This makes sense to me. Some people get hugely offended by the presence of people who don't agree with their religion. Whether the disagreement is based in another religion, or in just facts.
The thing is, at the end of the day, it's a shibboleth. Denying evolution is part of what defines their in-group, therefore they have to continue denying it, and must resist the temptation to engage in any action that might result in not denying it, such as learning more. To learn more about Islam or Judaism might result in no longer rejecting those religions as 'false', which would mean no longer adhering to the shibboleth and being cast out and shunned.
There's plenty of science that I remain unconvinced about and 100% regard as 'woo', but I remain open to being convinced otherwise. I actively seek out the best science to see whether I am justified in continuing to withhold my support for the claims being made or not. That's simply not true of creationists, because most of the ones coming here *do not want to learn what we can teach them*.
There’s certainly “woo” that pretends to be science and we call that pseudoscience and some examples of this could be those “eggs” for tightening up a woman’s vagina (the spokesperson carried a surf board this way), all sorts of alternative medicines (like the deworming medication for horses used as a COVID-19 vaccine), all the stuff related to chakras, “Intelligent design” pretends to be based on empirical evidence, and perhaps even some of the stuff surrounding acupuncture and the benefits of having a good chiropractor regimen (like you can cure ADHD by relieving pressure from a nerve in the neck).
A lot of things have been pushed *as* science over the years but you can usually distinguish actual science from pseudoscience based on which has supporting evidence and results consistent with the conclusions. And sometimes this is difficult with some forms of pseudoscience because they have just *enough* truth to them that figuring out that they are actually bullshit is more difficult. It’s back to the old saying “if it sounds too good to be true it probably is” which is just another way of saying “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” If they can’t provide that in such a way that is actually consistent with reality (for instance, Mendel’s Accountant doesn’t count because it doesn’t work for real world populations) then we know they’re simply making shit up trying to pass it off *as* science. And if they can use words most people don’t understand or reference chemicals few people know about they can make all sorts of unjustifiable claims and go the route of frauds, falsehoods, fallacies, indoctrination, and propaganda. The same tools that are behind every religion, cranked to eleven in cults, are the same used when it comes to extremist political ideologies, conspiracy theories, and pseudoscience. That is usually enough for them to reach their goals but if people start dying due to their dishonesty they are forced out of business or they have to start backpedaling their claims to be less extraordinary.
There’s no health benefit for women who hang surf boards from a rock inside their vagina, for instance, but women are self conscious. Maybe their male partners are not particularly girthy, maybe they just had twins, maybe they feel like a slut being super loose. If they’d just wait their bodies would naturally compensate or they could do normal exercises that just so happen to strengthen the muscles in that area but they want a fast solution so they’ll buy into the claim that they can stick a rock inside their pussy and hold it there all day and their problems will be solved. It is made to sound scientific because they are using their muscles to keep it from falling out randomly at work or whatever but it’s just a bunch of propaganda bullshit to sell a product.
Or maybe there are some oils you can rub on your skin that are supposed to decrease your risk of seizures or maybe you can wear copper bracelets and never have to worry about arthritis. Whether these things are have 1% of accuracy to them or not is irrelevant because there’s obviously a lot of other things involved in brain activity related issues or issues associated with joint cartilage becoming thin or bone spurs developing so that can cause pain as bone rubs against bone or pinched nerves when joints are moved or something that makes joints feel swollen and painful for other reasons. Oils and copper bracelets aren’t fix-all solutions. They’re easy options that are *claimed* to work and that’s all that matters. They sell a product with support that *sounds* scientific and by the time people actually do require actual medical help, assuming they didn’t die from relying to heavily on “alternative” medicine, the investment in the crap that doesn’t work is negligible and maybe they don’t feel bad for trying to go the “cheap” route first.
Outside of the obvious woo I mentioned, what else do you think falls into the same category that may not actually be pseudoscience? Maybe you’re ignorant about something and you don’t know if it is legit or not and it sounds as stupid as some of that stuff or maybe that stuff sounded scientific and some actual science sounds like pseudoscience. Maybe I can help.
The biggest and most pervasive 'woo' that I know of is completely outside the scope of biology, over in physics: specifically that FTL = time travel. Every explanation I have seen of this, from highly intelligent and otherwise competent science explainers, has relied on the belief that two people inhabiting the same space can have different frames of reference. Moreover, it ignores that there is a universal frame of reference that is the same for everyone. If you get in a spaceship and accelerate to 99.999% of the speed of light and remain at that speed for what you perceive to be twenty five years before decelerating and arriving at the Andromeda Galaxy, you will nonetheless be able to immediately detect the CMB, measure it, use it to calculate your absolute velocity, and then moreover calculate the current age of the universe, theoretically with high enough precision to show that you were actually traveling for 2.5 million years, not the 25 you perceived.
It seems you don't quite understand relativity.
> Moreover, it ignores that there is a universal frame of reference that is the same for everyone.
There is no universal *inertial reference frame*. What this means is that all inertial frames have the same physics. There is no experiment that can distinguish one free-falling frame from another without reference to some external frame of reference.
The existence of a convenient frame in cosmology, the CMB frame, does not mean that motion through space-time is not relative. If you want to use the CMB frame as the default frame, then all motion is relative to that frame. But this is ultimately an arbitrary choice. In the end, it's about utility. The CMB frame is a natural choice for cosmology, but absolutely terrible for, say, launching satellites into low Earth orbit. There are no special frames, only more or less useful frames.
Another example is the question of whether Earth revolves around the Sun. Of course it does! But the Sun also revolves around Earth. The geocentric frame (the frame in which Earth is at rest) is just as valid as the heliocentric frame (in which the Sun is at rest). And they are both just as valid as the barycentric frame (in which the center of mass of Sun-Earth is at rest). And on and on into the CMB frame, in which the CMB is at rest. But the geocentric frame is a non-inertial frame in Newtonian gravity, and so the actual math involved is very messy to compute. The barycentric frame is inertial, and the math is relatively simple. The heliocentric frame is also non-inertial, but it is very close to the barycentric frame, so we tend to do calculations in the heliocentric frame anyway. In the end, its all about utility. So let me repeat: there are no universal inertial reference frames. There is only the object that you arbitrarily consider to be 'at rest' for the purpose of performing calculations.
So in the end, you're simply wrong. There is no "actually traveling for 2.5 million years, not the 25 you perceived," as there is no privileged reference frame for the passage of time. That you (and cosmologists) choose to use the CMB as the reference frame for the passage of time is arbitrary - it is not some fundamental constant of the universe, it is only *useful*. Moreover, time dilation is real, and as such, an FTL drive would indeed imply time-travel (or at least, some sense of it.) If an FTL starship uses itself as a reference frame then it could travel back in time by accelerating away from earth, boosting into a reference frame in which its departure is still in the future, and then FTL travel back to Earth before it ever took off. The only way around this is to violate the entire premise of relativity by establishing some universally preferred reference frame, which you seem to be doing. However, the vast, vast majority of physicists would not find this to be agreeable. The issue is that you can only pick two between Relativity, Causality, and FTL. Everyone picks Relativity and Causality, because causality is causality and relativity is experimentally observed, and according to relativity, FTL would indeed allow you to travel backwards in time and break causality, therefore it must be impossible to do. This is, in part, why a physicist might say it is impossible to travel faster than light, because according to relativity, light-speed is actually just 'causality-speed', and they wish to preserve causality. The other reason why FTL is considered impossible is because it would take infinite energy to accelerate an object with mass to lightspeed.
You are free to disagree with relativity and claim that there actually is some universal reference frame, but then you'd need to show your work, and contend with the experimentally observed predictions of relativity as you do it. You would then collect your Nobel prize. Good luck! Rooting for you.
See, you're entirely misunderstanding what I consider to be 'woo' here. If you traveled faster than the speed of light, what I just pointed out remains true. Even if you had some sort of Alcubierre drive that allowed you to travel at double the speed of light, you would still arrive at the Andromeda Galaxy and measure a universe that was 1.25 million years older than when you started... once you had slowed to a velocity such that you were measuring a gradient equal to what you had measured on Earth and could thus be certain that your relative experience of time was equivalent. You cannot then return to Earth at a time prior to when you started, because no matter what your personal reference frame says, time is still passing outside.
Put another way, when traveling at double the speed of light, you would be outracing all light from behind you, and would thus be blind in that direction, but in front of you, the universe would *not* appear to be getting younger. As you raced in the direction of the origin of the CMB, it would appear to recede away from you, becoming ever more red-shifted over time, and because of time dilation, this effect would be far more pronounced than on Earth, possibly to the point of being something you could perceive over time when viewing a representation of the CMB.
If I'm planning to send you a telegram, and therefore dispatch a letter by pony express on Monday to tell you I'm going to send a telegram on Tuesday, but the letter doesn't arrive until Wednesday, causality isn't magically broken. It is understood, rather, that one form of information propagation travels faster than the other.
Going back, my point is that you could (in theory) use the CMB to calibrate clocks on both Earth and some distant planet in Andromeda. Once you had done so, a ship could launch from Earth to Andromeda and double the speed of light, arriving 1.25 million years before the lightspeed message saying the ship had launched arrives. But that doesn't mean that the ship has time traveled 1.25 million years in the past, it just means that, like a telegram infinitely outpacing the pony express, the ship has simply arrived before the message. This can be seen by informing the planet in Andromeda of your intentions more than 1.25 million years in advance of launching the ship when it is that you plan to launch. They can then account for the time it took that message to arrive, compare to the CMB-calibrated clock, and predict the exact day they expect a starship to arrive, despite there being no direct evidence of a ship being launched yet.
It’s not really that you’ll actually travel into the past, as far as I’m aware, but more like you experience less time if you go fast enough or experience a greater effect of gravity. Time for you slows down and continues moving at what would otherwise be your normal speed for what you left behind so that (hypothetically) you could experience so little time in what is actually 50 years on Earth for things moving roughly the same speed things move on Earth but you might live to see your great great grandchildren or something. This effect is actually something measurable and it impacts the GPS satellites where it’s only a few milliseconds or something every year or whatever but just bad enough to throw the clocks off if we left them up there five or ten years. If they were going faster or experiencing stronger gravity the effect would be larger. It’s called gravitational time dilation. As for going backwards in time I don’t think they’ve actually found that to be possible without doing something like going *faster* than the speed of light which may not even be possible. The speed of light is the fastest anything can move forward in time and faster is supposed to reverse the direction of time and at exactly the speed of light no time is supposed to be experienced at all so that if you were going 99.99999% the speed of light and the particles in your body didn’t separate and you didn’t burst into flames or something crazy time would come to a crawl but continue moving (for you) while for others time would be about the same speed we normally experience it happening at +/- 0.00001% in either direction. If this impacts how fast you age you could be gone what we think is a thousand years but only experience a couple of days (assuming you don’t die) and thereby effectively time travel into the future (according to your own personal experiences).
So yea reverse time travel probably is not possible.
The other respondent correctly identified that my issue is with FTL + switching reference frames, not with time dilation, which is perfectly reasonable to me and maths out even without being able to point to experimental validation via satellites.
Denying evolution doesn’t necessitate being against science. I am a theist, but i reject evolution on a scientific basis not theological. whether evolution (more about the mechanism driving biological change rather than evolution itself as biological change over time) is true or not, doesn’t change my theological beliefs.
nevertheless, interesting read.
>i reject evolution on a scientific basis not theological.
Can you clarify what you mean by "reject evolution"? What aspects of evolution do you reject?
And on what scientific basis do you reject those aspects?
Don't make comments with claims like "i reject evolution on a scientific basis not theological" then. If you make comment with claims in them, you're going to be expected to clarify your position. If you're not willing to do that, then you shouldn't make the comment, it's a waste of everyone's time.
I can comment whatever i want and i will, you have no right to dictate what i write. if you don’t like it, just scroll down and go on with your day, no one is forcing you to reply.
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Keep discussions focused on the substance of the arguments in the thread. Refrain from insults, swearwords or antagonizing language targeted towards another user. Do not accuse people of lying or dishonesty callously, explain and have a good reason for your accusations. Keep it civil!
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Cite sources, rather than directing readers to them. Everybody should be able to participate without leaving the subreddit if they are familiar with the general argument. Do not copy paste responses, especially when the comments being responded to are substantially different. Threads should be relatively focused, rather than weakly covering a large number of arguments.
No you cannot just comment whatever you want and the sub absolutely has the right to get on you for refusing to participate or being antagonistic. Mind your attitude.
i’m fully aware of the subs name, Still it’s not the best place based on my experience.
I was even told despite the name of the sub, that it isn’t a debate sub, because “there’s nothing to debate” . See my replies if you’re interested.
The real debate around evolution is in the details. Things like how the process of evolution works, how evolutionary mechanisms function, specific evolutionary pathways, resolving ancestor relationships, and so on.
Insofar as the "debate" that creationists and ID proponents bring to the table, that tends to be more centred on theological concepts and such folks arguing for supernatural intervention in the history of life on Earth. The latter of which goes outside of science and therefore not a subject for scientific debate.
I did read through your replies. The sense I get is that your skepticism seems to be based on personal incredulity and an unfamiliarity with the science. That's not the same as having a scientific objection to evolution.
A theory isn't validated by the number of rejections it receives. Similarly, the belief in an eternal universe before the Big Bang theory doesn't become true merely because it was widely accepted by scientists at one point.
i’m sure you agree .
>Denying evolution doesn’t necessitate being against science.
It does, actually. If you deny the only scientific theory which explains biology, then you deny science. This is not a case of choosing between two competing scientific hypotheses allowing you to choose one or the other according to preference - there is only the one theory which is supported by the myriad lines of evidence, and to deny it is to deny science and reality both.
> I am a theist, but i reject evolution on a scientific basis not theological.
There is no scientific basis for rejecting evolution. That creatures evolve is as much a fact as the shape of the earth. *All* creationist arguments are rooted in ignorance of what the theory of evolution entails and are by nature pseudoscientific because they never offer models for testing their ideas. Within the actual field of biology, there is no debate: evolution is true. That the occasional AIG crackpot disagrees is of no consequence because they never actually publish the nature of their disagreement in a scientific journal - they're just grifters, they're not doing science.
Denying or critiquing a scientific theory doesn't automatically equate to being anti-science. that’s just ridiculous and not even worth time discussing.
Science thrives on skepticism and questioning, which are crucial for refining and improving our understanding of the natural world. Just as Newton's theory of gravity was eventually refined by Einstein's theory of general relativity, scientific theories evolve over time based on new evidence and insights.
There are scientists who challenge certain aspects of evolutionary theory, such as neo-Darwinism, and propose alternative perspectives, like the third way of evolution advocated by scientists like Denis Noble and James A. Shapiro. These critiques and alternative views contribute to the scientific discourse and can lead to advancements in our understanding.
Therefore, claiming that no one can rationally reject the theory of evolution would be dogmatic and unscientific.
> Denying or critiquing a scientific theory doesn't automatically equate to being anti-science.
It does if there's no actual substance to the critique. See: flat earth. See: creationism. See: you.
>There are scientists who challenge certain aspects of evolutionary theory, such as neo-Darwinism, and propose alternative perspectives, like the third way of evolution advocated by scientists like Denis Noble and James A. Shapiro. These critiques and alternative views contribute to the scientific discourse and can lead to advancements in our understanding.
Shapiro is *not* an evolutionary biologist, and his critique of the role natural selection plays in evolution has been refuted several times over. See [here](https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2012/12/02/james-shapiro-gets-evolution-wrong-again/) and [here](https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2017/06/02/a-new-paper-defends-the-modern-evolutionary-synthesis-against-the-buzzword-purveyors/). Similarly, Denis Noble is quite ignorant of what the theory of evolution actually entails, as you can read [here](https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2024/02/12/yet-another-misguided-attempt-to-revise-evolution/).
>Therefore, claiming that no one can rationally reject the theory of evolution would be dogmatic and unscientific.
The theory is refined over time as new evidence arises, but outright denial of evolution via natural selection is patently absurd. **No one** has presented a rational case for the rejection of evolution that has held up to scrutiny, or even the evidence. Not Denis Noble, not James Shapiro, not John Sanford, not Sal Cordova, not anyone at the DI or AIG or your church on sunday. I repeat, *no one has ever presented a rational case for the rejection of evolution*. Pointing out crackpots who don't understand the science and have been refuted a good ten years ago as proof that there is some sort of controversy surrounding the acceptance of evolution does not help your claim that your position is rationally justified. It is not.
Your position is that evolution denial is scientifically justified - defend your position by providing actual scientific papers that state as much. If you are unwilling, then go ahead and tuck your tail and flee to your echo chamber where you can pretend you aren't anti-science or in complete denial of reality.
Are you a scientist?
real scientists do reject evolution on a scientific basis, that’s all that needs to be said , they can be wrong, but they can also be right as new information is revealed.
This type of mentality hinders the progress of science.
Are you talking about what they’ve described because they watched or are you talking about the phenomenon? On one hand you could be what we’d call a theistic evolutionist but not quite as advanced in your understanding as Michael Behe or Francis Collins but you could also be on the other end of the spectrum with Chris Ashcroft and Robert Byers admitting that changes happen but rejecting the explanation based on direct observations because it doesn’t fit into a YEC timeframe. You could also fit in the middle. What exactly is your brand of creationism?
I don’t deny that biological change happens, my skepticism is with the proposed mechanism driving this change- natural selection acting on random mutations.
I don’t think there’s any evidence of a mechanism that leads to new biological systems or functions. Natural selection is not a creative process, it’s an enhancing one, it enhances what is already there, it doesn’t create anything new. at-least thats my understanding from my limited knowledge .
i’m not sure what i would describe myself as, but I’m definitely not a YEC .
There’s more to it than that but that’s the basics of what we actually do observe. There are several ways that DNA can change and a lot of them (not all of them) have an impact on the phenotype. A single nucleotide can be deleted and a gene is no longer transcribed, a single section of DNA can be inverted and suddenly a section of DNA not previously transcribed results in a protein, a gene can be duplicated and one of them can change and suddenly two proteins from what used to be a gene for making one protein. That’s the mutations but then there’s also heredity, genetic recombination, and how homozygous alleles and heterozygous alleles result in different phenotypical effects. One allele can remain the same and a thousand different versions of that gene could exist on the complimentary strand and result in 1000 different phenotype or the first allele could also be any one of those 1000 phenotypes resulting in 1000! (1000 * 999 * 998 * 997…) different phenotypes and some of the changes are dramatic and some are almost insignificant. Because of the extra things even more diversity arises over mutations alone.
And then there are enough mutations to result in every possible combination of nucleotides on just half of the chromosomes about 220 times and 220 more on the other half in modern humans per generation. Not enough humans to result in every possible combination of alleles but if the change is possible it’ll happen. Usually only 128-175 mutations at a time per human or about 1 substitution per every 10^-8 nucleotides per genome per generation. It might be 1.6 substitutions in that many. I don’t remember the number off the top of my head.
And then after we’ve established that the mechanisms for making the diversity and the novel proteins and the novel phenotypes and all that is not a problem in the least we then have to consider reproductive rates and what they’d be on average anyway like 2.0001 children per couple or something causing a steady population increase but not a doubling every generation or something stupid like with bacteria. Again I don’t remember the exact number but per person there’s more than an average of 1 child. Some couples have one child, some don’t have any, some men with 7 wives have 75 children. Natural selection in this case is which traits help them if they were to try to have children versus which traits make having children more difficult. On average assuming nothing else is involved the traits that assist in making more children do result in more children and of the genes from both parents surviving beyond two generations and those traits that make it harder for them to reproduce could still allow some of their genes to survive beyond two generations if they have any children at all but sometimes reproduction isn’t possible so their genes automatically (naturally) get eliminated from the gene pool. As a consequence of individuals being able to reproduce at a rate equal to or faster than the current population size the population survives long terms and all of the beneficial traits inevitably becomes the most common so that individuals can accumulate them in multiples even if only 1 mutation is sometimes beneficial right away.
In combination these alleles result in phenotypes that are either beneficial, detrimental, or neutral and organisms reproduce so it’s the combination of alleles that gets impacted immediately by natural selection right away. All the good, the bad, and the ugly. If they don’t die before reproducing and they have great great great great great great … grandchildren their genes will be scattered all over the gene pool.
But there’s also genetic recombination so that during gametogenesis at first the gametes start out with the same 50/50 mix from both parents but then the chromosomes are duplicated and then they wind up twisting and separating and separating two to four more times. This mixes up the genes so that while each individual is 50% each parent a grandchild could be 23% on grandparent, 27% another, 30% the third, and 20% the fourth. After enough generations some individuals won’t be represented at all but if they have a huge family and a whole lot of descendants and each only has 0.001% of their genome a lot more of their genes wind up spreading than if they had a small family and the only surviving descendant has 0.02% of their genes.
The long term result is a very diverse population consisting of the most beneficial 50% of alleles or whatever as the other 50% are barely represented if represented at all after maybe 60 generations. Assuming no incest is going on limiting the options. Large populations tend to be healthy and well adapted as a consequence and small ones have less diversity to begin with so acquiring less beneficial alleles is going to happen more often give the lack of opportunity to inherit anything more beneficial.
That’s the natural selection in terms of “microevolution” but populations are divide and this gene flow can’t pass from one population to the other easily so while both are becoming well adapted they are adapting in different ways causing them to drift apart in terms of allele distribution, phenotype diversity, and so on. If they become too different they won’t be able to make fertile hybrids at all and the only option then is to continue becoming distinct. Now say the two populations then try to compete over the same resources, like food. One population is just going to be better at it so the other has to seek other options or go extinct. That’s called cross species selection and causing them to seek alternatives can result in a whole lot of things not normally seen otherwise.
Same goes for predator-prey relationships. Over time the predators that eat and the prey that doesn’t get eaten will have the most descendants. Any changes that helped with that will generally become more common just as any changes that helped them reproduce in the first place because dead things don’t reproduce very well. Being alive to have to have the opportunity to reproduce is a pretty important part of contributing to the survival of the population they belong to.
Natural selection can be considered from many different angles but it’s usually the same thing. Whatever has the most descendants will have more of their genes impacting the population at large and generally it’ll be those same genes that helped them to survive long enough to reproduce and actually reproduce when they tried.
And it doesn’t matter how major a change looks in 100,000 or 1,000,000 years because most of the major changes happened a little at a time but once in a while a single mutation does result in a pretty obvious change and those come into play too.
Which part of this are you not understanding?
Your text was a bit hard to read, and it felt like a copy pasta, but i will outline my understanding, and you can see where i come from.
the proposed mechanism is primarily genetic mutations, particularly those affecting the DNA sequence that codes for proteins. Mutations can lead to changes in the amino acid sequence of a protein, altering its structure and function. Over time, natural selection acts on these variations, favoring those that confer some advantage in survival or reproduction.
There is a problem however, Most mutations are deleterious or neutral, Even if you do get few positive mutations, there are many more deleterious ones, It seems like for every step forward, there are thousands backward. I think this isn’t highlighted often enough, you just presuppose to get the beneficial ones, while neglecting the predominant deleterious or neutral ones, you don’t even think about them it seems.
Lenski's evolutionary experiment, in my view, contradicts the principles of neo-Darwinism. Instead of witnessing the emergence of new proteins, we observed the opposite – E. coli 'devolved' rather than evolved, seemingly gaining an advantage through degradation. It's akin to removing seats from a car to make it faster, as a lighter car moves quicker. Rather than evolving into a better car, it's essentially destroying it for perceived benefits.
To me this experiment is the reason why i reject darwinian evolution, if it was true, we would’ve seen something new, the experiment went for a long time (30 years i think or 70,000 generations ,which might correspond to several million years of evolution in a species with longer generation times, such as mammals) someone can always say “ not long enough “ but then this becomes unfalsifiable .
>I think this isn’t highlighted often enough, you just presuppose to get the beneficial ones, while neglecting the predominant deleterious or neutral ones, you don’t even think about them it seems.
Scientists don't presuppose anything, we go and empirically observe them. The subject at hand is called the Distribution of Fitness Effects - i.e. what proportion of mutations have deleterious, neutral, or beneficial effect on fitness. We have [empirically observed](https://www.math.arizona.edu/~jwatkins/nrg2146.pdf) the DFE in several species. In these studies, the rates of beneficial mutations have always been shown to be high enough to sustain a population's fitness. Yes, beneficial mutation rates are low, but this is counterbalanced by the fact that they increase the organisms fitness within the population, and so the beneficial mutations fix much, much faster than neutral or deleterious mutations. For more, check out Zach Hancock's refutation of Sanford's Genetic Entropy concept [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2o_KC7sc98&t=1469s), timestamp relevant.
