How the C&E debate has changed my beliefs

mnbvcxz87 · Sep 14, 2006

No a christian fundamentalist rejects science on the grounds that a christian text refutes it.

I reject science because the TOE and BB are not provable, and it isn't acceptable.

Those are your conclusions to draw.

And I'm not even rejecting science, that's putting words in my mouth. I'm rejecting some scientific principles.

Opcode42 · Sep 14, 2006

mnbvcxz87 said:
This is where I take inspiration. There is no explanation for this but it happened in kenya.

http://www.olerai.com/detail/images/lioness&oryx06.jpg

http://www.timeenoughforlove.org/images/Kamuniak.jpg

And this would be an excellent demonstration of what I have been saying.
You see one strange incident, and instead of trying to find out how it heppened, you make up an entire new religion from it because it makes you feel better than the reality.

The reality is that a lioness befriended a prey animal, for reasons we don't yet know. Yet she continues to hunt and eat other prey animals.

The reality is that my parents have both a cat and a dog, and they get along great. Yet the cat still drags home birds and chipmunks on occasion, and the dog still loves to chew on bones.

Thanks for proving my point.

Opcode42 · Sep 14, 2006

mnbvcxz87 said:
No a christian fundamentalist rejects science on the grounds that a christian text refutes it.

I reject science because the TOE and BB are not provable, and it isn't acceptable.

Those are your conclusions to draw.

And I'm not even rejecting science, that's putting words in my mouth. I'm rejecting some scientific principles.

If you attest that they are not provable, then you again demontrate you know next to nothing about science.

Science is NEVER provable. Science is the best explanation nwe have based on the evidence we have. But it is never 100%, and it does not deal with proof.

By rejecting these theories not on the basis lack of evidence, or contradictory evidence, but because you don't like what they say, you reject the entireity of science. You are in effect stating that the principles used to derive these theories are not sound. And since these princibles are the same as used in all other sciences, you thus reject all of science.

If you reject the ToE or the Big Bang, then explain what about the theory does not work.

mnbvcxz87 · Sep 14, 2006

Opcode if you ever find a feral cat adopting a mouse I'll eat my hat, or someone's hat.

A lion adopting an oryx calf has never happened before in recorded history, and I'll hazard a guess it will never happen again.

It is entirely unexplainable. I have examined it the best I can. Give me a possible explanation.

The best I've heard is the lioness confused the oryx with a lion calf, actually the idea that a lion could confuse an oryx calf with a young lion is proposterous on every level.

Opcode42 · Sep 14, 2006

mnbvcxz87 said:
Opcode if you ever find a feral cat adopting a mouse I'll eat my hat, or someone's hat.

A lion adopting an oryx calf has never happened before in recorded history, and I'll hazard a guess it will never happen again.

It is entirely unexplainable. I have examined it the best I can. Give me a possible explanation.

The best I've heard is the lioness confused the oryx with a lion calf, actually the idea that a lion could confuse an oryx calf with a young lion is proposterous on every level.

Not at all preposterous. If the lion in question had recently lost her own cubs, she may have accepted a surrogate instead.

The problem here is you take a situation where our knowledge is incomplete and make up and elaborate tale base don no evidence at all to explain it away because it makes you feel good. You skip from "I don't know, lets figure it out" to "Goddidit".

It is this leap in logic that causes your beliefs to be in serious doubt.

And of course you leave out the conlusion to the tale. In that the lioness being in experienced in the needs of a Oryx, took a nap at a watering hole aat which time the Oryx was then eaten by a nother lion.

And all the while, she still coninued to eat other animals. This story doesnt even support the idealogy you have concocted from it.

mnbvcxz87 · Sep 14, 2006

Well science has essentially cheated for the BB to work. I said that to someone well versed in science and they agreed. They can tell you that, assuming these rules are true it makes sense, but the BB makes assumptions that time itself, and space did not exist pre the big bang. I'm sorry but you can hardly call this theory a fact of life.

And the TOE, you can see progression in animals, you can see a mouse and a squirrel and a small cat. But where is the progression to the complexity and intelligence of the human brain, from an animal. I think I'm right in saying dolphins have bar humans the largest brain in animalia, and even they are with all due respect not very bright compared. And the progression from breathing in water to air.

I've heard the possible scenarios, eg if a lakebed were to dry out then the animals would have to adapt, or just hold their breathe outside the water as a start. But the mutation is random, please tell me how an aquatic animal could ever as the result of a mutation breathe air.

It is exactly the same as an oxygen breathing land animal, due to one of these mutations breathing in water. It's not gonna happen and the TOE presumes it did happen.

mnbvcxz87 · Sep 14, 2006

And of course you leave out the conlusion to the tale. In that the lioness being in experienced in the needs of a Oryx, took a nap at a watering hole aat which time the Oryx was then eaten by a nother lion.

And all the while, she still coninued to eat other animals. This story doesnt even support the idealogy you have concocted from it.

