Ray Comfort, On The Origin Of Species

[sillyking14]

The interpretation comes from the theory itself - if the evidence you find matches the results your hypothesis expected, then you have a good working model and possibly a theory.

or a bias, but i do understand the scientific process. however, the theory of evolution is not founded on fossil evidence, it was created by darwin. who observed basic adaptation in progress on some famous island somewhere. people began to think that maybe this was a good way to disprove God and therefore began looking for more evidence with the express purpose of proving evolution to be true. now i'm not saying that all scientists are biased. what i'm saying is that many want evolution to work so that they have an excuse not to believe in God. and when you approach an experiment wanting a specific outcome, then it increases the chance that you get the specific outcome. none of this is provable (or disprovable for that matter) because it will never be published what the scientist hoped the outcome would be because that's against the scientific process.

now we've covered a lot of ground on this evolution. we have both (i think) exhausted our own evidence, and arguments, since most of all of the previous posts have been regurgitation of what we have been saying all along. i dare say that neither of us expected to convince the other at the start of this debate, as a matter of fact i didn't plan on convincing anyone, my point was to show that it is possible to logically argue against evolution and that it is not air tight as many people believe. now, i may have succeeded, and i may not have, but perhaps someone will read through here and have a personal revelation about life, in either direction, but i don't think anything will be gained by continuing to argue about evolution.

If your up for it however, i wouldn't mind talking about origin of life. we haven't really said anything about it. also i would like to continue this debate on intelligence (sapience as you think of it).

Every decision we make is a product of our brain-state at that moment in combination with its inputs.

this itself sums up the anti-soul argument, but it is unproven. it is an assumption that is made by people that deny the existence of soul. and yes, if we don't have souls, then this assertion would have to be correct, however it has never been proven scientifically. earlier i talked about my "psych teacher" and how he said what i said. i'm sorry i misspoke(wrote?), it was in my psych class, where my teacher did very little teaching of his own, mostly he read from our textbook or he showed us a documentary by psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who (as i understand) is rather famous. the documentary basically explained: the history of psychology, different studies that were done in psychology (and the results and conclusions that were derived from these studies), and studies that are currently going on and questions that are still unanswered. it was in the latter section that consciousness, falls in (of course he talked about more like (we still don't know how the brain creates consciousness as opposed to we think it possible that consciousness is not part of that brain), but still he did claim that they haven't fully mapped the brain and that, therefore, they cannot irrevocably claim that consciousness is derived from the brain.
here is a link to zimbardo's home page.
http://www.zimbardo.com/ (pretty original ain't it?)

I can't believe someone hasn't refuted this yet. I guess nobody knows their history

yeah i had problems in my world history class, i mostly paid attention to the chapters about the great wars as opposed to the time in between. but i still tried to refute it. although actually i don't believe it needs refuting since that graph doesn't actually explain everything. it simply illustrates what SG was asserting. since it has no quantified "y" variable. but you did a good job in refuting it, kinda makes me wish i'd paid more attention to world history.

[Daxx]

Part the second.

brown: faith is not about :withdrawing from the argument so that you don't have to deal with the possibility of being wrong. faith is what happens when we are touched by god, when we actively seek god. i'll give an example of faith in action. there was a little girl in Russia. all her life her teachers talked about science and how it had left no room for god, and that god didn't exist. never once did she meet someone that affirmed gods existence. however she came to the conclusion that god must exist. that is faith. now whether or not this is a true story i don't know, but it is an excellent example of what faith is.

Faith is exactly that - saying "la la la I don't have to look at the real world because I accept this on faith which means I don't need proof". It is a complete withdrawal from an argument, because at the point where you say "oh I don't have any evidence I just accept this on faith" then you're out of the range of rational discussion.

You can say "it isn't definitively proven" and you'd be right that we still have a way to go in our understanding of the brain, but fundamentally it is an argument from ignorance and a logical fallacy to suggest that because of this it is false; the fact is that modern neuroscience uses this as the best explanation of what happens because a) it is a reasonable explanation that fits the data, and b) there is no credible alternative.

black: i did say that it isn't definitely proven, i simply used different wording.
red: yes that is true, but the reverse is also true. there is no evidence to suggest that the brain does produce thought.

Incorrect, the reverse is not also true. Brain activity correlates with certain thoughts and emotions and we can detect this with brain scanners. People missing parts of their brain suffer the inability to perform certain cognitive functions. Brain damage can change peoples' memories, perceptions and behaviours. This is evidence (extremely strong evidence, at that) that mental activity is sourced from the brain. Higher functions are specifically sourced in the frontal lobe and cerebral cortex. Check out this page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_in_the_human_brain) for more information.

blue: there is no data, aside from the fact that in order for many people to live guilt-free they haveto deny the existence of a spiritual side.

See above. Absolutely false, and this demonstrates your complete lack of understanding of the topic. Neuroscientists do this sort of work all the time.

purple: there is a credible alternative, the existence of a soul.

This is not a credible alternative because it is not backed by evidence. Otherwise I could say that an alternative is that we are all guided, puppet-like, by that same teapot that orbits near Mars. That is not a credible alternative, and neither is the soul.

however there are mountains of empirical evidence for the existence of a soul.

No, there is anecdotal evidence. Empirical evidence involves testing, not hearsay.

my point is that existence of a soul is just as credible a theory as the other.

It is not, because there is no evidence to support that hypothesis because it is intrinsically unfalsifiable. The hypothesis that the brain is responsible for thought is quite well tested and there is a lot of evidence for it. They are in no way as credible a hypothesis as each other.

More importantly, it's logically impossible to disprove the existence of a soul (or God, for that matter). Science doesn't try, because it's not actually a falsifiable concept. To go into more detail - the soul is completely intangible and completely untestable - therefore, there is no way to tell whether it actually exists or not.

setup: place a famous christian.....say billy graham, in a room that contains only a table with a gun atop it), a chair, and whatever machine is needed to influence the brain
experiment: using the machine, force billy graham to decide to pick up the gun and shoot himself. this would prove that the soul, as i defined it, does not exist. since as i defined it the soul is un-affected by the brain. so if it is proven that you can stimulate the brain in complex forms to create a decision that is against what the person wants, then you have proven that the brain creates thoughts, and therefore, the soul doesn't exist.
another way, (one that is probably far simpler) is to succeed in creating AI, if you can create a free-thinking computer that would also prove that thought is created by the complexity of our brain as opposed to by our soul.

This isn't a scientific test that can be used to falsify the existence of souls by common definition (though it would be nice if people saw this and recanted their belief). Christians will simply use special pleading to claim that it was somehow nothing to do with the soul.

Furthermore, this sort of experiment has already been done a million times over on a more imprecise basis. Have you ever taken any mood-altering drugs? Alcohol will do, even if it isn't as great an illustration as LSD or other hallucinogens (check out MK ULTRA if you have the time). Whilst drunk, have you ever done something stupid? That's your thought and higher judgement being affected by the chemicals in your brain. Clearly alcohol cannot affect your soul as you have defined it, yet you do stupid things because you are drunk anyway. What about people who have suffered brain damage? Those people's souls shouldn't be affected by your definition but yet brain damage can cause all sorts of issues.

But the point is not to disprove that the soul exists - the burden of proof is on those who claim it does. As a famous example, imagine there was a completely invisible and intangible teapot that orbited Mars. There is no way to prove or disprove its existence, but we do not automatically accept that it exists - why? Because to operate scientifically we operate on two principles. The first is the statistical concept of the null hypothesis, which states that we take a default position when examining a phenomenon (in questions of existence, this is usually of non-existence), and if our hypothesis is not confirmed then we fall back to the null. The second is the burden of proof - when someone makes a positive claim (X exists, Y raped and murdered a young girl in 1990, Z is planning to kill us all with their communo-fascist agenda) the burden is on them to substantiate their claim. When you claim that consciousness is caused by the existence of a soul, you need to prove that souls exist. Unfortunately, there is no such proof.

red: that example is useless, since a teapot orbiting mars won't affect us in any way. the soul does.

You're simply making that assertion. Fundamentally, the teapot example illustrates why the concept of a God or a Soul is ridiculous. You have no proof for it and because it is not falsifiable you're nevertheless asking people to believe in it anyway. Well, I should probably point you towards the church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (may you be touched by his noodly appendage).

blue: that is the wrong way of thinking about null hypothesis. nono, for the purposes of the experiment you must take on as a null hypothesis that it doesn't exist, because that is what you are trying to disprove. i took statistics i know all about null hypothesis versus alternative hypothesis.

You disprove the null only by showing that the data fits the alternative in a statistically significant way. Since you can't demonstrate this (there being no significant dissenting data), you should accept the null (that is, that souls do not exist).

brown: that example is one of somebody introducing a concept that is new. yes. if you want to change the way people believe you must prove what you are saying. however, theists aren't changing anything. theism has been around much longer than atheism. therefore, it would fall to the atheists to prove what they want everyone to believe to be true. after all, scientists are making a positive claim. they claim that intelligence is created by a complicated brain. the burden of proof then falls on them to prove it.

The burden of proof does not equate to chronological snobbery (a logical fallacy in itself). The concept of God's existence is necessarily a positive claim that is made in order to explain some position, and therefore the burden of proof lies on someone attempting to postulate it. Skeptical atheism is the default position - it doesn't make any claims by default; it only makes claims in relation to the non-existence of God once the concept of God has been introduced. Theism, on the other hand, necessarily needs to introduce that claim about God regardless of an atheistic challenge.

purple: there is also no proof that intelligence spawns from a complicated brain.

Aside from: the fossil record, looking at species currently alive, neurological experiments; so on and so forth.

this itself sums up the anti-soul argument, but it is unproven. it is an assumption that is made by people that deny the existence of soul. and yes, if we don't have souls, then this assertion would have to be correct, however it has never been proven scientifically. earlier i talked about my "psych teacher" and how he said what i said. i'm sorry i misspoke(wrote?), it was in my psych class, where my teacher did very little teaching of his own, mostly he read from our textbook or he showed us a documentary by psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who (as i understand) is rather famous. the documentary basically explained: the history of psychology, different studies that were done in psychology (and the results and conclusions that were derived from these studies), and studies that are currently going on and questions that are still unanswered. it was in the latter section that consciousness, falls in (of course he talked about more like (we still don't know how the brain creates consciousness as opposed to we think it possible that consciousness is not part of that brain), but still he did claim that they haven't fully mapped the brain and that, therefore, they cannot irrevocably claim that consciousness is derived from the brain.
here is a link to zimbardo's home page.
http://www.zimbardo.com/ (pretty original ain't it?)

