tl:dr
I'm sorry to have to post something so long but I feel insulted about being called close-minded. I basically say that most of my arguments were misinterpreted, likely due to my unavoidable habit of being flippant about important topics.
goldenheart323 said:
I'm not expecting you to change your mind. Your tone tells me you're very closed minded about this. I'd be happy if I'd at least opened your eyes to how others might actually be rational by believing God instead of believing the equivalent of Mount Rushmore happening in the world of biology.
Since you're so closed minded on the subject, these will be my last words on the matter.
OK, where to begin.
First of all you just refused to debate this, I can think of nothing more cowardly than to say on a forum, specifically made for discussion, that you refuse to talk about something just because you assume the other person is dogmatic. Secondly I don't believe I am dogmatic, you can't call someone close minded based off a paragraph of text. I don't think I'm close-minded by saying that you can't believe in god from a rational perspective but that's my opinion
I'm going to avoid any further humour/flippancy as it seems to confuse my arguments.
I was continuing with your analogy by saying "Mount Rushmore's of biology". I was saying there are NO cases of irreducible complexity, thus no Mount Rushmore's of biology. Because you were using the monument as an analogy for irreducible complexity yes?
goldenheart323 said:
You only understood part of my point with Mount Rushmore. Yes, it's ridiculous to think Mount Rushmore would've been created by natural forces, just as creationists think it's ridiculous irreducibly complex parts of biology came about by chance. Just as you see a fin turning into a leg, the geologist sees nature make a slope in stone, eroding dips & indentations into stone, and erosion wearing underneath a ledge. The ridiculous part comes with people seeing irreducibly complex parts of life & saying it still happened by chance, just as the Rushmore geologist sees the erosing wearing underneath a ledge to create the botton of a nose, the slope making the profile of the nose, and the indentation making the nostril, etc. Every INDIVIDUAL aspect of the faces can be made by natural forces. The ridiculous part comes in thinking ALL those chance forces would come together to make something as complex as Mount Rushmore, or an irreducible complex process, or organ, or organelle of a cell.
And you completely misunderstood my response to your Mt Rushmore analogy. I said it was completely moot as there are no cases of irreducible complexity. "No mount Rushmore's of biology"
Also, if all the parts of an animal can come about perfectly naturally, I see nothing wrong with those things coming about at the same time. They don't just "Come together" like a nose flying through the air and attaching itself to a face (sorry I promised no flippancy), they all develop as part of the entire organism. If it can't breathe I find it unlikely that it would develop a sense of smell, it's logical that bodily functions would evolve in relation to one another.
goldenheart323 said:
Saying because we know how the complex eye evolved, therefore I assume we know how the simple one came into existence is a poor argument and worse logic. "I bet some scientist somewhere has figured that out," has to be one of the weakest arguments I've ever heard. I'm sorry I didn't follow lock-step with the creationists and give you one of their examples. I've obviously befuddled you by doing that.
Don't twist my words. I said that we already have plausible cases for how the eye evolved, I didn't say that meant we must know how everything else in it came to be.
What I meant by "some scientist has probably written a 50 page thesis on it" was that how photosensitive cells WORK, let alone evolved is beyond my means of explaining it without being over verbose and/or copying and pasting from an online scientific paper.
I was using logic to state that since creationist scientists (who have no doubt done a lot more research than you or I) have NOT used photosensitive cells as a case of irreducible complexity, this could could easily mean that I am right in assuming a scientist has written that 50 page thesis.
Additionally you cannot possibly state that photosensitive cells are irreducibly complex just because I do not know how something as complex as a photosensitive cell works/evolved. I thought we were arguing ideas here, not competing to see who can spout the most pseudo-science. You can't say "HAH, you don't know how those cells could possibly evolved! That means I've just disproved evolution by finding something irreducibly complex! You can suck on that people of the professional scientific community!" If you can find a scientific paper (peer reviewed of course) stating that those cells are irreducibly complex then I'll be perfectly happy to state that evolution could be completely wrong based off that evidence.
goldenheart323 said:
I never said shared genes was the only thing supporting evolution. I said it could also be explained by a common creator. Basically, it can't be used for or against either argument because each could explain why we share genes.
And i agreed with you, I then went on to state some of the other things you neglected to mention.
goldenheart323 said:
Just because every planet, comet, and asteroid belt isn't a utopia humans doesn't mean the universe wasn't tuned for our existence. I wasn't quoting creationist scientists. Those are main stream, secular scientists saying that. By "tuned for our existence" they mean if the cosmological constant were anything but what it is, the entire nature of the universe would be so drastically different that life as we know it couldn't possibly have evolved. A planet like Earth would never come into existence. Therefore life would have no place to exist, nor the time to evolve even if it did come to exist. If you don't grasp the concept of what it means for a universe to be tuned for the existence of life, you're ill equipped to debate this point. You don't have to believe in a god to understand what that concept means. Try this math. 1 universe +1 God, or 1 universe plus infinite universes. Now, keep in mind that an infinite number of universes means an infinite number of stars, and that means an infinite amount of energy was required to create them, and they're giving off an infinite amount of energy every second. Whichever you choose to believe, I hope your mind is thoroughly blown.
This is the bit that got me really annoyed, that and Mount Rushmore. Again my main argument was not that every astrological body should be perfect for life for this universe to have been tuned.
I already knew about cosmological constants, that's why I spouted out the argument used to rebut the idea that since all of those things like the speed of light, the strength of the strong nuclear force or the gravitational constant, are all just right and hence the universe must have been tuned.
I knew you weren't quoting creationists, I knew that it's the scientific consensus that all those constants are perfect for us. What there is no consensus on is the idea that all those things are so unlikely as to make god the most logical answer.
Saying "tuned" is not accurate, that automatically implies a creator. All they say is that they're just right, nothing more and nothing less. I doubt they say that it's just right, they say that they happen to allow for the possibility of life to develop.
You're going on a complete tangent here, you're questioning a different theory to evolution. You're saying that there must be a god because there can't be infinite universes, nothing at all to do with the topic.
But I'll answer it with this, infinite universes = infinite POSSIBLE "events" occurring Q.E.D there must be at least one event in which the randomly rolled cosmological constants have come up life friendly. If life can't exist anywhere else then the only place it could exist is here.
Nothing supernatural about that, just remarkable is all.
Anyway that's based off a prevalent scientific theory that there is a "multiverse" of infinite universes, which I'm not going to argue about in a topic about evolution. Even if there's only one universe, couldn't you say we just got very very lucky? At least the 1 in goodness knows what chance that our universe would be like this is possible and explainable by science. Whereas god isn't even taken account into those 1/whatever chances. In a venn diagram of events where the universe isn't good for life and of the ones where it is good, god doesn't get a circle, he's not even in the diagram!