BeSiege82

It is odd how the Bible notes that the ark is located in the mountains of Ararat. The main problem with all of the recent finds- especially the 2006 expiation- is that either there were no professional archaeologists or something of that sort involved or the people who 'found it,' kept their mouth shut about the important details. It is sad.

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Kerostasis

As far as I know, the Bible never actually mentions the Ararat mountains. Thats simply our best guess as to a landform that matches the description. Or am I forgetting something?

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Requital

Yet, Atheism is dependant on Evolution as a means to prove God does not exist. You can't both believe that "God made life and God doesn't exist", or "Something made everything, and that something doesn't exist". This is a logically false statement. I am under the premise that Logic exists...why this is so, is a different subject, but for now we will make that huge assumption for arguments sake.

I would agree with you, science does not contracdict the Bible, but Antithiest Science claims the Bible contradicts science because God can not exist.

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Requital

Even if they Did find the Arc (I use Arc because it reminds me of the rainbow, which first appeared in the bible at the end of the flood...gives rise to a lot of interesting scietific possibilities about the nature of the world before and after that time), it couldn't be the Arc because that would lead to all kinds of issues with the "scientific" theories that do no allow for God. Mostly I think it would be too much of an Idol for people. Similar to the Ark (conenant one) being found again. I think revelations mentions the Ark (convenant one or the Arc?) is placed in the Holy of Holy's in the last days.

"and on the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. 5 The waters continued to recede until the tenth month, and on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains became visible." It's actually in the Bible, but whether or not it is still the correct name is questionable. Genesis 8 or so.

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Beatnik

LOL. I didn't reply because I couldn't tell what the hell he or you are talking about.

What you guys are saying sounds like actual language, but the content just makes no sense. And I'm not about to get into an internet argument on the plausibility of Noah's Ark. If something like Noah's Ark, that's on the face of it so obviously impossible no matter what kind of mental gymnastics are employed to visualize a Big Boat and Peaceful Animals and a 40 day planetwide flood, is up for debate, then we're talking from two different universes, with zero overlap for discussion. Sorry.

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Kerostasis

Oh right, forgot that. Thanks. Although you're right that the name might have changed at some point in the thousands of years since then. Lots of other place names in the Bible are no longer valid.

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CingularDuality

I won't respond to someone that is too lazy to write in common English. If I don't understand a lazy person's post the first time I read it, I no longer bother to try to decipher a boatload of misspellings and grammar tragedies.
I think you'll find that most atheists are also agnostic, in that they don't just believe that god doesn't exist, but that it is also impossible to prove that he exists OR doesn't exist.

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Embiggener

So lets sum up.

You have a problem with lifeforms slowly evolving over millions of years. But no problem with every creature on earth evolving and redistributing from a relatively small number of animals on a big wooden boat a mere 4000 years ago.

Requital

Yes, if you apply "God does not Exist" to that story and apply what we see in nature today to it. But, you can't do that because the story says specifically God exists, and God did the work. So for arguments sake, I will agree if God does not exist then that story is absolutely false. I never said the story was true without God. You said that it is not true.

So, if we take the story as it is written and God exists. God couldn't have done that? How is that two different universes? Do i live in a different Universe than you because I believe in God? Why is it your universe? "How about you just leave My universe?" LOL. Thats pretty flawed logic. I thought you were all about logic? Isn't Logic the basis of your faith?

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SmokingTarpan

And I offered a large part of the ancient world believing in Zeus as critical disproof of the Judeo-Christian God's numbers of believers being a sound argument for anything. Your God still existed back then, even though 0 people were believers, yes? I took the FSM out of the equation (of course I don't believe, it's merely one of many example options) and presented a real-world (albeit ancient real-world) scenario where a substantial portion of the world worshipped a deity that is not your God. Is that acceptable disproof of God? Of course not, people and societies change their beliefs over time.

Your argument, at base, is an inverse appeal to popularity. "Because 0 people believe X, X cannot be true." Back in the day, zero people believed the world was round, that the earth rotated around the sun and that Pluto existed.

I'm asking for proof of something without the proof itself containing fallacies, not disproof of anything. Since it's primarily a given that you won't show up with God on my doorstep (likely one of the only proofs a non-believer would accept), let's not use zero or a billion believers in something intangible and imperceivable as an argument one way or another.

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Requital

Yes, because God exists and has said it didn't happen that way. That is the main reason, but there are a significant number of logical reasons as well...(logic... ).

