Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Evolution is a myth? Please explain:

But if you don't start with "I exist as something capable of thought" how can you claim that you think? Suppose you don't exist, how can you assert "I think." Is nothing capable of thinking? That's silly but by eliminating that possibility you're left with only the alternative of existence from the beginning. You must exist to make the assertion "I think."

BTW, "murder" is unprivileged killing which is generally accepted as the meaning of "killing of an innocent." A slight refinement of terms.

Are you kidding? Google a dictionary.

Shortly it will be pointed out thatthis is the Marxist position because SJG'S father was a by the book marxist..

"Gould is famous for "punctuated equilibrium"---the theory that tries to reconcile Neo-Darwinism with the decidedly anti-Darwinian fossil record. "Punk-eek" doesn't work either, but its hilariously funny watching the intellectual contortions neo-Darwinian fundamentalists have to go through to try to reconcile their theory with the disconfirming evidence." - Tarquin

Ridiculous. Punctuated equilibrium merely asserts that there are periods of high pressure for rapid change within certain species, such as relatively sudden changes in the environment. "Rapid change" must be understood in terms of geological time scales, i.e., still very long periods of time.

In other words, it asserts that most major changes occur within a geologically short time scale, and that in between those periods are long periods of a relative absence of change (slow or no change).

An example would be the sudden gigantism among many species of birds (along with the loss of the ability to fly) that occurred after the K-T Extinction Event. This occurred because of the sudden disappearance of all of the earth's mega fauna, i.e., all dinosaurs other than birds. This left a vacuum in terms of niches to be filled, so birds grew larger to fill them, and lost their flight because they adopted the roles of land mega fauna, which didn't require flight. This change in birds happened relatively quickly.

You're just regurgitating what you read on The Institution For Creation Research website. You've been duped.

The fossil record speaks for itself....3 billion years of microbial life before the emergence of multicellular organisms and an 'explosion' in evolution, five major extinction events and here we are.

This does not paint a picture of special creation or guided evolution.

98%+ of all species to ever inhabit the earth are extinct.

Doesn't really speak to much of a "plan".

Bah!

Thats called progress!

And once again you fail to respond on the merits---invoking fallacies rather than real arguments. I accept your concession.

If there were any merits, I'd respond to them.

How's your math?........

Lets rephrase this a bit, from Decartes:

"we cannot doubt of our existence while we doubt."
"I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am"

As for your position on the Geico lizard, please demonstrate he's capable of forming a cogent thought.

I thank you for your effort but I'm a high school graduate only and almost 67 years old. I'm pretty good at arithmetic and real good at reading comprehension. This discussion and your answer are so far over my head I guess I'll do like my wife does about politics and just forget about it. But anyway thanks again and sorry for putting you to the trouble. Best thing for me to do is to go back to arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic that our country has become.

It's a tenet of Western thought that we exist. cf Eastern philosophy. Yet it can't be proven. Wiping out Eastern philosophy in one fell swoop would be cool! However you phrase the proposition you must exist to be able to state the proposition. I don't know enough Descartes to know if he's restating that assumption in a backhanded way or meant something else.

I'm not sure that anyone at Geico can form a cogent thought.

Hastings, Let me apologize for the complexity of my answer. Since you feel you are better with words than numbers, lets try to stick to mostly words and skip the numbers. Imagine you need to build a house, but have a personal net worth of exactly zero (We begin with nothing). Now we're going to assume a special idealized world for this example, one where every dollar spent on building the house creates exactly one dollars worth of value in the finished product, so in the process, not value can be created, nor destroyed. (This represent the conservation of energy). By building the house you create an asset (matter)You can borrow exactly what you need from a bank, but this creates a liability (negative gravitational energy)You build a new house worth 200k, and in the process take out a loan for exactly 200k. At the end of the process, you have a new house (Matter in the Universe), but an equal amount of debt (negative gravitational energy), so your net worth remains exactly zero (Net energy level of the entire local presentation of our universe). You have created an asset out of nothing. All of your friends marvel at your new wonderful house, but are unable to see or even comprehend the nature of your bank note, so they idolize you as the amazing man who created a house out of nothing.