christian ammunition

“Hey agnophilo, Thank you for your in/depth responses!”

Likewise.

“Regarding your comments:
You said: ‘Actually all you are doing is highlighting your own ignorance and hoping the other person will be as ignorant as you.’ I hate to jump to conclusions so early in this discussion, but declaring oneself to be intellectually superior is usually a sure sign that the opposite is true. Let’s see if that’s the case:”

I was not trying to say anything about myself in that statement, I was just saying that you were declaring your own ignorance (asking questions which you believed there to be no answer to but which there actually is) which is by definition ignorant of those answers and hoping the other person couldn’t answer them, which to be fair most people couldn’t. I don’t take any pride in being able to answer them, I just can.

“First of all, how do you know that I don’t know the answer to this question? This sounds like an unjustified assumption on your part.”

This is just arguing for the sake of arguing. How do I know you haven’t figured out how the universe began? Because I didn’t read about it in the front page headline of every newspaper in the world yesterday. The same way I can be reasonably sure you can’t cure cancer. Though religions often pretend they can do that too.

“Besides, the question has everything to do with darwinian evolution, because if there is no matter to evolve in the first place, there can be no evolution. If you have no justification for the very existence of matter, life, etc., then your whole foundation for evolution rests upon blind faith.”

First of all we know that matter exists regardless of whether we know where it came from (or if it even came from anywhere), and no more need “blind faith” in it’s existence to accept evolution than we do to accept that we’re using a computer to communicate right now. Faith is belief without evidence, not belief with evidence. Whether life evolved or the holocaust happened or any other event too place is not dependent on explaining where matter came from, any more than whether the civil war happened or not is dependent on abiogenesis. These are very different ideas which, while one logically would take place before the other, are not logically continent on each other and are based on entirely separate avenues of evidence. The american civil war took place (and we can prove it) whether life arose by abiogenesis or was created by jehovah or flew out of a giant space monkey’s rear end. And evolution is no different.

“Of course, I don’t have to remind you that believing in things with no rational reason for doing so is but one form of irrationality.”

Believing them based on centuries of tests and evidence is the exact opposite of that.

“You said: 3) The universe isn’t necessarily “strictly material”, material is just all that we can empirically observe and know to exist objectively. – Then what is your justification for the existence of abstract, immaterial entities/ concepts if they cannot be observed or known to exist objectively? Blind faith, perhaps?”

Abstract concepts are by definition subjective and do not, as I said, “exist objectively”. A unicorn “exists” as a concept in the mind in an entirely different sense than a table exists outside of the mind regardless of whether we know about it or believe it exists or call it a table. And again how is blind faith applicable to anything I’ve said?

“These “laws” are man-made symbolic representations of the world, and they are no more immutable than we are. – If it is your position that the laws of logic are man-made, then could the universe have both existed and not existed at the same time and in the same way before men were present to create the law of non-contradiction?”

You are confusing the properties of the universe with the “laws” we invented to try to describe them. And as far as the universe “existing” that is an “if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it fall” type of question that is getting kind of far from the topic of conversation.

“You said: 4) ask a more specific question and I can help you, but I am not going to spend an hour describing dozens of atomic, biological, chemical, geological etc processes that produce different things – No problem. More specifically, why and how do molecules presently know how to behave the same as they have in the past with regards to the formation of matter, etc.? What compels them to do so in such a consistent, basically uniform fashion?”

This is not a more specific question, it’s a different question. You asked me how did matter get “perfectly organized” and now you’re asking where did the properties of matter come from. And I’ve already answered this question several times.

“You said: 5) See the answer to questions 1-3. – There is no answer to this question in 1-3.”

Yes, there is – I don’t know, and neither do you.

“Simply stating that matter and physical laws exist is a far cry from accounting for the existence of the energy needed to create and sustain these processes. I trust that you can see that, no?”

You are making assumptions about the universe.

