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This whole apologist / sympathizing attitude needs to be changed I don't know, as an atheist myself I think the attitude of smug arrogance embodied in terms li

by SiVal 10y ago

This whole apologist / sympathizing attitude needs to be changed I don't know, as an atheist myself I think the attitude of smug arrogance embodied in terms like "benighted creationist" is the real problem, not that even acknowledging a theory that has been believed in some form by most humans who ever lived is too kind. A person can be a creationist without being a fool and can be a believer in evolution by nothing more enlightened than a lack of independent thinking in an environment where atheism is in fashion among the cool kids. I'll have to say that I'm astonished again and again when I write code that uses some "mindless" search process (including numerous experiments with evolutionary algorithms) and it finds the answer to some problem that I couldn't reason through. I can't seem to get over the feeling that if I have to reason to solve a certain problem, and I can't reason well enough to solve it, and another "thing" does solve it, it must reason better than I do--be smarter than I am--even when I wrote the code that did it. It gives me a sense of "awe" for the power of evolution and a lasting "sympathetic attitude" toward those who just can't believe that it could work this well. Like the power of a simple, naive bayes spam sorter to "interpret the text of email", evolution is one of those things that, even when I can explain it well enough to actually implement it with my own hands, it's still hard for me to believe.

flukus 10y ago
> I don't know, as an atheist myself I think the attitude of smug arrogance embodied in terms like "benighted creationist" is the real problem, not that even acknowledging a theory that has been believed in some form by most humans who ever lived is too kind. Creationism was never a scientific theory. And I think we can give a free pass to people being creationist before the theory was created and before it was taught in schools. Modern day creationist though, they are fools.
- alphapapa 10y ago
  The idea that the universe was created by an intelligent being is not a scientific theory and cannot be disproven by science. It is not in competition with scientific theories of evolution or even, for example, big bang theories, because neither of them can explain why the universe exists, where it came from, etc. If you believe in the big bang, then what caused it, where did the matter come from, etc? You cannot disprove philosophy with science, and the fools are those who think they can.
  - flukus 10y ago
    Sure, there are limits to out knowledge, atheists are a lot happier to say they don't know than most religious folk I've come across. But what your describing is very different to most creationist, you've pushed the god of gaps back to a level where it's largely irrelevant. Most creationist are the 6000 year old earth kind, which has been disproven by several major branches of science.
    - alphapapa 10y ago
      > Sure, there are limits to out knowledge, atheists are a lot happier to say they don't know than most religious folk I've come across. So, if a person says, "I don't know, but I still believe," is that not an example of faith? How, then, can you claim that atheism and/or, shall we say, "sciencism", are more rational belief systems than Creationism, Christianity, etc, given that they both ultimately rely on faith? The atheist says, "Creationists are fools because they have no proof of their creator," while the creationist says, "Atheists are fools because they have no proof of what created." What's the difference? Who has more faith: the one who sees something that exists and believes that something created it, or the one who sees something that exists and believes it was not created? Is either one not faith-based? Does either one not have missing links in its assumed chain? > But what your describing is very different to most creationist, you've pushed the god of gaps back to a level where it's largely irrelevant. How is it not relevant whether an intelligent being created the universe? If the universe was created by an intelligent being, what does it matter how it was done, through natural processes set in motion or by blinking into existence in an advanced state? If the universe was created by an intelligent being, wouldn't that be much more important than how? > Most creationist are the 6000 year old earth kind, which has been disproven by several major branches of science. To be strictly fair, this is not true, because it does not engage with that kind of creationism's assumptions. If one believes that an intelligent being created the universe from nothing, including all the physical laws from subatomic to intergalactic, why would it be beyond that being's ability to create the Earth in a state advanced far beyond its actual age? Besides, in matters like this, what is time, anyway? Einstein showed that it's relative--and if an intelligent being created the rules that Einstein discovered, could not that being bend its own rules? In other words, you unfairly ascribe to the "6000 year old earth kind" an inconsistency which it does not actually bear; you do not engage with it on its own terms. If you do not accept its assumptions, that's fine--your disagreement then lies with them, not with a false inconsistency. Ultimately, the most important question is of who or what created the universe, not how or when it was created. The former makes a difference in how we should lead our lives, while the latter is merely interesting.