I already dealt with this earlier in the thread (http://elementstheforum.smfforfree3.com/index.php/topic,1283.msg15064#msg15064).

[Daxx]

Split into 2 posts because I have exceeded the character limit.

Um, Evolution is not entirely Darwin. It has been improved and expanded since then. If we treated every scientific theory as being inviolate from its conception we'd have to be playing with Newtonian mechanics when we wanted to talk about gravity, and Ptolemaic theories of planetary motion. Even if you remove entirely Darwin's work you'd still have more than enough evidence to support the modern theory as it stands.

Fundamentally this is what distinguishes science from other beliefs. It doesn't matter what you believe. Whether you enter into the debate trying to prove that there is or is not a God, or just don't care, the scientific method still holds true. The massive mountain of evidence supporting evolutionary theory, and the complete absence of evidence for creationism, is not a conspiracy from scientists to "disprove God" (there are many theist scientists who support evolution - see also Theistic Evolution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theistic_evolution), and much of the work on the theory was and continues to be done by Christians) - it's just the way the cookie has crumbled.

ok. my point was that when Darwin proposed his theory on the "origin of species" all that he had to go on was his observations of these birds and animal life on this island (i really wish i remembered what the island was called). my point was not that the modern evolutionary theory is built on only Darwin's observations.

Darwin built his theories on previous ideas about the transmutation of species (See Paley, Lamarck, etc.). He simply proposed a mechanism by which evolution could take place. I'm not entirely sure where you're going with this point as I have already pointed out that what the theory was like at its inception is irrelevant - if you weren't attempting to make the point that further developments don't count, then I'm not sure what the point was in bringing it up in the first place.

my next point was that evidence does not provide any commentary on life. it has no opinion, it is simply there (i don't mean this to sound like i think that you think the evidence is alive, this was simply personification used to illustrate my opinion on the saying "evidence doesn't lie"). what makes evidence proof is how the evidence is interpreted. and if a scientist has a bias then he is going to interpret the evidence according to his bias.
since there is no way for a scientist to prove that (s)he was completely unbiased in their interpretation, we can't take their word for it. this is where the scientific process breaks down in relation to these kinds of matters. for many other kinds of experiments, ones that don't have religious ramifications, this break down doesn't occur. but, since nearly everyone has an opinion when it comes to god, everyone is open to bias.

I'm not sure how to put this any more bluntly - your standard for proof is fundamentally flawed in a massive way. You're willing to take the events of the bible as truth without any supporting evidence whatsoever, presumably because your pastor or parents told you so, but you're more than happy to discredit every scientist who has ever looked at the mountains of evidence that supports evolutionary theory on the speculative premise that they're only doing it because they're biased?

As I said before, but you glossed over - scientists don't start with a conclusion and attempt to find evidence to support it, unlike religious people. They start with the evidence and see whether it fits any particular hypotheses they can come up with. If the hypothesis is that "life on earth evolves through natural selection", and the evidence confirms that hypothesis, then there is no inherent bias there. Again, as I pointed out, many theist scientists support evolution through natural selection, so that does not necessarily mean that it is inherently anti-God. You're simply creating a massive conspiracy which doesn't exist.

were i a betting man, i would willingly bet everything i own that you, daxx, have never seen any of he so-called "evidence" with your eyes.

Depending on what you mean by evidence - I have seen quite a lot. I have seen evolution through natural selection in action take place in computer simulations. I have seen other forms of evolution (through artificial selection) take place in real life. I have seen and found fossils, and been to see more in museums. I have caught diseases which had adapted to become immune to certain drugs.

you have heard about it, read about it, talked about it, but i'd bet you haven't seen most of the fossils that have been discovered, or any of the evidence that you have cited. and i know that i haven't, the difference is that i have heard multiple interpretations of the evidence, which means that i am less prone to accept any one interpretation.

So, let me get this straight - because you are not a scientist in a lab working on evolutionary biology, and have therefore not seen any evidence with your own eyes, all those scientists are lying to you? You're willing to trust a bunch of poorly educated nonspecialists over people who actually work with this stuff? There is vast agreement in the academic community that evolution through natural selection happens, but you'll gladly cherry-pick through the occasional one who dissents and take his word as gospel?

let me give an example, i once read a book called "case for the creator." in it, the author traveled far and wide and sought out theistic scientists to explain why they believe in intelligent design. all of these scientists have just as much credibility as any other scientist, they simply have a different bias.
one such scientist talked about the "Cambrian explosion," which, as he explained it, was a time when all of a sudden (in geological terms all of a sudden can mean over the course of a few thousand years or million years depending on the topic being discussed. the idea is that this happened far more quickly than can be explained) a whole bunch of different species of life began showing up in the fossil record. when previously all that they had were single celled life. he claimed that this was evidence of the biblical depiction of the beginning of life. later, i was reading books and articles that scientists had written in response to "case for a creator." and in one of them the responder also talked about the cambrian explosion, and his point was basically, that even though it is true the cambrian explosion did occur, the fossils that were discovered have little relation to modern animals, and that it therefore wasn't evidence to support the biblical depiction of the beginning of life. there, two different interpretations of exactly the same evidence, who should i believe, i personally would tend to believe the theistic scientist because it confirms what i already know.

Both of those examples confirm that the evidence is in favour of evolution. You can have different interpretations of the meaning as related to some story in a book, but not of the facts. Science doesn't work like English Lit - you can only interpret data in the sense that you draw conclusions from the data; you can't just say anything you like. The Cambrian explosion is a perfect illustrative example of evolution in action - putting a theological meaning on top of it is useless, because there's no evidence that suggests that is a reasonable interpretation to draw.

That, and you don't know anything about God. It's not like you have any evidence at all. It's very obvious that you have serious deficiencies in your knowledge of biology, physics, astronomy, philosophy and logic. I'm sure this isn't your fault - we're all still learning - but you're falling massively on confirmation bias rather than educating yourself. You have absolutely no evidence to support any position you've postulated so far, even when challenged on it, and the arguments you've made (which you've said you don't want to support with evidence) have been almost completely without merit.

if the theory is self-defeating then it doesn't matter what the evidence is, the theory is wrong. however if the theory makes logical sense then we must admit that it is a possibility.

If the theory is "self defeating" and the evidence still points in that direction, it means you might have a problem with your theory, or you might not - you have to falsify your theory before it becomes wrong. It certainly does not mean that the evidence is wrong. How much logical sense a theory makes is actually completely irrelevant to its truth. I'm guessing you're not a physicist, but have you ever done any reading on quantum theory? Even its foremost proponents maintained that it didn't make much sense.

But given that there is no real case for a Christian God that is not either self-defeating or completely unbacked by any evidence whatsoever, why do you even subscribe to that idea in the first place?

When you're trying to argue that the evidence is a conspiracy, I think it's a sign that you don't really have any argument. If you want to take the whole thing on faith, then that's certainly your prerogative, but please don't think that evolution has been "disproven" on any scientific basis, and don't think that your beliefs have any basis in fact. I don't mean to sound aggressive or mean here, but this is what faith is all about - withdrawing from the argument so that you don't have to deal with the possibility of being wrong.

       
red: ouch, nono as i explained above i don't think that evidence is a conspiracy (at least not one created by humans) what i believe is that we can't argue using evidence since we have never seen it for ourselves and the only thing we have seen is other peoples interpretations of the evidence.

Yeah, you don't really have any argument. You are, despite your protestations, attempting to argue that pretty much every mainstream evolutionary biologist is lying to you or deliberately misinterpreting the evidence (or possibly is influenced by Satan?!). That is the biggest argument from ignorance I have ever seen "I haven't seen the evidence for myself therefore the conclusions everyone else has drawn from it must be wrong", and it isn't going to fly.

blue: like i said above, there are multiple interpretations of the evidence, probably the only ones that you have seen are either ones that are argued by people that haven't seen the evidence themselves, or by the scientists that interpreted the evidence as being against creationism. there are many credible scientists that interpreted the evidence differently.

Who are they and what are their interpretations? There are no credible scientists from the field who support creationism. Creationism is completely nonscientific as a concept - even intelligent design is little more than pseudoscience since it has no supporting evidence and ultimately relies on the existence of a creator.

[Daxx]

The interpretation comes from the theory itself - if the evidence you find matches the results your hypothesis expected, then you have a good working model and possibly a theory.

or a bias, but i do understand the scientific process. however, the theory of evolution is not founded on fossil evidence, it was created by darwin. who observed basic adaptation in progress on some famous island somewhere. people began to think that maybe this was a good way to disprove God and therefore began looking for more evidence with the express purpose of proving evolution to be true. now i'm not saying that all scientists are biased. what i'm saying is that many want evolution to work so that they have an excuse not to believe in God. and when you approach an experiment wanting a specific outcome, then it increases the chance that you get the specific outcome. none of this is provable (or disprovable for that matter) because it will never be published what the scientist hoped the outcome would be because that's against the scientific process.

Um, Evolution is not entirely Darwin. It has been improved and expanded since then. If we treated every scientific theory as being inviolate from its conception we'd have to be playing with Newtonian mechanics when we wanted to talk about gravity, and Ptolemaic theories of planetary motion. Even if you remove entirely Darwin's work you'd still have more than enough evidence to support the modern theory as it stands.

Fundamentally this is what distinguishes science from other beliefs. It doesn't matter what you believe. Whether you enter into the debate trying to prove that there is or is not a God, or just don't care, the scientific method still holds true. The massive mountain of evidence supporting evolutionary theory, and the complete absence of evidence for creationism, is not a conspiracy from scientists to "disprove God" (there are many theist scientists who support evolution - see also Theistic Evolution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theistic_evolution), and much of the work on the theory was and continues to be done by Christians) - it's just the way the cookie has crumbled.

When you're trying to argue that the evidence is a conspiracy, I think it's a sign that you don't really have any argument. If you want to take the whole thing on faith, then that's certainly your prerogative, but please don't think that evolution has been "disproven" on any scientific basis, and don't think that your beliefs have any basis in fact. I don't mean to sound aggressive or mean here, but this is what faith is all about - withdrawing from the argument so that you don't have to deal with the possibility of being wrong.

i would like to continue this debate on intelligence (sapience as you think of it).