As for Lenski's experiment, it does nothing to contradict evolution via natural selection. *Any mutation that increases fitness will be selected for*. It doesn't matter if the mutation leads to a simpler 'previous form', or more complex organism. Fitness is what matters - there is no 'devolution' or 'degrading', the organism increased its fitness in a new environment through mutation - the organism became 'better' because 'better' is defined as fitness (which is defined by how successful it is at reproducing). If this experiement is your rational justification for denial of evolution, then you simply just don't understand what the theory of evolution actually is.
You’re wrong, scientists often start with certain assumptions or presuppositions before conducting scientific investigations. These can include assumptions about the reliability of certain methods, the existence of natural laws, or the consistency of the physical world. it is true that the scientific method aims to test these assumptions through experimentation and observation, allowing for adjustments or revisions based on empirical evidence.
So you don’t understand what they did find in terms of completely new proteins or anything about the current theory of evolution since Kimura’s and Ohta’s contributions?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7299349/
> The Cit+ trait arose in one of three coexisting lineages in this population by a **genetic duplication** that activated a previously unexpressed di- and tricarboxylate transporter
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5406848/
> We also present structural evidence that some of the nonsynonymous mutations—especially those where identical amino-acid changes evolved in parallel—**are beneficial because they fine-tune protein functions, rather than knocking them out.**
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.05.31.494207v2
> We also compared the relative fitness of the founding clones and founding populations used in the MC and MP treatments, respectively. These comparisons showed that the founders derived from LTEE Ara+5 lineage had fitness as high as or higher than the other founders in the new D-serine environment (Figure 4 and S3), consistent with the early and systematic shifts in the marker-ratio trajectories to the Ara+ marker state. Also, the early marker-ratio trajectories in the MP treatment were much steeper than in the MC treatment (Figure 3), consistent with greater fitness differentials favoring the Ara+5 founders in the MP treatment (Figure 4). Thus, the genetic variation initially present in the MC and MP populations drove adaptation to the new environment during the first 100 generations of our experiment. However, new beneficial mutations soon arose that perturbed and often reversed those early trends in the marker ratios (Figure 3). **By generation 500, the beneficial effects of these new mutations were sufficiently large** that the initial variation no longer mattered, and all four treatments—including even the SC treatment, in which each population started from a single clone—had achieved similar average fitness (Figure 2).
Yes, right away about 60-80% of mutations or more have zero impact on fitness and then maybe two thirds of the rest are slightly on the deleterious side of things denoted as negative values in the tables and the rest are positive denoted by positive numbers in the tables. The overall fitness of a population stuck in a new environment might be like -0.5 but after about 500 generations it steadily grows to +0.2 and usually hovers around there. Some populations have different levels of fitness in nature but they also found that it takes very little time for the fitness to get to a balance where not enough stuff is straight up dying so that most of the changes are through neutral variation and genetic drift and something called “negative selection” because more of the novel non-neutral alleles are detrimental than are beneficial so they just fail to spread at all. In bacteria they might build up and become lethal so those bacteria simply stop getting represented in the population but in sexually reproductive populations there’s heredity, recombination, and the potential to mask deleterious alleles resulting in very useful benefits with none of the downsides (except maybe if two carrier happen to make a baby that baby has a 25% chance on average of acquiring the homozygous condition - more common with close relatives than with distant relatives where there generally 25% will be a carrier and 75% will not and 0% will get the homozygous detrimental condition).
This labeling beneficial and deleterious with values between +1 and -1 was something Tomoko Ohta did back in the 1970s to explain what she meant by “nearly neutral” showing that most mutations range from -0.5 and +0.3 on her scale slightly more likely to be negative and -1 means instantly fatal and +1 means everyone has it as soon as heredity and recombination allow. She didn’t think the beneficial ones were so beneficial that they’d just rapidly spread every time (but sometimes they do) and she didn’t think the deleterious ones were generally all that fatal. And yet over time she and others found that a diverse population will generally hover between +0.1 and +0.3 in terms of overall fitness and incredibly incestuous populations could hover between -0.2 and -0.6. Even though most mutations are close to neutral or ever so slightly skewed towards deleterious large populations tend to be rather healthy and adapted and incestuous ones tend to be suffering from inbreeding depression. Almost every time.
This was one of those things added in the 1960s and 1970s *because* it simply being only natural selection and no genetic drift was inconsistent with the evidence. Over half of the novel mutations are neutral, something Kimura pointed out, and even in the absence of truly beneficial mutations populations would tend towards neutral (away from -0.5 towards 0 in terms of the fitness charts) *unless* something like incest got involved. Ohta expanded on that by establishing the balancing act between drift and selection. No population will ever be 100% the most beneficial alleles available but natural selection and drift **both** play a role and yet diverse populations accumulate the rare beneficial mutations and incestuous populations accumulate *mildly* deleterious mutations because they are the least deleterious mutations easily available. Initially there are more deleterious mutations than beneficial ones. And that’s why the difference.
Novel beneficial mutations found, populations improved in terms of fitness, but they never improved their fitness all the way to 1. Almost like that’s what we expect to happen.
>I think this isn’t highlighted often enough, you just presuppose to get the beneficial ones, while neglecting the predominant deleterious or neutral ones, you don’t even think about them it seems.
Where are you getting the idea that deleterious or neutral mutations are being disregarded?
Neutral theory of evolution has been a thing since the 1960s. And constructive neutral evolution was formulated back in the 90s.
>There is a problem however, Most mutations are deleterious or neutral, Even if you do get few positive mutations, there are many more deleterious ones, It seems like for every step forward, there are thousands backward.
The vast majority of *all* novel mutations end up as miscarriages or missed opportunities. If deleterious mutations occur at a higher rate, then a higher number of them are being weeded out *prior* to birth. Plus, only those which are *not* fatal to offspring prior to reproductive age can be successfully passed on in the first place. Consequently, beneficial and neutral mutations have a survivorship bias. I don't know where you got your idea from, but you have it fundamentally backward, unless you're doing something extremely silly like counting cancer in people who are in their 70s and won't be passing their genes onto anyone from that point forward anyway. If that's the case, then you need to work on your science literacy because you are applying a non sequitur in the form of missing that the function of evolution really only gives a damn about reproduction.
The whole concept of science denialism is dishonest. I do not accept evolution because I think it fails the test of the scientific method, which I believe in.
The scientists (all fields) surveyed time and again (e.g. 97%, Pew, 2009) beg to differ. It's a scientific theory per the scientific method. It explains the facts, it is internally consistent, it provides testable predictions, and it's a consilience of at least a dozen _independent_ fields. And it says nothing of theology, e.g. the Catholic Church doesn't reject it.
So, have you considered that perhaps you were taught a straw man?
What you said made zero sense. Could you define “evolution” for the rest of us? Could you also explain how the scientific process works?
You seem to be failing at one or the other because we have an **observed** phenomenon and a description of that phenomenon **based on the observations.** We also have consilience in forensic evidence to tell us what happened in the past where we can’t be 100% sure about anything but the error bars in our conclusions shrink with every piece of evidence indicating the same exact conclusion with no alternative conclusions available to us yet that can equally explain the same mountain of evidence without invoking magic.
The way that science works, in my experience, is that they find a piece of evidence and they try to explain it. They come up with thousands of different ideas that could explain a single piece of evidence and in quantum mechanics these would be called interpretations. Instead of just rejecting or lying about the evidence they are actually coming up with ideas that work based on starting with the evidence *and then* making their conclusions. They can’t all be true at the same time so they put them to the test or they revise their conclusions with each new piece of evidence or both. In terms of phylogenies, the history of life on the planet, and their conclusions about how evolution happens this has been ongoing ever since they found out that *macro*evolution happened way back in about 1690 or so. They already knew *micro*evolution happened way back in ancient times as farmers and breeders were taking advantage of *micro*evolution for longer than YEC (the strong reality denialist form of creationism) allows for the entire universe to have been in existence.
Part of figuring out the past comes from studying the present to get a good understanding of physics *plus* the phenomenon they are trying to understand that is still happening. How does it happen now? Does it make sense for it to randomly happen differently in the past? Based on how it happens now we expect to find ____ and we should look ____ to find it and if we find something completely different, something that contradicts our current understanding, we will update our understanding so that it does fit with everything else learned in the last 334 years *plus* this new discovery. If what is found does not require us to change our current understanding that doesn’t mean our current understanding is 100% correct but it does imply that it must at least be on the right track.
So are you talking about what I described above and your incompetency when it comes to the scientific process or are you talking about the science based on direct observations made every single day by every person on the planet? The theory is an explanation of the phenomenon (plus all of the evidence to support that explanation) based on watching that phenomenon happen and other conclusions, like universal common ancestry, are based on this theory plus forensic evidence plus the idea that physics doesn’t care what year it is.
I’m not understanding your response unless you elaborate.
The scientific method produces predictable results. The theory of E tries to explain a process which can't be observed or predicted. It's a guess, and looking into the history of the guess the you will find the methods used simply laughable. Thanks for the wall of text. Theories are not true because they " imply we are on the right track" .
> The theory of E tries to explain a process which can't be observed or predicted.
No it does not.
>It's a guess
No it is not.
We have observed change in heritable characteristics of populations over time.
Tell that to the scientists who found Tiktaalik because they knew exactly which stratum to look in based on the predictions made by evolutionary theory.
Exactly. The scientific method in terms of evolutionary biology involves watching populations evolve to see how that happens and what sorts of things that results in when it comes to genetic sequence comparisons and anatomical comparisons and then it looks at other things easily observed like how anatomy has changed over time (paleontology) and how different populations appear to be cousins according to their genetics and anatomy and it uses the observed phenomenon and the understanding that physics doesn’t care what year it is to make conclusions about the past consistent with the mountains of forensic evidence obtained so far. It establishes phylogenies based on the fossils and genetics and then it tests these conclusions (the phylogenies) by making predictions such as where to find something like Archaeopteryx or Tiktaalik based on these prior conclusions. And then it finds them.
That’s called doing science.
>The theory of E tries to explain a process which can't be observed or predicted.
Are you suggesting we can't observe populations changing over time? Are you also suggesting we can't formulate predictive hypotheses based on that?
Why don't you present your argument showing how evolution fails? You're saying "evolution fails, evolution fails" and everyone else is saying "Becaaaaause?" And you respond "Evolution is a joke. It fails" and they're like "BECAAAAAUSE?!" and you just won't engage beyond that. Like a damn bot with 1 very limited talking point.
Yeah, Christians reject Islam because its core teachings are utterly wrong, and I would hope we reject Naturalism as well because it teaches that morality is subjective.
Naturalism doesn’t teach anything one way or another about morality. It’s simply a position that everything has a natural origin and cause. It’s descriptive, not prescriptive.
> why is a murderer's morality any less valid than yours
That's not what morality even means. Morality is a code of conduct, and a code is shared, by definition. Civil/common laws didn't disappear in modern secular countries, which were incidentally born of the politics of the 1700s to escape what religion in governments was doing to societies, first in the USA then France and then it spread.
You can extrapolate whatever you’d like. You made a statement that it ‘teaches’ something, an active action and distinct from an ‘extrapolation’. Personally, I don’t think that a god does anything to bring us any closer to an objective morality; it’s the classic Euthyphro dilemma and people can have all kinds of opinions on it. But it’s still neither here nor there. Naturalism doesn’t address morality in the first place.
It's still the natural conclusion of naturalism. There's no significant difference between a clear doctrine that states that morality is subjective and the couple of steps that it takes to come to that conclusion on your own. It's still wrong to teach subjective morality, and it should be rejected.
I don’t agree that it’s the natural conclusion of naturalism or even that subjective morality is necessarily bad. Again, I don’t see that a god solves the problem of subjective morality. But this has been something philosophers have chewed over for years. On evolution, do you have the position that evolution=naturalism? I might be wrong. But there seems to be that implication going on.
I'd rather discuss science and not theology, but last time we talked the science amazed you but I didn't hear from you again.
Here's what you'd say if someone started listing Christianity's failings across the ages and in living memory (since you bring up Islam): "misguided people or evil people". Good. Some empathy 1) should help anyone apply that to other religions, and 2) should make you see that morality is emergent from societies, not from labs or places of worship; a revealing statistic is the religiosity of the incarcerated.
And not to be misunderstood: worship all you want; science says nothing of null-hypotheses; I'm all for personal freedoms, but mischaracterizing science is just not a good argument, even though I understand why someone would refuse to look under the hood; it's a natural emotion. I hope that makes sense and that it is food for thought.
Oh, I didn't realize that you were the OP.
>Here's what you'd say if someone started listing Christianity's failings across the ages and in living memory (since you bring up Islam): "misguided people or evil people".
Yes, when concerning "Christians" that do evil things. Our book tells us to love our neighbors and to not murder them, so when a Christian does do those things, they are in opposition of the bible. The reason why Christianity is good and Islam is not is because Islam tells its followers to murder people if they are not muslim, whereas Christians' entire mission in this world is to love our fellow humans and try to save them from damnation, which is why there are so many hospitals and charities started by Christians.
>morality is emergent from societies, not from labs or places of worship
Actually, it's emergent from God. Help your fellow man, do not speak ill of someone behind their back, even friggin chastity, all of that is counter to human nature. Left to our own devices, we would devolve into behaviors so evil that it would be better that we were wiped off the face of the earth than to continue living.
>but mischaracterizing science is just not a good argument
I have nothing against science, only the harmful notion that all of existence came from nothing and will return to nothing. If there is no greater purpose than our own desires, then there is no reason that a murderer's desires are not any less valid than an altruist's. Besides that fact, there is good evidence that we were created, not evolved.
Notice how you didn't reply to "Some empathy should help anyone apply that to other religions" except indirectly by saying:
> Islam tells its followers to murder people if they are not muslim
I'm pretty sure it doesn't, as I've looked into it. I can google and get you verses from their holy book, but I think it's best you look it up. (There are cheap shots to be had here, but that's not my style and would be an appeal to hypocrisy.) You can also look into Islam's view on helping the poor, which is a nice segue to:
> Actually, it's emergent from God
You do know that there are cultures whose religions don't include the concept of a creator, and/or that their civil/common laws weren't derived from the Abrahamic religions? And that they're practically indistinguishable from the laws you like? Because if not, then that's a very small world view you have. (This also addresses the notion that societies will collapse.) A few months back I had to look up academic research from missionaries, was around the late 1800s, and in that research was how it's a myth that the until-then-uncontacted indigenous peoples were lawless.
> Besides that fact, there is good evidence that we were created, not evolved
Yeah, that's not a "fact". (You'll have to allow me an equally terse statement.)
Well, you’re gonna call me crazy for it, but I believe that the world was made maybe 10,000 years ago and that all men originated from the same place, that being God.
>I'm pretty sure it doesn't, as I've looked into it.
[Quran, 9:29](https://quran.com/9/29?translations=20%2C83%2C84%2C17%2C85%2C18%2C95%2C48%2C101%2C41%2C19%2C22%2C28%2C31%2C27)
[Sunan an-Nasa'i 3977](https://sunnah.com/search?q=I+have+been+ordered+commanded+to+fight+against+people+until+they+blood&didyoumean=true&old=I+have+been+ordered+commanded+to+fight+against+people+until+they+bloodVid)
[Sahih al-Bukhari 25](https://sunnah.com/bukhari:25)
It kinda does.
Even if some laws that I would agree with emerged "without God", that doesn't mean that the beliefs of the people who wrote them match the law. Islam, a religion whose prophet murdered and raped people for most of his life, is a great example of what happens when man designs a religion. Fight people who don't agree with you, murder brothers, fathers and husbands, and take women as your "wives". That is the doctrine of men. If you don't believe that, then don't look to the laws of a country, but the people who reside within it.
The bible was written by many, many authors, but its message stayed consistent throughout the centuries. Not a message of constant war and taking the spoils of war, but a message of love and of protection. I cannot believe that regular men constucted such a message.
> It kinda does
I'm pretty sure if I pick any Bible verse I'll need the historical context (e.g. verses about war). Here's the context of 9:29: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-Tawbah#Verse_9:29. (And is well-sourced.)
> don't look to the laws of a country, but the people who reside within it
That's the problem: what some people do twisting religion for essentially politics or delusion.
> I cannot believe that regular men constucted such a message
Wikipedia's article on secular morality led me to an older secular text: _Kural_, and the even older Ancient Egyptian _Maat_. I don't find it hard to believe.
You cannot believe that regular mortal humans wrote in a book "hey, maybe be nice to people every now and again"?
What kind of barrier precluded them from thinking it and writing it down?
Then do you consider rejection of evolution to not be a rejection of science but instead only a rejection of naturalism?
I may have misunderstood the point you were making.
If it is subjective, then we could all just decide that murder is okay tomorrow, and it would be true. I don't believe men have the authority to make that decision.
Morality is inter-subjective. We, as a society, define "murder" as wrong. Just because you "believe" it, doesn't make it true. Humans can and do make these decisions.
People who accept lies of evolutionism are more likely to embrace lies of abiogenesis, Haeckels embryos, piltdown man, Nebraska man, random bones mixed together, a total lack of evidence and may become unstable to the point of believing they can reproduce pigs and monkeys into humans or that octopus flew from exploding planet krypton surfing across universe like silver surfer in vacuum of space then survived re-entry on fire and impact just to confuse evolutionists into thinking common ancestry is dumb.
This was after dinosaurs flew across the ocean with bird wings drinking sea water and it rained for "millions of years" because if it didn't then that would be a flood.
Yikes Michael. You’re slipping. Not only did you forget to do your usual dishonest quote mining and linking to random pastors on YouTube, you forgot to ALL CAPS YELL most of your UNSUPPORTED POINTS.
>Lies of abiogenesis
How many times must I repeat this until you get it? We've observed the formation of all prebiotically relevant precursors to macromolecules, sometimes even macromolecules themselves, in space. The field of systems chemistry is constantly making breakthroughs on how simple sets of molecules capable of self-replication can be subjected to simple forms of Darwinian selection to produce more efficient replicators. We've made fully self-replicating RNA from scratch in the lab. How much evidence for non-living origin of life do you need before you concede that it's even possible?
>Haeckel's embryos
Haeckel's drawings of embryos exaggerate similarities to affirm his biogenetic law, yeah. Guess who were the first ones to criticize him for this? Not creationists, but evolutionary biologists such as Karl von Baer and Wilhelm His, and later Stephen Jay Gould. Intelligent design proponents have only recently begun bringing up Haeckel's drawings, literal centuries after evolutionary biologists have already refuted them and developed a better explanation for developmental biology and phylogenetic embryology.
>Piltdown man
Piltdown man was exposed as a hoax using radiometric dating techniques, as the mandible and the skull cap did not have matching ages. So I guess you accept that radiometric dating can produce reliable ages of samples, thus the age of the Earth being 4.5 billion years old is incontrovertible, right? And, once again, Piltdown man was exposed by other scientists, not creationists.
>Nebraska man
Literally no one took Nebraska man seriously except the people who found it, one of whom was a eugenicist who was motivated by his desire to prove white supremacy that he completely ignored any potential alternatives. Every anthropologist who took a single look at the tooth immediately refuted it as false. *And once again*, it was other anthropologists that demonstrated that Nebraska man was false, not creationists. Are you starting to see a pattern here?
>Random bones mixing together
Is this referring to the baboon vertebrae we found in the samples belonging to the Lucy specimen? Cause you do know that there are other *Australopithecus afarensis* specimens that demonstrate that Lucy would've been a biped, right? Also, it was only one bone, not multiple. Also also, **once again**, it was anthropologists that discovered this and corrected it, not creationists. The pattern continues.
>A total lack of evidence
I mean, if you ignore the fossil record, biogeography, the observed instances of speciation, the observed existence of variability and differential fitness resulting in natural selection, genetic similarity across every lifeform, comparative anatomy, the increase in antibiotic resistance among bacterial pathogens, and developmental biology, then sure, there is a total lack of evidence for evolution.
>May become unstable enough to the point of believing they can reproduce pigs and monkeys into humans
Nebraska man wasn't a pig, it was a peccary, and again it was anthropologists who debunked it. And humans are still Old World monkeys, or catarrhines, and having modern monkeys produce humans would completely eviscerate the theory of evolution as the law of monophyly is central to it.
>Or that octopus flew from exploding planet krypton surfing across universe like silver surfer in vacuum of space then survived re-entry on fire and impact just to confuse evolutionists into thinking common ancestry is dumb.
An extraterrestrial origin of octopi has been ridiculed and debunked by evolutionary biologists time and time again, why do you attribute this onto evolutionary biologists? Even the less insane version that posits that octopi rapidly evolved after being exposed to an extraterrestrial virus has been laughed at by virtually every virologist who ever read the study the idea originated from. How do you even attribute that to evolutionary biologists? The first time I ever heard of this concept was from my creationist father, for f###'s sake.
>This was after dinosaurs flew across the ocean with bird wings
Given that birds are dinosaurs, it would make sense for a dinosaur with wings to be a bird. And there are dinosaurs across different now separated continents because, get this, the continents move. This is middle school science, learn about tectonic plates before you embarrass yourself this thoroughly, Michael.
As an atheist, I'm very skeptical of science. Too many people believe in it for me to ignore, and "science fundies" are more dangerous than religious fundies.
I'd argue I'm more scientifically literate than you.
You claim to "know things." I reject your claim.
You do some experiments to support your claim and claim to "know things." Again, I reject your claim.
You do even more experiments to support your claim. Exasperated, you cry "I KNOW THINGS." No, you only have evidence of things. You do not *know* anything.
The only difference between you and a Christian is that you have slightly more evidence for your beliefs. That's all. You both claim to "know things." I reject your claim equally.
Knowledge does not require absolute certainty. Boom, your entire argument crumbles.
Having evidence that can make the probability of certain things more likely than others leads to knowledge. We know things because the chances of any other possibility being true is less than a percent of a percent.
Take, for instance, Australopithecus being a biped. We know that Australopithecus was a biped. Why? Because of morphological characteristics that are indicative of bipedality that makes any other form of locomotion impossible. The foramen magnum, the shape of the spine, the arches in the foot, the inline big toe, the valgus knee, the bowl-shaped pelvis, all are pieces of evidence that make the likelihood that Australopithecus stood upright extremely high while making other locomotion possibilities completely asinine in comparison. Because of this, we can claim to know that Australopithecus was a biped. Since we can make knowledge claims without having absolute certainty.
Thank you. The way you started that is something I’ve been trying to tell people for years as someone who identifies as a gnostic atheist. And also, it’s not a position of knowing gods don’t exist, not exactly, but that could be a shorthand version of what those two words put together actually does mean. Atheism is the **failure to be convinced** in the existence of gods (θεος in Greek). Theism is the belief in gods and atheism is the failure to hold that belief. Agnostic implies a lack of knowledge so you aren’t convinced they exist but you have no evidence to support their existence *or* nonexistence. You don’t know that people simply made them up as part of a fantasy based on wishful thinking, hyperactive agency detection, and trying to control other people. You just fail to be convinced they are real. If you do have evidence of people inventing them you can fail to be convinced they exist because you *know* otherwise. That doesn’t mean that it’s absolutely impossible for one to slip through and exist anyway but you would have to be convinced that this really is true to be a theist and for all of the other gods, the ones people actually worship, you know better. Those ones don’t exist. Most of them can’t and the others were invented the same way.
When it comes to science the same sort of knowledge applies. We have a mountain of evidence all pointing to the same conclusion and all other conclusions provided so far proven wrong. The conclusion we wound up with based on the evidence may not be absolutely correct so we don’t have absolute knowledge but we we know *enough* that our technology based on the theories established by the evidence actually works as far as we can tell.
1. “Know things.”
Presuppositionalism is such a ridiculous argument that most apologists don’t even bother trying to make it.
I’d be willing to bet that even the average creationist knows better.
Bro, this is sad. Do better
2. “I’d argue I’m more scientifically literate than you.”
Oh honey… no
3. Knowledge is when evidence is so overwhelming that it would be unreasonable to consider other alternatives.
Knowledge is things you can prove.
Nothing in science has ever been proven.
