As an explanation of the existence of man, creation is superior to evolution

[o_mlly]

So all living things have souls?

Yes.

Are other animals not made of 'corporeal substance'?

They are made of their own unique corporeal substance.

 

[o_mlly]

If you don't agree that the criteria I presented were suitable for distinguishing between good explanations and bad ones, criticise them and/or suggest your own, and defend your title claim by those criteria.

Until you agree with those non-deducible and rational First Principles of philosophy, I would have nothing to appeal my criticism to that I could expect you to respect.

 

[Astrid]

You have obviously never performed an even mildly sophisticated measurement like a titration. There is a reason why spreadsheets have functions like the standard deviation.

Side note, the famous Einstein quote is fake, he didn't
and would never have said such a thing.
Nor would any scientist.
Note Rutherford experiment for an example of why.

 

[Hans Blaster]

Nope. Where's the authoritative citation? Perhaps because it does not support your conclusion.

You erroneously state that only Christians hold that God created the universe.

It's not hard to get things wrong.

I don't feel like I should have to look up fairly common, widespread pieces of information like this. It's not hard to find and many people already know it. (Sort of like "What are the two largest world economies?", if we were just discussing the fact of which two countries had the largest economies, I should hope that you knew such things, but also that you could check my claim if you thought it incorrect. Sigh.)

Since you need the link provided for you:

LMGTFY - Let Me Google That For You

Then perhaps you could address my actual question.

 

[Astrid]

Yes.

They are made of their own unique corporeal substance.

What Principal of Philosophy allows for just making things up?

 

[Frank Robert]

Please let us know when the consensus reduces from the current 26 definitions of speciation to, let's say, just a few.

Specialization is not the problem you imagine it is.
What Makes a Species?

Today, technology has enabled both new ways to settle the species question and ways to further the lumper/splitter debate. DNA sequencing has brought us the genetic species concept. In this model, species are defined by genetic isolation rather than reproductive isolation. Species may be more or less identical morphologically but differences in DNA determine if a population is a separate species or not.​

On the other hand defining consciousness is a real problem.

 

[Astrid]

Xx

 

[Subduction Zone]

Please let us know when the consensus reduces from the current 26 definitions of speciation to, let's say, just a few.

The really basic stuff to remember is that "invention" is not "discovery".

Do you seriously think that the fact that "species" is a slippery term to define hurts the concept of evolution? You have it backwards. Species is hard to define because of the fact that life evolved. If life was the product of creationism it would be easy to define species since there would be well defined "kinds". Any time that creationists try to define "kind" they end up shooting themselves in the foot. Their beliefs say that it should be a term that can be well defined but they always fail to do so. Evolution on the other hand predicts that there will be points where what particular species a population belongs to would be hard to decide. That is why today's biologists rely on cladistics. Cladistics is rather clear. There can be doubts if a particular example is ancestral or an "uncle" but there is little doubt about the overall clade of the example. For example there was a fair amount of variation in Homo erectus since it was very successful species. Whether one specific fossil was ancestral or a closely related sub-population that went extinct can be hard to determine, but that they are related is not in doubt.

Okay, sorry to take off on a longish spiel. But the fact that there are multiple definitions of species supports the fact of evolution. It does not harm it.

 

[Hans Blaster]

There were many questions about Flew towards the end of his life, and how much of those books he actually wrote.
The Case of Antony Flew

He said this with a laugh. When we began the interview, he warned me, with merry self-deprecation, that he suffers from “nominal aphasia,” or the inability to reproduce names. But he forgot more than names. He didn’t remember talking with Paul Kurtz about his introduction to “God and Philosophy” just two years ago. There were words in his book, like “abiogenesis,” that now he could not define.​

Is Anthony Flew the "evolutoinist" of people? Someone who is only mentioned as an attack? (In the case of "evolutionist" or "Darwinist" to imply that accepting the findings of evolution and science was some how a dogma or belief system of "evolutionism" or "Darwinism".)

