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The Watchmaker

T'ai Chi said:
'Well what natural phenomena produced X?'

(where X is the oldest natural phenomena they have mentioned so far)
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The answer? No one knows....not mindblowing but at least it is accurate.

Invoking God explains absolutely nothing. Instead, it inflates the problem 1,000,000 fold.
 
KingMerv00 said:
Evolution doesn't have a pinnacle or a sideshow.
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Yeah, whatever... my point was that the model in which organisms evolve into greater complexity is demonstrably wrong. Obviously, evolution doesn't have a literal sideshow or pinnacle. But we can look at the size distribution on existing species, and we'll see that it is drastically slanted to the left, with the median very close to the smaller sizes.

But then, if I was to notice that we are an infimous branch in the tree of life, some nitpick would probably remark that life is not a tree ;).
 
Megalodon said:
Yeah, whatever... my point was that the model in which organisms evolve into greater complexity is demonstrably wrong. Obviously, evolution doesn't have a literal sideshow or pinnacle. But we can look at the size distribution on existing species, and we'll see that it is drastically slanted to the left, with the median very close to the smaller sizes.

But then, if I was to notice that we are an infimous branch in the tree of life, some nitpick would probably remark that life is not a tree ;).
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Well we are on the nitpickiest twig. That's got to be worth something.
 
Here it is, my 1000th post, and I will use it showing the response I received from my brother with only the rule 8 thing editted.

After reading all the comments it seams that most of the ones that replied are a bunch of altheas a** holes and you can tell them I said so. Just goes to show why the world is so f###ed up.Next they will be siding with that fag Elton John to ban all religion and the c@ck suckers out in California who banned the pledge of allegiance from their school . It makes me sick knowing that are guys are fighting to protect the rights of a** holes like them .There are no altheas in fox holes Gen. Jack Pershing
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Yes, he and I are related. Must be something to the nature vs. nurture thing I guess. :D
 
Ossai said:
Meadmaker
Damn, but you’re ignorant, oh wait, you’re a creationist so that goes without saying.

We do have experimental evidence. In fact we’ve had experimental evidence since at least the 1960s.

Ossai
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You are wrong on so many different levels.

The last book I read on the subject of biogenesis was "Spark of Life", recommended on these forums I might add. Good book. Recommended for anyone with interest on the subject. It is of recent vintage, and it gives a pretty good overview of what we know on the subject as of its writing.

And what do we know? Precious little.

The argument from ignorance works because we really are ignorant. Fallacy or no fallacy, until you can show how chemicals dumped into a vat end up as cells, you won't persuade the faithful. At least, not that way.

By the way, if anyone has even more recent vintage stuff that advances the state of the art on the subject, I would love to hear it.

Grayman's brother may be wrong about evolution, but he's right about the people, and in the end that will win more arguments than anything else.
 
The question of "Who made the first cell?" is not a hard one to answer. The answer is simply that cells themselves evolved. How? We don't know. But one has merely to consider that at one point, proteins began replicating. If they were able to do so imperfectly, it's turtles all the way up from there.

Of course, to grayman's brother, I'm just another altheas a** whole. I wish I could be filled with Christian love, like grayman's brother.
 
grayman said:
Here it is, my 1000th post, and I will use it showing the response I received from my brother with only the rule 8 thing editted.



Yes, he and I are related. Must be something to the nature vs. nurture thing I guess. :D
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Oddly enough, this is one altheas a**hole who will fight to protect anyone's rights. Even the rights of your brother.:D
 
T'ai Chi said:
Apparently not just our current understanding of physics, but the actual laws themselves. Remember? According to the Big Bang, nothing was around. Nothing, not even the laws of physics. Then some magic happened, then everything in the universe popped into existence.
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BEEP!

Wrong.

Right after Big Bang, there were no galaxies, stars, not even atoms.

Educate yourself.
 
