest reason for the ignorance about evolution is down to religion. Some religious leaders / proponents try to suppress knowledge about evolution (e.g. imams stopping students learning about it as I mentioned above) or religious fanatics trying to stop evolution being taught in (typically American) schools. Then there are the nut jobs who create websites trying to deny evolution in favour of creation and there are enough people who are ignorant of science to fall for their misinformation and lies.