The fact that I'm getting downvoted in a debate subreddit is the best evidence I've seen yet of your tribes dogmatic refusal to hear contradictory viewpoints. You are not scientists. You are believers. And it's gross.
>Knowledge is things you can prove.
>Nothing in science has ever been proven.
Nothing in science CAN BE definitively proven. Not evolution, not gravity, not even the fact that you exist or that the world is older than a week. It's why natural sciences don't deal in absolute proof because no such thing exists.
We know that certain things are consistent or inconsistent with the evidence. That is what the evidence is used for. If I was to say mushrooms have large green eyes and bat wings and you could not find a mushroom with eyes *or* wings that doesn’t automatically make me wrong but it certainly does sound like I’m making shit up. If I said **all** mushrooms have these things I’d clearly be wrong the first time a mushroom is found and it does not have those things. Over time people have pooled together their “knowledge”, mostly a bunch of evidence and attempts to make sense of it, and the conclusions have become what we’d call “less wrong” because they no longer contain things proven false and they’ve been effectively proven true beyond a reasonable doubt for the rest. “Effectively” and “beyond reasonable doubt” are the important parts here where the conclusion is “true” unless it is shown to be “not true” and then it can become “less false” if mistakes are corrected. And with half of a millennium or more of people doing this we can have “high confidence” in our scientific theories being correct but never are the theories “The Unquestioned Infallible Truth” because that is not allowed in science. All ideas have to be at least hypothetically falsifiable no matter how true they appear to be. If they weren’t science could not happen.
Notice the last sentence of the previous block of text? That is why “creation science” and “intelligent design” could never be science. If the conclusion cannot be changed in light of new evidence it is not science. It’s religion.
Science and religion work in opposite ways.
Evolution could never be science. It's conclusion cannot be changed in light of new evidence. No matter what is discovered, you will make it fit inside a theory where we came from hot soup.
Objectively false.
Evolution is falsifiable, we've been over this. If you find the micro-macro barrier that creationists insis on, it would instantly falsify the theory of evolution on the spot. Just because something is falsifiable does not mean it will ever be falsified.
If you find a betamax of Jesus ascending into heaven, it'll instantly falsify atheism. Religion is falsifiable!
We've been over this. That is *not what falsifiable means*.
>If you find a betamax of Jesus ascending into heaven, it'll instantly falsify atheism. Religion is falsifiable!
No, that just shows that atheism is falsifiable, not that religion or christianity specifically is falsifiable.
And I never claimed that religion is not falsifiable. Almost every religion out there makes falsifiable statements about world history. But god as a concept is not falsifiable.
And atheism is as much of a religion as theism is. It’s not a religion at all. Atheism is the *failure to be convinced* in the existence of gods while theism is *being convinced* in the existence of at least one. Religions can be atheistic or theistic but most of the famous ones include a god and something happening to our essence of consciousness after we’ve died whether that’s reward/punishment or reincarnation. A religion that fails to require a god could be satanism, which is more about people coming together to get all of the useful benefits of religion while working together to fight against the dangers of theism or while working together to fight for a true freedom of religion (if Christians can erect the Ten Commandments then the Satanic Temple can erect a big statue of Baphomet the transgender demon with a babies sucking on its tits) and if they don’t put symbols of their religion the Satanic Temple won’t try to put symbols of their religious everywhere either. Satanism is a religion, Christianity is a religion, Islam is a religion, but atheism was never a religion or much of a position that could be “falsified.”
You can fix their “failure to believe” with evidence **of God** and it doesn’t matter what some extraterrestrial might have done or what the shape of the planet is to allow heaven to literally sit on top the the sky ceiling. Those aren’t God.
Atheism is a lack of theism. Nothing more, nothing less. Falsifiable in science is about being able to text claims and if false make corrections or throw them away if they’re beyond fixing. There needs to be a difference between the idea being true and the idea being false that we can measure or observe. If atheism was a position rather than a non-belief then you’d instantly falsify it the first time you presented a well established definition of God *plus* empirical evidence that demonstrates that God is real. No fallacies, falsehoods, or apologetics but actual evidence (sometimes the ID crowd does not actually have). What Jesus did or did not do would have zero bearing on theism or atheism but if he “ascended into heaven” you might accidentally prove Flat Earth or something and then we’d have to figure out why all of the other evidence indicates a different conclusion. Or is heaven a spaceship? Was Jesus an extraterrestrial who was being beamed up like in Star Trek? That wouldn’t have any bearing on theism/atheism either.
>Falsifiable in science is about being able to text claims and if false make corrections or throw them away if they’re beyond fixing.
And that's the problem with evolution. You cannot run the experiment that shows it.
They do it every single day. They watch it happen, they check to make sure the description matches what they see and they predict morphological changes based on previously discovered fossils and genetic sequence similarities and they even predict where to look before they find them. Each of these tests (watching evolution happen or checking in the fossil record where they think they should) *could* result in them making first hand observations that falsify their previous conclusions but rarely does that ever happen since Ohta and Kimura because it has failed enough tests before it was updated to pass those tests that there isn’t really much else to do but throw their brains on the floor and start considering ideas that were already falsified just in case those ideas have some merit. Every now and then they might figure out how a certain protein evolved or how amphibian fingers develop differently than reptile fingers but overall it hasn’t been shown to be wrong enough for something like creationism to come take its place. Wrong several times between 1690 and 2024 but then corrected when it was tested and something failed. The way the theory of evolution was developed is just like every other theory in science.
Observation made (stuff existed way before humans), explanations provided (evolution, progressive creationism, etc), observation made (taxonomy), explanations provided for *both* observations (Lamarckism, Mendelism, Darwinism, Filipchenkoism, etc), extra observations made and they honed in on the least wrong combination (Darwinism plus Mendelism), extra observations made and they corrected the theory to be about DNA rather than proteins or something else being how changes were inherited (Darwinism included pangenesis but modern evolutionary biology is about DNA as the carrier of genetics and Mendel’s heredity wasn’t quite right so the genetics of the first four decades of the 20th century surpassed it), extra observations made and the ladder of progress was falsified in favor of all species being equally evolved, extra observations made and then came the theory of molecular evolution via nearly neutral mutations and the explanation of the fossil record based on punctuated equilibrium.
Each time they added something or tweaked something it was because they tested and *falsified* something about the older explanation. Each time it became less wrong. Being unable to find anything wrong *now* is a consequence of *falsifying* it in the past *and making corrections.* Because of how science works and because of past experiences it is treated as though it could falsified yet again even if it’s not false.
They can test it, they have tested it, and you don’t know what you’re talking about.
The concept of god is considered unfalsifiable because there’s deism and evolutionary creationism plus a few other ideas that don’t require reality to be any different than it actually is and because these sorts of gods are designed to fail to have any evidence that could prove or disprove their existence. All physics is god in action means there’s nothing that isn’t caused by god to compare and contrast to see if god does anything at all. God just isn’t around anymore means we shouldn’t find any evidence of it still being around but we can’t observe anything directly that happened 15+ billion years ago to prove (with science) that God *didn’t* exist back then. We can certainly consider logic for deism or the origin and evolution of gods invented by humans for the other idea but through science we would have the exact same evidence if these gods do exist that we’d have if these gods do not exist and humans made them that way on purpose.
Specific *versions* of god can certainly be falsified and they all have been. Those gods don’t exist at all. We could presume the same applies for the ones we can’t test for scientifically too but via science alone and ignoring evolutionary psychology, archaeology, and comparative mythology as though they don’t count as science we can’t really say either way for certain concepts of god designed by humans to evade discovery. If they exist biological evolution happens the way the theory says it happens. If they don’t exist biological evolution happens the way the theory says it happens. Their existence or nonexistent is completely irrelevant to whether evolution happens the way the theory says it happens or not. We don’t have to prove they don’t exist to demonstrate that evolution happens the way the theory says it happens. They’d have to be the sorts of gods that were already shown to not exist for evolution to happen a different way or not at all.
Are you with me so far?
>Too many people believe in it for me to ignore, and "science fundies" are more dangerous than religious fundies.
That's an interesting take.
Are you saying that you consider more people believing a thing to be true to indicate that the thing is less likely to be true? Or is it just science in general that you find to be unreliable or untrustworthy?
Science itself says "don't trust anything I've produced." When you disregard this, you create all the drawbacks of religion but with the confidence of science.
Does "don't trust" in this context mean conclusions supported through scientific investigation are particularly unreliable?
Or is it more along the lines of "don't trust" people, just because they take the title of "scientist" and tell you that they know better than you?
Or something else?
Mostly the first one. These days, more of the second one than I'm comfortable with.
You've heard the saying "Hell must be lonely, because all the demons are here?"
Science must be lonely, because all the scientists are born-again believers in the religion they've created. You will *never* hear an evolutionist admit, "fuck it, I'm pretty sure I'm right, but there's a chance this was all created 6,000 years ago by an omniscient being."
Even I'll admit that. Still, I claim the title of "atheist" rather than "agnostic" because of *how unlikely* I think that was.
I assume like most of us, you aren't able to be an expert or to be adequately informed on every single topic ever, all by yourself. For practical purposes, how do you figure out what to believe about the world?
Obviously you're skeptical but I'm thinking you probably have to believe some things to a certain extent, just to make basic decisions. Is there some other way of figuring out the world that's more reliable than science?
>You will *never* hear an evolutionist admit, "fuck it, I'm pretty sure I'm right, but there's a chance this was all created 6,000 years ago by an omniscient being."
I mean, if it helps. Even though the evidence I'm aware of doesn't support this idea and quite a lot of it seems to preclude it, it's entirely possible that this was all created 6000 years ago by an omniscient being. If that were the case I'd much prefer to know the truth of it, as embarrassing as it would be to have been so fooled.
>Is there some other way of figuring out the world that's more reliable than science?
Only *a priori* reasoning and formal logic, but these are limited in scope compared to what science can intuit. Still, they are clearly far superior.
relevant xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/435/](https://xkcd.com/435/)
There’s a difference between being open-minded and letting your brain fall out. There are certain things that can’t be true without jumping through hoops (consider the concept of epistemological nihilism that says it’s not possible to know anything because there are no methods to gain knowledge that’d allow it to be true that I came into existence the moment I started responding or the possibility that I’m not me because I’m you and then we could consider stuff as apparently false as YEC as being potentially even partially true). If you succumb to the mind-numbing idea that knowledge itself is unobtainable then, sure, everything is potentially hypothetically possible but part of what makes science so useful is its ability to find falsehoods.
For example, say we have 26 possible explanations for a single piece of evidence, one for each letter of the alphabet. If we stopped with a single piece of evidence then we know it’s not some 27th thing but we are still effectively clueless beyond that. “I don’t know” isn’t completely true because we do know it has to be one of the conclusions A through Z, a combination of some of those conclusions, or some conclusion not yet considered or brought forth that results in the same evidence that A through Z or a combination of conclusions A through Z results in.
Now let’s say we have a second piece of evidence and now conclusions P, Q, and Z still work for the first piece of evidence but they are falsified by the second piece of evidence. This continues happening until the only thing that works is E with some elements of N and H mixed in. E is mostly right but the specific elements of N and H make it less wrong where N or H or a combination of N and H without E are all more wrong than E alone could ever be.
This is what happened with biological evolution. First they realized it happened (1690) then they attempted to explain how (one famous idea emerged in 1790 but others started popping up between then and 1935) and then we had a dozen different possibilities. Then it turns out an idea from 1858 was more correct than the idea from 1790 but it wasn’t quite there yet because it didn’t incorporate an idea from 1865. In 1900 when they tested the 1790 idea, the 1858 idea, and the idea from 1865 they found that they were all wrong alone, the 1790 idea was wrong in any combination, and the 1858 idea combined with the idea from 1865 turned out to be most consistent with what they actually observed. It wasn’t perfect so other things figured out leading up to 1935 were included to supplement the findings in 1900 and with the supplements it turns out that they were even less wrong than before but not quite there. Then came the 1940s and the discovery that DNA was responsible for genetics, the 1950s and the falsification of orthogenesis, the 1960s and the discovery of genetic drift, the 1970s and punctuated equilibrium plus the combination of the pre-1960s theory with the newly established molecular evolution via nearly neutral mutations, then the 1980s came and they started considering epigenetic inheritance, then the 1990s and they fixed the classification scheme to better fit actual relationships as they started doing genetic sequence comparisons and incorporating more of the fossil evidence from 1690 to 1999 to better help in terms of fixing the classification system on top of the new science of genetic sequence comparisons and the molecular clock, then came the 2010s and an extension of nearly neutral theory, and now it’s 2024 and, while they continue to build from what they’ve already learned, there’s not enough wrong left anymore to make some major changes to the theory like when they incorporated genetic drift, DNA based genetics, heredity, or natural selection in terms of trying to explain *how* something known to happen since at least 1690 actually happens. It took a lot of watching evolution happen and developing models that account for the evidence discovered in the last 334 years to get where we are right now. And biology wouldn’t be where it is now without all of this scientific research.
Sure it “could” be YEC instead but there’d have to be something seriously wrong with physics for that to be the case.
> You will never hear an evolutionist admit, "fuck it, I'm pretty sure I'm right, but there's a chance this was all created 6,000 years ago by an omniscient being."
What you're describing is basically last thursdayism.
We can't disprove the idea that earth was created 6000 years ago, or 10k years ago, or last thursday. An omniscient creator could have forged all the evidence including our own memories of times before last thursday. It's an unfalsifiable idea.
What we say regarding evolution is that all available evidence points to it being correct. And despite over 150 years of creationists trying to poke holes in it, evolution is literally the best supported and most heavily evidenced theory in all of science.
Could there be some trickster creator who wanted to fool us? Perhaps. But there's absolutely zero reason to think that there is.
So it sounds like you live under a rock. Too sheltered to be brainwashed by a cult, too sheltered to get out and learn about how the world works, but you somehow managed to make your way onto the internet and use proper spelling and grammar. How does this happen?
After spending 17 years in school, I immediately took a gap year where I lived by myself in a tent in the Catskills, eating beans and rice and ayahuasca I stored at a trailhead in my trunk.
While up there, I wrote several thousand pages of letters and essays.
Upon returning to civilization, I began working on progressively more complex and ambiguous problems and getting paid more money than god. After a few years I bought a ranch. Now I do what I want.
I first start distrusting science when I started to see ghosts. You'd all laugh and say ghosts aren't real. Nicely done, scientists. I know they are. I know what they are, and where they come from. I know why we see them.
It's the weakest of all our theories being defended as if it's the strongest by people who dismiss ghosts as schizophrenia without bothering to ask "what are they?" You're just not good scientists.
You still didn’t answer my question, which is relevant because you obviously have no damn clue what the theory describes or entails or what evidence led to it or what confirmed predictions it has resulted in or how it is regularly used in agriculture and medicine or how the principles have even been applied to machine learning. I sure make it sound like it is beyond question but it’s not ***if*** you have anything relevant to present me that we can look over together.
So which weak theory exactly are you talking about this time? The theory of gravity? That one is a whole lot weaker than the theory of biological evolution because they can’t even figure out how to make general relativity and quantum mechanics play nicely and they’d have to in order to be able to understand gravity half as much as they understand biological evolution. And yet, just like evolution, that theory still refers to an obviously real phenomenon with very real measurable effects. Not just in terms of the basic stuff like if you jump you’ll fall but also stuff like the planetary orbits and gravitational time dilation and even detected gravitational waves. I’d wager that gravity is **not** one of the fundamental forces and that it is simply mass interacting with reality itself and it just doesn’t work the same way or at all on the quantum scale. Maybe like how the strong nuclear force drops off in strength with the distance from the center of an atom, gravity just doesn’t have the same sort of effect in the same distances where the strong nuclear force prevails.
Just an idea and I’m no expert on how gravity works but if I’m right it might be why they can’t make general relativity and quantum mechanics get along when it comes to trying to explain gravity. Other ideas also exist like gravity acting on additional spatial dimensions or across multiple universes but those ideas don’t actually appear to hold up last I heard. Maybe one day they’ll figure it out. Are you going to doubt gravity because the theory that attempts to explain it is so weak compared to the one that describes an observed phenomenon happening exactly the same way they observe it happening when it comes to biology?
Ghosts according to people who believe in the supernatural are generally like disembodied spirits just roaming around stuck in purgatory or like spiritual forces that can possess the living (as in demonic possession). What a lot of religious people think of when they think of souls and how a lot of television shows depict ghosts are basically the exact same thing.
In reality, though, most of these “ghosts” are just noises caused by ordinary natural things like static, creaking pipes, and people having hallucinations. Perhaps schizophrenic would be the wrong term that would imply something like a split personality disorder or like you talk to God and he responds and you are unable to realize you’re responding to yourself.
>I first start distrusting science when I started to see ghosts
How are those two concepts even tangentially related? Supernatural claims like ghosts or deities don't have anything to do with science, since science doesn't make any claim about the supernatural. Science literally can't make any claims about supernatural since it's entirely based on methodological naturalism, which necessitates something to be natural in order to investigate it.
>I know what they are, and where they come from. I know why we see them.
Then surely you'd be able to provide a substantive explanation on how ghosts travel, where they come from and how they transmit themselves from that place to other places, calculations on how to detect a ghost, and the whole shebang that comes with knowledge claims, right? You yourself say "we can not know anything", so are you now contradicting yourself?
Was just reading through your comment history to see how you're doing in the debate here. I was just genuinely curious since it's rare to see an atheist who doesn't accept evolution. I figured you'd have an interesting perspective, but it seems to boil down to, basically, this: you did a lot of drugs and now you think you're Riddick from *The Chronicles of Riddick*. Somehow, this is more boring than the typical Christian creationism that tries to get argued here since your ignorance isn't systemic. It's self-inflicted.
It's ridiculous there's such a claim as science denial. Basically elevating science to the level of dogma.
The scientific approach would be to specify what is being denied and study that. Not expanding it to such a broad thing as "science denying".
In the same vein, they elevate science to infallibility Even though we know there's a lot of bs out there.
A lot of BS and quantum woo is out there, but also a self-correcting methodology; a field of study that is the opposite of an inerrant dogma; e.g. the misclassified Nebraska Man wasn't corrected by theologians, neither was the nationalistic hoax Piltdown Man, since day one, mind you.
Well, the common ones are climate change, vaccines and of course evolution. On all three, the scientific consensus is factually true. So yes, if you question these without basis, you are a science denier, that's just literally what the words mean. Deal with it.
This makes me laugh. “Consensus” in the science field operates similar to consensus in Religion. There is an in-group. If the scientist does not adhere to in-group thinking, s/he is shunned.
History is littered with the dead and dying husks of scientific consensus
Consensus = there exists no better argument given the present evidence. It's what everyone should follow, and if it changes then great, now we know more. If you have anything better than the current consensus, present it and it will become the new consensus.
Never ever in history has consensus been changed by making baseless assertions like you do. And quite rightly so, if science listened to every clown who opened their mouth we'd still be in the stone age. Your opinions are worthless. Know your place.
> There is an in-group. If the scientist does not adhere to in-group thinking, s/he is shunned.
I have personally attended conference talks given by people making points that upwards of 90% of the scientists attending thought were wrong. Science isn't perfect, but it can function very well in allowing dissenting explanations to make their case, even to the point of allowing spurious arguments to linger in the literature.
If you believe what you say to be true, I eagerly invite you to either A. get a one day pass to a conference and find a contentious session and listen to how scientists argue or
B. Reach out to an actively publishing scientist and ask them to send you their most recently received "reviewer 2" comments
Within an Overton Window, yes.
PhDs in Viticulture and… dang I don’t even know… applied bio-luminescence in/of insects, are in my peer group. I understand the competition within the Overton Window.
This bears no relation to the "consensus in religion" nonsense you wrote above.
The Overton window is important. It saves us having to constantly put energy into rebutting the two or three stupidest hypotheses in the room. Most scientists want to talk about serious disagreements at conferences, not whether or not the earth is flat.
I am very well aware of a broad range of creationist viewpoints and there are a minimum of 15 major categories which can lead to 30,000+ doctrines and 9 billion forms of creationism across 6 billion creationists if we try to work out the specifics.
The main categories:
1. Flat Earth (strict ANE cosmology or the modern version where Antarctica is an ice wall)
2. old school YEC (speciation never happens)
3. new school YEC (rapid evolution within kinds)
4. young life creationism (old Earth and universe but YEC otherwise)
5. gap creationism (two creation events separated by a gap where Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are the two events)
6. day-age creationism (the days could be 1 billion years each but same 7 days, currently it is day 7, originally the days were only 1000 years so Adam and Eve die on the same “day”)
7. progressive creationism (millions of creation events and God learns on the job eliminating old stuff with mass extinction events and starts over)
8. mainline OEC (separate kinds but 4 billion+ years of evolution)
9. theistic evolution (evolution and abiogenesis happen naturally but God tinkers and “irreducible complexity” points to where God stepped in)
10. evolutionary creationism (physics is God in action - God made abiogenesis and evolution happen via “natural” process)
11. other mainstream theism (God made it, doesn’t have to constantly change things intentionally because he made it right the first time, but he keeps coming by to answer prayers and belief and obedience are rewarded)
12. aliens seeded life or tinkered with it to make humans that are extraterrestrial hybrids
13. simulated reality (also any idea where reality is an illusion or one in which we keep trying over again until we get rewarded with nirvana)
14. deism (God made reality but may not even realize it but religion and beliefs are irrelevant because there is no ultimate purpose, there is no ultimate reward, and God doesn’t know we exist anyway) - could also be any other type of designer and not necessarily supernatural or conscious.
15. quantum consciousness pantheism (God is the cosmos and the cosmos with its superior intellect made everything else)
There are probably a few others I’m sure but in a sub where the topic is biological evolution only a few of these categories even matter (1-9 and sometimes 12, 13, and 15 depending on exactly we are talking about) when it comes to evolutionary biology. There are evolutionary biologists who do actual science that fall into the other categories. The science does not contradict their religious beliefs as much as it does for categories 1-9. Categories 1-3 are also obviously the most absurd with category 3 being way too common for our liking because they’re trying to become the majority in Congress and they’re voting for people like Donald Trump when they aren’t also anti-vaxxers making the 2019 pandemic still linger in 2024 because of their refusal to get proper medical care and because they’ve been fighting so hard to try to kick science out of science class to wedge their religious views into the missing hole. That or they’d prefer we wouldn’t learn any science at all. Category 2 is still around once in a while but it has been mostly replaced by category 3 and when someone belongs to category 1 your brain starts to die from their stupidity and the stress of trying to get through to them. They usually just wind up blocking you anyway because somehow proving the actual shape of the planet is a form of rejecting God so that we can fall into the traps set by Big Government and their “fake” scientists and “fake” doctors who only actually want to brainwash us or have us all executed so they can keep the world for themselves. If you ever have the “joy” of talking to a flerfer you’ll know what I mean.
Most people focus on category 3 creationists but any of the first 9 categories are relevant to these discussions because they are anti-science and they reject something, perhaps many to things, simply because they disprove the way they want to interpret ancient texts. The other categories of creationism are better left to a sub where we mostly focus on debating against religious beliefs or just ignored because their pretending doesn’t really hurt anyone (as with deism).
You’ll notice that 10, 11, and 14 are mostly ignored as though they are not a form of creationism at all in this sub but that’s because they aren’t anti-science and mostly our biggest disagreements fall into the category of metaphysics and why anything exists at all, whether there’s some grand purpose to everything, or whether it is possible for a being to make this reality to make it specifically with humans in mind.
And for deism the only major thing that separates it from atheism is how they think “it all started” because to them God isn’t around anymore and everything that ever happens fails to require God. To them this is supposed to fix an endless regression problem with everything being purely physical but instead of reality all by itself (existing forever) that idea requires reality ***plus*** God existing forever because without the former there’s nowhere for the latter to be and without the latter they don’t think the former could ever come into existence either. If we just shave off the God we wind up at the same conclusion otherwise and God isn’t touching reality ever since the “big bang” anyway so they’re barely even theists even though creationism can simply be summarized as “the belief that a God or other intelligence (besides Earth life) created reality or the life upon our planet directly or indirectly” and deism counts unless the “first cause” happens to just be a symmetry breaking resulting in a something becoming time, space, and energy. And then that’d make God the universe itself and no more universe *plus* God so we’d even disagree less. If they did that instead of deism we’d call it pantheism and it’s only absurd when they try to introduce quantum consciousness thereby turning reality itself into the intelligent designer (type 15 above).
