I agree that it is kind of ego-centric for us to believe that the entire universe was created just for us to be amused. I didn't hang pictures on my living room wall to keep the fish in my tank amused.




John Wilken
2002 Cavalier
2.2 Vin code 4
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I think it's opposite--if there is some über-deity out there, most likely we were greated to keep it amused...and the universe is just it's petri dish


Goodbye Callisto & Skaði, Hello Ishara:
2022 Kia Stinger GT2 AWD
The only thing every single person from every single walk of life on earth can truly say
they have in common is that their country is run by a bunch of fargin iceholes.

Jackalope wrote:But then people have been fighting and killing because of Gods word since time began. Funny, all the different versions of God call for peace and understanding and yet the followers are willing to kill you if you doubt it.

/\/\ This by far is the best post on this thread.

There was a time on this planet where humans didn't exist.

We can trace our ancestry back to a time when we didn't have a large enough brain to know how to document history.

We can go back further to a time when we didn't walk upright or have a developed language.

We can find all the pieces of the puzzle except one that leads us to the same ancestry as apes, but still find people unwilling to accept that humans evolved.

Regardless of why or from who, we have evolved. You can put together a jigsaw puzzle that's missing a few pieces and tell what the picture is supposed to be.





John Wilken
2002 Cavalier
2.2 Vin code 4
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Thank you john.

HAHAHA, I wasn't telling YOU not to be narrow minded but everyone who thinks for one minute that the intire universe is out there just for to look at and go Wooo pretty!
Thats rediculous.





Semper Fi SAINT. May you rest in peace.

Quote:

Man is certainly crazy. He could not make a mite, yet he makes gods by the dozens.

~Michel de Montaigne, Philospoher

Quote:

We may prefer to think of ourselves as fallen angels, but in reality we're just risen apes.

~Desmond Morris, Anthropologist

Quote:

The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.

~Bill Watterson, Cartoonist

Just some food-for-thought on this topic. I'm not going to give credence, or agrue the truth behind any of those statements or use them as grounds for an argument...

...Except the last one, I think that one hits the nail on the head.


Goodbye Callisto & Skaði, Hello Ishara:
2022 Kia Stinger GT2 AWD
The only thing every single person from every single walk of life on earth can truly say
they have in common is that their country is run by a bunch of fargin iceholes.

[quote=Keeper of the Light™]

Quote:

The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.

~Bill Watterson, Cartoonist

Just some food-for-thought on this topic. I'm not going to give credence, or agrue the truth behind any of those statements or use them as grounds for an argument...

...Except the last one, I think that one hits the nail on the head.

Anyone else get the astronomy class on why if there was intelligent life and it did come to earth it would be hostile because it would be trying to aquire resources?

Under Mormon beliefs we ARE NOT the only creation of god, and he does not stay watching over us 24/7 but rather visits from time to time, so he can watch over his other creations as well.

Sort of like the heaven Bill and Ted visit on their most Bogus Journey when they meet the most intelligent beings in the universe and their not human, and don't speak english.


-Chris

Mind if I dump a few thoughts into this? or is the thread pretty much dead now?


03z24

Why not?

Nobody here will stop you, they'll just argue against whatever you say

PAX

lol, wow so encouraging


03z24

so.. C'mon... We're waiting..


There's nothing wrong with ideas, or argument about those ideas, just post em up.

PAX

Quote:

You can put together a jigsaw puzzle that's missing a few pieces and tell what the picture is supposed to be.

Very well put. It reminds me of the episode of the simpsons, where the owners of a bed and breakfast are putting a puzzle together. they had completed the head, limbs and 95% of the body; then when someone placed a small piece in the animal's back, a woman said "Oh! It's a donkey!"





"i promise we won't get drunk, and go out in boat in the dark, stand up in the boat and fire the gun into the air unless we have life jackets on."

Sure, except for one thing..

This puzzel has 95% of the pieces missing, not the other way around.

The oldest skelatle remains consist of what.. A bit of jaw bone, a bit of pelvis.. Certainly no where near a complete skeleton.. Of course a skeleton is still only a piece of the bigger puzzle.. SO the physical evidence is a few pieces of a piec e of the puzzle. Let's not make it out to be more than it is.. It makes suggestions, certainly no conclusions.

PAX

= disagreement

we are missing 95% of remains of could be would be direct "links" between humans and primates

we are NOT missing 95% of the evidence showing EVOLUTION FROM primates


we have the whole right side of the puzzle doen and the whole left side. we are missing a bit in the middle. while we can not know FOR SURE what is pictured in the middle of that puzzle, because we have completed both sides we can make a VERY qualified estimate of what should be there.

and that highly qualified estimate is that evolution from primates happened.






:::Creative Draft Image Manipulation Forum:::

So I'm looking at my dog, and wondering about his evolution. I think most people will agree that dogs have been domesticated from the wolf family, but what about my dog?

In a few dog generations we have taken a wild animal and bred it for a more tame personality, so it doesn't try to eat us when it's hungry and so we can teach it tricks to amuse us.

But what about my dog? Does he know he was once in the wolf family? Seeing a wolf in person would make my dog run and hide in fear. A wolf wouldn't recognize my dog as one of his own, just another meal on 4 legs.

They look similar, but they don't know they're decendants of the same gene pool. We didn't create dogs, but we made wolves into dogs. So in a way, we are responsible for the intelligent design of dogs.

Maybe in a few hundred generations man will become extinct, and dogs will evolve into smarter beings. If dogs develop a language and begin to document history, I'm sure they will look for answers to their origins the same way humans have. Are the remains of the first domesticated dogs available for them to find? Will they have the same debates, arguing if dogs were created or evolved from wolves?

My dog will never ask that question. Maybe a few million years ago, humans couldn't ask that question either. Maybe we were too busy walking on our hind legs to get a treat.




John Wilken
2002 Cavalier
2.2 Vin code 4
Auto

dude, thats awsome......funny, yet makes you think


You'll never touch God's hand
You'll never taste God's breath
Because you'll never see the second coming
Life's too short to be focused on insanity
I've seen the ways of God
I'll take the devil any day
Hail Satan

(slayer, skeleton christ, 2006)

And it shows that without human intervention, dogs would still be wolves. Works for both camps.

The real aregument isn't if evolution happened but if it is a fluke of nature, or a purposefull design.

We made dogs, they didn't happen by accident.

PAX

Well evolution of the dog and many other species at least shows that evolution has happened. I don't see how it works for both camps. The bottom line is why did they change? It is because their environment changed. Humans caused their environment to change, but we did not cause the evolution itself. Environment change + beneficial genetic mutation + time = evolution through natural selection.

If we were the environmental change that cause dogs to be domesticated, then we cause the domestication. We were that influence, it did not happen randomly.

That is the whole argument. The church does not deny evolution, but it does deny random mutation. Circa 230AD

Note the thread title "Q for intelligent design"

PAX

Except that we ran across each other by chance, hence, in a way, we evolved a bit from what we were, and so did the wolf.

I see the point you're trying to make, hahaha, but it still comes back to the question (to me) of whether it was a random chance that did the evolution, or did someone else have their hand in it (and I speak on the what made Man and Wolf hunt together?)

So, the dog analogy adds something to ponder, but it no way near wins the argument IMHO.


Goodbye Callisto & Skaði, Hello Ishara:
2022 Kia Stinger GT2 AWD
The only thing every single person from every single walk of life on earth can truly say
they have in common is that their country is run by a bunch of fargin iceholes.

Hahahaha wrote: The church does not deny evolution, but it does deny random mutation. Circa 230AD

PAX

Hahaha, we know random mutation happens. Every year there's a new flu virus, which is a mutation from last years flu virus. There are strains of bacteria that have mutated to become impervious to antibiotics.

If random mutation can happen on a microscopic level, it can happen at any level, even people.




