The World is Flat?

[fooflexible]

redspear said:

fooflexible said:

 

No evidence? Look around! Tell me how many coincedences there had to be to get our intelligent race up and running. No evolutionist can possibly explain this. Our planets position, our solar systems position, our suns position. All the evolutionary paths that had to be set straight to get us where we are. Michael Behe, talks often in his books about irreduciable complexity, meaning that there are system within us that require many pieces all in place all at once to function. Evolution and natural selection explain that a change occurs and when that change serves a purpose it stays helping us to survive. But how can you assume that every function in our body magically had all the right components pop up all at once. Like consider all the things in your car that contribute to your stereo. you have speakers, cd player, radio antenna, and wiring. Now lets say your car was an evolving life form, and one day bam! a speaker poped up. I doubt that even within a billion years of random evolutions and mutations would just happen to get wires that connect to those speakers and magically connect them to a radio, and even if it did without power going to the radio it wouldn't work. These things are to complex to happen by chance. It's like shaking the parts of a gameboy up in a box and expecting them to snap in place. It would never happen. If you see something like a house, a game system, a car, you know it's created designed, because it's to complex to just get smacked together accidentally, not even with some motion involved. LIke a little kid is never going to randomly hit keys on a piano and accidnetally play an amazing song.

Now what scientists would have you believe is that a simplier structure would continue to exist based on some simpler uses or fuctioning. Like the eye is commonly used and is spoken of as perhaps being able to make out light and dark shapes, prior to full blown vision. Now that sounds good in theory, but you still are depending on an amazing amount of coincedences to get the eye to that point. Let take a whale for example. a whale is a mammal, and it's been said that to go from a land animal to a water animal it would have required 100,000 evolutionary changes. and at some point complex things would to have to coincendently happened like when it made the transition to water. Plus look at how well designed and how useful everything is in the environment, if I'm to believe all this random crap is generated, we'd have tons of useles body parts tons of wacky hybird like animals exist, yet the only useless thing around is the appendix, I can't seem to find another thing. Seems unlikely that that would be evolutions only left over part. Plus when looking at evolitionary transitions I'm always looking at bones, why on earth with how slow these transitions are, is there not a single living transition? why did every transitional living between all the species today die off? Fox example, like primates, you can say we're close to apes, but what about the species between the two, I'd think there'd be at least group of talking semi-intelligent apes, but no there isn't, the civilization differences are startling. So in the end, I believe what I believe because I look around and a see a world a God would have created, not a random world created by chance. I could argue about a billion things, but in the end thats why I believe what I believe.

Not as many coincedences as you think. First take a look up in the night sky and see how many stars are up there that are visible to use and than multiply those numbers by several trillions to end up with only a small fraction of the number of available stars. Many of those stars have planets and theory is starting to show that planets formation may be intergral to star formation which would mean most of the stars in the night sky probably have planets. Secondly many any stars will be in galatic locations similiar to ours in their respective galaxies or not even in a galaxy at all. So the odds of a planet being in a sitation where it can sustain life at all is very high the odds of an individual planet being able to support life itself is very low but the only way anyone would know that is if they lived on a planet that could support os it isn't coincidence but happenstance that life exists on a planet that is prime to support it and there are probably trillions of planets that do support life.

Full blown vision did not just pop over night there are many species of animals with impaired vision that is supplemental to other senses. Yes a Whale and doliphin are mammals and yes they reverted back to sea creatures yet they are not the same as fish. They still have lungs and they still have a skeletal structure that is similiar to mammals and it took a long time. You will have to site the 100,000 times of evolutionary change to me never heard it before and it sounds like an embellishment for arguments things change and the changes with regards to the enviroment can be good or bad.

 

Your argument is one of intelligent design. Personally I find intelligent design to be a deeply flawed philosophy. For starters your radio example is an oversimplification. Life has been around for more than a billion years and the parts for things never just show up bam like you say. You say you read a lot on evolution but I seriously doubt you read it with an open mind or that you read it beyond a 7th grade biology textbook or maybe a freshman year biology text book. You may want to consider a class in Microbiology or maybe Mycology to get a more modern grasp on evolution as it effects these fields of biology more than other.

BTW evolution DOES not prohibit a religous belief of anything evoltion mixed with geologic history and timelines may through an askew to literal readings of the pentauch particualrily genesis but it is not out right procluded anyone whose faith is threatened by evolution or plate tectonics or astronomy really doesn't have much faith at all. You do not have to accept or believe science either(in fact despite the egos of people who strive to be the top science does actually encourage questioning and does not take the stance of being absolutely right but the closest approximation of what is explainable based on what we now today). Maybe the concept of Abiogenesis is threatening but even that is likely only a few years away(we are getting close to creating fully mainmade life forms from non living matter).

