A factual digression concerning evolution and creation

Originally posted by oliveoil
Who created and controls this force?

I'm done answering your questions. You have completely ignored my repeated questions to you, even though I have done my very best to answer yours.

You speak from a position of knowledge that you do not possess.

Have a nice day.

If you are to accept the evidence of the big bang and the natural rise of life, there is absolutely no reason to believe that human beings have no purpose. It is up to ourselves to give our lives purpose. Our hopes, our dreams, our aspirations, these give our lives purpose.

Originally posted by oliveoilThe argument of "were we created" holds more truth than the alternative, being that we have no purpose and evolved as a result of a Big Bang..

Absolutely not. Just because you think human beings were created with intent does not make it true.

Evolution will never explain were life actually came from

Originally posted by the illuminator
Evolution will never explain were life actually came from

You're right, because evolution explains where biodiversity comes from. Evolution doesn't speak to the origin of life, only the origin of species.

Evolution isn't "accidental" as you claim.

Either way, you are filling a gap in knowledge with magic (god)...typical god of the gaps trap.

Originally posted by Benevolent Heretic
reply to post by Kailassa

 

Forest fires happen naturally and are critical to the health of the forest, giving access to sunlight to the new saplings.

Wolves have the natural instinct to eat the entrails of their prey first with the intent of gaining the most nutrients.

The sex drive is nature in action. The intent of the sex drive is procreation.

Where forest fires are not the norm, the forest still flourishes.
Where forest fires are the norm, the species which post-fire conditions favour have the opportunity to get a foothold.
After the first human residents of Australia arrived and started using fire to drive their prey from the forest, that forest changed becuase the conditions changed, trees which thrived in those conditions took over.
There is no reason to believe nature is an entity with purpose, making decisions which favour a particular outcome. Have you no understanding of the processes driving evolution?

Wolves with inclinations whish supply their nutritional needs are more likely to pass their genes on than those that don't. Thus the species evolves what for wolves are healthy eating habits.
There is no entity which decided to make wolves eat entrails.

Nor does the sex drive have intent. It is not an entity. The sex drive is merely a drive, an urge to indulge in sexual behaviour. As sex is vital to procreation, animals with the optimal level of sex drive are more likely to pass their genes on, including the genes for that level of sex drive.

reply to post by Benevolent Heretic

Sorry, BH. Those aren't expressions of intent. They are the results of evolution by natural selection. We see them happening because they are the only--or at least the most repeatable, because adaptive--occurrences the given conditions permit. Evolution doesn't have a goal in view. It just happens.

Only conscious beings can act with intent. Even they don't do it very often. And the connection between intent and action may only exist in their own perceptions.

Of course, this post makes it clear you see nature as an entity, possibly divine. Do you also see it as endowed with consciousness? Is that why you say nature acts with intent?

*

reply to post by sykickvision

If you are content with your superstitious belief system, I urge you to keep it and stop asking questions. The more you know and understand, the fewer gaps will there be for god to reside in.

There should be a Warning to Creationists put up on every thread in this forum: 'Abandon Hope, All Ye That Enter Here'. They can't win, and they will leave without either their peace of mind or their faith.

Originally posted by oliveoil
reply to post by Sly1one

 

Its your argument. Energy you speak of is either material or not.If it is material it contains matter.Material things either evolved by accident (which have no meaning) or were created.

Matter is something that has mass and takes up space. A photon, which has enough energy to mutate your cells or give you a sunburn, depending on wavelength, is neither. It is a massless point particle/wave. And the second sentence in your post makes no sense. Does the plural verb "have" refer to the singular noun "accident?" So what exactly are you trying to say has/have no meaning?

Originally posted by Benevolent Heretic

Originally posted by oliveoil
Who created and controls this force?

I'm done answering your questions. You have completely ignored my repeated questions to you, even though I have done my very best to answer yours.

You speak from a position of knowledge that you do not possess.

Have a nice day.

Your question was

How do you know that accidents don't have purpose?

My answer was that

Because they are accidents. They have no apparent or deliberate cause

I even went as far as telling you to pick up a dictionary for the meaning of the word itself . Here, ill do this for you. websters says : lack of intention or necessity. Now lets look up the word "PURPOSE', will use the same dictionary. 1 a : something set up as an object or end to be attained : intention.So there you have it, Something that came to be through accident has no intent. No intention = no purpose.
Again your question has been answered. Oh and by the way, Im not asking questions, only stating fact.It was your choice to refute. Unsuccessfully I might add.Thank you and have a nice day your self.

reply to post by PieKeeper

If you are to accept the evidence of the big bang and the natural rise of life, there is absolutely no reason to believe that human beings have no purpose. It is up to ourselves to give our lives purpose. Our hopes, our dreams, our aspirations, these give our lives purpose.

