Atheists can you prove that science is correct?
in Religion

Royalty · June 2018

Is science correct, it terms of it's explanation/evidence for the creation of all things on earth today, including humanity?

MayCaesar · June 2018

Modern science is not correct and has never been intended to be correct. The goal of science is to find a theoretical model matching the observable data as closely as possible, not to find some objective truth of the Universe. We cannot describe everything in the Universe with 100% precision (and likely we never will be able to), but we can find models giving very accurate predictions of experimental outcomes - and modern science has come pretty far in that accuracy. Calculating and cross-matching the gravitational constant down to 0.005% is pretty neat! The explanation of the observed effects is derived from these models and is a function of them. It is likely that there is more than one possible set of models giving accurate description of the observable data, leading to different visualizations and interpretations.

Theist models, however, are not included in the space of these sets. Theism does not follow a rigorous consistent method, it is more of a fantasy fiction, it gives almost zero useful testable predictions, and its wild stories have zero evidence behind them, aside from a few words in an ancient folklore book.

If you are looking for the singularly "correct" description of the world, then science will disappoint you. Science, however, will provide a tool set sufficient for any practical questions you may have. Theism does not provide either.

Royalty · June 2018

MayCaesar said:

Modern science is not correct and has never been intended to be correct. The goal of science is to find a theoretical model matching the observable data as closely as possible, not to find some objective truth of the Universe. We cannot describe everything in the Universe with 100% precision (and likely we never will be able to), but we can find models giving very accurate predictions of experimental outcomes - and modern science has come pretty far in that accuracy. Calculating and cross-matching the gravitational constant down to 0.005% is pretty neat! The explanation of the observed effects is derived from these models and is a function of them. It is likely that there is more than one possible set of models giving accurate description of the observable data, leading to different visualizations and interpretations.

Theist models, however, are not included in the space of these sets. Theism does not follow a rigorous consistent method, it is more of a fantasy fiction, it gives almost zero useful testable predictions, and its wild stories have zero evidence behind them, aside from a few words in an ancient folklore book.

If you are looking for the singularly "correct" description of the world, then science will disappoint you. Science, however, will provide a tool set sufficient for any practical questions you may have. Theism does not provide either.

Past predictions in the Bible have already come and gone.

Why is the Bible "fantasy fiction" or what that is written in there makes it fantasy fiction?

Where did humans first come from and how was space, the planets and everything on them formed?

whiteflame · June 2018

I won't speak to the statements made by @MayCaesar, as he can defend his own arguments, but I do have to address that last bit. I don't think anyone's arguing that they have absolute certainty regarding how all of the objects in the universe formed, or the specifics regarding how humanity came to be, at least not from a scientific perspective. I don't know how that applies to the question you're posing from the outset, though. Is science correct? Well, science has evidence that it derives conclusions from. Those conclusions are theoretical, i.e. they take that scientific data and build a logical conception of what is actually happening. I have to emphasize that the word "theoretical" has a different meaning in the scientific context, and that theories are not guesses. They are well-substantiated explanations of how the natural world works. There's a difference between well-substantiated and fully-substantiated, and even very conclusive evidence can often lead scientists to derive different conclusions.

All of this is a long way to say that there's a lot that science does not currently have the evidence to explain in full. There is evidence regarding where humans "came from", at least with regards to evolutionary history and common ancestors. That evidence is incomplete, but the conclusions are derived from a large set of data that strongly support them. There is evidence regarding the formation of planets, particularly in other solar systems, which astronomers have been able to monitor for quite some time. How life came to be, and how it evolved over time, also has some substantiation, though I'll be the first to admit that abiogenesis doesn't have the evidence to show precisely how it happened.

What you're asking here is for a very large burden of proof from scientists, one that is impossible to meet. Accepting that science has produced a great deal of important data that helps us explain the world and where we came from seems practically tautological. You might disagree with their conclusions, and you may find that the gaps in the available evidence call their theories into question to some degree, but I don't think you can deny that science plays an essential role in explaining the world around us. I'm not sure what this has to do with atheism in particular - plenty of scientists are religious, and support of scientific findings and conclusions doesn't require disbelief in a deity. If you want to find God somewhere in the world around you, that doesn't have to come into conflict with theories of evolution. Frankly, I find evolution far more amazing of a process than the idea that a deity simply popped all of the animals of the world into existence, and I can completely understand religions viewing evolution as divine in its own way. It seems like you want to put science and religion at odds, but I don't fully see why, particularly on these bases.

Fredsnephew · June 2018

Science is science. Science is simply a word that defines a specific human activity.
Atheists can be scientists, theists can be scientists.
Correctness is always correctness, and isn't dependant on human scientific activity to make it correct.
Atheistic assumptions are no more valid or invalid than theistic assumptions.
The big question remains unanswerable and beyond the reach of human capability.
All big question assumptions therefore remain theoretical and theory is not proof of anything.

MayCaesar · June 2018

Royalty said:

MayCaesar said:

Modern science is not correct and has never been intended to be correct. The goal of science is to find a theoretical model matching the observable data as closely as possible, not to find some objective truth of the Universe. We cannot describe everything in the Universe with 100% precision (and likely we never will be able to), but we can find models giving very accurate predictions of experimental outcomes - and modern science has come pretty far in that accuracy. Calculating and cross-matching the gravitational constant down to 0.005% is pretty neat! The explanation of the observed effects is derived from these models and is a function of them. It is likely that there is more than one possible set of models giving accurate description of the observable data, leading to different visualizations and interpretations.

Theist models, however, are not included in the space of these sets. Theism does not follow a rigorous consistent method, it is more of a fantasy fiction, it gives almost zero useful testable predictions, and its wild stories have zero evidence behind them, aside from a few words in an ancient folklore book.

If you are looking for the singularly "correct" description of the world, then science will disappoint you. Science, however, will provide a tool set sufficient for any practical questions you may have. Theism does not provide either.

Past predictions in the Bible have already come and gone.

Why is the Bible "fantasy fiction" or what that is written in there makes it fantasy fiction?

Where did humans first come from and how was space, the planets and everything on them formed?

@whiteflame gave a very good response. Let me address a more general part of your questions.

First of all, the predictions in the Bible are extremely vague, and interpretation of almost any historical event can be stretched enough to fit one of the possible interpretations of the Bible verses. This is the "Nostradamus" effect, when predictions seem to be true if you want them to be true - but if you read them literally, you will see that they do not predict anything specific. This is what fiction does. Science is different, science gives exact predictions, down to measurable numerical quantities. You can prove a scientific prediction right or wrong. You cannot prove a theistic prediction right or wrong due to the nature of those predictions, hence those predictions have little practical relevance.

This is what, in general, differs science from theism. Theism involves confirmation bias as the core of its construction process: rather than trying to obtain a practically useful and experimentally hardened tool, it tries to obtain a model that matches the tales produced by a combination of folklore, fiction and traditions. In other words, the story theism tells is already predefined, regardless of any data, and theists need merely to tune the model in a way that matches that story best. This is crucial: it should match the story produced by human storytellers, not the observable data.

Science instead tries to describe the infinitely vast array of data we can observe and interact with. Our models can change, sometimes by 180 degrees, when our improving technological capabilities reveal something we have been missing before. However, every popular model science features is hard-tested for any possible errors. We perform the same type of experiments for decades to make sure we are not missing anything fundamental. When we say that a theory describes the data well as a result of thousands peer-reviewed research projects, this theory truly is resilient - and practically useful. All the fancy technology we have today: computers, cars, airplanes, smartphones, Internet, GPS, home electricity - all the result of scientific research.

What has theism produced instead? Do we have any technology that appeared as a result of following the Biblical prophecies? No, and for a good reason: those prophecies are not based on the observable data, hence they cannot contribute to using this data to better suit our needs.

---

Now, to your real question: how can we be sure that the theory of Evolution, that the Big Bang, that the whole history of the Universe and of the humanity that science predicts - is correct? Well, we can never be 100% sure that it is correct. Our data is always incomplete, our theories always have some flaws and gaps, and - let us be honest here - there are questions that science simply may not be able to answer by its very design. "Why did the Big Bang happen?" - this question may not be answerable, since the cause-effect connection is something we derived from the observable Universe, and it may not apply to the time "before" this Universe was born. Perhaps the only answer we can give is "It happened, and we can study its consequences - that is it".

However, what we do know led us to construct very solid models that withstood the test of time and countless observations. We have found thousands pieces of data derived from our assumption that the Big Bang occurred - hence it probably occurred. We have found remains of hundreds human species, sub-species and pre-species, and the structure of their remains matches very well what we expect from our evolutionary theories. At this point, for the interpretation of these theories to be "wrong", we must truly have been missing something obvious, or we are extremely unlucky and only have been finding the outliers, instead of the relevant data points. Not to say that it is impossible for us to be wrong, but it is extremely unlikely that we are wrong about something as fundamental as the idea of Evolution.

This is the advantage of the scientific viewpoint over the religious one: the consequences of applying scientific method honestly and rigorously are very solid and trustworthy theories, not unverifiable tales that are a product of human imagination. If we have no direct evidence of the existence of angels, then we will not assume that angels exist - regardless of what any book may say. We will instead try to understand where the stories of angels in those books came from, and we do understand it pretty well nowadays from studying folklore and literature of the same people who produced the Bible and seeing a lot of connections there. Ironically, science explains the Bible much better than theism does.

---

The final point I want to make is about theism as it is defined: belief in the creator. Does science reject the existence of the creator? Not necessarily. It is very much possible, for example, that we live in a Matrix created by higher beings in another dimension. Or maybe some extra-dimensional alien civilization created our Universe and left it alone. Finally, who knows, maybe the God really exists and direct this world. However, a) we do not have any evidence of any of this being true, and b) our current theories not involving any of this work pretty well for us, so there is a good chance that this Universe indeed appeared naturally and humanity indeed appeared on its own, rather than being artificially created by someone.

Granted, we do not understand very well how life emerges in the first place and what exactly defines the evolution path it is going to take. Is Silicon-based life possible? Maybe. How abundant is life in the Universe? We do not have even an approximate idea, with hypotheses ranging from "We are the only life in the Universe" to "Life is so abundant, it probably exists in some form on every tiny asteroid". Nor do we understand anything about what defines when and how a Universe appears - maybe it does not really appears at all, and exists only in my minds, that have their own rules of existence we cannot even imagine.

There is a lot of questions science is far from answering at this point. We are incredibly ignorant overall, and we probably do not know even 0.0001% of the most fundamental things there is to know. But science is pragmatic. Scientists have the strength and humility to admit when we do not know something: we are in the process of constant learning. And while theism and science are not mutually exclusive, theism in itself does not have this property of pragmatism, and for a theist to admit that "Maybe the god does not really exist" is virtually unheard of. We, scientists, will not in general deny the possibility of god's existence - however, we prefer not to speculate about something no data is available on and to assume that if we have not encountered it so far while by all accounts we should have, then it probably does not exist.

whiteflame · June 2018

Fredsnephew said:

Science is science. Science is simply a word that defines a specific human activity.
Atheists can be scientists, theists can be scientists.
Correctness is always correctness, and isn't dependant on human scientific activity to make it correct.
Atheistic assumptions are no more valid or invalid than theistic assumptions.
The big question remains unanswerable and beyond the reach of human capability.
All big question assumptions therefore remain theoretical and theory is not proof of anything.

I think you're undervaluing the importance of science in an attempt to elevate theistic belief over it. Sure, science is a word, just as theism is a word, but I think the idea that it simply defines some specific human activity ignores the importance of that activity. Science produces data, and that data can provide support for certain conclusions and put others in doubt. You're right, scientific activity doesn't make a conclusion correct, but it does provide a means for assessing a set of conclusions based on the available evidence. I don't think that should be undervalued because it means science is an unbiased means of assessing a set of conclusions, so while reaching those conclusions still requires some assumptions, they are still based on experimental evidence. Their validity can always be challenged, but that's part of what makes science science: it lets the evidence speak for itself. Theistic conclusions come from a lot of places, and interpretations of theistic literature certainly range, but I've never known a religion that was so open to challenge as science is.

Whatever "the big question" is, there will always be questions we cannot answer, and no matter how far science advances, certain questions may remain out of our grasp. However, I don't view that as a failing of science, any more than I view the need to express conclusions as scientific theories. Recognizing that there will always be questions beyond our grasp provides all the more reason for science to keep pushing forward and trying to answer them, and recognizing that a set of evidence may be better explained in some other way keeps scientists from simply assuming the conclusions they want to see. You're right that theory isn't proof, even scientific theory, but even when it comes to the big questions, I think it would be foolish to ignore the evidence that scientists are finding through their experiments. Any objective evidence to direct our conclusions is better than none.

Royalty · June 2018

whiteflame said:

I won't speak to the statements made by @MayCaesar, as he can defend his own arguments, but I do have to address that last bit. I don't think anyone's arguing that they have absolute certainty regarding how all of the objects in the universe formed, or the specifics regarding how humanity came to be, at least not from a scientific perspective. I don't know how that applies to the question you're posing from the outset, though. Is science correct? Well, science has evidence that it derives conclusions from. Those conclusions are theoretical, i.e. they take that scientific data and build a logical conception of what is actually happening. I have to emphasize that the word "theoretical" has a different meaning in the scientific context, and that theories are not guesses. They are well-substantiated explanations of how the natural world works. There's a difference between well-substantiated and fully-substantiated, and even very conclusive evidence can often lead scientists to derive different conclusions.

All of this is a long way to say that there's a lot that science does not currently have the evidence to explain in full. There is evidence regarding where humans "came from", at least with regards to evolutionary history and common ancestors. That evidence is incomplete, but the conclusions are derived from a large set of data that strongly support them. There is evidence regarding the formation of planets, particularly in other solar systems, which astronomers have been able to monitor for quite some time. How life came to be, and how it evolved over time, also has some substantiation, though I'll be the first to admit that abiogenesis doesn't have the evidence to show precisely how it happened.

What you're asking here is for a very large burden of proof from scientists, one that is impossible to meet. Accepting that science has produced a great deal of important data that helps us explain the world and where we came from seems practically tautological. You might disagree with their conclusions, and you may find that the gaps in the available evidence call their theories into question to some degree, but I don't think you can deny that science plays an essential role in explaining the world around us. I'm not sure what this has to do with atheism in particular - plenty of scientists are religious, and support of scientific findings and conclusions doesn't require disbelief in a deity. If you want to find God somewhere in the world around you, that doesn't have to come into conflict with theories of evolution. Frankly, I find evolution far more amazing of a process than the idea that a deity simply popped all of the animals of the world into existence, and I can completely understand religions viewing evolution as divine in its own way. It seems like you want to put science and religion at odds, but I don't fully see why, particularly on these bases.

I'm trying to understand the whole point of science. Because there are people that say that science has the answers and it's evidence is based on observable evidence, and there are people, like yourself, that say that science doesn't have all the answers and it is based on well-substantiated explanations.

Another thing, science and religion cannot go hand in hand because there will be confusion. If someone that says they believe in God the bible and all the teachings in the bible, believes that science explains this and that, so on and so forth, they have no faith that God exists. The bible actually tells us to stay away from science (1 Tim 6:20). Science will always be at conflict with the bible.

But here's what I'm trying to get across to atheists who believe in full on science. Just like science can't explain and show proof of everything, the bible cannot show proof of everything. A lot of things that you hear about the bible, are false because those statements come from Christianity. I can't show you that God exists, but because of the prophecies in the bible and with what is going on today and it being in the bible (I'm talking about huge events that impact the world and people around us), I have faith that God does exist. Just like science cant give us proof that the universe, everything in it, humankind, etc. came from something else other than man, but scientists have faith that this stuff happened. They don't have a lot of observable evidence for the data they collect when it comes to creation. Therefore they have faith in what they put together, if that makes sense.

Royalty · June 2018

MayCaesar said:

Royalty said:

MayCaesar said:

Modern science is not correct and has never been intended to be correct. The goal of science is to find a theoretical model matching the observable data as closely as possible, not to find some objective truth of the Universe. We cannot describe everything in the Universe with 100% precision (and likely we never will be able to), but we can find models giving very accurate predictions of experimental outcomes - and modern science has come pretty far in that accuracy. Calculating and cross-matching the gravitational constant down to 0.005% is pretty neat! The explanation of the observed effects is derived from these models and is a function of them. It is likely that there is more than one possible set of models giving accurate description of the observable data, leading to different visualizations and interpretations.

Theist models, however, are not included in the space of these sets. Theism does not follow a rigorous consistent method, it is more of a fantasy fiction, it gives almost zero useful testable predictions, and its wild stories have zero evidence behind them, aside from a few words in an ancient folklore book.

If you are looking for the singularly "correct" description of the world, then science will disappoint you. Science, however, will provide a tool set sufficient for any practical questions you may have. Theism does not provide either.

Past predictions in the Bible have already come and gone.

Why is the Bible "fantasy fiction" or what that is written in there makes it fantasy fiction?

Where did humans first come from and how was space, the planets and everything on them formed?

@whiteflame gave a very good response. Let me address a more general part of your questions.

First of all, the predictions in the Bible are extremely vague, and interpretation of almost any historical event can be stretched enough to fit one of the possible interpretations of the Bible verses. This is the "Nostradamus" effect, when predictions seem to be true if you want them to be true - but if you read them literally, you will see that they do not predict anything specific. This is what fiction does. Science is different, science gives exact predictions, down to measurable numerical quantities. You can prove a scientific prediction right or wrong. You cannot prove a theistic prediction right or wrong due to the nature of those predictions, hence those predictions have little practical relevance.

This is what, in general, differs science from theism. Theism involves confirmation bias as the core of its construction process: rather than trying to obtain a practically useful and experimentally hardened tool, it tries to obtain a model that matches the tales produced by a combination of folklore, fiction and traditions. In other words, the story theism tells is already predefined, regardless of any data, and theists need merely to tune the model in a way that matches that story best. This is crucial: it should match the story produced by human storytellers, not the observable data.

Science instead tries to describe the infinitely vast array of data we can observe and interact with. Our models can change, sometimes by 180 degrees, when our improving technological capabilities reveal something we have been missing before. However, every popular model science features is hard-tested for any possible errors. We perform the same type of experiments for decades to make sure we are not missing anything fundamental. When we say that a theory describes the data well as a result of thousands peer-reviewed research projects, this theory truly is resilient - and practically useful. All the fancy technology we have today: computers, cars, airplanes, smartphones, Internet, GPS, home electricity - all the result of scientific research.

What has theism produced instead? Do we have any technology that appeared as a result of following the Biblical prophecies? No, and for a good reason: those prophecies are not based on the observable data, hence they cannot contribute to using this data to better suit our needs.

---

Now, to your real question: how can we be sure that the theory of Evolution, that the Big Bang, that the whole history of the Universe and of the humanity that science predicts - is correct? Well, we can never be 100% sure that it is correct. Our data is always incomplete, our theories always have some flaws and gaps, and - let us be honest here - there are questions that science simply may not be able to answer by its very design. "Why did the Big Bang happen?" - this question may not be answerable, since the cause-effect connection is something we derived from the observable Universe, and it may not apply to the time "before" this Universe was born. Perhaps the only answer we can give is "It happened, and we can study its consequences - that is it".

However, what we do know led us to construct very solid models that withstood the test of time and countless observations. We have found thousands pieces of data derived from our assumption that the Big Bang occurred - hence it probably occurred. We have found remains of hundreds human species, sub-species and pre-species, and the structure of their remains matches very well what we expect from our evolutionary theories. At this point, for the interpretation of these theories to be "wrong", we must truly have been missing something obvious, or we are extremely unlucky and only have been finding the outliers, instead of the relevant data points. Not to say that it is impossible for us to be wrong, but it is extremely unlikely that we are wrong about something as fundamental as the idea of Evolution.

