Homestar Runner Wiki Forum

I am not an atheist, but I believe in evolution.

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G D G G A B C D D D Eb F G G G F Eb F Eb D D C C D Eb D C Bb Bb C D C Bb A A Bb C Eb D D D D D D D

It just so happens I have a webcomic...
http://forum.hrwiki.org/viewtopic.php?t=10852

Please define evolution before we get started.

I find that helps.

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We already have a thread on this topic. Would you please post there?

EDIT: Never mind. I'll just merge it.

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There's no option for "I believe in both creation and evolution"? I believe the two can coexist; creation says how life first came upon the Earth, and evoultion says how it developed, not really how it started.

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Then click "Other".

The misconception about evolution is that we came from chimps. Which is incorrect. We broke off from the chimps a while ago. Just check out a cladogram of primates if you use the argument. "But chimps are still around today, why haven't they evolved yet?"

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TIRES TIRES TIRES

That doesn't seem like a fair choice, though. Apparently Christians can't believe in evolution.

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Read that first response again, Ian.

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But I believe in both.

I am a heavy duty Christian, but evolution has been proven. And humans have only been on earth for like a speck of time compared to the earth.

I believe that God made the earth with the big bang, and created humans through evolution.

You have to remember, the bible WAS written by humans, mortals, so it's not always 100% right.

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You're playing Team Fortess 2... you are a heavy and you have two medics... you are taking out everone on the other team so easy... another medic aproaches... THEN HE TURNS INTO A SPY AND STABS YOU IN THE SPINE!
SPY PWNS ALL!

That seems a bit inconsistent with other things you've said on this forum, Sbemailman.

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Quite true--that IS a misconception, as we're much more closely related to apes than chimps (and other primates). And perhaps the option that reads "I am a creationist" should read "I am a Young Earth Creationist" for better distinction (as opposed to "Old Earth Creationist"--more commonly known as "Theistic Evolutionists").

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The meaning of life is 'bucket.'

FOR PONY!!!

I'll see if I can change that.

EDIT: I changed the poll. However, I messed up the results and had to start it over. Please vote again if you have already done so.

(as I'm thinking about it, I wonder if the poll is even necessary. I'll let it run for a while and see what kind of response it generates).

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I would probably be an old-earth creationist. I think life may have evolved, but divinely guided. I don't think it could get to where it is now by random mutations and natural selection alone, especially not in only 3.5 billion years. Actually, I like this post by Buz (from a long time ago) better:

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I really miss Buz. He was one of the most thoughtful, provocative, intelligent, and cordial posters on this forum.

But at least I can take comfort knowing he's in the Lord's hands.

Rest peacefully, brother.

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Whoa, whoa, whoa. What did I miss? What happened?

(EDIT: Never mind. I've been filled in.)

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But the idea that Earth is the center of the universe was not a theory - it was an hypothesis. You can't compare it to evolution.

I voted "old-Earth creationist". There.

Buz sorta missed the point, I think, in that post that was quoted. Arguing about pulsars and stars or Omega-3 fatty acids don't really have anything to do with a fundamental flaw that we as humans have built into us: that we need to feel self-important almost to the point of personal diefication. We have to be so special, so unique, so set apart from everything else.

When the idea of a geocentric universe was challenged, it made us angry, because we wanted to be the center of the universe. We wanted to believe that everything revolved around us and us alone. Now, with Darwinian Evolution, the same threat is happening again--now on a bit more personal level, because it's not our planet being put in comparison or contrast with the rest of the universe, but our species being put under comparison and contrast with other species. To suggest that we have a shared history with all other species--that they are our kin (extremely long-distance kin, but kin none the less)--simply goes to shoot down our silent desires of self-importance yet again. People want to feel like they're better than animals--but how can they, if they ARE animals?

Yet Evolution (contrary to popular myth) does not explain how life even began. That could still be the work of some diety, couldn't it? Well, our stories of special treatment (in the form of an omnipotent diety taking its time and energy to actually create us) are being threatened yet again with new, testable hypotheses that the origin of life itself is nothing more than a result of the laws of physics--namely, the law stating how "nature abhors a gradient," so that all the energy being put off by the sun, collected here on Earth, is used up...directly by plant life that engage in photosynthesis, then by later-evolved life forms that consume plant life, making use of that potential energy, and later still by other evolved life forms that we know as predators, eating other members of the animal kingdom for THEIR potential energy.

What this all boils down to is a destruction of the fundamental use of explaining the mysteries of the universe through any given diety. The more we learn about the universe, the more we realize how impotent we as a species truly are. And we don't like to be impotent. A lack of control means a lack of predictability for any given event, object, or environment. And without predictability, we are hard-wired to fear the worst, to err on the side of caution in fear for our very own lives, because THAT is the most fundamental rule: That every single object in the universe, living and non-living, has a primary objective to continue its existence.

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The meaning of life is 'bucket.'

FOR PONY!!!

How so?

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You're playing Team Fortess 2... you are a heavy and you have two medics... you are taking out everone on the other team so easy... another medic aproaches... THEN HE TURNS INTO A SPY AND STABS YOU IN THE SPINE!
SPY PWNS ALL!

