Does God exist? (20 Viewers)

[Graney]

Emytaylor to respond: "Continuous creation. God put those new bacteria there to test my faith."

Micro evolution is real, but macro evolution is not. Animals may make minor changes to adapt to their environment, this is well documented, but they still remain the same 'type' of animal. All you've shown is bacteria becoming a different type of bacteria. There is no proof of bacteria becoming complex multi-cellular life, fish do not become amphibians, do not become reptiles etc...

 

[Captain Gh3y]

Scientists accidentally create a very complex evolutionary trait in a lab bacteria:

http://www.newscientist.com/channel...make-major-evolutionary-shift-in-the-lab.html
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/10/1845250

One of the best (of many, many) pieces of proof yet that evolution is real and actively operating in real-time, right now, over the course of seconds, years, and the age of the Earth itself.

Emytaylor to respond: "Continuous creation. God put those new bacteria there to test my faith."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Wall_Lizard#Rapid_evolution

I like this one better, scientific illiterates don't understand microorganisms well enough, you need something with vertebrates

 

[emytaylor164]

i do not agree with the whole idea of apes turning to humans, but i also do not understand micro-organisims

 

[Captain Gh3y]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Wall_Lizard#Rapid_evolution

I like this one better, scientific illiterates don't understand microorganisms well enough, you need something with vertebrates

i do not agree with the whole idea of apes turning to humans, but i also do not understand micro-organisims

 

[Slidey]

Micro evolution is real, but macro evolution is not. Animals may make minor changes to adapt to their environment, this is well documented, but they still remain the same 'type' of animal. All you've shown is bacteria becoming a different type of bacteria. There is no proof of bacteria becoming complex multi-cellular life, fish do not become amphibians, do not become reptiles etc...

Holy hell that's one of the stupidest things I've ever heard.

At least I can somewhat respect the logical consistency of a Creationist's stance, but that's borderline retarded.

 

[Polygrl]

God really exists because it says so in the Bible and he preached to millions on the true gospel !! in terms of creation It's true not so much for science!!

 

[Ennaybur]

^troll ?

 

[Graney]

Holy hell that's one of the stupidest things I've ever heard.

That's intelligent design.

 

[boris]

the evolution of multicellularity in bacteria is possible, since multicellularity has independently arisen among bacteria several times in actinomycetes, cyanobacteria and myxobacteria (Bonner, 2001Down). Moreover, experimental microbial evolution demonstrates that cooperative behaviour can readily evolve in bacteria (Rainey & Rainey, 2003Down; Velicer & Yu, 2003Down). The work of Pfeiffer et al. argues that the combination of multicellular organization and economical use of resources (e.g. respiration) could represent a major fitness advantage that does not require cell differentiation and thus benefits the simplest multicellular organism derived from respiring cells as soon as it arises.

burp

 

[Graney]

i do not agree with the whole idea of apes turning to humans

It's been theorised that humans and chimps could possibly breed in the old-school way and create a hybrid. There are no clear biological barriers to this. Species further apart can and do cross breed. Having one fewer chromosome than other apes is not an absolute barrier to hybridisaion.

If they can still breed are they truly a different species? What do you even define a species as? How is a man not an ape?

 

[xeuyrawp]

Macro evolution is just a whole lot of little micro evolutionary changes over a long time.

Yes exactly. I've only done minimal reading on the subject, but it's my understanding that the 'modern/new evolutionary synthesis' outlined that very fact.

Saying that microevolution is real -- but macroevolution not real -- is ridiculous. Does an organism just simply keep microevolving?

That being said, I usually don't like this argument because macroevolution is defined as something like 'change across species'. But, a species is a very arbitrary term which only exists so that we can label and refer to things easily. The various issues associated with the 'species problem' only highlight this. One would have to solve all the problems associated with the term 'species' before even entering into the macro-vs-microevolution debate.

 

[hiphophooray123]

god really does exist i read it in the bible.



----

YOU CANNOT DELETE THAT OR YOU HAVE DOUBLE STANDARDZ

 

[KFunk]

The debate we should be having is 'does evolution account for all the diversity of life?'. That microevolution takes place is as close to irrefutable as you could hope for in science. Captain Gh3y provides a nice example of macroevolution. It should not be controversial to claim that these processes occur.

