Are You Religious?

[James]

Sorry for not replying earlier, but I wanted to make a complete response to everything that has been posted since my last reply. Warning: this post is VERY long. So long that the board is forcing me to do it in multiple posts.

In response to PB_guy and information, impossibility, dogma, eye evolution, worldviews:

[Click to Show Content]

In response to Geodave on "suspicious" genomes, age of the earth, social Darwinism:


[spoiler]

[quote]While it's possible that all primates derived from one primate, there are some very "suspicious" things in the human genome, which make it unlikely (but still possible) that we evolved from apes unaided.

Such as?

The age of the earth is pretty much undetermined. However, since there are 11000 years of history in the Ulduvai gorge alone, it's hard for me to swallow 6000 as the age of the earth. If we are to believe the Sumerian record, earth is hundreds of thousand of years old (at least). Also, the remnants of the last ice age (12000 years ago) are pretty hard to ignore.

Now when you start talking billions of years, the science is much more sketchy. There's no way to know for sure if those dating methods are valid -- it's all theory. It's certainly possible, but it's not FACT.

The science is just as valid when you get to larger time periods. Do you have any specific criticisms? And nothing can ever be called a fact, if you want to get semantical. How do you know you didn't just marry a gigantic unicorn 5 minutes ago, and then the unicorn wiped your memory and removed all related evidence? You can't prove that didn't happen. Your state of not-marrying-a-unicorn-5-minutes-ago cannot be considered sure, and therefore not a fact.

Do you know why we had "jungle gyms" in elementary school? Something called "social Darwinism". Since kids are evolved from monkeys, they must be something like monkeys -- the child goes from monkey to human as he grows up. We all know this is pretty much bunk (and jungle gyms over concrete are stupid), but you see how dangerous and insidious a belief system can be. What if we found out tomorrow that tater tots caused cancer -- could we all sue the school lunch program?

dafuq? I literally understand none of this. Can you, uh, elaborate?