“You said: 6) I don’t know that it ever was non-random, or that anything even is non-random. We call things random when we lack the ability to predict them.
– A couple of things regarding this: 1) Why are things not random?”

As I explained the concept of randomness or non-randomness is one of human perspective, it does not describe the universe so much as it describes what we can and can’t predict. And again I have no idea. Anything that exists must have some kind of property and everything that exists, that we know of, is made of smaller things that are made of smaller things that are made of smaller things and so on, and ultimately some constituent of matter just is what it is for whatever reason and the properties we see flow from that fact.

“(2) ‘Predicting’ things assumes a certain basic uniformity of nature (i.e non-randomness). What is your basis for assuming that the future will in any way resemble the past in a random chance, accidental universe? I should remind you that atheistic philosopher David Hume was reduced to utter skepticism regarding this.”

This is like asking how do I know my house won’t be hit by a meteor tonight (and thus decide to sleep in my own bed). The answer is “I don’t”. However I have zero reason to suspect that this will happen and can, as a matter of practicality, only base my choices on information I actually possess. I cannot anticipate the unknowable so I am not going to act on random guesses.

“You see, as a Christian, I can rationally proceed with the expectation that nature will remain basically uniform due to God’s promises is His Word to sustain His creation in a fashion such that mankind can subdue it and have dominion over it. This would not be possible absent a basic general uniformity in nature. As such, the Christian worldview provides a logical basis for a belief in the principle of induction (which is the very basis of all science), while atheism/ evolution does not.”

This point of view contains numerous fallacies. One, just because the dogma of your religion claims something that does not make it true. A claim is not it’s own proof. Second, the people who wrote the scriptures a) didn’t know about the “laws” of physics as we understand them and were not talking about them, and b) even if they were they were capable of observing for themselves that the universe behaves in a consistent way with regular seasons and day/night cycles, weather patterns etc and were not saying something that they could not know by observation. This is not hidden knowledge that is in any way impressive or needed to be “revealed” to them by god. And thirdly, when you say that your religion, if it were true, would account for something in nature therefore it justifies your religion this is what is called abductive reasoning, and it is a logical fallacy. IF it were true that the CIA snuck into my house last night and stole my car keys as a part of a mind control experiment that would explain why I can’t find them the next morning – however the power of that idea to account for something that is true does not make the idea true. Nor does my unwillingness to explore alternate explanations or even my inability to conceive of an alternate explanation. We have been talking about why evolution isn’t valid but you don’t seem to know a lick about the science of evolution. You are attacking it from a purely philosophical position and using different forms of arguments from ignorance, abductive reasoning being one of them. In your mind (and it’s not just you this is common in apologetics and “paranormal” culture) you not understanding or knowing something justifies your religion’s claims. So you spend your time seeking out things you don’t understand, not to try to explain them, but to say “aha! See, this proves there must be a god, because how else would x occur/exist/be this way!” But your not knowing or understanding something proves nothing. By the way high school students perform evolution experiments and watch insects and bacteria evolve over a handful of generations. It’s as well observed and tested as anything in science and this line of inquiry drives you further from what we can see and test and deeper into a tangled web of hypotheticals.

“You said: 7) Plants turn non-living matter into living matter every day, non-living matter and living matter are the same thing – the iron in your blood and the iron in the steel of a golf club are identical. – Um, your answer to the question about where life came from is that ‘non-living matter and living matter are the same thing’? Do you also believe that rational and irrational responses are equally valid, too? You’re making me think so. ;-)”

So add chemistry to the list of topics you don’t know much about. There is no distinction whatsoever between “living” matter and “non-living” matter. The matter itself is identical and interchangeable. The only difference is whether or not it is in a functional arrangement.

“You said: 8) Learning in the sense of mental activity evolved several billion years later, the first life would’ve simply been a chemical process. – How do you know this for certain? Where have you observed it? If you are honest, you would admit that you believe these things absent any verifiable justification (i.e. blind faith), as you have admitted in your responses to # 1-2.”

