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(Daily Mail) Amusing The Church of England will tomorrow officially apologise to Charles Darwin for misunderstanding his theory of evolution and biting his style [w/pic]   (dailymail.co.uk) divider line 240
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strangeguitar 2008-09-13 08:27:51 PM  
Nothing like being timely.

 
DamnYankees [TotalFark] 2008-09-13 08:35:06 PM  
So in about 200 years we can expect the religious right in our country to do the same?

 
Aarontology [TotalFark] 2008-09-13 08:35:47 PM  
You know what would be cool? If this lead to a schism.

 
DistendedPendulusFrenulum 2008-09-13 08:36:14 PM  
DamnYankees: So in about 200 years we can expect the religious right in our country to do the same?

I think by then we will be in serious decline, and all scientific research will have moved to Brazil

.

 
This About That [TotalFark] 2008-09-13 08:37:00 PM  
Perhaps the Church of England is beginning to evolve.

 
H_is_for_Heretic 2008-09-13 08:54:12 PM  
i.dailymail.co.uk
Jeez, unexpectedly scrolling down onto this... she makes that portrait of Darwin look sexy.

 
CravenMorehead 2008-09-13 08:56:16 PM  
Church: "Sorry, our bad."

 
Zamboro [recently expired TotalFark] 2008-09-13 09:32:29 PM  
....And the spotlight continues to grow. =]

 
ninjakirby [TotalFark] 2008-09-13 09:40:35 PM  
i2.photobucket.com

 
TheGrayCat [TotalFark] 2008-09-13 09:44:36 PM  
H_is_for_Heretic: Jeez, unexpectedly scrolling down onto this... she makes that portrait of Darwin look sexy.

Is that Senator Palpatine in a wig?

 
Zamboro [recently expired TotalFark] 2008-09-13 09:53:56 PM  
So if they accept evolution and do not read Genesis literally, there was no Adam and Eve in the garden, no snake or apple....So whence cometh original sin, for which Jesus had to die?

It's really pretty tightly interwoven. Without certain pieces the whole thing collapses.

 
abb3w [TotalFark] 2008-09-13 09:59:02 PM  
DamnYankees: So in about 200 years we can expect the religious right in our country to do the same?

I dunno; the Brits shipped off the worst of the religious nutjobs to America.

This About That: Perhaps the Church of England is beginning to evolve mutate .

FTFY.

 
ninjakirby [TotalFark] 2008-09-13 10:01:00 PM  
eqtworld: /yeah i know "god could have started the big bang" but how much further away can your God of the gaps in knowledge can he be? He's been absent for 13.7 billion years? Why worship something that caused the big bang?

Well if you think of it like an algorithmic process unfolding, which will eventually reach a certain plateau of complexity - then God comes down and starts handing out souls - you could work it that way.

That would make a pretty interesting religion actually. You change the concept of 'created in his image' from meaning human, to meaning 'x degree of intelligence', and allow that all beings that reach 'x degree' fit His image.

That would make the search for intelligent life a religious duty, if anything.

Anyone want to start a tax shelter with me? This thing might have legs.

 
Tr0mBoNe [TotalFark] 2008-09-13 10:04:25 PM  
Zamboro: So if they accept evolution and do not read Genesis literally, there was no Adam and Eve in the garden, no snake or apple....So whence cometh original sin, for which Jesus had to die?

It's really pretty tightly interwoven. Without certain pieces the whole thing collapses.


They can still take the events of the New Testament as historical fact.

 
Zamboro [recently expired TotalFark] 2008-09-13 10:11:38 PM  
ninjakirby: "That would make a pretty interesting religion actually. You change the concept of 'created in his image' from meaning human, to meaning 'x degree of intelligence', and allow that all beings that reach 'x degree' fit His image.

That would make the search for intelligent life a religious duty, if anything."


