Tulip wrote:

"Stahrwe, you should read The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. He explains in very polite terms why your whole watch in a bag idea is purest idiocy. Life evolved. Get used to it."

Carefully read the below warning Dawkins gives to his readers in the The Blind Wachmaker:

"This book is not a dispassionate scientific treatise...Far from being dispassionate, it has to be confessed that in parts this book is written with a passion which, in a professional scientific journal, might excite comment. Certainly it seeks to inform, but it also seeks to persuade"

Lets be savy about these types of "scientific" books written for laymen.
Dawkins is a highly skilled literalist. He mixes personal "passion" with a pinch of science explained in terms that can be digested by a non scientist.
His "passions" are personal opinions that would not get past professional scientists conducting peer review and would be thrown out of professional scientific journals as a result.

The Blind Watchmaker is not a "polite" work. One of its primary objectives is to attack religion.
Evolution/life does not need a designer. It blindly does its work without a god.
That's the thrust of this book. Dawkins leads his readers to that conclusion, which by the way is NOT a scientific statement but a personal belief (view) Dawkins is pronouncing on his own.

Dawkins is able to entwine science and his personal beliefs so well the casual unskilled reader becomes hypnotized, and as a result, pusuaded by the skills of the author.

So lets call it like it really is, Robert.

http://io9.com/5976112/how-19+year+old- ... eationists

Good move Kopplin!

Hey, you can't prove creationism ain't true, you damn arrogant scientists. Teach the controversy!

ant wrote:Dawkins is able to entwine science and his personal beliefs so well the casual unskilled reader becomes hypnotized, and as a result, pusuaded by the skills of the author.

One of its primary objectives is to attack religion.

Good Lord!?!?!? say it isn't so.... religion is above reproach and to attack it is clearly sociopathic!!!!

think of all those pure and wonderful dogmas that should be above reproach and certainly not subject to a critical analysis!!

what next, challenging the flat earth doctrine?!

Kopplin FTW!

he contacted Sir Harry Kroto, a British chemist who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley. Kroto helped him to draft the letter — one that has now been signed by 78 Nobel laureates.

i saw Zack Kopplin on a youtube vid while i was lookin' around the other day and he impressed me with his sure footed style and sincerity.

He's been called the Anti-Christ, a stooge of "godless liberal college professors," and was even accused of causing Hurricane Katrina. Kopplin cooly brushes these incidents aside, saying they're just silly distractions.

Too many of my peers have this attitude that they need to dress nicely, sit quietly, and wait until we are adults to change things. This attitude must change. My generation needs to speak out for what we believe."

Top Man!

Where do appendages come from?

We have two legs and two arms. Dogs have four legs. Octopi have 8 legs.

Actually, octopi don’t have any legs. They’ve got tentacles.

Legs came from our stegocephalian ancestors who adapted lobed- fins to help support their weight underwater, and which slowly through the generations gained stronger support, eventually leading to rigid boney stalks which could be used to travel across land.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stegocephalian

Some stegocephalians later returned to the sea and re-acquired fins, but they aren’t the old lobed fins of their ancestors, nor are they sleek fins of fish. They developed flukes from the legs of their ancestors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cetacea



The octopus does not come from stegocephalia and it’s ancestors never had lobed fins from which to adapt anything. Our limbs come from the sides of our bodies. The Octopus’ limbs are actually modified “lips”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus

You can see a bit of how such things might get started in the elephant and the star nosed mole.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star-nosed_mole

Those are instances of appendages developing from extant features which as they change become suitable for different uses than they originally served. The star-nosed mole’s meaty nose frill is nowhere near as dexterous as the elephant’s trunk, or the octopus’ tentacles, but you can see here where such appendages get their start.

Evolution, in other words, is always a game of changing proportion. Start with what’s there, change it slightly in size, color, texture, and that’s the next generation. Over many generations you can go from flexing the nose to spread the nostrils and take in scent, to being able to pinch leaves between lips and nose, to holding food with the nose which has now become more dexterous than before. Moving on it is always just a matter of changing proportion. This is how you could go from a snout to a trunk.

I share your exuberance regarding the explanatory abilities of science as it relates to mechanical processes of selected species. It's a celebration of sorts.

There are many materialists like yourself that tenaciously attempt to replace the reverent worship of a divine intellegence who's existence is by no means at odds with the natural world, with celebration of a grand story of evolutionary mechanisms.

You wish to exalt the natural world in a way that replaces religion.
I'm sorry my friend, but that will never come to pass.

At the very heart of the matter is the fact that at the core of theism is a reverence for something beyond the material world. Something who's reality is inexplicable by scientific methodology. Beyond demand of empiracle evidence and scientific testability. Metaphysical "realities" are themselves untestable. And yet science, not fully satisfied with mechanistic explanations, often dives head first into metaphysics empty handed.

Your error is simply this: you mix science with natural philosophy.
Your objective? - to give meaning to the meaninglessness of the evolution of the universe and the "gambling casino" you refer to as "the origin of the species by means of natural selection."

The "Human Experience" demands more than what science has to offer.
Scientists are not even close to unanimous agreement when they attempt to turn "an is to an ought."
An answer of "everything exists because it just does" is unsatisfactory for the human experience.

Your opiate is "promissory materialism - partial explanatory success extrapolated into a grand and final conclusion"

ant wrote: An answer of "everything exists because it just does" is unsatisfactory for the human experience.

And your answer is what? Something called God did it?

Do your beliefs have any content, or are you just saying there is something that science doesn't know right now?

Deleted

ant wrote:You wish to exalt the natural world in a way that replaces religion.

God forbid!

in him we live and move and have our being

I'm sorry my friend, but that will never come to pass.

oh i don't know so much, never say never and all that. If you can't see him in his creation where can you see him.

The "Human Experience" demands more than what science has to offer.

it also demands more than religion has to offer, so what!

ant, you have your god and i have mine, you may think my god is stupid and i may think the same of yours, but really it's just our different way of thinking about that which is beyond thought.

i don't need your personal mythology, i already have one of my own, you dont need my personal mythology as you already have one of your own, but i read your posts and if you ever offer something useful i will add it to my personal collection of useful metaphors.