r/DebateEvolution

I am totally convince that evolution is true. However, a scientific theory should be falsifiable; and I dont know how falsifiable is with evolution

For example, a "good" trait could be explain the result of natural selection. But a "bad" trait could be explain as just base on chance, or the selection preasure is not enough.

so, my question is: if someone want to prove that evolution is wrong, what test can they make and what the expected result should be (if evolution theory is wrong)?

Edit: Thank everyone for your time and patient with me. I found the answer. It seem that I need to update my highschool knowledge

hey everyone, I’m looking for some feedback on an article I wrote but haven’t published yet. Does this make me sound like an asshole?

Sometimes you just shouldn't believe a specific interpretation of the Bible. Nobody witnessed the past and it's arrogant for humans to think they can decipher it with vague or complex theories and explanations.

I would rather trust evidence over the mythology of bronze aged barbarians about the genesis of the universe, earth and life.

Instead of debating this vain topic, sometimes we just have to take a leap of faith and say yes, my interpretation of the Bible must be wrong.

You can tell me all about your favorite interpretation of the Bible but I am not going to be convinced because it contradicts what we can observe to be true about the universe.

Only evidence can convince me to believe one way or another so instead of telling me about your favorite interpretation of the Bible start reading science textbooks to enlighten me if you really want me to be convinced because unlike you, I understand high school level science, so I can easily discern that you are wrong about the science.

Evidence—not faith is at the top of my pyramid.

It's evidence, emotion and then faith.

When I say facts don't care about your feelings, I mean it in the facts take precedence over emotion and faith.

Evidence does not care about your faith or emotion.

I don't subscribe to the religion of creationism.

Sometimes you just shouldn't believe the evidence. Nobody witnessed the past and it's arrogant for humans to think they can decipher it with vague or complex theories and explanations.

I would rather trust God over human theories about the genesis of the universe, earth and life.

Instead of debating this vain topic, sometimes we just have to take a leap of faith and say no, I just don't believe it.

You can show me all the evidence of the world but I am not going to be convinced.

Only God can convince me to believe one way or another so instead of showing me evidence start praying for God to enlighten me if you really want me to be convinced because unlike you, God has authority and my complete honor, Submission and respect.

Faith—not logic is at the top of my pyramid.

It's Faith, Logic and then emotion.

When I say facts don't care about your feelings, I mean it in the facts take precedence over emotion but never do I mean facts take precedence over faith.

Faith does not care about your logic and reason.

I don't subscribe to the religion of scientism.

Scientists do lots of work to come to the conclusions about evolution and how organisms evolved. It is not a matter of faith.

​

Hi!

I have a question regarding the ways we can come to know that all species have a common origin.

In trying to teach myself phylogenetics, one of the basic inferences I see used to produce trees is: the degree of resemblance between species is "inversely proportional" to the degree of genealogical distance between them.

The resemblance in question can be genetic, embryological, morphological, behavioral, etc.

In The Origin of Species, Darwin uses this inference to conclude that Linnean classification actually reflected genealogical relations between species.

But what warrants us to use this inference to begin with? That's my question.

I am just trying to get the reasoning ironclad here, because once this inference is justified, and given modern comparative evidence, the common origin of life follows quite naturally.

I also have a very curious nephew who likes nature and asks a lot of questions, and it would be nice to have a simple way of explaining to him that all life shares a common origin!

PS : I know that there are also other lines of evidence such species geographical distributions and fossil as proof of transition, but I would like to stick to the basic inference for phylogenetics.

Thanks for reading 🙏

What you choose to believe will have drastic consequences on your life from your identity, your purpose of life and what you value and your sense of morality.

I choose to put my faith in what makes the most sense to me on a philosophical level. Science can change but the fundamental facts and laws of morality and wisdom stay the same.

If you want to believe in spontaneous evolution and billions of years old Earth and all the sub-beliefs that go with denying intentionality for the universe's existence then you can but it will affect how you perceive life, yourself, others and morality in a bad way and that's my bias.

