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Putting Anti-Evolution Candidates On the Spot
hmccabe writes "YouTube is currently taking submissions for their next debate, in which the Republican candidates will answer questions. This seems like a good opportunity to challenge those candidates who say they do not believe in evolution. But since I am not an expert in the subject, I would be interested in how you all feel the question should be presented. For my own part, I think it is important to present the overwhelming body of evidence on the subject as incontrovertible fact, much the same way DNA evidence is presented during a criminal trial, and ask why the candidate feels they can pick and choose what facts they believe in. Moreover, I am wary of coming across like Christopher Hitchins, so vitriolic the candidate will defend themselves rather than answer the question. Perhaps the most important aspect of posing the question is to inform the viewers who watch the debate that this is really not a matter of opinion, but of science. So my question is: 'Hey geneticists, have you considered addressing evolution in the YouTube debates? Can you do it in 30 seconds?'"
Which candidate's are Anti-Evolution exactly?
Because (believe it or not) there are people who don't know the difference between "the universe", "the Galaxy", and "the Solar System", and there are fundies that actively exploit that ignorance.
It's easy to screen out the radical fundamentalists. They answer "6000 years" and are at least honest about their base.
But the dangerous ones are the ones who "teach the controversy", because "Them crazy scientists can't seem to agree on anything! Some of 'em say everything's 14 billion years old, and some of 'em the world's just 4.6! They can't both be right!"
Vote only for a politician who is smarter than a fifth-grader; that is, one who knows that "The Universe", is approximately 14 billion years old (I'll take any number between 10B and 15B) is much bigger and older than "The Solar System", which is 4.6 billion years old (hell, I'll take anything between 5 and 4.5).
Mr. Candidate, sir, given the overwhelming body of evidence from hundreds of different scientific fields ranging from archeology to physics to zoology, can you explain to us how you can seriously believe that the world was created 2,000 years after the Babylonians invented beer?
A-Bomb
Why is the government on the *federal* level funding science? At most you could argue that it could find science that is directly impacts military standards and equipment for the Navy.
Primate Testing in the United States involved the "use" of 60,000 animals in 2004. Such testing is used to help ensure the safety of new drugs and vaccines. If you don't believe evolution is scientifically valid, how can one justify this? Why wouldn't we use flatworms? The FDA, in fact, requires primate testing for many new medical treatments. Should the FDA remove this requirement?
Seriously, this matters much, much more than what teenagers do or don't learn in hi skool biology class. If the Creationist and ID people are right, then we can save quite a bit of money and quite possibly quite a few human lives by forgoing such testing. Plus thousands of furry animals.
he believes in a bible that was read out of a hat. nothing more to say.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
- Global warming vs climate change
- The adequacy of our current lines of embryonic stem cells
- The effectiveness (or lack thereof) of abstinence only sex education
- Mercury emissions
- Baby Einstein
- Reproductive health issues
- the list goes on but these are off the top of my head...
My point is that Bush has a clear history of distorting science (the theory of evolution included) to fit his ideological views. That is the real problem.Creationism is for neither idiots nor the insane. A lot of Creationists/ID believers are actually fairly intelligent and level headed. Instead, they are delusional. That's a whole other ball of wax compared to stupid or insane. Of course, being stupid or insane tends to favor the delusion a bit better...
Delusional people can be much more dangerous because they do have intelligence and behave normally, and are able to apply their delusion to direct and meaningful actions.
And no, I don't think we should elect a delusional man as our leader, even though we have a history of doing so.
=Smidge=
...what their opinions are on: the atomic theory of matter, special relativity, evolution, and the round-earth theory.
There is no ban on stem cell research. There is a moratorium on using Federal funds for the creation of new lines of embryonic stem cells.