Lets go with the simple creation of life?
There is no evidence that supports, Matter created life by itself. None. The person who proves this will earn a Noble Prize and it will be in every magazine and newspaper in the world. That person will be rich beyond their wildest dreams.

So lets assume that Matter creating life by itself has been proven (there is no evidence this is even possible), but we will assume this to be the case because I am not above making some base assumptions in order to see a thoughtful logical pattern. I will even start it by saying lets give that 1 little creature DNA and a Cell wall and the ability to procreate all spontaneously and instantly. That's a pretty big step. It gets rid of some of the issues of irreducible complexity. So lets talk about mutations. I am going to quote a few people and plagurise because I don't fully understand this subject and have only read what has been written.

"New alleles |genes| originate only by mutation."1 The only way for organisms to acquire DNA other than what they inherited from their parents is for their DNA to change, or mutate. If their DNA doesn't change,living things could never change regardless of how much time passes. Lizards could never become chickens and monkeys, and fish could never become philosophers. Since evolution rejects purposeful design, genetic change could only be random, or accidental."

So lets take a look at that.

"The underlying genetic mechanism of evolution is random mutation, and specifically mutation that is beneficial to life. Biology textbooks in theory present positive and negative mutations to students as though these were commonplace and roughly equal in number. However, these books fail to inform students that unequivocally positive mutations are unknown to genetics, since they have never been observed (or are so rare as to be irrelevant)."

So lets say for the sake of argument you get the rare DNA change over the course of your life (remember evolution is slower than this, centuries upon centuries). Thats pretty fast, but we will just assume that to be true so we can continue on.

"The recent decoding of the human genome has allowed scientists to determine that cystic fibrosis is caused by a random change of three nucleotides in a gene that codes for a 1480-amino acid-long ion transport protein.(2)"

Big words that don't mean a lot to me, but seemed important.

"The human genome has three billion nucleotides, or base pairs, in the DNA. Since a random change of three nucleotides in a three-billion-part genome is fatal (0.0000001%), how is it remotely possibly that a chimp could be the evolutionary cousin of a human? The lowest estimate of the genetic differences between our DNA and that of chimps is at least 50 million nucleotides (some estimates of the disparity are much higher)."

Now lets check out the math of genetics....

One top geneticist recently conducted a computer analysis to quantitate the ratio of "beneficial mutations" to harmful mutations.(3) Only 186 entries for beneficial mutations were discovered (and even they have a downside), versus 453,732 entries for harmful mutations. The ratio of "beneficial mutations" to harmful mutations is 0.00041! Thus, even if a very rare mutation is "beneficial," the next 10,000 mutations in any evolutionary sequence would each be fatal or crippling, and each of the next 10,000 imaginary mutations would bring the evolution process to a halt."

Now, for me this whole long period of time concept sees pretty plausible. The longer the time the more chance something goes wrong. Yet, Evolution indicates that we hit the jackpot. Everything went exactly right every time, because it couldn't happen any other way or the entire organism would die off.

This to me is one of the big leaps of faith required in the concept of evolution.

There is also the dating system that has serious flaws that disagree with what we have observed.

If we back it back up and look at the first two steps. Evolution gets moved into religious dogma being institutionalized years ago and since proven untenable through modern sience.


1 Campbell, N. et al. 1997. Biology: Concepts & Connections. Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin Cummins, 426.
2 Collins, F. et al. 1990. The cystic fibrosis gene: isolation and significance. Hospital Practice, 25(10):45-57.
3 Sanford, J. 2005. Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome. Lima, NY: Elim Publishing, 26.

http://www.icr.org/article/3466/

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Requital

So basically many Athiests believe God does not exists, but also that you can not prove he exists or does not exist. So really Athiests don't know? So their stance is God doesn't exist because we can't prove it or disprove it?

When I ask where did life come from? They state Evolution as the source, but they can't prove it and by extension disprove it either? Life had to come from somewhere or the logic they rely upon to survive is gone. So do you have to believe in some form of begining? or can you just wave your hand at it and call it an unknowable mystery?

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Kerostasis

At this point I have to believe you're misinterpreting me intentionally, as the second half of my post which you declined to quote clears up nearly every question that you ask me here. So lets try something exceedingly clear: Do you assert that the FSM, to the best of your knowledge, may potentially exist?

If not, and given that I also do not, then I see no reason to continue the subject of proofs or disproofs of the FSM any farther. We can simply both agree that he does not exist and leave it at that.

