Evolutionism

Mareeka wrote: There are thousands of Christ conscious individuals who don't believe Christ was Jesus' last name, who believe that Christ consciouness is like the Force, present long before Jesus or the Budha ever lived. It is "through this consciousness" they believe that Jesus, Budha and many others were referring to as a means to rise out of dualistic thinking to purer awareness. Some call it the Tao to enter Qi.. . The same thousands don't believe in the model of hellfire or left out of heaven. Many of these individuals have joined creationism and evolutionism in their mind and are done with valuing one versus the other. A synthesis. They are at peace. They have compromised nothing.

Yes, I explicitly said (responding to Lila's post, again), that there a people believing all kinds of fancy stuff. Essentially my objection was that one hardly qualifies a Christian if one doesn't believe the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as portrayed in the New Testament. I did not say that separating creationism from the label that is "Christian" is impossible, I only said it was wrong because one makes no sense without the other and is rather bad, if not evil, in either case. If "rising out of dualistic thinking to purer awareness" is what some people think the words attributed to Jesus and the Buddha, respectively, are, that's fine, but it is the opposite of any judgement that can reasonably follow reading the respective scriptures and doctrines.

Yes, it is correct that an argument, or a moral stands on its merits and not on the authority or the amount of people who speak them. That is why I can confidently proclaim that the better portion of for instance Jesus' attributed teachings are awful - I don't care so much who said those words, but the words are mostly rather abusive and some awful advice at best. Same counts for most teachings of most religions at least I looked into. Granted, I may not have been in depth into many of them, but certainly the bad things you get to see right there on the surface don't necessarily need to be there and good things underneath that surface are surely no excuse to keep the bad stuff. So maybe one day we should sit down and you show and explain me your comparative analysis so I might see what tremendous amount of information I might have overlooked and how it cancels out the horrors that jumped at my eye so soon.

As for your illustration to the issues you claim you've been having... I don't understand the example. The thesis is either true or false by the nature of the statement made within it itself. The statement you made in your antithesis is entirely irrelevant to that regard. The synthesis you made is not a synthesis of the thesis and the antithesis, its just a random other statement about how you feel about the matter.
If the point you're trying to make is that there is a middle ground to the creationism-evolution debate, well.. you're wrong. And so are the thousands who think they found it. Its a violation of the Law of Excluded Middle. And no, you have compromised intellectual honesty, logical consistency and potentially a lot of knowledge by uniting the two or choosing one over the other through mere will rather than proper examination. That sort of peace comes at a price and at one no being as intelligent and decent as a human should ever be paying.

Yeah... I said issues, not gaps. A big difference there Gisteron. You may want to re-read what I said. And by issues, I mean the following:

1.Does evolution tend to proceed slowly and steadily or in quick jumps?

2.Why are some clades very diverse and some unusually sparse (for instance the Cambrian explosion)?

3.How does evolution produce new and complex features?

4.Are there trends in evolution, and if so, what processes generate them?

But I am out of this one, I can see it's not going anywhere and people are getting caught up on things.

Gisteron wrote: Actually, Sheuthem, yes, he was. They cut out pieces of that interview to emphasize that Dawkins would rather accept aliens than their imaginary friend while sweeping under the rug that he was pushed to suggest any remote possibility of Design and you can tell they have made cuts every time Dawkins gives an answer that seems to have nothing to do with the preceding question (like when for some reason Dawkins suddenly jumped to the origins of life after a preceding back and forth on the origins of the universe)... And of course Dawkins himself testified to the dishonesty of that editing in a public appearance not much later (google for "On the Art of Quote Mining"). This interview was before it started already intended to ridicule Dawkins rather than portray him. The movie is called "Expelled", by the way. And as for Dawkins admitting to major gaps in the Theory of Evolution, you'd have to bring up some quotations for that, for whenever I saw him touch upon that he quite explicitly expressed that by today there is no margin for reasonable doubt. At best what he said is that he couldn't definately disprove any deities.

Erm... I never said that Dawkins said there were gaps. In fact, I never said that anyone said there were gaps. What I actually said was that Dawkins has said similar things to that which he said in the video.

Peace of mind has no price. . if someone had to pay . . then there would be no peace.

Gisteron wrote: The 'designs' we find in nature for the most part are bad, incomplete or unnecessary and I can provide prominent examples, if needed.

Yes please...