I always imagined a scenario in which the inevitable end result of evolution towards larger, more sophisticated brains was an artificially facilitated transition into beings of pure energy, directed and organized by clouds of nanites. I imagined that this was the last stage of the evolutionary 'life cycle' of every species as a large, decentralized organism in and of itself, with their home planet being a sort of egg. Of course they would embark upon a journey to distant start systems in search of fertile planets to seed by deliberately inducing biogenesis. In essence, this was 'their' reproductive mechanism. There were trillions of others, the disembodied forms of intelligent species from all over the universe, some of which had been in the 'final form' for millions of years, simply communing with others like them and exploring. For the most part all such beings would travel as a single discrete cloud of consciousnesses, which would itself represent yet another higher form of super-organism with the individual disembodied mind as its equivalent of a cell.


....But then I was 9, imaginative, and a voracious consumer of science fiction. Still, you could pull a better religion than scientology out of your ass if you made something like that the "$60,000 secret" rather than the Xenu business.

 
ninjakirby [TotalFark] 2008-09-13 10:12:36 PM  
eqtworld: It's like walking up to a dog the day they evolve to be able to understand simple concepts and saying "starting today, humping other dogs is evil and I'll send you to hell if you do it"

If a dog also lie with human leg, as he lieth with a biatch, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.

 
ninjakirby [TotalFark] 2008-09-13 10:14:35 PM  
eqtworld: If we never had perfection (eden) and Eve never defied god in a world free of death and pain, then giving those things to us as punishment is simply evil. Pain and death and cancer existed before we were even human

Well my hypothetical doesn't have those things, obviously. I was just working in the Catholic doctrine for taste.

 
Bevets [TotalFark] 2008-09-13 10:30:55 PM  
In a bizarre step, the Church will address its contrition directly to the Victorian scientist himself, even though he died 126 years ago.

But the move was greeted with derision last night, with Darwin's great-great-grandson dismissing it as 'pointless' and other critics branding it 'ludicrous'...

The Church is also anxious to counter the view that its teaching is incompatible with science. It wants to distance itself from fundamentalist Christians, who believe in the Biblical account of the creation of the world in seven days.


I have lately read Morley's Life of Voltaire and he insists strongly that direct attacks on Christianity (even when written with the wonderful force and vigor of Voltaire) produce little permanent effect: real good seems only to follow the slow and silent side attacks. ~ Charles Darwin

Darwin's theory made nonsense of all of this. He said that the world was a constantly changing place and that all living creatures were changing too.

Far from being created in God's own image, Darwin suggested that human life had probably started out as something far more primitive -- the story of Adam and Eve was a myth.

No wonder that the Church was outraged. ~ 'Controversy' exhibit at Down House

Probably, so far as I know, there is no professor of Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university who does not believe that the writer(s) of Genesis 1-11 intended to convey to their readers the ideas that (a) creation took place in a series of six days which were the same as the days of 24 hours we now experience; . . . Or, to put it negatively, the apologetic arguments which suppose the "days" of creation to be long eras of time, the figures of years not to be chronological, and the flood to be a merely local Mesopotamian flood, are not taken seriously by any such professors, as far as I know. ~ James Barr Regius Professor of Hebrew at Christ Church, Oxford

 
Coronach 2008-09-13 10:34:59 PM  
Glad you could make it Bev.

 
Zamboro [recently expired TotalFark] 2008-09-13 10:42:25 PM  
Bevets: "Probably, so far as I know, there is no professor of Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university who does not believe that the writer(s) of Genesis 1-11 intended to convey to their readers the ideas that (a) creation took place in a series of six days which were the same as the days of 24 hours we now experience"

I agree, that's exactly what the authors believed and intended to convey. They were wrong, for the same reason that the authors of all other creation myths were wrong; They were making some of our first, worst attempts at explaining origins without the benefit of working scientific methodology. Theirs were guesses based upon analogies involving experiences familiar to humans in that period (forming figures from clay, for instance) as well as the imagined properties and dispositions of gods.

i63.photobucket.com

Why don't you defend the factual veracity of Yggdrasil, the world tree?

 
Coronach 2008-09-13 10:42:33 PM  
Bevets: I have lately read Morley's Life of Voltaire and he insists strongly that direct attacks on Christianity (even when written with the wonderful force and vigor of Voltaire) produce little permanent effect: real good seems only to follow the slow and silent side attacks. ~ Charles Darwin



You seem to be attributing this "quote" to Charles Darwin, I find no record of such a thing.

 
ninjakirby [TotalFark] 2008-09-13 10:42:45 PM  
Lets test what happens if no one responds to Bevets.

 
ninjakirby [TotalFark] 2008-09-13 10:43:21 PM  
Dammit!

 
mrwknd [TotalFark] 2008-09-13 10:46:23 PM  
Hell, why stop there.

