Creation & Evolution OFFICIAL DEBATE

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Re: Creation & Evolution OFFICIAL DEBATE

Post by StarPhoenix »

"Humankind cannot bear very much reality." T.S. Elliot
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Re: Creation & Evolution OFFICIAL DEBATE

Post by Anakha56 »

Coming in from the other side of the pond now...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... Koran.html
Muslim medical students boycotting lectures on evolution... because it 'clashes with the Koran'

By Daily Mail Reporter

Muslim students, including trainee doctors on one of Britain's leading medical courses, are walking out of lectures on evolution claiming it conflicts with creationist ideas established in the Koran.

Professors at University College London have expressed concern over the increasing number of biology students boycotting lectures on Darwinist theory, which form an important part of the syllabus, citing their religion.

Similar to the beliefs expressed by fundamentalist Christians, Muslim opponents to Darwinism maintain that Allah created the world, mankind and all known species in a single act.

Steve Jones emeritus professor of human genetics at university college London has questioned why such students would want to study biology at all when it obviously conflicts with their beliefs

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z1f1vF0xlv


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*sigh*

Friggin Dr Dino infecting everyone now...
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Re: Creation & Evolution OFFICIAL DEBATE

Post by KALSTER »

Yes, some of those allegations are true (some not), but these people really grope at anything they can get their hands on. Scientists, believe it or not, are human too! :) Good thing we have the scientific method, isn't it? Too bad some of these people seem incapable of understanding it, no matter how carefully it is explained.
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Re: Creation & Evolution OFFICIAL DEBATE

Post by Prime »

It's not like they will respect their patients. Sorry, you are female. If i touch you, I will become unclean so you'll have to lie there and bleed to death...infidel...

Or a fundamentalist doing gynaecology? Everytime a patient pitched up in the middle of her cycle, he'll want to stone her...

:?
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Re: Creation & Evolution OFFICIAL DEBATE

Post by hamin_aus »

:lol: at the false evidence pic

We need one for creationists false evidence:

bible.jpg

:troll:
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Re: Creation & Evolution OFFICIAL DEBATE

Post by GreyWolf »

love this:
Geology shows that fossils are of different ages. Palaeontology shows a fossil sequence, the
list of species representing changes through time. Taxonomy shows biological relationships
among species. Evolution is the explanation that threads it all together. Creationism is the
practice of squeezing your eyes shut and wailing ‘DOES NOT!’
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Re: Creation & Evolution OFFICIAL DEBATE

Post by Anakha56 »

Image

Something I stumbled upon...
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Re: Creation & Evolution OFFICIAL DEBATE

Post by CapNemo »

Here is what I don't get why does people who make fun of other people's believes have such an unshakable believe in winning the lotto a couple of hundred times in a row
"I hear voices in my head but they are my own this time"
"Except for a battle lost, there is nothing so terrible as a battle won."
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Re: Creation & Evolution OFFICIAL DEBATE

Post by hamin_aus »

CapNemo wrote:Here is what I don't get why does people who make fun of other people's believes have such an unshakable believe in winning the lotto a couple of hundred times in a row
If I were to guess your beliefs based on the grammatical accuracy of that sentence, I would guess you believe bananas are tasty.
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Re: Creation & Evolution OFFICIAL DEBATE

Post by CapNemo »

:lol: feel free to use that sentence in an English test about punctuation as well if you want too. Oh and where can we debate that last statement?
"I hear voices in my head but they are my own this time"
"Except for a battle lost, there is nothing so terrible as a battle won."
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Re: Creation & Evolution OFFICIAL DEBATE

Post by GreyWolf »

CapNemo wrote:Here is what I don't get why does people who make fun of other people's believes have such an unshakable believe in winning the lotto a couple of hundred times in a row
Mathematically speaking, there is a higher chance of me winning the lotto multiple times, than there being a bearded sky man who created the universe.
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Re: Creation & Evolution OFFICIAL DEBATE

Post by CapNemo »

Was revering to the amount of times the lotto needed to be won for everything to happen by chance for people to exist. Oh I would really like to see the statistics that was used in calculating that probability might be interesting
"I hear voices in my head but they are my own this time"
"Except for a battle lost, there is nothing so terrible as a battle won."
"Sanity is for the weak!!"
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Re: Creation & Evolution OFFICIAL DEBATE

Post by KALSTER »

CapNemo wrote:Was revering to the amount of times the lotto needed to be won for everything to happen by chance for people to exist. Oh I would really like to see the statistics that was used in calculating that probability might be interesting
But that is also a commonly repeated fallacy. It is not just pure chance. Different parts of the genome mutates at different rates, in a random way, but still within certain restricting parameters (you won't get an antelope that suddenly has a pair of eyes on it's bottom). Then the decidedly non-random environment selects on these mutations.

You could literally take anything and work out extreme odds of it ever happening, yet it does. It is a misapplication of the laws of probability, either deliberately or ignorantly, used as a reductio absurdum logical fallacy to discredit abiogenesis/evolution. It is an untenable argument.
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Re: Creation & Evolution OFFICIAL DEBATE

Post by hamin_aus »

Did you really just post latin in a response to a guy who who confuses belief and believe :?:
:P
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Re: Creation & Evolution OFFICIAL DEBATE

Post by doo_much »

jamin_za wrote:Did you really just post latin in a response to a guy who who confuses belief and believe :?:
:P
Here's some more latin.

