intelligent design vs. evolution
- Thread starter Termite Man
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stdPikachu
Plughole in bathtub curve
Fruitloop said:
Yeah, but we already knew he'd lost anyway
ID does not resemble a scientific theory in any way, hence should not and cannot be taught as science. Keep it in RE and theology classes if you must insist on teaching it.
FruitandNut
New Member
Savage Henry said:Why are both of these seen as seperate ? Surely it would be possible for a god to intelligently design a creature with an ability to adapt and evolve to suit it's enviroment yet I've never heard anyone use this argument before
I have used the argument of a 'Creator God' Who makes the rules governing science as we know it. I believe in BOTH creation AND evolution; I feel that to look at either in isolation is to miss much of the reality.
Atheists talk of the God of Gaps, well to my mind they have got it in part right. Indeed God does cover the gaps in our knowledge, but He also provides the laws and substance of our science as well. They make the mistake of saying that if God exists 'He' should be provable by scientific means. BUT if God created science, He is superior to science, and to use science to prove and understand His nature is therefore to use an inadequate tool.
Atheists put their faith and belief only in science and then are faced with event horizons, limits to measurement (including light), and infinity. To fill those gaps they often often go into the realms of speculation, sometimes pushing it into fantasy, and yet they still happily criticise theistic beliefs.
Creationists are uncomfortable with evolution, they often see and explain existence almost as a series of independent events. It is as though the natural law of cause and effect is constantly interrupted by Divine intervention.
There are Christians who take the Old Testament quite literally, forgetting that it was the tradition at the time to explain things in parables. If the Adam and Eve story and 'The Tree of Knowledge' were taken as such, it would indeed fit with science and evolution, the Tree of Knowledge being a metaphor for the 'Ah, Ha' moment of human cognition - of spirituality, philosophy, art, right and wrong, and subtle emotions. That being banished from the 'Garden of Eden' was a metaphor for growing beyond the 'innocence' of purely animal existence.
The following are a few musings of mine on the topic of life, the universe and everything.
Creation AND evolution.
Lots of micro-evolutions, mutations, sports and the like add up to the macro changes. Missing links are only missing because they have not yet been found or else they have not survived in the fossil record, or are inaccessible because of the likes of tectonic activity.
Homo Sapiens Neanderthalis were into tool making, art and religious type ritual burial; I wonder where they figure in the Garden of Eden alongside Adam and Eve????
In terms of evolution, as the Scottish saying goes, 'Monie a mickle maks a muckle'. Or, lots of little bits make a big bit.
The basic evolutionary mechanisms — mutation, migration, genetic drift, and natural selection — can produce major evolutionary change if given enough time.
A process like mutation might seem too small-scale to influence a pattern as amazing as the beetle radiation, or as large as the difference between dogs and pine trees, but it's not. Life on Earth has been accumulating mutations and passing them through the filter of natural selection for 3.8 billion years — more than enough time for evolutionary processes to produce its grand history.
If a Creator God who is Lord of the Universe and all its laws chose to have other sentient 'special' life elsewhere, who am I, or you for that matter, to question His works? There is no proof either way, so as far as I for one am concerned 'life' out there remains a 'possibility'. It has nothing to do with a 'sustainable' universe anyway. In terms of the laws of the universe in regard to infinity as we understand things - event horizons and all that - nothing should exist; so it's blatantly obvious that there is 'something' else that must explain existence that the 'universe's science' and laws are too limited to explore. (As they are but products of this 'greater science'/being.)
In the terms and conditions of infinity no event horizon is ever reached. All universes and civilisations have to wait for infinity for their turn to come.
Only time is as far as events having happened and as far as we know about the happenings in the universe can be measured, beyond that it is all conjecture, speculation and belief. Future events run as probabilities to a point scientifically, beyond that point it becomes possibility, and then beyond that point speculation and belief. Cumulatively you do NOT have infinity, you have a heck of a lot of time, but without going into possibility and belief, you will never come close to infinity, even with those tools of the imagination, you still haven't captured infinity within a mathematical formula.
My eldest son is heavy into maths and physics and also has a philosophy degree and he concludes that as much as science has 'told' us, both it and we know "Jack Shit"!
Amino acids SUPPORT LIFE, they are NOT LIFE. Life is something that science is probably ill equipped to fully understand because it was probably 'popped into' the primordial creative soup at a later stage than the 'big bang'. What happened at the time of the big bang was the setting up of the laws of evolution that would eventually allow those necessary support mechanisms of life.
Amino acids are implicit to temporal life, BUT THEY ARE NOT THE TOTAL OF WHAT CONSTITUTES LIFE. There appears to be an addendum that science can't quite get to grips with. Yes, complex and pretty chains of molecules can be formed in the lab from bits and bobs, but it is NOT creating life.
Stick all your amino acids together and all the other bits and pieces and all you have is an interesting organic soup. IT IS NOT LIFE AND THERE IS NO LIFE. You don't even catch a cold.
