Is morality objective or subjective?

[Immanuel Can]

Despite the severe weaknesses and limitation faced by Science...

Sorry...not interested.
Somebody who has no respect for logic has no argument.

You're are really a philosophy gnat with so shallow and narrow thinking.

Sorry...somebody who doesn't understand the value of logic isn't even in the philosophical "game." She doesn't even realize, for that matter, that she's trying to appeal to that very thing she says doesn't count -- to logic -- but selectively, only in the ways it pleases her, and not subject to its adjudications.

She's like one of those football or soccer moms who think the best games are the ones with no particular rules, no penalties, and nobody gets to keep score. It's not the game...but she doesn't realize that.

[Dubious]

Do you think there's ever any genuine "alternative" to believing the truth?

Indeed, there is!

We're a lot closer to believing the truth when it's opposite to everything you believe.

[iambiguous]

Sander Lee on Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors:

...Allen's investigation of the moral decline of society had been limited to acts which, while clearly immoral, were rarely illegal. In Crimes and Misdemeanors....the main character, Judah Rosenthal, comes to 'see' that in a world devoid of divine presence, all acts are permissible, even murder.

The apparent philosophical despair of this film, in which the most moral individual, Ben, is shown gradually going blind, has been taken by many to symbolize Allen's ultimate sense of hopelessness. All of the supposedly virtuous characters are shown wearing glasses because of their inability to see the true nature of the world. As the film progresses, one character, Halley, is apparently able to discard her glasses only after she has also discarded her values by agreeing to marry an arrogant, pompous but successful TV producer Lester. Allen's character, Cliff Stern, is punished for his commitment to his beliefs as we see him lose everything he cared for: his love, his work, and even his spiritual mentor, the philosophy professor Louis Levy who, like Primo Levi, survived the Holocaust but responds to the petty immoralities of everyday life by killing himself.

Most ominously, Judah, who bears the name of one of the greatest fighters for traditional Jewish values and heritage, betrays the faith of his father Sol by not only committing a murder, but also renouncing the consequences of his guilt in a universe which he declares to be indifferent to our actions.

Now, in my view, Woody Allen blinked in this film re the manner in which he rationalized the murder. In two ways:

1] He clearly portrays the murdered mistress, Dolores, as a neurotic demon from hell bent on destroying his marriage by exposing their relationship to Judah's wife. He tries to escape the noose by talking her out of it first....but she won't go along with him.

2] He clearly shows the moral agony Judah endured as he genuinely wrestled with the searing ambivalence of hiring someone to kill the woman.

Suppose, instead, the mistress was nothing like that at all? Suppose she was an enormously appealing woman? Suppose he wanted her dead for a far less weighty reason? He just got tired of her and had her killed so there was never any possibility at all of this wife finding out. And, in turn, suppose he reacted to her death as he might react to a mere inconvenience in his life? Suppose her death didn't bother him at all?

In other words, it is still the same Godless universe in both scenarios...one where all human behaviors are essentially interchangeable in the end. That, of course, is something [a point of view] most folks find particularly unnerving, right?

More Lee:

Dialogue from the film Crimes and Misdemeanors:

Judah:

'Our entire adult lives you and I have been having this same conversation in one form or another.

Ben:

'Yes, I know. It's a fundamental difference in how we view the world. You see it as harsh and empty of values and pitiless, and I couldn't go on living if I didn't feel it with all my heart a moral structure, with real meaning, and forgiveness, and some kind of higher power, otherwise there's no basis to know how live!'

When Ben says that they have moved from 'a small infidelity to the meaning of existence', he suggests an interpretation of both the film's title and the interrelationship between its two plotlines. How one acts to deal with 'a small infidelity' determines one's position on the very 'meaning of existence'. The distance between such small misdemeanors and unforgivable crimes is much shorter than normally thought, once one has rejected all notions of values and responsibility.

This is the way the world actually functions, in my view. Once God is gone, all is permitted. But that does not mean we are not compelled to come up with our own moral compass. We are and most do. It suggests only that whichever one we do come up with is merely an existential reflection of how we choose to live. There is no Right or Wrong way.