WalterBright 10y ago
A theory makes predictions that can be tested. Creationism is a faith, not a theory, as it makes no predictions. For example, Einstein's relativity theory predicted that gravity bends light, an effect that had never been observed. Decades later, the theory was confirmed when bent light was detected and the amount of the bend matched the theory's prediction.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  I'd say that for a typical religious person, "theory of evolution" as a source of life is akin to saying "Einstein's theory predicted gravity bends light, therefore my sun burn was really caused by a black hole over at Proxima Centauri". There's kind of a huge gap to cover between directly testable predictions and what's trying to be explained. So it boils down to whether or not you believe a complex chain of reasoning made by smart people, and there's plenty of things that can influence what you believe and who you trust.
  - flukus 10y ago
    > There's kind of a huge gap to cover between directly testable predictions and what's trying to be explained. The thing is, evolution is really simple. First there are random mutations, which are directly testable. Your DNA will be slightly wrong from your parents DNA. Secondly, there is environmental selection, also easily testable. Drop a house cat in the middle of the arctic and you'll see how it works, although there are much better (and humane) experiments that have been conducted. The testability is much more accessible to ordinary folk than Einsteins theory will ever be. The final component is time, which is really what creationist take issue with. That's why you'll see them reject every branch of science except evolution.
- SiVal 10y ago
  Although I tend to agree with you, Walter, most of the time, and I don't disagree here, I'm a little puzzled at why you're making this distinction. When discussing the evolution of humans, it was already a past event before any explanations were even possible, and creationism and evolution are both (in this context) offered as explanations for something that happened in the past, like the Tunguska Event. We can't really make predictions about Tunguska, just figure out what explanation is most likely. For creationism vs evolution of humans, predictions, except maybe about things that haven't been found in the fossil record but will be, don't seem involved. It's not faith vs. theory; it's plausibility of explanation vs. explanation or mechanism vs. mechanism. But if we're talking about something going forward, which excludes the origin of humans, evolution definitely makes predictions (and creationism has nothing to say, AFAIK). We can see evolution in action with our own eyes in those recent "evolution of drug resistant bacteria" videos, and we can definitely make predictions about that and run cool experiments, but creationism isn't a part of those conversations. It's only about where humans first came from. I'm not defending creationism (more generally: things that even a human isn't smart enough to do but yet WERE done, were done by being(s) smarter than humans) as an explanation, which I believe was only the most likely until we discovered a clearly superior and powerful explanation, but I'm a little puzzled at the "creationism is faith, evolution is theory" response. Evolution as explanation for the past seems like the same kind of thing as creationism, and creationism is only about explaining the past.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
> A person can be a creationist without being a fool and can be a believer in evolution by nothing more enlightened than a lack of independent thinking in an environment where atheism is in fashion among the cool kids. Oh, I love the last point. I've met people like this - who are atheists for the same reason others are religious - because that's what they were taught and/or because it's cool these days. Religion vs. atheism in general population is not really about independent thinking - in general, people are equally poor at this, whether believers or non-believers. > evolution is one of those things that, even when I can explain it well enough to actually implement it with my own hands, it's still hard for me to believe. I think you need to have a proper "thinking framework" to explain it well. Like e.g. evolution seems awesome only until you get the feel of just how many checks it does to get to its goal. If you could do half as many checks yourself in a similar timeframe, you'd solve your problem yourself, along with countless others. Or with Bayesian filters, at some point you need to get the feel of how things are connected to one another via causality, and then it stops being a surprise[0]. What I'd wish people would do is to stop trying to score cheap shots off one another. I.e. there's a difference between believing in evolution as a a process and evolution as the only source of all the life around us. For the former, the very phenomenon, you need only: - ability for a thing to make copies of itself - ability of an environment to make changes on the blueprint of those copies That's it. You have those two things, you have evolution by definition. It's a trivial thing to accept once you understand how it works (which sadly, schools tend to not explain well). On the other hand, I sympathize with people who have troubles accepting that this very phenomenon could by itself create all life we know, ourselves included. Ultimately it boils down to whether you trust "science" or "religion" more, and frankly, there's plenty of reasons to distrust both nowadays. Keep in mind that for a typical person, science is not just GPS and cars and cell phones, it's also (and primarily) all the utter bullshit they read in science sections of newspapers and magazines. -- [0] - Tangentially, it also makes you realize that you can only get away with a lie because the party that's being lied to doesn't bother to check things - things are connected together via causal links on so many levels that you really can't tell a perfect lie. Personally, it also makes me believe that the quest for privacy is a moot thing, because it again only depends on how much people bother to dig out the information they want; technology is only making the process of looking at causal links easier and faster.
