Poll: Controversial Topics

[SilentCom]

I already know there are going to be more people supporting evolution over intelligent design on these forums. Although, the question here is 'does evolution exclude intelligent design and vice versa'? I don't remember anything in any holy scripture that excluded evolution, even though some religious people might feel offended by the idea of evolution. The same goes with some scientists who don't want to believe in any form of religion, so they reject them all.

 

[Prince Regent]

This is not really controversial. Slavery The Game is (a) controversial (hoax). But this is just a very old discussion between different vieuwpoints.

 

[SilentCom]

I want to state that if human beings evolved from a different species, could we not say that God is like a great scientist that treated all other species as an experiment in effort to create us? It did state in the bible that God created the fish in the sea and the beast on the land and air before He created us... with all the different interpretations, couldn't people interpret this as the evolutionary steps? I mean as far as our understanding of evolution, life evolved from the sea then moved to the land and then some animals evolved to fly... Just saying, the bible doesn't exactly exclude evolution...

 

[Lono Shrugged]

Arguing about God/religion on an internet forum.....

Maybe THIS time we can finally resolve it

 

[CannibalCorpses]

I would say its all a matter of perspective. Some organisms live their entire life span on something we can barely even see and the difference in perspective is that their entire universe might revolve around, say, my foot, while mine is rooted in the planets and universe we see. If we scale that up ten times and then look at the universe again it could well be that we are living on 'gods' foot. The planets could be to god what atoms are to us. The entire universe as we see it could well be in the bowels of some other being that we think of as god, too large to even be comprehendable to us.

Think on that a moment.

I'm a non-believer in religion because i see nothing that suggests that there is a god watching over us and guiding us, all i see is chaos and self interest. That said i can see how some organisms, if intelligent, might perceive us as 'god' because, literally, their entire existence is because of us. We don't deliberately do it, it's a by-product of what we do...maybe our creation was just the same.

To the topic at hand though it seems to boil down to funding. Religion is having a hard time maintaining the funding it's had for centuries and science is the reason for this. They have to disagree with each other because they are both trying to attract funding from the same pot. It's one or the other. Both arguements have flaws and i guess we wont be able to disprove one until we goto another planet and find life. If its the same there as here then that would lend credence to life being by design rather than chance.

Hrmmm...thats a very diplomatic response from me for a change.

 

[Yvgeny]

I'll do my best.

Science tells us that:

1 There is no evidence for more than one universe or more than one creation event.

2 Examples of fine tuning continue to increase. Some parameters designed to within a part in 10 to the 120th power.

3 Rocky planets matching the general characteristics of planet earth have been few. Most planets found are large gas giants orbiting very close to their stars.

4 No other life found. SETI has been completely unsuccessful.

5 It is impossible to chemically produce many basic molecules required for origin of any living system.

6 Naturalistic synthesis of either biochemical nor replicative pathways have not been described. In fact, many scientists think that they could not have arisen by any naturalistic means.

7 Contrary to the expectations of evolutionary theory, the fossil record is replete with complex transitions and new designs whereas simple transitions (intermediates) are rare. Evolutionary theory would expect the opposite to be true and to be reflected in the fossil record.

8 Evolution predicts slow recovery following extinctions and that those recoveries will be filled by the species surviving the extinction event. However, the fossil record indicates rapid recovery with completely different designs and species appearing within a period of tens of thousands of years or less.

 

[fenrizz]

Evolution obviously.

Why are we even discussing it?

 

[Raven_Operative]

Creationism (IE Intelligent Design) is not a theory.

1)It is taught from religious texts, and is expected by those who teach it to be taken as irrefutable, infallible Word of God.

2)It's not testable, which is one of the main requirements of a theory. There is no possible to test whether or not a sentient deity-being can an entire planet's worth of life, as we have no sentient deity-beings to bribe into being test subjects.

