Atheist Mormon Posted October 18, 2016 Posted October 18, 2016 Yesterday I was watching "Westworld" on HBO, it ihas an intriguing plot..(going back to Yul Brynner, what a guy he was). Anyway, the story is about an amusement park filled with robots where the visitors can live any adventure they want to...As the story goes the Boss Anthony Hopkins replies to a concerned employee; "Evolution thrives on mistakes" . I never heard a better explanation for Evolution's mechanism, if one cares to look how many proto human experiments Evolution had until we ended with Homo Sapiens. Imagine if you will if we ended with Neanderthal punctuation. It was like the whole time went by perpetuating one mistake after another.....All those mistakes ended with Homo Sapiens (Which I'm very happy about it...It's been a great ride!) And yet I heard all these perfection stories in the Church.......It just made little sense as time went by....
oremites Posted October 18, 2016 Posted October 18, 2016 6 minutes ago, Atheist Mormon said: And yet I heard all these perfection stories in the Church.......It just made little sense as time went by.... I'm not sure what you mean by perfection stories. My observation about how God works is that he gives us direction and assignments, then lets us make mistakes along the way. It's a great method for learning and growth. Why should the creation of the earth be any different?
mfbukowski Posted October 18, 2016 Posted October 18, 2016 (edited) 1 hour ago, Atheist Mormon said: Yesterday I was watching "Westworld" on HBO, it ihas an intriguing plot..(going back to Yul Brynner, what a guy he was). Anyway, the story is about an amusement park filled with robots where the visitors can live any adventure they want to...As the story goes the Boss Anthony Hopkins replies to a concerned employee; "Evolution thrives on mistakes" . I never heard a better explanation for Evolution's mechanism, if one cares to look how many proto human experiments Evolution had until we ended with Homo Sapiens. Imagine if you will if we ended with Neanderthal punctuation. It was like the whole time went by perpetuating one mistake after another.....All those mistakes ended with Homo Sapiens (Which I'm very happy about it...It's been a great ride!) And yet I heard all these perfection stories in the Church.......It just made little sense as time went by.... Totally absurd. If survival is a mistake you would be right. Really an odd perspective. Survival in changing environments is what we do. We do not need to evolve extra fur in an ice age- we kill a polar bear and wear it's fur instead or build a shelter out of what- ice?? Yes, ice. Who would think you could even make a shelter from ice? We CREATE environments from matter unorganized, another verification of LDS principles. That's what humans do. If that is not a progression I don't know what is. I don't see monkeys on computers....... No, I won't go there..... Edited October 18, 2016 by mfbukowski 2
Freedom Posted October 18, 2016 Posted October 18, 2016 Oh look, another condescending post. Ignorance and arrogance makes for great entertainment however. 2
ERayR Posted October 18, 2016 Posted October 18, 2016 9 hours ago, Atheist Mormon said: Yesterday I was watching "Westworld" on HBO, it ihas an intriguing plot..(going back to Yul Brynner, what a guy he was). Anyway, the story is about an amusement park filled with robots where the visitors can live any adventure they want to...As the story goes the Boss Anthony Hopkins replies to a concerned employee; "Evolution thrives on mistakes" . I never heard a better explanation for Evolution's mechanism, if one cares to look how many proto human experiments Evolution had until we ended with Homo Sapiens. Imagine if you will if we ended with Neanderthal punctuation. It was like the whole time went by perpetuating one mistake after another.....All those mistakes ended with Homo Sapiens (Which I'm very happy about it...It's been a great ride!) And yet I heard all these perfection stories in the Church.......It just made little sense as time went by.... I will agree "Evolution thrives on mistakes" . Mistakes in interpretation of data and on the fertile imaginations of those interpreting the data. 3
