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Goddit versus Evolution

CrabCake said:
Of course you can't disprove any of that, that's not how you evaluate allegorical works.
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Which begs the question of how does it get evaluated.

If we accept that this is a work of allegory then what is the message to be received from it?

As an aside it also brings up the question of whether the bible is a complete work of allegory or a partial work of allegory mixed with a literal reading. Was the story of jesus also an allegory or was it literal? And how do you tell the difference?


The argument of looking at genesis as an allegory instead of as scientific creationism opens up a very large can of worms as regarding to where we draw the line on all the stories in the bible being a literal translation of events or an allegorical one.
 
faithful_servant said:
Too many changes needed, not enough time to make those changes. Without some form of intelligence behind our evolution, there simply isn't enough time for random changes to occur and propagate throughout a population.
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How many billions of years would be needed for these changes?
 
ashurbanipal said:
Why in the world would it not be up for debate?
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Because we know sexual dimorphism evolved, probably over a billion years ago, but was certainly present during the Cambrian about 1/2 a billion years ago.
 
calamity said:
Because we know sexual dimorphism evolved, probably over a billion years ago, but was certainly present during the Cambrian about 1/2 a billion years ago.
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Why would this make it not up for debate?
 
RAMOSS said:
And, exactly how do you know that?? Why are 'too many changes' needed? What is the criteria that you determined that there isn't enough time for random changes to occur and propogate throughout a population? What about the filter of natural selection?? Have you taken that into account?
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What about ancient aliens? ;)
 
TheGoverness said:
What? There's plenty of time to for changes (not random) to arise through natural selection.
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Especially as environmental changes are swift and harsh. For example, mammals developed nocturnal habits and superior brains by dodging dinosaurs, which then made them perfectly suitable to survive the impact event which eventually wiped out the dinosaurs.
 
ttwtt78640 said:
What about ancient aliens? ;)
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I do not see any evidence of ancient aliens, except for that monolith that was discovered on the moon.
 
calamity said:
Especially as environmental changes are swift and harsh. For example, mammals developed nocturnal habits and superior brains by dodging dinosaurs, which then made them perfectly suitable to survive the impact event which eventually wiped out the dinosaurs.
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That does not even begin to make sense. It was not only mammals that had to dodge being eaten other species also had the same problem. But no superior brain there. Any evidence found so far suggest intelligence and tool using came long after the dinosaur left . The real question is how does nocturnal habits and a superior brain help you survive a huge rock hitting the planet with the force of a dozen atomic bombs?
 
calamity said:
Especially as environmental changes are swift and harsh. For example, mammals developed nocturnal habits and superior brains by dodging dinosaurs, which then made them perfectly suitable to survive the impact event which eventually wiped out the dinosaurs.
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I don't think that's why a few survived. The reason why some animals were able to survive the impact, is because they lived in burrows and aquatic environments that shielded them from the intense heat from the meteor impact.
 
Fishking said:
Do you have anything unique to bring to the discussion or are you just making a public statement of your atheism and your disdain for those who believe in religion?
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Many religious people believe in evolution. The Pope for one. Creationists belong in the "flat Earth" clan.
 
RAMOSS said:
And, exactly how do you know that?? Why are 'too many changes' needed? What is the criteria that you determined that there isn't enough time for random changes to occur and propogate throughout a population? What about the filter of natural selection?? Have you taken that into account?
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The number of differences between the proto-organisms and current ones is massive. We're talking about taking a few trillion years for that number of changes to occur. Not a couple billion years, but orders of magnitude more than the age of the universe.

When a change happens, it's not some huge specie altering over-night change, it's a minor change. A limb that's now .2% longer, giving a .00002% better chance of survival to those who carry the gene. That means that not only does the gene have to spread through the entire population, it has to avoid getting bred out, since there's no guarantee that the advantage will get passed on. It also has to work with the rest of the anatomy of the carrier, so if that .2% longer limb means that the stress it puts on the muscles that have to control it overload those muscles, then it doesn't work. Then there's also the fact that a lot of changes demand more than one change in order for them to be effective. If a creature evolves a light-sensitive spot on it's ear, but that spot is covered by hair, then it's useless, unless there is another change that causes the hair to not grow there. Remember that evolution is not triggered by environment, but rather reinforced by it. It's like having a billion-sided die with a unique color on each side. Evolution is like rolling that die on a felt table that is one of those colors and every time it matches the color of the felt, you get to change one side to match the color of the felt, but if it doesn't then 1 out a thousand times 1000 random sides gets changed to a color that is not the color of the felt, giving the chance that the color will be dropped. A lot of people think that evolution happens as if the color of that felt drives the chance that the right color will come up. The changes that evolution demand are random. Environment can help to filter out those random changes to keep the good ones and lose the bad ones, but it has NOTHING to do with what changes happen. All of this and more works together to become a process that is so slow that the time it takes for the changes required to get from a mammoth to an African elephant is huge and the time it takes for us to go from a sponge-like creature to a human is longer than the age of the universe. Then let's talk about the fossil record - long periods of massively slow, punctuated short bursts of massive change. Poeple like to try to say that the environment changed, but that doesn't create more change, it just changes the filtering process that the environment provides.
 
faithful_servant said:
The number of differences between the proto-organisms and current ones is massive. We're talking about taking a few trillion years for that number of changes to occur. Not a couple billion years, but orders of magnitude more than the age of the universe.

