Dr. Dawkins is preaching that the creatures and their ecosystem could have come about magically through an atheistic naturalistic evolutionary process supported by natural selection
Well, which is it? Magically, or through a natural process?
Natural selection is part of the process. It's not some kind of external support.
apes mutating up into men
"Up"? There is no "up".
Teaching kids that land mammals magically grew fins and flippers while metamorphing in all kind of sea mammals
No, evolution is not metamorphosis. Pokémon uses the word wrong.
I'm sure you've noticed that children look similar to their parents. I'm sure you've also noticed that they neither look like either one of their parents, nor is every single one of their traits necessarily found in any of their parents. A few are new. Some of those can be inherited. Heritable changes over generations – that's evolution.
Demeaning them by pumping them absurdities that they would be apes and cousins of chimps is also very demeaning.
Too bad for you if you feel that reality is demeaning. Too bad for you if you'd rather live in cloud-cuckoo-land; you don't live in cloud-cuckoo-land. Deal with it.
The kinds of brains natural selection could create are different from those created by an intelligent entity.
Exactly. An intelligent entity wouldn't create a brain that sees patterns where they exist and also where they don't exist; it wouldn't create a brain that is afraid of the dark even when it knows full well that there aren't any hyenas around; it wouldn't create a brain that can develop optical illusions; I could go on.
If you can believe that land mammals would evolve into sea mammals
It has happened three times. The evidence for this is quite overwhelming. Want me to provide some?
David Marjanović has won the debate because Vince Goodrum has run out of arguments and resorted to personal attack.
Vince Goodrum :
"You’re a moron and too stupid to even know why. "
Prior to this Vince Goodrum had been running behind on points simply because he failed to provide any clear examples supporting his assertions. Simply asserting that the opposing propositions were "religious crap" and "absurdities" was not helpful.
No one is winning this argument because there is no argument. An argument is a discussion between two or more people that are willing to come to a conclusion, some sort of synthesis, or at least trying to understand someone's viewpoint better. The reason why there is no argument is because Vince is not willing to listen empathetically to the other side, and therefore can not understand and counter the other ideas. There is no point in arguing with a dogmatic person.
Vince Goodrum is disqualified for using a sock puppet after it became apparent that he had no credible argument or evidence.
David Marjanović' , a shame your opponent wasn't better prepared or honorable for it would make the victory sweeter but you didn't get to chose you opponent and a win is a win.
David Marjanović' wins one internet, a hearty "well done" for patiently speaking science and reason to mindless superstition , and a virtual drink of his choice.
@BOBBY
"Conclusion"- the final judgment or decision, the end, a resolution. How do we resolve this? Where does the debate between believers and nonbelievers ultimately end? Obviously at the truth. In the end that's all that will stand. Either we were created and share existence with God, or we're an unsupervised chance occurrence. Either we evolved from something different than what we presently are, or we were created as we presently are. Both can't be right as we have a black or white situation with only one truth. It is possible however that one side has already passed the test that the other side is still studying for.
Nobody is contesting the fact that the earth is spherical in 2014, though at one time many believed it was flat. Men of previous generations discovered the truth, and now centuries later we can all see from photos taken from a HIGHER PERSPECTIVE that their discovery is indisputable. Some believe that the Bible had a jump on the unrevealed when it revealed: "It is He who sits above the circle of the earth, and it's inhabitants are like grasshoppers" (Isaiah 40:22). Or when it asserts in Job 26 that "He stretches out the north over empty space and He hangs the earth on nothing", a passage written centuries before anyone had any observational proof.
There may be other nuggets of insight in the Bible that will destroy false theories and disclose nonnegotiable truth. Whether or not there is a God, THAT'S A BIG ONE and we all should want to get a confirmation on that before we expire. The existence of heaven and hell is another topic worthy of thorough research. Did Jesus perform all those alleged miracles and die for our sins, resurrecting 3 days later? Did God "exalt Him to the highest place and give Him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord"?
It's yes or no, true or false. If the believers are wrong, they have absolutely nothing to loose but some lost opportunities at vain sin that wouldn't profit much anyway. At worst they follow the most famous, most impactful, most (positively) influential, most resonant Man to ever live into potentially making the world a better place (see the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King and/or many U.S. Presidents not named George W. Bush). They take their best swing at righteousness/emulation, they die and disappear - no harm done. Contrarily if nonbelievers are wrong, their worst case scenario is far more grave. They may find out that there is a spiritual component to human existence and face a Creator that they consciously rejected and ignored, resulting in a fate of eternal separation from that Creator (in hell of course). In other words they may get what they want only to discover that they don't want it.
What is the ABSOLUTE truth? The earth is round, the sky is blue, Elvis is dead, global warming is true. The debate about God and creation will be settled, and it will at some point cease to be open for discussion.
David Marjanović has won the debate because Vince Goodrum has run out of arguments and resorted to personal attack.
As everyone has been saying, there is no debate. This is about which ideas are wrong, not who is better at rhetorics. Scientists never hold debates with each other – debate is whatcha put on de hook to catch de fish.
I'm not here to win anything. This is not about me. I'm here simply because demonstrably wrong claims have been made in this thread.
It's also a total fallacy to believe that people only insult each other once they've run out of arguments. I'm only restraining myself from using certain words because I'm told National Geographic Inc. doesn't like them.
(...Some of the insults Mr Goodrum uses, though, show that he's a racist. I'm not exactly restraining myself from not using those...)
Back to quoting false claims, then:
Magically of course as naturalism is hogwash. There is no such natural process as evolution, which is merely your atheistic fairytale. We are not great apes.
Evidence?
Merely repeating yourself isn't an argument. It doesn't make anything true, and it won't convince anybody.
Keep in mind that according to you an atheist naturalist brain is made by a blind and dumb watchmaker and therefore it is entirely untrustworthy.
Evolutionary epistemology: a brain that is "entirely untrustworthy" is at a disadvantage compared to one that is less untrustworthy in its interpretation of the environment. A completely untrustworthy brain would make it really hard to find food, escape predators, and so on. Thus, the theory of evolution predicts that brains will, in the long run, be as good as needed.
At the same time, it predicts they won't be better than needed, because there's no advantage in that that would lead to a greater number of surviving fertile offspring. Human pattern recognition is overactive because if there's a leopard in the nearest bush and you don't see it, you're dead and can't reproduce or care for your children anymore, while if there's no leopard in the nearest bush but you see one anyway, you get away with just being scared for a few seconds.
Creationism cannot explain why our pattern recognition is overactive. It cannot explain pareidolia.
and of course you have zero evidence for your idiotic claims
You haven't even asked for any... anyway, I just provided some. There's more.
Evolutionists cannot eliminate the need of time to demonstrate evolving inorganic matter to organic life matter.
By definition, evolution only begins once the first self-replicator exists. How the first self-replicator came into being is a separate, unrelated question.
They then cannot mutate a bacteria to increase the information to the genome
...Adding genes or whole plasmids to the genome of a bacterium is an utterly standard procedure in molecular biology, and has been for decades. I've done it myself several times. Now, maybe you don't count that as a mutation, because those genes already existed in other species, but that's hard to reconcile with your bizarre use of "mutate" as a transitive verb. It's intransitive; it's "you mutate", not "I mutate you". Mutation happens.
or move it to a higher design that appears as a insect.
