Religion Creationism, Evolution and the Bible

ShadowsOfParadox

Well-known member
The way to convince someone not to believe in evolution is to convince them that there are powerful immaterial forces (IE: God) at work. The way to convince someone not to believe in Young Earth Creationism is to convince them that Genesis is either false or allegorical.
Key problem. Evolution doesn't give a carp if God is involved or not.

God could very well be involved, God might have made the first bit of life, God might well have arranged for specific circumstances to get certain species. All Evolution claims is that God did it over a long period of time with lots of intermediate steps and mostly just let life do life stuff to get where God wanted it.

Meanwhile, Young Earth Creationism needs an actual explanation for the Fossil Record. And I have yet to see one that doesn't amount to "God Deep Faked it all as a test of FAITH!!!"
 

ParadiseLost

Well-known member
Key problem. Evolution doesn't give a carp if God is involved or not.

God could very well be involved, God might have made the first bit of life, God might well have arranged for specific circumstances to get certain species. All Evolution claims is that God did it over a long period of time with lots of intermediate steps and mostly just let life do life stuff to get where God wanted it.

Meanwhile, Young Earth Creationism needs an actual explanation for the Fossil Record. And I have yet to see one that doesn't amount to "God Deep Faked it all as a test of FAITH!!!"

Theistic evolution exists as a compromise, but its not taken seriously either by conservative theologists or by mainstream scientists.

Theistic evolution is also directly at odds with Biblical inerrancy (key belief of conservative theology) and materialism (key belief of modern scientific orthodoxy).

Its all fundamentally philosophically opposed to both. If God is directing evolution then it isn't by random chance or by natural selection.

The type of people that believe in theistic evolution are generally the type of people who don't really care that much, so its easiest to just accept both and ignore that they don't fit well. There are notable famous exceptions, but they are generally mocked both by the scientific establishment and by conservative theologists.
 

ShadowsOfParadox

Well-known member
Its all fundamentally philosophically opposed to both. If God is directing evolution then it isn't by random chance or by natural selection.
So?

Again, I was pretty careful with my wording there. "arranged specific circumstances", the circumstances not being entirely 'random' doesn't mean it's not natural selection. For that matter, there's an interesting question of just how deterministic things are, because if they are deterministic enough all God actually has to do is set the initial conditions. There's also the interesting question of just how specific God's intent was, which is another way for God to just set the initial conditions and then let it play.

Maybe there's some specific bit of theology that makes this impossible... but that's people interpreting sooooo.

Evolution isn't a religion, it's a theory, if we find a T. Rex in with the giant bugs then Evolution has a problem, until then, well, at least I'm satisfied that it fits all available evidence even assuming the existence of a Creator.
 

LordsFire

Internet Wizard
You don't. Conditions creating vaguely reliable yet utterly random DNA (or RNA) synthesis mechanisms mean the odds go up dramatically, because the odds of genetic material forming have risen enormously. Proto-cells that would never accept selective permeability sufficient for recognizable biochemistry still give some level of insulation from ambient conditions.

I was going to reply to more of your post, but you know what, no.

The post I made with the math was already operating under the assumption that the conditions for DNA synthesis existed, and even under those conditions the odds are obscenely low. You clearly aren't actually paying attention to my arguments, you already have your conclusion, and I'm not just going to rehash the same points endlessly.

It's this simple:

The complexity involved to have any part of life functioning arising is improbable beyond human comprehension. Until you can demonstrate something that goes orders of magnitude past the complexity that has been achieved in Miller-Urey-et all, all you have is speculation and statements of faith, not science.

Show me examples of something, let's say a quarter of the way between inanimate matter and life, that isn't derivative of an already-existing life-form, or you don't have an argument.

Not a hypothetical argument. Not a computer simulation, or a model. An actual example of something that is about a quarter of the way between inanimate and living.


The fundamental problem with this debate is that it misses the primary point of why people have come to their conclusion.

(Snipped)

I'm old-school. I believe that the physical evidence can teach us something for itself; it's what made up my mind in deciding between the materialistic and theistic perspectives, but I well understand most people don't want the facts to confuse their ideology.
 

bintananth

behind a desk
I like to think that God set the rules when the universe was created and then let things happen.

Life would have come about according to those rules. Maybe not on Earth, but somewhere in the universe. We're probably not on the only planet with a species discussing the origin of life in the universe.

For real mind-boggling. Consider just how much information a DVD can hold. ~17GB if it's dual layer and double sided. That's enough to record all the DNA I, my wife, and both of our daughters have without using data compression.

There will be at least 3GB left unused.
 

ShadowsOfParadox

Well-known member
Show me examples of something, let's say a quarter of the way between inanimate matter and life, that isn't derivative of an already-existing life-form, or you don't have an argument.
Ah, you're assuming that conditions on Earth when life first formed were similar to conditions today.