And it is, in my opinion, the visceral psychological repugnance that many feel trying to imagine a world like that [the world as it really is] that motivates psychological defense mechanisms to kick in in order to rescue us from an essentially absurd and meaningless world. God thus becomes the mother of all psychological defense mechanisms. We embrace God because, among other things, God stands for the possibility [or the certainty] of Divine Justice.

And, for some who cannot believe in God, they replace Him with Reason. But there is no more or less ratioanl or logical manner in which to differentiate moral from immoral behavior in a Godless universe. How could there be when the vantage point of a mere mortal is inherently existential?

[Will Bouwman]

But it will not, so long as that eye does not function.

Yes it will.

No, it won't.

Well it's Panto season, so oh yes it will. You are strawmanning evolution for ideological reasons, and you are projecting your ideological motivation onto 'Evolutionists'.

Break down the preliminary stages, and you'll see it won't.

That's exactly what I do see. Early prey were hunted by early hunters.

The alleged "light-sensitive" area, putatively eventually to end up being an eye, is at first barely light-sensitive at all. Its sensitivity is utterly uninterpretable to the rudimentary organism that has it, and it amounts to little more than a sunburn spot would.

Is this original research of yours, or are you deferring to people who know better than you? Please don't tell me it is 'analytically' or logically so. If science has shown one thing repeatedly, it is that things that some people claim is obvious aren't always true.

It presents no survival advantage, because it does not convey any survival-relevant and interpretable information to the organism.

Now you're projecting your conscious experience onto simple creatures with very little brain. Here's the thing; a survival advantage doesn't have to be interpreted; all it has to do is provoke a reaction.

And in that state it must remain for thousands or millions of years, while the alleged slow-grinding of evolution works its way forward. In fact, the organism which has its survival attention divided between, say, its sensitive spot and its other survival faculties is not at an advantage but at a disadvantage.

This is just nonsense. Do you think if a wildebeest starts running because it sees a lion, is going to stop if the cunning lion roars?

The case becomes even more clear in the case of something like the bacterial flagellum. There's not only no utility to an undeveloped flagellum -- it's most definitely an injury, a survival-liability that, according to survival of the fittest, ought to result in the immediate death of the organism. But the Evolutionists' story requires us to think that not only did the injured organism persist, contrary to survival of the fittest, but that the injury was selected-for for millions of years; and not just in one organism, but in millions of others.

What do you actually know about bacteria?

So the story eats itself.

Well, by design, your ideologically motivated version of the story eats itself.

If survival of the fittest is true, then linearly-developing organisms cannot develop unless the mutation represents a decisive survival advantage at every requisite stage. The second it does not, survival of the fittest kills the organism.

Nearly every species that has ever existed is now extinct; they either evolved, or died out. A rough average of the lifespan of a species is 1 to 10 million years, so it isn't quite the second they are out competed.

These guys know more about it than you or I:
"As with the evolution of other complex structures and processes (29–32), we have shown the bacterial flagellum too originated from “so simple a beginning,” in this case, a single gene that underwent successive duplications and subsequent diversification during the early evolution of Bacteria."

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/p ... 20Bacteria.

So "appeal to authority"?

No, it's just a citation with a reference, which anyone who has been within sniffing distance of academic study would understand. 'Appeal to authority' is when you say something is true because someone you happen to belief said it; it's how religions, including yours work. In effect it is the opposite to ad hominem which is dismissing an argument because of some perception you have of the author; as you do here:

I don't think they do. I think they're ideologically motivated.