You're beginning to become incoherent. "Higher" is wrong, "design" is wrong, "appears as" is at the very least confusingly clumsy, I have no clue why you pick "a insect" as your example...
But the adaptation is borne of a loss of genetic sequences in the DNA Map or Genome, so it is devolved. Mutations that force an adaptation to survive is not evolution, since the design is devolved in terms of genetic sequences left in the Genome.
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Only three parts of this quote aren't word salad, but rise to the level of being wrong.
One is "devolve", a term that doesn't exist in biology. There is no "higher" or "lower"; evolution goes in whatever direction the environment presses it.
The second is the assertion that "genetic sequences", whatever that is exactly, can only be lost, not gained; they're gained all the time, and they're modified all the time without any loss. Every once in a while, DNA polymerase slips back and copies something again that it had already copied, so the new strand is longer than the older; this is how gene duplication happens. Having more copies of a gene often means that more of the protein it codes for is made; that can confer an adaptive advantage. When one of the copies undergoes ordinary substitution mutations, you can get a whole new gene.
The third is the claim that a genome is a map of DNA. It's not the map, it's the territory! The genome of an organism is the totality of the DNA in each of its cells.
What do you mean by "Mutations that force an adaptation to survive"??? It doesn't make sense.
They cannot show a single Genome that the method of mutations causes the information in the Genome to increase.
Any insertion mutation and any duplication mutation increases the information in the genome. Be aware that you're using a technical term that may not mean what you think it means.
Oh, man. :-D I'm a vertebrate paleontologist. Name a transition in vertebrate evolution, and I'll list the transitional fossils for you!
Science Theory is like Gravity or Atomic Numbers, which can be proven
Then learn some science theory (you know, theory of science): science cannot prove, only disprove, and even that only given certain assumptions – because it isn't possible to disprove solipsism.
What science uses a lot is the principle of parsimony.
Is Evolution Simply Change?
No. It's descent with heritable modification.
Science tells us that things must have causes. It is hardly scientific to credit an organ transplant, which is more complex and elegant than anything we could devise, to blind natural principles. The Bible has a better and more logical answer!
What a silly argument from personal incredulity: "I personally can't imagine how it works, therefore it doesn't work".
Closely related to the argument from ignorance: "I personally happen not to know how it works, therefore it doesn't work".
I don't think I need to explain why these are logical fallacies. You should be ashamed that you keep using them.
(I particularly love the use of "sea slug" in your source, as if there were a single species of "sea slug"! There are thousands, one of which does what's described in your source, and some of which are more closely related to land and freshwater snails than to other sea snails/slugs.)
Either we were created and share existence with God, or we’re an unsupervised chance occurrence.
Evolution isn't simply chance. Mutation and drift are random, but selection is not – it's determined by the environment.
Some believe that the Bible had a jump on the unrevealed when it revealed: “It is He who sits above the circle of the earth, and it’s inhabitants are like grasshoppers” (Isaiah 40:22). Or when it asserts in Job 26 that “He stretches out the north over empty space and He hangs the earth on nothing”, a passage written centuries before anyone had any observational proof.
Oh dear. Don't the words "above" and "circle" clue you in to the fact that the Bible assumes a flat earth? This is a bit long, but I recommend you read it. I found it dense and not boring.
Contrarily if nonbelievers are wrong, their worst case scenario is far more grave. They may find out that there is a spiritual component to human existence and face a Creator that they consciously rejected and ignored, resulting in a fate of eternal separation from that Creator (in hell of course).
Did you just seriously bring up Pascal's Wager? :-) It's such a bad argument that some wonder if it was originally meant to be a parody.
First, I'm not capable of believing without evidence. Pascal's Wager in effect tells me to pretend to believe – in the hope of fooling a god who knows everything and thus knows I'm pretending. Seriously?
(Pascal himself recognized this problem and in effect said "fake it till you make it". That, however, doesn't work; I can't fake it till I make it, and I'm far from the only one.)
Second, it pulls assumptions out of nowhere. What if this hypothetical deity prefers people who use the gift of reason it gave them over unthinking yes-men? What if it prefers atheists who are wrong for the right reason over pious believers who are right for the wrong reason?
Relatedly, it assumes that there are only two possibilities: either the Christian god, specifically the one of Pascal's denomination or similar, exists, or all religions are completely wrong. Well. What if the ancient Mesopotamian religion had it right? In that case, everyone's shadow – completely regardless of faith, good works, anything – goes to the dark, depressing underworld, eats mud and lives in depression forever. Or, more to the point, how about Islam? It assumes a heaven quite like the Christian one, and it assumes that only believers get there, but some of the things you supposedly need to believe to get there are mutually exclusive with some of the things you supposedly need to believe to get to the Christian heaven.
What is the ABSOLUTE truth?
A good question, given the impossibility of disproving solipsism.
I just wrote a long comment that is awaiting moderation because it contains 6 links. I don't think PZ is going to look at the moderation queue anytime soon, so I'm submitting it again, in three parts. Please excuse the duplication and the shift in comment numbers that will likely happen at some point.
Part 1 of 3:
David Marjanović has won the debate because Vince Goodrum has run out of arguments and resorted to personal attack.
As everyone has been saying, there is no debate. This is about which ideas are wrong, not who is better at rhetorics. Scientists never hold debates with each other – debate is whatcha put on de hook to catch de fish.
I'm not here to win anything. This is not about me. I'm here simply because demonstrably wrong claims have been made in this thread.
It's also a total fallacy to believe that people only insult each other once they've run out of arguments. I'm only restraining myself from using certain words because I'm told National Geographic Inc. doesn't like them.
(...Some of the insults Mr Goodrum uses, though, show that he's a racist. I'm not exactly restraining myself from not using those...)
Back to quoting false claims, then:
Magically of course as naturalism is hogwash. There is no such natural process as evolution, which is merely your atheistic fairytale. We are not great apes.
Evidence?
Merely repeating yourself isn't an argument. It doesn't make anything true, and it won't convince anybody.
Keep in mind that according to you an atheist naturalist brain is made by a blind and dumb watchmaker and therefore it is entirely untrustworthy.
Evolutionary epistemology: a brain that is "entirely untrustworthy" is at a disadvantage compared to one that is less untrustworthy in its interpretation of the environment. A completely untrustworthy brain would make it really hard to find food, escape predators, and so on. Thus, the theory of evolution predicts that brains will, in the long run, be as good as needed.
At the same time, it predicts they won't be better than needed, because there's no advantage in that that would lead to a greater number of surviving fertile offspring. Human pattern recognition is overactive because if there's a leopard in the nearest bush and you don't see it, you're dead and can't reproduce or care for your children anymore, while if there's no leopard in the nearest bush but you see one anyway, you get away with just being scared for a few seconds.
Creationism cannot explain why our pattern recognition is overactive. It cannot explain pareidolia.
and of course you have zero evidence for your idiotic claims
You haven't even asked for any... anyway, I just provided some. There's more.
Evolutionists cannot eliminate the need of time to demonstrate evolving inorganic matter to organic life matter.
By definition, evolution only begins once the first self-replicator exists. How the first self-replicator came into being is a separate, unrelated question.
