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The Believabliltiy of Evolution

gnostic

gnostic

The Lost One
cladking said:
How would they live? Why would a tree grow in a rocky crack on a mountain side for no reason?

You ignored the evidence I cited to show yew trees are conscious and tree roots. Almost every single bit of evidence and logic I cite are all ignored.
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What do you mean by, “for no reason”?

How do you think that tree get there? By “consciously” walking there and planting itself in that crack of the mountain? By magic? How?

And why do you think trees are “conscious”?
 
W

Wildswanderer

Veteran Member
rrobs said:
I can understand how an intelligent individual may have problems with the creation account in Genesis. What I don't understand is how that same intelligent individual has no problem whatsoever believing everything we see in the world somehow came from the so-called primordial soup.

Not only must a particular life form spontaneously arise, but the other organisms upon which it depends must have arisen in lock step. And what are the odds of the flora arising in the required sequence as that of the fauna which depends on that flora? That is more believable than Genesis?

Science is based on observation. Who has ever seen one genus becoming another? Nobody! It's purely inference which is only slightly better than guessing. It is a model that admittedly could be said to fit with some observed phenomena, but there is perhaps a better model that nobody has thought of yet. A model is a model. It is not necessarily a reality.

If one does not believe Genesis it seems it would be better to just say, "I don't know how we all got here."
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There are so many gaps in the evolution theory it's absurd to expect people to just buy it wholeheartedly.
 
shunyadragon

shunyadragon

shunyadragon
Premium Member
cladking said:
...And on this note, this truth, I think I'll try to take a little break. It's become obvious that believers in science can run rampant and nobody can call them on it.
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Without 'objective verifiable evidence' to the contrary, science remains science, an objective evolution of knowledge of our physical existence.

Note: The computers and internet could not exist without science.
 
It Aint Necessarily So

It Aint Necessarily So

Veteran Member
Premium Member
tas8831 said:
It is amazing to me how proud religious zealots are of their spectacular ignorance.
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I think that they're merely that they don't know what they don't know, and see themselves as having equally valid opinions. They aren't aware that other people have knowledge that allows them to know things they do not and cannot. We see it frequently on these threads, and it isn't limited to creationists. Consider the anti-vaxxers. They are spectacularly ignorant as well, but they don't see it that way. They just aren't aware of what critical thinking is or can do regarding knowledge, so they are unaware that they aren't doing the same thing as others, don't know that they can know things that they would just have to guess about and assume that others are doing the same, and so believe that their opinions are equally valid.

Isn't that the basis of the Dunning-Kruger syndrome?

exchemist said:
Like a lot of this creationist boilerplate it only works rhetorically in front of an audience that knows nothing about science. Like fellow creationists, in fact.
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Agree. What many apologists here on RF don't seem to understand that their apologetics has an effect the opposite of the one that they are used to it having in their religious bubbles. There, it gives a veneer of respectability to those that cannot evaluate their arguments, and who want reassurance that their views are also scientific and evidence-based. It's part of a two-pronged approach to attempt to achieve parity with science, this being that religion has science, the other being that science is religion, that is, also faith-based.

So, an argument that would satisfy another faith-based thinker with little scientific understanding has the opposite effect when delivered to a mixed audience that contains critical thinkers with a degree of scientific prowess. It just confirms for the latter that he is right and the apologist wrong. I don't think that they understand that. It's the Dunning-Kruger thing - not knowing what others can know, and falsely thinking that their arguments can be dispatched with pretty much out of hand as soon as they say something like the comment tas8831 was replying to. Would rrobb have posted that comment if he knew the effect it would have on his ethos, or perceptions about him distinct from the message itself that might undermine his credibility?

Wildswanderer said:
There are so many gaps in the evolution theory it's absurd to expect people to just buy it wholeheartedly.
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I am aware of no gaps in the theory. Perhaps you are referring to gaps in knowledge about the path from, say, man's last common ancestor with the chimps to modern man, or any other pathway that evolution took. The theory isn't an attempt to fill in that knowledge, but merely to describe the mechanism that caused it - natural selection applied to genetic variation between generations over time. The steps are for others to fill in, perhaps physical anthropologists or paleontologists. The task may turn out to be difficult or impossible. How do we decide if a given extinct hominid is an ancestor or a sibling or cousin of an ancestor - a branch from our pedigree that went extinct?

Do you see any gaps in the creationist account, such as why all those extinct fossils exist, or how one goes from dust to a man?
 
W

Wildswanderer

Veteran Member
It Aint Necessarily So said:
are referring to gaps in knowledge about the path from, say, man's last common ancestor with the chimps to modern man, or any other pathway that evolution took. The theory isn't an attempt to fill in that knowledge, but merely to describe the mechanism that caused it - natural selection applied to genetic variation between generations over time. The steps are for others to fill in, perhaps physical anthropologists or paleontologists. The task may turn out to be difficult or impossible. How do we decide if a given extinct hominid is an ancestor or a sibling or cousin of an ancestor - a branch from our pedigree that went extinct?
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Or, there's no such animal and we aren't animals at all. There's plenty of room for error in the so called branches, who are mostly twigs with no plain connections, based on tiny fragments if bones from extinct animals that we actually know little about.
 
metis

metis

aged ecumenical anthropologist
Wildswanderer said:
You mean the guesswork of evolution theory.
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No, we don't do "guesswork", and "theory" in the scientific sense means something quite different than within the general population. There's gravitational theory, for example, and anyone who has fallen well knows that gravity exists.

And evolution stands to plain old common sense, namely that all things appear to change over time, and genes and life forms are material things.
 
W

Wildswanderer

Veteran Member
metis said:
No, we don't do "guesswork", and "theory" in the scientific sense means something quite different than within the general population. There's gravitational theory, for example, and anyone who has fallen well knows that gravity exists.
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No, we only know what it does.

"However, if we are to be honest, we do not know what gravity "is" in any fundamental way - we only know how it behaves. "

That's from NASA.
 
metis

metis

aged ecumenical anthropologist
Wildswanderer said:
No, we only know what it does.

"However, if we are to be honest, we do not know what gravity "is" in any fundamental way - we only know how it behaves. "

That's from NASA.
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You miss the point as those of us don't know everything, but we do know the essence of the evolutionary process and have done so for well over a century.
 
W

Wildswanderer

Veteran Member
metis said:
And evolution stands to plain old common sense, namely that all things appear to change over time,
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They adapt, they don't gain entirely new functions from nowhere. If it's not already in the DNA it cannot be added on. That's like saying a car can be made over into a Boeing 747 without adding any extra parts.
 
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