Intelligent design, my version.

[Mohammad Nur Syamsu]

That's what I meant, I have 100% faith Allah exists, It is proven to me He is real.

What I meant by saying I was talking in atheist terms, when I said in previous discussion "you cannot prove 100% God is real or doesn't exist", TO THEM, not to me

I realise there are different definitions of evidence and proof. The Grand Canyon is majesticly beautiful, therefore it is evidence God exists. Something like that would be the sort of evidence that goes in religion.

But for creation science the terms opinion and fact must be distinguished categorically, or else it is a total confusion.

And really what creation vs evolution is about is the rejection of subjectivity altogether by the atheistic hordes. Not just the subjectivity in regards to God, but undermining all subjectivity altogether, turning people into the emotionless mr Spock stereotype.

So then it is bad form to say it is a fact and proven that God exists etc., It seems to imply a fact is better than an opinion. Aren't opinions and subjectivity good in their own right?

 

[Monk Of Reason]

There are plenty of credible Christian Universities, my father works at Loma Linda University and Medical Centre, where they were pioneers in infant heart transplants, and performed the first Baboon heart transplant(even though I am against that). I'm sure there are plenty of credible South American Universities that teach religion in classes, you are thinking solely of the USA, it would seem, In most of the rest of the world, separation of church and state is not a religion or written in their constitutions.

The great and credible universities that are Christian or otherwise affiliated do separate the religious teachings with the educational ones. They use common sense. I have friends in Catholic schools and they are fundamentally the same as regular schools except for uniforms, nun's and corporal punishment. They even accept non-Catholics.

 

[Mohammad Nur Syamsu]

The great and credible universities that are Christian or otherwise affiliated do separate the religious teachings with the educational ones. They use common sense. I have friends in Catholic schools and they are fundamentally the same as regular schools except for uniforms, nun's and corporal punishment. They even accept non-Catholics.

Except ofcourse there are no "great" universities anymore. "great" is something universities were in the past, but to use this term now I find ridiculous. Universities now are simply nonsense, because of failing to acknowledge the obvious fact that freedom is real and relevant. The lack of subjectivity of scientists presently, makes them a laughing stock in situation comedy and movies.

 

[outhouse]

Except ofcourse there are no "great" universities anymore.

]You have nothing credible to back that unsubstantiated opinion do you?

 

[outhouse]

The lack of subjectivity of scientists presently, makes them a laughing stock in situation comedy and movies.

Is this another biased unsubstantiated opinion with no credibility?

 

[nazz]

You have no scientific evidence FOR theistic evolution buddy, you need to find some before I have anything to disprove.

I'll take that as an admission you cannot back your previous claim.

I never suggested I had any scientific evidence of theistic evolution. It's not a matter of different evidence but how the same evidence is interpreted.

 

[gnostic]

Good idea that God had missed, why not walking than building a large ark.

What about those who believe in God and wanted to be saved with Noah ?
What about babies and children ?
What about old women and men ?
What about the food that should be stored and to be enough for all ?

It is easier to walk than to have an ark, it is as stupid as to say it is better to travel by walking than to travel by a car.

Actually according to the Bible Mt Ararat was under water before the flood receded, so If Noah had walked up a mountain, he would have drowned.

I was talking to FearGod if the flood wasn't global.

According to the Qur'an, Noah's flood was regional, not global. The Qur'an (like the bible) doesn't state where Noaẖ was living before the flood, but many assume he lived in the Mesopotamia, if not in the Levant or the Arabian peninsula.

You are forgetting, Lyndon, that he was a bloody prophet and that he had a hundred years to decide which high ground was safe, and Mt. Ararat wasn't the highest mountain in the world.

If Noaẖ was living in the Middle East, then it wouldn't take him 100 years to walk to any mountain that were higher than Mt Ararat.

