The Most High vs Evolution

Debate Room
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Again, which species of human?

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O.k lets take God out of the equation, how is the sun perfectly positioned so its not to close to the Earth not to burn it up but it is also not so far away from the Earth that the Earth does not freeze over?

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Ha ha ha ha ha

the same way it did with Mars.

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64

You use the analogy of someone having a heart problem. Out of curiosity what keeps someone’s heart beating over or under hundred times per minute and until the very day someone passes away?

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You say you came from your parents and where did your original ancestors come from?

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The one you see when you look directly in the mirror


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That is actually a fair question.

As a way to address this point, consider scattering seeds at random all over the place. Most seeds will not grow, because maybe the ground is too rocky, too moist, or lacking in nutrients.

If we can imagine that plants could talk, the very few that found soil and grew might see divine influence because everywhere else is inhospitable.

Religious people want to believe that the Universe is–somehow–“fine tuned” for life, and nothing seems further from the truth.

More that 99.999% of the Universe is lethal to life (as we know it). We can’t exist in the middle of stars, or in the vast emptiness between galaxies. Sure, we have technology, but technology does not trump the laws of physics. We can visit such places, and–maybe in the future–we can set up colonies or, somehow, change our bodies in some way . . . but the emptiness of space doesn’t seem like a likely source of energy and/or raw materials. The Laws of Thermodynamics places absolute limits on what we can do (unless there is a very, very drastic breakthrough in physics that seems very unlikely).

So, more than 99.9999% of the Universe would kill us instantly.

So why does anyone think that the Universe is fine-tuned for life?

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68

The sinoatrial node. Or an artificial pacemaker if the sinoatrial node fails in some way.

The seemingly precise time-keeping of the sinoatrial node may seem mysterious, but it really isn’t. We know how to manipulate it with drugs, electronic devices, and/or surgery. I’ve done it many times with medications and electricity when I was a medic.

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Well, most of my dna is Homo sapien sapien and a bit of it is Neanderthal. So I would guess, although I’m far from expert, my ancestors were Homo sapiens (note: that’s different than homo sapien sapiens) with a random breeding event between sapiens and Neanderthal.
But if you’re really that interested in the evolution of the many human species, you should refer to literature available compiled by evolutionary biologists and anthropologists.

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Religious people have issues with the idea that we evolved from apes.

Why?

My view is that it’s ego. Personally, I like the idea that my distant ancestors were apes. This means that if I’m better than my ancestors . . . then my descendants will be much better than me, which means that humanity has a chance of improving over time. Maybe we might outgrow prejudice, greed, and short-sightedness.

So, evolution gives me hope for the future.

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Your forgot religion
but we are showing signs of outgrowing that as well.

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They came from their parents. This is really boring. If you read my previous post you would not have asked such a stupid question. Do you even know what it is you actually want to know? No ‘SPECIES’ had ever had an offspring that was different from its parent species.

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[quote=“Kevin_Levites, post:70, topic:4034”]
Religious people have issues with the idea that we evolved from apes.
[/q

Um
 to be a bit pedantic
 We are apes. We did not evolve ‘from’ anything.

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Cog; Last Warning: if you ruin my erotic homo sapiens sapiens/deistic fantasies once more I shall remove your corrugated rolling pin and hide it forever.

Edit to consume olive leaf and crack much abused footie sock over knee of statue of David.

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I would need to see sufficient objective evidence that the universe was “created” before I would believe that. It is an objective scientific fact supported by overwhelming evidence that humans evolved, but even if we didn’t know this or it were not the case, I would again need to see sufficient objective evidence that humans were created before I would believe it. It is not a choice between a creator deity and evolution, so the argument you parotted from Ray Comfort in your OP is itself a false dichotomy fallacy.

You keep saying “you believe” and “what do atheists believe” but these facts are part of an accepted scientific theory, it has nothing to do with atheism or atheists per se.

I am an atheist because no one has demonstrated any objective evidence for any deity, or that a deity is even possible. No other reason is necessary.

I found this:

“Modern humans originated in Africa within the past 200,000 years and evolved from their most likely recent common ancestor, Homo erectus, which means ‘upright man’ in Latin. Homo erectus is an extinct species of human that lived between 1.9 million and 135,000 years ago.”

CITATION

Note this has nothing to do with atheism, and though this and many other scientific facts are directly at odds with religious creation myths, my disbelief in those myths is based on the lack of any objective evidence to support them.