They then cannot mutate a bacteria to increase the information to the genome
...Adding genes or whole plasmids to the genome of a bacterium is an utterly standard procedure in molecular biology, and has been for decades. I've done it myself several times. Now, maybe you don't count that as a mutation, because those genes already existed in other species, but that's hard to reconcile with your bizarre use of "mutate" as a transitive verb. It's intransitive; it's "you mutate", not "I mutate you". Mutation happens.
or move it to a higher design that appears as a insect.
You're beginning to become incoherent. "Higher" is wrong, "design" is wrong, "appears as" is at the very least confusingly clumsy, I have no clue why you pick "a insect" as your example...
But the adaptation is borne of a loss of genetic sequences in the DNA Map or Genome, so it is devolved. Mutations that force an adaptation to survive is not evolution, since the design is devolved in terms of genetic sequences left in the Genome.
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Only three parts of this quote aren't word salad, but rise to the level of being wrong.
One is "devolve", a term that doesn't exist in biology. There is no "higher" or "lower"; evolution goes in whatever direction the environment presses it.
The second is the assertion that "genetic sequences", whatever that is exactly, can only be lost, not gained; they're gained all the time, and they're modified all the time without any loss. Every once in a while, DNA polymerase slips back and copies something again that it had already copied, so the new strand is longer than the older; this is how gene duplication happens. Having more copies of a gene often means that more of the protein it codes for is made; that can confer an adaptive advantage. When one of the copies undergoes ordinary substitution mutations, you can get a whole new gene.
The third is the claim that a genome is a map of DNA. It's not the map, it's the territory! The genome of an organism is the totality of the DNA in each of its cells.
What do you mean by "Mutations that force an adaptation to survive"??? It doesn't make sense.
They cannot show a single Genome that the method of mutations causes the information in the Genome to increase.
Any insertion mutation and any duplication mutation increases the information in the genome. Be aware that you're using a technical term that may not mean what you think it means.
Oh, man. :-D I'm a vertebrate paleontologist. Name a transition in vertebrate evolution, and I'll list the transitional fossils for you!
Science Theory is like Gravity or Atomic Numbers, which can be proven
Then learn some science theory (you know, theory of science): science cannot prove, only disprove, and even that only given certain assumptions – because it isn't possible to disprove solipsism.
What science uses a lot is the principle of parsimony.
Is Evolution Simply Change?
No. It's descent with heritable modification.
Science tells us that things must have causes. It is hardly scientific to credit an organ transplant, which is more complex and elegant than anything we could devise, to blind natural principles. The Bible has a better and more logical answer!
What a silly argument from personal incredulity: "I personally can't imagine how it works, therefore it doesn't work".
Closely related to the argument from ignorance: "I personally happen not to know how it works, therefore it doesn't work".
I don't think I need to explain why these are logical fallacies. You should be ashamed that you keep using them.
(I particularly love the use of "sea slug" in your source, as if there were a single species of "sea slug"! There are thousands, one of which does what's described in your source, and some of which are more closely related to land and freshwater snails than to other sea snails/slugs.)
Either we were created and share existence with God, or we’re an unsupervised chance occurrence.
Evolution isn't simply chance. Mutation and drift are random, but selection is not – it's determined by the environment.
Some believe that the Bible had a jump on the unrevealed when it revealed: “It is He who sits above the circle of the earth, and it’s inhabitants are like grasshoppers” (Isaiah 40:22). Or when it asserts in Job 26 that “He stretches out the north over empty space and He hangs the earth on nothing”, a passage written centuries before anyone had any observational proof.
Oh dear. Don't the words "above" and "circle" clue you in to the fact that the Bible assumes a flat earth? This is a bit long, but I recommend you read it. I found it dense and not boring.
Contrarily if nonbelievers are wrong, their worst case scenario is far more grave. They may find out that there is a spiritual component to human existence and face a Creator that they consciously rejected and ignored, resulting in a fate of eternal separation from that Creator (in hell of course).
Did you just seriously bring up Pascal's Wager? :-) It's such a bad argument that some wonder if it was originally meant to be a parody.
First, I'm not capable of believing without evidence. Pascal's Wager in effect tells me to pretend to believe – in the hope of fooling a god who knows everything and thus knows I'm pretending. Seriously?
(Pascal himself recognized this problem and in effect said "fake it till you make it". That, however, doesn't work; I can't fake it till I make it, and I'm far from the only one.)
Second, it pulls assumptions out of nowhere. What if this hypothetical deity prefers people who use the gift of reason it gave them over unthinking yes-men? What if it prefers atheists who are wrong for the right reason over pious believers who are right for the wrong reason?
Relatedly, it assumes that there are only two possibilities: either the Christian god, specifically the one of Pascal's denomination or similar, exists, or all religions are completely wrong. Well. What if the ancient Mesopotamian religion had it right? In that case, everyone's shadow – completely regardless of faith, good works, anything – goes to the dark, depressing underworld, eats mud and lives in depression forever. Or, more to the point, how about Islam? It assumes a heaven quite like the Christian one, and it assumes that only believers get there, but some of the things you supposedly need to believe to get there are mutually exclusive with some of the things you supposedly need to believe to get to the Christian heaven.
What is the ABSOLUTE truth?
A good question, given the impossibility of disproving solipsism.
David Marjanović , you have done very well. You clearly know the subject.
But, perhaps, you should have accepted the award and moved on. Being from the deep Bible-thumping south I've been around people like our buddy Vince for better than fifty years and have been debating/ arguing/ jousting with his kind on-line going back to the days when connecting involved dialing a phone and placing a handset into a cradle.
You are right that this isn't a debate or argument in any conventional or academic sense. But it is something of a contest. For Vince it is all about him and his ability to get attention and win cheap points thinking he has engaged learned opponents such as yourself and got away without making himself look like too much of a fool. Like a mouse belling the cat.
This will get him points in his own mind and any circle of friends he might have, and serves to transfer reputation from you to him. For him it is all about him. Which is why my short post pointing out you won was answered so quickly and vehemently. He had lost the game he had set up and had lost fair and square, even in his own eyes.
You rescued him by engaging in factual discussion, as an adult. There is some value to that because everything on the internet lives on essentially forever so your good faith argument is not entirely lost and may one day help clarify the issue for anyone seeking to honestly know. Unfortunately Vince isn't one of them.
You see Vince is, or can be assumed to be, everything he accuses you of being. Which is why the words liar, bullshitter, lying shitsack, and indoctrinated idiot come so quickly to his mind. It is a veritable laundry list of the failings, tendencies, and insecurities caused by the stress of having to bend himself and his logic out of shape seeking to defend the indefensible.
In my experience Vince may actually be on the verge of accepting atheism after seeing his religious beliefs as the hollow ruse it is. He would undoubtedly, and most vociferously, deny this but I've seen more than one devout Christian punch themselves to mental and philosophical exhaustion before figuring out that they are fighting reality. Reality which their religion can't explain or guide them through.
It has been enlightening to read your posts. I used to be able to keep up on the science and used to delight in point-by point refutations of creationists, back when they were still known as Bible-thumpers, but I've gotten tired. I've heard all the standard creationist arguments too many times. All of Vince's arguments have been laid to rest many, many times before. The answers are easy to find.