There was no ban on research into the molecule of inheritance but all the useful research was government funded. So if we had a moratorium on research on which molecule was the heritable factor we probably would not have gotten the entire field of genetics and all of it's useful axillary benifits we currently have for it.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Whether or not it is science and whether or not it can be falsified has potentially little to do with whether or not it's right. I support the scientific process, but if the scientific process is going to take precedence over even considering what may be right, then science is becoming a religion and that's not good. Whether or not I.D. is science, I think it makes sense to at least mention the possibility in the same class that discusses evolution. Whether it's science or not and whether you like it or not, the topics are related and it makes sense that they be presented together.
No-one can know with absolute conclusive certainty whether or not God exists. Those that believe in God either believe in him on faith, or look at the world and universe around them and make a subjective determination that it's unreasonable to believe it's random chance. Those that don't believe in God look at the same world and universe and make the subjective determination there's nothing amazing about it that requires a God; and in that case, even though that doesn't exclude the possibility of a God, they make a decision essentially also based on faith that God doesn't exist. In the end, there's no way to prove that God does or doesn't exist.
However, people do a disservice to society when they mock a belief system simply because they believe differently. In the end, whether or not we believe in God is simply based on our faith in our own belief system. If you don't believe in God, it's not because science has demonstrated to you that God doesn't exist. You don't believe in God based on faith just as those that believe in God do so also on faith.
It's a lot broader than that. If you have a lab that's partially funded by the federal government (obviously that includes all labs at all public universities) then you are not allowed to do any stem cell research there even if the funding for the lab time and materials does not come from the federal government. That's because they would be using some lab tools that were purchased for other purposes with federal funding.
In order to do stem cell research, the researchers can't be paid in any way by the federal government. The lab they use cannot have any equipment in it that was paid for by the federal government. The rent for the building cannot have been paid for by the federal government. A lab either needs to give up all federal money or it needs to set up an entirely separate lab with all new equipment.
If you have a lab with $100,000 of private equipment in it and you want to buy a single microscope with federal funds then that lab cannot be used to research stem cells.
That puts a severe crimp on stem cell research which goes far beyond it being a mere question of funding the research.
Cow Cube
Then ask the politician that question: "Do you believe the world is only 6000 years old?" Ask THAT question. But you can have doubts about evolution and not be a religious nutcase.
Oh, and very few people--even Christians--believe he world is 6000 years old so why do you even bother erecting that strawman?
Creation is recorded (supposedly revealed to man by God).
Evolution of mankind is inferred from evidence that we have uncovered.
The former is scientifically unfalsifiable and cannot be logically refuted by any means except to just dismiss it. There is no point in trying to put anti-creationists "on the spot" because their viewpoint isn't amenable to scientific scrutiny in the first place, and of course any viewpoint that cannot be scientifically scrutinized must invariably be mistaken, right?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Too bad about Ron Paul... His view of the role of government (at least domestically) is so tremendously better than anybody else's, that it seems a shame to write him off for one issue. But national defense is a big issue.
If he truly is "the most honest man in Washington" (and I think he may well be), then it's possible after being sworn in, and after looking at all the data and talking with the military, he could decide that it _is_, in fact, worth fighting Islamic terrorism.
But can I support him? I don't know...
You're not really. A theory is a theory, not a fact. As you say, the theory of evolution has been tested as well as we're capable of testing it and has come through nicely. Other theories, like gravity, relativity or the standard model have been tested (and confirmed) to excruciating precision. That DOESN'T make them facts though. The theory of evolution itself is under very active development.
It's a very non-scientific thing to do to take your explanation for something, no matter how likely it is that that explanation is correct, and call it a fact. That's what pseudo-science and religion do.
Also, theories do not mature into "scientific laws." "Scientific law" is a kind of careless term for certain famous mathematical relationships that are parts of various theories. After all, Newton's "laws" of motion aren't really correct -- they're very good approximations in most circumstances we're familiar with, but they have been superseded by relativity.
