Jaghatai Khan
Banned
Ah man,when I chose that some mathematical and scientifical constants could change, he warned me that the path to God ends here.
Morons.
Morons.
Evolution or Creation?
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jeansberg
Sergeant Knight at Arms
Jaghatai Khan
Banned
I always disliked Abrahamic religions.
I'm actually an agnostic atheist, but apparently my answers didn't show this clearly enough.
I got 100% Satanism & 100% Athiest.Surely if you don't believe in God, then you don't believe in Satan
And that proof that God exists page is horribly flawed.
Ancientwanker
Master Knight
Christians have a history of circulating this nonsense. My gf used to be a fundamentalist and *still* gets the emails from old church friends. They circulate these internet myths about christianity being outlawed if you dont vote republican or about christians being physically threatened by atheists. Um, many of them believe these idiotic stories and circulate them to other like minded people. They live *completely* in a world of their own making in which they are constantly under threat of death for their beliefs. Right. 
Battal
Sergeant
Its not directly relevant to christianity actually; people give similar responses under similar conditions , in Turkey we have "our religion is under threat" ("Din elden gidiyor"
) debates nearly every single day in one name or another in different channels. Its either a left party or "outside forces"(or "the west") that poses these so-called threats. Sometimes they even accuse RTE (Prime minister) of killing Islam when ,in fact, he's known to be very fundementalist.Fear-mongering and propoganda are among the best defining concepts of our age unfortunately.
brasidus
Sergeant at Arms
Kissaki said:
Dude,
If you do not believe in absolute truth, that is an absolute belief.
That is logic.
here is my understanding of Neo-Darwinian evolutionistic theory:
Evolution of the type that adheres to the stance that all living things initially came from non-living chemicals that organized themselves into a self-reproducing organism. This was done by a natural, ongoing process. For this to work the first self-reproducing organism needs to have made copies of itself, and that some of those copies were not completely accurate (errors/ mutations). Any error that allowed an organism to leave more self-reproducing offspring would pass its genes on to further generations (differential reproduction) otherwise known as natural selection.
It is my understanding that the Neo-Darwinian evolutionist believes that the scource of new genetic information is from mutations sorted by natural selection.
Am I close to on-track with that?
On the other hand, creationists starting from the Bible believe that God created different organisms the reproduced “after their own kinds” (Gen. 1:11-12:21, 24-25). Each of these original kinds had a huge amount of genetic information. Enough, information in fact, to account for a wide variety of adaptation to a wide variety of environments.
All sexually reproducing organisms genetic information is contained in paired form. Each offspring gains half of its genetic data from each parent. Hence there are two genes at a given position, or loci coding for a particular trait. It is my understanding that an organism can be heterozygous at a particular locus, so that it carries different forms of this gene (alleles). For instance, one allele can code for blue eyes while the other for brown, or for type A blood while the other type B. These alleles can reinforce one another, or they can have on dominant, and one recessive allele.
Now I believe that humans have somewhere around 100,000 genes, both mother and fathers halves. Dr. Jonathan Sarfati points out it is the equivalent of one-thousand 500 page books, or as the NAS in its book “Teaching About Evolution and the nature of Science” puts it 3 billion base pairs. Avid evolutionist Francisco J. Ayala in “Scientific American” wrote an article entitled “The mechanisms of Evolution” that states humans today have “An average heterozygosity of 6.7 percent.”
SO,
For every thousand gene pairs coding for any trait, 67 of the pairs would have different alleles. I believe that would mean 6,700 heterozygous loci all told. Therefore, any single human can reproduce up to 2 to the 6700th power, or 10 to the 2017th (sorry ,cant figure out how to do proper notation here) heterzygous loci. An interesting side note here is that there are only 10 to the 80th known atoms in the whole universe (Dr. Sarfati “Refuting Evolution” pg 33). And so I see no problem with creationists asserting that the original created kinds could give rise to a myriad of varieties even to the point of saying that the original creatures would have had much more heterozygosity than their modern more specialized descendants.
Now, this leads to an important aspect of the Christian creationist stance.
Deterioration.
We hold that man was created “good” (Gen. 1:31) and that due to Adams rebellion against God, death and decay came into the world (Gen. 3:19, Rom. 8:20-22, 1 Cor. 15:21-22, 26). From the premise of perfection followed by decay it would seem rationale that mutations from copying errors, lost some of the original genetic material. Dr. Sarfati mentions that:
“Many evolutionists point to allegedly imperfect structures as “proof” of evolution, although this is really an argument against perfect design rather than for evolution. But many allegedly imperfect structures can be interpreted as deterioration of once-perfect structures, for example, eyes of blind creatures in caves. However this fails to explain how sight could have arisen in the first place.”
Creationists also believe that the environment was effected by this “Fall of man” and was far more harsh and varied afterwards. Hence creatures adapted to these environments through natural selection. Not Darwins natural selection mind you, but natural selection in the form held by Edward Blythe who thought of the concept 25 years before Darwins “Origin of Species”. Unlike Darwin, Blythe held that natural selection was a conservative process that removed defective organisms thus preserving the health and well-being of the population as a whole. And so these harsher environments had the effect of weeding out defective, or unnecessary genetic data. Darwins form is dependent upon a hypothetical information-gathering mutation, in order to be creative.
A simplistic example of this would be a hypothetical look at the original dog/wolf kind. It probably had the genetic data for a wide variety of hair lengths. The first ones probably had medium length fur. Below is an illustration of what I mean. Two initial canines each have a long hair gene, and a short hair gene (“L” and “S”)
LS-LS
|
SS LS LL-LL
|
LL LL LL LL LL LL
On row one we have medium fur animals interbreeding and capable of producing a variety of possible dominant gene combinations. Each offspring can get one of either gene from each parent.
Next , we see in row 2 that they offspring can have:
Short (SS)
Medium (LS)
Or long (LL )
Fur.
Now if they are in a rapidly cooling climate only those with long fur might survive to give rise to the next generation (line 3). So from then on all dogs will be of a new, long furred variety.
1) They are now adapted for their environment
2) They are now more specialized than their ancestors.
3) This has occurred through natural selection
4) There have been no new genes added
5) In fact genes have been lost from the population (the opposite of neo Darwinian evolution)
6) The population is now less adaptable for future environmental changes and so if the temperature were to become too hot they might not survive through it.
Furthermore, a human couple with only one child, where the mother had AB blood (had both A and B
alleles) and the father had O type blood (both alleles are O-and recessive). So the child would have either AO or BO alleles, so either the AO or BO allele must be missing from the childs genetic data, hence the child could not have the AB bloodgroup, but would have either the A or the B bloodgroup.
As I understand it a large population is less likely to lose established genes because there are many copies of the genes of both parents. However, in a small isolated community it is very possible for information to be lost due to random sampling, or genetic drift. Since any new mutant genes would start off as a minority it is quite likely that they would be eliminated by genetic drift even if beneficial. If a pregnant creature, or pair is isolated for instance washed upon a desert island or some such it may lack a number of genes from its forefathers. So when the creatures descendants fill the island they will be different from the old one, with LESS information. I believe this is the gist of the “Founder Effect”.
When genetic information is lost through mutations, natural selection, or genetic drift it can sometimes get to the degree that certain small populations cannot interbreed with its predecessors. Changes in song, or color might result in birds no longer interbreed. Hence a new “species” is formed.
As to antibiotic, and pesticide resistance.
If I may;
The book “Teaching about Evolution” on pages 16-17 puts forth that:
“The continual evolution of human pathogens has come to pose one of the most serious health problems facing human society. Many stains of bacteria have become resistant to antibiotics as natural selection has amplified resistant strains that arose through naturally occurring genetic variation.
Similar episodes of rapid evolution are occurring in many different organisms. Rats have developed resistance to the poison warfarin. Many hundreds of insect species and other agricultural pests have evolved resistance to the pesticides used to combat them-even chemical defenses genetically engineered into plants.”
What I fail to see is how this can be so dogmatically claimed to be “proof of evolution”?
I have seen no verifiable proof that any new kinds of genetic information are present in these organisms. Instead there seems to be much evidence that some bacteria already had the genes for resistance to the antibiotics. In fact Dr. Sarfati (I hate citing the same guy repeatedly, but I just read his book) points out that some bacteria obtained by thawing sources that were pre- man-made antibiotics have shown to be anti-biotic resistant. Hence, when antibiotics are applied, they kill those without resistance, and those with resistance grow more prominent. The same in the case for the rats.