This is the advantage of the scientific viewpoint over the religious one: the consequences of applying scientific method honestly and rigorously are very solid and trustworthy theories, not unverifiable tales that are a product of human imagination. If we have no direct evidence of the existence of angels, then we will not assume that angels exist - regardless of what any book may say. We will instead try to understand where the stories of angels in those books came from, and we do understand it pretty well nowadays from studying folklore and literature of the same people who produced the Bible and seeing a lot of connections there. Ironically, science explains the Bible much better than theism does.

---

The final point I want to make is about theism as it is defined: belief in the creator. Does science reject the existence of the creator? Not necessarily. It is very much possible, for example, that we live in a Matrix created by higher beings in another dimension. Or maybe some extra-dimensional alien civilization created our Universe and left it alone. Finally, who knows, maybe the God really exists and direct this world. However, a) we do not have any evidence of any of this being true, and b) our current theories not involving any of this work pretty well for us, so there is a good chance that this Universe indeed appeared naturally and humanity indeed appeared on its own, rather than being artificially created by someone.

Granted, we do not understand very well how life emerges in the first place and what exactly defines the evolution path it is going to take. Is Silicon-based life possible? Maybe. How abundant is life in the Universe? We do not have even an approximate idea, with hypotheses ranging from "We are the only life in the Universe" to "Life is so abundant, it probably exists in some form on every tiny asteroid". Nor do we understand anything about what defines when and how a Universe appears - maybe it does not really appears at all, and exists only in my minds, that have their own rules of existence we cannot even imagine.

There is a lot of questions science is far from answering at this point. We are incredibly ignorant overall, and we probably do not know even 0.0001% of the most fundamental things there is to know. But science is pragmatic. Scientists have the strength and humility to admit when we do not know something: we are in the process of constant learning. And while theism and science are not mutually exclusive, theism in itself does not have this property of pragmatism, and for a theist to admit that "Maybe the god does not really exist" is virtually unheard of. We, scientists, will not in general deny the possibility of god's existence - however, we prefer not to speculate about something no data is available on and to assume that if we have not encountered it so far while by all accounts we should have, then it probably does not exist.

The bible was not written for the entire world. It was written to a nation of people, the Israelites, so-called blacks, Latinos/Hispanics, and Nat. Amer. Indians today. We are the only people that fit the prophecies. So the bible was written to, for and from the Israelites. The scrips are written in code and only the Israelites are given the understanding to put the pieces together. God is not dealing with the other nations. The bible is written precept upon precept, line upon line, here a little there a little, which you probably don't understand and religions sure as hell doesn't understand.

You've heard of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade right? Well, that was bible prophecy. Christopher Columbus coming to now called, America, killing the Nati. Amer. Indians, raping them, murdering them, taken all their wealth and land, then enslaving them, that was prophecy. Latinos/Hispanics today were originally black but because of interracial marriages, the look European, however it depends on the fathers bloodline as he is the one who we get most of our DNA from or in God's terms, he is the one who carries the seed.

But because of religion, I'm sure you probably did not know this type of stuff. I'm sure you heard that when we all die, we're going to be floating around in the sky, lol (that's what they were teaching me in the Christian church). That's religion, not the bible. Just like the white man is in ruler ship today, and yes, white people are the superior race today as they have control of everything, well, that's what heaven is according to the bible. Thats the 4th heaven, ruler ship. Religion is all fairy tales, but the bible is a true book. We cannot bring God down from his throne and show him to you as observable proof, just like science can't take us back to the day of creation of all things. So in essence, you have to have faith in many things, especially things you cannot observe but have other proof for it's existence, if that makes any sense.

I don't know. Science is very confusing because there are many different view points regarding it's evidence and so on.

Erfisflat · June 2018

Royalty said:

whiteflame said:

I won't speak to the statements made by @MayCaesar, as he can defend his own arguments, but I do have to address that last bit. I don't think anyone's arguing that they have absolute certainty regarding how all of the objects in the universe formed, or the specifics regarding how humanity came to be, at least not from a scientific perspective. I don't know how that applies to the question you're posing from the outset, though. Is science correct? Well, science has evidence that it derives conclusions from. Those conclusions are theoretical, i.e. they take that scientific data and build a logical conception of what is actually happening. I have to emphasize that the word "theoretical" has a different meaning in the scientific context, and that theories are not guesses. They are well-substantiated explanations of how the natural world works. There's a difference between well-substantiated and fully-substantiated, and even very conclusive evidence can often lead scientists to derive different conclusions.

All of this is a long way to say that there's a lot that science does not currently have the evidence to explain in full. There is evidence regarding where humans "came from", at least with regards to evolutionary history and common ancestors. That evidence is incomplete, but the conclusions are derived from a large set of data that strongly support them. There is evidence regarding the formation of planets, particularly in other solar systems, which astronomers have been able to monitor for quite some time. How life came to be, and how it evolved over time, also has some substantiation, though I'll be the first to admit that abiogenesis doesn't have the evidence to show precisely how it happened.

What you're asking here is for a very large burden of proof from scientists, one that is impossible to meet. Accepting that science has produced a great deal of important data that helps us explain the world and where we came from seems practically tautological. You might disagree with their conclusions, and you may find that the gaps in the available evidence call their theories into question to some degree, but I don't think you can deny that science plays an essential role in explaining the world around us. I'm not sure what this has to do with atheism in particular - plenty of scientists are religious, and support of scientific findings and conclusions doesn't require disbelief in a deity. If you want to find God somewhere in the world around you, that doesn't have to come into conflict with theories of evolution. Frankly, I find evolution far more amazing of a process than the idea that a deity simply popped all of the animals of the world into existence, and I can completely understand religions viewing evolution as divine in its own way. It seems like you want to put science and religion at odds, but I don't fully see why, particularly on these bases.

I'm trying to understand the whole point of science. Because there are people that say that science has the answers and it's evidence is based on observable evidence, and there are people, like yourself, that say that science doesn't have all the answers and it is based on well-substantiated explanations.

Another thing, science and religion cannot go hand in hand because there will be confusion. If someone that says they believe in God the bible and all the teachings in the bible, believes that science explains this and that, so on and so forth, they have no faith that God exists. The bible actually tells us to stay away from science (1 Tim 6:20). Science will always be at conflict with the bible.

But here's what I'm trying to get across to atheists who believe in full on science. Just like science can't explain and show proof of everything, the bible cannot show proof of everything. A lot of things that you hear about the bible, are false because those statements come from Christianity. I can't show you that God exists, but because of the prophecies in the bible and with what is going on today and it being in the bible (I'm talking about huge events that impact the world and people around us), I have faith that God does exist. Just like science cant give us proof that the universe, everything in it, humankind, etc. came from something else other than man, but scientists have faith that this stuff happened. They don't have a lot of observable evidence for the data they collect when it comes to creation. Therefore they have faith in what they put together, if that makes sense.

This is exactly why I am here. I'm not trying to be "anti-science" at all, as some would assume. I'm showing with science and logic that the atheist's theory of how we came about has some serious doubt stemming from an early assumed axiom which is the shape of the earth.

MayCaesar · June 2018

Royalty said:

MayCaesar said:

Royalty said:

MayCaesar said:

Modern science is not correct and has never been intended to be correct. The goal of science is to find a theoretical model matching the observable data as closely as possible, not to find some objective truth of the Universe. We cannot describe everything in the Universe with 100% precision (and likely we never will be able to), but we can find models giving very accurate predictions of experimental outcomes - and modern science has come pretty far in that accuracy. Calculating and cross-matching the gravitational constant down to 0.005% is pretty neat! The explanation of the observed effects is derived from these models and is a function of them. It is likely that there is more than one possible set of models giving accurate description of the observable data, leading to different visualizations and interpretations.

Theist models, however, are not included in the space of these sets. Theism does not follow a rigorous consistent method, it is more of a fantasy fiction, it gives almost zero useful testable predictions, and its wild stories have zero evidence behind them, aside from a few words in an ancient folklore book.

If you are looking for the singularly "correct" description of the world, then science will disappoint you. Science, however, will provide a tool set sufficient for any practical questions you may have. Theism does not provide either.

Past predictions in the Bible have already come and gone.

Why is the Bible "fantasy fiction" or what that is written in there makes it fantasy fiction?

Where did humans first come from and how was space, the planets and everything on them formed?

@whiteflame gave a very good response. Let me address a more general part of your questions.

First of all, the predictions in the Bible are extremely vague, and interpretation of almost any historical event can be stretched enough to fit one of the possible interpretations of the Bible verses. This is the "Nostradamus" effect, when predictions seem to be true if you want them to be true - but if you read them literally, you will see that they do not predict anything specific. This is what fiction does. Science is different, science gives exact predictions, down to measurable numerical quantities. You can prove a scientific prediction right or wrong. You cannot prove a theistic prediction right or wrong due to the nature of those predictions, hence those predictions have little practical relevance.

This is what, in general, differs science from theism. Theism involves confirmation bias as the core of its construction process: rather than trying to obtain a practically useful and experimentally hardened tool, it tries to obtain a model that matches the tales produced by a combination of folklore, fiction and traditions. In other words, the story theism tells is already predefined, regardless of any data, and theists need merely to tune the model in a way that matches that story best. This is crucial: it should match the story produced by human storytellers, not the observable data.

Science instead tries to describe the infinitely vast array of data we can observe and interact with. Our models can change, sometimes by 180 degrees, when our improving technological capabilities reveal something we have been missing before. However, every popular model science features is hard-tested for any possible errors. We perform the same type of experiments for decades to make sure we are not missing anything fundamental. When we say that a theory describes the data well as a result of thousands peer-reviewed research projects, this theory truly is resilient - and practically useful. All the fancy technology we have today: computers, cars, airplanes, smartphones, Internet, GPS, home electricity - all the result of scientific research.

What has theism produced instead? Do we have any technology that appeared as a result of following the Biblical prophecies? No, and for a good reason: those prophecies are not based on the observable data, hence they cannot contribute to using this data to better suit our needs.

---

Now, to your real question: how can we be sure that the theory of Evolution, that the Big Bang, that the whole history of the Universe and of the humanity that science predicts - is correct? Well, we can never be 100% sure that it is correct. Our data is always incomplete, our theories always have some flaws and gaps, and - let us be honest here - there are questions that science simply may not be able to answer by its very design. "Why did the Big Bang happen?" - this question may not be answerable, since the cause-effect connection is something we derived from the observable Universe, and it may not apply to the time "before" this Universe was born. Perhaps the only answer we can give is "It happened, and we can study its consequences - that is it".

However, what we do know led us to construct very solid models that withstood the test of time and countless observations. We have found thousands pieces of data derived from our assumption that the Big Bang occurred - hence it probably occurred. We have found remains of hundreds human species, sub-species and pre-species, and the structure of their remains matches very well what we expect from our evolutionary theories. At this point, for the interpretation of these theories to be "wrong", we must truly have been missing something obvious, or we are extremely unlucky and only have been finding the outliers, instead of the relevant data points. Not to say that it is impossible for us to be wrong, but it is extremely unlikely that we are wrong about something as fundamental as the idea of Evolution.

This is the advantage of the scientific viewpoint over the religious one: the consequences of applying scientific method honestly and rigorously are very solid and trustworthy theories, not unverifiable tales that are a product of human imagination. If we have no direct evidence of the existence of angels, then we will not assume that angels exist - regardless of what any book may say. We will instead try to understand where the stories of angels in those books came from, and we do understand it pretty well nowadays from studying folklore and literature of the same people who produced the Bible and seeing a lot of connections there. Ironically, science explains the Bible much better than theism does.

---

The final point I want to make is about theism as it is defined: belief in the creator. Does science reject the existence of the creator? Not necessarily. It is very much possible, for example, that we live in a Matrix created by higher beings in another dimension. Or maybe some extra-dimensional alien civilization created our Universe and left it alone. Finally, who knows, maybe the God really exists and direct this world. However, a) we do not have any evidence of any of this being true, and b) our current theories not involving any of this work pretty well for us, so there is a good chance that this Universe indeed appeared naturally and humanity indeed appeared on its own, rather than being artificially created by someone.

Granted, we do not understand very well how life emerges in the first place and what exactly defines the evolution path it is going to take. Is Silicon-based life possible? Maybe. How abundant is life in the Universe? We do not have even an approximate idea, with hypotheses ranging from "We are the only life in the Universe" to "Life is so abundant, it probably exists in some form on every tiny asteroid". Nor do we understand anything about what defines when and how a Universe appears - maybe it does not really appears at all, and exists only in my minds, that have their own rules of existence we cannot even imagine.

There is a lot of questions science is far from answering at this point. We are incredibly ignorant overall, and we probably do not know even 0.0001% of the most fundamental things there is to know. But science is pragmatic. Scientists have the strength and humility to admit when we do not know something: we are in the process of constant learning. And while theism and science are not mutually exclusive, theism in itself does not have this property of pragmatism, and for a theist to admit that "Maybe the god does not really exist" is virtually unheard of. We, scientists, will not in general deny the possibility of god's existence - however, we prefer not to speculate about something no data is available on and to assume that if we have not encountered it so far while by all accounts we should have, then it probably does not exist.

The bible was not written for the entire world. It was written to a nation of people, the Israelites, so-called blacks, Latinos/Hispanics, and Nat. Amer. Indians today. We are the only people that fit the prophecies. So the bible was written to, for and from the Israelites. The scrips are written in code and only the Israelites are given the understanding to put the pieces together. God is not dealing with the other nations. The bible is written precept upon precept, line upon line, here a little there a little, which you probably don't understand and religions sure as hell doesn't understand.

You've heard of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade right? Well, that was bible prophecy. Christopher Columbus coming to now called, America, killing the Nati. Amer. Indians, raping them, murdering them, taken all their wealth and land, then enslaving them, that was prophecy. Latinos/Hispanics today were originally black but because of interracial marriages, the look European, however it depends on the fathers bloodline as he is the one who we get most of our DNA from or in God's terms, he is the one who carries the seed.

But because of religion, I'm sure you probably did not know this type of stuff. I'm sure you heard that when we all die, we're going to be floating around in the sky, lol (that's what they were teaching me in the Christian church). That's religion, not the bible. Just like the white man is in ruler ship today, and yes, white people are the superior race today as they have control of everything, well, that's what heaven is according to the bible. Thats the 4th heaven, ruler ship. Religion is all fairy tales, but the bible is a true book. We cannot bring God down from his throne and show him to you as observable proof, just like science can't take us back to the day of creation of all things. So in essence, you have to have faith in many things, especially things you cannot observe but have other proof for it's existence, if that makes any sense.

I don't know. Science is very confusing because there are many different view points regarding it's evidence and so on.

I see what you are saying, and I do agree that there is certain logic in the approach to theism you are exhibiting. However, let me try to make my point more clear by describing the scientific method on a simplified example.

---

Suppose you live in the medieval times. You were captured by pirates, but managed to free yourself and throw all the pirates into the sea. Now you are alone on the ship, but you do not know anything about sailing. You are absolutely ignorant as to how the ship moves. So you start experimenting around, to try to learn more about it.

You walk around, try pushing at different things, but nothing seems to do anything. Eventually you find the wheel. You turn it around, and - wow - you feel that something changed! You look down and see that your ship is turning around. Interesting! You turn it around again, and ship again moves. Maybe this is the control? So you form the hypothesis:
"The wheel turns the ship".
Now, the crucial element of the scientific method: you need to verify your hypothesis with the observable data. So you grab the wheel and turn it around. Ship turns. You wait for a long time without turning it around. Ship does not turn. You turn it around again, ship turns. You do it for a while and realize that your hypothesis is reasonable.
But this is still a very limited theory, it hardly allows you to sail anywhere. You ask the following question: "Okay, but how exactly does it turn it?" You turn the wheel around. You try many things: turning it clockwise and counter-clockwise, turning it slow and fast, turning it in jerky movements or one smooth movement. Eventually you come to a new hypothesis:
"The clockwise turn of the wheel turns the ship to the right, and the counterclockwise turn of the wheel turns the ship to the left. The stronger the wheel is turned overall, the stronger the ship moves."
You decide to take a step further and to quantify it, so you can know exactly how much you should turn the wheel to turn at a certain angle. You make an assumption:
"Total angle of the ship turn to the right = constant times total angle of the wheel turn clockwise".
You turn the wheel by 360 degrees and see that the ship turns by, say, 60 degrees. "Okay, the constant equals 1/6".
You repeat the experiment. You turn the wheel by 180 degrees, but now the ship turns by 35 degrees. "Hmm, the constant of 1/6 does not work. Maybe I made some mistake?" You turn the wheel again and again and obtain different constants every time.

You realize eventually: "This formula does not work. What other variables could I be missing?" You give up for today and go to sleep.

Next morning, a small storm is occurring. Nothing damaging, so you resume your experiments. Surprisingly, the wheel is noticeably harder to turn than yesterday, and the ship turns much less compared to the wheel turn, than today. "Aha, so maybe what my theory is missing is the weather! The more calm the weather is, the easier it is to turn the wheel? Let us try a new formula."

I will not continue this forever. Let us just say that after a very long experimentation in different weather conditions, in different waters, in different air and water temperatures and so on, you have missed a lot of factors. But as you gradually add them and develop a more and more complicated formula, you start understanding very well how the ship works. You understand how the water resistance slow its turning down. You understand how the winds can be used to speed the ship up. You become a seasoned sailor. Eventually you even learn to use stars and the Sun for directions, and one day you finally land in Europe and your travels are finished.

---

How did you figure out the ship controls? You kept trying different things, making hypotheses every time you were on to something and testing them. Making a wrong hypothesis meant that you could not use it for sailing and you would be back to square one if you tried, so you kept refining your hypotheses again and again, until you became a very knowledgeable sailor fully in control of your fate.

This is what science in essence is: you look at the data, you make a hypothesis, you test and refine it over and over, until it grows into a consistent, practically useful and stable theory. Then you can use that theory to develop new technology - and that is how we move forward as a species. That is how we have moved from living in caves on to living in skyscrapers. This evolution would not be possible if, instead of the experiment-theory-practice approach, we analyzed ancient scriptures in caves instead. We move forward by trying different things and learning something fundamental about the world, not by looking at old texts and trying to find some hidden meaning behind them.

I do not know the Bible very well, that is true. What I do know, however, is that prophecies have never created new technology, they have never helped anyone improve the world, and they have never led to a principally new knowledge. The fact that we are communicating right now, while sitting in our comfy chairs thousands miles away from each other - this is a product of science, not of theism. Not of the Bible or other scriptures, but of hard work of millions scientists and billions natural experimenters, who did not settle for hunting deer with obsidian axes and wanted something more.

Erfisflat · June 2018

MayCaesar said:

Royalty said:

MayCaesar said:

Royalty said:

MayCaesar said:

Modern science is not correct and has never been intended to be correct. The goal of science is to find a theoretical model matching the observable data as closely as possible, not to find some objective truth of the Universe. We cannot describe everything in the Universe with 100% precision (and likely we never will be able to), but we can find models giving very accurate predictions of experimental outcomes - and modern science has come pretty far in that accuracy. Calculating and cross-matching the gravitational constant down to 0.005% is pretty neat! The explanation of the observed effects is derived from these models and is a function of them. It is likely that there is more than one possible set of models giving accurate description of the observable data, leading to different visualizations and interpretations.

Theist models, however, are not included in the space of these sets. Theism does not follow a rigorous consistent method, it is more of a fantasy fiction, it gives almost zero useful testable predictions, and its wild stories have zero evidence behind them, aside from a few words in an ancient folklore book.

If you are looking for the singularly "correct" description of the world, then science will disappoint you. Science, however, will provide a tool set sufficient for any practical questions you may have. Theism does not provide either.

Past predictions in the Bible have already come and gone.

