Evolution & Atheism... Is it really more plausible?

[ICs2Xist]

Oh fuck, not another one of these. You know, I don't mind educating people on atheism, the intricacies of evolution, etc., but when you act like an asshole it's not going to get you anywhere (calling people "noobs"? Really?)

well, to be honest, I'm just trying not to swear. It ticks me off when I ask for actual examples, which by the way, I now acknowledge some of you have given me (props to MalthusX and grimsprice for supplying legitimate links, I'll be sure to try and check them out.)

noob.

You've used that word in both of your posts. Around here, its looked down upon a great deal. It makes you sound like an 11 year old kid. Which you probably are. And most people here aren't paleontologists. So not many of them have fossils laying round in their drawers. If you want to see well documented 'missing links', you're going to have to do some research by yourself instead of trolling a respectable and intelligent website community.

That's actually part of what I'm saying: many people post that evolution is supported by fact and leave it there. If that's what they're going to post, they shouldn't post at all. It says nothing.

Okay guys... post. Please do so in an intelligent manner (I reserve the right to make fun of every grammatical error found), and, if you directly mention elements of Christianity... make sure you have some idea what you are talking about.

PS: Don't hate me for making a religious thread.

I'd ask you to have similar standards in terms of evolution. We've proven evolution is true. We've proven it in plants, animals, individual cells, the whole shabang. Evolution itself is proven, the real debate is human evolution. Now, are humans that biologically perfect that we never evolved? Are our bodies really that suited to every environment we know we've been in? I have a gut feeling that it's a 'no', but maybe that's just my fucking appendix talking.

For the love of Godwin, evolution is proven. It happens, it's happening, it's happened. That is not up for debate unless you're willing to pull a PHD out of the your arse and start talking sciencey.

I'm not going to try and debate the issue of religion with you, but your arguement is the great old-fashioned "science has gaps and has made mistakes" stance. That viewpoint would be fine if your entire arguement didn't come from a text with multiple errors and no ways of explaining the processes. It's equivalent to clapping your hands over your ears and screaming. If you want to take a 'logical' standpoint on the whole idea, it's it more 'logical' to believe in something once it's found to exist, rather than believe in everything until proven otherwise.

To let you understand the viewpoint a little bit more from my perspective; go out and prove me wrong when I say there's an 80ft sea-serpent living on Bournemouth beach who cannot be perceived by man or machine.

To be frank, I find the idea of 'faith' a brainless, ridiculous affair dating back to medieval methods of 'thought police', but I don't throw that in the face of anyone who believes in a religion. No, I save that for people like you who demand facts whilst offering none in return.

Go learn me a book, and stop pissing us all off.

PROVEN. IT'S NOT FREAKIN PROVEN TILL YOU GO BACK TO THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD AND SEE IT FOR YOURSELF (not even then, really).

And yes, I failed to account for evolution going on nowadays. I completely agree with the concept of microevolution. Yes, we are getting wisdom teeth. But all the teeth in the world wouldn't turn us into a shark, or make us able to breed with one.

As for the sea-serpent, go out and prove yourself right. The beginning of the world is no more perceptible to us than God is.

Offering no facts in return. Yes, I'm not offering facts in return. No, this is not a fair fight, because I say I don't have to. Why can I say that? I don't claim to have so many, nor do I claim my theory is, or even can be, proven.

but try and offer some real evidence FOR evolution.

Are you going to die? If yes, there's your evidence.

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

Mmmmmkay...

Here I will offer an actual apologetic discussion defending creation (I believe Augustine said this, and I believe this is what you are referring to). What is darkness? The absence of light. What is evil? The absence of good. If it weren't for death, life wouldn't be a concept, and you would be pointing something else out. Besides, here's part of the point of all creation, according to a Christian: the relationship between God and man. If you create something that is only able to love you, you gain no satisfaction (I rely a little on the "in God's image" part of the creation of man here and assume he shares some emotions with us, bear with me please.) Due to sin, which inevitably happened due to the free will God gave man, death (hell) had to occur, and eternal life (heaven) no longer became a given for all men, although with a show of God's love in sacrificing himself (the trinity is a little fuzzy, we sometimes have to accept that things will be intangible), he made it available to all.

If you simply mean the end of a physical life, I must admit I don't see your point. Why not give things an end, especially with a new, eternal stage planned for them after that end?

Show me a REAL missing link, noob. Part of the point of this thread is to have people actually give real EXAMPLES. That seems to be the problem nowadays. You say, "this is supported by facts and statistics," and people believe you. THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT OF THIS POST. And fossils that show similarities... hmmm. Maybe because those bones work? Maybe they serve a freakin similar purpose??? Geez. Good job regarding grammar and spelling though.