Vince doesn't have the integrity or heart to look the material up because he doesn't want answers. He wants the comfort of faith and to feel like he is fighting the good fight for that faith. Until he comes around to it naturally he isn't going to let anything as insignificant as actual facts get in his way.
THE PROOF: [...] in American Scientist, Vol. 63, November-December, 1975
1975.
Do you have any idea how long ago that was? Chengjiang was only discovered in 1981. Kimberella was only recognized as a mollusk in 1997. And so on.
This is backed by Gould, Patterson, Eldredge, etc. etc.
...for a meaning of "abrupt" that easily covers ten million years. BTW, Gould isn't backing anything anymore, he died in 2002.
‘Natural Selection’ is a misnomer as nature isn’t a living entity and doesn’t select anything.
I agree: it's a metaphor – just like "law of physics".
You know, that you’ve to fall back upon such a stupid and tired strawman shows that even a chimp would wince at your tomfool arguments and look upon you as being vaguely retarded at the very least.
You keep making arguments from personal incredulity and arguments from ignorance.
When will you learn that these are logical fallacies? You can shout them louder and louder, again and again, and it still won't help. Sit down, read, and learn.
Just to make things abundantly clear to your addle brain, the simple FACT of creation can simply be likened to 2, the solution to 1+1.
Yeah, whatever.
what you are asserting to be scientific fact is in actuality far more ludicrous than
That's really funny when it comes from a believer in miracles.
Now, once you're done with your meltdown, would you like to discuss the evidence? Or, as I asked, would you rather continue to not know what you're talking about?
Vince Goodrum, looks like someone hit a nerve. Five posts, each more infantile than the last. You are regressing.
You have lost ... in a rather embarrassing manner.
Time for a new set of user names because, even though you are not knowledgeable enough to fully appreciate the depth of your failure you don't want people on other sites Googling your user name/s and seeing this particularly ugly failure as a thinking being, and as a Christian.
I can say that last bit because I grew up as a good Southern Baptist before I grew up, noticed how useless Christianity is, and got a little education.
Don't believe me? Print out a copy of this thread and have your preacher tell you exactly how you have failed as a Christian. You have failed both yourself and your religion.
A spectacular double-fail that will live on forever on the internet.
Mr. Goodrum, what is your intention with these posts? Whether one is a proponent of creationism or evolutionary theory, he usually spends his effort trying to argue his case because he hopes of convincing the other person that his perspective is correct or at least plausible.
You seem to be more interested in crafting insults. Which would be fine, I suppose, if they actually succeeded at offending. Given Mr. Marjanović's tenacity in responding with patient explanations, however, the insults don't seem to be working. Also, they're not very witty. At this point, you are making other creationists look not only mean-spirited but worse, uncreative. Your passion for the art of the insult is encouraging, and if nurtured and harnessed through intentional practice, could someday bloom into a true gift. The key here is "intentional". Never content yourself with a old trick— a string of random adjectives, a spin on a surname —but rather maintain that vigilance for new material and new perspectives. Some comedians even impose a rule of not reusing any material older than a year. Find a way to adapt and apply that rule that to your current occupation as commenter and I've no doubt you'll discover new material you never knew you had. Your penchant for improv is promising, but if you really want to do some damage to people's egos, you're going to have to go all the way.
Also, never underestimate the power of brevity. Like a good punch, a biting insult packed into few words packs much more force than a rant of several sentences.
Highly amused at this sad excuse for a human - this pathetic Vince person. Luckily, his genes won't end up in the gene pool at this rate, not even in the shallow end. I predict an apoplectic fit in a year or two.....
@David Marjanović
Pascal's Wager lays out the risk involved with the gamble of nonbelief moreso than it suggests that you "fake it till you make it", AND it highlights the possibility that there is a God :). It also highlights the possibility that you may be in route to hell :(. OUCH (hurts to type it)! I know you don't believe you're on that trajectory and likely don't believe in an afterlife at all, but you can't disprove it (considering that you can't disprove the existence of your soul) any more than anyone else can prove that they're going to heaven. You don't have to "pretend to believe" if you can see with your eyes that creation exists, and therefore KNOW - with gratitude - that it was created. Of course the evidence of creation is not enough tangible evidence to prove to the atheist that there was a Creator (they maintain), but Pascal's Wager is useful in illustrating how that doesn't matter when it comes down to whether or not He exists. One shouldn't bet their life on there not being a God, which to some is a reasonable argument. I obviously hope that hell is not your destination, though it's evident you don't have a clue about the Person of God or His justice. You study His work and say that He didn't do it, which is like taking a class on Mozart, then "logically" concluding that his musical masterpieces came about by many instruments accidentally banging up against each other - generating songs in perfect harmony and tempo. Take no offense, but that's foolishness. You say: "Pascal's Wager assumes that there are only two possibilities: either the Christian god, specifically the one of Pascal’s denomination or similar, exists, or all religions are completely wrong. Well. What if the ancient Mesopotamian religion (or Islam) had it right?"
I say what if the Jesus had it right? When I was a nonbeliever, Christians confronted me with Jesus and I would politely listen, but reject them thinking; "what the hell do they know? I'm doing my own thing. What if Tina Turner has it right with her Buddism, she's doing good in her life so who can tell her otherwise? Muhammad Ali (literally) kicked ass as a Muslim so who can tell him he's wrong? What if this, what if that?" I would ask. Sparing you the details of my personal testimony and making a very long story short, all of our "what ifs" will be eventually answered by what is. The ancient Mesopotamian religion has diminished as will every other philosophy, religion or theory that is not inevitable truth. What is the inevitable, ABSOLUTE truth?
According to Jesus, He is "the way, the Truth and the life and no one comes to the Father except through Him." He also had the audacity to state that "if you had known Him, you would have known God also", and that we will one day see "Him seated in the place of power at God's right hand and coming on the clouds of heaven." The balls!!! Crazy man or truth bearer? Of course He was crucified shortly after that last assertion, but (as you know) was reported to have resurrected 3 days later. Whatever you believe, the consensus is that He changed the world in an unprecedented way for the better and brought balance to the force.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Due to exhaustion, it's really tempting to do nothing and let Godlessness run a muck, but if Jesus had done the same we would all be in a (worst) world of hurt. I don't mean to classify your work as "evil" as I know you've spent a lot of precious time delving into the "theory", but if it leads you and others down the broad road of denouncing or disregarding God, it's the opposite of good. If you spend all your life studying whatever only to overlook the DETAIL of your soul's existence, you've made an irrevocable mess. If you encourage others to do the same, an even bigger and sadder mess. Hey, but maybe (grandpa was a monkey) evolution and/or atheism does spur people on to good deeds, fulfilled potential and a blissful existence in the hereafter. What did Jesus know?