Why is the Bible "fantasy fiction" or what that is written in there makes it fantasy fiction?

Where did humans first come from and how was space, the planets and everything on them formed?

@whiteflame gave a very good response. Let me address a more general part of your questions.

First of all, the predictions in the Bible are extremely vague, and interpretation of almost any historical event can be stretched enough to fit one of the possible interpretations of the Bible verses. This is the "Nostradamus" effect, when predictions seem to be true if you want them to be true - but if you read them literally, you will see that they do not predict anything specific. This is what fiction does. Science is different, science gives exact predictions, down to measurable numerical quantities. You can prove a scientific prediction right or wrong. You cannot prove a theistic prediction right or wrong due to the nature of those predictions, hence those predictions have little practical relevance.

This is what, in general, differs science from theism. Theism involves confirmation bias as the core of its construction process: rather than trying to obtain a practically useful and experimentally hardened tool, it tries to obtain a model that matches the tales produced by a combination of folklore, fiction and traditions. In other words, the story theism tells is already predefined, regardless of any data, and theists need merely to tune the model in a way that matches that story best. This is crucial: it should match the story produced by human storytellers, not the observable data.

Science instead tries to describe the infinitely vast array of data we can observe and interact with. Our models can change, sometimes by 180 degrees, when our improving technological capabilities reveal something we have been missing before. However, every popular model science features is hard-tested for any possible errors. We perform the same type of experiments for decades to make sure we are not missing anything fundamental. When we say that a theory describes the data well as a result of thousands peer-reviewed research projects, this theory truly is resilient - and practically useful. All the fancy technology we have today: computers, cars, airplanes, smartphones, Internet, GPS, home electricity - all the result of scientific research.

What has theism produced instead? Do we have any technology that appeared as a result of following the Biblical prophecies? No, and for a good reason: those prophecies are not based on the observable data, hence they cannot contribute to using this data to better suit our needs.

---

Now, to your real question: how can we be sure that the theory of Evolution, that the Big Bang, that the whole history of the Universe and of the humanity that science predicts - is correct? Well, we can never be 100% sure that it is correct. Our data is always incomplete, our theories always have some flaws and gaps, and - let us be honest here - there are questions that science simply may not be able to answer by its very design. "Why did the Big Bang happen?" - this question may not be answerable, since the cause-effect connection is something we derived from the observable Universe, and it may not apply to the time "before" this Universe was born. Perhaps the only answer we can give is "It happened, and we can study its consequences - that is it".

However, what we do know led us to construct very solid models that withstood the test of time and countless observations. We have found thousands pieces of data derived from our assumption that the Big Bang occurred - hence it probably occurred. We have found remains of hundreds human species, sub-species and pre-species, and the structure of their remains matches very well what we expect from our evolutionary theories. At this point, for the interpretation of these theories to be "wrong", we must truly have been missing something obvious, or we are extremely unlucky and only have been finding the outliers, instead of the relevant data points. Not to say that it is impossible for us to be wrong, but it is extremely unlikely that we are wrong about something as fundamental as the idea of Evolution.

This is the advantage of the scientific viewpoint over the religious one: the consequences of applying scientific method honestly and rigorously are very solid and trustworthy theories, not unverifiable tales that are a product of human imagination. If we have no direct evidence of the existence of angels, then we will not assume that angels exist - regardless of what any book may say. We will instead try to understand where the stories of angels in those books came from, and we do understand it pretty well nowadays from studying folklore and literature of the same people who produced the Bible and seeing a lot of connections there. Ironically, science explains the Bible much better than theism does.

---

The final point I want to make is about theism as it is defined: belief in the creator. Does science reject the existence of the creator? Not necessarily. It is very much possible, for example, that we live in a Matrix created by higher beings in another dimension. Or maybe some extra-dimensional alien civilization created our Universe and left it alone. Finally, who knows, maybe the God really exists and direct this world. However, a) we do not have any evidence of any of this being true, and b) our current theories not involving any of this work pretty well for us, so there is a good chance that this Universe indeed appeared naturally and humanity indeed appeared on its own, rather than being artificially created by someone.

Granted, we do not understand very well how life emerges in the first place and what exactly defines the evolution path it is going to take. Is Silicon-based life possible? Maybe. How abundant is life in the Universe? We do not have even an approximate idea, with hypotheses ranging from "We are the only life in the Universe" to "Life is so abundant, it probably exists in some form on every tiny asteroid". Nor do we understand anything about what defines when and how a Universe appears - maybe it does not really appears at all, and exists only in my minds, that have their own rules of existence we cannot even imagine.

There is a lot of questions science is far from answering at this point. We are incredibly ignorant overall, and we probably do not know even 0.0001% of the most fundamental things there is to know. But science is pragmatic. Scientists have the strength and humility to admit when we do not know something: we are in the process of constant learning. And while theism and science are not mutually exclusive, theism in itself does not have this property of pragmatism, and for a theist to admit that "Maybe the god does not really exist" is virtually unheard of. We, scientists, will not in general deny the possibility of god's existence - however, we prefer not to speculate about something no data is available on and to assume that if we have not encountered it so far while by all accounts we should have, then it probably does not exist.

The bible was not written for the entire world. It was written to a nation of people, the Israelites, so-called blacks, Latinos/Hispanics, and Nat. Amer. Indians today. We are the only people that fit the prophecies. So the bible was written to, for and from the Israelites. The scrips are written in code and only the Israelites are given the understanding to put the pieces together. God is not dealing with the other nations. The bible is written precept upon precept, line upon line, here a little there a little, which you probably don't understand and religions sure as hell doesn't understand.

You've heard of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade right? Well, that was bible prophecy. Christopher Columbus coming to now called, America, killing the Nati. Amer. Indians, raping them, murdering them, taken all their wealth and land, then enslaving them, that was prophecy. Latinos/Hispanics today were originally black but because of interracial marriages, the look European, however it depends on the fathers bloodline as he is the one who we get most of our DNA from or in God's terms, he is the one who carries the seed.

But because of religion, I'm sure you probably did not know this type of stuff. I'm sure you heard that when we all die, we're going to be floating around in the sky, lol (that's what they were teaching me in the Christian church). That's religion, not the bible. Just like the white man is in ruler ship today, and yes, white people are the superior race today as they have control of everything, well, that's what heaven is according to the bible. Thats the 4th heaven, ruler ship. Religion is all fairy tales, but the bible is a true book. We cannot bring God down from his throne and show him to you as observable proof, just like science can't take us back to the day of creation of all things. So in essence, you have to have faith in many things, especially things you cannot observe but have other proof for it's existence, if that makes any sense.

I don't know. Science is very confusing because there are many different view points regarding it's evidence and so on.

I see what you are saying, and I do agree that there is certain logic in the approach to theism you are exhibiting. However, let me try to make my point more clear by describing the scientific method on a simplified example.

---

Suppose you live in the medieval times. You were captured by pirates, but managed to free yourself and throw all the pirates into the sea. Now you are alone on the ship, but you do not know anything about sailing. You are absolutely ignorant as to how the ship moves. So you start experimenting around, to try to learn more about it.

You walk around, try pushing at different things, but nothing seems to do anything. Eventually you find the wheel. You turn it around, and - wow - you feel that something changed! You look down and see that your ship is turning around. Interesting! You turn it around again, and ship again moves. Maybe this is the control? So you form the hypothesis:
"The wheel turns the ship".
Now, the crucial element of the scientific method: you need to verify your hypothesis with the observable data. So you grab the wheel and turn it around. Ship turns. You wait for a long time without turning it around. Ship does not turn. You turn it around again, ship turns. You do it for a while and realize that your hypothesis is reasonable.
But this is still a very limited theory, it hardly allows you to sail anywhere. You ask the following question: "Okay, but how exactly does it turn it?" You turn the wheel around. You try many things: turning it clockwise and counter-clockwise, turning it slow and fast, turning it in jerky movements or one smooth movement. Eventually you come to a new hypothesis:
"The clockwise turn of the wheel turns the ship to the right, and the counterclockwise turn of the wheel turns the ship to the left. The stronger the wheel is turned overall, the stronger the ship moves."
You decide to take a step further and to quantify it, so you can know exactly how much you should turn the wheel to turn at a certain angle. You make an assumption:
"Total angle of the ship turn to the right = constant times total angle of the wheel turn clockwise".
You turn the wheel by 360 degrees and see that the ship turns by, say, 60 degrees. "Okay, the constant equals 1/6".
You repeat the experiment. You turn the wheel by 180 degrees, but now the ship turns by 35 degrees. "Hmm, the constant of 1/6 does not work. Maybe I made some mistake?" You turn the wheel again and again and obtain different constants every time.

You realize eventually: "This formula does not work. What other variables could I be missing?" You give up for today and go to sleep.

Next morning, a small storm is occurring. Nothing damaging, so you resume your experiments. Surprisingly, the wheel is noticeably harder to turn than yesterday, and the ship turns much less compared to the wheel turn, than today. "Aha, so maybe what my theory is missing is the weather! The more calm the weather is, the easier it is to turn the wheel? Let us try a new formula."

I will not continue this forever. Let us just say that after a very long experimentation in different weather conditions, in different waters, in different air and water temperatures and so on, you have missed a lot of factors. But as you gradually add them and develop a more and more complicated formula, you start understanding very well how the ship works. You understand how the water resistance slow its turning down. You understand how the winds can be used to speed the ship up. You become a seasoned sailor. Eventually you even learn to use stars and the Sun for directions, and one day you finally land in Europe and your travels are finished.

---

How did you figure out the ship controls? You kept trying different things, making hypotheses every time you were on to something and testing them. Making a wrong hypothesis meant that you could not use it for sailing and you would be back to square one if you tried, so you kept refining your hypotheses again and again, until you became a very knowledgeable sailor fully in control of your fate.

This is what science in essence is: you look at the data, you make a hypothesis, you test and refine it over and over, until it grows into a consistent, practically useful and stable theory. Then you can use that theory to develop new technology - and that is how we move forward as a species. That is how we have moved from living in caves on to living in skyscrapers. This evolution would not be possible if, instead of the experiment-theory-practice approach, we analyzed ancient scriptures in caves instead. We move forward by trying different things and learning something fundamental about the world, not by looking at old texts and trying to find some hidden meaning behind them.

I do not know the Bible very well, that is true. What I do know, however, is that prophecies have never created new technology, they have never helped anyone improve the world, and they have never led to a principally new knowledge. The fact that we are communicating right now, while sitting in our comfy chairs thousands miles away from each other - this is a product of science, not of theism. Not of the Bible or other scriptures, but of hard work of millions scientists and billions natural experimenters, who did not settle for hunting deer with obsidian axes and wanted something more.

Well said, but how can we translate this from building computers and sailing ships to "how man has come about" which is the conclusion here? The scientific method is great, as long as it is the actual scientific method. Making observations, measurements, scalable experiments etc. is the foundation of science as it is expected to be today. But what observations, measurements, and or scalable experiments have you or anyone used to decide without a doubt that the ancient texts are false and the big bang and evolution is true? Are you making not one but several assumptions? At some point in your journey to explain where life inevitably came from, you've had to make some assumptions, and or believed the words of man. This is no different than someone basing their beliefs on ancient texts.

whiteflame · June 2018

Royalty said:
I'm trying to understand the whole point of science. Because there are people that say that science has the answers and it's evidence is based on observable evidence, and there are people, like yourself, that say that science doesn't have all the answers and it is based on well-substantiated explanations.

Another thing, science and religion cannot go hand in hand because there will be confusion. If someone that says they believe in God the bible and all the teachings in the bible, believes that science explains this and that, so on and so forth, they have no faith that God exists. The bible actually tells us to stay away from science (1 Tim 6:20). Science will always be at conflict with the bible.

But here's what I'm trying to get across to atheists who believe in full on science. Just like science can't explain and show proof of everything, the bible cannot show proof of everything. A lot of things that you hear about the bible, are false because those statements come from Christianity. I can't show you that God exists, but because of the prophecies in the bible and with what is going on today and it being in the bible (I'm talking about huge events that impact the world and people around us), I have faith that God does exist. Just like science cant give us proof that the universe, everything in it, humankind, etc. came from something else other than man, but scientists have faith that this stuff happened. They don't have a lot of observable evidence for the data they collect when it comes to creation. Therefore they have faith in what they put together, if that makes sense.

The point of science is to provide a factual basis for conclusions regarding how things work in the observable world. It does provide answers, but the answers it provides come in the form of data, and conclusions based on that data use those answers as a means to explain some of the mysteries of the universe. Those conclusions are answers to the question "what does this information tell us and what can you extrapolate from it?" The problem is when people treat those conclusions, i.e. the extrapolations, as gospel. They are rational conclusions based on a set of data, but they are not "correct" in the sense that they have not (may never be) fully verifiable. Suppose we're looking at gravity. On this planet, gravity has been shown to exert the same force, regardless of where you are. The extrapolation from that is that the same force of gravity is applied to everything on the planet. We assume that is correct because it has not been disproven, but it's entirely possible that there is some part of the world that does not have the same gravity as the rest, which would require scientists to take that into account when accounting for the force of gravity on objects within that space. So, it is correct to say that gravity exerts a force, and that that force is consistent in all known situations across the surface of the planet Earth. It is incorrect to say that science has proven that gravity is absolutely the same across every square inch of the planet, but we can assume that that's the case based on the given data.

I agree that science and religion butt heads in some important ways, but I think that mainly has to do with the details of stories believed by certain religions rather than the core beliefs of those religions. I don't think there's anything preventing an individual from believing both that evolution is a natural process that has been corroborated by science over the years and that that natural process is designed by an all-knowing deity who wanted to see creatures change over the course of the existence of life. I recognize that evolution flies in the face of the Garden of Eden story, but honestly, I don't see that story (or any of the others that raise some concerning questions) does any harm to the core theologies of Christianity or Judaism. Beyond that, since the vast majority of what can be considered modern science did not exist at the time when most of these religions were founded, it seems absolutely fine to me to allow for misunderstandings of the time in the writing of religious texts. Stating that religious explanations are lacking in the details, particularly with regards to evidence, doesn't invalidate them entirely.

I think I better understand your overall point you are conveying to atheists, but I find it difficult to appreciate. You're treating belief in science as functionally equivalent to belief in Christianity or any other religion. There is some belief inherent to any subject, including science. However, the fact that science cannot give us fully correct answers based on observable evidence does not mean that conclusions like evolutionary theory are purely faith-based. There is actual evidence behind that theory, and though there are points of uncertainty and may be other explanations for the observable data, evolutionary theory best fits what scientists have seen. Is there some belief required to take that data and develop a theory? I suppose so. It requires putting together the pieces of the puzzle and imagining how the puzzle will look if all of the other pieces were found, so there's some belief involved. It's entirely possible that the final picture won't match expectations. You might believe you're doing the same with regards to prophecies, but matching events mentioned in a text to things that happened in the real world will always require some interpretation. That evidence itself is contested, and even if we accept that things played out precisely how the Bible predicted they would, there is always the specter of how that proves the existence of God (i.e. the ability of past people to predict what would happen later doesn't correlate to the existence of a deity). I'm not saying you're wrong to believe how you do, but the basis for your belief is largely interpretation based on perceived correlation between events in written text and events that happened after the text was written.

Royalty · June 2018

whiteflame said:

Royalty said:
I'm trying to understand the whole point of science. Because there are people that say that science has the answers and it's evidence is based on observable evidence, and there are people, like yourself, that say that science doesn't have all the answers and it is based on well-substantiated explanations.

Another thing, science and religion cannot go hand in hand because there will be confusion. If someone that says they believe in God the bible and all the teachings in the bible, believes that science explains this and that, so on and so forth, they have no faith that God exists. The bible actually tells us to stay away from science (1 Tim 6:20). Science will always be at conflict with the bible.

But here's what I'm trying to get across to atheists who believe in full on science. Just like science can't explain and show proof of everything, the bible cannot show proof of everything. A lot of things that you hear about the bible, are false because those statements come from Christianity. I can't show you that God exists, but because of the prophecies in the bible and with what is going on today and it being in the bible (I'm talking about huge events that impact the world and people around us), I have faith that God does exist. Just like science cant give us proof that the universe, everything in it, humankind, etc. came from something else other than man, but scientists have faith that this stuff happened. They don't have a lot of observable evidence for the data they collect when it comes to creation. Therefore they have faith in what they put together, if that makes sense.

The point of science is to provide a factual basis for conclusions regarding how things work in the observable world. It does provide answers, but the answers it provides come in the form of data, and conclusions based on that data use those answers as a means to explain some of the mysteries of the universe. Those conclusions are answers to the question "what does this information tell us and what can you extrapolate from it?" The problem is when people treat those conclusions, i.e. the extrapolations, as gospel. They are rational conclusions based on a set of data, but they are not "correct" in the sense that they have not (may never be) fully verifiable. Suppose we're looking at gravity. On this planet, gravity has been shown to exert the same force, regardless of where you are. The extrapolation from that is that the same force of gravity is applied to everything on the planet. We assume that is correct because it has not been disproven, but it's entirely possible that there is some part of the world that does not have the same gravity as the rest, which would require scientists to take that into account when accounting for the force of gravity on objects within that space. So, it is correct to say that gravity exerts a force, and that that force is consistent in all known situations across the surface of the planet Earth. It is incorrect to say that science has proven that gravity is absolutely the same across every square inch of the planet, but we can assume that that's the case based on the given data.

I agree that science and religion butt heads in some important ways, but I think that mainly has to do with the details of stories believed by certain religions rather than the core beliefs of those religions. I don't think there's anything preventing an individual from believing both that evolution is a natural process that has been corroborated by science over the years and that that natural process is designed by an all-knowing deity who wanted to see creatures change over the course of the existence of life. I recognize that evolution flies in the face of the Garden of Eden story, but honestly, I don't see that story (or any of the others that raise some concerning questions) does any harm to the core theologies of Christianity or Judaism. Beyond that, since the vast majority of what can be considered modern science did not exist at the time when most of these religions were founded, it seems absolutely fine to me to allow for misunderstandings of the time in the writing of religious texts. Stating that religious explanations are lacking in the details, particularly with regards to evidence, doesn't invalidate them entirely.

I think I better understand your overall point you are conveying to atheists, but I find it difficult to appreciate. You're treating belief in science as functionally equivalent to belief in Christianity or any other religion. There is some belief inherent to any subject, including science. However, the fact that science cannot give us fully correct answers based on observable evidence does not mean that conclusions like evolutionary theory are purely faith-based. There is actual evidence behind that theory, and though there are points of uncertainty and may be other explanations for the observable data, evolutionary theory best fits what scientists have seen. Is there some belief required to take that data and develop a theory? I suppose so. It requires putting together the pieces of the puzzle and imagining how the puzzle will look if all of the other pieces were found, so there's some belief involved. It's entirely possible that the final picture won't match expectations. You might believe you're doing the same with regards to prophecies, but matching events mentioned in a text to things that happened in the real world will always require some interpretation. That evidence itself is contested, and even if we accept that things played out precisely how the Bible predicted they would, there is always the specter of how that proves the existence of God (i.e. the ability of past people to predict what would happen later doesn't correlate to the existence of a deity). I'm not saying you're wrong to believe how you do, but the basis for your belief is largely interpretation based on perceived correlation between events in written text and events that happened after the text was written.

I understand what you're saying about the scientific method. I learned that in school. But that still doesn't explain how everything was formed. I want to know what science says and/or shows about the creation of all things.

As far as written text goes, its not my interpretation. It's what the bible says.

Deuteronomy 28:68 And the Lord shall bring thee into Egypt again with ships, by the way whereof I spake unto thee, Thou shalt see it no more again: and there ye shall be sold unto your enemies for bondmen and bondwomen, and no man shall buy you.

