Setec, public schools have been feeding you a truckload of bullshit. The Theory of Evolution is only taught because it is the only theory about the origin of life that is not based on a religion (however, evolution is still a faith that you are worthless and you came about by chance to reproduce your species).
RomeStar, I'm sorry, but you really don't even have a clue what evolution
is. You have only the fuzzy strawman picture of it that religious sources have shown you, which is nothing like the actual scientific field.
And I'm not "being fed a truckload of bullshit by public schools." I did my undergrad at an Ivy League college (oh shit, East Coast Liberal Alert!!!! RUN!) and my graduate research uses evolution constantly. So my qualifications are a little better than "bullshit public school." And they're a
lot better than Christian schools, Islamic Madrassas, etc.
You creationists just don't realize what a huge joke you are to anybody who knows
anything about life science. That's why we mostly just make fun of you rather than engage your arguments -- it's impossible to take you seriously. The information to prove you're wrong is everywhere, and if you can't take 15 seconds on Google to find it then you're pretty much hopeless. Fairly "debating" you isn't really worthwhile since you wouldn't recognize evidence if it hit you over the head with a bowling ball. I found a good IRC quote off Digg today that kind of conveys this point:
<kow`> "There are 10 types of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't."
<SpaceRain> That's only 2 types of people, kow.
<SpaceRain> STUPID
Creationists are like SpaceRain. They constantly think they're playing "gotcha" when really they just aren't thinking on the level necessary to understand even the basics.
(I went to a Christian school for two years) Setec, I highly doubt you have honestly studied creationism.
You don't have to study horoscopes or Tarot cards, either, to know that those are bullshit. The Bible is exactly like those, except more harmful.
I only brought up carbon dating because a lot of people's first response when I tell them the age of the Earth is what about carbon dating? My point is that it is not reliable. There are varies factors that could make it inaccurate; for example carbon dating assumes that the rate of carbon decay has remained the same over the thousands of years the creature has been dead.
Apparently you missed the point. Carbon dating is very accurate on the scale at which it's used. And it's calibrated using tree rings and other measures for the first several thousand years.
And that brings up another good point: fucking
tree rings prove the Universe is older than you think it is. You don't need radioactive isotopes, just an ax. When your world view can be disproved with a tool you can fashion out of flint, you need to rethink it.
"Evolution is mathematically impossible. The mathematical probability of a SINGLE CELL coming about by chance is 1/10340,000,000, the fraction 1 divided by 1 followed by 340 million zeros! And then this cell must live long enough to reproduce. And then the reproduced cell must live long enough to do the same. And then more "accidents" must happen to cause more complexity. And then more "accidents" must happen to cause more complexity. And long before the first "accident" evolution is nothing but a silly, mystical fairy tale."
This is why people who know ANYTHING laugh their asses off at you. You have not even remotely described how evolution suggests that life came to be.
First, cells are advanced, especially eukaryotic cells. The first life was probably a self-replicating molecule, a precursor of DNA, devoid of all the other fancy trappings of a cell. And given that the proper ingredients were stewing in a soup of organic goo across much of the Earth for hundreds of millions of years, that's not improbable at all.
Evolution is really the opposite of an accidental process. That's what people don't get. All forms of life involve errors in their replication, which result in some degree of random variation in future generations. Natural selection is the
highly non-random process which funnels those variations in the most beneficial directions, resulting in surprisingly predictable long-term changes of organisms in response to their environments.
Try learning something about it before you run around telling people it's wrong.
Finally, I would like to point out that there is no such thing as a vestigial organ (an organ that is useless - like a leftover byproduct of evolution). It is a common misconception that the appendix is useless, go read this:
Cutting out a useless vestigial argument
Wronnnnng. Just about every organism has
lots of vestigial features, and not just macroscopic organs. Most DNA doesn't do a thing... it's mostly left-over byproducts of past ancestors.
there are very smart people on both sides of the creation vs evolution argument
There are very few on the creation side, and all of them are either (a) brainwashed from such an early age that they didn't have a chance, or (b) formerly smart, but now suffering from senility.
when has something turned into a new species? never.
Read the links in my last post. We have observed several cases of speciation. Furthermore, that's all we would expect. In most things it happens over a much longer time scale than we've been around for. It's not instantaneous. Evolution does not say Harry Potter came along and *poof* turned a cat into a dog. That only happens in religion.
science itself may not be a faith, but the Theory of Evolution is. You believe that there is no God and that you are absolutely worthless, you came around by chance and that you can do whatever you want in your materialistic lives and when you die you just cease to live (when you actually go to Hell on Judgement Day)
Where do you get your information about atheists, fucking Pat Robertson?
Atheists are one of the most moral groups in America, responsible for
far less crime per person than Christians or other religious types. We believe that there's only one life so we shouldn't fuck it up, and that under no circumstances will we be rewarded with a room full of virgins if we fly a jet into a skyscraper. Furthermore, I don't need a giant imaginary father figure in the sky to give meaning to my life -- I can decide on my own meaning. And I'm certainly not worthless to myself or to thousands of other people who benefit from various things I do.
You've been brainwashed by KKK types to think that atheists lead materialistic, immoral, meaningless lives. You're not alone; we atheists are pretty much the only group about which a majority of Americans still agree with the Klan.
I am encouraged by the number of atheists speaking up here, and in other places on the Internet. I guess places like WF are usually tilted toward a smarter than average segment of the population, and therefore more atheists, but I think the anonymity of the Internet is part of it, too. There are probably a lot more atheists willing to speak their minds behind the anonymity of the net than in public or phone surveys... so the percentage of fully sane people in the country might be higher than the estimated 10-15%.
