God vs. Science

Yeah, but it's also incredibly funny to watch Creationists shoot down their own strawman attacks - the irony is wonderful.

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When you know you're going to wake up in three days, dying is not a sacrifice. It's a painful inconvenience.

Logical inference is still valid evidence. Every human ever examined has a brain, and when the brain is damaged significantly, the person dies. It is therefor perfectly reasonable to infer from direct observations that you have a brain. If I replaced the word "God" in your statement with, say, "fairies" or "the flying spaghetti monster" or "your imaginary friend" or "chance," would you be able to show that the statement is incorrect? Would there even be any difference whatsoever?There would not, beyond perhaps a "feeling" you may have felt at the time. It's literally identical to a small child who, when asked how he found his lost toy, responds that his invisible friend "helped" him.If I am helped on the side of the road by a man, I can say "I physically saw him. I spoke with him, he responded to me verbally, and you can probably find his fingerprints on my car." With God, you are saying "I survived a situation where I think survival was highly unlikely without intervention. I will assume that there was intervention, and I will attribute it to the deity I already believe in."

Are you kidding? A boat was moved into a corner and then back out by the current, and because you had an emotional experience due to stress and your coworker happened to have prayed for you, you attribute your survival to the divine?Objects get swept into and back out of river pockets by the current all the time, with no prayer involved. Your lack of effort at the end may have even helped you escape, since working against currents tends not to work at all.The fact is, you can't show in any meaningful way that your survival was due to your god, opposed to fairies, an imaginary friend, or the FSM. Chance and the natural behavior of river currents, however, frequently result in the sort of behavior you witnessed.You attribute your survival to god because you prefer to do so, not out of any observation of objective facts.

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When you know you're going to wake up in three days, dying is not a sacrifice. It's a painful inconvenience.

It's the typical superstition delusion. If I get my way, "God did it." If I dont get my way, "God said no." Statistical evidence about praying is dismissed with "you can't test God" or "God has a plan that you dont understand."It's exactly like the tree fairy scenario: the fairies are there, they just hide in the tree before you can see them.It's just like imaginary friends: he's there, but you can't see him because he's invisible.They make it unfalsifiable. Edited by Rahvin, : No reason given.

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When you know you're going to wake up in three days, dying is not a sacrifice. It's a painful inconvenience.

That was a small component of my reply, and you know it. You still can provide no reason to attribute your survival to the supernatural - you do so because you prefer to do so, not out of any objective evidence or rational reasoning. Again, you could attribute your survival to "fairies pushing the boat," and you would have no more or less evidence than you have for your god.I'm certain you haven't even made the most cursory examination of the facts surrounding your experience in terms of actual current behavior and other objects trapped even in the same place you were - you simply had a close call, were traumatized by it, and decided you would be most comfortable attributing this to some divine protector (that you already believed in, of course) rather than face the fact that you survived only because of natural causes and chance.ABE: If the current really trapped objects as you describe, the same location would have been filled with normal river debris. If there was no debris already trapped, the current must occasionally sweep objects back out into the river.Edited by Rahvin, : No reason given.

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When you know you're going to wake up in three days, dying is not a sacrifice. It's a painful inconvenience.

Congratulations - you're an optimist.But if you really think "everything works out for the best," you're sorely mistaken, unless you truly regard starving infants in droughts, people drowned in tsunamis, or any other natural disaster or simple consequence of being born into poverty somehow "work out for the best."Once again, any time you get your way with a prayer, you exclaim that "God did it!" and use this as proof of the divine. When faced with similar (or worse) circumstances where such prayers were not answered, or even the prayers you make that are unanswered, you respond "I don't understand god, but I'm sure he has a plan."Your premise is unfalsifiable - there is no evidence that will dissuade you, despite the lack of any objective evidence for what you do believe. You choose to believe because it makes you more comfortable, and because of the human tendency to look for patterns where none exist - the same reasons for all other superstitions.

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When you know you're going to wake up in three days, dying is not a sacrifice. It's a painful inconvenience.

