Is Evolution a science or a faith?

[The Grand Nudger]

Problem here is that fruit flies have not shown any beneficial traits in the laboratory experiments.

And? "Beneficial" is not some arbitrary thing that we get to determine. The purpose of the experiment is simply to demonstrate how "traits" are generated, how "species" is achieved - it does so in an unambiguous way.

Perhaps when you've taken some time to understand the theory you'll be able to form a more cogent argument against it? Go for it buddy! Do some science (or some deep thinking-whichever you prefer).

[Harris]

Humiliation? No, just frustration when creationist morons repeat the same debunked bullshit that has been repeatedly debunked by actual scientists and then act like children and ignore the facts presented to them.

To answer the question of the thread: It's a science. Creationism is a claim, nothing more.

If you can bring hard evidence favouring Theory of Evolution then simply submit them otherwise abstract talking is not science.

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No but really, I think he's gone.

Don’t worry I am not gone. I am little slow in responding, nothing else.

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All he is trying to achieve is to justify his faith by saying it's OK to have faith, we all do it, and that we shouldn't split hairs over the contents of our respective faiths.

The reason I know they're delusional is because they cannot and won't accept 2 simple premises.
1) That there is the minutest possibility that "god" may not exist.
2) That they don't need to prove "god" to us using science and logic.

You are looking for logic; I will give one to show how deluded the concepts are in atheism.

For you (atheist) mind is the brain which has nothing transcendence. For you (atheist) brain evolve in time and it is the end product of a mindless and unguided process. Do you think anyone would trust a computer, which he/she knows is the end product of mindless and unguided process?


Here is the paradox; you (atheist) trust your brain, which is the product of unguided and mindless process, to believe in the theory that your brain is the product of mindless, unguided, blind process. This approach is ridiculous and it is self-contradictory. This kind of extreme reductionism that reduces thought simply to the firing of the neurons in the brain is suicidal.

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Re the OP: I take it on faith that what can be repeated in the lab and which has been peer reviewed in science journals is provisionally the best we can do where empirical questions are concerned. So I'm going to go way out on a limb and accept science -including evolution- on faith over what ever any holy book may be interpreted as saying to the contrary. That's just the way I roll.

Many people think that when we have scientific explanation of something we don’t need God. People like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawkins say to the people, “you have got to choose between science and God.” The first thing to clear up here is that they imagined God to be a kind of god of the gaps (I cannot explain it therefore, God did it). Now, if you think of God like that then of course you ask people to choose between God and science because the more God the less science or more science the less God. However, that is not true in the light of the religious definition of God that says God is the creator of the whole show. He is the God of things that we understand and He is the God of things that we don’t understand. So summing up what we have here two kinds of explanation.

1. Explanation in terms of law and the mechanism on the one hand and
2. Explanation in terms of agency on the other hand.

It is absurd to suggest that an explanation in terms of law and mechanism rules out the existence of the agency and yet that is exactly what people are arguing in the case of explanation of the universe.

[The Grand Nudger]

Not only have you failed to understand Modern Synthesis, you have failed to understand atheism. You are arguing against yourself - the participation of this forum is not required for such a disagreement. You could have it in a dark room, without anyone else around - which is, ironically, what you're doing here anyway. (and you probably should rattle this one around in your head a little more...just to refine the argument before you present it to others).

[Harris]

After reading it, I started feeling persecuted and unsure of my belief.
Can anybody recommend a "god" I can pray to?

Read Quran and compare it with other religious scriptures.

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An evolutionary god? Hail Eris!

How can you define Natural selection otherwise?

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I've spent the last week checking out a heap of YouTube full docos about evolution, physics, Dawkins, miracles, etc.
It isn't hard if you want to seek the truth.

Do these brainwashed idiots think that if I watch lots of creationist docos that I'm going to start believing in the bullshit.

Scientific knowledge is a one way street. If you actually allow yourself to understand the "real" world, it will open your mind's eye and most things become obvious. The problem is that religious people won't give it a chance.


