That's vastly oversimplifying the issue. Anyone that thinks that biologists all thought that junkDNA didn't do anything until this project came along are pretty ignorant of the last 30 years of biology, imho.
"No, the forms are very novel compared to what came before upon visual inspection *regardless* of classification issues."
Again, this claim is very overblown: first of all, as time as has gone on, we HAVE found more and more precusors to many of the forms: like precambrian proto-chordates for instance.
Second of all, you are overplaying the novelty of just one feature: bodyplans. But early multicelluar life had a lot of flexibility in body plans precisely because so little was set down so far: that isn't the same thing as demonstrating that this era of life showed changes that were functionally to a degree unlike any other change in the fossil record. For all we know (and indeed it seems likely), life in this era could take on radically different bodyplans quite a lot more easily with very little underlying genetic modification compared to more complex multicelluar life today. Your authority Valentine notes, for instance, that if we consider number of likely cell types as a measure of complexity, then there is no Cambrian Explosion at all: there in fact a fairly steady increase from before the Cambrian on into the present day.
But third of all, none of this addresses the claim that YOU MADE that there is something huge and amazing about the creatures showing up being "whole new phyla." As I already explained, this is an extremely misleading way to make the case that they were especially novel. I'd say that birds and lizards and elephants are pretty darn amazingly different from any Cambrian life form, and yet we keep getting told by people pushing the CE as a barrier to evolution that we should find it especially significant that most of the major phyla all appeared at the time. Nonsense.
"The "soft fossil" theory has already been addressed. It does not seem to be well supported anymore. We have a good enough sample of soft-body fossils both before and after CE. Niche critters perhaps escaped fossilation, but we have a pretty good snapshot from multiple regions of the more common critters."
No it has not been well addressed: especially because niche creatures that took off is PRECISELY the issue with many of these forms and especially because some of the earliest fossils we have in periods just before the Cambrian show traces of being near microscopic: i.e. many of the forms could be there already, but too small to see without very rare conditions to preserve detail at that size. All of this is discussed, in fact, in Valentine's work: if you are going to cite him, why haven't you mentioned any of this yet? If you plan on providing quotes, it will be more interesting to see which you DO NOT provide, I think.
Regardless, the claim that we have "enough" samples to conclude anything and rule out future finds is ludicrous: most simply because we have continued to find more relevant fossils fairly steadily as time goes on that we'd never seen before. The fossil record has always been gappy and will always be gappy. There are many animal phyla, for instance, that are not part of the Cambrian and appear after it without solid fossil records. No one from this, however, believes that they have no precursors (and indeed molecular evidence confirms this, just as it suggests that most Cambrian life dates their splits from other life back before the Cambrian.
In short, you've failed to make any case that the Cambrian Explosion, while still a mystery, provides any reason to think it outside the paradigm of common descent and small stepwise change in populations from generation to generation.
"No junk DNA would seem to indicate more of an overall design to the system, no?"
Not really. Exactly how and why DNA keeps or discards various sequences, coding or not, is not something on which design or no design rests: it's a matter of the particulars of how DNA works (and it doesn't, actually, work the quite same way in every creature, which complicates matters even more: some creatures have much more robust ways of catching error than others, for instance).
It's also worth noting that the term "junkDNA" is a bit of a misnomer, and any good discussion of the term in biology generally notes it as such: it's possible that your 110 class basically just, well, sucked. If you do a PubMed search, you'll find this discussion goes back way farther than 97: biologists were noting that even apparently non-coding DNA had usefulness for mapping out genomes even back in the 70s.
No redudancy? We have MILLIONS of copies of the same short satelite sequence whose only known purpose seems to be to reproduce itself. This very article notes that most of what they found is HIGHLY redundant.
And it is NOT obvious that parts of DNA that don't code for anything useful would be weeded out: there are any number of mechanisms by which this would be prevented, and actually very little incentive TO weed anything out in any case.
No one thinks that flight just popped into existence. There are all sorts of useful traits prior to actual full flight that the earliest flyers would have developed: heck, things like feathers pretty clearly evolved long before flight was even remotely possible, and likely for very different reasons than flight. As for the thing itself, there are lots of different adaptions and traits on the way to flight that are all useful: things like decreased weight for sprinting across the ground, and of course brief gliding from tree to tree without actually being able to fly.
I dunno, the usage seems mostly legitimate to me. The plants ARE toning down their normal aggressive behaviors, the ones that allow them to compete for scarce resources with other plants. No one is saying that the plants have feelings for their kin, but it makes perfect sense that they'd show some form of kin selection. It makes no real sense to just call it a "mistake" or a "confusion" because plants don't have intentions.
Most human altruism appears to be from the same source: it began as something we extended to kin groups, and extended to others only as civilization developed further. I don't see what the value of calling it "abnormal" or a "mistake." It's a behavior that seems to help the species and does what it does regardless of how it came about.
"This isn't having some counter claim and arguing it. It is a bunch of people in a quasi organized manor going out and spreading their version of "the word" in much the exact same ways as the the worst of the Christians attempt to force their beliefs on you."
That's what YOU CLAIM IT IS. But just because you claim it is so doesn't make it so. The accusation you are making is very convenient for your position, because it allows you to simply dismiss the arguments of others and poison the well. So there is plenty of reason to think that you'd accuse others of being zealots irregardless of whether or not they really are.