Sarfati rather concisely brings up the cases for mutation in regard to bacteria as well:
“In other cases, antibiotic resistance is the result of a mutation, but in all known cases, this mutation has destroyed information. It may seem surprising that destruction of information can sometimes help. But one example is resistance to the antibiotic penicillin. Bacteria normally produce an enzyme, penicillanase, which destroys penicillin. The amount of penicillinase is controlled by a gene. There is normally enough produced to handle any penicillin encountered in the wild, but the bacterium is overwhelmed by the amount given to patients. A mutation disabling this controlling gene results in much more penicillinase being produced. This enables the bacterium to resist the antibiotic. But normally, this mutant would be less fit, as it wastes resources by producing unnecessary penicillinase.
Another example of acquired antibiotic resistance is the transfer of pieces of genetic material (called plasmids) between bacteria, even between those of different species. But this is still using pre-existing information, and doesn’t explain its origin.
An4Sh
Count
You scored as atheism.
You are... an atheist, though you probably already knew this. Also, you probably have several people praying daily for your soul. Instead of simply being "nonreligious," atheists strongly believe in the lack of existence of a higher being, or God.
atheism
100%
Satanism
88%
Buddhism
58%
Judaism
50%
Paganism
33%
agnosticism
17%
Islam
17%
Christianity
0%
Hinduism
0%
You are... an atheist, though you probably already knew this. Also, you probably have several people praying daily for your soul. Instead of simply being "nonreligious," atheists strongly believe in the lack of existence of a higher being, or God.
atheism
100%
Satanism
88%
Buddhism
58%
Judaism
50%
Paganism
33%
agnosticism
17%
Islam
17%
Christianity
0%
Hinduism
0%
Battal
Sergeant
There are two kinds of "truth" one is self-proving logical truths like "true is true" based solely on logical rules. And there are others which are based on other axioms. For example;
a)a person who steals is bad.
so if A steals something than "A is bad" is true based on a).
Now when someone says he doesn't believe in absolute truth he means he doesn't believe in absolute axioms. The idea behind can be explained with "the infinite chain", meaning that you can ask infinite "why?" questions to these axioms("why is stealing bad?") and you will get infinite answers and it will never stop unless you stop it with a "belief" that you just accept.And here's the cool part ;since you just accept it ,there's nothing that prevents someone else to accept another idea this way.And "his" truth would just be as valid as yours.
not believing in absolute truth doesn't mean not believing in truth at all.
No, believing in X is not the same as not believing in not X. If I don't believe in God, this is not the same as to say I believe God doesn't exist. In fact, that's what being agnostic is all about: an agnostic does not believe God exists, but nor does he believe God does NOT exist.brasidus said:
In any case it's a different argument, because it doesn't really have any relevance to my concept of truth. I don't believe in absolute truth, as I believe truth is different from one person to the next. My truth is not the same as your truth, and so there is no absolute truth. Truth should under no circumstances be confused with fact. To illustrate the difference, here's one of my favourite movie quotes:
"Archaeology is the search for FACT. Not the "truth". If it's truth you're looking for, Dr. Tyree's philosophy class is right down the hall."
- Indiana Jones
That test isn't completely bad. Got an atheist, but a very, very agnostic atheist, which is what I would classify myself. I don't know God doesn't exist, but in the absence of evidence that he does, I assume he/she/it doesn't.
leprechaun
Marquis
What a surprise.
You scored as Hinduism.
Your views are most similar to those of... Hinduism! Do some research on Hinduism and possibly consider becoming Hindu, if you aren't already.
Hinduism
79%
agnosticism
75%
Islam
58%
Paganism
58%
Christianity
50%
Buddhism
50%
Judaism
46%
atheism
38%
Satanism
38%
I'm not shocked - as I've said repeatedly, I love Hinduism as a religion. I am yet to be convinced about God's existence or nonexistence, but if it turns out he/she/it is real, I'm real keen on the sound of Aum.
You scored as Hinduism.
Your views are most similar to those of... Hinduism! Do some research on Hinduism and possibly consider becoming Hindu, if you aren't already.
Hinduism
79%
agnosticism
75%
Islam
58%
Paganism
58%
Christianity
50%
Buddhism
50%
Judaism
46%
atheism
38%
Satanism
38%
I'm not shocked - as I've said repeatedly, I love Hinduism as a religion. I am yet to be convinced about God's existence or nonexistence, but if it turns out he/she/it is real, I'm real keen on the sound of Aum.
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