Evolution is NOT science: A challenge

This from the person still claiming that evolutionary theory justifies racism, and still trying to drag it into any debate topic even minutely related and many that aren't at all.When it comes to the preformatted debate script Syamsu, you wrote the book.TTFN,WK

You seem to be saying that 'creation' is an issue of free will. Dear Syamsu,Religions may say 'that there is something beyond or within choice, which is not material', but as yet there seems to be no evidence of this, so it is reasonable for the scientific approach, which relies on evidence, not to include these immaterial things in its purview.Your version of 'creation' is not one I suspect many creationists would subscribe to. They may well agree about the presence of an immaterial 'creative' aspect to choice but I doubt they would say this is what makes them creationists. There is a commonly understood meaning to creationism, that being that creationists are people that believe the universe was created by some sort of God.TTFN,WK

If that is the case you might have a point, but even though that is a widely held belief there is no evidence that it is actually true. The fact is that we simply don't know if there is anything beyond a purely material basis for our choices. The fact that people generally ascribe to a belief in something is far from conclusive evidence of its existence. And it still isn't conferring any credibility to religion.Your argument seems to be that lots of people believe in free will and therefore there is a good chance that god exists, which doesn't neccessarily follow.TTFN,WK

Which is totally irrelevant to the discussion and in no way addresses anything from the post you replied to. By the by, I assume you mean that uncertainty is a recognised concept in many areas of science rather than there people are uncertain about a lot of things in science.In what way am I misinformed? Do you have some evidence for there being a specific non-material basis for decision making processes in humans, if so then why haven't you collected your nobel prize yet?There is a considerable difference between things being determined or probabilistic and between them having a material or non-material basis. The fact that the heisenberg uncertainty principle, for instance, operates on subatomic particles doesn't mean that we can't use deterministic newtonian physics to calculate a ballistic trajectory, or even the more complex trajectory of your dropped rock, and neither relies on any supernatural intervention or 'creation' or requires the existence of non-material properties.TTFN,WK

Dear Syamsu,Perhaps you should also try your own challenge. As far as your example of a falling rock goes it fails miserably, there are already a host of material factors affecting which way it bounces. There is the shape of the rock, the exact way in which it tumbles as it falls, how that tumbling is affected by things such as air resistance and wind currents, the shape of the ground on to which it is being dropped and probably a host of others I can't think of. The mathematics required to work out what the effect of all these factors would be is frankly beyond me and probably beyond anyone without a highly sophisticated supercomputer, that doesn't mean that they aren't determing the final trajectory of the stone however.If you think you spelled it out then I fear you used the cyrillic alphabet to do so. But even so I'll give it a try.When I go for my morning tea break I might decide to have a bacon roll on the other hand I may not. At the moment it is impossible to determine the outcome of my decision. I'll let you know how it turns out later.TTFN,WK

It turned out that I decided to have a bacon roll, but I couldn't tell you why, spooky eh?TTFN,WK