"Many people are using science as the substitute religion."
I certianly understand why religious people might want to make this claim (it's a good schoolyard "rubber/glue" retort). But I rarely if ever see that it has much merit.
I'm sorry, but merely the fact that someone argues some position strongly and is highly critical of claims made by a certain group does not qualify them as religious. To use your form of argument: if you weren't blinded by your own lack of reading comprehension, you'd understand that.:)
They do differ from John. Your quotes are not the same thing as actually reading the Gospels in order, and seeing pretty clearly that from the earliest known Gospel to the latest (John), the culpability of the Jews gets more and more and that of the Romans less and less. Your quotes rebutted the claim that no other Gospel portrayed any Jews as enemies of Jesus, but that was a claim no one made.
Again, you are just trying to poison the well. Either you can support your point or you can't. Arguing that my criticisms are invalid because I'm "wrapped up" in things is not an appropriate response or rebutal to them.
"What it meas it that you can take not believing into a realm where it becomes a believe by your actions that mimic the actions of believers."
I would agree that it's possible, but I think it's rare and largely a straw man based on you misrepresenting what people are actually doing.
But non-religious people, writ large, are not religious. People who don't believe in a particular something are not believers. Those are the general statements which shouldn't get confused and mangled just because you feel like some people criticize religion too harshly (which is far too often just a way to avoid dealing with the issue of whether those criticisms are legitimate or not). Being highly skeptical of religious claims is not the same thing as being religious.
Not unless not having an apple is a TYPE of apple.
"We don't know that for sure, but all that change in a few million years is still rather sudden, and tends to fly in the face of gradulism."
Phyletic gradualism is not a tenet of macroevolution, common descent, or anything else. This is another term often used to confuse people. There is a difference between evolution in the sense of small gradual changes, and gradual in the sense of a steady pace to when those changes happen. Nothing about the CE refutes the idea of the first kind of gradualism, and the latter kind has never been the orthodox position on which all evolution rests, as many people portray it. Heck, even Darwin, who didn't know anything at all about the overall picture of the fossil record, explicitly said that he didn't expect the pace of change to be steady. Overplaying the surprise at finding that it is not, in fact, steady, is highly misleading.
"There are many Vendian/Ecidaceran(sp?) and Cambrian fossil samples from all over the world, both soft and hard-boddies. We indeed may be missing some fringe critters, but we have a good idea of the critters that in general were around."
So? The most successful Cambrian critters might well be those that started out as rare but then hit on some remarkable successes and took over niches dramatically (perhaps in part because of their hard, easy to fossilize parts gave them such an advantage). You say that we "may" be missing some fringe critters. Well, that's sort of an understatement. Not so long ago one of the "fringe critters" we were missing any precambrian evidence of were the chordates. Only very recently did we find one. The history here is clearly on the side of finding more and more links to the Cambrian as we go, and NOT a flumoxed stall-out of finding anything more that can explain where these creatures came from. The suddeness really HAS gotten less and less, and there is every expectation from this history that the more we learn, the more explicable it will become. Given that, claiming that CE has anything in the way to say about common descent or evolution in general being problematic and doubtful is just a gross misrepresentation.
As I explained elsewhere, the idea that there is something really specially problematic with the idea of "phyla" appearing as opposed to any particular rank of something appearing without known precursors is way overblown, and largely an artifact of how taxonomy works. Phyla HAD to appear at some point and then never again, and because of the way the system is laid down, it's almost deliberately by our choice of a ranking system that they would all emerge at relatively the same time.
That's not to say that there isn't a lot we don't know about why there was such a diversity of animal life emerging within this period without much available before it, but it certainly isn't the problem for evolution or common descent that creationists make it out to be. There are many plausible reasons as to why (not to mention that multicelluar body plans WOULD be the most dramatically flexible when they were just starting to develop, since very little would be nailed down), and the main questions involve which explanation is right, and not having enough evidence to fully resolve the matter at this point. That's NOT the same thing as saying that "wow, there is just no possible way that evolution can explain this!" which is how many creationists paint it.
"Because a growing beak extends something already in existence, the most complex thing being that it moves the center of gravity; thus necessitating some counterbalance, and making the bird heavier and less likely to fly. (Or something similar.) An immune system is a complex and dynamic symbiotic system which when compromised results in a failure of Darwinian proportions. See AIDS."
A MODERN immune system is complex and dynamic, sure, but that's the current pinacle of development in that respect. That's not a good arguments against the idea that immune systems have evolved (right alongside the things they fight). And in fact, biologists actually have a pretty decent track record of showing how the immune system probably did involve, something that becomes more and more possible with genetic evidence taken from comparing increasingly distant modern species (each of which represents a branching off, sort of like a code fork that gives you some sense of what the common reference point was like). Many of the components of our immune systems, for instance, are recognizeably slightly altered duplicate proteins. Many other parts are missing in other creatures closely related to us, without the system failing. And so on.