/That list has been evolving.

 
ninjakirby [TotalFark] 2008-09-13 10:53:06 PM  

Well since that game is busted, I fall back to my standard play.

i2.photobucket.comBevets: James Barr Regius Professor of Hebrew at Christ Church, Oxford

Here we have to give some thought to a view that has been propounded, namely that the relations between theology and natural science provide something like a kind of natural theology. The development of such a view has been a feature of certain later phases of the Barthian tradition in which some kind of natural theology has come to be tentatively reaffirmed.
How far, however, can any such view claim to have biblical support? On the face of it, only to a very slight degree. Within the pages of scripture, scientific questioning and scientific investigation are very thinly spread. [...]

These involve simple, pre-scientific, observations of nature, but no more than this. They are illustrations which comment on human customs and mores, and this is their purpose and interest. They are no more science than La Fontaine's fables are science.
More might be made, perhaps, of the creation story of Genesis itself. For generations people have become accustomed to say that the first chapter of Genesis did not purport to be a scientific account of the origins of the world, and this was an understandable apologetic response to the fact that the account is not scientifically true. But to say that Genesis does not purport to be scientific may be a mistaken sort of apologetic argument. In its own context and purpose, for the people who elaborated it and composed it, it was a sort of scientific account. Something akin to the thinking of Mesopotamian list science may have lain behind it, and this, with the implication of transreligious and transcultural understanding, lends a certain tinge of natural theology. The writers of Genesis meant it as a cosmological organization of the world, in which a place and role are given for the great outer elements, light and dark, sky, earth, and sea, sun, moon, and stars, and also for the closer, inner environment, vegetable and animal, and finally for humanity at the centre of it all. Its seven days, linked by the subsequent genealogies with the chronology which runs down through the following centuries, deliberately inaugurate the exact temporal and calendrical framework for later history. To us none of this constitutes a science; it is closer to legend or mythology.2 But to them it was as close as they could come to a sort of science. However, none of the base on which it was worked out was scientific. They had no means of knowing how the world had begun, no means of experimentation, no methods of research other than the most obvious human experience. Their view of the world rested on religious tradition, both without and within Israel, and on the refashioning of these traditions in order to fit with the monotheistic deity of Israel. ~ James Barr, Gifford Lecture - Biblical Faith and Natural Theology 1990-1991

 
mamoru [TotalFark] 2008-09-13 10:59:16 PM  
So... Will they give Darwin's descendants the choice of cake or death?

/cake for me too, please

 
Kome [TotalFark] 2008-09-13 11:02:50 PM  
mamoru: So... Will they give Darwin's descendants the choice of cake or death?

/cake for me too, please


Death... No, cake!

Ah, you said death!

Well, I meant cake.

Oh, alright.

 
EZ1923 2008-09-13 11:03:23 PM  
mamoru: So... Will they give Darwin's descendants the choice of cake or death?

/cake for me too, please


Sorry, we're all out of cake.

 
clifton [TotalFark] 2008-09-13 11:14:22 PM  
I see that Mr. Quote-boto made an appearance.

 
ninjakirby [TotalFark] 2008-09-13 11:26:46 PM  
eqtworld: Jesus died for your inclusive fitness.

I am the lord thy Allele, thou shalt have no other amino acids before me.

You shall not make for yourself a genome, whether in the form of anything that is in greater complexity, or that is of lesser complexity, or that which is in the primordial water from long ago.

You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your Allele am a Selfish Gene, punishing children for the unfitness of parents, to the third and fourth generation of those who reject me, until extinction.

But showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who are fit and keep my commandments, You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your Allele, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misunderstands his definition.

Observe the reproduction cycle and keep it encoding, as the Lord your Allele commanded you. For six days you shall labour and do all your work.