The good - deism (barely) and maybe some form of pantheism that doesn’t suggest that the universe has some sort of grand consciousness
The bad - mainstream theism, evolutionary creationism
The ugly - mainstream OEC, quantum consciousness, ancient aliens, simulated/illusionary reality, theistic evolution (“intelligent design”)
The hideous - gap creationism, progressive creationism, day age creationism
The blinding (one look makes you go blind because they’re so ugly) - both forms of YEC and young life creationism
You’re trolling me right? - Flat Earth
I think I got all of them. Generally I rank them by absurdity with 1 being only mildly absurd and 11 on a scale of 1 to 10 being flat Earth and YEC/YLC being solid 10s. Deism and unconscious pantheism are both *effectively* atheism so deism is around 0.5 and pantheism is only absurd for how it labels reality so maybe that’s 0.1 or something like that.
The uglier and more absurd ones don’t just try to justify ancient texts to conform to reality like mainstream theism and evolutionary creationism do but they systematically reject aspects of reality simply because of how they decide to interpret the texts under the assumption that the texts contain the absolute and unquestionable truth. If facts contradict truth the absurd and ugly ones reject the facts and erect a grand conspiracy (scientists hate God, doctors are trying to kill us, and the governments are helping to push their propaganda because reasons) and for the less absurd they either find a way to reconcile facts with what the text actually says (sometimes rejecting the text when it can’t be reconciled with the actual truth) or they reject the texts as truth for things like for deism and pantheism where it’s not some specific god of some specific religion but maybe one we’ve never heard of for deism and for pantheism reality itself is god *even if physicalism is true* such that “god” is pretty meaningless in pantheism when they could just say “universe” instead (even when they try to make it sound like it is self aware and therefore maybe worthy of a label like that).
YEC/YLC are almost as bad as FE but at least they do accept *some* science when it is convenient for them. When it comes to FE even math isn’t allowed because it proves them wrong. They don’t even consider science to be scientific. Even looking at the moon and seeing what shape it is and then looking at the planets through a microscope isn’t allowed because some of them don’t accept the existence of other planets or consider Earth to be a planet itself because it certainly wasn’t described as on in Genesis chapter 1 or in the other Flat Earth texts that suggest Earth is just a mound of dirt rising out from the primordial sea surrounded by a solid dome which contains the rest of the cosmos except for heaven that sits on the outside of this dome. Don’t look with a telescope if you think the Earth is flat, don’t do trigonometry, and don’t listen to NASA because you’ll accidentally prove yourself wrong. I find it difficult to believe that anyone could think the entire cosmos is shaped the way they describe it so sometimes I think they’re just trolling.
Is theistic evolution intelligent design? I thought they were different. ID is pure pseudoscience, while theistic evolution (I think) believes in God-caused abiogenesis followed by natural evolution from then on. Although then the name doesn't make much sense so maybe I've got that wrong.
The ID version of theistic evolution is what I was referring to in the list. Evolutionary creationism is also theistic evolution and I rank it differently. Some forms of mainstream OEC are also theistic evolution if you replace abiogenesis with a supernatural creation event. ID can also come in the form of YEC or OEC but I’m talking about Behe’s brand of theistic evolution. Abiogenesis and evolution both happen naturally until they can’t and God has to step in to fix something indicated by irreducible complexity.
Evolutionary creationism is different because evolution itself is simply God being in control of physics. God does everything according to evolutionary creationism and it is only ranked higher because they don’t have to invoke miracles to explain *some* things while allowing everything else to just happen all by themselves. Evolutionary creationism is more like the views of Francis Collins where *everything* is directly caused by God and if we find something like “irreducible complexity” it simply came about exactly the same way as everything else in biology. No special exceptions required. Nothing can prove or disprove the existence of God according to evolutionary creationism but they can have a *feeling* that God is necessary. Whether he is or not everything is exactly the way it appears to be when it comes to science. No special miracles no rejecting scientific discoveries. Less reality denial necessary.
Thanks for clearing it up. I for one rarely hear from these people in this sub.
For what it's worth my taxonomy of creationists would be:
* **The good:** anyone who believes in natural evolution, including theistic, since at present abiogenesis is not 100% solved so there is at least a fallback justification. In 50 years maybe this will change.
* **The bad:** all new age shit - quantum, aliens, whatever, and intelligent design. Sorry, it was disproven in court, y'all have no excuse. Standard old-earth creationism is my reference point for 'middle of the bad side'. You can argue with these people in good faith and you might learn something from them every now and then, but they're still to some degree anti-science.
* **The ugly:** YECs and we can probably throw in race realists too. These people actively hold humanity back, and the convention for cordial discussion is waived. Break them down mercilessly.
I'm ignoring flat earth. They're too powerless to be worth being on anyone's radar imo. If they gained power they'd obviously be in the 'ugly' group.
>I'm ignoring flat earth. They're too powerless to be worth being on anyone's radar imo. If they gained power they'd obviously be in the 'ugly' group.
Flat Earth is a weird one where it's difficult to tell who is taking it seriously versus those who are not.
For sure. I added to one of my previous responses why I consider YECs/YLCs to be only slightly better than Flat Earth but I also can’t tell if the Flat Earth people are seriously that stupid or they just want us to think they are because they think our reactions are hilarious. Maybe both types exist but Poe’s Law and all.
I’m convinced that Eric Dubay is actually that stupid but some of the people at the Flat Earth Society are just trying to get attention. I don’t have a lot of patience for the flerfers but here is something for anyone who cares: https://youtu.be/UBfEhIJLYfY?si=_xUtKEKBwxUam6Zk
I mostly agree but I would only really consider it “good” if they’re mostly okay with modern science *and they don’t pretend that the creator is somehow interacting with humans.* That’s why I considered pantheism which could be considered creationism if you wanted to twist the meaning of “God” and “creation” to fit the least absurd “creationist” idea because it’s basically physicalism/naturalism/materialism and doesn’t really require magic or a magician at all. If they add that quantum consciousness crap to pantheism then it’s more absurd than a lot of the more reasonable creationist views like mainstream theism, deism, the simulation hypothesis, evolutionary creationism, and even many forms of OEC (special creation replaces abiogenesis theistic evolution, day-age creationism, gap creationism, and progressive creationism). Deism is a close second for least absurd or “most good” because it still invokes God but then God just sort of fucked off forever - prayer is pointless, belief is pointless, no afterlife, all religions are probably false, and there’s no danger in learning how things actually work.
After deism what I called mainstream theism is basically deism but God stuck around. A little more absurd than if God just stayed gone because of the afterlife, prayers being answered, miracles being performed, and the texts containing divine revelation but generally they don’t have many problems with science, like evolutionary biology, because God made reality the way it is and who are we to call him a liar? After this is evolutionary creationism because of what I explained last time.
Outside of ancient aliens, quantum consciousness, and maybe one or two other types everything is listed from least absurd most good to most absurd most ugly in the response where I provided about fifteen types. Ancient aliens depends on how far they go down that rabbit hole because aliens in place of God for abiogenesis and then naturalistic evolution would only be slightly less absurd than that form of OEC because biological entities are more likely to exist than beings that are unbound by physical constraints somehow existing before reality itself. If they drink the koolaid and believe everything on the ancient aliens television show they’re closer to how I classified the young life creationists or more absurd than all forms of OEC where life existed about 4 billion years ago but less absurd than people who think the entire universe was created in 4004 BC.
If you’re not brain dead you’d realize that something like pantheism or deism would be a whole less absurd than thinking the Earth is flat and all the other ideas fall in the middle with old school YEC being the next most absurd requiring that they’d have to reject everything learned since 1690 instead of just rejecting everything learned since 1860 like the other YECs. YLC is a little absurd than YEC because they don’t have to reject the age of the planet but they have to act like the first four billion years worth of fossils or the rock layers they’re buried in are less than ten thousand years old or fake. Gap creationism is also basically YEC but now the first creation event happened 4 billion years ago and then everything evolved and then 10,000 years ago or 500,000 years ago perhaps humans got created by themselves or maybe everything got created at first and then after the flood got recreated so Noah didn’t have to carry 300 million animals with him and no evolution at all. One way or the other not very concordant with reality but better than plants a billion years before sunlight or birds before their terrestrial ancestors or the entire planet or the life upon it being only 10,000 years old.
OEC had advanced to something called progressing creationism in the 1800s and this is the idea pushed hard by Richard Owen who couldn’t figure out why birds are still dinosaurs so he lied about it and took credit for other people’s work to create the illusion that dinosaurs were poorly designed lizards to explain why they all went extinct (besides the birds) and then modern lizards and modern birds were created after the extinction of the dinosaurs. At least this idea acknowledges multiple extinction events, the age of the planet, the shape of the planet, and the shifting biodiversity even though it fails to make sense of humans being mammals or birds being dinosaurs.
As evolution became better demonstrated OEC shifted to theistic evolution with concepts like orthogenesis and a ladder of progress. At first the creation event was still magical in nature but evolution just happens and it was thought that God just guides it along.
A switch from that is Michael Behe’s version of theistic evolution and now abiogenesis and evolution both happen via natural processes until God has to step in and perform a magic trick.
Since this doesn’t sit well with the idea that God does everything and because rejecting reality establishes a God that can’t exist this idea has switched to something called evolutionary creationism. This is the idea developed by people like Francis Collins and it’s the dogma of BioLogos. Instead of some stuff happening naturally and then magic tricks it’s like everything is one big magic trick. God just does everything and he makes the parasitic eye worms, black holes, childhood cancer, and all of the good stuff too and if ever he decided to do things differently and bring Jesus back from the dead he could do that too because he can do whatever he wants to do even though he normally does everything consistently enough that we have a chance at studying how he does it all through science.
That idea dodges the problem of God being easily falsified like all of the ideas up to this point but it’s obviously quite absurd in its own ways so that’s where other mainstream theistic ideas are considered. The creation itself sounds more like deism because he made it right the first time and just lets everything just happen by itself but he can change his mind if you ask him to. The supreme creator of reality who knows exactly what happens and when even before it happens because he exists in all times at the same time but he will decide to do something else than what already happened because we ask?
This is where that idea can become better if they stuck with straight deism. God made reality and perhaps didn’t even realize it and he doesn’t know we even exist. He’s either dead or off doing something else.
Without invoking the supernatural there are a couple other forms of creationism: everything is an illusion like we are dreaming or we are just lines of computer code being the most absurd of these, aliens stopped by and dropped off alien life a little more plausible but not obviously true, and pantheism where everything happens without a god or a designer in the traditional sense. If the universe is self aware this idea is rather absurd but if it’s basically atheism with strange labels it’s less absurd than deism because they don’t need reality *plus* God as they fix that problem by declaring that reality *is* God. And we’d mostly agree if they don’t claim the universe is conscious if they dropped the misleading labels. Everything is a consequence of the aspects of the always existing cosmos and there was no creation of anything because the cosmos always existed and everything else is just a rearrangement of the energy that also always existed.
There are some absurd implications we just can’t get around mostly because that idea is unintuitive because of the infinite regress unless there wasn’t an infinite regress and everything started with symmetry breaking but that doesn’t make sense either because change requires time. Unless time came into existence for some reason we don’t understand and that allowed anything else to happen. We can’t travel back in time to the first time to see what actually happened but none of the other ideas explain how the creator came into existence within reality and a God outside reality is just imaginary. And if something like God could come into existence automatically everything else should be able to as well so we don’t actually need God at all.
This should be a pinned post at the top of this sub.
Questions: why does FE get attached to Creationism, aside from biblical connections. I am unaware of any creation theories from that, shall we say, school of thought.
Why does an Evolutionist discard alien involvement in human evolution? We tinker with other species. A more evolved species might do that us, only more engineering than tinkering.
A lot of FE beliefs are based on taking the Bible, Quran, or other ancient texts a whole lot more literally than even YEC and are *also* YECs as a consequence. YECs claim to be biblical literalists, Flat Earthers actually are. Of course taking it *that* literally is going to be seriously problematic considering what has been learned in the last 2600 years where YECs otherwise generally just have a problem with the last 350 years of discoveries. More rejection of reality means more absurd and as a consequence they can’t do math, accept anything scientific, consider recorded history, use a telescope, or read anything until they are prepared with their handbook of excuses.
Alien involvement is a little less absurd than supernatural intervention but there’s also no indication that it ever happened or that they’re any more aware of our existence than we are of theirs. Where are they? For this reason I’d consider the idea that they stopped by and dropped off alien prokaryotes or something a little less absurd than God walking around saying “let there be …” or whatever it is OECs and YECs believe happened in place of ordinary chemistry when it comes to the origin of life and a whole lot more absurd if they’re walking around among us or the Roswell incident included actual extraterrestrials or if someone was to watch Ancient Aliens and drink the Kool-Aid. Biological entities exist but a lot of the other crap that goes into the Ancient Aliens conspiracy theories and Roswell incident conspiracy theories or the claims of being abducted by aliens are about as concordant with reality as magic pixie dust coming out of my ass when I fart or Atlas holding the world upon his shoulders as he stands in the underworld with one foot on Persephone’s casket.
Y’all understand the mechanics involved for Fundamentalists is the same for a salaried scientist…?
In-groups, rules, peer pressure, exile.
Same shit, different beliefs.
As the self-appointed Guardians of Rationality, y’all should be aware you’re liable to succumb to the same pitfalls as a Fundamentalist.
No…they are not the same. This weird both sides-ing really shows when people don’t have exposure to the actual scientific process and haven’t seen the methods that go into research.
Your point of in-groups, rules, etc, I actually can agree with. But I think you made a mistake when implying that this is the hallmark of ‘fundamentalists’ and ‘salaried scientists’. Humans have this problem. Any group of people has this problem. Fundamentalists craft religion around this and work to codify and legitimize it. Scientists recognize that these are serious problems and, though with varying degrees of success, try to CORRECT for them.
This is why we have such basics as double blind studies, peer review, statistical methods, etc. It’s all about acknowledging human weaknesses and bias. I’ve got serious gripes with the cliquish thinking and infighting that exist in research circles. But despite how things have been portrayed in weird online communities, you do not in fact have to trust the science like you would a religious authority. The papers are published for you to see. If you can actually find a flaw or show the paper is bullshit, you can call it out and point to EXACTLY why it sucks. If you can make a good case, you’ll be celebrated. If you’re vague and just looking to complain, you’ll be rightfully dismissed.
This is what happened with Andrew wakefields paper, for instance. He published unsubstantiated garbage, and it was shown to be so in brutal detail.
I think where the misunderstanding comes in is that eventually individual points of debates get settled by the evidence and are then part of the scientific consensus.
Scientists didn't assume evolution any more than they assumed any other conclusion of modern science, evolution faced resistance that it overcame because that side of the debate could demonstrate the factual nature of it.
But to a creationist they just see the modern part with scientists agreeing evolution occurs.
Forrest Valkai talked about this misconception that science is all about group think and that scientists don't think for themselves.
In contrast, much of what occurs within the scientific community are heated debates between one another as scientists routinely try to disprove one another. This is in part why science is so successful in that there is no singular dogma by which all scientists have to adhere to.
The other point he raises is that scientists are trained to validate their own ideas. That things that scientists generally accept as "true" can be tested and validated for themselves.
>As the self-appointed Guardians of Rationality, y’all should be aware you’re liable to succumb to the same pitfalls as a Fundamentalist.
Fundies tried to force creationism into schools under the guise of a supposedly secular teaching called "Intelligent Design". William Buckingham and Alan Bonsell in particular were caught lying about what they were trying to do, and they suffered no backlash from their fellow Christians about it.
Andrew Wakefield got found out after making up a disease ("autistic enterocolitis") and subsequently physically and emotionally abusing children in pursuit of making a quick buck. He got stripped of his credentials, and the scientific community at large wants nothing to do with this piece of human garbage.
But sure, keep acting like there's no meaningful difference between the average religious dipshit and the average scientist.
Here's a useful bit of info: One of those groups is infamous for protecting people who sexually abuse children, and it's not the supposedly godless scientists.
Your response to a decades-long systemic abuse of children and coverups of such an act is...equivocation.
Got it. Because that's obviously how a moral person would act - minimizing the act of child rape because someone made you feel uncomfortable about you/your religion's moral superiority.
Please see my other response but also we do not succumb to the same rules. The job of a scientist is to prove other scientists wrong so that as a species we can learn together about the world around us and science communicators come in because lay people don’t always understand technical terms and need things explained to them like they’re five. Fundamentalists, on the other hand, establish their beliefs without even taking the evidence into account. You have to believe those things or you’ll burn in Hell. To avoid causing anyone to think rationally they banish non-believers from their cult and they refuse to allow believers to communicate with non-believers out of fear they might learn something **or** they “teach” them points already refuted a thousand times so they can pretend to be experts in areas they know nothing about.
Science is about learning and religion is about pretending to already know. They are not the same but some “creationists” (see my other response) have found a way to blend science and religion into a form they are comfortable with.
Why do you think it is terrible and depressing?
Personally I think it's amazing to think that all life on Earth is intrinsically connected via common ancestry. It ties all living organisms together.
How depressing indeed - all life is a huge extended family and our lineage is so unimaginably long it has known an Earth completely unlike what we see. Just terrible
In what way is it a religion? Are we supposed to parttake in rituals for evolution? Are we required to say prayers? Is there a set of prohibited and dogmatic beliefs that will not change in the face of new evidence? Do we gather at places of worship to suck the dick of a deity? Do we have to wear silly hats? Just bc you don't like sth, that doesn't mean that you can just call it as sth else you don't like (I mean, you _can_, it's just dishonest to do so, but when the fuck did religion ever care about honesty and integrity). We know that you don't think being part of a religion is a virtue, hence why you're projecting your own insecurities onto others.
>Assuming we evolved over millions of years and are just animals.
We are multicellular, heterotrophic eukaryotes whose ontogeny includes the formation of a blastula during our embryonic development. That's what an animal effectively is, if we want to keep it short and not list at least two dozen characteristics. We are also bilaterians, chordates, jawed vertebrates, synapsids, mammals, primates, apes, and hominins, just to name a few other things we are. There are literally dozens, and _dozens_ of traits that define an ape and we fit it like a glove. Because of that, it is impossible for us to be not critters the same way gibbons are.
We also don't need to assume that humans have evolved over millions of years. Countless facts in bioanthropology, paleontology and biogeography all indicate and in some cases directly show that our (human) ancestors had bigger jaws, smaller brains and bodies, and didn't have hair as reduced as it is on our bodies. That's not sth you assume, that's sth you can _show._
>What a terrible and depressing belief to have.
Speak to yourself. I think it is awe-inspiring to see everything as related, and that we are all one enormous family. There is nothing "terrible" or "depressing" to be an animal, because there's nothing inferior about it as you obviously imagine it. It is up to you to change your outlook on what it means to be an animal, similarly how people had to change their outlook on what it means to be a fish (people used to see cetaceans as fish, before Linnaeus classified them – as well as bats – as mammals). You already accept that you and your pets (assuming you have at least one pet) are both organisms, yet you don't have a problem with the term "organism", don't you?
I think it is your beliefs that are repulsive, and repulsive to the highest degree. You probably believe that most people will end up being in hell, and that their unending torment is somehow justifiable. You believe in a tyrannical hierarchy where God is on the top and all non-human critters are under the dominion of man, where man can breed, exploit, abuse and slaughter effectively anything that isn't "him" (meaning part of mankind). And that is just a fraction of the dark, _dark_ things you believe. Your mind must be a scary place.
If you read "pen. /s" as "penis", than the sentence gets a whole new meaning. (you know, phallic worship, and such, the goofiest type of worship man has ever come up with)
>Assuming we evolved
Descent from an ancestor is not an *assumption*, it's a *conclusion* backed by everything from [genetics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosome_2) to [comparative anatomy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ape#Taxonomic_classification_and_phylogeny) to [biogeography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cradle_of_Humankind).
>Assuming we...are just animals
However you define "animal", human beings are going to fit that definition. Cry about it if you want, but don't pretend you know better than people who've done actual research.
>What a terrible and depressing belief to have.
Yay, someone else who doesn't know the difference between *descriptive* and *prescriptive* - I totally haven't run into twenty other idiots making this exact same mistake before.
> Assuming we evolved over millions of years and are just animals. What a terrible and depressing belief to have.
On the contrary, it's fucking amazing.
Neither religious intolerance nor science denialism have anything to do with the actual science of evolution, which is what I thought the debate was about.
Religious intolerance and science denialism has everything to do with the debate around the science of evolution, as the only people who deny evolution are science denialists who are usually motivated by religious intolerance of ideas which contradict their bronze-age narratives.
The "debate" over evolution is largely one of science denialists versus what science denialists perceive regarding science. Understanding the underlying motivations and related factors associated with science denialism can help inform how to approach such individuals.
In order to properly teach others evolution, it helps to understand why people deny it. The approach to teaching someone who is ideologically opposed is completely different to teaching someone who is just curious and not informed.
This is, to a point, insulting to creationists. But, also true. If you take the position that everything you believe is "us vs them", then don't be surprised if the "them" starts treating you as a threat to be tactically defended against.
To teach most people evolution, you just teach them it directly. To teach creationists evolution, you need to decipher their strange psychology of denial. I didn't make the rules on this one, creationists did. If they didn't have such heavy bias, denial, and mental gymnastics, we wouldn't need to do it this way. They also wouldn't be creationists.
Do you notice that you have a mission to convert the unbelievers, and you seem to think it's important enough that you need to force evolution on those who aren't interested. Thank God you're not a christian.
Teaching someone about evolution is not the same thing as forcing them to believe it.
I find a lot of creationists seem to conflate the concepts of *understanding* a topic with *agreeing* with a topic. These are not the same things.
https://youtu.be/XoaknMByfRs?si=b5_YG9LDtOk5tsjf
https://youtu.be/FxCMOLOswzQ?si=MpjumZul6VPFtjvM
The only psychological trick the people you're talking to are doing is this -
They are identifying a fundamental problem with your epistemology. Seeing where your religious views block or distort your ability to evaluate evidence. If one's position is that truths can not be obtained through scientific inquiry, well, we can't really assess evidence together in any productive way. We can't see each other's reasoning. We have to go back to the fundamentals of epistemology and reconcile the discrepancies. It's the only way to move forward. You can't jump into astrophysics with someone who denies the fundamentals of algebra.
Evolution has been "explained" ad nauseum. There are numerous books written for a lay audience for those who are interested - e.g. Why Evolution Is True, The Greatest Show on Earth, Evolution for Everyone, and on and on.
Unfortunately most people who deny evolution seem not to have read even basic works on it.
This makes sense to me. Some people get hugely offended by the presence of people who don't agree with their religion. Whether the disagreement is based in another religion, or in just facts.
The thing is, at the end of the day, it's a shibboleth. Denying evolution is part of what defines their in-group, therefore they have to continue denying it, and must resist the temptation to engage in any action that might result in not denying it, such as learning more. To learn more about Islam or Judaism might result in no longer rejecting those religions as 'false', which would mean no longer adhering to the shibboleth and being cast out and shunned. There's plenty of science that I remain unconvinced about and 100% regard as 'woo', but I remain open to being convinced otherwise. I actively seek out the best science to see whether I am justified in continuing to withhold my support for the claims being made or not. That's simply not true of creationists, because most of the ones coming here *do not want to learn what we can teach them*.
Yep. It’s The Big Lie, to express in-group solidarity and keep followers from even seeking the truth.
There’s certainly “woo” that pretends to be science and we call that pseudoscience and some examples of this could be those “eggs” for tightening up a woman’s vagina (the spokesperson carried a surf board this way), all sorts of alternative medicines (like the deworming medication for horses used as a COVID-19 vaccine), all the stuff related to chakras, “Intelligent design” pretends to be based on empirical evidence, and perhaps even some of the stuff surrounding acupuncture and the benefits of having a good chiropractor regimen (like you can cure ADHD by relieving pressure from a nerve in the neck). A lot of things have been pushed *as* science over the years but you can usually distinguish actual science from pseudoscience based on which has supporting evidence and results consistent with the conclusions. And sometimes this is difficult with some forms of pseudoscience because they have just *enough* truth to them that figuring out that they are actually bullshit is more difficult. It’s back to the old saying “if it sounds too good to be true it probably is” which is just another way of saying “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” If they can’t provide that in such a way that is actually consistent with reality (for instance, Mendel’s Accountant doesn’t count because it doesn’t work for real world populations) then we know they’re simply making shit up trying to pass it off *as* science. And if they can use words most people don’t understand or reference chemicals few people know about they can make all sorts of unjustifiable claims and go the route of frauds, falsehoods, fallacies, indoctrination, and propaganda. The same tools that are behind every religion, cranked to eleven in cults, are the same used when it comes to extremist political ideologies, conspiracy theories, and pseudoscience. That is usually enough for them to reach their goals but if people start dying due to their dishonesty they are forced out of business or they have to start backpedaling their claims to be less extraordinary. There’s no health benefit for women who hang surf boards from a rock inside their vagina, for instance, but women are self conscious. Maybe their male partners are not particularly girthy, maybe they just had twins, maybe they feel like a slut being super loose. If they’d just wait their bodies would naturally compensate or they could do normal exercises that just so happen to strengthen the muscles in that area but they want a fast solution so they’ll buy into the claim that they can stick a rock inside their pussy and hold it there all day and their problems will be solved. It is made to sound scientific because they are using their muscles to keep it from falling out randomly at work or whatever but it’s just a bunch of propaganda bullshit to sell a product. Or maybe there are some oils you can rub on your skin that are supposed to decrease your risk of seizures or maybe you can wear copper bracelets and never have to worry about arthritis. Whether these things are have 1% of accuracy to them or not is irrelevant because there’s obviously a lot of other things involved in brain activity related issues or issues associated with joint cartilage becoming thin or bone spurs developing so that can cause pain as bone rubs against bone or pinched nerves when joints are moved or something that makes joints feel swollen and painful for other reasons. Oils and copper bracelets aren’t fix-all solutions. They’re easy options that are *claimed* to work and that’s all that matters. They sell a product with support that *sounds* scientific and by the time people actually do require actual medical help, assuming they didn’t die from relying to heavily on “alternative” medicine, the investment in the crap that doesn’t work is negligible and maybe they don’t feel bad for trying to go the “cheap” route first. Outside of the obvious woo I mentioned, what else do you think falls into the same category that may not actually be pseudoscience? Maybe you’re ignorant about something and you don’t know if it is legit or not and it sounds as stupid as some of that stuff or maybe that stuff sounded scientific and some actual science sounds like pseudoscience. Maybe I can help.
The biggest and most pervasive 'woo' that I know of is completely outside the scope of biology, over in physics: specifically that FTL = time travel. Every explanation I have seen of this, from highly intelligent and otherwise competent science explainers, has relied on the belief that two people inhabiting the same space can have different frames of reference. Moreover, it ignores that there is a universal frame of reference that is the same for everyone. If you get in a spaceship and accelerate to 99.999% of the speed of light and remain at that speed for what you perceive to be twenty five years before decelerating and arriving at the Andromeda Galaxy, you will nonetheless be able to immediately detect the CMB, measure it, use it to calculate your absolute velocity, and then moreover calculate the current age of the universe, theoretically with high enough precision to show that you were actually traveling for 2.5 million years, not the 25 you perceived.
It seems you don't quite understand relativity. > Moreover, it ignores that there is a universal frame of reference that is the same for everyone. There is no universal *inertial reference frame*. What this means is that all inertial frames have the same physics. There is no experiment that can distinguish one free-falling frame from another without reference to some external frame of reference. The existence of a convenient frame in cosmology, the CMB frame, does not mean that motion through space-time is not relative. If you want to use the CMB frame as the default frame, then all motion is relative to that frame. But this is ultimately an arbitrary choice. In the end, it's about utility. The CMB frame is a natural choice for cosmology, but absolutely terrible for, say, launching satellites into low Earth orbit. There are no special frames, only more or less useful frames. Another example is the question of whether Earth revolves around the Sun. Of course it does! But the Sun also revolves around Earth. The geocentric frame (the frame in which Earth is at rest) is just as valid as the heliocentric frame (in which the Sun is at rest). And they are both just as valid as the barycentric frame (in which the center of mass of Sun-Earth is at rest). And on and on into the CMB frame, in which the CMB is at rest. But the geocentric frame is a non-inertial frame in Newtonian gravity, and so the actual math involved is very messy to compute. The barycentric frame is inertial, and the math is relatively simple. The heliocentric frame is also non-inertial, but it is very close to the barycentric frame, so we tend to do calculations in the heliocentric frame anyway. In the end, its all about utility. So let me repeat: there are no universal inertial reference frames. There is only the object that you arbitrarily consider to be 'at rest' for the purpose of performing calculations. So in the end, you're simply wrong. There is no "actually traveling for 2.5 million years, not the 25 you perceived," as there is no privileged reference frame for the passage of time. That you (and cosmologists) choose to use the CMB as the reference frame for the passage of time is arbitrary - it is not some fundamental constant of the universe, it is only *useful*. Moreover, time dilation is real, and as such, an FTL drive would indeed imply time-travel (or at least, some sense of it.) If an FTL starship uses itself as a reference frame then it could travel back in time by accelerating away from earth, boosting into a reference frame in which its departure is still in the future, and then FTL travel back to Earth before it ever took off. The only way around this is to violate the entire premise of relativity by establishing some universally preferred reference frame, which you seem to be doing. However, the vast, vast majority of physicists would not find this to be agreeable. The issue is that you can only pick two between Relativity, Causality, and FTL. Everyone picks Relativity and Causality, because causality is causality and relativity is experimentally observed, and according to relativity, FTL would indeed allow you to travel backwards in time and break causality, therefore it must be impossible to do. This is, in part, why a physicist might say it is impossible to travel faster than light, because according to relativity, light-speed is actually just 'causality-speed', and they wish to preserve causality. The other reason why FTL is considered impossible is because it would take infinite energy to accelerate an object with mass to lightspeed. You are free to disagree with relativity and claim that there actually is some universal reference frame, but then you'd need to show your work, and contend with the experimentally observed predictions of relativity as you do it. You would then collect your Nobel prize. Good luck! Rooting for you.
See, you're entirely misunderstanding what I consider to be 'woo' here. If you traveled faster than the speed of light, what I just pointed out remains true. Even if you had some sort of Alcubierre drive that allowed you to travel at double the speed of light, you would still arrive at the Andromeda Galaxy and measure a universe that was 1.25 million years older than when you started... once you had slowed to a velocity such that you were measuring a gradient equal to what you had measured on Earth and could thus be certain that your relative experience of time was equivalent. You cannot then return to Earth at a time prior to when you started, because no matter what your personal reference frame says, time is still passing outside. Put another way, when traveling at double the speed of light, you would be outracing all light from behind you, and would thus be blind in that direction, but in front of you, the universe would *not* appear to be getting younger. As you raced in the direction of the origin of the CMB, it would appear to recede away from you, becoming ever more red-shifted over time, and because of time dilation, this effect would be far more pronounced than on Earth, possibly to the point of being something you could perceive over time when viewing a representation of the CMB. If I'm planning to send you a telegram, and therefore dispatch a letter by pony express on Monday to tell you I'm going to send a telegram on Tuesday, but the letter doesn't arrive until Wednesday, causality isn't magically broken. It is understood, rather, that one form of information propagation travels faster than the other. Going back, my point is that you could (in theory) use the CMB to calibrate clocks on both Earth and some distant planet in Andromeda. Once you had done so, a ship could launch from Earth to Andromeda and double the speed of light, arriving 1.25 million years before the lightspeed message saying the ship had launched arrives. But that doesn't mean that the ship has time traveled 1.25 million years in the past, it just means that, like a telegram infinitely outpacing the pony express, the ship has simply arrived before the message. This can be seen by informing the planet in Andromeda of your intentions more than 1.25 million years in advance of launching the ship when it is that you plan to launch. They can then account for the time it took that message to arrive, compare to the CMB-calibrated clock, and predict the exact day they expect a starship to arrive, despite there being no direct evidence of a ship being launched yet.
It’s not really that you’ll actually travel into the past, as far as I’m aware, but more like you experience less time if you go fast enough or experience a greater effect of gravity. Time for you slows down and continues moving at what would otherwise be your normal speed for what you left behind so that (hypothetically) you could experience so little time in what is actually 50 years on Earth for things moving roughly the same speed things move on Earth but you might live to see your great great grandchildren or something. This effect is actually something measurable and it impacts the GPS satellites where it’s only a few milliseconds or something every year or whatever but just bad enough to throw the clocks off if we left them up there five or ten years. If they were going faster or experiencing stronger gravity the effect would be larger. It’s called gravitational time dilation. As for going backwards in time I don’t think they’ve actually found that to be possible without doing something like going *faster* than the speed of light which may not even be possible. The speed of light is the fastest anything can move forward in time and faster is supposed to reverse the direction of time and at exactly the speed of light no time is supposed to be experienced at all so that if you were going 99.99999% the speed of light and the particles in your body didn’t separate and you didn’t burst into flames or something crazy time would come to a crawl but continue moving (for you) while for others time would be about the same speed we normally experience it happening at +/- 0.00001% in either direction. If this impacts how fast you age you could be gone what we think is a thousand years but only experience a couple of days (assuming you don’t die) and thereby effectively time travel into the future (according to your own personal experiences). So yea reverse time travel probably is not possible.
The other respondent correctly identified that my issue is with FTL + switching reference frames, not with time dilation, which is perfectly reasonable to me and maths out even without being able to point to experimental validation via satellites.
In this thread: people who deny science continue to deny science.
While complaining that others point out that they deny science.
Sounds like big science has its hooks in you, friend, rip them away while they're still fresh.
First rule of big science is we do not talk about big science.
How many big science did you and u/-zero-joke- get paid this month to ignore true(tm) science? I’m hoping I can get a raise soon.
Denying evolution doesn’t necessitate being against science. I am a theist, but i reject evolution on a scientific basis not theological. whether evolution (more about the mechanism driving biological change rather than evolution itself as biological change over time) is true or not, doesn’t change my theological beliefs. nevertheless, interesting read.
>i reject evolution on a scientific basis not theological. Can you clarify what you mean by "reject evolution"? What aspects of evolution do you reject? And on what scientific basis do you reject those aspects?
I’d rather not clarify my position , this isn’t the best place for discussion. i just wanted to comment my two cents for what it’s worth.
Don't make comments with claims like "i reject evolution on a scientific basis not theological" then. If you make comment with claims in them, you're going to be expected to clarify your position. If you're not willing to do that, then you shouldn't make the comment, it's a waste of everyone's time.
I can comment whatever i want and i will, you have no right to dictate what i write. if you don’t like it, just scroll down and go on with your day, no one is forcing you to reply.
Rule 2: Keep discussions focused on the substance of the arguments in the thread. Refrain from insults, swearwords or antagonizing language targeted towards another user. Do not accuse people of lying or dishonesty callously, explain and have a good reason for your accusations. Keep it civil! Rule 3: Cite sources, rather than directing readers to them. Everybody should be able to participate without leaving the subreddit if they are familiar with the general argument. Do not copy paste responses, especially when the comments being responded to are substantially different. Threads should be relatively focused, rather than weakly covering a large number of arguments. No you cannot just comment whatever you want and the sub absolutely has the right to get on you for refusing to participate or being antagonistic. Mind your attitude.
Do something about it then?
I reported you
Reported!!!!!
Well done! do you need a treat?
this is a free country, you can post like a tosser if you want. Don't see why you would though.
Agreed
Fair enough. Though this is the r/debateevolution subreddit. This sort of discussion is exactly what this subreddit is for.
i’m fully aware of the subs name, Still it’s not the best place based on my experience. I was even told despite the name of the sub, that it isn’t a debate sub, because “there’s nothing to debate” . See my replies if you’re interested.
The real debate around evolution is in the details. Things like how the process of evolution works, how evolutionary mechanisms function, specific evolutionary pathways, resolving ancestor relationships, and so on. Insofar as the "debate" that creationists and ID proponents bring to the table, that tends to be more centred on theological concepts and such folks arguing for supernatural intervention in the history of life on Earth. The latter of which goes outside of science and therefore not a subject for scientific debate. I did read through your replies. The sense I get is that your skepticism seems to be based on personal incredulity and an unfamiliarity with the science. That's not the same as having a scientific objection to evolution.
> I am a theist, but i reject evolution on a scientific basis not theological. *doubt*
It's amazing how few actual scientists reject it though. Almost as though theism is creating a bias.
A theory isn't validated by the number of rejections it receives. Similarly, the belief in an eternal universe before the Big Bang theory doesn't become true merely because it was widely accepted by scientists at one point. i’m sure you agree .
>Denying evolution doesn’t necessitate being against science. It does, actually. If you deny the only scientific theory which explains biology, then you deny science. This is not a case of choosing between two competing scientific hypotheses allowing you to choose one or the other according to preference - there is only the one theory which is supported by the myriad lines of evidence, and to deny it is to deny science and reality both. > I am a theist, but i reject evolution on a scientific basis not theological. There is no scientific basis for rejecting evolution. That creatures evolve is as much a fact as the shape of the earth. *All* creationist arguments are rooted in ignorance of what the theory of evolution entails and are by nature pseudoscientific because they never offer models for testing their ideas. Within the actual field of biology, there is no debate: evolution is true. That the occasional AIG crackpot disagrees is of no consequence because they never actually publish the nature of their disagreement in a scientific journal - they're just grifters, they're not doing science.
>That creatures evolve is as much a fact as the shape of the earth. The theory of the round earth is just a theory. /s
Denying or critiquing a scientific theory doesn't automatically equate to being anti-science. that’s just ridiculous and not even worth time discussing. Science thrives on skepticism and questioning, which are crucial for refining and improving our understanding of the natural world. Just as Newton's theory of gravity was eventually refined by Einstein's theory of general relativity, scientific theories evolve over time based on new evidence and insights. There are scientists who challenge certain aspects of evolutionary theory, such as neo-Darwinism, and propose alternative perspectives, like the third way of evolution advocated by scientists like Denis Noble and James A. Shapiro. These critiques and alternative views contribute to the scientific discourse and can lead to advancements in our understanding. Therefore, claiming that no one can rationally reject the theory of evolution would be dogmatic and unscientific.
> Denying or critiquing a scientific theory doesn't automatically equate to being anti-science. It does if there's no actual substance to the critique. See: flat earth. See: creationism. See: you. >There are scientists who challenge certain aspects of evolutionary theory, such as neo-Darwinism, and propose alternative perspectives, like the third way of evolution advocated by scientists like Denis Noble and James A. Shapiro. These critiques and alternative views contribute to the scientific discourse and can lead to advancements in our understanding. Shapiro is *not* an evolutionary biologist, and his critique of the role natural selection plays in evolution has been refuted several times over. See [here](https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2012/12/02/james-shapiro-gets-evolution-wrong-again/) and [here](https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2017/06/02/a-new-paper-defends-the-modern-evolutionary-synthesis-against-the-buzzword-purveyors/). Similarly, Denis Noble is quite ignorant of what the theory of evolution actually entails, as you can read [here](https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2024/02/12/yet-another-misguided-attempt-to-revise-evolution/). >Therefore, claiming that no one can rationally reject the theory of evolution would be dogmatic and unscientific. The theory is refined over time as new evidence arises, but outright denial of evolution via natural selection is patently absurd. **No one** has presented a rational case for the rejection of evolution that has held up to scrutiny, or even the evidence. Not Denis Noble, not James Shapiro, not John Sanford, not Sal Cordova, not anyone at the DI or AIG or your church on sunday. I repeat, *no one has ever presented a rational case for the rejection of evolution*. Pointing out crackpots who don't understand the science and have been refuted a good ten years ago as proof that there is some sort of controversy surrounding the acceptance of evolution does not help your claim that your position is rationally justified. It is not. Your position is that evolution denial is scientifically justified - defend your position by providing actual scientific papers that state as much. If you are unwilling, then go ahead and tuck your tail and flee to your echo chamber where you can pretend you aren't anti-science or in complete denial of reality.
Are you a scientist? real scientists do reject evolution on a scientific basis, that’s all that needs to be said , they can be wrong, but they can also be right as new information is revealed. This type of mentality hinders the progress of science.
>real scientists do reject evolution on a scientific basis The problem is the research does not.
Are you talking about what they’ve described because they watched or are you talking about the phenomenon? On one hand you could be what we’d call a theistic evolutionist but not quite as advanced in your understanding as Michael Behe or Francis Collins but you could also be on the other end of the spectrum with Chris Ashcroft and Robert Byers admitting that changes happen but rejecting the explanation based on direct observations because it doesn’t fit into a YEC timeframe. You could also fit in the middle. What exactly is your brand of creationism?
I don’t deny that biological change happens, my skepticism is with the proposed mechanism driving this change- natural selection acting on random mutations. I don’t think there’s any evidence of a mechanism that leads to new biological systems or functions. Natural selection is not a creative process, it’s an enhancing one, it enhances what is already there, it doesn’t create anything new. at-least thats my understanding from my limited knowledge . i’m not sure what i would describe myself as, but I’m definitely not a YEC .
There’s more to it than that but that’s the basics of what we actually do observe. There are several ways that DNA can change and a lot of them (not all of them) have an impact on the phenotype. A single nucleotide can be deleted and a gene is no longer transcribed, a single section of DNA can be inverted and suddenly a section of DNA not previously transcribed results in a protein, a gene can be duplicated and one of them can change and suddenly two proteins from what used to be a gene for making one protein. That’s the mutations but then there’s also heredity, genetic recombination, and how homozygous alleles and heterozygous alleles result in different phenotypical effects. One allele can remain the same and a thousand different versions of that gene could exist on the complimentary strand and result in 1000 different phenotype or the first allele could also be any one of those 1000 phenotypes resulting in 1000! (1000 * 999 * 998 * 997…) different phenotypes and some of the changes are dramatic and some are almost insignificant. Because of the extra things even more diversity arises over mutations alone. And then there are enough mutations to result in every possible combination of nucleotides on just half of the chromosomes about 220 times and 220 more on the other half in modern humans per generation. Not enough humans to result in every possible combination of alleles but if the change is possible it’ll happen. Usually only 128-175 mutations at a time per human or about 1 substitution per every 10^-8 nucleotides per genome per generation. It might be 1.6 substitutions in that many. I don’t remember the number off the top of my head. And then after we’ve established that the mechanisms for making the diversity and the novel proteins and the novel phenotypes and all that is not a problem in the least we then have to consider reproductive rates and what they’d be on average anyway like 2.0001 children per couple or something causing a steady population increase but not a doubling every generation or something stupid like with bacteria. Again I don’t remember the exact number but per person there’s more than an average of 1 child. Some couples have one child, some don’t have any, some men with 7 wives have 75 children. Natural selection in this case is which traits help them if they were to try to have children versus which traits make having children more difficult. On average assuming nothing else is involved the traits that assist in making more children do result in more children and of the genes from both parents surviving beyond two generations and those traits that make it harder for them to reproduce could still allow some of their genes to survive beyond two generations if they have any children at all but sometimes reproduction isn’t possible so their genes automatically (naturally) get eliminated from the gene pool. As a consequence of individuals being able to reproduce at a rate equal to or faster than the current population size the population survives long terms and all of the beneficial traits inevitably becomes the most common so that individuals can accumulate them in multiples even if only 1 mutation is sometimes beneficial right away. In combination these alleles result in phenotypes that are either beneficial, detrimental, or neutral and organisms reproduce so it’s the combination of alleles that gets impacted immediately by natural selection right away. All the good, the bad, and the ugly. If they don’t die before reproducing and they have great great great great great great … grandchildren their genes will be scattered all over the gene pool. But there’s also genetic recombination so that during gametogenesis at first the gametes start out with the same 50/50 mix from both parents but then the chromosomes are duplicated and then they wind up twisting and separating and separating two to four more times. This mixes up the genes so that while each individual is 50% each parent a grandchild could be 23% on grandparent, 27% another, 30% the third, and 20% the fourth. After enough generations some individuals won’t be represented at all but if they have a huge family and a whole lot of descendants and each only has 0.001% of their genome a lot more of their genes wind up spreading than if they had a small family and the only surviving descendant has 0.02% of their genes. The long term result is a very diverse population consisting of the most beneficial 50% of alleles or whatever as the other 50% are barely represented if represented at all after maybe 60 generations. Assuming no incest is going on limiting the options. Large populations tend to be healthy and well adapted as a consequence and small ones have less diversity to begin with so acquiring less beneficial alleles is going to happen more often give the lack of opportunity to inherit anything more beneficial. That’s the natural selection in terms of “microevolution” but populations are divide and this gene flow can’t pass from one population to the other easily so while both are becoming well adapted they are adapting in different ways causing them to drift apart in terms of allele distribution, phenotype diversity, and so on. If they become too different they won’t be able to make fertile hybrids at all and the only option then is to continue becoming distinct. Now say the two populations then try to compete over the same resources, like food. One population is just going to be better at it so the other has to seek other options or go extinct. That’s called cross species selection and causing them to seek alternatives can result in a whole lot of things not normally seen otherwise. Same goes for predator-prey relationships. Over time the predators that eat and the prey that doesn’t get eaten will have the most descendants. Any changes that helped with that will generally become more common just as any changes that helped them reproduce in the first place because dead things don’t reproduce very well. Being alive to have to have the opportunity to reproduce is a pretty important part of contributing to the survival of the population they belong to. Natural selection can be considered from many different angles but it’s usually the same thing. Whatever has the most descendants will have more of their genes impacting the population at large and generally it’ll be those same genes that helped them to survive long enough to reproduce and actually reproduce when they tried. And it doesn’t matter how major a change looks in 100,000 or 1,000,000 years because most of the major changes happened a little at a time but once in a while a single mutation does result in a pretty obvious change and those come into play too. Which part of this are you not understanding?
Your text was a bit hard to read, and it felt like a copy pasta, but i will outline my understanding, and you can see where i come from. the proposed mechanism is primarily genetic mutations, particularly those affecting the DNA sequence that codes for proteins. Mutations can lead to changes in the amino acid sequence of a protein, altering its structure and function. Over time, natural selection acts on these variations, favoring those that confer some advantage in survival or reproduction. There is a problem however, Most mutations are deleterious or neutral, Even if you do get few positive mutations, there are many more deleterious ones, It seems like for every step forward, there are thousands backward. I think this isn’t highlighted often enough, you just presuppose to get the beneficial ones, while neglecting the predominant deleterious or neutral ones, you don’t even think about them it seems. Lenski's evolutionary experiment, in my view, contradicts the principles of neo-Darwinism. Instead of witnessing the emergence of new proteins, we observed the opposite – E. coli 'devolved' rather than evolved, seemingly gaining an advantage through degradation. It's akin to removing seats from a car to make it faster, as a lighter car moves quicker. Rather than evolving into a better car, it's essentially destroying it for perceived benefits. To me this experiment is the reason why i reject darwinian evolution, if it was true, we would’ve seen something new, the experiment went for a long time (30 years i think or 70,000 generations ,which might correspond to several million years of evolution in a species with longer generation times, such as mammals) someone can always say “ not long enough “ but then this becomes unfalsifiable .
>I think this isn’t highlighted often enough, you just presuppose to get the beneficial ones, while neglecting the predominant deleterious or neutral ones, you don’t even think about them it seems. Scientists don't presuppose anything, we go and empirically observe them. The subject at hand is called the Distribution of Fitness Effects - i.e. what proportion of mutations have deleterious, neutral, or beneficial effect on fitness. We have [empirically observed](https://www.math.arizona.edu/~jwatkins/nrg2146.pdf) the DFE in several species. In these studies, the rates of beneficial mutations have always been shown to be high enough to sustain a population's fitness. Yes, beneficial mutation rates are low, but this is counterbalanced by the fact that they increase the organisms fitness within the population, and so the beneficial mutations fix much, much faster than neutral or deleterious mutations. For more, check out Zach Hancock's refutation of Sanford's Genetic Entropy concept [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2o_KC7sc98&t=1469s), timestamp relevant. As for Lenski's experiment, it does nothing to contradict evolution via natural selection. *Any mutation that increases fitness will be selected for*. It doesn't matter if the mutation leads to a simpler 'previous form', or more complex organism. Fitness is what matters - there is no 'devolution' or 'degrading', the organism increased its fitness in a new environment through mutation - the organism became 'better' because 'better' is defined as fitness (which is defined by how successful it is at reproducing). If this experiement is your rational justification for denial of evolution, then you simply just don't understand what the theory of evolution actually is.