Fine then, let's call them issues. I used gaps as a synonym and it may be that it was an incorrect usage. I apologize for the misunderstanding it caused. The point that Dawkins rarely admitted to any major ones or to the significance of any other ones remains. The point that the video made an emphasis on the little green men or on the scientific community's incomplete understanding of the abiogenesis event remains, too. As for the four questions you posed, there is probably one that really is a grand issue, thus I'll try and respond to each according to what I learned about the subject so far:
1. AFAIK and IIRC its both. Variation and selective pressure are enough to account for most of the major changes in and speciations of life forms. Random and rapid mutations are likely also contributing to the evolution of a species, although probably not as much and as often as variation alone. It is also conceivable that more rapid evolution would occur in adaptable species under extensive pressure (i.e. in times of crisis). Such time periods however are very detrimental to the population and more often than not lead to extinction or a population so small that the gene pool does no longer allow for high adaptability and an evolution as quick as it was before at least for the immediately following generations.
2. Diversity occurs under high selective pressure. It is not so much that entire populations diverge into different species, but rather that perhaps some variations inbetween aren't fit enough to survive the competition. On the other hand, if the environment is rich enough to allow for a multitude of rather similar species, their morphological diversity will not be as high. How this question relates to the Cambrian Explosion I don't quite grasp, so I apologize if my response so far doesn't address the question you actually meant to pose.
3. Variation, mutation, natural selection. New and complex features don't just come up for the most part. They evolve from simpler stages of themselves and variants that are slightly more beneficial to the individual are increasing its chances of survival and thereby the time the individual gets to pass on its genes that conveniently contain the blueprint for that slightly more advantageous variation of said feature. No mysteries here at all.
4. Generally speaking, no, there are no definite trends or goals to evolution. While natural and sexual selection are everything but random, variation within a population and mutations in individuals are and there is no feature that is being selected for in all circumstances. However, there are many instances of somewhat similar eyes evolving separately and independantly. It seems to be that a light-sensitive organ of that type is rather beneficial in many environments and it seems there are only so many sensible structures for such an organ. We know how and why they come about, but it is noteworthy that on our planet they evolved on several independant occasions, even if its no big mystery how and why they did.

Mareeka, that's my point. Peace of mind at the price of abandoning curiosity, honesty or let alone basics of logical thought, is not a peace worth having. That's the price you have to pay when claiming there is a supreme ethical good to be gained from world religions. That's the price you have to pay when trying to reconcile beliefs in magic with beliefs in reality. That's the price you have to pay when compromising a testible truth statement against your own feelings and will and then leave the issue behind. You may no longer have to wrap your mind between the two and work it out, but that is not a good gained - that is a good lost.

And now a few examples of bad "design" in nature for Brenna:
Unnecessary: The fifth toe of dogs, for instance. They have a fully formed fifth toe on each leg, with a claw growing out of it. These have no muscles attached to them and are useless at best and superfluous potential places for injuries after getting stuck somewhere or something of the sort. Same can be said of the vestigial clawed arms of emus, although, to be fair, since those are feathered, they are at least not as badly exposed as the dogs' fifth toes.
Incomplete: Just to keep digging from the top of my head, let's take the infamous laryngeal nerve of the giraffe, as Richard Dawkins so famously disected a few years ago. Its a nerve that has barely to have any considerable length from the brain to the voice box, yet it goes all the way through the neck to the chest and up again, missing the voice box by an inch on its way down. it makes a completely unnecessary detour of fifteen feet. Now, the worst thing that can happen is damage to the neck resulting in the giraffe losing its voice (which wouldn't happen were it not for the detour), so its conceivable why this intelligent design hasn't been too effectively selected against yet.
Bad: Let's take another rather famous example: The human eye. If someone is to argue that placing the film of a camera behind a wire salad and then lead the wires through a hole in the film, then I can only hope that someone is never going to be in the optics industry, but this is exactly the case with the human eye. The light-receptive cells are behind the nerve fibers attached to them and the fibers converge in a blind spot to go through the retina and on to the brain. In order to hit the retina the light needs to penetrate the nerve forest first. It is remarkable how well we can see nonetheless, but a creator would most certainly have done it better, be the creator even so dumb as a human.

And then of course there are the countless species that went extinct because of their unintelligent design. I know of no predator on earth that cannot digest human flesh. The only place we know of where we can reasonably survive is one single planet with limited resources most of which is covered by water, ice or desert each equally inappropriate as human habitat, and leaving its gravitational field going to space usually has negative effects on our health, let alone if we did so without the spacecraft we took so long to engineer.

Most of what we see looks every way it should not look like if it were designed by an intelligent entity and every way we would expect it to look like if it were bent and molded into shape by the cruel and merciless laws of physics or selective pressures for the case of life diversity. If a creator is responsible, he is a rather capricious and malevolent creator who takes enormous pains to make sure we have every reason to think there is none and to make us and our fellow life forms suffer as much as we possibly can. Now if that is the creator they are proposing - fine, I can't argue against that except for maybe the fact that there is nil evidence for even that type of creator.

EDIT: Keep it coming, guys, this is really motivating research

Gisteron wrote: 4. Generally speaking, no, there are no definite trends or goals to evolution. While natural and sexual selection are everything but random, variation within a population and mutations in individuals are and there is no feature that is being selected for in all circumstances. However, there are many instances of somewhat similar eyes evolving separately and independantly. It seems to be that a light-sensitive organ of that type is rather beneficial in many environments and it seems there are only so many sensible structures for such an organ. We know how and why they come about, but it is noteworthy that on our planet they evolved on several independant occasions, even if its no big mystery how and why they did.

Mareeka, that's my point. Peace of mind at the price of abandoning curiosity, honesty or let alone basics of logical thought, is not a peace worth having. That's the price you have to pay when claiming there is a supreme ethical good to be gained from world religions. That's the price you have to pay when trying to reconcile beliefs in magic with beliefs in reality. That's the price you have to pay when compromising a testible truth statement against your own feelings and will and then leave the issue behind. You may no longer have to wrap your mind between the two and work it out, but that is not a good gained - that is a good lost.

