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Author Topic:   Use of Science to Support Creationism
sidelined
Member (Idle past 5908 days)
Posts: 3435
From: Edmonton Alberta Canada
Joined: 08-30-2003


Message 21 of 122 (106595)
05-08-2004 12:20 PM
Reply to: Message 18 by BobAliceEve
05-08-2004 7:57 AM


Re: You are not helping
BobAliceEve
Policy setters are the ones using the theory of evolution as fact - no one here will claim that the theory is fact.
You are correct the theory is not a fact in the same way that a map is not the territory.Evolution is a fact {the territory} and the Theory of Evolution is the model {the map}
The theory of evolution is our best framework to explain what actually exists as an event evident in our observations.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 18 by BobAliceEve, posted 05-08-2004 7:57 AM BobAliceEve has not replied

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sidelined
Member (Idle past 5908 days)
Posts: 3435
From: Edmonton Alberta Canada
Joined: 08-30-2003


Message 24 of 122 (106739)
05-09-2004 5:00 AM
Reply to: Message 23 by almeyda
05-09-2004 4:07 AM


Re: ...
almeyda
I mean throwing around millions of yrs to give the impression that anything can happen with chance doesnt really change much does it?
If I understand you correctly you are talking about evolution and are yourself operating under the impression that evolution works by chance alone. This is a misunderstanding that is somehow constantly circulating even today. Evolution works through not just chance but also through natural selection.Natural selection is the enviroment surrounding a creature throughout its lifetime and includes hazards such as predators ,climate change,and any chance occurances that work tfor or against the creature reaching an age of reproduction.And,yes,this is sufficient to explain the process of evolution and all the wonderous diversity of life upon Earth.
Chance by the standards you are operating on would be a little like the monkeys hammering out the works of Shakespear.By random process we would of course expect eons to pass before they could be expected to go from one end of reproducing shakespears works to the other with no errors in spelling.
Natural selection though works by {taking our monkey authors and their keyboard hunt and peck methods} locking in proper combinations as they occur which rapidly allows Shakespear to be accurately reproduced.Let us take the phrase "to be or not to be" and for simplicity's sake we will condense it to "tobeornottobe".
Now I will allow you to perform the experiment yourself.Go to your keyboard,close your eyes and rapidly punch in keystrokes randomly while counting to 20.Then go over the apparent gibberish and when you find the first "t" circle it then locate the next letter "o",circle it and proceed until you have found "tobeornottobe".Let me know how many letters you went through in all until you had the whole phrase.
Fast and efficient isn't it?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 23 by almeyda, posted 05-09-2004 4:07 AM almeyda has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 25 by almeyda, posted 05-09-2004 5:42 AM sidelined has replied

  
sidelined
Member (Idle past 5908 days)
Posts: 3435
From: Edmonton Alberta Canada
Joined: 08-30-2003


Message 33 of 122 (106795)
05-09-2004 1:07 PM
Reply to: Message 25 by almeyda
05-09-2004 5:42 AM