But the period of ovulation is a sabbath to the Lord your Allele; you shall do much work - to your son and your daughter, andr your male and female slaves, and your ox and your donkey, and any of your livestock, and the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may reproduce as well as you.

Honor your father and your mother, as the Lord your Allele commanded you, so that your days may be long and that it may go well with you in the land that the Lord your Allele is giving you.

You shall not murder, accept such act shall benefit the group as a whole.

Neither shall you commit cuckoldry, so long as you may be discovered.

Neither shall you steal, unless those victims are of poor observation and weak in attack, and such an act may provide for the greater of the whole.

You shall you bear false witness against your neighbour, so as to maintain the power of elusivity.

You shall you covet your neighbour's wife. You shall desire your neighbour's house, and field, and male and female slave, and ox, and donkey, and anything that belongs to your neighbour; but be aware of the group and its needs before your own.


Pff, 12 points of Evolution. Who needs em? Eh? Eh?

 
CDP [TotalFark] 2008-09-13 11:40:24 PM  
Coronach: Bevets: I have lately read Morley's Life of Voltaire and he insists strongly that direct attacks on Christianity (even when written with the wonderful force and vigor of Voltaire) produce little permanent effect: real good seems only to follow the slow and silent side attacks. ~ Charles Darwin



You seem to be attributing this "quote" to Charles Darwin, I find no record of such a thing.


It is not the first time that Bevets has broken the 9th Commandment in regards to Mr. Darwin...

Bevets are you ever going to respond to this?

I found another example of an out of context quote on your web site.

Here is the quote from your web site:


If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. Origin of Species (1859) p.189
And the link: Link (new window)

Here is the quote in the correct context along with some additional commentary.


If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case. No doubt many organs exist of which we do not know the transitional grades, more especially if we look to much-isolated species, round which, according to my theory, there has been much extinction. Or again, if we look to an organ common to all the members of a large class, for in this latter case the organ must have been first formed at an extremely remote period, since which all the many members of the class have been developed; and in order to discover the early transitional grades through which the organ has passed, we should have to look to very ancient ancestral forms, long since become extinct."

Fomrner scientist Michael Behe quotes this in Chapter two of his book. Well not exactly; Behe quotes only the first sentence, leaving his readers in the dark about the fact that Darwin answered his own question, and that he realized evidence might be irretrievably buried in the ash heap of history. This is a dishonest practice known as "quote mining."
And the link: Link (new window)

So far I am two for two when reviewing the quotes on you web site for proper context.

You need to be careful now some people might start to get the idea that you're a purposely trying to mislead or bear false witness.

Isn't there something in The Ten Commandments about bearing false witness?

 
Zamboro [recently expired TotalFark] 2008-09-13 11:48:10 PM  
CDP: "You need to be careful now some people might start to get the idea that you're a purposely trying to mislead or bear false witness."

Creationists come in two flavors: Ignorant and defensive about it, and willfully deceptive. Both are a pain in the ass but the first honestly believes the evidence is on their side. The second knows it isn't, but is willing to knowingly misrepresent it so it appears as though it is. The first type is the average man on the street creationist, where the second is better exemplified by people like Bevets or the Intelligent Design proponents made notorious by the transcripts of the Dover trial.

While it's rare that you can say such a thing about any large group of people and not be guilty of misrepresenting at least some of them, this is a bit of a special case. I can say "Creationists are all either fools or liars", and it's a completely fair and accurate statement. All rhetoric and hyperbole aside, all insults laid down, really consider the significance of the fact that we can say such an inflammatory thing about any one large group and for once it actually applies to them all without exception. Unprecedented.

 
ninjakirby [TotalFark] 2008-09-13 11:49:00 PM  
CDP: It is not the first time that Bevets has broken the 9th Commandment in regards to Mr. Darwin...

I wasn't able to source it to either of my collections which purport to have a "Complete Collection" of his works, so perhaps Bev would be so kind as to post the letter in full, rather than rely on a single line without context to substantiate his claim (which I've already completely demolished by proving beyond reasonable doubt that James Bar, Regius Professor of Theology, agrees that the authors of Genesis didn't know what the fark they were talking about)

 
CDP [TotalFark] 2008-09-14 12:06:19 AM  
i132.photobucket.com

 
Kome [TotalFark] 2008-09-14 12:28:58 AM  
ninjakirby: CDP: It is not the first time that Bevets has broken the 9th Commandment in regards to Mr. Darwin...