Sure thing.

Every decision we make is a product of our brain-state at that moment in combination with its inputs.

this itself sums up the anti-soul argument, but it is unproven. it is an assumption that is made by people that deny the existence of soul. and yes, if we don't have souls, then this assertion would have to be correct, however it has never been proven scientifically.

You can say "it isn't definitively proven" and you'd be right that we still have a way to go in our understanding of the brain, but fundamentally it is an argument from ignorance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance) and a logical fallacy to suggest that because of this it is false; the fact is that modern neuroscience uses this as the best explanation of what happens because a) it is a reasonable explanation that fits the data, and b) there is no credible alternative.

More importantly, it's logically impossible to disprove the existence of a soul (or God, for that matter). Science doesn't try, because it's not actually a falsifiable concept. To go into more detail - the soul is completely intangible and completely untestable - therefore, there is no way to tell whether it actually exists or not.

But the point is not to disprove that the soul exists - the burden of proof is on those who claim it does. As a famous example, imagine there was a completely invisible and intangible teapot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russel%27s_teapot) that orbited Mars. There is no way to prove or disprove its existence, but we do not automatically accept that it exists - why? Because to operate scientifically we operate on two principles. The first is the statistical concept of the null hypothesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_hypothesis), which states that we take a default position when examining a phenomenon (in questions of existence, this is usually of non-existence), and if our hypothesis is not confirmed then we fall back to the null. The second is the burden of proof (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof#Burden_of_proof_in_epistemology_and_scientific_methodology) - when someone makes a positive claim (X exists, Y raped and murdered a young girl in 1990, Z is planning to kill us all with their communo-fascist agenda) the burden is on them to substantiate their claim. When you claim that consciousness is caused by the existence of a soul, you need to prove that souls exist. Unfortunately, there is no such proof.

[sillyking14]

ok here we go. i also had to split into 2 responses...sorry.

I'm not entirely sure where you're going with this point as I have already pointed out that what the theory was like at its inception is irrelevant - if you weren't attempting to make the point that further developments don't count,

if you had read and comprehended everything i wrote then you WOULD understand where i DID go with this. Darwinism came first, then came fossil evidence. this left scientists open to bias. VERY open to bias. for more information continue reading, this information does matter.

'm not sure how to put this any more bluntly - your standard for proof is fundamentally flawed in a massive way

i never, ever mentioned standard of proof. yo introduced that.

You're willing to take the events of the bible as truth without any supporting evidence whatsoever, presumably because your pastor or parents told you so, but you're more than happy to discredit every scientist who has ever looked at the mountains of evidence that supports evolutionary theory on the speculative premise that they're only doing it because they're biased?

Yeah, you don't really have any argument. You are, despite your protestations, attempting to argue that pretty much every mainstream evolutionary biologist is lying to you or deliberately misinterpreting the evidence (or possibly is influenced by Satan?!). That is the biggest argument from ignorance I have ever seen "I haven't seen the evidence for myself therefore the conclusions everyone else has drawn from it must be wrong", and it isn't going to fly.

no doubt i missed a few quotes where you spewed this misinterpretation. i am not saying that they are wrong simply because i haven't seen the evidence. i am saying that, because there are multiple interpretations from credible sources i cannot take any one specific scientists word. I have to rely on logic. otherwise i am as guilty of blind faith as most everybody in the world.
neither am i saying that every mainstream biologist is lying to us. i continually talked about bias. bias, is not something that is decided on by a person. it is inherent in a persons beliefs. if you strongly believe something is true, than any evidence you find tha has anything to do with that subject is very likely to be interpreted according to your bias. atheists have a bias AGAINST God. theists have a bias FOR god. so when they interpret he same evidence they come to opposing conclusions.

Depending on what you mean by evidence - I have seen quite a lot. I have seen evolution through natural selection in action take place in computer simulations. I have seen other forms of evolution (through artificial selection) take place in real life. I have seen and found fossils, and been to see more in museums. I have caught diseases which had adapted to become immune to certain drugs.

never once have i claimed that natural selection does not happen. throughout this entire discussion i have maintained that natural selection and evolution are excellent models to explain the large diversity of life seen on our planet. however, they simply do not explain human intelligence.
and a computer simulation? don't make me laugh. you may have seen what scientists believe happened, or seen a demonstration of what evolution means. but you could not have seen any actual evidence on a computer simulation. computers only ever do what they are told, they can be programmed to show a simulation of anything.
artificial selection? artificial selection is the opposite of natural selection. it is not random, and it is done by intelligent beings.
diseases? covered above.
fossils? but the fossil itself isn't the evidence. you also have to consider where the fossils were, ho old was the rock around them, the existence of fossils, ad the fact that you found some of your own, only proves that there were creatures alive before you were.
in museums? like i said, interpretation. were you actually able to study the fossil? find out where it was dug up? see it where it was dug up? again a fossil alone proves nothing. there are many other factors involved when a fossil is treated as evidence.

Both of those examples confirm that the evidence is in favour of evolution. You can have different interpretations of the meaning as related to some story in a book, but not of the facts. Science doesn't work like English Lit - you can only interpret data in the sense that you draw conclusions from the data; you can't just say anything you like. The Cambrian explosion is a perfect illustrative example of evolution in action - putting a theological meaning on top of it is useless, because there's no evidence that suggests that is a reasonable interpretation to draw.

That, and you don't know anything about God. It's not like you have any evidence at all. It's very obvious that you have serious deficiencies in your knowledge of biology, physics, astronomy, philosophy and logic. I'm sure this isn't your fault - we're all still learning - but you're falling massively on confirmation bias rather than educating yourself. You have absolutely no evidence to support any position you've postulated so far, even when challenged on it, and the arguments you've made (which you've said you don't want to support with evidence) have been almost completely without merit.

did you not read what i said? the Cambrian explosion occurred near instantaneously (in geological terms). we went from single celled organisms, to full, multi-celled organisms, without any intermediate steps. that is not evolution. and besides, my point in bringing up the Cambrian explosion was not that it proves or disproves evolution, but that it is possible to draw multiple conclusions from evidence. as a result i have absolutely no faith in the word of a scientist. i will not believe his interpretation of evidence without examining the evidence for myself.

and as for that second paragraph. that is a direct attack on not only my intelligence but my humanity. exactly what deficiencies have i shown in the area of biology, physics and such? logic? every argument i have made has been based on logic. unlike yours. your arguments have consisted of a mix of logic, misinterpretations of what i'm saying, and "there is evidence that this is what actually happened" with a link to a website of a scientist, that is saying the exact same thing, and "you have no idea what your talking about." don't talk to me about deficiencies. i never said that i didn't want to support my logic with evidence, per se, what i have said time and again, is that the "logic" used to come up with many "theories" is circular, and is based on stipulations that are unfounded.
/ end rant
sorry about that but when someone tries to shut me up by insulting me, i really get upset, especially when it is a person that i trust to at least try to sound logical.

If the theory is "self defeating" and the evidence still points in that direction, it means you might have a problem with your theory,

  exactly!! that is exactly what i have said from the start. a theory that makes no logical sense, is wrong. period. you have to fix it somehow. my argument from the get-go was that evolution is not a logical theory in relation to the creation of man.

So, let me get this straight - because you are not a scientist in a lab working on evolutionary biology, and have therefore not seen any evidence with your own eyes, all those scientists are lying to you? You're willing to trust a bunch of poorly educated nonspecialists over people who actually work with this stuff?  There is vast agreement in the academic community that evolution through natural selection happens, but you'll gladly cherry-pick through the occasional one who dissents and take his word as gospel?

ok red: almost true. i do not believe that mostly they are lying to us. i simply cannot trust their word. because i have seen first-hand how much your perspective can e changed by bias. (come to think of it so have you)
green: whoever said "poorly educated." the people i am talking about have doctorates, and are in the thick of it, they do work with this stuff. and who said i was taking their word as gospel? i said that the fact that scientists do not agree makes it impossible for me to take anybody at their word. theist or atheist.
brown: ok first i will respond to what you said. then i will respond to what you meant.
1. i do not dispute the fact that natural selection occurs. thats it
2. there is NOT a "vast" agreement in the scientific community. check out this page
    http://www.dissentfromdarwin.org/
 this page, so far as i know, make no mention of evidence, it is simply a list of credible scientists that do not agree that humans were created by natural selection.

There are no credible scientists from the field who support creationism

exactly how do you define credible? how much education they have? every body that i have and ever will mention as a credible source, has at least a masters degree with years of research under their belt. many of them have doctorates. or similar. people that are published? many of these people have written books/articles about their beliefs.
as a matter of fact the only possible criteria for "credibility" that these people don't possess is that they don't believe that we are products of chance.

[sillyking14]

sorry i couldn't post this at the same time as the previous one. i got kicked off the computer and had to save and come back to it.

Faith is exactly that - saying "la la la I don't have to look at the real world because I accept this on faith which means I don't need proof". It is a complete withdrawal from an argument, because at the point where you say "oh I don't have any evidence I just accept this on faith" then you're out of the range of rational discussion.

who are you to tell me what faith is? what you have described is what people do with faith. its like saying that cars are weapons because people run other people over with them. some of these people rightly guard themselves with faith. if they can't argue because they don't know what your talking about then they are right to hide behind faith. that is in fact what faith is for. but what faith is is a completely different matter. faith is knowing with absolute certainty that something is true, even in the face of adversity. like my story about the Russian girl. she had faith that god existed, not because her parents told her he did, not because of societal pressure. but because God spiritually reached out to her and touched her. that is faith.

