Why do humans have genes for full body hair?

[TagliatelliMonster]

I get to decide God exists, it's called faith

"I get to decide leprechauns exist, it's called faith".

Good argument, you got there..............

Nothing has demonstrated that God does not exist of course

Just like nothing has demonstrated that leprechauns don't exist.

Fortunately, the burden of proof does not work that way.
Claims aren't to be accepted, or even contemplated, simply because they weren't proven wrong.

Having said that: gods are impossible to disprove because they are unfalsifiable.

And unfalsifiable claims are USELESS and MEANINGLESS

They are infinite in number, only limited by your imagination.

Just ask my undetectable pet dragon.

and you don't need to demonstrate that, and you don't, you just reject evidence for God.

We've seen your "evidence". It consists of just claims.
Hearsay / anecdotes / testimony /.... = just claims.

Claims aren't evidence. Claims require evidence.

Science has explained a lot we did not know.

And none of it supports belief in undetectable entities or anything "supernatural".


Au contraire.... historically, every time science tackled a phenomenon which was attributed to gods / spirits / other supernatural shenannigans, it only demonstrated natural causes and that gods / spirits / what-have-you in fact had nothing to do with it.

 

[Wildswanderer]

No. The majority, even among christians, have no issue with evolution theory.

But the vast majority believe in a creator God.

 

[Dan From Smithville]

But the vast majority believe in a creator God.

Are you familiar with argumentum ad populum?

What is argued may be true, but the number that believe it is irrelevant to demonstrating that.

There are 8 billion people on Earth. About 2.2 billion identify as Christian. That's about 4 to 1 against Christianity by your way of thinking and demonstrates against Christianity using your logic.

I don't accept that, but this is your work I'm going by.

 

[Wildswanderer]

Are you familiar with argumentum ad populum?

What is argued may be true, but the number that believe it is irrelevant to demonstrating that.

There are 8 billion people on Earth. About 2.2 billion identify as Christian. That's about 4 to 1 against Christianity by your way of thinking and demonstrates against Christianity using your logic.

I don't accept that, but this is your work I'm going by.

Irrelevant. The vast majority of humans believe in a creator.

 

[Brian2]

The burden of proof is on the person making the claim that there is order and purpose in the universe, created by the specific god you worship. It's not on anyone else to prove it wrong. It's your job to demonstrate that it's true.
Please, please explain to my why you cannot comprehend this. Please.

Why do you think I don't understand that?
Why do you think that I want to make God into a hypothesis of science. That is something that ID might want to do, not me. I just point stuff out. It is anathema in science to say that design in the DNA is or even might be the handiwork of a designer, even though that is what it looks like. I have to first show a designer exists before I can point out that stuff looks like it is designed. I could say that an evidence for a designer is that stuff like DNA looks like it is designed. But I can only use that for my personal faith and those who accept only what science does are not going to see that as evidence.

 

[Brian2]

It is not chance alone or even significant in every step.

Using science, we can only conclude what there is evidence and reason to conclude. There is no room to include belief in this due to the subjective nature of believed views. This means that everyone does have the same evidence and conclusions even if some refuse to acknowledge and recognize that. Or use logical fallacies to justify distorted views of reality to themselves and attempt to with others.

You can follow God and still accept science on a rational, practical level. Neither has to compromise the other if a person is not locked in some box that supersedes God and demands that life be viewed through some preconceived human notion.

If life arose through natural means it was not completely under the control of blind chance. It could not be. Blind chance would go in too many directions to achieve the patterns of living things we see today. The patterns of living things, of even the Earth, do not support blind chance as the sole creative force. Chance plays a part, but it is limited and without selection.

If life arose thought natural means, as the evidence suggests, that does not mean that God does not exist nor does it mean that He had no hand in it. The reality is that we cannot say that God didn't use natural means to create and the story in Genesis is an allegory of that with hyperbolic description to emphasize that creation to a primitive culture with limited education.

The evidence for the existence of God is unavailable to us. The only thing I see from those that reject the facts are personal incredulity, arguments from ignorance and behavior that is not becoming of a follower of Christ.