Something inside them tells them not to because it is detrimental to their belief system.

I say God exist, it shows that I BELIEVE in the existence of God. You say God does not exist and this statement shows you BELIEVE in the non-existence of God. Religion is based on the BELIEF in God and Atheism is based on the BELIEF that there is no God. Both atheism and religion have their own BELIEF systems. You think I am detrimental but have you ever looked inside your own shirt or you are only used to criticise others. Can science prove there is no God and universe came out from nothingness? Or perhaps, science can prove that life appeared on earth in result of a random, unguided, mindless, and blind process which is heavily dependent over luck and chance.
ABSURD.

[The Grand Nudger]

How can you define Natural selection otherwise?

As the winnowing agent of change in population allele frequencies over time. You're welcome.

[Harris]

Today, I got a link to a playlist of TED talks, the 20 most viewed, or something like that.
In one of them, there was a guy talking about motivating people to buy a product from some company and he outlined what he called the "golden circle": a 3 concentric circles bulls-eye.
At the center, he put "why", in the middle he put "what" and at the outermost layer, he put "how".
And he said that most companies work from the outside inwards.
But the truly great companies work from the inside out.

So, back to these creatards. If we want to captivate them, we have to make them understand "why" we think the way we think, "why" evolution is correct... only then can we say what evolution is and how it works.
"why", the motivation that makes everything else fall in place.

We've been going at this all wrong, probably due to the creatards' fault always starting the conversation on some "conceived" faults of evolution... we keep showing them "how" evolution works and a bit of "what" it is..... we never show them "why". Our inner reason to accept it.

So, "why" is evolution right? "why" should I consider evolution? (Remember, this is not a "how" nor "what" question!)

- Beats me if I can verbalize it!
Perhaps it's because we need of a way to catalog all life on this planet and make sense of why it is as it is, why we see animals and plants like what they are?
Why do we see very similar animals, but with slightly different features... features which seem very well suited to the particular environments in which these different animals inhabit...?
I'd say this is the first level of acceptance of evolution, as it can provide an answer to these questions... a tangible answer, one we can easily visualize, even if it requires some imagination into long stretches of time.... but not too long, so it seems plausible that, as sexual reproduction mechanisms produce offspring with slight variations of features over their parents, the accumulation of such variations would, in time, given enough generations, lead to some form of adaptation to a particular environment.

And I got stuck in the "how" answer... darn!
I leave this to someone better in tune with the question. Best of luck!

Read
MIND AND COSMOS:
Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
Thomas Nagel

He is your brother in FAITH

[Esquilax]

Problem here is that fruit flies have not shown any beneficial traits in the laboratory experiments.

This is the problem: you aren't listening to a word anyone else says to you.

Because I've linked you to Diane Dodd's fruit fly experiments in the past, where two groups of fruit flies experienced a speciation event and could no longer interbreed when they were separated; that this isn't a particularly beneficial trait isn't germane, as evolution doesn't concern itself with exclusively beneficial traits.

If it's benefits you're looking for, I've also directed you to flavobacteria experiments that have been done which showed, under laboratory conditions, to develop the ability to digest nylon, a material that did not exist before 1935, from an initial population without this ability. Beneficial trait, developed in a lab. Bam.

But then, you're not actually looking for information, are you? Because you're not even concerned with what anyone else is saying, really. You're just clinging to your presupposition, droning on like a lunatic about how little you understand evolution, and growing smugger and more condescending with every ball blasting refutation you remain staunchly ignorant of.

[Harris]

I don't think it is a good mental health practice to fantasize that you know the infinite thoughts of imaginary entities.― Stefan Molyneux

We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. --Richard Dawkins

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."

Einstein, Albert (1930). "Religion and Science" New York Times Magazine (Nov. 9): 1-4.

