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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, Ca.
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Nov 12, 2009 - 08:19pm PT
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The vertebrate eye is not the same as the cephalopod eye. Why did God design the eye twice? Was one of them a first draft, the other an improved version?
The same reason he didn't give plants a clitoris. Next....
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Crimpergirl
Sport climber
Boulder, Colorado!
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Nov 12, 2009 - 08:23pm PT
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Hilarious Rokjox!
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C. Small wall climber.
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Nov 12, 2009 - 08:28pm PT
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People are just pissed that preachers keep telling them not to have a "yaba daba doo time"
The actual wording, written by Hanna-Barbera:
Flintstones... Meet the Flintstones,
They're a modern stoneage family.
From the town of Bedrock,
They're a page right out of history.
Let's ride with the family down the street.
Through the courtesy of Fred's two feet.
When you're with the Flintstones,
have a yabba dabba doo time,
a dabba doo time,
we'll have a gay old time Possibly the creationists may not have such a gay time.
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TripL7
Trad climber
'dago'
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Nov 12, 2009 - 08:44pm PT
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del cross!
He didn't invent it twice, they are variations of each other.
Are there no similarities at all, on the contrary, there are many.
They function in two different arenas. Have different requirements, but are essentially the same.
Just as the example I gave Norton regarding the presents of opposition in the hand or lack thereof.
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WBraun
climber
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Nov 12, 2009 - 08:47pm PT
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See .....
They're still in dugout.
This proves the atheists can not remain focused on anything.
Their minds wander all over the place.
When they come up to bat they strike out 99.9999% of the time.
Their fans are just as bad. They throw all kinds of objects onto the field.
The garbage in center field is piling up .........
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Gobee
Trad climber
Los Angeles
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Nov 12, 2009 - 08:50pm PT
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Psalm 68:3, "But the righteous shall be glad;
they shall exult before God;
they shall be jubilant with joy!"
ARE YOU HAVING A GOOD TIME?
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C. Small wall climber.
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Nov 12, 2009 - 08:51pm PT
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We're having a yabba dabba gay old time. And you?
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the Fet
climber
Tu-Tok-A-Nu-La
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Nov 12, 2009 - 08:56pm PT
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It takes a severe case of self-induced brainwashing to deny evolution.
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Gobee
Trad climber
Los Angeles
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Nov 12, 2009 - 08:59pm PT
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More like under the grandstand by Seemore Butts!
Edit; Fet are you a believer, there walking the right way?
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TripL7
Trad climber
'dago'
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Nov 12, 2009 - 08:59pm PT
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dave goodwin! "how long ago did....roam the earth"
Up until the great flood.
Have you ever thought about the fact that there is a 'great flood story' in most of our great cultures. That when Noah and his sons and wives set out towards the four corners to repopulate the earth, this epic story was brought with them and preserved in some form all these years by such diverse peoples, that it is true?
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TripL7
Trad climber
'dago'
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Nov 12, 2009 - 09:06pm PT
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The Fet!
You show homo erectus as having 'opposition between thumb and digit'. As I stated earlier, only modern day man has opposition!!!
Where is the proof of that?
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dirtbag
climber
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Nov 12, 2009 - 09:12pm PT
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Have you ever thought about the fact that there is a 'great flood story' in most of our great cultures. That when Noah and his sons and wives set out towards the four corners to repopulate the earth, this epic story was brought with them and preserved in some form all these years by such diverse peoples, that it is true?
The Tigris Euphrates river system, the Nile, and other major rivers that were the cradles of early civilization were frequently subject to major floods.
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 12, 2009 - 09:18pm PT
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Strike Three
How blind salamanders make nonsense of creationists' claims.
