Originally posted by resonance
josephus was born 4-5 years after jesus' death.. the others 30-40 years and its obvious that they would have to talk about him after his life..

Originally posted by resonance
if i did a report on lets say amelia earhart, would it just be hearsay since i never met her? she existed bottom line many people did meet her

Originally posted by resonance
those people writing that long ago knew jesus existed they would not spread doctrine about a man knowing that people could easily just ask people who supposedly saw him that werent connected to the religion

Originally posted by np6888
Anyway, no proof of intelligent design? Once again, no one has answered my question, what is considered proof?

Originally posted by np6888
If an event is too statistically impossible to happen by chance(yes, given an "infinite" amount of time, an event, no matter how unlikely, will happen, however, the universe is said to be "only" 14 billion years old), yet happens anyway, then doesn't that imply that someone must have designed it?

Originally posted by np6888
And of course, we have the beginning of life, where we can't explain WHY exactly these atoms keep having these chemical reactions that lead to amino acids, then protein, then cells, then organs, etc., before it ever developed the brain to interpret that these processes are advantageous.

Originally posted by TheWalkingFox

Originally posted by Outlawstar

I mean the Olmecs for instance didint acquire their advanced mathematics from NOWHERE, whoever built the pyramids didint do so on a whim, shy did so many civilisations seem to pop out fo the woodwork, with their culture fully formed and then begin to decline, its contrary to what the average joe would consider history to depict.

These are serious questions that have not been anywhere near adequately answered!^______^

[edit on 4-11-2009 by Outlawstar]

If there's one thing that annoys me more than science-denial, it's pseudohistory. Especially pseudohistory of the "brown people can't stack rocks" variety.

First, the Olmecs didn't have advanced mathematics. The Maya did - sort of. To believe that you have to believe that having the concept of zero makes mathematics advanced. Their counting system was also base twenty. So I suppose they were more advanced than the Romans were, at least. However the Maya didn't have anything like what we would consider advanced math - They used addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication, but nothing advances that can be compared to math like algebra, trigonometry, calculus, or the like.

So, yeah. The Maya; better at math than Rome, worse than Baghdad.

And why weren't the pyramids built on a whim? Have you ever seen the ludicrous crap that gets built on a whim nowadays? No reason that a society that thinks the king is literally god itself (under pain of torture and execution of course!) wouldn't be more than happy to fulfil his whimsical building designs. The way it works is that some ancient Egyptian kings had small step-pyramids built for themselves. Later kings kept building bigger, better pyramids, until we get the ones at Giza. Think of it as a royal afterlife version of penis-measuring.

What civilizations "pop out of the woodwork"? I can understand the illusion of such, and there's a very good reason - most archaeologically interesting sites tend to be on top of whatever came before. Mohenjo-Daro for instance, is almost certainly hte product of at least hundreds of years of people living on the Indus. However the city is inevitably built on top of whatever villages, towns, tribal meeting places and the like that came before - we would have to destroy the place in order to find out what it's sitting on.

Originally posted by Outlawstar
My question is this, why doesint evolution seem to apply to humans?
Where did Cro-Magnon man come from 35,000 years ago?

It is clear that they are not as conventionally was believed related, that is, Neanderthal ws not Cro-magnon's ancestor, they were completely different skeletally and physically, and why does it seem that Neanderthals became more primitive before abruptly dissapearing, why have we evolved way beyond the needs to survive

Why have we changed so much? Technology. Fire allows us to cook our food, meaning it's softer and needs less chewing - thus why our jaws are shorter and weaker than those of our H. sapiens forebearers - which is why wisdom teeth are such a problem for us. Projectile weapons, sturdy clothing, and the ability to build shelter meant that we developed a more gracile form - we didn't need to put so much of our energy towards grrowing muscle and bone mass, shed our hair, lost a lot of fat, etc.

And do you want to know why neanderthals became "more primitive" looking? Inbreeding. The Aurignacian H. sapiens culture had pushed neanderthals to the extremes of their range - the very southern reaches of Iberia and the Italian peninsular, and there they sat, basically breeding among their own small families for a few thousand years before H. Sapiens was pushed southward by the last Glacial Maximum, and either killed or outcompeted the things.

And also, I really do think that natural selection is itself the greatest evidence of an intelligence,I mean it would be just as easy to call it intelligent selection would it not, no, Im not convinced.

I see the theory of evolution as very good, but not definite, hmm, is there a third variable were not looking at, perhaps something to explain modern mans explosion onto the scene and his unusual evolutionary traits?

Unfortunately just because you do not understand something doesn't mean it's flawed. Humans didn't "Explode" onto the scene. Like any other animal, we have a definite family tree, lots of species (now all extinct save for ourselves and, if you like the woo-woo, perhaps yetis and sasquatch). There is clear development between those species and within our own. We don't really have many "unusual" evolutionary traits. In fact we're pretty much what you'd expec