Archeopteryx, perhaps? Or Australopithecus? Or Icthyostega? There's a million of them.

All of those have been disproved (even evolutionists have realized that, although they are not always vocal about it (why would they be?))(and when I say 'all', I don't include the "million" you claim is there, show them to me (I won't believe them, but I'll appreciate your intelligent response nonetheless) and I will hopefully find the time to view them).

The domestication of wolves into dogs would be an example of evolution...
I mean, look at a beagle, or chihuahua. 10,000 years ago that would've been a wolf.

A domestication has nothing to do with an animal's species. We have no proof that dogs actually descended from wolves, by the way.



Thanks to Cxizent (similar names?) for having my back somewhat in this thread... this got a lot more posts than I had expected.

 

[Captain Blackout]

I'm referring to the worship of Chinese rulers.

Lao Tzu NEVER advocated the worship of Chinese rulers. Where did you get this from?

I don't pretend to know much about Taoism. I only meant I advocated their philosophy of equilibrium in all things.

Read "The Tao of Pooh." It's a pain in the butt to find, yes I know it's Winnie the Pooh, but it's worth it.

More importantly, please read at least two different translations of the "Tao Te Jhing" before you make bad claims about it. It's a short book and much easier to find than "The Tao of Pooh."

Why two translations you might ask? Because of one of my favorite commentaries on Taoism: It does not translate well into any language, including the original Chinese it was written in.

By reading more than one translation, you will get a broader perspective and with the Tao that will mean a lot.

 

[grimsprice]

I'm deist, but I believe in the Christian God. Therefore, I don't believe the Bible is as accurate as it's claimed. I'm also into the Intelligent Design idea. So, yeah evolution is plausible, but it had to start somewhere.

Damn, as i rolled past the Deist claim my respect for you was growing (I have an innate respect for Deists, don't ask why) and it hit its crescendo at the Bible line. But then sank through my shoes when you mentioned intelligent design. You should probably know that intelligent design proponents aren't quite the people you think they are.

Here is a cell biologist explaining Intelligent design as we know of it in America. I realize that you probably mean a 'God starts evolution' sort of thing. But as it is known in the scientific communities 'intelligent design' is just creationism in disguise.

http://fora.tv/2008/08/18/Kenneth_Miller_on_Evolution_and_Intelligent_Design

 

[michael_ab]

intellegent design is WRONG!!

INCORRECT!!

look up the case of dover colorado, evolution vs intellegent design, nova did something on it

 

[Doug]

Does it really make more sense? Can people really argue this logically for me? Yes, I realize you can't completely disprove or even offer significant evidence against the fuzzy, biased view of the earth's creation by a Christian, but try and offer some real evidence FOR evolution.

The fossil record and scientific study of genomes. But regardless, we're not scientists, so stop trying to make us trip up on our own words because we aren't fully versed in the exact details of cutting edge theory (by which I mean the latest and best detailed studies of the process)

PS: Don't hate me for making a religious thread.

Don't tell me what to do. These damn religious threads are a plague nowdays.

Hardline Atheist: "GOD DOESN'T EXIST RELIGIOUS SHEEPLE"
Hardline Theist, "GOD WILL POUR FIRE DOWN YOUR THROAT, HERETIC!"
Agnosists and everyone else, "Dudes, calm the hell down"
Hardline Atheist: "HELL DOESN'T EXIST!"
Hardline Theist, "HELL IS WHERE THIS SINNER IS GOING!"

*Sigh* Just get the hell over it, alright? You probably believe in god, Atheists don't, you most likely won't be able to change their minds, they won't be able to change your's, etc.

 

[ICs2Xist]

OKAY PLEASE PEOPLE. GIVE ME A BREAK ABOUT MY AGE. I'M 17, OKAY? I ask for a few intelligent responses and about 75% of them simply call me a 12-year-old moron.

I can stand moron, but the age thing is getting kind of annoying. As soon as you say I must be 12, I can automatically assume (since you can't come up with a more unique or complex insult) that your age (or IQ) must be about half that.

As for the word "noob"... Whatever, I'll stop. It was stupid of me to begin.

 

[Silva]

I simply refuse to see this as a two-sided debate.

It's not just atheism versus Christianity. There are other belief systems out there and they are NOT less plausible.

They're all equally implausible on the level of spiritual claims, but this emphasis on the "equal" I have made is demanded by justice.

As for evidence of evolution, it's called the dinosaur. It's called the several skeletons of the so-called "Missing Link" that have been found. It's called scientific consensus.