John Wilken
2002 Cavalier
2.2 Vin code 4
Auto

I understand your argument Hahahaha and you may believe that it is your gods tool. IMO it is easy to see that when an organism mutates(happens at random or by act of god as you believe) and this mutation is beneficial, the animal has a greater chance to survive and there for a better chance to pass on it's (mutated) genes. Therefor evolution without human intervention can happen.

Well what a terribly inefficient way of doing things.. Of the millions of possible mutations, 99% would be harmful to an organisim (as most mutation leads to a loss of genetic code), the poor organism must play a mutation lottery in hopes for something benefitial. On top of that, no single mutation is likely to be benefitial. The cillia on a paramecium are useless withought the mechanism to move those cillia, for example.

I was not suggesting the human intervention is necessary, but that intervention of some kind is involved. In the case of the dog, humans were part of the equation. Did God predesposed wolves to be domesticated? Maybe, don't know, can't answer that one.

Yes things have mutations, yes things appear to evolve, but that does not equate to things evolving through random mutation. For one, we don't have any way of knowing just how randon it is.. We would have to see the millions of failures Vs. the single successes and try to figure it out from there. We simply don't have the body of evidence. After all, if it is random, then there must be millions upon millions of organisms that failed because their mutation was not an advantage.

PAX

^^^most likely, they were killed off when they were still a "member" of the progenitor specie. After all, there is not hard defining line of species...as random mutations come into a specie, some are flushed out, some are buried under recessive genes (only to reappear later), and some find a niche in which they perform admirably. Hell, if you think about it, if humanity, as it was before intercontinental travel, was kept isolated, most likely you would find a multitude of "human" species based upon the isolated biomes that they live in, but instead, we have the different "breeds" or "races" as we like to call them. Ever wonder why blacks are black and whites are whit? look at the areas where their progenitors originally came from. Hence, human evolution...until we began to cross-breed--which may be an evolutionary step in and of itself--since having polar, temerate, desert, subtropical, mediterranean, and tropical genes all mixed int he genome, will make it a lot easier for humanity en masse to survive in the many different biomes of the planet.

Still, enough of that tangent. The argument comes down to a simple "choice" if you will: did something have their hand into all of this, or not when you reach the alpha terminus of everything?


Goodbye Callisto & Skaði, Hello Ishara:
2022 Kia Stinger GT2 AWD
The only thing every single person from every single walk of life on earth can truly say
they have in common is that their country is run by a bunch of fargin iceholes.

[quote=Keeper of the Light™]^^^most likely, they were killed off when they were still a "member" of the progenitor specie. After all, there is not hard defining line of species...as random mutations come into a specie, some are flushed out, some are buried under recessive genes (only to reappear later), and some find a niche in which they perform admirably. Hell, if you think about it, if humanity, as it was before intercontinental travel, was kept isolated, most likely you would find a multitude of "human" species based upon the isolated biomes that they live in, but instead, we have the different "breeds" or "races" as we like to call them. Ever wonder why blacks are black and whites are whit? look at the areas where their progenitors originally came from. Hence, human evolution...until we began to cross-breed--which may be an evolutionary step in and of itself--since having polar, temerate, desert, subtropical, mediterranean, and tropical genes all mixed int he genome, will make it a lot easier for humanity en masse to survive in the many different biomes of the planet.

Still, enough of that tangent. The argument comes down to a simple "choice" if you will: did something have their hand into all of this, or not when you reach the alpha terminus of everything?

great post!





:::Creative Draft Image Manipulation Forum:::

[quote=Keeper of the Light™] After all, there is not hard defining line of species...as random mutations come into a specie, some are flushed out, some are buried under recessive genes (only to reappear later), and some find a niche in which they perform admirably.

Good point. I was just emailed a picture of a baby albino doe. In Ohio, that would make it an extremely easy target for hunters and whatever natural preditors are here. But if this happened in a climate that had snow for 10 months out of the year, being albino would be an asset and this doe could have many offspring that would carry the albino gene.






John Wilken
2002 Cavalier
2.2 Vin code 4
Auto