I don't like what it does to me if I acceptEd these mainstream nerdy stances on the history of the universe, Earth and life.

It does not make sense from a Philosophical perspective and even if you can make a convincing case scientifically, it doesn't stop being a toxic view on life and existence.

I am Altruistic not Egoistic but even I can't accept a belief/worldview that denies God and humans having an immaterial spirit and that conveniently affirms death as valid processes rather than a curse and immorality as natural competition.

I don't want to make this post about politics but horseshoe theory is real at least on paper.

A purple haired communist liberal vegan acknowledges the immorality of eating meat at some level despite believing in evolution and how it's supposed to be natural for life forms to consume other life forms and the Christian view on eating meat is that it's considered an unnatural necessity because we lost Paradise—the place of food abundance so now we eat meat to compensate for living in a world of extreme scarcity. Just looking outside there is not much edible plant life that grows so people relied on meat since animals can eat plants that aren't suitable for human consumption but by eating the animals we benefit from the nutrition of what they ate after being filtered by their bodies.

So Christians reject eating meat as natural but "science" calls it the food chain.

So that's an example of how impactful what you believe is to your character.

We lost Paradise so now death is part of this world so if you need to eat meat because it's healthy and more affordable then do it but just remember that all the animals that are dying to make your life possible for now are not going to save you forever because you're going to die with them eventually, the wages of sin is death.

But according to "science" death is part of a natural cycle and not something to desire for it to be abolished.

Humans have a survival instinct but it's not absolute. People do things that can kill them all the time like smoking. They say risk taking is good for evolution sometimes but life preservation is always admirable in my perspective of others over oneself.

So how you view the most intimate concepts of life is deeply affected by your foundational beliefs on what is reality based on the past.

What I found out over the years is that the character comes before the beliefs so people who are already inclined to reject God's existence prefer a different worldview over those who prefer to believe in God's existence.

The ideas convince nobody because people choose to put their faith in whatever they already want to believe in.

Both "accept the science" or "accept religion" are tyrannical approaches to this schism.

Just let people choose to believe in whatever they want.

And in less than 100 years from now (when we're dead) we can figure out which side turned out better than the other—if any.

But speaking personally, I am more comfortable with the terminal question of "who created God" over "who or how was the universe created" or "what created what created the universe if not God".

I don't have to know how the Genesis of God works or how to comprehend the absence of a beginning.

But you non-believers are always searching for an answer to the genesis of the universe and I am confident you'll never find it.

Radiometric dating, fossils, satellite measurements, repeated observations and calculations.

You can convince yourself you are right with so much "evidence" but that does not substitute the fact that you were not there to witness it happen.

I'm just saying no. I'm not putting my faith in any of that stuff.

I'm open to alternative explanations but I appreciate having sovereignty/control over what I believe and I'm putting my faith in what relatively speaking is considered "young earth creationism" even though I can allow for the Earth to be around 10 to 15 thousand years old in my opinion.

Last but not least, if we are just material and have no spirit, the logic of punishment breaks because how do we punish people who have no free will and are simply driven by biological processes? Maybe that's why they want to replace punishment with therapy these days but evil is real and efforts to release prisoners always lead to a backlash the following elections.

If you do evil you are not simply a victim of your environment or just following your biological and genetic processes.

You should believe in moral guilt but if you reject God and human spirits/souls with free will then you can't.

In conclusion. I am not going to believe in such a sad worldview like evolution and scientific attempts for explaining why anything exists at all.

If you want to believe that all I ask is to please be a hypocrite. Do not consistently believe it. Please treat immorality like real blame not an evolutionary process. If your beliefs logically conclude or equate to a scandal be inclined to favor sanity over what you think is probably true.

If humans are soulless then our lives have no objective meaning especially if people are in circumstances that include pain and suffering instead of joy.

Pain and suffering in Christianity allow our spirits to grow in sanctity.

Pain and suffering in non-theistic worldviews is a problem to either fix or to end with euthanasia.

