Open Debate: Evolution.
- Thread starter Muslim
- Start date
scibetel said:
Not that I know of and I'm a little busy in the lab today, but here's a couple of links:
http://www.themodernreligion.com/verses_sci.htm
http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/quran/scislam.html
(Q) said:
Of course!!!! I'm a devout Muslim!!!! You infidel!!!
Seriously, I don't disbelieve it since it is supported by the science on evolution today; i.e. that life began in the water. (FYI - I have very limited knowledge about evolution, whatever was contained in The Origin of Species, The Ascent of Man and the Selfish Gene )
Although the Quran is essentially history plus parables plus social concepts; there are very many intriguing scientific concepts which could not have been known at the time of Mohammed, and are only now and gradually being uncovered. As the Quran says:
[96:1-5] Read! In the name of your Lord who created - Created the human from something which clings. Read! And your Lord is Most Bountiful - He who taught (the use of) the Pen, Taught the human that which he knew not.
[29:20] Say: Travel through the earth and see how Allah originated creation...
However, I also believe that beliefs are personal and you are on your own journey of discovery......
Damn I'm getting sucked into this discussion...
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Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
A lot of Christians say that you guys are the "evil empire." They even use those exact same words. Does that mean that they have the right to destroy you? They seem to be leaning in that direction. Should the rest of us just sit back and watch the Christians and Muslims annihilate each other? And maybe take the Jews, Zoroastrians, and Baha'i with them for good measure? Rid the world of evangelistic patriarchal monotheism for good?Muslim said:
If you tell me that the adherents of one religion have the right to exterminate the adherents of another over what looks, to rational people, like petty arguments over mythology, well by golly we might just let you do it! My morality does not allow me--much less urge me--to kill people I disagree with. My morality celebrates diversity and points to the history of civilization which in general has demonstrated that diversity makes humanity stronger. Your own faith becomes stronger by being forced to stand up to the challenges of those who disagree with it. With no opposition it just turns into a fairy tale you tell your children and becomes weak and useless as a guide to righteousness.
But if I don't have to actually take up arms against anyone, but merely have to sit on the sidelines and not interfere, gee, it would be really tempting to let the Abrahamists annihilate themselves. I'm just worried that since none of you have demonstrated the slightest concern for collateral damage, you'd probably kill non-combatants anyway. That is after all what Muslim fanatics and Jewish fanatics are already doing and Christian fanatics have a long and proud history of it.
Am I calling 80 percent of the world idiots? Let's see, 80 percent of the human race has IQ < 120. I guess that technically they don't qualify as idiots, but they're stupider than most of the people on SciForums.
Besides, I didn't say they were idiots. You even slipped up and reprinted my entire posting to make it obvious to everyone that I didn't say that. You have a really annoying and increasingly obvious habit of deliberately misquoting people so that you never have to argue with what they actually say. Your other really annoying and increasingly obvious habit is to simply ignore what they say when you can't come up with a good counter-argument. Don't think I've let you off the hook for that one. You simply do not debate with honor; you don't follow the rules of intellectual discourse and we're all being incredibly (and unnecessarily) polite to even bother discussing anything with you.
What I said was that monotheistic, patriarchal, evangelical (there were three words there, you seem to have missed two of them) religions bring out the worst in the human spirit, especially during hard times. They treat the masculine as superior to the feminine, which over the centuries creates nations with lopsided cultures that behave like little boys running amok, shooting each other, fouling the environment, killing animals for fun, making and enforcing rules just for the hell of it, and not caring about the future. They get pig-headed and egotistical, being so sure that they're right and everyone else is wrong, and they end up insisting that the world is flat, that black people are inferior, and that paleontology is a fraud, just because they find it "dishonorable" to admit that they might be wrong. They think they're destined to rule everybody and convert everybody to their way of thinking, which is bad enough most of the time but it gets really bad when there are two or three or four opposing sects each being certain that some god told them they have to defeat the others.
I didn't call them (or Einstein) idiots. If you think this kind of philosophy and this kind of behavior is idiotic, well then you can all just draw your own conclusions.
The reason I don't advocate killing all the Abrahamists--aside from the fact that I don't believe in killing anybody except rapists, child molesters, and terrorists, and the fact that I especially don't believe in being violent to people just because they disagree with me--is that every community of any size is a Bell Curve. There are a few good people among the worst of them, even the Abrahamists. Perhaps you are a good person, when we're not pushing your hot buttons and making you spout your racist rhetoric about hanging infidels.
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What a complete asswipe. Not even sadly funny here, which is just about all you're good for.Muslim said:
which one of your definitions does fire not satisfy?Hercules Rockefeller said:
besides the one or more cells one of course.
the fact of the matter is that there is no proof that things become alive.
nothing in nature leads me to believe that things become alive.
no scientific experiment has proved that elements become alive.
there is also no evidence that the structure of molecules endows them with properties that are fundamentaly different than what nature can explain.
1) No direct proof. You are correct.leopold99 said:
2) Every living thing should lead you to this mostly reasonable conclusion.
3) True.
4) Of course not. Living and non-living molecules are nicely explained by natural mechanisms.
No direct proof. Correct.leopold99 said:
But it is a strong working hypothesis with no compelling evidence to the contrary either. It is the most reasonable hypothesis we have, and is definitely testable, especially as we learn more about how molecules behave.
Are you trying to emulate Valich?leopold99 said:
I spent a long post with multiple paragraphs outlining why fire does not satisfy any of the requirements for life. I addressed them all. Look back at the previous page. Your inability to assimilate information and the pseudo-philosophical and scientifically inaccurate ramblings immediately above have convinced me that it’s not worth any more of my effort. Believe whatever you want, just please stop talking on behalf of “science” because you don't know what you're talking about and are merely making a fool of yourself.
Fraggle gets kudos for the best posts in this thread. Anyways, evolution is basically proven. We have the fossil record, we have observed it in action, both under lab and in nature. Now, you can either say that allah guided evolution or satan made it appear like evolution occurred when it really didn't to fool people into disbelief in allah. The problem with those theories is falsifyibility. A theory that can't be proven false or true is not scientifically acceptable. All you have is faith for that one.
samcdkey said:
Evolution does not predict life began in the water, nor is it related. The beginning of life is the topic of abiogenesis. Furthermore, you might not argue successfully that abiogenesis predicts that life began in the water, so the Quran cannot make that claim either.
Or, is it such that people find meanings not necessarily originally portrayed by the authors, yet those new foundling meanings usurp their progenitors.
Are they? Or, are they hand-me-downs from your parents? No, really.
No worries. I'm unable to comprehend peoples beliefs in gods. No one has yet to explain their beliefs other than they "know" the supernatural exists and that it's a personal thingy. They appear to merely rationalize these beliefs within the confines of their imaginations.
Baffling.
