Atheist Haiku of the Month- Summer Edition

WAIT! It's Sunday.... that better be holy water!

Summer Vacation

More family and less church

stop wasting Sundays

What does "Open Minded" Really mean?

I'm sorry. I'll stop talking about science and evidence  :(

This is an ongoing accusation that every atheist or critical thinker faces eventually.

"Why can't you be open minded?"

or

"Why are you so closed minded?"

Usually in reference to some imagined slight they have received by the audacity of your irrationality.  The irrationality that you display for not agreeing with them.

Water has memory! You'd understand that if you weren't so closed minded.....or addicted to "facts".

What does that particular argument even mean? What IS being open minded?

Do we allow for the possibility of anything as true until it is DISproven?

Do we agree that everything is right if you can find something to support it?

Do we let anything go lest we be branded "Closed minded"?

Do we dismiss unsupported claims until they are supported by evidence and seemingly immune to falsification?


DING DING DING DING!!!!

Not to throw TOO much of a monkey wrench into the works of the woo makers, and religion takers but being open minded means NOT coming to a conclusion without evidence. It is dismissing all claims that are unsupported and falsified until they have the evidence to support them and have gone through the falsification process. It is letting the conclusion follow the facts and not looking for facts to bolster your conclusion.

But most of all, it is being open to more evidence.

Richard Dawkins tells a story about an old colleague of his who for 15 years argued ardently for a theory that was infallible ( as far as he could tell) and who one day had to stand in front of the very same colleagues whom he had debated and worked with all this time with a somber truth.

His hypothesis had been debunked by new evidence.

Did he argue?

Did he fuss?

Did he cry "Foul" or "Closed minded"??

No, he thanked his peers for showing him his mistake and for adding to the learning of science. THAT is the scientific and skeptical ideal. His idea couldn't pass the skeptical process of falsification and he was happy to hear it because of the advance in knowledge that this discovery had revealed.

That is the definition of what it means to be skeptical. To withhold belief until evidence is presented and it has passed the falsification process.

To be open to new evidence as it comes along, and to not so invest yourself in a conclusion that you are sure that you can never be convinced otherwise.

For THAT is the very definition of "closed minded".

Ghosts aren't real you say? LALALALALA!!!

When your conclusion is more important than new evidence or than re-examining old evidence, then you are closed minded. You have closed your mind to any possibility that you and your idea could be wrong. You are NOT open minded for believing in unsupported things. You have DECIDED before the evidence is counted that what you believe is true, and therefor have entered into the very realm of closed mindedness that you accuse the detractors of your chosen beliefs of being trapped in.
I DO understand however that my post will not convince many people who already believe in such unsupported things and that they will continue to think that we need to "open our minds" to their beliefs but there is a very easy explanation for this. People have invested time, effort and personal identity into these beliefs and to give them up would not only shake the foundations of the logical person that they already think they are for being "taken in" (it shouldn't, quite the opposite actually it should reinforce the feeling of being a rational being) but it would be too costly emotionally to give up something that is so much a part of who they are. Things that are believed without possibility of change tend to tie themselves to our identity, and to give them up would be devastating in many cases. All I can do is try...

SO

Homeopathic healers,

Reiki practitioners,

Aromatherapists,

Crystal Therapy kooks,

Magnet Therapy believers,

Astrology adherents,

Christians,

Muslims, and

Believers of all kinds, you need to listen up!


NEVER SAY "I can't be convinced otherwise" because it is not a statement....

It is a label.

I could share this dunce cap if you like...

It is a label that brands YOU as closed minded.

It is a label that brands YOU as being opposed to rationality

It is a label that brands YOU as the one who simply can't be reasoned with.

and remember..... (in the words of Tim Minchin)

"If you're too open minded, your brain will fall out"










PS- This is not a negative thing. Skepticism is a pathway to ensuring that your beliefs are TRUE. If you care about whether or not they are true skepticism is the only real way to achieve validated assurance that it is. In science it is called the scientific method. For journeymen like most of us we are left with skepticism.

Peace

Guest Blogger of the Month- Roger Ebert

I apologize for not being here for those who follow me lately. I have been sick but that is no excuse to leave words unspoken and unwritten for those who follow this blog to hear/read.  

I feel it is necessary to commemorate someone whom I have never before mentioned in this blog merely because of the respect that I held for him. 

Roger Ebert.