Mt Ararat doesn't even have the highest peak in the Taurus range. Compare Ararat's 3611 metres to Mt Demirkazik's 3756 m, for instance. Or 3908 m of Tirich Mir, is in present-day Pakistan, on the Hindu Kush. And there are over 100 mountains in the Himalayas above 7200 m.

And if Noaẖ had gone to Europe instead, the entire Swiss Alps is over 2000 m above sea level, with 5 mountains above 4400 m.

Whether Noaẖ gone east to the Hindu Kush, or west to the Swiss Alps, he could have gotten there in less than 10 years.

Just remember, I was talking to feargod about regional flood as opposed to global flood.

But even then, there are no geological evidences to support Mt Ararat ever being underwater, in human history. There was never flood that cover Mt Ararat during the Neolithic period (after the last ice age) or the Bronze Age. That because the bible flood or the Qur'an version was mythological, and it never happened.

 

[outhouse]

According to the Qur'an, Noah's flood was regional, not global.

Sources please

Noah in Islam - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Thereupon, God decreed that a terrible flood would cover the whole earth and He ordered Noah to build an Ark which would save him and the believers from this dreadful calamity.[18]

 

[metis]

"Myth" does not mean falsehood but is a narrative that reflects certain teachings deemed to be important. One simply does not have accept the narrative as historical in order to understand what these teachings may be. All societies have these narratives, and they vary greatly from culture to culture.

Therefore, to take the flood account as somehow being historical makes little sense, especially since it is so illogical, plus it obscures what actually is there that's important: the conveying of basic morals and values that the society feels are important.

 

[FearGod]

Sources please

Noah in Islam - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Thereupon, God decreed that a terrible flood would cover the whole earth and He ordered Noah to build an Ark which would save him and the believers from this dreadful calamity.[18]

That was a wrong information as punishment was against the tribe of Noah and not for the whole world, similarly God punished the tribe of Lot for their awful deeds.

 

[Monk Of Reason]

Except ofcourse there are no "great" universities anymore. "great" is something universities were in the past, but to use this term now I find ridiculous. Universities now are simply nonsense, because of failing to acknowledge the obvious fact that freedom is real and relevant. The lack of subjectivity of scientists presently, makes them a laughing stock in situation comedy and movies.

Universities are better than ever. Our public education system in America is terrible. The university level is fairly solid. But I differentiate between 'great" and "regular" religious universities because you have respectable universities that produce students that graduate with fundamental understandings of the fields that they go in. Then we have the creationist """""universities""""" that aren't actually creating well informed students but simply passing on "experts" to force their own opinions into science. Lucky for us they actually aren't taken seriously in the scientific communities.

Though the way you are trying to define how we should learn and what we should study has never been done in the past. The "great" universities that you are thinking of in the past still don't agree with you in terms of "choosing". True classical education, which was interesting and great and all, wasn't as effective at passing down the applicable skills and information that we need to do in todays specialized world.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Sure. All elements come from hydrogen

WHAT!!!??

WHAT!!!??

Not far off

It most certainly is "far off". All elements do not "come from hydrogen" in any sense, including reference to particle physics or the big bang. Almost 2 minutes after the big bang (according to the Standard Model), the first elements were able to form, and hydrogen was one of these, but it formed alongside the others and it is composed (made from) the same things that other were then and are now. Simplistically, electrons, neutrons, and protons (that's the grade school version and good enough for our purposes). That hydrogen is so abundant doesn't mean other elements "come from it". Nor does the small number of atomic constituents somehow make this statement sensical, as apart from anything else the most common isotope doesn't have any neutrons (deuterium does, but the elements do not come from this isotope of hydrogen nor any other).

Almost the whole of particle physics is devoted to explaining what atomic structures "come from" in terms not only of particles but of forces, and it was changes two both that allowed elements (and atoms) to form, and it will be changes to both that will eventually- ~10^100 years - result in the return to a universe of particles (only instead of extremely hot, brilliant, & dense it will be cold, dark, and sparse).