I surely don't mean to call myself a good man either because I AM NOT. I screw up on a frequent basis, but Jesus was a good Man and is good through vessels of men whenever they allow (again see people who changed the world diligently following Him: Isaac Newton, MLK, Galileo, Mother Theresa, U.S. founding fathers, Martin Luther, the Apostle Paul, etc.). Where is the man who is aware of Jesus, that is willing and able to dispute His goodness? Is there anyone who can effectively destroy His credibility and legacy? I know if there was, it would have been done by now. Turning water into wine, walking on water, rising from the dead, etc. - if any of this happened, atheists and evolutionists have a problem omitting the supernatural God from human history. Actively changing lives and destinies years after being dead and gone (if you will) to the tune of 2.3 billion followers in 2014. Nobody can disprove any of His claims or deny the results of Him having walked among us. The problem is, He couldn't have been a good man as many have agreed and say things like; "I tell you the truth, before Abraham was even born, I Am!" or "today you shall be with Me in Paradise" if they were lies. Again, claims so outrageous that they would make Him (or anybody else) a mad man for saying them if they were not true. Was Jesus Christ a mad man?
You do not believe that you are in need of forgiveness, salvation or reconciliation with God I suppose? In the same breathe you surely acknowledge that you are not perfect, and that you have made and will continue to make many mistakes? Like me, you've been wrong before as well? Well we can't afford to be wrong on this one. If there is a God, we need to personally know Him before we croak. None of the other options on the buffet make the assertion that God Himself hopped in skin, and came down to dwell among us. You don't know Him (obvious because you don't believe He exits), you're mistake (sin) prone and therefore "potentially" have a room booked in hell. Major problems with a Solution.
I fully expect you to have an argument against everything I posted with internet sites and the whole nine. Many see "circle" in Isaiah 40:22 and interpret globe or round, you see it and interpret flat. I read about Jesus and interpret God incarnate (the Truth if I may), you read and of course see someone else. Certainly we are both able to click on a myriad of sites that will argue our different perspectives and with respect, you are probably someone who will need an act of God to believe in God so I may be throwing seeds on concrete. Nevertheless, some guilty bystander may be reading this thread looking for insight and is unsure either way. To that person(s) I share that Jesus Christ wasn't a myth, wasn't a theory, but was God and (a real, actual) Man who lived for the purpose of reconciling the two. And did. Feast on some of His Words.
A long post I know, but there are some other novels on here as well. God bless the whole lot of you fearfully and wonderfully made creatures.
Well, which is it? Magically, or through a natural process?
Natural selection is part of the process. It's not some kind of external support.
"Up"? There is no "up".
No, evolution is not metamorphosis. Pokémon uses the word wrong.
I'm sure you've noticed that children look similar to their parents. I'm sure you've also noticed that they neither look like either one of their parents, nor is every single one of their traits necessarily found in any of their parents. A few are new. Some of those can be inherited. Heritable changes over generations – that's evolution.
Too bad for you if you feel that reality is demeaning. Too bad for you if you'd rather live in cloud-cuckoo-land; you don't live in cloud-cuckoo-land. Deal with it.
Exactly. An intelligent entity wouldn't create a brain that sees patterns where they exist and also where they don't exist; it wouldn't create a brain that is afraid of the dark even when it knows full well that there aren't any hyenas around; it wouldn't create a brain that can develop optical illusions; I could go on.
It has happened three times. The evidence for this is quite overwhelming. Want me to provide some?
David Marjanović has won the debate because Vince Goodrum has run out of arguments and resorted to personal attack.
Vince Goodrum :
"You’re a moron and too stupid to even know why. "
Prior to this Vince Goodrum had been running behind on points simply because he failed to provide any clear examples supporting his assertions. Simply asserting that the opposing propositions were "religious crap" and "absurdities" was not helpful.
I beg to differ Art, Vince is ahead in points scored by a substantial margin. Brutal delivery, but winning.
No one is winning this argument because there is no argument. An argument is a discussion between two or more people that are willing to come to a conclusion, some sort of synthesis, or at least trying to understand someone's viewpoint better. The reason why there is no argument is because Vince is not willing to listen empathetically to the other side, and therefore can not understand and counter the other ideas. There is no point in arguing with a dogmatic person.
Game set and match to David Marjanović'
Vince Goodrum is disqualified for using a sock puppet after it became apparent that he had no credible argument or evidence.
David Marjanović' , a shame your opponent wasn't better prepared or honorable for it would make the victory sweeter but you didn't get to chose you opponent and a win is a win.
David Marjanović' wins one internet, a hearty "well done" for patiently speaking science and reason to mindless superstition , and a virtual drink of his choice.
Vince, I'm a bit confused that you pray for some people and insult others. You are a poor example of what you want to represent.
@BOBBY
"Conclusion"- the final judgment or decision, the end, a resolution. How do we resolve this? Where does the debate between believers and nonbelievers ultimately end? Obviously at the truth. In the end that's all that will stand. Either we were created and share existence with God, or we're an unsupervised chance occurrence. Either we evolved from something different than what we presently are, or we were created as we presently are. Both can't be right as we have a black or white situation with only one truth. It is possible however that one side has already passed the test that the other side is still studying for.
Nobody is contesting the fact that the earth is spherical in 2014, though at one time many believed it was flat. Men of previous generations discovered the truth, and now centuries later we can all see from photos taken from a HIGHER PERSPECTIVE that their discovery is indisputable. Some believe that the Bible had a jump on the unrevealed when it revealed: "It is He who sits above the circle of the earth, and it's inhabitants are like grasshoppers" (Isaiah 40:22). Or when it asserts in Job 26 that "He stretches out the north over empty space and He hangs the earth on nothing", a passage written centuries before anyone had any observational proof.
There may be other nuggets of insight in the Bible that will destroy false theories and disclose nonnegotiable truth. Whether or not there is a God, THAT'S A BIG ONE and we all should want to get a confirmation on that before we expire. The existence of heaven and hell is another topic worthy of thorough research. Did Jesus perform all those alleged miracles and die for our sins, resurrecting 3 days later? Did God "exalt Him to the highest place and give Him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord"?
It's yes or no, true or false. If the believers are wrong, they have absolutely nothing to loose but some lost opportunities at vain sin that wouldn't profit much anyway. At worst they follow the most famous, most impactful, most (positively) influential, most resonant Man to ever live into potentially making the world a better place (see the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King and/or many U.S. Presidents not named George W. Bush). They take their best swing at righteousness/emulation, they die and disappear - no harm done. Contrarily if nonbelievers are wrong, their worst case scenario is far more grave. They may find out that there is a spiritual component to human existence and face a Creator that they consciously rejected and ignored, resulting in a fate of eternal separation from that Creator (in hell of course). In other words they may get what they want only to discover that they don't want it.
What is the ABSOLUTE truth? The earth is round, the sky is blue, Elvis is dead, global warming is true. The debate about God and creation will be settled, and it will at some point cease to be open for discussion.
As everyone has been saying, there is no debate. This is about which ideas are wrong, not who is better at rhetorics. Scientists never hold debates with each other – debate is whatcha put on de hook to catch de fish.
I'm not here to win anything. This is not about me. I'm here simply because demonstrably wrong claims have been made in this thread.
It's also a total fallacy to believe that people only insult each other once they've run out of arguments. I'm only restraining myself from using certain words because I'm told National Geographic Inc. doesn't like them.
(...Some of the insults Mr Goodrum uses, though, show that he's a racist. I'm not exactly restraining myself from not using those...)
Back to quoting false claims, then:
Evidence?
Merely repeating yourself isn't an argument. It doesn't make anything true, and it won't convince anybody.
