Question for people that believe in evolution

[Quiddity]

Um...what? Were you trying to be relevant and make sense here?

....

 

[Quiddity]

You're confusing "science" with "arguments made by scientists".

I doubt it...

 

[Jose Fly]

I doubt it...

Ok, show me a scientific paper published in a scientific, peer-reviewed journal that addresses the existence or non-existence of gods.

 

[Luminous]

1. Although I accept evolution as valid, I find the epistemology behind it as problematic. The scientific community is grossly infiltrated with an epistemology that is naturalized. That is to say, an epistemology (under the guise of scientism) that interprets not only that the universe can show no evidence for God but that it looks exactly as it would be expected to look if there is no God. That the evidence that exists can be used to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that this God does not exist.

2. These are the same people who write in such a faculty that they argue against approaches that emphasize a priori or insist on a theory of knowledge that is independent of science. Yet they do the very same thing by putting on there philosophical hat and saying “at least we are using science”. As if them attaching meaning to evidence was any different then attaching meaning outside of evidence.

What a joke...

Here is one example:

3. "The process I will follow is the scientific method of hypothesis testing. The existence of God will be taken as a scientific hypothesis and the consequences of that hypothesis searched for in objective observations of the world around us."

<snip>

4. "The God worshipped by the billion of followers of the monotheistic religions either exists or he does not. And his existence is a legitimate scientific issue."

5. The Godless Universe

Watch the anti-theist throw tomatoes at me....:run:

...



:sarcasticScientism... riiiiiight.

1. it works just fine with no god. but no credible scientist would ever say he can disproove a god concept. nor could one disprove the invisible pink unicorn. ur putting thoughts in scientists minds that they do not have.

2. attaching logical meaning to evidence that makes the meaning have the least assumptions is a basic necessity in science. to do otherwise would be to not look at the evidence at all. in which case it would be useless to make a conclusion.

3. that example you gave speaks more of the person giving it then about how science is a religion. to that scientis god does not exist because there is no evidence for it, its as logical as saying that alien life doesnt exist becasue there is no evidence for it. however believing that aliens exist because they could and that god exists because it could is illogical.

4. everyting is a legitamate scientific issue. science is there to explain everything.

5. its a book just like the bible. it doesnt have to be truthful or fair, it has to make money, it has to sell. buddha warned us about books. Jose Fly in the previous post has the right idea. plus, the book does not say that the god concept is disproven, just that the abrahamic god in relation to the individual denominations following it, is a false delusion that goes against much that science has learned and should therefore be considered a "failed hypothesis".
tomatoes? :tuna:

im not anti-theist, ur anti-logic.

 

[Luminous]

I doubt it...

doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
i edited post 24 (the one before this one)

 

[ftv1975]

ftv1975, if you are really interested in evolution and the evidence behind it, the I suggest you look at these:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3k0dDFxkhM&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8Q2Db17v5U&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU-7d06HJSs&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qfoje7jVJpU&feature=related

and perhaps the most evidential video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MXTBGcyNuc&feature=related


If you really really are interested in learning then sit down and watch these videos entirely through and resist any urge you may have to "debate" with them...just learn.

this guy is hard to follow he talks pretty fast for me, but i think that i get the basic idea. most of which has to do with mutations and the proof that mutations happen. i have to watch these agian.

 

[ftv1975]

As any scientist will tell you, you have to be intellectually honest. Scientists will often say words like, "can" or "I believe that..." this in no way means that the scientist is unsure or that he doesn't have the evidence to back up his claim. Don't get hung up on the lingo. They use these words to show a little modesty on there behalf. Unlike most creationists who go in with utter certainty.

okay!

 

[ftv1975]

OK, I know this is really long, and a long post is easy to skip over, but I have made a sincere effort to answer your question in detail as you have asked.

OK, now admittedly, I'm using hypothetical examples, so please don't go looking at a tree of life and say "but mudskippers aren't supposed to be ancestors to whales". I'm demonstrating the process, and using common animals to illustrate, so while the particular species I use as examples are actually ancestors of one another is not important, I'm only explaining how the process works using hypothetical analogies.

1. Fish are swimming around happily in a pond.
2. The raind doesn't come for a long time and the pond nearly dries up, to the point where the fish are lying in mud for a day.
3. The fish with low oxygen fitness die because they can't breathe.
4. The fish with hi oxygen fitness suffer, but manage to pull through until it rains that evening.
5. There are no more low-oxygen fit fish in that group because they died, only hi-oxygen fit fish, so most fish babies going forward will inherit the hi efficiency oxygen fitness of their parents rather than the low efficient oxygen fitness of their dead uncles and aunts.
6. This happens many many many times over many tens of thousands of years, and the fish get so oxygen fit that they can live without breathing water for up to a couple of days.
7. Some of the fish have slightly longer pec fins than others, which makes them able to flop around more in the mud during drought.
8. Those long finned ones accidentally but luckily flop over to bigger puddles which havent dried up, while short finned fish can't get to new water sources, and die in long multi-day droughts.
9. This continues to happen many many many times over many tens of thousands of years, until thier fins are so long they begin to resemble limbs as much as fins.
10. They start spending so much time out of the water that it's gills slowly become less efficient at extracting oxygen from the water, but more efficient at extracting it from the air. Now the fish can really hang out on land for days at a time. Voila, it's no longer a fish - it's a mudskipper! With half lungs, half gills.
Stay with me.
10. The mudskippers walk around on land, but really still likes the water too, so they spend much time in both places.
11. The ones that spend more time in on land start getting eaten up by the local terrestial wildlife, so there are fewer of them to reproduce. The ones that are safe in the water reproduce, and voila! Aquatic mammals!