bcuzbcuz Posted October 18, 2016 Posted October 18, 2016 (edited) An article from the NY Times: Where Did the First Farmers Live? Looking for Answers in DNA By CARL ZIMMEROCT. 17, 2016 A fossilized skeleton of a human who was buried beneath a floor in a family home in Ain Ghazal, a 10,000-year-old farming village in Jordan. Credit C. Blair/The Ain Ghazal Archaeological Project Beneath a rocky slope in central Jordan lie the remains of a 10,000-year-old village called Ain Ghazal, whose inhabitants lived in stone houses with timber roof beams, the walls and floors gleaming with white plaster. Hundreds of people living there worshiped in circular shrines and made haunting, wide-eyed sculptures that stood three feet high. They buried their cherished dead under the floors of their houses, decapitating the bodies in order to decorate the skulls. But as fascinating as this culture was, something else about Ain Ghazal intrigues archaeologists more: It was one of the first farming villages to have emerged after the dawn of agriculture. Around the settlement, Ain Ghazal farmers raised barley, wheat, chickpeas and lentils. Other villagers would leave for months at a time to herd sheep and goats in the surrounding hills. Sites like Ain Ghazal provide a glimpse of one of the most important transitions in human history: the moment that people domesticated plants and animals, settled down, and began to produce the kind of society in which most of us live today. Continue reading the main story close story-body close supplemental close story-body-supplemental But for all that sites like Ain Ghazal have taught archaeologists, they are still grappling with enormous questions. Who exactly were the first farmers? How did agriculture, a cornerstone of civilization itself, spread to other parts of the world? The influence of ancient farming villages in the Near East can still be seen in places like India. Credit Sanjay Kanojia/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Some answers are now emerging from a surprising source: DNA extracted from skeletons at Ain Ghazal and other early settlements in the Near East. These findings have already challenged long-held ideas about how agriculture and domestication arose. What’s more, the new data are showing that early farmers would leave a tremendous mark. People from Ireland to India trace some of their ancestry to people who began growing barley and wheat in the Near East thousands of years ago. “It’s a part of the story of civilization that we’re just beginning to understand,” said Iosif Lazaridis, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Medical School. Altering False Impressions The agricultural revolution changed our species and our planet. As bands of hunter-gatherers began domesticating plants and animals, they quit the nomadic life, building villages and towns that endured for thousands of years. A stable food supply enabled their populations to explode, and small egalitarian groups turned into kingdoms sprawling across hundreds of miles. Agriculture originated in a few small hubs around the world, but probably first in the Fertile Crescent, a region of the Near East including parts of modern-day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Jordan. The evidence for full-blown agriculture there — crops, livestock, tools for food preparation, and villages — dates back about 11,000 years. In the Zagros Mountains of Iran, wild goats were domesticated over many centuries. Credit Fereidoun Biglari/National Museum of Iran In the 1990s, archaeologists largely concluded that farming in the Fertile Crescent began in Jordan and Israel, a region known as the southern Levant. “The model was that everything started there, and then everything spread out from there, including maybe the people,” said Melinda A. Zeder, a senior research scientist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. But in recent years, Dr. Zeder and other archaeologists have overturned that consensus. Their research suggests that people were inventing farming at several sites in the Fertile Crescent at roughly the same time. In the Zagros Mountains of Iran, for example, Dr. Zeder and her colleagues have found evidence of the gradual domestication of wild goats over many centuries around 10,000 years ago. People may have been cultivating plants earlier than believed, too. In the late 1980s, Ofer Bar-Yosef of Harvard and his colleagues began excavating a 23,000-year-old site on the shores of the Sea of Galilee known as Ohalo II. It consisted of half a dozen brush huts. Last year, Dr. Bar-Yosef and his colleagues reported that one of the huts contained 150,000 charred seeds and fruits, including many types, such as almonds, grapes and olives, that would later become crops. A stone blade found at Ohalo II seemed to have been used as a sickle to harvest cereals. A stone slab was used to grind the seeds. It seems clear the inhabitants were cultivating wild plants long before farming was thought to have begun. “We got fixated on the very few things we just happened to see preserved in the archaeological record, and we got this false impression that this was an abrupt change,” Dr. Zeder said. “Now we really understand there was this long period where they’re playing around