They Weren't. Atmospheric Oxygen is, itself, a product of Life. There's far, far, more sources of energy on the primordial Earth than are extent today, including straight up, everything was hotter.

On top of which, here's another way for the dice to have memory
and here's a Christian perspective on it

These are just some of what I found that wasn't paywalled. There's plenty more to find in the actual literature.
The complexity involved to have any part of life functioning arising is improbable beyond human comprehension.
So's the time scale involved, and I notice you still haven't offered an explanation for the rocks the fossils are found in. Or how insects bigger than an Anaconda could exist in an Oxygen mix not poisonous to humans.
 

LordsFire

Internet Wizard

I'm not defending a position here, you are. Give me an example, and stop trying to deflect or distract. I'm not going to take the time to follow a hundred rabbit trails while the primary issue remains unaddressed.

For example, in an earlier post I addressed issues of time-scale, and how if you took the entire mass of the observable universe, comprised entirely of the appropriate elements to make life, and had it react for the entire estimated age of the universe, you still be hundreds of zeroes in the hole.

Actually address the point, or concede defeat.


I'm willing to argue the merits of Intelligent Design against someone who is sitting at a point of neutral skepticism. I'm not willing to argue them with someone who is ideologically committed to evolution.
 

bintananth

behind a desk
Actually address the point, or concede defeat.
You can get amino acids from a lightning strike in what we think the primordial atmosphere was like:


Toss in hydrogen sulfide and you'll get at least 23 different ones. DNA uses four. Our bodies make only 11 of the 20 essential ones.

A chromosome is an enormous and mind-boggingly complex self-replicating molecule that almost never produces an exact duplicate. Each of our cells has 47* of them.

Life as we know it wasn't intelligent design. Life is random chance and a whole shitload of "exploding dice" all coming up 10 to use L5R terms.

* mtDNA is the 47th
 

ShadowsOfParadox

Well-known member
I'm not defending a position here, you are.
Ummm... but no though.

My Position is "Evolution explains how life has changed" your position is "Evolution cannot explain how life first happened and is therefore bunk".

Here's the problem, my position doesn't CARE how life started. I don't give a shit if God made the first bit of life. I've engaged somewhat with your "Life cannot possibly have started from a random point" position. But also the fossil record was not brought up by me, it was brought up over here
Darwin himself stated that his theory would be proven false if the fossil record wasn't full of transitional creatures moving from one animal to another. And there aren't.
Which I have since repeatedly demonstrated to be utter bunk.

And then you continued to insist that the fossil record DISPROVES evolution
I didn't bring up the fossil record as proof that evolution is bunk (though it does fall against evolution rather than support it)
Which I, again, have repeatedly demonstrated to be untrue given both the amount of fossils that ARE clearly transistory and the fossils of creatures that straight up DO NOT WORK in a modern environment. Fossils of creatures which are MUTUALLY exclusive with anything alive today to boot.

The fossil record comes up AGAIN, and you AGAIN make the verifiably false claim that the fossil record does not have transistory fossils
The fossil record actually better fits to an ID explanation for life, because of how it does not reflect 'long gradual changes' that evolutionary theory predicted.
Which I immediately disprove(again) with a bunch of lists of exactly those things. And you continue to have no answer for million year old rocks and bugs too big to exist in an Oxygen mix that anything alive today could handle.


As an aside, while rereading the thread to make sure of how this argument went, I came across this
Did you know that some people claim that there's been mathematics done proving that a bumblebee can't fly?
Did you know that was done to demonstrate the flaws of a simplified set of aeronautics rules being used in the classroom as a set of "close enough" simplifications of the laws of aeronautics?
 

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
You can get amino acids from a lightning strike in what we think the primordial atmosphere was like:


Toss in hydrogen sulfide and you'll get at least 23 different ones. DNA uses four. Our bodies make only 11 of the 20 essential ones.

A chromosome is an enormous and mind-boggingly complex self-replicating molecule that almost never produces an exact duplicate. Each of our cells has 47* of them.

Life as we know it wasn't intelligent design. Life is random chance and a whole shitload of "exploding dice" all coming up 10 to use L5R terms.

* mtDNA is the 47th
That doesn't answer his actual point you quoted at all though, does it? His statement was that even given all the amino acids free, you can't actually get life without beating odds far higher than anything that could possibly be within credulity, even if every atom in the universe were an amino acid.


It's also fairly notable that these spark experiments always leave the quiet part missing from it.