geomark 10y ago
I get the some of the same feeling. And related is emergent behaviors where entities with simple rules/behaviors exhibit amazing, complex and seemlingly unpredictable behaviors when interacting in large numbers.
memracom 10y ago
> A person can be a creationist without being a fool and can be a believer in evolution by nothing more enlightened than a lack of independent thinking in an environment where atheism is in fashion among the cool kids. Lots of people are ready to make definitive statements about creationism without ever having studied the subject. Unless I am mistaken, creationism is not taught in universities, so one could only make EDUCATED statements about it if one had put the personal effort into studying creationism independently. And if a person had done that, they are unlikely to be making glib statements about how foolish creationists are, instead they would be blogging on the subject where there is enough space to make reasoned arguments. People who say that creationists are fools, are just like people who are politically correct, or like right-wing extremist ideologues (Christian or Muslim). They are true-believers who have received wisdom from their chosen prophet (who may be a biology professor) but they are not thinking and reasoning. Thinking is hard. Reasoning is even harder. But I would hope that on HN, there is a larger population of thinkers and reasoners than in the general public. I'm not even going to state my beliefs on the subject because I am happy to let all of you believe what you want to. Evolution is a useful tool for biological life, but as the article states, it is not the be-all and end-all. It certainly does not negate creationism in all its forms because if it did, I would have heard of the paper which demonstrated this proof. Since I have heard of no such paper, and I know of no biology department in which creationism is studied, I feel confident in saying that evolution has not trumped creationism. I'm even willing to allow that some well-described theory of creationism in the future, could include evolutionary theory and the current neutral genomic mutation theory as part of a larger whole.
- dilemma 10y ago
  Agree. Elsewhere in this thread someone said that creationists are fools. I'm assuming its because they believe in a theory of the world that's not correct. By that standard, so are people who believe in Big Bang, evolution, and e=mc2 because they are just best approximations waiting to be replaced by something less wrong. In my other comment I made a joke about evolution being intelligently designed and instantly got downvoted. It just shows, just like you say, that hardcore atheists are true believers - its belief, not knowledge, just like any religion.
CamperBob2 10y ago
A person can be a creationist without being a fool How, brainwashing aside?
- flukus 10y ago
  Compartmentalization. They are certainly fools with respect to the origin of humanity though.
  - alphapapa 10y ago
    So, since you seem to have the answers, where did humans come from? If humans evolved from other primates, where did those primates come from? How far back can you go? To a pile of goo? Where did the pile of goo come from? Where did the solar system come from? What about the universe? There are necessarily missing links in the chain of causality, ones which science cannot fill. Even if you believe popular theories of the origin of the universe, such theories only go back so far, and they do not explain what caused the events they describe. For example, where did the big bang's matter come from? Which requires more faith: to believe that a being set in motion the processes we observe today, or that they happened by chance? Who is the fool: one who believes that someone must have created this universe, or one who believes that it exists without a cause? If you tell me that something can exist without having been created, where is your proof? Is not your belief in that theory itself a matter of faith? How, then, do you call others fools who have their own faiths? Of course, you answered this question yourself: compartmentalization.
    - flukus 10y ago
      God/creation doesn't solve any of the mysteries we still have left, fewer than you seem to think. All it does is create an infinite regress of what created god.
      - alphapapa 10y ago
        > God/creation doesn't solve any of the mysteries we still have left Really? So, tell me then, why are we here? What is the purpose of our life, if there is one? What happens after we die? Or are these mysteries not still left? > All it does is create an infinite regress of what created god. Yes, that's right. But saying that, "Since we then cannot answer the question of where God came from, God must not exist" is not logical. The existence of another turtle does not disprove the previous turtle. By your logic, since we cannot explain what created the universe, the universe must not exist.

