What is the greatest evidence against the theory of evolution...?

[KWCrazy]

Personal testimonies are not evidence.

Tell that to the judicial system.

Part of my working life was spent working with the mentally ill - psychotics, schizophrenics. Look into their eyes. You will be convinced that "the voices" certainly exist.

I have, and we both know the voices do exist in the mind of the schizophrenic.

Will the same "wise man" investigate unicorns? Leprechauns? Poltergeists perhaps?

What did your parents tell you about God? Anything?
How about your grandparents?
My grandfather was saved very late in life, and he realized that it was only my grandmother's faith that convinced him there had to be something to it. So as a mature adult he opened his mind to the message, and later opened his heart to the Lord. Unicorns and leprechauns are not real. As for poltergeists... it depends on how you define them. Casper the Friendly Ghost is not real. Angels and demons are very real.

 

[DogmaHunter]

Human intelligence did appear quickly and abruptly.

No, it did not.

Don't confuse "intelligence" with "knowledge".

 

[Loudmouth]

I'm sorry you feel that way, but truth is truth, and only those with God's Spirit can believe it. It boggles my mind that people can claim to love God yet reject the very first chapter of His Word.

How can you reject the evidence found in the Creation?

 

[Loudmouth]

Indeed. Is it logical to believe that man came from soup? Do computers come from junkyards?

No one is claiming that man came from soup.

 

[KWCrazy]

Could you define "supernatural" and "supernatural encounter" please?

Natural: contained within the laws of nature; simple cause and effect.
Supernatural: No contained within the laws of nature; acting in violation of natural law. A supernatural encounter might be something moving of its own accord, like pool balls rolling around when nobody has disturbed them or clearly heard footsteps when nobody is walking around. It could be an apparition that is there one moment and gone the next, or the sudden imparting of knowledge of things which had not happened yet. For example, a family was driving down the road and the wife/mother makes a comment about a restaurant that had recently burned. It was still smoldering. Everyone thought she was seeing things. On the return trip a day later, the restaurant had burned to the ground and was still smoldering; exactly as the woman had seen it the day earlier. It sounds a little weird and I probably wouldn't have believed it either, but you see... I was in the back seat on both days.

 

[Loudmouth]

Octopi live in the sea and are never exposed to direct sunlight, so anyone designing them would give them eyes that are more low light sensitive. Our eyes can survive intense light without burning out (though it is possible if you stare at the sun). Isn't God amazing?

Then why do vertebrate fish have the same backwards retina that humans have?

 

[Loudmouth]

Human intelligence did appear quickly and abruptly.

Evidence, please.

 

[DogmaHunter]

No, not all. However, the premise is that either the supernatural exists or it does not.

Yep. Just like "either Elvis lives or he doesn't. Or just like "either aliens exist and are abducting people, or they aren't".

For it to NOT exist, every single supernatural encounter in the history of mankind has to be false.

Yep.

That's a pretty big presumption

Nope.

especially since you can ask the people who posted here specific questions about what they encountered.

Just like you can go out and meet people who claim to have had weird sex experiments conducted on them while orbiting a star in the Orion belt on some alien space ship.

I believe that something happened at Fatima and I'm not Catholic.

That's only good if there is no invisible dragon.
The fact is, one day you WILL die and after that there WILL be a day of judgment.

Nope, that's not a fact. That's merely your religious belief. Beliefs and facts aren't the same thing.

On the throne will be the God you reject.

Or one of the many, many other gods that YOU reject. Or, you know, there might not be any throne at all.

You will give an accounting for your sins, and the weight of them will be overbearing. As an unforgiven sinner you will be cast away from the presence of the Lord. That's not what any of us want, which is why we invest our time responding to you. The difference between us and you is that we have a savior who paid the debt of our sins. You do not. We were all disbelievers before we became believers.

Threatening me with entities I don't even believe to be real, will have the same effect as threatening you with the idea that Santa is not going to bring you presents next year. Surely you must understand that...