By Christopher Hitchens
It is extremely seldom that one has the opportunity to think a new thought about a familiar subject, let alone an original thought on a contested subject, so when I had a moment of eureka a few nights ago, my very first instinct was to distrust my very first instinct. To phrase it briefly, I was watching the astonishing TV series Planet Earth (which, by the way, contains photography of the natural world of a sort that redefines the art) and had come to the segment that deals with life underground. The subterranean caverns and rivers of our world are one of the last unexplored frontiers, and the sheer extent of the discoveries, in Mexico and Indonesia particularly, is quite enough to stagger the mind. Various creatures were found doing their thing far away from the light, and as they were caught by the camera, I noticed—in particular of the salamanders—that they had typical faces. In other words, they had mouths and muzzles and eyes arranged in the same way as most animals. Except that the eyes were denoted only by little concavities or indentations. Even as I was grasping the implications of this, the fine voice of Sir David Attenborough was telling me how many millions of years it had taken for these denizens of the underworld to lose the eyes they had once possessed.
If you follow the continuing argument between the advocates of Darwin's natural selection theory and the partisans of creationism or "intelligent design," you will instantly see what I am driving at. The creationists (to give them their proper name and to deny them their annoying annexation of the word intelligent) invariably speak of the eye in hushed tones. How, they demand to know, can such a sophisticated organ have gone through clumsy evolutionary stages in order to reach its current magnificence and versatility? The problem was best phrased by Darwin himself, in his essay "Organs of Extreme Perfection and Complication":
To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.
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His defenders, such as Michael Shermer in his excellent book Why Darwin Matters, draw upon post-Darwinian scientific advances. They do not rely on what might be loosely called "blind chance":
Evolution also posits that modern organisms should show a variety of structures from simple to complex, reflecting an evolutionary history rather than an instantaneous creation. The human eye, for example, is the result of a long and complex pathway that goes back hundreds of millions of years. Initially a simple eyespot with a handful of light-sensitive cells that provided information to the organism about an important source of the light …
Hold it right there, says Ann Coulter in her ridiculous book Godless: The Church of Liberalism. "The interesting question is not: How did a primitive eye become a complex eye? The interesting question is: How did the 'light-sensitive cells' come to exist in the first place?"
The salamanders of Planet Earth appear to this layman to furnish a possibly devastating answer to that question. Humans are almost programmed to think in terms of progress and of gradual yet upward curves, even when confronted with evidence that the past includes as many great dyings out of species as it does examples of the burgeoning of them. Thus even Shermer subconsciously talks of a "pathway" that implicitly stretches ahead. But what of the creatures who turned around and headed back in the opposite direction, from complex to primitive in point of eyesight, and ended up losing even the eyes they did have?
Whoever benefits from this inquiry, it cannot possibly be Coulter or her patrons at the creationist Discovery Institute. The most they can do is to intone that "the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away." Whereas the likelihood that the post-ocular blindness of underground salamanders is another aspect of evolution by natural selection seems, when you think about it at all, so overwhelmingly probable as to constitute a near certainty. I wrote to professor Richard Dawkins to ask if I had stumbled on the outlines of a point, and he replied as follows:
Vestigial eyes, for example, are clear evidence that these cave salamanders must have had ancestors who were different from them—had eyes, in this case. That is evolution. Why on earth would God create a salamander with vestiges of eyes? If he wanted to create blind salamanders, why not just create blind salamanders? Why give them dummy eyes that don't work and that look as though they were inherited from sighted ancestors? Maybe your point is a little different from this, in which case I don't think I have seen it written down before.
I recommend for further reading the chapter on eyes and the many different ways in which they are formed that is contained in Dawkins' Climbing Mount Improbable; also "The Blind Cave Fish's Tale" in his Chaucerian collection The Ancestor's Tale. I am not myself able to add anything about the formation of light cells, eyespots, and lenses, but I do think that there is a dialectical usefulness to considering the conventional arguments in reverse, as it were. For example, to the old theistic question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" we can now counterpose the findings of professor Lawrence Krauss and others, about the foreseeable heat death of the universe, the Hubble "red shift" that shows the universe's rate of explosive expansion actually increasing, and the not-so-far-off collision of our own galaxy with Andromeda, already loomingly visible in the night sky. So, the question can and must be rephrased: "Why will our brief 'something' so soon be replaced with nothing?" It's only once we shake our own innate belief in linear progression and consider the many recessions we have undergone and will undergo that we can grasp the gross stupidity of those who repose their faith in divine providence and godly design.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Nov 12, 2009 - 09:28pm PT
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Hey Werner, I'm just tired of hitting balls over the center field wall...