It is good to note that even if we could create our own pocket universes which were left to chance but measured for complexity after that fact that we could not prove that intelligent design is necessary. If complex life proved extremely statistically unlikely to arise on its own, that would only prove we were an anomaly and not the nature of the anomaly. Even if we created life intelligently, that would only prove it's possible, and not that we arrived via the same route.
;-) . You don't have to believe in it. You don't have to believe it was unguided if you do believe in it. You do have to learn it and you do have to learn to apply it and reason about it. No matter what you believe, science is based on evidence, and despite the beliefs, hopes, and dreams of many people, evolutionary theory is a good model for understanding things. Even though Newtonian physics have been overtaken by Einstein, and Einstein's physics might be overtaken by QM or string theory, Newtonian physics is still a good framework for lots of things. That's why people need to learn about evolution: for all the doubts one might personally have about it, there's lots of evidence for it and it explains lots of things. Those students who don't want to believe in evolution emotionally are free to feel that way, but intellectually the class will act based on evidence and not emotion. The test is the same no matter how you feel about it.
We likewise cannot disprove that we were created by an intelligent creator. Even if we found it was easy in our pocket universes for complex life to thrive, that would not be proof that our specific origins were not special.
We could only offer absence of proof, and never proof of absence. This puts the definition of "fact" quite contrary to anything to do with intelligent design, unless we all one day in some afterlife meet the creator and are shown how we were created. We can neither prove nor disprove intelligent design, so it is outside the scope of science.
I rather like what my high-school biology teacher said about evolution. This is not verbatim by any means, as it was erm... a while ago that I was in high school
In case anyone's wondering, the teacher was Southern Baptist and didn't believe in evolution as truth about the past at all. She did, however, believe what she said about it being necessary to understand it because scientific progress was being made based on it. I never asked whether she thought intelligent design should be taught in public schools, but another student tells me her opinion is that it should be mentioned in passing that some people believe in it if a student asks, and the class should get right back to evolution.
ID isn't even a hypothesis. Since it is essential to the idea that there be a supernatural force which is guiding things, it shouldn't even be considered a hypothesis.
That is not correct. ID as stated does NOT require a supernatural being. In fact, Monsanto is doing mild ID (lower case?) as we speak. And it may be possible to look for artifacts of manufacture in life-forms, such as math, messages, or photos encoded in DNA somewhat similar to what SETI does or would do with sky signals. Most supporters of ID don't look at it this way, but you must be careful about making such absolute statements. Being sloppy with terms and claims can be used against evolutionists in bias cases.
Table-ized A.I.
Just because we are created beings does not mean that "God" must be a created being. Just because I can make a car, does not mean I have wheels. Think about it. We only have this universe as reference. An entity that made the system and defined its properties must not itself have properties of the designed system.
Can we please stop saying that a rational person can somehow not believe in evolution?
The Fact that Evolution occurs is not the same thing as Darwin's Theory of Evolution.
An intelligent, rational person may well not agree with Darwin, but anyone who runs around saying that there is no evolution, that it's all just a theory, is really too unintelligent to take seriously.
So, obviously, we want to weed out those candidates for whom science is just another kind of voodoo.
Whether you believe in God, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or Absolutely Nothing, does anybody really want someone that backward in public office?
Rather than ask whether they believe in evolution, why not ask if they believe in the Scientific method? Maybe the right question to ask the candidates is something like:
We can all see how successful the methods of Science have been at discarding wrong ideas about Nature that were widely believed for thousands of years, and we depend upon the ability of scientists to discover and correct mistakes in their ideas in order to build our wondrous technologies. The same scientific methods that have led us to computers and airplanes have brought us modern medicine and biology. As a biological researcher, the framework of Darwinian Evolution is as essential to my work as a microscope or a centrifuge. Do you believe that I should teach anything in my Biology classes that hasn't survived the rigorous testing of the scientific method?
It's not quite that clearcut--in fact, very few issues of real controversy are, unless you're biased to the point of blindness.
