Question About Evolution

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What Kills Thought?
Yes but I don't ever cite the authors of my opinions because of the emotional investment people have in socialism, evolution, feminism, whatever theory or ism we are discussing. We should be free to entertain everything and anything, free thinking. It closes peoples ear before a discussion can be had. I mention Michael Behe, or Robert Kagan, or Ross Douthat, or Thomas Sowell, and the conversation is killed on the spot. Also, we do agree on my statement about Evolutionists and gods existence.


How Can We Differ?
Evolution works in exactly the way I have put it. I am merely asking the questions of how it goes about doing what it does. So it is fine if we look at the same thing, and:

1.) It makes you wonder in awe at the complex processes that must have taken place to go from Fish to man, and
2.) I find skepticism in an almost impossible theory

Matter of fact, both are legitimate responses, both we can occupy and switch between, because in the final analysis, we have absolutely nothing to work with considering what evolution logically demands.... all of this is in great faith. You should have some or at least one or maybe two lingering questions of its impossibility, and, equally, I am in complete awe and wonder when I entertain the idea, considering all that has to work, and work right, to make it workable... my finite imagination grounds me. For example, in order for the eyesight of the human to evolve to that of a cheetah or any animal who has slightly better eyesight then the human being, our optical nerves have to be increased. What guides that? What mutates the brain to begin producing more photoreceptive membranes to account for the data coming in? What reroutes connections in the brain and nervous system to account for these changes, because every change effects other systems, what, how, and why do these mutations happen, and how do they all happen at once or in the appropriate sequence to make them happen at all? What sustains the morphing of a zebra or a rabbit into a whale over millions of years, and assuming Darwinian evolution is true, with the possibilities of certain genetic codes turning on and off at random(with variations that are up to 2 to the 25,000th power), where are the billions of potential offshoots? That zebra could have mutated one way and if herds of it became isolated, which inevitably would happen, after a while could have developed into other mammalian like creatures in the ocean, especially when we give ourselves hundreds of millions of years....

But instead we have a Zebra, or a rabbit, and we have a whale, and not much else in between other then 7 examples which could be slotted in an evolutionary way. I don't think that those 7 working examples in the fossil records discards evolution. I am skeptical, however, when people look at 7 working examples of a whale link the two. Even if we had 48 examples, to use your number, 48 isolated mutated examples would account for what exactly? The eyelids evolving for marine use? Lactation systems reorganized? If we have 7 examples, and the process took a billion mutations in every system in the animal adapting to marine life, could this be the same animal, offshoots of the animal, the questions are endless. The benefits that a whale has evolved are not the only benefits a sea creature can have, and considering the gagillions of potential evolutionary traits a sea creature could take on for survival, we could/should not only have millions of working examples of the links between a land walking mammal and a whale, but also millions or even billions of working examples of other creatures that the process should have spawned. My questions should be yours as well, and the answers to them we should declare unknowable until we have evidence beyond patchwork theories.


The Discovery Institute and Education
I must also add that I have consistently opposed the teaching of anything other then Darwinian evolution in a scientific setting. Though I don't agree with it and even with all the holes it has, micro evolution is something every person I can imagine prescribes to. It won't affect whether you make a great geneticist or physicist. It's only one 1/2 of 1/3 of the natural sciences taught in k-12 education, it's not a big deal. In a philosophical setting, Intelligent Design is perfectly fine, and you shouldn't have a single objection to that. I don't support creationism, and it has no place in the classroom, in science in general, and especially in religion.

Points Being Answered
No one's answered any of my points either. Do go back and reread every post I have ever made, this isn't a debate, it is merely two sides throwing points at each other, if you want to dance around my points, that is fine, none of my critiques have been answered, I answer you all regularly.

You asked, in the post that I quoted, about a workable example of macroevolution. I provided you with one. Explain to me how this is dancing around your point?

Two sides throwing points at each other... man that sounds awfully like a debate to me...

My Response:
I don't know anything about that horse and its mammalian ancestor and do not know where to start in researching it and why it has what it has. Your demands of explaining the horse by a visual is simplistic. WE KNOW ABSOLUTELY NOTHING from looking at those pictures. I don't know the fossil record and what we have to work with, there are large collapses of time, millions of years between each example(according to the diagram), I don't know the reasons it abandoned 5 toes for 1 hoove. Please post images of the fossils we have that we then constructed the ancestors you see in that picture.

What's this? You don't know? Why is that hardly surprising...

You will find the following link highly informative: Click Me To Educate Yourself

I can simply look at these simplistic drawings and draw homological similarities, and say that since they look similar, they are the same, which they may be. If they are the same creature, then they are. But it is just definitional. Give me a month to study it, and feel free to educate me as well while I learn about it. Specifically, why it evolved the way it evolved.

