Also, ganstaman, if God guides evolution by controlling weather/coldness, then how on earth do you explain why tsunamis and natural disasters kill millions of innocent people? If atheism is true and there is no mind behind natural disasters, then these make perfect sense. If theism is true, then you agreed (since we know evolution by natural selection is true) God MUST have guided weather. You said yourself he controls cold weather. Then God is responsible for these recent tsunamis in India and Japan killing millions of innocent people. Btw, if he's controlling them he would have hit Japan during WWII while Japan was invading China and committing war crimes. Not while Japan is being a peaceful and productive country 50 years later.

Hey guys, I found a very great quote on wikipedia that I think summarizes the theists, in this topic, viewpoints:

"Like any Christian (and indeed any theist), I believe that the world has been created by God, and hence "intelligently designed." The hallmark of intelligent design, however, is the claim that this can be shown scientifically; I'm dubious about that. ...As far as I can see, God certainly could have used Darwinian processes to create the living world and direct it as he wanted to go; hence evolution as such does not imply that there is no direction in the history of life. What does have that implication is not evolutionary theory itself, but unguided evolution, the idea that neither God nor any other person has taken a hand in guiding, directing or orchestrating the course of evolution. But the scientific theory of evolution, sensibly enough, says nothing one way or the other about divine guidance. It doesn't say that evolution is divinely guided; it also doesn't say that it isn't. Like almost any theist, I reject unguided evolution; but the contemporary scientific theory of evolution just as such—apart from philosophical or theological add-ons—doesn't say that evolution is unguided. Like science in general, it makes no pronouncements on the existence or activity of God."

Now here's what I have to say about this. If you agree with this quote, then yeah of course there is still plenty of room for God. If you believe this quote, it seems like it's still "up in the air" and evolution does not affect whether God exists. But what I'm trying to say is this quote is wrong. The scientific theory of evolution DOES say that evolution isn't divinely guided. Scientists understand evolution by looking at what is happening to the DNA molecules during meiosis, right before genetic material is passed onto the next generation, and by looking at how that new genetic material is sent to the offspring. Then they look at how traits affect survival in animals by observing, carefully and meticulously, animal populations in the wild sometimes for years at a time. Then scientists use this information to learn, basically, how natural selection happens, and how variation is produced for natural selection to choose from. Then, they apply this information and assume these exact same processes have been at work for most if not all of evolution.

And I guess this is where the theists disagree with science. They somehow think it's unjustifiable to assume natural selection worked in the past how we see it work today. But I don't understand this at all, this is how basically all science is done. And you theists are assuming books written thousands of years ago by a bunch of desert people are accurate even though you didn't actually see Jesus or any of the biblical events. How do you reject this logic for evolutionary theory yet accept it for your theism?

You should always cite your sources:

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

Context for the quote:

Now, as to the criticism provided:

At this point, you not only understand evolution better than basically everyone else, apparently including Ken Miller and Francis Collins (for you seem to think they have an obvious and fatal flaw in their beliefs regarding the logical consequences of evolution), but now you're also going to add Alvin Plantinga to your list of people you're smarter than.

I submit that you have yet to pull your fingers out of your ears, or your head out of your rear.

This counter argument is flawed because you are comparing two different things. In the example of the painting and actual forrest you are comparing an image(the painting) with a process(trees growing). When I talk about comparing evolutionary systems we are discussing the same thing...it is all the same process...the only difference is the stage on which that process is played out.

I think the real problem with using evolutionary theory to debunk “God did it” is that ToE is a descriptive model that is basically useless as a predictive model. I mean, we can say what has happened, but at no evolutionary stage can we say what will happen in the future, armed simply with random mutation and natural selection. For example, a million years ago evolutionary theory wouldn’t tell us that a rational being will evolve anymore than it can currently tell us what sort of creatures the process will produce a few million years in the future. All it can really say is that there will be random mutations and natural selection, not what those mutations and selections will result in. It’s that teleological end or purpose that’s behind the traditional design arguments, not the process.

So design, the way a lot of theists think of it, is more akin to the design of a roulette wheel, where despite all the mindless, unguided and random activity the teleological end (the house wins) is predictable and inevitable. In contrast to an Intelligent Design proponent’s take on things where God intervenes with random occurrences to ensure the house wins.