Evolutionary epistemology: a brain that is "entirely untrustworthy" is at a disadvantage compared to one that is less untrustworthy in its interpretation of the environment. A completely untrustworthy brain would make it really hard to find food, escape predators, and so on. Thus, the theory of evolution predicts that brains will, in the long run, be as good as needed.
At the same time, it predicts they won't be better than needed, because there's no advantage in that that would lead to a greater number of surviving fertile offspring. Human pattern recognition is overactive because if there's a leopard in the nearest bush and you don't see it, you're dead and can't reproduce or care for your children anymore, while if there's no leopard in the nearest bush but you see one anyway, you get away with just being scared for a few seconds.
Creationism cannot explain why our pattern recognition is overactive. It cannot explain pareidolia.
You haven't even asked for any... anyway, I just provided some. There's more.
By definition, evolution only begins once the first self-replicator exists. How the first self-replicator came into being is a separate, unrelated question.
...Adding genes or whole plasmids to the genome of a bacterium is an utterly standard procedure in molecular biology, and has been for decades. I've done it myself several times. Now, maybe you don't count that as a mutation, because those genes already existed in other species, but that's hard to reconcile with your bizarre use of "mutate" as a transitive verb. It's intransitive; it's "you mutate", not "I mutate you". Mutation happens.
You're beginning to become incoherent. "Higher" is wrong, "design" is wrong, "appears as" is at the very least confusingly clumsy, I have no clue why you pick "a insect" as your example...
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Only three parts of this quote aren't word salad, but rise to the level of being wrong.
One is "devolve", a term that doesn't exist in biology. There is no "higher" or "lower"; evolution goes in whatever direction the environment presses it.
The second is the assertion that "genetic sequences", whatever that is exactly, can only be lost, not gained; they're gained all the time, and they're modified all the time without any loss. Every once in a while, DNA polymerase slips back and copies something again that it had already copied, so the new strand is longer than the older; this is how gene duplication happens. Having more copies of a gene often means that more of the protein it codes for is made; that can confer an adaptive advantage. When one of the copies undergoes ordinary substitution mutations, you can get a whole new gene.
The third is the claim that a genome is a map of DNA. It's not the map, it's the territory! The genome of an organism is the totality of the DNA in each of its cells.
What do you mean by "Mutations that force an adaptation to survive"??? It doesn't make sense.
Any insertion mutation and any duplication mutation increases the information in the genome. Be aware that you're using a technical term that may not mean what you think it means.
:-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D
Oh, man. :-D I'm a vertebrate paleontologist. Name a transition in vertebrate evolution, and I'll list the transitional fossils for you!
Then learn some science theory (you know, theory of science): science cannot prove, only disprove, and even that only given certain assumptions – because it isn't possible to disprove solipsism.
What science uses a lot is the principle of parsimony.
No. It's descent with heritable modification.
What a silly argument from personal incredulity: "I personally can't imagine how it works, therefore it doesn't work".
Closely related to the argument from ignorance: "I personally happen not to know how it works, therefore it doesn't work".
I don't think I need to explain why these are logical fallacies. You should be ashamed that you keep using them.
(I particularly love the use of "sea slug" in your source, as if there were a single species of "sea slug"! There are thousands, one of which does what's described in your source, and some of which are more closely related to land and freshwater snails than to other sea snails/slugs.)
Evolution isn't simply chance. Mutation and drift are random, but selection is not – it's determined by the environment.
Oh dear. Don't the words "above" and "circle" clue you in to the fact that the Bible assumes a flat earth? This is a bit long, but I recommend you read it. I found it dense and not boring.
Did you just seriously bring up Pascal's Wager? :-) It's such a bad argument that some wonder if it was originally meant to be a parody.
First, I'm not capable of believing without evidence. Pascal's Wager in effect tells me to pretend to believe – in the hope of fooling a god who knows everything and thus knows I'm pretending. Seriously?
(Pascal himself recognized this problem and in effect said "fake it till you make it". That, however, doesn't work; I can't fake it till I make it, and I'm far from the only one.)
Second, it pulls assumptions out of nowhere. What if this hypothetical deity prefers people who use the gift of reason it gave them over unthinking yes-men? What if it prefers atheists who are wrong for the right reason over pious believers who are right for the wrong reason?
Relatedly, it assumes that there are only two possibilities: either the Christian god, specifically the one of Pascal's denomination or similar, exists, or all religions are completely wrong. Well. What if the ancient Mesopotamian religion had it right? In that case, everyone's shadow – completely regardless of faith, good works, anything – goes to the dark, depressing underworld, eats mud and lives in depression forever. Or, more to the point, how about Islam? It assumes a heaven quite like the Christian one, and it assumes that only believers get there, but some of the things you supposedly need to believe to get there are mutually exclusive with some of the things you supposedly need to believe to get to the Christian heaven.
A good question, given the impossibility of disproving solipsism.
I just wrote a long comment that is awaiting moderation because it contains 6 links. I don't think PZ is going to look at the moderation queue anytime soon, so I'm submitting it again, in three parts. Please excuse the duplication and the shift in comment numbers that will likely happen at some point.
Part 1 of 3:
As everyone has been saying, there is no debate. This is about which ideas are wrong, not who is better at rhetorics. Scientists never hold debates with each other – debate is whatcha put on de hook to catch de fish.
I'm not here to win anything. This is not about me. I'm here simply because demonstrably wrong claims have been made in this thread.
It's also a total fallacy to believe that people only insult each other once they've run out of arguments. I'm only restraining myself from using certain words because I'm told National Geographic Inc. doesn't like them.
(...Some of the insults Mr Goodrum uses, though, show that he's a racist. I'm not exactly restraining myself from not using those...)
Back to quoting false claims, then:
Evidence?
Merely repeating yourself isn't an argument. It doesn't make anything true, and it won't convince anybody.
Evolutionary epistemology: a brain that is "entirely untrustworthy" is at a disadvantage compared to one that is less untrustworthy in its interpretation of the environment. A completely untrustworthy brain would make it really hard to find food, escape predators, and so on. Thus, the theory of evolution predicts that brains will, in the long run, be as good as needed.
At the same time, it predicts they won't be better than needed, because there's no advantage in that that would lead to a greater number of surviving fertile offspring. Human pattern recognition is overactive because if there's a leopard in the nearest bush and you don't see it, you're dead and can't reproduce or care for your children anymore, while if there's no leopard in the nearest bush but you see one anyway, you get away with just being scared for a few seconds.
Creationism cannot explain why our pattern recognition is overactive. It cannot explain pareidolia.
You haven't even asked for any... anyway, I just provided some. There's more.
Part 2 of 3:
By definition, evolution only begins once the first self-replicator exists. How the first self-replicator came into being is a separate, unrelated question.
...Adding genes or whole plasmids to the genome of a bacterium is an utterly standard procedure in molecular biology, and has been for decades. I've done it myself several times. Now, maybe you don't count that as a mutation, because those genes already existed in other species, but that's hard to reconcile with your bizarre use of "mutate" as a transitive verb. It's intransitive; it's "you mutate", not "I mutate you". Mutation happens.
You're beginning to become incoherent. "Higher" is wrong, "design" is wrong, "appears as" is at the very least confusingly clumsy, I have no clue why you pick "a insect" as your example...