I did no such thing, you are just misrepresenting my words. And I know roughly when brains evolved because the fossil record goes back billions of years and for most of that time there is no evidence of anything more complex than a microbe. The oldest fossilized brains ever discovered are about 300 million years old, about half as old as the oldest multi-cellular life.

“You said: 9) Sexual reproduction allows an individual to gain successful genes from many lineages maximizing it’s chance of survival and allowing a population to adapt to many selective pressures simultaneously. – A few questions: 1) How do you know what ‘successful’ genes are without knowing the proper goal of evolution?”

There is no goal of evolution, proper or otherwise. Species no more mean to evolve or plan on it than a rock plans to fall to the ground, it just does. Intention is not a part of nature as we currently understand it (and can demonstrate/test/prove), beyond human and animal intentions.

“(2) How do you know that surviving and adapting is what we SHOULD be doing instead of not-surviving and not-adapting?”

According to whom? I’m sure some people think we should go extinct and others think we should survive, grow and thrive. I happen to be one of the latter people.

“(3) Is survival of the individual or survival of the group the ideal and how do you know this?”

That is too vague a question to answer, and again you’re staying squarely in the realm of philosophy and not venturing into the realm of science at all.

“I’m not a big fan of sci-fi, but if I was, that definitely sounds like the ultimate experience! Surely you can see the irony though, in advocating a computer program DESIGNED by someone to try and promote the idea that you yourself are the product of a mindless, random-chance process, no (unless, of course, you are now going to argue that the computer program also evolved over billions of years)?”

You can perform the same simulation with a pen and paper and write out billions of calculations if you want or you can avail yourself of “designed” technology. That we can use something man-made to understand something not man-made is only ironic or profound to creationists. And as for the simulator programs in question I don’t mean simulation as in a video game or a video showing what something is supposed to look like according to whoever, I mean a computer program that makes random changes to a virtual system and applies non-random selection pressures to artificially evolve something it is not designed to produce. For instance this program which is free and you don’t have to download which produces random geometric shapes, each with it’s own virtual “genome” (a string of short numbers determining it’s dimensions) and then each “generation” removes the worst shapes and blends the best together randomly to produce the next generation, virtually evolving better and better 2-dimensional vehicles:

http://boxcar2d.com/

Note also the hall of fame area where they list the best vehicles ever produced – the ones that were “evolved” by randomized trial and error all outperform the ones that were designed by people.

“You said: 10) Other cells presumably. – And those other cells just happened to be capable of sexual reproduction at exactly the same time and place? Riiiiiiight!”

You are ignorant and obnoxious. Sexual reproduction is just exchanging DNA which bacteria do all the time. It isn’t just what mammals do with penises and ovaries, that is just a more refined version of it. A single celled organism with permeable cell walls can just as easily swap (or even steal) genes from it’s neighbors, not to mention that if one microbe has the ability to swap DNA all it has to do is reproduce and it has a microbe to swap DNA with.

“One thing is for sure, agnophilo, you certainly have no shortage of (blind) faith in evolution. Again, though, this makes your position an irrational one, as there is no logical justification for the things you are assuming here.”

Stop projecting onto other people. And stop asking question after question and rewarding my patience with you by putting words in my mouth just so you can mock your own sentiments.

“You said: 11) As opposed to what, just dying out? I somehow think natural selection would favor starvation over automatic extinction. – Why? What is the basis for that assumption?”

Natural selection is the preservation of genes that survive because they survive. By definition natural selection would favor anything but extinction.

“As a science nerd who knows about this stuff it is always depressing to read rants like this posted by people who are bashing science and who, halfway through their rant betray the fact that they literally have no idea what the science they’re opposed to is about at all. -I appreciate your desire to learn and your quest to obtain knowledge, agnophilo, as this is what we are commanded by God to do. However, what you’re doing isn’t demonstrating that you ‘know about this stuff’, but rather you’re only ‘making unjustified and unjustifiable assertions about it’. You are telling me about your faith based beliefs, but not what you know and how you claim to know it for certain (which is what I am really interested in). You seem to be confusing the two.”

