[Emu]

Originally Posted by ScruU2wice

My overarching message was that everything requires degrees of faith. Whether its quantum mechanics and string theory or whatever Sciences of all sorts have fundamental axioms that require you to just have faith. So you can't just pull the blanket on religion as completely illogical and wrong.

I never said that. I don't know who did. Certainly you have to take things on faith in life, including things in science, but some things require less faith than others. For example, the statement "The sky is blue" requires less faith than the statement "The sky is polka-dot." The reason is that the sky is OBSERVABLY blue. We can SEE it as it is.

And some might make the argument that human senses are too fallible to know for certain that the sky is, in fact, blue. But so what? I could expand that argument to EVERYTHING in life, just like your faith argument. Perhaps we see design in everything because our senses are too fallible to grasp how it could have arisen otherwise.

I'm kinda digressing from my point, but math in all of its' forms is based off of the perceptions of humans and human reasoning. It has its' unproven fundamentals and philosophies. For example you can't prove that a+b=b+a so it's just taking on faith. I do a crappy job of explaining it but if you talk to someone who's way more well versed in pure math and philosophy they can give you a run down on the implications of 2+2 not equalling 4.

No, I get what you're saying. But my response to this is the same as the one above. Just because you take either side of a position on faith doesn't make one closer to the truth than it actually is.

You're suppose to memorize the different evolutionary phases of man just like you would prophets in the bible. There is no real explanation to it Teachers just say "well this is what they were, it's in the book"

Well, that's just bad teaching. Aside from the truly bad teachers out there, you have to remember that students only spend a finite amount of time in school and only a fraction of that time is spent in biology class, and only a fraction of biology class is spent on evolution at all, and an EVEN SMALLER fraction is spent on the evolution of man specifically. And besides, just because the explanations they give you in school aren't exactly adequate doesn't mean that there is no explanation. Richard Dawkins' "The Ancestor's Tale" goes into deep explanations of our evolutionary past, retrographing it from our most recent ancestors to our most ancient. You just have to look for it, like you would in any classroom topic. They don't explain why half the battles of the Civil War were fought, either, but you can find out if you're really interested.

Well I got it from some article I had from a Econ professor who was trying to dissociate Social Darwinism as a model for economic theory, and I kinda extrapolated that to a criticism of Darwinism. Basically my horrible run down of what the guy sais is that evolution says is that a species evolves, but it can't really narrow down what makes it evolve and how it makes it evolve. In this sense it's not really providing any evidence to the theory besides a certain species exists.

This is the point of natural selection. Using what we know about a species today, we can deduce what must have happened to it to make it evolve that way. Evolution can't tell you EXACTLY what made the species evolve the way it did, but it can tell you what factors would have selected a species to evolve in this manner. For example, evolution can't tell you that an earthquake caused an underwater cave to collapse, but it can tell you why a species of fish in that cave evolved vestigial (nonfunctional) eyes and developed sonar detection: It was fucking dark.

I wish I could explain it better but what I got from it was that a species could have grown wings because it wished really hard for all we know. since evolution is the result of some change, it results in a change in the species. but if we change one variable in an environment it causes immeasurable change so any determining power of an darwinian model won't provide any predicitve power, which is why it's bad economic model.

Here's where your confusion lies. Evolution is by no means concerned with the future. You're falling into eugenics territory, which is something wholly seperate from evolution, and a disproven theory besides. Evolution as a theory has no concern whatsoever with what a species will evolve in to, as opposed to what it evolved from. Yes, social darwinism is a terrible economic model. It was only in vogue because it gave an explanation for why the poor are getting poorer and the rich are getting richer.

But the point he was making was that the darwian model says that that species exists in it's current form because it was the only form evolution would let it take. So it kinda is just self fulfilling evidence.

Evolution had nothing to do with what form the species was "allowed" take. It was environmental factors that caused a species to evolve the way it did, not evolution in and of itself. The same way the existence of a wall prevents you from walking through it.

I've already mixed and shredded whatever tattered remains of a message I wanted to get across. I really wish I could explain what I was trying to talk about better but I'm just not intellegent enough. So I think I'll just try laps back in to life requiring degrees of faith..

No, I understand your criticism, but just because evolution and creationism both require faith doesn't mean anything. Creationism requires leaps and bounds more faith than evolution does because you have to suppose the existence of 1) A supernatural power, 2) An intelligent supernatural power, 3) and all of the implications that go along with it (Where did that intelligence come from? How did it become intelligent? Where is it now? What is it? How did it create life? What created the intelligence?) all of whicha re questions absolutely unasnwerable by science; they're completely outside of the realm of science. Which is why science doesn't concern itself with or suppose the existence of supernatural powers.