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(Today 05:05)alexwenzel Wrote: Will you please give me a couple of facts?
(7th July 2014 02:32)Pickup_shonuff Wrote: Wow. Not reading all that text but to answer your question, the theory of evolution is a body of scientific facts, not faith.

Facts.

Another junk yard where I have not found any evidence for dog becoming mule through the process of natural selection and evolution. I have gone through many similar junk yards but have not found a single solid scientific fact for ape becoming human.

“Evolution can turn dinosaurs into birds, apes into humans, and amphibious mammals into whales.”
Live science
http://www.livescience.com/474-controver...works.html

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Quote:All available evidence supports the central conclusions of evolutionary theory, that life on Earth has evolved and that species share common ancestors. Biologists are not arguing about these conclusions.

Yes. But this is too complex for creatards and for them we have the Buy Bull.

Because reading one book is a lot easier then reading a lot of hard ones

I presume you have read 100s of hard books. However, for some unknown reason, it seems you are not willing to give few hard quotes from those hard books to support your case.

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(Today 06:09)Lemonvariable72 Wrote: Because reading one book is a lot easier then reading a lot of hard ones

Which is strange, because the bible is technically multiple books, and given the number of contradictions and apparently constant switches between literal and figurative language, it'd seem like a pretty hard series of books to get through too.

Although as being a Muslim I believe in Bible (the bible that was revealed over Jesus) to be a Holy Scripture, I ask you to read Quran and compare it with other scriptures.

But then, we are assuming that they've even read the bible, here. Instead of, say, imposing their own meaning upon certain select passages and ignoring the rest...

Please put forward some selective passages from Quran that you think I am ignoring.

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(10th July 2014 22:38)pocaracas Wrote: Today, I got a link to a playlist of TED talks, the 20 most viewed, or something like that.
In one of them, there was a guy talking about motivating people to buy a product from some company and he outlined what he called the "golden circle": a 3 concentric circles bulls-eye.
At the center, he put "why", in the middle he put "what" and at the outermost layer, he put "how".
And he said that most companies work from the outside inwards.
But the truly great companies work from the inside out.

That's Simon Sinek.
(10th July 2014 22:38)pocaracas Wrote: So, back to these creatards. If we want to captivate them, we have to make them understand "why" we think the way we think, "why" evolution is correct... only then can we say what evolution is and how it works.
"why", the motivation that makes everything else fall in place.

We've been going at this all wrong, probably due to the creatards' fault always starting the conversation on some "conceived" faults of evolution... we keep showing them "how" evolution works and a bit of "what" it is..... we never show them "why". Our inner reason to accept it.

So, "why" is evolution right? "why" should I consider evolution? (Remember, this is not a "how" nor "what" question!)

I'll give it a shot: Given mutations, millions of years and billions and billions of creatures, you'd need a mechanism that prevents evolution from happening. Like a reset-button.

If the mutations themselves were truly random—that is, if they were neither directed by an intelligence nor influenced by the functional needs of the organism (as Neo-Darwinism stipulates) then the probability of the mutation and selection mechanism ever producing a new gene or protein could well be vanishingly small. Why? The mutations would have to generate, or “search” by trial and error, an enormous number of possibilities—far more than were realistic in the time available to the evolutionary process.

[Esquilax]

Another junk yard where I have not found any evidence for dog becoming mule through the process of natural selection and evolution.

Simple question, straight answer, yes or no: is this actually what you think the theory of evolution states will happen?

[Harris]

(Yesterday 22:51)Polaris Wrote: Evolution in the vein of paleontology is a science for those who like to make a lot of mistakes because of guessing and extrapolation and pass it off as fact.

Maybe, but just because some people have some beliefs does not make evolution, or its study, a faith. In order to do that, you'd have to have one particular dumb idea forced onto a whole population, with no willingness to collect further information or address new ideas.

Not even paleontology as you've described it would do something that dumb.

“The greatest delusion of the 20th century is that the laws of nature explain the phenomena of nature when they do not, they only describe them.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein