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Not all of the "New Athiests" even do that. Daniel Dennet gets rolled into the bunch but all he ever advocates is for religion to be studied more by science. He does advocate fighting against terrible ideas that religious people can come up with but not fighting against religion itself. We should fight against terrible ideas regardless of who comes up with them so it's not even a special position reserved for the religious.
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Apr 18, 2012 12:03
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Not Conservapedia, but I wouldn't be surprised if Conservative makes a page for it soon as he runs across it. (http://missinguniversemuseum.com/Evtest.htm) Evolution Test Students, give this test to your teachers. When they fail it, ask them why they are teaching this nonsense! Teachers, give this test to your students if you really want them to know the truth about evolution! 1. Which evolved first, male or female? 2. How many millions of years elapsed between the first male and first female? 3. List at least 9 of the false assumptions made with radioactive dating methods. 4. Why hasn't any extinct creature re-evolved after millions of years? 5. Which came first: ...the eye, ...the eyelid, ...the eyebrow, ...the eye sockets, ...the eye muscles, ...the eye lashes, ...the tear ducts, ...the brain's interpretation of light? 6. How many millions of years between each in question 5? 7. If we all evolved from a common ancestor, why can't all the different species mate with one another and produce fertile offspring? 8. List any of the millions of creatures in just five stages of its evolution showing the progression of a new organ of any kind. When you have done this, you can collect the millions of dollars in rewards offered for proof of evolution! 9. Why is it that the very things that would prove Evolution (transitional forms) are still missing? 10. Explain why something as complex as human life could happen by chance, but something as simple as a coin must have a creator. (Show your math solution.) 11. Why aren't any fossils or coal or oil being formed today? 12. List 50 vestigial or useless organs or appendages in the human body. 13. Why hasn't anyone collected the millions of dollars in rewards for proof of evolution? 14. If life began hundreds of millions of years ago, why is the earth still under populated? 15. Why hasn't evolution duplicated all species on all continents?
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Apr 18, 2012 14:29
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Goddamn that's stupid, if you give this to your teacher he pretty much has to fail you.
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Apr 18, 2012 14:40
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Oh hey, another list of questions that doesn't understand the theory of evolution at all. Evolution doesn't teach how or where life began! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhbhbhhhhh!!!!!!
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Apr 18, 2012 14:45
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jojoinnit posted:11. Why aren't any fossils or coal or oil being formed today?
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Apr 18, 2012 14:47
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quote:11. Why aren't any fossils or coal or oil being formed today? They...they are? quote:12. List 50 vestigial or useless organs or appendages in the human body Why the gently caress would there have to be at least 50 for evolution to be true? don't creationists claim that there are NO vestigial organs? quote:3. List at least 9 of the false assumptions made with radioactive dating methods. I have to list why dating methods don't work to prove evolution? As a biologist I....I.... 
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Apr 18, 2012 14:48
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Stalingrad posted:
No they say that if we evolved we'd not have vestigial things because something something poor grasp of Darwin something something YOUR MOVE 'SCIENCE' 
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Apr 18, 2012 14:50
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Stalingrad posted:
I think that's a direction for the student asking the questions, and not a question itself. I have no idea why the "at least" is there though.
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Apr 18, 2012 14:53
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Also why would there be any useless organs? That would prove evolution isn't real.
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Apr 18, 2012 15:02
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God could have created 49 but not 50 vestigial organs, it's pretty obvious if you think about it.
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Apr 18, 2012 15:03
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Glitterbomber posted:something something poor grasp of Darwin something something YOUR MOVE 'SCIENCE'
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Apr 18, 2012 15:51
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Stalingrad posted:Why the gently caress would there have to be at least 50 for evolution to be true? don't creationists claim that there are NO vestigial organs? I suppose that they do, at least insofar as the whole idea of being designed/created suggests that vestigial bits wouldn't exist. The whole list seems as if it has been designed to backfire, though. I mean, these questions aren't just your normal idiocy. Look at 15 - that species aren't duplicated on all continents provides a strong and intuitive argument for evolution and against creation. By which I mean that it's a really interesting and accessible subject, at least in comparison to the biological nitty gritty. And much of the Origin of Species is based on observation of species in isolated areas. So it's sort of stupid to say "WELL EXPLAIN THIS THEN SCIENTISTS - IF YOU CAN" for this thing in particular. My point is that some questions can be hard in that they're difficult to answer concisely. These are just an invitation to be hosed over evolutionist style.