with resources.” Many scientists have suggested that humans turned to agriculture under duress. Perhaps the climate of the Near East grew harsh, or perhaps the hunter-gatherer population outstripped the supply of wild foods. But “playing around with resources” is not the sort of thing people do in times of desperation. Instead, Dr. Zeder argues, agriculture came about as climatic changes shifted the ranges of some wild species of plants and animals into the Near East. Many different groups began experimenting with ways of producing extra food, which eventually enabled them to start a new way of life: settling down in more stable social groups. DNA Breakthroughs Enter the geneticists, who have long wondered if they could help solve the riddle of agriculture’s origins with DNA from human remains discovered in places like Ain Ghazal. Ancient genetic material can survive in skeletons for thousands of years, sometimes even hundreds of thousands of years. Scientists have been able to reconstruct entire genomes of ancient humans and extinct relatives like Neanderthals. But a number of attempts to get DNA out of skeletons in the Near East failed. It looked as if the conditions in the region were too harsh for ancient DNA to survive. “Genetically, the Near East was terra incognita,” said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School. It isn’t any longer. In two recent studies, geneticists including Dr. Reich used new methods to fish out enough DNA from the bones of the first farmers to figure out their relationship to other people. A team of researchers based at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, reconstructed the genomes of four early farmers from the Zagros Mountains whose bones date back as much as 10,000 years. Two of the sculptures recovered at Ain Ghazal. They likely represent mythical ancestors to whom the plastered skulls were directed. Credit P. Dorrell and S. Laidlaw/The Ain Ghazal Archaeological Project Dr. Reich and his colleagues — including Ron Pinhasi, an archaeologist at University College Dublin, and Dr. Lazaridis of Harvard — recovered genetic material from 44 sets of remains around the Near East. Their haul included DNA from early farmers in Iran, as well as from bones from another site in the Southern Levant like Ain Ghazal. Dr. Reich’s group discovered even older genetic material from hunter-gatherers in the region, from as far back as 14,000 years ago. The new results all point to the same overall conclusion: The first farmers in each region were the descendants of the earlier hunter-gatherers. What’s more, each population had its own distinct ancestry, going back tens of thousands of years. They were as different from one another genetically as the Europeans and Chinese. And these groups remained distinct through the agricultural revolution as they changed from hunter-gatherers to full-blown farmers. “It was quite surprising to see how different these groups were from each other,” Dr. Lazaridis said. “It was more extreme than anything you could have imagined was going on.” Dr. Reich and others argue that the findings show that people around the fertile crescent became farmers independently. “It’s not like you had one Near Eastern population that developed farming that expands and overruns all the others,” he said. One Birthplace, or Many? Archaeologists have welcomed the new results from the geneticists. But for now, they are interpreting the data in different ways. Dr. Zeder said that ancient DNA supports a scenario where farmers across the Fertile Crescent independently invented agriculture, perhaps repeatedly. But Dr. Bar-Yosef says he thinks full-blown agriculture evolved only once, and then quickly spread from one group to another. He points to the increasingly precise dating of archaeological sites in the Fertile Crescent. Instead of the southern Levant, the oldest sites with evidence of full-blown agriculture are in northern Syria and southern Turkey. That’s where Dr. Bar-Yosef thinks agriculture began. In other parts of the Fertile Crescent, he argues, people were just toying with farming. Only when they came in contact with the combination of crops and livestock, and the technology to manage them — what scientists call the Neolithic package — did they permanently adopt the practices. “You just map the dates” of the sites at which the evidence for farming is found, he said, “and you see it’s always later as you get away from the core area.” The new genetic results simply show that this farming technology spread through the Fertile Crescent, but that the populations sharing it did not interbreed. The new research also shows that even after agriculture was established across the Fertile Crescent, people remained genetically