Do you believe their was a worldwide flood?

"Reproducibility' refers to recreating circumstances.
"reproduction System" implies something like a Uterus.

But whatever, I can't see this conversation going anywhere.

 

So, there's no science in the reproduction system???

Col

 

What does a question like that even mean?

Science isn't an object. It doesn't 'exist' somewhere. Science is a philosophy. No wonder you have so much trouble with it....

Anything real can be approached scientifically. But to say that 'Science is in something' is meaningless.

 

I think you are pulling what I said out of context
I know science is not in things...LOL

Col

 

science is not a philosophy in the way your applying it aegist. Philosophy is thinking about a myriad of different things - your 'science' is a set of 'experiments' and 'analysis' of data - which supposedly draws ever closely to the 'truth' or at least a better understanding of how things work.

The problem is of course with evolution theory is

- it is near impossible to produce experiments which require a huge amount of time to prove their validity.
- they require the input of thought and application of intelligence - whereas your evolution is without thought and it mainly driven by DNA ever striving to reproduce itself (for what purpose!) and in doing so producing ever 'better' DNA for the environment niche
- that data can be interpreted in a number of ways - I know you say it should be interpreted in only one way - but lets be 100% honest here there is always more than one way to interpret just about anything

I wonder aegist what gives you meaning in life. You have an interest in extending life - longevity - a noble pursuit - and one which the Bible might allude to being ultimately successful (as it was in the days of Noah so it shall be when the son of man comes - I've always wondered if that meant like in Noah's day people will be living incredibly long lives - 900 years plus - this also poses a huge problem of evil people living that long as well).

But why extend life? You enjoy it. But then what? Would you like eternal life? I already believe I have it through Jesus Christ.

What gives you any purpose at all? What gives you morality? What gives you direction?

(Now thats philosophy - very different from your scientific evolution)

Yes some of your arguments pose interesting thought provoking material for creationists - not impossible barriers but certainly areas that need more serious thought - but I think you have brush over a lot of things that should have given you a second thought about evolution. I know people who were strong evolutionists yet became creationists - did they de-evolve - or did they see a different logic?

P.S. have you ever read the Bible cover to cover?

 

That's like asking somone if they've read the entire encyclopedia set as a precondition to discussing zebras with them.

Considering he was unaware of how many years that the animals had to migrate to the ark, I'd be more interested in him just reading up on what the Bible actually says about the flood. And then reading up on Christian web-sites that discuss the logistics of it and then coming back with questions about how they explain it.

If the animals were to travel 8 miles a day for 100 years (fewer years than they actually had) they could travel 8*365*100 = 292000 miles. The earth is 24,000 miles in circumference.

 

That's very reasonable to think that. The animals did not need to be sought and gathered. If one were to believe God existed and God did talk to Noah and God did give Noah the direction then why would God not use his holy spirit to arrange the animals to come to the ark?

I mean Noah had other work to do as well as building the ark. Don't forget the Bible says Noah had to also give the warning to the people living there to get into the ark. He was a very busy man back then.

Col

 

Bible ( or the one supplied....) is based on the life of people who live inbetween two rivers.
The Tigris and the Euphrates. They have the second largest ebbb and flow in the world varying by up to 24 feet.
An increase in the sea leavel of just an inch could have moved this up by 100 feet.
It is reasonable to assume that the sea level has changed over the last e.g
12507 years

 

I wasn't asking it as a pre-condition.

 

Science is a branch of philosophy. It is a pragmatic philosophy which relies on reproducable measurements and observations of the world around us.

Science is conducted as a combination of the two major elements of "data collection" and "Theory". Look at any scientific research paper and you will nearly always find 4 sections.
1: Introduction, the background theory.
2: Materials and Methods, Data as to how the experiment was conducted.
3: Results, Datas as to how the experiment turned out.
4: Discussion, Theory as to what the results mean in context of the methods and the background theory.

Science IS philosophy OF facts.

The beauty of the scientific method is that it will continue to collect facts, even if the philosophy is way off kilter. Regardless of whether the philosophy is right at the time or not, the facts will accumulate and inevitably erroneous theories will be overthrown. Like Creationism, which was over thrown by Darwinian evolution after the particulate inheritence theory of genetics was re-released in the early 1900s, solving the major criticism of darwinian evolution. And since then, like it or not, innumerably more facts have been collected on the subject, and NONE of them contradict Evolution.