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Apr 18, 2012 15:55
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jojoinnit posted:5. Which came first: Of course by listing the options this way they already limit the answers to fully formed things appearing. The first thing wasn't "the eye", it was probably a light sensitive cell or patch of cells.
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Apr 18, 2012 15:56
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modig posted:I like how there is actually one interesting and very hard question buried in here. As if a high school teacher not being able to outline eye evolution in excruciating detail off the top of her head is evidence against evolution. Yup. Most invertebrates have what are termed "simple" eyes, or pigment pits, which just detect the difference between light and dark. That's why they have them in a compound structure, since they need several to build a single image. Box jellyfish actually have eyes, complete with retinas, and corneas, that can distinguish between different shapes and colors. These are simple in comparison to our eyes, but they still show pretty clearly the different evolutionary steps something like a an eye could take to develop.
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Apr 18, 2012 16:38
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Question 5 is, at its core, just a rehash of irreducible complexity arguments. If the argument was actually made in good faith (it isn't), then it just shows how poorly the questioner understands evolution. More telling is question 4:quote:4. Why hasn't any extinct creature re-evolved after millions of years? As a biologist, sometimes I get unnecessarily mad at those kind of lists, but then you start realizing that these people really haven't even tried to understand the most basic fundamentals of biology, and you can't help but pity them.
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Apr 18, 2012 17:05
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ZobarStyl posted:Question 5 is, at its core, just a rehash of irreducible complexity arguments. What's moderately funny about this is that it's not even original. The only reason that creationists are so fixated on it is that Darwin himself said "y'know, the eye represents a bit of a poser" in discussion of his ideas in TOS. It just seems like all the creationists who ever bothered to actually read it at all (which is probably, like, 3 of them) got to that bit and apparently thought "Aha! You thought that you were clever, Mr Darwin, and I suppose that you had a good run of it! But you made the fatal mistake of writing the reason why your theory is a load of tosh down in the book about your theory!" and then stop reading. And then I guess they beat their heads against the wall or cheese-grater their genitals or whatever the gently caress these people do to quiet that nagging, doubtful voice in the back of their head that MUST BE THERE telling them that they've just done something really obviously wrong.
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Apr 18, 2012 17:22
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Lassitude posted:The problem is that they ask for adequate answers to those questions. Which means, the actual scientific answers that exist do not count because in the opinion of the Question Evolution people, those answers are not good enough. Stalingrad posted:Why the gently caress would there have to be at least 50 for evolution to be true? don't creationists claim that there are NO vestigial organs? If you wanted 50 different dysfunctional evolutionary relics in the human body then that would probably be very doable though! Lanugo, male nipples, floaters, blind spot, hiccups, pretty much every age-related illness, etc.
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Apr 18, 2012 17:26
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OneEightHundred posted:If you wanted 50 different dysfunctional evolutionary relics in the human body then that would probably be very doable though! Lanugo, male nipples, floaters, blind spot, hiccups, pretty much every age-related illness, etc. And while it's not vestigial, just how poorly the body is wired up shows that, if there is a designer, then he was a loving cowboy. Of course, that doesn't mesh with the idea of a "perfect" creator. If it is imperfect, then why? Why would a perfect creator create imperfections?
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Apr 18, 2012 17:34
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Pesky Splinter posted:And while it's not vestigial, just how poorly the body is wired up shows that, if there is a designer, then he was a loving cowboy. Of course, that doesn't mesh with the idea of a "perfect" creator. I'm pretty sure their argument for imperfections, disease, birth defects, etc. is the original sin and being cast out of Eden. Before then people were perfect, and God invented genetics and biology after that, apparently.
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Apr 18, 2012 17:39
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Pesky Splinter posted:And while it's not vestigial, just how poorly the body is wired up shows that, if there is a designer, then he was a loving cowboy. Of course, that doesn't mesh with the idea of a "perfect" creator. It's not as elegant an example as the recurrent laryngeal nerve, but the RL nerve doesn't make making GBS threads at work a complete nightmare.
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Apr 18, 2012 17:44
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I think it's fairly obvious that no matter how good of an explanation "science" (scoff at the mere mention of it!) comes up with, if it's not as easy to understand as "God did it", then creationists will simply never accept it. (And even if it were that simple, they wouldn't accept it.)
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Apr 18, 2012 17:49
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Gary Dupre posted:Before then people were perfect, and God invented genetics and biology after that, apparently. It must have been later than that, considering literalists are basically saying that mankind hit incest a generation in. Their interpretation of God is sure loving in his spite; "Hey guess what Adam? You know your vas deferens? I'm going to make it loop around your insides for fun. And I'll make it so your food hole joins with your air hole. Hope you don't choke you little bitch. And, Eve! I sure hope you like that new plantaris muscle...'what does it do?', why barely anything. How's them apples! And now I'm going to gently caress around with the insides of animals too, because they're just too perfect. See you both later! Don't let the Gates of Eden hit you on the way out!" ZobarStyl posted:Why should I, formed in God's image, have to deal with this poo poo when my cat doesn't even have this problem? The answer's obvious: Cats are obviously purrfect in the eyes of God...sorry. 
Pesky Splinter fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Apr 18, 2012 |
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Apr 18, 2012 17:54
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Pesky Splinter posted:It must have been later than that, considering literalists are basically saying that mankind hit incest a generation in. What I find hilarious about the whole "design" argument is that watching any organism grow from a single cell would seemingly refute it. Like the watch comparison. The reason we know a watch had a designer is because gears don't form through cell mitosis, you idiots! We have watched a human embryo develop! At what point did God walk in and replace it with a clay doll he made himself? You don't even need evolution to show that their "design" argument makes no sense. No human-designed machine has ever been able to replicate itself via a single viable zygote! Pesky Splinter posted:The answer's obvious: Cats are obviously purrfect in the eyes of God...sorry. Maybe that's why Pharaonic Egypt worshiped them....
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Apr 18, 2012 18:12
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jojoinnit posted:13. Why hasn't anyone collected the millions of dollars in rewards for proof of evolution?  Anyone know what this is talking about? Or is it just referring to the Nobel prize?
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Apr 18, 2012 18:42
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Binowru posted:
e: http://www.lifescienceprize.org/ popped up from a quick google search. A smaller prize, but equally unattainable. ZobarStyl fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Apr 18, 2012 |
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Apr 18, 2012 18:51
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I think that's a reference to rewards offered for 'proof of evolution' by creationist organisations (which have impossible standards and hence no one can satisfy them). e: beaten Sorry, can I take this up? TinTower posted:There's an argument that Dawkins et al are deliberately emulating the early feminist and LGBT rights movements by making all these overtures that make people uncomfortable but at the same time make people think (c.f. Valerie Solanas and the Scum Manifesto). Dawkins pretty much admits as much in the God Delusion, when bringing up concepts such as consciousness raising. Talking about this stuff like it's a social justice movement is absolutely crazy to me, and I suspect the reason for the 'stridency' of Dawkins has less to do with modelling this stuff on social justice movements -- though possibly he's come around to thinking of himself like that -- than between the disconnect between British and American attitudes towards religion.
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Apr 18, 2012 18:51
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Kieselguhr Kid posted:Talking about this stuff like it's a social justice movement is absolutely crazy to me, and I suspect the reason for the 'stridency' of Dawkins has less to do with modelling this stuff on social justice movements -- though possibly he's come around to thinking of himself like that -- than between the disconnect between British and American attitudes towards religion. In America at least, it's forming into a secular movement as a reaction against people like Rick Perry and Rick Santorum, against people who want to teach Creationism as science, and people who want to politicize reproductive health care. Just last month there was the Reason Rally in Washington, D.C. which drew about 20,000 people, myself included.
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Apr 18, 2012 19:33
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Considering how much these people have wound themselves into neoconservative politics (Harris' torture apologism, Hitchens' warmongering, etc.), I always find it a little weird and frankly kind of depressing when I hear this kind of stuff. Like, there's a long, ongoing tradition of secularism on the left but it's these guys who are seen as the opposition to the religious right. What it really comes off as saying to me most of the time is 'Republicans would be great if they were less religious.'
