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My mind is being screwed up here. What are X, Y and Z?</p>
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<p>X = infallibility of clergy/divine inspiration
Y = torture people
Z = infallibility of clergy exists only for particular clergy and only in cases of proclamation of faith and morals</p>
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<p>This raises the problem: How is a stub useful? Unless it provides some major advantage it is just as likely to die out randomly as it is to spread.</p>
<p>Even if it grants some advantage under some strange situation which we assume occured, it would take many generations for the stub mutation to multiply and replace the non-stub population. Until the stub mutation was common across the population it is highly unlikely that another mutation extending the stub would occur.</p>
<p>And this all assumes that the stub can even happen in the first place, something we have not observed as far as I know.</p>
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<p>Sure, this is the kind of mutation we expect to see given a Creation->Entropy theory. Code for horns already exists in deer. This code was corrupted in this individual, causing it to only have one horn instead of two.</p>
<p>If they found a deer that had been born with wings, I’d be impressed.</p>
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<p>Not Catholicism, but rather abuses of Christianity, of which the most prominient examples happen to have involved Catholics. I could also point to the Anglican church in the 1600s, or the Puritans in the early colonies, or the “hard shell Baptists” that turned some people I know away from the church… All people who started asserting things not supported by the teachings of Jesus as if they were unquestionably the Will of God.</p>
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<p>When Catholicism “teaches Z, which is consistent with Y” then there’s not a problem. I’m arguing that institutional religion has a tendancy towards X.</p>
<p>Because you start with “some clergy are inspired by God”, but it is all to easy to end up at “I, clergy, say this. I am inspired by God. If you do not do this you will go to hell, plus my followers will make you wish you were already there.”</p>
<p>Institutionalized religion might be a bad term to use. Basically I mean Christianity where you don’t put the statments of the leaders to the “truth check” of whether they are consistent with the Bible.</p>
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<p>It was just an example. But if Christianity predicts that Christians will be happier (or healthier, or more purple, or whatever), and then these predicted results take place, then this can be considered support for the belief.</p>
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<p>It’s possible that God can be observed. Say in 500 years Jesus comes back and crushes Satan in a giant Armageddon. Then that will obviously be observable.</p>
<p>But so far neither possibility has taken place. So here and now Evolution and Christianity are both not scientifically verifiable.</p>
<p>Future research may prove either of those false or true (actually they can only be proven true, as if they are not observed there remains the possibility that they will happen in the future).</p>
<p>The problem is that many people seem to believe that we already have proven Evolution, not that it may be proven in the future, which is what I believe.</p>
<p>I like how this thread has gotten so far from the original question: “Which is more useful to society”.</p>
<p>It went from that to “which should we choose to follow” to “do we have to choose” to “is atheism true” to “is evolution proven true”…</p>
<p>With occasional side-debates about Islam, Catholicism, the Bible, the Holocaust, and the Nature of Knowledge.</p>
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I would be too, considering how it wouldn’t happen. Fully functional wings don’t just appear out of nowhere. Evolution happens in many small steps, and the purpose of any trait can change several time in a species existence.</p>
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AKA mutation. This is how change occurs. Also, code for antlers exists in deer, not a single horn. And this is only one generation worth of change. Imagine what a deer would look like after a million years worth of this kind of change. You wouldn’t recognize it, and it wouldn’t be a deer either.</p>
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<p>Of course! Not only do they not happen in one generation, they don’t happen in many generations, at least as far as we have observed.</p>
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<p>AKA destruction: continue this and you will end with a creature lacking code for anything useful.</p>
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<p>I thought you might say that :P. Actually, “Unicorn” didn’t have anything new. The articles I’ve read call it either an antler or a horn, but that’s just the writing of the article. There’s nothing to suggest that the deer has a horn as opposed to its parents having antlers.</p>
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<p>I can: it’d look dead, while natural selection kept the non-debiliated members around.</p>
<p>I don’t expect you to agree with me or think I’m right, hahalolk, I’m just trying to show that I have valid reasons to believe what I believe.</p>
<p>@Sithis - there are opinions that just simply aren’t true. Someone who disputes the existence of an electron or anything that is unquestionably true deserves to get told up. Holding that the electron isn’t true isn’t a valid opinion being that it contradicts fact. Theres nothing in the definition of “opinion” that makes it infallible, even to the people who believe it.</p>
<p>If an argument is misleading or is full of logical errors then I can’t really say that dismissing it is ad hominem. You’d get annoyed and frustrated with someone real fast who disregards logic, makes baseless claims or states something as true when its just misleading or flat out wrong. Both groups do all of those things and it’d be nice if they looked at the evidence honestly but they don’t.</p>
<p>I’ve made my arguments for why the analogy draws parallel. There is indisputable parallel and room for analogy.</p>
<p>About your claim that I “appealed to authority”: not so, I was pointing out your claim that no one agrees with me wasn’t true since its been published and used before.</p>
