Again, I guess it depends on what you mean by "compatible".Originally Posted by Mr. E
Again, I guess it depends on what you mean by "compatible".
A creator is incompatible with simple scientific principles. No "taking anything literally" required.
Fair enough. Theoretically speaking, one could take Adam and Eve to be the first fully-realized evolved humans, could take the biblical timetable as inaccurate or poorly defined, take the 7-day story as meaning the big bang and setting physics into motion, and just ignore the omissions (because omissions don't prove or disprove anything anyway) and their belief system could line up just fine with science.
"The first fully-realized evolved humans" seems to be a statement without meaning.
Now you are just being picky. You get my meaning.
Well, not really. I mean, if evolution happens by means of tiny spontaneous genetic mutations from generation to generation, then the difference between any given Adam and any given Eve and their parents is just negligible -- we've probably evolved further away from Adam and Eve than they had from the previous generation.
The first generation of a species is impossible to pinpoint, I think. I could be wrong, but I leave that to someone more educated than me to point out.
Once again, not taken literally. 'god' speaking to 'adam and eve' could be viewed theoretically as 'god' telling the beginning of the species not to be fucking stupid, because it would look bad if he told them later.
I don't know, I am having a real hard time arguing this side of this argument seeing as I consider most of the bible to be moralistic folk tale.
My point is to question what is the "beginning of the species". I'm not being picky or taking apart one little irrelevant detail. It's a point that has intrinsic importance to your position.
The beginning of the species is a theoretical but not actually existent point when humans evolved the trait that made them more human and less what came before.
So at what point could God have stepped in and reasonably chose to impart his instructions?
Whenever he wanted to, he's god. The biggest problem with making the adam and eve story theoretical isn't 'how did god do it?', it is 'who were adam and eve?'
*groans* I am tired, and this argument is too hypothetical for me at this hour, so I'm going to simplify my stance a bit. I think that there is no reason why someone couldn't be a deist and believe that all of science is right also.
Last edited by Mr. E; 04-06-2009 at 12:28 AM.
Yes. At this point, we were just debating what we mean by "coexistence" and "contradictory"; I don't think what we were saying was really in disagreement.
Well, regardless of the debate you and Mr. E have been having, there's nothing in science that definitively rules out a higher intelligence behind it all. I haven't the slightest clue where you get that impression.
On the other hand, I still agree that religion and science occupy different spheres, just as science and music occupy different spheres, or jackhammering and religion...
Last edited by sycld; 04-06-2009 at 12:37 AM.
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I think what he means is that it's unscientific to accept belief in something when there's no supporting evidence for it.
This is basically the same question as which came first: the chicken or the egg.
The answer is, of course, the egg.
Once upon a time, there was a creature that was not quite a chicken and from that not-quite-chicken came a thing which was without a doubt an egg. That egg hatched and the creature that emerged was what we call a chicken.
The reason why we can say this is because a chicken and an egg are both things we can define. So we can point at some thing and say, yes that it a egg or no it isn't etc. Or similarly, yes that is a human being, or no it isn't. We can argue and quibble forever and a day with each other over the exact definition you want to use, but the fact is, if you have a word for it, that word has a definition, and historical entities either fit (or fitted) that definition or they don't/didn't. This is true even if you don't know if a given specimen fitted that definition or not, so we don't have to know exactly WHICH chicken egg was first, to know that there was a first chicken egg, or that the egg came before the chicken.
Last edited by MrShrike; 04-06-2009 at 02:25 AM.
(Well, nothing that we know of, anyway.) But certain scientific principles do conflict with the idea of a creator, which I said earlier.
I had this in mind when I wrote that.
A chicken is a creature which fits a certain biological profile. A human, similarly. A human, then, is presumably something with a sufficiently similar biological profile to ours, but I'm saying that there is probably more difference between the biological profiles of whatever "first human" you want to identify and us than there would have been between those first humans and the previous generation.
I don't know how to say this succinctly and I'm not all that comfortable with the terminology, so am I making any sense?
I can only think of one, and it is pretty complex and a bit of a stretch even. Please elaborate.
The scientific principle that knowledge comes from observation of phenomena, and that the best explanation for something is the one that best fits the observed evidence. Belief in a creator flies in the face of this principle.
When it comes to speciation, this explanation isn't really correct. Speciation is too gradual a process for us to be able to say that the chicken OR the egg came first. The transition from "not-quite-a-chicken" to "definitely a chicken" took more than one generation. There would have been multiple generations where breeding between a modern chicken and the "proto-chicken" from those generations would have had a chance of producing fertile offspring, but wouldn't have reliably done so (and the chance would have increased over time as the population in question became more and more closely related to modern chickens). There wouldn't have been a single generation where you could say "this creature is definitely a chicken but it's parents definitely weren't quite chickens, so the egg came first".