During slavery we were sold as slave men & slave women.

Egypt is symbolic for slavery or bondage.

Exodus 20:2 I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

Yes, everyone at one point in time was in slavery, but the slavery of the so called blacks, Latinos/Hispanics & Nat. Amer. Indians was the worst ever recorded in history. No other nation was ever treated the way we were during slavery. No other nation ever had their babies stripped from them and their babies bashed against rocks. No other nation every had to endure the evils that we did.

Daniel 9:12 And he hath confirmed his words, which he spake against us, and against our judges that judged us, by bringing upon us a great evil: for under the whole heaven hath not been done as hath been done upon Jerusalem.

So its not my interpretation. Its bible prophecy.

All books were written by man. So what makes your book(s) anymore credible than my book if all books were written by man?

Erfisflat · June 2018

In reality, there is no tangible evidence against creationism, or flat earth, geocentric cosmology.

whiteflame · June 2018

Royalty said:
I understand what you're saying about the scientific method. I learned that in school. But that still doesn't explain how everything was formed. I want to know what science says and/or shows about the creation of all things.

As far as written text goes, its not my interpretation. It's what the bible says.

Deuteronomy 28:68 And the Lord shall bring thee into Egypt again with ships, by the way whereof I spake unto thee, Thou shalt see it no more again: and there ye shall be sold unto your enemies for bondmen and bondwomen, and no man shall buy you.

During slavery we were sold as slave men & slave women.

Egypt is symbolic for slavery or bondage.

Exodus 20:2 I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

Yes, everyone at one point in time was in slavery, but the slavery of the so called blacks, Latinos/Hispanics & Nat. Amer. Indians was the worst ever recorded in history. No other nation was ever treated the way we were during slavery. No other nation ever had their babies stripped from them and their babies bashed against rocks. No other nation every had to endure the evils that we did.

Daniel 9:12 And he hath confirmed his words, which he spake against us, and against our judges that judged us, by bringing upon us a great evil: for under the whole heaven hath not been done as hath been done upon Jerusalem.

So its not my interpretation. Its bible prophecy.

All books were written by man. So what makes your book(s) anymore credible than my book if all books were written by man?

I don't pretend to understand enough of the astrophysics to actually be able to explain in any detail how scientific theories regarding the origins of the universe were derived. I know that data exists, and I can cite a bunch of articles that explain it from a higher level (and a few that go into detail, but that go over my head), but I'm not going to attempt to summarize how they got their data or why it's important in informing the Big Bang Theory and other associated theories. I'm sure there are others with some knowledge of that field who could do it justice far better than I could. As for the data regarding abiogenesis and the evolution of life, I could go through that in some detail. The reason I'm not doing so right now is because I'm not sure that that's what you want. I'm sure you've at least taken the time to scope out some of the scientific theories and get a feeling for how they work, and you probably know that they have research to back them up, at least to some degree. Scientists may hypothesize about how the word behaves without much in the way of data, but they theorize based on actual data. So, if you want me to go through abiogenesis theory and provide the evidence that exists to support it, I'd be willing to do that, but it sounds like you have a problem with the basic conception of theorizing about how it all began. So, I would like to be clear on where your perception is, and what in particular you are looking for, before we proceed.

Regarding the rest of your post, I'm having some difficulty seeing your point. First off, I don't really see how this is proof of the existence of God. The capacity to predict the future seems to have, at best, a tenuous link to proving the existence of a deity of any sort. And, if that's the case, then any religious text that includes a predictive element that came true would also be proof of the existence of their deity. Second, I'm not sure how this is predictive. Slavery in Ancient Egypt predates the Bible, and while the story sounds pretty good (I'm Jewish and it's kind of essential to one of our most important holidays: Passover), there appears to be little historical evidence that that period of enslavement occurred. Maybe it did, but it's not corroborated by much in the way of other texts.[http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2013/01/3-things-i-would-like-to-see-evangelical-leaders-stop-saying-about-biblical-scholarship/] That stands for the ways we were treated in slavery as well. If this is the kind of biblical prophecy you're talking about, it isn't clearly supporting your argument.

However, it's not my goal to disprove aspects of the Bible in this discussion. My only goal here is to show that science provides clear and verifiable evidence to support its theories, whereas belief in biblical conclusions requires faith that those who wrote it were correct. I'm not quite sure what "book(s)" you're talking about, mainly because there is a litany of scientific literature available and many of them are publications of scientific work that could not be called a book, but what makes these pieces of literature credible is that, given the tools and the time, I could repeat these experiments and see the same results. I could find the same data that they did. I don't know if that makes them more credible than the Bible (that depends on your perspective), but it makes the accounts in them more verifiable, and I personally find that to be more credible.

MayCaesar · June 2018

Erfisflat said:

MayCaesar said:

Royalty said:

MayCaesar said:

Royalty said:

MayCaesar said:

Modern science is not correct and has never been intended to be correct. The goal of science is to find a theoretical model matching the observable data as closely as possible, not to find some objective truth of the Universe. We cannot describe everything in the Universe with 100% precision (and likely we never will be able to), but we can find models giving very accurate predictions of experimental outcomes - and modern science has come pretty far in that accuracy. Calculating and cross-matching the gravitational constant down to 0.005% is pretty neat! The explanation of the observed effects is derived from these models and is a function of them. It is likely that there is more than one possible set of models giving accurate description of the observable data, leading to different visualizations and interpretations.

Theist models, however, are not included in the space of these sets. Theism does not follow a rigorous consistent method, it is more of a fantasy fiction, it gives almost zero useful testable predictions, and its wild stories have zero evidence behind them, aside from a few words in an ancient folklore book.

If you are looking for the singularly "correct" description of the world, then science will disappoint you. Science, however, will provide a tool set sufficient for any practical questions you may have. Theism does not provide either.

Past predictions in the Bible have already come and gone.

Why is the Bible "fantasy fiction" or what that is written in there makes it fantasy fiction?

Where did humans first come from and how was space, the planets and everything on them formed?

@whiteflame gave a very good response. Let me address a more general part of your questions.

First of all, the predictions in the Bible are extremely vague, and interpretation of almost any historical event can be stretched enough to fit one of the possible interpretations of the Bible verses. This is the "Nostradamus" effect, when predictions seem to be true if you want them to be true - but if you read them literally, you will see that they do not predict anything specific. This is what fiction does. Science is different, science gives exact predictions, down to measurable numerical quantities. You can prove a scientific prediction right or wrong. You cannot prove a theistic prediction right or wrong due to the nature of those predictions, hence those predictions have little practical relevance.

This is what, in general, differs science from theism. Theism involves confirmation bias as the core of its construction process: rather than trying to obtain a practically useful and experimentally hardened tool, it tries to obtain a model that matches the tales produced by a combination of folklore, fiction and traditions. In other words, the story theism tells is already predefined, regardless of any data, and theists need merely to tune the model in a way that matches that story best. This is crucial: it should match the story produced by human storytellers, not the observable data.

Science instead tries to describe the infinitely vast array of data we can observe and interact with. Our models can change, sometimes by 180 degrees, when our improving technological capabilities reveal something we have been missing before. However, every popular model science features is hard-tested for any possible errors. We perform the same type of experiments for decades to make sure we are not missing anything fundamental. When we say that a theory describes the data well as a result of thousands peer-reviewed research projects, this theory truly is resilient - and practically useful. All the fancy technology we have today: computers, cars, airplanes, smartphones, Internet, GPS, home electricity - all the result of scientific research.

What has theism produced instead? Do we have any technology that appeared as a result of following the Biblical prophecies? No, and for a good reason: those prophecies are not based on the observable data, hence they cannot contribute to using this data to better suit our needs.

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Now, to your real question: how can we be sure that the theory of Evolution, that the Big Bang, that the whole history of the Universe and of the humanity that science predicts - is correct? Well, we can never be 100% sure that it is correct. Our data is always incomplete, our theories always have some flaws and gaps, and - let us be honest here - there are questions that science simply may not be able to answer by its very design. "Why did the Big Bang happen?" - this question may not be answerable, since the cause-effect connection is something we derived from the observable Universe, and it may not apply to the time "before" this Universe was born. Perhaps the only answer we can give is "It happened, and we can study its consequences - that is it".

However, what we do know led us to construct very solid models that withstood the test of time and countless observations. We have found thousands pieces of data derived from our assumption that the Big Bang occurred - hence it probably occurred. We have found remains of hundreds human species, sub-species and pre-species, and the structure of their remains matches very well what we expect from our evolutionary theories. At this point, for the interpretation of these theories to be "wrong", we must truly have been missing something obvious, or we are extremely unlucky and only have been finding the outliers, instead of the relevant data points. Not to say that it is impossible for us to be wrong, but it is extremely unlikely that we are wrong about something as fundamental as the idea of Evolution.

This is the advantage of the scientific viewpoint over the religious one: the consequences of applying scientific method honestly and rigorously are very solid and trustworthy theories, not unverifiable tales that are a product of human imagination. If we have no direct evidence of the existence of angels, then we will not assume that angels exist - regardless of what any book may say. We will instead try to understand where the stories of angels in those books came from, and we do understand it pretty well nowadays from studying folklore and literature of the same people who produced the Bible and seeing a lot of connections there. Ironically, science explains the Bible much better than theism does.

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The final point I want to make is about theism as it is defined: belief in the creator. Does science reject the existence of the creator? Not necessarily. It is very much possible, for example, that we live in a Matrix created by higher beings in another dimension. Or maybe some extra-dimensional alien civilization created our Universe and left it alone. Finally, who knows, maybe the God really exists and direct this world. However, a) we do not have any evidence of any of this being true, and b) our current theories not involving any of this work pretty well for us, so there is a good chance that this Universe indeed appeared naturally and humanity indeed appeared on its own, rather than being artificially created by someone.

Granted, we do not understand very well how life emerges in the first place and what exactly defines the evolution path it is going to take. Is Silicon-based life possible? Maybe. How abundant is life in the Universe? We do not have even an approximate idea, with hypotheses ranging from "We are the only life in the Universe" to "Life is so abundant, it probably exists in some form on every tiny asteroid". Nor do we understand anything about what defines when and how a Universe appears - maybe it does not really appears at all, and exists only in my minds, that have their own rules of existence we cannot even imagine.

There is a lot of questions science is far from answering at this point. We are incredibly ignorant overall, and we probably do not know even 0.0001% of the most fundamental things there is to know. But science is pragmatic. Scientists have the strength and humility to admit when we do not know something: we are in the process of constant learning. And while theism and science are not mutually exclusive, theism in itself does not have this property of pragmatism, and for a theist to admit that "Maybe the god does not really exist" is virtually unheard of. We, scientists, will not in general deny the possibility of god's existence - however, we prefer not to speculate about something no data is available on and to assume that if we have not encountered it so far while by all accounts we should have, then it probably does not exist.

The bible was not written for the entire world. It was written to a nation of people, the Israelites, so-called blacks, Latinos/Hispanics, and Nat. Amer. Indians today. We are the only people that fit the prophecies. So the bible was written to, for and from the Israelites. The scrips are written in code and only the Israelites are given the understanding to put the pieces together. God is not dealing with the other nations. The bible is written precept upon precept, line upon line, here a little there a little, which you probably don't understand and religions sure as hell doesn't understand.

You've heard of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade right? Well, that was bible prophecy. Christopher Columbus coming to now called, America, killing the Nati. Amer. Indians, raping them, murdering them, taken all their wealth and land, then enslaving them, that was prophecy. Latinos/Hispanics today were originally black but because of interracial marriages, the look European, however it depends on the fathers bloodline as he is the one who we get most of our DNA from or in God's terms, he is the one who carries the seed.

But because of religion, I'm sure you probably did not know this type of stuff. I'm sure you heard that when we all die, we're going to be floating around in the sky, lol (that's what they were teaching me in the Christian church). That's religion, not the bible. Just like the white man is in ruler ship today, and yes, white people are the superior race today as they have control of everything, well, that's what heaven is according to the bible. Thats the 4th heaven, ruler ship. Religion is all fairy tales, but the bible is a true book. We cannot bring God down from his throne and show him to you as observable proof, just like science can't take us back to the day of creation of all things. So in essence, you have to have faith in many things, especially things you cannot observe but have other proof for it's existence, if that makes any sense.

I don't know. Science is very confusing because there are many different view points regarding it's evidence and so on.

I see what you are saying, and I do agree that there is certain logic in the approach to theism you are exhibiting. However, let me try to make my point more clear by describing the scientific method on a simplified example.

---

Suppose you live in the medieval times. You were captured by pirates, but managed to free yourself and throw all the pirates into the sea. Now you are alone on the ship, but you do not know anything about sailing. You are absolutely ignorant as to how the ship moves. So you start experimenting around, to try to learn more about it.

You walk around, try pushing at different things, but nothing seems to do anything. Eventually you find the wheel. You turn it around, and - wow - you feel that something changed! You look down and see that your ship is turning around. Interesting! You turn it around again, and ship again moves. Maybe this is the control? So you form the hypothesis:
"The wheel turns the ship".
Now, the crucial element of the scientific method: you need to verify your hypothesis with the observable data. So you grab the wheel and turn it around. Ship turns. You wait for a long time without turning it around. Ship does not turn. You turn it around again, ship turns. You do it for a while and realize that your hypothesis is reasonable.
But this is still a very limited theory, it hardly allows you to sail anywhere. You ask the following question: "Okay, but how exactly does it turn it?" You turn the wheel around. You try many things: turning it clockwise and counter-clockwise, turning it slow and fast, turning it in jerky movements or one smooth movement. Eventually you come to a new hypothesis:
"The clockwise turn of the wheel turns the ship to the right, and the counterclockwise turn of the wheel turns the ship to the left. The stronger the wheel is turned overall, the stronger the ship moves."
You decide to take a step further and to quantify it, so you can know exactly how much you should turn the wheel to turn at a certain angle. You make an assumption:
"Total angle of the ship turn to the right = constant times total angle of the wheel turn clockwise".
You turn the wheel by 360 degrees and see that the ship turns by, say, 60 degrees. "Okay, the constant equals 1/6".
You repeat the experiment. You turn the wheel by 180 degrees, but now the ship turns by 35 degrees. "Hmm, the constant of 1/6 does not work. Maybe I made some mistake?" You turn the wheel again and again and obtain different constants every time.

You realize eventually: "This formula does not work. What other variables could I be missing?" You give up for today and go to sleep.

Next morning, a small storm is occurring. Nothing damaging, so you resume your experiments. Surprisingly, the wheel is noticeably harder to turn than yesterday, and the ship turns much less compared to the wheel turn, than today. "Aha, so maybe what my theory is missing is the weather! The more calm the weather is, the easier it is to turn the wheel? Let us try a new formula."

I will not continue this forever. Let us just say that after a very long experimentation in different weather conditions, in different waters, in different air and water temperatures and so on, you have missed a lot of factors. But as you gradually add them and develop a more and more complicated formula, you start understanding very well how the ship works. You understand how the water resistance slow its turning down. You understand how the winds can be used to speed the ship up. You become a seasoned sailor. Eventually you even learn to use stars and the Sun for directions, and one day you finally land in Europe and your travels are finished.

---

How did you figure out the ship controls? You kept trying different things, making hypotheses every time you were on to something and testing them. Making a wrong hypothesis meant that you could not use it for sailing and you would be back to square one if you tried, so you kept refining your hypotheses again and again, until you became a very knowledgeable sailor fully in control of your fate.

This is what science in essence is: you look at the data, you make a hypothesis, you test and refine it over and over, until it grows into a consistent, practically useful and stable theory. Then you can use that theory to develop new technology - and that is how we move forward as a species. That is how we have moved from living in caves on to living in skyscrapers. This evolution would not be possible if, instead of the experiment-theory-practice approach, we analyzed ancient scriptures in caves instead. We move forward by trying different things and learning something fundamental about the world, not by looking at old texts and trying to find some hidden meaning behind them.

I do not know the Bible very well, that is true. What I do know, however, is that prophecies have never created new technology, they have never helped anyone improve the world, and they have never led to a principally new knowledge. The fact that we are communicating right now, while sitting in our comfy chairs thousands miles away from each other - this is a product of science, not of theism. Not of the Bible or other scriptures, but of hard work of millions scientists and billions natural experimenters, who did not settle for hunting deer with obsidian axes and wanted something more.

Well said, but how can we translate this from building computers and sailing ships to "how man has come about" which is the conclusion here? The scientific method is great, as long as it is the actual scientific method. Making observations, measurements, scalable experiments etc. is the foundation of science as it is expected to be today. But what observations, measurements, and or scalable experiments have you or anyone used to decide without a doubt that the ancient texts are false and the big bang and evolution is true? Are you making not one but several assumptions? At some point in your journey to explain where life inevitably came from, you've had to make some assumptions, and or believed the words of man. This is no different than someone basing their beliefs on ancient texts.

No additional assumptions are needed. Like I said, we look at the data and find the model that describes it best. It does not matter how weird that model looks and how weird the consequences of that model are: if it describes the observable data with high accuracy, then it is a valid theory.

First, we make a hypothesis. Then we cross-reference it with a vast array of observable data we have. If it matches the data, then we take the next step and predict various consequences our model would have if it was correct. We look for those consequences and test them extensively. When a model predicts an array of new effects we did not know before and those effects are measured, then there are two possibilities: either we were EXTREMELY lucky and our model's predictions magically coincided with all the observable data which actually is not related to the theory - or our model has credibility. The only real assumption science makes is that it is the latter than the former: when the odds of our model being reasonable are 100,000,000 to 1, then we do not gamble with the 1 and go with the 100,000,000 instead.

Once we have a functional model that has been tested to be bulletproof against all kinds of observations, then we can use that model to also explore the directly immeasurable. Yes, we cannot go back in time and look at the Big Bang occurring. But we can ask ourselves, "If the Big Bang had happened, what would be the consequences? What data would those consequences produce?" Then we find this data, cross-match it with the theoretical predictions, see a nearly perfect match - and then again we apply the 100,000,000-to-1 principle.

Strictly speaking, science may be wrong about everything. But the probability of it is so low, you are better off burning all your savings in cash in a fire and hoping that they will burn perfectly to form a very expensive diamond you can sell for a fortune. For it to be wrong, all those trillions pieces of evidence must have matched our theories by pure chance - not something a reasonable individual is going to go with.

---

You keep making the same mistakes: "I cannot prove that whales exist, and I cannot prove that unicorns exist. Hence both are equally likely to exist". No, they are not, and you know it - you are simply afraid to extrapolate this logic to your beliefs about science, because they threaten your core assumptions about our world. And this is another difference between theism and science: in science, we are not afraid to be wrong - we love to be wrong. Being wrong about something means we can learn something new and improve our models. We constantly perform old experiments again and again, hoping to be wrong and discover something new.

A theist will almost never admit that they are wrong. Science is about studying the observable data; theism is about convincing oneself that the observable data is what they want it to be.

Erfisflat · June 2018

"I could repeat these experiments and see the same results."

One example, please. This is what the OP is asking for, proving any of these theories correct, more or less.

Royalty · June 2018

whiteflame said:

Royalty said:
I understand what you're saying about the scientific method. I learned that in school. But that still doesn't explain how everything was formed. I want to know what science says and/or shows about the creation of all things.

As far as written text goes, its not my interpretation. It's what the bible says.

Deuteronomy 28:68 And the Lord shall bring thee into Egypt again with ships, by the way whereof I spake unto thee, Thou shalt see it no more again: and there ye shall be sold unto your enemies for bondmen and bondwomen, and no man shall buy you.

During slavery we were sold as slave men & slave women.

Egypt is symbolic for slavery or bondage.