So if you believe in non-theistic worldviews please be a hypocrite, it's the only time I'll tell someone that.

I swear this isn’t a bad faith question. I am a science accepting agnostic not here to challenge the truth of evolution. I know evolution is true. But my specialty lies in the humanities, not science. Can you explain to me like I’m twelve how sexual reproduction came about without intelligent design?

This actually makes more sense than the endless millions and billions we are told. Human history today is moving so fast, I'm gen z when I was a baby the Internet was just beginning, my school in coastal California didn't even have computers and now we have AI. I read history and I see things moving quickly not slowly so if we assume things move at a semi constant speed there is no reason to believe billions of years have passed since the Earth's creation.

Life goes by fast on a personal level but also by a historical level. I'm 27 years old I can now tell you I have witnessed the climate change, the weather is not what it was when I was little, the fact that change is fast even if I felt it slow when I was a little child is one reason why I don't believe in old Earth.

Don't get me wrong, if the earth is 10,000 years old that's still very old compared to our lifespan and I'm willing to believe it might be around that age but not millions.

People in the old testament lived almost a thousand years, basically like a day since a day is often compared to a thousand years.

Aside from Philosophical theories, hard science proof of Earth's age I can't offer it but I can tell you that I think stuff happened rather fast. I live in a mountainous area and I don't think we got a volcano every quarter of a million years until it formed a mountain range, I think something huge happened that altered the landscape and then everything settled down into a more stable state meaning most mountains are probably around the same age.

The global flood could be real or a theological analogy or parable, but considering how long people lived before the flood and the stronger bodies people had back then which they needed to live that long, I think the ark could have been a real thing. There's a lot of big things you can do if you had more than 100 years to do it. We spend 20 years of our short life just growing up and soon after reaching the climax of our physical maturity we begin to decline ultimately to the point of our death, we do not have time to build an ark anymore.

I'm not even trying to make this post convincing to science nerds, I am more interested in the philosophy. The fact that everything happens so fast and that it is conceivable that the earth is not as old as they're telling us.

You can believe whatever you want but it's ultimately dictated by your morality not science because nobody knows.

The non believers are coincidentally always the egalitarian liberal type.

What you believe about the genesis of Earth is inseparable from your political beliefs.

One of my least favorite arguments is those who deny global warming because "the climate has always changed for millions of years".

It's kind of weird to think about it but the political divide is not that divided. Both sides are united against God in their embrace of the evil of egoism.

The communist envies the wealthy for the wealth they wish they had and the lucridolaterous "capitalist" simply wants to defend their loot.

If you can't win at the game you change the game/rules but the evil spirit is the same behind the divide.

In philosophy we only divide on the basis of Altruism and Egoism. Christianity is an Altruistic religion.

Old Earth lends itself to egoist beliefs while young Earth creationism lends itself to Altruistic beliefs.

Depending on what you are, you are going to choose one or the other.

Most modern Republicans are old Earthers fyI, hence global warming isn't a problem because climate change has been happening for "millions of years" plus Earth used to be very hot in the long distant past or so they say.

I actually believe that's true, Earth is a lot colder than it was before the time of the flood in the old testament.

Creationists still bring up Levinthal's paradox to falsify evolution. They say a functional protein of 50 or 100 amino acids will take billions of years to evolve and fold to perfect 3d shapes , so if it takes so much time for a single protein to evolve to be useful ,then how evolution creates so many proteins ? How ?

Well they don't know about energy funnel concepts,which describes that protein folding is not completely random and it's guided by physics and chemistry. Hydrophobic regions will always prefer to hide from polar aqueous environments ,hence making it possible for mostly polar groups to stay exposed to polar environments.

And if they really deny protein evolution ,how come can they accept that bacterial antibiotic resistance genes like beta lactamase have undergone mutations in so many different bacterial species or strains over the years ? There's so many varied sequences of beta lactamases.

Like you all accept that bacterial antibiotic resistance is natural ,right ?

Atheists who don’t believe in Darwin theory - how would you explain origin and development of life on earth?