One of the things that I posted involved my brother, who was a hate filled bigot for most of his life. He was born with juvenile onset diabetes and could never do the things healthy kids could do. As time went on he became even more hateful and violent. He ended up living on the streets because he couldn't be trusted around children.

Wait.... you stood by and had your brother live on the streets??

When he finally discovered God, he became a deacon in the church, taught computer classes to the poor, ran the food pantry and went out of his way to help the people who lived in the same project house as he did. On the last day of his life he walked 2 miles in 90 degree heat to get groceries for a wheelchair bound black woman who lived in the apartment next to him. The members of his church; almost all of them minorities; said he was the finest of men. Only God could make such a change in a person's life.

Claiming that "only god" can make a such a change, does not make it so.
Plenty of people turn their life around for plenty of various reasons. Not all of them reasonable. I'm sure, for example, that you won't be impressed by a similar story of a man who found such positive energy in Islam or Hinduism, right? You won't suddenly become a muslim or a hindu, right?

This particular "hallucination" has about 30 witnesses.

Turning your life around for whatever reason is not a hallucination.
It's always nice if someone finds positive energy in a story, event or situation wich raises their awareness and makes them turn their life around.

But it's quite senseless to not acknowledge that the actual source of that positive energy can be just about anything - and would not necessarily reflect something reasonable.

That's why there are so many examples; one isn't enough. The Bible lists 333 miracles.

Every religion has its share of "miracles". Doesn't make them true.

Islam has no miracles of which to boast.

Denial isn't going to help you either. Muslims would seriously dispute your statement.

Personal testimony is easy to refute. The testimony of hundreds who say the same thing is very difficult to refute.

No, it's not. It stays "personal testimony". It doesn't matter if 5 people make the claims or 500.000. Claims are just that: claims.

Jesus fed five thousand with a few loaves and fishes. News of that was spread by the people who were there. If the event had never happened, there would have been five thousand people denying it.

This is just another claim of the bible.
Just because the bible claims that there were 5000 people there, doesn't make it true.

In a universe which has billions of stars, 100% of the ones we can study closely supports life. How, then, can we say life is exclusive to this planet? Do you trust the government to tell the truth about a potential threat for which they can offer no defense? I don't know if there is life on other planets or not.
Genesis 6:
"Now it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves of all whom they chose.
And the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, for he is indeed flesh; yet his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.” There were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown."
Who were these men?

Was this an elaborate way of saying that you believe all the alien abductee stories?

And it exists, which it would not had we simply evolved.

That is simply not true. We are a social species. We depend on cooperation for survival. Empathy and the sense of "guilt" are all social traits.

A conscience suggests an intrinsic knowledge of right and wrong, which is what Adam and Eve discovered in Eden. With that knowledge came responsibility. No other animal has that knowledge, and no animal is eternally esponsible for its actions.

This is not true either. Every social species has some sort of moral system and a sense of hierarchy. Ours is just much more developed, which makes sense as we have the most complex social structures going on.

Social constructs are taught. The conscience is intrinsic.

No. Social senses are intrinsic in social species. It's present by instinct.

Personal testimony is evidence.

Very poor and unreliable evidence, that is.

However, the true evidence comes when you open your heart to the Lord and you encounter the Holy Spirit. Once that happens, your world changes forever.

In other words: you must believe before you can be justified in believing. Nice circular argument, you got there.

 

[Chris B]

Smart human. Really smart.

Well that's not winning against the shark, but IS a reasonable precaution.
(Especially if you've been baiting the area so hungry sharks will turn up for the tourists to see.)

But pursuing fish species for food beyond sustainable limits is not smart.
And slaughtering sharks in incredible numbers (sharks aren't the predator here) just for their fins as a food fad fails as smart and intelligent stewardship whether that has a secular or theistic underpinning.

 

[ClothedInGrace]

Based on survivability, both eyes ARE pretty good! That's the point! Evolution provides "good enough" solutions. Intelligent design, one would think, should provide better ones, without the problems inherent in an iterative, evolved system. A "top down" designed eye should look more like an octopus eye than a human one.

So you think a better designed human would have the eye of an octopus? Assuming we can guide evolution, how do we go about obtaining an octopus eye?