No they dont. No one can truly say that his life has meaning unless someone or something has told them the purpose of their being. Only a creator of such knows what his creation is for.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

On a more serious note:

,,, they are accidents. They have no apparent or deliberate cause.

keyword for this one being APPARENT. As much as creationism REQUIRES a creator, evolution does not require that there is none, and is therefore not in opposition to any god. It has no need for intent (although causality nevertheless applies - if I eat you, you will not have babies unless you are capable of reproducing after i have snacked on you), and, with intent being impossible to prove (and thus not really the interest of science which is largely concerned with what IS provable), intention - and thus any man, woman or pony in the sky running the whole business - is of no real consequence.

And the (small) accidental aspect of evolution - namely the arisal of new genotypes through independent assortment, crossover and mutation - has, as you stated, no APPARENT cause, and so as far as science is concerned, it is random. As far as being accidental goes, ahem, "Those are your words."

PS - somebody talked about reproduction being an intention. This doesn't necessarily follow - if you reproduce, your genotype - and thus aspects of your phenotype (the expression of your genotype) - persists. If you do not reproduce, your genotype does not persist. Hence non-reproductive lineages tend to be short.

Originally posted by oliveoil
some stuff I accidentally deleted about stuff, purpose can only be had if someone tells you so, yada yada yada Only a creator of such knows what his creation is for.

Aargh to my incompetence.

Anyway, let's consider the human consciousness, specifically mine. I, the concept of self (mine, in particular) is something that is created by me, concerning me. Any purpose selected by me is given to the self-created concept of me, by me, which also tells me that I have that purpose. Example: I intend to drink a cup of tea. This is my purpose, which is formed in my mind, and given to me - and confirmed, sometimes aloud, by me - by me.

So as much as I would not say that there is not some big ole creator creating stuff, the ability to assig purpose to oneself is the cornerstone of consciousness, without which apparently conscious thought patterns are simply reflections of instinct originating in novel areas...

Hang on, are you presbytarian? I mean old-school presbytarian, not the liberal modern types. Because that would explain a lot.

If you're not, then it may interest you that a lot of scientists (although I feel that, for rejecting the hypothesis of a theory of mind in non-primates in the absence of an exhaustive search failing to find it, they are not truly scientific in their method) suggest that consciousness is what distinguishes humans from other animals. As most of the anti-evolution brigade dislike being grouped with animals, do you really want to reduce it to instinct from a different angle (god rather than black-box environmental processing).

reply to post by TheWill

keyword for this one being APPARENT.

No. Actually, the key word I believed I used was "apparent or deliberate" as in meaning ,'and or'.

Apparent and deliberate have two different meanings.

Now add the word deliberate to your statement instead of apparent. suddenly your whole cluster schmuck of words makes no sense (as if it did in the first place).

Point being is that apparent is not the key word.

Apparent is the same as saying "seems to be". A direction. Could be or couldnt be.

Anything that is deliberate is intentional. The direction here points to an absolute. heaven is north.

Apparent or deliberate cause means; seems to be... an absolute.

Get it.

reply to post by oliveoil


the keyword from your persective was apparent or deliberate. For my explanation of why the dichotomy you had created was in error, apparent was the keyword: if accidents are described as such if they lack "apparent" or "deliberate" cause, some may lack deliberate cause, some may lack apparent cause, and some may lack both. No deliberate cause is apparent for the minor role that accidents have to play for evolution, however this does not necessarily exclude intentional (=deliberate) cause from this (already described) aspect, as it is of little concern to it.

Sorry for any confusion.

reply to post by TheWill


Look, it really doesn't take a brain scientist to figure out what I am saying. What I said was that accidents have no apparent or deliberate cause. Why ? because they are not intentional. Any rational person would have to agree.I think you, just like BH, are twisting things just a little bit throwing all common sense out the window.

reply to post by oliveoil


I do agree that a true accident has no deliberate cause (although apparency is surely only important in interpretation). My issue comes where you suggest that evolution, based on its "accidental" nature, is improbable - evolution makes no statement regarding whether or not its causes - most of which are readily apparent - are deliberate, and so we cannot take this to mean that it is necessarily accidental.

I may edit this post again once I have looked at your original post to work out precisely what the smaller issues were, too.