While not perfect, the spectrum of modern life actually does a pretty decent job of capturing a lot of the samples of ramping up of various organs and systems. For instance, the major steps of how we think eyes developed are not just hypothetical: they are actually found in many creatures living today. While many of them in those creatures have developed in other directions from the line we might be trying to trace at the time, their commonalities paint a lot of very plausible paths, and they all clearly refute the idea that "simpler" forms woudl not be viable (this idea also often suffers from forgetting that simpler forms often faced simpler environments to deal with, or simpler requirements. For instance, less powerful blood clotting systems might well be disastrous if we imagine them in a modern human, but in something with a less high pressure circulatory system, they would have been fine, and in fact co-development of these systems IS what evolution suggests: NOT that a modern form stayed the same with just ONE feature getting simpler)
"But in technology, we have seen this *multiple* times (I already listed examples). We have not seen a Cambrian-Explosion scale of change (based on fossil record) before nor after the C.E. There is NO known multi-phylum-level burst that is even close. Besides, a clear understanding of the machinisms behind the C.E. are outright missing. Thus, it is a Great Mystery for multiple reasons, two being scale and detail."
This is a hard one to explain without getting really complicated, but most of the layperson beliefs you are expressing about what the CE involved, and how supposedly big of a mystery are really quite confused and overblown. That's not to say that there isn't a heck of a lot to learn about the CE or some mysteries about it, but few of them actually challenge the idea of common descent or evolution generally.
For instance, the idea that there is something specially significant about how "all the phyla" came into being at that one time, and taking that to be really significant, is based on misunderstanding of taxonomy. The problem is that our traditional taxonomic system is ranked, when evolutionary change is cladistic (i.e. branching). When you put the two together, you get some odd effects, and this is one of them: since everything alive today descends from something else, and since in our classification system is based on groups within groups that we try to squeeze into pre-determined ranks, phyla cannot EVER "arise" at any time OTHER than a particular early time in the history of life. That time happens to be right around the CE, but this is largely just an artifact of how we group things and NOT some dramatic development in the evolution of life. I know that's confusing at first, but it really is an inevitable outcome of mixing what we find with life on earth (i.e. nested clades) with a taxonomic system based on set ranks (that we try to apply across all creatures).
Think of life as branches off a tree: EVERYTHING develops first as twigs off something else. It's only in retrospect that we look back and see major branches jutting off. If we start calling twigs on a tree "species" and then the larger branches they come off of "orders" and then all the way back to "phyla" we might think that there was something especially amazing about the first few (now largest) branches down near the trunk of the tree. We could even say "wow, look: back here near the trunk all these phyla developed, and then never after did any phyla ever develop! That must have been a really significant time!" But as I hope you can see, this exclaimation is highly misleading. At the time those branches developed, they were only twigs, exactly like the twigs developing today. It's just that the ranked named system, working backwards through time, gives them a false significance.
Secondly, a lot of the explosion seems based on an explosion in the development of fossilizable parts rather than something especially dramatic in the development of creatures. While the CE probably marked the point where multicellular life really came into its own as far as filling new niches to exploit, and thus really DID take off in a big way, we've also found plenty of precursors for most of the forms we find in the CE in older eras as well: they just tend to be harder to find because they are mostly all soft parts, and those only fossilize VERY rarely. So the idea that these developmental developments really were unprecedented has taken a pretty sound beating as far as the evidence goes.
"You'll actually find critical thinking is more pervasive among strong creationists than evolution proponents."
No, I've actually never found that to be the case. In fact, I haven't met a single strong creationist that seems to apply much critical thinking at all to their creationist beliefs (though a few that are admirably critical in other areas of life). Maybe my experience is unrepresentative, but I've met a LOT of creationists, and read most of the major ones.
"most of the people I know who believe in evolution have no scientific basis for that belief, they just believe it out of blind faith, and they happen to be smart people in their own fields."
That could be your experience. Or you could just be saying that because it supports your point. Shrug. Seems to me to be largely irrelevant either way. Maybe creationists are as a group really very critical or not. I think the actual statistical evidence leans VERY heavily the other way, but whatever.
The fact remains that the evidence for evolution is pretty solid, and most creationist arguments RELY on simply ignoring all of that evidence. Or sometimes it's even worse than that. Many creationist arguments, contrary to your experience basically are of the form of mentioning one or two facts (generally in a misleading way) and then just making an assumption about how they might support creationism... and then just STOPPING THERE. But the whole point of critical thinking is that you never stop: you actually go out and test those assumptions. That's what science journals and evolution in general is chock full of. If you want to convince me that creationists are such critical thinkers, then you really really really need to explain why so many of their arguments consist of dead-ends where there are obvious further questions that just never go addressed or explored. Many of their supposed questions are misconceptions or cases where they DIDN'T bother to find out what evolution actually consists of and involves. I just can't see that as some sort of sign of great critical curiosity. I see it instead, time and time again, as someone who is only willing to look into a subject for as long as it takes to reach the conclusion that they like, and then go no further.
Right. I'm sure millenia of the blood libel had nothing to do with the attitudes of Europeans towards Jews.
Ever read the last work of Martin Luther, titled "On the Jews & Their Lies?" It's so uncanily like a blueprint for the Holocaust that it almost makes me think that the guy could see the future.
To say it with a little less sarcasm: in the case of the Germans, science was seen as validating what began as religious-inspired hatreds. In fact, that was how the science worked: it started with the idea that Jews were evil and corrupting, and then hunted for "evidence" to back it up. It isn't like the Nazis all started out as dispassionate scientists who made a great discovery that the Jews were a poison to the very soil of the motherland and, convinced by the overwhelming evidence of the shapes of their skulls, reluctantly decided that they had to go.