Yodachoda must believe that the evolutionary system identified by Darwin is a special case...that it did not require intellect for its inception(when all other evolutionary systems appear to require intellect) . Further he must have some hand wavy explaination on why there is only one occurence of it(when other natural phenomenom occur independently many times in nature).

I don't believe in this heavy handed approach to theistic evolution. However if you have ever played around with an evolution simulators you can often to do things just like this to guide evolution...like drop "food" near "beings" who you want to survive long enough to reproduce.


This is the type of theistic evolution I believe in. Set it and forget it. If you've done your prep work well you will end up with beings which possess the qualities you desire.

Actually evolutionary systems are very predictable. Do you believe life evolved elsewhere in the universe? Do you believe that the life that evolved elsewhere in the universe evolved eyes? Do you believe that life that evolved elsewhere in the universe that evolved eyes also evolved stereopsis(depth perception) if its a predator?

Wrong on so many levels...Simply awful, simplistic, kindergarten level of understanding of the history of science, for starters...

What the ancient Greeks and Euclid called "science" and what the moderns call "science" are two almost entirely different phenomena. Islamic science in the middle ages comes closer to our modern understanding of science (but not quite), which essentially depends on a complete quantification of what the ancients called "physis". This was an absolute anathema to Aristotle etc.

Ancient Greek science always insisted on a rather strong chasm between mathematics and physics for a very important reason: The concept of a number in ancient Greek science (arithmos) denoted something countable. In other words, a number was always a concrete "number of something", it was never an abstract concept. For this very reason, despite their achievements in philosophy, ancient Greeks and Romans did not have the concept of "zero," for example. The introduction of the concept of zero ( it was invented by the ancient Indian mathematicians, its relation to the Indian/Buddhist metaphysical concept of "sunyata" is rather obvious) to the Middle East led ultimately to the invention of algebra by Al-Kharazmi. Algebra and its further development in Europe into "analysis" as a result of Leibniz' and Newton's inventions of calculus made the modern mathematical understanding of science possible.

So, for god's sake, please stop making moronic statements such as the following in the thread, pretending that they are some sort of wisdom:
"Articulation of scientific methodology didn't emerge in the Enlightenment, after all. Euclid and that lot of Greeks understood axiomatic conditions well enough."

No. Simply no. Jesus....

damaci,

Yawn. Didn't bother reading.

Finally some good news.

Stu, I am proposing this troll as the definite proof that there is no intelligence behind the process of evolution.

<nods>

Right. It's an inherently deterministic process.

let me try saying it this way. do what you say scientists do.

go look at the primary literature (scientist do this in addition to gather their own data) and not some text book or a wikipedia article before making your statements as if your an expert in the field (might be an expert on some aspects of evolution, but on the molecular/genetic aspects, you have a looooong way to go). look at the data not a summary 2 or 3 degrees removed from the data.

i guess i'm having trouble figuring out how given the data how we know whether the mutations that have become fixed is a result of natural selection or something else. i see papers that discuss the molecular evolution of a gene or a area of the genome and give statistical evidence of non-randomness in the mutations all the freaking time.

if the argument is that these genes apparently non-random mutations appear so because they've been selected (i would agree that that is a good model), then please provide me the data that the selection parameters are random and not guided (don't recall having ever seen it in those papers myself).

there is still the possibility that i just can't see what the scientific argument here is (it seems to me it's a teleological one). sometimes text is not sufficient to show a model or pathway.

This thread is replete with examples of God making things more convoluted. For one thing, you have to recharacterize the system as ASSURING that humans would be created rather than human beings as one set of possible adaptive traits that result from natural selection. Further, you have to adopt a deterministic worldview that holds that whatever twists and turns, such as the KT extinction event, were foreordained to make sure that humans resulted from evolution. You also have to insert God into a story where we already know the mechanisms and give God some role that nonetheless won't appear in the fossil record as if God was in control. Finally, you have to explain WHY any God would choose this method for creating a species in Her image.

It's a whole mess that you completely avoid by just saying that God had no role in evolution other than perhaps winding the clock.