The scientific evidence demonstrates that humans evolved, as have all living things, but again while this contradicts creations myths in religions, my atheism is not based on this fact.

If your question has nothing to do with any deity, I’m struggling to understand why have you brought it to an atheist forum, instead of just searching for an answer online?

If you want to know how solar systems are formed. it took me a few seconds to find this:

" The Sun and the planets formed together, 4.6 billion years ago, from a cloud of gas and dust called the solar nebula. A shock wave from a nearby supernova explosion probably initiated the collapse of the solar nebula."

CITATION

Again this took literally a few seconds to Google? Why are you asking atheists questions that you could research yourself in seconds?

“The heart’s rhythmic pumping is controlled by electrical impulses that cause the walls of the heart to contract, keeping the blood flowing through your body’s veins and arteries at the proper rate.”

What is an original ancestor? Are you asking how life first emerged, if so then rephrase the question more accurately, and be honest about why you’re asking this, as you appear to be building to the very common religious apologists tactic of using an argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy, in order to try and reverse your burden of proof.

What objective evidence can you demonstrate for any deity? If it is none then please be honest, and then offer the most compelling reason you think demonstrates the existence of any deity, and I will give you an honest response.

Note this was the first time I asked you to demonstrate some objective evidence for any deity.

You seem to have returned with a raft of questions, though you previously failed to address the challenges presented to your many unevinced assertions, here for example:

It seems that my prediction is coming true, and you have returned with no real interest in honest debate.

Religious faith is defined as a strong belief in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual conviction rather than proof. If you have any objective evidence for your beliefs then demonstrate some, as you have failed to do so, indeed when asked previously your answer demonstrated you did not understand the difference between objective evidence and unevidenced religious doctrine and rhetoric.

You also don’t seem able to grasp what atheism means, or that beliefs require answers, explanations and objective evidence to support them, but a lack of belief demonstrably does not, as we all must necessarily start from that position.

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Just for clarity can you explain why after a hiatus of almost 4 months, you have returned to this thread, and failed to address any of the responses to your OP? For example my response initially highlighting that Ray Comfort is using a false dichotomy fallacy:

Any thoughts? You were warned initially not to preach, as this is a debate forum, and this return after a long absence, only to ignore all those responses again, to ask loaded questions to avoid the burden of proof of your beliefs still seems like preaching to me. Now if you again return and ignore all the answers offered, one can only infer you have no interest in honest debate, wouldn’t you agree?

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Oh look, the in tray is full again 
 this is going to be fun 


This post of yours alone tells me that you have MUCH to learn. Pay scrupulous attention to what follows, because failure to do so will result in much embarassment here on your part. I’ll begin with the following elementary concepts:

Elementary Concept No. 1 : Atheism does NOT involve “belief”. Atheism, in its rigorous formulation, consists of nothing more than suspicion of unsupported mythology fanboy assertons. That is IT. As a corollary, it does NOT involve presenting assertions of its own, merely treating YOUR assertions with proper suspicion. Indeed, you can learn the following pithy maxim to make this concept easier to digest - "NOT treating unsupported mythological assertions uncritically as act, is the very ANTITHESIS of ‘belief’ ".

Elementary Concept No. 2 : Not accepting YOUR assertions does not mean accepting contrary assertions. This is an elementary lesson taught in every class on basic logic. In the absence of supporting evidence for either assertion, it is perfectly possible to be suspicious of both A and Not-A. Indeed, this concept is made explicit in the textbook Methods of Logic by Willard Van Ormand Quine, who was one of the foremost logicians and analytical philosophers of the 20th century. I commend this textbook to everyone with the diligence required to wade through its admittedly terse prose.

Elementary Concept No. 3 : Topics such as the origin of the universe, the origin of life, or the origin of biodiversity, are NOT the remit of “atheism”. The topics just cited are the remit of SCIENCE, and in particular, the remit of well-defined and specific scientific disciplines. In the case of the three listed above, they are the remit of, in turn:

[1] Origin of the universe: Physics, particularly the subdivison known as cosmological physics;

[2] Origin of life: Chemistry, particularly the subdivision known as prebiotic chemistry (itself a subdivision of organic chemistry);

[3] Origin of biodiversity: Biology, particularly the subdivision known as evolutionary biology.