Exodus 20:2 I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

Yes, everyone at one point in time was in slavery, but the slavery of the so called blacks, Latinos/Hispanics & Nat. Amer. Indians was the worst ever recorded in history. No other nation was ever treated the way we were during slavery. No other nation ever had their babies stripped from them and their babies bashed against rocks. No other nation every had to endure the evils that we did.

Daniel 9:12 And he hath confirmed his words, which he spake against us, and against our judges that judged us, by bringing upon us a great evil: for under the whole heaven hath not been done as hath been done upon Jerusalem.

So its not my interpretation. Its bible prophecy.

All books were written by man. So what makes your book(s) anymore credible than my book if all books were written by man?

I don't pretend to understand enough of the astrophysics to actually be able to explain in any detail how scientific theories regarding the origins of the universe were derived. I know that data exists, and I can cite a bunch of articles that explain it from a higher level (and a few that go into detail, but that go over my head), but I'm not going to attempt to summarize how they got their data or why it's important in informing the Big Bang Theory and other associated theories. I'm sure there are others with some knowledge of that field who could do it justice far better than I could. As for the data regarding abiogenesis and the evolution of life, I could go through that in some detail. The reason I'm not doing so right now is because I'm not sure that that's what you want. I'm sure you've at least taken the time to scope out some of the scientific theories and get a feeling for how they work, and you probably know that they have research to back them up, at least to some degree. Scientists may hypothesize about how the word behaves without much in the way of data, but they theorize based on actual data. So, if you want me to go through abiogenesis theory and provide the evidence that exists to support it, I'd be willing to do that, but it sounds like you have a problem with the basic conception of theorizing about how it all began. So, I would like to be clear on where your perception is, and what in particular you are looking for, before we proceed.

Regarding the rest of your post, I'm having some difficulty seeing your point. First off, I don't really see how this is proof of the existence of God. The capacity to predict the future seems to have, at best, a tenuous link to proving the existence of a deity of any sort. And, if that's the case, then any religious text that includes a predictive element that came true would also be proof of the existence of their deity. Second, I'm not sure how this is predictive. Slavery in Ancient Egypt predates the Bible, and while the story sounds pretty good (I'm Jewish and it's kind of essential to one of our most important holidays: Passover), there appears to be little historical evidence that that period of enslavement occurred. Maybe it did, but it's not corroborated by much in the way of other texts.[http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2013/01/3-things-i-would-like-to-see-evangelical-leaders-stop-saying-about-biblical-scholarship/] That stands for the ways we were treated in slavery as well. If this is the kind of biblical prophecy you're talking about, it isn't clearly supporting your argument.

However, it's not my goal to disprove aspects of the Bible in this discussion. My only goal here is to show that science provides clear and verifiable evidence to support its theories, whereas belief in biblical conclusions requires faith that those who wrote it were correct. I'm not quite sure what "book(s)" you're talking about, mainly because there is a litany of scientific literature available and many of them are publications of scientific work that could not be called a book, but what makes these pieces of literature credible is that, given the tools and the time, I could repeat these experiments and see the same results. I could find the same data that they did. I don't know if that makes them more credible than the Bible (that depends on your perspective), but it makes the accounts in them more verifiable, and I personally find that to be more credible.

Well I'm not going to get into why your history isnt in the bible because that is just a lot to go through.

Any type of publications were written by man. They couldnt have just written themselves.

I have another question. I cant quiet remember what you said earlier and I don't have much time to go back and read through everything. But I remember you mentioning something about Evolution. Do you believe in Evolution?

whiteflame · June 2018

Erfisflat said:

"I could repeat these experiments and see the same results."

One example, please. This is what the OP is asking for, proving any of these theories correct, more or less.

I'm not sure what you're looking for in terms of examples. I'm talking about the fact that publications include the materials and methods - they each contain the means by which any other researcher could actually repeat those experiments and, presumably, obtain the same results the original research group managed to get. I'm a PhD candidate in microbiology, and the vast majority of the methods I use are taken from the pages of publications that showed that they worked. If what you want is examples of the research done by astrophysicists that support the theories regarding the Big Bang Theory and the like, I could probably find some example papers that include the materials and methods, or at least find links to those publications (I may not have access to the meat of those articles).

Royalty said:
Well I'm not going to get into why your history isnt in the bible because that is just a lot to go through.

Any type of publications were written by man. They couldnt have just written themselves.

I have another question. I cant quiet remember what you said earlier and I don't have much time to go back and read through everything. But I remember you mentioning something about Evolution. Do you believe in Evolution?

Alright.

Yes, publications are written by human beings. I'm not sure why that's a point you're making. If your argument is that, in being written by a human being, they are inherently flawed, then we disagree on that. There are certainly flaws in scientific literature, and some of the writing could definitely be improved, but the fact that they are designed and written by human beings does not make scientific publications inherently flawed.

I would say that I don't believe in evolution. I find the prospect of belief in a theory to be a strange one because I'm not basing my views on evolution on faith. I've read a great deal of the literature regarding the support for evolution, I've analyzed the basis for the theory, and I find the theory has a great deal of support. As a result, I find that the theory of evolution best fits the available evidence. Note the difference: it's not a belief in the theory itself, but a correlation between the available evidence and a given conclusion.

Royalty · June 2018

whiteflame said:

Erfisflat said:

"I could repeat these experiments and see the same results."

One example, please. This is what the OP is asking for, proving any of these theories correct, more or less.

I'm not sure what you're looking for in terms of examples. I'm talking about the fact that publications include the materials and methods - they each contain the means by which any other researcher could actually repeat those experiments and, presumably, obtain the same results the original research group managed to get. I'm a PhD candidate in microbiology, and the vast majority of the methods I use are taken from the pages of publications that showed that they worked. If what you want is examples of the research done by astrophysicists that support the theories regarding the Big Bang Theory and the like, I could probably find some example papers that include the materials and methods, or at least find links to those publications (I may not have access to the meat of those articles).

Royalty said:
Well I'm not going to get into why your history isnt in the bible because that is just a lot to go through.

Any type of publications were written by man. They couldnt have just written themselves.

I have another question. I cant quiet remember what you said earlier and I don't have much time to go back and read through everything. But I remember you mentioning something about Evolution. Do you believe in Evolution?

Alright.

Yes, publications are written by human beings. I'm not sure why that's a point you're making. If your argument is that, in being written by a human being, they are inherently flawed, then we disagree on that. There are certainly flaws in scientific literature, and some of the writing could definitely be improved, but the fact that they are designed and written by human beings does not make scientific publications inherently flawed.

I would say that I don't believe in evolution. I find the prospect of belief in a theory to be a strange one because I'm not basing my views on evolution on faith. I've read a great deal of the literature regarding the support for evolution, I've analyzed the basis for the theory, and I find the theory has a great deal of support. As a result, I find that the theory of evolution best fits the available evidence. Note the difference: it's not a belief in the theory itself, but a correlation between the available evidence and a given conclusion.

So I just want to make sure that I'm understanding completely what you're saying. Basically, you believe in Evolution, correct?

whiteflame · June 2018

Royalty said:
So I just want to make sure that I'm understanding completely what you're saying. Basically, you believe in Evolution, correct?

I believe the evidence behind evolution is substantial enough to support the theory as the most likely explanation for how species have changed over time.

To be clear, I believe in God, I do not believe in evolution, at least not in a similar fashion. My support for evolution as a theory is not faith-based.

MayCaesar · June 2018

Okay, let us try again. Suppose you are driving a car and want to turn right. What do you do? You turn the steering wheel clockwise.

Do you "believe" that turning the steering wheel clockwise will cause your car to turn right? No, you do not "believe" it: you know it. Now, you cannot know it with 100% certainty (What if this car was rigged and the steering wheel works backwards, for example?), nor can you prove on the Internet that it is exactly what will happen (How would you even go about proving it while not sitting behind the wheel?). And yet, you are very-very certain that it will happen, to the point where you do not even think about it consciously and turn your steering wheel subconsciously, as if it was an integral part of your body.

Evolution - and established theories in science in general - are similar. We do not "believe" in them, nor can we prove them with 100% certainty. But they match all the data we have dealt with so far (just like the theory on your steering wheel behavior matches everything you and billions other drivers worldwide have experienced first-hand), while alternative theories do not hold and contradict a lot of data we possess - hence our confidence in Evolution, the Big Bang theories and other theories regarding our past is very-very high.

I want to emphasize this once again: "belief" is not a part of the equation. Knowledge is. Extensive experience and rigorous testing is. When we say "the theory of evolution describes reality", we do not imply any real degree of belief/faith. We instead imply high precision of predictions the theory provides with regards to the observable data. Now, what precision exactly is required for the theory to be considered verified is somewhat subjective - but suffice to say that for the dominant theories that precision is high enough to easily dismiss the possibility of them being outright wrong. In case of particle physics, for example, we often deal with the 5 sigma precision, corresponding to the probability of the theory being wrong of ~0.00005%. It tends to me much higher than that for less direct sciences, such as history or linguistics, simply because the data we deal with is quite a bit less quantifiable -- but it is still high enough for the claim that "this theory is wrong" to not be viable.

Royalty · June 2018

whiteflame said:

Royalty said:
So I just want to make sure that I'm understanding completely what you're saying. Basically, you believe in Evolution, correct?

I believe the evidence behind evolution is substantial enough to support the theory as the most likely explanation for how species have changed over time.

To be clear, I believe in God, I do not believe in evolution, at least not in a similar fashion. My support for evolution as a theory is not faith-based.

Wait wait wait. You believe in God but you also believe in the evidence Evolution gives? It's either you believe in God or you believe in evolution. You can't be on both sides because science contradicts what the bible says. If you believe in God you believe and have faith in the fact that he created all things. You can't believe in God and say I believe in the evidence for creation that evolution gives.

Would you be able to give some visible or observable evidence that evolution is true? Something that we don't have to have faith in.

whiteflame · June 2018

Royalty said:
Wait wait wait. You believe in God but you also believe in the evidence Evolution gives? It's either you believe in God or you believe in evolution. You can't be on both sides because science contradicts what the bible says. If you believe in God you believe and have faith in the fact that he created all things. You can't believe in God and say I believe in the evidence for creation that evolution gives.

Would you be able to give some visible or observable evidence that evolution is true? Something that we don't have to have faith in.

I disagree. I believe in God and I agree that the evidence behind evolution firmly supports the theory. I don't see how the two contradict because I don't have to believe everything in the Bible to believe in God. I don't believe many of the stories in the Bible, particularly ones relating to the beginnings of life on the planet. I could still believe in an ominiscient, omnipotent deity and not believe that said deity created all life forms as they exist today all together at the same time, though admittedly my concept of God is probably rather distant from yours. It's probably pretty distant from how most Christians and Jews perceive God.

However, this is all a digression. My notions of what God is and isn't are a personal matter, and I don't think explaining those views further this discussion. The most I can say based on my views of God is that belief in such a deity can be reconciled with agreeing that the scientific literature regarding theories such as evolution or the beginnings of the universe is accurate. If you want to get into the specifics of how I reconcile these with my faith, we can do that, though I don't think it furthers this discussion. We're not talking about my faith. We're talking about the ability to reconcile whole religious doctrines with science.

In terms of evidence for evolution... I mean... where do you want me to start? Our genetic code is as good a place as any to begin. The difference between our genetic code and that of a chimpanzee or a bonobo is 1.2%. Gorillas differ from us by 1.6%, orangutans by 3.1%, and rhesus monkeys by 7%. These numbers do not include all differences, and there are certainly others to take into account, but that's pretty startling: that such a small portion of the genome is apparently responsible for some pretty marked differences.[http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics] Now, we can make similar comparisons to other mammals, and we find that they are further away from us. If we go to reptiles, birds, or other non-mammals, we find that they are even more different. This indicates a relationship between human beings and other mammals, and a closer relationship between human beings and certain apes. One might be inclined to believe that these relatively close genetic codes could develop independently, but we're talking about massive genomes here, over 6,000 megabases, all of which just happen to be closely aligned. Much as human beings that are related are more genetically similar, animals that are related are more genetically similar.

We could go through a litany of other evidence available today. There is a long fossil record, which includes some genetic data indicating that certain human-like creatures existed that fill in some of the gaps between apes and humans, acting as common ancestors. There are developmental similarities, particularly in the common traits of embryos between similar species. We can use various dating technologies, particularly those based on radioactivity, to determine when each of these creatures was alive and establish some idea of when they were likely wiped out based on a drop off in the fossil record. And all of this is just focused on human evolution. We can actually show bacterial and viral evolution in progress, as numerous researchers have, due to their rapid production of progeny and amazing adaptability.

I mean, we can dig down into these topics if you want, but if that's what we're going to do, it's going to eat up much of the rest of this thread.

someone234 · June 2018

Erfisflat said:

In reality, there is no tangible evidence against creationism, or flat earth, geocentric cosmology.

Agree to the latter 2 but there is against the first and even though I believe in a supernatural God, I am sure the ultimate power is a random being with no creationist system other than random number generation in binary to code reality.

Erfisflat · June 2018

MayCaesar said:

Okay, let us try again. Suppose you are driving a car and want to turn right. What do you do? You turn the steering wheel clockwise.

Do you "believe" that turning the steering wheel clockwise will cause your car to turn right? No, you do not "believe" it: you know it. Now, you cannot know it with 100% certainty (What if this car was rigged and the steering wheel works backwards, for example?), nor can you prove on the Internet that it is exactly what will happen (How would you even go about proving it while not sitting behind the wheel?). And yet, you are very-very certain that it will happen, to the point where you do not even think about it consciously and turn your steering wheel subconsciously, as if it was an integral part of your body.

Evolution - and established theories in science in general - are similar. We do not "believe" in them, nor can we prove them with 100% certainty. But they match all the data we have dealt with so far (just like the theory on your steering wheel behavior matches everything you and billions other drivers worldwide have experienced first-hand), while alternative theories do not hold and contradict a lot of data we possess - hence our confidence in Evolution, the Big Bang theories and other theories regarding our past is very-very high.

I want to emphasize this once again: "belief" is not a part of the equation. Knowledge is. Extensive experience and rigorous testing is. When we say "the theory of evolution describes reality", we do not imply any real degree of belief/faith. We instead imply high precision of predictions the theory provides with regards to the observable data. Now, what precision exactly is required for the theory to be considered verified is somewhat subjective - but suffice to say that for the dominant theories that precision is high enough to easily dismiss the possibility of them being outright wrong. In case of particle physics, for example, we often deal with the 5 sigma precision, corresponding to the probability of the theory being wrong of ~0.00005%. It tends to me much higher than that for less direct sciences, such as history or linguistics, simply because the data we deal with is quite a bit less quantifiable -- but it is still high enough for the claim that "this theory is wrong" to not be viable.

This is asanine to be honest. How on earth can you test evolution, or speciation without "being behind the wheel"? Man would have had to go through hundreds of changes to go from primate to man, according to the theories, there should be thousands of these links found by now. Most if not all of the "missing links" are found to be hoaxes or extinct primates.

whiteflame · June 2018

Erfisflat said:
This is asanine to be honest. How on earth can you test evolution, or speciation without "being behind the wheel"? Man would have had to go through hundreds of changes to go from primate to man, according to the theories, there should be thousands of these links found by now. Most if not all of the "missing links" are found to be hoaxes or extinct primates.

You can test evolution in a laboratory, so long as you can shorten the generation time enough. For most organisms, it's not possible to have enough generations to be able to see changes accumulate over time, but it is entirely possible for bacteria, fungi and viruses, which have extremely short generation times. And we do see it happen. The question is not so much whether or not organisms evolve, but rather how far they can evolve under different conditions.

As for the changes from primate to human, there are a few things you're not taking into account.

First, while we would certainly expect to find organisms that fill in the gap in physiology between primates and humans, the idea that they accumulated slowly over time is actually a separate theory within the scope of evolutionary theory. Phyletic gradualism falls along the lines of what you're saying, where we should see organisms slowly picking up traits over time, and as such we should be able to find fossils to represent each of those different changes. Punctuational evolution, on the other hand, functions under the idea that changes accumulate in groups and become stable, meaning that we have very defined instances of change in the fossil record that persist over longer periods of time. In that case, there may not be "thousands of these links" because all of those changes could be presented in a smaller number of links between us and our ancestral species.

Second, I'm not sure why you're dismissive of extinct primates as a link between humans and some unknown ancestral species. We could go through individual examples, including Ardipithecus, Australopithecus, and everything else that spans the timeline between humans and ape ancestors. Each shows a clear shift towards traits that are human while retaining more of the traits of apes than we do. I don't know what you'd call them if you are averse to calling them links because that's what they are.

Third, a lack of available evidence regarding certain links in this evolutionary chain does not invalidate the theory. Populations along an evolutionary timeline may have been relatively localized to certain regions of the world, and last I checked, we haven't had archaelogical digs on every part of the planet. There are also issues with preservation, which may affect our ability to find such evidence. No one is arguing that the evolutionary progression from an ape ancestor to a human is so rock solid that we can trace it with a clear line of ancestors leading up to us, but it seems to me that people who find fault with evolutionary theory use these missing links as a means to invalidate all of the other data. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.

Royalty · June 2018

whiteflame said:

Royalty said:
Wait wait wait. You believe in God but you also believe in the evidence Evolution gives? It's either you believe in God or you believe in evolution. You can't be on both sides because science contradicts what the bible says. If you believe in God you believe and have faith in the fact that he created all things. You can't believe in God and say I believe in the evidence for creation that evolution gives.

Would you be able to give some visible or observable evidence that evolution is true? Something that we don't have to have faith in.

I disagree. I believe in God and I agree that the evidence behind evolution firmly supports the theory. I don't see how the two contradict because I don't have to believe everything in the Bible to believe in God. I don't believe many of the stories in the Bible, particularly ones relating to the beginnings of life on the planet. I could still believe in an ominiscient, omnipotent deity and not believe that said deity created all life forms as they exist today all together at the same time, though admittedly my concept of God is probably rather distant from yours. It's probably pretty distant from how most Christians and Jews perceive God.

However, this is all a digression. My notions of what God is and isn't are a personal matter, and I don't think explaining those views further this discussion. The most I can say based on my views of God is that belief in such a deity can be reconciled with agreeing that the scientific literature regarding theories such as evolution or the beginnings of the universe is accurate. If you want to get into the specifics of how I reconcile these with my faith, we can do that, though I don't think it furthers this discussion. We're not talking about my faith. We're talking about the ability to reconcile whole religious doctrines with science.

In terms of evidence for evolution... I mean... where do you want me to start? Our genetic code is as good a place as any to begin. The difference between our genetic code and that of a chimpanzee or a bonobo is 1.2%. Gorillas differ from us by 1.6%, orangutans by 3.1%, and rhesus monkeys by 7%. These numbers do not include all differences, and there are certainly others to take into account, but that's pretty startling: that such a small portion of the genome is apparently responsible for some pretty marked differences.[http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics] Now, we can make similar comparisons to other mammals, and we find that they are further away from us. If we go to reptiles, birds, or other non-mammals, we find that they are even more different. This indicates a relationship between human beings and other mammals, and a closer relationship between human beings and certain apes. One might be inclined to believe that these relatively close genetic codes could develop independently, but we're talking about massive genomes here, over 6,000 megabases, all of which just happen to be closely aligned. Much as human beings that are related are more genetically similar, animals that are related are more genetically similar.

We could go through a litany of other evidence available today. There is a long fossil record, which includes some genetic data indicating that certain human-like creatures existed that fill in some of the gaps between apes and humans, acting as common ancestors. There are developmental similarities, particularly in the common traits of embryos between similar species. We can use various dating technologies, particularly those based on radioactivity, to determine when each of these creatures was alive and establish some idea of when they were likely wiped out based on a drop off in the fossil record. And all of this is just focused on human evolution. We can actually show bacterial and viral evolution in progress, as numerous researchers have, due to their rapid production of progeny and amazing adaptability.