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/A/AbioticSynthesis.html
redsquirrel
This Machine Kills Progressives
Bullshit, that only stands if you accept that there is a set of astone tablets somewhere defining what actions are good and what are evil (or some other way of calculating whether things are good and evil). If you don't then this statement doesn't stand at all. Some things can be good, some evil, some good and evil and some neither.phildwyer said:
FruitandNut
New Member
redsquirrel said:
We are created/evolved with fallibility and a modicum of 'free will'. This permits us (within the constraints of our particular situation) to make choices. It is in making those choices that we involve ourselves in not only the natural law of right and wrong actions, but of the spiritual and philosophical concepts of good and evil.
God did not create the Holocaust, but He as sure as heck created something that could. Don't forget that this same 'creature' also has the potential to produce fine music, literature, art and indulge in extreme examples of altruism. We are all both Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde.
redsquirrel
This Machine Kills Progressives
Cheers so much for that.FruitandNut said:
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
redsquirrel said:Cheers so much for that.
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
phildwyer said:
Nonsense: both words carry religious connotations, particularly the word "evil".
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
This one doesn't - I just invoke probability. Earth as a planet has developed conditions amenable to life over the 3 billion years or so that it's been around through a combination of it's own and extra-terran activity (i.e. vulcanism, plate tectonics and other local geological activity and meteors/asteroids hitting the planet) and for my money the most plausible reason that life started is that the combinaton of good environment and stuff hitting the place led, at some point, to the beginings of 'life'.
Why bother with Gods and mysticism - the universe is plenty interesting in and of itself without invoking capricious spaghetti monsters.
E.Blackadder said:
kyser_soze said:
How does one go about invoking probability in such circumstances?
You would require at least some idea of the mechanics of the spark of life or whatever you want to call it.
I agree that you can apply probabilistic arguments to attaining the right conditions for life over time, in which case the combination of terran and non-terran activity are relevant ... but unless you have some clue that I'm not aware of as to how vulcanism and meteor bombardment could produce life then I don't take your point.
parallelepipete
Aelod cysylltiol y Taliban Cymraeg
God is claimed by organised religions to be both omniscient and benevolent, but the two are mutually exclusive in this universe. If a creative deity is omniscient, it would have known in advance the consequences of its actions during the alleged creation, and having proceeded anyway it's proved itself to be heartless. Religion talking about creating agents with 'free will' is just a cop-out because they can't explain away this dilemma.FruitandNut said:
If you discard organised religions, then you can discard their common dogma of omniscience and benevolence, but then why would you worship something which has neither characteristic, and whose existence does not fit with our experience of the world?
parallelepipete
Aelod cysylltiol y Taliban Cymraeg
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
angry bob said:
Please note I'm not a xenobiologist...a one of the rocks hitting the planet could have had some bit of frozen goo that interacted with local bits of goo to create some new goo...repeat this process over a few thousand millenia and maybe you ended up with 'live' goo.
My point is that given the time period that earths' been around (and bearing in mind that it was born into what some scientists call the '3rd generation' universe i.e. there had already been 2 previous solar cycles of suns being born and dying) there's a probablistic chance of this happening.
Bascially I think that life on Earth as a whole is something that happened by chance and that it's subsequent developments have been chance also - what in an animals genes made it more or less succeptible to local conditions that cause it to start mutating to a more effective survival model of itself?
It's all about probabilities.
Ignore the volcanoes for the time being...
kyser_soze said:
OK ... neither of us are xenobioligists and I'm not about to dismiss that field of study out of hand but ...
You can't really be talking about the probability of something happening if you have no idea what that thing is. We have an idea of the time scale involved ... and I agree that such an immensly long period allows for a huge number of things to 'probably' happen, amoeba evolving into mankind for instance.
Goo colliding with goo may well have been the cause of life but until someone comes up with a reasonable theory (by which I mean supported by a fair amount of observation) as to the origins of said goo and the mechanisms by which it produces live goo then it really is guesswork to talk about probabilities of life.
stdPikachu
Plughole in bathtub curve
kyser_soze said:
As romantic as the "comets bringing the seeds of life to our planet" idea is, most astronomers and cosmologists dismiss it as fantastically unlikely (and possibly impossible).
Of more interest are things like the Miller/Urey experiment which took to find out if a primordial environment was conducive to the creation of organic compounds. You'll also note that that page mentions the possibility of meterors bringing the same organic compounds to Earth (since we know that they already exist in space).
The only problematic part is how we go from a pile of goo to cellular lieforms
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
Well that's what probabililites are mate - an attempt to formalise guesswork and conjecture...
If I were a Xenobiologist I could probably point to comet particles or something, but as neither of us can take it any further lets leave it there.
Still better than the Giant Spaghetti Monster view IMO
I'm not going quite that far!! I'm just referring to alternate types of goo being deposited that worked with other types of goo, not that some comet hit the place and deposited lil proto-goos all over the planet. And nothing is impossible, just astronomically improbable. Remember that whole quuatum thing - it's improbable but still possible that the next Big Bang emerge over your shoulder...