Elementary Concept No. 4 : Scientific postulates are NOT a matter of “belief”, they are a matter of understanding and evidence. Evidence that scientists have presented in abundance in several million peer reviewed scientific papers. Indeed, I’m reminded at this juncture, that not only have scientists provided, for example, direct experimental test and verification of evolutionary postulates, but that several of those tests can be replicated in any high school laboratory.

Now I suspect others here may have a different view of the output from cosmological physics, but you’ll find I’ve been prolific with respect to discussion of relevant scientific subjects, cosmological physics included, and an important part of my output here can be studied in detail here.

As for human ancestry, the scientific consensus is that we share a common ancestor with the other great apes. Before you even think of taking offence at the suggestion that we are apes, we have a large body of data, from both palaeontology and molecular phylogeny, pointing to this conclusion. Indeed, if the various ludicrous assertions peddled by evolution denialists were something other than products of their rectal passages, the entire discipline of molecular phylogeny would not even exist.

But wait, there’s an even earlier item to bring to the table, courtesy of one Carl von LinnĂ©, better known to the world as Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy. Who, wait for it, decided on the basis of comparative anatomy (a discipline he did much to make rigorous during his life, alongside his taxonomic work), that humans and chimpanzees were sufficiently closely related, to warrant their placement in the same taxonomic Genus. The reason he didn’t? Religious interference in his scientific work. About which he lamented in a letter written to the fellow taxonomist Johann Georg Gmelin. The letter in question can be read in full here.

Here’s the original Latin passage:

This translates to:

Note that Linnaeus wrote this letter SIXTY TWO YEARS BEFORE DARWIN WAS BORN. The letter is dated February 25, 1747. Charles Darwin wasn’t born until 1809, and didn’t publish any material on the subject of evolution until 50 years later. Linnaeus alighted upon the idea that humans and chimpanzees were related 112 years before Darwin published On The Origin of Species. I’ll let that one sink in for a while.

Meanwhile, let’s take a look at some of the findings from molecular phylogeny, in particular, the finding that the genomes of thousands of living organisms contain insertions known as ERVs for short. To give them their full title, these are endogenous retroviral insertions. Which occur when various retroviruses (of which there are many, I might add, indeed there are entire families of these) insert genetic material into the genome of the host.

I’ll clarify that last statement more rigorously, as it has an impact upon what follows. Any virus alters the genome of the particular cell it infects, and only that cell. Consequently, only infected cells exhibit the requisite changes I’m discussing. But, if those cells happen to be what are known as “germline cells”, i.e., cells in the testis or ovary, then because those cells produce sperm and eggs, any changes in those cells are passed on to offspring via the genetically altered sperm and eggs arising from those germline cells.

Now it transpires that this has happened many times in a wide range of organismal limeages. Mammals are the most intensively studied organisms in this regard, but you can also find germline retroviral insertions that resulted in the requisite gene remnants being disseminated across multiple generations in other organisms. That minor digression over, what is important is that because of the mechanism retroviruses use to insert their genetic material into a host, they exhibit NO preference for any particular part of a DNA strand, when insertion is conducted. As a corollary, if two different individuals are infected by a retrovirus, the insertion points in the two genomes will almost certainly be different. The probability of identical retroviral insertions occurring in two individuals is minuscule.

But here’s the major point. When any group of organisms arise from a common ancestor, ERVs can be used to trace the family tree. If that common ancestor acquired a germline ERV, that ERV will be disseminated by inheritance to all the descendants of that common ancestor. If a new ERV affected some of those descendants, that ERV will appear in their descendants in turn. Each new ERV inection in the family tree, will allow that family tree to be contructed, and the cladistics of that group of organisms determined rigorously.

Quite simply, the probability that a group of organisms simultaneously acquired the exact same sets of ERVs independently, is so astronomically small as to be dismissed for practical purposes. On the other hand, if that group of organisms inherited the ERVs from a common ancestor, the probability of this occurring is 1.

And guess what? Humans and chimpanzees share over two dozen identical ERV insertions in their genomes. The probability of this happening independently in the two lineages is almost ridiculously tiny. The probabillity of this occurring via inheritance from a common ancestor is 1.

