evolution vs creation vs Intelligent Design

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(priusguy04 @ May 17 2006, 01:36 PM) [snapback]256922[/snapback]</div>

Here's a good version, to which I subscribe (Human Nature & ethics vs. obeying a so-called supernatural tyrant).

Human Nature
Man is a rational being. Reason, as man's only means of knowledge, is his basic means of survival. But the exercise of reason depends on each individual's choice. "Man is a being of volitional consciousness." "That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call 'free will' is your mind's freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom. This is the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and character."Thus Objectivism rejects any form of determinism, the belief that man is a victim of forces beyond his control (such as God, fate, upbringing, genes, or economic conditions).

Ethics
"Reason is man's only proper judge of values and his only proper guide to action. The proper standard of ethics is: man's survival qua man—i.e., that which is required by man's nature for his survival as a rational being (not his momentary physical survival as a mindless brute). Rationality is man's basic virtue, and his three fundamental values are: reason, purpose, self-esteem. Man—every man—is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others; he must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; he must work for his rational self-interest, with the achievement of his own happiness as the highest moral purpose of his life." Thus Objectivism rejects any form of altruism—the claim that morality consists in living for others or for society.

Ayn Rand

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Randy @ May 19 2006, 03:15 AM) [snapback]257945[/snapback]</div>

You folks keep repeating the tired old refrain: Nobody can "see" god unless they first believe. Then you tell me I do not want to believe, as if you could see inside my heart. I would dearly love to believe in your comforting fantasy.

I seek truth!!! I seek it without prejudice!!! You lie most vilely when you accuse me of not "wanting" to see god. I want to see whatever is true. I do not want to brainwash myself into seeing something that is not there, and I do not want to blind myself to what is there.

You offer to "show" me your god, but you insist that I must believe first. But if the question at hand is whether or not there is a god, then it is dishonest to demand belief as a condition of revelation. One of the principle reasons I do not believe in god is that half a century of honest searching has revealed nothing but a cold and unfeeling physical world. And I repeat that if you assert that my searching has not been done with an open heart, then you slander me and you lie most vilely. You do not and you cannot know my heart!

Give me some evidence, or I'll dismiss you with the astrologers and the peddlars of perpetual-motion machines.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(windstrings @ May 18 2006, 10:50 PM) [snapback]257917[/snapback]</div>

Your logic being that if I did not make myself then god must have. But you ignore the myriad other possible explanations. I never claimed to have made myself. And your argument is dishonest because you know I never would make such a claim. It is most likely that I evolved from earlier life forms and that the first life form arose from inanimate matter according to basic laws of chemistry.

 

circular logic's a b!tch, isn't it?

 

Wow!.. do you really think if you evolved, that it was not done with order?
What made the laws of science?... who's word forces matter to obey?
Who set up the laws and who enforces it?

Do you really think "chance" is able to arrange and evolve life on earth with symmetry?

Does inanimate matter create animate matter?

Do you worship an object of stone or wood that has no life?

If not... why do you think you could be created by matter?.. do you really think matter is the highest form of existence?

Have you looked closely how the human body works?.. the brain?.. a pedal of a flower?
The mechanisms of the body, the endocrine system, nervous.. etc etc.....

Do you think intelligence was created by non intelligence?

Lets think about this here!

The Glory and evidence of God is everywhere if you can see it.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(windstrings @ May 19 2006, 08:42 PM) [snapback]258365[/snapback]</div>

This of course is one of the prime arguments used by advocates of intelligent design. They claim that life forms are so complex that they could not possibly have formed without some intelligent designer guiding their creation. One of their main advocates, William Dembski, famously claimed that the probability of the bacterial flagellum evolving randomly is less than the probability of a tornado in a junkyard creating a jet plane. Well, we could begin by debating whether evolution is a random or deterministic process (a more interesting argument than this one, IMHO) Dembski's claim is completely without merit. I am not a biologist; I'm a marine scientist but I have an advanced degree in statistics. Not only does his claim not hold water mathematically; many people (myself included) have, using mathematical models such as genetic algoritms, shown that complex life forms indeed CAN evolve without any prior design.
Now this doesn't prove that there cannot be some intelligent designer, it merely refutes the ID proponents' claim that a designer is necessary in order for complex life forms to evolve.