I haven't gone into the conclusions I draw from it. Those conclusions are that it wasn't the work of god - how would that fit with pantheism - but for whatever mystical reason it happened. It was life telling us that these things can happen it we do our bit.

Actually that wasn't the end of the story, the lion went on to adopt 4 more oryx calves, 5 in total. All the laws of nature negate the possibility of this story, infact kamuniak should have eaten the oryx (even if she mistook if for a young lion which doesn't give lions much credit!) as food.

A lioness can lose their young at any time. A male lion could kill them in order to mate, take them for food, or even the lioness may not bother to care for it's young if there is only one. Again, the laws of nature make what happened impossible.

The symbolism is what was important, not that the lion tried to hunt when she could. She actually turned down meat given to her at one point by a TV crew who saw that she was suffering starvation due to all the work of mothering the oryx.

Opcode42 · Sep 14, 2006

mnbvcxz87 said:
Well science has essentially cheated for the BB to work. I said that to someone well versed in science and they agreed. They can tell you that, assuming these rules are true it makes sense, but the BB makes assumptions that time itself, and space did not exist pre the big bang. I'm sorry but you can hardly call this theory a fact of life.

Who? What exactly did he say? What does "well veresed in science mean". Sources please, or it is just hear say.

The assumption as you put it about time and space, is not even an assumption. It is a logical conclusion of the big bag. If the big bang is the expansion of space-time, then space-time could not have existed before this event. There is no assumption there, just hyopothesis->conclusion.

mnbvcxz87 said:
And the TOE, you can see progression in animals, you can see a mouse and a squirrel and a small cat. But where is the progression to the complexity and intelligence of the human brain, from an animal. I think I'm right in saying dolphins have bar humans the largest brain in animalia, and even they are with all due respect not very bright compared. And the progression from breathing in water to air.

I've heard the possible scenarios, eg if a lakebed were to dry out then the animals would have to adapt, or just hold their breathe outside the water as a start. But the mutation is random, please tell me how an aquatic animal could ever as the result of a mutation breathe air.

It is exactly the same as an oxygen breathing land animal, due to one of these mutations breathing in water. It's not gonna happen and the TOE presumes it did happen.

Here again you demonstrate that you have not studied this subject AT ALL. You have obviously been exposed to it, heard things you didnt understand, but instead of trying to find out what we know, you just concluded that your vast knowledge of science was enough to label it all false.

Please spend sometime learning about evolution before making silly claims such as the above..A good place to start would be at any of the below sites.
www.talkorigins.org
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/home.php
http://www.christianforums.com/t2580923-ce-thread-archive.html

AnEmpiricalAgnostic · Sep 14, 2006

mnbvcxz87 said:
But philosophy can claim some scienfitic principles to be incorrect. For example, god created the universe precisely 10 thousand years ago. I don't go in for that, but it cannot be rejected on the logic. I would go in for something more along the lines of, the universe came into being at a relatively recent point, as the manifestation of god - pantheism. This obviously is refuted by science, a simple test on fossils or a glance into space tells us we are billions of years old. But as I've said, I need to put reason to our being and so I can't accept science.

Are you joking? Knowledge isnt a buffet. You dont get to pick and choose what is true and what isnt. Your reasoning is as flawed as the YECs.

If theres one thing you can take away from this at least understand that philosophy and science are two entirely different domains. If you support or reject one with the other you have already engaged in flawed reasoning.

mnbvcxz87 said:
Our problems are of our own making. We spray chemicals on our foods and then die of the viral infections. We eat too much and become unhealthy. Anyway, the real problem for me isn't ourselves. that is easy to solve. The real problems are the ones we seem to be unable to solve, carnivores, natural disastrous phenomina and such.

If there was ever a person that needed to invest some time watching Penn & Tellers Bull$hit! I believe it to be you. You can find the episodes you most direly need to see on video.google.com.

rmwilliamsll · Sep 14, 2006

mnbvcxz87 said:
Well science has essentially cheated for the BB to work. I said that to someone well versed in science and they agreed. They can tell you that, assuming these rules are true it makes sense, but the BB makes assumptions that time itself, and space did not exist pre the big bang. I'm sorry but you can hardly call this theory a fact of life.

And the TOE, you can see progression in animals, you can see a mouse and a squirrel and a small cat. But where is the progression to the complexity and intelligence of the human brain, from an animal. I think I'm right in saying dolphins have bar humans the largest brain in animalia, and even they are with all due respect not very bright compared. And the progression from breathing in water to air.

I've heard the possible scenarios, eg if a lakebed were to dry out then the animals would have to adapt, or just hold their breathe outside the water as a start. But the mutation is random, please tell me how an aquatic animal could ever as the result of a mutation breathe air.