Of course, this isn’t the only piece of data from molecular phylogeny that supports common ancestry of all great apes (and our being one of them), there are quite literally hundreds more, too many to fit into one post. But this piece of data is particularly useful, because [1] it acts as practically a guarantor of common ancestry when discovered in a clade of living organisms, and [2[ allows rigorous phylogenetic trees to be constructed. If evolution didn’t happen, none of this data would exist.

An apposite scientific paper (one of many, I might add) covering ERVs in primates, is this one:

Constructing Primate Phylogenies From Ancient Retrovirus Sequences by Welkin E. Johnson & John M. Coffin, Proceedings of the National Academy of SCiences of the USA, 96(18): 10254-10260 (31st August 1999)

From that paper:

The paper can be read in full via the link I provided without downloading the PDF, though of course the diligent can do this as well. The cotents of that paper make for fascinating reading among those of us with an interest in scientific topics.

Electrochemistry. Won’t take long for you to learn about this if you exert some diligence in the matter.

At this point, you should be aware that you are seriously out of your depth.

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This is the anthropic principle - the range of possible observations that could be made about the universe is limited by the fact that observations could happen only in a universe capable of developing intelligent life (source). If the conditions had not been right, the observations would not have happened, YOU wouldn’t have happened, and YOU would not have pondered it (or, rather, parroted it).

Besides, get your science right - the sun is not “perfectly positioned”, because the sun does not orbit the earth, but the earth orbits the sun. You should instead ask “how is the earth perfectly positioned so its[sic] not to[sic] close to the Sun [etc]”. To repeat, this is applying the anthropic principle. The real issue here is that we (you, me, everyone) are here to make that observation because we live on a planet in a solar system that is conducive to life, and that life happened. Had it been different, with the earth too close to or too far away from the sun, there would not have been any life here to ask those questions. In the same way as planets like Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and also other minor bodies in the solar system, like Pluto, our Moon, asteroids, etc. probably are not conducive to life, as well as (probably) the vast majority of exoplanets. The jury is still out when it comes to Mars and some of the moons of the outer planets. In short, you are here and can ask questions because the conditions favour it. Without favourable conditions, there will never devolop life that can ponder those questions. Or, to quote Douglas Adams:

This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’

And in case I have to spell it out for you - the puddle does not fit the hole perfectly because the hole was made for the puddle, but because the puddle naturally shapes to fill the hole. No hole, no puddle.

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On, and finally 
 @Soldier4christ 
 do NOT pollute my topics with blind, unsupported assertions.

Speaking of which, this assertion you attempted to pollute my thread with:

is merely another example of how out of your depth you are here. Because, wait for it, the only “creator” we have evidence for, is testable natural processes, not a cartoon magic man from a goat herder mythology.

Indeed, several million peer reviewed scientific papers document in exquisite detail, the evidence that testable natural processes are sufficient to explain the vast body of observational data obtained over the past 350 years. As a corollary, cartoon magic men from pre-scientific mythologies are superfluous to requirements and irrelevant.

Oh, and by the way, your favourite mythology is disqualified as a “source”, on the basis that it contains assertions about the natural world, that are known not merely to be wrong, but fatuous and absurd. Such as the whole Genesis “creation myth” drivel, which IS drivel (plants being “created” before the Sun? Do you seriously believe that garbage?), the assertions of which have been utterly destroyed by modern scientific discoveries, or the hilarious assertion contained within your mythology, that genetics is purportedly controlled by coloured sticks (this one was pulverised all the way to its constituent quarks by a 19th century monk, when he launched modern genetics as a properly constituted scientific discipline).

Meanwhile, instead of polluting that thread of mine with your fatuous and asinine blind assertion, try READING that document, in full, and learning the FACTS presented therein. Oh, and you can also take note that I addressed that assertion of yours, and several others, the first time you polluted the thread with said garbage, but it’s obvious that you couldn’t be bothered reading that comprehensive dissertation, and learning WHY your canards are not merely canards, but infantile ones at that.

Indeed, it’s obvious you never once bothered to READ any of my numerous dissertations on scientific topics in that thread, all of which were in direct response to your scatter-gun posting of unsupported blind assertions, and de facto admissions of total ignorance of even elementary scientific concepts.

Tell us all, have you never once in your life exhibited enough curiosity about relevant topics, to exert the effort to learn the pertinent facts about those topics?

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Yes, we are apes. I was trying to make a point to a theist and–in some ways–I allowed myself to sink to his level in an effort to get through to him on his own terms.

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