You haven’t asked me a single question about what I believe or why, or even about the evidence for evolution. All you’ve asked me is “how do you account for this thing that has nothing do do with evolution and isn’t even within ten miles of the subject of biology?” then as though you were going to regardless of my reply, you declare that I have blind faith and, in your mind, that makes blind faith okay.

“Also, not that I agree with you about my post being a rant, but so what if it was? If there is ultimately no meaning to life and our thoughts are just the products of the (random) chemical reactions in our evolved brains, then why bother to take the time and try and ‘correct’ anyone else’s thinking whatsoever, since people necessarily think the way their brains tell them to? If your position were true, you don’t believe in evolution because it’s true, but because that’s just what the reaction of the chemicals in your brain tell you to think. Your very arguments here betray your professed position and demonstrate that you don’t live in accordance with your professed beliefs. This type of internal inconsistency is also but another form of irrationality. Why trust such an absurd position?”

I’m tired of defending positions you’ve put in my mouth by over and over again having to explain that that is not what I think or believe. I think I’ll skip this one.

“Again, though, how do you know what genes are ‘useful’ or ‘harmful’ without knowing the PROPER function of natural selection?”

Natural selection doesn’t have a conscious goal or etiquette (and thus propriety or impropriety), it is just the fact that genes that help an organism survive or reproduce get passed on because they do so and genes that do not do not, because they do not. This process does not require a human being to stand around understanding why a gene is useful or not.

“You said: 12a) The food to be digested obviously, since predation is one organism eating another organism the organism must first exist before predation is an option. As for the rest, any organ system does not begin in it’s most tricked out, complex state – That’s the point. Why would natural selection favor the formation of a digestive system to be used for food that the organism currently couldn’t eat anyway? What good would a partially formed/ nonfunctional digestive system be to an organism while it was evolving and what function would it serve once formed, without an appetite for the food to be eaten? After all, what benefit is there to having an appetite if there is no fully functioning digestive system present?”

There are all kinds of digestive systems and members of a species usually can digest different things to different degrees. The first digestive system would not be anything like a mammalian digestive system other than perhaps being tubular, one thing all higher animals have in common, even microscopic ones. To give a hypothetical series of intermediates, a microbe could have a tube through the middle that it could use for something else, like propulsion through the water, and natural selection could favor any individuals that could also absorb nutrients in the water as they pass through, and eventually when it got good enough at this it could pass smaller organisms through and absorb nutrients from them as well, and natural selection would improve this ability until it could retain them inside and completely digest them. I haven’t looked into the evolution of the digestive system a whole lot but I’ve looked into the evolution of many other parts of our anatomy and the reason we know how so many things evolved is that those primitive forms usually still exist in nature to this day. We know how the heart evolved because there are still simpler and simpler and simpler hearts in nature, because not every species has the metabolism of a mammal and needs to circulate oxygen hyper-efficiently. And we know a lot about how the lungs evolved because there are still species for whom fully functional lungs are not useful, given their environment. Etc, etc, etc. I would not be in the least surprised if the same intermediate forms existed in nature for the digestive system.

“What good is a fully functioning digestive system without an appetite?”

Most species that digest food do so automatically with no thought or desire or pleasure, which are all functions of the brain, something most organisms on the planet lack.

“(b) Sex drive is a behavioral mental characteristic of higher animals which would not have been present in early microbial lifeforms which lacked brains just like bacteria do. Early life would’ve reproduced by chemical reactions just like mindless microbes do today. – I’m not asking about ASEXUAL reproduction in ‘early’ life, I’m asking which evolved first, the drive to reproduce sexually or the ability to do so. Hopefully you can see that neither one is of any benefit without the other, which is the point here. Well?”