"However, the point of the "under god" (and references to "god" in many US documents) is there to define all people as being on an equal level."
Well, why can't you do that without being, like, you know, dicks about it? Seriously: is it really too much to ask that you at least respect the fact that not everyone believes in god, and so not try to piss all over our commonality as Americans like a dog marking territory? There are many many values we all care about as Americans, and it would be nice if we could celebrate those without trying to fight about religious beliefs. It's not like atheists have spent most of the history of the nation trying to get the Constitution to declare that no god exists or then have it added to the pledge or the money just to lord it over everyone. Heck, even the founders considered adding religious claims to the constitution but then decided AGAINST it. You know why? Because they felt there was no point and it sent the wrong message entirely about what a limited government was supposed to be all about. People, not the government, are the best ones to decide what to believe in or not believe in. Trying to have the government do it for them was pointless and one step along the road back to making religion into a political matter.
"Except athiests. They think they are somehow exempt and superior to the rest of us because they don't subscribe to the concept of something higher."
Only in your Bill O'Reilly-sized imagination. Just because we don't believe in YOUR god does not mean that we don't think there are things that are vastly more important than ourselves. Countless atheists have lived and died for things they feel are greater than themselves, most importantly as soldiers fighting for our country and what it stands for.
Your picture of what atheists are is pure caricature. If that makes you feel better about being dicks to us, I guess I can see why you'd play pretend like that. But it doesn't make you any less of a dick.
"It make plenty of sense, to anyone not wrapped up in it."
That's not an argument, it's just an tedious insult. Since you are the one trying to argue against the plain meaning of English words, I think it's up to you to put some effort into justifying your claims, rather than just asserting that they are true.
No, you didn't address the point I made. I argued that John is more concerned with painting the Jews as evil and responsible than the other Gospels, not that the other gospels do not contain anything about the Jews being against Jesus.
"Not believing in a belief is a belief when it is done in the same or similar manor of creating a god."
That doesn't make any sense. I don't believe. I have no idea how that means I've created anything, much less a god.
"You can look and you will see people so enshrined with how their belief is better, they will go out and evangelize except they are trading science for Christ."
There is a big difference between valuing rationality and science (i.e. honest and full debate using EVIDENCE) and evangelizing a faith. To begin with, many many Christians also see value in those things as well, so its not even particular characteristic of ANY religion.
I wouldn't discount all MDs. Go see a DO trained in osteopathic manipulative treatment (OMT). DOs are basically MDs (they get the same "full" medical education, unlike many chiropractors) with a more general focus on healthiness and dealing with pain and discomfort.
You are basically just dodging my argument. My argument does not rest on any level of human understanding. The point is that the more you try to shelter your claims from criticism with the argument that "well, God just knows better and we can't understand" the worse it gets: because all those other possibilities ALSO increase to the same degree. Your claim that God makes promises and tells us how it is become more and more irrelevant, because all these things only survive to the degree we can understand God's arguments and purposes. If we can't understand, then perhaps morality is scheduled to change next week, just as it changed with Jesus. Perhaps ANYTHING. And there is no way for you to discount any other possibility or argue that your own claimed one is more likely: you've already undercut your own argument.
Chiropracty is an interesting case, because we know that there is a measurable benefit from some of the manipulations that are performed (but then, you can see a DO and they'll do the same sorts of things too). It's mostly the theory and the more extreme claims about what it can do for things OTHER than back pain that are batty, not the idea that backrubs and spine cracks can't make one feel better (they can).
If you think that creationists have been pointing out anything helpful in science, then I don't know what to say. I can't think of a single instance in which a creationist has realized anything relevant to the science of biology before mainstream biologists realized it... at least not since the creationists of Darwin's day realized that the evidence refuted creationism. Most creationist arguments are distortions and falsehoods about what the science actually shows and argues: NOT fair criticism. Evolutionary science itself is full of debate and criticism meanwhile: mistakes and inconsistencies are caught and developed just fine by people actually educated in what they are talking about as opposed to people who don't even understand what a transitional fossil is and then go on to claim that there aren't any manbearpigs like evolution supposedly says.
Just because some people don't understand evolution and just believe in it does not mean that this the way it is for everyone.
A good start might be to read some actual scholarly work on the subject. A good book for laypeople is "Misquoting Jesus" which you can find at most bookstores.
Someone who insists right off the bat that there can be no contradictions or that differences mean nothing will never ever see any in anything of course. But take some time and look at how these texts were written, copied, and how they evolved through the various political and theological issues to how they are read today. What they include, what the leave out, what they show differently matters. The portrayal of how Jesus faces his death, for instance, is very different from Mark to Luke to John, and these are not mere differences in emphasis: they are based off very different conceptions about who Jesus was. The way the Jews are portrayed is not the same: you merely quote a bunch of mentions of the Jews being involved with the crucifixion, which is sort of irrelevant: read the entire portrayals. Mashing all these accounts together and pretending that Jesus said and did everything in all of them, again, as I said, does a real disservice to understanding the writers of these texts.