 

[Mohammad Nur Syamsu]

Universities are better than ever. Our public education system in America is terrible. The university level is fairly solid. But I differentiate between 'great" and "regular" religious universities because you have respectable universities that produce students that graduate with fundamental understandings of the fields that they go in. Then we have the creationist """""universities""""" that aren't actually creating well informed students but simply passing on "experts" to force their own opinions into science. Lucky for us they actually aren't taken seriously in the scientific communities.

Though the way you are trying to define how we should learn and what we should study has never been done in the past. The "great" universities that you are thinking of in the past still don't agree with you in terms of "choosing". True classical education, which was interesting and great and all, wasn't as effective at passing down the applicable skills and information that we need to do in todays specialized world.

My idea about choosing is standard religion and standard philosophy since forever.

If it is not standard then you must point to a religion which 1 does not accept the soul chooses 2. Does not regard the existence of the soul as a matter of opinion.

For example if you find religion in which the existence of the soul is regarded as a matter of fact, then that would disprove the assertion that the idea about choosing same as mine is pretty much universally accepted in religion.

For example there is religion in which the weight of the soul is measured to be 21 grams. That denies the existence of the soul is a matter of opinion, because it can be measured. But such beliefs are exception and generally not accepted in official doctrines.

Even in ancient Egypt they broadly followed the concept of the soul, which soul is judged. It is very universal.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Buddy, you are not making any sense at all.

Evolution is at its heart a matter of fitness. While the definition of fitness is (especially in recent years) somewhat a matter of disagreement, essentially it is a measure of an organisms propensity/ability to produce offspring (the most common definition is actually not a matter of propensity but defined in terms of actual offspring, but the point is the same: the better adapted its environment an organism is, the more likely it is to survive long enough to reproduce and succeed in doing so).

Variability is plentiful in part because environments very over space and time. Thus traits that increase an organisms fitness in one environment would be maladaptive in another. However, among the most common and certainly most "fit" organisms on the planet are those that are also the oldest. The "vast diversity" we find is because many traits are "selected" given a specific environment. The most famous example is perhaps Darwin's finches. The changes in the beaks size and structure were the result of evolutionary processes that selected out those finches in a particular environment with beaks that better enabled them to access food in that environment.

Not all adaptive traits are that specific, or anywhere near that specific. We do not have antibodies that are specific to X or Y pathogen. Rather, particular cells assemble gene fragments together to form a custom-made antibody specific to a given pathogen.

The more an organism is able to survive with minimal variation in maximally variable environments, the less variability we will find. It turns out that the organisms which are in fact the least variable are also those which are able to survive with minimal variation in maximally variable environments, because the traits they possess that enable their survival depend minimally on the specific environment (they are generally "adaptive"). So, while fitness functions are evaluated specific to specific environment, this is because for the most part evolution has tended towards the selection of environmentally specific adaptive traits and thus decreased "general fitness".

Evolution has no direction. The term is misleading, in fact, because before the theory and still today (outside of its relation to evolutionary theory) it implies progress (or change in a positive/better/superior direction). Species both increase AND decrease in complexity over time. The vast majority of life is utterly incapable of the kind of learning that anything with a cortex has, because like virtually every other even so general a trait as is intelligence, it is not so universally beneficial that all species evolve to be more and more intelligent. Too often, we think of evolution as a process of change and adaption itself rather than the success of changes/mutations and how/whether resulting traits are adaptive.

Why has a process which is defined for the most part by the mechanisms through which the "fit" survive resulted in a vast decrease in the average fitness among species due in no small part to the "vast diversity" we find among life forms?

 

[gnostic]

That was a wrong information as punishment was against the tribe of Noah and not for the whole world, similarly God punished the tribe of Lot for their awful deeds.

My understanding is that Lot is related to Abraham, in the Qur'an, and not to the residents of either Sodom or Gomorrah. Lot was not of their tribes despite moving there.