I am not aware of any other explanation.

1. Prediction: vestigial organs as ‘left-overs’ of evolution. Evolutionist Weidershein made a list of 180 supposed vestigial structures in 1890. However, a lot of these predicted vestiges of past evolution that are no longer considered useless organs. They identified many candidates, such as the human appendix, tonsils, ‘tailbone’, whale hip bones, etc. This is a massive humiliation of evolutionary biology.

2. Prediction: no wheels would be found in living things. The famous evolutionary population geneticist, J.B.S. Haldane, proclaimed in 1949 that mutations and natural selection (neo-Darwinian evolution) could never produce “various mechanisms, such as the wheel and magnet, which would be useless till fairly perfect.” But ‘wheels’ far more sophisticated than Haldane could have imagined, such as subcellular rotary motors and the bacterial flagellum have been discovered.

3. Prediction: similarities, being due to common ancestry, would show a clear pattern of phylogeny, aka the tree of life. This is not so; there are numerous ‘homoplasies’, which are similarities that do not fit any pattern of common ancestry, or phylogeny. Homoplasies are so common that evolutionists invented the rescuing device of ‘convergent evolution’. A comparison of the genes involved in bat and dolphin sonar found 200 similar genes. ¹ Since there is no possible sonar-equipped common ancestor of both, these similarities must have evolved independently, by chance mutations. This is impossible for ‘convergent evolution’ to do.

​4. Prediction: Richard Dawkins predicted there should only be one genetic code. However, there are over 32 genetic codes in living beings. ²This This is a massive fail under Dawkins’ own criterion.

5. Prediction: there would be little genetic resemblance between extant and ‘primitive’ life forms (biochemical homology). Thus, Ernst Mayr stated in his 1963 book Animal Species and Evolution “the search for homologous genes [derived from the same ancestor] is quite futile except in very close relatives.”38 This was a strong prediction, but it has been falsified repeatedly. One example: humans share a gene involved in eye formation with flies. Walter Gehring, University of Basel scientist, remarked: “Much to our surprise, the same gene causes eyeless[ness] in the fruit fly. That came as a total surprise, because we thought that the fruit fly eye was in no way a homologous, a similar structure as in humans.”

¹ Pennisi, E., Bats and dolphins evolved echolocation in same way, news.sciencemag.org, 4 September 2013.

² Elzanowski, A. and Ostell, J., The genetic codes, NCBI, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Taxonomy/Utils/wprintgc.cgi, 7 Jan 2019.

³ Walter Gehring: Master control genes and the evolution of the eye, pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/04/4/text_pop/l_044_01.html (Accessed 11 Oct 2023).

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When Creationists claim all similar design equals a designer it shoots themselves in the foot on occasion.

In both humans and giraffe the neck is made up of 7 cervical neck vertebrae. While it doesn’t cause many problems in humans in the case of giraffes it’s a different story. Since the amount of vertebrae constricts the giraffe’s neck flexibility they have to awkwardly splay their legs amount to graze or drink. This leads to severe arthritis and chronic pain in giraffe legs. Why would a designer without vertebrae from a giraffe when birds like swans have upwards of 20.

Anyways this post’s goal is to share bad design plans in nature and if any creationist can make sense of them.

Some people think that over the course of several million years, Australopithecus became Homo habilis resulting later in us. For this to happen the embryos of this organism would have to remain viable, allowing the organism to develop into an adult stage. I'm not sure why anyone believes millions of years of evolution via natural selection pressures will achieve this. When you try to simulate the embryo evolution over hundreds of millions of years on a computer, or just do the math with a pencil, the embryos always die, so they do not even make it to early development, let alone adulthood, so why would you think they could do it over a few million years?

If you try to do this in a lab with a real embryo, I don't think anyone's ever seen a similar thing happen with living apes. It seems like the simplest explanation is that chimpanzees and humans don't actually have a common ancestor, and they were simply always around, or if there were some phenotypic changes due to natural selection, they were small.