OK not just through chance but through chance and rules of natural selection and laws of physics etc but wait, with no God all these are the result of chance also. So the big picture is chance even though there are chance mechanisms and laws etc also.
And yes it is easy to display behaviour unbecoming of a follower of Christ while in the midst of all of this. It is regrettable and hopefully does not happen too often. There is strain when being attacked by half a dozen people at once who repeat the same stuff and make their posts as long as possible so that if you wanted to answer them you would have to spend all day on the computer, only to find out that the next day there are even more and longer posts to answer. It a strategy to shut you down and waste your time I'm sure.
You don't seem to have the need to worry about all that.

 

[Brian2]

What did that ever explain? It was always just a claim. And as time goes on there are fewer and fewer "God did it" claims.

It does not matter about all those silly "God of the gaps" superstitions people had, it is what God has said "I did that" which counts.

It was Christians that said that prayer is effective. Tests indicate otherwise. One should not make claims of that sort without clear evidence.

You can't make God into the subject of testing as if God is a thing. That is expecting from science what it cannot deliver.

You did it wrong.

What do you mean?

 

[Brian2]

Just like nothing has demonstrated that leprechauns don't exist.

Fortunately, the burden of proof does not work that way.
Claims aren't to be accepted, or even contemplated, simply because they weren't proven wrong.

Having said that: gods are impossible to disprove because they are unfalsifiable.

And unfalsifiable claims are USELESS and MEANINGLESS

They are infinite in number, only limited by your imagination.

Just ask my undetectable pet dragon.

Yes I know these things, you pet dragon keeps telling me, and I keep repeating stuff to. It gets tiring. There is evidence for God and for the Bible God and it is the evidence of faith, or I could put it that faith is the evidence that God and the Bible are true.
Unfalsifiable claims does not mean the claims are not true (just ask you pet dragon) and it is amazing how easy it is to decide which unfalsifiable claims are worth considering and which are not.

We've seen your "evidence". It consists of just claims.
Hearsay / anecdotes / testimony /.... = just claims.

Claims aren't evidence. Claims require evidence.

Not for me. The claims are the evidence and all the attempts by skeptics to show that the claims are rubbish do nothing for me and when I consider the attacks and the silly arguments used and the number of attacks it only shows me that Satan is real.

And none of it supports belief in undetectable entities or anything "supernatural".


Au contraire.... historically, every time science tackled a phenomenon which was attributed to gods / spirits / other supernatural shenannigans, it only demonstrated natural causes and that gods / spirits / what-have-you in fact had nothing to do with it.

It is only those things which God has said, "I did that" which matter. The rest are superstitions of people and it is good that they were blown away. But of course a natural mechanism does not mean that God was not needed, so science has NOT demonstrated that God had nothing to do with it. That is just a skeptic argument that is false.

 

[Subduction Zone]

It does not matter about all those silly "God of the gaps" superstitions people had, it is what God has said "I did that" which counts.

Your God is one of those "silly superstitions". And when did he ever say anything? Sorry, but the Noah's Ark myth sinks you when you make such claims.

You can't make God into the subject of testing as if God is a thing. That is expecting from science what it cannot deliver.

You mean that you can't. You are now stating that there can't be any evidence for God.

What do you mean?

You did not use the same reasoning that others used against you.

 

[metis]

Well, the question to some here is who designed the "designer"? If one says that the "designer" was not designed, then we're right back to square one.

My point is that none of us was old enough to go back to the "beginning"-- or was there even a "beginning"?

OTOH, faith needs no proof.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

But the vast majority believe in a creator God.

Moving the goalpost, will not advance your case.

PS: the point was scientists. And it's simply not true that the "vast majority" of scientists believe in a "creator god". But not that it matters, because the discussion is about some vague god belief, but rather concerning very specific points about evolution.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

Irrelevant. The vast majority of humans believe in a creator.

So what?

100% of people could believe the earth is flat, and 100% of people would be wrong.

 

[SkepticThinker]

I did not agree that "God did it" does not have explanatory power.

Sure you did:

"God did it" does not explain how God created everything exactly no.

Spirit is non physical.

I just pointed out to you that you can't even define what spirit is, let alone demonstrate it's existence and therefore you can't describe any of it's attributes, and here you are trying to give it attributes. And you sure are quick to tell us what spirit isn't, but have yet to tell us what a spirit actually is. We don't generally define things by what they aren't.