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That's vastly oversimplifying the issue. Anyone that thinks that biologists all thought that junkDNA didn't do anything until this project came along are pretty ignorant of the last 30 years of biology, imho.
"No, the forms are very novel compared to what came before upon visual inspection *regardless* of classification issues."
Again, this claim is very overblown: first of all, as time as has gone on, we HAVE found more and more precusors to many of the forms: like precambrian proto-chordates for instance.
Second of all, you are overplaying the novelty of just one feature: bodyplans. But early multicelluar life had a lot of flexibility in body plans precisely because so little was set down so far: that isn't the same thing as demonstrating that this era of life showed changes that were functionally to a degree unlike any other change in the fossil record. For all we know (and indeed it seems likely), life in this era could take on radically different bodyplans quite a lot more easily with very little underlying genetic modification compared to more complex multicelluar life today. Your authority Valentine notes, for instance, that if we consider number of likely cell types as a measure of complexity, then there is no Cambrian Explosion at all: there in fact a fairly steady increase from before the Cambrian on into the present day.
But third of all, none of this addresses the claim that YOU MADE that there is something huge and amazing about the creatures showing up being "whole new phyla." As I already explained, this is an extremely misleading way to make the case that they were especially novel. I'd say that birds and lizards and elephants are pretty darn amazingly different from any Cambrian life form, and yet we keep getting told by people pushing the CE as a barrier to evolution that we should find it especially significant that most of the major phyla all appeared at the time. Nonsense.
"The "soft fossil" theory has already been addressed. It does not seem to be well supported anymore. We have a good enough sample of soft-body fossils both before and after CE. Niche critters perhaps escaped fossilation, but we have a pretty good snapshot from multiple regions of the more common critters."
No it has not been well addressed: especially because niche creatures that took off is PRECISELY the issue with many of these forms and especially because some of the earliest fossils we have in periods just before the Cambrian show traces of being near microscopic: i.e. many of the forms could be there already, but too small to see without very rare conditions to preserve detail at that size. All of this is discussed, in fact, in Valentine's work: if you are going to cite him, why haven't you mentioned any of this yet? If you plan on providing quotes, it will be more interesting to see which you DO NOT provide, I think.
Regardless, the claim that we have "enough" samples to conclude anything and rule out future finds is ludicrous: most simply because we have continued to find more relevant fossils fairly steadily as time goes on that we'd never seen before. The fossil record has always been gappy and will always be gappy. There are many animal phyla, for instance, that are not part of the Cambrian and appear after it without solid fossil records. No one from this, however, believes that they have no precursors (and indeed molecular evidence confirms this, just as it suggests that most Cambrian life dates their splits from other life back before the Cambrian.
In short, you've failed to make any case that the Cambrian Explosion, while still a mystery, provides any reason to think it outside the paradigm of common descent and small stepwise change in populations from generation to generation.
"No junk DNA would seem to indicate more of an overall design to the system, no?"
Not really. Exactly how and why DNA keeps or discards various sequences, coding or not, is not something on which design or no design rests: it's a matter of the particulars of how DNA works (and it doesn't, actually, work the quite same way in every creature, which complicates matters even more: some creatures have much more robust ways of catching error than others, for instance).
It's also worth noting that the term "junkDNA" is a bit of a misnomer, and any good discussion of the term in biology generally notes it as such: it's possible that your 110 class basically just, well, sucked. If you do a PubMed search, you'll find this discussion goes back way farther than 97: biologists were noting that even apparently non-coding DNA had usefulness for mapping out genomes even back in the 70s.
No redudancy? We have MILLIONS of copies of the same short satelite sequence whose only known purpose seems to be to reproduce itself. This very article notes that most of what they found is HIGHLY redundant.
And it is NOT obvious that parts of DNA that don't code for anything useful would be weeded out: there are any number of mechanisms by which this would be prevented, and actually very little incentive TO weed anything out in any case.
No one thinks that flight just popped into existence. There are all sorts of useful traits prior to actual full flight that the earliest flyers would have developed: heck, things like feathers pretty clearly evolved long before flight was even remotely possible, and likely for very different reasons than flight. As for the thing itself, there are lots of different adaptions and traits on the way to flight that are all useful: things like decreased weight for sprinting across the ground, and of course brief gliding from tree to tree without actually being able to fly.
I dunno, the usage seems mostly legitimate to me. The plants ARE toning down their normal aggressive behaviors, the ones that allow them to compete for scarce resources with other plants. No one is saying that the plants have feelings for their kin, but it makes perfect sense that they'd show some form of kin selection. It makes no real sense to just call it a "mistake" or a "confusion" because plants don't have intentions.
Most human altruism appears to be from the same source: it began as something we extended to kin groups, and extended to others only as civilization developed further. I don't see what the value of calling it "abnormal" or a "mistake." It's a behavior that seems to help the species and does what it does regardless of how it came about.
"This isn't having some counter claim and arguing it. It is a bunch of people in a quasi organized manor going out and spreading their version of "the word" in much the exact same ways as the the worst of the Christians attempt to force their beliefs on you."
That's what YOU CLAIM IT IS. But just because you claim it is so doesn't make it so. The accusation you are making is very convenient for your position, because it allows you to simply dismiss the arguments of others and poison the well. So there is plenty of reason to think that you'd accuse others of being zealots irregardless of whether or not they really are.
