What is the probability for fishes in the Pacific Ocean to become apes during one hour of waiting time?
It may take longer than an hour for this fish to be converted to ape.
And it goes both ways. Apes can become fish:
labeling man an "animal" is simply a construct of human thought which doesn't make it true.
Simply claiming that a human being is not an animal is wrong, unless you don't mean by animal what a biologist does. Perhaps you have a religious definition that excludes man, which seems to be the case, but that wouldn't have any value to a person who does not believe in gods or the teachings of any religion, who has no use for concepts like spirit and soul. They have no referent in reality - nothing you can detect evidence for out there with any naked or aided perception and say, "There, that's the thing I was talking about."
Science does fine without such confounding and unjustified assumptions, which violate Occam's principle of parsimony, or the idea that adding complications to an explanation of observed phenomena that are all accounted for by a simpler narrative is undesirable. And we can see why. It's got people saying that human beings aren't animals or apes based on unjustified assumptions about man not being a twig on the tree of life. Religious beliefs have us visualize man as unrelated to apes or other animals, which causes one to make logical errors.
Spiritual beings do spiritual things. Have you seen a family of gorillas make an altar and worship any gods or God? Have you seen a family of orangutans take a lamb (or another animal), sacrifice it and worship gods or God as they present it as a worship experience?
Why is that spiritual? Because it's based on a belief in the existence of spirits? I'd say that the gorilla and orangutan have a leg up on those performing such acts.
And many human beings have returned to that state. We don't perform what we consider meaning acts to appeal to nonexistent gods. Mans religious phase is the period connecting the time when man first developed to intellect to ask about how the world came to be the way we find it, and when he got his answers.
In between, gods were invented to stand for natural processes. The sun appeared to move through the sky, so Apollo was assigned the task of pulling it. Someone seemed to be rumbling in the heavens and throwing bolts of lightning, so Thor was invented. Their services are no longer needed, and they have been excused. But we have further to go. There are still gods invoked to account for that for which gods are not needed, but far more people jumping ahead back into atheism with the other apes than ever in man's history since the advent of religion.
we can look at the same thing and come to two completely different conclusions.
If the conclusions are contradictory - in part or whole mutually exclusive - then at least one is wrong. If two people add the same column of numbers and come to different conclusions about their sum, at least one is wrong, and we have a means to determine if either is correct. If you have your own way of adding that is faith - based rather than based in pure reason, your results aren't useful.
And therein is the crux of the matter. The faith-based and reason and evidence-based thinkers don't merely come to different conclusions. They have different methods of processing information to arrive at them. If we can agree on the rules of arithmetic and we come up with different sums (conclusions), we have a means of resolving our differences using our agreed-upon method for adding and seeing who made the mistake.
This is the process called dialectic, wherein two people with shared critical thinking skills can decide which of them is in error and one learns from the other in the process. This is not a competition or debate. It's a cooperative effort toward attaining a common understanding.
If you allow faith-based thought into the process, then that ability to come to agreement is lost. If we can agree that 2 + 2 = 4 in every case, and one of us has mistakenly come up with 5, then we can locate the error and come to an agreement.
But if one of us says that he chooses to believe that 2 + 2 = 5 because he read it in a book, then all is lost.
Just look at everything around you... proof enough IMO [of a god]
Not proof enough for me. When I look around, I see a world that is proof of nothing other than that it exists. It either has no source, or it has either a conscious or unconscious source. None of these possibilities can be ruled in or out. If you have decided that the conscious external source is the correct answer, you have made a logical error. Your conclusion doesn't follow from the proper application of reason to the relevant data or evidence. You have jumped to a faith-based conclusion.
If those are rules of the reason you follow, then I can't really use any of your conclusions about the significance of evidence.
attacking the poster is always a good defense.
What I a doing now is what is usually called attacking. Most of us reject that description. You might feel beset by answers like these, but they are part of dialectic. When we disagree with somebody's reasoning and conclusions, we explain why. It you are receptive to that and take it in the spirit of a pursuit of truth, you don't feel attacked. You appreciate the interest, and if the argument is compelling, you appreciate the help..
But if you simply don't like being disagreed with or your having your thinking constructively criticized, you will feel beset. That's a fundamental difference in the spirit of dissent in the academic setting and in church, where independent thought is considered an attack on the agreed-upon dicta of the faith.
For me, if there is a creation, then there is a Creator and thus it is proof.
I assume that you mean a conscious creator, or a god, since you capitalized the word. If so, that's a circular argument, since your definition of creation implies a god, which presumably is the conclusion your are aiming at. By that reasoning, you cannot call rows of parallel sand dunes in the desert a creation of the wind acting on the sand, or if you did say that the wind created the sculpture, you would be inserting your "Creator" again.
I respect your position. Don't agree, but I do respect your right to have a differing viewpoint.
Acknowledging and tolerating another's right to hold an opinion and holding that opinion in high regard are different things - both unfortunately called respect. As I explained, I have no regard for faith-based thought or its output, but am polite to people indulging in it as long as they are also polite in return. I hope that you feel that this has been the case here and don't characterize this as attacking your beliefs.