isolated for thousands of years. “If they were talking to each other, they weren’t intermarrying,” said Garrett Hellenthal, a geneticist at University College London who collaborated with the Gutenberg University researchers. But the DNA research also shows that this long period of isolation came to a sudden and spectacular end. The remains of an acorn recovered from a storage hut at Ohalo II. Credit Prof. Ehud Weiss, The Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology, Bar Ilan University About 8,000 years ago, the barriers between peoples in the Fertile Crescent fell away, and genes began to flow across the entire region. The Near East became one homogeneous mix of people. Why? Dr. Reich speculated that growing populations of farmers began linking to one another via trade networks. People moved along those routes and began to intermarry and have children together. Genes did not just flow across the Fertile Crescent — they also rippled outward. The scientists have detected DNA from the first farmers in living people on three continents. “There seem to be expansions out in all directions,” Dr. Lazaridis said. Early farmers in Turkey moved across the western part of the country, crossed the Bosporus and traveled into Europe about 8,000 years ago. They encountered no farmers there. Europe had been home to groups of hunter-gatherers for more than 30,000 years. The farmers seized much of their territory and converted it to farmland, without interbreeding with them. The hunter-gatherers clung to existence for centuries, and were eventually absorbed by bigger farming communities. Europeans today can trace much of their ancestry to both groups. The early farmers in what is now Iran expanded eastward. Eventually, their descendants ended up in present-day India, and their DNA makes up a substantial portion of the genomes of Indians. And the people of Ain Ghazal? Their population expanded into East Africa, bringing crops and animals with them. East Africans retain ancestry from the first farmers of the southern Levant — in Somalia, a third of people’s DNA comes from there. Dr. Reich hopes to learn more about the early farmers by obtaining samples more systematically from across the Fertile Crescent. “It’s not easy to come by these unique and special specimens,” he said. But he is pessimistic about filling in some of the most glaring gaps in the genetic map of the Fertile Crescent. No one has yet recovered DNA from the people who lived in the oldest known farming settlements. And it’s unlikely they’ll be trying again anytime soon. To do so, they would have to venture into the heart of Syria’s civil war. Edited October 18, 2016 by bcuzbcuz
thesometimesaint Posted October 18, 2016 Posted October 18, 2016 1 hour ago, ERayR said: I will agree "Evolution thrives on mistakes" . Mistakes in interpretation of data and on the fertile imaginations of those interpreting the data. Which one of your parents do you look exactly like?
Johnnie Cake Posted October 18, 2016 Posted October 18, 2016 11 hours ago, Atheist Mormon said: Yesterday I was watching "Westworld" on HBO, it ihas an intriguing plot..(going back to Yul Brynner, what a guy he was). Anyway, the story is about an amusement park filled with robots where the visitors can live any adventure they want to...As the story goes the Boss Anthony Hopkins replies to a concerned employee; "Evolution thrives on mistakes" . I never heard a better explanation for Evolution's mechanism, if one cares to look how many proto human experiments Evolution had until we ended with Homo Sapiens. Imagine if you will if we ended with Neanderthal punctuation. It was like the whole time went by perpetuating one mistake after another.....All those mistakes ended with Homo Sapiens (Which I'm very happy about it...It's been a great ride!) And yet I heard all these perfection stories in the Church.......It just made little sense as time went by.... I agree, Hopkins's statement captures the essence of evolution. After all what is evolution but the "Mistakes" or the "Mutations" that occur accidentally to an organism’s DNA. They can happen for a number of reasons, but one of the most important is when the cellular machinery makes a mistake as it copies DNA from one cell to the next. The incidence of mutations, then, is affected by how good the machinery of the cell is at copying DNA. The human family exists as it does today because of the accumulation of DNA mistakes...aka mutations. BTW: I love Westworld...great show highly recommend it to all of my friends here at MD&D. The Utah scenery is breathtaking...but I do find it ironic that a show that is filmed in Utah probably won't be watched by the majority of Utahans due to the mental conditioning of its people.