Incorrect, the reverse is not also true. Brain activity correlates with certain thoughts and emotions and we can detect this with brain scanners. People missing parts of their brain suffer the inability to perform certain cognitive functions. Brain damage can change peoples' memories, perceptions and behaviours. This is evidence (extremely strong evidence, at that) that mental activity is sourced from the brain. Higher functions are specifically sourced in the frontal lobe and cerebral cortex. Check out this page for more information.

okokok so first let me make one thing clear. when i say soul i literally mean you. i literally mean that you are not a physical person but a spirit, a spirit that is possessing your body as it were. not in the same way that demons are said to possess, i mean that you are the only spirit in your body. you have to understand what i mean by this or nothing i say is going to be comprehensible much less make any logical sense.
now then, asa a spirit that is possessing a physical body you are dependent on that body for stimuli, you use that body as though it were a machine. so, when you think and make decisions you use the brain as a sort of computer. like if you were doing a science project. and you were typing your report. any body could see (if they hacked your computer from a remote source) the pages you were looking at, and what you are typing into your word processor. but they can't see you. you are the one that is thinking an telling the computer what to write/type/show. so, the fact that you can change what people see/percieve is not surprising. it would be like if that hypothetical hacker took remote control of your computer and began typing whatever (s)he wanted. you would no longer have control of the machine but you would still be free to think. that is what the soul is. and the soul explains all current evidence just as well as the non-existence. as a matter of fact, it explains it better since so far scientists have been unable to introduce thought, only actions. although it is true that this is not definitive since there is still much research to do.

blue: there is no data, aside from the fact that in order for many people to live guilt-free they haveto deny the existence of a spiritual side.

See above. Absolutely false, and this demonstrates your complete lack of understanding of the topic. Neuroscientists do this sort of work all the time.

guilt is an emotional response to an action that a person believes to be wrong. I.E. if you do something that you believe to be wrong then you feel guilty.
therefore in order to be completely guilt free you must deny the existence of morals. the existence of absolute right and wrong.
religion is the only belief system that purports the existence of absolute morals, and in every religion morals are tied inseparably with spirit.
therefore, in order to deny the existence of absolute morals (and thereby live guilt-free) one must deny the existence of spirits.
the point of this argument is that in order for people to live guilt-free, they have to assume that they are the product randomness. and that is the only real reason that people believe that their intelligence (maybe self-awareness would be a better word) spawns from a complicated brain. as i described above, both the theory of a soul and the theory of no-soul explain the evidence equally well. neither caries more wait. and as i explained even further above and will explain below, the soul can be proven to exist.

This is not a credible alternative because it is not backed by evidence.

it is backed by evidence. it is backed by empirical evidence. it is simply not baked by experimental evidence (i'll explain the difference below.)

/joke

Otherwise I could say that an alternative is that we are all guided, puppet-like, by that same teapot that orbits near Mars. That is not a credible alternative, and neither is the soul.

actually, as far as experimental evidence goes, this theory is as credible as the other two, although it doesn't have the empirical evidence that the soul does. and it doesn't have an reasonable backing that the anti-soul theory does.

It is not, because there is no evidence to support that hypothesis because it is intrinsically unfalsifiable. The hypothesis that the brain is responsible for thought is quite well tested and there is a lot of evidence for it. They are in no way as credible a hypothesis as each other.

This isn't a scientific test that can be used to falsify the existence of souls by common definition (though it would be nice if people saw this and recanted their belief). Christians will simply use special pleading to claim that it was somehow nothing to do with the soul.

it is a scientific test that can be used to falsify the existence of soul. it doesn't matter what people would argue, it would still falsify the claim that our consciousness is created by a spiritual side. because ot would show that our consciousness can be manipulated through physical means. don't assume that everybody is going to believe something simply because it is true. if i dropped a 1000-pound anvil on top of a house from 2 miles up it would smash through the house and create a large hole in the roof. i could then say that this is proof that the anvil is heavy. and i would be right. anybody could argue that the house was poorly made or all kinds of silly things like that. but the fact remains, that anvil was HEAVY. truth does not require widespread acceptance, it is simply true.

Furthermore, this sort of experiment has already been done a million times over on a more imprecise basis. Have you ever taken any mood-altering drugs? Alcohol will do, even if it isn't as great an illustration as LSD or other hallucinogens (check out MK ULTRA if you have the time). Whilst drunk, have you ever done something stupid? That's your thought and higher judgement being affected by the chemicals in your brain. Clearly alcohol cannot affect your soul as you have defined it, yet you do stupid things because you are drunk anyway. What about people who have suffered brain damage? Those people's souls shouldn't be affected by your definition but yet brain damage can cause all sorts of issues.

first of all. no i have never been drunk, never had an LSD trip, really i've never taken any illicit drugs of any kind. the closest i have some i taking drugs used for medicine (recently i was hospitalized by strep throat, and pnemonia simultaneously attacking my body (where they normally attack) and my ear) but that is it. however, hallucinogens are not a parallel example to the procedure that i described. hallucinogens do not force you to do anything, what they do is they alter the stimuli that your soul is dependent on. the make you see things that aren't there. hear things that aren't being said. feel things that don't exist. and you personally have to respond to these incorrect stimuli. same goes for alcohol, it does it to a much lesser extent but it does do it. it alters the stimuli, makes them slightly different from what they should be.
te procedure that i described above, however, does not change stimuli or anything. if such a machine were to be invented it would work by leaving the stimuli intact completely. the subject (call him john). john, would know what the gun was, he would know exactly what would happen if he faced it at himself and pulled the trigger, he wold retain all of his previous moral beliefs that suicide is wrong, and in spite of all of that, he would still decide to pick pick up the gun and shoot himself. if you could create a machine that did that, then you would prove that the brain is the center of thought and decision making (and therefore, by extension, prove that the soul is not).

You're simply making that assertion. Fundamentally, the teapot example illustrates why the concept of a God or a Soul is ridiculous. You have no proof for it and because it is not falsifiable you're nevertheless asking people to believe in it anyway. Well, I should probably point you towards the church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (may you be touched by his noodly appendage).

i have answered all of these objections above.
the soul is falsifiable. its not provable, since there would be no way to know why the above experiment failed (assuming it failed). but it is certainly falsifiable.

You disprove the null only by showing that the data fits the alternative in a statistically significant way. Since you can't demonstrate this (there being no significant dissenting data), you should accept the null (that is, that souls do not exist).

yes. but, the null hypothesis must be something that is proved to be true since the point of a statistical analysis is to see if the null hypothesis has changed. you can't assume that something is true and then place it as your null hypothesis. then, when you can't prove the statistical significance of an alternate hypothesis, claim that as evidence that the null hypothesis is true.
another way to look at its like this.
we know "x" either is or was true. however, recently we collected sample "y" which contradicts "x." so we do a statistical analysis to see what the likelihood of randomly choosing a sample that matches "y" out of population "x" . if the likelihood is low enough then we call this statistically significant, and we accept not that "y" is true. but that "x" has changed.
a practical example would go like this.
say you have a population of 10,000 male "goops." you take a survey of the entire population of "goops" and find out that 50% have 3 legs, 25% have 2 legs and 25% have 4 legs. ten years later you decide to see if this has changed. but you don't want to go through the rigamarole of surveying all 10,000 "goops" again. so instead you take a sample of 1000 goops. but in the sample you discover that 400 (40%) of the goops have 2 legs. 300 (30%) have 3 legs, and 300 (30%) have 4 legs. now, clearly this data is different from what your old data is. so you must do a statistical analysis. your null hypothesis is is the population survey (i.e. 25%,50%,25%). and you alternative hypothesis is not the sample data, but simply that these numbers have changed. so you do a statistical analysis to see what the chances are that you would randomly select a sample of 40,30,30% from a population of 25,50,25%. say you find out that the chances are less then 1% that such a sample would be drawn. because of this you determine that the sample data is statistically significant and decide that the %'s have indeed changed. from there you decide that you must conduct a survey of all of "goops" to determine the new numbers.

another application is to determine he accuracy of null hypothesis. like this.
you take sample "x" from a population. but some idiot says that the population's actual numbers are "y." so you do a statistical analysis. you take "y" as your null hypothesis and "x" as your alternate. you then perform your statistical analysis by determining what the chances are that if "y" is true you get sample "x." if the chances are low you reject he null hypothesis. but you don't accept the alternate hypothesis. all that you have done is proven that "y" is unlikely.
in neither circumstance do you prove that the null hypothesis is true. simply determine the likelihood of the alternative hypothesis. null hypothesis is usually something that had been proven to be true previously.

Skeptical atheism is the default position - it doesn't make any claims by default

this is a double standard. previously you stated that religion was created because there were many unexplained phenomena going on . and now you are saying that skeptic atheism (when i first typed that i put an "e" after the "a" so it was like "aetheism"....darn elements) is a default. i shouldn't have to go into how that doesn't make any sense.
unless when you say default you mean like, blank or something. and if that's true then you are still wrong. atheism claims that ogd doesn't exist. its agnosticism that make no claims by default.

The burden of proof does not equate to chronological snobbery (a logical fallacy in itself). The concept of God's existence is necessarily a positive claim that is made in order to explain some position, and therefore the burden of proof lies on someone attempting to postulate it.

chronological snobbery? how the heck is that a logical fallacy. again, please, how did you arrive at this conclusion. every example that you have cited is about people introducing a concept. not about people making positive claims. when you introduce a concept you must prove that this concept is worth exploring. theism was introduced a long long time ago. the new concept here is atheism, so prove that atheism is worth exploring.

Aside from: the fossil record, looking at species currently alive, neurological experiments; so on and so forth.

fossil record? HA!! the fossil record can't be used as proof of the complexity of brains. all a big head means is a large brain, which doesn't mean a complex or intelligent one.
current species:  there is no evidence that any species alive today has intelligence the way that humans do. at least none that i've heard.
neurological experiments: i explained this above (i think in my previous post)
so on and so forth: this is just a phrase that people (including me on occasion) tack on to the end of lists to make it sound like there is more to the list. if you have more to add, add it. but don't simply say that there is more.

p.s. if you can think of a way to condense these posts back down to a relatively small post then please do so. i really don't want to type to full posts every time i try to retort.

[sillyking14]

Um, Evolution is not entirely Darwin. It has been improved and expanded since then. If we treated every scientific theory as being inviolate from its conception we'd have to be playing with Newtonian mechanics when we wanted to talk about gravity, and Ptolemaic theories of planetary motion. Even if you remove entirely Darwin's work you'd still have more than enough evidence to support the modern theory as it stands.