I don't think the theory of evolution says humans are not important. That only has to do with whether you believe in God or not. Now, if you believe in both evolution and God, then God still somehow planned it out so humans would evolve the dominant species on the planet. I mean, we're the only living things who have figured out all this stuff, learned to speak languages and communicate, and live civilly. Now, as for believing in God just because I want to feel important..... maybe some religions, but I don't think that would apply to Christianity. I think God at least created angels like Michael and Gabriel 'above' humans. Not that he necessarily loves them more, but at least I'm not a Christian because it makes me feel important... okay, now I'm just rambling.

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"Evolution" and "God" aren't strictly compatible ideas, though. Ask yourself, "where did Eve come from?" The answer is: "It depends." If I am an evolutionist, then I say "Eve is a type; not a real historical individual. Moses (or whoever) wrote her into existence to fulfill his own aims". If I am a theist, then I say "Eve is the first woman God ever made." If I am both... Well, did God make a first woman human or didn't he? So a theist who believes in general evolution is stuck discounting his own Holy Book, and at the same time claiming "life from no life" in antithesis to observation. These ideas don't so much combine as annihilate.

UPSHOT: research the evidence and choose a side based on that. Not even learned advocates of the general evolutionary theory of origin are steadfast; at least their writings say they are not.

And consider the population argument: if every couple had three kids (just one more than the replacement rate) -- one at 20, 25 and 30 years of age -- and if everybody lived until they were 40, then after about a hundred years of tenuous growth there'd only be about 50 people. At 500 years, however, there'd be 3 million or so; but still within the easy reach of a historically sized disaster. To get to our present (6 billion), you'd need about 800 years. From 2. There aren't as many atoms in the universe (=10^80) as there would be people on earth, if the earth was old, old, old, to the tune of millions (or worse billions) of years. And attrition or plague or war, any time after year 600 (40 million people) is not sufficient to stop the growth; plagues just don't get that big -- historically speaking.

There's more, of course, but I'd like to hear some comments.

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Well, in that case, you also "defeated" the argument that it's 6000 years old (assuming humans appeared within the first days).

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Only a certain kind of theist. The doctrine of Biblical inerrancy is not universal to all Christians. Biblical inerrancy itself is a complex topic to say the least, however, and would be best explored in another thread (if at all).



The authors of this argument are making a few large assumptions. First and foremost, they are ignoring infant mortality, the rate of which has been extremely high throughout history. Only in the past two centuries or so have we as a species really started to cap it off. Prior to the industrialization of the world people lived lives of backbreaking labor, which only became harder as more children were born. (In this era infanticide was widely practiced and almost never criminal; another mouth to feed could literally push a family past the tipping point and wind up starving most of them.)

Before the advent of agriculture people we were hunter-gatherers...a very hard life. Let's take a hunter-gatherer father and give him a pregnant wife and two young children (5 and 10, as per your example), and then task him to find enough food for all of them. His wife can't move very far anymore, and the ground they're on eventually becomes well picked over. There may or may not be edible animals in the area, and even if there are, the hunter fails to catch them far more often than he succeeds. At ten, the hunter's oldest child might be able to scratch together a few berries, but he's probably not catching any meat. The younger child is useless. The father can only hope the kid doesn't hurt himself playing and pick up an infection, which could easily mean the end of him. The result of all this? Some or all of them starve. They have populated themselves beyond what their environment could support.

All of this is also before the advent of modern medical science, which has also come into its own only over the past couple of centuries. Before modern procedure childbirth itself could be lethal to both mother and baby. In modern undeveloped nations the odds of maternal mortality are about 1 in 16; in the ancient world it was even worse. If the mother dies delivering her first child then two of the children in your example aren't born; if she dies delivering the second or third she's no longer available to help gather food for the survivors, further decreasing their chances of survival.

In short, the planet itself enforces population control very strictly; it's just that we now exert enough influence over our close environments that we can throw off the yoke a bit.

Mike

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Logical fallacies ahoy! I'd also like to say: graaaaagh!

I don't buy this "god guided evolution" stuff. It seems theists often, if not always, tribute to god things that could have happened without god. Like if someone survives a disease, they'll say god helped them.

Ever heard of Homo neanderthalensis? They were well on their way with speech, tools, and such, but got extinct. Also, some apes can use tools and can be taught sign langauge and even understand symbols. You could even teach them how to use a lighter to make fire. Besides, I think the question would not be "why did we become a dominant species with language and tools etc.?" but rather "why do we find ourselves as a dominant species with language and tools etc.?". If this was not the case, we would not be able to ask ourselves that question. It's the same thing with the earth and the universe; "why do we find ourselves in a universe in wich life can exist?" rather than "why can life exist in our universe?". If life couldn't exist here, we wouldn't be able to make a note of it. If you are alive and intelligent enough to ask such questions, you will find yourself to be a intelligent, sucessfull species in a universe with life.

It's as I said before--using Occam's Razor, any process is reduced to use the least amount of necessary processes to reach its conclusion. With science, we can and have found many instances where the processes can be reduced to exclude the need for a process relying on any diety. But this doesn't disprove the existence of any given diety; it simply means it's an extraneous process, so a belief in the existence of any diety becomes a wholly neutral option. It doesn't affect the process as science explains it; as far as science is concerned, it's merely an add-on...bells and whistles and such.

