When a friend tells you he "does not agree" with the concept of evolution

[squeekenator]

3/ Different denominations don't equal different religions. I don't see any one denomination as being superior than others. I think the Phelps kinda have their own cult thing going on there and so I wouldn't really include them. But other than that, for the most part they all share the same basic premise, for lack of a better word.
4/ The only thing in the entire vid that even gave me pause to think was about the infinite number of possibilities out there. And yes there are infinite possibilities. I chose one that there is a basis for here on our planet. And I am quite comfortable with my own personal process of rational thought that I don't believe video game god will begrudge me for choosing to believe in something else. I also don't believe that this possibility invalidates the basic premise of Pascal's Wager. Given the very finite number of possibilities that humans can consciously choose to believe, the concept still stands up. I never said that it is limited to Christianity, I even made a point to mention other religions. And in believing that there may be a video game god that rewards rational thought, doesn't "rational thought" get thrown out the window? I've taken my stance, I chose an established religion, albeit much less formal than your typical established religion. Given that established religions have been here for so long, I believe that there is a greater chance that one of them is correct than a god that has chosen to not have any interaction with us.

1) and 2) - The first half of the video is addressed towards the people who try to convert atheists with the wager, so I agree it's not really relevant to what you're saying.
3) - Perhaps, but what about all the Christians who use birth control? If Catholicism is correct they're going to hell for murder or whatever sin it falls under. I don't know enough about all the various offshoots of major religions to provide any other examples, but generally each sect is founded on some interpretation of their holy book that often redefines the list of sins somewhat.
4) - No religion can be said to be more or less likely than any other unless you're motivated by bias. It simply isn't possible to determine the statistical likelihood of an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient being existing, and there certainly isn't any way of determing which is more likely than the others. Every religion is claimed, by its followers, to have a basis here on our planet, and dismissed as ludicrous by everyone else, and none of them have actual scientific evidence. And an idea being persistent doesn't make it right, it simply means that people want to believe it.

The 'video game god' idea is an irrational one, yes. Perhaps it's a hypocritical god, they certainly exist in major religions today. Or perhaps it's because, when you play a game, you're expected to play by the rules of that game, not of reality. Since this 'game' happens to be the world we live in, you're expected to use the rational rules of the world. Sure, it'd be rational to pick up the ball when you're playing soccer, but it goes against the point of the game. But picking apart one specific example goes against the whole point. There are an infinite number of potential gods. Every god that can possibly be conceived, and every god that cannot possibly be conceived if the 'maybe man was not meant to know' crowd are correct, must be considered. For every god that rewards a certain behaviour, another will punish it. Because probability is something grounded in the laws of physics (we can only give an assessment of how likely a glass is to break when you drop it because reality follows certain laws that supernatural beings don't), we cannot possibly determine how likely each god is to exist. Thus, even if a god exists, there is no way of knowing whether any given behaviour will lead to reward or punishment. Feel free to believe in a religion if you like, but to say that it is the only option that can ever benefit anyone is simply incorrect.

 

[ThisIsSnake]

snip

Well diddums

1. You quoted my posts but apparently got them from another guy. I'm not the centre of the universe, however you may worship me as your lord and master is you wish.
2. So you feel depressed that humanity has advanced this far on our own? If you need a grandiose mission from an all powerful being in order to feel happy then you do that. (If he starts telling you to murder people he's not really your friend)
3. Quelle surprise. Macro evolution is micro evolution on a longer time scale, what you describe is a Deist which many scientists are. Nice piss-poor effort at wit there.
4. You insisted on fawning over linguistics, people in glass houses shouldn't (omfg coract apastrophy Yous!) throw stones.

 

[kinggamecat]

Evolution is a scientific fact, it has been proven has it now?

No matter what your religion says it cannot stand up to facts, it can try all it wants, but facts are facts and cannot be anything but facts.

 

[masticina]

Ask him what he doesn't agrees with and why

See everybody can have their opinions with things like science you can actually ask the why's and hows. I mean maybe he simply doesn't understands a part of it. Or has been taught wrongly.. it happens all the time.

So ask him what he doesn't agree with and based your reactions upon that. If in the end all he can say "Well my belief is .." then say "Belief.. are we still talking science?"

 

[XHolySmokesX]

If anyone's interested i have proof of evolution that has happened in our scientific lifetime.

Pets, specifically dogs, as they give the strongest example.

Long long ago back in time when people were still hunter gathering, we made friends with the wolf/dog to aid us in our tracking and hunting of prey. After the invention of farming, we descided we no longer needed dogs for hunting and instead used them to protect our flocks. Then after society got into full swing we descided dogs would be good as companions for every day life.

Dogs all originated as wolves or wild dogs, even the chihuahua, and they evolved to look and act the way they do through sped up natural selection by us.

Natural selection is one of the main factors affecting evolution and by selectively allowing certain traits to continue we humans can effectively evolve a species into something new. If someone descided one day they wanted elephants to be really small, all you got to do is only allow the smaller elephants to breed, and then elephants will eventually become smaller.

That's how evolution works, only instead of us as the driving force it's prey, predators or environmental factors that descide the traits that live on.

 

[soulblade06]

Guys, the fact is that evolution doesn't have concrete, 100% irrefutable evidence and neither is there definitive evidence as to how the world was created. Thanks to Charles Darwin, we know that animals tend to have traits that give them an advantage in their enviornment, but we don't know for a fact that we started out as the equivalent of a chimpanzee. There is evidence suggesting it, but it has not been reproduced in a scientific experiment, so it's still a theory.

I am open to the idea that things (plants, animals, the environment, etc.) have changed over great spans of time, but I don't claim to know exactly how that happend or why it happened. All I know is that we're here, and there is no comprehensive story on how that occurred except what is offered by religions (like I said, I'm open to things changing over time and different interpretations of Genesis and all that). Maybe this whole discussion is the truth we aren't meant to understand.

 

[Thaa'ir]

I shrug. Creationism is amusing, not dangerous. I only become concerned when people advocate teaching it as science, when it is clearly not scientific.

 

[SilentCom]

If it's fine for you to believe in evolution, it's fine for him not to. It's not like he's forcing you to stop believing in it.

 

[Babitz]

There is no such thing as "believing" in evolution. It's a proven fact. People don't research shit and then they say such ignorant things. Do you believe in gravity?

 

[MidnightKnight]

Even Pokemon believe in evolution

 

[Some_weirdGuy]

No to be honest on this forum when I say evolution is just a theory I expect most replies to uninformed dribble salivating at the prospect of proving me wrong and that I don't know shit about science.

When I say evolution is a fact and theory I mean it in the same way gravity is a fact but there is theory behind if it that makes sense.

Yeah, but the theories are always the 'how', the actual phenomenon itself is not a theory at all. As my post was pointing out, people get confused cause they don't know what they are actually paraphrasing. If people stuck to the proper names instead of trying to shorten it then the confusion wouldn't exist (well, it wouldn't exist among reasonable people, which despite what some people want everyone to think, does include most religious people).

So what i'm trying to say is how you're putting is a bad(and unnecessarily confusing) way of explaining it. You really shouldn't say its a fact and a theory, cause its not(and if you're trying to look like you do indeed know what you're talking about, you don't want to be saying one thing but meaning another). Basically, I know what you're trying to say but that's not what you're actually saying.

The fact is the phenomenon(eg. evolution, gravity), the theory is how it occurs(Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, Newton's theory of Universal Gravitation).
Explain it like that is a much better way of putting it(and from what you saying now is what you actually meant anyway).

 

[martin's a madman]

Well, he's wrong. Humans do undergo and have underwent evolution, there isn't a debate here.

And yet, the Missing Link remains just that. Missing. You take it on faith that because something happens to the simplest life forms that it also happened to us. You might call on Lucy and other skeletal fragments from Africa, but I've never seen an ape change into a human. Your faith against mine. Let's call it even.

For the record, I'm a proponent of Intelligent Design. I'm pretty much exactly where the OP's friend is in terms of that philosophy. I don't see religion and evolution as mutually exclusive, I just think that humanity is...different. And as you type your rebuttal, think about what you do. Have whales invented language, or birds computers, or cats rhetorical techniques?

Just so you know, the fossil record isn't needed to actually prove evolution, it's just a happy coincidence that we have some fossils that help paint a picture of transitional phases; but fossils by themselves are not actually necessary evidence. The real evidence is in molecular and genetic studies.

We share genetic code with animals, if humans and other animals were 'created' separately, you would expect actual massive differences in their coding, but you have a 96% similarity between human and chimpanzee genetics.

 

[Hatchet90]

So... because he believes in a different creation theory, something has yet to be proven one way or another, he's an idiot? If he doesn't push his beliefs onto you, why push your beliefs onto him?

 

[martin's a madman]

This gives a brief understanding of how things change over time and how animals can make things...oh dear lord please learn about evolution before you try and argue against it.

i know all i need to about the fairy tale that is evolution

long ago and far away nothing exploded and made everything.
then it rained on the newly born rocky earth. the rocks turned to soup and the the soup came alive and turned into a prince (humans/everything we see today) 4.whatever-billion years ago (i have no idea how this cannot sound stupid to people)
nobody witnessed any of the events that took place but its obvious to us now becase we cannot prove it happend


Arthur Keith once said ...
"Evolution is unproven and unprovable. We believe it only because the only alternative is special creation, and that is unthinkable."

(take that as you will)

You clearly don't know anything about chemistry or biology to make a statement dripping with such proud ignorance.

'i know all i need to about the fairy tale that is evolution '

That attitude is most disappointing, I won't judge someone if they lack access to education, but what this is is willful ignorance.

Ask questions, read a book about the subject, just don't throw it away without learning anything.

 

[Nieroshai]

So... now you're doubting your friend's intelligence? About a theory that has only been proven half-true? Sure things evolve. But did they evolve from goo, from primordial pools, from single cells into what we have today? We have no evidence that we did. Are we different from our ancestors? Yes. Are we related somehow to every form of life to ever exist? MAYBE.

 

[PurePareidolia]

actualy no fossil counts as evidence for evolution if you find some bones in the dirt all you know is that the animal died you cannot prove it had any kids.

I'm not saying the individual fossils themselves are the evidence - the purpose of the fossil record is to look at trends over time. The fossils represent a certain species at a certain time, they aren't literally the common ancestor of everything that came after. Nonetheless, even ignoring the entire fossil record, evolution has been reproduced in a lab, so your position is invalid.

Google 'Lenski bacteria experiment' - basically, the guy got E Coli to adapt to eat citrus, simply by living in an environment with a lot of citrus and not much other food. That's evolution. It happened. He has preserved generations of bacteria from throughout the entire experiment. You can assume that those bacteria are the fossils in this experiment - they didn't necessarily split into the ones that eat citrus, but they represent transitional forms all the same.

you definitely cannot prove it had different kids (as in a bird giving birth to a none bird). and why would you assume a dead animal can do something animals today cant do? (breed animals outside of there own kind)(or magically transform into other animals)

EVOLUTION DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!

More specifically:
-Nobody says birds can give birth to things that aren't birds. If they did, evolution would be falsified. They can give birth to slightly different birds, but not say, cats. That would be stupid and completely out of touch with reality. You know, that thing science is designed to explain.
-Dead animals can't do anything, they're dead. But what you meant was ancient animals can transform or breed with animals from other species. Note that the term "kind" is not a real thing. Like, at all. It doesn't have a definition.
-So yeah, same argument - animals don't turn into other animals, that's biologically impossible, things like butterflies notwithstanding, which is still the same animal. Again, nobody's saying birds can turn into cats.
-Equally stupid is the idea that ancient cats could breed with ancient birds. I mean the definition of a 'species' precludes breeding with different 'species', at least in terms of producing fertile young (obviously ligers and tigons exist, they're just sterile). Obviously no reputable scientist has suggested this within the last several centuries.

Science isn't completely retarded, give it a little credit here - when it invents a word, it at least gives it a definition and when it comes up with a theory, it does know what it's talking about. Being that the purpose of the theory is in fact "knowing what you're talking about".


Please people, wikipedia this thing before you start throwing around Ray Comfort quotes or what have you.

Oh my GOD some people here are mentally retarded. Lemme just sum everything up for once before I blow a gasket here.

FAKE EDIT: triple shot of vodka. LET'S DO THIS.
~snip~

Why does this forum not have a reputation system?

 

[Kadoodle]

Why would his view on evolution has anything to do with his intelligence?

It has to do with him putting his intelligence aside for the sake of religion.

 

[Kadoodle]

So... now you're doubting your friend's intelligence? About a theory that has only been proven half-true? Sure things evolve. But did they evolve from goo, from primordial pools, from single cells into what we have today? We have no evidence that we did. Are we different from our ancestors? Yes. Are we related somehow to every form of life to ever exist? MAYBE.

Excuse me? Half true? You can watch evolution happen in a fucking test tube. There is so much evidence to support it that it is practically fact.

It is also apparent that you don't understand what "theory" means. When you're talking about science, a "theory" is a hypothesis that has so much data and evidence to back it up that it is nearly fact.

 

[Peteron]

So what? People have separate beliefs, intelligence has nothing to do with it. Some of the Earth's smartest people thought the world was flat. We have no right to judge him for his beliefs.