If there was a conclusion that God did it, it would explain that life came from God and so it spirit based.

You'd still have to demonstrate what a spirit is and that they exist.

I get to decide God exists, it's called faith.

You get to decide if you believe that God exists.
Appealing to faith means that you've given up on evidence.

You get to reject that belief. We demonstrate to ourselves that our beliefs are true. I try to offer some sort of demonstration to skeptics that God is real but what I offer is not good enough. Nothing has demonstrated that God does not exist of course and you don't need to demonstrate that, and you don't, you just reject evidence for God.
Science has explained a lot we did not know.

Science has explained everything about everything we know about the universe and everything in it. Religion has done diddly squat in that department. Faith even less so.

Of course none of this addresses the point that "God did it" has zero explanatory power.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

There is evidence for God and for the Bible God and it is the evidence of faith, or I could put it that faith is the evidence that God and the Bible are true.

Nonsensical.
Faith is what you need to believe something when you have no evidence.

I don't require "faith" to believe that my keys will fall to earth if I drop them instead of shooting into space. Because I have actual evidence that they will.

And calling things "evidence" does not make them evidence.

For data to be evidence, first you need an actual verifiable & falsifiable model. Without such, you can't have any evidence by definition.

Your god claims are unfalsifiable.
Draw the obvious conclusion.

Unfalsifiable claims does not mean the claims are not true

But it does mean they are useless and indistinguishable from things that are NOT true.

What's the actual difference between an undetectable dragon and a dragon that doesn't exist?

(just ask you pet dragon) and it is amazing how easy it is to decide which unfalsifiable claims are worth considering and which are not.

NO unfalsifiable claims are worth considering, because by definition you have NO WAY to distinguish them from true or false things.

The undetectable and the non-existent, look very much alike.

One could even wonder why you would even make an unfalsifiable claim in the first place... imagination is the only place from which such claims can come.

Not for me. The claims are the evidence

Can you say "circular reasoning"?

My undetectable pet dragon exists.
That's the claim. According to you, that claim is also evidence of the truth of the claim.
So you should accept simply because I claim it to be so and apparently, that's evidence.

Do you think things through before you post?

and all the attempts by skeptics to show that the claims are rubbish do nothing for me

Only because you have already decided a priori that you are going to dogmatically believe those claims.
I call the claims rubbish, because
1. they are unfalsifiable
and
2. they have no evidence (they can't, being unfalsifiable and all...)

That's all.

and when I consider the attacks and the silly arguments used

Nothing I said about unfalsifiable claims, how meaningless such are and how they are indistinguishable from incorrect claims, is "silly".

What is "silly", is to believe such claims with such passion..........

and the number of attacks it only shows me that Satan is real.

For crying out loud...............................
So pointing out that a claim is unfalsifiable and has no evidence is "the work of the devil" now?

The further along this conversation goes, the more absurd it becomes.
I've stopped taking you seriously pages ago tbh

It is only those things which God has said, "I did that" which matter.

Yes, such things were tackled by science also and shown to have simple natural causes.
Your head-in-sand-denial notwithstanding.

It's not my fault that your religious dogma has closed your mind firmly to ANY evidence of the contrary. That's all on you.

I have a serious "leading a horse to water..." feeling here.

The rest are superstitions of people

Those "superstitions of people" were things that they believed their gods told them also.
Just like you believe when the bible says that god said X, you believe it's actually god saying X. In reality, it's a human who's claiming it and wrote it down.

God didn't write your bible right? It was humans, right?
So you are really just believing the words of men who claimed to be speaking for their god.
Just like all the other "superstitions" you were referring to.

But of course a natural mechanism does not mean that God was not needed

It actually does.

You could have a belief that a god is needed to make water turn into ice.
But discovering the process of "freezing" shows that you don't need a god for that at all.

Discovering natural causes / mechanisms for phenomenon demonstrates that gods, or any other agents, aren't required at all.

, so science has NOT demonstrated that God had nothing to do with it.
That is just a skeptic argument that is false.

Nope.

Science for example has explained sea storms and tides. How they occur, how they form and why.
To the point that we can actually also predict when they will occur, what path they'll take etc.

