alwight
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Which have adapted and speciated from previous forms, there's no lie.
New film tackles evidence for evolution
- Thread starter Stripe
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Alate_One
Well-known member
You are unwise to call someone a liar for things they never said.
Evolution CAN explain many behaviors and genetic traits. But morality is a lot more than a "behavior" and humans are more than just a set of behaviors.
The fact that some people try to use evolution to explain things it should not be used for, does not suddenly make evolution the scientifically appropriate explanation for such things.
If you read any scientific literature that comments on society, you would see them bemoaning the attempts to explain everything by evolution.
Easily showed as a fanciful, unchecked and false assertion on your part:
http://www.summer.ceu.hu/morality-2014
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-humans-became-moral-beings-80976434/
http://www.imprint.co.uk/books/morality.html
Who's to say God made us perfect?
Perfection is a dangerous word- the second God deems us perfect, He ultimately deems us as being exactly what He wills, no matter what we do. Whether fall or not.
Because something perfect cannot be made imperfect if it is ordained as such by an omnipotent power.
That's a bit of the contradiction of many people's perception of the Beginning.
Therefore, what made mankind fall was not the lack of being explicitly Godly, it was, ironically, the knowledge of good and evil- which makes us a whole lot more like God really because such knowledge is an unveiling that subjects us to celestial beings.
Unlike animals, we are the only beings of Earth who know such knowledge.
I think that people are missing out on these big details here. We may have been like animals, but we didn't have vices or shame either. We weren't knowingly enacting sin, we were simply just taking the intended route of nature.
If it's so extreme to think God made us that way, then why did he make the ANIMALS that way?
Holding to evolution does require a revision of perception on the Beginning, but that doesn't mean to say it's false- it simply means that perhaps people through the ages have simply misinterpreted it out of ignorance to these findings.
musterion
Well-known member
You implied evolution cannot explain morality and need not make the attempt. Now you say it can. You are confused.
Alate_One
Well-known member
No . . .you're confused.
I said it doesn't explain morality. There's no reason for a scientific theory that explains the diversity of life to explain human morality.
There might be some people that think it should, but there's no reason for it to explain morality. Morality isn't part of the underpinnings of evolution, so showing it doesn't explain morality is pointless from any perspective.
Alate_One
Well-known member
You're twisting my words. I said bemoaning using evolution to explain everything. Some will try to explain the origin of morality. That doesn't mean they are using biological evolutionary theory to do it. And even if they are, it's quite a stretch.
Even Rationalwiki agrees on that point
Evolutionary Psychology is problematic at best.
| As Leda Cosmides and John Tooby write: "...in the rush to apply evolutionary insights to a science of human behavior, many researchers have made a conceptual 'wrong turn,' leaving a gap in the evolutionary approach that has limited its effectiveness. This wrong turn has consisted of attempting to apply evolutionary theory directly to the level of manifest behavior, rather than using it as a heuristic guide for the discovery of innate psychological mechanisms |
You, Stipe, who have been repeatedly reminded that abiogeneis, the origin of galaxies, and innumerable other things are not evolution, have no excuse whatever for pretending otherwise.
BTW, you might have missed my second suggestion for you to tell us what you think the most convincing argument in that video would be, so we can discuss it.
Or maybe you just realized you really don't want those claims given a close examination.
But I'll ask once more, just to be sure which it is.
Not really. However, you are backpedaling rapidly. :chuckle:
And you also said: "If you read any [evolutionary] literature that comments on society," it will deny evolution as the source for morality. However, when I showed you three links directly refuting your obviously flawed assertion, you ran for cover. :chuckle:
:darwinsm:
So they don't use evolution to explain morality, but they do "apply evolutionary theory ... as a heuristic guide for the discovery of innate psychological mechanisms."
Golly, but you're desperate on this one, huh?
Why would it offend you, if God chose to produce morality in us the way He chose to make our physical bodies?
Of course anyone with any sense will deny that evolution is a guide to morality. You might as well say that gravity should be a guide to morality. If you can't distinguish the difference between that, and what Alate One is telling you, then we've found the problem.
Meantime, how about stepping up and telling us what the most convincing argument in the video is, by your understanding? Then we can take a close look at it, and see how it stands up to inspection.
C'mon, Stipe. Let's see what he's got.
Of course anyone with any sense will deny that evolution is a guide to morality. You might as well say that gravity should be a guide to morality. If you can't distinguish the difference between that, and what Alate One is telling you, then we've found the problem.
Meantime, how about stepping up and telling us what the most convincing argument in the video is, by your understanding? Then we can take a close look at it, and see how it stands up to inspection.
C'mon, Stipe. Let's see what he's got.
Alate_One
Well-known member
In science, it's not bad to be wrong, you know, so long as you change when new data appears. (You know, the thing you're incapable of doing.) :chuckle:
No. You gave me three links of individuals that do attempt explain morality naturalistically. Whether they actually use evolution or not is an open question as is how widely accepted any of their work is.
And no I should not have implied "nobody" tries to apply evolutionary theory to morality. However, I have said previously that some people DO try to apply evolution to morality, but that it's a bad idea (also what rationalwiki says) and I don't agree with it.
Here's the real problem:
Your argument is not so much "evolution" can't explain morality is that you are saying "there is no explanation for morality apart from God".
You don't seem to understand that evolution does not equal all naturalistic explanations. An actual "naturalistic explanation" of morality would include things like culture as well as biology. But the problem with morality is it really can't be tested scientifically very well. It doesn't fossilize so it doesn't leave behind evidence, and it's often at least slightly different between individuals and extremely hard to measure. It's something that science is not really able to deal with.
We can study psychological mechanisms of the human brain and attempt to extrapolate, but that's probably the limit of what can be studied.
The funny thing is I bet you believe there is a naturalistic explanation for any other culture's morality other than the Judeo-Christian one. Yes? Or perhaps you say other cultures are "amoral"?
musterion
Well-known member
Not exactly. Morality is innate within man, put there by God in the form of the conscience, however depraved, distorted and shattered by sin it often is. It is why no one, in the end, will be without excuse before Him -- they'll be judged by whatever light they had.
So why are you so offended that He might have done it using nature?
6days
New member
Alate_One said:
Exactly! Evolution can explain greed and altruism. Evolution can explain specified complexity in our genome, as well as it explains junk.
In other words Evolutionism is so plastic that it isn't about science...its about explaining things to fit a belief system. *
Alate_One
Well-known member
Lesse they have:
Genetic Entropy
Origin of Life (Not Evolution)
Cosmology (Not Evolution)
The Fossil Record (Not even close to supporting YEC)
Geologic Column (Not Evolution)
Ethics/Morality - Their argument is rather different from Stripe's "If evolution is true there's no rational basis for morality". This is the "evolution will destroy the world" argument
Alate_One
Well-known member
Not exactly. But it can explain why babies are cute and why we have "pleasure centers" in our brains.
Complex behaviors as you describe are very difficult to explain.
I dunno about "specified complexity" but it explains genomes in general fairly well. Many genome regions tell the story of mutation and natural selection.
Nope. That'd be your belief about evolution, not what it is.
It can explain how these would be of survival value under different circumstances. And why we see greed in some animal populations and altruism in others. There's a good deal of math involved in this but we can talk about it, if you like.
"Specified complexity", in the creationist usage, is a religious term, and thus not accessible by science. However, there is much about the genome that is explicable by evolutionary theory.
Perhaps you mean "junk DNA", which scientists normally call "non-coding DNA." Some of it does have uses, which are explicable in evolutionary theory, but some of it is merely damaged genes not yet removed or reworked to another purpose. Would you like to learn about that?
Ah, you've confused "evolutionism" (the word creationists use for "the boogyman") with evolutionary theory. No wonder you hate it.
The fact that evolutionary theory requires no belief system is why Christians, Jews, atheists, Muslims, and all sorts of other people can understand it and use it in science.
6days
New member
Barbarian said:
Yup... like a fog that covers any landscape.
Barbarian said:
Specified complexity.... evolutionists call it "appearance of design..but not designed"
Barbarian said:
Yes, they also called it flotsam and other things. It was used as evidence of evolutiinism. They didnt understand the design and purpose. Now that we are beginning to understand the function of non coding DNA, *evolutiinists say the functionality is evidence of evolutionism.*
See? It isnt about science...its abour trying to explain it within the evolutionary belief system.
Barbarian said:
The word is a good way to differentiate between what is observable science and *psuedoscience beliefs. Evolutionism is the belief system that something like a fish can evolve into something like a fisherman.*
Evolution is the development of life. You're confusing the process with the things that affect it. For example, an asteroid strike on Earth is not evolution, but it greatly affected evolution by removing almost all animals weighing over a few kilograms, from the Earth.
If this puzzles you, then we've found another reason you can't get your head around the issue.
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