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Apr 18, 2012 20:00
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It's because leftists have more important things to deal with than religion in my experience
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Apr 18, 2012 20:02
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It's kind of a social issue because fundamentalists are trying to keep the information that atheism is a valid choice away from young people.
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Apr 18, 2012 20:04
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rt4 posted:It's because leftists have more important things to deal with than religion in my experience I wouldn't say that's entirely true. I think it's just that there's a broader view of religion as being convolved with social and political processes and tied into a system of values, rather than just being a kind of insane, malevolent fairy-story without which we'd all be good liberals. An atheist left is not going to be animated with the same desire to attack religion in the same way the atheist right seem to.
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Apr 18, 2012 20:13
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Kieselguhr Kid posted:I wouldn't say that's entirely true. I think it's just that there's a broader view of religion as being convolved with social and political processes and tied into a system of values, rather than just being a kind of insane, malevolent fairy-story without which we'd all be good liberals. An atheist left is not going to be animated with the same desire to attack religion in the same way the atheist right seem to. I think the atheist right is animated by the same type of authoritarian streak that predominates the religious right. If you start with a fundamental premise that you are better than other people (because you are more religious, or in the case of atheists, more logical) then you feel you have the right to dictate what everyone should do, and not listen to them. This type of person is blind to their own cognitive bias, and assumes they understand in absolute terms the way the world works. I think it's this absolutism, more than anything, that underlies a lot of the problems with the republicans and a lot of the militant Atheist movement that can't tolerate the idea of a cross in a public space.
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Apr 18, 2012 20:40
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kuddles posted:It actually makes me incredibly nervous. It's already been pretty clear that a lot of fundamentalist Christians are agressively homophobic because they have homosexual feelings and since they also believe it's a choice that every other man on the planet must have the exact same urges. It makes you wonder if a lot of these people claiming that Atheists have no morality actually do think about raping and killing all the time and choose not to do it just because they are afraid of Hell and not because they think it is a bad thing to do. I know this was the last page but I actually want to clarify that there's not a lot of evidence to support this assertion and I think you need to be very careful in how you use it. I want to preface by saying I'm MtF trans and an atheist so I'm not trying to cover up my own insecurities. First, gay people make up somewhere between 3-10% of the population, it's impossible to get an exact number but I think we can safely assume it's in that range, potentially a bit higher. Now, the people who identify as Christian make up the vast majority of the US population, and while I don't know if we could tally an exact number, a probably non-negligible number of these people could probably be classified as "fundamentalist". I'm supposed to believe that every one of, or most of these people are gay? It implies that on some level that WASPs are some special group with a disproportionate number of gays somehow. Religion for most people is something they were born into rather than something they gravitated to, so it's not like self hating gays just naturally gravitate to Christianity (Even if some looking to be saved will do this). Trying to pull the "well homophobics are actually gay" card is really short sighted and damaging. It makes being gay out to be some sort of punchline, "Wouldn't it be funny if the homophobe actually liked dicks?". It also ignores the root causes of the issue (I chalk it up mostly to ignorance and indoctrination, but there's other causes I'm sure) and makes the person wall themselves off from listening to you. By accusing them of being gay that is exactly the type of thing that Fundamentalists are arguing against, that you're trying to "recruit" them. I know this does happen, it's kind of hard to ignore the "republican politician caught having sex with male prostitute" stories you see in the news, but it's important to keep some perspective. These people are still a minority of the anti-gay movement and by ignoring the larger issue for the cheap shot you're missing the chance to persuade a lot more people. Plus the idea of disgusting people like that all being secretly victims of an anti-gay society is really pretty depressing.