It's pretty clear that you are no sort of biologist, so even if the authors of the paper were ideologically motivated, and even if the conclusion of their research is wrong, it remains almost certain that they know more about the subject than you. Unless they are outright liars, they certainly know more than I do about the twiddly bits of some bacteria, but in the field in which I know more about than they, and you, what they are presenting amounts to an underdetermined hypothesis. Even though I don't pretend to understand all the details, the paper was written at the University of Texas, Austin, by Renyi Liu and Howard Ochman, neither of whom have anything in their biography to suggest they are virulent anti-theists. It was edited at University of California, Irvine, by Francisco J. Ayala, a former priest, and the references are commensurate with the article. The paper has all the hallmarks of a serious piece of work. Since you think referencing work by third parties can be dismissed as

"appeal to authority"?

how has your own research demonstrated that the paper is in fact an elaborately conceived and executed ideologically motivated error, if not fraud?

Very few people thought the failure of Aristotelian cosmology was immanent. But it was.

That's because very few people had looked through a telescope. (imminent rather than immanent)

Aristotelianism, as you note from Kuhn's account and others, had become a sclerotic orthodoxy that was stifling cosmology, just as Aristotelian assumptions had once stifled medicine, too...and for thousands of years.

If Aristotle stifled cosmology and medicine that was because of his adoption as a pillar of the stifling cosmology of Christianity. Aristotle's 'unmoved mover' is an argument you still use.

What if, as Thomas Nagel asserts, Evolutionism is just another sclerotic orthodoxy that's stifling science? I think he's right, of course: but even from a secular perspective, which is Nagel's perspective, there's a powerful case to be made that that is exactly what Evolutionism has become.

Nagel's point is not that evolution doesn't happen, rather he doesn't believe that it can be explained purely in terms of materialist physics. Not many physicists believe that physics can be explained that way either.

We're failing to understand humanity -- its meaning, origin, morals, teleology and all of that -- because we're addicted to the paradgim that lets us reject God.

Not according to you we're not:

...belief in God has verifiably not died at all...there are more Theists in the world now than at any point in history.

And we're afraid to question it now, because man does not want God back in the equation...not because it's actually the right science, or the truth.

You can have God as your explanation for any scientific fact you choose, but in the day to day business of making things work, while you can stick God into any equation, unless you assign him a particular value, it won't make any difference.

[Immanuel Can]

Break down the preliminary stages, and you'll see it won't.

That's exactly what I do see. Early prey were hunted by early hunters.

No. I mean the early stages of the alleged "evolving" of the particular animal in question.

The alleged "light-sensitive" area, putatively eventually to end up being an eye, is at first barely light-sensitive at all. Its sensitivity is utterly uninterpretable to the rudimentary organism that has it, and it amounts to little more than a sunburn spot would.

Is this original research of yours, or are you deferring to people who know better than you?

Sorry...it's very logical. If evolution is progressive and slow, what we would expect to find is an infinite variety of underevolved "missing links" in every single species on earth. According to the very terms upon which the Evolutionism narrative itself insists, there ought to have been literally millions of failed and partly-developed cases for every single adaptation that ever took place. And yet we don't find nearly the numbers, or nearly the unbroken and smooth record of multitudinous "transitional forms" that the Evolutionism narrative would require us to expect to find.

However, all this is moot, except in the human case. And there, we find the "record" even less satisfactory than in all the "lower" species. So unsatisfactory, in fact, that since the first articulation of the theory, it's been repeatedly necessary to fake the "finding" of various "transitional" humanioids, in order to keep the story going.

But why should it be so hard? For every finished "stage" in our evolution, there ought to have been millions of years of very gradual "transitional forms," and we should be knee deep in millions of examples of anthropithecus, and Java man, and Peking man, and Lucies, and such, and every now-extinct transition of each to the next.

And yet, we're not. Why not?

And in that state it must remain for thousands or millions of years, while the alleged slow-grinding of evolution works its way forward. In fact, the organism which has its survival attention divided between, say, its sensitive spot and its other survival faculties is not at an advantage but at a disadvantage.

This is just nonsense.

Not at all. It's bound to be true, in fact, if we take the Evolutionism narrative at all seriously. Each alleged "survival" advantage isn't an "advantage" at all, unless the "advantage-producing" appendage is at least marginally functional. Before that, it's just a liability.