<p>When someone says the theory of gravity or the theory of evolution they’re not saying that it is just a hypothesis. Gravity exists, the earth orbits the sun, life evolves - ALL of those are true. It just isn’t a bright opinion for someone to say that gravity still might not exist just because its the “theory” of gravity.</p>
<p>The burden of proof is on the evolution denier and and holocaust denier to prove that their beliefs are correct. Evolution has and continues to prove itself true just as holocaust historians have proven that occurrence to be true. If the deniers can’t just contradict the evidence is there really a point over wasting time with them?</p>
<p>@ksarmand: I thought you weren’t going to respond? I thought both of you weren’t going to? Anyways, you just said that there is something similar between the two which just proved my basic point. But you falsely claim that theres only one thing in common. I’ve stated what these similarities are.</p>
<p>And yes, the holocaust has been dropped from many curricula - just left out of it completely. </p>
<pre><code>CollegeNET Forum - British Schools to Stop Teaching About Holocaust
</code></pre>
<p>My middle school history teacher denied the holocaust. I can’t prove this to you and I don’t care if you dont believe me but holocaust deniers have a dangerous level of power just as those who want creationism taught or evolution excluded. Evolution and the holocaust both occurred and it just ****es me off when deniers can influence whats taught without evidence and blinding themselves to proof.</p>
<p>And I agree, holocaust denial is hate speech. But tell that to a denier and they will jump all over you. Its sad. You won’t budge them from their position either. And if you compare them to another hate group they’ll **** and moan about how that isn’t fair when it’s true. Holocaust denial is like saying “we know more than historians and photographs and camera footage” whereas creationism is “we know more than evolutionary scientists and the abundance of evidence and fossil record.”</p>
<p>And to return your closing statements I say stop disputing it. Get my basic point and move on - that’s all I ask you to do. The original statement you quoted is analogically equal to a creationist coming up to an evolutionary biologist and saying “what you’ve been doing your entire life is wrong. God did everything! Species don’t change. We don’t have evidence. Those thousands of journals full of evolutionary evidence are wrong and you’re all stupid enough to think it’s evidence!”</p>
<p>@post 1355: evolution also has many people who have witnessed it - in the laboratory in the fossil record, through biochemistry, through biogeography, through empirical methods. You just don’t want to believe it. I think you know that you’re wrong deep down.</p>
<p>@post 1366: Yes, in breeding you get different combinations but if you change genetic material in any way its new. Different combinations lead to new traits and if the traits become different enough over time and there are barriers between populations you’ll get entirely new species which is an evolutionary event.</p>
<p>And you are wrong by saying that there’s no such thing as a beneficial mutation.</p>
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<p>Your original assertion was that Holocaust deniers wanted to have their beliefs taught in the curriculum, not that the Holocaust was dropped from the curriculum. Therefore, your point is unnecessary and irrelevant to your original assertion.</p>
<p>Because you still seem to forget the basis of my criticism, I shall post it once more:</p>
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<p>Again, that’s not a good analogy.</p>
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<p>Well, there are certain portions of your posts pertaining to our discussion that I do not respond to, simply because they are immaterial to our dispute.</p>
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<p>Stop changing your original position. Remember, you claimed that they were the same in the way they wanted their curriculum taught as the only truth. Now that you’ve elaborated, the falsity of that statement is clear.</p>
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<p>You’ve forgotten to add the concrete, tangible evidence and verified eyewitness testimonies. Those are two things that differentiate it from evolution.</p>
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<p>I enjoy dragging things out immensely; you can stop responding if you wish.</p>
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<p>That doesn’t even begin to approach the reaction of someone directly affected by genocide to a denier’s view, and it’s a scurrilous position you adopt if you claim so.</p>
<p>Me lie pie :D</p>
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<p>Actually, those things are not observations of Evolution. They are observations of things which can be interpreted as making sense if Evolution is true.</p>
<p>To observe Evolution, we would have to observe a population of, say lizards, and see if they ever developed any new features such as feathers or an organ to sense thermal radiation, which did not exist at all in the population’s genome before.</p>
<p>Since according to Evolution this would take a very long time, you are safe to assert that it would happen and I can’t disprove you. However, I am equally safe to assert that it wouldn’t and you can’t disprove me.</p>
<p>Since this is the case, neither theory can be shown irrefutably to be Fact. However, one theory may be better supported by the evidence.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, “supported by the evidence” tends to be rather subjective. I can look at a spider and see all the myriad things it can do, and decide that it is not reasonable to assume that all of those traits occured one at a time by chance and were each preserved by natural selection.</p>
<p>But if you come at it with a different set of presuppositions, then you may draw a different conclusion.</p>
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<p>Believe me, if I wasn’t really well convinced, I’d go with the scientific consensus.</p>
<p>pquote]Yes, in breeding you get different combinations but if you change genetic material in any way its new. Different combinations lead to new traits and if the traits become different enough over time and there are barriers between populations you’ll get entirely new species which is an evolutionary event.
