Why are you an Atheist today? (Revelations, choice, atheists, agnostic)

[Visvaldis]

Originally Posted by jackdonekings

How on earth will you be an atheist today? During this time when science itself is discovering the unexplainable. Why would our consciousness spontaneously happen, the organize planets that orbit around the stars, then the solar systems are orbiting and so is our galaxies, like something caused it to happen.

Why would we ourselves be an accident, when our thoughts operate as antennas generating at different frequencies, why is there the law of gravity and the polarities of atoms.

Scientist can't even create life but you still believe we spontaneously happen, life gives life i thought you knew

i thought you knew wisdom comes from the higher source, Truly our complex brain has receptors that generate thought in a form of frequency, we create our days through our thoughts and if we getting bad luck we cannot blame God but us. There is a God in charge of the universal laws the an accident cannot govern itself.

There is a cause for a everything, there is a reason why our bodies have red blood cells, white blood cells and non are an accident and that counts for this universe, The cause was not accidental but has reasons of all reason

Absolutely wonderful. All the proof of creationism one needs is written in several pages of a book called the bible.
All you have to do is believe it all, what could be easier?

[coosjoaquin]

I wonder what would happen if we mated a male labrador with a female chihuahua?

[AREQUIPA]

Originally Posted by coosjoaquin

I wonder what would happen if we mated a male labrador with a female chihuahua?

That would bad news - for the Chihuahua, anyway.

[c'est la vie]

Originally Posted by scarmig

Take them all, divide them in half. Put a permanent wall between them. Make one side cold and snowy, the other side desert, but with enough resources in each to subsist.

Fast forward 1000 generations.

Same species?

Evolutionists postulate billions of speciation events. But the number of times that geographic separation of this type could be achieved would have to be small.

The 'flooded river', 'forest fire' 'volcanic eruption' 'earthquake' scenarios aren't going to separate animals for 1000 generations.

And the 'mountain building', 'island broke off the mainland' 'massive volcano destroyed everything within 1000 miles' scenarios happen so rarely as to not even be statistically significant when trying to account for billions of species.

The 'dump them in totally different environments' question of extremes that you pose is simply not realistic.

You want an answer to whether 'speciation' would occur naturally, not under some situation that would never happen.

If two groups of critters that formerly lived together as one species found themselves separated, they would likely locate themselves in an environment very similar to the one from which they came.

Speciation doesn't occur fast enough (even evolutionists will admit) to allow critters to flourish and survive in the artificial example of two extremes that you propose.

[scarmig]

Originally Posted by c'est la vie

Evolutionists postulate billions of speciation events. But the number of times that geographic separation of this type could be achieved would have to be small.

The 'flooded river', 'forest fire' 'volcanic eruption' 'earthquake' scenarios aren't going to separate animals for 1000 generations.

And the 'mountain building', 'island broke off the mainland' 'massive volcano destroyed everything within 1000 miles' scenarios happen so rarely as to not even be statistically significant when trying to account for billions of species.

The 'dump them in totally different environments' question of extremes that you pose is simply not realistic.

You want an answer to whether 'speciation' would occur naturally, not under some situation that would never happen.

If two groups of critters that formerly lived together as one species found themselves separated, they would likely locate themselves in an environment very similar to the one from which they came.

Speciation doesn't occur fast enough (even evolutionists will admit) to allow critters to flourish and survive in the artificial example of two extremes that you propose.

I'm answering your question, which is to explain your apparent misunderstanding of a fundamental evolutionary principal. I am attempting to show the process with as little noise and distraction as possible. Once I get to that point, you cite the noise and distraction as reasons why you think it can't happen.

Now, we know for a fact that a microbe can evolve major changes to primary traits when the environment changes. It's a fact. It's been done in a lab, under controlled circumstances, duplicated, and peer reviewed. It's indisputable. All you have to do is figure out the right trigger of cognitive dissonances to let it into your brain.

Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab - life - 09 June 2008 - New Scientist

A major evolutionary innovation has unfurled right in front of researchers' eyes. It's the first time evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait.
And because the species in question is a bacterium, scientists have been able to replay history to show how this evolutionary novelty grew from the accumulation of unpredictable, chance events.


...


But sometime around the 31,500th generation, something dramatic happened in just one of the populations - the bacteria suddenly acquired the ability to metabolise citrate, a second nutrient in their culture medium that E. coli normally cannot use.


...


"It's the most profound change we have seen during the experiment. This was clearly something quite different for them, and it's outside what was normally considered the bounds of E. coli as a species,


...


Lenski's experiment is also yet another poke in the eye for anti-evolutionists, notes Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. "The thing I like most is it says you can get these complex traits evolving by a combination of unlikely events," he says. "That's just what creationists say can't happen."

Yet it did. Multiple times. Add up one or two trait changes like this and e-coli becomes e-coli-x or e-cola, with only one calorie.


Now, you may have any number of other problems or disagreements with *how* evolution has occurred on this planet. There is no empirical disagreement that evolution of major traits occurs. Evolution *is* fact. All that's left is to map the history and processes. And anyone claiming an incompletely mapped history as grounds for dismissing the principals of evolution, there are some e-coli in a petri dish that would like to speak with you.