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Only three parts of this quote aren't word salad, but rise to the level of being wrong.
One is "devolve", a term that doesn't exist in biology. There is no "higher" or "lower"; evolution goes in whatever direction the environment presses it.
The second is the assertion that "genetic sequences", whatever that is exactly, can only be lost, not gained; they're gained all the time, and they're modified all the time without any loss. Every once in a while, DNA polymerase slips back and copies something again that it had already copied, so the new strand is longer than the older; this is how gene duplication happens. Having more copies of a gene often means that more of the protein it codes for is made; that can confer an adaptive advantage. When one of the copies undergoes ordinary substitution mutations, you can get a whole new gene.
The third is the claim that a genome is a map of DNA. It's not the map, it's the territory! The genome of an organism is the totality of the DNA in each of its cells.
What do you mean by "Mutations that force an adaptation to survive"??? It doesn't make sense.
Any insertion mutation and any duplication mutation increases the information in the genome. Be aware that you're using a technical term that may not mean what you think it means.
Part 3 of 3:
:-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D
Oh, man. :-D I'm a vertebrate paleontologist. Name a transition in vertebrate evolution, and I'll list the transitional fossils for you!
Then learn some science theory (you know, theory of science): science cannot prove, only disprove, and even that only given certain assumptions – because it isn't possible to disprove solipsism.
What science uses a lot is the principle of parsimony.
No. It's descent with heritable modification.
What a silly argument from personal incredulity: "I personally can't imagine how it works, therefore it doesn't work".
Closely related to the argument from ignorance: "I personally happen not to know how it works, therefore it doesn't work".
I don't think I need to explain why these are logical fallacies. You should be ashamed that you keep using them.
(I particularly love the use of "sea slug" in your source, as if there were a single species of "sea slug"! There are thousands, one of which does what's described in your source, and some of which are more closely related to land and freshwater snails than to other sea snails/slugs.)
Evolution isn't simply chance. Mutation and drift are random, but selection is not – it's determined by the environment.
Oh dear. Don't the words "above" and "circle" clue you in to the fact that the Bible assumes a flat earth? This is a bit long, but I recommend you read it. I found it dense and not boring.
Did you just seriously bring up Pascal's Wager? :-) It's such a bad argument that some wonder if it was originally meant to be a parody.
First, I'm not capable of believing without evidence. Pascal's Wager in effect tells me to pretend to believe – in the hope of fooling a god who knows everything and thus knows I'm pretending. Seriously?
(Pascal himself recognized this problem and in effect said "fake it till you make it". That, however, doesn't work; I can't fake it till I make it, and I'm far from the only one.)
Second, it pulls assumptions out of nowhere. What if this hypothetical deity prefers people who use the gift of reason it gave them over unthinking yes-men? What if it prefers atheists who are wrong for the right reason over pious believers who are right for the wrong reason?
Relatedly, it assumes that there are only two possibilities: either the Christian god, specifically the one of Pascal's denomination or similar, exists, or all religions are completely wrong. Well. What if the ancient Mesopotamian religion had it right? In that case, everyone's shadow – completely regardless of faith, good works, anything – goes to the dark, depressing underworld, eats mud and lives in depression forever. Or, more to the point, how about Islam? It assumes a heaven quite like the Christian one, and it assumes that only believers get there, but some of the things you supposedly need to believe to get there are mutually exclusive with some of the things you supposedly need to believe to get to the Christian heaven.
A good question, given the impossibility of disproving solipsism.
David Marjanović , you have done very well. You clearly know the subject.
But, perhaps, you should have accepted the award and moved on. Being from the deep Bible-thumping south I've been around people like our buddy Vince for better than fifty years and have been debating/ arguing/ jousting with his kind on-line going back to the days when connecting involved dialing a phone and placing a handset into a cradle.
You are right that this isn't a debate or argument in any conventional or academic sense. But it is something of a contest. For Vince it is all about him and his ability to get attention and win cheap points thinking he has engaged learned opponents such as yourself and got away without making himself look like too much of a fool. Like a mouse belling the cat.
This will get him points in his own mind and any circle of friends he might have, and serves to transfer reputation from you to him. For him it is all about him. Which is why my short post pointing out you won was answered so quickly and vehemently. He had lost the game he had set up and had lost fair and square, even in his own eyes.
You rescued him by engaging in factual discussion, as an adult. There is some value to that because everything on the internet lives on essentially forever so your good faith argument is not entirely lost and may one day help clarify the issue for anyone seeking to honestly know. Unfortunately Vince isn't one of them.
You see Vince is, or can be assumed to be, everything he accuses you of being. Which is why the words liar, bullshitter, lying shitsack, and indoctrinated idiot come so quickly to his mind. It is a veritable laundry list of the failings, tendencies, and insecurities caused by the stress of having to bend himself and his logic out of shape seeking to defend the indefensible.
In my experience Vince may actually be on the verge of accepting atheism after seeing his religious beliefs as the hollow ruse it is. He would undoubtedly, and most vociferously, deny this but I've seen more than one devout Christian punch themselves to mental and philosophical exhaustion before figuring out that they are fighting reality. Reality which their religion can't explain or guide them through.
It has been enlightening to read your posts. I used to be able to keep up on the science and used to delight in point-by point refutations of creationists, back when they were still known as Bible-thumpers, but I've gotten tired. I've heard all the standard creationist arguments too many times. All of Vince's arguments have been laid to rest many, many times before. The answers are easy to find.
Vince doesn't have the integrity or heart to look the material up because he doesn't want answers. He wants the comfort of faith and to feel like he is fighting the good fight for that faith. Until he comes around to it naturally he isn't going to let anything as insignificant as actual facts get in his way.
1975.
Do you have any idea how long ago that was? Chengjiang was only discovered in 1981. Kimberella was only recognized as a mollusk in 1997. And so on.
...for a meaning of "abrupt" that easily covers ten million years. BTW, Gould isn't backing anything anymore, he died in 2002.
I agree: it's a metaphor – just like "law of physics".
You keep making arguments from personal incredulity and arguments from ignorance.
When will you learn that these are logical fallacies? You can shout them louder and louder, again and again, and it still won't help. Sit down, read, and learn.
Yeah, whatever.
That's really funny when it comes from a believer in miracles.
Now, once you're done with your meltdown, would you like to discuss the evidence? Or, as I asked, would you rather continue to not know what you're talking about?
I know. Why would I care? :-)
Someone should submit him to Failblog, then.
Vince Goodrum, looks like someone hit a nerve. Five posts, each more infantile than the last. You are regressing.
You have lost ... in a rather embarrassing manner.
Time for a new set of user names because, even though you are not knowledgeable enough to fully appreciate the depth of your failure you don't want people on other sites Googling your user name/s and seeing this particularly ugly failure as a thinking being, and as a Christian.
I can say that last bit because I grew up as a good Southern Baptist before I grew up, noticed how useless Christianity is, and got a little education.
Don't believe me? Print out a copy of this thread and have your preacher tell you exactly how you have failed as a Christian. You have failed both yourself and your religion.
A spectacular double-fail that will live on forever on the internet.
And other things may live on forever elsewhere.
Can someone explain to me what any of this has to do with the squid picture?