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<p>If that’s your definition of Evolution then sure, I believe it. Given a population with genome A of traits, natural selection and varying enviromental factors will very likely result in populations with genomes B, C. and D, each of which consists of a selection of the genes originally present in A. But you will never get population E, which contains an entirely different set of genes.</p>
<p>Speciation (splitting A in B, C, and D, each consisting of traits orignally in A) is a well documented part of the natural world. Evolution (getting from A to E, which contains a bunch of traits that didn’t exist in A) is a unconfirmed hypothesis.</p>
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<p>This isn’t exactly what I claim, but anyway, this kind of situation does happen. Truth hurts sometimes.</p>
<p>I imagine it was rather a blow to the Geocentric scientists when their theory, which had stood for thousands of years, was shown wrong…</p>
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<p>This is very one-dimensional. Gravity, as viewed in classical mechanics, is a great example of how theories are not just static “facts.” Newton’s Law of Gravity is only valid in extreme conditions where we move very slowly. The Law predicted that the source of gravity somehow came from mass and that this mass exerted a force from a distance. We now know better (or we think we do, anyways). General relativity shows that it is not just mass that creates this “force,” that this “force” is really a curve in spacetime, and that the classical equation of gravity is not useful at high speeds.</p>
<p>Now, how does this segue into Evolution?</p>
<p>To accept that Finches have different beak sizes and that these different sizes could be explained by the statistical control of natural selection is not to accept Evolution. Likewise, there have been many other comparisons of fossils, etc., and many of these findings support (by not contradicting) Evolution. You can accept all this data as real without believing that Evolution describes reality. </p>
<p>Newton’s Law of Gravity correctly predicted the existence of binary stars, the exact orbits of plants, and the trajectories of so many objects on and around earth. For a long time, the observable universe was telling us that Newton’s Law was complete and correct. But our observable universe changed.</p>
<p>Likewise, our observable universe–which currently supports Evolution (debatable, I know)–is bound to change. Evolution is likely too simple to explain the incredible biological feats going on, even within our own bodies. </p>
<p>You do not know what has not been observed. The observable reality is not necessarily the entire reality–it might not even be a partial reality. It is reasonable to say that Evolution explains and predicts the observable reality as we currently know it, but this does not discredit Creationism or prove Evolution. It can only be said that, from our limited data sets, Evolution models our results better than Creationism. And, as we’ve seen in this thread, even this is debated.</p>
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<p>Yes, this.</p>
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<p>Disputing the existence of an electron is totally different than disputing the Law of Gravity or the Theory of Evolution. We can now observe electrons physically. Electrons move so quickly and typically help atoms bond in a time frame that we can physically observe from start to finish. You can still doubt your senses, but this is a different level of doubt than simply doubting Evolution.</p>
<p>It is true that not all properties of an electron can be known at the same time (e.g. momentum and position), but this does not present a significant confound to the existence of an electron. Gravity and Evolution are not physically observable in the same sense as an electron.</p>
<p>^^ This is an example of a reasonable person. Thank you.</p>
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<p>To completely exclude is to avoid it altogether, no?</p>
<p>Deniers want their beliefs heard in the education setting:</p>
<p>[PublicEye.org</a> - The Website of Political Research Associates](<a href=“http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v08n3/holodeni.html]PublicEye.org”>PublicEye.org - The Website of Political Research Associates)</p>
<p>I also think you should watch this:</p>
<p>[YouTube</a> - Michael Shermer compares creationism to Holocaust denial (mirror)](<a href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B387S0F4dzQ]YouTube”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B387S0F4dzQ)
Maybe Michael Shermer can get the basic point through your head.</p>
<p>Heres a quote from this website: [ADL</a> wants Facebook to bar Holocaust-denier groups | j. the Jewish news weekly of Northern California](<a href=“http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/38066/adl-wants-facebook-to-bar-holocaust-denier-groups/]ADL”>http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/38066/adl-wants-facebook-to-bar-holocaust-denier-groups/)</p>
