[Alchemy]

Originally posted by winewood
I personally don't think humans are any smarter than thousands of years before we have just been able to keep better records and build on it.

I think the evolution of the scientific method, its first discovories - germ theory, for one example - and the ability of the Western world to more or less agree on a construction of civil rights that include the abolition of slavery, theocracy, and dictatorship, as well as governmental focus on environmental protection and restoration, all represent significant intellectual advancement in the past few hundred years. I think as time goes on, more things are discovered and known, and people are expected to know and understand more aspects of politics, their career, and the world they live in. I think humankind grows smarter because we are all encouraged to become smarter, because - amazingly - it benefits people to be shrewd in business, to be clever in games, etc. Not all people feel the intelligence/personal success gradient, but it's certainly a major factor to much of the world's population.

This isn't to say we're the paragon of intelligent life right now - far from it. But I think it's the nature of intelligent life to be continually improving the conditions in which it lives. Though we may be, as a whole, a very selfish species, it is that selfishness that drives us to improve the lives of those worse off - poverty, unemployment, and homelessness damages *all* of society.

So far, we have not been able to find a substantial logical fallacy with the Bible, but still hold it in high regard as one of the most hardened volumes of morality and logic to our criticisms.

I'm not sure who the "we" is here. I could easily point out a number of examples where the Bible is internally inconsistent, such as the two slightly different creation stories in Genesis, or the existence of humans who are not descendents of Adam and Eve, or the drawing of Jesus's lineage from David (Abraham? can't recall) through Joseph, who Jesus was not borne by and thus by Hebrew law his ancestry would be irrelevant to Jesus. There are physical inconsistencies, such as the story of Noah - a very clear parable, yet an event many fundamentalists consider factual. There is Revelation, a book many Christians discount, and many scholars find to be not a foretelling of the Apocalypse but a foretelling of the fall of Rome - a political tract with little meaning in modern times. There is evidence of trinity-type dieties in pre-Christian religions, though I can't recall which ones, and I apologize for not having more information. The flood tale of Noah is similar to pre-Jewish religions. Many aspects of the Old Testament can be seen in Sumerian religions, in Egyptian religions, and then re-interpreted in Islam. No writer of any holy book wrote in a vacuum - all were influenced by the folklore of their time.

As for a "hardened volume of morality," I am not sure what particular chapter and verse you refer to. I find the book of Job very distressing. I find repeated references to God encouraging his followers to kill, torture, mutilate, and rape in the Old Testament. I find the Ten Commandments inapplicable to any but Christians - the first three command singular loyalty to him and how that loyalty should be professed, the remaining seven are redundant and could have easily been cut down to "Do not take what is not yours," with it being understood this applies to your neighbor's possessions, wife, and life. The fealty to ones' parents seems appropriate, though to consider it a commandment of equal level of the others seems strange, especially in current Western society where it is no longer the father's perogative to kill his children.

Jesus's teachings are mostly beyond reproach, for he spoke in parables and thus there is nothing to prove or refute - they are all opinions. Strangely, I don't see many fundamentalists arguing the truth of Jesus's parables - they are apocryphal, and unlike many other events in the Bible, most people actually realize this.

My only suggestion, really, would be to have amended "Do unto others as you would have done unto you" as "Do unto others as they would like to have done unto them." More complicated, and perhaps the brevity is the important factor, but I think much unhappiness in this world could be solved by selflessness as well as empathy.

Faith in this regard is acceptance that the road that we should not venture out into is in fact not in our best interests. If we have that for no other reason than we haven't been led astray or can find no holes in the fabric of the arguement, this is a scientific principle of the theory. Test it until we find it is false. I have tested and therefore find it a working theory that has yet to be disproven. Do I have blind faith? Not at all, it is based on what I cannot disprove, and have already seen

Trusting texts on their face is not consistent with the scientific method. A theory must be based on logical assumptions, but it must also predict something. It has to be disprovable - if it isn't, science becomes a mess of half-truths.

I'm not sure how you have tested the Bible, but I find it difficult to believe you've done so in a manner that stands up for any sort of review - religion by its nature makes no predictions and explains nothing about the natural world. It isn't supposed to.