I wasn't able to source it to either of my collections which purport to have a "Complete Collection" of his works, so perhaps Bev would be so kind as to post the letter in full, rather than rely on a single line without context to substantiate his claim (which I've already completely demolished by proving beyond reasonable doubt that James Bar, Regius Professor of Theology, agrees that the authors of Genesis didn't know what the fark they were talking about)


I did a search for the quote, and I could only find it cited on creationist websites. But some of them had the good graces to provide a citation:
Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1959), p. 368.

 
Pope George Ringo [TotalFark] 2008-09-14 12:43:53 AM  
img165.imageshack.us

 
Sun God [TotalFark] 2008-09-14 12:45:52 AM  
Darwin started out as a creationist. Which means he believed that every living animal on the face of the earth was and would remain the same forever. He did some reading and looked back at his samples, and theorized quite a bit. Including breeding a lot of pigeons. What he found is that he could breed pigeons with certain traits (something people have been doing with animals for quite a long time), but he could not prove that nature had caused the physical elements of those pigeons. Darwin proved genetics. He didn't prove evolution.

Darwin never observed natural selection. He never observed evolution. To this day, there are very few experiments which support Darwin's theories.

 
shivashakti [TotalFark] 2008-09-14 12:46:17 AM  
Well, Darwin is buried in a C of E church, after all.

 
Aarontology [TotalFark] 2008-09-14 12:51:57 AM  
Sun God: Darwin never observed natural selection. He never observed evolution. To this day, there are very few experiments which support Darwin's theories.

Never heard of Darwin's Finches have you?

 
ninjakirby [TotalFark] 2008-09-14 12:52:51 AM  
Sun God: Darwin never observed natural selection. He never observed evolution. To this day, there are very few experiments which support Darwin's theories.

I grant you 6.6/10

Very strong, but you gave yourself away too early. Leave this out "Which means he believed that every living animal on the face of the earth was and would remain the same forever." and then come back and try again. We'll drop the lowest score out of three, and average the results.

 
Bevets [TotalFark] 2008-09-14 01:05:35 AM  
In a bizarre step, the Church will address its contrition directly to the Victorian scientist himself, even though he died 126 years ago.

But the move was greeted with derision last night, with Darwin's great-great-grandson dismissing it as 'pointless' and other critics branding it 'ludicrous'...

The Church is also anxious to counter the view that its teaching is incompatible with science. It wants to distance itself from fundamentalist Christians, who believe in the Biblical account of the creation of the world in seven days.

Bevets

I have lately read Morley's Life of Voltaire and he insists strongly that direct attacks on Christianity (even when written with the wonderful force and vigor of Voltaire) produce little permanent effect: real good seems only to follow the slow and silent side attacks. ~ Charles Darwin

Darwin's theory made nonsense of all of this. He said that the world was a constantly changing place and that all living creatures were changing too.

Far from being created in God's own image, Darwin suggested that human life had probably started out as something far more primitive -- the story of Adam and Eve was a myth.

No wonder that the Church was outraged. ~ 'Controversy' exhibit at Down House

Probably, so far as I know, there is no professor of Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university who does not believe that the writer(s) of Genesis 1-11 intended to convey to their readers the ideas that (a) creation took place in a series of six days which were the same as the days of 24 hours we now experience; . . . Or, to put it negatively, the apologetic arguments which suppose the "days" of creation to be long eras of time, the figures of years not to be chronological, and the flood to be a merely local Mesopotamian flood, are not taken seriously by any such professors, as far as I know. ~ James Barr Regius Professor of Hebrew at Christ Church, Oxford


ninjakirby:

Here we have to give some thought to a view that has been propounded, namely that the relations between theology and natural science provide something like a kind of natural theology. The development of such a view has been a feature of certain later phases of the Barthian tradition in which some kind of natural theology has come to be tentatively reaffirmed.
How far, however, can any such view claim to have biblical support? On the face of it, only to a very slight degree. Within the pages of scripture, scientific questioning and scientific investigation are very thinly spread. [...]