Fundamentally this is what distinguishes science from other beliefs. It doesn't matter what you believe. Whether you enter into the debate trying to prove that there is or is not a God, or just don't care, the scientific method still holds true. The massive mountain of evidence supporting evolutionary theory, and the complete absence of evidence for creationism, is not a conspiracy from scientists to "disprove God" (there are many theist scientists who support evolution - see also Theistic Evolution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theistic_evolution), and much of the work on the theory was and continues to be done by Christians) - it's just the way the cookie has crumbled.

if this seems a little rushed its because i had gotten mostly finished responding when my computer went crazy and closed out my web browser before i could post.
ok. my point was that when Darwin proposed his theory on the "origin of species" all that he had to go on was his observations of these birds and animal life on this island (i really wish i remembered what the island was called). my point was not that the modern evolutionary theory is built on only Darwin's observations.

my next point was that evidence does not provide any commentary on life. it has no opinion, it is simply there (i don't mean this to sound like i think that you think the evidence is alive, this was simply personification used to illustrate my opinion on the saying "evidence doesn't lie"). what makes evidence proof is how the evidence is interpreted. and if a scientist has a bias then he is going to interpret the evidence according to his bias.
since there is no way for a scientist to prove that (s)he was completely unbiased in their interpretation, we can't take their word for it. this is where the scientific process breaks down in relation to these kinds of matters. for many other kinds of experiments, ones that don't have religious ramifications, this break down doesn't occur. but, since nearly everyone has an opinion when it comes to god, everyone is open to bias.

now the previous argument is entirely speculation, albeit speculation founded on what i believe is common sense. the next point is far more practical

were i a betting man, i would willingly bet everything i own that you, daxx, have never seen any of he so-called "evidence" with your eyes. you have heard about it, read about it, talked about it, but i'd bet you haven't seen most of the fossils that have been discovered, or any of the evidence that you have cited. and i know that i haven't, the difference is that i have heard multiple interpretations of the evidence, which means that i am less prone to accept any one interpretation.
let me give an example, i once read a book called "case for the creator." in it, the author traveled far and wide and sought out theistic scientists to explain why they believe in intelligent design. all of these scientists have just as much credibility as any other scientist, they simply have a different bias.
one such scientist talked about the "Cambrian explosion," which, as he explained it, was a time when all of a sudden (in geological terms all of a sudden can mean over the course of a few thousand years or million years depending on the topic being discussed. the idea is that this happened far more quickly than can be explained) a whole bunch of different species of life began showing up in the fossil record. when previously all that they had were single celled life. he claimed that this was evidence of the biblical depiction of the beginning of life. later, i was reading books and articles that scientists had written in response to "case for a creator." and in one of them the responder also talked about the cambrian explosion, and his point was basically, that even though it is true the cambrian explosion did occur, the fossils that were discovered have little relation to modern animals, and that it therefore wasn't evidence to support the biblical depiction of the beginning of life. there, two different interpretations of exactly the same evidence, who should i believe, i personally would tend to believe the theistic scientist because it confirms what i already know. however, i can't ask that you make the same choice as me. neither of us has seen the evidence that relates to the cambrian explosion. after all, both scientists focused on the aspects of the evidence that support their point so in order for us to interpret it we need the help of scientists, but since scientists can't agree on what it means then how can we? this is my point in a nutshell, different scientists interpret evidence differently, so how do we know which one is right? we ourselves must examine, logically, the conclusions, and theories that are spawned from the evidence. if the theory is self-defeating then it doesn't matter what the evidence is, the theory is wrong. however if the theory makes logical sense then we must admit that it is a possibility. this is what i meant when i said that i prefer logical arguments over arguments about evidence. as a matter of fact, one of my largest goals in life is to gain the credibility, and the clout and whatever so that i can actually see the evidence and make my own conclusions.

When you're trying to argue that the evidence is a conspiracy, I think it's a sign that you don't really have any argument. If you want to take the whole thing on faith, then that's certainly your prerogative, but please don't think that evolution has been "disproven" on any scientific basis, and don't think that your beliefs have any basis in fact. I don't mean to sound aggressive or mean here, but this is what faith is all about - withdrawing from the argument so that you don't have to deal with the possibility of being wrong.

       
red: ouch, nono as i explained above i don't think that evidence is a conspiracy (at least not one created by humans) what i believe is that we can't argue using evidence since we have never seen it for ourselves and the only thing we have seen is other peoples interpretations of the evidence.
blue: like i said above, there are multiple interpretations of the evidence, probably the only ones that you have seen are either ones that are argued by people that haven't seen the evidence themselves, or by the scientists that interpreted the evidence as being against creationism. there are many credible scientists that interpreted the evidence differently.
brown: faith is not about :withdrawing from the argument so that you don't have to deal with the possibility of being wrong. faith is what happens when we are touched by god, when we actively seek god. i'll give an example of faith in action. there was a little girl in Russia. all her life her teachers talked about science and how it had left no room for god, and that god didn't exist. never once did she meet someone that affirmed gods existence. however she came to the conclusion that god must exist. that is faith. now whether or not this is a true story i don't know, but it is an excellent example of what faith is.

 and as for the "theistic evolutionists" i believe that its possible, likely even that that is what happened although i would add one this to the theory and that is that evolution is not a natural system, the laws of which were set up by god but instead evolution is a natural system created by god to create the vast diversity that exists on our planet, but, he had to actually metaphorically step in, and change something in order for humans to evolve.

You can say "it isn't definitively proven" and you'd be right that we still have a way to go in our understanding of the brain, but fundamentally it is an argument from ignorance and a logical fallacy to suggest that because of this it is false; the fact is that modern neuroscience uses this as the best explanation of what happens because a) it is a reasonable explanation that fits the data, and b) there is no credible alternative.

black: i did say that it isn't definitely proven, i simply used different wording.
red: yes that is true, but the reverse is also true. there is no evidence to suggest that the brain does produce thought.
blue: there is no data, aside from the fact that in order for many people to live guilt-free they haveto deny the existence of a spiritual side.
purple: there is a credible alternative, the existence of a soul. the theory that the brain produces thought is only backed up by the assumption that a soul doesn't exist, and therefore complexity in the brain must be the cause of self-actualization. however there are mountains of empirical evidence for the existence of a soul. now empirical evidence doesn't hold much weight in the scientific community but that is beside the point. there is still more evidence for a soul than against a soul. but like was mentioned above this is and argument from ignorance. my point isn't that this is proof that the soul exists, my point is that existence of a soul is just as credible a theory as the other.

More importantly, it's logically impossible to disprove the existence of a soul (or God, for that matter). Science doesn't try, because it's not actually a falsifiable concept. To go into more detail - the soul is completely intangible and completely untestable - therefore, there is no way to tell whether it actually exists or not.

ahhh but it is logically possible to prove the existence of a soul. before i go into detail i would first like to define a couple of phrases.
"invisible and intangible:" when you use this phrase i assume that you mean something that doesn;t actually interact with the physical world.
soul: when i talk about soul, i'm not talking about a simple "spirit" that attaches itself to you. i'm talking about you. it is my belief that the soul is in fact the person, their conscious mind. and that the brain and body are in fact tools that the soul uses.
now then. how to prove the soul exists.
dicalimer: i am not saying that the soul has been proven or disproven to exist this is simply an explanation about how to go about proving or disproving the soul scientifically.

setup: place a famous christian.....say billy graham, in a room that contains only a table with a gun atop it), a chair, and whatever machine is needed to influence the brain
experiment: using the machine, force billy graham to decide to pick up the gun and shoot himself. this would prove that the soul, as i defined it, does not exist. since as i defined it the soul is un-affected by the brain. so if it is proven that you can stimulate the brain in complex forms to create a decision that is against what the person wants, then you have proven that the brain creates thoughts, and therefore, the soul doesn't exist.
another way, (one that is probably far simpler) is to succeed in creating AI, if you can create a free-thinking computer that would also prove that thought is created by the complexity of our brain as opposed to by our soul.

But the point is not to disprove that the soul exists - the burden of proof is on those who claim it does. As a famous example, imagine there was a completely invisible and intangible teapot that orbited Mars. There is no way to prove or disprove its existence, but we do not automatically accept that it exists - why? Because to operate scientifically we operate on two principles. The first is the statistical concept of the null hypothesis, which states that we take a default position when examining a phenomenon (in questions of existence, this is usually of non-existence), and if our hypothesis is not confirmed then we fall back to the null. The second is the burden of proof - when someone makes a positive claim (X exists, Y raped and murdered a young girl in 1990, Z is planning to kill us all with their communo-fascist agenda) the burden is on them to substantiate their claim. When you claim that consciousness is caused by the existence of a soul, you need to prove that souls exist. Unfortunately, there is no such proof.

red: that example is useless, since a teapot orbiting mars won't affect us in any way. the soul does.
blue: that is the wrong way of thinking about null hypothesis. nono, for the purposes of the experiment you must take on as a null hypothesis that it doesn't exist, because that is what you are trying to disprove. i took statistics i know all about null hypothesis versus alternative hypothesis.
brown: that example is one of somebody introducing a concept that is new. yes. if you want to change the way people believe you must prove what you are saying. however, theists aren't changing anything. theism has been around much longer than atheism. therefore, it would fall to the atheists to prove what they want everyone to believe to be true. after all, scientists are making a positive claim. they claim that intelligence is created by a complicated brain. the burden of proof then falls on them to prove it.
purple: there is also no proof that intelligence spawns from a complicated brain.

i would like to continue this debate on intelligence (sapience as you think of it).

Sure thing.

i think its your turn. i'm pretty sure that i was the last person to mention this topic. let me see if i can find it.....................

ah-ha found it.
 

this itself sums up the anti-soul argument, but it is unproven. it is an assumption that is made by people that deny the existence of soul. and yes, if we don't have souls, then this assertion would have to be correct, however it has never been proven scientifically. earlier i talked about my "psych teacher" and how he said what i said. i'm sorry i misspoke(wrote?), it was in my psych class, where my teacher did very little teaching of his own, mostly he read from our textbook or he showed us a documentary by psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who (as i understand) is rather famous. the documentary basically explained: the history of psychology, different studies that were done in psychology (and the results and conclusions that were derived from these studies), and studies that are currently going on and questions that are still unanswered. it was in the latter section that consciousness, falls in (of course he talked about more like (we still don't know how the brain creates consciousness as opposed to we think it possible that consciousness is not part of that brain), but still he did claim that they haven't fully mapped the brain and that, therefore, they cannot irrevocably claim that consciousness is derived from the brain.
here is a link to zimbardo's home page.
http://www.zimbardo.com/ (pretty original ain't it?)

p.s. sorry for the length

[Daxx]

Part 2 of 3.

