The best way to tell if something is bullshit is to see if it’s on a blogspot url. I mean - do you really think any of us are going to take you or that site seriously?
Its subhead is:
It is agreed by all that human intelligence is the highest level of intelligence found among the creatures that inhabit the planet. Hence, it naturally follows that anything which is purposeful, ingenious, and complex, which is not capable of having been designed by human intelligence, must have had its source in a much higher level of intelligence. We will call this level of intelligence “Infinite Intelligence.”
(which you can’t read without inspecting the source because it’s a shithouse site made and quoted by fucking idiots)
Creationist dumbarses have long tried to suggest Darwin didn’t believe his own theory because they don’t understand that the scientific process requires skepticism and they think claiming that he did doubt the theory would be the silver bullet for their argument.
Absolutely…Most people believe what those around them believe. Some believe that evolution is an evil doctrine spread by the devil to sway them from the truth, Some believe that class struggle will inevitably lead to the triumph of socialism. Some people believe that global climate change is caused by human action. Most people don’t TRULY examine all their beliefs. Their simply isn’t time in our lives to reason through everything that we know. One of the things that college is FOR is to be exposed to different people, different beliefs, and different ways of thinking. At the end of the day, you have to trust somebody. I can no more read and understand all the scientific papers underlying what I believe than others are going to read the bible in Greek and Aramaic and 2,000 years of commentary. But understanding the process is a first step.
What would you consider sufficient proof to justify your concurrence?
You sound like someone who doesn’t believe we landed on the Moon. The sort of person who you could fly to the Moon, show them the footprints and equipment left behind, and they would remain unconvinced, still insist it was planted.
You aren’t interested in science or rational debate, you have a faith based position on this issue. Please don’t pretend otherwise, its completely obvious.
The universe has always existed. The concept of “before” doesn’t make sense because there was no space or time. The beginning of time was literally the beginning with no earlier state possible.
Here in the UK there’s not really any debate about evolution as a basic theory, and as far as I’ve heard that’s true across
Europe as well.
Is there anywhere outside of the US where people still believe in creationism as actual truth?
I know quite a few UK Evangelicals from a few years ago who are still convinced creationists. I’ve also spoken with a number of Muslims who are too, and who use very similar arguments - I’ve often wondered whether they come up with them separately, or whether they’re just filtered arguments from Creation magazine. On the whole, it only seems to be a minority of creationists who will make a point of affirming it. Others seem to accept that it’s a part of their faith, but they’re not going to stand on street corners insisting that eveyone else accepts it. It seems to be a common idea that nobody can really prove what happened in the past - godless scientists have their theories and Christians have their divine revelation, but only God can really know.
Really? Blimey, although I suppose it’s not surprising I’ve never met anyone like that, I only know one person under the age of 50 who goes to church more than a couple of times a year, and that’s because he’s paid to (he’s a choir singer).
Science doesn’t actually address the existence of god, as far as I know. Studying the Big Bang is simply going where the evidence leads us; there’s no such thing as “supernatural” because anything that exists in nature is by definition, natural. (The Higgs boson might be nicknamed “the God Particle” but it’s not really about looking for proof of god, any more than some rare jazz or rock LP really is “the Holy Grail” when vinyl collectors refer to it as such.)
Contrast this with religion, where one has to always be careful about “where the evidence leads”, since it could lead to heresy (or a fatwa). There is something very dishonest about that.
Think of it like a murder trial, and the defense is desperately trying to sow doubt in the minds of the jury, except the evidence is so overwhelming that the only people willing to believe in the innocence of the accused are his family and friends, people who want him to go free. The evidence for evolution is very very strong, and creationists arguments to the contrary are essentially just very detailed hypotheticals.
I don’t think that it is correct that Dalton’s atomic theory was untestable. It arose out of his observations of chemical reactions and a way to understand the law of multiple proportions. Just because Dalton never got to “see” an atom doesn’t mean that the observations he and others made at that time were not most consistently understood in the context of atomic theory.
And for the nitpicking you make on testing Dalton’s theory, even the electron microscope doesn’t observe electrons or atoms, it observes their interactions with other electrons or atoms. That might be a subtle point but subtly might be the point here.
The unanswerable question is “Why is there anything rather than nothing”? Physics has no answer to this. If religion says “A God did it”, the next question is “Why is there a god rather than no god”, and after that it’s turtles all the way down. Theists of the less intelligent bent never quite get that the question is about where the buck stops, and there is no marker in the sands of existence.
I hold creation theories in high regard, because they are fun. There are lots of them. Even in my TaeKwonDo class there is Chon Ji, the mythical intersection of heaven and earth, where the first people appear and start learning martial arts.