What is this supposed to mean? Do you mean that the resolution of the motion and the effects of the shapes are not too complex to be calculated but that there is something else which leaves us uncertain as to the result? Its a fairly big assertion and you provide nothing to back it up. Or are you simply agreeing with me that while the motion could in theory be calculated it is doubtful we could do so successfully with our current understanding of things.If it is a question of the complexity of the system then you simply seem to be arguing from ignorance and using a 'god of the gaps' type argument to say that the creation/ choice event is hidden in the portion of the phenomenon that we cannot as yet resolve. Fair question. I certainly have a material component but it is not impossible that I also have some intangible spiritual component. I don't have any evidence that this is so but I have no reason other than parsimony to exclude it as a possibility. Assuming that I do have such a spiritual element and that it in some way underlies or influences my thought process. I would suggest that your rock has no such spiritual element which can influence it, and that it is incapable of choosing anything as its trajectory is solely determined by a variety of physical factors.Again I ask you, are you saying that creation is simply a question of the existence of free will and that materialism (not evolution) naturally leads us to a conclusion that there is no free will? I have some sympathy with that view, in a large part the question is really 'what governs the behaviour of sub-atomic paricles?'. What, if anything, causes a particular particle to decay at a particular time? From a materialist viewpoint it could be seen to folow that all of our so called choices are simply the result of highly complex but ultimately deterministic processes. Even the stochastic nature of events may be deterministic if we have a sufficient understanding of the behaviour of every single component. Chaos theory states that minute variations in initial conditions can lead to large sacele differences in outcomes.The question of whether the universe is deterministic or not is a big one, but isn't by any means relevant to the creation Vs. evolution debate or even the dualist Vs. strict materialist debate. The source of whatever true randomness exists in the universe, if any, is unknown, labelling it 'creation' simply confuses the normal understanding of that term in the long standing EvC debate and provides no argument in favour of religion simply an argument in favour of our knowledge being insufficient to answer the question.TTFN,WKP.S. Are you ever coming back to the natural selection thread?P.P.S. In order not to get in the way of the dialogue between you and B2P would you be interested in discussing the question of 'creation as free will' in a seperate thread?This message has been edited by Wounded King, 07-23-2004 07:28 AMThis message has been edited by Wounded King, 07-23-2004 07:31 AM

Oh well, as long as you have someone's word on it that thats what SCIENCE says, not just wussey old science, it must be true.Come on Syamsu, even for you this level of argumentation is astonishingly lame. An argument from some totally anonymous authority.Please give us something to show what your understanding of the place of 'uncertainty' in science is. I gave two possibilities and you plumped for a vague non-description. So you are claiming that the trajectory of a dropped stone isn't determined by its various physical properties, the properties of the surface it impacts on and its motion, are you familiar with mechanics? Surely you remember Newton's laws of motion that you were so keen on having as fundamental to all science and which are wholly deterministic. So what does make the stone go one way or another? If your answer is 'creation' I may just have to scream. I'm not arguing that, I'm just framing a couple of interesting question fairly central to this debate. I'm saying that some materialist certainly do ascribe to the determinist philosophy you mention but that it isn't a neccessary result of materialism and that similarly many religions espouse a belief in fore-ordination which suggests that events are pre-determined, although many try to have their cake and eat it by saying that although events are predetermined people still have free will, they just choose to do the things which were predetermined.As far as I am concerned I am a discrete individual and I certainly don't feel that my behaviour is pre-determined. I can't dissect my mental processes to the degree neccessary to see if I can identify an origin for my choices. I don't know how much more precise you think I can be, I certainly can't identify some physical area of my brain which is responsible for the choice. And even if certain parts of my brain should show activity as I make choices that does not show that some process within those areas is reponsible for the origination of the idea.TTFN,WKP.S. Would you be interested in moving this discussion to the thread I am trying to get established as 'Creation Vs. Evolution = Free will Vs Determination'? It might help keep this thread on topic a bit more and clear some of the atheists out of the way so you and B2P can have a more one on one debate.

Strange yet untrue. Once more you reveal your unfamiliarity with evolutionary science. Evolutionary scientists are often concerned with possible differing outcomes, arguably that is what happens in every instance of speciation, especially sympatric.Once something has happened you can try and find out what may have influenced or caused it to happen, and it is often possible to speculate on other possible outcomes if things had happened slightly differently. If something has not yet happened then usually more than one possible outcome is hypothesised.Arguably the entire basis of all science is based on differing outcomes, that is what experimentation is about after all.TTFN,WK

That sounds about par for the course. A prediction published 7 years after what it is supposed to predict has been discovered.I take it this is some sort of typo which should have either 1985 or 1998 instead.TTFN,WK

One word Syamsu, mutation.

That is certainly one definition of faith, although looking at dictionary.com it says 'proof or material evidence', it is not however the only definition and not all of them rely on an absence of proof/ evidence.It also doesn't logically follow that believing in something means having faith in it, unless you can demonstrate that there is no material evidence for that belief.TTFN,WK