by SiVal 10y ago

flukus 10y ago

> I don't know, as an atheist myself I think the attitude of smug arrogance embodied in terms like "benighted creationist" is the real problem, not that even acknowledging a theory that has been believed in some form by most humans who ever lived is too kind. Creationism was never a scientific theory. And I think we can give a free pass to people being creationist before the theory was created and before it was taught in schools. Modern day creationist though, they are fools.

alphapapa 10y ago
The idea that the universe was created by an intelligent being is not a scientific theory and cannot be disproven by science. It is not in competition with scientific theories of evolution or even, for example, big bang theories, because neither of them can explain why the universe exists, where it came from, etc. If you believe in the big bang, then what caused it, where did the matter come from, etc? You cannot disprove philosophy with science, and the fools are those who think they can.
- flukus 10y ago
  Sure, there are limits to out knowledge, atheists are a lot happier to say they don't know than most religious folk I've come across. But what your describing is very different to most creationist, you've pushed the god of gaps back to a level where it's largely irrelevant. Most creationist are the 6000 year old earth kind, which has been disproven by several major branches of science.
  - alphapapa 10y ago
    > Sure, there are limits to out knowledge, atheists are a lot happier to say they don't know than most religious folk I've come across. So, if a person says, "I don't know, but I still believe," is that not an example of faith? How, then, can you claim that atheism and/or, shall we say, "sciencism", are more rational belief systems than Creationism, Christianity, etc, given that they both ultimately rely on faith? The atheist says, "Creationists are fools because they have no proof of their creator," while the creationist says, "Atheists are fools because they have no proof of what created." What's the difference? Who has more faith: the one who sees something that exists and believes that something created it, or the one who sees something that exists and believes it was not created? Is either one not faith-based? Does either one not have missing links in its assumed chain? > But what your describing is very different to most creationist, you've pushed the god of gaps back to a level where it's largely irrelevant. How is it not relevant whether an intelligent being created the universe? If the universe was created by an intelligent being, what does it matter how it was done, through natural processes set in motion or by blinking into existence in an advanced state? If the universe was created by an intelligent being, wouldn't that be much more important than how? > Most creationist are the 6000 year old earth kind, which has been disproven by several major branches of science. To be strictly fair, this is not true, because it does not engage with that kind of creationism's assumptions. If one believes that an intelligent being created the universe from nothing, including all the physical laws from subatomic to intergalactic, why would it be beyond that being's ability to create the Earth in a state advanced far beyond its actual age? Besides, in matters like this, what is time, anyway? Einstein showed that it's relative--and if an intelligent being created the rules that Einstein discovered, could not that being bend its own rules? In other words, you unfairly ascribe to the "6000 year old earth kind" an inconsistency which it does not actually bear; you do not engage with it on its own terms. If you do not accept its assumptions, that's fine--your disagreement then lies with them, not with a false inconsistency. Ultimately, the most important question is of who or what created the universe, not how or when it was created. The former makes a difference in how we should lead our lives, while the latter is merely interesting.