First how did this magical atmosphere come about? Why do they think the primordial atmosphere would be like that? Because they started with what they could create amino acids from and worked backwards. There's no atmosphere remotely like what's needed, and no theoretical way to get such an atmosphere, in fact you'd need a ROB actively futzing around with things for it to be possible. You can't have an oxygen-free atmosphere with a significant percentage of water vapor, it readily breaks down into oxygen and free hydrogen. But once you have oxygen, the spark process doesn't work anymore.

In fact, NASA teams examining how atmospheres form have firmly determined that the above voodoo atmosphere is totally impossible, and in fact the atmosphere was quite similar to what we have today even before there was any life.


This is backed up by basic science establishing that a methane/ammonia atmosphere would be extremely unstable and short-lived, meaning the problems of "We just need lots of time" is horrifically compounded because you have a ridiculously narrow window of time before the magic atmosphere vanishes, if it ever existed at all.


Second, a spark decomposes amino acids much, much more quickly than it creates them. Without an intelligent designer, the scientist in this scenario, actively protecting the newly created amino acids from the spark with a trap to remove them the instant they form, there won't be any amino acids at the conclusion of the experiment because the same spark destroyed them all. Of course, since we now know there was free oxygen present, and that also kills the amino acids faster than a chainsaw cutting through cardboard, the fact that the experiment uses other impossible conditions is pretty irrelevant anyway.
 

ShadowsOfParadox

Well-known member
Hey, by the way, would you normally consider Lions and Tigers distinct species?
Because female hybrids, whether Liger or Tion are fertile with Lions or Tigers.
Oh, and, while a Lab Chihuahua mix exists, it's only via IVF(or unusually small Labs and unusually large Chihuahuas, according to some sources)
(this one disagress on that small Lab and large Chihuahua thing)
 

bintananth

behind a desk
Hey, by the way, would you normally consider Lions and Tigers distinct species?
Because female hybrids, whether Liger or Tion are fertile with Lions or Tigers.
Male hybrids - like mules, another hybrid - are almost never fertile. Ligers and Tigons also have a host of defects, which the article mentions. Their offspring, if any, are often sickly and even worse off.

Yeah, different species.

Dogs, Dingoes, Gray Wolves, Red Wolves, Coyotes, and Golden Jackels, OTOH, do produce healthy hybrid offspring in the wild.
 

Scottty

Well-known member
Founder
In the absence of atmospheric Oxygen, ultraviolet light from the sun would react with water to split it into... Hydrogen and Oxygen!
(As happens on Europa, btw. Thin O2 atmosphere on that moon, due to its surface being ice)
So no Oxygen-free early Earth until photosynthesis comes along, as some people pretend. Checkmate Atheists. /joke
 

bintananth

behind a desk
In the absence of atmospheric Oxygen, ultraviolet light from the sun would react with water to split it into... Hydrogen and Oxygen!
(As happens on Europa, btw. Thin O2 atmosphere on that moon, due to its surface being ice)
So no Oxygen-free early Earth until photosynthesis comes along, as some people pretend. Checkmate Atheists. /joke
Oxygen is also very reactive. That free oxygen is going find and attach itself to something that's not already oxidized to hell-and-back fairly quickly. Only fluorine is worse ...

There was some free oxygen, but not as much as we have today.
 

Morphic Tide

Well-known member
Logical inference to what was, shows us that all complex systems were created by an intelligent mind.
What definition of "complexity" are you using? Because I'm pretty damned sure that the definition used by probability is about the pure convolution of the thing completely irrespective of usefulness. The most "complex" book is the densest and hardest to describe mass of pure randomness, not an intricate treatise, because the treatise has patterns that make it more likely. The most "complex" physical systems are turbulences larger than the Sun.

It was at one point a hypothesis, but the evidence gathered has continually proven that it is a flawed hypothesis which does not fit the data.
No, it's just proven an increasing pain in the ass to actually get numbers because as it turns out we don't know how the shit we have works. Since we don't know how the present operates, we cannot actually construct a meaningful hypothesis of how it came to be. This is exceedingly basic "we don't know", and you just fucking can't stand ever doing anything but inserting "therefor God", despite never having any positive evidence in favor of God, just very large improbabilities of the mainstream alternatives that don't satisfy you.

You literally argue "if you do not have a perfect intermediate example, you are wrong":
An actual example of something that is about a quarter of the way between inanimate and living.
Do you have any meaningful definition of what this would look like? Do you actually have any concept of what the in-between would indicate? Do you actually have a fucking clue what the steps along the way would be? Because the big issue with abiogenesis that causes you to reject it is that nobody in the sciences does, when science never claimed that kind of completeness to begin with.

You insist that because there is such a gap right now, there absolutely must be God in there, without any positive proof of that hypothesis. Your "proof" has always been just screaming that science is wrong because it's unlikely or has something missing, not any hard disproof that it cannot be right. But the science looks at a gap, and works on filling it. Just because we don't know now, does not mean we cannot know, that's the whole point of science.

