Is the evolution story really scientific?

[Farmageddon]

Scoobes said:

Aielyn said:

Farmageddon said:

Aielyn said:

Many dog breeds are the result of artificial selection. But did you know that there are dog breeds that are incapable of breeding with each other? For instance, the beagle and the irish setter cannot breed with each other. Yet they can each breed with the same other types of dog - their DNA is just a little too distant from each other to produce viable offspring.

Do you have any sources for the bolded part? It sounds quite interesting.

I read it while looking into the issue. But there's a slight inaccuracy, now that I've looked a bit deeper. Apparently, they can produce viable offspring sometimes, but most of the time it's not viable. You can, for instance, find it mentioned here: http://sciencenetlinks.com/science-news/science-updates/dog-breeds/

Just to follow on from this. Where a species starts and a breed ends is not always easy to define. Some cat species can successfully breed to give viable offspring. Lions and Tigers in captivity can be bred to produce ligers which can be further bred to produce liligers (apparently, I'm not making these names up!). They were long thought to be sterile, but it appears they (ligers) can be viable.

Thanks, Aielyn.

Scoobes, yeah, I don't know much about the subject, but the idea of defining species through viable offspring alone doesn't sound very practical.

DarkWraith said:

Farmageddon said:

Besides what I've said above and others before, there's a very simple reason why you can't really apply logic to disprove an all powerfull being, and it's very simple: by definition, even if implicitly, such a being has the very handy ability to tell logic to just shove it. Which solves all of those "unmovable object and irresistible force" paradoxes. God, being almighty, is the very third valid state for a binary logic. He can be both the negation and the affirmation of any given proposition. You can't say "this thing is not subject to logic, but aplying logic to it leads to a contradiction, thus this thing doesn't exist", as that's just bad logic.

And this is precisely the reason I don't believe in any such sort of being: you just can't take anything useful out of it. It's a waste of time. Still, it's not contradictory and it's impossible to prove wrong.

By the way, not to be offesnive, but you sound very immature, DarkWraith.

yeh you really have no idea what youre talking about here. when attributes like omnipotence are defined they are defined in a way as to be cohesive with logic. for example:

Omnipotence - all-powerful with respect to its nature 

thus negating any logical absurdities as those would not be within the nature of omnipotence

have you had any philosophy in your entire life, esp. about theology? it seems no...

seek out plantingas ontological argument

Formally? No, not really, I've just read about this and that. As far as I know, though, many thinkers have advanced and attacked many definitions of omnipotence under different points of view, relating it or not to the idea of an actual god, some even defending such "absolute omnipotence".

But it would seem to me that the main reasons to define it the way you talk about would be either to preserve logic, so as to be able to actually derive anything from it, or as a counter argument and deflect things like the stone paradox. My point was that I see no reason why we should impose - or really even expect - God to be bounded by logic, be it either because He abidies by it or because it's part of His very "nature" . I really can't see any a priori reason at all to expect that. If you can, please, I'm interested.

Besides, you speak of studying philosophy and theology, yet your initial argument about the impossibility of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent being is as simple as possible and, I'm sure, has been tackled by any of the great thinkers who didn't see God as an impossibility or even believed on it's existence in some form or capacity.  To suppose that disproving theism, or even more specifically a Christian-like God, is by this very simple logic such an open and shut case is just preposterous.

As such I bet many, and much better, counter arguments can be found elsewhere, but here's a quick, probably way over-simplified, shot at one:

You seem to take "the good" as being an absolute, necessary and eternal quality, independent of God. That, by itself, can be seen as restricting God. Furthermore, you assume we're in a position to judge what "the good" consist of. One might, on the other hand, say that "the good" is contingent, at least in a sense, being precisely that which God wills, or that "the good" is that which conforms to the nature of God, or that we can't really define waht it is and isn't, thus removing the contradiction you proposed, if kind of tautologically, I guess.

Anyway, as I said before, I don't believe in any given kind of deity, but my broader point remains that I see no reason to expect logic (and, well, reason itself as we know it) to never break on any level of existence, infinitelly distant from our experience as it may be. Much less do I see any reason to believe or, worse yet, impose this to be necessarily the case.

(Just as an aside, a random quick though: another interesting way to argue against the impossibility of God is to notice that God and His properties might actually be impossible to even put in "words". Which I think is acutally consistent with Christian tradition, which says it's only through the Holy Spirit's guidance taht one can to truly understand the bibble. As in, you pretty much need a miracle of faith to even read about God)