WalterBright 10y ago

A theory makes predictions that can be tested. Creationism is a faith, not a theory, as it makes no predictions. For example, Einstein's relativity theory predicted that gravity bends light, an effect that had never been observed. Decades later, the theory was confirmed when bent light was detected and the amount of the bend matched the theory's prediction.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
I'd say that for a typical religious person, "theory of evolution" as a source of life is akin to saying "Einstein's theory predicted gravity bends light, therefore my sun burn was really caused by a black hole over at Proxima Centauri". There's kind of a huge gap to cover between directly testable predictions and what's trying to be explained. So it boils down to whether or not you believe a complex chain of reasoning made by smart people, and there's plenty of things that can influence what you believe and who you trust.
- flukus 10y ago
  > There's kind of a huge gap to cover between directly testable predictions and what's trying to be explained. The thing is, evolution is really simple. First there are random mutations, which are directly testable. Your DNA will be slightly wrong from your parents DNA. Secondly, there is environmental selection, also easily testable. Drop a house cat in the middle of the arctic and you'll see how it works, although there are much better (and humane) experiments that have been conducted. The testability is much more accessible to ordinary folk than Einsteins theory will ever be. The final component is time, which is really what creationist take issue with. That's why you'll see them reject every branch of science except evolution.
SiVal 10y ago
Although I tend to agree with you, Walter, most of the time, and I don't disagree here, I'm a little puzzled at why you're making this distinction. When discussing the evolution of humans, it was already a past event before any explanations were even possible, and creationism and evolution are both (in this context) offered as explanations for something that happened in the past, like the Tunguska Event. We can't really make predictions about Tunguska, just figure out what explanation is most likely. For creationism vs evolution of humans, predictions, except maybe about things that haven't been found in the fossil record but will be, don't seem involved. It's not faith vs. theory; it's plausibility of explanation vs. explanation or mechanism vs. mechanism. But if we're talking about something going forward, which excludes the origin of humans, evolution definitely makes predictions (and creationism has nothing to say, AFAIK). We can see evolution in action with our own eyes in those recent "evolution of drug resistant bacteria" videos, and we can definitely make predictions about that and run cool experiments, but creationism isn't a part of those conversations. It's only about where humans first came from. I'm not defending creationism (more generally: things that even a human isn't smart enough to do but yet WERE done, were done by being(s) smarter than humans) as an explanation, which I believe was only the most likely until we discovered a clearly superior and powerful explanation, but I'm a little puzzled at the "creationism is faith, evolution is theory" response. Evolution as explanation for the past seems like the same kind of thing as creationism, and creationism is only about explaining the past.

TeMPOraL 10y ago

> A person can be a creationist without being a fool and can be a believer in evolution by nothing more enlightened than a lack of independent thinking in an environment where atheism is in fashion among the cool kids. Oh, I love the last point. I've met people like this - who are atheists for the same reason others are religious - because that's what they were taught and/or because it's cool these days. Religion vs. atheism in general population is not really about independent thinking - in general, people are equally poor at this, whether believers or non-believers. > evolution is one of those things that, even when I can explain it well enough to actually implement it with my own hands, it's still hard for me to believe. I think you need to have a proper "thinking framework" to explain it well. Like e.g. evolution seems awesome only until you get the feel of just how many checks it does to get to its goal. If you could do half as many checks yourself in a similar timeframe, you'd solve your problem yourself, along with countless others. Or with Bayesian filters, at some point you need to get the feel of how things are connected to one another via causality, and then it stops being a surprise[0]. What I'd wish people would do is to stop trying to score cheap shots off one another. I.e. there's a difference between believing in evolution as a a process and evolution as the only source of all the life around us. For the former, the very phenomenon, you need only: - ability for a thing to make copies of itself - ability of an environment to make changes on the blueprint of those copies That's it. You have those two things, you have evolution by definition. It's a trivial thing to accept once you understand how it works (which sadly, schools tend to not explain well). On the other hand, I sympathize with people who have troubles accepting that this very phenomenon could by itself create all life we know, ourselves included. Ultimately it boils down to whether you trust "science" or "religion" more, and frankly, there's plenty of reasons to distrust both nowadays. Keep in mind that for a typical person, science is not just GPS and cars and cell phones, it's also (and primarily) all the utter bullshit they read in science sections of newspapers and magazines. -- [0] - Tangentially, it also makes you realize that you can only get away with a lie because the party that's being lied to doesn't bother to check things - things are connected together via causal links on so many levels that you really can't tell a perfect lie. Personally, it also makes me believe that the quest for privacy is a moot thing, because it again only depends on how much people bother to dig out the information they want; technology is only making the process of looking at causal links easier and faster.