 

[Chris B]

Certainly.
Do you know the details of the design?

I'm aware of the details of the natural processes.

You are doing down what natural nature can produce by leaping far too quickly to see "a divine hand."
(That is not a statement ruling out a divine hand, just one objecting to one being invoked prematurely, precluding any and all other possibilities.)
Comets and eclipses were taken as "hand of god" events in some regions long after other regions were making progress in their mathematical prediction.

 

[ClothedInGrace]

There are any number of natural formations in the world that "look" designed. Look at various tessellated rocks and columnar stones. Yes, a painting on a cave wall LOOKS designed, but we can test it closely to see if it WAS designed. Tessellated rocks fail at this step, as does biology. Just because something looks like something at first glance doesn't mean it IS.

Rocks and biology are two different things; you know that.

 

[ClothedInGrace]

Your point is weak here. Yes, there is design, but there is also much chaos. As Hume once remarked, at attacking the design argument, the womb of nature spews forth all sorts of abominations. Order schmorder. To strengthen your posit90on, you need to account for this disorder and chaos.

Well, as Armoured pointed out that I would say, the disorder and chaos is a result of sin. But you don't believe the Bible in this case, so I guess chaos is just because God chose to let everything be chaotic.

 

[ClothedInGrace]

Total non sequitur and sad evidence of the absence of any useful level of critical examining thought.
Did you examine and consider that parallel the slightest degree before you swallowed it?
If you had, you might have spotted why it is inappropriate, provides a false example and argument...

But then that also applies to whoever first used the argument and published it somewhere, to have it uncritically adopted and copied.

I didn't pick it up from anywhere. I just thought that if human beings can evolve without intelligence then a computer might as well be made in a junkyard.

 

[ClothedInGrace]

Well, there's a flawed logic chain.
You'd probably have to work out for yourself why it is.
Not everyone can see it at first.

Yes, don't address the fact that life looks designed, say that my logic is flawed and move on.

 

[Loudmouth]

So you think a better designed human would have the eye of an octopus? Assuming we can guide evolution, how do we go about obtaining an octopus eye?

The same way that the octopus obtained it.

If you were designing a digital camera, would you have the wires cross in front of the light path before it got to the sensor? Obviously not. So why design the vertebrate eye that way, especially given the fact that you supposedly designed the octopus eye without those faults?

 

[Loudmouth]

Yes, don't address the fact that life looks designed, say that my logic is flawed and move on.

Does this cloud have the appearance of a duck?

Does that mean it IS a duck?

 

[ClothedInGrace]

Life! Successful life through generations. If you have, yes by chance, something that gives you a slight edge, in survival or in reproductive efficiency (two different "strategies" can be thought of immediately, both seen on the planet to this day) then there is a bias to your type having more descendants and the variation being spread. Next variation on stage for the game of life, please...

A horrendous casualty rate of failure is irrelevant as long as a few (tougher) versions survive, to found the basis of the new population.
That alone would be enough to produce bacteria resistant to antibacterials, over time. Which we see.
(In fact they can do a bit better than that.)

You misunderstand what that post was about. I asked where a selective mechanism would come from in the case of life, because he answered that a computer could be assembled from a junkyard if there was a selective mechanism.

 

[Loudmouth]

I didn't pick it up from anywhere. I just thought that if human beings can evolve without intelligence then a computer might as well be made in a junkyard.

There is one massive problem with your analogy. Computers don't replicate. Life does. It is the ability to replicate which allows life to evolve without intelligence.

 

[ClothedInGrace]

I'm an optometrist (retired)
The human eye is a magnificent mess.
It is "designed" to fail, in that it's good at lasting through to the individual having children and being there till they reach adulthood.
The human lens (not cornea) never stops growing, which in later life promotes presbyopia, glaucoma and cataract.
Better if it stopped growing (as some other parts of the body do) at maturity. 24 would be good.
Just for one thing.

Well, that's your opinion. I believe the human eye is a beautifully crafted organ which allows us to behold the beauty of creation.