Some evidence on the non-spiritual side trumps no evidence on the other. Simple.

It comes down to faith that you believe there's more to the origin of life/Earth/the Universe (i.e. a spiritual dimension or parallel) than evolution and Darwinism. But whatever truth there is will coincide with the theory of evolution, on both the macro and micro scale.

 

[michael_ab]

Hardline Atheist: "GOD DOESN'T EXIST RELIGIOUS SHEEPLE"
Hardline Theist, "GOD WILL POUR FIRE DOWN YOUR THROAT, HERETIC!"
Agnosists and everyone else, "Dudes, calm the hell down" <---
Hardline Atheist: "HELL DOESN'T EXIST!"
Hardline Theist, "HELL IS WHERE THIS SINNER IS GOING!"

i could not stop laughing at this, you are so right.. thank you for that

 

[Flying-Emu]

Good night then. But with all due respect you have a very odd notion of happiness.

And with all due respect, stop trolling.

This isn't worth arguing. Micro-Evolution is a bloody fact, and is about as deniable as gravity and Newton's First Law. Macro-Evolution admittedly has holes, but its still the best guess we've got as to how things came about.

Either way. Everyone can have their own beliefs about it, it's not like bickering over the internet is going to change anyone's opinion.

This coming from a Christian Deist.

 

[AhumbleKnight]

While I do agree that science and faith do have different ways of looking at things, they can coexist. See Intelligent Design: the theory that evolution is so complicated that the only way it could be possible would be if it were directed by a higher power.

The problem with Intelligent Design/Creationism (yes, they are the same thing) is that it does not mix science and faith. It supports faith by abusing science. The number of things proposed by ID as 'science' that directly contradicts current scientific understanding is mind blowing. The US supreme court ruled that it was unscientific and was an unconstitutional attempt to force the teaching of God into the science class room using pseudo-science.

 

[ICs2Xist]

To all who say evolution isn't yet proven (even those who believe in it), I wish I could send a box of donuts. I swear. You guys may hate me, but in this crowd of people who think "your a moron!" is an intelligent response, I have to thank you.

 

[Skeleon]

Why do I know evolution to be true?
Because we can see its results. And because we can see it happen.

We can compare various animals to one another, using bone-structure or DNA-analysis to show how similar various animals truly are (chimps are our very close cousins, for example). Then we have vestigial organs that show no use today but are remnants of shared ancestors.
Then there's microbiology, where we can actually see evolution in action with both bacteria and virus changing from generation to generation through mutation and based on selective pressure or through transformation, conjugation and transduction.
We have the endosymbiosis-theory which explains how we got to have mitochondria.

Sorry, but to me, evolution just makes sense. The basic principles are simple and we can test them in the laboratory. The fact that we cannot watch evolution in the macrocosmos is simply because of a lack of time.
But again, that's where comparisons between species and fossils comes into it.

I could never disprove deism (though I certainly don't believe it), but it's without a doubt that evolution took place.
And any serious scientist will say the same thing.
The only ones in the scientific community who still doubt evolution itself are religiously motivated people who try to somehow force gods into this where they aren't needed, which results in funny things such as intelligent design.

 

[smell-of-man]

God and Creationism is "made up" by religious people
Evolution is "made up" by scientists

It all comes down on who you believe the most.
In the Dark Ages the church was at the centre of everything, everything the church said was considered true. Recently (well, some decades ago) this power shifted to the scientists. Now the majority of people consider scientific standpoints to be true... and I think a lot of scientific "facts" will be proven wrong in the future.

If you look at it as unbiased as possible there aren't really facts to prove evolution.
Yes, there are fossils of ancient creatures we know have existed somewhere, but there isn't any proof there is an evolutionary link between them and us. It's just a human condition to want to see causality in everything. For example: Boiling water, we see water boiling at 100 degrees Celsius. It happens every time, so we conclude there is a relation between cause and result, but there isn't any proof the 2 (100 degrees and boiling water)have anything to do with each other... It is still possible (however highly unlikely) this just happens by chance or some other explanation.


I hope my text is understandable for most... it's still early here (I live in Belgium) and my internal English dictionary hasn't kickstarted yet.
Btw: I'm a firm believer of evolution, I'm just watching this from a philosofical standpoint.

 

[Captain Blackout]

~4.6 billion years ago certain gases (all of which were present on earth) are struck by ultraviolet light (from the sun) they produce amino acids (the basis of things such as dna, rna, muscles etc). These formed the first "life". This early "life" was a simple collection of dna that absorbed the sunlight and the early gases and made energy. Eventually these formed the first cells and bacteria and began producing oxygen (16x more powerful than early H2S photosynthesis). With this abundance of life a new class emerged, this class was able to eat other life. We call these "sponges". These sponges evolved muscles and a nerve net becoming polyps and jellyfish. These evolved stomachs, hearts, lungs, legs, hands, feet, etc. and created the vast variety of life that populates this great planet of ours.