So whether you like the theory of evolution or not ir irrelevent. Science has accumulated tons of facts, everyone of which could have overthrown the theory, yet none of them have.

This isn't true. The principle of replication, variation and selection has been mathematically proven. It has been simulated in computers, and it is regularly used to produce novel answers to questions and design technology.

having the theoretical aspect of it proven, the only question remaining is whether that theoretical concept is applicable to reality. Thanks to advances in molecular biology since the 1950's, it is without doubt that the way biology works is completely congruent with the theoretical concepts of evolution. That is, there is a replication of simple information, there is variation in that information, and there is a selective pressure.

Regardless of what creationists think, you don't need to witness the creation of a new 'Species' (whatever that actually is) in order to 'Prove' evolution is true.

Your assumption because you don't understand evolutionary theory at all well, and so do not understand the power of it. Evolution is Guess and Check on steroids. Unlike usual human guess and check, unlike 'intelligent' guess and check, evolution is not confined by imagination. It's only confine is current conditions + time. Every replication, every mutation, every change is a chance to create something novel, something unique, something remarkable. And then every time it does, that feature will most likely be recorded in the genetic record books for all history.

What you see now is the snowball affect of lucky mutations that happened 1 to 2 billion years ago, all rolled up into one amazing body.

There is no purpose. It is purposeless. but just like a ball will roll downhill (for what purpose?), so to will a replicating device replicate itself.

Absolutely. Just do the data justice, and actually interpret the data. As opposed to what creationists do, and that is: Interpret the BIBLE, and then pick and choose the data which might work with the conclusion they want.

I give myself meaning. My life is inherently meaningless, just as everything in the universe it without meaning. The brain is a meaning making machine, and every meaning we think something has, its all in the brain.

I want to live forever, because I enjoy making meaning, and so I wish to continue doing so. If I one day change my mind, then i might kill myself. But that is something for me to decide as I want.

I believe your beliefs are misguided and founded upon faith. (yes, I meant that as a negative). i want to extend my life because I know there is a lot more to learn, and I could be wrong. If I die being wrong, then who knows what mistakes I may have made. So I will continue seeking the truth, just incase the truth corrects some critical error I have made. Maybe Zeus is real afterall? I don't want to piss that guy off, i tell you!

Me (my biology more than anything).

My biology, in concert with the society I live in.

Me. (my brain chemistry which is a direct consequence of my genetics and my environment)

Sure, those questions were subjective questions. They were about what I think feel experience. Science only cares about the subject in an objective way. It is a fact that I thought that I felt that way. Science still requires philosophy to work. Never forget that.

Facts are like a bus timetable. Civilisations recorded the movement of the stars for millenia. They knew were the stars in the night sky were for 2000 years leading up to their time back in ancient babylon, and with that information, they could accurately predict where the moving stars (planets) would be forever into the future. this is an example of FACTS without theory. They knew the facts, but they had NO IDEA why. They described them as Gods moving through the sky, and other fanciful notions like that.

It wasn't until Ptolemy created the first theory of the motion of the mobile stars that you had your first theory. It was accurate, it explained the motion, it worked. Of course it was compeltely wrong, Epicycles are non-existent. But for the purposes of the time, they have the data, and they had a theory, and the two worked well together.

it took over a thousand years and the invention of the telescope to finally change that theory, because it needed the new facts (from the telescope) to prove some of the assumptions wrong of Ptolemy.

Evolution cannot be applied to a person. Not biologically, and certainly not to thought processes.

And just because you say someone was a 'strong evolutionist' doesn't mean that they actually were strongly for it (maybe you just thought they were, but they still hadn't made up their mind), but much more importantly, even if they were super strong for evolution, it doesn't mean they have a clue what they are talking about. I can support President bush like a zealot and not have any idea what he does, why he does it, what his motives are, what arguments are for or against him, etc. And then someone could show me Fahrenheit 911, and that is my first 'argument' I have ever encountered, and since it is my first argument, I find it very persuasive (I have no ammunition in my arsenal to combat the powerfully persuasive arguments Michael Moore has!), and so I quickyl become anti-bush.

Does that mean Michael moore is right? because he converted someone who was strongly for Bush into an anti-bush person?

no. It means very little, because the variable and the reasoning behind the conversion are in fact unknown to the outside observer.

No. i started, but it got boring. I have studied a lot from it, and I am probably more knowledgable about it than people who actually have read it cover to cover though.

 

Been there done that.