 

Hard to believe this thread is still going. A few more days of this and the thread will reach to the edge of the universe without requiring any splicing. The we can reel it in and see what it snagged out there. Perhaps one of god's discarded boots.

OK, the creationists look at what they perceive as an orderly universe and they say: "Something of higher order than this must have created the order we perceive here."

But they STOP there!

They don't go on to ask: "If something of higher order was necessary to create the order we perceive, whence the higher order entity itself? THAT certainly could not be the product of random processes. What created THAT?"

Creationists: You cannot brush that question aside. Without addressing it, your principal premise dissolves to dust.

Some of you do attempt to address the issue in this fashion: The higher order entity needs no explaining because it has neither beginning nor end: it has existed always.

OK, let's grant that. The higher order entity was never itself created or evolved or even sprung into being: it's just existed across the infinity of time in its entirety. Never mind that no facet of the observable universe has exhibited that kind of stability, from the sub-atomic to the galactic, every quanta we've seen shares one invariant characteristic with every other quanta: change. Morph. Mutation. But your higher order entity sits unaltered and unaffected by the warp and twist and stretch and spin every particle of the universe. This inconceivably complex "thing" sits clear of all that.

So it can do what.

Organize something of lesser order than itself.

Why should it bother?

Because you can't accept that the lesser order can have exactly the property you ascribe to the higher order - existence independent of time.

You easily swallow the notion that a high order of complexity can exist without being created, but you can't accept that something of LESSER order can exist without being created?

The lexicon has a phrase for that, in Latin: "non-sequitur" - "It Does Not Follow"

So that argument bites the dust.

Creationists: Answer the quetion: Whence the creator?

 

Its a really sad commentary on mankind.

We have grown so smart in our technology and our intellect has caused us to reach for the sky and attempt to capture time and matter itself...

Yet we still don't know who's our daddy, where we came from and who made us!

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(daniel @ May 19 2006, 08:13 PM) [snapback]258345[/snapback]</div>

You say you are open minded but your very words contradict this statement.
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(daniel @ May 19 2006, 08:13 PM) [snapback]258345[/snapback]</div>

Daniel, I am not questioning your heart. But, I am questioning your methods. For example, I might pray to God for two weeks "God if Evolution is true please show me a sign." And I may be very sincere in my heart when I make that prayer. Now if God does not show me any sign, does this prove that Evolution is not true? If you say yes than I would agree with your methods of seeking God. But, if you say no than I would disagree with your methods.
Let me put it to you this way. If you are not open to the possibility that there is a God than you will never know if God truly exists. I do not know why God puts so much emphasis on faith. All I can tell you is that He does and this is the method that He uses to reveal His truth to us.

 

Yea..... fact is we "are" walls!... really thick ones!

Trying to talk about spiritual things to someone that can only relate to material earthly things is indeed quite the challenge.. but for twisted reason.. I find it entertaining....

I too am very intellectual and I understand many of the struggles of trying to grasp things that seem to defy the laws of the material world.
In the spirit world.. good is bad in the material world.... white is black and freedom is bondage.
They are dominated by two different rulers which operate by different agendas.

Its like trying to mix two demensions.... they have different laws, but yet mirror each other in many ways too.

Fact is.. we have to get "desperate" enough by whatever means to reach out into an unknown demension that is against our understanding and far away from our comfort zone.

Thats why God responds so much better when someone released faith by letting go of thier comfort zone and walks out on the limb of trust.
Without desperation to the point of "having nothing to loose", its hard to find that place.

I have always found that my attempting to understand is the major hindrance to my recieving.

Its like trying to understand love before you open up to it.. it doesn't work!

Sorry, but there are many things that don't fit into the box of our brain and never will.. they are much too big!

Spirit is real, material is a representation.