And anyway, religious beliefs of any sort have no place in public education. None. teach your religion at home or in your chosen place of worship. Everyone in this country has the right to believe how they will...Teaching religious beliefs as facts violates that right and threatens our already pathetic public education system even more.

and yet...

Evolution is taught from the "infallible Word of Science"

Evolution isn't testable.

Evolution, in itself is a religion. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/religion

If you say you cant teach "Intelligent Design" because it's a religion, then we shouldn't teach evolution either. It seems the simplest solution is to either teach about all views, but with no focus on a specific one (although people are biased by nature so that probably wouldn't work) or to teach no views and leave the whole concept of evolution out of school. I see no reason why an untested theory should have a place in school. Science has been wrong about many things in the past, so why is it impossible to consider that the same thing can occur today.

[HEADING=1]But that's [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_evolution] a complete load of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_evolution] horse-shit. [http://myxo.css.msu.edu/ecoli/][/HEADING]

I beg to differ. The articles you linked, have shown science proving "Natural Selection" and "Adaption".

Contrary to popular belief, Adaptation, and Natural selection actually fit with the intelligent design doctrine.

Now your probably going to ask me "Whats the difference between adaption and evolution?", or say that "adaption IS evolution.", but you are wrong. Adaption is different from evolution, because no new genetic material is added. For example, if you take a breed of dog with the genes to create dogs with long hair or short hair, and then leave them with a cold environment, the dogs with the short hair gene die. This means that the surviving members of that species will only have the "long hair" gene, since the carriers of the short hair gene would have died before they could pass it on.

Now, if you took these long haired dogs, and put them in the middle of the desert, they would probably all die due to heatstroke. This is because the short haired gene was eliminated, when the dogs were on the mountain, so they would not be able to "re-adapt" since they would not have the genes required.

This is not evolution, since the dogs only change because certain genes are eliminated, not because they spontaneously generate new ones.

 

[Nudu]

Intelligent design isn't religious; it's actually scientific. They want to address (although rashly) the parts in a cell and the spots in time were there aren't any simpler or reducible forms of life.

Not religious though. Religious creationism is completely different than intelligent design.

http://www.intelligentdesign.org/

I agree more with Evolution and I actually think there's a different answer to irreducible forms of life, but intelligent design in and of itself shouldn't be discredited.

Now you know. So you don't have to bash intelligent design everytime you hear its name.
It is in fact scientific.

It is absolutely not scientific. I could go on about how it deliberatly ignores conflicting evidence, which disqualifies it, but instead, let's look at the contradictory premises instead.

Intelligent Design is based on the idea that an intelligent being is so complex that it has to be created by an even more complex being. Of course, it either abandons this premise by saying that the creator of life is not himself created by an even more complex being, or they actually claim it's turtles all the way down. And since, let's be real, most intelligent design proponents are Christians who want the bible taught in school and are trying to sneak around the first amendment, and the idea of God being created conflicts with Christianity, I have problems imagining that's what they're interested in teaching in schools.

 

[Thaluikhain]

now what i dont get is atheists,i mean how do they think the universe started,sure thers the big bang theory,and its dumb as hell,there must be something that caused the bang,or something that made the thing that caused the bang,

You've managed to completely miss the point. To oversimplify things, the Big Bang theory doesn't set up to explain how the universe "started" as such, just what happened as far back as we are able to determine.

What "happened before" or "created" the Big Bang is as yet totally unknown, but that's not all that important when discussing the Big Bang itself, the same way that people mapped the way the visible planets orbit the Sun and developed ideas of gravity long before they knew how the Sun worked.

There are, however, various explanations for what happened to create the Big Bang, but any satisfactory explanation tends to be very complicated and requires something of a scientific background to understand.

You can, of course, just say "God did it", if you like, it doesn't affect the evidence for the Big Bang. Otherwise, most people are likely to say "I don't know" and content themselves for not being likely ever to know. There's plenty of things known to humanity that aren't known to any given individual, without worrying too much about things unknown to anyone.