If I were a Xenobiologist I could probably point to comet particles or something, but as neither of us can take it any further lets leave it there.
Still better than the Giant Spaghetti Monster view IMO
I'm not going quite that far!! I'm just referring to alternate types of goo being deposited that worked with other types of goo, not that some comet hit the place and deposited lil proto-goos all over the planet. And nothing is impossible, just astronomically improbable. Remember that whole quuatum thing - it's improbable but still possible that the next Big Bang emerge over your shoulder...
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
Besides which, cosmologists are trying to convince people that 80% of the universe is made up of something that can't be seen, felt, touched or indeed measured in any way...not to mention mathematically provable 13 dimensional space...yeah, of course they can dismiss ANY idea out of hand...
kyser_soze said:
No doubt, seeing as how that little gem was invented by some smartass in an attempt to show how ridiculous creationism is and that it should not be taught in schools.
IMO it is no better or worse than belief in a 'supreme being' who exists 'outside' of the physical universe (be it 4-, 7- or 13-dimensional!).
But then at the end of the day it is all opinions. Science has little to say on the matter beyond guesswork and conjecture.
stdPikachu
Plughole in bathtub curve
angry bob said:
On the contrary; science has plenty to say about it. Guesswork and conjecture are the precursors to theories and experiments and ultimately, observable facts.
stdPikachu said:
Right ... but science is still at the precuror stage on this question. Which means all scientists have to say is merely guesswork and conjecture. Not that that doesn't have value ... but without the observables to support a theory there is no reason to think it correct.
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
I think we need to get back to the goo personally...
Some goo, yesterday:
'Do you think you hold the key to life Mr Goo?'
'Flob'
*translator* Mr Goo says he feels there is some anti-goo feeling on this thread before he says anymore
Some goo, yesterday:
'Do you think you hold the key to life Mr Goo?'
'Flob'
*translator* Mr Goo says he feels there is some anti-goo feeling on this thread before he says anymore
Donna Ferentes
jubliado
If it's "intelligent" design, how come there's wasps?
fractionMan
Custom Title
intelligent doesn't mean niceDonna Ferentes said:
merlin wood
mind traveller 3rd class
phildwyer said:
Or maybe there's something like a god that can't give us strong enougj reasons to be good.
merlin wood
mind traveller 3rd class
kyser_soze said:I think we need to get back to the goo personally...
Some goo, yesterday:
'Do you think you hold the key to life Mr Goo?'
'Flob'
*translator* Mr Goo says he feels there is some anti-goo feeling on this thread before he says anymore
Got nothing against Mr. Goo personally. Perhaps he's being a bit oversensitive.
merlin wood
mind traveller 3rd class
merlin wood said:
or then again perhaps not since he seems to have put off anyone continuing this thread.
I thought perhaps Mr Goo could be a single cell organism like an amoeba, which is an interesting kind of goo creature. That is even if doesn't have much fun because it's asexual and only reproduces by splitting in half (although come think of it praps it does get some kind of kick out of doing just that).
But then you can say this millimetre sized living blob must know where it's at and to the extent that it can find, wrap itsself round and devour appropriately consumable organic stuff. and so you'd have to say it has some kind of sensitivity for doing this.
And then ypu can wonder what happens when it splits in half? How can it turn into two living blobs that can each a single unique sensitivity to the world?
So you can think of yourself being a sensitive living blob splitting in half and then wondering how is that other half of me not me?
So maybe Mr Goo does hide a secret to life after all, that is, rather than some Mr Intelligent Designer sitting on a cloud somewhere with hjs green eyeshade and drawing board.
Purdie
there are no stars, only suns
i was wondering, and i don't believe there someone sitting on a cloud as such, it's all good and well but how does this non-intelligent thing that caused mr.Goo to eventually become more complicated lifeforms like humans and other animals and plants get the intelligence from to have some sort of balance ... if it was really random then the ratio of male/female would be random too and over the millenia it seems to have this balance just right enough so the male/female balance is ideal for furthering. Makes me think evolution is intelligence in itself and what we define as intelligence is an illusionary design in itself
merlin wood
mind traveller 3rd class
Purdie said:i was wondering, and i don't believe there someone sitting on a cloud as such, it's all good and well but how does this non-intelligent thing that caused mr.Goo to eventually become more complicated lifeforms like humans and other animals and plants get the intelligence from to have some sort of balance ... if it was really random then the ratio of male/female would be random too and over the millenia it seems to have this balance just right enough so the male/female balance is ideal for furthering. Makes me think evolution is intelligence in itself and what we define as intelligence is an illusionary design in itself.
Um can't think of an answer to that, really.
Except that I think 'evolution is intelligence in itself' sounds quite good. I suppose all I'm suggesting here is that the indivisibility of consciousness argument for some kind of mind/body duality is a valid one (although I'd say not the kind of duality that Descartes was arguing for), while the secret of life is in answering the question of what kind of mind, self or soul is it that results in consciousness - or the experience of the inividual - being such that it can't be divided?
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