I labelled this blog as a Guest Blogger of the Month, but if only that were true. 

I would have been honoured for him to acknowledge my meager words by participating in my project, but I knew of no other way to categorize this. 

There are very few public figures that I care in the least about. Very few that affect me at all, and fewer still that affect me profoundly. So many celebrities are worshipped or looked to for answers and eloquence when all they do is mirror our own thoughts. They teach us nothing that we didn't already know, or feel might be true.

Roger Ebert is not one of those men.

He is one of a select few people whose eloquence and insight sometimes astounded me. He didn't always say things that I agreed with, but he always made me reconsider my position on things. His words always touched me, and I was honoured to have had very brief contact with him on Twitter. Even though I didn't know him, I will miss him. These are his words on dying;

AN EXCERPT FROM "LIFE ITSELF: A MEMOIR"

(Re-printed from his book "Life Itself: A Memoir,")

"I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. I am grateful for the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.

I don’t expect to die anytime soon. But it could happen this moment, while I am writing. I was talking the other day with Jim Toback, a friend of 35 years, and the conversation turned to our deaths, as it always does. “Ask someone how they feel about death,” he said, “and they'll tell you everyone’s gonna die. Ask them, In the next 30 seconds? No, no, no, that’s not gonna happen. How about this afternoon? No. What you're really asking them to admit is, Oh my God, I don't really exist. I might be gone at any given second.”

Me too, but I hope not.

I have plans. Still, illness led me resolutely toward the contemplation of death. That led me to the subject of evolution, that most consoling of all the sciences, and I became engulfed on my blog in unforeseen discussions about God, the afterlife, religion, theory of evolution, intelligent design, reincarnation, the nature of reality, what came before the big bang, what waits after the end, the nature of intelligence, the reality of the self, death, death, death.

Many readers have informed me that it is a tragic and dreary business to go into death without faith. I don’t feel that way. “Faith” is neutral. All depends on what is believed in. I have no desire to live forever. The concept frightens me. I am 69, have had cancer, will die sooner than most of those reading this. That is in the nature of things. In my plans for life after death, I say, again with Whitman:

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

And with Will, the brother in Saul Bellow’s “Herzog,” I say, “Look for me in the weather reports.”

Raised as a Roman Catholic, I internalized the social values of that faith and still hold most of them, even though its theology no longer persuades me. I have no quarrel with what anyone else subscribes to; everyone deals with these things in his own way, and I have no truths to impart. All I require of a religion is that it be tolerant of those who do not agree with it. I know a priest whose eyes twinkle when he says, “You go about God’s work in your way, and I’ll go about it in His.”

What I expect to happen is that my body will fail, my mind will cease to function and that will be that. My genes will not live on, because I have had no children. I am comforted by Richard Dawkins’ theory of memes. Those are mental units: thoughts, ideas, gestures, notions, songs, beliefs, rhymes, ideals, teachings, sayings, phrases, clichés that move from mind to mind as genes move from body to body. After a lifetime of writing, teaching, broadcasting and telling too many jokes, I will leave behind more memes than many. They will all also eventually die, but so it goes.

O’Rourke’s had a photograph of Brendan Behan on the wall, and under it this quotation, which I memorized:

I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don’t respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.

That does a pretty good job of summing it up. “Kindness” covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn't always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.

One of these days I will encounter what Henry James called on his deathbed “the distinguished thing.” I will not be conscious of the moment of passing. In this life I have already been declared dead. It wasn’t so bad. After the first ruptured artery, the doctors thought I was finished. My wife, Chaz, said she sensed that I was still alive and was communicating to her that I wasn’t finished yet. She said our hearts were beating in unison, although my heartbeat couldn’t be discovered. She told the doctors I was alive, they did what doctors do, and here I am, alive.

Do I believe her? Absolutely. I believe her literally — not symbolically, figuratively or spiritually. I believe she was actually aware of my call and that she sensed my heartbeat. I believe she did it in the real, physical world I have described, the one that I share with my wristwatch. I see no reason why such communication could not take place. I’m not talking about telepathy, psychic phenomenon or a miracle. The only miracle is that she was there when it happened, as she was for many long days and nights. I’m talking about her standing there and knowing something. Haven’t many of us experienced that? Come on, haven’t you? What goes on happens at a level not accessible to scientists, theologians, mystics, physicists, philosophers or psychiatrists. It’s a human kind of a thing.

Someday I will no longer call out, and there will be no heartbeat. I will be dead. What happens then? From my point of view, nothing. Absolutely nothing. All the same, as I wrote to Monica Eng, whom I have known since she was six, “You’d better cry at my memorial service.” I correspond with a dear friend, the wise and gentle Australian director Paul Cox. Our subject sometimes turns to death. In 2010 he came very close to dying before receiving a liver transplant. In 1988 he made a documentary named “Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent van Gogh.” Paul wrote me that in his Arles days, van Gogh called himself “a simple worshiper of the external Buddha.” Paul told me that in those days, Vincent wrote:

"Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why, I ask myself, shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?"

Just as we take a train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. We cannot get to a star while we are alive any more than we can take the train when we are dead. So to me it seems possible that cholera, tuberculosis and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion. Just as steamboats, buses and railways are the terrestrial means.

To die quietly of old age would be to go there on foot.

That is a lovely thing to read, and a relief to find I will probably take the celestial locomotive. Or, as his little dog, Milou, says whenever Tintin proposes a journey, “Not by foot, I hope!”"

Thank you Mr. Ebert.

And I'll still see you at the movies.

(Take a look around at his website. Movie reviews, opinion, social commentary and all sorts of interesting things that will enlighten you and enthrall you with this most interesting of men.)

Atheist Haiku of the Month- April Fools Edition

God is logical

God is loving and moral

......

I just can't do it.

Guest Blogger of the Month- Randy McCauley "My Story"

In this edition of "Guest Blogger of the Month" I am extremely pleased to bring to you the story of the first real atheist that I ever had the opportunity to have a conversation about skepticism and religion. We became friends on my first overseas deployment to Kosovo in 1999. Up until then I had no real idea how to classify myself with regards to religion or what real critical thinking was all about. It was during our conversations with Randy that I was forced to think about the question "why" and developed the need for supporting evidence for all of my beliefs (not just religious). It was also during these conversations with Randy that I graduated from thinking that was centered around "what makes sense" to actual skeptical thinking in which logic and evidence play a critical role. "What makes sense" reasoning has now been left behind with all the other trappings of childhood thinking for me. 

Thank you Randy.

So this post may be a selfish one for me, but I hope that you share in my excitement.

"My Story"

"My name is Randy McCauley.  I am a Sergeant in the Army and have been a professional soldier for 25 years now.  I am a family man and a devout atheist.  This is not even close to how I had originally planned for things to end up but, thankfully, the best laid plans of mice and men... 

            I was born and raised in a small town.  It was in this small town that I learned about right and wrong, god and the devil and the powers of good and evil.  As a child I don't recall ever being taught to fear or hate other religions but I also have no memory of other religions being discussed.  I don't remember ever questioning aloud the obvious (even then) contradiction between our gentle, loving god to whom we were taught to pray every night, and the reverence that was often heaped upon "god-fearing Christians".  

That seemed like a big one to me.  

Fear?  Really? 

I think that I understood, the way only a child can, that the Old Testament god was fire and brimstone and that the New Testament god was love and forgiveness.  I knew it was still the same "one god" but, hey, I was just a kid and had better things to do with my time than to think about these things.  As far as that goes, if I were to be honest, Batman had more relevance in my life at that point than God did. Sure I went to Sunday School every week and said my prayers every night but the songs and prayers were things that I learned by rote and did because they were part of my routine.  If Mom didn't wake me up I wouldn't have been that worked up about missing church but there was no fucking way was I missing Batman!

             My parents rarely went to church with us and there was a volunteer who would pick up all the neighborhood kids for Sunday School then drop us off again afterward. So my parents (and plenty of other parents too) barely had to get moving in the morning, other than to get us ready for pick up and that was Mom's job. All things considered, going every week was a lot of fun.  It was the Salvation Army for Christ's sake.  There were no nuns to hits us and, as far as I know, no one ever got raped.  (Plus the stories were pretty exciting.) There was always plenty of slaying and slewing and even a good ol' smiting now and then. Those two towns where people had poopy sex and wanted to rape angels got nuked and Lot's disobedient wife got turned into a salt-lick.  Ahh, good times...good times, and we'd be home just in time for lunch and to spend the rest of the day playing war or cowboys in the field behind our house.