I mean, we can dig down into these topics if you want, but if that's what we're going to do, it's going to eat up much of the rest of this thread.

That's why Im saying that you cant have belief in both because science contradicts the bible. If you don't believe in all the bible, you don't believe in God. Science was created to contradict the bible. Science was created by man, it didnt create it self. Let's just assume the bible was written for all man kind. If that was the case, you wouldn't be getting into heaven or rulership because you don't have full faith in God, Christ and the Laws. If that makes sense. I don't know how the earth was created or who created but because the bible correlates with my history and my history is in the bible, I believe God does exist and I have faith and believe he created all things, meaning the earth, universe, everything in the universe, humanity, animals, etc. No one was there to record the events of what was happening when the creation began, I wasn't there, you weren't there, within the 7yr time frame during those times, God, Christ and his counsel was there creating everything. So I'm not going to have faith in the same man that enslaved my people, raped, robbed, murdered, stole our history, heritage, and identity, put drugs, alcohol in our communities, so on and so forth, I'm not going to believe in that same man that continues lying about who we are, and merely paints us out to be criminals. Science is of the so called white man and he created science to contradict the bible to keep us confused. That' like you being married and telling your husband/wife, I believe that youre not cheating on me, but I don't trust you when you are out somewhere without me. Your faith is not fully in your spouse and s/he wants your full trust, not just 50% of it. It's the same thing with God, he wants all your trust and faith to be in him, not 50% science and 50% God.

As far as genetics go, can you be more specific on that part?

whiteflame · June 2018

Royalty said:

That's why Im saying that you cant have belief in both because science contradicts the bible. If you don't believe in all the bible, you don't believe in God. Science was created to contradict the bible. Science was created by man, it didnt create it self. Let's just assume the bible was written for all man kind. If that was the case, you wouldn't be getting into heaven or rulership because you don't have full faith in God, Christ and the Laws. If that makes sense. I don't know how the earth was created or who created but because the bible correlates with my history and my history is in the bible, I believe God does exist and I have faith and believe he created all things, meaning the earth, universe, everything in the universe, humanity, animals, etc. No one was there to record the events of what was happening when the creation began, I wasn't there, you weren't there, within the 7yr time frame during those times, God, Christ and his counsel was there creating everything. So I'm not going to have faith in the same man that enslaved my people, raped, robbed, murdered, stole our history, heritage, and identity, put drugs, alcohol in our communities, so on and so forth, I'm not going to believe in that same man that continues lying about who we are, and merely paints us out to be criminals. Science is of the so called white man and he created science to contradict the bible to keep us confused. That' like you being married and telling your husband/wife, I believe that youre not cheating on me, but I don't trust you when you are out somewhere without me. Your faith is not fully in your spouse and s/he wants your full trust, not just 50% of it. It's the same thing with God, he wants all your trust and faith to be in him, not 50% science and 50% God.

As far as genetics go, can you be more specific on that part?

That's a false dichotomy: belief in the Bible does not equate to belief in a deity. Plenty of religions do not rely on the Bible, and many of them are monotheistic. If I'm a deist (which, let's face it, I kind of am) then I don't subscribe to any religious text and instead believe in a deity based on entirely separate reasoning. I don't see why the Bible is integral to my belief in God. You're welcome to your beliefs and those may be intertwined between the Bible and God, but mine aren't, and I don't see why that is a prerequisite. If your argument is that the Bible is correct because you think it was written for everyone and therefore affects everyone, that's fine, but it's not my view. I don't think that any religious text was written for all of mankind, especially given just how exclusionary each of them happens to be, but that's just my perspective. Assuming that the Bible is absolutely correct, you could be right that I would not go to heaven. Honestly, that doesn't bother me. I don't make a habit of being concerned about what happens after death.

It's also a bare assertion to argue that science was created specifically to contradict the Bible. I find that unlikely, mainly because science as an enterprise is reliant on data to reach a conclusion. The idea that science was tailored specifically towards the conclusion of contradicting religion assumes that scientists have had a goal in mind from the start and have simply been gathering data to reach that goal, i.e. science is inherently biased against religion. I don't see how that's the case. I don't see how you're justifying the idea that science was created to keep us confused, either. It seems as though science is seeking some clarity. I suppose you could argue that it's confusing to get conflicting ideas of how things work, but if that's the case, why aren't you railing against every other religion as well? They all have differing origin stories, and different explanations for how the natural world works. Why do those get a pass? I also don't understand why you're targeting science as symbolic of harms that have come to your people, or why it's inherently something racial in nature. You certainly feel a lot of enmity regarding what white people have done over time, but I don't see how any of it applies to science. At what point did science cause any of those harms, and why should a basis for inquiry be held responsible for the evils of certain subsets of the population?

This seems to come down to an issue with trust. You don't trust science and its findings because you feel like it is representative of the various oppressions and other harms caused by society. You think that it is the deliberate aim of science to undermine the Bible and other religious texts. Do science and religion clash? Absolutely. Does that mean that either of them is wholly wrong? I don't think so. Accepting that people who wrote and translated the Bible thousands of years ago may not have fully understood the world in the way we do today seems perfectly reasonable to me, and it doesn't make me mistrust my religion as a result. I think what stands out as more problematic is the notion that we should reject any and all evidence, regardless of how well supported it is, on the basis that faith wins out. Faith is a great thing, but I don't think it should close our minds to everything that may contradict what we believe. Using your example, it would be like stating that you trust your wife to be faithful, being presented with evidence that she is cheating, and rejecting that evidence because you have faith in your wife.

As for the genetics element, I'm not sure what you're looking for. Genetics establish a lineage of sorts based on how similar one genome is to another. We can and do use that closeness to establish relations between human beings, and we can do the same for comparing other creatures to us. Could you be more specific about what doesn't make sense, or where you feel you need more information?

MayCaesar · June 2018

Erfisflat said:

MayCaesar said:

Okay, let us try again. Suppose you are driving a car and want to turn right. What do you do? You turn the steering wheel clockwise.

Do you "believe" that turning the steering wheel clockwise will cause your car to turn right? No, you do not "believe" it: you know it. Now, you cannot know it with 100% certainty (What if this car was rigged and the steering wheel works backwards, for example?), nor can you prove on the Internet that it is exactly what will happen (How would you even go about proving it while not sitting behind the wheel?). And yet, you are very-very certain that it will happen, to the point where you do not even think about it consciously and turn your steering wheel subconsciously, as if it was an integral part of your body.

Evolution - and established theories in science in general - are similar. We do not "believe" in them, nor can we prove them with 100% certainty. But they match all the data we have dealt with so far (just like the theory on your steering wheel behavior matches everything you and billions other drivers worldwide have experienced first-hand), while alternative theories do not hold and contradict a lot of data we possess - hence our confidence in Evolution, the Big Bang theories and other theories regarding our past is very-very high.

I want to emphasize this once again: "belief" is not a part of the equation. Knowledge is. Extensive experience and rigorous testing is. When we say "the theory of evolution describes reality", we do not imply any real degree of belief/faith. We instead imply high precision of predictions the theory provides with regards to the observable data. Now, what precision exactly is required for the theory to be considered verified is somewhat subjective - but suffice to say that for the dominant theories that precision is high enough to easily dismiss the possibility of them being outright wrong. In case of particle physics, for example, we often deal with the 5 sigma precision, corresponding to the probability of the theory being wrong of ~0.00005%. It tends to me much higher than that for less direct sciences, such as history or linguistics, simply because the data we deal with is quite a bit less quantifiable -- but it is still high enough for the claim that "this theory is wrong" to not be viable.

This is asanine to be honest. How on earth can you test evolution, or speciation without "being behind the wheel"? Man would have had to go through hundreds of changes to go from primate to man, according to the theories, there should be thousands of these links found by now. Most if not all of the "missing links" are found to be hoaxes or extinct primates.

There are thousands links known and tested. It is only your willful ignorance that does not let you accept their existence.

If you want to persist to the end and to claim that to turn right, the wheel has to be turned counter-clockwise - then nobody can convince you that you are wrong, because even when you are actually put in the driver seat and asked to turn right, you will turn the wheel clockwise and claim that the wheel is rigged specifically for the purpose of deceiving you.

Science deals with real data and its cross-referencing with the theory prediction. It does not deal with the "I am right, and all the evidence of the contrary is rigged" nonsense.

Erfisflat · June 2018

@whiteflame said:

"You can test evolution in a laboratory, so long as you can shorten the generation time enough. For most organisms, it's not possible to have enough generations to be able to see changes accumulate over time, but it is entirely possible for bacteria, fungi and viruses, which have extremely short generation times. And we do see it happen. The question is not so much whether or not organisms evolve, but rather how far they can evolve under different conditions."

I'm specifically referring to speciation, sorry for not clarifying. So, what do we see exactly? Does the fungus give birth to bacteria? To my knowledge, this has never been observe, and would serve as a base tenant for evolution, conditions or not.

"First, while we would certainly expect to find organisms that fill in the gap in physiology between primates and humans, the idea that they accumulated slowly over time is actually a separate theory within the scope of evolutionary theory. Phyletic gradubangm falls along the lines of what you're saying, where we should see organisms slowly picking up traits over time, and as such we should be able to find fossils to represent each of those different changes. Punctuational evolution, on the other hand, functions under the idea that changes accumulate in groups and become stable, meaning that we have very defined instances of change in the fossil record that persist over longer periods of time. In that case, there may not be "thousands of these links" because all of those changes could be presented in a smaller number of links between us and our ancestral species."

If punctuational evolution were to be taken seriously, why do we not see these changes still happening today? This type of evolution requires "jumps" in evolution rather than small, gradual changes, correct?

"Second, I'm not sure why you're dismissive of extinct primates as a link between humans and some unknown ancestral species. We could go through individual examples, including Ardipithecus, Australopithecus, and everything else that spans the timeline between humans and ape ancestors. Each shows a clear shift towards traits that are human while retaining more of the traits of apes than we do. I don't know what you'd call them if you are averse to calling them links because that's what they are."

I'm dismissal of these theories mostly because of the ocean of evidence against the big bang which is being taught to children, and the amount of deception behind the theory of evolution. Your first example, Ardipithecus's head was never found, yet they featured his head prominently, and claimed this was a link to humans, because of part of a toe. The toe, which was found some 16km away, according to Lemonick, M.D. and Dorfman, A., “One giant step for mankind”, Time (South Pacific) pp. 58–59, 23 July 2001, was allegedly hundreds of thousands of years younger than the rest of the pieces.

Yet, with such shoddy evidence, they knew it aligned with the preconceived theories, they jumped to conclusions and it was propagandized, and their discoverers instant heroes.

Remember this?

This was published in every school book in America, and is pushed by evolutionists everywhere. A drawing that everyone took as fact, but nobody fact checked, until recently, embryologist Micheal Richardson took photos of the embryos involved in the fraudulent drawings.

This gives an idea of what length evolutionists go through to "find evidence" for the theory. I could go on and on, pointing out that the evidence is scarce to nil for evolution. These are ad hoc by definition. It's the same thing for the shape of the earth, which seems to be the elephant in the room.

Royalty · June 2018

whiteflame said:

Royalty said:
That's why Im saying that you cant have belief in both because science contradicts the bible. If you don't believe in all the bible, you don't believe in God. Science was created to contradict the bible. Science was created by man, it didnt create it self. Let's just assume the bible was written for all man kind. If that was the case, you wouldn't be getting into heaven or rulership because you don't have full faith in God, Christ and the Laws. If that makes sense. I don't know how the earth was created or who created but because the bible correlates with my history and my history is in the bible, I believe God does exist and I have faith and believe he created all things, meaning the earth, universe, everything in the universe, humanity, animals, etc. No one was there to record the events of what was happening when the creation began, I wasn't there, you weren't there, within the 7yr time frame during those times, God, Christ and his counsel was there creating everything. So I'm not going to have faith in the same man that enslaved my people, raped, robbed, murdered, stole our history, heritage, and identity, put drugs, alcohol in our communities, so on and so forth, I'm not going to believe in that same man that continues lying about who we are, and merely paints us out to be criminals. Science is of the so called white man and he created science to contradict the bible to keep us confused. That' like you being married and telling your husband/wife, I believe that youre not cheating on me, but I don't trust you when you are out somewhere without me. Your faith is not fully in your spouse and s/he wants your full trust, not just 50% of it. It's the same thing with God, he wants all your trust and faith to be in him, not 50% science and 50% God.

As far as genetics go, can you be more specific on that part?

That's a false dichotomy: belief in the Bible does not equate to belief in a deity. Plenty of religions do not rely on the Bible, and many of them are monotheistic. If I'm a deist (which, let's face it, I kind of am) then I don't subscribe to any religious text and instead believe in a deity based on entirely separate reasoning. I don't see why the Bible is integral to my belief in God. You're welcome to your beliefs and those may be intertwined between the Bible and God, but mine aren't, and I don't see why that is a prerequisite. If your argument is that the Bible is correct because you think it was written for everyone and therefore affects everyone, that's fine, but it's not my view. I don't think that any religious text was written for all of mankind, especially given just how exclusionary each of them happens to be, but that's just my perspective. Assuming that the Bible is absolutely correct, you could be right that I would not go to heaven. Honestly, that doesn't bother me. I don't make a habit of being concerned about what happens after death.

It's also a bare assertion to argue that science was created specifically to contradict the Bible. I find that unlikely, mainly because science as an enterprise is reliant on data to reach a conclusion. The idea that science was tailored specifically towards the conclusion of contradicting religion assumes that scientists have had a goal in mind from the start and have simply been gathering data to reach that goal, i.e. science is inherently biased against religion. I don't see how that's the case. I don't see how you're justifying the idea that science was created to keep us confused, either. It seems as though science is seeking some clarity. I suppose you could argue that it's confusing to get conflicting ideas of how things work, but if that's the case, why aren't you railing against every other religion as well? They all have differing origin stories, and different explanations for how the natural world works. Why do those get a pass? I also don't understand why you're targeting science as symbolic of harms that have come to your people, or why it's inherently something racial in nature. You certainly feel a lot of enmity regarding what white people have done over time, but I don't see how any of it applies to science. At what point did science cause any of those harms, and why should a basis for inquiry be held responsible for the evils of certain subsets of the population?

This seems to come down to an issue with trust. You don't trust science and its findings because you feel like it is representative of the various oppressions and other harms caused by society. You think that it is the deliberate aim of science to undermine the Bible and other religious texts. Do science and religion clash? Absolutely. Does that mean that either of them is wholly wrong? I don't think so. Accepting that people who wrote and translated the Bible thousands of years ago may not have fully understood the world in the way we do today seems perfectly reasonable to me, and it doesn't make me mistrust my religion as a result. I think what stands out as more problematic is the notion that we should reject any and all evidence, regardless of how well supported it is, on the basis that faith wins out. Faith is a great thing, but I don't think it should close our minds to everything that may contradict what we believe. Using your example, it would be like stating that you trust your wife to be faithful, being presented with evidence that she is cheating, and rejecting that evidence because you have faith in your wife.

As for the genetics element, I'm not sure what you're looking for. Genetics establish a lineage of sorts based on how similar one genome is to another. We can and do use that closeness to establish relations between human beings, and we can do the same for comparing other creatures to us. Could you be more specific about what doesn't make sense, or where you feel you need more information?

Religion is not of God and God is not of religion. That's why religion perverts the scriptures. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc. are not of God and God hates religion and those religions feast days (Amos 5:21). Religion is a control system and is filled with nothing but lies. The bible is of no particular religion. The bible is simply the bible. But, I'm not going to argue about God hating science and believing in both science and God at the same time. I'm going to stick to what I was originally asking.

For genetics on the fossil records, here's what I'm trying to get at. You can't give me observable evidence tracing Evolution through fossil records because that was hundreds of thousands to billions of years ago. So, would you be able to give me some other type of observable evidence for Evolution?

whiteflame · June 2018

@Erfisflat

"I'm specifically referring to speciation, sorry for not clarifying. So, what do we see exactly? Does the fungus give birth to bacteria? To my knowledge, this has never been observe, and would serve as a base tenant for evolution, conditions or not."

Um... you said you're talking about speciation (i.e. the process of generating distinct species), but then you jump to two dramatically different domains of life. Fungi are eukaryotes, bacteria are prokaryotes. They're as far away on the evolutionary spectrum as you can possibly get. No matter how long you build up a culture of bacteria, they will not transform into eukaryotic life, and a large part of the reason for that is one simple word: organelles. If you look at the specific subcellular bodies within a eukaryotic cell, they're rather diverse, and some even have their own genomes. What does that tell us? It tells us that, at some point in the distant past, two different species of cells interacted, and one of those was brought inside the other. It provided energy in some novel form to the larger cell, and there was evolutionary pressure to keep the smaller one. That smaller cell replicated with the larger one, receiving necessary nutrients in return for its output of energy, and over time it became entirely dependent on the larger cell. That's the progenitor for eukaryotes as a whole. This is a long way of answering your question, but the fundamental reason why we don't see prokaryotes spontaneously become eukaryotes is that the process clearly requires the interaction of multiple different life forms, many of which are probably not even culturable in the laboratory. To set that as the standard that scientists must meet in order to prove that evolution happens seems more than a little absurd to me, since scientists have proven that speciation is actually possible within the lab. Why should they have to go light years further along and show the active process of bacteria evolving into eukaryotes?

"If punctuational evolution were to be taken seriously, why do we not see these changes still happening today? This type of evolution requires "jumps" in evolution rather than small, gradual changes, correct?"

I thought I addressed this with my previous post, but I'll elaborate. The theory functions under the assumption that these changes are stable, i.e. that they persist over very long periods of time. We're talking about millions of years in many cases, and even the shortest time scales would likely measure in the thousands of years. That makes it rather difficult to actually see this kind of evolution take place. Beyond that, I don't really get the mentality that we have to see it taking place right before our eyes in order for the theory to have any validity. I suppose there's always some chance that evolution could happen right in front of us, but you're essentially asking that we predict when these changes will occur and then observe it when it does. That's also asking a lot.

"I'm dismissal of these theories mostly because of the ocean of evidence against the big bang which is being taught to children, and the amount of deception behind the theory of evolution. Your first example, Ardipithecus's head was never found, yet they featured his head prominently, and claimed this was a link to humans, because of part of a toe. The toe, which was found some 16km away, according to Lemonick, M.D. and Dorfman, A., “One giant step for mankind”, Time (South Pacific) pp. 58–59, 23 July 2001, was allegedly hundreds of thousands of years younger than the rest of the pieces.

Yet, with such shoddy evidence, they knew it aligned with the preconceived theories, they jumped to conclusions and it was propagandized, and their discoverers instant heroes.

This was published in every school book in America, and is pushed by evolutionists everywhere. A drawing that everyone took as fact, but nobody fact checked, until recently, embryologist Micheal Richardson took photos of the embryos involved in the fraudulent drawings.

This gives an idea of what length evolutionists go through to "find evidence" for the theory. I could go on and on, pointing out that the evidence is scarce to nil for evolution. These are ad hoc by definition. It's the same thing for the shape of the earth, which seems to be the elephant in the room."

Alright, there's a good deal to tackle here, but I'll start with the fundamental assumption: that evolution as a theory is wrong because some scientists have built fraudulent data upon it. I'll get into whether or not these are actually fraudulent examples shortly, but even assuming they are, you're committing a pretty clear fallacy of composition by asserting that errors, or even outright fraud, invalidate the theory as a whole. Take, for example, Ardipithecus. Let's say I completely accept that the head of this creature is entirely fabricated. I'll accept that the toe was found elsewhere and shouldn't have been united with the rest of the body (though I don't see anywhere in that article, or any other for that matter, where Ardipithecus's link to humans is established based solely on that particular toe). That doesn't erase the age of the rest of the body, it doesn't sever the link between that body and both humans and chimpanzees, and it doesn't push back on any of the other available links. Looking at the very article you cite, there are numerous other bodies that have been found and researched, and they establish other separate and important links that cannot be ignored. No matter how deceptively some of the evidence behind the theory of evolution may be presented, their existence does not invalidate the theory itself because they are not the sole supporting features of the theory.

But let's get down to the specifics. You don't provide any evidence against the big bang theory, though I'll leave that aside since it isn't your focus here. The Ardipithecus skull has actually been recovered, even if it was badly crushed, and reconstructed.[https://www.academia.edu/9805320/The_Ardipithecus_ramidus_Skull_and_Its_Implications_for_Hominid_Origins?auto=download] If you have a problem with the reconstruction method, that's one thing, but you seem to be arguing that the head is basically derived from nothing but a guess. Regardless, I don't see how this can be construed as "shoddy evidence" - it's incomplete, to be sure, but it's not shoddy.

I don't recall that particular image representing embryo development, but I have two problems with your characterization of it. First, where is your proof that "evolutionists" published this image? I haven't been able to find the origin. Second, I don't see how problems with the drawing invalidate anything regarding evolution. Regardless of Richardson's own views, the fact that this initial diagram was obviously wrong doesn't disprove evolution, just that the textbooks in which this featured were clearly flawed. There may have been a bias in how this was drawn, but even if the person who drew this was actively trying to fraudulently support evolutionary theory, why do his actions define the veracity of the theory as whole? If I point out creationists who were trying to push their theories fraudulently, does that invalidate creationism?

whiteflame · June 2018

Royalty said:
Religion is not of God and God is not of religion. That's why religion perverts the scriptures. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc. are not of God and God hates religion and those religions feast days (Amos 5:21). Religion is a control system and is filled with nothing but lies. The bible is of no particular religion. The bible is simply the bible. But, I'm not going to argue about God hating science and believing in both science and God at the same time. I'm going to stick to what I was originally asking.

For genetics on the fossil records, here's what I'm trying to get at. You can't give me observable evidence tracing Evolution through fossil records because that was hundreds of thousands to billions of years ago. So, would you be able to give me some other type of observable evidence for Evolution?

Alright, probably best to move away from that line of conversation, as it appears we're of very different opinions on the matter.

I believe there is strong fossil evidence that evolution occurred. The fossil record goes back quite a ways, and I think it provides substantive support for evolutionary theory. But if you want to move away from that, we can for the time being. I gave developmental similarities and data of actual speciation of bacteria and viruses in the lab, but let's focus on genetics. I'm not sure what else to provide on this front because I'm not sure where you see a hole in the genetics argument. There is a tremendous amount of genetic code, which acts as a fingerprint separating human beings based on a small set of genes that differentiate individual persons. That set of genes increases as you move further away from human beings, but it's still rather close when you look at the animals that evolutionary theory posits came from a common ancestor to ours. The closer in evolutionary time one species is to another, the higher the homology between their genomes. The amount of information in a genome is simply too large and complex to somehow show such similarity based on random chance. If this is unclear, I'll need you to explain what I am lacking in terms of explanation, because I think this is relatively clear.

Royalty · June 2018

whiteflame said:

Royalty said:
Religion is not of God and God is not of religion. That's why religion perverts the scriptures. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc. are not of God and God hates religion and those religions feast days (Amos 5:21). Religion is a control system and is filled with nothing but lies. The bible is of no particular religion. The bible is simply the bible. But, I'm not going to argue about God hating science and believing in both science and God at the same time. I'm going to stick to what I was originally asking.

For genetics on the fossil records, here's what I'm trying to get at. You can't give me observable evidence tracing Evolution through fossil records because that was hundreds of thousands to billions of years ago. So, would you be able to give me some other type of observable evidence for Evolution?

Alright, probably best to move away from that line of conversation, as it appears we're of very different opinions on the matter.

I believe there is strong fossil evidence that evolution occurred. The fossil record goes back quite a ways, and I think it provides substantive support for evolutionary theory. But if you want to move away from that, we can for the time being. I gave developmental similarities and data of actual speciation of bacteria and viruses in the lab, but let's focus on genetics. I'm not sure what else to provide on this front because I'm not sure where you see a hole in the genetics argument. There is a tremendous amount of genetic code, which acts as a fingerprint separating human beings based on a small set of genes that differentiate individual persons. That set of genes increases as you move further away from human beings, but it's still rather close when you look at the animals that evolutionary theory posits came from a common ancestor to ours. The closer in evolutionary time one species is to another, the higher the homology between their genomes. The amount of information in a genome is simply too large and complex to somehow show such similarity based on random chance. If this is unclear, I'll need you to explain what I am lacking in terms of explanation, because I think this is relatively clear.

No, you explained it well.

Darwinian evolution says that were would be a change of kinds in regards to animals & bacteria (if Im not mistaken). Can you show observable evidence for a change of kinds? Again something that I don't have to receive by faith.

whiteflame · June 2018

Royalty said:
No, you explained it well.

Darwinian evolution says that were would be a change of kinds in regards to animals & bacteria (if Im not mistaken). Can you show observable evidence for a change of kinds? Again something that I don't have to receive by faith.

I don't understand the question. I've heard the term "kinds" before, but it's inherently vague. What taxonomic level of classification is a "kind"? Are you asking for observable evidence showing that there's a transition between taxonomies? I need some clarity regarding what you're asking for so that I can address the issue.

Royalty · June 2018

whiteflame said:

Royalty said:
No, you explained it well.

Darwinian evolution says that were would be a change of kinds in regards to animals & bacteria (if Im not mistaken). Can you show observable evidence for a change of kinds? Again something that I don't have to receive by faith.

I don't understand the question. I've heard the term "kinds" before, but it's inherently vague. What taxonomic level of classification is a "kind"? Are you asking for observable evidence showing that there's a transition between taxonomies? I need some clarity regarding what you're asking for so that I can address the issue.

In other words, I'll give you an example of what I mean...monkey to man, or fish to bird. That's what I mean by change of kinds. Change of species.

whiteflame · June 2018

Royalty said:
In other words, I'll give you an example of what I mean...monkey to man, or fish to bird. That's what I mean by change of kinds. Change of species.

That's clearer, though I do feel the need to clarify that the taxonomic distance between a monkey and a human, or a fish and a bird, is not on a species level. We're talking about massive separations between organisms. Taxonomic breakdowns are largely based on the kingdom system, and they break down from kingdoms to a number of different subgroups:

Kingdom
Phylum
Class
Order
Family
Genus
Species

The level of difference you're talking about between a fish and a bird is all the way up at phylum. Monkeys are classified closer to humans, but they are still only part of the same order - each is in entirely separate families. So, if you want to see transitions from one species to another, you're looking at something much closer. As an example, a gray wolf is Canis lupis and a dog is Canis lupis familiaris. That means that they're both part of the Canis genus, but are distinct species.

As for observable evidence, there are plenty of examples. If you want something that happened relatively recently, you need to look at instances of geographic isolation, which most often requires an island or set of islands. Anole lizards represent a pretty solid example of recent species radiation.[https://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/anole-lizards-example-speciation] There are examples in owls, where just being isolated by inhabiting different locations appears to have caused a speciation event. Labs have also demonstrated in fruit flies (because they have rapid generation times) that isolation of populations leads to reproductive isolation, which is an important step towards generating new species.[https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evo_45] We could talk about the Galapagos Islands, or various fish populations as examples as well.[http://biomed.brown.edu/Courses/BIO48/23.Cases.HTML] These are all observable radiations of species.

Royalty · June 2018

whiteflame said:

Royalty said:
In other words, I'll give you an example of what I mean...monkey to man, or fish to bird. That's what I mean by change of kinds. Change of species.

That's clearer, though I do feel the need to clarify that the taxonomic distance between a monkey and a human, or a fish and a bird, is not on a species level. We're talking about massive separations between organisms. Taxonomic breakdowns are largely based on the kingdom system, and they break down from kingdoms to a number of different subgroups:

Kingdom
Phylum
Class
Order
Family
Genus
Species

The level of difference you're talking about between a fish and a bird is all the way up at phylum. Monkeys are classified closer to humans, but they are still only part of the same order - each is in entirely separate families. So, if you want to see transitions from one species to another, you're looking at something much closer. As an example, a gray wolf is Canis lupis and a dog is Canis lupis familiaris. That means that they're both part of the Canis genus, but are distinct species.

As for observable evidence, there are plenty of examples. If you want something that happened relatively recently, you need to look at instances of geographic isolation, which most often requires an island or set of islands. Anole lizards represent a pretty solid example of recent species radiation.[https://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/anole-lizards-example-speciation] There are examples in owls, where just being isolated by inhabiting different locations appears to have caused a speciation event. Labs have also demonstrated in fruit flies (because they have rapid generation times) that isolation of populations leads to reproductive isolation, which is an important step towards generating new species.[https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evo_45] We could talk about the Galapagos Islands, or various fish populations as examples as well.[http://biomed.brown.edu/Courses/BIO48/23.Cases.HTML] These are all observable radiations of species.

And what did those animals turn into?

whiteflame · June 2018

Royalty said:
And what did those animals turn into?

That's... a confusing question, and a somewhat leading one. Evolutionary theory does not include any supposition that animals transform into other animals. No one is arguing that a bird can be a bird one day and then turn into a fish the next, nor is anyone arguing that a single generation change will see a monkey give birth to a human being.

So, you ask what those animals turned into? They didn't turn into anything. They gained or lost specific genes and traits, and so long as those changes afforded them some advantage or were otherwise favored by their population, they were retained. Those changes were sufficient to ensure that they meet the threshold for a new species, i.e. they cannot interbreed with the population they came from.

Royalty · June 2018

whiteflame said:

Royalty said:
And what did those animals turn into?

That's... a confusing question, and a somewhat leading one. Evolutionary theory does not include any supposition that animals transform into other animals. No one is arguing that a bird can be a bird one day and then turn into a fish the next, nor is anyone arguing that a single generation change will see a monkey give birth to a human being.

So, you ask what those animals turned into? They didn't turn into anything. They gained or lost specific genes and traits, and so long as those changes afforded them some advantage or were otherwise favored by their population, they were retained. Those changes were sufficient to ensure that they meet the threshold for a new species, i.e. they cannot interbreed with the population they came from.

This question will go hand in hand with what I'm asking.

According to Evolution, where do humans come from?

whiteflame · June 2018

Royalty said:
This question will go hand in hand with what I'm asking.

According to Evolution, where do humans come from?

I had an answer kind of thought out, but honestly, every time I look back at the question, something about it rubs me the wrong way. So, I'll reframe the question: according to evolutionary theory, how did the species Homo sapiens come about? I think that's what you're trying to ask, though if I'm missing some key piece, let me know.

Much like other species, evolutionary theory posits that human beings radiated out from a common ancestral species. Based on our genomes, our traits, and similarities to other living organisms, there is good reason to believe that this common ancestor would have belonged to the order of primates. At some point along the evolutionary tree, that order branched, and while there are various suborders, infraorders and superfamilies we could talk about, one of the smaller branches that came off of it was Hominidae, or the hominids. Based on fossil evidence, this is believed to have occurred between 15 and 20 million years ago, and the common ancestor is thought to have diverged from Hylobatidae (gibbons). Our ancestors continued to diverge, forming a subfamily distinct from orangutans, and eventually forming a taxonomic tribe called Hominini, which includes our bipedal ancestors and chimps. Those tribes parted ways later, fully separating bipedal hominids from other hominids. Other changes accumulated over the past 4 million or so years that led to the creation of a distinct species, Homo sapiens.

So, to try and answer your question more directly, humans "come from" a common ancestor. The closer you get to the present, the more related that ancestor is to us. Likewise, the further back in time you go, the less related the ancestor is to us today.

Royalty · June 2018

whiteflame said:

Royalty said:
This question will go hand in hand with what I'm asking.

According to Evolution, where do humans come from?

I had an answer kind of thought out, but honestly, every time I look back at the question, something about it rubs me the wrong way. So, I'll reframe the question: according to evolutionary theory, how did the species Homo sapiens come about? I think that's what you're trying to ask, though if I'm missing some key piece, let me know.

Much like other species, evolutionary theory posits that human beings radiated out from a common ancestral species. Based on our genomes, our traits, and similarities to other living organisms, there is good reason to believe that this common ancestor would have belonged to the order of primates. At some point along the evolutionary tree, that order branched, and while there are various suborders, infraorders and superfamilies we could talk about, one of the smaller branches that came off of it was Hominidae, or the hominids. Based on fossil evidence, this is believed to have occurred between 15 and 20 million years ago, and the common ancestor is thought to have diverged from Hylobatidae (gibbons). Our ancestors continued to diverge, forming a subfamily distinct from orangutans, and eventually forming a taxonomic tribe called Hominini, which includes our bipedal ancestors and chimps. Those tribes parted ways later, fully separating bipedal hominids from other hominids. Other changes accumulated over the past 4 million or so years that led to the creation of a distinct species, Homo sapiens.

So, to try and answer your question more directly, humans "come from" a common ancestor. The closer you get to the present, the more related that ancestor is to us. Likewise, the further back in time you go, the less related the ancestor is to us today.

Yeah, you answered my question. That's what I was looking for.

Ok. So now, evolution claims that humans basically come from monkeys. So, that would mean that there was a change of kinds. Meaning there was change of kinds from species/animal to human. Thus, what I'm asking is, can you give me observable evidence of a change of kinds? Common sense would tell me that if humans came from a type of monkey millions of years ago, humans should still be coming from monkeys. They wouldn't have just changed from monkey to human one time. That's how I see it.

whiteflame · June 2018

Royalty said:
Yeah, you answered my question. That's what I was looking for.

Ok. So now, evolution claims that humans basically come from monkeys. So, that would mean that there was a change of kinds. Meaning there was change of kinds from species/animal to human. Thus, what I'm asking is, can you give me observable evidence of a change of kinds? Common sense would tell me that if humans came from a type of monkey millions of years ago, humans should still be coming from monkeys. They wouldn't have just changed from monkey to human one time. That's how I see it.

I disagree with your characterization of my point. I never argued that humans came from monkeys, nor do others who support evolution. That's a common misapprehension of the theory. Monkeys, as they exist today, are an entirely stable and separate species from humanity. What both monkeys and humans share is a common ancestor, though the specifics of what that ancestor was and how it is related to monkeys or humans in terms of its classification is not clear.

I still don't get the "kinds" aspect, and the more I read up on it, the less I feel that I understand what the argument is using that word, so let's just stick to the change of species. That is certainly true - the common ancestor of monkeys and humans became a point of divergence where the two species radiated from.

All of this is to say that I can't provide this change of "kinds" (again, I'm reading this as species for the sake of clarity), and there are multiple reasons why.

1) I've already mentioned this, but the transition from monkey to human is not species-based. We're talking about entirely separate orders of life, which are multiple tiers above species. If you're asking for evidence of a change of "kinds" on that level, then you're no longer talking about species. You're talking about orders, and it's never been the argument of any researcher of evolution that such massive shifts in organisms happen anywhere. Species radiation is one thing, but transitions between orders is quite another.

2) These are stable evolutionary forms of two entirely separate animal species. We don't know what caused our common ancestor to yield the precursors of our evolutionary lineages, but the key point is that whatever it was isn't happening right now. Even if it was happening right now, the most we'd see is groups of changes accumulating in either organism. A monkey wouldn't suddenly spring from a woman's womb because to do so would require a gigantic mess of genes to switch on and off. No one is arguing that such a shift happened over a single generation.

3) There's a reason that an event like this happened tens of millions of years ago, and you seem to be missing it. Speciation is not a random event - mutations and accumulated changes may occur sporadically, but there has to be a reason for them to be maintained. I don't pretend to know the specific conditions that led to this specific speciation, but I don't think you can assume that those some conditions persist today.

4) The idea that we should have to see a clear speciation event in organisms that are closer to us in order to prove that evolution occurs seems ridiculous to me. The time scale for evolution of a species is much longer when that organism has fewer children, which may be due to having smaller numbers of children with each pregnancy, having fewer children on the whole, or having longer gestation periods. All of these are traits of humans. Primates aren't exactly populous across the world, and we cannot constantly monitor wild populations. Even if we could, though, these are still among the least likely organisms to evolve within a short timeframe. Monitoring populations that don't have these problems substantially increase the likelihood that we will see a speciation event, and we do. I don't see why that's not sufficient from your perspective.

Royalty · June 2018

whiteflame said:

Royalty said:
Yeah, you answered my question. That's what I was looking for.

Ok. So now, evolution claims that humans basically come from monkeys. So, that would mean that there was a change of kinds. Meaning there was change of kinds from species/animal to human. Thus, what I'm asking is, can you give me observable evidence of a change of kinds? Common sense would tell me that if humans came from a type of monkey millions of years ago, humans should still be coming from monkeys. They wouldn't have just changed from monkey to human one time. That's how I see it.

I disagree with your characterization of my point. I never argued that humans came from monkeys, nor do others who support evolution. That's a common misapprehension of the theory. Monkeys, as they exist today, are an entirely stable and separate species from humanity. What both monkeys and humans share is a common ancestor, though the specifics of what that ancestor was and how it is related to monkeys or humans in terms of its classification is not clear.

I still don't get the "kinds" aspect, and the more I read up on it, the less I feel that I understand what the argument is using that word, so let's just stick to the change of species. That is certainly true - the common ancestor of monkeys and humans became a point of divergence where the two species radiated from.

All of this is to say that I can't provide this change of "kinds" (again, I'm reading this as species for the sake of clarity), and there are multiple reasons why.

1) I've already mentioned this, but the transition from monkey to human is not species-based. We're talking about entirely separate orders of life, which are multiple tiers above species. If you're asking for evidence of a change of "kinds" on that level, then you're no longer talking about species. You're talking about orders, and it's never been the argument of any researcher of evolution that such massive shifts in organisms happen anywhere. Species radiation is one thing, but transitions between orders is quite another.

2) These are stable evolutionary forms of two entirely separate animal species. We don't know what caused our common ancestor to yield the precursors of our evolutionary lineages, but the key point is that whatever it was isn't happening right now. Even if it was happening right now, the most we'd see is groups of changes accumulating in either organism. A monkey wouldn't suddenly spring from a woman's womb because to do so would require a gigantic mess of genes to switch on and off. No one is arguing that such a shift happened over a single generation.

3) There's a reason that an event like this happened tens of millions of years ago, and you seem to be missing it. Speciation is not a random event - mutations and accumulated changes may occur sporadically, but there has to be a reason for them to be maintained. I don't pretend to know the specific conditions that led to this specific speciation, but I don't think you can assume that those some conditions persist today.

4) The idea that we should have to see a clear speciation event in organisms that are closer to us in order to prove that evolution occurs seems ridiculous to me. The time scale for evolution of a species is much longer when that organism has fewer children, which may be due to having smaller numbers of children with each pregnancy, having fewer children on the whole, or having longer gestation periods. All of these are traits of humans. Primates aren't exactly populous across the world, and we cannot constantly monitor wild populations. Even if we could, though, these are still among the least likely organisms to evolve within a short timeframe. Monitoring populations that don't have these problems substantially increase the likelihood that we will see a speciation event, and we do. I don't see why that's not sufficient from your perspective.

If humans and monkeys share a common ancestor, that would mean that humans come from monkeys. That would be like me saying, me and my cousin share a common ancestor (by blood) but, we're not related. That wouldn't really make any sense. It wouldn't really matter what kind of ancestor monkeys and humans share. That's basically saying humans come from monkeys. Evolutionist like to say that humans evolved from monkeys because that animal has a 5th digit, like humans do. However, monkey's are not the only animals with a 5th digit.