Now editing: the big one is that you assume that evolution, big bang, and origins without young-earth creationism, by inference of having no apparent cause, have no deliberate cause, when to make any assertions about cause without evidence is unscientific and thus should not be presented as a logical (=scientific in my head) argument.

The next one is the assumption that purpose cannot arise without intent. A table has purpose, assigned by it's non-divine creator, the creator. While you might state that this is homologous with humans being created intentionally and thus the m/f partnership having purpose assigned by a deliberate creator, this does not have to be so: would you argue that termites are intelligent and thus do things deliberately? If so, I congratulate you on your open-mindedness, but in the absence of any evidence for their consciousness, I would suggest that the tendency to build a termite mound - a structure which, as a table has purpose of raising objects off the ground, has the purpose of ventilating the structures below housing the queen - has been created through a non-deliberate causal process (so is it an accident?) where termites which created more expansive nests survived and reproduced better when they built the mound, with its complex network of shafts, etc., etc.

Male and female sexes are not unique to humans, but there are animals which do not possess them. There are asexual organisms - but this is a situation which does not survive long periods of evolutionary time in large or slow-reproducing organisms - and so sexual reproduction (where two separate organisms mix their genotypes to produce the next generation) is favoured. Basally, they make an equal contribution - each gamete is identical, and so the sexes are not separate. However, some individuals can do better - although the effect is density dependent - by producing smaller gametes (cheating - their partner fuels the initial embryo) and thus being able to produce more of them. This is pretty much as far as the male/female sexes go in externally fertilised marine organisms. "females" whose eggs survive this low male investment also do better than their counterparts who MUST fuse with an equal size gamete, as some of their offspring will be male and able to reproduce at a higher volume. Internal fertilisation - complicated to an extreme degree in many vertebrates - is more about protecting the investment of eggs.

Basically, M/F thing does not imply purpose. And if this doesn't make sense, it's past midnight and I need to sleep.

Originally posted by oliveoil
No they dont. No one can truly say that his life has meaning unless someone or something has told them the purpose of their being. Only a creator of such knows what his creation is for.

Actually, that's what a purpose is. It's a goal or object to be attained. Ex. "The purpose of this mission is to asses the strength of the enemy." In this sense, I can give my own life a purpose, a goal. I have the free will that allows me to do so.

In terms of meaning, we're talking about significance. We can assess the significance, or meaning, of our lives through our experiences and how we interact with out world.

We don't need anyone to tell us what our purpose is.

Originally posted by oliveoil
Look, it really doesn't take a brain scientist to figure out what I am saying.

True, true. Though it may take a brain scientist to figure out why you keep saying it after TheWill has pointed out so clearly to you that you are wrong.

What I said was that accidents have no apparent or deliberate cause. Why? because they are not intentional.

What TheWill is trying to explain is that eveything has a cause. There are no causeless events in the world, even random ones.

You, just like BH, are twisting things just a little bit throwing all common sense out the window.

No, you just aren't keeping up with their arguments. That's not their fault, Olive. It's yours.

reply to post by TheWill

I do agree that a true accident has no deliberate cause

There is no such thing as a true accident.Accidents are not intentional.

My issue comes where you suggest that evolution, based on its "accidental" nature, is improbable - evolution makes no statement regarding whether or not its causes - most of which are readily apparent - are deliberate, and so we cannot take this to mean that it is necessarily accidental.

Woe, wait one minute. Lets clear some things up. First off, I believe that man has indeed evolved physically, Although, certainly not spiritually.This has nothing to do with creation.My statement is clear. There is only two ways anything can come to be.That is either intentional or accidental.Mind you, evolution and creation are two different concepts.The "big bang" did not evolve.Something or someone (god) intended this to be.The Big Bang was either an accident (which accidents have no purpose) or it was intentional (purpose). Mind you, that I am not speaking of the results that can occur from an accident,(meaningful or not) rather the accident itself which is without intent.

The next one is the assumption that purpose cannot arise without intent. A table has purpose, assigned by it's non-divine creator, the creator. While you might state that this is homologous with humans being created intentionally and thus the m/f part

Yes, you are correct in your analogy, however, The only true way to know exactly what that table is for is by asking the creator its purpose.Other than that we could only theorize, or in plain English, guess.Same goes for humanity.The only way we can truly know what man is for is to ask the Creator.Good thing for us God has revealed this to us.

reply to post by Astyanax


I have found here on ATS two kinds of people. Those who speak for themselves, and those who leach onto those with superior intellect and try in there own rudimentary analogy to explain them.I dont need an english lesson thank you.Now if you have something concrete to add, by all means