harryjrf: If this is ground that has been trodden on before, I'd love some references to further my curiosity.

Classic Fark Linky. I've made a few minor refinements since then, but that's roughly it.

entropic_existence: In many of thee studies involving judges

King James translation, I guess?

ninjakirby: GilRuiz1: "Dear God, please help me to not believe in you. Amen."

Close, but no not quite. None of my immediate family and friends on my mothers side believe in God - however my mother believes in spirits, 'mother earth', and will pleadingly "send out her wishes" to the universe.

My sister sincerely believes in much the same thing, but doesn't anthropomorphize any 'spirits', instead relying on some sort of pervasive universal consciousness akin to what you might find in some forms of Buddhism, like say karma, or perhaps tao.

Other friends are adamant believers in the existence of 'energy' that responds to your will - which is more paraspychological and at least has some statistical validity to it.

I myself have found myself praying during a few times of emotional weakness - my girlfriends father had collapsed from a stroke and been rushed the hospital, and my car wouldn't start to get her to his hospital.

All of those anecdotes are simply substantiating the point in the article. Humans are predisposed mentally - and socially - to see external forces at play - whether they call them ghosts, witches, angels, demons, Yahweh, Vishnu, Odin, Brahma, crystal energy, or psychic speakers of the dead.

It also explains why you see increased 'occult' belief in the irreligious. People who lack a supernatural structure like Catholicism, or Hindu, or Episcopalian, tend to more often believe in lei lines, or crystal healing, or dream catchers or any of those other more out there supernatural alternative beliefs.

One of the running jokes within Skepticism is 'What is your sacred cow?' ie - what thing do you believe in irrationally, and tend to cling to, despite all your otherwise rational beliefs. Because everyone seems to always have one. Always.

They just also recognize them as irrational, and try to understand why. That rarely happens with religious belief, as seen in the Christian response to those Bus adds. Atheists use the term "probably", but the religious response is "definitely".

That's a bold claim, but par for the course for that style of thinking.

This right here is one of the major things that shaped my beliefs. I know I've got irrationality in me. So I prefer to believe fervently and irrationally in something that will have as little impact on the rest of my life, and that is as congruent with logic as I can manage it.

The fact that I also find it personally satisfying and helpful in my day to day life is just gravy.

ninjakirby: (If we're being abb3w pedantic, as much as is required to believe evidence relates to reality)

A leap of faith still involved; just a rather small gap.



Most theology uses something a trifle more significant.

ryanguy7890: Is it really that inconceivable that a God creating us would implant in us an inherent reason for us to believe in Him?

Of course it's conceivable. However, trying to draw a conclusion that God created us would be...
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ryanguy7890: Trying to draw a conclusion that evolution is true based on nothing but circumstantial evidence is just as bad.

It's not. It's based on the primary premises of logic, ZF, and Evidence-Reality Relatability, together with all evidence and Inference therefrom.

ryanguy7890: Neither theory, whether of God or of evolution, have any verifiable proof to back them up.

Science refers to the process of gathering evidence, forming conjectures about the evidence, developing a formal hypothesis which indicates how the current evidence may be described under the conjecture, competitive testing of all candidate hypotheses under a formal criterion for probable correctness, plus the body of hypotheses testing best thereby and which thereafter are referred to as "Theories".

In the most formal sense, the criterion used for this is a more exacting expression of Occam's Razor, which has been proven in the absolute mathematical sense in the paper "Minimum Description Length Induction, Bayesianism and Kolmogorov Complexity", by Paul M. B. Vitanyi and Ming Li [(doi:10.1109/18.825807), PostScript file here]. This shows that the most "concise" hypothesis (a function of both the bit size of the conjecture of how the data should be described, and how many bits are needed to convey all properties of the data thereby) is the one most likely to correctly describe the character of future data. Science thus becomes dependent (due to this paper, and as I implied above) on the philosophical assumptions that propositional logic is valid for formal inference, that the Zermelo-Fraenkel Axioms of set theory (which serve as the modern foundation for all mathematics) are self-consistent (though they need not be complete), and that Reality is relatable to Evidence.