You have not asked me to provide proof that my God does exist, nor have I offered to do so, given that we both agree that you will not accept any proof I offer anyway (as evidenced by your last comment). Therefore none of the proofs I offered for my God could possibly have contained any fallacies, because I didn't offer any.

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Switch

The ark couldn't have happened because 1 man in ancient times couldn't build an enormous cruise ship and somehow travel the entirety of the UNKNOWN world collecting every species in existence. This is a ridiculous. When I was in 1st grade I argued with kids about santa clause. We are having the same argument. To argue this is to argue for Santa Clause. Do you or do you not concede that this isn't a literal or factual event.
No, thats not evolution in a nut shell and thats not the biggest problem in the ark fairytale. In a situation where only 2 individuals are chosen to repopulate a species, you experience a fixing of alleles and degeneration due to consanguinity (inbreeding). This leads to dying off in most populations. Its a problem many zoologists are trying to approach on behalf of several species who have been decimated to the point of low population #s and now lack several traits that used to be part of their natural variation. Will you at least concede that Noahs Ark is not a factual event? Do you believe a man built a boat of wood and carried 2 of every species from around the world? With 1000's of biologists actively searching for species, we cannot get every single one even today (because many are dying off or evolving into new species too quickly for us to catalog them all).
To be completely honest, it would be FAR MORE PLAUSIBLE that an alien life form came and scooped up species in an attempt to save the inhabitants of the planet and then put us back after the flood. That story is far more plausible than a man and a wooden boat. If you think its ridiculous, reassess the validity of your original idea.

Alright, book titles--- we'll start with what I have on my book shelf right now:

Freemon & Herron. Evolutionary Analysis, Third Edition. Prentice Hall (no isbn, its at the bottom of a pile of books andI don't feel like taking out and getting back to the bottom)
This is a text completely devoted to evolution. If you read this cover to cover and understood it, you'd be considered very knowledgeable on the topic of evo.

Larson, Edward J. Evolution. Modern Library Chronicles Book ISBN: 0-679-64288-9
This is a very ID friendly book. This author has many titles with varying degrees of scientific detail to help people understand.

Edward O. Wilson & William H. Hossert. A Primer of Population Biology. Sinauer Associates Inc. Publishers ISBN: 0-87893-926-1
This is exactly what the title says... A primer on population biology. This will help you understand the way a gene pool works in any given population. This will get you familiar with the basic statistics behind gene flow

King & Cummings. Concepts of Genetics, Seventh Edition. Prentice Hall Press.
This is all genetics. If you read this cover to cover, you might begin to understand why some of your assumptions are totally off base.

Goldschmidt, Tijs. Darwins Dream Pond: Drama in Lake Victoria (don't know where i put it at the moment, but i'm actively rereading it now)... google it you'll find it.
This book is more of a scientific memoir written in a novel format. It tracks a scientists as he studies an organisms that is evolving at an extreemly rapid pace (and I mean so its visible in our life time) He discusses how difficult it is to catalog the species because they appear and disappear so quickly. In the end, a non native fish is introduced and it begins to decimate the population under study. This is probably the easiest read, but contains the least amount of educational material. If you're not already familiar with evolution and population biology, you may get lost in what looks like a simple novel.

In addition to these books, every single modern biology book in print espouses genetics and evolution as the process that results in evolution, a solid, visible, and quantifiable phenomenon.

All of these titles require you to come into them with a basic understanding of biology. If you don't have that, you won't understand very much at all. You might want to start with any number of basic bio texts.

Campbell & Reece. BIOLOGY Sixth Edition. Benjamin Cummings Press

Do read them, so far you've made many assertions that clearly show you don't have an understanding of biology or evolution. Your whole 'because I said DNA' post shows that you don't know what we're discussing here. I never said anything ridiculous. I never said, 'because I said DNA i'm right'. What I did do is give a specific example about how that author is completely inaccurate with his assertions. Life exists without DNA. In some cases, it functioned with RNA only. Now, if you knew anything about either, you could probably make some decent points to debate, but you clearly dont. To make make incorrect and substandard interpretations of modern science makes the arguments of that author invalid and trivial.

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RandomGuy

Calling it a mystery seems a much more intellectually self-honest answer to the question than waving your hand at it and saying popular supernatural forces did it.

Evolutionary theories are disprovable. Theistic beliefs such as the existence of the FSM are not. An atheist doesn't necessarily accept evolutionary thories, by the way. I image that most do however accept them in the same way most people accept the germ theory of disease.