hua@cmu-cs-gandalf.ARPA (Ernest Hua) (03/04/85)
___________________________________________________________________________ > { From: Gordon A. Moffett ...!{ihnp4,hplabs,sun}!amdahl!gam } > > ORIGINALS IN NET.RELIGION: > > Proofs for/against the existence of God are not valid because > God's existence is outside the scope of the scientific method. Exactly! In fact, the entire concept/idea/notion of a deity is beyond the scope of the scientific method. Now my question is: Why do creationists still insist on spending time/money/effort to support their clearly unscientific concept/idea/notion of special creation? > > "EVOLVE BY CHANCE" IS SELF-CONTRADICTORY - I HOPE ALL HERE REALIZE THAT! > > Uh, this isn't really the place to discuss it, but I cannot allow > that statement to go unchallenged. > > It is precisely that it is all by chance that makes it so interesting. > We are the result of billions of years random mutations. The 'good' > ones survived to reproduce, the 'bad' ones didn't. Such a system > can't help but produce progressively more advanced creatures. Well, maybe ... The idea of chance/choice is debatable since one can say that given an specific configuration/arrangement of the universe, one can predict the next configuration/arrangement. Of course we are talking about a pretty brilliant guy here, so you might say that for the average human being, since the amount of knowledge required to do this prediction is ridiculously large, one cannot not even remotely predict the next configuration of the universe accurately because there is always some knowledge not considered. Therefore, one can consider the transition to be random to some extent. The other idea presented here is quite interesting, and is some- thing that creationists will not admit to. (Of course not!) A system which one can consider to have random processes that create and destroy macro objects will certainly allow objects that are created with better survival characteristics to remain than other objects. Such a system does favor the "fittest" objects. If there exists processes to modify, rather than simply create or destroy objects, such a system will certainly favor the objects that suffer more changes, since more changes increase the likelyhood of some helpful change, thus making the objects more "fit"... I can go on and on ... It seems that a lot of people can see the truth of the previous paragraph, including some creationists. However, many of them, expecially the creationists, refuse to apply objects to life forms. (I can't really understand what the barrier may be ... ego, self-respect, contra-doctrinal, etc...) > I will not argue this further in this newsgroup. Hence the transplant to this group. ___________________________________________________________________________ Keebler { hua@cmu-cs-gandalf.arpa }