"Many people are using science as the substitute religion."
:)
I certianly understand why religious people might want to make this claim (it's a good schoolyard "rubber/glue" retort). But I rarely if ever see that it has much merit.
I'm sorry, but merely the fact that someone argues some position strongly and is highly critical of claims made by a certain group does not qualify them as religious. To use your form of argument: if you weren't blinded by your own lack of reading comprehension, you'd understand that.
They do differ from John. Your quotes are not the same thing as actually reading the Gospels in order, and seeing pretty clearly that from the earliest known Gospel to the latest (John), the culpability of the Jews gets more and more and that of the Romans less and less. Your quotes rebutted the claim that no other Gospel portrayed any Jews as enemies of Jesus, but that was a claim no one made.
"I would assume it doesn't make sense to you. "
Again, you are just trying to poison the well. Either you can support your point or you can't. Arguing that my criticisms are invalid because I'm "wrapped up" in things is not an appropriate response or rebutal to them.
"What it meas it that you can take not believing into a realm where it becomes a believe by your actions that mimic the actions of believers."
I would agree that it's possible, but I think it's rare and largely a straw man based on you misrepresenting what people are actually doing.
But non-religious people, writ large, are not religious. People who don't believe in a particular something are not believers. Those are the general statements which shouldn't get confused and mangled just because you feel like some people criticize religion too harshly (which is far too often just a way to avoid dealing with the issue of whether those criticisms are legitimate or not). Being highly skeptical of religious claims is not the same thing as being religious.
Not unless not having an apple is a TYPE of apple.
"We don't know that for sure, but all that change in a few million years is still rather sudden, and tends to fly in the face of gradulism."
Phyletic gradualism is not a tenet of macroevolution, common descent, or anything else. This is another term often used to confuse people. There is a difference between evolution in the sense of small gradual changes, and gradual in the sense of a steady pace to when those changes happen. Nothing about the CE refutes the idea of the first kind of gradualism, and the latter kind has never been the orthodox position on which all evolution rests, as many people portray it. Heck, even Darwin, who didn't know anything at all about the overall picture of the fossil record, explicitly said that he didn't expect the pace of change to be steady. Overplaying the surprise at finding that it is not, in fact, steady, is highly misleading.
"There are many Vendian/Ecidaceran(sp?) and Cambrian fossil samples from all over the world, both soft and hard-boddies. We indeed may be missing some fringe critters, but we have a good idea of the critters that in general were around."
So? The most successful Cambrian critters might well be those that started out as rare but then hit on some remarkable successes and took over niches dramatically (perhaps in part because of their hard, easy to fossilize parts gave them such an advantage). You say that we "may" be missing some fringe critters. Well, that's sort of an understatement. Not so long ago one of the "fringe critters" we were missing any precambrian evidence of were the chordates. Only very recently did we find one. The history here is clearly on the side of finding more and more links to the Cambrian as we go, and NOT a flumoxed stall-out of finding anything more that can explain where these creatures came from. The suddeness really HAS gotten less and less, and there is every expectation from this history that the more we learn, the more explicable it will become. Given that, claiming that CE has anything in the way to say about common descent or evolution in general being problematic and doubtful is just a gross misrepresentation.
As I explained elsewhere, the idea that there is something really specially problematic with the idea of "phyla" appearing as opposed to any particular rank of something appearing without known precursors is way overblown, and largely an artifact of how taxonomy works. Phyla HAD to appear at some point and then never again, and because of the way the system is laid down, it's almost deliberately by our choice of a ranking system that they would all emerge at relatively the same time.
That's not to say that there isn't a lot we don't know about why there was such a diversity of animal life emerging within this period without much available before it, but it certainly isn't the problem for evolution or common descent that creationists make it out to be. There are many plausible reasons as to why (not to mention that multicelluar body plans WOULD be the most dramatically flexible when they were just starting to develop, since very little would be nailed down), and the main questions involve which explanation is right, and not having enough evidence to fully resolve the matter at this point. That's NOT the same thing as saying that "wow, there is just no possible way that evolution can explain this!" which is how many creationists paint it.
"Because a growing beak extends something already in existence, the most complex thing being that it moves the center of gravity; thus necessitating some counterbalance, and making the bird heavier and less likely to fly. (Or something similar.) An immune system is a complex and dynamic symbiotic system which when compromised results in a failure of Darwinian proportions. See AIDS."
A MODERN immune system is complex and dynamic, sure, but that's the current pinacle of development in that respect. That's not a good arguments against the idea that immune systems have evolved (right alongside the things they fight). And in fact, biologists actually have a pretty decent track record of showing how the immune system probably did involve, something that becomes more and more possible with genetic evidence taken from comparing increasingly distant modern species (each of which represents a branching off, sort of like a code fork that gives you some sense of what the common reference point was like). Many of the components of our immune systems, for instance, are recognizeably slightly altered duplicate proteins. Many other parts are missing in other creatures closely related to us, without the system failing. And so on.