To start with, there are many notions of Godhood. One notion is that of God as the Prime Mover, i.e. the force that maintains the universe as it is. Some believe that natural laws (i.e. the laws of physics, except the laws of physics as we understand them are probably not exactly the same as the laws of physics As They Truly Are) function as a Prime Mover, and with some justification, identify them with God. In other words, God is the aggregate of all the mathematical and physical laws that keep the universe functioning.
There are other notions, but many of them tend to acknowledge God as a fictional character and simply address him in those terms. But even if you want to take the most religious and personal notions of God, well, in that case God is a bit more like the female orgasm than he is like Captain Picard--many people claim to have experienced it, many people think the others are either lying or crazy, and it's largely an open question as to who to believe. The main difference is that the female orgasm is a bit more amenable to scientific experimentation (especially if the female in question has a fetish for being experimented on!), of course, which is why we're certain about that but not so much about God.
I don't particularly think God exists in any significantly religious way, and I think it trivializes the idea of God somewhat to equate it to the laws of physics, but the minute you start acting like it's impossible for reasonable people to disagree with you, you're being a fundamentalist.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
It is testable in several ways.
First, it predicts what things we will discover in future digs. One of the complaints early on in the evolution/creationism debate was a lack of transitional fossils. These fossils hadn't been discovered yet. Evolution predicted that we would find them, and we did. Creationists then pointed out that there were new transitional fossils that hadn't been discovered (any time you fill a gap between one point and another, you're creating two new, smaller gaps). Evolution predicted that we would find those, and we did. Those were testable predictions. You're probably going to say it didn't predict anything because the fossils were already buried, waiting to be discovered. That same argument could be made for electrons before they were discovered. What it predicted was the result of future experiments (digs).
Secondly, and far less importantly, it predicts a useful technique — one that I use on a regular basis in computer science. Specifically, it led to evolutionary algorithms (of which genetic algorithms are one type).
If your point is that evolution is no more exact than F=ma, then I'll concede that point. I believe in evolution only to the same extent that I believe in quantum mechanics. It's an imperfect theory, but the best we've got.I believe in a lot of things, and science is definitely one of them. I believe in the scientific method as sure as I believe in myself.
Global warming is definitely based on several other theories, if that's what you're after. By your reckoning, it sounds like thermodynamics isn't a proper theory since it's based on statistical mechanics. The reason that global warming and thermodynamics are theories is that they make predictions, and these predictions have been verified.Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
If it is 100% fact that God doesn't exist, prove it.
That's what always comes up. Let me turn it this way: I believe that there is an invisible and undetectable Flying Spaghetti Monster, and it created the entire universe after drinking an awful lot.
I hope you agree, if you do not: prove that I am wrong!
Ok, think about this. Without God, nothing matters. It doesn't matter if you are terminally ill, or a terrorist. You are going to die, and that is the end of it. Life, then, is utterly meaningless. Nothing you do will make a difference. When you die, you wont even remember that you were here, and in a short time, no one else will remember you either. Life has no meaning, it never did, it doesn't now, and it never will. It is just time and death. Thats all. That's tough. Get used to it.
Yes, get used to it. When you die, it's all over for you. Your sentence should be reversed though: "With a god, nothing matters. It doesn't matter if you are terminally ill, or a terrorist."
It should be reversed because you believe you get access to some heaven, so it really does not matter when you die. After all, it won't be over, would it? There's eternity and the paradise awaiting you, isn't it? Suicide-Bombing would not make much sense if they didn't believe there's something great afterwards, would it? But without a god, it's over when you die. So it indeed does matter if you die, because you can't do anything after you die. Better stay alive if you're not ready to die.