These involve simple, pre-scientific, observations of nature, but no more than this. They are illustrations which comment on human customs and mores, and this is their purpose and interest. They are no more science than La Fontaine's fables are science.
More might be made, perhaps, of the creation story of Genesis itself. For generations people have become accustomed to say that the first chapter of Genesis did not purport to be a scientific account of the origins of the world, and this was an understandable apologetic response to the fact that the account is not scientifically true. But to say that Genesis does not purport to be scientific may be a mistaken sort of apologetic argument. In its own context and purpose, for the people who elaborated it and composed it, it was a sort of scientific account. Something akin to the thinking of Mesopotamian list science may have lain behind it, and this, with the implication of transreligious and transcultural understanding, lends a certain tinge of natural theology. The writers of Genesis meant it as a cosmological organization of the world, in which a place and role are given for the great outer elements, light and dark, sky, earth, and sea, sun, moon, and stars, and also for the closer, inner environment, vegetable and animal, and finally for humanity at the centre of it all. Its seven days, linked by the subsequent genealogies with the chronology which runs down through the following centuries, deliberately inaugurate the exact temporal and calendrical framework for later history. To us none of this constitutes a science; it is closer to legend or mythology.2 But to them it was as close as they could come to a sort of science. However, none of the base on which it was worked out was scientific. They had no means of knowing how the world had begun, no means of experimentation, no methods of research other than the most obvious human experience. Their view of the world rested on religious tradition, both without and within Israel, and on the refashioning of these traditions in order to fit with the monotheistic deity of Israel. ~ James Barr, Gifford Lecture - Biblical Faith and Natural Theology 1990-1991

Coronach:

You seem to be attributing this "quote" to Charles Darwin, I find no record of such a thing.

Try this.

CDP:

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. Origin of Species (1859) p.189
And the link: Link (new window)


ninjakirby:

I wasn't able to source it to either of my collections which purport to have a "Complete Collection" of his works, so perhaps Bev would be so kind as to post the letter in full

Kome:

I did a search for the quote, and I could only find it cited on creationist websites. But some of them had the good graces to provide a citation:
Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1959), p. 368.


Did either of you bother to click the link in CDP's post?

 
abb3w [TotalFark] 2008-09-14 01:21:40 AM  
Bevets: [...] ~ James Barr Regius Professor of Hebrew at Christ Church, Oxford

"Un bon mot non prouve rien." (A witty saying proves nothing.) - François-Marie Arouet d'Voltaire

Would you agree that (P OR (Q OR R)) is equivalent to ((P OR Q) OR R)?

 
Canadian Canuck [TotalFark] 2008-09-14 01:23:37 AM  
Dr Brown argues that there is nothing incompatible between the scientific theories adopted by Darwin and Christian teaching.

Wow an intelligent religious official. There are millions of scientists out there who have happily believe in evolution and god. Heck go to any university and probe the biology department and you're going to find a fair number of religious biologists who don't see any conflict.

 
mamoru [TotalFark] 2008-09-14 01:27:30 AM  
abb3w: Would you agree that (P OR (Q OR R)) is equivalent to ((P OR Q) OR R)?

Hey... isn't that the second step? Does this mean you finally got Bevets to say yes to "'P OR Q' is equivalent to 'Q OR P'"?

 
ninjakirby [TotalFark] 2008-09-14 01:28:36 AM  
Bevets: Did either of you bother to click the link in CDP's post?

No, I went to your website on my own, saw the citation for the quote was a letter, searched for the recipient and date, as well as the key phrase "Morley's Life of Voltaire", and found nothing.

Allow me to help in your in your quest for credibility.

MLA Citation Format.

APA Citation Format.

May I now direct your attention to the fact that you citation for the quote in question is "Letter to George Darwin October 1873", and the offered citation is "CHAP. VI. ORGANS OF EXTREME PERFECTION." in the Origin of Species, of which I already own a copy and which completely fails to address the veracity of the quotation and its context?

Additionally I will note that the behavior you have exhibited in the above excerpt is what is known as "Confirmation Bias", and is the reason we call you a liar - and if I may add, having attempted to review the publications of the ICC6, money grubbing fraud.