See, from an aquatic creature, to a hybrid creature, to a different aquatic creature, with no plan, no design, and no personal intervention on the part of the creature itself, or any other source. Now of course, some of the mud skippers did stay on land and were not eaten, and those ones became salamanders. See, fish to salamander, no design involved. Only random mutations which work. Those that don't work die off. So simple, yet so powerful. The key is that the creature itself has no knowledge of it's own adaptations, and nobody is necessary to plan them out, becuase they just happen automatically.

thanks for your explanation.

 

[Luminous]

okay!

she means that there is no such thing as true certainty, being as we are all agnostic. therefore creationist delude themselves into false certainty. a false feeling of being right without a chance of being wrong. i hope u got that.

 

[ftv1975]

That I saw it take place with my own eyes.



As an undergrad, I conducted an experiment that produced something like this:

Nucleotide sequence of the ampicillin resistance gene of Escherichia coli plasmid pBR322

thanks for providing the article.

 

[ftv1975]

she means that there is no such thing as true certainty, being as we are all agnostic. therefore creationist delude themselves into false certainty. a false feeling of being right without a chance of being wrong. i hope u got that.

yes i understand the point she was making.

 

[ftv1975]

have any of you read this article? Problems in Protein Evolution

what do you think?

 

[OmarKhayyam]

this tread is simply to learn and understand.

What evidence of evolution has persuaded you to the believe that evolution occurs?

if you have articles or anything that supports your statement i would be interested in reading them.

Others have provided you with some evidence. I would add this little gem

http://machineslikeus.com/news/darwin-test-tube

My experience has been that theists have a BIG problem with this concept. Populations evolve NOT individuals.

No creature is a different species than his parent. Like produces like as your favorite book of fables says and what we observe in nature. What happens is the "like" changes over time. No individual is part one species and part of another. It is the characteristics of the species itself that changes.

 

[Luminous]

have any of you read this article? Problems in Protein Evolution

what do you think?

easy to point its fallacy. proteins have nothing to do with evolution. proteins dont evolve. dna does. something close to that.

 

[Jose Fly]

have any of you read this article? Problems in Protein Evolution

what do you think?

Garbage. For example, he states:

"Grishin [Grishin 01] proposes some mechanisms for the evolution of new protein folds without an explicit computation of probabilities, but this process is still problematical."

So this person starts out by saying "No one can figure out how evolution can change protein shapes", but then immediately cites a paper that describes how evolution can change protein shapes. He then immediately commits the fallacy of moving the goalposts by saying "Yeah, but he didn't calculate probabilities".

He then states:

"The evolution of proteins of new shapes by point mutations is not possible, because the change of shape of a protein would require too many mutations."

This is nothing more than a bald assertion. No citations, references, or supporting evidence is given. Apparently the author expects us to take his assertions as unquestioned gospel.

He then states:

"If the probability of a mutation is high enough to change the shape of the protein, then many other mutations will also occur that will essentially randomize the rest of the gene and cause the newly shaped protein to be harmful to the organism."

That doesn't even make sense. Mutations are random, and across the genome landscape, they are equally probable (by mutation type). That's what random means.

At this point I stopped reading. As I said, the web article is garbage.

 

[Quiddity]

Ok, show me a scientific paper published in a scientific, peer-reviewed journal that addresses the existence or non-existence of gods.

My goodness....this doesn't necessitate a publication if I'm getting it from the horses mouth. You want another example of a scientist over reaching?

Try this:
http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/07-07-04

 

[Jose Fly]

My goodness....this doesn't necessitate a publication if I'm getting it from the horses mouth. You want another example of a scientist over reaching?

Try this:
http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/07-07-04

Apparently you didn't understand my point. There is a difference between "science" and "arguments made by some scientists". For example, some scientists might argue that Dickens is a better writer than Melville, but just because they're scientists, that doesn't make the Dickens vs. Melville argument "science".

Likewise, just because some scientists argue that gods do or don't exist, that doesn't make the existence or non-existence of gods "science".

If you disagree, provide a scientific paper published in a scientific, peer-reviewed journal that addresses the existence or non-existence of gods. If you cannot, the issue is settled.

 

[Quiddity]

So...

...no credible scientist would ever say he can disproove a god concept.

But yet it's a legitimate scientific issue:

4. everyting is a legitamate scientific issue. science is there to explain everything.

...:areyoucra.

This is pretty embarrasing......really it is.

For a second there, I thought you actually understood.

 

[Quiddity]

Apparently you didn't understand my point. There is a difference between "science" and "arguments made by some scientists". For example, some scientists might argue that Dickens is a better writer than Melville, but just because they're scientists, that doesn't make the Dickens vs. Melville argument "science".

Likewise, just because some scientists argue that gods do or don't exist, that doesn't make the existence or non-existence of gods "science".

If you disagree, provide a scientific paper published in a scientific, peer-reviewed journal that addresses the existence or non-existence of gods. If you cannot, the issue is settled.

Seriously, don't get sensitive about a theist educating you...I mean no offense.

Read up on the difference between arguments and methods used in science:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalized_epistemology

 

[ftv1975]

easy to point its fallacy. proteins have nothing to do with evolution. proteins dont evolve. dna does. something close to that.

natural selection is another subject i would like to learn more about.

do you think that mutations exist out of necessity? example a mutation of a four leaf clover from a three leaf clover. what scenario could exist to cause a four leaf clover to become dominate over a three leaf clover? what cause a need of a forth leaf?

so the fact that when a new human life combines DNA of mother and father this is proof of mutation. the same mutation disproves creation, because mutation occurs.

these are just thoughts not ment to be arguements.