Both of those examples confirm that the evidence is in favour of evolution. You can have different interpretations of the meaning as related to some story in a book, but not of the facts. Science doesn't work like English Lit - you can only interpret data in the sense that you draw conclusions from the data; you can't just say anything you like. The Cambrian explosion is a perfect illustrative example of evolution in action - putting a theological meaning on top of it is useless, because there's no evidence that suggests that is a reasonable interpretation to draw.

That, and you don't know anything about God. It's not like you have any evidence at all. It's very obvious that you have serious deficiencies in your knowledge of biology, physics, astronomy, philosophy and logic. I'm sure this isn't your fault - we're all still learning - but you're falling massively on confirmation bias rather than educating yourself. You have absolutely no evidence to support any position you've postulated so far, even when challenged on it, and the arguments you've made (which you've said you don't want to support with evidence) have been almost completely without merit.

did you not read what i said? the Cambrian explosion occurred near instantaneously (in geological terms). we went from single celled organisms, to full, multi-celled organisms, without any intermediate steps. that is not evolution. and besides, my point in bringing up the Cambrian explosion was not that it proves or disproves evolution, but that it is possible to draw multiple conclusions from evidence. as a result i have absolutely no faith in the word of a scientist. i will not believe his interpretation of evidence without examining the evidence for myself.

Actually you're just factually wrong on this point. The Cambrian explosion was fast, that's for sure. But it took 70 to 80 million years, under which species did in fact evolve through intermediate steps which we are gathering evidence for - the evolutionary process simply sped up by an order of magnitude. The Cambrian explosion is in fact explained by evolutionary theory and more evidence is being gathered which explains items that previously were puzzling. I'm not sure where you'd be able to draw another conclusion from this - we have evidence for it, there wasn't such a huge explosion in diversity as was once thought, and ultimately it wasn't all that inexplicable (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion#How_real_was_the_explosion.3F).

and as for that second paragraph. that is a direct attack on not only my intelligence but my humanity.

If you want me to attack your intelligence, we can see what that's like. Frankly I don't think you are unintelligent - I do however think that you are poorly- or mis-educated and you are making a substantial amount of errors in trying desperately to defend an idea for which you have little supporting evidence and (I'm going to guess here and make an assumption, forgive me if I'm incorrect) which has never been challenged substantially by anyone before, due to the gated way the Christian community defends their thought. If I am personally attacking you then I am sorry to have to do so - but when it is a failing that you have personally made that is impeding discussion, I don't believe that pointing it out is inappropriate.

For example: let's assume that I am arguing that 2 + 2 = 5. Despite all the mathematical evidence you present, I choose to ignore it and continue to believe that 2 + 2 = 5 because I don't have the mathematical training to understand why I am wrong to make that assertion. This isn't a failing in my argument, it is a failing in myself because I am making poor and misinformed arguments and am not acknowledging where my arguments are flawed. In this case, it would be quite appropriate for you to point out that I am making mistakes due to an error of personal judgement or education.

tl;dr whining isn't going to win you the argument.

exactly what deficiencies have i shown in the area of biology, physics and such?

Well I've been pointing them out fairly consistently over the last few posts. I don't much care for going back to find them all again, but since for the most part you haven't responded to my corrections I take it that you accept them.

logic? every argument i have made has been based on logic. unlike yours. your arguments have consisted of a mix of logic, misinterpretations of what i'm saying, and "there is evidence that this is what actually happened" with a link to a website of a scientist, that is saying the exact same thing, and "you have no idea what your talking about." don't talk to me about deficiencies. i never said that i didn't want to support my logic with evidence, per se, what i have said time and again, is that the "logic" used to come up with many "theories" is circular, and is based on stipulations that are unfounded.

Actually I've pointed out the errors in your "logic", again repeatedly over the last few pages in the thread. You might want to claim I'm mischaracterising your argument, but when you are being continually factually incorrect, vague in your use of terminology, and shifting your position, it is very difficult to get a handle on what exactly your arguments are on some occasions. You might claim that every argument you have made has been based on logic, but most of them have been based on logical fallacies and most of the rest have been based on a flawed factual understanding.

If the theory is "self defeating" and the evidence still points in that direction, it means you might have a problem with your theory,

  exactly!! that is exactly what i have said from the start. a theory that makes no logical sense, is wrong. period. you have to fix it somehow. my argument from the get-go was that evolution is not a logical theory in relation to the creation of man.

At least do us both the favour of finishing the quote. Context in reading comprehension is important, and misquoting someone is actually intellectually dishonest in quite an egregious way.

If the theory is "self defeating" and the evidence still points in that direction, it means you might have a problem with your theory, or you might not - you have to falsify your theory before it becomes wrong. It certainly does not mean that the evidence is wrong. How much logical sense a theory makes is actually completely irrelevant to its truth. I'm guessing you're not a physicist, but have you ever done any reading on quantum theory? Even its foremost proponents maintained that it didn't make much sense.

So, let me get this straight - because you are not a scientist in a lab working on evolutionary biology, and have therefore not seen any evidence with your own eyes, all those scientists are lying to you? You're willing to trust a bunch of poorly educated nonspecialists over people who actually work with this stuff?  There is vast agreement in the academic community that evolution through natural selection happens, but you'll gladly cherry-pick through the occasional one who dissents and take his word as gospel?

ok red: almost true. i do not believe that mostly they are lying to us. i simply cannot trust their word. because i have seen first-hand how much your perspective can e changed by bias. (come to think of it so have you)

green: whoever said "poorly educated." the people i am talking about have doctorates, and are in the thick of it, they do work with this stuff. and who said i was taking their word as gospel? i said that the fact that scientists do not agree makes it impossible for me to take anybody at their word. theist or atheist.[/quote]

Again this is the problem of hypercredulity. You are willing to believe (or in this case consider) all ideas on equal footings and not think critically about it at all in an attempt to justify a belief which is roundly rejected by most experts in the field. Why are you a Christian? Why do you believe in one specific God? After all, essentially what you are doing is trusting the same people that told you that Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny were real. And, more importantly, you are picking one particular God over many many others for whom there is about the same amount of supporting evidence.

If you are choosing not to trust the scientific community then ultimately that's your own lookout. I don't care whether you live a life of superstition and credulity, provided it doesn't impact on mine. But don't expect to enter into a serious discussion and be taken seriously if you are going to deliberately ignore consensus and evidence in order to advance your own agenda.

Then again you've already mentioned that you accept evolution through natural selection, so I guess this point is moot.

brown: ok first i will respond to what you said. then i will respond to what you meant.
1. i do not dispute the fact that natural selection occurs. thats it
2. there is NOT a "vast" agreement in the scientific community. check out this page
    http://www.dissentfromdarwin.org/
 this page, so far as i know, make no mention of evidence, it is simply a list of credible scientists that do not agree that humans were created by natural selection.

Sorry. Nice try, but that list is dishonest and not representative, as the video explains. Compare for comedy value with Project Steve (http://ncse.com/taking-action/project-steve), which is a list of eminent scientists named "Steve" (or some variant) who support evolutionary theory, which already has more signatures.

There are no credible scientists from the field who support creationism

exactly how do you define credible? how much education they have? every body that i have and ever will mention as a credible source, has at least a masters degree with years of research under their belt. many of them have doctorates. or similar. people that are published? many of these people have written books/articles about their beliefs.
as a matter of fact the only possible criteria for "credibility" that these people don't possess is that they don't believe that we are products of chance.

Credible would mean that you'd have to a) be in the field i.e. be a biologist and not a mathematician, engineer or physicist, b) be performing research into the relevant areas of biology, c) preferably be associated with an accredited university in terms of your education or employment as faculty, and d) have been published in a credible journal which is subject to peer review. If you can find me one person who meets these criteria and disagrees with evolution by natural selection and common descent, I'll gladly retract my statement.

Faith is exactly that - saying "la la la I don't have to look at the real world because I accept this on faith which means I don't need proof". It is a complete withdrawal from an argument, because at the point where you say "oh I don't have any evidence I just accept this on faith" then you're out of the range of rational discussion.

who are you to tell me what faith is?

For one, an ex-fundamentalist Christian who has read the bible cover-to-cover and knows it well, knows a lot about the fundamentalist Christian mindset, understands philosophy and (importantly) understands people. That appeal to authority over, let's get on to the important stuff.

what you have described is what people do with faith.

Absolutely. In terms of discussions like these, that is what it means and the purpose it serves. I'm not making any claims about what faith means personally to people because I understand what that is like. I'm merely describing how "faith" is used in the context of these discussions. In these discussions faith is that refusal to be curious, and it is the blind roadblock to rational discussion.

some of these people rightly guard themselves with faith. if they can't argue because they don't know what your talking about then they are right to hide behind faith. that is in fact what faith is for.

No, they are absolutely wrong to do so. Hiding behind faith is admitting that you don't know and are not curious to find out. Hiding behind faith is the blind acceptance of a fairy tale you have constructed around your own psyche so as it won't be damaged by contact with the real world.

