Posted on 07/20/2006 6:58:11 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
Take care!
We have a difference of opinion. I see evidence of intelligence that has a supernatural origin, you see evidence of intelligence that has a natural origin. It is a philosophical question, not a scientific question, because science has not demonstrated a mechanism in nature that can program life to become progressively more complex.
It is fairly obvious that Evolutionists philosophically believe natural mechanisms have created the intelligence we see in mankind and other animals. However, there is no natural evidence to support this claim. The evidence for change exhibited by RMNS does not explain what we can currently see exhibited by life.
Good news!
At which point it's turtles all the way down.
btt
Wrong. Learn some Biology.
"Sounds more redundant than necessary."
I see. Being repetitively redudant is my hallmark, now that I'm a YECCer. I shall always repeatedly say the same thing multiple times, from here on out, and again and again.
"I would argue that nature does not create or possess intelligence."
And it seems to have done just fine without it, too, doncha think?
"Ok, how did they get eyes and limbs?"
Ooooh! Can I answer? As a newly born YECCer, let me be the first to say: Goddidit.
"At which point it's turtles all the way down."
I'd forgotten that, until the other day. I saw one of the turtles...actually two of them.
The first one was while I was out fishing in my boat. I was anchored near some lilly pads, casting for largemouth bass. Next to my boat, I noticed out of the corner of my eye a change in the water's color. As I watched, an enormous snapping turtle slowly rose in the water. It broke the surface, extended its neck, and breathed deeply. It then sank slowly back into the water.
Later that day, I encountered a common pond turtle walking on my lawn. It was much smaller than the snapper, and could easily have ridden on the snapping turtle's back, supporting who knows what.
I consider these two sightings as a prophetic vision. I am now firmly convinced that it is, indeed, turtles all the way down.
It's more of an index of categories so names of plants and creatures can be given more meaning and appropriate ablatives.
"I would argue that nature does not create or possess intelligence. Therefore any evidence of intelligence we come across in nature would have originated from a supernatural intelligence."
Unfounded assumption. You are concluding your premise.
Being that you are siding with Al Gore on Mother Gaea being the creator, I could say the same about you. Don't hurt Mother Gaea, she can feel your abuse.
Well, then, provide it. That you "see" it has little bearing on whether or not it exists. Whether you can show it to others and they can see it too is what counts.
Perhaps it was this reference in EDGE to a 1988 study by Susan Mineka:
The classic and best experiment in this is Susan Mineka's work with a group of monkeys in Madison in the '80s, where she set out to examine the ontogeny of an instinct—in this care fear of snakes.
Wild-born monkeys are afraid of snakes. They're so scared of snakes that they will cower in the back of the cage screaming rather than reach across a plastic model snake to get at a peanut when they're very hungry. Captive-born monkeys are not afraid of snakes; they happily reach across the model snake to get at a peanut.
So what's going on here? That means that fear of snakes must be learned. But how on earth do you learn fear of snakes? The conventional classical conditioning wouldn't work very well, would it, because either you have a bad experience with a snake to learn from, in which case you're dead, or you don't have a bad experience, in which case you don't learn that snakes are frightening.
So how are you going to end up acquiring a fear of snakes? It seems an absurd thing to acquire. She argues that what's happening is that there is a program for fear of snakes, an instinct if you like, but that that instinct needs to be socially triggered—in some sense triggered by a vicarious experience, by observing another monkey having a fear of snakes. So she set up an experiment in which she videotaped the wild-born monkey reacting with fear to a snake, and she then showed this video to a captive-born monkey, which immediately acquired a fear of snakes and was not then prepared to reach across even a model snake to get a peanut.
She now doctors the video, so that it has the same monkey reacting in the same way in the background, but the bottom half of the screen now instead of having a snake has a flower. Again, the captive-born monkey has never seen a flower, so after it sees a monkey reacting with extreme fear to this new thing called a flower it should just as easily learn a fear of flowers. But it doesn't. It just learns that some monkeys are crazy.
So what's going on here is that there is clearly an instinct for fear of snakes, and that's not surprising. Human beings have snake phobia. It's the commonest of all the phobias, even though most of us hardly even ever see a snake in our lives, but it requires an input from the environment. It requires a nurture input to be triggered. We know this is happening in the amygdala, and we're getting a bit of a handle on which cells are involved. We're not yet down to the gene level, but I'd bet my bottom dollar there's going to be a little pathway of genes in here that's mediating this process.
From EDGE: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ridley03/ridley_p5.html
"Being that you are siding with Al Gore on Mother Gaea being the creator, I could say the same about you. Don't hurt Mother Gaea, she can feel your abuse."
Huh? Mother Gaea? I don't believe in that nonsense any more than I believe in any other concept of a deity that can speak universes into existence but that can't manage to make a male human being who retains his hair his whole life.
There's no "Mother Gaea." There is the natural world. It has no intelligence. It has no intent. It simply is. It changes all the time.
There is no creator. There is the natural world. It exists. Anyone can see it, examine it, test it, even fiddle with it.
You show me your creator and we'll talk about it.
Hopefully in C or Perl instead of BASIC.
The Grand Master was rather disappointed with the last pathetic effort ...
Here's an outline. Needs work. Have fun:
BASIC Troll Program
100 Locate new crevo thread
105 Load stock of disruptive comments from [Troll Database]
110 Cruise thread for an evo's post
115 Post reply: "Evolution is trash. You're an idiot. Call me when a bird turns into a toad."
120 GOSUB 200.
130 Cruise thread for another evo's post
135 Post reply: "Evolution is only a theory. All evos are atheists. Hitler loved Darwin."
140 GOSUB 200.
145 Cruise thread for another evo's post
150 Post reply: "Go back to DU. Evolution is nonsense. Stop bashing my religion."
155 GOSUB 200.
160 Cruise thread for another evo's post
165 Post reply: [randomly selected text from any creationist website].
170 GOSUB 200.
180 GOTO 105
200 REM Subroutine
210 If evo replies, hit abuse button. Say: "This creep is very abusive. This thread is garbage."
220 If thread is moved to Chat or Backroom, or locked, or pulled, GOTO 100.
230 RETURN
What do you think the snakes evolved into?
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