Ad hominem attackes from jamin? I'm surprised.
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Re: Creation & Evolution OFFICIAL DEBATE

Post by hamin_aus »

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Re: Creation & Evolution OFFICIAL DEBATE

Post by doo_much »

jamin_za wrote:Image
My comment was tongue in cheek - don't you Jackie Chan me! :mrgreen:

Like this.

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A surprising amount of modern pseudoscience is coming out of the environmental sector. Perhaps it should not be so surprising given that environmentalism is political rather than scientific.
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Re: Creation & Evolution OFFICIAL DEBATE

Post by CapNemo »

Kalster I'm not just talking about life forms mutating I'm talking about every thing from the universe just by chance exploding from nothing up to your planet just by chance being the right distance for liquid water etc etc.

Jamin luckily you are brilliant enough to understand what I meant to say even if the grammar isn't perfect
"I hear voices in my head but they are my own this time"
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Re: Creation & Evolution OFFICIAL DEBATE

Post by KALSTER »

Ok, but the same point stands.

Have you heard of the anthropic principle? Consider this: our planet is perfect for life, but if it wasn't, we wouldn't be here to debate it in any case. Conversely, because it is, we are and we can. The big bang has to have happened and the laws of physics must be as they are now for us to be able to contemplate our existence. Because we can contemplate our existence mean the universe must be as it is in the first place. I am not sure I am doing a good job of explaining this....

It is just like calculating the immense odds that the exact configuration of molecules that make you, that was present in the original planetary nebula, would at this moment sit in front of your computer and read this text. The odds are immense, but you are still sitting there, reading this.

The chances are immense and mind boggling, but it does not really say anything about the significance of our universe just by being so.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
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from hunter-gatherer to cutter-paster

Post by jee »

I think this analogy needs to be taken very seriously, because just as natural selection has acted on genetic populations, and sculpted them, we'll see how social learning has acted on human populations and sculpted them.

What do I mean by "sculpted them"? Well, I mean that it's changed the way we are. And here's one reason why. If we think that humans have evolved as social learners, we might be surprised to find out that being social learners has made us less intelligent than we might like to think we are.
Long but interesting article by Mark Pagel,an evolutionary biologist on social learning and how the networking and innerwebs is creating copy-pasters is taking away our incentives to be creative.
"Integrity" and "integer" both contain a Latin root meaning "whole; complete." The root sense, then, is that people may be said to be acting with integrity when their beliefs, words, and actions have a sense of unity or wholeness.
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Re: Creation & Evolution OFFICIAL DEBATE

Post by RiaX »

Hmmm this is still going, suppose people are blind to face the truth. God did not create man, man created god and there is a medical theory behind this. I think it was a german prof that created what is known as the "god helmet" where by running a neurological stimulant through the right side of the brain (a specific point i forgot where exactly, but the mirrored area of where the limbic area is located on the left, the stimulatant is passed on the right side). The brain then creates presences so speak and the reason it does that is to protect the mind itself from collapsing from sheer stress (obviously its more complex than that but this is the simplest way i can put it). In other words it makes sense all prophets in history had some extreme event happen to them so its possible that their brain's activated this response and in their time of gods and goblins they believed it to be a devine intervention.

Anyways if you think of it logically it would make no sense, im going to use easter as an example (this is no attack on christianity). I was told that jesus was killed and then came back from the dead walked around for 40 days around this time and this is why christians celebrate easter. Now if I said my friend died and woke up from the grave and walked around for 40 days, I would be commited to a psych hospital. So my point is why believe stories written so far back in history BY MEN who didnt even understand what the stars were?

So what this has to do with the debate of the topic? simple creation is an act of god, therefore disproving god disproves this theory ;)

k bring the angry flames :O
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Re: Creation & Evolution OFFICIAL DEBATE

Post by Stuart »

RiaX wrote: why believe stories written so far back in history BY MEN who didnt even understand what the stars were?
Because they were eyewitnesses.
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Re: Creation & Evolution OFFICIAL DEBATE

Post by hamin_aus »

Stuart wrote:Because they were eyewitnesses.
Are you sure?
There is no way to verify that the any of the 12 books of the apostles were actually written by the apostles.
IIRC they were mostly simple fishermen and herders. Probably illiterate. I doubt very much they could write their own names - let alone what essentially constitutes the New Testament.

It's most probable these works were written decades if not hundreds of years after the fact by people mixing word of mouth stories with guesses and personal bias. Then the Catholic church came along took all the works and canonised it into something they could use to control the masses.
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Re: Creation & Evolution OFFICIAL DEBATE

Post by KALSTER »

The fact that the gospels don't agree with each other that well, along with the position of the majority of scholars, really puts a big question mark over the first hand account idea. As far as I know, the earliest verified reference to Jesus was by Josephus some 90 AD and only references the brother of Jesus, the Christ, James.

Plus, I saw David Copperfield fly and walk through the Great Wall of China and I don't think he was magical.
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Re: Creation & Evolution OFFICIAL DEBATE

Post by doo_much »

jamin_za wrote: It's most probable these works were written decades if not hundreds of years after the fact by people mixing word of mouth stories with guesses and personal bias.
When I was taught the dogma, popular thinking was that the authors had been inspired by the holy ghost. Of course the fact that the protestants don't see some books being canonical which are held so by the catholics was never discussed.
One of my favorite moments was when we were busy with 'katkisasie' (catechism?) and when asked how christians knew this to be true, the preacher answered that the bible told us this was true.

He really didn't seem to get the irony in that. So I was taught about recursion even before I touched my first computer. :roll:
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A surprising amount of modern pseudoscience is coming out of the environmental sector. Perhaps it should not be so surprising given that environmentalism is political rather than scientific.
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