Incorrect, the reverse is not also true. Brain activity correlates with certain thoughts and emotions and we can detect this with brain scanners. People missing parts of their brain suffer the inability to perform certain cognitive functions. Brain damage can change peoples' memories, perceptions and behaviours. This is evidence (extremely strong evidence, at that) that mental activity is sourced from the brain. Higher functions are specifically sourced in the frontal lobe and cerebral cortex. Check out this page for more information.

okokok so first let me make one thing clear. when i say soul i literally mean you. i literally mean that you are not a physical person but a spirit, a spirit that is possessing your body as it were. not in the same way that demons are said to possess, i mean that you are the only spirit in your body. you have to understand what i mean by this or nothing i say is going to be comprehensible much less make any logical sense.
now then, asa a spirit that is possessing a physical body you are dependent on that body for stimuli, you use that body as though it were a machine. so, when you think and make decisions you use the brain as a sort of computer. like if you were doing a science project. and you were typing your report. any body could see (if they hacked your computer from a remote source) the pages you were looking at, and what you are typing into your word processor. but they can't see you. you are the one that is thinking an telling the computer what to write/type/show. so, the fact that you can change what people see/percieve is not surprising. it would be like if that hypothetical hacker took remote control of your computer and began typing whatever (s)he wanted. you would no longer have control of the machine but you would still be free to think. that is what the soul is. and the soul explains all current evidence just as well as the non-existence. as a matter of fact, it explains it better since so far scientists have been unable to introduce thought, only actions. although it is true that this is not definitive since there is still much research to do.
[...]
first of all. no i have never been drunk, never had an LSD trip, really i've never taken any illicit drugs of any kind. the closest i have some i taking drugs used for medicine (recently i was hospitalized by strep throat, and pnemonia simultaneously attacking my body (where they normally attack) and my ear) but that is it. however, hallucinogens are not a parallel example to the procedure that i described. hallucinogens do not force you to do anything, what they do is they alter the stimuli that your soul is dependent on. the make you see things that aren't there. hear things that aren't being said. feel things that don't exist. and you personally have to respond to these incorrect stimuli. same goes for alcohol, it does it to a much lesser extent but it does do it. it alters the stimuli, makes them slightly different from what they should be.
te procedure that i described above, however, does not change stimuli or anything. if such a machine were to be invented it would work by leaving the stimuli intact completely. the subject (call him john). john, would know what the gun was, he would know exactly what would happen if he faced it at himself and pulled the trigger, he wold retain all of his previous moral beliefs that suicide is wrong, and in spite of all of that, he would still decide to pick pick up the gun and shoot himself. if you could create a machine that did that, then you would prove that the brain is the center of thought and decision making (and therefore, by extension, prove that the soul is not).

You are advocating a concept which is in some ways quite different to mainstream ideas about the soul, but let's explore it anyway since it's obviously at the heart of the argument.

The concept is one which seems to be entirely untestable - especially not by the example you're trying to give. You claim when you talk about drugs and so forth that altering the brain-state and the stimuli that the brain receives is not a method of making decisions, so therefore it would not be possible to construct a machine that interferes with decisions in that way. The premise is therefore untestable because you have defined "decision" to be a function entirely independent of the brain's state; should it be possible to alter someone's behaviour by tampering with the brain (as has been done) then you claim that it wasn't a "decision" to do so - i.e. special pleading.

[Daxx]

Part 3 of 3.

blue: there is no data, aside from the fact that in order for many people to live guilt-free they haveto deny the existence of a spiritual side.

See above. Absolutely false, and this demonstrates your complete lack of understanding of the topic. Neuroscientists do this sort of work all the time.

guilt is an emotional response to an action that a person believes to be wrong. I.E. if you do something that you believe to be wrong then you feel guilty.
therefore in order to be completely guilt free you must deny the existence of morals. the existence of absolute right and wrong.
religion is the only belief system that purports the existence of absolute morals

You're factually incorrect again on this one. Religion does do this, but there are other ethical systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_absolutism). As a side point it is more than possible to feel guilty without ascribing to an absolute moral code.

, and in every religion morals are tied inseparably with spirit.

Also not strictly true. Maybe in your religion, sure.

therefore, in order to deny the existence of absolute morals (and thereby live guilt-free) one must deny the existence of spirits. the point of this argument is that in order for people to live guilt-free, they have to assume that they are the product randomness. and that is the only real reason that people believe that their intelligence (maybe self-awareness would be a better word) spawns from a complicated brain.

Actually I ascribe to theory that intelligence and self-awareness is an emergent property of a complicated brain because that hypothesis matches the data we have. I don't do it out of some perverse desire to eliminate guilt, as you appear to be implying.

If I were to kill someone, I might still feel guilt because I have been programmed by the social structure in which I live to feel emotional responses like guilt to certain situations. I might feel fear of reprisal, I might feel guilty because I am violating the social contract and a moral code that has been socially constructed, I might feel sadness and remorse if the person was someone who did not wish to kill, or I might feel happy if the person was someone I did wish to kill. I don't need to invoke the existence of a God to explain the existence of these emotions, and I certainly don't need a God to be the basis of my moral code.

as i described above, both the theory of a soul and the theory of no-soul explain the evidence equally well. neither caries more wait.

The theory of a soul, if indistinguishable from the theory of no-soul by any method, is a philosophically and scientifically useless idea. Since there is no way to prove that the soul exists then it is entirely reasonable to assume that it does not.

I should probably direct you for extra reading to the parable of the Invisible Gardener (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Invisible_Gardener), and Occam's razor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor), which it would be valuable to consider together in the context of this argument.

and as i explained even further above and will explain below, the soul can be proven to exist.

Sure, I'll wait until you provide that proof.

Otherwise I could say that an alternative is that we are all guided, puppet-like, by that same teapot that orbits near Mars. That is not a credible alternative, and neither is the soul.

actually, as far as experimental evidence goes, this theory is as credible as the other two, although it doesn't have the empirical evidence that the soul does. and it doesn't have an reasonable backing that the anti-soul theory does.

Hypercredulity again. But there is no empirical evidence for the teapot, nor is there any for the soul. Therefore they are on the same unsupported footing. But I'll continue to wait for this "empirical evidence" (please don't get this confused with anecdotal evidence, they're quite different).

if i dropped a 1000-pound anvil on top of a house from 2 miles up it would smash through the house and create a large hole in the roof. i could then say that this is proof that the anvil is heavy. and i would be right. anybody could argue that the house was poorly made or all kinds of silly things like that. but the fact remains, that anvil was HEAVY. truth does not require widespread acceptance, it is simply true.

There is an anvil. It may or may not be heavy (let's ignore the revelation of absolute truth in its heaviness for now since there is no possible way we could know this).

Observable facts:
An anvil-shaped object appeared to drop for two miles above the earth's surface and hit a house, breaking through the roof.

Hypothesis 1:
The anvil broke through the roof because in falling it gained velocity. Combined with its mass, this generated momentum and force sufficient to break through the roof.

Is this falsified or verified by the observed event? Apparently it is verified, but there could be other explanations.

Hypothesis 2:
The anvil had considerable mass.

Is this falsified or verified by the observed event? No. The evidence doesn't actually tell us either way - it just tells us that the anvil broke through a roof. Assuming Hypothesis 1 is correct, to break through the surface of the roof the anvil would have required an amount of momentum that is proportional to the strength of the roof. If the roof were made out of paper, the anvil might not need to be considerably massive. We cannot therefore verify the weight of the anvil. This isn't the same thing as proving that the anvil is light.

Proposed experiment:
Drop the anvil on a roof as part of an experiment where we can control the variables - that is, where we know the strength of the roof (in terms of how heavy an anvil would be needed to break through). If the anvil did not break through the roof, then we can discard the hypothesis that its mass led to enough force being applied to the roof. Importantly this would not necessarily disprove the hypothesis that the anvil has considerable mass and we would have to conduct further experiments with the anvil under different conditions (such as the amount of pressure it applies to a set of scales at rest or the force required to have the anvil travel at a certain speed). If it did break through the roof, we should propose further experiments in an attempt to falsify or verify Hypothesis 2.

This is the scientific method. The method of faith is to have someone tell you that the anvil was heavy simply because it sounds to them like a reasonable hypothesis and have you accept it unquestioningly. But the person who tells you that the anvil was heavy has no idea whether he is right, he just claims the authority of knowledge. If there is an absolute truth then you would be correct to point out that acceptance of it is irrelevant to its truth. However, you cannot claim access to this absolute truth so therefore the point is moot. I could quite as easily claim an absolute truth that was quite in opposition to yours and there would be no difference.

That was quite offtopic. Apologies for the digression.

You disprove the null only by showing that the data fits the alternative in a statistically significant way. Since you can't demonstrate this (there being no significant dissenting data), you should accept the null (that is, that souls do not exist).

yes. but, the null hypothesis must be something that is proved to be true since the point of a statistical analysis is to see if the null hypothesis has changed. you can't assume that something is true and then place it as your null hypothesis. then, when you can't prove the statistical significance of an alternate hypothesis, claim that as evidence that the null hypothesis is true.

Actually when we are talking about methodologies in the scientific (non-mathematical) worldview this isn't what we must do because there is no such thing as absolute proof. What we do is we take the theory which is not making the positive claim (X does not exist, Y didn't rape and murder a young girl in 1990, Z doesn't want to kill us all with his commu-fascist agenda) and place it as our null, because the burden of proof lies with those making positive claims about the world.

Skeptical atheism is the default position - it doesn't make any claims by default

this is a double standard. previously you stated that religion was created because there were many unexplained phenomena going on . and now you are saying that skeptic atheism (when i first typed that i put an "e" after the "a" so it was like "aetheism"....darn elements) is a default. i shouldn't have to go into how that doesn't make any sense. unless when you say default you mean like, blank or something. and if that's true then you are still wrong. atheism claims that ogd doesn't exist. its agnosticism that make no claims by default.

It's no double standard unless you're abiding by chronological snobbery (which you appear to be), which is a logical fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronological_snobbery). The time of the beliefs has no bearing on which we accept as holding the burden of proof.

You should read up on your definitions. Atheism doesn't come only in its strong form. Weak atheism rejects the claims for the existence of God. It makes no positive claim that God definitely doesn't exist. You should check out this page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontheism) for more details.

Agnosticism is something different entirely, and involves epistemology.

The burden of proof does not equate to chronological snobbery (a logical fallacy in itself). The concept of God's existence is necessarily a positive claim that is made in order to explain some position, and therefore the burden of proof lies on someone attempting to postulate it.

chronological snobbery? how the heck is that a logical fallacy. again, please, how did you arrive at this conclusion. every example that you have cited is about people introducing a concept. not about people making positive claims. when you introduce a concept you must prove that this concept is worth exploring. theism was introduced a long long time ago. the new concept here is atheism, so prove that atheism is worth exploring.

Chronological snobbery (which I have linked above) is a fallacy which assumes that because something came first (or afterwards) it is therefore better. It would be like one person walking into a room and saying "2 + 2 = 5", and then someone walking in and saying "2 + 2 =4", and accepting the first person's statement because he said it first. The same would apply the other way around.

Actually introducing a subject has no bearing on its worth or truth. It is quite possible that a long-held belief (the world is flat, grain spawns rats, gods exist) could be entirely wrong. These are all positive statements on the world. If you make the claim that the world is flat, you should substantiate that claim rather than claiming that other people should substantiate their claims that it is otherwise. Similarly for the rats and the gods.