Did that not demonstrate that Poseidon isn't required for tides and storms to manifest?

 

[SkepticThinker]

If we got to the end of the line and natural explanations could not answer anything (creation, life) and it was admitted, then the alternative (God) explains a lot,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,and it has always done so,,,,,,,,,,,, so it is not a matter of becoming explanatory.

No, it doesn't. As already pointed out. "God did it" doesn't explain anything at all. It doesn't give us any measurements, observations, mechanisms - nothing. At all.

And my point was that "God did it" doesn't magically become true if an alternative explanation is falsified. You still have to actually demonstrate that God did it.

No I was not referring to prayer and studies on the effectiveness of prayer don't tell us that God does not answer prayer.

It tells us that prayers are "answered" at the rate of chance. Which is not evidence that God answers prayers.

Plugging anything in to take the place of God would be just like saying that God is that thing. It is only God who can create and give life. If you want to say that God is a flying spaghetti monster that is your prerogative.

Yep. And no matter what word or phrase you substitute in there, you've still got zero explanatory power.

Brian2 said: You could replace "god" with ""spaghetti monster" and you would just be saying that God is a spaghetti monster.
There of course is zero evidence that a spaghetti monster is real but there is evidence that a god is real.
There is no evidence that all of this came to be all by itself.
All this means that "God did it" has the most evidence.

Nope. This is terrible reasoning that attempts to shift the burden of proof, based on a strawman argument.

As you can see, you have done what skeptics commonly do and have dissembled what I said into parts so that the point of what I said is lost. I consider that to be dishonest.

LOL Is that why you thing I break it up like that? That's funny.

I get your point. You're just upset I'm not buying it.

But I suppose you may not realise what you are doing and may not even understand the whole quote of what I said.

Yeah, I'm just a dumb skeptic. Derp derp.

But it is a common practice amongst skeptics/atheists for some reason.

The reason is to address each of your points, one at a time. That's it. There's nothing nefarious about it.

So after a short post by me of a few lines, I end up with a lengthy reply because my post has been broken up into phrases so that the overall meaning is lost.

You're the one avoiding points here, dude.

 

[SkepticThinker]

There is evidence for God that is not scientific evidence. I believe it, you do not, and say that it is not real evidence, science cannot use it.
In today's science, scientific evidence is needed even if scientists accept evidence for God and believe in God.
You otoh accept only evidence that science accepts.

Another poster here has spent endless time explaining to you that empirical evidence is the only evidence that is actually useful to anybody, and in fact is the only evidence that has provided us with the knowledge of everything we know about the universe, and here you are just repeating this nonsense again.

And this is why you always end up on faith, when it comes right down to it.

 

[SkepticThinker]

Irrelevant. The vast majority of humans believe in a creator.

It's irrelevant that your claim is a logical fallacy? I don't think so.

 

[SkepticThinker]

Why do you think I don't understand that?
Why do you think that I want to make God into a hypothesis of science. That is something that ID might want to do, not me. I just point stuff out. It is anathema in science to say that design in the DNA is or even might be the handiwork of a designer, even though that is what it looks like. I have to first show a designer exists before I can point out that stuff looks like it is designed. I could say that an evidence for a designer is that stuff like DNA looks like it is designed. But I can only use that for my personal faith and those who accept only what science does are not going to see that as evidence.

Because you demonstrate it repeatedly.

You need to demonstrate that the universe is designed. That's your claim and your burden of proof. Attempting to poke holes in scientific theories does nothing to demonstrate the veracity of the claims you're making.

 

[SkepticThinker]

It does not matter about all those silly "God of the gaps" superstitions people had, it is what God has said "I did that" which counts.

You can't make God into the subject of testing as if God is a thing. That is expecting from science what it cannot deliver.


What do you mean?

How do we know the any god, let alone the specific God you believe in, has "said" anything at all?

 

[Wildswanderer]

So what?

100% of people could believe the earth is flat, and 100% of people would be wrong.

100 percent could believe God doesn't exist and 100 percent would be wrong. But they don't. There's something in the human psych that understands life isn't accidental... and the tiny percent of hold outs just confirm that people can be brain washed effectively.