BTW, I am starting to wonder if you are delusional or something, because I have never mentioned the time taken to migrate to teh ark ever.....

 

You must have been very selective in your reading. There are some definite advances in science that had contradicted evolution or at least made its likelihood more difficult - e.g. the increasing understanding of how various chemicals, reactions and molecules work - particularly with regards to left and right handedness - I'm sure you'd heard of this before?

 

- Your step by step approach is one of the most difficult things for evolution to explain because - we seldom see a step by step in the fossil record (if evolution is right we should see this step by step)
- an eye is useless until properly evolved, likewise most 'advances' require much more than one mutation in the code.
This is one of the greatest arguments against evolution - that 90% of the steps need for mutation after mutation after mutation on the road to a beneficial outcome would hinder the advantage for the animal.
Some evolutionists recognize this as such a difficult problem they have abandoned a step by step approach and propose that evolution can only work if you have radical periods of huge evolution in a short space of time - like due to radiation or as the result of an asteroid impact, etc - Leaps in evolution.


other problems - symbiotic relationships that require but an animal and plant - what did the plant do for millions of years before animals were around

 

May I remind you that Sir Isaac Newton a theologian, God believing man and the fore-father of much modern science today wasn't picking and choosing data - he interpreted what he saw and then said he believe the clock like regularly of the universal laws of space, motion, etc lead him to believe in an intelligent designer.

 

Point taken. But I did want to illustrate that some people have looked at the data and changed their minds.

 

Of course there is science today that could later be proved wrong - including Einstein - speed of light being an absolute barrier - Christians believe this to be wrong - why - because Angels talk to God in heaven one minute and are earth the next - so most Christians don't believe in the speed of light being a barrier - if Christians proved this to be the case (re: light speed) - would you recognize that even Creation scientists might contribute to science better the an evolutionist scientist?

 

Nothing contradicts it. The central tennant of evolution stands unchallenged. There may be facts which have come to light which have refined the theory (the major one being the particulate inheritence of genes from gregor mendel. That was what made Darwins theory ultimately acceptable), but nothing has contradicted the actual theory.

As for the stereochemistry of molecules (left hand and right hand), that is not a challenge for evolution at all. In fact I expect you are refering to the valid concern which creates difficulties for theories of Abiogenesis as a result of the natural 50-50 nature of left and right handed molecules. Abiogenesis is not actually part of evolutionary theory because evolution mearly describes the method through which self replicating organisms increase in diversity. Abiogenesis is an attempt to figure out how that could have started.

In anycase though, the difficulty it describes is not a brick wall difficulty. It isn't a problem like say, finding a rabbit fossil amongst fossils of Jurassic dinosaurs. That sort of actual contradiction would FORCE biologists to re-evaluate everything. The argument about the natural occurance of chiral molecules mearly creates an extra concern for chemists to consider when trying to formulate conditions which might have been existent on early earth which could have facilitated the creation of a self replicating molecule. The theory which they create must simply factor that consideration into it.

Understand that most of the 'problems' with evolution which you have been told by creationist websites like 'Answers in Genesis' and people like Kent hovind, all of those facts have come from scientists who actually understand evolution, and have noted this fact, and still beleive evolution is true. Not out of willful neglect of the facts (as the dodgy creationists provocateurs would have you believe) but because the fact they have discovered is simply a consideration for the ultimate form of the final theory (not that anything is ever final in science). Which is why I say nothing has 'Contradicted' evolution, because every argument I have ever seen presented by a creationist has never tackled the fact that evolution accurately describes the variation and descent of biolgoical organisms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality_(chemistry)

Oh puhlease. This is one of the oldest, most non-threatening arguments of creationism ever.

Fossil records are ridiculously uncomplete. The process of fosilisation is so rare that we are lucky we have billions of years worth of time and billion of billions of billions of dead organisms to find the few million fossils we are lucky to have! So the best fact that we can extract from the fossil record, is not a remark about what isn't there (MOST stuff isn't there), but instead we can use it in an absolute sense to demonstrate what is there! And what is there is a very systematic layering of distinct eras of life. Organisms which are found only in their own time frame and not in any others, some which are found in all, and some which clearly developed later than others and are only found from then onwards.