             My Father was fairly strict and we had plenty of normal social and familial rules but nothing so crazy that I have to tell my therapist. Mostly they were about how to get along and not get on our parent's nerves.  We said grace before meals when Mom made us but the rules (for us kids) that we saw as religious were things like not swearing (Mom and Dad got to swear), not smoking and drinking (except for Mom and Dad) and no "unclean thoughts or deeds" (?!?) which made absolutely no sense to me until I was a bit older. 

I've more than made up for it since those crazy time... (I love you Mila!)

So, all in all, not terribly hard but all kids misbehave.  Fortunately, this was covered too.  Getting forgiven was easier with God than it was with Mom and Dad.  You had to promise both that you wouldn't do it again but God couldn't look at you all disappointed when you inevitably fucked up and did do it again!  Of course even our loving, gentle and forgiving God was jealous so if you didn't pray, go to Sunday School and think only clean thoughts you knew that he would cast you down into the fiery pits of hell to roast and torment for all of eternity, but it would be for your own good. Kinda like going to bed without dinner because you said shit at the table...

except you NEVER GET TO EAT AGAIN.

All in all, it seemed to me like the easiest few rules that I had ever heard and I figured that I was a shoe-in for Life Eternal!  After all, I hardly ever swore where people could hear me, I almost always went to Sunday School and, since I was only a kid, what the fuck sort of dirty thoughts could I have? 

Other than her of course!

            A tremendous fear of sin, guilt over any form of sexual desire, feelings of inadequacy over the state of my soul and an overwhelming sense of hopelessness and defeat with regards to 'big S' (salvation) are the gifts that I received from religion. 

Yea, thanks religion.

On the other hand I got my strong work ethic and need for independence from my parents.  In their imperfect ways my mother taught me about charity and my father gave me a love for the outdoors and, in a mid-20th century way, a respect for nature.  In normal life religion as a subject never really came up, but it was always there as the elephant in the room. And I knew that we were the protestants and that "those" people were the Catholics.  Nobody really used the word "Christian" back then because we were all Christians.  I remember trying to sort out which of my friends were the "normal" protestants like us and which were the "nutty" ones who tried to be Catholic by taking communion and saying confessions.  For some reason it really seemed to matter.  For us their crucifix was a symbol of suffering whereas our bare cross was a symbol of salvation.  

Does that make any sense at all? Even as a kid I was pre-programmed to judge such things.

            Around the time I was ten it started becoming apparent that the world was a far more complicated place than I had thought and I began exercising a little something I later learned to call critical thinking. Basically, I decided, it goes like this: 

If it sounds like bullshit, you need to start asking questions because in the end there's a pretty good chance that it really is bullshit and you really need to know.  Otherwise you could end up dedicating large amounts of time, energy and your life to bullshit.  I started off by pointing out to my Sunday School teacher that if Adam and Eve were the first and only people on earth, then it follows that the world was populated through incest, but that's a sin, isn't it?  That was my first note sent home. 

My memory is hazy but I am pretty sure this is what it said.....

            Later, I learned that slay and slew meant kill and killed and that the Israelites killed non-believers by the thousands in the name of God.  Men, women, children and even animals were put to the sword or burned.  Nowadays we all know that even if god speaks to you directly and tells you to kill it's murder.  Things like that are only okay if he speaks to you through your government.  I'm not making this up.  This is the result of many conversations I had as a kid with adults and pastors.  I was seriously worried about soldiers and police officers but I was assured that the commandment should be correctly read as "Thou Shalt Not Murder" which made sense to me and filled me with relief. Unfortunately, I wasn't stupid and I again asked the question that seemed most obvious which was "What if you go to war with another Christian nation like Germany or Italy?".  That was a phone call and a visit. As it turns out it only counts what your government is (Nazi, Facist, Pinko) and not what the people you are killing believe in.  Much later in life I learned that it also seems to go a long way with god that we are the Western democracies and mostly white. Who knew?  As I was just a kid, this again, gave me a feeling of relief.  I could still stand proudly on 11 November and offer a prayer to god everlasting that the souls of our brave departed soldiers be granted peace. As the years passed I was even magnanimous enough to attempt an ecumenical prayer.