Which of course means nothing ever comes down the river, right?Come on. Debris eventually floats down all rivers, particularly after storms or strong wind upstream. If the eddy you describe truly traps objects inescapable barring outside intervention, at least some of that debris should have still been swirling around where you were trapped. If not, then the debris was obviously carried away - by the very same current that eventually forced you back into the river.5 days is not a long period of time.

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When you know you're going to wake up in three days, dying is not a sacrifice. It's a painful inconvenience.

Correction: everything good that's happened to you, you attribute to god. You ignore everything else, however, or dismiss it with the "god has a plan" nonsense. You see literally everything as evidence for god, when it's nothing of the sort.You're just insisting the fairies are flying away when we look. I don't need to be dissuaded, I would need to be persuaded into believing in a deity. An argument not based on incredulity, appeals to authority, false dilemmas, special pleading, or containing some sort of actual evidence would go a long way.

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When you know you're going to wake up in three days, dying is not a sacrifice. It's a painful inconvenience.

At no point did I suggest it was likely .There is a reason I'm no longer a Christian, after all.

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When you know you're going to wake up in three days, dying is not a sacrifice. It's a painful inconvenience.

Oh, look, he's caught an Evolutionist in a giant contradiction!...wait, no he hasn't. You observed the river for all of five days, genius, and every other river has debris flowing down it. Assuming that your river does not ever have debris because of 5 contiguous days of observation is idiotic. Radioactive decay is tied to the speed of light, among other things. You don't even realize what you're suggesting - if you change radioactive decay rates, the entire Universe as we observe it could not exist. If every stalagtite ever observed grows within the same growth rate, all over the world, and older layers look exactly the same as the layers we observe building up, by what mechanism would you propose they speed up or slow down in the past? Especially since stalagtite growth is tied to specific water flow - too much and the material is simply rinsed away. If all coral ever observed grows within a certain range, by what mechanism do you propose that it speeds up or slows down in the past? Especially when the growth of life forms is limited to how fast cells can replicate. And if they grow too fast, they use up all of their food or all of the oxygen in the area, stopping all growth entirely - it happens today with algea, causing massive "dead zones" where there is no oxygen left in the water for fish to breathe. We can make predictions based on increased radioactive decay, the conditions necessary for increased stalagtite growth, etc. Those predictions are not borne out by the observable evidence.It is extremely unlikely that any specific location along a river will be completely absent debris for an entire year. Your survival was due to normal river currents, nothing more. You choose to believe otherwise becasue it makes you feel better, not out of objective evidence. If you're really going to rehash the idiotic idea that tree ring formation was faster in the past, be my guest - open the thread. But I'll warn you - we've been over that PRATT a few times before, and it won't go well for you.

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When you know you're going to wake up in three days, dying is not a sacrifice. It's a painful inconvenience.

So, literally, your entire faith is based on your incredulity that anything that exists could have come from something other than a deity.What you're saying is identical to claiming the existence of a knife proves Bob killed Jim.The knife alone proves nothing other than a knife exists...especially if Jim was shot, or better yet, is still alive. A knife with Jim's blood, Bob's fingerprints, and a dead Jim would be evidence for Bob killing Jim...but without those bits of evidence, the conclusion from the knife's mere existence is a gigantic non sequitur.Likewise, without some sort of actual evidence of a deity, the mere existence of the Universe and life (especially with the growing validity of completely natural explanations for the processes and structures found in the Universe) proves absolutely nothing with regards to a deity. We'd need to find real evidence that the deity exists.In the Young Earth case, it's easy to test. For example, you brought up tree rings. If the world is only a few thousand years old and trees were made to grow faster for a period of time, we should see fewer rings, but at least one extremely large ring from the period of accelerated growth (since the rings are created by the seasons, not simply the growth of the tree), and we should see this in all trees of the correct age.We see nothing of the sort.We have the knife, but the blood, fingerprints, and even the dead body are missing. And Jim is tapping you on the shoulder saying "I'm not actually dead, I'm standing right here."

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When you know you're going to wake up in three days, dying is not a sacrifice. It's a painful inconvenience.

Ironically enough, its not only the scientific method but its application through the Theory of Evolution itself that produces quite a few medical breakthroughs these days.

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When you know you're going to wake up in three days, dying is not a sacrifice. It's a painful inconvenience.

