Evolutionism vs creationism

[Grey]

It's also worth noting that what order there is came about over a period of time and across a physical space that is far far beyond our ability to realistically conceive. And on top of that, there's still a lot of chaos about. Evolution goes a long way to explaining why we have so many millions of species of beetles. Creationism rather falls short on that area, unless you believe god has some sort of beetle fetish...

[fazisi]

Your computer is what you might call a highly ordered state. It is made of many constituent pieces that are each less complicated than the whole, and work in an ensemble to produce a particular result. But your computer came about from disorder: originally, all of the pieces of your computer were trace bits of rock scattered across the globe. Putting them all together required clearly moved them from a less orderly state to a more orderly one. Now, yes, your computer was built by humans--but humans are not God. We are not granted special exemptions from physical laws; we have to obey the same laws as everything else in the universe. If 'order does not come from choas' were a physical law, it would apply to everything we do. We wouldn't be able to build or create anything, because doing that would violate this law.

Humans, while not God, are part of the "intelligent design" idea. I sadly haven't seen a microprocessor created in the wild by continental plates rubbing up against each other then having it struck by lightning to solve pi to the 189332154634523762342 decimal.

Also, if there are physical laws governing what objects may act, doesn't that remove the chaos and create order?

It's also worth noting that what order there is came about over a period of time and across a physical space that is far far beyond our ability to realistically conceive. And on top of that, there's still a lot of chaos about. Evolution goes a long way to explaining why we have so many millions of species of beetles. Creationism rather falls short on that area, unless you believe god has some sort of beetle fetish...

Creationists argue that the presence of God and his capabilities are far far beyond human understanding.

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As to put some confusion aside to my personal beliefs so people can understand where I am coming from, I believe in some form of intelligent design. Nothing doesn't create something which doesn't create complex life in near balance by some miraculous accident. I have an easier time believing that a guy raised a stick and made a fucking sea open up a pathway for thousands of people to walk across.

However, God isn't some old dude in the sky judging my actions. And true acts of God aren't him reaching down from heaven and squishing the ants that didn't follow his rules properly. God is the laws of nature. All his acts on our world and our universe act upon the rules that we must follow. That is why it is hard to recognize miracles for what they are because most are so mundane.

And also, I completely agree with Darwin about survival of the fittest. Within a species and in relation to other species, the fittest will survive. However, just because you are the biggest and baddest monkey with the rockingest genes on the planet and you get all the babes you could ever want doesn't mean that you will ever have an offspring that will turn into a human. Nor if you are the most gimped monkey who has less hair than all your brothers and sisters but a bulging cranium and happen to get with your inbred aunt/cousin/daugther monkey who had been exposed to too many UV rays from suntanning on the savannah will you ever produce a human. Micro evolution I'm with 100%. Macro evolution is retarded.

[gut]

> your computer came about from disorder

Nope. I wasn't saying order comes only from 100% order, but
rather that it can't come from 100% chaos.

> If 'order does not come from choas' were a physical law,
> it would apply to everything we do. We wouldn't be able to
> build or create anything,

An idea may be considered chaotic, but it can't happen without
a brain (a rather pinacle of order).

> Is a tree more orderly than a seed?

Don't know, but I'm not reaching for a bar that high. I'll
happily settle for a tree being considered more orderly than
an instance of 'nothing' exploding... unless it was a very
orderly explosion of nothing, that is.

> explaining why we have so many millions of species of beetles.

Yeah, lots of birds too. Even our allmighty ~scientists~ couldn't
understand the value of having so many varieties. That is, until
a few types were extincted, then it's a lot easier for them to
see

> Creationism rather falls short on that area,

I seem to share the opinion of some others here, that these two
concepts aren't mutually exclusive. Evolution isn't illogical, I'm
only criticizing the stuff I see as illogical or against common sense.

[Silfir]

Nothing doesn't create something which doesn't create complex life in near balance by some miraculous accident.

Provided I actually understood the sentence...

I've never had a problem with the notion that life being created can be the result of a chain of coincidence and extremely "lucky" circumstances. Billions upon billions of stars in the universe means that conditions for life pretty much had to develop somewhere. It's very likely that someone, somewhere, is going to play the lottery and actually win, too. Coincidences happen. On a planet with 6 sextillion tons of mass (or something) and with a time frame of several billion years to work with, there's plenty of room for a whole lot of coincidences. We have the "luck" of having been placed on a planet capable of sustaining life since if we hadn't, we wouldn't exist to point out our unluckiness.