Funny stuff. Thats so Clintonesque. When a large portion of the theory involves 2 creatures VASTLY different and tells us how many thousands and millions of years in between evolved to get there, but there are no fossils or proof of those "drawn in" figures, doesn't that seem absurd?

Fossils aren't easy to come by. What is your interpretation of the data - that a supernatural force randomly spawns and then smites species of animal and plant for about four billion years?

From fish to salamander, there would be thousands of transistions VERY much like the former or the latter.

How do you know that there isn't evidence of that, somewhere?

There are large gaps in between these and thousands of years of their existance involving thousands of simple changes in each step. Logically you cannot explain away the transitional periods that are voids now, as a labeled step.

I'm unable to do so, yes, simply because I'm not an evolutionary biologist. I haven't the expertise or knowledge base to explain *everything* about a scientific field that I am not an expert in. So no, given your choice of two species, I can't dig up cited references of all the transitional species between them, or chart them upward to the ancestor of common descent. It's a lot of work, and it's not my job.

I feel like that arguement is the Wizard of OZ saying disregard the steps of my theory, don't question them.

And I feel like an empiricist whose information is discoutned by a pundit because I cannot give you an infinite amount of data points for a particular process. If I show you one transitionary species between an animal and its evolutionary descendant, would you ask for five? If I showed you five, would you ask for twenty? I feel like you're not grasping the gist of my argument - the transition is slow, there are thousands or millions of creatures between two discovered species. To expect physical proof of existence of every single animal, plant, microbe, etc. that ever lived on Earth is absurd.

Science has documented no example of a benificial mutation. Each mutation catalouged has resulted in a less functional animal for its environment. Especially a mutation that can be carried along genetically to a following generation.

pHaestus has made his point. You tell him he is wrong. There's not much I can say beyond that: If you ask for evidence, and someone well-versed in biology gives you evidence, and you say "No" without further explanation, there's nothing else that can be done. Few people will bother arguing with you if you respond to evidence against your argument with categorical dismissal.

You are using apples and oranges. First of all, the heat, temperature can be argued but tested by multiple independent people. The biology, which outside of dna research on the creatures 10's of thousands of years old is limited to a very defined set group who attempts to make the best hypothesis based on bones, without an understanding of skin, internal organs.

I have enough trust in biologists that they are aware of skin and internal organs, and that animals have them. Information about hide, feathers, scales, etc. can be and often are preserved in fossil remains. Biologists, like all scientists, must make logical theories, and these theories must stand up to peer review. Those that don't are discounted. People who fabricate evidence are found, usually very quickly. Scientists, like anyone else with a job, usually know what they are doing.

A series of "facts" creating other "facts" based on supposition of function to begin with.

What supposition? That things live? That things die? That things mutate? That things reproduce? Which one of these is fundamentally incorrect?

Color me amused indeed.

The one holding an arrogant, mocking opinion of the other side usually is not doing well in a debate.

Lets extrapolate on that idea and say the biology is more misunderstood than the thermodynamics of heat transfer of a core to a block.

I still stand by my observation that natural selection is a much older and much more studied topic in science than turbulence, or certain advanced topics in optics, or special or general relativity, or quantum mechanics, or chaos mathematics. Painting it as a silly or renagade branch of scientists is, quite simply, wrong.

Not obvious means not discovered, but a theory hangs on it.

The theory does not hang off it. A single step missing does not make the entire theory invalid, no more than a single missing note makes a symphony not a symphony. Yes, it's fascinating to try to come up with possible explanations. I don't know which ones are currently posed, as I am not well-read in current biological publications.

Do you understand? Evolution is a theory that makes predictable events. You pick a certain event that is not predictable, and say that the fact evolution does not predict it disproves evolution. It's an invalid argument: it is irrelevant to the truth or falsity of evolution whether a single organism, chosen at random, can have its evolutionary geneology drawn to a previous ancestor, even if that organism is very important, because such a thing requires biologists to know the full genotype, phenotype, livespan, etc. of every single animal ever born since the existence of the Earth - it's a computational impossibility.

Alchemy