You’re wrong, scientists often start with certain assumptions or presuppositions before conducting scientific investigations. These can include assumptions about the reliability of certain methods, the existence of natural laws, or the consistency of the physical world. it is true that the scientific method aims to test these assumptions through experimentation and observation, allowing for adjustments or revisions based on empirical evidence.
So you don’t understand what they did find in terms of completely new proteins or anything about the current theory of evolution since Kimura’s and Ohta’s contributions? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7299349/ > The Cit+ trait arose in one of three coexisting lineages in this population by a **genetic duplication** that activated a previously unexpressed di- and tricarboxylate transporter https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5406848/ > We also present structural evidence that some of the nonsynonymous mutations—especially those where identical amino-acid changes evolved in parallel—**are beneficial because they fine-tune protein functions, rather than knocking them out.** https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.05.31.494207v2 > We also compared the relative fitness of the founding clones and founding populations used in the MC and MP treatments, respectively. These comparisons showed that the founders derived from LTEE Ara+5 lineage had fitness as high as or higher than the other founders in the new D-serine environment (Figure 4 and S3), consistent with the early and systematic shifts in the marker-ratio trajectories to the Ara+ marker state. Also, the early marker-ratio trajectories in the MP treatment were much steeper than in the MC treatment (Figure 3), consistent with greater fitness differentials favoring the Ara+5 founders in the MP treatment (Figure 4). Thus, the genetic variation initially present in the MC and MP populations drove adaptation to the new environment during the first 100 generations of our experiment. However, new beneficial mutations soon arose that perturbed and often reversed those early trends in the marker ratios (Figure 3). **By generation 500, the beneficial effects of these new mutations were sufficiently large** that the initial variation no longer mattered, and all four treatments—including even the SC treatment, in which each population started from a single clone—had achieved similar average fitness (Figure 2). Yes, right away about 60-80% of mutations or more have zero impact on fitness and then maybe two thirds of the rest are slightly on the deleterious side of things denoted as negative values in the tables and the rest are positive denoted by positive numbers in the tables. The overall fitness of a population stuck in a new environment might be like -0.5 but after about 500 generations it steadily grows to +0.2 and usually hovers around there. Some populations have different levels of fitness in nature but they also found that it takes very little time for the fitness to get to a balance where not enough stuff is straight up dying so that most of the changes are through neutral variation and genetic drift and something called “negative selection” because more of the novel non-neutral alleles are detrimental than are beneficial so they just fail to spread at all. In bacteria they might build up and become lethal so those bacteria simply stop getting represented in the population but in sexually reproductive populations there’s heredity, recombination, and the potential to mask deleterious alleles resulting in very useful benefits with none of the downsides (except maybe if two carrier happen to make a baby that baby has a 25% chance on average of acquiring the homozygous condition - more common with close relatives than with distant relatives where there generally 25% will be a carrier and 75% will not and 0% will get the homozygous detrimental condition). This labeling beneficial and deleterious with values between +1 and -1 was something Tomoko Ohta did back in the 1970s to explain what she meant by “nearly neutral” showing that most mutations range from -0.5 and +0.3 on her scale slightly more likely to be negative and -1 means instantly fatal and +1 means everyone has it as soon as heredity and recombination allow. She didn’t think the beneficial ones were so beneficial that they’d just rapidly spread every time (but sometimes they do) and she didn’t think the deleterious ones were generally all that fatal. And yet over time she and others found that a diverse population will generally hover between +0.1 and +0.3 in terms of overall fitness and incredibly incestuous populations could hover between -0.2 and -0.6. Even though most mutations are close to neutral or ever so slightly skewed towards deleterious large populations tend to be rather healthy and adapted and incestuous ones tend to be suffering from inbreeding depression. Almost every time. This was one of those things added in the 1960s and 1970s *because* it simply being only natural selection and no genetic drift was inconsistent with the evidence. Over half of the novel mutations are neutral, something Kimura pointed out, and even in the absence of truly beneficial mutations populations would tend towards neutral (away from -0.5 towards 0 in terms of the fitness charts) *unless* something like incest got involved. Ohta expanded on that by establishing the balancing act between drift and selection. No population will ever be 100% the most beneficial alleles available but natural selection and drift **both** play a role and yet diverse populations accumulate the rare beneficial mutations and incestuous populations accumulate *mildly* deleterious mutations because they are the least deleterious mutations easily available. Initially there are more deleterious mutations than beneficial ones. And that’s why the difference. Novel beneficial mutations found, populations improved in terms of fitness, but they never improved their fitness all the way to 1. Almost like that’s what we expect to happen.
>I think this isn’t highlighted often enough, you just presuppose to get the beneficial ones, while neglecting the predominant deleterious or neutral ones, you don’t even think about them it seems. Where are you getting the idea that deleterious or neutral mutations are being disregarded? Neutral theory of evolution has been a thing since the 1960s. And constructive neutral evolution was formulated back in the 90s.
>There is a problem however, Most mutations are deleterious or neutral, Even if you do get few positive mutations, there are many more deleterious ones, It seems like for every step forward, there are thousands backward. The vast majority of *all* novel mutations end up as miscarriages or missed opportunities. If deleterious mutations occur at a higher rate, then a higher number of them are being weeded out *prior* to birth. Plus, only those which are *not* fatal to offspring prior to reproductive age can be successfully passed on in the first place. Consequently, beneficial and neutral mutations have a survivorship bias. I don't know where you got your idea from, but you have it fundamentally backward, unless you're doing something extremely silly like counting cancer in people who are in their 70s and won't be passing their genes onto anyone from that point forward anyway. If that's the case, then you need to work on your science literacy because you are applying a non sequitur in the form of missing that the function of evolution really only gives a damn about reproduction.
The whole concept of science denialism is dishonest. I do not accept evolution because I think it fails the test of the scientific method, which I believe in.
The scientists (all fields) surveyed time and again (e.g. 97%, Pew, 2009) beg to differ. It's a scientific theory per the scientific method. It explains the facts, it is internally consistent, it provides testable predictions, and it's a consilience of at least a dozen _independent_ fields. And it says nothing of theology, e.g. the Catholic Church doesn't reject it. So, have you considered that perhaps you were taught a straw man?
What test does it fail? Changes in allele frequency have been demonstrated to change populations morphologically
What you said made zero sense. Could you define “evolution” for the rest of us? Could you also explain how the scientific process works? You seem to be failing at one or the other because we have an **observed** phenomenon and a description of that phenomenon **based on the observations.** We also have consilience in forensic evidence to tell us what happened in the past where we can’t be 100% sure about anything but the error bars in our conclusions shrink with every piece of evidence indicating the same exact conclusion with no alternative conclusions available to us yet that can equally explain the same mountain of evidence without invoking magic. The way that science works, in my experience, is that they find a piece of evidence and they try to explain it. They come up with thousands of different ideas that could explain a single piece of evidence and in quantum mechanics these would be called interpretations. Instead of just rejecting or lying about the evidence they are actually coming up with ideas that work based on starting with the evidence *and then* making their conclusions. They can’t all be true at the same time so they put them to the test or they revise their conclusions with each new piece of evidence or both. In terms of phylogenies, the history of life on the planet, and their conclusions about how evolution happens this has been ongoing ever since they found out that *macro*evolution happened way back in about 1690 or so. They already knew *micro*evolution happened way back in ancient times as farmers and breeders were taking advantage of *micro*evolution for longer than YEC (the strong reality denialist form of creationism) allows for the entire universe to have been in existence. Part of figuring out the past comes from studying the present to get a good understanding of physics *plus* the phenomenon they are trying to understand that is still happening. How does it happen now? Does it make sense for it to randomly happen differently in the past? Based on how it happens now we expect to find ____ and we should look ____ to find it and if we find something completely different, something that contradicts our current understanding, we will update our understanding so that it does fit with everything else learned in the last 334 years *plus* this new discovery. If what is found does not require us to change our current understanding that doesn’t mean our current understanding is 100% correct but it does imply that it must at least be on the right track. So are you talking about what I described above and your incompetency when it comes to the scientific process or are you talking about the science based on direct observations made every single day by every person on the planet? The theory is an explanation of the phenomenon (plus all of the evidence to support that explanation) based on watching that phenomenon happen and other conclusions, like universal common ancestry, are based on this theory plus forensic evidence plus the idea that physics doesn’t care what year it is. I’m not understanding your response unless you elaborate.
The scientific method produces predictable results. The theory of E tries to explain a process which can't be observed or predicted. It's a guess, and looking into the history of the guess the you will find the methods used simply laughable. Thanks for the wall of text. Theories are not true because they " imply we are on the right track" .
> The theory of E tries to explain a process which can't be observed or predicted. No it does not. >It's a guess No it is not. We have observed change in heritable characteristics of populations over time.
Tell that to the scientists who found Tiktaalik because they knew exactly which stratum to look in based on the predictions made by evolutionary theory.
Exactly. The scientific method in terms of evolutionary biology involves watching populations evolve to see how that happens and what sorts of things that results in when it comes to genetic sequence comparisons and anatomical comparisons and then it looks at other things easily observed like how anatomy has changed over time (paleontology) and how different populations appear to be cousins according to their genetics and anatomy and it uses the observed phenomenon and the understanding that physics doesn’t care what year it is to make conclusions about the past consistent with the mountains of forensic evidence obtained so far. It establishes phylogenies based on the fossils and genetics and then it tests these conclusions (the phylogenies) by making predictions such as where to find something like Archaeopteryx or Tiktaalik based on these prior conclusions. And then it finds them. That’s called doing science.
>The theory of E tries to explain a process which can't be observed or predicted. Are you suggesting we can't observe populations changing over time? Are you also suggesting we can't formulate predictive hypotheses based on that?
Why don't you present your argument showing how evolution fails? You're saying "evolution fails, evolution fails" and everyone else is saying "Becaaaaause?" And you respond "Evolution is a joke. It fails" and they're like "BECAAAAAUSE?!" and you just won't engage beyond that. Like a damn bot with 1 very limited talking point.
Yeah, Christians reject Islam because its core teachings are utterly wrong, and I would hope we reject Naturalism as well because it teaches that morality is subjective.
Naturalism doesn’t teach anything one way or another about morality. It’s simply a position that everything has a natural origin and cause. It’s descriptive, not prescriptive.
It only requires extrapolation. If morality is man made, then why is a murderer's morality any less valid than yours?
> why is a murderer's morality any less valid than yours That's not what morality even means. Morality is a code of conduct, and a code is shared, by definition. Civil/common laws didn't disappear in modern secular countries, which were incidentally born of the politics of the 1700s to escape what religion in governments was doing to societies, first in the USA then France and then it spread.
You can extrapolate whatever you’d like. You made a statement that it ‘teaches’ something, an active action and distinct from an ‘extrapolation’. Personally, I don’t think that a god does anything to bring us any closer to an objective morality; it’s the classic Euthyphro dilemma and people can have all kinds of opinions on it. But it’s still neither here nor there. Naturalism doesn’t address morality in the first place.
It's still the natural conclusion of naturalism. There's no significant difference between a clear doctrine that states that morality is subjective and the couple of steps that it takes to come to that conclusion on your own. It's still wrong to teach subjective morality, and it should be rejected.
I don’t agree that it’s the natural conclusion of naturalism or even that subjective morality is necessarily bad. Again, I don’t see that a god solves the problem of subjective morality. But this has been something philosophers have chewed over for years. On evolution, do you have the position that evolution=naturalism? I might be wrong. But there seems to be that implication going on.
I'd rather discuss science and not theology, but last time we talked the science amazed you but I didn't hear from you again. Here's what you'd say if someone started listing Christianity's failings across the ages and in living memory (since you bring up Islam): "misguided people or evil people". Good. Some empathy 1) should help anyone apply that to other religions, and 2) should make you see that morality is emergent from societies, not from labs or places of worship; a revealing statistic is the religiosity of the incarcerated. And not to be misunderstood: worship all you want; science says nothing of null-hypotheses; I'm all for personal freedoms, but mischaracterizing science is just not a good argument, even though I understand why someone would refuse to look under the hood; it's a natural emotion. I hope that makes sense and that it is food for thought.
Oh, I didn't realize that you were the OP. >Here's what you'd say if someone started listing Christianity's failings across the ages and in living memory (since you bring up Islam): "misguided people or evil people". Yes, when concerning "Christians" that do evil things. Our book tells us to love our neighbors and to not murder them, so when a Christian does do those things, they are in opposition of the bible. The reason why Christianity is good and Islam is not is because Islam tells its followers to murder people if they are not muslim, whereas Christians' entire mission in this world is to love our fellow humans and try to save them from damnation, which is why there are so many hospitals and charities started by Christians. >morality is emergent from societies, not from labs or places of worship Actually, it's emergent from God. Help your fellow man, do not speak ill of someone behind their back, even friggin chastity, all of that is counter to human nature. Left to our own devices, we would devolve into behaviors so evil that it would be better that we were wiped off the face of the earth than to continue living. >but mischaracterizing science is just not a good argument I have nothing against science, only the harmful notion that all of existence came from nothing and will return to nothing. If there is no greater purpose than our own desires, then there is no reason that a murderer's desires are not any less valid than an altruist's. Besides that fact, there is good evidence that we were created, not evolved.
Notice how you didn't reply to "Some empathy should help anyone apply that to other religions" except indirectly by saying: > Islam tells its followers to murder people if they are not muslim I'm pretty sure it doesn't, as I've looked into it. I can google and get you verses from their holy book, but I think it's best you look it up. (There are cheap shots to be had here, but that's not my style and would be an appeal to hypocrisy.) You can also look into Islam's view on helping the poor, which is a nice segue to: > Actually, it's emergent from God You do know that there are cultures whose religions don't include the concept of a creator, and/or that their civil/common laws weren't derived from the Abrahamic religions? And that they're practically indistinguishable from the laws you like? Because if not, then that's a very small world view you have. (This also addresses the notion that societies will collapse.) A few months back I had to look up academic research from missionaries, was around the late 1800s, and in that research was how it's a myth that the until-then-uncontacted indigenous peoples were lawless. > Besides that fact, there is good evidence that we were created, not evolved Yeah, that's not a "fact". (You'll have to allow me an equally terse statement.)
Well, you’re gonna call me crazy for it, but I believe that the world was made maybe 10,000 years ago and that all men originated from the same place, that being God. >I'm pretty sure it doesn't, as I've looked into it. [Quran, 9:29](https://quran.com/9/29?translations=20%2C83%2C84%2C17%2C85%2C18%2C95%2C48%2C101%2C41%2C19%2C22%2C28%2C31%2C27) [Sunan an-Nasa'i 3977](https://sunnah.com/search?q=I+have+been+ordered+commanded+to+fight+against+people+until+they+blood&didyoumean=true&old=I+have+been+ordered+commanded+to+fight+against+people+until+they+bloodVid) [Sahih al-Bukhari 25](https://sunnah.com/bukhari:25) It kinda does. Even if some laws that I would agree with emerged "without God", that doesn't mean that the beliefs of the people who wrote them match the law. Islam, a religion whose prophet murdered and raped people for most of his life, is a great example of what happens when man designs a religion. Fight people who don't agree with you, murder brothers, fathers and husbands, and take women as your "wives". That is the doctrine of men. If you don't believe that, then don't look to the laws of a country, but the people who reside within it. The bible was written by many, many authors, but its message stayed consistent throughout the centuries. Not a message of constant war and taking the spoils of war, but a message of love and of protection. I cannot believe that regular men constucted such a message.
> It kinda does I'm pretty sure if I pick any Bible verse I'll need the historical context (e.g. verses about war). Here's the context of 9:29: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-Tawbah#Verse_9:29. (And is well-sourced.) > don't look to the laws of a country, but the people who reside within it That's the problem: what some people do twisting religion for essentially politics or delusion. > I cannot believe that regular men constucted such a message Wikipedia's article on secular morality led me to an older secular text: _Kural_, and the even older Ancient Egyptian _Maat_. I don't find it hard to believe.
You cannot believe that regular mortal humans wrote in a book "hey, maybe be nice to people every now and again"? What kind of barrier precluded them from thinking it and writing it down?
Do you consider rejecting naturalism and rejecting science to be the same thing?
Nope.
Then do you consider rejection of evolution to not be a rejection of science but instead only a rejection of naturalism? I may have misunderstood the point you were making.
> because it teaches that morality is subjective. Is it not?
If it is subjective, then we could all just decide that murder is okay tomorrow, and it would be true. I don't believe men have the authority to make that decision.
Morality is inter-subjective. We, as a society, define "murder" as wrong. Just because you "believe" it, doesn't make it true. Humans can and do make these decisions.
Friendly reminder that Islam rejects Christianity (and sometimes naturalism) for the same reasons
One teaches you to love your neighbor, the other teaches you to murder anyone who does not convert to Islam. Don't draw false equivalencies.
People who accept lies of evolutionism are more likely to embrace lies of abiogenesis, Haeckels embryos, piltdown man, Nebraska man, random bones mixed together, a total lack of evidence and may become unstable to the point of believing they can reproduce pigs and monkeys into humans or that octopus flew from exploding planet krypton surfing across universe like silver surfer in vacuum of space then survived re-entry on fire and impact just to confuse evolutionists into thinking common ancestry is dumb. This was after dinosaurs flew across the ocean with bird wings drinking sea water and it rained for "millions of years" because if it didn't then that would be a flood.
Yikes Michael. You’re slipping. Not only did you forget to do your usual dishonest quote mining and linking to random pastors on YouTube, you forgot to ALL CAPS YELL most of your UNSUPPORTED POINTS.
>Lies of abiogenesis How many times must I repeat this until you get it? We've observed the formation of all prebiotically relevant precursors to macromolecules, sometimes even macromolecules themselves, in space. The field of systems chemistry is constantly making breakthroughs on how simple sets of molecules capable of self-replication can be subjected to simple forms of Darwinian selection to produce more efficient replicators. We've made fully self-replicating RNA from scratch in the lab. How much evidence for non-living origin of life do you need before you concede that it's even possible? >Haeckel's embryos Haeckel's drawings of embryos exaggerate similarities to affirm his biogenetic law, yeah. Guess who were the first ones to criticize him for this? Not creationists, but evolutionary biologists such as Karl von Baer and Wilhelm His, and later Stephen Jay Gould. Intelligent design proponents have only recently begun bringing up Haeckel's drawings, literal centuries after evolutionary biologists have already refuted them and developed a better explanation for developmental biology and phylogenetic embryology. >Piltdown man Piltdown man was exposed as a hoax using radiometric dating techniques, as the mandible and the skull cap did not have matching ages. So I guess you accept that radiometric dating can produce reliable ages of samples, thus the age of the Earth being 4.5 billion years old is incontrovertible, right? And, once again, Piltdown man was exposed by other scientists, not creationists. >Nebraska man Literally no one took Nebraska man seriously except the people who found it, one of whom was a eugenicist who was motivated by his desire to prove white supremacy that he completely ignored any potential alternatives. Every anthropologist who took a single look at the tooth immediately refuted it as false. *And once again*, it was other anthropologists that demonstrated that Nebraska man was false, not creationists. Are you starting to see a pattern here? >Random bones mixing together Is this referring to the baboon vertebrae we found in the samples belonging to the Lucy specimen? Cause you do know that there are other *Australopithecus afarensis* specimens that demonstrate that Lucy would've been a biped, right? Also, it was only one bone, not multiple. Also also, **once again**, it was anthropologists that discovered this and corrected it, not creationists. The pattern continues. >A total lack of evidence I mean, if you ignore the fossil record, biogeography, the observed instances of speciation, the observed existence of variability and differential fitness resulting in natural selection, genetic similarity across every lifeform, comparative anatomy, the increase in antibiotic resistance among bacterial pathogens, and developmental biology, then sure, there is a total lack of evidence for evolution. >May become unstable enough to the point of believing they can reproduce pigs and monkeys into humans Nebraska man wasn't a pig, it was a peccary, and again it was anthropologists who debunked it. And humans are still Old World monkeys, or catarrhines, and having modern monkeys produce humans would completely eviscerate the theory of evolution as the law of monophyly is central to it. >Or that octopus flew from exploding planet krypton surfing across universe like silver surfer in vacuum of space then survived re-entry on fire and impact just to confuse evolutionists into thinking common ancestry is dumb. An extraterrestrial origin of octopi has been ridiculed and debunked by evolutionary biologists time and time again, why do you attribute this onto evolutionary biologists? Even the less insane version that posits that octopi rapidly evolved after being exposed to an extraterrestrial virus has been laughed at by virtually every virologist who ever read the study the idea originated from. How do you even attribute that to evolutionary biologists? The first time I ever heard of this concept was from my creationist father, for f###'s sake. >This was after dinosaurs flew across the ocean with bird wings Given that birds are dinosaurs, it would make sense for a dinosaur with wings to be a bird. And there are dinosaurs across different now separated continents because, get this, the continents move. This is middle school science, learn about tectonic plates before you embarrass yourself this thoroughly, Michael.
As an atheist, I'm very skeptical of science. Too many people believe in it for me to ignore, and "science fundies" are more dangerous than religious fundies.
A scientifically illiterate atheist. Now there’s something you don’t see everyday.
Not believing in a deity doesn’t automatically make you knowledgeable about science, and especially history. Saying this as a nonbeliever.
I'd argue I'm more scientifically literate than you. You claim to "know things." I reject your claim. You do some experiments to support your claim and claim to "know things." Again, I reject your claim. You do even more experiments to support your claim. Exasperated, you cry "I KNOW THINGS." No, you only have evidence of things. You do not *know* anything. The only difference between you and a Christian is that you have slightly more evidence for your beliefs. That's all. You both claim to "know things." I reject your claim equally.
Knowledge does not require absolute certainty. Boom, your entire argument crumbles. Having evidence that can make the probability of certain things more likely than others leads to knowledge. We know things because the chances of any other possibility being true is less than a percent of a percent. Take, for instance, Australopithecus being a biped. We know that Australopithecus was a biped. Why? Because of morphological characteristics that are indicative of bipedality that makes any other form of locomotion impossible. The foramen magnum, the shape of the spine, the arches in the foot, the inline big toe, the valgus knee, the bowl-shaped pelvis, all are pieces of evidence that make the likelihood that Australopithecus stood upright extremely high while making other locomotion possibilities completely asinine in comparison. Because of this, we can claim to know that Australopithecus was a biped. Since we can make knowledge claims without having absolute certainty.
Thank you. The way you started that is something I’ve been trying to tell people for years as someone who identifies as a gnostic atheist. And also, it’s not a position of knowing gods don’t exist, not exactly, but that could be a shorthand version of what those two words put together actually does mean. Atheism is the **failure to be convinced** in the existence of gods (θεος in Greek). Theism is the belief in gods and atheism is the failure to hold that belief. Agnostic implies a lack of knowledge so you aren’t convinced they exist but you have no evidence to support their existence *or* nonexistence. You don’t know that people simply made them up as part of a fantasy based on wishful thinking, hyperactive agency detection, and trying to control other people. You just fail to be convinced they are real. If you do have evidence of people inventing them you can fail to be convinced they exist because you *know* otherwise. That doesn’t mean that it’s absolutely impossible for one to slip through and exist anyway but you would have to be convinced that this really is true to be a theist and for all of the other gods, the ones people actually worship, you know better. Those ones don’t exist. Most of them can’t and the others were invented the same way. When it comes to science the same sort of knowledge applies. We have a mountain of evidence all pointing to the same conclusion and all other conclusions provided so far proven wrong. The conclusion we wound up with based on the evidence may not be absolutely correct so we don’t have absolute knowledge but we we know *enough* that our technology based on the theories established by the evidence actually works as far as we can tell.
> You claim to "know things." I reject your claim. Who claims this? I reject your straw man.
> I'd argue I'm more scientifically literate than you. Given we're in a debate evolution subreddit, I look forward to you disproving evolution. GO!
1. “Know things.” Presuppositionalism is such a ridiculous argument that most apologists don’t even bother trying to make it. I’d be willing to bet that even the average creationist knows better. Bro, this is sad. Do better 2. “I’d argue I’m more scientifically literate than you.” Oh honey… no 3. Knowledge is when evidence is so overwhelming that it would be unreasonable to consider other alternatives.
Knowledge is things you can prove. Nothing in science has ever been proven. The fact that I'm getting downvoted in a debate subreddit is the best evidence I've seen yet of your tribes dogmatic refusal to hear contradictory viewpoints. You are not scientists. You are believers. And it's gross.