When a change happens, it's not some huge specie altering over-night change, it's a minor change. A limb that's now .2% longer, giving a .00002% better chance of survival to those who carry the gene. That means that not only does the gene have to spread through the entire population, it has to avoid getting bred out, since there's no guarantee that the advantage will get passed on. It also has to work with the rest of the anatomy of the carrier, so if that .2% longer limb means that the stress it puts on the muscles that have to control it overload those muscles, then it doesn't work. Then there's also the fact that a lot of changes demand more than one change in order for them to be effective. If a creature evolves a light-sensitive spot on it's ear, but that spot is covered by hair, then it's useless, unless there is another change that causes the hair to not grow there. Remember that evolution is not triggered by environment, but rather reinforced by it. It's like having a billion-sided die with a unique color on each side. Evolution is like rolling that die on a felt table that is one of those colors and every time it matches the color of the felt, you get to change one side to match the color of the felt, but if it doesn't then 1 out a thousand times 1000 random sides gets changed to a color that is not the color of the felt, giving the chance that the color will be dropped. A lot of people think that evolution happens as if the color of that felt drives the chance that the right color will come up. The changes that evolution demand are random. Environment can help to filter out those random changes to keep the good ones and lose the bad ones, but it has NOTHING to do with what changes happen. All of this and more works together to become a process that is so slow that the time it takes for the changes required to get from a mammoth to an African elephant is huge and the time it takes for us to go from a sponge-like creature to a human is longer than the age of the universe. Then let's talk about the fossil record - long periods of massively slow, punctuated short bursts of massive change. Poeple like to try to say that the environment changed, but that doesn't create more change, it just changes the filtering process that the environment provides.
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This is not supporting the view at al. This is marking even more unsupported claims. I asked 'how do you know', and i got more unsupported claims. I also see a straw man of what biologist say happened. You make claims, yet you do not back them up.

For example, where are you getting your percentages?? Document where you are pulling your information from. Can you show that this is the truth? It seems to me that making more unsupported claims is not backing up your original unsupported claim.
 
faithful_servant said:
The number of differences between the proto-organisms and current ones is massive. We're talking about taking a few trillion years for that number of changes to occur. Not a couple billion years, but orders of magnitude more than the age of the universe.

When a change happens, it's not some huge specie altering over-night change, it's a minor change. A limb that's now .2% longer, giving a .00002% better chance of survival to those who carry the gene. That means that not only does the gene have to spread through the entire population, it has to avoid getting bred out, since there's no guarantee that the advantage will get passed on. It also has to work with the rest of the anatomy of the carrier, so if that .2% longer limb means that the stress it puts on the muscles that have to control it overload those muscles, then it doesn't work. Then there's also the fact that a lot of changes demand more than one change in order for them to be effective. If a creature evolves a light-sensitive spot on it's ear, but that spot is covered by hair, then it's useless, unless there is another change that causes the hair to not grow there. Remember that evolution is not triggered by environment, but rather reinforced by it. It's like having a billion-sided die with a unique color on each side. Evolution is like rolling that die on a felt table that is one of those colors and every time it matches the color of the felt, you get to change one side to match the color of the felt, but if it doesn't then 1 out a thousand times 1000 random sides gets changed to a color that is not the color of the felt, giving the chance that the color will be dropped. A lot of people think that evolution happens as if the color of that felt drives the chance that the right color will come up. The changes that evolution demand are random. Environment can help to filter out those random changes to keep the good ones and lose the bad ones, but it has NOTHING to do with what changes happen. All of this and more works together to become a process that is so slow that the time it takes for the changes required to get from a mammoth to an African elephant is huge and the time it takes for us to go from a sponge-like creature to a human is longer than the age of the universe. Then let's talk about the fossil record - long periods of massively slow, punctuated short bursts of massive change. Poeple like to try to say that the environment changed, but that doesn't create more change, it just changes the filtering process that the environment provides.
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That is full of unsupported claims.
 
RAMOSS said:
This is not supporting the view at al. This is marking even more unsupported claims. I asked 'how do you know', and i got more unsupported claims. I also see a straw man of what biologist say happened. You make claims, yet you do not back them up.