I'm pretty sure the order we perceive in natural phenomena doesn't hint at a being that placed said order, it hints at the human ability to recognize patterns and commit them to mind. We look for the order in things, therefore we find it. We saw the sun rise in the east, reach its zenit at noon, then saw it set in the west, and concluded it was a strange disc of light that travelled across the sky dome covering the flat earth. Humans are good at finding theories and explanations - they don't have to be correct - it's what helped us survive to this day. For every completely wrong assumption there is another completely correct, or sometimes half-correct one that still ends up beneficial. A people becomes aware that those who eat pig meat end up dying in a pretty nasty manner shortly thereafter - clearly it must be the will of the gods not to eat pork! (2000 years later other explanations are provided, but religious practices are stronger.)

Humanity has thrived for ages working under hilarious webs full of untruths, half-truths and the occasional insight that is actually pretty close to what later generations will keep finding out. And it's always, always because we look for patterns, because we look for the order in things, and try to understand what we see. We wouldn't have done it this way for thousands of years if it wasn't a good way (selection again). Of course, if we always realized that nothing is set in stone and if we were always willing to see that the explanation we devised doesn't hold up to scrutiny, that would help, but stubbornness is another trait that has helped humans thrive in adversarious circumstances over the years.

Having an explanation for everything does not preclude ignorance - if anything, ignorance is much easier to amass and retain that way.

Creationism, in whichever form, is an explanation humans have found for things being as they are. At this, it's good as any other, for as long as you don't adopt it in ignorance of scientific evidence and observations made over thousands upon thousands of years. There will always be something we don't know beyond the things we know, and we will always be able to attribute this part to divine influence. Some do, some don't; as long as we don't choose to remain ignorant to satisfy our desire to find explanations it's perfectly fine.



"Classical" 6000 years creationism always reminds me of the Church of "Last Thursday"ism (which champions the belief that the world was actually created last Thursday, and all evidence pointing to the contrary, including your own memories of the past, has been planted by God in order to confuse you about the truth). Both make equally little sense.

[grobblewobble]

We have the "luck" of having been placed on a planet capable of sustaining life since if we hadn't, we wouldn't exist to point out our unluckiness.

The anthropic principle. I love that argument.

[gut]

> with a time frame of several billion years to work with,
> there's plenty of room for a whole lot of coincidences

A few of those coincidences, yeah, but start chaining those
things together and your %'s start going down the drain. It
wouldn't just take a few coincidences to explain order
coming from chaos, it would take absurd chains.

[grobblewobble]

Evolution is not about coincidence. It is about selection.

I think the main reason evolution is hard to accept for some is that it implies that humans are an animal species.

The interesting thing is that at a certain level, there is no difference between creationism and evolution. When someone creates something, like a computer, you might as well say that the computer evolved from our culture. A computer is the result of a long history of development of ideas that evolved from each other.. Similarly, if you regard the physical world as (part of) god, than there's no longer any difference between "god has created man" or "mankind has evolved".

[fazisi]

Yeah, that wasn't my most coherent statement. Just as a person who has studied a little about probabilities, the billions of coincidences over the course of billions of years to come to this very point in time takes a lot more faith for me to believe in than some supreme being who had a little too much spare time.

I completely accept humans are animals. We operate just like the rest of our animal brothers. Most people try not think of it because it reminds us we are mortal and will eventually die. The modern western society especially where we try to hide the fact that people die. Hell, everything dies.

At least the ignorant fools who choose to believe in some afterlife get consolation that they will be in a better place... just before they realise everything they believed in life was wrong. Oh wait, they're dead, they don't realise shit.

[JellySlayer]

Humans, while not God, are part of the "intelligent design" idea. I sadly haven't seen a microprocessor created in the wild by continental plates rubbing up against each other then having it struck by lightning to solve pi to the 189332154634523762342 decimal.

Also, if there are physical laws governing what objects may act, doesn't that remove the chaos and create order?

Give me a coherent definition of what you think chaos and order are, and we'll move on from there.

Creationists argue that the presence of God and his capabilities are far far beyond human understanding.

This isn't an argument for creation.