The case becomes even more clear in the case of something like the bacterial flagellum. There's not only no utility to an undeveloped flagellum -- it's most definitely an injury, a survival-liability that, according to survival of the fittest, ought to result in the immediate death of the organism. But the Evolutionists' story requires us to think that not only did the injured organism persist, contrary to survival of the fittest, but that the injury was selected-for for millions of years; and not just in one organism, but in millions of others.

What do you actually know about bacteria?

I know lots. One thing about flagella is that they are made up of around...I think it's 43...separate parts that work like an outboard motor, because they have to rotate the flagella at literally hundreds of rotations a second, so that the "whip" effect that can propel the organism. Before that, it's effectively an anchor...a weight that not only doesn't propel the organism, but literally anchors it down and makes it far slower than other bacteria-style organisms.

So a bacterium with an underformed flagella is not at an advantage, but an overwhelming surival disadvantage. And the "motor" of the flagella will simply not work if all its parts are not 100% functional. So there's no reasonable gradualist or Evolutionary account of that, nor even an explanation of how, in theory, it could be possible.

If survival of the fittest is true, then linearly-developing organisms cannot develop unless the mutation represents a decisive survival advantage at every requisite stage. The second it does not, survival of the fittest kills the organism.

Nearly every species that has ever existed is now extinct...

No...I'm speaking of "evolution" within a species: not the evolution of different species.

I don't think they do. I think they're ideologically motivated.

It's pretty clear that you are no sort of biologist, so even if the authors of the paper were ideologically motivated, and even if the conclusion of their research is wrong, it remains almost certain that they know more about the subject than you.

And it remains certain, as well, that I don't share their ideological motivations. Do you count that as a disadvantage?

Very few people thought the failure of Aristotelian cosmology was immanent. But it was.

That's because very few people had looked through a telescope.

It wasn't that, but okay: the point's the same, so I won't dispute that. It's that science rides a particular paradigm a long while, until something comes along that proves it was wrong all along. Only when a critical mass of contrary data has been piled up with the scientific establishment allow the paradigm shift to take place: until then, they're resistant.

Aristotelianism, as you note from Kuhn's account and others, had become a sclerotic orthodoxy that was stifling cosmology, just as Aristotelian assumptions had once stifled medicine, too...and for thousands of years.

If Aristotle stifled cosmology and medicine that was because of his adoption as a pillar of the stifling cosmology of Christianity.

Aristotle was not a Christian: didn't you know?

It was the Catholic Church that bought in wholesale to Aristotelianism. So much so, in fact, that it was they who resisted the Galileo discovery. But if you read the history, you'll find out that as much as the Catholics opposed Galileo, the scientific establishment of Aristotelians objected to him even more strenuously, and the resistance of the Catholics came from that source, ultimately.

What if, as Thomas Nagel asserts, Evolutionism is just another sclerotic orthodoxy that's stifling science? I think he's right, of course: but even from a secular perspective, which is Nagel's perspective, there's a powerful case to be made that that is exactly what Evolutionism has become.

Nagel's point is not that evolution doesn't happen, rather he doesn't believe that it can be explained purely in terms of materialist physics.

You didn't read the book? He's quite explicit that it's the Materialist-Darwinian view he finds, as he puts it "prima facie highly implausible." (6)

What he says is that he HOPES that at some time in the future a new kind of secular paradigm will emerge, rather than any Theistic one. But he says he can't help but recognize that the Evolutionary Progressivist story is stifling science, and secularists need to stop "browbeating" (7) secular culture and "wean themselves" of their Darwinian just-so story. (127)

We're failing to understand humanity -- its meaning, origin, morals, teleology and all of that -- because we're addicted to the paradgim that lets us reject God.

Not according to you we're not:

I'm speaking of the "we" of secular, Atheistic Westerners, who imagine that the 96% of the rest of the world are fools who believe in impossible things. After all, the West is where you and I live.

And we're afraid to question it now, because man does not want God back in the equation...not because it's actually the right science, or the truth.