I seek to understand what you are saying . . .


Who has abandoned curiosity? honesty? and basics of logical thought?

Does it say anywhere in this thread that someone makes claims to a supreme ethical good to be gained from world religions?

By accepting a religious belief as substitute for scientific inquiry, curiosity is being abandoned. To ask "How do I confirm this?" instead of "What is going on?" is not curious, although to be fair, if one is going honestly about the former, the latter might follow.
As for honesty and logical thought, those two go together for the most part. What you basically implied in post #126732 is that creation and evolution are reconcilable beliefs in thousands of minds, and just to back you up, here is a quote from that post:

Many [of these 'Christ conscious people'] have joined creationism and evolutionism in their mind and are done with valuing one versus the other. A synthesis. They are at peace. They have compromised nothing.

And I disagree specifically with the last sentence. Yes, there are people living with a generally scientific mind and religious beliefs, some are even active in both. However, to reiterate what I said, this comes at a price. They are living one life in church and another one at work, having a double standards on truth claims and are genuinely inconsistent for that reason. Granted, they may be sincere with both and not realize how two-faced they really are, and this gap in self-awareness, by the way, is yet another price they have to pay to reconcile the mutually exclusive.
I'm not so much pointing fingers as saying that the idea that you can be both within and outside a box at once is in violation of the most fundamental and axiomatic rules of logic. The proposition itself denies all of human thought, let alone math, outright and cannot be effectively defended with or without any degree of honesty.

As for supreme ethics in world religions.. No, this was not made an explicit point although it was implied in the same post #126732, even if probably common ethics rather than superior ethics were meant, and for that matter, one might say why bother for the least of those ethics are good and those that are usually are also found outside of religion and in fact with or without being taught them as a child. So consider this not so much a rebuttal of the point you made (which was actually about fear of investigation) but rather a rebuttal by anticipation of a point that can potentially be meant, implied or made in the future within this discussion. And yes, the price one has to pay to claim that the religions are not only comparable but unitable and that any good ethics can be derived from that is pretty mucht he same: More sooner than later there is no honest way of arguing that position any longer.

Gisteron wrote: By accepting a religious belief as substitute for scientific inquiry, curiosity is being abandoned. To ask "How do I confirm this?" instead of "What is going on?" is not curious, although to be fair, if one is going honestly about the former, the latter might follow.
As for honesty and logical thought, those two go together for the most part. What you basically implied in post #126732 is that creation and evolution are reconcilable beliefs in thousands of minds, and just to back you up, here is a quote from that post:

Many [of these 'Christ conscious people'] have joined creationism and evolutionism in their mind and are done with valuing one versus the other. A synthesis. They are at peace. They have compromised nothing.

And I disagree specifically with the last sentence. Yes, there are people living with a generally scientific mind and religious beliefs, some are even active in both. However, to reiterate what I said, this comes at a price. They are living one life in church and another one at work, having a double standards on truth claims and are genuinely inconsistent for that reason. Granted, they may be sincere with both and not realize how two-faced they really are, and this gap in self-awareness, by the way, is yet another price they have to pay to reconcile the mutually exclusive.
I'm not so much pointing fingers as saying that the idea that you can be both within and outside a box at once is in violation of the most fundamental and axiomatic rules of logic. The proposition itself denies all of human thought, let alone math, outright and cannot be effectively defended with or without any degree of honesty.

As for supreme ethics in world religions.. No, this was not made an explicit point although it was implied in the same post #126732, even if probably common ethics rather than superior ethics were meant, and for that matter, one might say why bother for the least of those ethics are good and those that are usually are also found outside of religion and in fact with or without being taught them as a child. So consider this not so much a rebuttal of the point you made (which was actually about fear of investigation) but rather a rebuttal by anticipation of a point that can potentially be meant, implied or made in the future within this discussion. And yes, the price one has to pay to claim that the religions are not only comparable but unitable and that any good ethics can be derived from that is pretty mucht he same: More sooner than later there is no honest way of arguing that position any longer.

well i don't have religious beliefs, therefore, i can't see how substitution could be construed.

i don't have a clue how one could think that superior or supreme ethics is implied in the post you referenced.

I respect and accept your decisions whatever means for reasoning that are used.

Mareeka wrote: well i don't have religious beliefs, therefore, i can't see how substitution could be construed.

Fair enough. I was trying to address your words or what other people may interpret in them. Its not about anyone specific, its just things that I think are worth being said and if someone gains anything from reading them, that's good enough for me

i don't have a clue how one could think that superior or supreme ethics is implied in the post you referenced.

Agreed, it technically isn't in there. Again, its about the conversation and the ideas that have been or will be emerging within it.

I respect and accept your decisions whatever means for reasoning that are used.

Can't say I do the same, unfortunately. Sound reasoning to me is about as important as the end results. Better be a Muslim for good reasons than a Jaine for bad ones, so to say

*shuts the heck up to let others talk*