Last edited by Syme; 04-06-2009 at 10:57 AM.
That principle isn't absolute though (as we often observe phenomena without full knowledge of all forces in action, be it whether it is a force we don't fully understand, a force which we mislabel as another force, or a force we don't know about at all), I was looking more for a specific law or theory.
I mean, arguments can be made using thermodynamic entropy, but gwahir said 'simple scientific principles' can refute the existence of a creator, and thermodynamic entropy isn't exactly simple.
Either way, whatever was a chicken came from an egg. Being born of an egg is one of the defining principles of being a chicken, so to speak. Therefore the egg had to have come before the chicken, surely? (forgive me if I'm misunderstanding something or missing something obvious)
No you are right, the egg did come first. Syme is just arguing the imperfection of the question.
So what laid the egg? A creature that was "almost a chicken but not quite"? No, because speciation doesn't work that way.
Look, a species is a group of organisms that can breed with each other and produce fertile offspring, right? But looking at a population over the evolutionary timescale, there's no single point where all the creatures after that point cannot successfully breed with all the creatures before that point. The transition is gradual, over many generations. If you could go back in time and look at the prehistoric fowl that modern chickens descend from, you would never find a single generation where the birds that came before couldn't successfully breed with modern chickens, but the birds that came after could.
There was never a point where an egg hatched, and the bird that came out of it "was a chicken" while the bird that laid the egg "wasn't quite a chicken". That never happened. So either answer to the "what came first" question is wrong, because the question doesn't take into account the gradual nature of speciation events.
Last edited by Syme; 04-06-2009 at 11:34 AM.
No, the egg obviously did come first (the egg far predates the chicken, because to be an egg is not a complicated requirement whereas to be a chicken is). No one has ever asked the question, "which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg?" That would be an imperfect question. However, "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" is not imperfect and can easily be answered.
Hahah, do you mean to say that the answer is the egg because animals have been laying eggs since long before chickens evolved? I mean, yeah, that's correct of course, but I thought it was fairly obvious that the question IS "which came first the chicken or the chicken egg", even though it's not explicitly phrased like that. I don't think anyone is seriously asking whether animals laid eggs before chickens existed, or whether chickens were the first species ever to lay eggs.
I dunno, I've always viewed it that way, as a trick question.
But Mr. Shrike and simonj were taking the question at face value, so it's their misunderstanding that I was addressing.
EDIT: I do like your answer though, I never thought of it that way.
I think it is technically which came first the chicken or the chicken egg but it has already been acknowledged that such is an imperfect question. A more appropriate question that retains the intent of the original would be along the lines of: if two items cannot exist without the existence of the other, which came first?
Yeah, I'd agree that would be a more appropriate question. When changed in that way, though, it doesn't have anything to do with evolution.
It never really had anything to do with evolution in the first place. As a question it far outdates the theory of evolution (it apparently dates back to Aristotle).
However, it still stays relevant to evolution when brought up in that context.
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I enjoyed that video.
but what is your opinion of thermodynamic entropy and its implications towards a 'god'?
Right, I meant that Mr. Shrike had asked the question with regard to evolution.
I forget what it's called, so I'm going to use the term "backwards causation" even though I'm fairly certain it means something else. The whole question of who (or what) created the Creator. "He was always there" is, of course, a complete cop-out.
God invented Thermodynamics with only a bachelors in engineering.
If I recall correctly I'm pretty sure the is a theory on the nature of the universe that says it was always here. And if the universe spawned from the big bang there is no reason to think an architect (in this sense, since creator wouldn't make sense) couldn't have been banged also.
I have a bachelors in physics and am getting my PhD in engineering, you stupid fuck.
If you didn't have your head firmly up your asshole, you'd have seen that I presented at the last American Physical Society conference.
I'm just not going to talk to you anymore. You're just a stupid little wanker, and saying anything to you is clearly a waste of time.
Oh and I'm going to add that you're a typical little prick of an undergrad; what are you, a fucking sophmore? You take two or one and a half semesters of biology and you think you're so fucking smart and clever.
And one more thing:
There, much better.This message is hidden because bacon ops is on your ignore list.
Last edited by sycld; 04-06-2009 at 08:33 PM.
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You are not british
That's what I thought, but I must admit, imagining that in Sycld's voice did make me smile inside.
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