The Like/Hate Thread

[Pinky]

There's a reason why Ben Stein cut the scene of Dawkins comment so short.

That said, what he is answering is more along whether its possible that we specifically were created. And it is possible. Everyone acknowledges that it is. He's saying that any number of things could have engineered many other creatures, in the same way that we have done it with crossbreeding and such. Its not a leap to think that someone could possibly tamper with dna to produce a race with certain characteristics. He's not saying "Yes, I think we were created but our creators evolved", he's saying "Its possible that we were, if you insist that, but somewhere down this line of races creating new races, there would have to be a race that evolved on its own." This is the same as saying "Yes, the domestic house cat could have been engineered. But most likely the race that did this evolved on its own." Ok, so we did it, and we assume we evolved. Perhaps we didn't and WERE engineered, but that doesn't mean that somewhere down the line of infinite creation that the originator didn't evolve by its own path.

He's more or less trying to point out the "You can't have the argument that 'something must have created this, it requires a creator' and then say 'MY creator has just always been there, no creator required'."

wish i could find a link to this, but google fails me.

i was impressed by an evolutionary experiment had began as an accident. flies are commonly used as test subjects in various experiments because they breed quickly, and in an unrelated study a group noticed that the flies were changing (normal, this is evolution at the lowest order; breeding causes change, those changes branch out making a slightly different kind of thing). but, after a while it was noticed that the flies would not diverge beyond a certain point. a new experiment was held specifically to test the limits, and iirc the flies wouldn't move beyond Genus. this stop-point is evidence of limitation.

the favored talking point of hardcore naturalists is that it takes too long to trigger the event but then it happens too fast to leave a trail in the fossil record. explaining away the lack of evidence is a red flag in my book, and it's painful when there's evidence of limitation. like rem mentioned, there is a culture of hostility.

not that i blame all of it. hard sciences like mathematics are straight-forward. applied sciences (engineering, chemistry, etc) are softer, but it's still results-based. evolutionary biology seems as much philosophy as anything else, and the position "im right and UR STOOPID DERPA DURR" is not helping.