Mr. Perfect wrote:
Well we have a lot of company with seculars. If you get to make bewildering untrue claims then you have to let other people do it also.
Secularism's reliance on science ensures that incorrect beliefs are purged over time. Secularists held many discredited beliefs at the turn of the 20th century. The flexibility of secularism has made it a force more conducive to human advancement than any religion.
But we're looking for statistically significant harms.
Religion, Christianity being no exception, leads to irrational discrimination against non-believers, which produces a statistically significant level of harm. The history of Christianity demonstrates this beautifully. Given power to do so, Christians interfere with the rights of others to engage in relationships, commerce, and even scientific thinking freely. Today, Christianity has been overpowered by secularism.
Flood myths perpetuate many ancient cultures. But check this out, seculars believe that something came from nothing, and life came from rock soup. They literally believe that. Forehead smacking.
Everyone believes something came from nothing, but not everyone has a coherent theory, deduced from experimental and mathematical reasoning that produces testable hypotheses about the nature of reality.
Evolution (speciation, the acquisition of new traits, and the development of new genetic material) itself has been demonstrated in the lab.
No it hasn't.
Yes it has. You've been shown the evidence on numerous occasions and simply move the goalposts each time. By your incomplete understanding of the scientific method, it is not even scientific to claim that humans gave live birth more than a century ago. It is no more scientific to claim this than to claim that humans were created and delivered by storks until ca. 1900. Nobody can prove otherwise, right?
Time cannot be turned back and we cannot observe every single birth of every single animal that ever existed leading up to present day humans (and neither can we prove that beyond living memory, human lineages converge to common ancestors,
Which is why there are real limits on knowing with any certainty things that happened in the past.
There are also fundamental limits on what we can directly observe. Scientists as far back as the 19th century had to grapple with this.
but few dispute the science of DNA), but within observable and testable limits, evolution remains the only viable theory for the origin of species.
It's not viable, and the standard for science is not how many theories there are but how well it conforms to the scientific method.
You have a severely limited understanding of the scientific method. Inductive reasoning is an acceptable part of science. Larger theories are inferred from smaller observations. This is why theories cannot be
proven true but can be demonstrated to be false. The theory of evolution is not only a valid scientific theory but an enormously successful one. Thus far, nothing has been discovered that is inconsistent with the theory.
So far evolution and abiotic genesis do not conform to the scientific method at all and so can be dispatched as nonsense.
False. Given the appropriate initial conditions, there is nothing precluding the formation of proteins and amino acids. If you understand the physics of how something is created, you can work out the conditions under which it could have been formed. That's a fundamentally scientific approach.
By contrast, there is zero evidence for creationism whatsoever.
That's not what creationists tell me.
You can't believe everything you hear. You have to subject it to the rigors of scientific reasoning first. And creationism fails every time.
I don't believe in God, and that hasn't stopped me from, well, anything! Nikola Tesla refused to believe in electrons and Albert Einstein refused to accept the probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics, and they remained relatively productive. So what? Should we stop teaching chemistry? I know plenty of EE and CS folks who not only believe in evolution but were inspired enough by its mechanics to adapt them to solving difficult engineering problems.
I have heard many times that rejecting evolution means you reject science itself and will then be incapable of thinking or doing any science, and I'm merely providing evidence that that is just more liberal BS.
Well it
is in effect a rejection of science. It is perfectly possible for someone to reject science and build functioning electrical circuits. That does not mean such viewpoints need to be treated with equal consideration. Few scientific theories have led state authorities to persecute their proponents, and evolution happens to be one of them (in both the United States in the early 20th century, and the Soviet Union). The other famous example is the theory of the heliocentric universe. Both challenged Christianity's notions of the nature of the universe and of man's place in it, demonstrating that religion will tolerate science only until it is applied to the most interesting and important question of all: who are we? And what good is science if it cannot be applied freely to such important matters? Therefore, to be anti-evolution is typically to be anti-science.
For those concerned with actual science, evolution is the
foundation of modern biology:
Darwin’s methodology revolutionized the life sciences, setting the stage for major advances in twentieth-century biology. Prior to Origin, natural historians primarily engaged in describing and naming organisms, along with studying their anatomy and physiology. To establish his claim that organisms evolved over time by means of natural selection, Darwin had to lay out a vast array of empirical evidence drawn from many different areas of natural history and then formulate “one long argument” to explain these observations (Origin, p. 459). Darwin relied on the use of analogy and inductive reasoning to support his theory of natural selection. Invoking the philosopher William Whewell’s notion of “consilience of inductions,” Darwin argued that any theory that was able to explain so many different classes of facts was not likely to be false. After 1859, Darwin’s hypothesis-driven research program, now called the “hypothetico-deductive” method, in addition to his particular theory of evolution, became the foundation for future work in biology.
Thus, Darwin’s legacy to posterity lies as much in revolutionizing the methodology of the life sciences as in offering particular views about evolution. Wallace and others likely would have introduced evolutionary views describing lawful change in organic life. Yet it is hard to envision any work that would have been able to match the persuasive power of “On the Origin of Species,” not simply in explaining the diversity of life but also in instructing naturalists about how to investigate complex relationships. Indeed, “On the Origin of Species” continues to serve as a striking exemplar of how to do good science. Historians generally shy away from engaging in “what if” stories, but most would agree that had “On the Origin of Species” not been published, we would still believe in evolution, but the development of modern biology would have unfolded much differently, and with less striking success.
. . or are you perhaps channeling Ibs?