If you are so ignorant of the subject that you require a month to put together a basic understanding of what happened and our current theory as to why, why are you even here talking about it? You're admitting to not knowing what you're talking about. This is why no one can take you seriously, you do not understand what you are talking about.


Materialism:
Materialism also dictates that matter is all there is. Matter. Entropy, does not exist. Neither does time, or numerical values. Neither does force. Physical terms can only be used descriptively to define a mode that matter occupies. That is it. Fields don't exist, nothing to be frank, if it is not material. That relates to my definition of naturalism. Darwinists believe our beginnings were within the confines of naturalism, and that the material world is all there is. The super natural and the non-material do not exist, ruling out the possibility of a spirit of higher consciousness.

[u][b]

1: ...Darwinists? Darwin was undoubtedly an intelligent man, but he didn't have access to the same knowledge we do today. He put forth the basic workings of evolution, and we have expounded upon and corrected that basic theory as we learned more about what actually happened. Science in motion, aint it beautiful? Anyway, there are no "Darwinists".

2: I'd like to enquire as to where you learned that definition of materialism, because no scientist would ever subscribe to it. Not a one. We know that it's wrong. We know that fields exist (magnets anyone?), we know that force exists, we know that entropy exists, we know that time exists (or, at the very least, are incapable of figuring out how the universe works if it doesn't). Our theory as to why and how they work may not be correct, but we know that these things do exist. None of that is supernatural either.

As far as numerical values go, that's a more debatable point. Numbers, in their base form, don't actually exist. Numbers are just something we use to define something else. A healthy human hand, for example, is defined as having five fingers. The number five itself doesn't exist, it's just a measurement. Much like litres, grams, and metres.

3: I repeat myself yet again and say that none of this has anything to do with evolution, which happens to be the topic at hand. We aren't discussing how life came to be, we're discussing how it went from what it started as to what it is today and why.[\b][\u]

I honestly do not know how any movement would go without a structured campaign and expect to survive. Atheists play by the exact blueprint, makes you wonder if the people hear themselves. You act like this is a power move foreign to atheism.

You don't believe that someone could seriously believe in intelligent design.

Which is why ID is labeled as dishonest, because, since you cannot imagine a normal person believing in it, there must be bad intentions involved that are not science related like their just trying to feed off of and cash in on misinformed peoples fears, or, they are just anti-science for religious power, respect, and prestige. You also don't think that - for those of us who should know better - deep down we actually disagree with Evolution, because to you, how could someone be presented with what you see as overwhelming evidence and deny it?

Where I part with Evolutionists framing of Evolution is the material confines naturalism as all there is, which precludes a designer. I see design all over the evidence. I might even prescribe to macro evolution if data showed that an intelligent source planted life on earth, and that then germinated into everything we know today, and had a hand in the process. That is more palpable then material nothing + random chance + natural selection equals life, and life evolving into things it wasn't instructed to evolve into.

I honestly do not know how any movement would go without a structured campaign and expect to survive. Atheists play by the exact blueprint, makes you wonder if the people hear themselves. You act like this is a power move foreign to atheism.

You don't believe that someone could seriously believe in intelligent design.

Which is why ID is labeled as dishonest, because, since you cannot imagine a normal person believing in it, there must be bad intentions involved that are not science related like their just trying to feed off of and cash in on misinformed peoples fears, or, they are just anti-science for religious power, respect, and prestige.

As a Christian, I think evolution is actually possible because Genesis doesn't mention the step-by-step process that God used to create everything in their respective days. Plus said "days" may not necessarily be literal 24-hour periods of time. A "day" could have been several thousand years (people were living to be over 900 back then--compared to our currently measly life expectancy of 78 here).

Of course there are literalists who believe the latter, like Granny Cuyler on Squidbillies--"I didn't come from no monkey's butthole!"

I agree - with you, not Granny Cuyler and her aversion to coming from a monkey's butthole.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Even then, it wouldn't apply to the Cuylers because they're squids.

Nice a thread about a theory.

Nice a thread about a theory.

The Greeks did call it insane. They called the Jews lazy because they rested every 7th day.

It baffled them why one would take a break from life, to just be with friends and family, to rest and not work, to give their animals rest, to reenact creation by resting on the 7th day as God did.

To the ancient Jew, it is understood that we are not merely here to work. That God took them out of slavery in Egypt wherein they had to work 7 days a week. There are other things more important then work, even if you do work every day of the week but get paid a million bucks, the torah feels you are still a slave, even if well-paid, a slave to your money, identity, and performance. This life time is short, at the end of your life, you can spend your dying days on a pile of money, and it won't mean a thing to you -- memories of people are what will occupy your mind, so they should be what focuses your mind long before your mortality forces you to, and to commit one day out of the week to just that is morally elevating. The Greeks had a philosophical concept of this as well, their insult was just out of misunderstanding.