While not perfect, the spectrum of modern life actually does a pretty decent job of capturing a lot of the samples of ramping up of various organs and systems. For instance, the major steps of how we think eyes developed are not just hypothetical: they are actually found in many creatures living today. While many of them in those creatures have developed in other directions from the line we might be trying to trace at the time, their commonalities paint a lot of very plausible paths, and they all clearly refute the idea that "simpler" forms woudl not be viable
(this idea also often suffers from forgetting that simpler forms often faced simpler environments to deal with, or simpler requirements. For instance, less powerful blood clotting systems might well be disastrous if we imagine them in a modern human, but in something with a less high pressure circulatory system, they would have been fine, and in fact co-development of these systems IS what evolution suggests: NOT that a modern form stayed the same with just ONE feature getting simpler)
"But in technology, we have seen this *multiple* times (I already listed examples). We have not seen a Cambrian-Explosion scale of change (based on fossil record) before nor after the C.E. There is NO known multi-phylum-level burst that is even close. Besides, a clear understanding of the machinisms behind the C.E. are outright missing. Thus, it is a Great Mystery for multiple reasons, two being scale and detail."
This is a hard one to explain without getting really complicated, but most of the layperson beliefs you are expressing about what the CE involved, and how supposedly big of a mystery are really quite confused and overblown. That's not to say that there isn't a heck of a lot to learn about the CE or some mysteries about it, but few of them actually challenge the idea of common descent or evolution generally.
For instance, the idea that there is something specially significant about how "all the phyla" came into being at that one time, and taking that to be really significant, is based on misunderstanding of taxonomy. The problem is that our traditional taxonomic system is ranked, when evolutionary change is cladistic (i.e. branching). When you put the two together, you get some odd effects, and this is one of them: since everything alive today descends from something else, and since in our classification system is based on groups within groups that we try to squeeze into pre-determined ranks, phyla cannot EVER "arise" at any time OTHER than a particular early time in the history of life. That time happens to be right around the CE, but this is largely just an artifact of how we group things and NOT some dramatic development in the evolution of life. I know that's confusing at first, but it really is an inevitable outcome of mixing what we find with life on earth (i.e. nested clades) with a taxonomic system based on set ranks (that we try to apply across all creatures).
Think of life as branches off a tree: EVERYTHING develops first as twigs off something else. It's only in retrospect that we look back and see major branches jutting off. If we start calling twigs on a tree "species" and then the larger branches they come off of "orders" and then all the way back to "phyla" we might think that there was something especially amazing about the first few (now largest) branches down near the trunk of the tree. We could even say "wow, look: back here near the trunk all these phyla developed, and then never after did any phyla ever develop! That must have been a really significant time!" But as I hope you can see, this exclaimation is highly misleading. At the time those branches developed, they were only twigs, exactly like the twigs developing today. It's just that the ranked named system, working backwards through time, gives them a false significance.
Secondly, a lot of the explosion seems based on an explosion in the development of fossilizable parts rather than something especially dramatic in the development of creatures. While the CE probably marked the point where multicellular life really came into its own as far as filling new niches to exploit, and thus really DID take off in a big way, we've also found plenty of precursors for most of the forms we find in the CE in older eras as well: they just tend to be harder to find because they are mostly all soft parts, and those only fossilize VERY rarely. So the idea that these developmental developments really were unprecedented has taken a pretty sound beating as far as the evidence goes.
"You'll actually find critical thinking is more pervasive among strong creationists than evolution proponents."
No, I've actually never found that to be the case. In fact, I haven't met a single strong creationist that seems to apply much critical thinking at all to their creationist beliefs (though a few that are admirably critical in other areas of life). Maybe my experience is unrepresentative, but I've met a LOT of creationists, and read most of the major ones.
"most of the people I know who believe in evolution have no scientific basis for that belief, they just believe it out of blind faith, and they happen to be smart people in their own fields."
That could be your experience. Or you could just be saying that because it supports your point. Shrug. Seems to me to be largely irrelevant either way. Maybe creationists are as a group really very critical or not. I think the actual statistical evidence leans VERY heavily the other way, but whatever.
The fact remains that the evidence for evolution is pretty solid, and most creationist arguments RELY on simply ignoring all of that evidence. Or sometimes it's even worse than that. Many creationist arguments, contrary to your experience basically are of the form of mentioning one or two facts (generally in a misleading way) and then just making an assumption about how they might support creationism... and then just STOPPING THERE. But the whole point of critical thinking is that you never stop: you actually go out and test those assumptions. That's what science journals and evolution in general is chock full of. If you want to convince me that creationists are such critical thinkers, then you really really really need to explain why so many of their arguments consist of dead-ends where there are obvious further questions that just never go addressed or explored. Many of their supposed questions are misconceptions or cases where they DIDN'T bother to find out what evolution actually consists of and involves. I just can't see that as some sort of sign of great critical curiosity. I see it instead, time and time again, as someone who is only willing to look into a subject for as long as it takes to reach the conclusion that they like, and then go no further.
Right. I'm sure millenia of the blood libel had nothing to do with the attitudes of Europeans towards Jews.
Ever read the last work of Martin Luther, titled "On the Jews & Their Lies?" It's so uncanily like a blueprint for the Holocaust that it almost makes me think that the guy could see the future.