If you really want to talk probability, "omniscience" requires indescribably infinite components, owing to the proofs for cardinalities beyond countable infinities, and even the trivial uncountables like the real numbers. Any time there is a property included in that that is not certain, the probability goes down, and there are indescribably many properties to become improbable. And that's one part that must be accepted axiomatically, because it literally cannot be proven positively.
 

Scottty

Well-known member
Founder
Do you have any meaningful definition of what this would look like? Do you actually have any concept of what the in-between would indicate? Do you actually have a fucking clue what the steps along the way would be? Because the big issue with abiogenesis that causes you to reject it is that nobody in the sciences does, when science never claimed that kind of completeness to begin with.

"Science" as an abstract concept doesn't claim anything, but plenty of loudmouth Atheists do go around claiming that literally every question about the origin of living things has already been answered, that brewing up simple chemicals in a lab somehow proves that those chemicals could just pop together to make living cells, etc etc.
When - as you admit - nobody working in the actual sciences on that sort of question would seriously defend that kind of claim, because they know perfectly well that they don't have a clue.
 

Scottty

Well-known member
Founder
If you really want to talk probability, "omniscience" requires indescribably infinite components, owing to the proofs for cardinalities beyond countable infinities, and even the trivial uncountables like the real numbers. Any time there is a property included in that that is not certain, the probability goes down, and there are indescribably many properties to become improbable. And that's one part that must be accepted axiomatically, because it literally cannot be proven positively.

That's rather a strawman concept of omniscience. When Christians describe God as all-knowing, we mean that He is aware of everything that ever happens in the universe He created, all of its contents, all events in it, being directly observable to Him. Not that He has a list of all of the prime numbers (there are infinitely many) or otherwise concerns Himself with abstract mathematics. Maybe He does, but that's hardly of practical relevance from our point of view.
 

Morphic Tide

Well-known member
When - as you admit - nobody working in the actual sciences on that sort of question would seriously defend that kind of claim, because they know perfectly well that they don't have a clue.
Has LordsFire not made numerous arguments on the basis of exactly this accusation, that science is wrong because it does not have a complete answer, and therefor it must be the Christian God filling that gap?

Maybe He does, but that's hardly of practical relevance from our point of view.
I am bitching at someone discarding abiogenesis for mere improbability and lack of a complete model. It is incredibly significant how few obvious steps it takes to get to God answering infinite regression completely, because that is something with a probability from skeptical priors of zero. You have to accept it for it to be acceptable.
 

Scottty

Well-known member
Founder
Has LordsFire not made numerous arguments on the basis of exactly this accusation, that science is wrong because it does not have a complete answer, and therefor it must be the Christian God filling that gap?

I'm not Lordsfire. But "science is wrong" sounds like a bastardization of his views. Science is not the same thing as Atheistic naturalism, regardless of attempts by atheists to make it so.

On the one hand, what I see often on this sort of topic is the atheists using a motte-and-bailey. One moment it's "Science has explained Everything!" - then when one points out some of the things that the real-world sciences have not even the beginnings of an explanation for, they flip over to "But nobody has proven to meeee that there's a God".

On the other hand - you have people like Lordsfire making the sort of sincere mistake you complain of - trying to prove that life must have come about by direct Divine creation - because there is no other possible alternative.
The problem is that this is an attempt to prove a universal negative.

I am bitching at someone discarding abiogenesis for mere improbability and lack of a complete model. It is incredibly significant how few obvious steps it takes to get to God answering infinite regression completely, because that is something with a probability from skeptical priors of zero. You have to accept it for it to be acceptable.

Maybe it's too late at night here, but I'm not sure I understand what you are trying to say here. Is this about the probability of a being like God coming into existence in a universe (or meta-verse) where there was not already a God?
That is both unanswerable, and not relevant to the beliefs of the people you are debating against.
 

Morphic Tide

Well-known member
I'm not Lordsfire.
LordsFire was the person I was responding to in the first place, you're the one who decided to butt in with general theology trends.

Maybe it's too late at night here, but I'm not sure I understand what you are trying to say here.
Just the flip side of statements like this:
The post I made with the math was already operating under the assumption that the conditions for DNA synthesis existed, and even under those conditions the odds are obscenely low.

That is both unanswerable, and not relevant to the beliefs of the people you are debating against.
It is, because LordsFire is making the exact same pure-improbability argument about abiogenesis. So if it's fundamentally unanswerable, then its value by the scheme for LordsFire's skepticism of evolution and abiogenesis is zero.

I am not going after your position. I am going after LordsFire's position, which uses probability alone as reason to dismiss abiogenesis.
 

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