On Tue, 24 Feb 2015 16:16:22 +0000, Steve O <nos...@here.thanks>
wrote:
>On 24/02/2015 15:33, netalat wrote:
>> On 2/24/2015 2:33 AM, The Starmaker wrote:
>>> The Starmaker wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Maybe I asked the wrong question.
>>>>
>>>> Maybe the question should be..
>>>
>>>
>>> Does God Exist?
>>
>> of course, someone had to design us, evolution cannot explain how the
>> complexity of an eyeball could develop on its own,
>
>Apart from the fact that it didn't 'develop on its own'- why do you have
>such a problem with the evolution of an eyeball?
>Eyeball evolution is easily explained, and there are plenty of different
>examples of different stages of development of the eyeball in the
>natural world, ranging from simple light sensitive pigmentation, across
>simpler and more rudimentary forms of sight and right up to the
>sophistication of an eagle's eye.
All of which provide a major survival advantage over those without
them.
Even simple light sensitivity compared with equivalent creatures
without it.
It's hardly surprising that the eye has evolved apparently
independently into so many different types.
The Liars For God usually quote Darwin out of context to make it
appear as if he saw it as a problem.
Even though that was more than 150 years ago.
But he, himself, answered it in the very next few sentences.
That was his writing style - to pose what people might see as
potential difficulties and then show why they weren't.
And he knew about what you just described.
The talk.origins quote mine project was set up to counter this kind of
creationist dishonesty.
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA113_1.html
Claim CA113.1:
Charles Darwin acknowledged the inadequacy of evolution when he wrote,
To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for
adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different
amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic
aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I
freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. (Darwin 1872)
Source:
Huse, Scott. 1996. The Collapse of Evolution. Grand Rapids: Baker Book
House, p. 73.
Response:
The quote is taken out of context. Darwin answered the seeming
problem he introduced. The paragraph continues,
Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a
perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade
being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the
eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which
is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the
organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life,
then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could
be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination,
can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to
light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated;
but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive
nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those
coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound. (Darwin 1872,
143-144)
Darwin continues with three more pages describing a sequence of
plausible intermediate stages between eyelessness and human eyes,
giving examples from existing organisms to show that the intermediates
are viable.
>> or your digestive
>> system, or how billions of tiny cells in your body all function together
>> so you can walk and talk, and last 90 years.
>
>The only thing that puzzles me is how the cells in your brain come
>together to allow you to walk and talk.
>>
>> if I am wrong, no big deal. However, if a god-denyer is wrong, he may
>> have room reserved at Hotel Hell, so...
>
>Ah! - One of those, are you?....
>That figures.
It is remarkably stupid to threaten people with your religion's threat
of punishment for its believers who step out of line, when they don't
believe that religion in the first place.
But then the theists we meet on the net are mostly incapable of
thinking outside the box.
If they were, they would recognise that non-Christians are no more
scared of the Christian hell than they themselves are of being
reincarnated as a maggot for not beiong Hindu.