Evolution vs Creationism

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Just what do you think is proof?
A silly youtube clip?
How about providing some REAL proof, oh wait you can't.

Well, not to get too personal but just what are you then? All the religions i know of have a belief in a soul/spirit.

 

Umm, martaug, that's Vilayanur Ramachandran (MD, PhD) there in that silly Youtube video, one of the world's renowned neurologists. It's not saying that it's hard, solid evidence that'd make you poop in your pants, but it's close.

What he's been saying a long time and what a lot of neurologists have been gone on and on about is that there's no evidence of such a thing as 'a soul' inside the brain.

There's no Descarte's homunculus. There's no ghost in the shell.

That's not to say that there's no soul, or ghost at all. Those things just have to scurry along into a fantasyland or into a completely another level of being, where the hippies would like to go after munching some shrooms, along with the gnomes and the fairies.

There's no need to be an atheist. There's no need to be antithetical at all for that matter. Antithesis works only inside a paradigm. The dichotomies theist/atheist do not work well within other religions. The idea that in all human beings there is a need for religion, 'the religious man' and all of comparative religious studies and all of theology were defined within the western, christianity based culture.

 

If you must know, Im a hindu, but Im a rational hindu.

So, how is a patient having their corpus callosum cut and having different personalities not evidence that there is no soul? Did the operation create two souls inside one body? Or, how about chimera, did one soul become two souls and then one soul? At what point, exactly, does the soul enter into the blastocyst? Is half of it carried by the sperm and the other residing inside the egg?

Or is it something inherent in the human body, which is really not too different from a chimpanzee? If you break everything down to their constituant parts, do you find a soul? Where is it? When I grind up tissue for analysis, should I take into consideration what part of the mixture is a soul and which part isnt?

Think about it...it just simply isnt there. If you cut the brain in half and get two personalities, both with differing beliefs and preferences, is that not enough to convince even a child that there is no soul tucked away in there?

There simply is no soul, it is not part of our biology.

 

Personally i believe that everything has a spirit(or soul if you will).
Show me one scientifically proven test that can definitively disprove the existence of the soul. You can't
http://lifeafterdeath.info/Philosophical.htm
i think this article does a good job of summing it up.

Sorry but your BELIEF that there is no afterlife(or soul) is NOT proof of same.
Just as i can't prove it, you can't disprove it.

 

I'd say it's getting muddled up with words.

The nice thing about almost every religion is that there's no clear definition of anything and all efforts to try to define some basic concepts have been more or less fruitless.

It's not that you should first go and define anything before you can look for it, but since our senses do not support the notion of the soul, nor is it available as an object that can be manipulated and placed under scientific scrutiny...

...what can be said about it as a hard cold fact is that the only thing that supports the notion of a god or The God or a soul is the human imagination. (read that Feuerbach and it shows )

 

As far as our senses go Uv & InfraRed light doesn't exist. Eventually we built machines that were able to detect these & other waves & rays that we didn't know existed.
One day a machine may be invented that can detect the energy that most refer to as the soul(or spirit if you prefer).

Now i'm really confused by you nataraja, as everything i have ever heard about hinduism seems to indicate that one of the central beliefs is that all things have a spark of divinity(or if you wish, a soul) Isn't that why a good chunk of hindus are vegetarians?

 

Can I just point out that nobody has said that they disagree with evolution? We all have different takes on what it means to us personally when combined with our beliefs. Please don't belittle peoples religions Nataraja

 

I simply don't understand why is it that people feel that this something called 'religion' is so important to them...

It's not that I'd be saying that "I don't understand religion or what's it about". It's close, but not the same thing at all.

To me these things are all just something to grow out of. All that clinginess to the idea that reality is limited by our imagination for instance. Works both in religion and in science...

 

Where do I belittle peoples religions?

Sure, I have a spark of divinity...we all do...its called matter. When I die my body will be recycled and made into something new, but my identity will cease to exist.

 

To each his own, my beliefs may appear as ludicrous to you as yours do to me but we are all entitled to them. Peace.

 

Reason why Im a vegetarian is that my parents were, and their parents were...

I cannot understand why people make a big deal about saving this species and protecting that species, and then go and eat a cow, or a sheep, or a chicken etc. I see every species as being at the same evolutionary level as humans are.

As for my own take on evolution, I have none. I dont mix my beliefs (which are increasingly less important as I get older) with what I know. Belief and knowledge are spheres that do not intersect one another. I dont understand how people can mix Afro-Asiatic religions with science as those religions have their set idea of how reality is, and are opposed to being corrected. Is it like 'well god made the world...sort of' and 'jesus died...sort of...and was raised from the dead...kinda...'. Moderate christianity confuses me so much. I dont have too many moderate christian friends, but I have a few fundamentalist christian friends and it just seems like they put their hands over their ears and shout 'no no no no no i cannot think!' whenever I try to talk to them. Im not really surprised that they are like this, since they think I worship demons.

The point I was making with the soul being non-existent is that humans are animals, period. There is nothing in us that makes us special other than that we are made of the universe...which I 'believe' is inside the mind of Shiva, but that is beside the point. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and the other Afro-Asiatic religions are incompatible with science today, from my understanding of the core beliefs. We know, by we I mean scientists, what drives evolution, and it is certainly not any god. If you try to mix religion and science you get muddled on both sides. Keep both separate as they deal with separate issues. Science tells us what is, religion tries to explain why what is is, which is what science can now do, hence people eventually will start worshiping it, its out nature to worship things...its part of the way our brains were wired up during our evolutionary past to cope with the world in which we lived at the time.