<p>“But it’s not the sort of thing you can easily have a debate about. Few periods in history are more well-documented than the Holocaust. It’s not debating the Middle East conflict. It’s debating something that is an established fact.”</p>
<p>Do you dispute that “few theories in science are more well-documented than evolution?”</p>
<p>From: [Hate</a> in the Classroom: Free Expression, Holocaust Denial, and Liberal Education<a href=“So%20don’t%20say%20that%20there%20isnt%20a%20parallel%20in%20educational%20controversy”>/url</a></p>
<p>“It is concerned with the expression of this idea by educators. Should we allow Holocaust deniers to teach in schools? This article attempts to answer this question through a close look at the Canadian experience.”</p>
<p><a href=“http://www1.yadvashem.org/download/education/conf/PentlinandShapirortf.pdf[/url]”>http://www1.yadvashem.org/download/education/conf/PentlinandShapirortf.pdf](<a href=“http://www.eric.ed.gov:80/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=EJ782966&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=EJ782966]Hate”>http://www.eric.ed.gov:80/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=EJ782966&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=EJ782966)</a></p>
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<p>Go read what I wrote above.</p>
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<p>That wasnt what I was talking about. You were making “I’m not going to talk about this anymore with you” statements.</p>
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<p>This is a straw man argument. Both groups want to foist their beliefs on other people – thats indisputable.</p>
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<p>So the scientists who observe speciation and natural selection in fast-breeding organisms - which basically IS “verified eyewitness testimony” - are bunk? Are evolutionary scientists who provide “concrete, tangible evidence” wrong like creationists think they are?</p>
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<p>You can do the same. What you’re saying doesnt change the fact that evolution-doesn’t-happen people are wrong just as the-holocaust-didn’t-happen people are wrong. And I can provide evidence of similarity as I have been doing over and over again.</p>
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<p>Are you denying that evolution scientists aren’t offended by those who say that no evolution happens? (something they’ve studied and verified their entire lives) No sane historian would say that the holocaust never happened just as no sane evolutionary scientist would say that evolution never happened. If you dispute that then you’re clearly wrong. If you don’t then the similarity is unquestionably there.</p>
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<p>Someone can’t say that there is no attractive force holding us down right now. No matter whether Newtons or Einsteins theory is used for scientific purposes, we know that gravity exists.</p>
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<p>And we also know Finches have different size beaks (among many other data).</p>
<p>The debate isn’t about the raw data available. The debate is how this raw data is modeled into a theory. </p>
<p>Supporting Evolution is supporting a particular theory that explains the data available. Saying that Evolution is true is saying that a theory is true–which would be the same as saying that Newton’s Law of Gravity is true 100 years ago.</p>
<p>It’s like any evidence collected. You can debate the data and how it was collected. But you can also debate how this data is analyzed. Evolution is an analysis/compression of data; it is not the data itself.</p>
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It is ad hominem if you just dismiss the arguments without specifying the errors in them. You can’t just say “The arguments group x and y make are fallacious, illogical, and stupid. Go find out the evidence of that yourself.” Also, I would not be annoyed or frustrated with those people unless their actions were a destruction of my livelihood. I recognize that it is seemingly impossible for a person to be completely and always rational unless they have a massively damaged amygdala. The possibility exists that someone will be irrational in one of those times where they are challenging your world view. That’s life, I suppose.</p>
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I don’t see any of those people posting in this thread. Nor have you presented me with actual evidence that it has been published in the exact way you stated it before.</p>
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<p>I’ll bring up my quote of Sir Karl Popper again:
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<p>EDIT: With an addition by Francis Bacon:
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<p>Science is in the method, not the results.</p>
<p>Additionally and unfortunately for someone of your mindset, some people are just Existentialists and don’t care very much for rationalism and empiricism.</p>