Unless they want to fall back onto a faith-based position, the proponent of intelligent design really needs to pull up a counter-example where it is shown that evolutionary processes could not generate a given change (e.g. those old E. Coli flagellum arguments). This is not an easy thing to try and show and I really don't think that intuition is good enough, at least not in the face of the kinds of positive arguments provided by science. Research into evolution doesn't merely assert that evolution occurs, nor does it only show using empirical observations that it does occur, but it is also able to explain how it occurs.

For those who would say to this 'but intuitively widescale macroevolution could not occur' then my reply is that you are falling back on faith and our argument is no longer about intelligent design vs. evolution at all, but is instead about scientific vs. faith-informed approaches to acquiring knowledge.

 

[BradCube]

Hi There all,

Wondering if any of your wonderful selves could recommend any good books on the topic of free will? As is probably evident, I am yet to solve my dilemma regarding free will (or lack thereof) coupled with a just and loving God. Any suggestions would be much appreciated

 

[*TRUE*]

Hi There all,

Wondering if any of your wonderful selves could recommend any good books on the topic of free will? As is probably evident, I am yet to solve my dilemma regarding free will (or lack thereof) coupled with a just and loving God. Any suggestions would be much appreciated

Wonderful selves? lol
PM Enteebee, Shroedinger, KFunk or even Slidey. They're the brainy philosophers.

 

[*TRUE*]

Slidey pwns me on science, ask him.

How is he an EVEN.:burn::burn::burn::burn::burn:

I knew Slidey was a science buff I wasnt sure about philosophy.....

 

[BradCube]

omg welcome back!!!

Ha Ha, thank you. I usually find that after a month or two I need a similar amount of time to take a break and let things sink in. Much of this stuff is pretty hard hitting for me and I take it pretty personally, so it does take a while

 

[Kwayera]

Ha Ha, thank you. I usually find that after a month or two I need a similar amount of time to take a break and let things sink in. Much of this stuff is pretty hard hitting for me and I take it pretty personally, so it does take a while

Glad to see you back in the fray

 

[KFunk]

How can you have a faith-informed approach to aquiring knowledge? Faith is based on defending existing doctorines and denying any new information that contradicts them. The only way faith can allow us to aquire new knowledge is if you believe god speaks to certain prophets ect. Or if god was to appear and tell us directly. But this never seems to happen.

It's certainly not an approach that I agree with, but some reasonable arguments have been made for such an approach (reasonable in that they deserve serious engagement). The most significant contemporary philosopher in this area, as far as I know, is probably Alvin Plantinga who has a three volume work on 'warrant' (in the sense of knowledge) in which he tries to show that belief in god can be rational in the absence of empirical evidence. See also reformed epistemology.

This is the kind of thing I have in mind when I talk about a theist being serious about challenging the notions of 'knowledge'/'warrant'/'justification' as they exist in the scientific framework. I do know a couple theists who can defend their beliefs at this level - which I find very impressive. Unfortunately, my experience suggests that the vast majority of 'the faithful' don't have such reasoned grounding for their faith-driven claims - most often a hodge-podge of such scholarly views which have filtered down to the masses. To be fair though, many atheists also fail to engage at this level.

 

[Atonofrash]

It's certainly not an approach that I agree with, but some reasonable arguments have been made for such an approach (reasonable in that they deserve serious engagement). The most significant contemporary philosopher in this area, as far as I know, is probably Alvin Plantinga who has a three volume work on 'warrant' (in the sense of knowledge) in which he tries to show that belief in god can be rational in the absence of empirical evidence. See also reformed epistemology.

This is the kind of thing I have in mind when I talk about a theist being serious about challenging the notions of 'knowledge'/'warrant'/'justification' as they exist in the scientific framework. I do know a couple theists who can defend their beliefs at this level - which I find very impressive. Unfortunately, my experience suggests that the vast majority of 'the faithful' don't have such reasoned grounding for their faith-driven claims - most often a hodge-podge of such scholarly views which have filtered down to the masses. To be fair though, many atheists also fail to engage at this level.

is that regarding the 'credence' topic? as in they can't be sure about the existance of god, just as we cant' be sure of anything (so nothing will have a credence of 1) but their's is at say .7, which is reasonable to believe in god.

I really should look this up..