...

My own personal explanation would be that the mathematical constants aren't constant, they just alter too slowly for us to have noticed. This has all sorts of implications for more or less everything (at least in the grand scheme of things, nothing you'd notice without a few billion years to watch), and could explain away more or less anything you wanted explained away.

I have, of course, no evidence for this at all, and there is no way of testing it. It differs only from a religion in that I don't particularly believe in it, it simply seems to be the most satisfactory answer out of a number of very unsatisfactory ones, and I'll happily abandon it when something else comes along.

 

[Raven_Operative]

What do the majority of scientists in the field know, anyway? Clearly, you know better. I'll compromise: give me one example of irreducible complexity and I'll stop quoting you.

The majority of scientists in the field though the world was flat, tomatoes were poisonous, and the sun revolved around the earth at one time or another.

and I think I'll help out the person your quoting, so heres your answer: The Angler Fish
...and the chicken egg
...and the bacterial flagellum
...and the mouse trap (alright, alright, its not an animal, but its a good demonstration of the concept)

 

[Yvgeny]

I show you a computer and ask you to make your best choice as to how it came into being:

1 Designed and put together by intelligent human beings.

2 Random computer parts were put into a large box and the parts soldered randomly by spraying molten lead into the box as it was rotated. This process was continued many times until the computer happened to be produced.

 

[HerbertTheHamster]

Iceland here. Evolution is only controversial if you life in some second world Islamic country or the U.S. (same thing really)

 

[Lukeje]

I show you a computer and ask you to make your best choice as to how it came into being:

1 Designed and put together by intelligent human beings.

2 Random computer parts were put into a large box and the parts soldered randomly by spraying molten lead into the box as it was rotated. This process was continued many times until the computer happened to be produced.

Congratulations on creating a straw man. You don't actually seem to understand (or are intentionally misunderstanding) evolution. Where is the survival based bias in your `random' system?

 

[Ranorak]

I show you a computer and ask you to make your best choice as to how it came into being:

1 Designed and put together by intelligent human beings.

2 Random computer parts were put into a large box and the parts soldered randomly by spraying molten lead into the box as it was rotated. This process was continued many times until the computer happened to be produced.

Congratulations, you just proved that computers aren't natural.

They are also perfectly designed for that they are suppose to do.

As for life?
Not so much, it's full of faults, odd ways that a engineer would never make, and a clear timeline on how they came to be in existence.

 

[Nudu]

but to say that mankind evolved from apes thats absurd

I've always wondered why people think this. Do you absolutely not see any sort of resemblance between chimpanzees and humans? Also, we didn't evolve from apes. Well, I guess we did, but the think is we ARE apes. Homo Sapiens is a species in the Hominidae family, or the "Great Apes" which include orangutans(distantly related to humans), gorillas(sligthly closer to humans), chimps(relatively close to humans. The genetic relation between humans and chimpanzees is closer then between gorillas and chimpanzees.)

theres no proof of that

[link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transitional_fossils#Human_evolution[/link]

 

[fenrizz]

I show you a computer and ask you to make your best choice as to how it came into being:

1 Designed and put together by intelligent human beings.

2 Random computer parts were put into a large box and the parts soldered randomly by spraying molten lead into the box as it was rotated. This process was continued many times until the computer happened to be produced.

Flawed argument.
Computer parts are not alive and thus cannot evolve, making your analogy very flawed.

Besides, that is not how evolution works at all.
http://www.iberianet.com/forum/evolution-explained/article_1153f049-2d25-59aa-a9db-18a77724ecee.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution

 

[liquidsolid]

Well I voted in the poll. I'm so tired of arguing about this one. They are both theories, there seems to be more evidence supporting one of them and according to the poll results more people seem to agree with me.

I feel like this argument is easier to win than the whole "Global Warming" argument. I honestly don't know who to trust on that one, because scientists from both sides tell me that the other side employs "bad science" and is trying to fool you.