RE: The Bible is the claim, not the evidence
December 13, 2013 at 5:45 pm
(This post was last modified: December 13, 2013 at 6:03 pm by Mister Agenda.)
(December 12, 2013 at 2:48 pm)orangebox21 Wrote: Do I have this right? Mutation is synonomous with chance. So mutation (chance) occurs, then natural selection eliminates the harmful or unbeneficial chance and the good chance survives to enter into another state of mutation (chance) and this cycle occurs for millions of years (time). So if I say chance through natural selection and time is that an accurate definition?
Among the synonyms for 'chance' I doubt 'mutation' should be concluded. Mutations follow the laws of organic chemistry, they're not entirely random. It's like picking a card out of a deck: you might get a three of clubs, but you'll never get a rock. Genes can only change in certain ways. But your third sentence wasn't far-off if you take out the attempts to make mutation and chance synonymous, it's about right.
If you said 'random natural variations due to genetic mutation that differentially affect reproductive success and thus are subject to natural selection forces which eliminate the variations that are consistently reproductively unsuccessful', that would be a pretty accurate description.
(December 12, 2013 at 3:03 pm)orangebox21 Wrote: I'm defining creation, as Simon Moon commented on, as existence. I called it creation instead. The earth, sun, moon, stars, animals, plants, etc. Everything we "percieve" through our senses. I pruposed that existence (creation) points intuitively to an intelligent designer.
I agree with you. We make things and when we wonder how other things came to be, it's natural (intuitive) to consider that someone besides us made the other things. A bigger 'maker', maybe. However, our intuitions are not reliable sources of information. A major part of science is preventing our intuition (bias) from influencing our findings. Much of what science helps us discover is counter-intuitive. The earth looks flat, but it's actually nearly a sphere. The earth is going around the sun, the sun isn't going around the earth. Time slows down for you when you go faster. The universe is made of stuff we can barely begin to imagine. And the apparent design and wonderful variet of living things is entirely explained by the differential reproductive success of living organism starting from simple microbes over about four billion years. I agree that intuition tells us otherwise. But intuition is often wrong.
(December 11, 2013 at 2:19 pm)orangebox21 Wrote: I believe it to be far more likely things are created rather than they just happened. Simon Moon propsed that "existance is evidence of existance", that there cannot be any further deductions, conclusions, or intuitions to be drawn from that observation.
No valid deduction can be made from the mere fact that we perceive (on a very basic level) existence except the obvious tautology. We have to study and examine and discover and learn about existence, and we then can draw tentative conclusions from the things that we learn, subject to revision if we learn something new that shows our previous conclusions to be incorrect.