And also, I completely agree with Darwin about survival of the fittest. Within a species and in relation to other species, the fittest will survive. However, just because you are the biggest and baddest monkey with the rockingest genes on the planet and you get all the babes you could ever want doesn't mean that you will ever have an offspring that will turn into a human. Nor if you are the most gimped monkey who has less hair than all your brothers and sisters but a bulging cranium and happen to get with your inbred aunt/cousin/daugther monkey who had been exposed to too many UV rays from suntanning on the savannah will you ever produce a human. Micro evolution I'm with 100%. Macro evolution is retarded.

There's no such thing as microevolution or macroevolution. These are terms invented by creationists. There is only evolution. Again, the problem here is the timescale. A monkey can't spontaneously turn into a human over a single generation--this would in fact disprove evolution. But we've certainly seen the emergence of new species from existing ones, and we've seen the evolution of beneficial traits over a relatively trivial number of generations of bacteria.

> your computer came about from disorder

Nope. I wasn't saying order comes only from 100% order, but
rather that it can't come from 100% chaos.

What does it mean for an object to have 100% order or 100% chaos? How are you defining these terms?

> If 'order does not come from choas' were a physical law,
> it would apply to everything we do. We wouldn't be able to
> build or create anything,

An idea may be considered chaotic, but it can't happen without
a brain (a rather pinacle of order).

Why is an idea chaotic? Why is a brain orderly? How can a chaotic idea come from an orderly brain?

Don't know, but I'm not reaching for a bar that high. I'll
happily settle for a tree being considered more orderly than
an instance of 'nothing' exploding... unless it was a very
orderly explosion of nothing, that is.

Conveniently enough, the Big Bang has nothing to do with evolutionary theory.

[fazisi]

Give me a coherent definition of what you think chaos and order are, and we'll move on from there.

Order means predictability. Chaos means inpredictability. If I mix lemon juice and sugar, I get lemonade. This is order. If I mixed lemon juice and sugar but got a sandwich, this would be chaos.

In the same way, if I breed humans and I get a human, this is order. If I breed humans and get a sandwich, this would be chaos.

Creationists argue that the presence of God and his capabilities are far far beyond human understanding.

This isn't an argument for creation.

So how come it is an argument for evolution? I read the original post as "With our limited understanding, we can't easily comprehend how evolution truly works." Since we can't understand how God works by the exact same reasoning, is it somehow an invalid argument?

There's no such thing as microevolution or macroevolution.

You probably don't know what the difference is. Let me describe it to you.

Microevolution is survival of the fittest within a species. There are numerous traits contained in the genes of the various members of this species. Members with weak traits die or fail to reproduce while members with strong traits survive or reproduce greatly. Therefore, the overall makeup of the species' collective genes will reflect that of the strong members. Outside sources can change what is considered strong and weak (such as climate, predators, food sources, etc.)

Macroevolution is the misconception that a species will change into a different species by gaining new traits (mutations). I will need some references to these apparent new species and proof that they have a higher survival rate than their parent species. Also, there are numerous examples of such complex species specific biological functions that it would take numerous evolutions of useless weak traits to combine to form one strong trait. The fish-to-amphibian is one of my favorite. The powers of evolution mystically endow this fish who yearns to experience the outside world with not only legs on which to walk the earth instead of flop around but also the ability to breath oxygen from the air rather than exclusively oxygen from the water. Oh, but it was just random chance that these two mutations occured at the same time and there were other such similar organisms in which to procreate with to further along this evolution.

Essentially, a couple of runt dogs (weak trait of being smaller and weaker) can survive because they can fit into holes and eat gophers and procreate and create a new "species" of smaller than average dog. But they are still dogs.

I don't see a couple of dogs that prefer tuna fish and birds and making strange mewing noises becoming cats, even over billions of billions of billions of millennia.

Also, I didn't mean that the awesome monkey with his many mates or the boondock monkey with his inbred spouse would have a human as their child but as a some descendant from the traits passed on by that particular mating.

Conveniently enough, the Big Bang has nothing to do with evolutionary theory.

This is why this argument is kind of difficult to debate. Are we talking about the source of life as we know it or how life as we know it has become as it is from any source? As others have stated, many accept both creationism and evolution at the same time. Some creator designed evolution to work as it does. Thread closed.