 

[Monk Of Reason]

My idea about choosing is standard religion and standard philosophy since forever.

Except never. But whatever.,

If it is not standard then you must point to a religion which 1 does not accept the soul chooses 2. Does not regard the existence of the soul as a matter of opinion.

For example if you find religion in which the existence of the soul is regarded as a matter of fact, then that would disprove the assertion that the idea about choosing same as mine is pretty much universally accepted in religion.

Christianity states that you have an immortal soul for a fact.

For example there is religion in which the weight of the soul is measured to be 21 grams. That denies the existence of the soul is a matter of opinion, because it can be measured. But such beliefs are exception and generally not accepted in official doctrines.

Actually there was a single guy that tried to measure the weight of the body both before and after death. He was a Christian. It wasn't a religion based off of a 21 gram soul. But it has largely been disproven by more accurate scales in modern times

Even in ancient Egypt they broadly followed the concept of the soul, which soul is judged. It is very universal.

True. The idea of a soul or a soul like thing exists almost all around the world.

 

[JayJayDee]

Sorry, haven't had time to read the whole thread but I am interested in the topic.

To my logic....intelligent design requires an intelligent designer.

What implements do humans use for a specific purpose wasn't designed and assembled by other humans? We don't expect to pick our wristwatches off a tree or our smartphones from a bush do we?

Even a simple mousetrap requires a semi-intelligent mind to assemble the components in the correct order. The components themselves, no matter how simple, needed someone to design them and the assembly then makes the product usable.

Think about a computer. How many components are required to make a working model that achieves all the tasks that it was designed to perform? If you threw all the components together in a washing machine for millions of years, what are the odds that a fully functioning computer would emerge at the end?

Even if you have all the components just come together by ransom chance (more zeros than would fit in a thick Encyclopedia) would the computer work without a power source? Did the power source need to be constructed by someone? Did it require further effort to bring the power to the computer...we could go on and on.....but you catch my drift. Just the human brain alone, more complex than any super-computer, could never be the product of blind chance. Not to mention the other amazing systems operating in living beings.

Organic evolution does not exist as a proven fact....it is human theory based on limited human thinking and pseudo-science. It is quite simply not provable by any scientific method other than educated guessing and speculation. Read the papers and articles for yourself and see how many times the words and phrasing are suggestion, guesses...not fact. "Might have" "could have" and "this leads us to believe that..." Are not scientific facts, but pure speculation.

Every piece of "evidence" that I have seen as an example of organic evolution proved to be "adaptation" within a species and stretched beyond reasonable limits to "prove" science has the answers. It clearly doesn't....regardless of the scientific jargon used to describe it.

If this ability to adapt to the environment is programmed into the genetics of all created beings, then what is the problem with believing in a super-intelligent designer? Who can quantify God? Who are mere humans to relegate him to the realms of fantasy and declare that we don't need him to explain our existence?

Are we only trying to prove our own superiority....that we are too smart to acknowledge him? Do we need him to go away so we don't have to follow his commands?

Whatever the reason...it is a complete and utter waste of time to squabble about it. If God exists...we owe him something. If he doesn't, our existence and future are looking pretty bleak. We can only expect more of the same.....doesn't exactly inspire confidence does it?

 

[metis]

Ya know, I had a great childhood, had lots of fun, looked forward to most days, but I never much worried about whether I was going to heaven or hell. My father brought me up often stating this to me: "live each day as if it were your last because some day it will be". Now I'm 69 years "young", and I really don't even think about the supposed afterlife.

Therefore, when I breathe my last breath, I'll have no regrets, and if there's some sort of heaven and I qualify, that'll be just "gravy" to me. If not, that's quite OK too. My main focus in life is to enjoy life, help my grandkids enjoy life, and just try to help out others whenever I can.