thesometimesaint Posted October 18, 2016 Posted October 18, 2016 I wouldn't say mistakes just naturally occurring variations. 1
hope_for_things Posted October 18, 2016 Posted October 18, 2016 12 hours ago, Atheist Mormon said: Yesterday I was watching "Westworld" on HBO, it ihas an intriguing plot..(going back to Yul Brynner, what a guy he was). Anyway, the story is about an amusement park filled with robots where the visitors can live any adventure they want to...As the story goes the Boss Anthony Hopkins replies to a concerned employee; "Evolution thrives on mistakes" . I never heard a better explanation for Evolution's mechanism, if one cares to look how many proto human experiments Evolution had until we ended with Homo Sapiens. Imagine if you will if we ended with Neanderthal punctuation. It was like the whole time went by perpetuating one mistake after another.....All those mistakes ended with Homo Sapiens (Which I'm very happy about it...It's been a great ride!) And yet I heard all these perfection stories in the Church.......It just made little sense as time went by.... I would characterize the mistakes as mutations. I also don't think this means that there aren't higher powers involved in this process, or at least I think that perhaps evolution and natural selection are mechanisms built into the system which can lead to the abundance of life that we experience today. I think sometimes we limit our thinking by believing that Homo Sapiens are the pinnacle of the evolutionary mountain, but I have no reason to believe that there won't be continued evolution, new species in the future with even greater abilities than we possess. I actually think this is all compatible with Mormon theology in a liberal kind of way.
Atheist Mormon Posted October 18, 2016 Author Posted October 18, 2016 13 hours ago, oremites said: I'm not sure what you mean by perfection stories. My observation about how God works is that he gives us direction and assignments, then lets us make mistakes along the way. It's a great method for learning and growth. Why should the creation of the earth be any different? So then do you admit OT was written by Men? Where the most kosher, circumcision laws were repealed?
Calm Posted October 19, 2016 Posted October 19, 2016 On 10/17/2016 at 8:52 PM, Atheist Mormon said: Yesterday I was watching "Westworld" on HBO, it ihas an intriguing plot..(going back to Yul Brynner, what a guy he was). Anyway, the story is about an amusement park filled with robots where the visitors can live any adventure they want to...As the story goes the Boss Anthony Hopkins replies to a concerned employee; "Evolution thrives on mistakes" . I never heard a better explanation for Evolution's mechanism, if one cares to look how many proto human experiments Evolution had until we ended with Homo Sapiens. Imagine if you will if we ended with Neanderthal punctuation. It was like the whole time went by perpetuating one mistake after another.....All those mistakes ended with Homo Sapiens (Which I'm very happy about it...It's been a great ride!) And yet I heard all these perfection stories in the Church.......It just made little sense as time went by.... Why would you do you see as mistakes Neanderthals who lasted around 200,000 years and passed on their DNA or any of the multiple species that survived for extensive periods of time, passed on DNA to other species, but then died out themselves when times changed?Sounds like they are as much as a success story as the rest of the living kingdom. 1
Atheist Mormon Posted October 19, 2016 Author Posted October 19, 2016 2 hours ago, Calm said: Why would you do you see as mistakes Neanderthals who lasted around 200,000 years and passed on their DNA or any of the multiple species that survived for extensive periods of time, passed on DNA to other species, but then died out themselves when times changed?Sounds like they are as much as a success story as the rest of the living kingdom. Neanderthal were deeply flawed for sure, that is why they couldn't survive against Homo Sapiens, as you can discern their brains were much bigger, which in turn consumed far more energy than their body could supply, they could not develop a sophisticated speech because of their tracheal, larynx design flaws..... Yes, they are success story....compared to Homo Habilis, Homo Erectus and slew of other Proto Humans....But nobody should argue Homo Sapiens was the the latest, successful Evolutionary experiments. If we can save ourselves from impending nuclear, Climate or Asteroid hit calamity (whatever happens first) we have a very good change to became a star faring species...Even then we will degenerate to subspecies, depending where we colonize, make home in Solar System or beyond. My main subject was that Evolution thrives on mistakes, experiments, re_experiments.....Whereas perfect God creates Human promptly, even more demeaning absurdity to women, he takes a rib from human to create Female., I'm not anti-religion, it's just that it's time came and passed, whether we like it or not
thesometimesaint Posted October 19, 2016 Posted October 19, 2016 It was a change in the environment that doomed Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis. Will we be able to survive ours?