For example, where are you getting your percentages?? Document where you are pulling your information from. Can you show that this is the truth? It seems to me that making more unsupported claims is not backing up your original unsupported claim.
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He would have more credibility if he just said "The Bible tells me so". The convolutions he goes through to just say that are comical .
 
ashurbanipal said:
Hmmmm..."the same as"...not exactly. Knowledge is a kind of belief (usually), a belief with added properties. Your question is similar to this: I have a triangle here. Is that the same as a shape? A triangle is a kind of shape, and if you have a triangle, you have a shape. But not all shapes are triangles. Similarly, all knowledge is belief, but not all belief is knowledge.

Knowledge is usually analyzed as justified true belief plus some anti-luck or virtue clause.
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Do you mean the musical instrument? Triangles are not things, except for that. A triangle is a concept. You don't really "have" a triangle, you only have the concept of it. A physical thing does not rely on human belief or knowledge. It just exists. My lack of belief or knowledge of something existing does not change that. The sun shines in places where no human observes it. Human observation is not the center of reality. I know that the sun exists because I know it doesn't depend on human observation to exist.
 
soylentgreen said:
Which begs the question of how does it get evaluated.

If we accept that this is a work of allegory then what is the message to be received from it?

As an aside it also brings up the question of whether the bible is a complete work of allegory or a partial work of allegory mixed with a literal reading. Was the story of jesus also an allegory or was it literal? And how do you tell the difference?


The argument of looking at genesis as an allegory instead of as scientific creationism opens up a very large can of worms as regarding to where we draw the line on all the stories in the bible being a literal translation of events or an allegorical one.
Click to expand...

I know this was not addressed to me, but I'm going to respond anyway: part of the difficulty seems to be that you may be assuming that a given passage is intended to have only one meaning. In fact that is not correct, especially with the Hebrew Bible, since in Biblical Hebrew almost every word has a vast array of meanings, some of them seemingly incoherent. I've done some scholarship on the Song of Songs. Here, for example, is the way that 1:3 is usually translated:

Because of the savour of thy good ointments thy name is as ointment poured forth, therefore do the virgins love thee.

But the same words can also be translated thus:

For your pleasing scents, she is being poured out forever, your beloved upon you.

And there are still other things those same words can mean in English. A person speaking Biblical Hebrew would understand all of them by those same words. Whether they would understand them as importing a single meaning composed of the many meanings we have in English, or would understand them as importing layers of meaning, we cannot precisely say. I tend toward the former view, but admit it cannot be proven.

The allegories of the Bible typically have multiple meanings, and would have been understood as having multiple meanings. Which one is "correct" is therefore not a well-formed question.
 
soylentgreen said:
Mike Pence Wants Creationism Taught In Public Schools


The flat earth clan are running your country.
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No kidding. It's really, really scary. This guy successfully was elected to the US House of Representative by the people of the great state of Georgia- Twice. He was supposedly educated as an MD (I don't know what quack med school let this guy even get a license). And, to boot, he served on the HOUSE SCIENCE COMMITTEE! Think about it: this guys deciding how modern science gets funded:

“God’s word is true. I’ve come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the big bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell. It’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior...

You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I’ve found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I don’t believe that the earth’s but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says.”
_Paul Broun (R-Georgia)
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It's like Invasion of the Body Snatchers over here, only instead of being taken over by emotionless automatons we're being invaded by zombies with no brains and an appalling excess of emotion. They are interested in eating your brain too.

Just keep telling yourself: There are still a few reasonable U.S. citizens... There are still a few reasonable U.S. citizens... There are still... (as gets eaten alive by a Tea Partier zombie...)

zombies.webp
 
iguanaman said:
He would have more credibility if he just said "The Bible tells me so". The convolutions he goes through to just say that are comical .
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What would a Hindu say?
 
devildavid said:
Do you mean the musical instrument? Triangles are not things, except for that. A triangle is a concept. You don't really "have" a triangle, you only have the concept of it. A physical thing does not rely on human belief or knowledge. It just exists. My lack of belief or knowledge of something existing does not change that. The sun shines in places where no human observes it. Human observation is not the center of reality. I know that the sun exists because I know it doesn't depend on human observation to exist.
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Before we get too off-track into a subject we've discussed before: look, if you don't like the triangle example, just change it to whatever you do like. How about dog/animal or table/furniture or whatever?

Anyway, do you think triangles wouldn't exist if human beings didn't exist? That just seems silly. Triangles seem to meet all the same criteria for reality that physical things do, according to your post here. I cannot believe that a triangle has four sides, and make it so, for example. Triangles are things that push back (metaphorically speaking), and there is public agreement about them. My equilateral triangle is not substantially different from your equilateral triangle--yours doesn't have one longer side or an interior angle that is smaller than the others, same as mine. In general, with geometry and math, if that were the case, we'd be in serious trouble.
 
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