Why would god care?

You are looking at the flip side of the coin right now.

They are fundamentalists. Their religion is Darwinism, and their God is named Chance.

 

That's about as ridiculous as if you watched one person leaving a kitchen eating a peanut butter sandwich. Then proceed to walk into the kitchen and see an opened loaf of bread with two pieces missing and a jar of peanut butter with a butter knife on top, look at the mess and think, well I wasn't here to witness the making of that sandwich so the sandwich just as likely fell from the sky!

Science has witnessed genetic mutations, the key mechanism of evolution. End of fucking story!

 

Yeah, that's basically it.

 

actually, considering no mutation has ever been known to be beneficial to an organism, except theoretically, this is no end of story.

considering we have never seen sandwiches fall from the sky into a kitchen, and every sandwich we have ever whitnessed was indeed made by a person, this reasoning is ridiculous.

A better analogy is if you knew that things could move around the kitchen, eg, when someone sits down to eat, they might move the chairs around and move the thigns on the table around.
And then to assume that the position of everything in the kitchen was some result of someone sitting down to eat.

 

Oh my shit, are you fucking serious!? Medical science uses mutations to create drugs and vaccines all the time! There is a known genetic mutation in Europeans that helps them survive the bubonic plague!

I've never seen God but I've seen toast dropped from a tall building so as far as I'm concerned I'd be more surprised to see God appear than to witness a sandwich fall from the sky.

 

Ok you are right, science has shown that some people posses genetic material that protects them from various dieases (and makes them vulnerable to others), and they call it a mutation because most people dont have such a genetic trait.

any other mutations, from a more morphological perspective?

 

Well I once worked with a guy who had absolutely no hair on his body. He didn't need to wear a hairnet and he'll never have to worry about crabs! Then there's this Mexican family with full body hair, it made them famous and got them jobs in the circus. Imaging if the world was thrown into an extreme ice age due to a meteor strike of something, they may be the only human family able to survive.

 

i doubt people will be running around naked in the event of an ice age

 

On the other hand, they might, by fluke, happen to be the only ones that survive. Extinction Level Events are great for this sort of thing. You get a species that are definitely "the fittest", and then something happens, too quick and short for any adaptation to occur, and suddenly the population is reduced to 0.001% or something, and chances are you'll get something completely different become dominant. But yeah, there's also a chance that a mutated male can go from being 0.001% of the species' males to 10%. Then you've got a trait that had no business getting off the genomic drawing board suddenly being a contender.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote an excellent book, called Galapagos, which explains the philosophy of evolution better than any other by giving an absurdist example. It provides answers to the kind of questions people have about evolution, and shows how it would work out if we evolved "wrongly".

 

I think it's important to keep in mind that natural selection and mutation is only one, tho probably the most important, mechanism responsible for evolution. Genetic drift, regional isolation of populations, symbiotic processes identified by Margoulis, the "neutral theory" of Kimura, and self-organizing tendencies described by Stuart Kaufmann, may also play important roles. The role of mutation and natural selection is clearly explained by geneticist Francis Collins (The Language of God) and biologists Kenneth Miller (Finding Darwin's God) and Francis Ayala (Darwin's Gift to Science and Religion). In addition to providing a spirited defense of Darwin's theory, these scientists also explain why they are devout Christians and see no conflict between Darwin and religion. Going farther, the late Jesuit paleontologist and mystic, Fr. Tielhard de Chardin, claimed that evolution is the very centerpiece in God's plan--anticipating the development of computers and the internet as the logical next step. By participating in these discussions on Hip Forums, we're bringing the Divine Purpose to fruition. Carrying this tradition to a "logical" (?)conclusion, physicist Frank Tipler (The Physics of Immortality; The Physics of Christianity)projects a future in which believers will be united with the Omega Point (God)and sinners will be consigned to virtual cyberhell. And the geeks will inherit the earth!

 

I dunno, I think the problem here is that people see two unproven things and think they're equally unprovable. Religion really gets let off lightly in terms of substantiating its claims - e.g. finding a piece of wood up a mountain PROVES the whole Bible rather than just the bit about Noah, is real to some - while science has to find a complete and perfect theory before people will go along with it. Not that that's a problem, of course, I'd rather have that complete theory than a science based so much on faith. But cmon, there's ultra-religious types who'll deny just about any scientific theory you care to mention. I've yet to see any deny Pythagorus' theorem, but I'm sure someone would if their book told them something which meant that, for them, it COULDN'T be right, and thus all proof of it must be a trick.


The thing about evolution is, it's a combination of science and history. Studying history, even relatively recent history, is not an exact science. And we're talking about the history of something pre-humanity?

 

well yeh we don't have much history to work with

Can you tell us about what is in those books, Okiefreak? Or is it too complicated?

 

You mean give you book reviews or summaries? All five? They're long, and yes, complicated, but I could try to summarize them, if people are interested.

 

Well quite. But we do have enough to dismiss a big chunk of possibilities. If you think about it, it's possible that the few historical records we have of, say, the 12th Century AD, are all lying. This doesn't mean that we have to assume that that's likely though.

It's a similar situation with creationism. Pretty much all accounts now rely on the exploitation of doubt rather than any real evidence. Someone says that carbon dating isn't absolutely 100% reliable in every situation ever, and before you know it, someone else is telling us that it's so unreliable that the Earth could only be 6000 years old. Sounds stupid, because it is, but this is where doubt gets you. Science has to admit that it's not sure about these things - even if science's fanboys makes like evolution is as proven as Pythagorean geometry - but no religion (or philosophy) has to 'fess up even when they're objectively wrong*. I'm not aware of any evidence that Richard III wasn't king, so I'll believe the evidence that he was. I'm not aware of any evidence that evolution didn't happen, so I'll believe the evidence that he is. It's kind of like The Flying Spaghetti Monster Model would be if we'd since found a load of ragu in orbit around the Earth.

* in the sense that all available evidence indicates that they're wrong, leaving them to rely on crappy flawed senses arguments that apply equally to all ideas; if we are expected to entertain that a creator made the world to look 6000 years old, for example, why should we not believe that a creator made creationists to trick us, and that it's actually a lot older than scientists believe, or, as someone's sig says, that God made the world last Thursday, and again, tricked us all. Maybe I'm thinking too algebraically, but I've never seen how it's not obvious that mitigating factors which apply equally to all sides of the "equation" by default are so hard for some people to dismiss off-hand.

 

I dont think the christian bible is a reasonable account to consider in the first place... but there are an infinite other possible creation accounts

 

god is supposed to be better than us in all aspects. when we do something to help others, and make sure others know we did it so we get recognition, its not a purely good act, we do it in self interest. if god were better than us, he wouldnt care about those who thought nothing of him, and he certainly wouldnt expect us to devote our lives to him. I feed my cat, and dont expect her to pray to me because i dont need inrecognition. I feed me, yet god wants a prayer for him? crazy talk..