You can have God as your explanation for any scientific fact you choose...

I didn't say that. Nor would I. That would be "God-of-the-gaps" thinking, and I don't do that.

What I said was that those who prefer the Evolutionists' story have a strong bad motive for clinging to it, one that comes from their desire that they should be allowed to continue to insist that God must not be allowed to exist.

Not that such a project isn't doomed, of course....

[Will Bouwman]

Is this original research of yours, or are you deferring to people who know better than you?

Sorry...it's very logical.

Logic isn't science. There's nothing wrong with using logic to generate hypotheses, but then assuming some story without doing the hard work is what cranks do.

According to the very terms upon which the Evolutionism narrative itself insists, there ought to have been literally millions of failed and partly-developed cases for every single adaptation that ever took place. And yet we don't find nearly the numbers, or nearly the unbroken and smooth record of multitudinous "transitional forms" that the Evolutionism narrative would require us to expect to find.

Whatever your logic says we should find, biology, chemistry and geology, not to mention observation tell a different story. During your lifetime, you know you have shared the planet with countless creatures that were born lived and died. What evidence do you have for any of them? Why are we not knee deep in their remains? Consider this:
"Every fossil is a small miracle. As author Bill Bryson notes in his book A Short History of Nearly Everything, only an estimated one bone in a billion gets fossilised. By that calculation the entire fossil legacy of the 320-odd million people alive in the US today will equate to approximately 60 bones – or a little over a quarter of a human skeleton.

But that’s just the chance of getting fossilised in the first place. Assuming this handful of bones could be buried anywhere in the US’s 9.8 million sq km (3.8 million square miles), then the chances of anyone finding these bones in the future are almost non-existent.

Fossilisation is so unlikely that scientists estimate that less one-tenth of 1% of all the animal species that have ever lived have become fossils. Far fewer of them have been found."
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2018 ... %20fossils.

However, all this is moot, except in the human case. And there, we find the "record" even less satisfactory than in all the "lower" species. So unsatisfactory, in fact, that since the first articulation of the theory, it's been repeatedly necessary to fake the "finding" of various "transitional" humanioids, in order to keep the story going.

You are only fooling yourself. You have one example of fakery.

So a bacterium with an underformed flagella is not at an advantage, but an overwhelming surival disadvantage. And the "motor" of the flagella will simply not work if all its parts are not 100% functional. So there's no reasonable gradualist or Evolutionary account of that, nor even an explanation of how, in theory, it could be possible.

All you had to do to discover none of that is true was Google 'bacterial flagellum evolution'. Here's a taste:
"Actually, flagella vary widely from one species to another, and some of the components can perform useful functions by themselves. They are anything but irreducibly complex"
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn ... y-complex/

If Aristotle stifled cosmology and medicine that was because of his adoption as a pillar of the stifling cosmology of Christianity.

Aristotle was not a Christian: didn't you know?

What is the point of that question?

...those who prefer the Evolutionists' story have a strong bad motive for clinging to it, one that comes from their desire that they should be allowed to continue to insist that God must not be allowed to exist.

I suggest that's your ideologically motivated logic again. What evidence do you have for your claim?

[Immanuel Can]

Is this original research of yours, or are you deferring to people who know better than you?

Sorry...it's very logical.

Logic isn't science.

It's worse than that: science is utterly logic-dependant. There would be no science at all without logic.

During your lifetime, you know you have shared the planet with countless creatures that were born lived and died.

You're missing the point. If they didn't "evolve," then what we SHOULD find is exactly, in fact, what we DO find: that there is a total shortage of transitional forms. Where are our fish-on-the-way-to-being-dogs? Where are our cats-on-the-way-to-being-birds? Where are our underdeveloped-apeoid-humans? What we find instead is many distinct species: but absolutely no evidence of inter-species evolution.

Species don't become one another, by definition. But Evolutionism says they have to: and not just one or two times, or even ten or fifty, but billions of times, with transitional forms abounding, and nothing so common among fossils as transitional forms.

We don't find any of that. So we have any right to question the theory.