stemelbow Posted October 19, 2016 Posted October 19, 2016 On 10/17/2016 at 8:52 PM, Atheist Mormon said: Yesterday I was watching "Westworld" on HBO, it ihas an intriguing plot..(going back to Yul Brynner, what a guy he was). Anyway, the story is about an amusement park filled with robots where the visitors can live any adventure they want to...As the story goes the Boss Anthony Hopkins replies to a concerned employee; "Evolution thrives on mistakes" . I never heard a better explanation for Evolution's mechanism, if one cares to look how many proto human experiments Evolution had until we ended with Homo Sapiens. Imagine if you will if we ended with Neanderthal punctuation. It was like the whole time went by perpetuating one mistake after another.....All those mistakes ended with Homo Sapiens (Which I'm very happy about it...It's been a great ride!) And yet I heard all these perfection stories in the Church.......It just made little sense as time went by.... I've heard a lot of weird things and phantom explanations in Church too.
thesometimesaint Posted October 19, 2016 Posted October 19, 2016 After 45 years in the Church I've heard just about everything. Some of it is even true.
Atheist Mormon Posted October 19, 2016 Author Posted October 19, 2016 1 hour ago, thesometimesaint said: It was a change in the environment that doomed Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis. Will we be able to survive ours? Very good observation.....Obviously we have star trek technology compared to Neanderthals, that should help us long way...
thesometimesaint Posted October 19, 2016 Posted October 19, 2016 I'm a long time fan of Star Trek, but we've got a long ways to go before we reach that level of technology.
cinepro Posted October 19, 2016 Posted October 19, 2016 On 10/17/2016 at 7:52 PM, Atheist Mormon said: Yesterday I was watching "Westworld" on HBO, it ihas an intriguing plot..(going back to Yul Brynner, what a guy he was). Anyway, the story is about an amusement park filled with robots where the visitors can live any adventure they want to...As the story goes the Boss Anthony Hopkins replies to a concerned employee; "Evolution thrives on mistakes" . I never heard a better explanation for Evolution's mechanism, if one cares to look how many proto human experiments Evolution had until we ended with Homo Sapiens. Imagine if you will if we ended with Neanderthal punctuation. It was like the whole time went by perpetuating one mistake after another.....All those mistakes ended with Homo Sapiens (Which I'm very happy about it...It's been a great ride!) And yet I heard all these perfection stories in the Church.......It just made little sense as time went by.... I've had similar thoughts about God "using" evolution to "create" the animals and humans on Earth. I mean, obviously he could have done it (since He can do anything), but why would He? We're told that He created everything spiritually before it was created physically, and you can't "evolve" something spiritually, so that means he had to plan out evolution beforehand, and every single step of the process (including dead ends) was created spiritually first. And He knew all along what the end result would be, so it wasn't evolution to adapt, it was evolution to achieve a pre-determined final result. So what is the purpose of spending millions of years just kind of nudging the process along, with false starts and dead ends when the end result was known and pre-determined? It would be like trying to make Nestle Toll House chocolate chip cookies, but instead of just using the Nestle Toll House recipe from the back of the package, you make thousands and thousands of different batches, trying to figure out how to make Nestle Toll House cookies. Then, finally, after years and years of experimentation, you arrive at the exact cookie that you could have made the first time by looking at the package. Even if you used that method, you wouldn’t say that you “evolved” the cookie. You would say you developed the cookie using trial and error. Do we really want to suggest that God created our physical world using “trial and error”? 1
Calm Posted October 19, 2016 Posted October 19, 2016 Why do you assume something spiritual cannot evolve? 2
mfbukowski Posted October 19, 2016 Posted October 19, 2016 (edited) On 10/18/2016 at 7:39 AM, Johnnie Cake said: I agree, Hopkins's statement captures the essence of evolution. After all what is evolution but the "Mistakes" or the "Mutations" that occur accidentally to an organism’s DNA. They can happen for a number of reasons, but one of the most important is when the cellular machinery makes a mistake as it copies DNA from one cell to the next. The incidence of mutations, then, is affected by how good the machinery of the cell is at copying DNA. The human family exists as it does today because of the accumulation of DNA mistakes...aka mutations. BTW: I love Westworld...great show highly recommend it to all of my friends here at MD&D. The Utah scenery is breathtaking...but I do find it ironic that