[talbet]

Most of the arguments here jump the canyon that because they believe that things as they are could not have happened on their own [and this is a leap of faith] that the Bible suddenly has all the answers. This is a false choice. Lets for arguments sake of argument say that every thing had been put in place by some divine super intelligent power. This does not by extension make it true that the Bible and the god of the bible is the answer to this question. In fact the bible is so full of contradiction that it would be hard and very inappropriate to give any power that would have the ability to create on the scale of the universe credit for a book so inept as the bible. If I were god I would destroy anyone who tried to tie me to such a despicable and ridiculous book as the bible. This is after we for arguments sake jump the canyon that the universe was created and not a natural happening. There is more evidence that things are more spontaneous then created. Just as the human eye is ineptly created as Frank Zindler said it best;


"As an organ developed via the opportunistic twists and turns of evolutionary processes, the human eye is explainable. As an organ designed and created by an infinitely wise deity, the human eye is inexcusable. For unlike the invertebrate eyes ..., the human eye is constructed upon the foundation of an almost incredible error: The retina has been put together backwards! Unlike the retinas of octopuses and squids, in which the light-gathering cells are aimed forward, toward the source of incoming light, the photoreceptor cells (the so called rods and cones) of the human retina are aimed backward, away from the light source. Worse yet, the nerve fibers which must carry signals from the retina to the brain must pass in front of the receptor cells, partially impeding the penetration of light to the receptors. Only a blasphemer would attribute such a situation to divine design!
Although the human eye would be a scandal if it were the result of divine deliberation, a plausible evolutionary explanation of its absurd construction can be obtained quite easily--even though we can make little use of paleontology (because eyes, like all soft tissues, rarely fossilize)."

[LogicIsYourFriend]

Originally Posted by c'est la vie

It's the atheistic faith.

What an ignorant statement. It seems you believe all atheists are communist, since it is "*the* atheist faith"? Atheism is lack of faith, anyway, specifically lack of faith in a theistic god. If a government forces people to worship the leaders instead of a god, such as in N. Korea, that says a lot about those leaders, but doesn't have anything to do with atheists such as myself. Again, the *only* link is a lack of faith in a theistic god.

But you must look at it objectively: your religion is not a governmental communism but an allegedly eternal spiritual communism, where your god is the totalitarian dictator with the "right" to give you cancer, allow evil people to torture you, allow his priests to molest your children, and can throw you in eternal torment at whim just because it is "his will", similar to Kim Jong Il, Hitler, Saddam, etc. However, these guys can't read your thoughts to convict you of thought crimes, and at least you can die to escape their regime.

Their god is man, just like every liberal and atheist I know.

Liberalism and atheism lead to setting up man as a god.

You use the term "god" too loosely here. I guess it's just that we don't look at people as low-lifes who are the scum of the earth and deserve eternal torture just for being born, as you believe. Apparently giving a little integrity to the human race lifts them up to gods in the Christian mind.

[coosjoaquin]

Originally Posted by scarmig

I'm answering your question, which is to explain your apparent misunderstanding of a fundamental evolutionary principal. I am attempting to show the process with as little noise and distraction as possible. Once I get to that point, you cite the noise and distraction as reasons why you think it can't happen.

Now, we know for a fact that a microbe can evolve major changes to primary traits when the environment changes. It's a fact. It's been done in a lab, under controlled circumstances, duplicated, and peer reviewed. It's indisputable. All you have to do is figure out the right trigger of cognitive dissonances to let it into your brain.

Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab - life - 09 June 2008 - New Scientist


Yet it did. Multiple times. Add up one or two trait changes like this and e-coli becomes e-coli-x or e-cola, with only one calorie.


Now, you may have any number of other problems or disagreements with *how* evolution has occurred on this planet. There is no empirical disagreement that evolution of major traits occurs. Evolution *is* fact. All that's left is to map the history and processes. And anyone claiming an incompletely mapped history as grounds for dismissing the principals of evolution, there are some e-coli in a petri dish that would like to speak with you.

One problem with creationists is that they expect these types of changes in one go. Generations for bacteria happen in minutes but take years with animals so they get some stupid idea of what evolution is and believe things like a chimp giving birth to an alligator.

[Spotted1]

I am an atheist today because I studied theology in the past. I am also irrevocably late to this thread.

[c'est la vie]

Originally Posted by scarmig

Yet it did. Multiple times. Add up one or two trait changes like this and e-coli becomes e-coli-x or e-cola, with only one calorie.

It becomes whatever you choose to call it, because in bacteria it's an arbitrary line drawn wherever one wishes to draw it.

If metabolising citrate makes it a new 'species', great.

If we wanted to 'discover' that this existing species could actually sometimes metabolize citrate, we would spin it that way.

Why?

Because it's up to us where the line gets drawn.

It's a bit tougher when you move up to higher animals like mammals and lay down a specific criteria , like the ability to interbreed successfully. Things get a bit stickier then.