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

An absence of evidence where evidence should be found is evidence of absence. If I believe that I left a carton of milk in the fridge, but upon searching for the carton in all the places it could be, I find that there is no carton of milk in the fridge, there is no evidence for the presence of a carton of milk in the fridge. There is no milk in the fridge.

Absence of evidence where evidence should be found is evidence of absence.

The same for the gods, there is no evidence for the presence of Zeus and his family of gods on Mt Olympus, so there is no reason to believe or be convinced that they are in fact there alive and well on Mt Olympus.

Of course, the gods could be invisible and undetectable, but that's another issue.

Where have you looked for God and not found him?

I win the lottery. Did God say I'm deserving or was it a statistical fluke? How would you know?

There was a man, a sailor, who was tougher than any here. A salve trader, a blasphemer, a non believer if there was one.
The man's name was John Newton, you can look him up if you want.

That's easy. There's no evidence of God's involvement, so that means you're just one lucky SOB.

That sounds lucrative, how much is salve going for these days?

There was plenty of opportunity for God's involvement "evidence" notwithstanding. So again how would you know He didn't put a thumb on the scale and it's lost in the statistical noise that is probability?

I didn't say I "looked for God." I said looking for evidence for the existence of a God or gods.

If there are other explanations, reasonable ecplanations that account tor the evidence, it is not reasonable to be convinced that you have evidence for the existence of God. Evolution, for example, does not need a God as an explanation for how it works.

OK, so what would you consider to be good evidence of God's involvement?

Statistically speaking, someone is likely to win at some time. It's then that person who thinks 'gosh, how lucky am I" - or if religious, "praise the Lord for His blessing" - never mind the millions of losers.

Some claim intelligent design and irreducible complexity. That was put to the test but failed.

I'm not asking what "some" consider good evidence, I'm asking you.

Intelligent design and irreducible complexity is a good start. Without that, what is there?

An all powerfull, all knowing Entity appearing out of nowhere might help.

I doubt that a Creator that's capable of creating a universe would have much of a problem proving its own existence.

900 plus replies. Just curious have any minds have come close to changing? PLease let us know if you were formerly agnostic , atheist, or theist-diest, but changed your beliefs after these 44 pages. None of my business, just curious.

He's proven it: evolution is a statistical impossibility. In fact, its the impossible odds that convinced long-time atheist intellectual and philosopher Anthony Flew that life could not have begun by chance. Its the long odds that convinced highly regarded philosopher of mind and atheist Thomas Nagel that naturalism (and Neo-Darwinism, its instrumental handmaiden) cannot account for the emergence of or complexity of life on earth. In fact, the odds are so bad for Darwin that even Francis Crick has been forced to hypothecate space aliens as the source of the necessary coded information. Employing Darwin's logic (reasoning from the best explanation) the best explanation is clearly some sort of intelligent causal agent because in all of human experience, Shannon complexity (specified complex information) only comes from mind, from intelligence. That is an irrefutable and irreducible fact.

Good question.

Not mine. But did enjoy reading what other people thought. Made me re-examine what I thought. And I was right.

You are imagining things. The statistics prove no such thing. Quoting the beliefs of philosophers offering their views does not negate the evidence for evolution, which is more than sufficient to prove evolution.

Maybe you can back your claim about Crick and 'space aliens?' I think that you are misrepresenting his position.

Introduction

''Both traditional creationists and intelligent design writers have invoked probability arguments in criticisms of biological evolution. They argue that certain features of biology are so fantastically improbable that they could never have been produced by a purely natural, "random" process, even assuming the billions of years of history asserted by geologists and astronomers. They often equate the hypothesis of evolution to the absurd suggestion that monkeys randomly typing at a typewriter could compose a selection from the works of Shakespeare, or that an explosion in an aerospace equipment yard could produce a working 747 airliner [Dembski1998; Foster1991; Hoyle1981; Lennox2009]. More recent studies of this genre, in an attempt to promote an "intelligent design" worldview, argue that functional biology operates on an exceedingly small subset of the space of all possible DNA sequences, and that any changes to the "computer program" of biology are, like changes to human computer programs, almost certain to make the organism non-functional [Axe2017; Marks2017].''

Fallacies in the creationist probability arguments

One major fallacy in the alpha-globin argument mentioned above, common to many others of this genre, is that it ignores the fact that a large class of alpha-globin molecules can perform the essential oxygen transfer function, so that the computation of the probability of a single instance is misleadingly remote. Indeed, most of the 141 amino acids in alpha-globin can be changed without altering the key oxygen transfer function, as can be seen by noting the great variety in alpha-globin molecules across the animal kingdom (see DNA). When one revises the calculation above, based on only 25 locations essential for the oxygen transport function (which is a generous over-estimate), one obtains 1033 fundamentally different chains, a enormous figure but incomparably smaller than 10183.

A calculation such as this can be refined further, taking into account other features of alpha-globin and its related biochemistry. Some of these calculations produce probability values even more extreme than the above. But do any of these calculations really matter? The main problem is that all such calculations, whether done accurately or not, suffer from the fatal fallacy of presuming that a structure such as human alpha-globin arose by a single all-at-once random trial event. But generating a molecule "at random" in a single shot is decidedly not the scientific hypothesis in question -- this is a creationist theory, not a scientific theory. Instead, available evidence from hundreds of published studies on the topic has demonstrated that alpha-globin arose as the end product of a long sequence of intermediate steps, each of which was biologically useful in an earlier context. See, for example, the survey article [Hardison2001], which cites 144 papers on the topic of hemoglobin evolution (note: this reference is now 17 years out of date -- many more have been published since then).

In short, the creationist-intelligent design argument claiming that scientists assert an all-at-once "at random" creation of various biomolecules, and then asserting that this is probabilistically impossible, is a classic "straw man" fallacy. Scientists do not believe this, so this line of argumentation is completely invalid. In other words, it does not matter how good or how bad the mathematics used in the analysis is, if the underlying model is a fundamentally invalid description of the phenomenon in question. Any simplistic probability calculation of evolution that does not take into account the step-by-step process by which the structure came to be is almost certainly fallacious and can easily mislead [Musgrave1998; Rosenhouse2018].

What's more, such calculations completely ignore the atomic-level biochemical processes involved, which often exhibit strong affinities for certain types of highly ordered structures. For example, molecular self-assembly occurs in DNA molecule duplication every time a cell divides. If we were to compute the chances of the formation of a human DNA molecule during meiosis, using a simple-minded probability calculation similar to that mentioned above, the result would be something on the order of one in 101,000,000,000, which is far, far beyond the possibility of "random" assemblage. Yet this process occurs many times every day in the human body and in every other plant and animal species.''

Maybe not here, but minds and beliefs can and do change.