Charles Darwin

Sorry, you're not even close. Oh sure, the cosmos are plenty complex, but biology is more-so. This is not controversial, nor, despite your ad-hominem, do I have any stake in the matter. I'm simply using biology as my example because it is so complex. If the cosmos were the more complex, then I'd use it as the example. You write: "All you have done in this forum is argue, without warrant, that we humans are somehow special, and therefore removed, from the reality around us." Please, let's try to stay on topic and to characterize each other's positions at least somewhat accurately.

Quantum Ninja

Life evolves all the time. Microevolution is a very real thing, an observable natural phenomenon like lightning or tidal changes. It is scientific fact.

But I'm assuming your gripe is with the theory of macroevolution. May I ask why? Never mind the heaps of empirical evidence supporting it. Just ignore the fossil record and the comparitive analysis of DNA sequences, embryonic development and anatomy of countless species around the world. It's not like any of that means anything. Empirical evidence is overrated anyway.

Share with us your infinite wisdom about the origins of life and the universe.

Why is it that invisible flying gnomes that pull you down to the ground not a good explanation for gravity?

Philosoft

Whatever. Either the atheist has religious beliefs by definition or the atheist has religious beliefs by logical necessity. The law doesn't care either way.
I must be missing something. If you're talking about the anti-discrimination lawsuits against the BSA, the scouts won those.

Philosoft

Pardon? Three of the four fundamental forces are purely attractive in nature. Maybe you should clarify what you mean by "things."
There are naturalistic models for both things mentioned. I don't know anyone who "believes" them by "faith." On the other paw, there are no models for divine creation. That's what faith is for.

Charles Darwin

Couple of weeks ago the BSA was declared to be a church and therefore an agreement between them and San Diego regarding use of some park land was found to be unconstitutional.

Charles Darwin

CD quote:
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If you believe that the DNA code or echolocation are examples of things which are likely to have fallen together, then you are clearly exercising faith.
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And that is the criterion isn't it : whether the model is naturalistic or not. No matter that they are incomplete to the point of being non scientific. No matter that the whole idea goes against everything science has shown us. Folks like you can claim that adherence to the models isn't an example of faith because, after all, the model is naturalistic.

Philosoft

Oh, right. Well, here's the thing. The BSA pursued a religious status in order to maintain their ability to discriminate against homosexuals and atheists. Fine, BSA is a religious group now. Then, the City of San Diego wants to lease land to them at $1. Since that is far below market price, it amounts to subsidization of religion.

I see your angle here. You don't think a group that walks into the city manager's office and says, "Hi, we're a legally incorporated group of atheists and we want to lease this land for $1 so we can do atheist things and exclude religious people" would have a prayer (ha) of succeeding?

Philosoft

What happens when you try to incorporate supernaturalism into explanatory models? I'll let you take a big fat guess at this one.

Really? How complete must a model be before it's properly "scientific"?

The whole idea of what? What parts of this "idea" are wave-particle duality, quantum fluctuations, imaginary time? These are things we expected to see 100 years ago? I think you have an artificially limited scope of what science is supposed to show.
Well, folks like me cringe whenever people think specific supernatural acts are things that can be legitimately incorporated into models.

Charles Darwin

The naturalistic models of how the likes of the DNA code or echolocation evolved amount to this: "well, since evolution is true then these must have evolved somehow, let's speculate about it."

I do agree with you that there is a heap of evidence for macro evolution, there also is for the flat earth theory and geocentrism. You can even predict ecclipses with geocentrism. But I assume you think the evidence for macro evolution is compelling. This is not the case -- each evidence, in fact, can be used to argue *against* evolution.

For example, the fossils often shows new species arising fully formed, as though they were planted there. Then they don't change for eons. Even the sequence of horse-like fossils, that old favorite of museums and textbooks, is now admitted to be a series of different, overlapping in time, species. If the different species evolved from each other, then it must have been rapidly so as not to have left any fossils of the transition. As Niles Eldredge admitted:

"There have been an awful lot of stories, some more imaginative than others, about what the nature of that history [of life] really is. The most famous example, still on exhibit downstairs, is the exhibit on horse evolution prepared perhaps fifty years ago. That has been presented as the literal truth in textbook after textbook. Now I think that that is lamentable, particularly when the people who propose those kinds of stories may themselves be aware of the speculative nature of some of that stuff."

Or as paleontologist Robert Carroll explains, the fossil record "emphasizes how wrong Darwin was in extrapolating the pattern of long-term evolution from that observed within populations and species." So to the rescue comes punctuated equilibrium, which isn't so much a theory as a label. We don't observe gradual evolution and the fossil species are static, so evolution must proceed by fits and starts.

There are, of course, many fossil species with similarities, and these rightfully are evidence for evolution. But the many "explosions" with strange and new species appearing out of nowhere are strong arguments against evolution. We certainly cannot simply conclude that the fossils are strong evidence for evolution. As paleontologist Henry Gee of Nature wrote:

"Many of the assumptions we make about evolution, especially concerning the history of life as understood from the fossil record, are, however, baseless. The reason for this lies in the scale of geological time that scientists deal with, which is so vast that it defies narrative. Fossils, such as the fossils of creatures we hail as our ancestors, constitute primary evidence for the history of life, but each fossil is an infinitesimal dot, lost in a fathomless sea of time, whose relationship with other fossils and organisms living in the present day is obscure. Any story we tell against the compass of geological time which links these fossils in sequences of cause and effect—or ancestry and descent—is, therefore, only ours to make. We invent these stories, after the fact, to justify the history of life according to our own prejudices."

Well, I'm afraid it gets worse from here. I'll spare the details, but the comparative anatomy evidence has all kinds of problems for evolution (calling for all sorts of "convergent" evolution and lateral gene transfer). For instance, we are constantly finding similar designs in otherwise distant species. IOW, the similar designs must have been repeated. Good old echolocation, in fact, probably had to have evolved multiple times if evolution is true. Sometimes these similarities are quite striking.

Charles Darwin

Pretty complete. Here's an example: The earth-moon system is the result of the moon being captured by the earth. This was the going theory for many years. Its main virtue was that it was naturalistic; otherwise, it had very little going for it. But that did not prohibit it from being touted in textbooks and popular literature as the old "scientists think this happened ..." explanation.

What if I told you neptune was created by a series of vortices. That's absurd, but it is naturalistic. What if I told you echolocation, the DNA code, or one of a thousand other incredible complexities in biology, arose on their own?