Fooflexible let me ask you your thoughts on Noah? Do you beleive the whole earth was flooded? I am not sure you are religous but the only people I know who even consider ID tend to be christians(I am a christian so I do not mean that as a blanket statement). ID itself has no proof neither does creationist theory but evolution does and it has a ton more and as far as I have seen nothing has disproved evolution yet.

 

Back on topic since this not about evolution. Even Stephen Hawkins says the world is flat but of course he is referring to the surface that is wrapped around a sphere. Also the Catholic Church did teach that world was flat during the Dark Age and it was the common belief at the time. However the greeks and the egyptions before them and even Europeans before them Knew the world was round and during the dark ages this knowledge hung around through groups of people. However the comon sense view would be the world was flat unless you were a mariner or had a good teacher or was just really smart

 

 This is exactly why I didn't want to have this conversation; it goes the same way every time. I know how big the universe is. I've heard everything you said before. I’m in no way new to the debate. Trust me there is very little you can say that I haven't heard. Some of my counter arguments will be perhaps crude or off, but I'm seriously behind at work here, and yet I really don't want you all to think I don't have a response. So anyway let me take a few things, you use the whole trillions of opportunities thing, sounds great, it's so easy to say, well if you try a trillion combinations you are eventually bound to get it right. Totally logical. It's always been the scientific get out of jail free card, there has been a trillion chances, and billions of years, of course eventually it will happen! Except, you don't go into just how many factors have to be right, to create and sustain that life. And more importantly how many times in a row on a particular scenario has to be. Earth might be 1 in a trillion that got it right, but this planet it got it right over and over and over, it's very much like a man who keeps winning the lottery every single day of his life. Take a look at some of the factors:

 

Location in the universe, yeah there may be trillions of stars, trillions of planets out there, but large portion of them are located in areas that are simply inhabitable. Look at the rare Earth hypothesis, I know it’s a hypothesis, but there are some points all agree on, area of tremendous gamma ray radiation would obviously refute the ability of life, and many other factors as well. So first location has to be right.

Secondly your star(like our sun) has to be right.

Your moon has to be right

Your solar system has to be right.

All these play a role in what would be required to have a planet sustain life, and they all have to get a lot of unusual things right in themselves and that’s yet to include the planet itself.

I could do research and go into all kinds of stuff like ultraviolet radiation from too large of a star would prevent complex life. But I think you get the point, it’s basic goldilocks principle at work. But if you did do research you’d find these things don’t become more generic, simple and common, there are an amazing amount of unique properties involved here.

And the planet most of all has to get a lot right, chemistry of the atmosphere, plate-tectonics, magnetic field, etc…

 

And we have yet to get to the actual life part.

 

Here is also more food for thought:

What are the chances of the angular diameters of the moon and sun as viewed from Earth being almost exactly the same, causing s total eclipse, giving us an opportunity to see starlight near the edge of the sun’s disc? Earth’s very habitable nature go hand in hand with it’s ability to be explored and understood, it’s a data recorder, it potentially has one of the very best views of the entire universe. What are the chances that in this universe being formed the planet that is habitable is also the most suitable for discovery and learning? I guess that was a lucky coincidence.

 

Now life. The other guy here kept saying I was wrong about evolution being chance. He used the long and short haired Tiger scenario. Well here is the problem, did someone choose to create a long haired tiger? No. random mutation in a gene by chance would have brought that about, and lucky for him, it helped in survive, so much so that the short haired tiger died off. What are the chances that the right random change would come at the right time? Your going to either assume someone rigged the game or, there are so many random changes, so many variations in the various tigers out there that one is bound to hit the mark. The first scenario implies their being a creator, the second one implies we live in a world with absurd variations, like 5 legged tigers, purple haired tigers, I mean for time and time again for natural selection to have gone through so many enduring scenarios with so much progression of species, there would have to be absurd level of randomness inherent in life. There are no sub-human species, the species are for the most part relevant to their own kind. So that makes me skeptical, randomness in genes would imply to my own logic a world that looked like a mad science experiment. Secondly go behind something as simple as tiger hair, there is clearly animals with functions that require many systems to work in harmony all at once, like a giraffe’s long neck would require special heart valve, special muscles, special lungs all to facilitate that one change. I find it hard to believe they all popped in at once, and one of those changes by itself would most likely kill the animal. So that’s my argument. I apologize for not covering everything as you can see this already killed a lot of time.