Rick Reuben wrote:

Linus Van Pelt wrote:Clocker Bob, you should learn more about evolution before you talk about it. No educated person thinks that evolution is random .

Don't patronize, Guy Who Can't Even Figure Out That The Federal Reserve Is Privately Owned. Or better yet- learn the definition of 'random'. One of the definitions of a random process is this: the process is undirected. If Van Deel says that evolution follows an orderly process, then he has to explain how order came to be imposed upon unguided matter. That makes three questions he can't answer: where did the raw matter appear, and how, and why does the matter follow patterns, if there was no designer?

Clocker Bob, you should learn more about evolution before you talk about it. If you had a high school biology student's understanding of evolutionary theory, you'd see that it answers every question you just posed (except for the raw matter one, which, of course, it isn't supposed to answer).

mark van deel wrote:We're the most complex and evolved form of life that we know of.

What you 'know' is very limited. You cannot compare yourself to all known life forms, because the universe is vast, and you can't reach it.

Earth humans may very well be very low on the complexity scale. You wouldn't know. Not being able to compare yourself to higher life forms doesn't mean you get to declare yourself 'head of the class'. The fact that Earth humans will say, "I can't see anyone else so I must be King" makes me laugh, when a one second glance into the stars should encourage humility about where you humans rank. Just look at how far you cannot see.

So in future I shouldn't refer to the Empire State Building as 'very tall', because on some planet somewhere, there may well be a building one hundred times as high? A building populated by people so old that to describe a 110 year old human woman as 'very old' would be ridiculous?

Rick Reuben wrote:

Linus Van Pelt wrote:Clocker Bob, you should learn more about evolution before you talk about it. No educated person thinks that evolution is random .

Don't patronize,

Who's patronizing? You're making some common mistakes that people who talk about evolution without knowing about it make. Learn more so you don't make those mistakes. Start here. You have a lot of contempt for people who won't educate themselves about the NWO or gold fringe on flags or whatever. Here's something going on in real life - if you want to talk about it, learn about it.

Guy Who Can't Even Figure Out That The Federal Reserve Is Privately Owned.

Do you have to drag that into every thread? You might be right about the Federal Reserve, but until I see credible evidence to support your claim, I'm not going to believe it. I don't know how you decide what to believe - I think it has less to do with credible evidence and more to do with whether it fits into your worldview. For me, though, I want credible evidence.

So when you try to hijack a thread to bring it back to the Fed, I'm going to ask you this:
Is it honest to edit a Wikipedia article so that it agrees with your view, and then post the edited portion of that article to support what you're saying?

Or better yet- learn the definition of 'random'. One of the definitions of a random process is this: the process is undirected. If Van Deel says that evolution follows an orderly process, then he has to explain how order came to be imposed upon unguided matter. That makes three questions he can't answer: where did the raw matter appear, and how, and why does the matter follow patterns, if there was no designer?

The first question has nothing to do with evolution. The short answer to the other questions is, basically, natural selection. Natural selection and genetic mutation are pretty much the engine and the fuel that drive evolution. Also self-replication and reproduction. Genetic mutation may be random, but natural selection is anything but. This is of course very rough - read more here, or more specifically, here.

van pelt wrote:What we do or do not know regarding the origin of life poses no problem for evolution.

If you don't know how the raw material appeared, then you also don't know if a code was installed in the material, making evolution a product of a designer.

True, and yet that question is still outside the scope of evolution. I can design and build any number of airplanes, rockets, and spaceships without knowing whether gravity works because mass curves space-time or because the baby Jebus wants matter to come together, or something else. Likewise, we're not limited in our study of evolution because we don't know if YHWH sat down one day and wrote DNA, or whether it developed over time as the most successful type of self-replicating molecule. It's not an unimportant question, but it's unimportant to evolution.

Rotten Tanx wrote:As I said (or tried to) you might as well say it with certainty or else never say anything with certainty since in an infinite universe anything can change.

Science at it's furthest reaches says you can't say anything with absolute certainty. You can come to conclusions based on greater or lesser degrees of evidence but i reckon we should all, humbly, accept that we have no clue what reality is - with any certainty. Therefore agnosticism is the reasonable position to hold when it comes to an idea as big as GOD.

I would say I am agnostic (and that certainly does not mean I am 'hedging my bets'. That's a ludicrous suggestion for most agnostics i know and one most often presented by devout Christians in my experience) but like you say it usually boils down to language (most things do. Our perception is structured by language).

The idea that the biblically described God is objectively real for one and all is - to me - silly*
So, I suppose, in that respect, I am an atheist.
But the idea of 'God' is bigger than that and could be defined in a number of different ways and some of them are not so easily dismissed (by me).
I guess it all depends on what connotations you attach to the word.

I think a lot of atheists throw the baby out with the bath water.

Rick, am I to take it you are not dismissing the idea of evolution but simply saying it seems patterned - and so a designer is presumed?

I'm inclined to say if there is a 'designer' imposing 'the pattern' (the existence of a pattern I accept) then I'm inclined to say we are that 'designer'.




*although i could hold by the perception that ideas themselves could be said to have some kind of tangible reality - they certainly seem to me to have massive effects on our perceptions of reality - therefore on our behaviour - therefore on everyone else's 'reality'.
If that's the case then the Biblical god is a pretty big idea that has a tangible reality for a lot of people.

Oh Yeah - word 'Nontheist' - er quite like watching languages morph and change as they are want to do.

Usually this is done in a creepy, Orwellian way but I don't see this being the case here so Not Crap.

Rick Reuben wrote:

Linus Van Pelt wrote:Is it honest to edit a Wikipedia article so that it agrees with your view, and then post the edited portion of that article to support what you're saying?

I have never done anything with wikipedia other than read it.

Then I don't know what to believe. What would you believe, given the facts?

lvp wrote: Natural selection and genetic mutation are pretty much the engine and the fuel that drive evolution.

Obviously. What have I said that ignores that?

When you said evolution was random. If natural selection is the engine that drives evolution, and natural selection is not random, then it doesn't make much sense to say that evolution is random.

You have two problems here:

First, you have to explain the source of the matter that appeared in a total vacuum.

Nope.

Second, you have to to explain how the matter also came by the energy that it used to create its own descendents, thus sustaining itself after Minute One of the Universe.

Nope.

I don't see why I have to explain either of those things.

There are many obstacles for 'uncreated' matter to conquer, namely: appearing from nowhere in the first place, and then, harnessing the energy of life and becoming the root of the diverse tree of life that we all know.

None of your "obstacles" are obstacles to evolution.

You're mixing up two questions. You can study evolution all day long without you yourself choosing to believe in a creator, *but*, once you say that you have determined that evolution occured without the role of a designer, you have crossed the line into making your data say things it does not, because of your bias against belief in a creator.

I have never said that I have determined that evolution occurred without the role of a designer. I may have said that there is no evidence of the role of a designer in evolution. I may have said that I believe evolution occurred without the role of a designer. I may have said that no designer is necessary for evolution. I have not said that I have determined that evolution occurred without the role of a designer.

I agree with you completely that to say such a thing would cross the line out of science into something else.

You don't know whether you are seeing the role of a designer in your studies of evolution. If natural selection works, it could be because it was designed to work. You don't know.

Correct.

Evolution can be either:

A designed process.

or

A process that resulted from physics and biology that were not designed.

Correct. There may be other possibilities. Maybe not. But at least these two, yes.

None of us can rule on this.

Correct.

You are wasting time trying to use evolution to support your case against the existence of a creator.

Incorrect. I have never used evolution to support my case against the existence of a creator. How did evolution appear in this thread? You used evolution as part of an argument from personal incredulity to support your case for the existence of a creator:

Clocker Bob wrote:You think humans, polar bears, and potatos all evolved randomly from the same primordial ooze? That seems extraordinarily unlikely to me.

Anything I've said about evolution in this thread has been correcting your misconceptions about it.

Evolution will remain inadmissible evidence in the case to prove or disprove a Creator's role in the universe.

Correct. So why did you bring it up?



You and I are probably in complete agreement with respect to a lot of the subject matter of this thread. There's no need to misrepresent my views to create a disagreement that isn't there.

Rick Reuben wrote:No matter what you say, until you explain the appearance of matter in a vacuum and you explain the energy source, you can make no conclusions about whether evolution is designed.

What happened, then?

Not being a scientist -- or even knowledgeable to a small degree of how physics works -- how can something have come from nothing?

In the Big Bang, what "banged" ("bung"?)?

Rick Reuben wrote:

Linus Van Pelt wrote: If natural selection is the engine that drives evolution, and natural selection is not random, then it doesn't make much sense to say that evolution is random.

No matter what you say, until you explain the appearance of matter in a vacuum and you explain the energy source, you can make no conclusions about whether evolution is designed.

Correct. And irrelevant, since I'm making no conclusions about whether evolution is designed.

Van Deel is the one who thinks that evolution can be used to disprove a creator, but the only reason he thinks that is because he refuses to recognize that he hasn't fully understood evolution yet- nobody has, because nobody can answer the questions I asked above.

van deel wrote:No one's trying to credit evolution for everything... only how living things we see could have developed from whatever the earliest form of life was. Where that initial form of life came from is irrelevant to the theory.

What a nut. He thinks he understands evolution, and he can't even explain the origins of the matter or the energy source.

Evolution didn't start until life started. How life started, and anything before that, is not within the scope of evolution.

Rick Reuben wrote:Evolution is sound science but I accept the possibility of either a designer.

Who/what might have designed this designer?

Earwicker wrote:
But the idea of 'God' is bigger than that and could be defined in a number of different ways...

But surely you can see that this concept of a "god" is something that has sprung from the human imagination?

The very idea of "God" is a mental exercise not something that there is any evidence pointing towards...

It's a hard concept to grasp in our culture, because the idea of monotheism has come to mean "the Christian God", or at least a god in that sense of the meaning. This idea of the Jewish god Yahweh - and the god that Judaism's offshoot cults Islam and Christianity - has become so all encompassing that when we talk about even the abstract Deist of, for example the Founding Father of the American republic, it still springs from a very Judo/Christian centered concept of monotheism. If you look at the Old Testament, even the early Jewish religion was not a monotheism, Yahweh was simply the god you were expect to worship above all others; that's right, "others". The monotheistic aspect came latter.

It's just all horribly inconsistent and totally suspect as a method of finding out, "the Truth" about the nature of reality. I'm not sure about other people but I find the God/Designer/Desist/Theist arguments about the nature of reality and the universe we live in depressingly small and totally uninspiring, not mention totally unbelievable.

Basically to not know whether God exists, i.e. to be an agnostic, you have to participate in the invention of the God in the first place. Saying you are an agnostic about this man-made idea of a "Creator" is no better then being an agnostic about Big Foot. Just because people say this god is "everything" or the seat of reality etc. isn't any greater reason to include the possibility of this god existing. In fact if anything the more incredible something is the more evidence it should require, not the other way around.

Rick Reuben wrote:Van Deel is the one who thinks that evolution can be used to disprove a creator

I never said this. I think the theory of evolution undermined what was, historically, the last logically sound reason for believing an unobserved deity was responsible for life on earth, though.

My main question to you is: Why should something be believed in if you possess no evidence in favour of it?

Or maybe more accurately: Without possessing any evidence in favour of something extraordinary, why should it be considered likely enough that you would answer 'I don't know' to the question 'do you believe in it?'