RE: Evidence God Exists
March 12, 2010 at 9:41 pm
(This post was last modified: March 12, 2010 at 10:19 pm by tavarish.)
(March 12, 2010 at 8:37 pm)AngelThMan Wrote: First of all, lions' sharp teeth or fangs are not unique to their species. Plenty of other species have them. Even if they were unique, sharp fangs don't give any species the ability to conquer the world as humans have. Humans themselves have unique physical traits, but is their intelligence which has allowed them to achieve dominion.
It's like talking to a wall.
Dominion IN THEIR ENVIRONMENT. You think our intelligence would stand a chance in the lions' environment without tools? You think that we would survive ANYWHERE without intelligence? It's a trait forged by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, and still isn't perfectly adapted for our environment. We're still killing each other over land that we think belongs to us, for fuck's sake. We still have very primitive emotional responses to lots of stimuli, and no amount of intelligence can shake the obvious attachment we have to our ancestors' behavior.
(March 12, 2010 at 8:37 pm)AngelThMan Wrote: Show me any 'other advanced mammal' that has invented computers.
Are computers the only bearing on intelligence a mammal could have?
How about communicable language? Self-awareness? Tangible emotional responses to stimuli? Working concepts of life and death? Established hierarchy and society? Expression of music? There are animals that have all of this and more.
If you want me to show you an advanced mammal that has invented a computer, show me a human that has developed SONAR naturally. It's just as ridiculous. It's like saying "monkeys don't show intelligence until they can fly the space shuttle". It's simply unreasonable at this point in time. However, I do contend that with time, anything is possible.
(March 12, 2010 at 8:37 pm)AngelThMan Wrote: What humans can achieve with their intelligence is far greater than what lions can achieve with their jaws. There's no comparison.
Greater in what sense?
How are you certain humans will remain "dominant" in the future?
(March 12, 2010 at 8:37 pm)AngelThMan Wrote: Basically what you're saying is that our intelligence is a survival tool that we developed through evolution. So now explain what the development of art, science, entertainment, etc. has to do with survival. From an evolutionary standpoint, why are those needed for the preservation of our species?
http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/...ions_sake/
Art, by contrast, is not about automatic responses to pretty things, expressive movements, and compelling rhythms, but our aesthetic activities and sensibilities in all their capricious diversity, from cave art and oral epics to museums and raves. It's that very flexibility and creativity - that humanity, in a word - of art which Dutton sets out to explain in evolutionary terms.
Some biologists have argued that art is an evolutionary accident, the fortuitous product of adaptations produced for other ends; Dutton disagrees. Far from being an accident of evolution, imagination is a useful survival tool, and thus almost certainly an adaptation in its own right. Dutton swiftly enumerates situations, from the Pleistocene age to the present, in which imagination proves its utility. One of the most important dimensions of our imaginative faculty, he argues, is its virtuality. Early hunter-gatherers would have derived immense benefit from a capacity to imagine and surmise: What's in the next valley? Do those caves harbor sheltering alcoves or dangerous bears?
(March 12, 2010 at 8:37 pm)AngelThMan Wrote: You've been reading too many fantasy books. See what I have to deal with here?
The Origin of the Species is a fantasy book now?
(March 12, 2010 at 8:37 pm)AngelThMan Wrote: Who used their intelligence to invent electricity and tools in the first place?
These are the types of arguments I'm subjected to here. Then people wonder why I don't 'listen' (concede).
Humans did. It still doesn't change the fact that we developed these traits over time and were not granted dominion over animals from a divine source. We would not survive in an environment that did not demand this from us, just as a slow-running cheetah would quickly die out in its environment. That's what i'm trying to point out. Your "dominance" is just the product of thousands of years of evolutionary development, still on-going by the way.