Creation & Evolution Together: ytzk's challenge answered

The world began when God created it (Creationism) and each generation thereafter is different than the generation that came before it (Evolution).

 

Huh? Did ytzk post a new topic and then delete it shortly afterwards? Tch. That's so like him.

 

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...Wayne, that video really hurts. What is wrong with that guy? Dissing geologists and biologists? Completely ignoring the fact that the earth crust moves (think of earthquakes)? And don't even think of Darwin. Population? Please don't think of wars and such, they have no impact at all, and what about the fact that life wasn't as easy before advent of things like... Clothes, weapons, etc.?

...And I'm ranting. But, fine, you see where I'm going with this.

 

Hey man, you're not questioning the Word of God, are you? That's surely blasphemous and wicked, and "The wicked shall be turned into hell, [and] all the nations that forget God." (Psalm 9:17). There are some fine gents here that can help you escape your wickedness, among other things (like expel demons from your rectum), and they seem like a friendly, God-loving bunch.

 

The guy's wearing a lab coat, what more reason do you need to believe him?

 

I don't trust men with receding hairlines. If they're bald, fine, but who knows that that semi-haired man could be thinking?

 

Then how come people can travel around the world?

 

In all seriousness, though, if I can dig a hole with greater than zero depth, and don't see space by looking through it, surely the Earth must be three-dimensional, since the surface is obviously two dimensional; so, if the Earth is said to be flat, surely it must mean that it's a two dimensional shape with some depth (i.e., a three-dimensional one, but in any case...); so what do people that believe the Earth is flat think is on the other side, since it would look like a shape cut out of paper and have two surfaces? My guess is the brown material that's on the underside of jigsaw puzzles.

 

Re: Creation & Evolution Together: ytzk's challenge answ

That's the best you could do?! Wow.

 

Wayne, those experiments were painful. Do those people not realize how big the earth is compared to them? Do they understand that a hollow balloon will never hold a piece of confetti on its underside, unless there's static electricity involved (or perhaps if it was a free floating body in space it might)How dumb are these people? You know what, I think I want to destroy the world. All it would take is a four-dimensional device to invert (chronologically) half of the mass of the earth, then boom. No more idiots. We just need to take the smart people to mars, and terraform it first. Those creation scientists won't believe we can actually travel to other planets, and indeed shun the idea as preposterous.
Either the antimatter idea or just launch a big enough rock into sub-orbit and let it crash into the planet. Or, even better, design a virus that kills off idiots. I only mean the people who believe the earth is flat, not true idiots. Those guys are cool.

 

The Vatican accepts evolution as a legitimate concept.

 

That's because the Vatican isn't extreme enough.

 

Don't worry, in 50 years or so, we'll have destroyed the whole world anyway.

 

Re: Creation & Evolution Together: ytzk's challenge answ

You don't see the complexity that the simple words hid? Very well, ...

Creation is a start point. Evolution is a process. Processes do not reveal when they start. Therefore saying that creation is an invalid theory or idea just because you proved evolution true is BULLSHIT! Now prove to me that evolution means more than an ever changing gene pool.

// Potential Point of Contention within Evolution: Either everything has a start point or the universe as a whole is perpetual motion machine. What proof do we have that one or the other is true?

// Watch, within five (maybe ten) years, you will hear my position elsewhere by some other idiot who spouts everything s/he hears. (Keep in mind that my argument is short and easy to remember.) So you best try out your arguments now.



And thanks WS for providing the link that showed where the challenge was posted. I didn't even think of providing it.

 

Re: Creation & Evolution Together: ytzk's challenge answ

It's posts like these that best illustrate why Xyle disgusts me: while he clearly believes that he's complex and misunderstood, anything he's said which attempts to exhibit these qualities is so shockingly simple and banal that a child could have come up with it; the fact that he thinks that his simple-minded notions contain some intricate, byzantine, meaningful thoughts beneath some sort of unapparent subterfuge is, on the one hand, laughable, and, on the other, sickening, because it's obvious that he hasn't got the wit to realize when he's being obvious, even when it's pointed out to him.

Presumably, Creationism is the Biblical account of creation. Since this account presumes that the Earth is no more than a few thousand years old, and the theory of evolution (I would imagine) states that at least millions of years is necessary for life to evolve to the stage at which we now see it, if someone were to 'prove' that evolution is 'true', it would mean disproving the hypothesis of the Earth being created a few thousand years ago, since they're mutually exclusive, which would disprove the account of creationism in the Bible. To attempt to reconcile the two by, for example, giving an interpretation in which the Bible doesn't give the Earth such a young age is to simply play with language or to give leeway to one view or the other by stating either that some parts of the Bible aren't completely true, or that the tried and tested hypothesis of evolution is just one big illusion, and that all the evidence (including things we can observe right now) doesn't exist; and it's quite difficult to candidly point to something physical and claim, 'this object I see before me does not exist'. To call interpretations into it is simply to reshuffle your view of what the Bible says based on science, if you didn't already think that the Bible doesn't give the Earth's age as being so young without having heard roughly how old it actually is, and I'm willing to bet that you take liberties with what the Bible says when it says something incorrect or offensive, which is a result of outside influence, since the only reason to do such a thing in such a way is if you want what you're reading to agree with reality.

I'm also willing to conjecture that you didn't reach the conclusion that the Earth was created by God by investigation; I'd go out on a limb and say you think that the Earth was created by God because you've read it in the Bible. Now, I wonder why you believe that whoever wrote the Bible had a clue about the beginning of the universe, and I would imagine that it's because somebody else told you that the Bible is right (how you know that they know is beyond me) or that the Bible says it's right; but if the Bible is wrong when it says it's right, then it's not right, and the same goes for anything else, which is why it's ridiculous to put faith into anything based on something such as this, because it's only a cause of belief and not a reason for it. Whenever I try to claim that something is correct, I do my best to appeal to both evidence and reason, which is to say that I appeal to reality and I make sense, and to avoid dogmatism, since, e.g., claiming that Creationism correctly hypothesises how the world was created because it's in the Bible is an informal fallacy, as you previously so kindly pointed out for us.

