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I'm always puzzled why similar topics always end up as a fight between so-called scientists who advocate evolution; and religious folk who believe in an "intell

by nyc111 8y ago

I'm always puzzled why similar topics always end up as a fight between so-called scientists who advocate evolution; and religious folk who believe in an "intelligent designer." The thing is, the "intelligent designer" doesn't have to be the creator of everything, that is, "The God." No. Consider a modern Airbus. It was definitely created by some "intelligent designers." But not necessarily God. If future archeologists find "fossils" of planes from the remains of Wright Brothers' planes up to the modern Airbus, the evolutionists of the time would claim that "planes evolved from bicycles." Implying that no intelligent agents were involved. It all happened on its own. Religious folks, on the other hand, would argue that there is intelligent design therefore planes must be created by an all-powerful God! But the truth is that some intermediary, earthly, intelligent agents, called humans, developed the planes. The same is true for human body. We should be asking who are those creators?

noxToken 8y ago
There are subsets of creationists. One being that all natural beings came directly from the creator with no evolution (typically young earth), and the kind you mention where something was created by design and further evolved.
- nyc111 8y ago
  > There are subsets of creationists... This is what I don't understand. We don't need to be "creationists", to observe that the letter "A" was designed by an intelligent designer. That an ant colony is designed by ants.
bhnmmhmd 8y ago
Interesting points! In Ancient Aliens documentary, they claim these "intelligent creators" are the so-called ETs (aliens). But regardless of whether that's true or not, one could ask "ok, who created those ETs?" and again, you'd go one level back and should try to find some older intelligent beings who designed our creators, etc., etc. But this has to stop at some point, because the universe - to the best of my knowledge - is only (!) 13.8 billion years old, thus, some intelligent beings must have appeared some where in the universe long time ago. The question is: "how did THAT happen?" It could be that mere _chance_ resulted in a very early development of intelligent life on a planet in a galaxy far far away. The same process could have helped shape life on the earth too. Or, maybe there really was an intelligent _being_ in charge of things that designed the whole universe such that exactly a few billion years after the Big Bang, in a specific galaxy and on a specific planet, some certain type of life would appear which would later create other forms of life, and maybe we are created by those people, thus, indirectly, created by that "intelligent being". You may call that "intelligent being" God.
- nyc111 8y ago
  > But this has to stop at some point... That's my point. We don't need to get into infinite recursion because we cannot know as humans the ultimate origin of anything. The best we can do is to try to find out the local and natural intelligent creators acting in nature within the laws of nature. Those are the things we can know. So, for instance, we can ask those questions, as you mention, Did someone come from another world? Is the creator smaller in scale than human body? Is the creator larger in size than the human body? And let's not forget that the human body is a symbiotic organism. It's a combination of different organisms living as symbionts. Which means that they were independent life forms in the infinite depths of time. These are the interesting questions for me. Trying to explain transformations with the word "evolution" explains nothing. It's like saying "sleeping pill will put you to sleep." Nothing is explained. But I understand that this is a very sensitive topic for many people. These are just my own opinions.
perl4ever 8y ago
I think there is a simple way to describe the difference between the "evolution" of things like TVs, and the evolution of living creatures. With TVs, we see how the outward form stays the same over a long period of time (rectangle, with varying depth), but the inner mechanism is completely different (vacuum tubes, plasma, LEDs, etc.) With living creatures, we see how the outward form varies wildly (mouse, elephant, dolphin) but the inner mechanisms have remarkable similarities (skeleton, muscles, organs, genetics). So it may not be helpful to reason by analogy between these two categories of human engineering vs natural evolution when they are fundamentally different.
- nyc111 8y ago
  > With TVs, we see how the outward form stays the same over a long period of time (rectangle, with varying depth), but the inner mechanism is completely different (vacuum tubes, plasma, LEDs, etc.) This is a very good point. I have to admit I haven't thought about it this way. I'm trying to understand the distinction you make between transformations of living organisms and man-made objects. So you are highlighting the observation that mammals have similar skeletons and muscle structures, similar digestive systems etc. What does this observation mean? Example: Wa see a remarkable similarity between human and bird skeletons. The difference is topological because differences are in form only. In topology a doughnut and a teacup are the same object. They may look different but they can be transformed into eech other. Another example: A cat has a tail. Human skeleton does not have a fully developed tail, but the spinal column ends with a tailbone. This is usually interpreted as a "vestigal" tail; meaning that human skeleton once had a tail but humans lost the tail by way of "evolution". For me this reasoning is not justified. To me it is more plausible that the creator(s) or designer(s) of mammals figured how to design different forms from the same formula. So they knew topology. And by tweaking certain terms in their formula (or genes) they could get a cat, a dog or a human. A dog embrio cannot be distinguished from human embrio in early stages. We can even observe this topological design in the two human species. The reproductive organs of man and woman are exactly the same; they differ only as the way a doughnut differs from a teacup. The fact that both sexes have the same reproductive organs, but organized in a topologically different form, does not imply that man evolved into woman. Or woman evolved into man. On the contrary, they must have been created separately with each other in mind. So if different species have similar organs varying only topologically, this does not imply that one "evolved" from the other. Or that they evolved from the same common ancestor. This only implies that the same formula created both of them. > (mouse, elephant, dolphin)... Regarding the topic of the creation of new species by evolution, I belong in Lynn Margulis' school of thought. According to Margulis, new species are created by symbiosis and not by speciation by evolution. I'm against arguing by using the word "evolution" as a cause because this word has so many meanings that it can mean anything and everything.