What I mean by 'kinds' is like, a different type, or a different species, in other words.

I still don't understand how those mutations only occurred one time. It sounds like Evolution needs time, which is something we don't have because our time on this earth is only limited. So it seems like Evolution will never actually be able to prove such things.

According to Evolution, it was millions of years ago when a monkey basically changed or transformed into a human. But, there is no actual solid observable evidence for that.

I believe what the bible says when it comes to man being created. Man was created from the dust of the ground, and that is what we return to when we die. We don't return to being monkeys, or some other type of species or organisms.

I don't know. It is difficult for me to believe in Evolution when it cannot prove solid observable evidence and it's beliefs are a little over the top for me. Man was created by men (God, Christ and the Angels are men) and all of them took part in the creation of all things, according to scripture. That is solely what I believe in, what makes sense to me, and what I have faith in. It makes more sense to me that man was created by man, as opposed to man suddenly coming from an animal. If we share a common ancestor, that means we're related, which means we came from that ancestor, which in turn, means, we came from monkeys.

whiteflame · June 2018

Royalty said:
If humans and monkeys share a common ancestor, that would mean that humans come from monkeys. That would be like me saying, me and my cousin share a common ancestor (by blood) but, we're not related. That wouldn't really make any sense. It wouldn't really matter what kind of ancestor monkeys and humans share. That's basically saying humans come from monkeys. Evolutionist like to say that humans evolved from monkeys because that animal has a 5th digit, like humans do. However, monkey's are not the only animals with a 5th digit.

What I mean by 'kinds' is like, a different type, or a different species, in other words.

I still don't understand how those mutations only occurred one time. It sounds like Evolution needs time, which is something we don't have because our time on this earth is only limited. So it seems like Evolution will never actually be able to prove such things.

According to Evolution, it was millions of years ago when a monkey basically changed or transformed into a human. But, there is no actual solid observable evidence for that.

I believe what the bible says when it comes to man being created. Man was created from the dust of the ground, and that is what we return to when we die. We don't return to being monkeys, or some other type of species or organisms.

I don't know. It is difficult for me to believe in Evolution when it cannot prove solid observable evidence and it's beliefs are a little over the top for me. Man was created by men (God, Christ and the Angels are men) and all of them took part in the creation of all things, according to scripture. That is solely what I believe in, what makes sense to me, and what I have faith in. It makes more sense to me that man was created by man, as opposed to man suddenly coming from an animal. If we share a common ancestor, that means we're related, which means we came from that ancestor, which in turn, means, we came from monkeys.

You haven't really addressed any of the points I just made. You say that humans and monkeys sharing a common ancestor means humans came from monkeys. That's not the case. The ancestor species that yielded both humans and monkeys likely shared a number of traits with both, and were almost certainly as distant from monkeys as they were humans. Your analogy doesn't work. I've already stated up front that we are related to monkeys, but your argument is that evolution says we came from monkeys. That's simply not so. It would be like saying that you came from your fourth cousin twice removed. As for what evidence we have that we came from monkeys, no one is saying that having a fifth digit is the only uniting characteristic. I've already pointed to our genetic similarities, but there's also stereoscopic vision, opposable thumbs, prehensile hands, larger brains (at least in some specific areas, like hand-eye coordination), the capacity for bipedalism (which has a lot to do with how the hips are formed), the collarbone and certain other shoulder structures... the list goes on.

I still don't get what a "kind" is, but as I said, I'm sticking to species. The problem with stating it is a species, though, is that you're setting a clear threshold that "evolutionists" like myself and others would have to meet. That bar is to show that speciation occurs. And I have. I've given you a number of examples of speciation, none of which you have contradicted. You keep pointing to the lack of evidence that a human came from a monkey. I've already explained how that can't and wouldn't happen, and in particular, I've explained how such a transition would be well beyond a speciation event. You're talking about a transition from one family of organisms to another. That would be akin to telling me that I'd have to prove evolution by showing a live capybara (one of the largest rodents in the world) coming out of a guinea pig. As I said before, changes accumulate, species radiate. Families of organisms don't come from individual changes or even groups of changes. It takes time and a lot of accumulated changes before an organism becomes so distant as to be called a separate family. These mutations didn't occur one time; they likely occurred multiple times, but this set of traits provided a unique advantage to the organisms that had it, ensuring that they persisted. There's a reason that all of our ancestral species are extinct: they lost their competitive advantage.

Will I or any other scientist ever be able to show you the process of evolution occurring to the point that we can demonstrate the evolution of a lifeform from a certain monkey to a human-like entity? Probably not. As I said, that would take an incredible amount of time and just the right conditions. But the major problem I have with your response is that you're essentially dismissing the entire theory based on evidence we have an extremely low chance of observing in our lifetimes. Why don't any of the examples that we have observed occurring sufficient to show that it occurs? Why is this particular event something you need to see in order to be convinced? It's not even, by your own definition, a change of kinds. It's a massive number of change of kinds.

Whatever you choose to believe is up to you. If you want to believe that human beings came from the dust, that's up to you. I don't see how our state when we die proves evolution or religious views right or wrong (we don't "return" to the dust when we die - there's a reason bones persist over millions of years, and many religions would say that our souls are reincarnated into other life forms, so I don't see why your view is more correct), especially as we're talking about how organisms begin, not how they end. We may not return to being our primal ancestors, but that doesn't have any implications for whether or not we evolved from them. Whatever you choose to believe doesn't erase available evidence. Regardless of what makes the most sense to you, at some point over the course of the history of life on this planet, we came from a non-human source. If you want to believe that's God, be my guest. Regardless of where you think we came from, the evidence shows that species radiate, and it seems incredibly dismissive to say that the origin of humans has nothing to do with that radiation.

Royalty · June 2018

whiteflame said:

Royalty said:
If humans and monkeys share a common ancestor, that would mean that humans come from monkeys. That would be like me saying, me and my cousin share a common ancestor (by blood) but, we're not related. That wouldn't really make any sense. It wouldn't really matter what kind of ancestor monkeys and humans share. That's basically saying humans come from monkeys. Evolutionist like to say that humans evolved from monkeys because that animal has a 5th digit, like humans do. However, monkey's are not the only animals with a 5th digit.

What I mean by 'kinds' is like, a different type, or a different species, in other words.

I still don't understand how those mutations only occurred one time. It sounds like Evolution needs time, which is something we don't have because our time on this earth is only limited. So it seems like Evolution will never actually be able to prove such things.

According to Evolution, it was millions of years ago when a monkey basically changed or transformed into a human. But, there is no actual solid observable evidence for that.

I believe what the bible says when it comes to man being created. Man was created from the dust of the ground, and that is what we return to when we die. We don't return to being monkeys, or some other type of species or organisms.

I don't know. It is difficult for me to believe in Evolution when it cannot prove solid observable evidence and it's beliefs are a little over the top for me. Man was created by men (God, Christ and the Angels are men) and all of them took part in the creation of all things, according to scripture. That is solely what I believe in, what makes sense to me, and what I have faith in. It makes more sense to me that man was created by man, as opposed to man suddenly coming from an animal. If we share a common ancestor, that means we're related, which means we came from that ancestor, which in turn, means, we came from monkeys.

You haven't really addressed any of the points I just made. You say that humans and monkeys sharing a common ancestor means humans came from monkeys. That's not the case. The ancestor species that yielded both humans and monkeys likely shared a number of traits with both, and were almost certainly as distant from monkeys as they were humans. Your analogy doesn't work. I've already stated up front that we are related to monkeys, but your argument is that evolution says we came from monkeys. That's simply not so. It would be like saying that you came from your fourth cousin twice removed. As for what evidence we have that we came from monkeys, no one is saying that having a fifth digit is the only uniting characteristic. I've already pointed to our genetic similarities, but there's also stereoscopic vision, opposable thumbs, prehensile hands, larger brains (at least in some specific areas, like hand-eye coordination), the capacity for bipedalism (which has a lot to do with how the hips are formed), the collarbone and certain other shoulder structures... the list goes on.

I still don't get what a "kind" is, but as I said, I'm sticking to species. The problem with stating it is a species, though, is that you're setting a clear threshold that "evolutionists" like myself and others would have to meet. That bar is to show that speciation occurs. And I have. I've given you a number of examples of speciation, none of which you have contradicted. You keep pointing to the lack of evidence that a human came from a monkey. I've already explained how that can't and wouldn't happen, and in particular, I've explained how such a transition would be well beyond a speciation event. You're talking about a transition from one family of organisms to another. That would be akin to telling me that I'd have to prove evolution by showing a live capybara (one of the largest rodents in the world) coming out of a guinea pig. As I said before, changes accumulate, species radiate. Families of organisms don't come from individual changes or even groups of changes. It takes time and a lot of accumulated changes before an organism becomes so distant as to be called a separate family. These mutations didn't occur one time; they likely occurred multiple times, but this set of traits provided a unique advantage to the organisms that had it, ensuring that they persisted. There's a reason that all of our ancestral species are extinct: they lost their competitive advantage.

Will I or any other scientist ever be able to show you the process of evolution occurring to the point that we can demonstrate the evolution of a lifeform from a certain monkey to a human-like entity? Probably not. As I said, that would take an incredible amount of time and just the right conditions. But the major problem I have with your response is that you're essentially dismissing the entire theory based on evidence we have an extremely low chance of observing in our lifetimes. Why don't any of the examples that we have observed occurring sufficient to show that it occurs? Why is this particular event something you need to see in order to be convinced? It's not even, by your own definition, a change of kinds. It's a massive number of change of kinds.

Whatever you choose to believe is up to you. If you want to believe that human beings came from the dust, that's up to you. I don't see how our state when we die proves evolution or religious views right or wrong (we don't "return" to the dust when we die - there's a reason bones persist over millions of years, and many religions would say that our souls are reincarnated into other life forms, so I don't see why your view is more correct), especially as we're talking about how organisms begin, not how they end. We may not return to being our primal ancestors, but that doesn't have any implications for whether or not we evolved from them. Whatever you choose to believe doesn't erase available evidence. Regardless of what makes the most sense to you, at some point over the course of the history of life on this planet, we came from a non-human source. If you want to believe that's God, be my guest. Regardless of where you think we came from, the evidence shows that species radiate, and it seems incredibly dismissive to say that the origin of humans has nothing to do with that radiation.

Monkeys mysteriously transforming into humans, ties in with a change of kinds or species (again, that's what I mean by change of kinds; species). I was asking for observable evidence of a change of kinds (species), just like from monkey to man. You say that evolution does not say that humans come from monkeys, but that we share a common ancestor. If we share a common ancestor, that means we have part of that ancestor.

"Humans did not evolve from monkeys. Humans are more closely related to modern apes than to monkeys, but we didn't evolve from apes, either. Humans share a common ancestor with modern African apes, like gorillas and chimpanzees. Scientists believe this common ancestor existed 5 to 8 million years ago. Shortly thereafter, the species diverged into two separate lineages. One of these lineages ultimately evolved into gorillas and chimps, and the other evolved into early human ancestors called hominids."
Source: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/faq/cat02.html

So shortly after that time, the species of the African ape separated into two lineages. One lineage evolved into gorillas and chimps, and the other evolved into early human ancestors called hominids. Which means that humans came from apes (monkeys). The species of the apes separated into two different lineages. So if humans share a common ancestor with monkeys, that means we come from monkeys, according to evolution. Evolution says our lineage, the human lineage, comes from African apes, because the species of the African apes separated into two different lineages, one being gorillas and chimps, and the other humans. That would also mean, that there was a change of kinds or species. Some mysterious lineage couldn't have just existed from nothing. That's a fairy tale. It's common sense. So if the species of the apes separated into two lineages, one being gorillas and chimps (still monkeys) and the other being humans (change of kinds/species), then that means that evolution is saying that humans come from monkeys.

You said humans don't return to the dust when we die because our bones still exist for years. But, what happens to our entire body if we get cremated? Our entire body, including bones, turns into dust. So, in essence, our bodies return to dust when we die. Over time, human bones began to decay. So evidently, we come from dust. That is why sometimes, the remains of someone, whose remains are badly decayed, cannot be identified. There human remains are to decayed, to broken down to determine, age, gender, ethnicity, etc. So what happens? It's a cold case and the person is labeled a John Doe or Jane Doe. There is no such thing as reincarnation. That's a fairy tale that comes from religion. The bible speaks of regeneration. Meaning when we die, our bodies return to the dust of the earth, and our souls go up to TMH to be judged (those Israelites that did not keep the Law, and the heathen nations). Once we are judged and over time, are souls will return to hell or captivity/slavery, here on earth (all the soul cannot be released all at once because the earth is not big enough to hold that many people). The other nations will continue returning because they have nothing to be saved from. They were not given no laws. You ever heard the phrase, "history repeats itself"? That's because those same spirits from old times, are back today doing the same exact things that they did in times past. The white man is separating immigrant children (Issacharites/ one of the 12 tribes of Israel) from their parents. That's the same thing they did to us in slavery 500+ years ago. It's the same souls back again. So reincarnation is garbage. There is no proof of that in the bible.

I'm not deny that organisms exist. We can see (live) them with our own two eyes through technology. What I'm deny is that humans share a common ancestor with monkeys. Which, would also assert that there was a change of species. So in essence, what I'm denying is that evolution and science (the science that claims everything evolved from whatever science says) is false when it comes to how everything evolved. Because (1) no one was around those millions or billions of years ago, nor is it actually possible to give observable evidence for that. And (2) no one was there those millions or billions of years ago to witness anything being created. So, that type of science and evolution is false when it comes to that, unless you guys can take us back those millions or billions of years ago and physically show us everything being created. Which cannot happen, thus, evolution and science cannot be accurate when it comes to such things, as they cannot provide real time observable evidence for their arguments. In reality, evolution and science are the same thing as religion; they are religions themselves. They believe and have faith in something they did not witness with their own two eyes. So they rely on the sayings of man to receive their faith.

So, that's what my common sense tells me. Your common sense may tell you that humans share the same ancestor with monkeys, but we don't come from monkeys and that humans just mysteriously, out of no where, popped up. But hey, that is your belief, not mine and we are all entitled to our own beliefs. I believe in a book that is backed up by historical, archaeological, and some scientific evidence, and that is also self-evident, as we can see it playing out right in front of us. And you believe in evidence that is only backed up by word of mouth and some evidence is self-evident, and you have faith in something you cannot see and did not witness yourself, just as I have faith in a man that has no beginning or end, that I cannot see and was not able to witness him and his counsel creating all things.

whiteflame · June 2018

@Royalty

I’m going to change tactics because I don’t think you and I are having much of an argument at this point. It seems to me that much of your responses are gut responses instead of analytical ones, and I think the reason for that is the focus on humans. So let’s take the focus off our species for a while.

Look, it’s pretty clear that you don’t want to engage in the actual support I’m providing, but at the very least it would be nice if you acknowledged it. I’ve provided definitive evidence that species radiation occurs. You haven’t challenged it, and yet you keep saying there’s no evidence. What you keep saying, over and over, is that we cannot go back in time and see the moment when evolution led to each common ancestor of humans, and you’re right. But that’s not all we’re talking about here. Regardless of whether you find all of the shared characteristics, including ample genetic evidence, convincing or not in the relationship between humans and other primates, this isn’t just about where humans came from. It’s about whether evolution as a whole is solidly supported. Similarly, it’s not about whether your faith is correctly placed and supported. That’s an entirely separate argument that we’ve endeavored to avoid.

So, I’ll simplify this whole thing and make it super straightforward by asking a simple question: do you believe there is no evidence for the radiation of any species (or, as you’ve put it, a change of kinds) on the planet? If your answer is no, then I’d like to see specific responses to the instances I’ve raised before, and in particular, to the genetic evidence. I’m taking this entirely away from the question of how humans came to be and just focusing on the question of whether evolution is accurate in a general way. I’d honestly like to hear why you feel that all of this support is effectively moot.

Royalty · June 2018

whiteflame said:

@Royalty

I’m going to change tactics because I don’t think you and I are having much of an argument at this point. It seems to me that much of your responses are gut responses instead of analytical ones, and I think the reason for that is the focus on humans. So let’s take the focus off our species for a while.

Look, it’s pretty clear that you don’t want to engage in the actual support I’m providing, but at the very least it would be nice if you acknowledged it. I’ve provided definitive evidence that species radiation occurs. You haven’t challenged it, and yet you keep saying there’s no evidence. What you keep saying, over and over, is that we cannot go back in time and see the moment when evolution led to each common ancestor of humans, and you’re right. But that’s not all we’re talking about here. Regardless of whether you find all of the shared characteristics, including ample genetic evidence, convincing or not in the relationship between humans and other primates, this isn’t just about where humans came from. It’s about whether evolution as a whole is solidly supported. Similarly, it’s not about whether your faith is correctly placed and supported. That’s an entirely separate argument that we’ve endeavored to avoid.

So, I’ll simplify this whole thing and make it super straightforward by asking a simple question: do you believe there is no evidence for the radiation of any species (or, as you’ve put it, a change of kinds) on the planet? If your answer is no, then I’d like to see specific responses to the instances I’ve raised before, and in particular, to the genetic evidence. I’m taking this entirely away from the question of how humans came to be and just focusing on the question of whether evolution is accurate in a general way. I’d honestly like to hear why you feel that all of this support is effectively moot.

I've acknowledge the evidence you're providing, but I don't believe in it. I understand that you're saying that species have developed into a different species, but of the same species, they just took on different shapes and what not. But, evolution says there would be a change of species, which you haven't given me observable evidence for. I'm going to keep going back to the example of monkey to man because that is a perfect example of evolution saying that there is a change of a species into another type of species.

For the radiation of species, I do believe that they form into new types of species, though being the same kind of species. We can easily observe that with bacteria. However, at the same time, I don't believe in evidence for the radiation of any species because to be able to show me, let's say for example, a bird changing to a different type of bird, we would have to go back millions of years. So that wouldn't be observable. You understand what I mean. You can give me fossil records, or any other type of records, but that still doesn't show me or give me observable evidence for this new type of bird. I also don't believe that a species lineage can change and give birth to two different types or kinds of species, for instance, I'll go back to it again, monkey to man. That's what I'm talking about when I say "change of kinds": monkey to man. To me, these types of things are just not logically possible because I have not witnessed it with my own two eyes.

whiteflame · June 2018

@Royalty

I’m having a really hard time understanding you. You acknowledged the evidence that there have been actual, observable radiations of species, but you say they’re of the same species? If they cannot interbreed, how are they the same species? It sounds like you want more than evidence of a new species coming from another, but you’ve been saying that a change of kinds is basically a change of species. Why doesn’t this meet your threshold? What about this is not believable? I’m still very unclear. The example of monkey to man (putting aside my qualms with that phrasing) as I’ve repeatedly stated, is a massive shift in traits that required multiple evolutionary events. It goes dramatically beyond the threshold for a change of species. Why are you requiring me to meet that threshold in order to prove that evolution has objectively verifiable evidence of radiations of species? Why do I have to prove human evolution true in order to prove that evolution occurs? You’re conceding the evidence, but still stating that you don’t believe it. You should be clear why that is the case.

If a new species is forming, it is, by definition, not the same kind of species as the one it came from. You want a bird changing into another bird, but you’ve ignored the evidence I’ve given for lizards, flies, owls and finches (which, last I checked, are birds) radiating and forming new species. If witnessing a speciation event is necessary to meet your threshold and substantiate evolution, why do these not count? It seems like the only reason they don’t for you is because your definition of species doesn’t match the reality. Massive changes don’t usually happen between species, that’s why they’re so closely related taxonomically. If you want more than that (i.e. radiations of genera, class, family, etc., as would be the case for humans and other primates), then that’s a different story and I’ve already addressed the issues with doing that, none of which you’ve acknowledged.

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