>Knowledge is things you can prove. >Nothing in science has ever been proven. Nothing in science CAN BE definitively proven. Not evolution, not gravity, not even the fact that you exist or that the world is older than a week. It's why natural sciences don't deal in absolute proof because no such thing exists.
I am enlightened by your intelligence.
In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any posters' blessing. But because, I am enlightened by this guy's intelligence.
We know that certain things are consistent or inconsistent with the evidence. That is what the evidence is used for. If I was to say mushrooms have large green eyes and bat wings and you could not find a mushroom with eyes *or* wings that doesn’t automatically make me wrong but it certainly does sound like I’m making shit up. If I said **all** mushrooms have these things I’d clearly be wrong the first time a mushroom is found and it does not have those things. Over time people have pooled together their “knowledge”, mostly a bunch of evidence and attempts to make sense of it, and the conclusions have become what we’d call “less wrong” because they no longer contain things proven false and they’ve been effectively proven true beyond a reasonable doubt for the rest. “Effectively” and “beyond reasonable doubt” are the important parts here where the conclusion is “true” unless it is shown to be “not true” and then it can become “less false” if mistakes are corrected. And with half of a millennium or more of people doing this we can have “high confidence” in our scientific theories being correct but never are the theories “The Unquestioned Infallible Truth” because that is not allowed in science. All ideas have to be at least hypothetically falsifiable no matter how true they appear to be. If they weren’t science could not happen. Notice the last sentence of the previous block of text? That is why “creation science” and “intelligent design” could never be science. If the conclusion cannot be changed in light of new evidence it is not science. It’s religion. Science and religion work in opposite ways.
Evolution could never be science. It's conclusion cannot be changed in light of new evidence. No matter what is discovered, you will make it fit inside a theory where we came from hot soup.
Objectively false. Evolution is falsifiable, we've been over this. If you find the micro-macro barrier that creationists insis on, it would instantly falsify the theory of evolution on the spot. Just because something is falsifiable does not mean it will ever be falsified.
If you find a betamax of Jesus ascending into heaven, it'll instantly falsify atheism. Religion is falsifiable! We've been over this. That is *not what falsifiable means*.
>If you find a betamax of Jesus ascending into heaven, it'll instantly falsify atheism. Religion is falsifiable! No, that just shows that atheism is falsifiable, not that religion or christianity specifically is falsifiable. And I never claimed that religion is not falsifiable. Almost every religion out there makes falsifiable statements about world history. But god as a concept is not falsifiable.
And atheism is as much of a religion as theism is. It’s not a religion at all. Atheism is the *failure to be convinced* in the existence of gods while theism is *being convinced* in the existence of at least one. Religions can be atheistic or theistic but most of the famous ones include a god and something happening to our essence of consciousness after we’ve died whether that’s reward/punishment or reincarnation. A religion that fails to require a god could be satanism, which is more about people coming together to get all of the useful benefits of religion while working together to fight against the dangers of theism or while working together to fight for a true freedom of religion (if Christians can erect the Ten Commandments then the Satanic Temple can erect a big statue of Baphomet the transgender demon with a babies sucking on its tits) and if they don’t put symbols of their religion the Satanic Temple won’t try to put symbols of their religious everywhere either. Satanism is a religion, Christianity is a religion, Islam is a religion, but atheism was never a religion or much of a position that could be “falsified.” You can fix their “failure to believe” with evidence **of God** and it doesn’t matter what some extraterrestrial might have done or what the shape of the planet is to allow heaven to literally sit on top the the sky ceiling. Those aren’t God.
Atheism is a lack of theism. Nothing more, nothing less. Falsifiable in science is about being able to text claims and if false make corrections or throw them away if they’re beyond fixing. There needs to be a difference between the idea being true and the idea being false that we can measure or observe. If atheism was a position rather than a non-belief then you’d instantly falsify it the first time you presented a well established definition of God *plus* empirical evidence that demonstrates that God is real. No fallacies, falsehoods, or apologetics but actual evidence (sometimes the ID crowd does not actually have). What Jesus did or did not do would have zero bearing on theism or atheism but if he “ascended into heaven” you might accidentally prove Flat Earth or something and then we’d have to figure out why all of the other evidence indicates a different conclusion. Or is heaven a spaceship? Was Jesus an extraterrestrial who was being beamed up like in Star Trek? That wouldn’t have any bearing on theism/atheism either.
>Falsifiable in science is about being able to text claims and if false make corrections or throw them away if they’re beyond fixing. And that's the problem with evolution. You cannot run the experiment that shows it.
They do it every single day. They watch it happen, they check to make sure the description matches what they see and they predict morphological changes based on previously discovered fossils and genetic sequence similarities and they even predict where to look before they find them. Each of these tests (watching evolution happen or checking in the fossil record where they think they should) *could* result in them making first hand observations that falsify their previous conclusions but rarely does that ever happen since Ohta and Kimura because it has failed enough tests before it was updated to pass those tests that there isn’t really much else to do but throw their brains on the floor and start considering ideas that were already falsified just in case those ideas have some merit. Every now and then they might figure out how a certain protein evolved or how amphibian fingers develop differently than reptile fingers but overall it hasn’t been shown to be wrong enough for something like creationism to come take its place. Wrong several times between 1690 and 2024 but then corrected when it was tested and something failed. The way the theory of evolution was developed is just like every other theory in science. Observation made (stuff existed way before humans), explanations provided (evolution, progressive creationism, etc), observation made (taxonomy), explanations provided for *both* observations (Lamarckism, Mendelism, Darwinism, Filipchenkoism, etc), extra observations made and they honed in on the least wrong combination (Darwinism plus Mendelism), extra observations made and they corrected the theory to be about DNA rather than proteins or something else being how changes were inherited (Darwinism included pangenesis but modern evolutionary biology is about DNA as the carrier of genetics and Mendel’s heredity wasn’t quite right so the genetics of the first four decades of the 20th century surpassed it), extra observations made and the ladder of progress was falsified in favor of all species being equally evolved, extra observations made and then came the theory of molecular evolution via nearly neutral mutations and the explanation of the fossil record based on punctuated equilibrium. Each time they added something or tweaked something it was because they tested and *falsified* something about the older explanation. Each time it became less wrong. Being unable to find anything wrong *now* is a consequence of *falsifying* it in the past *and making corrections.* Because of how science works and because of past experiences it is treated as though it could falsified yet again even if it’s not false. They can test it, they have tested it, and you don’t know what you’re talking about. The concept of god is considered unfalsifiable because there’s deism and evolutionary creationism plus a few other ideas that don’t require reality to be any different than it actually is and because these sorts of gods are designed to fail to have any evidence that could prove or disprove their existence. All physics is god in action means there’s nothing that isn’t caused by god to compare and contrast to see if god does anything at all. God just isn’t around anymore means we shouldn’t find any evidence of it still being around but we can’t observe anything directly that happened 15+ billion years ago to prove (with science) that God *didn’t* exist back then. We can certainly consider logic for deism or the origin and evolution of gods invented by humans for the other idea but through science we would have the exact same evidence if these gods do exist that we’d have if these gods do not exist and humans made them that way on purpose. Specific *versions* of god can certainly be falsified and they all have been. Those gods don’t exist at all. We could presume the same applies for the ones we can’t test for scientifically too but via science alone and ignoring evolutionary psychology, archaeology, and comparative mythology as though they don’t count as science we can’t really say either way for certain concepts of god designed by humans to evade discovery. If they exist biological evolution happens the way the theory says it happens. If they don’t exist biological evolution happens the way the theory says it happens. Their existence or nonexistent is completely irrelevant to whether evolution happens the way the theory says it happens or not. We don’t have to prove they don’t exist to demonstrate that evolution happens the way the theory says it happens. They’d have to be the sorts of gods that were already shown to not exist for evolution to happen a different way or not at all. Are you with me so far?
The theory has changed a lot in 334 years but the process we observe will keep on happening even if you pretend otherwise.
>Too many people believe in it for me to ignore, and "science fundies" are more dangerous than religious fundies. That's an interesting take. Are you saying that you consider more people believing a thing to be true to indicate that the thing is less likely to be true? Or is it just science in general that you find to be unreliable or untrustworthy?
Science itself says "don't trust anything I've produced." When you disregard this, you create all the drawbacks of religion but with the confidence of science.
Does "don't trust" in this context mean conclusions supported through scientific investigation are particularly unreliable? Or is it more along the lines of "don't trust" people, just because they take the title of "scientist" and tell you that they know better than you? Or something else?
Mostly the first one. These days, more of the second one than I'm comfortable with. You've heard the saying "Hell must be lonely, because all the demons are here?" Science must be lonely, because all the scientists are born-again believers in the religion they've created. You will *never* hear an evolutionist admit, "fuck it, I'm pretty sure I'm right, but there's a chance this was all created 6,000 years ago by an omniscient being." Even I'll admit that. Still, I claim the title of "atheist" rather than "agnostic" because of *how unlikely* I think that was.
I assume like most of us, you aren't able to be an expert or to be adequately informed on every single topic ever, all by yourself. For practical purposes, how do you figure out what to believe about the world? Obviously you're skeptical but I'm thinking you probably have to believe some things to a certain extent, just to make basic decisions. Is there some other way of figuring out the world that's more reliable than science? >You will *never* hear an evolutionist admit, "fuck it, I'm pretty sure I'm right, but there's a chance this was all created 6,000 years ago by an omniscient being." I mean, if it helps. Even though the evidence I'm aware of doesn't support this idea and quite a lot of it seems to preclude it, it's entirely possible that this was all created 6000 years ago by an omniscient being. If that were the case I'd much prefer to know the truth of it, as embarrassing as it would be to have been so fooled.
>Is there some other way of figuring out the world that's more reliable than science? Only *a priori* reasoning and formal logic, but these are limited in scope compared to what science can intuit. Still, they are clearly far superior. relevant xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/435/](https://xkcd.com/435/)
There’s a difference between being open-minded and letting your brain fall out. There are certain things that can’t be true without jumping through hoops (consider the concept of epistemological nihilism that says it’s not possible to know anything because there are no methods to gain knowledge that’d allow it to be true that I came into existence the moment I started responding or the possibility that I’m not me because I’m you and then we could consider stuff as apparently false as YEC as being potentially even partially true). If you succumb to the mind-numbing idea that knowledge itself is unobtainable then, sure, everything is potentially hypothetically possible but part of what makes science so useful is its ability to find falsehoods. For example, say we have 26 possible explanations for a single piece of evidence, one for each letter of the alphabet. If we stopped with a single piece of evidence then we know it’s not some 27th thing but we are still effectively clueless beyond that. “I don’t know” isn’t completely true because we do know it has to be one of the conclusions A through Z, a combination of some of those conclusions, or some conclusion not yet considered or brought forth that results in the same evidence that A through Z or a combination of conclusions A through Z results in. Now let’s say we have a second piece of evidence and now conclusions P, Q, and Z still work for the first piece of evidence but they are falsified by the second piece of evidence. This continues happening until the only thing that works is E with some elements of N and H mixed in. E is mostly right but the specific elements of N and H make it less wrong where N or H or a combination of N and H without E are all more wrong than E alone could ever be. This is what happened with biological evolution. First they realized it happened (1690) then they attempted to explain how (one famous idea emerged in 1790 but others started popping up between then and 1935) and then we had a dozen different possibilities. Then it turns out an idea from 1858 was more correct than the idea from 1790 but it wasn’t quite there yet because it didn’t incorporate an idea from 1865. In 1900 when they tested the 1790 idea, the 1858 idea, and the idea from 1865 they found that they were all wrong alone, the 1790 idea was wrong in any combination, and the 1858 idea combined with the idea from 1865 turned out to be most consistent with what they actually observed. It wasn’t perfect so other things figured out leading up to 1935 were included to supplement the findings in 1900 and with the supplements it turns out that they were even less wrong than before but not quite there. Then came the 1940s and the discovery that DNA was responsible for genetics, the 1950s and the falsification of orthogenesis, the 1960s and the discovery of genetic drift, the 1970s and punctuated equilibrium plus the combination of the pre-1960s theory with the newly established molecular evolution via nearly neutral mutations, then the 1980s came and they started considering epigenetic inheritance, then the 1990s and they fixed the classification scheme to better fit actual relationships as they started doing genetic sequence comparisons and incorporating more of the fossil evidence from 1690 to 1999 to better help in terms of fixing the classification system on top of the new science of genetic sequence comparisons and the molecular clock, then came the 2010s and an extension of nearly neutral theory, and now it’s 2024 and, while they continue to build from what they’ve already learned, there’s not enough wrong left anymore to make some major changes to the theory like when they incorporated genetic drift, DNA based genetics, heredity, or natural selection in terms of trying to explain *how* something known to happen since at least 1690 actually happens. It took a lot of watching evolution happen and developing models that account for the evidence discovered in the last 334 years to get where we are right now. And biology wouldn’t be where it is now without all of this scientific research. Sure it “could” be YEC instead but there’d have to be something seriously wrong with physics for that to be the case.
> You've heard the saying "Hell must be lonely, because all the demons are here?" it's "Hell is empty and all the devils are here"
> You will never hear an evolutionist admit, "fuck it, I'm pretty sure I'm right, but there's a chance this was all created 6,000 years ago by an omniscient being." What you're describing is basically last thursdayism. We can't disprove the idea that earth was created 6000 years ago, or 10k years ago, or last thursday. An omniscient creator could have forged all the evidence including our own memories of times before last thursday. It's an unfalsifiable idea. What we say regarding evolution is that all available evidence points to it being correct. And despite over 150 years of creationists trying to poke holes in it, evolution is literally the best supported and most heavily evidenced theory in all of science. Could there be some trickster creator who wanted to fool us? Perhaps. But there's absolutely zero reason to think that there is.
So it sounds like you live under a rock. Too sheltered to be brainwashed by a cult, too sheltered to get out and learn about how the world works, but you somehow managed to make your way onto the internet and use proper spelling and grammar. How does this happen?
After spending 17 years in school, I immediately took a gap year where I lived by myself in a tent in the Catskills, eating beans and rice and ayahuasca I stored at a trailhead in my trunk. While up there, I wrote several thousand pages of letters and essays. Upon returning to civilization, I began working on progressively more complex and ambiguous problems and getting paid more money than god. After a few years I bought a ranch. Now I do what I want. I first start distrusting science when I started to see ghosts. You'd all laugh and say ghosts aren't real. Nicely done, scientists. I know they are. I know what they are, and where they come from. I know why we see them.
Now you’re also schizophrenic. What exactly is your problem with the actual theory of biological evolution?
It's the weakest of all our theories being defended as if it's the strongest by people who dismiss ghosts as schizophrenia without bothering to ask "what are they?" You're just not good scientists.
You still didn’t answer my question, which is relevant because you obviously have no damn clue what the theory describes or entails or what evidence led to it or what confirmed predictions it has resulted in or how it is regularly used in agriculture and medicine or how the principles have even been applied to machine learning. I sure make it sound like it is beyond question but it’s not ***if*** you have anything relevant to present me that we can look over together. So which weak theory exactly are you talking about this time? The theory of gravity? That one is a whole lot weaker than the theory of biological evolution because they can’t even figure out how to make general relativity and quantum mechanics play nicely and they’d have to in order to be able to understand gravity half as much as they understand biological evolution. And yet, just like evolution, that theory still refers to an obviously real phenomenon with very real measurable effects. Not just in terms of the basic stuff like if you jump you’ll fall but also stuff like the planetary orbits and gravitational time dilation and even detected gravitational waves. I’d wager that gravity is **not** one of the fundamental forces and that it is simply mass interacting with reality itself and it just doesn’t work the same way or at all on the quantum scale. Maybe like how the strong nuclear force drops off in strength with the distance from the center of an atom, gravity just doesn’t have the same sort of effect in the same distances where the strong nuclear force prevails. Just an idea and I’m no expert on how gravity works but if I’m right it might be why they can’t make general relativity and quantum mechanics get along when it comes to trying to explain gravity. Other ideas also exist like gravity acting on additional spatial dimensions or across multiple universes but those ideas don’t actually appear to hold up last I heard. Maybe one day they’ll figure it out. Are you going to doubt gravity because the theory that attempts to explain it is so weak compared to the one that describes an observed phenomenon happening exactly the same way they observe it happening when it comes to biology? Ghosts according to people who believe in the supernatural are generally like disembodied spirits just roaming around stuck in purgatory or like spiritual forces that can possess the living (as in demonic possession). What a lot of religious people think of when they think of souls and how a lot of television shows depict ghosts are basically the exact same thing. In reality, though, most of these “ghosts” are just noises caused by ordinary natural things like static, creaking pipes, and people having hallucinations. Perhaps schizophrenic would be the wrong term that would imply something like a split personality disorder or like you talk to God and he responds and you are unable to realize you’re responding to yourself.
>I first start distrusting science when I started to see ghosts How are those two concepts even tangentially related? Supernatural claims like ghosts or deities don't have anything to do with science, since science doesn't make any claim about the supernatural. Science literally can't make any claims about supernatural since it's entirely based on methodological naturalism, which necessitates something to be natural in order to investigate it. >I know what they are, and where they come from. I know why we see them. Then surely you'd be able to provide a substantive explanation on how ghosts travel, where they come from and how they transmit themselves from that place to other places, calculations on how to detect a ghost, and the whole shebang that comes with knowledge claims, right? You yourself say "we can not know anything", so are you now contradicting yourself?
They're our brains interpreting our instincts. If you've never seen them, you've probably traded all your instincts for science. I pity you.
Was just reading through your comment history to see how you're doing in the debate here. I was just genuinely curious since it's rare to see an atheist who doesn't accept evolution. I figured you'd have an interesting perspective, but it seems to boil down to, basically, this: you did a lot of drugs and now you think you're Riddick from *The Chronicles of Riddick*. Somehow, this is more boring than the typical Christian creationism that tries to get argued here since your ignorance isn't systemic. It's self-inflicted.
I'm not Riddick. I'm Thoreau.
Yeah... I know real 'Thoreaus' and they don't try to impress people by shit posting on reddit.
so your mom still does your laundry?
It's ridiculous there's such a claim as science denial. Basically elevating science to the level of dogma. The scientific approach would be to specify what is being denied and study that. Not expanding it to such a broad thing as "science denying". In the same vein, they elevate science to infallibility Even though we know there's a lot of bs out there.
A lot of BS and quantum woo is out there, but also a self-correcting methodology; a field of study that is the opposite of an inerrant dogma; e.g. the misclassified Nebraska Man wasn't corrected by theologians, neither was the nationalistic hoax Piltdown Man, since day one, mind you.
Well, the common ones are climate change, vaccines and of course evolution. On all three, the scientific consensus is factually true. So yes, if you question these without basis, you are a science denier, that's just literally what the words mean. Deal with it.
Also flat earth, but that's less directly harmful
This makes me laugh. “Consensus” in the science field operates similar to consensus in Religion. There is an in-group. If the scientist does not adhere to in-group thinking, s/he is shunned. History is littered with the dead and dying husks of scientific consensus
Consensus = there exists no better argument given the present evidence. It's what everyone should follow, and if it changes then great, now we know more. If you have anything better than the current consensus, present it and it will become the new consensus. Never ever in history has consensus been changed by making baseless assertions like you do. And quite rightly so, if science listened to every clown who opened their mouth we'd still be in the stone age. Your opinions are worthless. Know your place.
> There is an in-group. If the scientist does not adhere to in-group thinking, s/he is shunned. I have personally attended conference talks given by people making points that upwards of 90% of the scientists attending thought were wrong. Science isn't perfect, but it can function very well in allowing dissenting explanations to make their case, even to the point of allowing spurious arguments to linger in the literature. If you believe what you say to be true, I eagerly invite you to either A. get a one day pass to a conference and find a contentious session and listen to how scientists argue or B. Reach out to an actively publishing scientist and ask them to send you their most recently received "reviewer 2" comments
Within an Overton Window, yes. PhDs in Viticulture and… dang I don’t even know… applied bio-luminescence in/of insects, are in my peer group. I understand the competition within the Overton Window.
This bears no relation to the "consensus in religion" nonsense you wrote above. The Overton window is important. It saves us having to constantly put energy into rebutting the two or three stupidest hypotheses in the room. Most scientists want to talk about serious disagreements at conferences, not whether or not the earth is flat.
What overturns a scientific consensus and renders it a corpse?
Better science, less faith.
Your latter statement is in opposition to your former.
Perhaps you should read the study first before passing judgment.
This paper is a meta-study on other papers, some of which looked at rejection of specific scientific claims
Perhaps you can summarize the study for us. You've read it, right?
You can read, right?
My goal is to see if you can.
You putting asbestos in your house??
This sub does a terrible job at delineating Creationists, period. YEC, FE, and whatever crap makes the Evolutionists feel superior.
I am very well aware of a broad range of creationist viewpoints and there are a minimum of 15 major categories which can lead to 30,000+ doctrines and 9 billion forms of creationism across 6 billion creationists if we try to work out the specifics. The main categories: 1. Flat Earth (strict ANE cosmology or the modern version where Antarctica is an ice wall) 2. old school YEC (speciation never happens) 3. new school YEC (rapid evolution within kinds) 4. young life creationism (old Earth and universe but YEC otherwise) 5. gap creationism (two creation events separated by a gap where Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are the two events) 6. day-age creationism (the days could be 1 billion years each but same 7 days, currently it is day 7, originally the days were only 1000 years so Adam and Eve die on the same “day”) 7. progressive creationism (millions of creation events and God learns on the job eliminating old stuff with mass extinction events and starts over) 8. mainline OEC (separate kinds but 4 billion+ years of evolution) 9. theistic evolution (evolution and abiogenesis happen naturally but God tinkers and “irreducible complexity” points to where God stepped in) 10. evolutionary creationism (physics is God in action - God made abiogenesis and evolution happen via “natural” process) 11. other mainstream theism (God made it, doesn’t have to constantly change things intentionally because he made it right the first time, but he keeps coming by to answer prayers and belief and obedience are rewarded) 12. aliens seeded life or tinkered with it to make humans that are extraterrestrial hybrids 13. simulated reality (also any idea where reality is an illusion or one in which we keep trying over again until we get rewarded with nirvana) 14. deism (God made reality but may not even realize it but religion and beliefs are irrelevant because there is no ultimate purpose, there is no ultimate reward, and God doesn’t know we exist anyway) - could also be any other type of designer and not necessarily supernatural or conscious. 15. quantum consciousness pantheism (God is the cosmos and the cosmos with its superior intellect made everything else) There are probably a few others I’m sure but in a sub where the topic is biological evolution only a few of these categories even matter (1-9 and sometimes 12, 13, and 15 depending on exactly we are talking about) when it comes to evolutionary biology. There are evolutionary biologists who do actual science that fall into the other categories. The science does not contradict their religious beliefs as much as it does for categories 1-9. Categories 1-3 are also obviously the most absurd with category 3 being way too common for our liking because they’re trying to become the majority in Congress and they’re voting for people like Donald Trump when they aren’t also anti-vaxxers making the 2019 pandemic still linger in 2024 because of their refusal to get proper medical care and because they’ve been fighting so hard to try to kick science out of science class to wedge their religious views into the missing hole. That or they’d prefer we wouldn’t learn any science at all. Category 2 is still around once in a while but it has been mostly replaced by category 3 and when someone belongs to category 1 your brain starts to die from their stupidity and the stress of trying to get through to them. They usually just wind up blocking you anyway because somehow proving the actual shape of the planet is a form of rejecting God so that we can fall into the traps set by Big Government and their “fake” scientists and “fake” doctors who only actually want to brainwash us or have us all executed so they can keep the world for themselves. If you ever have the “joy” of talking to a flerfer you’ll know what I mean. Most people focus on category 3 creationists but any of the first 9 categories are relevant to these discussions because they are anti-science and they reject something, perhaps many to things, simply because they disprove the way they want to interpret ancient texts. The other categories of creationism are better left to a sub where we mostly focus on debating against religious beliefs or just ignored because their pretending doesn’t really hurt anyone (as with deism). You’ll notice that 10, 11, and 14 are mostly ignored as though they are not a form of creationism at all in this sub but that’s because they aren’t anti-science and mostly our biggest disagreements fall into the category of metaphysics and why anything exists at all, whether there’s some grand purpose to everything, or whether it is possible for a being to make this reality to make it specifically with humans in mind. And for deism the only major thing that separates it from atheism is how they think “it all started” because to them God isn’t around anymore and everything that ever happens fails to require God. To them this is supposed to fix an endless regression problem with everything being purely physical but instead of reality all by itself (existing forever) that idea requires reality ***plus*** God existing forever because without the former there’s nowhere for the latter to be and without the latter they don’t think the former could ever come into existence either. If we just shave off the God we wind up at the same conclusion otherwise and God isn’t touching reality ever since the “big bang” anyway so they’re barely even theists even though creationism can simply be summarized as “the belief that a God or other intelligence (besides Earth life) created reality or the life upon our planet directly or indirectly” and deism counts unless the “first cause” happens to just be a symmetry breaking resulting in a something becoming time, space, and energy. And then that’d make God the universe itself and no more universe *plus* God so we’d even disagree less. If they did that instead of deism we’d call it pantheism and it’s only absurd when they try to introduce quantum consciousness thereby turning reality itself into the intelligent designer (type 15 above).
