Mageth

So god created a system wherein, to satisfy god's lust to be loved, man could (actually, would) fall into sin and need redeeming. And wherein the MAJORITY of humans wouldn't make the grade and thus be condemned to eternal suffering (not to mention the miserable life of suffering on earth for many, if not most, humans)? God created a "perfect" system to churn out a few millions or billions of love slaves, even though the by-product was eternal suffering for many billions more, whose only crime was being born into god's cruel, selfish system? Wow, that sounds peachy-keen perfect to me!

He might be better off by placing the apple in the garden, but we sure as hell would have been better off without it. God's love sounds goddamned selfish and cruel, to me.

Mageth

Mageth, maybe that's why God created us with 2 eyes, cause one eye sees everything the blind spot of the other doesn't.

Ever here of binocular vision and depth perception? Plus, many animals' field of vision do not overlap enough to cover the blind spots.


And about the nerves and you seeing better in the night - that might be at the expense of you being blinded the following morning when you look out of the window and see the light of the sun.

Another problem that a good designer could have easily worked around.

The problem with your arguments, IMO, is that our eyes do an adequate job for survival in our particular environment, but do have a few flaws due to evolutionary limits (once the nerves were set the way they were, there was no going back). That's what you'd expect in an evolved organ. A good engineer could easily design at least as adequate if not better eye without the design flaws and shortcomings, and could easily overcome any of the counter-problems ("Morning Light") you can come up with.

[ January 15, 2002: Message edited by: Mageth ]</p>

Dr Rick

This explanation isn't rational, nor is it the least bit satisfying. There is a complete lack of objective evidence to support davidH's assertion even as he demands and then just refuses to acknowledge objective evidence as it's provided to him ad nauseum in support of evolution.

The assertion that something perfect was somehow made imperfect is a contradiction in terms if there ever was one. That which is perfect is free of flaws or it is not perfect. If something can be damaged it is vulnerable, and hence has a flaw which in turn means it is not perfect. So if "creation" was adversely affected by "the Curse" (as davidH proposes but fails to support with any evidence), it was not perfect in the first place.

Coragyps

I guess a thread on "sinless squids" would need to be in non-Abrahamic Religions?

davidH

lol, ok so are you saying that your vision is impaired? I doubt that very much. I can see perfectly well and the detail is sufficient for me and I can see well enough in the night too.

So to what avail would reinverting the retina be?
You would see better in the night? We don't need to.
As for other mammels maybe you should look at what they have to enhance their vision without inverting the retina.
look at cats

They have a reflecting layer situated behind the retina called a tapetum.
This reflects light back into the retina after it has passed through the retina. Thus the eye gets a second chance to absord the light and so greatly improves vision in dim light. This is why cats' eyes give bright reflections whenever light shines into them.

So maybe instead of going to all the bother of reinverting the retina and moving all the nerve cells you would want a tapetum?
Then you have the shading effect of the nerve fibres and capillaries but also increased vision.

Again this suggests design. That the animals that live on land in the presence of the sun have a shaded retina whose blood capillaries "clean up" the cell fragments. But that those who need increased vision for hunting at night and during the day have a tapetum that allows them better vision. They are perfectly adapted to do this.

If this tapetum did come about by evolution it would have had to occur when there where these animals about. These mutations just happened to provide a tapetum and promote better vision. But assuming this there's a chance that this DNA wouldn't have been passed on during mating. Also the animals also hunt during the day and so the odds of a tapetum increasing the likely hood of survival by natural selection are remote. Therefore shouldn't there be evidience of cats (big ones too) that show some with a tapetum and others without?

This is all just my guess - but even to assume that a tapetum formed by mutations and natural selection.....A logic mind would see the futility of the odds.

Also some have said that I just wouldn't accept anything you said about the eye on the other topic.
That is only the case because no one gave me a feasible way in which it could have happened but even went as far to say that a cell would only have to produce a pigment that light could break down to be a simple eye. But the cell would have to have a way of interpreting the energy released by the breaking down. And also what are the chances of the cell producing a pigment via mutations - if a mutation did occur it would be another remote chance that in producing DNA for the pigment that nothing else in the cell DNA was damaged or altered to the extent that it would cause the death of the cell.

elwoodblues

"This is all just my guess - but even to assume that a tapetum formed by mutations and natural selection.....A logic mind would see the futility of the odds."

You have to try to comprehend the sheer scale we're talking about here. At any one time, there'd be millions or billions of a given species in existence. Any one of these has the potential to have mutated offspring. Of these mutated offspring, some of those mutations will be passed on. Of THOSE mutations, some will be beneficial to survival, and thrive, and spread, until the species is changed, in some way great or small.

So, we have many, many entities at any one time. And the scope of the time involved is also incredible. We live for less than a century, and are very ill-equiped to grasp lengths of time longer than that in anything other than the abstract. We can grasp decades, even centuries, to an extent. But the length of time we're talking about aren't mere multiples of that. It's many orders of magnitude more than we can grasp.

The mutations ARE random. But the ones that survive, they are a reflection of the environment, the world the creature lives in, and are 'designed' in this way. Pick up 'The Blind Watchmaker' by Dawkins for an in-depth discussion on this. He explains it better than I ever could.

Mageth

This is all just my guess - but even to assume that a tapetum formed by mutations and natural selection.....A logic mind would see the futility of the odds.

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Mageth

lol, ok so are you saying that your vision is impaired? I doubt that very much. I can see perfectly well and the detail is sufficient for me and I can see well enough in the night too.

So to what avail would reinverting the retina be?
You would see better in the night? We don't need to.
As for other mammels maybe you should look at what they have to enhance their vision without inverting the retina.
look at cats

They have a reflecting layer situated behind the retina called a tapetum.
...
So maybe instead of going to all the bother of reinverting the retina and moving all the nerve cells you would want a tapetum?
Then you have the shading effect of the nerve fibres and capillaries but also increased vision.

Again this suggests design.


Again this is consistent with evolution. You're right in commenting "we don't need to." I said something similar in my posts. We've evolved eyes (as have cats) that are sufficient to survive in our particular environment. Our ancestors didn't need better eyes, so there was little or no selection pressure for our eyes to get better.

Why would a designer have given some animals a tapetum as a kluge to fix an inverted retina (if such is the case)? Why not make the retina correct in the first place? That screams out against design.