I have to admit, I am curious as to why a supposed creationist would continuously use the word "mongrel" as an insult.
Is this not unbiblical polygenism? How many people besides Adam and Eve did God supposedly create, and when and where did this supposedly happen?
Mr. Goodrum, what is your intention with these posts? Whether one is a proponent of creationism or evolutionary theory, he usually spends his effort trying to argue his case because he hopes of convincing the other person that his perspective is correct or at least plausible.
You seem to be more interested in crafting insults. Which would be fine, I suppose, if they actually succeeded at offending. Given Mr. Marjanović's tenacity in responding with patient explanations, however, the insults don't seem to be working. Also, they're not very witty. At this point, you are making other creationists look not only mean-spirited but worse, uncreative. Your passion for the art of the insult is encouraging, and if nurtured and harnessed through intentional practice, could someday bloom into a true gift. The key here is "intentional". Never content yourself with a old trick— a string of random adjectives, a spin on a surname —but rather maintain that vigilance for new material and new perspectives. Some comedians even impose a rule of not reusing any material older than a year. Find a way to adapt and apply that rule that to your current occupation as commenter and I've no doubt you'll discover new material you never knew you had. Your penchant for improv is promising, but if you really want to do some damage to people's egos, you're going to have to go all the way.
Also, never underestimate the power of brevity. Like a good punch, a biting insult packed into few words packs much more force than a rant of several sentences.
Highly amused at this sad excuse for a human - this pathetic Vince person. Luckily, his genes won't end up in the gene pool at this rate, not even in the shallow end. I predict an apoplectic fit in a year or two.....
@David Marjanović
Pascal's Wager lays out the risk involved with the gamble of nonbelief moreso than it suggests that you "fake it till you make it", AND it highlights the possibility that there is a God :). It also highlights the possibility that you may be in route to hell :(. OUCH (hurts to type it)! I know you don't believe you're on that trajectory and likely don't believe in an afterlife at all, but you can't disprove it (considering that you can't disprove the existence of your soul) any more than anyone else can prove that they're going to heaven. You don't have to "pretend to believe" if you can see with your eyes that creation exists, and therefore KNOW - with gratitude - that it was created. Of course the evidence of creation is not enough tangible evidence to prove to the atheist that there was a Creator (they maintain), but Pascal's Wager is useful in illustrating how that doesn't matter when it comes down to whether or not He exists. One shouldn't bet their life on there not being a God, which to some is a reasonable argument. I obviously hope that hell is not your destination, though it's evident you don't have a clue about the Person of God or His justice. You study His work and say that He didn't do it, which is like taking a class on Mozart, then "logically" concluding that his musical masterpieces came about by many instruments accidentally banging up against each other - generating songs in perfect harmony and tempo. Take no offense, but that's foolishness. You say: "Pascal's Wager assumes that there are only two possibilities: either the Christian god, specifically the one of Pascal’s denomination or similar, exists, or all religions are completely wrong. Well. What if the ancient Mesopotamian religion (or Islam) had it right?"
I say what if the Jesus had it right? When I was a nonbeliever, Christians confronted me with Jesus and I would politely listen, but reject them thinking; "what the hell do they know? I'm doing my own thing. What if Tina Turner has it right with her Buddism, she's doing good in her life so who can tell her otherwise? Muhammad Ali (literally) kicked ass as a Muslim so who can tell him he's wrong? What if this, what if that?" I would ask. Sparing you the details of my personal testimony and making a very long story short, all of our "what ifs" will be eventually answered by what is. The ancient Mesopotamian religion has diminished as will every other philosophy, religion or theory that is not inevitable truth. What is the inevitable, ABSOLUTE truth?
According to Jesus, He is "the way, the Truth and the life and no one comes to the Father except through Him." He also had the audacity to state that "if you had known Him, you would have known God also", and that we will one day see "Him seated in the place of power at God's right hand and coming on the clouds of heaven." The balls!!! Crazy man or truth bearer? Of course He was crucified shortly after that last assertion, but (as you know) was reported to have resurrected 3 days later. Whatever you believe, the consensus is that He changed the world in an unprecedented way for the better and brought balance to the force.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Due to exhaustion, it's really tempting to do nothing and let Godlessness run a muck, but if Jesus had done the same we would all be in a (worst) world of hurt. I don't mean to classify your work as "evil" as I know you've spent a lot of precious time delving into the "theory", but if it leads you and others down the broad road of denouncing or disregarding God, it's the opposite of good. If you spend all your life studying whatever only to overlook the DETAIL of your soul's existence, you've made an irrevocable mess. If you encourage others to do the same, an even bigger and sadder mess. Hey, but maybe (grandpa was a monkey) evolution and/or atheism does spur people on to good deeds, fulfilled potential and a blissful existence in the hereafter. What did Jesus know?
I surely don't mean to call myself a good man either because I AM NOT. I screw up on a frequent basis, but Jesus was a good Man and is good through vessels of men whenever they allow (again see people who changed the world diligently following Him: Isaac Newton, MLK, Galileo, Mother Theresa, U.S. founding fathers, Martin Luther, the Apostle Paul, etc.). Where is the man who is aware of Jesus, that is willing and able to dispute His goodness? Is there anyone who can effectively destroy His credibility and legacy? I know if there was, it would have been done by now. Turning water into wine, walking on water, rising from the dead, etc. - if any of this happened, atheists and evolutionists have a problem omitting the supernatural God from human history. Actively changing lives and destinies years after being dead and gone (if you will) to the tune of 2.3 billion followers in 2014. Nobody can disprove any of His claims or deny the results of Him having walked among us. The problem is, He couldn't have been a good man as many have agreed and say things like; "I tell you the truth, before Abraham was even born, I Am!" or "today you shall be with Me in Paradise" if they were lies. Again, claims so outrageous that they would make Him (or anybody else) a mad man for saying them if they were not true. Was Jesus Christ a mad man?
You do not believe that you are in need of forgiveness, salvation or reconciliation with God I suppose? In the same breathe you surely acknowledge that you are not perfect, and that you have made and will continue to make many mistakes? Like me, you've been wrong before as well? Well we can't afford to be wrong on this one. If there is a God, we need to personally know Him before we croak. None of the other options on the buffet make the assertion that God Himself hopped in skin, and came down to dwell among us. You don't know Him (obvious because you don't believe He exits), you're mistake (sin) prone and therefore "potentially" have a room booked in hell. Major problems with a Solution.
I fully expect you to have an argument against everything I posted with internet sites and the whole nine. Many see "circle" in Isaiah 40:22 and interpret globe or round, you see it and interpret flat. I read about Jesus and interpret God incarnate (the Truth if I may), you read and of course see someone else. Certainly we are both able to click on a myriad of sites that will argue our different perspectives and with respect, you are probably someone who will need an act of God to believe in God so I may be throwing seeds on concrete. Nevertheless, some guilty bystander may be reading this thread looking for insight and is unsure either way. To that person(s) I share that Jesus Christ wasn't a myth, wasn't a theory, but was God and (a real, actual) Man who lived for the purpose of reconciling the two. And did. Feast on some of His Words.
A long post I know, but there are some other novels on here as well. God bless the whole lot of you fearfully and wonderfully made creatures.