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Apr 18, 2012 20:49
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rt4 posted:It's because leftists have more important things to deal with than religion in my experience RagnarokAngel posted:I know this was the last page but I actually want to clarify that there's not a lot of evidence to support this assertion and I think you need to be very careful in how you use it. I think it's the opposite of repressed desires, most of them have no interest in men and are homophobes largely because they can't understand that interest and see gay sex as some bizarre sexual kink on par with loving a horse. They think gays shouldn't get married because they can just give up their bizarre fetish and try dating women in a "normal" relationship instead. They're pretty obvious about this too, tell them gays should get married and they'll ask you if marrying a goat is next. It's just dull, unsophisticated "eww that's gross" and "why can't they just be like me? I'm not having this problem." In fact the latter probably sums up 99% of American conservatism. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 22:43 on Apr 18, 2012 |
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Apr 18, 2012 22:15
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quote:9. Why is it that the very things that would prove Evolution (transitional forms) are still missing? This one is impossible to answer, because of the creationist mindset that things belong to "kinds", and there is a finite set of clearly delimited kinds. For example: code:code:Understanding this issue properly is actually much more intuitive in the domain of language evolution, I think. Consider the change from Old English to Modern English. The language has slowly changed over time, and to such a degree that Old English is no longer recognizable as English to Modern speakers. But there is no "transitional language" that has half the lexicon of Old English and half the lexicon of Modern English. This change takes places slowly as each generation of children acquire a slightly different language than their parents. At every stage, there is a fully formed grammatical language, but it's still impossible to identify any of one of these as transitional forms. (edit: or rather they're all transitional; the language at generation n is a transitional form between the language at generation n-1 and generation n+1) Similarly, French is a descendant of Latin, but there is no transitional language in between. It wasn't like there was this one baby born to Latin-speaking parents, but who grew up speaking French. French gradually appeared over time through a series of changes. These changes only happened in one population of Latin speakers though. In other regions, Latin evolved into Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and other Romance languages. FoiledAgain fucked around with this message at 00:06 on Apr 19, 2012 |
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Apr 18, 2012 23:55
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To put what Foiled Again said into simpler terms, asking "Who did the first human evolve from?" is like asking "Who did the first French speaker talk to?" The question is usually a willful obfuscation of the facts.
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Apr 19, 2012 00:09
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If you want to get into semantics every creature that successfully passes on its genes is a transition. The change be microscopic and have little if no physical change from its predecessor, but it is there. Where you cross the line from one species to the next is debtable and usually comes from the fact that the models we have to work with are already several thousand or million years apart.
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Apr 19, 2012 01:29
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colonelslime posted:I find it funny that New Atheists seem totally certain that without religion, everyone would get along, when a lot of them (Dawkins included) explicitly talk in terms of selfishness and profit-maximization. What one of the "New" atheists has actually said this? I see it attributed to Dawkins a lot but I've never seen a source for it.
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Apr 19, 2012 01:39
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I think the world would be better off without religion but it wouldn't cause people to be decent, just less scams and brainwashing.
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Apr 19, 2012 02:07
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catch22 posted:What one of the "New" atheists has actually said this? I see it attributed to Dawkins a lot but I've never seen a source for it. Technically Dawkins himself never said it, but his book the Selfish Gene basically defined altruism in terms solely understood as what would allow propagation of specific genes as widely as possible. So, selflessness makes sense between closely related individuals, but gets less and less logical the further out you go. He was describing this solely in terms of evolution strategy, but many philosophers have pointed out that this isn't a robust explanation for why humans develop empathy across ethnic groups and species. Dawkins sort of just assumes humans consciously decided to create a moral framework that extends universally, and this is the big problem people have, because going from his purely biological and evolutionary terms, there's no reason to assume that humans should ever have crafted the moral systems we did, yet every culture on the planet has. Social evolution, which religion constitutes a big part of, explains partly why humans developed the complex systems needed to maintain a stable society. It's this I (and many other people) have a problem with. It's not that Dawkins actively advocates for selfishness (though many fundies like to claim he does). It's that he assumes that morality was a choice, and isn't some fundamental part of human instinct, which plays out through the formation of complex social networks and cultural concepts. They hold this view, yet at the same time say "we don't need religion" despite the fact that there understanding of humanity without the veneer of civilization is one where humans would totally kill people outside of their immediate peer group if it was to their benefit in any way. Religion is just a stupid sham to them, despite how important it was to crafting alot of the moral values they have themselves integrated.
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Apr 19, 2012 02:52
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