Gleeful Public Evisceration

[Blog of Reason]

Discussion thread for the blog entry "Gleeful Public Evisceration" by rabbitpirate.

Permalink: http://blog.leagueofreason.org.uk/reason/gleeful-public-evisceration/

 

[Josan]

Oh man, thank you for posting that pdf. I haven't seen such crap in a long time. It's basicly a 60-page long "Atheist Riddle". It's great fun reading! And man, I'm going to do that drinking game for real with a friend some time, see how many pages we manage to get through before we can't read anymore.

And I definitly understand why you didn't bother going through everything point by point, as everything is basicly just logical fallacies and misunderstandings of what evolution really is - basicly the same shit we've all seen a hundred times before.

If you can't survive without your parents then you die. If you die you can't pass on your genes to the next generation. As such of those creatures who never see their parents the ones that are able to survive are the ones that pass on that ability to survive to their own young. That makes so much sense to me I really can't understand how they don't get it.

Indeed, you would think they could at least understand something as basic as natural selection... until I found THIS:

What about natural selection?

After the fossil record, the second supporting pillar of evolution offered by Darwinists is natural selection, which they hoped biologists would confirm. "Just as the breeders selected those individuals best suited to the breeder's needs to be the parents of the next generation," explained British philosopher Tom Bethell, "so, Darwin argued, nature selected those organisms that were best fitted to survive the struggle for existence. In that way evolution would inevitably occur. And so there it was: a sort of improving machine inevitably at work in nature, 'daily and hourly scrutinizing,' Darwin wrote, 'silently and insensibly working . . . at the improvement of each organic being.' "In this way, Darwin thought, one type of organism could be transformed into another,for instance, he suggested, bears into whales. So that was how we came to have horses and tigers and things,by natural selection" ("Darwin's Mistake," The Craft of Prose, Robert Woodward and Wendell Smith, editors, 1977, p. 309). Darwin saw natural selection as the major factor driving evolutionary change. But how has this second pillar of evolutionary theory fared since Darwin's day? In truth, it has been quietly discarded by an increasing number of theorists among the scientific community. Darwin's idea that the survival of the fittest would explain how species evolved has been relegated to a redundant, self-evident statement. Geneticist Conrad Waddington of Edinburgh University defines the fundamental problem of advocating natural selection as a proof of Darwinism: "Natural selection . . . turns out on closer inspection to be a tautology, a statement of an inevitable although previously unrecognized relation. It states that the fittest individuals in a population . . . will leave most offspring" (p. 310). In other words, the answer to the question of which are the fittest are those that survive, of course. And which ones survive? Why, naturally, the fittest. The problem is that circular reasoning doesn't point to any independent criteria that can evaluate whether the theory is true.

Apperantly, natural selection is so obvious it is circular reasoning... which makes it wrong... somehow... :roll:

 

[.V.]

I posted that blog on the league a while back in Religion and irreligion. http://forums.leagueofreason.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1505
A whole bunch of people signed up to get there own . Still waiting on my book to come.

 

[Giliell]

How low can you sink to use Wernher von Braun, intellectual whore with the backbone of a slug as an authority on anything except space engineering?

And I must have gotten natural selection totally wrong if the question whether the offspring can run away right after birth is a relevant factor :lol:
Hey, that means that ducks stand on a higher evolutionary step than eagles :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:
Although the notion of the evolutionary stepladder is also new to me.
Gosh, I shouldn't have skipped that one biology lesson for preparing for a maths test, I'm sure it was all explained that day

 

[AmandaSmelser]

Thank you for posting such an insightful response to this creationist propaganda.

In the United States, court decisions have interpreted constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion as freedom from religion,effectively banning public expression of religious beliefs and denying the country's rich religious heritage.

Now I don't live in the United States but I am pretty sure that's just not true.

I live in the US. They are probably referring to the US Supreme Court banning of a ten commandments display in courtrooms. However, they only banned them from being inside of the courtrooms themselves, and not generally in public. They even allow various religious symbols on all sorts of government property. So, the statement you quote above is a downright lie. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4627459.stm

I'm not sure why Christians want the ten commandments displayed anyway, since they are clearly in violation of the first two with their Jesus worship.

 

[e2iPi]

I live in the US. They are probably referring to the US Supreme Court banning of a ten commandments display in courtrooms.

The first thought I had was the Dover trial.
And there is no ban on public displays of faith in this country - private individuals and organizations can display all the faith they want - the government cannot.

Also, there was an interesting case a few years back regarding the ten commandments where its display in a courthouse was upheld - I cannot remember where - because it was part of a display which also included the Code of Hammurabi, Lipit-Ishtar's Code as well as Egyptian and Roman laws.

In that context, I feel that it is perfectly acceptable because it's a legal display not religious.

Please excuse my irrelevant rambling.....

i^2