However, all this is moot, except in the human case. And there, we find the "record" even less satisfactory than in all the "lower" species. So unsatisfactory, in fact, that since the first articulation of the theory, it's been repeatedly necessary to fake the "finding" of various "transitional" humanioids, in order to keep the story going.

You are only fooling yourself. You have one example of fakery.

Every stage is a fake. And not just Piltdown. Nebraska man was made out of a pig's tooth. Java Man was a gibbon. Neanderthal has now been identified as a modern human. Somebody's trying way too hard to manufacture fossils.

But if the whole "ascent of man" thing had any truth to it at all, then practically every human fossil we find ought to be some transitional form, some half-way developed example of the billions of "mistakes" that evolution had to include in the messy process of killing off all the randomly "unadaptive".

So a bacterium with an underformed flagella is not at an advantage, but an overwhelming surival disadvantage. And the "motor" of the flagella will simply not work if all its parts are not 100% functional. So there's no reasonable gradualist or Evolutionary account of that, nor even an explanation of how, in theory, it could be possible.

All you had to do to discover none of that is true was Google 'bacterial flagellum evolution'. Here's a taste:
"Actually, flagella vary widely from one species to another,

Not the point. I say again: Evolutionism has to explain not variations among different species, but the process by which a single species can develop into what it is. You're trying to explain intraspecies evolutionary change by referring to a different story, one called "interspecies" evolution. Each has its own serious problems, but they're different problems.

If Aristotle stifled cosmology and medicine that was because of his adoption as a pillar of the stifling cosmology of Christianity.

Aristotle was not a Christian: didn't you know?

What is the point of that question?

Well, I was surprised. Aristotle's not part of Christian thinking. True, he was made a late adoption by Catholic Natural Law advocates like Aquinas, so one could argue that he was some contributor to Catholicism; but he had no Christian suppositions of his own at all, and most Christians give little or no thought to him or his ideas. He lived in the 4th Century BC, in Greece, not in 1st Century Israel. Why should they?

...those who prefer the Evolutionists' story have a strong bad motive for clinging to it, one that comes from their desire that they should be allowed to continue to insist that God must not be allowed to exist.

I suggest that's your ideologically motivated logic again. What evidence do you have for your claim?

That they cling to ridiculous and debunked explanations long beyond the time when they ought to have let them go...as they did with Aristotle's idea that the universe was eternal in the past. It took the general scientific community until about the '60s to admit that one, though it was effectively scientifically proved by 1929, with the discovery of the red shift effect. For some reason, secular scientists seem very, very reluctant to give up any theory that they hope might eliminate God...rather like Evolutionism, if Nagel or Berlinski or any of their many other critics is right.

It's funny: secular scientists claim they love disproofs of theories. They say that "falsification" is just as helpful to the progress of science as is are proofs or demonstrations of success, and that eliminating the wrong theories is just as important as verifying the right ones. But when their own theories are falsified, they get horribly thin-skinned sometimes, as Kuhn and others have noted.

[Will Bouwman]

Logic isn't science.

It's worse than that: science is utterly logic-dependant. There would be no science at all without logic.

You could make a case that in order for us to make sense of the natural world, we have to organise it within a structure that is essentially logical, which is more or less the point that Kuhn made famous but had antecedents. As I wrote for Philosophy Now:
Ludwik Fleck, a biologist, introduced the idea of a ‘thought collective’ – a group of scientists who share some common theory and working practices, their scientific method, and who collaborate to develop that research structure to its fullest potential. Michael Polanyi, a professor of chemistry, made a similar point. Science, in his experience, was not a single objective method that could simply be prescribed and followed; rather scientists put into practice the philosophy and methods they have been taught by other scientists. Essentially, once they have been initiated into a thought collective, they contribute to that collective. The physicist Max Planck, like Einstein, never fully accepted the interpretations of quantum mechanics given by younger scientists; but he observed that “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” So a prominent biologist, chemist, and physicist were all saying that in their professional experience, science did not work as philosophers such as Popper thought it should, and there isn’t one scientific method, there are many. And in 1962 Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which made everyone pay attention to the growing conviction that science is not the pristine singular enterprise philosophers had been trying to describe.
https://philosophynow.org/issues/133/Ph ... _Millennia
But as Richard Feynman said:
It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2xhb-SdK0g

There would be no science at all without logic.

