@richardhutnik

I do know Pascals wager. It was what I was bringing up, I just didn't mention it in the post, which in hindsight I should have.

And Yes at everyone saying that its majorly flawed, I completely agree, as my post and all of the ones after clearly demonstrate.

^

1) I hope that you understand that procedurally generated content in vidoegames is a "toy model" i.e. one that can provide insights into how a real model can be developed, but not an explanation of actual phenomena. In particualr the complexity of real world physics means that both the evolving subject and the selecting environment offer orders of magnitude more complex and subtle problems and solutions.

We can't numerically predict the weather on micro scales and useful times. I don't think anyone will postulate that it means that our physics of gas is wrong, or that our general atmosphere knowledge is completely wrong. It merely means that our numerical simulations are very poor because the real phenomenon is very complex.

2)

"Natural selection is insufficient to explain how complex functioning systems got there.  Natural selection doesn't add any new features, it merely cuts them out.  What is needed is to understand the mechanics of how features got there.  And there is some work done, but a LOT left to do.  Until this is done, there will still be the gap, and what seems normal to say someone engineered it."

Selection is of course only half of the evolution through natural selection model, the other one being the hypothesis of natural variation.

And of course there's a lot of debate about the real mechanisms by which these variations occurs, the amount in whcih they can accumulate, the "size" of evolutionary jumps, the "virtual machine" effects when changes have deep behavioural influxes (see Popper).

But still, that's all an insider debate, that does not refute the general scaffolding of "random variety in genotipe/fenotipe pruned by natural environment".

Last but not least "normal" brings no epistemologic value here. Normal for whom? It might have been normal for a small tribe to think that lightning was caused by angry gods, or that the faces we can see in tree bark and shaped rocks were frozen spirits of dead people. For me, it's normal to understand how lightning work in ionization terms, and how we tend to recognize a lot of patterns as faces because a lot of our social skills needed such a bias in visual analysis. Thus "normal" in this context  means "according to the amount of knowledge", and you're just saying that people that know little about evolution will resort to ID.

3) There are no fossils of eyes, thus we don't have the lineage of changes that led to our current structures.

But we have

a) fossils of bones showing the phylogenesis of skeletal apparati. The fingers inside the cetaceans' "fins" for example. Or the evolution of the foot in proto-horses.

b) parallel evolution of similar structures in indipendent manner. The octopus' eye evolved indipendently from ours and has many of the same structural features, but a retina that has an actually better design because the sensors are not "upside down".

c) An animal that is genetically closer to the octopus than to us, the nautilus, still has an "open chamber" eye like one could think would be developed at some point during that sequence of smaller steps. Animals that are genetically closer to common ancestors of us and octopi exhibit even more primitive eyes. In short, genetic similarity used as a measure to renconstruct a "tree of species" is in accord with the evolution fo the eye structures along the "branches".

This is empirical data, and science. No, it's not replicating that evolution of an eye in a lab or having a neat sequence of photos of the intermediate steps. Just like we don't replicate the conditions of the core of the sun in a lab and we don't get exact readings of its working in all detail. We take our empirical data, see if our models explain the data in a simple manner, see if the models are predictive of something we can test, proceed with testing and research new empirical data.

The day science will be restricted to just "showing" an actual phenomena will be the day we regress to 19th century science, given that nowadays we are working on scales of time and energy and complexity that only allow indirect testing.

Once upon a time you had god creating the world in six days because we had not the faintest idea of how the universe had evolved, now the line has been moved to where the new explanatory complexity lies, i.e. the first microseconds of the big bang or the detailed mechanism of phylogenesis. Stil, saying "someone intelligent did it because right here and now I can't understand how it became to happen" is the same cop-out. Meanwhile, as scientific knowledge advances that threshold of  ignorance turned "hypothesis" is moved further and further... so much that there's no reason to believe that it has any reason to be in the first place.

PS: Pascal's wager is silly in more ways that one.

Ethically, Pascal's god doesn't seem to care if you behave somehow because you love your neighbour or because you are looking for your own reward. A formal god.

Logically, outweighting the realistic choice (don't believe in god, this life is all you get) with an outlandish one (an entity will reward you if you believe in its existance) is devoid of any value because the oultandish choice has no more probability to be true than infinite other outlandish ones which predicate a different behaviour. Not just as someone else said "what if in the end the islamists were right", but even more outlandish ones. What if afterlife is governed by an evil demon that rewards who was atheist in life and gives eternal punsihment to the believers and all their beloved?

The moment you start admitting arbitrary, hypothetical rules is the moment the bet loses any logical meaning.

