RE: Proof of God
April 25, 2015 at 6:18 am
(This post was last modified: April 25, 2015 at 6:25 am by bennyboy.)
Your claims of "argumentum ad nauseam" are hypocritical, because you keep insisting there's no good or evil without God, despite beyond told 20 ways past Sunday why that is not the case, and you haven't effectively responded to those.
As for evolution and natural selection: disregarding their status as scientific hypothesis or theory, they have a great advantage over your religoius views: common sense. At its core, evolution is just a statement of very obvious fact: some events lead to properties which have an increased chance to persist, and some do not. By the simplest definitions of time and function, persistent systems will. . . persist.
I have also sometimes criticized evolution as being too based on narrative, and too little on evidence. For example, I don't like hearing that the universe's capacity for mind evolved "just because." However, it's pretty obvious from the WAY we behave that our behaviors are 1) geared toward survival or sexual fitness; 2) lagging behind our social development.
Let me ask a question: why do men lust after women, even though birth control and harsh laws will lead to non-reproduction and punishment? Your answer is that God is fucking with us: He gave us these desires to see if we could overcome them; and if we CAN, we will be rewarded with 72 virgins. My answer is that most of these behaviors represent vestigial behaviors-- they made sense thousands of years ago, and the slow process of weeding them out through sexual selection, natural selection, and artificial selection (like execution) has not caught up yet to the fast changes in society.
I believe my answer makes a lot more sense than your answer, and EVEN IF there were zero scientific evidence for evolution, my narrative would still make a lot more sense than yours. That's because my narrative is an extension of observable fact: some things persist, so it's probable that collections of persistent qualities will interact and move forward through time together. Your narrative is based on an entity who nobody can demonstrate having seen or communicated with, and whose definition is intrinsically contradictory.
As for evolution and natural selection: disregarding their status as scientific hypothesis or theory, they have a great advantage over your religoius views: common sense. At its core, evolution is just a statement of very obvious fact: some events lead to properties which have an increased chance to persist, and some do not. By the simplest definitions of time and function, persistent systems will. . . persist.
I have also sometimes criticized evolution as being too based on narrative, and too little on evidence. For example, I don't like hearing that the universe's capacity for mind evolved "just because." However, it's pretty obvious from the WAY we behave that our behaviors are 1) geared toward survival or sexual fitness; 2) lagging behind our social development.
Let me ask a question: why do men lust after women, even though birth control and harsh laws will lead to non-reproduction and punishment? Your answer is that God is fucking with us: He gave us these desires to see if we could overcome them; and if we CAN, we will be rewarded with 72 virgins. My answer is that most of these behaviors represent vestigial behaviors-- they made sense thousands of years ago, and the slow process of weeding them out through sexual selection, natural selection, and artificial selection (like execution) has not caught up yet to the fast changes in society.
I believe my answer makes a lot more sense than your answer, and EVEN IF there were zero scientific evidence for evolution, my narrative would still make a lot more sense than yours. That's because my narrative is an extension of observable fact: some things persist, so it's probable that collections of persistent qualities will interact and move forward through time together. Your narrative is based on an entity who nobody can demonstrate having seen or communicated with, and whose definition is intrinsically contradictory.