Alternativley: 6000 years ago a large, immortal deity created life in 7 days, buried all the dinosaur bones and layered out all the rocks so as to make the earth seem really old in order to "test our faith". eventually one of his angels got pissed off, became a snake and told adam and eve to eat an apple from a tree that the deity had placed there the deity got mad and kicked everybody out. Thus humanity came about.

I have layed out the most popular thoeries, the evolution one and the mainstream religions' (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) one. Pick for yourself.

You forgot one thing, it wasn't just a piece of fruit, is was fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.

Knowledge of Good and Evil. Kind of important to the story.
Want to have fun? You know how some scientists think life didn't originate here? Go back and look at the order things are done in creation. Life starts before the Sun and Moon. Life therefore starts before Earth. I often wonder if the creation story wasn't a metaphor for events unexplainable to the audience of the time. Heck, I wonder if some of the events still aren't explainable (as we don't have the language for them yet)
Why 7 days? Because it was only 6 days, the author was a poet (the creation story has a poetic structure) and the author was looking to order Jewish life into a rhythmic flow.

Sometimes reading the Bible is like reading Pat Robertson's latest piece of crap (God ordered infantcide? Really? Or did Samuel use God to justify genocide?). Other times it can be like... The movie "Contact", the message from the 'Vegans'. There were multiple levels to the message, in order to get as much information into as small a transmission as possible. I suspect a lot of that happened (well, in some of the better written books, anyway)

 

[Flying-Emu]

if he can but wont he's malevolent, therefore not a god.
if he cant, he's not all powerful, therefore not a god.

...

See Loki, Hel, Hades, etc. for why this is oh so wrong.

 

[grimsprice]

jewish zombie rules over all of us.

I actually got the the second jewish zombie line before i realized what you meant. And i proceeded to die of laughter.

 

[Captain Blackout]

To all who say evolution isn't yet proven (even those who believe in it), I wish I could send a box of donuts. I swear. You guys may hate me, but in this crowd of people who think "your a moron!" is an intelligent response, I have to thank you.

Proven? That depends on your standards of proof. If by that you mean "I see it myself" then very little can ever be proven to you. If by proof you mean "the mountain of evidence, plus the hard-core math, followed by excellent deductive and inductive reasoning." then yes, evolution has as much proof to it as all of modern medicine.
If you don't want to be called a moron, don't act like one. And QUIT MAKING MY JOB HARDER!

 

[Skeleon]

if he can but wont he's malevolent, therefore not a god.
if he cant, he's not all powerful, therefore not a god.

...

See Loki, Hel, Hades, etc. for why this is oh so wrong.

I think the original line isn't "no god" but "not worth of worship".
Though that is not really plausible, either, since worship might be the only thing that appeases a malevolent god. That and virgin sacrifices.

 

[Notsomuch]

Creationists and people who just don't get evolution listen up. I could direct you to a bunch of complicated lectures but instead why don't I introduce you to a fellow named Carl Sagan. He'll explain to you the inner workings of the universe and the intricate process' which lead to a build up of complexity in a way that you can understand and that isn't insulting or demeaning. I'm talking about Cosmos!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDxuLldFR9c

All questions presented in this thread can be answered in episode 2... well, most of them.

 

[uncle-ellis]

Evolution has basis in fact. There are numerous fossils that show similarities to humans over the years, the fossils becoming more and more human-like as time came closer to the dawn of man. Plus our DNA is shared with several of our ancestors, AKA Monkeys.

Atheism is plausible because, if there's no evidence for God Existing/Not-Existing, I'll just take it that he doesn't exist.

Show me a REAL missing link, noob. Part of the point of this thread is to have people actually give real EXAMPLES. That seems to be the problem nowadays. You say, "this is supported by facts and statistics," and people believe you. THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT OF THIS POST. And fossils that show similarities... hmmm. Maybe because those bones work? Maybe they serve a freakin similar purpose??? Geez. Good job regarding grammar and spelling though.

Dude, If you're not going to be civil (and for that matter smart) then please leave the forums.

P.S. A majority of people on the escapist wont be able to answer you're correctly (The people on the escapist are smart no doubt but not THAT smart) But evolution has been proven by people who are smarter then you.

P.P.S. Don't say noob it makes you sound like a little kid.