             I remember as a teen listening to and watching the troubles in the Middle-East on the CBC and, on my own, began fearing words like Jihad, Mohammad and Allah.  The people who used these words were against us and our entire way of life.  They were as bad or even worse than the godless communists but, thankfully, were far less of a threat to us in the West because they lived in huts and didn't even seem to have proper uniforms let alone ICBM's.  In fact, the Muslim nations didn't even really figure into it for my crowd (as we knew from the book of Revelations that, although the Apocalypse was going to start in the deserts of the Middle East, it would be fought between the godless USSR and the god-fearing christian states of the west (re: NATO)).  What could be more obvious than that to a child of the Cold War 70's and 80's?  This attitude grew and became a personal virtue for my friends and I as we changed gradually from boys to young men and it began to even make a lot of sense and even seem kinda likely when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.  I think that of all my friends I was the last to reject this as a philosophy but not until my late teens.

            For years I coasted on a vague knowledge of what Christianity was and what it was to be a Christian.  As I said, everyone I knew was a christian of one sort or another and most of my friends even went to church so, at fourteen when I was away at Summer Cadet Camp and we saw some guys try to get out of two-hour church parade by claiming to be atheists, we were quite rightly amused when they were told to decide if they were roman catholic atheists or protestant atheists.  

Not sure where, but Catholic Atheist is in there somewhere...

The Chaplin's were CF Officers so the connection between religion and patriotism was easily strengthened within us.  Every Sunday had a big hint of Remembrance Day to it and we were always in uniform.

            Much later in life, when I was really no more mature, I joined the Army and was exposed to many different types of people with just as many different views and I felt fortunate to have the opportunity to talk to them and either help them evolve their views or have mine challenged or changed.  Deploying to foreign lands and meeting various peoples with religious ideas that they were actually willing to kill and die for impressed the hell out of me...at first.  Being the focus of such dedication tends to wear thin pretty fucking fast in my experience.  I had read a lot and tried to educate myself on religion and spiritualism but when faced over and over again with the pain and destruction that people, and I mean mostly men, were capable of inflicting in the name of god I could not, finally, learn to make sense of it.

  

             I began to wonder, and wonder in a very serious way, why god had had such a change of heart from the old to the new testament and was now more than content to let us kill each other on a scale never before seen?  I certainly wanted to know  why we could be so dead-set against Sunday shopping, yet never question why god would favour a sports team with a big win, but yet still let a childhood friend of mine be burned to death along with his sister by their own Dad?  What kinda of a deity would look at his day's work and not go "What the fuck was I thinking?" 

This guy, that's who!

Local children as well as little African boys and girls were being starved and defenseless men, women and kids around the world had to suffer beatings, humiliation and execution.  At times these things would be happening only a short distance from the front gate of our well defended and well stocked camps and yet the troops with God on their side were forced to sit idle.  Some were even forced to watch and record the atrocities.  I know that many suffered horrific emotional damage from these experiences but I also know that many were only concerned with getting the job done and getting their extra pay and a medal. 

            We are told from an early age that god answers all prayers.  We are also told that sometimes the answer is "No".  It was while witnessing man's inhumanity to man, woman, child and beast that I became utterly convinced that either the almighty's decision making paradigm was really out of wack or that he was just a giant cunt.  

Either way there was some explaining that had to be done. 

In the meantime I was confronted by such childish platitudes as "He works in mysterious ways" and "He will never give you a burden that you cannot bear" and "God's plan is unknowable".  Perhaps having faith in god and an afterlife would help those watching on TV, but looking at a small child's charred corpse and trying not to choke on the ham-stench, I couldn't help but think about how heavy a burden that must have been for her to bear. Today when I hear these same platitude used to explain things I am disgusted and ashamed.  

   

            My wars are over and I am home for good now.  I lost my faith in a real and personal god a long time ago and have been struggling with what I actually am and how to fit this into who I am ever since but suddenly (or over time, who bloody knows how these things really happen?) I realized that this was me.  There was no point in holding god to account and demanding some sort of reconciliation.  God was not going to answer for these, his crimes, against humanity or for the evil in the world. 

There never has been evil in the world. 

There is no supernatural force that drives some people to rape, murder or genocide just like there is nothing keeping me from committing these acts myself, except that I don't want to.  I don't find these things helpful in creating a society that is worth living in and that I would want my children to live in.  My wife and kids are not good people because they are determined to get into heaven or in order to avoid some sort of punishment, but because they have genuine empathy for the human experience. They know not to cause pain and to promote peacefulness for the sake of peacefulness alone.  There is no force of evil and there is no force of goodness. There is just you and I and the decisions that we make every day to determine how we will live.  