And: You have the chance to be remembered. Maybe your grandson will tell his grandson once how cheerful, how sincere you once were, and how you impressed him. Maybe your name will once stand side-by-side of names like "Leonardo Da Vinci" or "Albert Einstein". You have the chance to make life on earth a bit better, and that's meaning enough for me to live. If you think that life has no meaning, you're a poor man.
this sig is useless
Creationists often try to lead you off track talking about the origins of life or even the universe. This immediately cuts out all that irrelevant nonsense and goes straight for the neck - if we didn't descend from apes, then why on earth could evolution, based on the premise that we did, make this prediction? There are more airtight pieces of evidence, like ERV patterns and the Vitamin C gene, but none so simple - two chimp chromosomes match the gene sequence, the human one has a second, broken structure that normal chromosomes have just one of, and it has bits of DNA in the middle that are normally at the end. Everything matches position with the two chimp chromosomes. Brilliant.
im in ur
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
What are you really asking? Do you want to frame the questions to control the answer or be fair? I haven't set foot in a church for over 20 years and I this whole debate always leaves me scratching my head. I just don't see the relevance, but then 30 years ago I thought typing class was a waste of my time! How much of this discussion is really about debunking Christianity? I can remember being in a Biology class in college where that was the way evolution was presented. That's philosophy not science. Ironically, I think you weaken your position by presenting evolution as incontrovertible facts. They aren't facts and never will be without the benefit of a "wayback" machine. It is a theory. If you try to wave a magic wand to make them facts, aren't you creating a hook for someone to attack the question rather than answer it? This discussion also makes me think that people should be careful what they ask for. If evolution becomes a fact, I can see this whole discussion becoming twisted. Won't one liberal argument will be used against another?
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Ok, think about this. Without God, nothing matters. It doesn't matter if you are terminally ill, or a terrorist. You are going to die, and that is the end of it. Life, then, is utterly meaningless. Nothing you do will make a difference. When you die, you wont even remember that you were here, and in a short time, no one else will remember you either. Life has no meaning, it never did, it doesn't now, and it never will. It is just time and death. Thats all. That's tough. Get used to it. It's called Absurd Nihilism, and it provides no hope. It make no promises of magical rewards that no one can ever see before they get them in secret, it makes no promises of cruel retribution for those who are bad.
It's just the world the way it is. No one to provide meaning for you, no all powerful father figure to tell you what to do, to tell you that it will all be fine in the end. You have what you have and you go with it. You want meaning? You make your own.
Some of us are strong enough to face life for what it is, others need to believe in fairy tales to dull the screaming horror in the back of their mind.
P.S. I had a look at the pile of circular logic you linked to, I found this bit particularly hilarious: "In fact, science began to flourish only when the biblical view of creation took root in Europe" lol! Tell it to Galileo and Aristotle! You do realize that this is representative of the entire website? Dishonesty, lies, half truths, misdirections, and illogical, unshakable belief.
You can't take the sky from me...
There really isn't any need to go into esoteric high energy physics to make parent's point. If you drive a car, or ride a bicycle, just contemplating one of the wheels for a moment is sufficient.
I'm looking at my bicycle. I can measure the distance from the center of the front axle to where the tyre touches the pavement very closely, say to the nearest 0.1 mm. I can feed this number into the cyclocomputer. And I can then always know how far and how fast I've gone.
Except that isn't true.
It would be true if wheels were perfect squares, but no, we have to use round wheels in this reality to make a working bicycle. So we have to include Pi between our measures and our calculated results. So I can never know the actual circumference of the wheel: within the level of significance I have chosen, I know that Pi introduces more than 0.05 mm of circumference than what I can use in calculations (2*Pi=6.28318, which I can use, but I lose the following 5307... digits since, although they definitely exist and therefore must have an effect, they are under the level of significance that I can use). So I know I will have traveled a little further and a little faster than the cyclometer will calculate, but I have no way of knowing how much further or how much faster.
This is irrational, but it is also real. Ask any mathematician: Pi is a real, irrational number. Those terms weren't chosen arbitrarily because they make for good sound bites: they were chosen because they are perfectly descriptive of sets of things that Pi belongs to. There is a pretty large group of important things that are both very much real, and very much irrational. Pi is very much not the only member of this group.