This particular one of these three non-threatening arguments is so old, Darwin mentioned it himself, and made predictions about it. And he has been persistently correct. And for every intermediate fossil we find, someone always has to ask "But whats the intermediate between that and that.." like a bloody fool. We have like 10 intermediate fossils between Humans and the common Ape ancestor, and creationists still act like there isn't even one. Even though even the creationists can't agree which fossils are apes, and which ones are humans, they still insist they are either one or the other, and they still want an intermediate fossil. Regardless of that demand though, I restate my point: we can't always rely on what we want being there, but we can rely on the fact that what we do have is a fact worthy of analysis. And what we so have does not contradict evolution once. And that in itself is enough of an argument for evolution, not even worrying about the theoretical arguments, the biological case, the molecular biology and the observed evolutionary changes.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional.html


As for the 'Eye' point. What is so perfect about our eyes? Ever heard of Spectacles? Why isn't our sight as good as Eagles, or Octopuses? Damnit, there are examples of every single degree of sight from a light recepter cell, to eagle vision in nature. Not to mention the fact that Human eyes have the nerve cell interupt our field of vision to create a blind spot. What a retarded design!
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB921_1.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye#Evolution_of_eyes

I'm sorry, but your 'greatest argument against evolution' is the most well debunked of all time. You just have to look at the science.

nah, they don't. There was a period of time when the idea of 'rapid evolution' was discussed, but it was discussed completely unlike what you have been lead to believe by the creationist propoganda. No one thinks evollution ever happens rapidly, other than 'rapid' in a geological sense. That is, maybe there will be a mass of variation and/or selection over a period of 5000 years and something will pop up (instead of taking 10,000 - 100,000 years for any change to be noticable in the fossil record.).
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/punc-eq.html

They were different. They fulfilled their needs from a different way. Then the animal comes along and does something which benefits them above and beyond the usual. The plant then finds that it is provided with...lets say protection as in the case of the Bullhorn Acacia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acacia_cornigera#Mutualism). Maybe that plant once had defence mechanisms, or some other method of surviving predation by herbivores. Then this ant comes along and makes a home on the plant, and as such starts to defend its home. The plant then starts to find that animals won't eat it. So any plant which subsequently had a 'negative' mutation (as you will most likely call it) where it lost it s natural defence, it wouldn't be negatively impaired because the ants maintain its survivability.

I guess the answer comes down to: "Things were different in the past, and then they change" Just because you can't imagine how it lives without its mutualism, doesn't mean it couldn't.

Really? Well, if he believed....well...say no more. I'm a theist now!(/sarcasm)

Just to point out something here: Arguments from authority, that is, making it look like a afigure who is highly respected or revered believes that your case is right, is an invalid argument. it is meaningless. It is a non-argument.

You should hopefully accept that as being self-evident.

And I could equally well say that more people have looked at it and changed their minds in the opposite direction, but in the end, this is just more variations on argument from authority. it is meaningless and a non-argument.

As I have repeatedly said to SEO all thread: Who I am, and who he is is irrelevent. It is the arguments themselves which matter. Are they valid? Are they sound? Who cares that I have studied molecular biology, philosophy and history and philosophy of science? Creationists constantly ignore hundreds of thousands of the MOST respected scientists of our time, why should the argument of ONE scientist sway the argument?

It shouldn't.

Stick to the arguments, not the people.

 

No.

because their christian belief has virtually nothing to do with the facts.

And in fact this is a good example of the need to distinguish the two aspects of science. Data collection, and Philosophy. beleiving that the Speed of light is an absolute barrier is a theory (philosophy) which was postulated to explain the facts Einstein was working with (which was mostly maths).

The fact that thigns ahve been measured as faster then the speed of light is the Data. This measurement can be made regardless of what your theory is. Not doubt theory does play a huge role on what experiments you do, so sure, believe angels do that, and use that as your reason for testing the speed of light theory, but don't expect that to validate your theory.

 

That is such vague categorising their sonny! You can not put all Christian beliefs into the same bag. If you insist you can then you are a much bigger fool than I thought you were.

You will need to clarify that statement BIG TIME to get yourself out of that hole you just dug for yourself.

Col

 

Ahhh, at first I thought you were just jumping to conclusions, but re-reading my statement I see the misunderstanding.

I wasn't trying to say that Christians (general) have no association between their beleifs and the facts (general). What I was saying was that if the christians (specific as per Alstars post) proved that light wasn't an absolute barrier and they did so because of their beleif in angels, it wouldn't make them any higher regard than anyone else who stuck their neck out and proved something contrary to popular theory. Their beleifs (specific) in this matter have no bearing to the facts (specific) of this matter.

Verstehen?