Darwin's "Downfall?"

[ProLifeSkeptic]

This individual who calls himself Keith Truth has made a recent documentary in which he illustrates the "downfall" of Evolution (you can watch the whole documentary if you choose, or click on the numbers in the description of the video to jump to his arguments)



He shows "evidence" Against Macro-evolution: 05:25 - 31:07, he tries to show Alleged Evidence for Macro-evolution: 31:08 - 01:08:06, and proof for the age of the Earth and the flood The Age of the Earth and the Flood: 01:08:07 - 01:24:28

The final segment of the documentary is typical "evolution teaches that we're animals" and stuff like that.

[Talishi]

He shows "evidence" Against Macro-evolution: 05:25 - 31:07, he tries to show Alleged Evidence for Macro-evolution...

Turns out all evolution is micro-evolution, applied over deep time. Mutation, sexual selection, and genetic drift (that little thing that makes your siblings look different from you). It's the deep time part they can't swallow.

[Divine Insight]

[Replying to post 1 by ProLifeSkeptic]

The video you posted is a religious apologists video. It's filled with false information and deceit. I only needed to watch the first 6 minutes of it to see this. It's a theistic lie that there are no transitional fossils or that this somehow represents a problem for scientists.

Theists are constantly trying to discredit science in an effort to support their false theologies. But the truth is that science cannot be discredited so easily.

And besides if this is a plea for one of the Biblical religions such as Christianity then it's even more absurd because it can easily be demonstrated that the Hebrew Bible cannot be true as written. It simply contains too many self-contradictions, not to mention supporting obvious immoral principles that are being attributed to a supposedly all-righteous God.

In fact, these theists have actually turned to trying to bring doubt upon the sciences precisely because they cannot support their own religious mythologies anymore. But the fact is that the sciences are not wrong.

In fact, the sciences have proven their credibility by revealing the falsehoods of religious superstitions repeatedly. For example, we now know what causes various illnesses that were once believed to be "demonic possessions". In fact, science has exposed countless falsehoods concerning religions like Christianity.

Let's not forget that the demigod Jesus was supposed to cast evil demons from people. We know that's a farce. So there isn't really any sense in trying to keep that religion afloat anymore, especially when the only way left to try to support the religion is through these extremely lame attempts at discrediting science.

Theists need to stick to their apologetic arguments for their original myths. And if you pay any attention to how that's been going you will see that the theists can't even convince each other of their lame apologetic arguments in support of their indefensible dogmas.

Christianity itself has fallen into countless disagreeing sects and denominations. Each being supported by theists who can't even convince each other of their totally outrageous and illogical apologetic arguments.

There is no hope for these Abrahamic religions.

If a theist wants to continue to believe in a "God" today their best bet is to look into something like Buddhism. And take note that Buddhism does not even conflict with science or evolution. So Buddhism is a religion you can embrace without any need to embarrassingly pretend that there are problems with the sciences when there aren't.

Buddhism also doesn't have embarrassingly immoral and self-contradictory dogma that needs to be apologized for either.

So the wise theists should look into Buddhism if they want to retain a theistic view of reality. And then they will no longer need to argue against science which has already been well-established to have revealed the truth of the natural world in which we live.

[Delphi]

I just finished sitting through that entire video. Why do I subject myself through such nonsense?

Sadly, Intelligent Design is not recognized as being scientific in any way. Science needs to be testable, verifiable, falsifiable, and demonstrable. A proper scientific theory needs to make predictions while explaining observed evidence. Evolution succeeds in all of these criteria.

The God hypothesis fails on all counts.

Trying to poke holes in evolution does nothing to show that there is evidence of intelligent godly design. In order to do so, one must show that there is indeed a designer, and then demonstrate a causal connection between the designer and the alleged design. This has not remotely been demonstrated.

ID is untestable, unverifiable, unfalsifiable, and indemonstrable. In a word 'unscientific'. It makes no predictions and it is vacuous as any sort of 'explanation' for how the natural world works.

[ProLifeSkeptic]

[Replying to post 4 by Delphi]

I just finished sitting through that entire video. Why do I subject myself through such nonsense?

You sat through the whole thing? Oh, dear...

Trying to poke holes in evolution does nothing to show that there is evidence of intelligent godly design. In order to do so, one must show that there is indeed a designer, and then demonstrate a causal connection between the designer and the alleged design. This has not remotely been demonstrated.

Did you see the argument that he tried to make for the problems with radio metric dating?

[Talishi]

Sadly, Intelligent Design is not recognized as being scientific in any way. Science needs to be testable, verifiable, falsifiable, and demonstrable. A proper scientific theory needs to make predictions while explaining observed evidence. Evolution succeeds in all of these criteria.

ID proponents have confused the argument from personal incredulity with science. One common attack is to calculate the astronomical odds against a DNA strand of a certain length from coming into existence all at once, at random. Thing is, there's hundreds of millions of years of trial and error encoded in any particular strand of DNA. That's kind of the whole point of DNA.

[Divine Insight]

Did you see the argument that he tried to make for the problems with radio metric dating?

I've heard those types of lame arguments before, I certainly don't need to sit through another religious apologetic presentation to hear them again.

None of this matters anyway. The religion has far greater problems than the sciences have. Until the theists can fix up their own failed dogmas any attempt to try to support them by complaining about science is ridiculous. In fact, all this amounts to is a distraction from the problems of their dogmas.

They can hardly claim that their theology doesn't have extreme problems when their own theists renounce each other. Just look at the great divide between Catholicism and the protesting Protestantisms. And the Protestantisms are an even bigger joke since they are in grave disagreement with each other.

Even if we were to assume that science is all wrong that would hardly help these extremely confused and self-disagreeing Christian theologies. For Christian theists to bash science only shows their extreme need to distract from their own problems.

Moreover, to renounce evolution actually suggests that their God wasn't smart enough to design a universe that could evolve into living creatures on its own. So bashing evolution does absolutely nothing to support an ideology of a God who is so powerful and intelligent that nothing is impossible for him.

Have you ever realized the truth of this?

To argue against evolution is to argue that the God of the theists isn't smart enough to design a universe that can evolve into living creatures without being manually adjusted and tinkered with by the God himself every step of the way.

Moreover, if life requires such a tinkering God then this God would necessarily need to be responsible for every genetic birth defect or genetically inherited disease.

The very idea of a tinkering God only creates extreme problems for the theists that claim that their God needs to constantly tinker with a poorly designed universe.

So these kinds of theological arguments actually backfire. They require that the God of the theology must necessarily be less than omnipotent and even careless and mistake-prone during his needed tinkering.

Arguments against evolution do not help theology, they only create more problems for the theology itself.

[Talishi]

They can hardly claim that their theology doesn't have extreme problems when their own theists renounce each other. Just look at the great divide between Catholicism and the protesting Protestantisms. And the Protestantisms are an even bigger joke since they are in grave disagreement with each other.

The Protestant Reformation was like the US Civil War, but the South won. The Union is the Catholic Church, the President is the Pope. Now imagine each state in the Confederate States going their own way. Then each county, and then each city. Thirty-eight thousand little municipalities, each one claiming to be the True America of the Founding Fathers.

[Delphi]

Did you see the argument that he tried to make for the problems with radio metric dating?

Yeah, baby! The problem is that there is no problem with radiometric dating. The creationists love to bring up anomalies and poorly-conducted bottom-rung science reports. The fact is that radiometric dating is a wonderful heuristic that is supported by physics. It works despite what creationist videos want to report.

Even if radiometric dating is completely wrong, it does nothing to dispel the truth of evolution or provide any evidence whatsoever of a supernatural designer.

One common attack is to calculate the astronomical odds against a DNA strand of a certain length from coming into existence all at once, at random.

And of course, it is not mathematically possible to actually calculate the statistical odds of DNA coming into existence retrospectively. For a couple of reasons.

We only have a statistical example of DNA existing on one planet. In order to determine statistical probability, we need a numerator and a denominator to do the maths. In the case of life, we only have an example of one. So it is meaningless to calculate probabilities.

Nobody can even demonstrate how life began. So it is impossible to determine the statistical probability when we do not even know the initial conditions or the mechanism.

[ProLifeSkeptic]

[Replying to Divine Insight]

I've recently de-converted from Christianity, and I'm still trying to learn about evolution, because even I still have trouble understanding it.