Not really. That would be called "circumstancial evidence," and if the knife had no blood or fingerprints, we could suspect Bob, but not prove he did it. Jim could have committed suicide, for instance.We have no evidence of the supernatural. We only know that we exist, and can observe the natural properties and behaviors of the Universe around us. Saying that our mere existence proves there must be a god is an unfounded leap - the Universe could simply exist withotu a creator, could have had multiple creators, could have formed from some cosmic event we have yet to doscover, etc. Without further evidence, it is only accurate to say "the Universe exists." Anything else violates parsimony and treads dangerously close to dishonesty. Not so. Your analogy seems to be addressing abiogenesis and evolution, but the analogy is invalid - neither process is a purely random occurrance. They work by the inevitable and predictable processes of chemistry, which allows for significant random variety within a set of possibilities, and is then selected by the self-evident process of natural selection. We aren't playing "Mouse Trap," we're watching snowflakes form as the temperature drops - random chaos yeilds a startling variety of ordered constructs due to completely natural processes. You're delving too deeply into an analogy - I meant only to illustrate that you are assigning responsibility to an entity based on an invalid leap in logic, and so your conclusion drawn from that leap is invalid. God may or may not exist, but you can't prove he does only by noticing that other things exist.I may as well say that I know you exist because a soda can exists on my desk, and you must have put it there. We know this is false because, while there is a can on my desk, I put it there, not you. You may or may not exist (going only with the information available in the analogy, of course), and it would have been possible for you to have put the can there, but they are compeltely logically disconnected unless additional evidence (a fingerprint, for example) is introduced linking the two.Your arguments are nothing more than personal incredulity and unfounded leaps of logic. You have no evidence of anything at all to support your beliefs - they are simply beliefs taken on faith. You conclusions can still be valid, and god may possibly exist, but your reasons are invalid, and so your conclusion is illogical.

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When you know you're going to wake up in three days, dying is not a sacrifice. It's a painful inconvenience.

Extinction is predicted by evolution. And you are incorrect - new species have been observed to form from previously existing species: the so-called "speciation event." We can provide examples, if you like, but it appears you have been misled. And yet we know that this is complete bollocks. There are new things all the time - computers, the internet, medicines, all of these are new, and even their predecessors had a demonstrable beginning.Biology and evolution, of course, agree with Solomon: according to evolution, no feature in any species should be wholly unique, but should rather be a slightly modified version of the same feature in a pre-existing species. This is exactly what we see - wings do not suddenly sprout from cows in a single generation, for instance.Abiogenesis is separate from evolution. It may or may not be a valid explanation for the first life on Earth, but evolution itself works whether abiogenesis, space aliens, a rogue comet with a bacterium onboard, or god started the ball rolling.

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When you know you're going to wake up in three days, dying is not a sacrifice. It's a painful inconvenience.

No worries - it seems we all do.Hell, I think that's the reason many people have so many misconceptions of evolution - analogies are taken too far. That's good. I hope you also realize that, absent a specific mechanism to prevent it, those small changes you identify as microevolution will inevitably add up to what you call macroevolution. You should also realize that the micro- and macro- terms are exclusively Creationist/ID inventions - there is no distinction between the two in actual science. Not necessarily, no. However, I think you'll find that the steps required for abiogenesis that we have determined thus far (presence of organic chemicals, spontaneous formation of amino acids, spontaneous assembly of amino acids into proteins, etc) are inevitable given the appropriate circumstances - which we model off of the conditions of the early Earth. We have not demonstrated every step and actually created artificial life, but we have gotten very, very close. No, this does not mean abiogenesis is the source of all life on Earth, necessarily, even if we manage to duplicate the process from early Earth chemicals to a self-replicating molecule. And no, it does not mean that "god" could not have gotten it started in the first place. But it certainly means that it was completely possible, and even likely - and it doesn't require "god." Out of curiosity, what would you say if scientists were able to, from base organic chemicals we know occur naturally in environments devoid of life (see: Titan, Saturn's moon), over several steps cause life to form? If scientists are eventually able to create life from nonlife, what will be your reaction? I mean, that will be solid proof that life on this planet could have arisen by totally natural means - and without any evidence of any other cause, it becomes the logical default explanation.