...whatever are you talking about?
Your are guided by your experience and thought and the application of knowledge handed down for a few thousand years by people who express their experience and thought. The extent to which you have explored the universe is small, and self-centered, mostly centered in your brain and the brains of those wise people, and an interpretation of what various forms of thought mean, including revelation.
It might be true, it might not be true. What is there really?
I think it has less chance of being real than the idea that there exists a strictly materialistic explanation for all of it.
I know you reject that notion, but it actually has a lot of similarities with the ideas you are familiar with... will we explain what you're thinking? no, but I believe that an explanation of how you think it is within grasp... and it won't be elegant but a patchwork of evolutionary adaptation... and not at all how you perceive it to be...
My train of thought lately is not to dismiss the spiritual and mystical but rather to identify it as a consequence of human thought, not of the physical universe.
Oddly, people object to that, yet insist that their ideas "must be real" as if thoughts are not real. One can have thoughts about things that cannot be real... and they can act on those thoughts and give them real consequences. And that is totally consistent with a "material description" of the universe.
How could you possible argue against that?
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, Ca.
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Nov 12, 2009 - 09:40pm PT
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My train of thought lately is not to dismiss the spiritual and mystical but rather to identify it as a consequence of human thought, not of the physical universe.
Oddly, people object to that, yet insist that their ideas "must be real" as if thoughts are not real. One can have thoughts about things that cannot be real... and they can act on those thoughts and give them real consequences. And that is totally consistent with a "material description" of the universe.
How could you possible argue against that?
Didn't you just argue against it yourself? Maybe everything you 'understand' is false or distorted. What was that conclusion that great physicist came to about the existence of a higher intelligence?
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Gobee
Trad climber
Los Angeles
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Nov 12, 2009 - 09:42pm PT
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We can bet on the game!
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WBraun
climber
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Nov 12, 2009 - 09:50pm PT
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The missing link is the soul.
Leave it out and all knowledge will ultimately lead to bewilderment.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Nov 12, 2009 - 09:51pm PT
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Mighty Hiker-
I got the Darwin ad in an email. I think you might have to register with Science to be eligible? I registered in order to read the various articles that were posted on Ardipithecus and then later I got the email.
If that doesn't work, let me know. I can order it for you and send it to Vancouver with my nephew & niece's Christmas presents. They live in North Van on the way to Squamish.
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, Ca.
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Nov 12, 2009 - 09:54pm PT
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Who said these things;
1. I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts; the rest are details.
2. Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.
3. My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.
4. The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.
5. Every one who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe-a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.
6. The scientists’ religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.
7. There is no logical way to the discovery of elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.
8. The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
9. The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious; It is the source of all true art and science.
10. We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.
11. Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the Gods.
12. When the solution is simple, God is answering.
13. God does not play dice with the universe.
14. God is subtle but he is not malicious.
15. A human being is a part of the whole, called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest-a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty.
16. Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.
17. The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life.
18. Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.
19. Only a life lived for others is a life worth while.
20. The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books—-a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects.
21. The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.
22. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.
23. The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties - this knowledge, this feeling ... that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself among profoundly religious men.
24. The real problem is in the hearts and minds of men. It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man.
25. True religion is real living; living with all one’s soul, with all one’s goodness and righteousness.
26. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelationship of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to form in the social life of man.
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Gobee
Trad climber
Los Angeles
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Nov 12, 2009 - 09:55pm PT
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Link does the National Anthem!
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