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The meaning of life is 'bucket.'

FOR PONY!!!

Not really. The point was to make it clear that the 6-billion-huge population observed now, could easily come about in 800 years. The truth of the matter is just as has been discussed: not all families have exactly 3 kids, and not everybody lives 40 years. And the biblical account would have the population starting over again at 4 couples after the first 1656 years -- "Noah's flood". So all that's left is some 4500 years, and harsh, harsh conditions. Ideally, with big families and long life spans, they'd be up and running at current levels -- 6 billion -- in 8 hundred years. The earth after The Flood would not have been ideal (think universal Katrina). It's easy enough to see how the exponential population explosion could be put off for a number of years, but not easy to see how it could be avoided for millions.

An interesting aside (admittedly taken from "The Matrix") -- humans really do expand to use all the available resources in a given region; then spore and find other regions. This is fairly unique among mammals, who -- as a rule -- live in equilibrium with their environment.

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Too big to be my avatar, but I like it.

Some problems: we know that human population growth hasn't been an exponential curve. At numerous points populations did hit ceilings due to the lack of the advances we have today, and another ceiling is projected for 9-12 billion. The "humans as virus" metaphor only seems to apply to humans with the means to be viruses. People need technology in order to overcome nature in that way. Existing primitive cultures do generally exist in a sort of equilibrium with their environments and necessarily so because their environments control them instead of them controlling their environments through technology. If they were given the technology they'd probably have a growth explosion, too, but they don't have those. It's really not that hard to imagine that even the most basic tool could have taken hundreds of thousands of years to stumble upon when you have much more pressing issues of survival to deal with, not many people surviving long enough to amass enough knowledge and wisdom to synthesize and figure out new ways of doing things.. then factor in that not everyone lives around easy sources of metals lying around on the ground to stumble upon, and that someone who hasn't seen metal before isn't gonna know what rock it comes from or even that they actually need it and it's useful... there are just so many reasons why it's actually to be expected that it'd take a really, really long time for this stuff to happen.

Also, you underestimate the power of diseases, which have more than once wiped out much of a population. 1/3 to 1/2 for the places affected by the plague (and sometimes more than once) to possibly 90% in the case of the Native Americans.

Personally, I don't think it's important to view the Adam & Eve story as literal fact. Even writers as early as Augustine (400 AD) were saying it could just as well be a parable rather than literal. Whether it's a parable or not doesn't change the message it contains for us one bit. I can see reading things as historically literal until shown otherwise, but being shown otherwise shouldn't have any impact on the message you receive from the reading.

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As with what Duke Nuke said, we are not at all the Dominant species on earth. We aren't even in the dominant phylum. The dominant groups of animals would probably be Phylum Nematoda (the roundworms) or Phylum Athropoda Order: Insecta.

Insects are by far the most successful species in the world. The locust would only take about 2 weeks after being down to two locusts to repopulate their already MASSIVE population. I'm pretty sure if "God" made anyone in his image its probably an ant. As a whole humans are just mildly successful with our long gestation period, and extreme difficulty in finding mates. In modern times I could see another bubonic easily wiping out our species. Or tiny insignificant blip on the geological calendar species.

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TIRES TIRES TIRES

The population argument is not conclusive, I must admit. There are too many variables.

What are your thoughts on the "irreducible complexity" argument? This guy's site on ATP Synthase is spectacular; the third visual in the line up is the one I'm writing about (it's in realplayer; you can see an older version mirrored here in quicktime). Without this molecular engine -- present in all life from least to greatest (except viral forms and chlamydia) -- there would be no ATP. And the wikipedia explanation of "modular evolution" is all wet. This thing is VERY highly conserved across species; it doesn't vary much. Because where it does vary, its host organism summarily dies from lack of any energy; this is a "survival of the fittest" argument against evolution. What is observed is "no ATP Synthase = virus/chlamydia" and "yes conserved ATP Synthase = EVERYTHING ELSE". More of a time-invariant mosaic than an incremental tree-like change over time...

The major philosophical theme here is just this: information is not equivalent to energy input. The sun shining on something is not the same as an engineer sitting down and designing something -- regardless of the amount of time the sun shines. Anywhere you find information it came from a will, unlike energy which requires only a liberating physical process; codes require code-writers, where energy requires only exergonic reactions. So -- shake a tub of legos (or a vat of chemicals) for 100 billion years, it will statistically NEVER assemble into an engine in such a short time. If you can agree with that, watch that ATP Synthase video again, and notice its keen resemblance to an engine. And remember too (a subtler point): algorithmic processes such as "survival of the fittest" contain information themselves -- the "evaluation procedure" involved in such schemes is an information-containing procedure -- and therefore designed.

The essence of this argument then is just: some things are just exactly as complex/information-rich as they need to be. If they were simplified (=less information-rich), they would not work at all -- so they could not participate in a selection process. They must have come about all at once, in a quantum. There is no provision for this in general evolutionary theory.

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