I have no idea who this person was, but I've seen many a Christian bring him out as if some how his (alleged) conversion to Christianity in his dotage should be evidence against "the atheist position". (again, whatever that is)

From this short excerpt it would seem he may have been a philosopher. That would of course explain why I have no idea who he is or what his contribution to thought and knowledge was.

The only people who ever seem to bring him up are Christians as an attack on atheists. A sort of "here's one of your greats. He converted, why don't you." This is never a good argument.

When I left The Church, I had no idea Richard Dawkins was an atheist. To me he was an English biologist who wrote very good books about evolution and who fought the good fight against the anti-science that is creationism. I had never read any atheist literature and would have been hard pressed to identify any famous non-believers. It wasn't arguments against God or Christianity that sent me away, but the slow realization that I didn't find the supernatural claims that were central to the religion plausible and that normal human activities could sufficiently explain the origins and development of Judaism and it offshoot, Christianity. My problems were not with the practice of the Church, so there was not lure in Protestant versions, and the Church had done an excellent job at preparing my mind to view non-Jesus religions as inherently wrong.

The alleged death-bed conversion of Hitchens would have no bearing on my position (and it is almost certainly false), nor would I care if Dawkins became a tent revival preacher teaching from the works of AiG.

One final note, as I said above, when I left the Church I'd never read any "atheist literature" or consumed any similar arguments. Ironically it was *this very website* where I was first introduced to the atheist movement, bloggers, and YouTube. And I only came here because I went deep down a pseudoscience (non-creationist) rabbit hole one Saturday afternoon. The site was interesting so I stuck around to browse a bit, and much later, joined the conversation. So congratulations CF, you didn't make me an atheist, but you did make me an aggressive one.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Is Anthony Flew the "evolutoinist" of people? Someone who is only mentioned as an attack? (In the case of "evolutionist" or "Darwinist" to imply that accepting the findings of evolution and science was some how a dogma or belief system of "evolutionism" or "Darwinism".)

I have no idea who this person was, but I've seen many a Christian bring him out as if some how his (alleged) conversion to Christianity in his dotage should be evidence against "the atheist position". (again, whatever that is)

From this short excerpt it would seem he may have been a philosopher. That would of course explain why I have no idea who he is or what his contribution to thought and knowledge was.

The only people who ever seem to bring him up are Christians as an attack on atheists. A sort of "here's one of your greats. He converted, why don't you." This is never a good argument.

When I left The Church, I had no idea Richard Dawkins was an atheist. To me he was an English biologist who wrote very good books about evolution and who fought the good fight against the anti-science that is creationism. I had never read any atheist literature and would have been hard pressed to identify any famous non-believers. It wasn't arguments against God or Christianity that sent me away, but the slow realization that I didn't find the supernatural claims that were central to the religion plausible and that normal human activities could sufficiently explain the origins and development of Judaism and it offshoot, Christianity. My problems were not with the practice of the Church, so there was not lure in Protestant versions, and the Church had done an excellent job at preparing my mind to view non-Jesus religions as inherently wrong.

The alleged death-bed conversion of Hitchens would have no bearing on my position (and it is almost certainly false), nor would I care if Dawkins became a tent revival preacher teaching from the works of AiG.

One final note, as I said above, when I left the Church I'd never read any "atheist literature" or consumed any similar arguments. Ironically it was *this very website* where I was first introduced to the atheist movement, bloggers, and YouTube. And I only came here because I went deep down a pseudoscience (non-creationist) rabbit hole one Saturday afternoon. The site was interesting so I stuck around to browse a bit, and much later, joined the conversation. So congratulations CF, you didn't make me an atheist, but you did make me an aggressive one.

Anthony Flew was a well respected atheist that supposedly became a theist towards the end of his life. Christians like to imply that he became a Christian. I think that their reasoning might be:

"The only real God is our God so if Anthony Flew believed in God towards the end of his life he must have been a Christian."

The article that he linked indicated that Flew might not even have been a theist. He appears to have had dementia towards the end of his life and others may have taken advantage of that. For years his supposed conversion towards the end of his life has been used as "evidence" by believers. Now it appears that they may not even have that illogical belief.

It was a nice article to use against those that refer to Flew.

 

[AV1611VET]

Any time that creationists try to define "kind" they end up shooting themselves in the foot.

Kind = Genus

 

[o_mlly]

I grant that you have not claimed that the planet is only a few thousand years old, but you appear to be saying here that there are significant errors in the ages obtained for rocks. How large do you think these errors are? Do you think, for example, that the age of the beginning of the Cambrian period was only 500 million years rather than the generally accepted age of 542 million years, or do you think that the true age was only about 5 million years? How large, in your opinion, do the errors in age have to be to vitiate the fossil record as evidence for evolution?

If you google on 'geological time scale' you will obtain about 121 million results; the different versions of the time scale for the Phanerozoic eon are by now in agreement to within better than 1%. What evidence have you that the errors in the time scale are large enough to cast doubt on the fossil record of the evolution of living things, and, in particular, on the evolution of Homo from the australopithecines and, before them, from Miocene apes?

Uncertainty in the Age of Fossils and the Stratigraphic Fit to Phylogenies

For purposes of the OP in this thread, I have for the sake of discussion, allowed any age to be estimated for the existence of life on earth.

The estimate of time between the first observed fossils arbitrarily assigned to a certain "species" (definition needed) from primates to man is irrelevant.

What is relevant is a scientific explanation of how evolution of the immaterial -- consciousness, intelligence, rationality, abstraction, free will -- from the material can be explained, ie, mind from matter.

Those who favor evolution have not posted a plausible explanation. The alternate, creation -- mind from Mind, intelligence from Intelligence, reason from Reason, free will from Free Will-- has explained these observed phenomena in mankind.

 

[o_mlly]

It depends what you mean by 'everybody'. If all professional biologists believed that humans evolved from Ediacarian invertebrates, would you have serious doubts about your lack of belief? If 99% of professional biologists believed this, would you still have serious doubts? What about 98%, or 95%? At what point would you think that there were enough biologists who had doubts about our evolution from invertebrates to justify your lack of belief?

If you think that there is not enough evidence for you to believe that we evolved from invertebrates, what do you think about the evidence that we share common ancestors with apes? Again, if 99% of biologists believed in our descent from simian ancestors, would you have serious doubts about your lack of belief, or would you insist on 99.9% or 100%?

Do you believe man is fully explained by evolution?

 

[Subduction Zone]

Kind = Genus

Sorry, that is only moving the goal posts since there is no hard definition of "genus" either. You still have the exact same problem:

How do you tell if a population belongs to a specific "kind" or not?

 

[o_mlly]

I have questions. But you don't seem to want to answer them.

Which question were those? To date, 60 posts from me on the thread. This is 61.

 

[o_mlly]

Quite nice. But where is the overlap? You said there was one. I'd like to know where you think it is.

I've answered your particular question at least twice so far.. Did you not read the quotation? It's pretty clear.

 

[Bradskii]

Which question were those? To date, 60 posts from me on the thread. This is 61.

And only claims but no explanations. You spend your time being negative. So for the fourth (or fifth?) time...

You said there was an overlap between the theological and scientific explanations. What is that overlap? Let's look at the scientific aspect of your claims.

 

[Astrid]

And only claims but no explanations. You spend your time being negative. So for the fourth (or fifth?) time...

You said there was an overlap between the theological and scientific explanations. What is that overlap? Let's look at the scientific aspect of your claims.

And "WHAT kind of "scientist", exactly?

 

[HitchSlap]

"Meaningless posts" = "Meaningless posts" + 1

Yes, the majority of the OT is anonymous (much of the NT as well). So claiming a book is inspired by a god/s is putting the cart before the horse, don’t you think? I really don’t have a dog in this fight, but you’re the one claiming to have a relationship with the god/s, and some immaterial part of you traverses the ether when you die, thereby securing a spot on the Eternal Heavenly Praise Band (I have an anonymous source that claims he likes adulation, etc.).

 

[Bradskii]

I've answered your particular question at least twice so far.. Did you not read the quotation? It's pretty clear.

What quotation? Gimme a post number or repeat it if you could.