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Missing Link Fossil Discovered
choongiri writes "The Guardian is reporting the discovery of a missing link of evolution. From the article: "Scientists have made one of the most important fossil finds in history: a missing link between fish and land animals, showing how creatures first walked out of the water and on to dry land more than 375m years ago.""
First, it's entirely unreasonable to entertain questions and concerns from unscientific proponents of so-called Intelligent Design. The debate ought not revolve around disproving Intelligent Design. Giving audience to those idiots is like teaching retarded children calculus: perhaps a noble endeavor, but ultimately pointless and frustrating.
Second, from the description, it sounds like gars and other crocodile-like fish. The pathway from gills to lungs needs to be fleshed out more, but from the description, this is a very interesting fish.
Intelligent Design is wrong for so many reasons, why do so many comment on it while not understanding it?
It's like saying evolution isn't true because my dad isn't a monkey.
And we're supposed to be the intellectuals...
Intelligent Design
The question is certainly valid. Just because we lack an answer doesn't mean that we automatically assume OMFG it was GOD and JESUS!
400 years ago we couldn't explain lightening either. That doesn't make lightening mystical either. Hell, we couldn't explain germ theory or even a basic rough approximation of gravity. The lack of an explanation RIGHT NOW isn't proof of anything other then that we don't know the answer yet.
That said, if you are dying for a scientific answer, string theory has thrown out some tantalizing theories involving other exotic realities crashing together. I can't do much justice explaining them. The Elegant Universe offers up some musings from theoretical physics much better then I can.
In my opinion, building up a "God of Holes" is a rather sad and pathetic way to conduct religion. Religion should be something that you take on faith that describes how you should live in this world and prepare for the next. Religion shouldn't be something that you use to plug every and any gap in your preexisting knowledge. As history has shown very succinctly, a "God of Holes" tends to find itself quickly getting amputated by science on a regular basis.
If nothing else, your "God of Holes" is likely insulting to God himself. You have a brain, use it. Maybe God did create the universe, or maybe a god created something more ancient and fundamental that goes back farther then even the big bang. If God set in forth a motion of events to lead to this precise outcome, instead of trying to crudely plug the gaps in YOUR understanding of His universe by simply declaring it mysticism, try and understand how he built the universe.
More then one theoretical physicist has taken a look at how our universe has been put together and found it so elegant and beautiful that it has left them with a belief that at the very end there exists a higher power. That sure as shit doesn't mean that every time they run into a question they can't instantly answer they throw their hands up and declare that God did it. Instead, they press forward and trying and truly understand God's universe and its deepest inner working.
Ironically enough, if God did create the universe, a theoretical physicist is probably much closer to understanding the mind of God then your average bible thumping nut job whose eyes bleed every time evolution is mentioned. While the bible thumping nut job runs around like an idiot declaring the world a couple thousand years old and turning their mind off completely to understanding the universe, a physicist is carefully studying the most basic rules and laws of the universe. In a sense, the physicist is studying God's work and perhaps gaining some insight into the mind of God.