You're absolutely right. In five years, there will be, somewhere, an infant, who's now just a foetus, that's just learning about religion and science, and who will forward this idea in an attempt to reconcile the two, since you do indeed only need the intelligence of a five-year-old to spout such glaringly obvious notions.

 

Re: Creation & Evolution Together: ytzk's challenge answ

Well, firstly, I think you've gone back to using "Evolution" to encompass all kinds of other things like astrophysics and geology, but never mind. Secondly, the evidence shows that the further back in time you go, the simpler organisms become. So the start point can be calculated by extrapolating backwards, to the point where amino acids started to arrange themselves in replicating chains. That was the starting point of biological evolution. Similarly, the timing of the big bang can be calculated by working out how fast the universe is expanding and then working out how long it would have taken starting from nothing. These are not hard concepts to grasp.

 

I'm sorry to break it to you, Xyle, but I've already heard your idea, from well over five (maybe ten) centuries ago, and that's just when it was published.

I assume that you're arguing about the creation of a universe supporting life, rather than the original creation of life on earth (because everyone knows the mechanics of life are present in the laws of physics and natural selection easily explains the rest).

It does raise the point of the mysterious First Mover, ie, some event began the universe as science suggests. This seems to vindicate the Hebrew notion of linear time with a beginning, middle and end. Then again, the bubble universe theory, where a multiverse of universes are perpetually being created and destroyed in a supermegametamultiverse, supports the Hindu premise that creation is circular, with no true beginning, middle nor end. A First Mover is obviously not called for in this paradigm.

In conclusion, you haven't impressed me yet, but I thank you for helping me to find common-ground with my erstwhile opponnents, Wayne-Scales and Smuel.

 

Say our universe was created. This does not imply a deity, it simply implies an intelligent creator. We might be an experiment, or even a simulation that acts as a viable experiment.
Our universe has been expanding for 15 odd billion years, the earth has been around for at least 4.5 billion, life on earth began about 3.7 billion years ago, with sideways data transferring lipid balls exchanging successful protein matrices long before that, possibly with reproduction governed by the tide aggregating lipids and proteins together to form "proto-cells"
Sideways information transfer remained the prime mode of exchange of genetic material for at least two billion years between bacteria, until the cryogenian ended around 640 million years ago, with fossil embryos being found as early as 630 million years ago. The ediacarans, possibly the first multicellular life on the planet, dominated from 610 million years ago until 545 million years ago, but due to peculiarities in their growth and formation, it's debated whether or not they were animals. Still, they're related to us, but they're more like a short lived experiment that couldn't compete with cambrian life once more complex organisms had evolved. The last ediacaran communities succumbed to the cambrian explosion, with the last ediacarans being found as late as 500 million years ago.
Really, the evidence of evolution is in the rocks. There was a T-rex bone found with soft tissue in it recently, but this was not original soft tissue to be found in the bone, but something chemically altered over millions of years, and is much unlike the fossilization we've come to know and love (rapid mineralization of bone structures). Despite this, creationists are claiming the soft structures in the bone are evidence that the beast died only 7000 years ago, and upon this that dinosaurs lived with humans (citing the legends of dragons for proof), and clearly know nothing of geology or evolution.

If I'm going to believe anyone when it comes to whether or not the universe was created, I'll believe myself; it's possible we were created, but not in 7 days, and not in the same manner as is present in the Tanakh. Certainly not as described in the King James Bible (that guy edited the crap out of the original texts, essentially molding the religion to suit his needs).
It's also possible we're in a cycle of death and rebirth, the universe akin to the mighty phoenix, rising from its own ashes in a perpetual cycle of renewal. If the Buddha is to be believed, life is suffering, and it is also part of a self renewing cycle of death and rebirth, but that eventually everything that comes to be indeed has an end.
We might also be one of millions of universes, because really, the fact that this particular one has life in it is pretty amazing. There could be a universe composed of antimatter, one of energy, and it may even be possible that our minds create universes every time we dream. Not lasting universes, but short lived creations that have reality according to your subconscious. Yes, you are the creator. We are all the creator. We have fabricated gods the explain the unexplainable, and a God to save us from ourselves. Was Jesus real? I don't doubt it. But did he really perform miracles, or is that just a way of explaining some bizarre technology given to him by another source of intelligence? That's right, we may have been visited by aliens, and that may explain our legends of gods. Superior technology is often mistaken for magic, and thousands of years ago, people were not capable of understanding that these beings from space were mortals that had millions of years on them in terms of development.
There are temples built in Egypt that are made of solid stones weighing 100 tons. How did they move them? Why would they have done something as hard as manual labor to move stones from the quarry? If there's anything modern life has taught me, it's that people love easy. The ancients were no different. If you showed a group of 500 modern laborers a stone that weighed as much as 100 cars, and told them they had to move it more than 10 feet, they'd say their equivalent of "fuck it." We don't have machines big enough to move those stones now. The ancients moving them on wooden sleds? Yeah, ok. Yes, we've devised ways to have moved those colossal stones, but they're not easy enough, and not effective enough, for anyone to have wanted to do them. The people who made those temples, and the pyramids, could not have been paid enough to do such hard work. I think they had help from superior technology, and that superior technology came from out there. You think those huge quarried hunks of limestone were cut with copper wire? Think again.