Well I thought it might help you to understand that large numbers of Christians and other theists believe in evolution too,
Which might be a valid point if not for the fact that you can't be a believer in the Bible and also a believer in minerals to man evolution.
It strikes against very core foundational aspects in both the old and new testament which clearly show that:
a) Death did not originally exist.
b) Death entered into the world by sin.
c) God, as Jesus, rescued us by sacrificing Himself in our place, so that we may have eternal life again.
d) One day death will cease to exist.
You can't get any more foundational than that. It is the reason everything exists. It is the reason why we do what we do. It is the reason why God does what He does. It sums up all of mankind's history from beginning to end as far as our temporary mortal existence goes. You cannot remove that from your worldview and theology without ceasing to be a Christian by any meaningful definition of the word. You'd cease to believe in anything that would Biblicly or historically define you as a Christian.
To say that death always existed, and to even make death the hero of the story by asserting that mankind came into being thanks to death (ie. the unproven hypothesis of natural selection causing simple organisms to supposedly evolve into mankind), is fundamentally and absolutely incompatible with the most basic and important message of the Bible.
Which is why minerals to man evolution is an inherently atheistic theology in the context of the western world where you had people who were atheists pushing the idea of evolution as a counter explanation for the creation of mankind in opposition to a Biblical worldview.
but when I saw you start trying to disprove evolution by disproving things which even if false would still not disprove evolution such as abiogenesis,
Your statement is not only demonstrably false, but also guilty of commiting the fallacies of "strawman" and "argument by assertion".
A strawman because it's not an accurate representation of what I actually argued.
1. I didn't only bring up abiogenesis of inorganic matter to organic organisms as proof that minerals to man evolution is unproven.
2. I also pointed out that there is no evidence for, and no known mechanism by which the informational coding language of DNA could arise out of nothing by random chance.
3. Further, I pointed out that you have no evidence of one kind of animal transforming into another kind, with new coding information being created.
Then your statement is is an assertion fallacy because you merely assert that my point about abiogenesis can't disprove the minerals to man evolution hypothesis without giving any reasons why that would be the case. Your claim isn't true just because you assert it is.
And finally, your statement isn't even true.
Because, by definition, if abiogenesis is not true then the evolutionary theology of minerals to man evolution is entirely impossible because you don't have a mechanism by which inorganic minerals and first turn into living organisms so that then natural selection can supposedly take over to produce more complex organisms.
Because you have no mechanism by which mankind could arise from nothing by chance you are then forced to have a special creation event at some point to explain the emergence of life.
Now, it's true to say that disproving abiogenesis doesn't disprove the claim that fish can transform into man. But that's not the only issue I was addressing, which was minerals to man evolutionary theology as a whole.
But even then your point still is invalid because I also pointed out that you have no observational evidence that would allow you to say it's possible for fish to transform into a man.
The mere existence of man becomes the only evidence advocates for abiogenesis have to prove it happened because they assume God doesn't exist and therefore they proclaim "well, if God didn't create man, then abiogenesis must have happened somehow, even though we can't explain how it would happen".
So they embrace abiogenesis for no other reason than they have no alternative. It is purely a religious belief on their part. An atheistic religious belief by definition. Because it assumes they know God doesn't exist. That's the only way they can conclude abiogenesis must have happened.
And they aren't even unaware of this problem. Which is why Dawkins is willing to speculate that maybe life was seeded on this planet by aliens from somewhere else.
But all that does is move the question of how life originated off one planet and onto another, hoping that maybe other planets will provide evidence for abiogenesis because you know full well you can't find that evidence on earth.
I realised you need a seperate thread... to straighten your views on it.
Your statement implies that what you assume what you believe is true and assume that what I believe is false.
An arrogant position to take considering you're the only one between the two of us that hasn't produced a single valid argument in support of your belief about evolution.
I can state now that you would never be able to provide valid arguments or evidence to disprove what I said because your claim that anything I said was in error isn't true.
I welcome you attempting to - even if you have to start a new thread for it.
Well for starters because certain religious people don't seem very good at thinking outside boxes of prepackaged beliefs. We are not all either Christian/right wing/religious or nonreligious/left/communist/nazi, and legislating on that basis would condemn large swathes of the nonreligious population without even understanding them, all on the basis of right wing fear and smear.
I don't understand what you are trying to say. I think the issue is that you're using a lot of terms with implied meanings and assumptions behind them.