by nyc111 8y ago

noxToken 8y ago

There are subsets of creationists. One being that all natural beings came directly from the creator with no evolution (typically young earth), and the kind you mention where something was created by design and further evolved.

nyc111 8y ago
> There are subsets of creationists... This is what I don't understand. We don't need to be "creationists", to observe that the letter "A" was designed by an intelligent designer. That an ant colony is designed by ants.

bhnmmhmd 8y ago

Interesting points! In Ancient Aliens documentary, they claim these "intelligent creators" are the so-called ETs (aliens). But regardless of whether that's true or not, one could ask "ok, who created those ETs?" and again, you'd go one level back and should try to find some older intelligent beings who designed our creators, etc., etc. But this has to stop at some point, because the universe - to the best of my knowledge - is only (!) 13.8 billion years old, thus, some intelligent beings must have appeared some where in the universe long time ago. The question is: "how did THAT happen?" It could be that mere _chance_ resulted in a very early development of intelligent life on a planet in a galaxy far far away. The same process could have helped shape life on the earth too. Or, maybe there really was an intelligent _being_ in charge of things that designed the whole universe such that exactly a few billion years after the Big Bang, in a specific galaxy and on a specific planet, some certain type of life would appear which would later create other forms of life, and maybe we are created by those people, thus, indirectly, created by that "intelligent being". You may call that "intelligent being" God.

nyc111 8y ago
> But this has to stop at some point... That's my point. We don't need to get into infinite recursion because we cannot know as humans the ultimate origin of anything. The best we can do is to try to find out the local and natural intelligent creators acting in nature within the laws of nature. Those are the things we can know. So, for instance, we can ask those questions, as you mention, Did someone come from another world? Is the creator smaller in scale than human body? Is the creator larger in size than the human body? And let's not forget that the human body is a symbiotic organism. It's a combination of different organisms living as symbionts. Which means that they were independent life forms in the infinite depths of time. These are the interesting questions for me. Trying to explain transformations with the word "evolution" explains nothing. It's like saying "sleeping pill will put you to sleep." Nothing is explained. But I understand that this is a very sensitive topic for many people. These are just my own opinions.

perl4ever 8y ago

I think there is a simple way to describe the difference between the "evolution" of things like TVs, and the evolution of living creatures. With TVs, we see how the outward form stays the same over a long period of time (rectangle, with varying depth), but the inner mechanism is completely different (vacuum tubes, plasma, LEDs, etc.) With living creatures, we see how the outward form varies wildly (mouse, elephant, dolphin) but the inner mechanisms have remarkable similarities (skeleton, muscles, organs, genetics). So it may not be helpful to reason by analogy between these two categories of human engineering vs natural evolution when they are fundamentally different.

nyc111 8y ago
> With TVs, we see how the outward form stays the same over a long period of time (rectangle, with varying depth), but the inner mechanism is completely different (vacuum tubes, plasma, LEDs, etc.) This is a very good point. I have to admit I haven't thought about it this way. I'm trying to understand the distinction you make between transformations of living organisms and man-made objects. So you are highlighting the observation that mammals have similar skeletons and muscle structures, similar digestive systems etc. What does this observation mean? Example: Wa see a remarkable similarity between human and bird skeletons. The difference is topological because differences are in form only. In topology a doughnut and a teacup are the same object. They may look different but they can be transformed into eech other. Another example: A cat has a tail. Human skeleton does not have a fully developed tail, but the spinal column ends with a tailbone. This is usually interpreted as a "vestigal" tail; meaning that human skeleton once had a tail but humans lost the tail by way of "evolution". For me this reasoning is not justified. To me it is more plausible that the creator(s) or designer(s) of mammals figured how to design different forms from the same formula. So they knew topology. And by tweaking certain terms in their formula (or genes) they could get a cat, a dog or a human. A dog embrio cannot be distinguished from human embrio in early stages. We can even observe this topological design in the two human species. The reproductive organs of man and woman are exactly the same; they differ only as the way a doughnut differs from a teacup. The fact that both sexes have the same reproductive organs, but organized in a topologically different form, does not imply that man evolved into woman. Or woman evolved into man. On the contrary, they must have been created separately with each other in mind. So if different species have similar organs varying only topologically, this does not imply that one "evolved" from the other. Or that they evolved from the same common ancestor. This only implies that the same formula created both of them. > (mouse, elephant, dolphin)... Regarding the topic of the creation of new species by evolution, I belong in Lynn Margulis' school of thought. According to Margulis, new species are created by symbiosis and not by speciation by evolution. I'm against arguing by using the word "evolution" as a cause because this word has so many meanings that it can mean anything and everything.