More importantly, there is no god.   

            These days when I am at the cenotaph on the 11th day of the 11th month, (and I am there.  Every fucking year!) I don't stand proudly and pray for the many thousands of the fallen.  I stand with my wife in front, holding her waist to keep from flinching when the cannons sound and I weep silently for the countless lives ended permanently and promise myself to remember those I knew.  I don't believe in an afterlife and I don't believe that we will ever see them again.  They are not in a better place.  They are gone and we allowed them to go.  We will remember them and that will have to be enough but we must not let this continue.  The enemy is not "them".  It is any of us that cling to bronze-age mythology or any faith-based doctrine which keeps individuals from making clear headed, intelligent decisions in the here and the now.

            Let it be."





Great post Randy. 

And well made point. Don't let dogma lead you to decisions. You don't need a book to tell you the difference between right and wrong. If you don't know that on your own, then there is a problem. You have a lot of tools with which to make those decisions. 

Empathy.  Experience.  Love.  

Remember, the enemy is not "them". It's your responsibility to ensure that the enemy is not "me".

Thanks again Randy.

and as he taught me to say.....

Peace

Quote of the Week- Tracie Harris

"Science proposes a cause that is demonstrated to exist; religion proposes a cause that has first to be demonstrated to exist."

This is a point often missed on debate. Creationism can't qualify even as an hypothesis. If you can't demonstrate existence for the cause of your explanation, then you can't move on to anything that follows.

"Religion says X (god) did it--without solving for X."

Again she hits the nail on the head. This is called confirmation bias. You begin at a proposition that you already believe is true and work backwards from everything until you can make it reach your God. Most times it is a stretch at best, at worst it is complete and total dishonesty. You simply can't say that "goddidit" while admitting that you have no idea by what mechanism that was achieved and offer that up as an explanation of anything.

If you have no explanation for your model, you simply don't get a place at the table in scientific discussion.

Sorry creationists.... back to the drawing board with you.

Peace

Atheist Haiku of the Month- New Years edition

A whole new year to hear more science denial!

3, 2, 1 NEW YEARS!

Will rational thought come too?

Not with religion...

PS- 

Got Resolutions?

break em down into small parts

they're too big to carry

  

Questions Answered- Jacob Abdo asks "Hasn't Evolution been proven wrong?"

This "Questions Asked" is in response to a Jacob Abdo from Twitter. During our short conversation he made several criticisms of evolution and science which were clearly borne from ignorance of the topic in question i.e.-





This is the first of his revealing messages. That he thinks that men came from monkeys.


We didn't

Ok, well MOST of us didn't....

But then again neither did Monkeys!  We both have a common ancestor.  Huge difference.

Here's another;

This is just nonsense and the kind of thing that drives me crazy. If you are going to criticize something, then PLEASE have the courtesy and intellectual honesty to read up on the topic instead of just trying to find arguments against it.  There is nothing wrong with trying to falsify something. That is the highest form of science. But to start with a proposition (that evolution is wrong on divine grounds) and then seek things to confirm it is intellectually dishonest because you are not seeking truth, you are merely bolstering your argument with no concern for reality. You simply can't debunk something that you don't understand.

In this tweet he is seen conflating evolution with abiogenesis. Evolution explains the diversity of life, not it's origins. Although abiogenesis has demonstrated that life from non-life is possible and has a number of different hypothesis on the topic, there is no single accepted one. Not that it matters, as all that you need to do is demonstrate that it is possible.

In any case, I digress.  I am just making my first point which I hope that he will take to heart. Do not criticize science that you don't understand.  You lack the foundational knowledge to do so, and only come off looking like you have an agenda ... which is true. His agenda is to keep faith in his god and deny all science that seems to disagree.

(A point on this is that science doesn't care about god. It makes no comment on it at all.)

These are the tweets of contention.

I will first say that no one worships Darwin (or if they do, they are ridiculous) and further no one says that everything he said was right.

There were definitely points upon which he was wrong. He had no idea how the traits were passed on to the offspring. It has only been in the modern era that we have discovered DNA and understood more fully the passage of the allele. No one disputes that. So to say that Darwin has been proven wrong is partially (although only in the detail not the idea) correct.

Evolution, however, is still unfalsified.

That is because it is correct. It is accepted universally by natural scientists all over the world and on the basis of mountains of evidence.