Sexual reproduction is the exchange of DNA which occurs in many kinds of life. If you want a more complex explanation, here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_sexual_reproduction#Origin_of_sexual_reproduction

“(c) And the answer is the throat, followed by the lungs and then the various add-ons to them. – And of what benefit would a throat be absent the connecting lungs with which inhale and to exhale the air through it?”

There are many species that have a throat and no lungs, and even your throat has more than one function. Think about it.

“Why would a creature need lungs if it did not currently have the capability to breathe air, as partially formed, nonfunctional lungs would be of no value to it (i.e. spare parts).”

There are many pseudo-lungs in nature, from fish like bettas that can gulp surface air in low-oxygen waters (there are areas of the ocean that have so little oxygen nothing can survive in them with just gills, and it would be useful for a species to venture into these waters for many reasons, from avoiding predators to seeking out sources of food), to mud-skippers that can survive off of water in their mouth for days out of the water, to species of fish that have empty sacs that retain air which they use as ballast tanks so they don’t have to burn calories to maintain their depth in the water. This is analogous to the use of the lungs in swimming, where someone in order to float will puff up their lungs. This functionality would be useful (and is, in some fish) with or without the additional ability to absorb oxygen from that air which various species have to different degrees.

“Unless of course you want to argue that evolution/natural selection somehow knew that these would be needed in the future and then proceeded to manufacture them for the benefit of the creature (which, of course, is absurd as you have admitted earlier). Well?”

No, that would be absurd. But just as natural selection did not know how useful ballast-type lungs could one day be we didn’t know when people started making telegraph lines that they could one day be used to send peoples’ voices (telephone) or images and data and computer software (internet). Nobody was thinking about those things when the telegraph was invented, but every advance in technology produces new possibilities, just as every change in an organism produces new possibilities.

“(d) The termite – it would logically have had the ability to digest it’s own food and later lost it as a result of the effectiveness of the symbiotic relationship, the same way humans btw have largely lost the ability to digest food since the trillions of bacteria in our intestines do such a good job of it. – Logically huh? What is your logical justification for assuming that termites have ever had the ability to digest cellulose absent the Trichonympha symbiotes? Where and when have you observed this or do you just accept it on blind faith?”

Just as a doctor has more than enough evidence that infections cause fevers and concluding that a patient with a fever likely has an infection is not “blind faith”, I have more than enough evidence that species often lose prior abilities because countless species (including humans) are riddled with non-functioning, broken and otherwise leftover body parts and genes.

“(e) Plants pre-date insects by many millions of years and flowering plants evolved several hundred million years after the first insects. – So how did the insects that depend on the flowering plants for food survive over the ‘several hundred million years’ that their food source was evolving? If you’re going to argue that they ate something else and then evolved to eat the nectar from the flowering plants afterwards, please provide justification for this and tell how you know it for certain.”

Species constantly adapt to changes in diet because the plants and animals in a given area are not uniform anywhere on the planet. Even humans have different abilities to tolerate or digest different substances, and cultures that have eaten a given type of food for thousands of years have a much higher ability to survive on that diet than cultures to whom that diet is relatively new. Refined sugars pose a much higher risk to african americans whose ancestors have eaten them for many centuries less than europeans the same way alcohol is many times as harmful and addictive to native americans as it was to the europeans who gave it to them. Similarly most humans right now can’t tolerate milk as adults but most europeans can. To quote wikipedia:

“The frequency of lactose intolerance ranges from 5% in Northern European countries (England, Scotland, Ireland, Scandinavia, and Iceland) to 71% in Italy (Sicily) to more than 90% in most African and Asian countries.[6] This distribution is now thought to have been caused by recent natural selection favoring lactase-persistent individuals in cultures in which dairy products are available as a food source.[7]”

So given the constantly changing nature of what individuals in every species on earth can and can’t digest and how well, it is not unreasonable to me that the same sort of changes that happen all the time also occurred in the past.