 

[Lyndon]

Seventh day Adventists, and Jehovah's Witnesses do not believe in the soul, they believe when you die, you sleep entirely unconscious till the resurrection, when God miraculously recreates your rejuvenated body from scratch. A bit hard from me to swallow, but interesting nonetheless.

 

[Sapiens]

Sorry, haven't had time to read the whole thread but I am interested in the topic.

Then I suggest that you do so prior to reeling off bizarre opinions and subject that you are "interested" in in such a desultory fashion.

To my logic....intelligent design requires an intelligent designer.

And what about non-intelligent design? Is a intelligent designer required to tell each and every stream, trickle, creek, river and current where and when to flow or can we leave that up to gravity and the shape of the topography?

What implements do humans use for a specific purpose wasn't designed and assembled by other humans? We don't expect to pick our wristwatches off a tree or our smartphones from a bush do we?

Many, starting with clubs.

Even a simple mousetrap requires a semi-intelligent mind to assemble the components in the correct order. The components themselves, no matter how simple, needed someone to design them and the assembly then makes the product usable.

Yes, a spring style mousetrap is designed by a person, but my favorite mousetrap, a cat is not.

Think about a computer. How many components are required to make a working model that achieves all the tasks that it was designed to perform? If you threw all the components together in a washing machine for millions of years, what are the odds that a fully functioning computer would emerge at the end?

I'd say that the odds approach zero, why are you proposing such a damn fool experiment anyway?

Even if you have all the components just come together by ransom chance (more zeros than would fit in a thick Encyclopedia) would the computer work without a power source? Did the power source need to be constructed by someone? Did it require further effort to bring the power to the computer...we could go on and on.....but you catch my drift. Just the human brain alone, more complex than any super-computer, could never be the product of blind chance. Not to mention the other amazing systems operating in living beings.

I know of no one who has ever suggested that either a computer or a human brain were the product of blind chance, do you? Please tell me who (and when).

Organic evolution does not exist as a proven fact....it is human theory based on limited human thinking and pseudo-science. It is quite simply not provable by any scientific method other than educated guessing and speculation. Read the papers and articles for yourself and see how many times the words and phrasing are suggestion, guesses...not fact. "Might have" "could have" and "this leads us to believe that..." Are not scientific facts, but pure speculation.

There you are simply wrong, but that is likely because you've been fed a line of BS like the foolishness you've been spouting up to now concerning computer parts and washing machines. Evolution holds the rank of a "theory," Please go learn what a scientific theory is and report back. As far as "the words and phrasing" of scientific papers are concerned, that stems not from confusion or a lack of surety but rather from politeness and a long tradition that requires the use of the third person and the passive voice.

Every piece of "evidence" that I have seen as an example of organic evolution proved to be "adaptation" within a species and stretched beyond reasonable limits to "prove" science has the answers. It clearly doesn't....regardless of the scientific jargon used to describe it.

It is rather difficult to refute a claim that is not really made. Please provide a specific example.

If this ability to adapt to the environment is programmed into the genetics of all created beings, then what is the problem with believing in a super-intelligent designer? Who can quantify God? Who are mere humans to relegate him to the realms of fantasy and declare that we don't need him to explain our existence?

The primary issue is that there is no need to invoke such a thing. What you are engaged in here is what is know as a logical fallacy, specifically, an "argument from ignorance." Look it up.

Are we only trying to prove our own superiority....that we are too smart to acknowledge him? Do we need him to go away so we don't have to follow his commands?

No, we have no evidence of any sort of the existence of such a being. Those who claim to believe in such a being must tie themselves up in all sorts of illogical knots in order to try and make a case for it.

Whatever the reason...it is a complete and utter waste of time to squabble about it. If God exists...we owe him something. If he doesn't, our existence and future are looking pretty bleak. We can only expect more of the same.....doesn't exactly inspire confidence does it?

That's also a logical fallacy, this time know as a false dichotomy.

Son, your education is sorely lacking and your preacher based sources are idiots who have ill prepared you to venture forth and argue their case.