When contemplating truths, realities, Gods and physics, it is important to keep in mind that large chunks of our technology, and also an indeterminate part of our core reasoning processes, use postulates that are irrational, very much real, and not subject to replacement. This is a limitation of the way we are built: we have no other way of perceiving and interacting with the universe. Because of these blind spots, there is no conceivable way that we can prove that there are no Gods. All atheist arguments are based on postulates whose falsehood can be demonstrated, or ignore inconvenient aspects of parts of reality that we have thoroughly explored (like Pi). That last sentence is probably saying the same thing in both its clauses, but the repetition doesn't hurt the argument and just maybe will help in getting the idea through some of the thicker skulls among us.
Why don't you quote Ron Paul's stance on evolution?
Also please quote where Ron Paul thinks that "The Constitution is an eternal suicide pact [or] that the Bible is the literal truth at every turn of the page"
Also, please show where Ron Paul is a "flip-flopper"
Are you also aware that Fred Thompson was a major lobbyist in Washington and is also a globalist?
Libertas in infinitum
You missed my point, the point is that the fossil records do not support billions of years and millions of generations. We find no (or very few) fossils that support a slow transision from species to species. So what is being taught in our Jr. High Schools in our state is that "leaps" occurred.
Don't speculate that just because I think evolution theory is weak that I believe in Creationism.
People sometimes ask me if I believe in God. I always reply that the question is meaningless to me, because God's existence or nonexistence cannot be proven, and it has no bearing on my life. That is, I would behave exactly the way I do whether or not God were proven to exist or not, or even if I chose to believe he did or did not exist. You might as well ask me if I believe in life beyond the reaches of the galaxy. Perhaps it exists, perhaps not, but either way it doesn't matter. And any position you might offer on the topic is nothing but speculation.
This is very interesting to me. Because if I found out tomorrow - by, say, an act of God - that God existed, then I would certainly begin to behave very differently. For one, I wouldn't answer the question "No" when asked if I believed in God. If, for example, he came down and told me everything in the Bible was correct, including all the assorted minutiae, then I would quickly become a Christian.
What interests me is why your concept of meaninglessness has anything to do with whether or not you will answer the question. Lots of things are meaningless to me - how, exactly, fish hatcheries operate, or how plutonium reacts in a nuclear weapon (as opposed to uranium). Yet if you asked me my opinion on the matter, my response would be "I don't know" - not that the question is meaningless to me. Recall, the question has nothing to do with whether or not you care, but what your position is on the matter.
But it's the second part of your response that gets me: Agnostics claim that the existence of God cannot be proved or disproved. Now we all know the second part is true. You cannot prove a negative. But the first part is incorrect. The existence of God can easily be proved - by God.
The response I see most often to that remark is simply that humans can't prove the existence of God, which is of course correct - but that's not the question. The agnostic argument isn't that humans can't prove the existence of God, it's that humans can't know whether there is a God. And that is patently false - God can come down and bonk us all on the heads any time he damn well pleases.
To wit:
Science simply isn't equipped to answer questions about the supernatural, nor should it be.
If there is a God, then he and all his works are, by definition, natural. We must simply redefine what natural is. And why, for example, would it be impossible (or even improbable) for God to have added a code to some natural phenomena that, when eventually decoded by humans will spell out in bright neon lettering, "HERE I AM! I CREATED YOU! AND YOU HAVE FOUND ME!"
Now I will, of course, grant you that there's a possibility that God is the deistic watch maker so often talked about in Jeffersonian times - and in that case, there's certainly a possibility that he/it/whoever can never be known. But I'm speaking more generally about the God that some 90% of the world believes in - an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent being (or beings) who has played an active role in human development over the course of world history.
Of course, there's always more to talk about - and we can go really deep into this, but it's nothing that Dawkins hasn't already talked about in The God Delusion, or what might be found in Sam Harris' End of Faith. I do highly suggest you pick them up if you haven't already.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume