suliman on 24/6/2009 at 10:13
Quote:
Hinduism: It’s an interesting concept, but it
doesn’t deal with your real problem of having sinned against
God and the reality of Hell.
your imaginary friend is silly because he does not account for my imaginary friend
DDL on 24/6/2009 at 10:16
I guess I'm thinking in terms of "evolution only works down the tree, not across it", so something lizardy (I guess saurians?) could concievable turn into a bird eventually, whereas a dog could never turn into a kitten, since they're both already here and on different branches, rather than at different points on a single (theoretical) branchline.
And it'd be my inherent scale-hating prejudice in lumping lizards and dinosaurs as 'pretty much the same, more or less, for this example' that's shooting me in the foot, I guess. :)
...but hey, I work on fucking yeast, what do I know?:D
EDIT: Suliman's basically hit the nail on the head, we shouldn't be trying to justify evolution, since it pretty much speaks for itself. We should be forcing them to account for why their god is better/more probably than all the other gods they choose not to believe in. Think how poor Zeus feels about that...
Brian The Dog on 24/6/2009 at 10:43
Quote Posted by aguywhoplaysthief
What I find interesting is that all but one of these "scientists" were around before the the twentieth century - talk about scraping the barrel!
It's rather silly to bolster your case by bringing up people without any modern philosophical or scientific knowledge. Most high schoolers have more general scientific knowledge about the world than almost all of the people on that list.
At the risk of sounding like I support these folk, to be fair, these people did revolutionise scientific thought, and their contributions are used all the time in modern science. Not many of the general public could name many top scientists of the mid-to-late 20th century.
I guess you would exclude Newton, Faraday and Einstien from your assertion? I would agree that Kepler and Copernicus would only have a hazy view of science as we know it.
Muzman on 24/6/2009 at 10:44
Quote Posted by Taffer36
I've never understood intelligent design. If you're religious, THE WHOLE POINT OF YOUR RELIGION is that you have faith in something that is difficult to believe, and that you believe that god will reward you for doing this.
So doesn't finding evidence to back it up/turning it into a science undermine the very basic concept of FAITH?(
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcncPpQ8loA)
DDL on 24/6/2009 at 11:16
Quote Posted by Brian The Dog
At the risk of sounding like I support these folk, to be fair, these people did revolutionise scientific thought, and their contributions are used all the time in modern science. Not many of the general public could name many top scientists of the mid-to-late 20th century.
But they're usually being misquoted (or, 'selectively quoted') in the fundie stuff: Einstein may have believed that god created
the universe, but that doesn't mean he believed god created the entirety of it in seven days, 6000-odd years ago, and that earth is the centre.
In fact, given that he was working on things like the cosmological constant and trying to unify gravitation with quantum mechanics and so on, that sort of idea would be totally counter to his entire research field.
And so on.
Outside of the fundie crowd, belief in the christian god (and to be honest, probably many others), even where fairly prevalent, is basically just some sort of "as long as it doesn't get in the way" kind of faith.
d0om on 24/6/2009 at 11:17
I find it very strange that the genesis story which COULD be interpreted as some form of vision of someone watching a speeded up version of life evolving and therefore you could use evolution to backup the creation story is instead used as a literal 7 day magic creationist-type-thingy.
Order in genesis:
Light
Firmament (hemi-sphere)
Earth and Sea
Life in Sea
Birds
Land creatures
Man
Which is at least roughly big-bang-esque. Stars, planets, oceans form, life in the sea, life on lands, people.
Compared to stories of giant snakes shedding their skin to make the land, or giants coughing up stars and the moon its not exactly far off.
But then rather than celebrate this, they go on a crazy attack on evolution for no apparent reason which completely mystifies me.
Brian The Dog on 24/6/2009 at 12:37
Quote Posted by DDL
But they're usually being misquoted (or, 'selectively quoted') in the fundie stuff: Einstein may have believed that god created
the universe, but that doesn't mean he believed god created the entirety of it in seven days, 6000-odd years ago, and that earth is the centre.
Indeed, this is one thing that annoys me about such people. It's not that I think their ideas are silly (lots of people have silly ideas). It's that they try to justify them using arguments that are stretched way beyond what the originial person who thought them had in mind.
Quote Posted by d0om
I find it very strange that the genesis story which COULD be interpreted as some form of vision of someone watching a speeded up version of life evolving and therefore you could use evolution to backup the creation story is instead used as a literal 7 day magic creationist-type-thingy.
At the risk of derailing, this is true - the hebrew word for "day" can also be translated as "epoch", i.e. an arbitrary timescale. Rowan Williams for instance definitely doesn't believe in a 6000-year old creation. People just read something and try to fit it into their world-view, not the other way round.
demagogue on 24/6/2009 at 13:00
Quote Posted by Vivian
I 100% guarantee you that I can get you a living dinosaur that will birth chickens.
Haha, there are ways. You don't want to hear about them, but there are ways. Hell, I can get you one by this afternoon.
Do you know much about the latent genes in chickens? They apparently still give lizard-esque instructions like grow teeth and grow a longer tail, but rather than disappearing they're just turned off; well, apparently entire systems are like on a sliding scale and genes push the slider rather than give specific instructions. (I'm sure you know a lot more about it than I.) Anyway, that's something I think about that would just embarrass people trying to argue like this to silence, if they were seriously confronted with it. They developed a few chicken fetuses where they turned them back "on"; let those things hatch and voila there's your chickens with lizard tails and teeth, where's my $10,000...
DDL on 24/6/2009 at 13:32
Quote Posted by demagogue
Haha, there are ways. You don't want to hear about them, but there are ways. Hell, I can get you one by this afternoon.
Do you know much about the latent genes in chickens? They apparently still give lizard-esque instructions like grow teeth and grow a longer tail, but rather than disappearing they're just turned off; well, apparently entire systems are like on a sliding scale and genes push the slider rather than give specific instructions. (I'm sure you know a lot more about it than I.) Anyway, that's something I think about that would just embarrass people trying to argue like this to silence, if they were seriously confronted with it. They developed a few chicken fetuses where they turned them back "on"; let those things hatch and voila there's your chickens with lizard tails and teeth, where's my $10,000...
HOX genes! And they're not just in chickens, they're in..well, basically all higher eukaryotes. Antennapedia for the win! Of creepiness.
There's a ton of shit like this, too. I seem to recall most mammalian embryos go through a 'gilled' stage before resealing the gills (actually more accurately both fish and mammals have a 'gill-like' region in the embryos, but mammals remodel/reseal most of it, and the fish remodel it into actual gills, so common precursor rather than OMG HUMANS AM FISH) but a quick google search mostly just turns up fundie sites ridiculing it...which now I think about it, is pretty decent evidence.