To say it with a little less sarcasm: in the case of the Germans, science was seen as validating what began as religious-inspired hatreds. In fact, that was how the science worked: it started with the idea that Jews were evil and corrupting, and then hunted for "evidence" to back it up. It isn't like the Nazis all started out as dispassionate scientists who made a great discovery that the Jews were a poison to the very soil of the motherland and, convinced by the overwhelming evidence of the shapes of their skulls, reluctantly decided that they had to go.
"However, the point of the "under god" (and references to "god" in many US documents) is there to define all people as being on an equal level."
Well, why can't you do that without being, like, you know, dicks about it? Seriously: is it really too much to ask that you at least respect the fact that not everyone believes in god, and so not try to piss all over our commonality as Americans like a dog marking territory? There are many many values we all care about as Americans, and it would be nice if we could celebrate those without trying to fight about religious beliefs. It's not like atheists have spent most of the history of the nation trying to get the Constitution to declare that no god exists or then have it added to the pledge or the money just to lord it over everyone. Heck, even the founders considered adding religious claims to the constitution but then decided AGAINST it. You know why? Because they felt there was no point and it sent the wrong message entirely about what a limited government was supposed to be all about. People, not the government, are the best ones to decide what to believe in or not believe in. Trying to have the government do it for them was pointless and one step along the road back to making religion into a political matter.
"Except athiests. They think they are somehow exempt and superior to the rest of us because they don't subscribe to the concept of something higher."
Only in your Bill O'Reilly-sized imagination. Just because we don't believe in YOUR god does not mean that we don't think there are things that are vastly more important than ourselves. Countless atheists have lived and died for things they feel are greater than themselves, most importantly as soldiers fighting for our country and what it stands for.
Your picture of what atheists are is pure caricature. If that makes you feel better about being dicks to us, I guess I can see why you'd play pretend like that. But it doesn't make you any less of a dick.
"It make plenty of sense, to anyone not wrapped up in it."
That's not an argument, it's just an tedious insult. Since you are the one trying to argue against the plain meaning of English words, I think it's up to you to put some effort into justifying your claims, rather than just asserting that they are true.
No, you didn't address the point I made. I argued that John is more concerned with painting the Jews as evil and responsible than the other Gospels, not that the other gospels do not contain anything about the Jews being against Jesus.
"Not believing in a belief is a belief when it is done in the same or similar manor of creating a god."
That doesn't make any sense. I don't believe. I have no idea how that means I've created anything, much less a god.
"You can look and you will see people so enshrined with how their belief is better, they will go out and evangelize except they are trading science for Christ."
There is a big difference between valuing rationality and science (i.e. honest and full debate using EVIDENCE) and evangelizing a faith. To begin with, many many Christians also see value in those things as well, so its not even particular characteristic of ANY religion.
I wouldn't discount all MDs. Go see a DO trained in osteopathic manipulative treatment (OMT). DOs are basically MDs (they get the same "full" medical education, unlike many chiropractors) with a more general focus on healthiness and dealing with pain and discomfort.
You are basically just dodging my argument. My argument does not rest on any level of human understanding. The point is that the more you try to shelter your claims from criticism with the argument that "well, God just knows better and we can't understand" the worse it gets: because all those other possibilities ALSO increase to the same degree. Your claim that God makes promises and tells us how it is become more and more irrelevant, because all these things only survive to the degree we can understand God's arguments and purposes. If we can't understand, then perhaps morality is scheduled to change next week, just as it changed with Jesus. Perhaps ANYTHING. And there is no way for you to discount any other possibility or argue that your own claimed one is more likely: you've already undercut your own argument.
Chiropracty is an interesting case, because we know that there is a measurable benefit from some of the manipulations that are performed (but then, you can see a DO and they'll do the same sorts of things too). It's mostly the theory and the more extreme claims about what it can do for things OTHER than back pain that are batty, not the idea that backrubs and spine cracks can't make one feel better (they can).
If you think that creationists have been pointing out anything helpful in science, then I don't know what to say. I can't think of a single instance in which a creationist has realized anything relevant to the science of biology before mainstream biologists realized it... at least not since the creationists of Darwin's day realized that the evidence refuted creationism. Most creationist arguments are distortions and falsehoods about what the science actually shows and argues: NOT fair criticism. Evolutionary science itself is full of debate and criticism meanwhile: mistakes and inconsistencies are caught and developed just fine by people actually educated in what they are talking about as opposed to people who don't even understand what a transitional fossil is and then go on to claim that there aren't any manbearpigs like evolution supposedly says.
Just because some people don't understand evolution and just believe in it does not mean that this the way it is for everyone.
A good start might be to read some actual scholarly work on the subject. A good book for laypeople is "Misquoting Jesus" which you can find at most bookstores.
Someone who insists right off the bat that there can be no contradictions or that differences mean nothing will never ever see any in anything of course. But take some time and look at how these texts were written, copied, and how they evolved through the various political and theological issues to how they are read today. What they include, what the leave out, what they show differently matters. The portrayal of how Jesus faces his death, for instance, is very different from Mark to Luke to John, and these are not mere differences in emphasis: they are based off very different conceptions about who Jesus was. The way the Jews are portrayed is not the same: you merely quote a bunch of mentions of the Jews being involved with the crucifixion, which is sort of irrelevant: read the entire portrayals. Mashing all these accounts together and pretending that Jesus said and did everything in all of them, again, as I said, does a real disservice to understanding the writers of these texts.