Forums → WEPR → The Religion Debate Thread

Lol okay. I guess not sufficient evidence. Thank you for understanding @Moegreche. I think that's what I should have asked. What would happen if we did find Jesus's body? I completely agree that Christianity would be pointless.

To continue the debate, you mentioned that

According to the Bible, more than 500 people saw Jesus after he died. So there would be a kind of eye-witness testimony of Jesus's resurrection, too.

But I don't consider either of these pieces of information to be evidence.

Why wouldn't eye-witness testimonies be considered evidence?

Why wouldn't eye-witness testimonies be considered evidence?

In the early 1900s, tens of thousands of people saw the Sun appear to dance around in the sky. Tens of thousands of people! Now, obviously, the Sun did not, in fact, dance around in the sky. Such an astronomical disturbance would have radically altered Earth's orbit in a devastating way.

So what they saw - i.e. the Sun changing its position in the sky - did not, in fact, happen. And when you see something that isn't really happening, that's a hallucination.

Now, ultimately, the Catholic Church declared this event to be a miracle. But I don't know exactly what the nature of the miracle is. It can't be that God made the Sun move, because it didn't. So is the miracle just that God managed to deceived many thousands of people into thinking the Sun was moving? That seems awfully... not very benevolent.

In short, we have a recent case where thousands of people reported to see something that didn't actually happen. In the same way, I don't believe a 2,000-year-old account that involved 500 people. As Fish pointed out, eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. But this also goes back to my earlier explanation about the whole Jesus's body thing. What's the most reasonable explanation, assuming these 500 people were giving an accurate report? Again, I would say that a supernatural explanation would be at the bottom of the list, in terms of plausibility.

Think about how we'd need to set up the argument. We would have a premise that says 500 people reportedly saw Jesus after he died. We would then need a second premise that says something like: the best explanation for this is that Jesus did, in fact, rise from the dead. But this premise just isn't sound (it's not true). It only makes sense if you're already assuming the truth of theism. The end result is that, since I'm not using theism as a starting point, that argument just never gets off the ground for me.

@Moegreche

It only makes sense if you're already assuming the truth of theism. The end result is that, since I'm not using theism as a starting point, that argument just never gets off the ground for me.

In the early 1900s, tens of thousands of people saw the Sun appear to dance around in the sky. Tens of thousands of people! Now, obviously, the Sun did not, in fact, dance around in the sky. Such an astronomical disturbance would have radically altered Earth's orbit in a devastating way.
So what they saw - i.e. the Sun changing its position in the sky - did not, in fact, happen. And when you see something that isn't really happening, that's a hallucination.
Now, ultimately, the Catholic Church declared this event to be a miracle. But I don't know exactly what the nature of the miracle is. It can't be that God made the Sun move, because it didn't. So is the miracle just that God managed to deceived many thousands of people into thinking the Sun was moving? That seems awfully... not very benevolent.

It only makes sense if you're already assuming the truth of theism. The end result is that, since I'm not using theism as a starting point, that argument just never gets off the ground for me.

Personally, I think that evolution is a very solid theory. Through my own reasoning, God could have designed those stress responses as a way for us to look to Him for help. Or another explanation could be that our designs happen to be similar to the designs of animals because they come from the same designer.

@HahiHa Gosh. You're right. I could have written that better. I mean that I value evolution because it explains a lot, but I don't think it's true because I use creationism as a starting point.

You think that something you consider to be false explains a lot? I'm still not sure to understand

In previous debates with creationists, I have noticed an apparent lack of understanding of certain basic evolutionary principles that lead to the typical creationist arguments. So forgive me if I ask, how well do you know the theory?

Concerning evolution as a process, it is a proven fact that living beings change and adapt over time. So whatever the precise reasons and underlying mechanisms are, I suggest we discard 'hard' creationism (claiming that nothing has ever changed since 'creation') for the sake of the discussion here, what do you say?

I have taken biology in high school last school year. I don't believe in macro-evolution, the evolution into another kind of animal, but rather micro-evolution, small changes and adaptations over time.

But micro- and macroevolution are fundamentally the same processes, at different time scales. A ring species for example is a great example of genetic drift, or there's the example of the London Underground mosquito. And, of course, the always recurring Darwin's finches.

Well sure. Microevolution allows for speciation but it doesn't necessarily support evolution. When I say evolution, I mean becoming a different kind. Creationists claim that there can speciation but a member of ape kind can't branch off to become human kind for example.
Edit: I found a link that deals with speciation. Click here.

Previously, creationists denied even speciation, and now they think it supports their views and invalidates evolution? *facepalm*

Apart from the fact that humans are apes (African Great Apes, to be precise (so in a way it really did happen)), speciation is evolution, and does lead to different 'kinds' with time. You can't just say this part here is evolution and this one isn't. It's all part of the same process. The point is that, once the gene flow stops between two populations - be it through geographic and/or reproductive isolation (the latter usually being the consequence of the former, although geographic isolation is not in all cases necessary for that) - both populations will, through genetic drift, differ more and more over time, and might evolve different traits. Give it sufficient time and you get a different kind. See the evolution of birds from dinosaurs for a well-documented example. It doesn't happen all at once, but rather trait by trait.

I'm wondering, what do you define as a 'kind', anyway? I get the feeling that creationists are just pushing the limit of what they would accept as evolution further up the taxonomic scale, first it was species, now, I don't know, genus or some higher taxon? But maybe I'm unjustly making assumptions here, after all I don't keep informed on creationist views on a regular basis.

In the article I posted, it talks about how "real, substantive increases in information (that is, specifying for an increase in what might be called ‘functional complexity’) will never arise without intelligent cause." I'm still reading this article about how creationists define kind (I stopped right before The Concept of Information section) but it seems that the difference between kind is the amount of information stored in the DNA(?) Like I said, I'm still reading it. However, my point is that the model of the birds to dinosaurs does not take into account/explain increases in information. Then again, the first article states that "Of course, such changes (for example, speciation as a result of horizontal changes in information, or as a result of a mutational defect with a loss of information) do not in themselves offer evidence against ‘big picture’ evolution, since they can easily be assigned a place within the overall model. However, one needs to emphatically point out that they do not suffice to demonstrate the validity of such evolutionary belief, since they can be just as easily assigned a place within a creationist model."

I plan on reading the links more in detail, but for now I just have a few short points.

- Genome size, for that is what I assume they mean by information, does not strictly correlate with complexity.

- Claiming that information will never increase without intelligent cause is an unsubstantiated claim unsupported by evidence-based research. All it achieves is remind us that creationism relies on faith alone, which would be fine if it didn't try so hard to be a pseudo-science.

- The dinosaur to bird model does take into account information changes, as each node represents a new apomorphy (a new derived character). The data might be exclusively osteological and not genetical in the cases of fossils, but both can yield valid taxonomies, as we know from research on extant animals.

Claiming that information will never increase without intelligent cause is an unsubstantiated claim unsupported by evidence-based research. All it achieves is remind us that creationism relies on faith alone, which would be fine if it didn't try so hard to be a pseudo-science.

The dinosaur to bird model does take into account information changes, as each node represents a new apomorphy (a new derived character). The data might be exclusively osteological and not genetical in the cases of fossils, but both can yield valid taxonomies, as we know from research on extant animals.

"Of course, such changes (for example, speciation as a result of horizontal changes in information, or as a result of a mutational defect with a loss of information) do not in themselves offer evidence against ‘big picture’ evolution, since they can easily be assigned a place within the overall model. However, one needs to emphatically point out that they do not suffice to demonstrate the validity of such evolutionary belief, since they can be just as easily assigned a place within a creationist model."

Animals release stress hormones and stuff when they are in danger of dying, but humans have very similar responses even though they might only be dealing with an upcoming test or something.

In this case, some people would see this as evidence for evolution: our ancestors were in very real danger of predators and these responses are traces of that.

Through my own reasoning, God could have designed those stress responses as a way for us to look to Him for help.

I have taken biology in high school last school year. I don't believe in macro-evolution, the evolution into another kind of animal, but rather micro-evolution, small changes and adaptations over time.

Creationists claim that there can speciation but a member of ape kind can't branch off to become human kind for example.

In the article I posted, it talks about how "real, substantive increases in information (that is, specifying for an increase in what might be called ‘functional complexity’) will never arise without intelligent cause."

[...] my point is that the model of the birds to dinosaurs does not take into account/explain increases in information.

However, one needs to emphatically point out that they do not suffice to demonstrate the validity of such evolutionary belief, [...]

They do give evidence why you can't have an increase without intelligent cause because with natural causes, only mutations produce new "sentences" in the sequence. Yet, mutations will never produce a meaningful change that way. That's what I got from it at least.