a show that is filmed in Utah probably won't be watched by the majority of Utahans due to the mental conditioning of its people. One man's mistake is another man's invisible plan. Mistakes are a deviation from an intended purpose- so unless life itself is a mistake, mutations cannot be mistakes. It's really an odd point of view. The other half of the alleged mistake is how the organism interacts with the environment- it either survives or does not. The environment makes the decision if it was a mistake or not. Interesting how Hopkins' statement anthropomorphizes evolution. To make a "mistake" you have to have a purpose in mind which goes against a purpose. So then what is the tacit assumption there of what the purpose of evolution is? It cannot be random then according to that logic. So is life itself a mistake? An interesting view, but I would wonder from who's standpoint it is a mistake. Is this a secret Freudian slip about his own personal life being a mistake?? Yeah it's projecting a lot, but what kind of attitude would it take to see all life as a "mistake"? Not one I would like to have. Pragmatically that is a hopeless position. No thanks. Edited October 19, 2016 by mfbukowski 2
mfbukowski Posted October 19, 2016 Posted October 19, 2016 1 hour ago, cinepro said: I've had similar thoughts about God "using" evolution to "create" the animals and humans on Earth. I mean, obviously he could have done it (since He can do anything), but why would He? We're told that He created everything spiritually before it was created physically, and you can't "evolve" something spiritually, so that means he had to plan out evolution beforehand, and every single step of the process (including dead ends) was created spiritually first. And He knew all along what the end result would be, so it wasn't evolution to adapt, it was evolution to achieve a pre-determined final result. So what is the purpose of spending millions of years just kind of nudging the process along, with false starts and dead ends when the end result was known and pre-determined? It would be like trying to make Nestle Toll House chocolate chip cookies, but instead of just using the Nestle Toll House recipe from the back of the package, you make thousands and thousands of different batches, trying to figure out how to make Nestle Toll House cookies. Then, finally, after years and years of experimentation, you arrive at the exact cookie that you could have made the first time by looking at the package. Even if you used that method, you wouldn’t say that you “evolved” the cookie. You would say you developed the cookie using trial and error. Do we really want to suggest that God created our physical world using “trial and error”? Yeah and let's just cut to the celestial kingdom and leave genuine choice out of all of it. This is just the tired old determinism argument. Yawn. If God knows how it is going to turn out then we cannot do otherwise. Sigh. You can do better than this. 1
bcuzbcuz Posted October 19, 2016 Posted October 19, 2016 11 minutes ago, mfbukowski said: One man's mistake is another man's invisible plan. The other half of the alleged mistake is how the organism interacts with the environment- it either survives or does not. The environment makes the decision if it was a mistake or not. Interesting how Hopkins' statement anthropomorphizes evolution. To make a "mistake" you have to have a purpose in mind which goes against a purpose. So then what is the tacit assumption there of what the purpose of evolution is? It cannot be random then according to that logic. So is life itself a mistake? An interesting view, but I would wonder from who's standpoint it is a mistake. Is this a secret Freudian slip about his own personal life being a mistake?? Yeah it's projecting a lot, but what kind of attitude would it take to see all life as a "mistake"? Not one I would like to have. Pragmatically that is a hopeless position. No thanks. Your comments are confusing, if not outright confused. Environments, nature, etc doesn't make mistakes. That's merely a label some people attach to changes. Some adaptations are successful....lead to continued birth, life, procreation, death cycles, while others hit a wall. To label paths that hit a wall as a mistake or failure is to not understand how vital different paths are. A path that hits a wall is just fertiliser to those that didn't.
mfbukowski Posted October 19, 2016 Posted October 19, 2016 1 minute ago, bcuzbcuz said: Your comments are confusing, if not outright confused. Environments, nature, etc doesn't make mistakes. That's merely a label some people attach to changes. Some adaptations are successful....lead to continued birth, life, procreation, death cycles, while others hit a wall. To label paths that hit a wall as a mistake or failure is to not understand how vital different paths are. A path that hits a wall is just fertiliser to those that didn't. Oh gosh Read the d... OP will you please? I did not call them mistakes. 1
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