Perhaps, but again; logic by itself is not science.

During your lifetime, you know you have shared the planet with countless creatures that were born lived and died.

You're missing the point. If they didn't "evolve," then what we SHOULD find is exactly, in fact, what we DO find: that there is a total shortage of transitional forms.

The point you are missing about evolution is that every organism that ever has been, or ever will be is a transitional form. That includes you with your vestigial tail and wisdom teeth.

Where are our fish-on-the-way-to-being-dogs?

If they ever become dogs, they are currently fish.

Where are our cats-on-the-way-to-being-birds?

If they ever become birds, they are currently cats.

Where are our underdeveloped-apeoid-humans?

You don't have to look very far for those.

What we find instead is many distinct species: but absolutely no evidence of inter-species evolution.

What we find is every organism at the precise stage of evolution that it is now.

Species don't become one another, by definition.

Well again, you can make a case that for human science to be manageable, we have understand what each other is talking about. Any suggestion that the language we use to communicate (directly) affects what happens in the natural world is nonsense.

But Evolutionism says they have to: and not just one or two times, or even ten or fifty, but billions of times, with transitional forms abounding, and nothing so common among fossils as transitional forms.

We don't find any of that.

You don't. I do.

So we have any right to question the theory.

And you have every right to believe that God created all the creatures on Earth, that you are not perfect because the mother of us all was persuaded to eat an apple by a talking snake, that Noah had dinosaurs on the Ark, that the world is 6000 years old and despite all appearances, completely flat.

You have one example of fakery.

Every stage is a fake. And not just Piltdown. Nebraska man was made out of a pig's tooth. Java Man was a gibbon. Neanderthal has now been identified as a modern human. Somebody's trying way too hard to manufacture fossils.

Yep; you can believe that too.

But if the whole "ascent of man" thing had any truth to it at all, then practically every human fossil we find ought to be some transitional form...

Which is what I believe.

[Immanuel Can]

Logic isn't science.

It's worse than that: science is utterly logic-dependant. There would be no science at all without logic.

You could make a case that in order for us to make sense of the natural world, we have to organise it within a structure that is essentially logical,

You couldn't "make a case" without logic. And logic underlies all scientific explanation. If the explanation isn't "logical," then that's the definition of an implausible style of explanation.

There would be no science at all without logic.

Perhaps, but again; logic by itself is not science.

Logic relates to science the way mathematics relates to good accountancy practices. The former is the master-discipline that makes the latter even possible.

During your lifetime, you know you have shared the planet with countless creatures that were born lived and died.

You're missing the point. If they didn't "evolve," then what we SHOULD find is exactly, in fact, what we DO find: that there is a total shortage of transitional forms.

The point you are missing about evolution is that every organism that ever has been, or ever will be is a transitional form.

I'm not missing it. It's not true.

To call any organism a "transitional form" is already to assume that a "transition" is taking place. In other words, it's to assume the wanted conclusion, not to do anything to prove it. Moreover, the number of transitional forms necessary to the production of just one of our current forms of life should outnumber our current examples by millions. And yet we find none.

What we find instead is many distinct species: but absolutely no evidence of inter-species evolution.

What we find is every organism at the precise stage of evolution that it is now.

Now you're getting the point...we should ask, "How does that happen?" How does every organism today (let's call that "modern form"), how does every modern form organism end up being modern form, instead of being merely almost-modern, or going-to-be-modern, or early pre-modern, or pre-modern, or pre-pre-modern...how has the great god Evolution managed to arrange that all members of any species arrive at precisely the same point at exactly the same time, so as to form their distinct species, rather than having so many variations and differences that there is no such thing as an identifiable "species" at all?