I said this to him and he responded with a link to his source of information.

I hate answering to whole pages of information as answers to questions, but this is a reasonably civil and polite person and just seems to be working on a wealth of misinformation on the topic.  So, just this once ... I will answer to the best of my ability.

I am not going to post the whole narrative of the page, but I will address some of the clear and willful misrepresentations of the science by the author of this page.

Before I begin, I hold no animosity towards Jacob.  The author of this page though is a disgusting representative of his religion and of science. I say this because as I read his article I see common arguments and unscientific propaganda.  These are easily researched falsehoods. He has made zero effort to ensure that what he is saying is true.

ZERO!

That is disgusting in a forum of supposed scientific conversation and such people deserve no respect. They are manipulating the informational authority that real scientists have in order to bolster support for his ideas.  They are using scientific terminology in order to garner respect and support from the scientifically illiterate.

Disgusting.

In any case ... on to the post.

I will address three main points:

First, that there is no fossil evidence to show slow and gradual change in species as they speciate;

Second, that the Cambrian Explosion is a major problem to the theory; and

Third, (and I can't believe that people still have to address this) irreducible complexity and Michael Behe.


Ok, here we go ...



 
"There is no fossil evidence to show gradual change in species to demonstrate speciation"


The first thing to understand here is that fossilization is an extremely rare event.  It is to be expected that we won't have a complete fossil record of every species at every stage of it's evolution from the beginning of time. That is an unreasonable thing to demand. What I am assuming is that this question is referring to  "transitional forms". The problem with looking for transitional forms is in definitions.

I call this the "Issue of ignorance" or the "Kirk Cameron Crocoduck Connundrum"

Very often what the under-educated (on the topic of evolution) are looking to see are animals that have half-formed parts.

Fish with legs, or birds with scales or things like our crocoduck friend here ...

I'm working on a powerful tail for swimming until next June, then WATCH OUT!

These amalgams of species simply don't exist, nor would we expect them to. In fact, if we ever discovered something like this, the theory of evolution would come into serious doubt.

Evolution happens in much much smaller stages, and the forms that scientists see as "transitional" are merely species in a time where we can most clearly see the step from one function to another. 
Put another way, a transitional fossil is any fossilized remains of a life form that exhibits traits common to both the ancestral group and it's derived descendant group.

The page he linked quotes Darwin as a method of falsifying his own theory;

"The number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on the earth, [must] be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graded organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory."

The issue with using this quote is that they have no follow up.  Darwin explains (as they say in the article) that this is due to the imperfect fossil record and the rareness of the fossilization event. What they FAIL to mention is that not only does the fossil record begin to fill the gaps as the science matures, but transitional forms ARE found. 

The discovery of Archeopteryx was of particular importance (found in 1861, just two years after the aforementioned quote) because it seemed to confirm his theory. Archaeopteryx is a classic transitional form between birds and dinosaurs. Since then MANY transitional forms have been discovered and any question about the evidence in reference to "transitional forms" is made either out of an ignorant view of what transitional forms are and how evolution manifests, or out of an intellectually dishonest attempt to garner support from the scientifically illiterate/gullible.

The thing to note about these transitional fossils is that they always appear in order of sequence in the fossil record. If one ever appeared out of sequence, then that would be a major blow to the discipline but they never do.  

Not once.

This is what we would expect to see if evolution manifested as scientists say it is. If it were not happening like this, gradual change from one species to another (speciation) then we would expect to find overlap. That never happens. 

Without going into too much depth here I am pretty sure that we can lay that criticism to bed. 

On to the next point ...





"The Cambrian Explosion is a problem for the Theory of Evolution"



It is a sad state when arguments such as this still exist.  The last argument was born from a simple and easy misunderstanding of the science. This one is borne from a willful neglect to study it.

Science is wrong if I don't hear it!

Punctuated Equilibrium has explained the existence of the Cambrian Explosion and it's place in the story of evolution for almost 40 years now.

Wait ... I am getting ahead of myself. First let's explain and define our terms.

The Cambrian Explosion is a time about 570 million years ago when the vast majority of modern animal phyla appeared. (Phyla are "forms" or "body plans".)  

There is a common criticism that the appearance of so many new Phyla (not just new species) during such a short period of time is contrary to what the theory of evolution would predict. The second part of that criticism is that there seems to be no evolutionary history for these new phyla. They even go so far as to quote Richard Dawkins;

"it is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history"-R Dawkins

"Please don't buy and read his book for context"    
 Signed-Creationists

 These claims are simply untrue. 