Re: ...
almeyda
It seems like the hopeless task of explaining how one ancestor organism could arise from dead matter triples in difficulty.
Indeed it is difficult in the extreme but we are a young race who have only spent the last century or so in a dedicated scientific pursuit of knowledge.It may very well be that the actual mechanism by which things began their climb will never be known. If so well too bad for us. However there is a possible way in which we
can explain these things and it goes back to a lecture given by a man named Richard Feynman.
In this lecture he discusses water and how it is made up of two elements {Hydrogen and Oxygen} and in this combination {which is repeated over and over always the same} we have the properties of water Ice,snowflakes,steam,the sounds it produces as you pour it into a container,the weak solvent ability that allows for so many reactions,all of this and literally hundreds more all inherent in two elements which if you were to be a stranger to water you would not be able to see that such was possible from the combination of the two.Now what if the elements were not repeated over and over but changed constantly throughout How much more is possible?
The actual words here are the general idea behind the leature. The full thing can be found in a book called Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman.But the idea is this.All of chemistry is a result of elements sharing forces and producing new more complex properties and science has the understanding of how those forces interact at their most fundemental to produce all the phenomena we see in biology.So all the things that atoms do can be shown to produce all the things that we do. This is a bold statement but as we go along things that were previously unexplained are being found to now have a rational explanation.
So now we discover the pattern behind the thing we call "life." However because we are still in the process of unfolding what were previously secrets of nature we are finding that we are calling the question of what "life" is into question. It is bias on the part of we humans that we consider ourselves as "living" when,in fact,we are simply a higher level of complexity on the road of evolution.It is not "dead matter" that we are dealing with.How the mechanisms work to allow us to do the things we do is unknown but is subject to investigation by science.That we do not know is no problem for scientiosts since doubt is what allows us to question and learn what the facts tell us.
As for this addendum.
P.S - gjrjk"b"mdjj"r"majdnjdj"t""e"kh"o"akegf"n"nv"n"nmhbmamgkakjghkkmbfmsk
pep"o"kgha,lslkfkfaeij"o"taeanalug"r"ughvngerh"t"rwjhtj"t"kylkymklkjs
jlmkjkukuiljyu"o"efafmek"t""e""b"klslmv;v bnkjlai"o"
--- Must they be in order? Because i did reach the letters but i dont think in order
{Added some blank spaces to break the text into seperate lines, to restore page width to normal. Sidenote: Is such as the above really needed? - Adminnemooseus}
They must be in order yes and I have gone over it and found that you got as far as tobeornot.The purpose of this is to show how with just one rule imposed on the random background order ensues.At this rate the works of Shakespeare are rapidly produced.With the imposition of natural selection evolution life can rapidly {rapid being long stretches of time from our perspective} produce new and varied combinations.If it is possible for this to produce greater complexity upon biological matter at our level how much of a stretch is it to have it happen to produce something of far less complexity {i.e. The first cellular organisms}
This message has been edited by Adminnemooseus, 05-10-2004 12:14 AM

"We cannot define anything precisely! If we attempt to, we get into that paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers, who sit opposite each other, one saying to the other, 'You don't know what you are talking about!' The second one says 'What do you mean by know? What do you mean by talking? What do you mean by you?', and so on."

This message is a reply to:
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sidelined
Member (Idle past 5908 days)
Posts: 3435
From: Edmonton Alberta Canada
Joined: 08-30-2003


Message 61 of 122 (107617)
05-11-2004 9:27 PM
Reply to: Message 36 by almeyda
05-10-2004 1:05 AM


Re: ...
almeyda
But at the beginning there was nothing. How did the nothing become something?
This statement and the rest of your post is the central question that science is trying to pin down.We do not know whether there there was nothing to begin with anymore than we know how the universe we do observe came to be.Science is not totally in the dark,though.We an use good theories {not just opinions mind you} and make predictions about what the nature of phenomena that should be present but have never been observed will be when we search for them.
If the phenomena match one of the theories it lends credence to the theory and if it does not match the theory we still learn from the failure.That science cannot say how the universe came to be is no more a failing than you being unable to say how God came to be.Where you merely have to say that it does not matter to you how God came to be is easy since you need only believe and no more need be said.Science does not have that luxury nor is it intellectually lazy in that sense.
This message has been edited by sidelined, 05-11-2004 08:28 PM

"We cannot define anything precisely! If we attempt to, we get into that paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers, who sit opposite each other, one saying to the other, 'You don't know what you are talking about!' The second one says 'What do you mean by know? What do you mean by talking? What do you mean by you?', and so on."