Meadmaker said:
Grayman's brother may be wrong about evolution, but he's right about the people, and in the end that will win more arguments than anything else.
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Yes, that points out the challenge we have in education.
I read a book about Human evolution and immediately chucked my creationism in a dumpster. But most people aren't like that. There are more reasons they believe religious and philosophical things than Science, reason, evidence, sound argument. The way they compose their own persons, the way they relate to others, their core values, and so on, are intertwined with their beliefs about origins. That's no surprise. Origin myths have always being crucial to the inner life of cultures. The majority of people will be persuaded by what gives them a ground to affirm their own existence and their significance as a person. The Creationists play that card again and again and win most games. So the Science Educator must address more than just intellectual arguments pro and con.

One approach is to point out that since one isn't a predeisigned unit that is defective unless it performs according to the maker's intent, we are free to be ourselves and affirm ourselves as who we are. That may not have meaning for most who are looking for the security of being an acceptable thing, but it begins addressing the heart issues that can't be ignored.
 
grayman said:
I need help! My brother sent me this, and I need suggestions on something to counter it.
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That old chestnut just never gets retired, does it? Creationists would argue it's because it's so good; I'd say it's because they still haven't managed to come up with anything better.

Okay, so you're walking on Hampstead Heath, you come across a watch. It's obviously out of place in its environment, so instead of assuming that it just grew there naturally, you assume it was made by some watchmaker elsewhere. So far so good.

A few steps further, you come across a large rock. Do you assume the rock was made by the watchmaker as well? Or the tree next to it? Or the grass, or the birds, the occasional badger or even Hampstead Heath itself? Well, no, you don't. The reason you assumed the watch came from elsewhere was because it is so obviously out of place in that environment. The rock, the tree, the grass, the birds and the badger do not strike you as being out of place, therefore you not only don't assume they were made by the same watchmaker, you actually assume, even without giving it conscious thought, that they were not.

So here's the problem with "Paley's" argument: while, in the way Paley and others framed the analogy, the watch is remarkable because it's obviously out of place in its environment (an environment teeming with objects which are implicitly acknowledged not to have been designed, evidently), we cannot say the same about the universe (or "all of Creation," if you're inclined to use that term). The universe ("Creation") encompasses everything in existence, so unlike the watch, we have nothing to compare it with.
 
Euromutt said:
So here's the problem with "Paley's" argument: while, in the way Paley and others framed the analogy, the watch is remarkable because it's obviously out of place in its environment (an environment teeming with objects which are implicitly acknowledged not to have been designed, evidently), we cannot say the same about the universe (or "all of Creation," if you're inclined to use that term). The universe ("Creation") encompasses everything in existence, so unlike the watch, we have nothing to compare it with.
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I agree with your conclusion but not your reasoning. What if you found the watch in a shop containing hundreds of timepieces? Would it seem "natural" then?
 
KingMerv00 said:
I agree with your conclusion but not your reasoning. What if you found the watch in a shop containing hundreds of timepieces? Would it seem "natural" then?
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Well, first off I'd point out that isn't actually the way the "Paley's argument" is commonly presented. Secondly, your revised example only points out a second flaw (or maybe it's just an extension of the first) in the basic assertion, namely that, without explicitly acknowledging this, it makes the leap from asking us to assume that a watchmaker made the hundreds of watches in the shop (not an unreasonable claim on the face of it), to asking us to assume that the watchmaker therefore also built the shop, the street outside, the city the street is in, etc. etc. Now note that even if I restrict myself to artificial things (buildings, streets, etc.), all of which were (one may reasonably assume) made by someone, there's no reason to assume that that someone was this one watchmaker. Similarly, even if there were something to Intelligent Design, there is zero reason to assume that we're dealing with a single Designer, as opposed to multiple. As a consequence, the argument from design fails to support the notion of a Prime Mover.

And that's leaving aside the parts of the world outside the watchmaker's shop for which we have no evidence that they are artificial.
 
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