I for one would think that uncovering Gods Truth and bearing witness of it to the world would be an endeavor freely taken, not $59.99, plus shipping. You folks never heard of Abstracts before?

 
Bevets [TotalFark] 2008-09-14 01:30:00 AM  
abb3w:

"Un bon mot non prouve rien." (A witty saying proves nothing.) - François-Marie Arouet d'Voltaire

What are you trying to prove?

 
dahmers love zombie [TotalFark] 2008-09-14 01:30:28 AM  
Bevets honey, could you do me a favor, just once?

Could you come into an evolution thread and NOT quote anyone at all? Like, use your own words? When my students do nothing but quote, even if they cite correctly (!), they get an F because it's not their own thinking.

I know you're used to having other writers do your thinking for you, sweetie, but you will NEVER convert anyone on Fark with your repeated quoting of the same material. And trying to follow your replies to people, with your interlacing of your (minimal) own words with large quotes from other human beings, is tiresome.

I won't ever put you on ignore, because you're too fun in a thread. Well, watching people go into insta-flame mode is fun. But srsly -- either get some new (better vetted) material, or try using your own words for once. And if you can't create a sensible argument from your own understanding of the material, you might want to rethink whether that viewpoint is tenable at all.

Thanky.

 
ninjakirby [TotalFark] 2008-09-14 01:35:50 AM  
dahmers love zombie: I won't ever put you on ignore, because you're too fun in a thread. Well, watching people go into insta-flame mode is fun. But srsly -- either get some new (better vetted) material, or try using your own words for once.

He tried images once, but it didn't go well.

 
Zamboro [recently expired TotalFark] 2008-09-14 01:52:21 AM  
Canadian Canuck: "Wow an intelligent religious official. There are millions of scientists out there who have happily believe in evolution and god. Heck go to any university and probe the biology department and you're going to find a fair number of religious biologists who don't see any conflict."

...And if animism were predominant, or mother goddess worship, or whatever else you may care to imagine, they'd claim it's perfectly compatible with science as well. Perhaps in the sense that it's possible to accept the efficacy and findings of science while persisting in unscientific beliefs, but that does not mean that whatever religious views they happen to hold logically mesh with the findings of science or that their religious views pass the test of science. Instead it's the case that religion is too popular, too dear to too many for it to vanish in the face of findings which suggest it is fraudulent. Everyone demands the enjoyment of having their cake, but they insist upon eating it too. Since there are so many of them and they are so insistent, we cannot very well look them in the eye and tell them to either have or eat their cake, but not both.

By the by, they are engaging in syncretism and compartmentalization of the brain, resulting in cognitive dissonance. The ability of the human mind to hold contradictory beliefs and convince itself that they are compatible is not only a matter of intense study and fascination, but also of films and theater. Any good 'conflicted' character has a bit of each going on, and we can all think of iconic exemplars of the minds ability to engage in doublethink and gloss it over with rationalization.

 
CDP [TotalFark] 2008-09-14 01:57:32 AM  
Bevets:

CDP:

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. Origin of Species (1859) p.189
And the link: Link (new window)


Bevets
the link you provided is for the first out of context quote that I found on your website.

The question is regarding the second out of context quote that I found.

I am sure that this was a simple oversight on your part, because it is not very "Christ like" to deliberately ignore and or mislead somebody.

Here is the first out of context quote.

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 degree. Origin of Species (1859) p.186 see also: Dispute

Now in the correct context.

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 degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any 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, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated; but I may remark that, as some of the lowest organisms in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibility. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 6th Edition

And the link Link (new window)

This is the second out of context quote

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. Origin of Species (1859) p.189
And the link: Link (new window)

now in the correct context


If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case. No doubt many organs exist of which we do not know the transitional grades, more especially if we look to much-isolated species, round which, according to my theory, there has been much extinction. Or again, if we look to an organ common to all the members of a large class, for in this latter case the organ must have been first formed at an extremely remote period, since which all the many members of the class have been developed; and in order to discover the early transitional grades through which the organ has passed, we should have to look to very ancient ancestral forms, long since become extinct." Link (new window)

 
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