This message is a reply to:
 Message 36 by almeyda, posted 05-10-2004 1:05 AM almeyda has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 62 by almeyda, posted 05-11-2004 11:29 PM sidelined has replied

  
sidelined
Member (Idle past 5908 days)
Posts: 3435
From: Edmonton Alberta Canada
Joined: 08-30-2003


Message 64 of 122 (107801)
05-12-2004 10:18 PM
Reply to: Message 62 by almeyda
05-11-2004 11:29 PM


Re: ...
almeyda
Since God be definition is the creator of matter and space. He is not restricted by a time dimension
These are statements of supposition that have no evidence to support them.You define God as creator but need give no propostition as to how he can create and manipulate a physical world.You state he is not restricted by a time dimension and give us no evidence to back up this claim.You do not even propose a means by which this could be so.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 62 by almeyda, posted 05-11-2004 11:29 PM almeyda has not replied

  
sidelined
Member (Idle past 5908 days)
Posts: 3435
From: Edmonton Alberta Canada
Joined: 08-30-2003


Message 74 of 122 (152951)
10-25-2004 11:59 PM
Reply to: Message 72 by MeganC
10-25-2004 11:22 PM


Re: A useful distintion
MeganC
Welcome to the jungle oh new one. I will begin with your statement
I can't bring myself to believe that everything just spontaneously happened one day.
May I ask where in all your studies you ever came across information that warrants this statement? In other words what reference can you show us where anyone thought this to be the case?
There is some crap science out there just like there is some crap Christianity out there.
Absolutely. However there is a huge amount of misinformation applied to some of the concepts of science as well as christianity.Please express what it is specifically that you disagree with.
Some things I just know are right.
Hmm.. Where have I heard that before?
Boy! Richard Dawkins would spin in his grave if he could read this! He'd probably jump up out of his grave and start debating with me if he could.:-) Richard Dawkins--the man we all loved to hate in my Science and Religion course in college.
You really must have been sucking back on the dream weed in college since Richard Dawkins is still in the land of the living.Perhaps you should get on a land line and see if you can straighten out this misconception with Richard himself..Reports of his demise are greatly exagerrated.Perhaps this is one of those things you "just know is right" eh?
I will tear some more flesh from your bones at a later date as I must sleep soon.Take care and again welcome to the madhouse.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 72 by MeganC, posted 10-25-2004 11:22 PM MeganC has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 78 by MeganC, posted 10-26-2004 10:37 AM sidelined has replied

  
sidelined
Member (Idle past 5908 days)
Posts: 3435
From: Edmonton Alberta Canada
Joined: 08-30-2003


Message 94 of 122 (153329)
10-27-2004 8:31 AM
Reply to: Message 78 by MeganC
10-26-2004 10:37 AM


Re: A useful distintion
MeganC
This may seem contrary to Occam's Razor, but if all things are assumed equal in this instance then the idea that a creator made the universe is as equally plausible as the idea that it created itself. Save the arguments that Occam's Razor eliminates the need for a God hypothesis because everything can be explained without him
Irregardless of Occam's razor,a creator is not equally plausible as a spontaneous uncaued universe.In order for us to allow for a creator we need ask things that are not resolvable such as what created the creator? What is the means by which a creator is able to create? Where would you locate a creator? What,indeed , do we even mean by a creator?
The result of our present investigations and understandings point towards a pattern that in the world that pretty much eliminates a creatoras being an entity indistinguishable from from no entity at all.There also emerges a pattern in human nature that points more to inherent fallacies of perception by people ofthe world around them than towards a entity that exists outside our own brains.
Without a plausible answer to the means by which we postulate a creator we gain no further clarity of the world and ,indeed, we confuse things to the point that a creator's likelihood is no different from any other thing we can dream up but would not seriously substitute as an answer to the world around us.
Good to talk with you ,hope to answer specific questions you may have,Good day.
This message has been edited by sidelined, 10-27-2004 07:32 AM

[W]hen people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together

This message is a reply to:
 Message 78 by MeganC, posted 10-26-2004 10:37 AM MeganC has not replied

  
sidelined
Member (Idle past 5908 days)
Posts: 3435
From: Edmonton Alberta Canada
Joined: 08-30-2003


Message 111 of 122 (154577)
10-31-2004 7:34 AM
Reply to: Message 109 by Cold Foreign Object
10-30-2004 9:46 PM


Re: Original title: Asking for a clarification from Creationists.
Willowtree
Millions of years to get erect yet an amount of disputed body of evidence that could fit into a medium sized box at best = so much based on so little = irrational belief not supported by the evidence.
Sounds like my wife discussing our love life.

This message is a reply to:
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