They now have machines that can "fax" material shapes from one place to another.
You can take an object and the machine scans it like a CT scanner and sends the electronic information to the recieving maching hundreds of miles away and the second recieving machine recreates the original with wax to make a perfect identical.

The first is the original, the second is not..... so is the spirit realm... the spirit is the real, the physical is a deformed corrupted representation that ages with every day.

Man is a noble spirit encased in a frail form.

Some call it "throwing pearls before swine", but I see it more as throwing seeds to the rocky ground. With a little dirt and water, they may take root.

Water is always typified as spirit and the heart is the earth. When the earth is hard and rocky, its because the heart has been exposed to intense heat and cooled to form a disfigured mold. When that rock gets wind and water, it turns to sand and dirt... thats what grows seeds.

For some reason, I've been given grace to continue so there must be good reason.... when I run out of grace, I know there is no more reason.

 

The following video clip on Anthropology.net is priceless:

The Monkeys

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(IsrAmeriPrius @ May 20 2006, 03:01 PM) [snapback]258519[/snapback]</div>

Indeed- it is hilarious, but also sad when you consider how true it is.

 

Here's the funny thing: if science (completely hypothetically speaking) was to discover a "god," it wouldn't be any god of any human-created religion.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(IsrAmeriPrius @ May 20 2006, 12:01 PM) [snapback]258519[/snapback]</div>

Wonderful. They even included the Flying Spaghetti Monster in one of the snapshots!


<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Randy @ May 19 2006, 07:34 PM) [snapback]258431[/snapback]</div>

I have to comment that I am blown away by the mind-boggling egotism of someone who can jump from "there must be a supernatural creator because this wonderful world could not have happened by itself," to "God loves humans best and I know exactly what he wants from us."

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(daniel @ May 20 2006, 12:56 PM) [snapback]258541[/snapback]</div>

When you leave someone clues and notes and send messengers and someone ignores the word left, the messengers and the notes, its thier own fault if they don't know exactly what the sender wants.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(windstrings @ May 20 2006, 06:38 PM) [snapback]258596[/snapback]</div>

In my opinion it's the sender's fault for unconvincingly conveying his message and choosing wrong messangers. Just like when you write something here and many people don't know what you are talking about, it's your own fault for not being able to express yourself clearly.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(dsunman @ May 20 2006, 03:53 PM) [snapback]258602[/snapback]</div>

What is clear to one person is mud to another. Who's at fault?

What is right to one person is wrong to another. Who's at fault?

What is peace to one person is torment to another.

What is God to one person is nothing to another. Who's at fault?

If I can see God and another can't... Who's at fault?

Sin blinds, blocks, numbs, and decieves.... who's at fault?... the one who holds the sin or the one who imputes it?

You want to hold your sin and have it accepted as an acceptable lifestyle, but God rejects your sin and made a way for you to shed it and just wants you the way you are so he can clothe you with his righteousness but you reject it. Who's at fault?

Lets ask God.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(windstrings @ May 20 2006, 03:38 PM) [snapback]258596[/snapback]</div>

So it's one of those games where god leaves mysterious clues here and there, and people have to figure them out, and if they get it wrong they go to hell forever????????? Considering that even christians cannot agree on what it all means, and adding to that Hindus and Muslims and Jews and Pagans and all the rest, all of whom believe in one way or another, but no two of them can read the "clues" the same way, I'd say either your god is pretty darn poor at getting his message across, or he wants most of the world to get it wrong. (And of course, if the Muslims have it right, you're the one going to hell.)

Or else there is no god and what you think are notes and clues are really just random variations in the background static.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(windstrings @ May 20 2006, 07:05 PM) [snapback]258608[/snapback]</div>

A lot of people here think that what you write is mud. And it's YOU who is at fault.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(daniel @ May 20 2006, 05:26 PM) [snapback]258644[/snapback]</div>

It more like God is in another world.. the spirit world.. although He is here among us in the form of "the Holy Spirit", its hard to touch and sense him without instructions as to how and the pitfalls that tend to grieve his Holy presence.