I'd like to understand why you think western society would be better off "drifting away from religion" as the basis for it's morals. But I can't understand what you mean by your latest statement without understanding the meanings and definitions behind what you're saying.
If you could answer these questions then I believe I'd have a much better understanding of what you're saying:
Legislating what exactly?
And on what basis exactly are you saying something is legislated?
And how would legislating on that basis condemn anyone?
What do you even mean by the word condemn? What happens to them?
What do you mean by understanding them?
Why does that change the equation?
What exactly is "right wing fear and smear", and how is that relevent to the equation?
How does "thinking outside the box" relate to all this?
And why do you think a Christian would have that problem but an atheist wouldn't?
Precisely, a bad atheist worldview as opposed to an atheist or non-religious worldview based in compassion which is good will result in attrocities, but numerous atheists and or non-religious people have worldviews based in compassion and tolerance and are as good as religions based on compassion and tolerance.
The premise of your statement is untrue. Ie: The implied claim that the difference between a "good religious worldview" and a bad one is "compassion and tolerance".
By definition, tolerance and compassion are not automatically good.
It depends entirely on what you advocate tolerating and having compassion towards.
For example:
I think we can agree that tolerating the random murder of innocent children is not good for society.
So it's false to just claim that tolerance is a virtue.
Quite the opposite actually: tolerance is actually a bad thing if what you're tolerating is evil and injustice.
In fact, in the Bible we see God condemn Israel for their tolerance of injustice and evil in their midst. For which judgement comes upon them to wipe away the evil of their society, righting the wrongs that they have been tolerating for too long.
The fact is, you can't even talk about whether or not tolerance and compassion are a virtue or a vice in any instance without first being able to make a moral judgement about whether or not a given activity is objectively right or wrong.
Actually it was based on Eugenics, and one need not believe in Eugenics to believe in natural selection/evolution.
Your statement is a fallacy of "irrelevant conclusion". What you are stating is not relevant to disproving what I said.
I didn't say you needed to believe in eugenics if you believed in natural selection.
I said you needed to believe in natural selection to believe in eugenics.
You got them reversed.
Belief in natural selection as the origin of man is a necessary prerequisite for eugenics. Which by it's very definition uses natural selection as it's basis for claiming that humanity can be improved by killing off those deemed weaker or undesirable.
In fact, it's hard to say you don't believe in eugenics by default if you really believe in natural selection as the origin of life and are an atheist too. Because even if you don't belief in it in the sense of wanting to do it or thinking it's good (because your natural moral predispositions are repulsed by it) - logically you can't deny the concept is valid from a logical standpoint if your only moral compass in life is atheistic natural selection. Eugenics is one of the natural logical conclusions of your worldview. And as an atheist you would have no moral basis though for telling others they would be morally wrong to follow that worldview to it's natural conclusion like the nazis did.
Well i'll let the atheists speak for themselves on that but I think that many atheists can argue against that if their worldviews are based on compassion and reciprocity.
And I would be able to show why they have no logical basis for any of the moral positions they try to hold to.
Even well known public atheist figures like Hitchens couldn't do it.
I guarantee you that whatever atheists you met couldn't either, when properly challenged to support their conclusions with valid reasons.
Humans became more dominant precisely because they evolved as a social compassionate species, if we gave away our virtues we would become inferior genetically to animals, I'll see if I can dig up a good article on this for you.
Try this one if you have the time;
The Biological Basis of Morality It gets really interesting from under the title "The Origin of Moral Instincts"
Your statement and article is irrelevant to the point you were responding to.
The point I made was that natural selection can't make value judgements - it can only measure the success or failure of an organism to procreate.
But I could name a lot of things that results in increased procreation or a reduction in your competition that you absolutely would not agree is a moral thing to do.
Like murdering all those of an opposing race like the nazis did, or forcibly inseminating a huge swath of the Asian continent like Gengis Khan is believed to have done.
So that proves your belief is in contradiction with itself. Since natural selection can only measure the success of passing on your genes relative to others, and since not every activity that fits that definition is something you would agree qualifies as morally good.
That is why all kinds of evil results from a worldview based in natural selection as the origin of life. Especially when combined with atheism because then your worldview allows you to really throw off any sense of moral restraint other than what makes you more successful at eliminating competition and procreating more.
Ideas have consequences. We act based on what we believe.