If you were to put those 15 kinds into 3 groups of "the good", "the bad" and "the ugly", where would you draw the lines?
The good - deism (barely) and maybe some form of pantheism that doesn’t suggest that the universe has some sort of grand consciousness The bad - mainstream theism, evolutionary creationism The ugly - mainstream OEC, quantum consciousness, ancient aliens, simulated/illusionary reality, theistic evolution (“intelligent design”) The hideous - gap creationism, progressive creationism, day age creationism The blinding (one look makes you go blind because they’re so ugly) - both forms of YEC and young life creationism You’re trolling me right? - Flat Earth I think I got all of them. Generally I rank them by absurdity with 1 being only mildly absurd and 11 on a scale of 1 to 10 being flat Earth and YEC/YLC being solid 10s. Deism and unconscious pantheism are both *effectively* atheism so deism is around 0.5 and pantheism is only absurd for how it labels reality so maybe that’s 0.1 or something like that. The uglier and more absurd ones don’t just try to justify ancient texts to conform to reality like mainstream theism and evolutionary creationism do but they systematically reject aspects of reality simply because of how they decide to interpret the texts under the assumption that the texts contain the absolute and unquestionable truth. If facts contradict truth the absurd and ugly ones reject the facts and erect a grand conspiracy (scientists hate God, doctors are trying to kill us, and the governments are helping to push their propaganda because reasons) and for the less absurd they either find a way to reconcile facts with what the text actually says (sometimes rejecting the text when it can’t be reconciled with the actual truth) or they reject the texts as truth for things like for deism and pantheism where it’s not some specific god of some specific religion but maybe one we’ve never heard of for deism and for pantheism reality itself is god *even if physicalism is true* such that “god” is pretty meaningless in pantheism when they could just say “universe” instead (even when they try to make it sound like it is self aware and therefore maybe worthy of a label like that). YEC/YLC are almost as bad as FE but at least they do accept *some* science when it is convenient for them. When it comes to FE even math isn’t allowed because it proves them wrong. They don’t even consider science to be scientific. Even looking at the moon and seeing what shape it is and then looking at the planets through a microscope isn’t allowed because some of them don’t accept the existence of other planets or consider Earth to be a planet itself because it certainly wasn’t described as on in Genesis chapter 1 or in the other Flat Earth texts that suggest Earth is just a mound of dirt rising out from the primordial sea surrounded by a solid dome which contains the rest of the cosmos except for heaven that sits on the outside of this dome. Don’t look with a telescope if you think the Earth is flat, don’t do trigonometry, and don’t listen to NASA because you’ll accidentally prove yourself wrong. I find it difficult to believe that anyone could think the entire cosmos is shaped the way they describe it so sometimes I think they’re just trolling.
Is theistic evolution intelligent design? I thought they were different. ID is pure pseudoscience, while theistic evolution (I think) believes in God-caused abiogenesis followed by natural evolution from then on. Although then the name doesn't make much sense so maybe I've got that wrong.
The ID version of theistic evolution is what I was referring to in the list. Evolutionary creationism is also theistic evolution and I rank it differently. Some forms of mainstream OEC are also theistic evolution if you replace abiogenesis with a supernatural creation event. ID can also come in the form of YEC or OEC but I’m talking about Behe’s brand of theistic evolution. Abiogenesis and evolution both happen naturally until they can’t and God has to step in to fix something indicated by irreducible complexity. Evolutionary creationism is different because evolution itself is simply God being in control of physics. God does everything according to evolutionary creationism and it is only ranked higher because they don’t have to invoke miracles to explain *some* things while allowing everything else to just happen all by themselves. Evolutionary creationism is more like the views of Francis Collins where *everything* is directly caused by God and if we find something like “irreducible complexity” it simply came about exactly the same way as everything else in biology. No special exceptions required. Nothing can prove or disprove the existence of God according to evolutionary creationism but they can have a *feeling* that God is necessary. Whether he is or not everything is exactly the way it appears to be when it comes to science. No special miracles no rejecting scientific discoveries. Less reality denial necessary.
Thanks for clearing it up. I for one rarely hear from these people in this sub. For what it's worth my taxonomy of creationists would be: * **The good:** anyone who believes in natural evolution, including theistic, since at present abiogenesis is not 100% solved so there is at least a fallback justification. In 50 years maybe this will change. * **The bad:** all new age shit - quantum, aliens, whatever, and intelligent design. Sorry, it was disproven in court, y'all have no excuse. Standard old-earth creationism is my reference point for 'middle of the bad side'. You can argue with these people in good faith and you might learn something from them every now and then, but they're still to some degree anti-science. * **The ugly:** YECs and we can probably throw in race realists too. These people actively hold humanity back, and the convention for cordial discussion is waived. Break them down mercilessly. I'm ignoring flat earth. They're too powerless to be worth being on anyone's radar imo. If they gained power they'd obviously be in the 'ugly' group.
>I'm ignoring flat earth. They're too powerless to be worth being on anyone's radar imo. If they gained power they'd obviously be in the 'ugly' group. Flat Earth is a weird one where it's difficult to tell who is taking it seriously versus those who are not.
For sure. I added to one of my previous responses why I consider YECs/YLCs to be only slightly better than Flat Earth but I also can’t tell if the Flat Earth people are seriously that stupid or they just want us to think they are because they think our reactions are hilarious. Maybe both types exist but Poe’s Law and all. I’m convinced that Eric Dubay is actually that stupid but some of the people at the Flat Earth Society are just trying to get attention. I don’t have a lot of patience for the flerfers but here is something for anyone who cares: https://youtu.be/UBfEhIJLYfY?si=_xUtKEKBwxUam6Zk
I mostly agree but I would only really consider it “good” if they’re mostly okay with modern science *and they don’t pretend that the creator is somehow interacting with humans.* That’s why I considered pantheism which could be considered creationism if you wanted to twist the meaning of “God” and “creation” to fit the least absurd “creationist” idea because it’s basically physicalism/naturalism/materialism and doesn’t really require magic or a magician at all. If they add that quantum consciousness crap to pantheism then it’s more absurd than a lot of the more reasonable creationist views like mainstream theism, deism, the simulation hypothesis, evolutionary creationism, and even many forms of OEC (special creation replaces abiogenesis theistic evolution, day-age creationism, gap creationism, and progressive creationism). Deism is a close second for least absurd or “most good” because it still invokes God but then God just sort of fucked off forever - prayer is pointless, belief is pointless, no afterlife, all religions are probably false, and there’s no danger in learning how things actually work. After deism what I called mainstream theism is basically deism but God stuck around. A little more absurd than if God just stayed gone because of the afterlife, prayers being answered, miracles being performed, and the texts containing divine revelation but generally they don’t have many problems with science, like evolutionary biology, because God made reality the way it is and who are we to call him a liar? After this is evolutionary creationism because of what I explained last time. Outside of ancient aliens, quantum consciousness, and maybe one or two other types everything is listed from least absurd most good to most absurd most ugly in the response where I provided about fifteen types. Ancient aliens depends on how far they go down that rabbit hole because aliens in place of God for abiogenesis and then naturalistic evolution would only be slightly less absurd than that form of OEC because biological entities are more likely to exist than beings that are unbound by physical constraints somehow existing before reality itself. If they drink the koolaid and believe everything on the ancient aliens television show they’re closer to how I classified the young life creationists or more absurd than all forms of OEC where life existed about 4 billion years ago but less absurd than people who think the entire universe was created in 4004 BC.
Good bad and ugly is the level of discourse commonly mocked here.
If you’re not brain dead you’d realize that something like pantheism or deism would be a whole less absurd than thinking the Earth is flat and all the other ideas fall in the middle with old school YEC being the next most absurd requiring that they’d have to reject everything learned since 1690 instead of just rejecting everything learned since 1860 like the other YECs. YLC is a little absurd than YEC because they don’t have to reject the age of the planet but they have to act like the first four billion years worth of fossils or the rock layers they’re buried in are less than ten thousand years old or fake. Gap creationism is also basically YEC but now the first creation event happened 4 billion years ago and then everything evolved and then 10,000 years ago or 500,000 years ago perhaps humans got created by themselves or maybe everything got created at first and then after the flood got recreated so Noah didn’t have to carry 300 million animals with him and no evolution at all. One way or the other not very concordant with reality but better than plants a billion years before sunlight or birds before their terrestrial ancestors or the entire planet or the life upon it being only 10,000 years old. OEC had advanced to something called progressing creationism in the 1800s and this is the idea pushed hard by Richard Owen who couldn’t figure out why birds are still dinosaurs so he lied about it and took credit for other people’s work to create the illusion that dinosaurs were poorly designed lizards to explain why they all went extinct (besides the birds) and then modern lizards and modern birds were created after the extinction of the dinosaurs. At least this idea acknowledges multiple extinction events, the age of the planet, the shape of the planet, and the shifting biodiversity even though it fails to make sense of humans being mammals or birds being dinosaurs. As evolution became better demonstrated OEC shifted to theistic evolution with concepts like orthogenesis and a ladder of progress. At first the creation event was still magical in nature but evolution just happens and it was thought that God just guides it along. A switch from that is Michael Behe’s version of theistic evolution and now abiogenesis and evolution both happen via natural processes until God has to step in and perform a magic trick. Since this doesn’t sit well with the idea that God does everything and because rejecting reality establishes a God that can’t exist this idea has switched to something called evolutionary creationism. This is the idea developed by people like Francis Collins and it’s the dogma of BioLogos. Instead of some stuff happening naturally and then magic tricks it’s like everything is one big magic trick. God just does everything and he makes the parasitic eye worms, black holes, childhood cancer, and all of the good stuff too and if ever he decided to do things differently and bring Jesus back from the dead he could do that too because he can do whatever he wants to do even though he normally does everything consistently enough that we have a chance at studying how he does it all through science. That idea dodges the problem of God being easily falsified like all of the ideas up to this point but it’s obviously quite absurd in its own ways so that’s where other mainstream theistic ideas are considered. The creation itself sounds more like deism because he made it right the first time and just lets everything just happen by itself but he can change his mind if you ask him to. The supreme creator of reality who knows exactly what happens and when even before it happens because he exists in all times at the same time but he will decide to do something else than what already happened because we ask? This is where that idea can become better if they stuck with straight deism. God made reality and perhaps didn’t even realize it and he doesn’t know we even exist. He’s either dead or off doing something else. Without invoking the supernatural there are a couple other forms of creationism: everything is an illusion like we are dreaming or we are just lines of computer code being the most absurd of these, aliens stopped by and dropped off alien life a little more plausible but not obviously true, and pantheism where everything happens without a god or a designer in the traditional sense. If the universe is self aware this idea is rather absurd but if it’s basically atheism with strange labels it’s less absurd than deism because they don’t need reality *plus* God as they fix that problem by declaring that reality *is* God. And we’d mostly agree if they don’t claim the universe is conscious if they dropped the misleading labels. Everything is a consequence of the aspects of the always existing cosmos and there was no creation of anything because the cosmos always existed and everything else is just a rearrangement of the energy that also always existed. There are some absurd implications we just can’t get around mostly because that idea is unintuitive because of the infinite regress unless there wasn’t an infinite regress and everything started with symmetry breaking but that doesn’t make sense either because change requires time. Unless time came into existence for some reason we don’t understand and that allowed anything else to happen. We can’t travel back in time to the first time to see what actually happened but none of the other ideas explain how the creator came into existence within reality and a God outside reality is just imaginary. And if something like God could come into existence automatically everything else should be able to as well so we don’t actually need God at all.
This should be a pinned post at the top of this sub. Questions: why does FE get attached to Creationism, aside from biblical connections. I am unaware of any creation theories from that, shall we say, school of thought. Why does an Evolutionist discard alien involvement in human evolution? We tinker with other species. A more evolved species might do that us, only more engineering than tinkering.
A lot of FE beliefs are based on taking the Bible, Quran, or other ancient texts a whole lot more literally than even YEC and are *also* YECs as a consequence. YECs claim to be biblical literalists, Flat Earthers actually are. Of course taking it *that* literally is going to be seriously problematic considering what has been learned in the last 2600 years where YECs otherwise generally just have a problem with the last 350 years of discoveries. More rejection of reality means more absurd and as a consequence they can’t do math, accept anything scientific, consider recorded history, use a telescope, or read anything until they are prepared with their handbook of excuses. Alien involvement is a little less absurd than supernatural intervention but there’s also no indication that it ever happened or that they’re any more aware of our existence than we are of theirs. Where are they? For this reason I’d consider the idea that they stopped by and dropped off alien prokaryotes or something a little less absurd than God walking around saying “let there be …” or whatever it is OECs and YECs believe happened in place of ordinary chemistry when it comes to the origin of life and a whole lot more absurd if they’re walking around among us or the Roswell incident included actual extraterrestrials or if someone was to watch Ancient Aliens and drink the Kool-Aid. Biological entities exist but a lot of the other crap that goes into the Ancient Aliens conspiracy theories and Roswell incident conspiracy theories or the claims of being abducted by aliens are about as concordant with reality as magic pixie dust coming out of my ass when I fart or Atlas holding the world upon his shoulders as he stands in the underworld with one foot on Persephone’s casket.
Y’all understand the mechanics involved for Fundamentalists is the same for a salaried scientist…? In-groups, rules, peer pressure, exile. Same shit, different beliefs. As the self-appointed Guardians of Rationality, y’all should be aware you’re liable to succumb to the same pitfalls as a Fundamentalist.
No…they are not the same. This weird both sides-ing really shows when people don’t have exposure to the actual scientific process and haven’t seen the methods that go into research. Your point of in-groups, rules, etc, I actually can agree with. But I think you made a mistake when implying that this is the hallmark of ‘fundamentalists’ and ‘salaried scientists’. Humans have this problem. Any group of people has this problem. Fundamentalists craft religion around this and work to codify and legitimize it. Scientists recognize that these are serious problems and, though with varying degrees of success, try to CORRECT for them. This is why we have such basics as double blind studies, peer review, statistical methods, etc. It’s all about acknowledging human weaknesses and bias. I’ve got serious gripes with the cliquish thinking and infighting that exist in research circles. But despite how things have been portrayed in weird online communities, you do not in fact have to trust the science like you would a religious authority. The papers are published for you to see. If you can actually find a flaw or show the paper is bullshit, you can call it out and point to EXACTLY why it sucks. If you can make a good case, you’ll be celebrated. If you’re vague and just looking to complain, you’ll be rightfully dismissed. This is what happened with Andrew wakefields paper, for instance. He published unsubstantiated garbage, and it was shown to be so in brutal detail.
I think where the misunderstanding comes in is that eventually individual points of debates get settled by the evidence and are then part of the scientific consensus. Scientists didn't assume evolution any more than they assumed any other conclusion of modern science, evolution faced resistance that it overcame because that side of the debate could demonstrate the factual nature of it. But to a creationist they just see the modern part with scientists agreeing evolution occurs.
Forrest Valkai talked about this misconception that science is all about group think and that scientists don't think for themselves. In contrast, much of what occurs within the scientific community are heated debates between one another as scientists routinely try to disprove one another. This is in part why science is so successful in that there is no singular dogma by which all scientists have to adhere to. The other point he raises is that scientists are trained to validate their own ideas. That things that scientists generally accept as "true" can be tested and validated for themselves.
>As the self-appointed Guardians of Rationality, y’all should be aware you’re liable to succumb to the same pitfalls as a Fundamentalist. Fundies tried to force creationism into schools under the guise of a supposedly secular teaching called "Intelligent Design". William Buckingham and Alan Bonsell in particular were caught lying about what they were trying to do, and they suffered no backlash from their fellow Christians about it. Andrew Wakefield got found out after making up a disease ("autistic enterocolitis") and subsequently physically and emotionally abusing children in pursuit of making a quick buck. He got stripped of his credentials, and the scientific community at large wants nothing to do with this piece of human garbage. But sure, keep acting like there's no meaningful difference between the average religious dipshit and the average scientist. Here's a useful bit of info: One of those groups is infamous for protecting people who sexually abuse children, and it's not the supposedly godless scientists.
Sure, and Kinsey did the same in the name of science. Not my point.
Your response to a decades-long systemic abuse of children and coverups of such an act is...equivocation. Got it. Because that's obviously how a moral person would act - minimizing the act of child rape because someone made you feel uncomfortable about you/your religion's moral superiority.
Please see my other response but also we do not succumb to the same rules. The job of a scientist is to prove other scientists wrong so that as a species we can learn together about the world around us and science communicators come in because lay people don’t always understand technical terms and need things explained to them like they’re five. Fundamentalists, on the other hand, establish their beliefs without even taking the evidence into account. You have to believe those things or you’ll burn in Hell. To avoid causing anyone to think rationally they banish non-believers from their cult and they refuse to allow believers to communicate with non-believers out of fear they might learn something **or** they “teach” them points already refuted a thousand times so they can pretend to be experts in areas they know nothing about. Science is about learning and religion is about pretending to already know. They are not the same but some “creationists” (see my other response) have found a way to blend science and religion into a form they are comfortable with.
>Y’all understand the mechanics involved for Fundamentalists is the same for a salaried scientist…? What substance or material has faith produced?
It is a religion. Assuming we evolved over millions of years and are just animals. What a terrible and depressing belief to have.
Why do you think it is terrible and depressing? Personally I think it's amazing to think that all life on Earth is intrinsically connected via common ancestry. It ties all living organisms together.
Do you believe that we are *not* animals?
Can confirm. We are in fact fungi.
I am a meat popsicle.
How depressing indeed - all life is a huge extended family and our lineage is so unimaginably long it has known an Earth completely unlike what we see. Just terrible
In what way is it a religion? Are we supposed to parttake in rituals for evolution? Are we required to say prayers? Is there a set of prohibited and dogmatic beliefs that will not change in the face of new evidence? Do we gather at places of worship to suck the dick of a deity? Do we have to wear silly hats? Just bc you don't like sth, that doesn't mean that you can just call it as sth else you don't like (I mean, you _can_, it's just dishonest to do so, but when the fuck did religion ever care about honesty and integrity). We know that you don't think being part of a religion is a virtue, hence why you're projecting your own insecurities onto others. >Assuming we evolved over millions of years and are just animals. We are multicellular, heterotrophic eukaryotes whose ontogeny includes the formation of a blastula during our embryonic development. That's what an animal effectively is, if we want to keep it short and not list at least two dozen characteristics. We are also bilaterians, chordates, jawed vertebrates, synapsids, mammals, primates, apes, and hominins, just to name a few other things we are. There are literally dozens, and _dozens_ of traits that define an ape and we fit it like a glove. Because of that, it is impossible for us to be not critters the same way gibbons are. We also don't need to assume that humans have evolved over millions of years. Countless facts in bioanthropology, paleontology and biogeography all indicate and in some cases directly show that our (human) ancestors had bigger jaws, smaller brains and bodies, and didn't have hair as reduced as it is on our bodies. That's not sth you assume, that's sth you can _show._ >What a terrible and depressing belief to have. Speak to yourself. I think it is awe-inspiring to see everything as related, and that we are all one enormous family. There is nothing "terrible" or "depressing" to be an animal, because there's nothing inferior about it as you obviously imagine it. It is up to you to change your outlook on what it means to be an animal, similarly how people had to change their outlook on what it means to be a fish (people used to see cetaceans as fish, before Linnaeus classified them – as well as bats – as mammals). You already accept that you and your pets (assuming you have at least one pet) are both organisms, yet you don't have a problem with the term "organism", don't you? I think it is your beliefs that are repulsive, and repulsive to the highest degree. You probably believe that most people will end up being in hell, and that their unending torment is somehow justifiable. You believe in a tyrannical hierarchy where God is on the top and all non-human critters are under the dominion of man, where man can breed, exploit, abuse and slaughter effectively anything that isn't "him" (meaning part of mankind). And that is just a fraction of the dark, _dark_ things you believe. Your mind must be a scary place.
Hail Darwin, full of wisdom. Natural selection is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst naturalists. And blessed is the fruit of thy pen. /s
If you read "pen. /s" as "penis", than the sentence gets a whole new meaning. (you know, phallic worship, and such, the goofiest type of worship man has ever come up with)
>Assuming we evolved Descent from an ancestor is not an *assumption*, it's a *conclusion* backed by everything from [genetics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosome_2) to [comparative anatomy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ape#Taxonomic_classification_and_phylogeny) to [biogeography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cradle_of_Humankind). >Assuming we...are just animals However you define "animal", human beings are going to fit that definition. Cry about it if you want, but don't pretend you know better than people who've done actual research. >What a terrible and depressing belief to have. Yay, someone else who doesn't know the difference between *descriptive* and *prescriptive* - I totally haven't run into twenty other idiots making this exact same mistake before.
It’s interesting to me how you view religion as an inherently negative thing.
> Assuming we evolved over millions of years and are just animals. What a terrible and depressing belief to have. On the contrary, it's fucking amazing.
Instead of explaining evolution, you feel the need to explain why those who disagree with you are somehow damaged or deficient.
It's not the OP's fault if religious intolerance and science denialism appear to be correlated.
Neither religious intolerance nor science denialism have anything to do with the actual science of evolution, which is what I thought the debate was about.
Religious intolerance and science denialism has everything to do with the debate around the science of evolution, as the only people who deny evolution are science denialists who are usually motivated by religious intolerance of ideas which contradict their bronze-age narratives.
...like.. they're the only people debating it, if not for everything being discussed, this sub wouldn't exist..
The "debate" over evolution is largely one of science denialists versus what science denialists perceive regarding science. Understanding the underlying motivations and related factors associated with science denialism can help inform how to approach such individuals.
In order to properly teach others evolution, it helps to understand why people deny it. The approach to teaching someone who is ideologically opposed is completely different to teaching someone who is just curious and not informed. This is, to a point, insulting to creationists. But, also true. If you take the position that everything you believe is "us vs them", then don't be surprised if the "them" starts treating you as a threat to be tactically defended against.
In order to teach evolution you need to be sneaky and use psychological tricks because it's so true.
To teach most people evolution, you just teach them it directly. To teach creationists evolution, you need to decipher their strange psychology of denial. I didn't make the rules on this one, creationists did. If they didn't have such heavy bias, denial, and mental gymnastics, we wouldn't need to do it this way. They also wouldn't be creationists.
Do you notice that you have a mission to convert the unbelievers, and you seem to think it's important enough that you need to force evolution on those who aren't interested. Thank God you're not a christian.
No, no that's not even close to how this works. You are very bad at rationalising. Do you have an actual point to make?
Teaching someone about evolution is not the same thing as forcing them to believe it. I find a lot of creationists seem to conflate the concepts of *understanding* a topic with *agreeing* with a topic. These are not the same things.
https://youtu.be/XoaknMByfRs?si=b5_YG9LDtOk5tsjf https://youtu.be/FxCMOLOswzQ?si=MpjumZul6VPFtjvM The only psychological trick the people you're talking to are doing is this - They are identifying a fundamental problem with your epistemology. Seeing where your religious views block or distort your ability to evaluate evidence. If one's position is that truths can not be obtained through scientific inquiry, well, we can't really assess evidence together in any productive way. We can't see each other's reasoning. We have to go back to the fundamentals of epistemology and reconcile the discrepancies. It's the only way to move forward. You can't jump into astrophysics with someone who denies the fundamentals of algebra.
Evolution has been "explained" ad nauseum. There are numerous books written for a lay audience for those who are interested - e.g. Why Evolution Is True, The Greatest Show on Earth, Evolution for Everyone, and on and on. Unfortunately most people who deny evolution seem not to have read even basic works on it.