 

Nataraja, humans are animals on the same level that my laptop is a chunk of metals and plastic. It's true on a physical level, but there's more, much more. Neurology may not be able to find the soul, but it also can't find the mind. Are you going to argue that the human mind, sentience, and self-will are illusions because one science based on the study of an organ that seems to be the material source of all commands doesn't have it? Here's a perpetual question for you: does activity in the brain shape the mind, or does activity in the mind shape the brain? Good luck proving either answer. Any claim based on changes in the brain changing behaviour can simply be explained as a damaged control system. You mess up a planes controls and it won't fly properly anymore, even though the pilot is fine.

As to vegetarianism and species preservation, cows and chickens aren't endangered animals. Eating them isn't likely to make the whole species disappear. Eating whales just may.

And here is where you left science behind. Science can't explain why anything happens, just how. Science is only an observation and analysis of the chain of events, it cannot bridge into purpose, only function. A lot of people mess those words up, they talk about X being the reasone or purpose of Y when it's really only the cause.

 

Um, no...humans are animals in the same way as all other animals are animals. Humans are mammals, there is no denying that. All mammals are animals. There is a nested hierarchy that humans fit into because...we are animals. Human chromosome number 2, for example, is the result of the head to head fusion of two chromosomes that are separate in the other great apes. Chimpanzee, animal; gorilla, animal; orangutan, animal; bonobo, animal; human, animal.

The human mind is no different really from the mind of any other animal. The mind is the emergent property of having a brain. The brain produces the mind. The mind isnt an illusion, per say, but it is really quite deceptive in that it makes you think you know a lot more than you really know. The reason why scientists cannot pin point the exact place in the brain where the mind resides is because it isnt localized like a computer, but, rather, all of the neurons take a sort of co-operative role in producing what we experience as consciousness. Consciousness can be reduced to chemical reactions by a relatively simple experiment. Smoke cannabis. The THC molecule is almost identical to anandamide, there being less than 10 atoms per molecule different. What you are experiencing is what conscious would be like if the body produced a molecule with less than 10 atoms different. The lack of these atoms changes your conscious experience quite a bit, because the molecules do not fit the cannabinoid receptors in precisely the way anandamide does. Cannabis has relatively the same affect on all chordates, I know this from personal experience with my cat who loves cannabutter, and the reason for this is because...humans are animals just like my cat is an animal...

Are you saying that science cannot make predictions? Science can most certainly tell you why things are happening and why things have happened as they did. This is true even in evolutionary biology. You can, for example, look at the DNA of someone who is homozygous for sickle cell and see where one of their nucleotides is 'wrong', which will then tell you why this person cannot make round red blood cells because the protein is coded wrong. The nucleotide change will tell you why the person has faulty blood cells.

Link to video presentation by Daniel Dennett on Human Consciousness...
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_dennett_on_our_consciousness.html

 

It's really too bad that you believe that kind of rhetoric. Dehumanizing people won't advance any scientific understanding of our "humanness" (what it is to be human). Your comment would be just annoying if it were not so dangerous.

 

So, how then, are humans 'not' animals?

Quote from wikipedia...

"A human being, also human or man, is a member of a species of bipedal primates in the family Hominidae (taxonomically Homo sapiens — Latin: "wise human" or "knowing human")."

What are primates? Oh, really? Animals?

 

Do you really need someone to tell you that? I'm surprised...and here I thought you were just being flippant.

 

Seriously. How are humans 'not' animals? If evolution is true and we share a common ancestor with the other great apes, then are we not an animal species?

 

And here'd be another person who'd need someone to do some heavy explaining why humans are not mammals and animals.

There's nothing dangerous about the notion. The only dangerous thing is how we preceive animals to be...so much lower than humans and for all of nature for that matter.

Oh there's differences, to be sure, but not that much. It's the little things that count, so getting off from the hubris train is not dehumanizing humans unless fool's pride is something what truly makes humans human.

 

Ok. And please understand that I am not being flippant here, Nataraja: Are animals human?

 

No, of course not. Is a dog a cat, or a horse a goat? Of course not. Human is just our species name. However, as far as Im concerned, ALL animals are people in the sense that we ALL have our own unique personalities. It is our personalities that people mistake for being our souls, or our spirits. Every animal that has the capability for personality is a person. My cat is a person, but she is also a cat, and as a cat she is an animal. I am a person, I am a human, I am an animal.

This is what I was getting at. Humans are animals, it is only our unique brains which produce our unique minds that truly separate us from the other great apes. I in no way think humans are less than what we are, I think as a species we have done remarkably well, considering the odds we have had against us.

Therefore...we are not made in the image of any god. We make gods in our image. I realised this one day as I was sitting at my computer and was looking at the picture of Shiva I had as my wallpaper and thought "Why does Shiva have nipples?". Shiva being a god has no need for nipples, especially since he is male as the male nipples are left overs from our period as embryos when we are female. Then I thought more and more about what I was seeing in the picture, and I realised that what I was looking at was just an idealised image of man. I was looking the man I wanted to be.

The whole point of my posts is that no religion is compatible with evolution because evolution makes no distinction between humans and the rest of life on the planet. Evolution is not goal orientated. A god cannot say "Ok I will run this ecological simulation on this planet and hope for the best.", that would cause evolution to cease being evolution, and it would just be another form of creation. Evolution is not even compatible with my religion, and sooner or later I will have to choose between the facts and the myths. I wish I didnt have to, but its how things are. Actually, if I could have it any way this would all be Faerun, but alas it cannot be so....