“(f) Bones first emerge in the fossil record in the cambrian period….etc. -The point is that a partially formed, non-functional skeletal system would be of no survival value to any creature and the necessary parts would have all had to evolve at the same time and place in order to have a functioning system. Without any one of the parts I listed above, the system is incomplete and is of no use or value.”

You do get that there are invertibrates, species that have bones that aren’t calcified and hard like ours, and species that have one bone in their entire body, right? The claim that a different or “diminished” skeletal system would be unsurvivable or useless flies in the face of the fact that every imaginable configuration of our skeleton already exists in some species in nature. Here is some quick info about the fossil record and the development of our anatomy:

“(g) I’m not sure what you mean by “repair” system but I suspect the answer is the nervous system, though I could be wrong. I don’t know a lot about the evolution of hormones. – Again, the point is that absent any one of the three, the system does not function and is of no use or benefit to the creature. You would therefore be arguing that natural selection favored unneeded spare parts in creatures and then somehow took those spare (i.e. useless) parts and made them into something useful rather than eliminating them.”

You are claiming that these mechanisms are useful to the point of being absolutely necessary (when they’re not, some species in some environments don’t possess them and survive just fine) and then at the same time claiming that a diminished version wouldn’t be even slightly useful. You seem to want to have it both ways. As the expression goes, in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king. In some environment a crappy, diminished version of something is very useful, the same way a 40 year old computer would not be very useful today (nor would it be able to compete with modern computers) but they were incredibly useful 40 years ago when they were the best around.

“This is in direct contradiction to evolutionary theory and the supposed function of natural selection producing creatures that are ‘more fit’ for survival via the elimination of those attributes which are detrimental/not useful to the creature. Again, this internal inconsistency reveals the irrationality of the position you are arguing for.”

Natural selection has been observed in nature, observed in the laboratory and factors into things like how we treat diseases and fight cancer. There is nothing “supposed” about it, and even most creationist sources (perhaps disingenuously) admit as much.

“(g) Well the first virus would necessarily pre-date the first immune system since natural selection is reactive, not pro-active. – And so how did infected organisms survive for the millions of years it took to evolve an immune system?”

Again the first immune system would not in any way resemble a modern immune system which has been evolving for billions of years. The first immune system would’ve been something like a change in the skin of an early proto-cell that allows it to be permiable to chemicals that are toxic to the first kind of virus to evolve or something simple, some minor chemical change of the makeup of the organism. The first computer was an abacus, not a server farm. By definition the earliest version would also be incredibly simple.

“Of what use would an immune system be to those organisms which were not affected/ infected. Hopefully you can see the logical binds that your worldview leads to by now, no?”

No, you just don’t have any knowledge of biology. Here’s how natural selection works in reality land, not the creationist bubble you hail from. Someone has cancer, which means one cell is broken and rapidly reproducing out of control which causes problems – so you give the person chemotherapy, ie toxic chemicals injected into the tumor to poison it’s cells. However much of the time several of the billions of cells in the tumor will, by random fluke chance, have some kind of tolerance or resistance to whatever you attack them with, and as the numbers of cells that don’t have a resistance to the therapy decrease, the number that do will increase, eventually producing a tumor that shrugs off the treatment. This is how cancer cells adapt to chemotherapy (and radiation btw). It is not hypothetical, it is not a maybe on a drawing board somewhere, it’s real actual biology that oncologists deal with every day. No planning ahead or thinking or knowledge or anything required on the side of the cancer cells, just blind chance. Or as we call it when engineers use it – trial and error. Just as the chance that 1 ticket will win the mega jackpot is incredibly small but yet someone always wins in the end, the odds that a particular mutation will be useful is very small, but in a large population there will always be useful mutations no matter what the environment throws at the species.

“You said: And yes, I also know which came first, the chicken or the egg. – As do I (Genesis 1:20-22). Take care!”

The difference is you “know” an anonymous story by an unknown author or authors from the iron age and I have actual fossils. The first eggs pre-date the first chickens (or birds) by several hundred million years.

LikeLike