The most rudimentary research into the Cambrian Explosion reveals this so, once again, Mark Hartwig seems to be caught in what would appear to be a barefaced misrepresentation of the science.

So in reference to the point that there is no evolutionary history to these Cambrian fossils, this is partially true. There have been very few Pre-cambrian fossils but this is explained by two factors.

One:  Fossilization is, as we mentioned previously, a very rare event.

Two:  Pre-Cambrian species were invertebrates which would leave very little in the way of fossil record.

The mitigating truth here is that there are NO Pre-Cambrian transitional forms. There are a number of transitional forms found from the pre-Cambrian period and more are being discovered all the time.



Anomalocaris is one. It is the precursor to the arthropod family.

I don't think that there is any need to go further into something that has been known since the 1940's.

Time to catch up on your reading Mr. Hartwig.

Here is a link to a very short article on the Pre-Cambrian fossil record.



Now we get to the last, and most ridiculous of arguments ...





Irreducible Complexity

And gravity works with invisible strings tying everything down ...

This one is a problem of definitions and has been debunked time and time again. It is an argument that was first proposed by Micheal Behe, and was debunked about 3 minutes later.  It is actually a bit of a silly posit.

It is based on a false premise. Behe states that evolution is simply impossible because there are forms that could not have evolved because they are irreducibly complex. By which he means, the removal of any single part makes that form non-functional.

His basic misunderstanding of the science is explained here, but I will explain in shorter terms. \


Behe's posit is based on the false thinking that scientists claim evolution works by a gradual and step-wise addition of parts. It is culminated in the thought that any gradual evolutionary precursors to an irreducibly complex system would be non-functional.

There is one fatal flaw in his argument.

He thinks that evolution only works by adding "parts".  It can also work by subtracting or changing parts.

This completely debunks his claim that there are irreducibly complex forms.

Forms do NOT have to have the same function as they evolve and evolutionary precursors do not have to have common functions with current ones.

As organisms evolve, functions can change with the addition (or subtraction) of new parts. This changing function is where Behe falls flat. He feels that if the function wouldn't remain with the subtraction of a part, then the organism is irreducibly complex. (Not to mention that evolution manifests as small and gradual changes, and the addition of a whole part would be a large change. Invalidating his argument again.)

I'll give you an example of how evolution can work in ways that Behe would decree impossible (there are better examples in the link I provided, but I will use this one for simplicity).

This has been called the Mullerian Two Step and it goes like this:
1. Add a part
2. Make it necessary

First take a stone bridge. We'll call it the "Evolutionary Precursor Bridge";

Next, we'll add a stone and call it our "Transitional Bridge";

Then we'll take away the middle stone and call it the "Irreducibly Complex Bridge";

But is it really irreducibly complex?

Clearly not. The middle stone just became superfluous, so it was evolved out of the equation giving our bridge the appearance of irreducibly complexity.


So Jacob, there is your answer to the link of information that you sent.

If you actually read my article as you expected me to read yours (well, not REALLY yours as you didn't write it) then you will understand that your claims about evolution are false.

BUT don't be sad.  The truth of evolution has no bearing on your God or your religious belief. Evolution is an area of knowledge that makes no comment on God at all and has nothing to do with atheism.

So, Jacob, continue to believe if you want but try not to be ignorant of science in the process.

It only takes away from the validity of anything you say when you do and it makes you look like this guy

Peace!

P.S. Next time you tweet a response, please don't send links. Otherwise I will just start sending encyclopedias in response. Use your own 140 words please.

*thanks to Talkorigins.org for the example graphics.

UPDATE-
I got a response from Jacob this morning. It saddened me because it looked like he might actually interested in learning the science behind evolution. Sadly this is not true. While he promised to read it, and I felt that I had laid things out in terms that were easy to understand, this was his response.

Learning is hard!

This is sad.  I had actually taken the time to address the article he linked (and I really DO hate "link warriors") but I had hoped for more. His blog is all about technology so I guess that swayed me to think that he might be open to actual science.

OH! I can't forget to include this one.

It's just a theory, just like gravity, and umm, math...

"Only a Theory".... ugh....

If only he had sent THAT little willfully and nonsensically blind statement first, I might not have wasted my time...


peace.