Evolution Or Intelligent Design

God said to Abraham...
Total votes: 5 (4%)
It's evolution, baby!
Total votes: 106 (83%)
Two sides of the same coin
Total votes: 16 (13%)
Total votes: 127

DEBATE: Evolution VS Intelligent Design

1035
disco suicide wrote:To keep it simple and separate from the ongoing debate, I pose a number of broad questions:

How does inorganic material become organic or biological material? Has this ever been witnessed? Isn't sound scientific evidence that which can be observed repeated? How does Chaos + Time = Order? Just wondering.


These are interesting questions which have nothing to do with evolution.

I would recommend this page.

ETA: Then this one.

Good luck!
Last edited by Linus Van Pelt_Archive on Fri Feb 23, 2007 5:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Why do you make it so scary to post here.

DEBATE: Evolution VS Intelligent Design

1036
matthew wrote:
clocker bob wrote:
matthew wrote:Once again, you are implicitly reducing God to a concept and contradicting yourself.


Matthew, God IS a concept! If you could prove God beyond the level of a concept, we wouldn't be watching you spin your wheels for 51 pages!


Concepts can be defined. You say God is a concept. Define God for me.
Define "art." Art is a concept. Define art. Define "love." Define "freedom." All the really good concepts are loose in definition, a probability cloud of meanings held together by mutual understanding and context, which is why if you start talking about god with a Buddhist there's a good chance you'll mean entirely different things.

Let's be serious, here: You pulled "concepts can be defined" out of your ass.

I have established that existence as existence cannot be conceived and thus defined but nonetheless IS regardless of OUR INABILITY TO CONCEIVE AND DEFINE IT. Such could only be the supreme existent.

This leads us back to The Choice:

EXISTENCE=IS-NOT

EXISTENCE=IS
You've established that you have the logically inconsistent philosophical skills of an 18th century also-ran.

"Existence as existence" isn't. There's no such thing. Any discussion of the existence of matter that treats existence as separate from the matter is operating on fundamentally inaccurate first principles.

Again: Embedded.
http://www.myspace.com/leopoldandloebchicago

Linus Van Pelt wrote:I subscribe to neither prong of your false dichotomy.

DEBATE: Evolution VS Intelligent Design

1037
disco suicide wrote:To keep it simple and separate from the ongoing debate, I pose a number of broad questions:

How does inorganic material become organic or biological material?

It sounds like you have made a pretty rigid distinction between living things (your "biological material") and non-living things (your "inorganic material"). Out here in the non-home-schooled world it isn't that clear a distinction.

The synthesis of organic materials including amino acids was demonstrated in the 1930s using nothing more than methane, water and any other non-inert element (enormously abundant in the universe) and electricity (enormously abundant as well). This is not what you mean, but it is trivial to demonstrate that simple inorganic material (atoms of hydrogen, oxygen and carbon) become ever more complex organic ones quite easily.

If you mean "the spark of life," well, that's not so clear a distinction either. A small chip of proteins can sit dormant for centuries and then reveal itself as a virus when conditions are right. Until that moment, it would appear to be just an inert chip of proteins. Did it become alive, or was it alive all the time? The tiny viruses called "Prions" are simpler yet, with only a few discernable molecules, yet they are self-replicating and can only be considered alive. In dormancy, they can sit unchanged for centuries. Are they alive?

Has this ever been witnessed?

I think you are harboring an 18th-century Dr. Frankenstien perception of life, such that things are either dead or alive, and dead things can be instantly animated somehow. Of course this has never been seen.

Isn't sound scientific evidence that which can be observed repeated?

Yes, and so far evolutionary evidence has been found repeating itself all over the earth. There are no pleistocene rabbits.
How does Chaos + Time = Order?

Anything + Energy + Time = Something Else. The sun, the earth's own atmosphere and geology gave the primordial soup all the energy it needed to spend eons cooking up life.
Just wondering.

No you're not, you're just tossing-out a home-schooler's creationism simple-speak shibboleth. You're not wondering at all, and that's why you are and will remain a fucking idiot.
steve albini
Electrical Audio
sa at electrical dot com
Quicumque quattuor feles possidet insanus est.

DEBATE: Evolution VS Intelligent Design

1039
I'd also like to pose a simple question to all of the ID'ers out there who think that "Chaos plus Time = Order" sounds ridiculous:

Might it be that your entire concepts of "chaos" and "order", since they have been determined by what we see on the Earth, are misleading when applied to the very natural system which produced them in your minds? After all, we are forced to see plant and animal life as the height of incomprehensibly complex order, while we are forced to denote things such as hurricanes and viruses as chaotic. Hence, one could imagine a more perfect world wherein no diseases or predatory violence among animals had to take place, and then we would have called THAT sort of system the height of complex order.

Also, keep in mind that 4.7 billion years is A HELL OF A LONG TIME. Why would God have kept everyone waiting so long? An incomprehensibly long time. All of the beautiful things outside your front door took ages and ages of pointless, meaningless time in order to develop into what they are today. And why would God have waited until the last few seconds of our biological life-clock to introduce such helpful things as books, computers and telephones? And to top it all off, he ends the whole shebang with environmental collapse and nuclear war, destroying all of the hard work he had spent so much time engaging in. Seems like an omnipotent, omniscient being could have looked out for a brotha a li'l bit.

DEBATE: Evolution VS Intelligent Design

1040
Steve, I am in no way a "home-schooler" nor am I entirely sure what that means or implies. I am publicly schooled as well that I have spent the last 10 years or so taking variety of different college classes including Biology. You're right that I wasn't "just" wondering, but I was wondering what exactly thoughts on this matter were among those who opposed anything but evolution, accepting evolution as holy truth when evolution on a larger scale has no more been evident than the existence of God. Yes, there are no Pleistocene rabbits, but every so often there are creatures popping up all over this earth that were thought to be extinct for thousands if not millions of years.

If you mean "the spark of life," well, that's not so clear a distinction either. A small chip of proteins can sit dormant for centuries and then reveal itself as a virus when conditions are right. Until that moment, it would appear to be just an inert chip of proteins. Did it become alive, or was it alive all the time? The tiny viruses called "Prions" are simpler yet, with only a few discernable molecules, yet they are self-replicating and can only be considered alive. In dormancy, they can sit unchanged for centuries. Are they alive?


If they are biological then I would consider them to be alive. Aren't these chips of protein witnessed after biological life has already been established?

I think you are harboring an 18th-century Dr. Frankenstien perception of life, such that things are either dead or alive, and dead things can be instantly animated somehow. Of course this has never been seen.


I never said anything about instantly, you did. Wouldn't the following statement be similar in principle to a Frankensteinian view of life, not instant, but over a period of time. Anything (inorganice material) + Energy (lightning!) + Time (time) = something else (Frankenstein's monster).

Anything + Energy + Time = Something Else. The sun, the earth's own atmosphere and geology gave the primordial soup all the energy it needed to spend eons cooking up life.


What is anything? Give me an example. What kinds of anything were available to Energy and Time to be manipulated into life as we know it. I seriously don't know.

Also, that you feel the need to call someone a "fucking idiot" is a rather violent assumption based on a very superficial understanding of what I am about or who I am. Your statements and behavior are hardly a strong case for evolutionary theory.

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