It is exactly the same as an oxygen breathing land animal, due to one of these mutations breathing in water. It's not gonna happen and the TOE presumes it did happen.

if we had a clear demarcation line between air breathing animals with lungs and water breathing fish with gills perhaps this argument would have some persuasive value. the problem is that we have all kinds of variations and intermediates.

we have animals with gills as youth, lose them and use lungs as adults.
with have animals with lungs and gills.
we have a number of different air breathing organ system and a number of different gill systems.
as well as fish which can breath out of water, and several ways this is achieved.

there is no clear demarcation line, but rather more a spectrum or continuum, which is about what common descent would predict.

mnbvcxz87 · Sep 14, 2006

But rm for those variations to exist as they do now, there must have been an initial mutation which led to an oxygen breathing animal to breathe in water, or the other way around.

Do you believe it possible for a genetic mutation to create this scenario?

rmwilliamsll · Sep 14, 2006

mnbvcxz87 said:
But rm for those variations to exist as they do now, there must have been an initial mutation which led to an oxygen breathing animal to breathe in water, or the other way around.

Do you believe it possible for a genetic mutation to create this scenario?

not "a" mutation but a whole series of them. not even a single tree leading from water-gills to land-lungs but like the TofE itself a bush representing populations of creatures "investigating" phenotypic space. that is why you see various permutations: internal and external gills, gills in the youth-lungs in the adult, several types of living lungfish etc. Plus when you look at the fossil record, lots of creatures that no longer exist fit into the gaps in the current creature list.

i think it is fundamentally an argument from personal incredulity rather than any real problems with evolutionary explanation for a big event like the movement onto land by animals.

if you propose a boundary between gill using fish and lung using animals it simply isn't there, not in the fossil record, not in existent creatures, not in the underlying molecular biology. the continuity is really much more striking than the discontinuities, which is what makes research on fruit flies work for people as well, which is really amazing, much more amazing than the transition from water to land.

mnbvcxz87 · Sep 14, 2006

Ok then, where am I going wrong in this thought process:

the mutations are minute and tend to advance to new mutations if the initial was benefial to the animal.

ie a predator in the african plains, a mutant gene causing them to have lighter skin, so they are more difficult for their prey to see.

This is where I see a problem with moving from sea to land or land to sea. These mutations are minute, slightly more rounded claws so an animal could climb a tree I don't see a mutation which could lead to an aquatic animal breathing air.

Where is the transition in terms of the minute mutations.

opcode those links are biased. I didn't read their articles but I saw 'the creationist claims' as a link. That's propoganda.

If you know of a good wikipedia article on this issue I'll read that.

Edx · Sep 14, 2006

skip.

im a silly

AnEmpiricalAgnostic · Sep 14, 2006

mnbvcxz87 said:
Ok then, where am I going wrong in this thought process:

the mutations are minute and tend to advance to new mutations if the initial was benefial to the animal.

It not that simple… Any mutation that increases an organisms chance of reproducing will spread more quickly throughout a population. There are also neutral mutations and harmful ones. If a mutation hinders the organism’s ability to reproduce (like sterility or premature death) then that mutation will not spread throughout the population. What decides what is beneficial and not beneficial is the selection pressure from the environment.

mnbvcxz87 said:
ie a predator in the african plains, a mutant gene causing them to have lighter skin, so they are more difficult for their prey to see.

You have a basic idea of a beneficial mutation but it doesn’t have to be so obvious. A mutation that increases the efficiency of red blood cells would be a benefit. A female with wider hips for giving birth is beneficial. Resistance to disease, stronger teeth, larger brain, whatever.

mnbvcxz87 said:
This is where I see a problem with moving from sea to land or land to sea. These mutations are minute, slightly more rounded claws so an animal could climb a tree I don't see a mutation which could lead to an aquatic animal breathing air.

http://hometown.aol.com/darwinpage/tetrapods.htm
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/03/4/l_034_03.html
http://www.carlzimmer.com/water_2.html

AnEmpiricalAgnostic · Sep 14, 2006

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphibious_fish

AnEmpiricalAgnostic · Sep 14, 2006

http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/nov99/942112076.Zo.r.html

AnEmpiricalAgnostic · Sep 14, 2006

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/vertebrates/sarco/dipnoi.html

(Google is your friend)

mnbvcxz87 · Sep 14, 2006

Cheers I'll read up on it.

mnbvcxz87 · Sep 14, 2006

I'm sorry agnostic but none of those links has definitve proof, or a demonstration of the transition.

Look at this statement

Although fishlike in many ways, it had robust bony legs, arms, and digits. Ichthyostega clearly spent some time out of water.

This is a fish, one of I presume many fossils which track some part of this transition (the devonian period).

But that's a blatant assumption. You'd call me crazy if I took a 360 million year old fossil and said, well this animal clearly ...

How is a guy in 360 million years time going to look at a slothe fossil and say this animal clearly used it's rounded claws to dig into it's prey. Wrong.

For as much you all dismiss philosophy for it's assumptions, science constantly makes assumptions and here is another.

How the C&E debate has changed my beliefs

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