Jeffthinks

My whole deal with the evolution v. creation thing is that if we're talking the Christian creation myth, and God went zap a few thousand years ago, why do we have internal organs?

I mean, I'm a mechanic, and I look at shit with an eye to the way it works. The human body is, basically, a highly efficient machine, not much different from your car's engine. Why?

If God could just go zap, and there stood Adam, why would Ol' Adam need internal organs? Why would he need to take in food and oxygen, and exhale and pee (among other things)? Why not just make the simplest machine possible? I mean, you're God, right? Why such a complex fucking instrument when a simple one would do just as well.

Ol' God could still throw us the usual spate of good and bad, to test us as the Christians say, without the high maintenance of keeping humans running. God could make it that we would die after a certain amount of years, have diseases that would kill and disable us, all the good shit we have now, but without all the complexity, right?

Why are all these little biological engines (us and the lower orders) on the road if there's really no need? Why? Because our God has to follow the physical laws of the Universe. It follows that God is our creation, not the other way around. It follows that evolution (thanks to the commonalities between all the biological engines) is a more focused view of what really happened than creation.

You da man, Jeff. Good series.
 

Fixer, that, in logical terms, is a non-sequitur. In other words, it does not follow (logically). It may follow in the flow of how you perceive things, but it does not follow from a logical standpoint. Or, at the very least, you have not proven that with the argument you have presented here.
 

Hell, Paul, I ain't trying to prove anything. You believe what you want and I respect that. Being science-based all my life (at least since I kissed off the Catholic church), I just look at shit from a mechanical point of view. I mean, if I were an omnicient, omnipotent being, why wouldn't I make shit work easier? Why all the processes of Nature? Why the interdependence of species? For the all-powerful, it would be easy to change.
 

Oh, and logic. As long as shit's logical to me, I'm good. I don't expect anyone to make sense out of the shit that makes sense to me. If they do, I consider them kindred spirits and suggest counseling. Ha!!!
 

A brilliant question, Fixer. Couple that with the basic commonality of all animals basically having TWO eyes, a NOSE of some sort, mouth and the same general organic make-up (brain, heart, etc.) and I think that if evolution isn't totally evident, then "god" was an alien being that had a similar make-up/structure to most of the animals on earth. Your points on this are truly excellent.
 

Paul, what Fixer points out is not THE argument, just part of the larger argument and I didn't catch any attempt on your part to refute it. Don't get me wrong, this isn't "us" against "you," it's just one possibility versus another. In addition, please don't think that I (we) consider you the "must have the answer" christian who's on the spot, either. Your ideas are as potentially enlightening as any others.
 

Jeff (and Fixer), I didn't propose any alternatives because, for the most part, I'm unsettled on much of it. I don't have any problem making some general statements such as: I believe that, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth...." I also believe that there is significan scientific evidence that the earth is NOT 5000 years old (and if it is then God has done a pretty good job of making it in such a way that it is not as it appears - which doesn't seem consistent with what God would be like).

That is why I didn't weigh in on this post, per se, but only on Fixer's response. I apologize if I misunderstood you, Fixer. You made a couple of comments saying, "It follows...." when I guess what you were saying was "It follows TO ME...."

I don't have a problem with you guys believing in evolution. Heck, I probably believe in some of it myself. I don't think that it precludes a God who originated it and/or directed it along the way.

By nature, science can't claim that there is no god because science only deals with things it can scientifically verify (or conversely disprove) and if God is spirit, science can no more verify or disprove his existence than it can ghosts or the precise location in the human brain that an individual specific thought comes from (or for that matter how thought or feeling is a part of the evolutionary process).

However, if you want to criticize the result of creation then the criticism applies not only to god (if there is a god) but to evolution or any other theory of creation. If what you see doesn't make sense to you, how do you explain it from an evolutionary point of view? If survival of the fittest is true then why don't things work better than they do? You see that as a weakness in the god theory. I see it as a weakness in the strictly materialistic theory. At any rate, it is not just a weakness for people who are theistic.
 

I partly addressed this in my previous response, but to be more specific, I don't see how complexity makes things any easier for evolution. If we are, indeed, evolving into a higher order then why in the world is the human the MOST complex. If god could have made a "simple" machine and we are to assume that simple is automatically "better," then why has evolution gone the other way? If simple is better wouldn't evolution be making us less complex, not more?

Again, the same questions apply to the materialist as to the theist. Why do we need to pee? The most basic organism of life has no eyes, no nose, no ears, no lungs with wich to breathe, no bladder. If simpler is better then the highest form of life is where the evolutionis suggests it all started - the single-celled amoeba. In that case it would seem that what we call "evolution" is actually "devolution."
 

Okay, now Paul... you're the one who's reading ahead (just kidding)! My next post will hopefully address this AFTER Christmas. It won't be pretty.
 

Blogger's Note: Taking a short break for Christmas. I'll be posting next hopefully this Sunday. In the meantime, to everyone (Christians, Jews, Hindus, Walnut worshippers... okay, you get my point), I wish a safe, peaceful and personally rewarding holiday season!
 

Happy Holiday, Jeff!

Thanks for your kind and supportive words on my blog.
 

Boy Paul, you put a lot of words in the mouth of Science. Who says we are evolving into a higher order? You're juxtaposing a "goal" onto evolution, a direction that does not exist. Evolution describes a mechanism by which organisms change to adapt to their environment or to move into a niche that is not presently occupied and gives them a better chance for survival. It does not describe a "goal" other than survival. Human beings happen to have evolved a greater intellect in order to make this adaptation, sacrificing strength, speed and macro-agility for wits and fine, micro-agilitiy. Evolution also doesn't assume that either simple or complex is "better", neither of these concepts has any application. In evolution, "more likely to survive" is better, whether more or less complex. The problem is, in order to adapt, based on chaos theory (another scientific theory) things in general must become more complex. Evolution can only go one way, this is evidence of it's non-intelligent, plodding nature.

Take a house for example. You have a small, one bedroom house that you live in. It has one bathroom, a small tv room and a small kitchen. It works ok for you, simple, suits your needs and is cheap to maintain. Now you get married. In order to be happy, you need a little bit more room. You need better cooking facilities, more furniture, a larger bathroom, maybe an extra closet. Adding these things makes your house more complex, in some ways less efficient, certainly more difficult and more expensive to maintain. Now you have kids and you need to add more bedrooms, a playroom, a pool in the back yard. All of these additions "improve" your house, but they also make it more complex and more difficult to maintain. More can go wrong with it, more things can break. This is the trade off you make with your house and the trade off organisms make to adapt.

Could you take your small house and make it bigger and more complex and server more needs while also making it more efficient? Yes you could, by tearing it down and starting over. You could put together an "Intelligent Design" of a new house and then bulid it. The problem with that is, you'd have to find another place to live while you were doing it. Organisms don't have this option, they can't tear themselves down and start over, all they can do is add complexity, sometimes retaining unneeded artifacts of their previous structures (like finger bones in whales, or the stub of tail that humans have).

Your second paragraph is just as silly. Again, you're presupposing that evolution has some sense of what is better rather than what is necessary. Single celled organisms are very successful, they still survive today. But at some point, certain communities of them faced a challenge, adapt to a changing environment or a scarcity of resources or perish. Many of these groups probably perished, a few adapted. This has continued for billions of years with tons of mistakes and dead ends.

Again, you're applying your proclivity for ID to evolution, this is a big fallacy with creationists. You believe there is an Intelligent direction to our design, so you assume evolution must have the same principles. It does not, no more than gravity cares whether or not it smashes two objects into each other. Scientific principles don't come with goals or opinions.