Note that the root of the word "prove" is from the Latin probare, "to test". Thus, hypotheses that become theories may be said to have been "proven" in the sense that Science uses the word. This is distinct from the mathematical sense, in that the usual use of "proof" in mathematics indicates a rigorous derivation from axioms; however, the sense that science uses is similar to the sense that a person might seek to "prove" that their brain is not a piece of cauliflower.

It follows, therefore, that "strengths and weaknesses" or reference to particular arguments being strong and weak can only be made in terms of how one hypothesis compares relative to another. The default reference comparison is the "absolute null hypothesis", which mathematically corresponds to simply noting there are data, and making no attempt to relate them. In the case of evolutionary biology, there are a number of competing variations which have evolved from Darwin's original concept. However, neither "creationism" nor "intelligent design" provide more than marginal improvement over the null, and are no-where near the conciseness of the Modern Evolutionary Genetic Synthesis. Similarly, discussion of "holes" and "missing transitional forms" are also misleading, since science is inherently a process for making inference from a bounded set of data to the characteristics of data we yet lack. Determining what is most probably in a hole in Evidence is fundamentally what Science is for.

Creationism and Intelligent Design advocates are thus, at best, supporters of a conjecture with roots established in religion, who do not test under the Minimum Description Length Induction criterion, and who do not gather evidence directly from reality. As such, whatever it may be that they are doing, it is not science, and does not belong in high school Science classrooms.

ryanguy7890: Just circumstancial evidence and ideas that lend credence to them.

Such as the universally observed ongoing mutation and genetic drift, as certainly observable as smoke still rising from the gun in the suspect's hand when the locked room is opened.

ryanguy7890: Where evolutionists and creationists differ is in the case of macroevolution-where one species mutates (devolves/evolves) into another species. This has not been observed or documented.





Microevolution refers to genetic mutations which are able to diffuse via inheritance (especially via reproduction) within a population group. When a population is divided by a barrier (geologic or genetic) which precludes future diffusion between subgroups, it is referred to as speciation. Microevolutionary developments in one group unable to diffuse across the species barrier are considered macroevolutionary with respect to the other group. When a species barrier arises, the organism does not become an ENTIRELY new species; rather, it becomes a MORE specific species. Humans, therefore, are technically a sub-species of hominid-catarrhine-primate-mammalian-chordate-deuterostomial-bilateral- eumetazoan-animal-eukaryote-cellular-life. After becoming distinct sub-species, any novel mutation in one is thus macroevolutionary with respect to the other.

While the rate of speciation is low (on the order of per species-megayear, depending in part on time to reproductive maturity), the large number of species on earth has resulted in several dozen speciations being recorded in the literature since Darwin's time.

For some examples of speciation mentioned in the literature, see here.

Given that we KNOW species barriers can arise with time, it is a reasonable inference to presume that extant barriers may not have always existed. Fossil evidence supports this. EG, searching back, we can find example some fossils showing resemblance to modern seals and some to weasels; and the older those appearing ancestral to seals are, the closer they are to resembling ancestral forms of the weasels. Thus, weasels are considered mustelid-caniform-carnivore-mammalian-chordate-deuterostomial-bilateral- eumetazoan-animal-eukaryote-cellular-life, whereas seals are considered pinniped-caniform-carnivore-mammalian-chordate-deuterostomial-bilateral- eumetazoan-animal-eukaryote-cellular-life. This inference is additionally supported by modern genetic sequencing, which indicates considerable overlap between the modern forms, with the distinguishing sequences consistent with mutations of the same type as observed in the lab, and in an degree consistent with the expectations from observed rate-of-mutation in present and from the time estimates of the fossil record.