I don't make the claim that the Judeo-Christian God of the Bible doesn't exist. I don't need to, since not believing in something is the rational skeptic's position. I challenge your claim that he does, however.

Aside from: the fossil record, looking at species currently alive, neurological experiments; so on and so forth.

fossil record? HA!! the fossil record can't be used as proof of the complexity of brains. all a big head means is a large brain, which doesn't mean a complex or intelligent one.

The fossil record can be an example of cranial capacity. Coupled with other knowledge on things like the size of the body, other various adaptions, the relationship to current species, this can tell us a lot about the complexity of a brain.

current species:  there is no evidence that any species alive today has intelligence the way that humans do. at least none that i've heard.

Only the way you define intelligence, which is special pleading in that it is distinct from regular intelligence. All species today exhibit some form of intelligence, and we can examine these species in order to correlate the complexity of their brains with their intelligence.
 

neurological experiments: i explained this above (i think in my previous post)

Afraid not.

TL;DR version for everyone else on the forum: sillyking14 accepts evolutionary theory. He disagrees that human-level intelligence can be explained by biology, and insists on the existence of some nebulous, untestable "soul" which is only possessed by humans for some reason.

[Daxx]

Split into 3 posts.

I'm not entirely sure where you're going with this point as I have already pointed out that what the theory was like at its inception is irrelevant - if you weren't attempting to make the point that further developments don't count,

if you had read and comprehended everything i wrote then you WOULD understand where i DID go with this. Darwinism came first, then came fossil evidence. this left scientists open to bias. VERY open to bias. for more information continue reading, this information does matter.

It's hard to understand a point based on something that is very obviously ignorant of the facts of the situation. As I've already pointed out, your idea that evolutionary theory came before the evidence makes no sense for a number of reasons. Fossil evidence had been piling up long before Darwin published Origin of Species in the second half of the 19th century - the Greeks found fossils, and so did people during the middle ages. People who were part of the Christian tradition interpreted these as being creatures killed in "the flood". Other peoples interpreted them as different things. In the 17th and 18th centuries there was a movement as part of the Age of Reason in furthering understanding, including theories on comparative anatomy and the transmutation of species. From Wikipedia:

In early modern Europe, the systematic study of fossils emerged as an integral part of the changes in natural philosophy that occurred during the Age of Reason. The nature of fossils and their relationship to life in the past became better understood during the 17th and 18th centuries, and at the end of the 18th century the work of Georges Cuvier ended a long running debate about the reality of extinction and led to the emergence of paleontology, in association with comparative anatomy, as a scientific discipline. The expanding knowledge of the fossil record also played an increasing role in the development of geology, particularly stratigraphy.

The first half of the 19th century saw geological and paleontological activity become increasingly well organized with the growth of geologic societies and museums and an increasing number of professional geologists and fossil specialists. This contributed to a rapid increase in knowledge about the past history of life on Earth, and progress towards definition of the geologic time scale largely based on fossil evidence. In 1822 the word "paleontology" was invented by the editor of a French scientific journal to refer to the study of ancient living organisms through fossils. As knowledge of life's past history continued to improve, it became increasingly obvious that there had been some kind of successive order to the development of life. This would encourage early evolutionary theories on the transmutation of species.

So clearly you are wrong to state that there was no evidence before Darwin's work. In fact, Darwin's work was based upon a growing body of scientific evidence that was crying out for hypotheses that fit the evidence. Darwin's work offered an interesting theory that fit the available evidence and allowed further progress to be made.

Secondly, you are wrong to assume bias. Scientists don't (as I have pointed out on multiple occasions but you don't seem to understand this very important point) collect evidence solely to support a theory. They collect evidence with the aim of testing whether the theory is correct or not - if the evidence substantiates the theory, then so much the better for the theory. If the evidence does not substantiate the theory, then the theory is probably wrong and needs to be changed or replaced. Your key argument in assuming bias is the revisionist assumption that "scientists" were somehow trying to disprove God by following up on evolutionary theory. But, as we know, this is not an accusation that holds water because many famous naturalists at the time were Christians, deists and other types of theist. If there is any bias in the way that scientists work, it is towards actual working models which fit the evidence and provide insight into the way the world actually works. No wonder then that this might be at odds with the creation story. So not only are your key arguments factually incorrect, the general point that you are trying to make doesn't actually make sense.

'm not sure how to put this any more bluntly - your standard for proof is fundamentally flawed in a massive way

i never, ever mentioned standard of proof. yo introduced that.

Yes, because you were questioning the veracity of the evidence published in scientific journals and collected by the scientific community, because you have not seen it personally. Nevertheless, you are quite happy to accept that the stories imagined by some bronze-age tribesmen sitting around the camp fire are quite true, despite you never having seen any evidence for that either. Do you see the double standard here?

You're willing to take the events of the bible as truth without any supporting evidence whatsoever, presumably because your pastor or parents told you so, but you're more than happy to discredit every scientist who has ever looked at the mountains of evidence that supports evolutionary theory on the speculative premise that they're only doing it because they're biased?

Yeah, you don't really have any argument. You are, despite your protestations, attempting to argue that pretty much every mainstream evolutionary biologist is lying to you or deliberately misinterpreting the evidence (or possibly is influenced by Satan?!). That is the biggest argument from ignorance I have ever seen "I haven't seen the evidence for myself therefore the conclusions everyone else has drawn from it must be wrong", and it isn't going to fly.

no doubt i missed a few quotes where you spewed this misinterpretation. i am not saying that they are wrong simply because i haven't seen the evidence. i am saying that, because there are multiple interpretations from credible sources i cannot take any one specific scientists word. I have to rely on logic. otherwise i am as guilty of blind faith as most everybody in the world.

neither am i saying that every mainstream biologist is lying to us. i continually talked about bias. bias, is not something that is decided on by a person. it is inherent in a persons beliefs. if you strongly believe something is true, than any evidence you find tha has anything to do with that subject is very likely to be interpreted according to your bias. atheists have a bias AGAINST God. theists have a bias FOR god. so when they interpret he same evidence they come to opposing conclusions.

You haven't yet demonstrated that there are any other credible sources. I keep asking you to provide evidence but you keep failing to meet that request. Ultimately what you are guilty of is hypercredulity - you are as willing to take the evidence of a non-expert who stands and talks at you each Sunday over the vast majority of experts in the scientific community. Appeals to Authority do not inherently make something true, but you'd be deluding yourself to think that the ideas are in any way on an even footing. Creationists do not deserve the credibility you are ascribing to them, because they've never made credible arguments and the evidence does not support their hypothesis.

When you are talking about confirmation bias (on which I agree with you to some degree; it's certainly amazing how far people will try to stretch things to fit their world-view), how do you explain theists who support evolutionary theory? There are many scientists who are experts in their field who for their own reasons have a faith in God. But they still accept that the evidence supports evolutionary theory. Evolution is not an inherently atheistic theory - it is an anti-ID theory purely because those two ideas are mutually incompatible - so your accusations of confirmation bias don't hold water. Your points about bias, which I have refuted here and above, just don't make support your point (and, logically speaking, neither do they actually have any bearing on the veracity of evolutionary theory).

never once have i claimed that natural selection does not happen. throughout this entire discussion i have maintained that natural selection and evolution are excellent models to explain the large diversity of life seen on our planet. however, they simply do not explain human intelligence.

In that case you are really confusing the discussion with inappropriate use of terminology. You're talking about biblical Creationism, which makes the claim that species were created and do not change. Creationism and Intelligent Design refutes what they term "macroevolution", which is evolution at the speciation level.

But fine, I'm glad that we got this cleared up - you support the theory of evolution by natural selection, you just have one problem with it relating to "intelligence". We can focus on that point for the rest of the discussion then.

and a computer simulation? don't make me laugh. you may have seen what scientists believe happened, or seen a demonstration of what evolution means. but you could not have seen any actual evidence on a computer simulation. computers only ever do what they are told, they can be programmed to show a simulation of anything.

The simple action of demonstrating how from simple rules emergent structures like evolution appear is an excellent proof of concept. If you were against evolution as a mechanism, you would counter that these processes do not occur in nature. Except we see them taking place, and we can model them with simulations.

artificial selection? artificial selection is the opposite of natural selection. it is not random, and it is done by intelligent beings.

Again, artificial selection is proof of concept. It demonstrates that evolution occurs - there's just a different selective pressure. There is no real difference between artificially selecting for a trait and naturally selecting for a trait, aside from the fact that with artificial selection you can have increased selective pressure compared to most examples of natural selection. Further, you misunderstand what bearing "random" has on the discussion. Mutation in cases of both artificial and natural selection is random, but in both cases the selective pressure is anything but. Natural selection isn't random - it selects in favour of certain traits just as artificial selection does. The only difference is that the selective pressure is, for the most part, lower. Any hypothetical intelligence or intent behind the selective pressure is irrelevant for establishing that evolution occurs.

But then you pointed out that you accepted evolutionary theory's mechanical processes (just not one particular facet of it), so we shouldn't have any disagreement here.

diseases? covered above.

You haven't actually covered this above. Diseases undergo the exact same evolution by natural selection as other species. It's certainly not artificial selection (though the selective pressure may be catalysed by man), otherwise we would select for them to not survive. No, diseases evolve resistances to drugs and so forth in the exact way that plants evolve resistances to various soil types and climates and creatures evolve resistances to the many and varied defensive measures that other creatures evolve. This is not only proof that evolution occurs, it is proof that evolution by natural selection occurs. But, again, you accept that anyway so there shouldn't be need for argument.

[ElementalGod]

Christians are the primary (getting to the point where it's almost fitting to say "only") religion that still denies facts for claims that have no merit.

Well, I personally have never denied or claimed anything without first observing the evidence, considering the cost, etc. There is no causality between intelligence and Christianity or reason and Christianity. Anyone who becomes a Christian does so by choice, not by coercion, and in making this choice, has not sacrificed one shred of their capacity to reason or think for themselves. Unintelligent Christians aren't dumb because they are Christians. They are just unintelligent.

Wrong once again Christians are dumber and this has been verified by multiple clinical studies. Because they are dumber they are more likely to believe in ancient fairy tales and so there is a direct correlation. The more education and iq points you have the less likely you are to believe...
Maybe you should watch this: Common Misconceptions About Atheism (

ws)