Absolutely Nothing: Atheists on What They Know About What They Pretend to Discuss

How do you recognise that natural things are designed? How can you tell the difference between designer and no designer, in nature?

You're telling lies now, Jan. Natural forces act on chemicals and produce living organisms all the time. Every time a baby is conceived and is born, that's what's going on.

How do we (you) know it? Is this one of those things you "just know"? Should we add this to the list of your magical knowledge?

What makes you say that? How can you tell it's designed?

 

Yes there is. The fossil record, genetic markers, comparative anatomy, supported by geology, paleontology, radioactive dating, etc. etc. But you know all this. So, time to stop telling lies, Jan.

Knowingly telling lies is grounds for an official warning, at least.

How do you account for the fossil record that shows a sequence of fossils progressing from land-dwelling animals to whales, with a clear sequence of small adaptations? Do you just wave it away? Or did God fake it to make it look as if whales evolved?

I thought you knew something about the scientific method. I guess I was wrong. Maybe start by researching what science is.

What do you think this means?

What designer?

Tell me your objections to the explanation, and explain to me why it is not science.

Define "Darwinism", please. You keep using that term. Let's find out what you mean by it.

How do you know?

Are Newton's laws of motion hopelessly outdated too? (Newton 1610, Darwin 1880.)

Subconscious assertions make people fools now? Interesting.

What's the evidence for intelligent design in nature? Can you present any?

Not obviously. Nothing it obvious until you make it so.

Show me why the complexity of the cell is a product of a mind. Show me how you know this is true.

Please provide an example of design in a biological structure, and tell me how you know it was designed.

You're parroting the creationist dogma again, Jan. Careful - you give yourself away.

What is compex, specified information?
Why does it require a designer?
What does it consist of in the cell?
How do you know that evolution by natural selection cannot produce complex, specified information?

Children are taught accepted science, except when creationist liars get their hooks into the education system.

 

So, whale flippers contain bones that can be put into a one-to-one correspondence with similar bones in fingers (let's say). There is a string of fossils where the same bones are seen to exhibit small steps of variation, including intermediate forms between obviously land-dwelling animals and sea-dwelling whales.

How do you account for these observed variations and the apparent sequence of variation leading from one to the other? Accident? God fakery? Or what?

As to your other point, you appear to be saying that you think that whales have finger bones for a reason. What is your reason why they need all those separate bones in their flippers, Jan?

 

You were pulled up on this previously, this thing where you talk about one animal "turning into" another. No animals turns into another type of animal, and you know that evolution claims no such thing. Evolution is not a process by which individual animals turn into other kinds of animals.

You are like your mother. Your mother is like your grandmother. Your grandmother is like your great grandmother, etc. etc. But your great grandmother is less like you than your mother. Your great great great great grandmother is even less like you.

Trace it back far enough and you'd eventually discover that your grandmother 40,000 generations ago was an ape. Some generations before that, your grandmother was most likely a small mouse-like creature. Generations before that, your grandmother was a fish-like thing. Generations before that, your grandmother was more like an amoeba.

You've already been told how we know that whales evolved from creatures like pakicetus. The fossil record. Comparative anatomy. Radioactive dating. Geology. Biology. Genetics. All of the evidence converges on only one conclusion, and there's not a single God in sight.

 

What are you talking about? Are you saying you believe "spontaneous generation" occurs?

Did you read any of the articles about her work? She doesn't think that it contradicts "darwinism".

What puzzles me is why you think it contradicts "darwinism". Please explain.

 

Yes and no. Everybody has been "told so" about just about everything they believe. You don't find out about stuff outside your direct experience unless you're "told so".'

Speaking for myself, however, I do not accept that evolution is a fact just because somebody told me that. Probably you are used to accepting dogma on the basis of some kind of heirarchy of assumed religious authority. That isn't how we scientists do things. You should learn some science. Seriously, it might open the window to your dark room and let in some light.

Part of the problem is that you don't know what kind of knowledge can be gleaned from a careful, expert study of fossils and anatomy. This is why anatomical drawings are equivalent to kiddy drawings as far as you're concerned. Zero expertise or experience, yet you still have this arrogant confidence that you can dismiss it all without ever bothering to learn anything.

It's a sad indictment on how religious indoctrination has messed you up, Jan.

What evidence are you bringing to the table in support of your claims? None, as far as I can see. All of your posts these days are bereft of any actually content. Your only aim seems to be to insult, which you try to do by making baseless claims about science.

You'd make a better fist of it if you are least tried to bring some evidence or substantive arguments to the table, but you don't. It seems the best you can do is attempt disproof by ridicule. It isn't working for you. All the science is against you and your creationist buddies. Meanwhile, you have an empty theory of your own with zero utility, predictive or explanatory power, built out of documented lies.

Are you upset because science has made a new, unexpected discovery?

What? The dinosaur bones?

Got a link?

The thing about pseudoscience is that quite often it tries to piggyback on legitimate science.

Are you willing to dig into this honesty, or are you afraid of what you might find if you look too hard?

Another allusion to absent data. Ho hum.

Planning on going out with a blaze of glorious lies and insults? If so, you won't be the first.

 

Once again, you are ignorant of the actual scholarship on the matter. Numerous biographers have combed through Einstein's statements about God and religion, but you can just ignore all those. You've never read a biography of Einstein, so you can remain blissfully ignorant.

Your source for this claim is ... what?

How do you know?

And so...?

Spinoza believed that God is “the sum of the natural and physical laws of the universe and certainly not an individual entity or creator”[5]. Spinoza attempts to prove that God is just the substance of the universe by first stating that substances do not share attributes or essences, and then demonstrating that God is a “substance” with an infinite number of attributes, thus the attributes possessed by any other substances must also be possessed by God. Therefore, God is just the sum of all the substances of the universe[6]. God is the only substance in the universe, and everything is a part of God. “Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God”[3]. [wikipedia]
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These days, people would dispute that "just the sum of all the substances in the universe" amounts to a God.

 

So what? Did Einstein say Jesus was God? Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that he did. Then what? Does that prove that Jesus is God and God is real?

Are you deferring to Einstein's authority on religious matters now, Jan?

Also, there's this (source: wikipedia):

Einstein, in a one-and-a-half-page hand-written German-language letter to philosopher Eric Gutkind, dated Princeton, New Jersey, 3 January 1954, a year and three and a half months before his death, wrote: "The word God is for me nothing but the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of venerable but still rather primitive legends. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can (for me) change anything about this. [...] For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstition. [...] I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them [the Jewish people]."​

 

Jan:

Another post to add to the list of posts you have dishonestly avoided. This is the second little reminder I have posted.

http://www.sciforums.com/threads/wh...retend-to-discuss.160197/page-61#post-3627746

 

But I already showed you my evidence. You dismissed it. So, what more do you need, given that comparative anatomy, fossils, genetics, geology, radioactive dating and all those things are insufficient to convince you?

What kind of evidence would convince you that whales evolved from land animals?