Do you believe in evolution ?
- Thread starter kaka4200
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Exactly
If you lived for 100000 years you would be able see 'macro' evolution
You are limiting yourself by your personal experience and inability to see it
There is no difference between the evolution of amoeba and us
We are after all based on the same base code
Look, I'm not getting into philosophy because it just muddies the waters. This thread is about Evolution and whether or not people accept it as true. All I'm trying to do is provide the evidence, and there is mountains of it, in order to educate the people who deny evolution because they don't understand how it works. One of the best ways to do this in my opinion, is to use one of the worlds leading evolutionary biologists as a means of conveying some of that evidence. Richard Dawkins is not a philosopher in any real sense, he is first and foremost a man of science. Philosophy won't get you anywhere when you try and study biology and it's origins and ask what mechanisms drive it. Only the scientific method can uncover these answers and these include molecular genetics, paleontology, radiometric dating and geology amongst others.
this to be honest...evolution is still happening
Well said.
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Just looking at the comments of that Richard Dawkins video, its scary how ignorant people still are.
Most of them comments I guess are from the U.S no doubt.
Most of them comments I guess are from the U.S no doubt.
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I feel fortunate to be brought up in a non religious environment
I often wonder what I would be like all things being equal but added religious brainwashing
I'd like to think I would still reject it but...
I'd be interested in a statistic into how many people with a strong religious upbringing turn atheist vs people who haven't and turn to religion
But the scientific method relies on assumptions that cannot be tested in order to work.
It is perfectly possible to accept evolution as an accurate approach to describe and predict our world without accepting that evolution is true to the point where it excludes all alternatives.
Dawkins' positions on religion, god etc and his published work in this area is exclusively philosophical in nature, not scientific. Science is a big part of the philosophy presented, but that doesn't make the two things interchangeable.
What assumptions are these? I'm not really clear on this.
Evolution is the currently accepted theory and if someone comes up with an evidenced alternative then I will accept. Creation is not an evidenced alternative.
No. You don't understand the scientific method. It does not rely on assumptions even if assumptions are made at the start of the process. It starts with observation and then an hypothesis is developed to try and explain that observation. Assumption is the wrong word.
The scientific method is the best way yet discovered for reaching the truth from lies and delusion. The simple version looks something like this:
• 1. Observe some aspect of the universe.
• 2. Invent a tentative description, called a hypothesis, that is consistent with what you have observed.
• 3. Use the hypothesis to make predictions.
• 4. Test those predictions by experiments or further observations and modify the hypothesis in the light of your results.
• 5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until there are no discrepancies between theory and experiment and/or observation.
Your theory will be subject to peer review by other scientists from around the world. Their aim is to find flaws in your theory and prove it wrong. Once a theory passes this test, it becomes widely accepted as the best possible explanation for the observed phenomena. This does not mean it is not subject to change however if new evidence arrives later.
When consistency is obtained the hypothesis becomes a theory and provides a coherent set of propositions which explain a class of phenomena. A theory is then a framework within which observations are explained and predictions are made.
For some examples:
Parsimony.
Time moves forward.
Accurately observable reality.
Consistent reality.
Repeatability
None of these things matter when you discuss predictive accuracy of a scientific model, because they are accepted to be true, despite being unprovable, within the scientific context.
The problem comes when people want to move science out of the predictive and into the truth. Once you so that, then it becomes a lot less clear because those assumptions that are fine for prediction cannot be stated as true.
at the moment most of those killed by weapons are done so in the name of one god or another..theres very few geo-political wars being fought now, most are fuelled by religious hatred.
My degree is in chemistry, I understand the scientific method just fine. What you fail to understand is that the scientific process itself cannot be indepently verified as being a true and valid definition of the universe.
The simple act of applying Ockham's razor to reduce entities beyond necessity, for example, is an act of faith that cannot be proven to represent how the universe actually works.
If you want to put faith in the scientific method to provide truth, as opposed to prediction, go right ahead, but don't pretend it is anything else but your own unprovable belief.
Unprovable but I can't see time moving forward not being provable ever being used as an argument against evolution. Nor the others.
If the scientific method can't provide truth then what can? Is all science just merely predictive and not necessarily true?
The scientific method is peerless as a predictive tool, but yes, it can't provide deep truths. It will tell you what will happen, and give possible (or even probable) explanation why. Indeed, for most mundane things, science can give you an answer as indistinguishable from the truth as makes no odds. But for things that can't be observed directly, or don't behave in a wholely predictable way, the scientific method is pretty poor at giving the truth.
None of this diminishes science in any way, it just diminishes some people who treat it like a Christian treats the bible a bit.
If you notice, though, I haven't argued against evolution. I accept it as accurate, I just neither believe or disbelieve in the truthfulness of it in a wider context.
So now we get down to the nitty gritty. You're trying to draw me back into philosophy by saying that science can not give absolute truth because it never conforms to logical absolutes. I'm not interested, sorry. Science is the best tool that humankind has ever developed for determining what is true about the natural universe. I don't care if Newton's Laws of mavity fly out the window at the Event Horizon of a Black Hole. It changes nothing. I don't care that in Quantum Physics we can never know the position of an electron until we measure it. It changes nothing. What I do care about is that while science may never be tautologically 100% true at all times, it's true enough to allow me to use a computer, drive a car, cure me when I'm sick, put people into space and onto the moon, make my mobile phone work, allow me to debate with strangers on the internet from around the world and the millions of other things science has achieved that we all benefit from. It doesn't need to perfect, It just needs to be accurate and it is.
Great, let's all put blindfolds on, cover our ears and sit quietly in corner because nothing is proveable and it's all pointless anyway, we can't rely on anything, it could all be an illusion and we would never know it.
Alternatively we can rely on the scienfic method because it simply is the only tool that offers consistent results when attempting to understand how the Universe actually works.
I am extremely grateful my geology degree included studying a little philosophy of science to nip this kind of positivist claptrap in the bud for most of my peers.
All observations are theory-laden.
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In fact most are being fought exactly on Geo-Political grounds for example the Israel-Gazans conflict has nothing to do with religion, The Ukrainian Situation has nothing to do with religion...The Syrian Civil War similarly. Even the ISIS movement is more about political ambition than religion, as evidenced by the Islamism justification used which by definition is a politically motivated one. The War in Afghanistan and the War in Northern Pakistan has little to do with religion but territory, the Islamist insurgency in Nigeria, again is about an Islamist agenda which is overtly political, not religious. The Somali Civil War again is about political supremacy.
Justifications for actions will always be rooted in the beliefs, be they political, moral or religious, of the region in which the conflict occurs..this doesn't necessarily imply that Religion is at fault or caused the conflict..any more that Science is the cause for creating the weapons that enable the killing in the first place.
As I have said many times, the tools we use to justify our actions are not the ultimate cause of our actions and like any tool, both science and religion (and other things such as politics, economics and morality) can be used to make both good and evil actions justifiable by the individual or groups modus operandi.
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