Species don't become one another, by definition.

Well again, you can make a case that for human science to be manageable, we have understand what each other is talking about. Any suggestion that the language we use to communicate (directly) affects what happens in the natural world is nonsense.

Species is a basic biological category, not a mere language trick. It signifies a reality...usually marked by such observations as interfertility and the possibility of reproduction-in-kind.

You have one example of fakery.

Every stage is a fake. And not just Piltdown. Nebraska man was made out of a pig's tooth. Java Man was a gibbon. Neanderthal has now been identified as a modern human. Somebody's trying way too hard to manufacture fossils.

Yep; you can believe that too.

I do.

[Harbal]

Neanderthal has now been identified as a modern human.

That's interesting, and surprising. Can you give your source for that revelation? I'd like to know more about it.

[Immanuel Can]

Neanderthal has now been identified as a modern human.

That's interesting, and surprising. Can you give your source for that revelation? I'd like to know more about it.

It has to do with that "interfertility" criterion. Many evolutionists now believe that Neanderthals and modern humans were contemporaneous and that there's evidence of "interbreeding." So that means that the two are no longer distinct species at all...but just two varieties of the same essential species, the variations not rising to the level of a distinct genus at all. See, for one example, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-018-0735-8.

[Harbal]

Neanderthal has now been identified as a modern human.

That's interesting, and surprising. Can you give your source for that revelation? I'd like to know more about it.

It has to do with that "interfertility" criterion. Many evolutionists now believe that Neanderthals and modern humans were contemporaneous and that there's evidence of "interbreeding." So that means that the two are no longer distinct species at all...but just two varieties of the same essential species, the variations not rising to the level of a distinct genus at all. See, for one example, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-018-0735-8.

That's not really new information. It has long been known that Neanderthals and humans interbred. Humans and Neanderthals had a common ancestor, and were still close enough to be capable of interbreeding, whereas species like chimpanzees, who we also share common ancestry with, are too far along a different evolutionary branch for that to be possible. This has all been known about for a long time; even I knew it.

[Immanuel Can]

That's interesting, and surprising. Can you give your source for that revelation? I'd like to know more about it.

It has to do with that "interfertility" criterion. Many evolutionists now believe that Neanderthals and modern humans were contemporaneous and that there's evidence of "interbreeding." So that means that the two are no longer distinct species at all...but just two varieties of the same essential species, the variations not rising to the level of a distinct genus at all. See, for one example, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-018-0735-8.

That's not really new information. It has long been known that Neanderthals and humans interbred.

Then that means they were not distinct species at all. What makes a cat a distinct species from dogs, or dolphins from whales, is that they cannot interbreed. Apes and humans, too, cannot interbreed...though I know nobody personally who has tested that hypothesis.

We were promised "the origin of species," and only got "the many variations within a single species." Quite a bait and switch, really.

[Harbal]

It has to do with that "interfertility" criterion. Many evolutionists now believe that Neanderthals and modern humans were contemporaneous and that there's evidence of "interbreeding." So that means that the two are no longer distinct species at all...but just two varieties of the same essential species, the variations not rising to the level of a distinct genus at all. See, for one example, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-018-0735-8.

That's not really new information. It has long been known that Neanderthals and humans interbred.

Then that means they were not distinct species at all. What makes a cat a distinct species from dogs, or dolphins from whales, is that they cannot interbreed. Apes and humans, too, cannot interbreed...though I know nobody personally who has tested that hypothesis.

We were promised "the origin of species," and only got "the many variations within a single species." Quite a bait and switch, really.

You would never concede that human beings evolved from primitive organisms, under any circumstances, and no matter what evidence was presented to you. At least let's not pretend it otherwise.

[Immanuel Can]

You would never concede that human beings evolved from primitive organisms, under any circumstances, and no matter what evidence was presented to you. At least let's not pretend it otherwise.

I would never concede that water is dry, that the moon is made out of cheese, or that pigs can fly, either. But I don't think that's a stroke against me.