I'm almost wordless. There's 11 pages full of walls of text. On this forum.

Anyway, I don't tend to think it like evolutionism versus creationism. It's not like we had a huge debate about which one is 100% and which one is 100% wrong here. It seems to be an American thing, and I'm not American. Though I must say, I don't really believe I should take everything the Bible says literally. In light of all the proof there is, it's more than just a *bit* hard to believe the world was suddenly created in seven days. And that's not to say there can't be a god of some sort, it's just that you shouldn't take everything a book says so literally. And yeah, I strongly lean towards evolutionism.

Don't bother pointing me out how wrong I am, I probably won't even try to find my message from this thread again. Besides, I'm full of fanatics on both sides trying to tell the other how wrong he/she is.

Sorry for this belated reply, I've been away  this weekend and I couldn't access the Internet.

If the creator came to Earth and presented himself, I would be the first in line to see if the claim could be proven. If the creator presents himself, then logically there has to be some valid way of testing the claim. His presence alone would be enough to give us a means of testing. Secondly, it would matter a lot to me and other sceptics, I can't understand the attitude of "not testing faith", you have to challenge what you believe once in a while, sceptical enquiry is the only way we grow.

As for suggesting what form of testing we would use, I can't answer that. I'm not going to pretend to know the nature of the creator, whatever form it may be in.

What I do know is that given our current knowledge we can test the creation stories, and for the most part they are extremely thin and offer no reason for me to accept them; and if they were true most of them would have some form of testing which can be done. An example would be the Abrahamic creation story, if it were true then half the evidence you would need is for the fossil records to stop dead at 4004 BC, it would be easily testable. But the fossils don't stop there, they continue for millions of years. On levels of evidence creation myths have very little, people are just told to believe them and never question it. If evolution had such a thin level of evidence we would be having a much different conversation.

Perhaps a creator can exist that we don't know the nature of and so can't test it, but in turn that would render every religious view incorrect.

Bottom line is I may not be able to test a creator right now, but I can test the alleged effects such a creator has had on Earth. Should a being claiming to be a creator ever come to Earth I'm sure their claim can be tested too, but to ho they are tested I can't say until they arrive.

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I love python.

Thanks for the book suggestion. I actually read the believers perspective often, usually to try and understand their arguments.

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You wonder why would God go out of his way, but the majority of people who believe in creation stories also believe that God has interacted with the planet frequently. Some believe his son has been sent to Earth, some believe he embodies animals, some believe he sends creatures such as angels to Earth frequently. Even for fairly mundane and run of the mill things, people claim God has been present in some form. None of these claims hold water for me. My beliefs may not be enough to warrant interaction from a God, but judging by the track record God would be interacting with the world frequently. If not for me, then for the Christians, Atheists, Muslims and other groups.

But life isn't perfect.

Life is a constant struggle for survival and animals are filled with biological weakness that affect their chances of survival in their environment. Only those that are not affected as much by those weaknesses get the chance to survive and breed.

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And by coincidence I assume you mean you think evolution is random. If it were a random process then any creature would survive and pass on their traits regardless of their fitness, but they don't, only the fit survive. It is a non-random process.

Our existence through evolution is anything other than a coincidence.

Indeed, people like bayuum seem to not understand what evolution is. Evolution is not random since the fittest survive, and when I say fittest, that does not mean strongest. It means those who are best adapted to their environment and are able to produce offsprings. That's why we see changes in allele frequencies.

"In essence, the current state of the art is a result of efforts that began in earnest some 250 years ago, with progress in the last 100 years almost exponential."

Pgs 3-4 of Boylestad's Introductory Circuit Analysis 5th Edition

Props to Copernicus and Galileo.

And a BIG F-U! to those who deserve it.

The key thing is that we don't make the same mistake as our ancestors did. We cannot have religion as the dominant force in our society. For if we do, we will return to the dark ages such as Europe did in the 500-900 CE and how many Islam countries look today. Science and Knowledge is the key to a bright future for humanity.

Religion is the very reason certain facts are being witheld from the public.

Just some "rocks" on Mars, nothing to see here...

Click here for the original NASA pic

edit:  fixed image and link to original

The bottom line here is that everyone is religious whether they admit it or not.  Having a religion simply means believing in something that gives some kind of meaning/motivation in our lives.  That applies to ALL of us.  But in regards to creationism, there are facts that have given validation to a relatively young earth as opposed to the conventional billion of years of evolution.  There is no fact or science that has proven that evolution is true.  Believing in an unproven theory is just as religious as believing that creationism is fact.