geomark 10y ago

I get the some of the same feeling. And related is emergent behaviors where entities with simple rules/behaviors exhibit amazing, complex and seemlingly unpredictable behaviors when interacting in large numbers.

memracom 10y ago

> A person can be a creationist without being a fool and can be a believer in evolution by nothing more enlightened than a lack of independent thinking in an environment where atheism is in fashion among the cool kids. Lots of people are ready to make definitive statements about creationism without ever having studied the subject. Unless I am mistaken, creationism is not taught in universities, so one could only make EDUCATED statements about it if one had put the personal effort into studying creationism independently. And if a person had done that, they are unlikely to be making glib statements about how foolish creationists are, instead they would be blogging on the subject where there is enough space to make reasoned arguments. People who say that creationists are fools, are just like people who are politically correct, or like right-wing extremist ideologues (Christian or Muslim). They are true-believers who have received wisdom from their chosen prophet (who may be a biology professor) but they are not thinking and reasoning. Thinking is hard. Reasoning is even harder. But I would hope that on HN, there is a larger population of thinkers and reasoners than in the general public. I'm not even going to state my beliefs on the subject because I am happy to let all of you believe what you want to. Evolution is a useful tool for biological life, but as the article states, it is not the be-all and end-all. It certainly does not negate creationism in all its forms because if it did, I would have heard of the paper which demonstrated this proof. Since I have heard of no such paper, and I know of no biology department in which creationism is studied, I feel confident in saying that evolution has not trumped creationism. I'm even willing to allow that some well-described theory of creationism in the future, could include evolutionary theory and the current neutral genomic mutation theory as part of a larger whole.

dilemma 10y ago
Agree. Elsewhere in this thread someone said that creationists are fools. I'm assuming its because they believe in a theory of the world that's not correct. By that standard, so are people who believe in Big Bang, evolution, and e=mc2 because they are just best approximations waiting to be replaced by something less wrong. In my other comment I made a joke about evolution being intelligently designed and instantly got downvoted. It just shows, just like you say, that hardcore atheists are true believers - its belief, not knowledge, just like any religion.

CamperBob2 10y ago

A person can be a creationist without being a fool How, brainwashing aside?

flukus 10y ago
Compartmentalization. They are certainly fools with respect to the origin of humanity though.
- alphapapa 10y ago
  So, since you seem to have the answers, where did humans come from? If humans evolved from other primates, where did those primates come from? How far back can you go? To a pile of goo? Where did the pile of goo come from? Where did the solar system come from? What about the universe? There are necessarily missing links in the chain of causality, ones which science cannot fill. Even if you believe popular theories of the origin of the universe, such theories only go back so far, and they do not explain what caused the events they describe. For example, where did the big bang's matter come from? Which requires more faith: to believe that a being set in motion the processes we observe today, or that they happened by chance? Who is the fool: one who believes that someone must have created this universe, or one who believes that it exists without a cause? If you tell me that something can exist without having been created, where is your proof? Is not your belief in that theory itself a matter of faith? How, then, do you call others fools who have their own faiths? Of course, you answered this question yourself: compartmentalization.
  - flukus 10y ago
    God/creation doesn't solve any of the mysteries we still have left, fewer than you seem to think. All it does is create an infinite regress of what created god.
    - alphapapa 10y ago
      > God/creation doesn't solve any of the mysteries we still have left Really? So, tell me then, why are we here? What is the purpose of our life, if there is one? What happens after we die? Or are these mysteries not still left? > All it does is create an infinite regress of what created god. Yes, that's right. But saying that, "Since we then cannot answer the question of where God came from, God must not exist" is not logical. The existence of another turtle does not disprove the previous turtle. By your logic, since we cannot explain what created the universe, the universe must not exist.