Next time your creationist friends reject evolution, show them this video

[kpete]

LET'S LOOK AT THE FACTS:

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A new video from science advocates Stated Clearly provides an 11-minute examination of the evidence behind the theory of evolution that should come in handy for anyone debating the issue with creationists.

“Thousands of observable facts from completely independent fields of study have come together to tell us the exact same story: all living things on Earth are related,” the group’s founder, Jon Perry, states.

The video focuses on cetaceans, using evidence gathered through fossil records and findings from embryologists and comparative anatomy studies supporting the theory that whales and dolphins evolved from large land-based mammals.


“Strangely, whales have arm, wrist, hand and finger bones inside their front flippers,” Perry says, comparing their bone structure to those found in the appendages of bats, hippos and people.


MORE:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/10/next-time-your-creationist-friends-reject-evolution-show-them-this-video/

[TreasonousBastard]

1. Creationists have seen all that and it won't...

convince them. They have slick answers for all of it.

However, it just might be the trick for someone who isn't convinced either way-- the undecided viewers of the debate.

[Fred Sanders]

2. Also ask your conservative buddy exactly how Ebola might become airborne, how antibiotics

become resistant.

Hilarity will ensue.

[markpkessinger]

23. Generally, they get around this . . .

. . . by conceding micro-evolution (i.e., small, adaptive changes within a particular species) while denying macro-evolution (i.e., changes that lead to the evolution of one species into another). As TreasonousBastard points out above, they have an answer for everything -- trying to convince them of anything is an exercise in futility.

[panfluteman]

3. How to Believe in God and Evolution - At the Same Time!

I believe in God, yet I also believe in evolution. Here is a very simple explanation of my belief: If God is Omniscient and infinitely intelligent, He would have gotten mighty bored with simply creating every living thing in one fell swoop. It would be infinitely more intriguing and engaging for the unlimited intelligence of God to have life forms evolve in an intricately complex and interconnected web of life. There - does that sound slick or clever to you? To me it sounds pretty reasonable.

Or, you can look at evolution from the standpoint of Native American religion and spirituality: We are all related - Mitakuye Oyasin, in the Lakota language. That relates directly to the web of life, and all living things being interrelated, that is the centerpiece of this video. It's the sovereign remedy for Judeo-Christians who get to presumptuous and uppity about their supposedly privileged place in the universe and special relationship to God.

Or, the Divine Mind or Divine Intelligence inherent in Life itself is always seeking to evolve into higher and more intelligent life forms.

[enki23]

4. Which is to say, God is an amoral tinkerer who never re-engineers anything.

And likes watching the vast majority of everything he's tinkered with suffer and die, just like he knew they would if he's omniscient. Just for the hell of it if he's omnipotent. Because, apparently, it's fun. And god, being the ultimate good, if your god is an omnibenevolent sort, puts its own fun well ahead of objectively less important things like earthly suffering.

Basically, this god is a heartless, ultimately self-absorbed tinkerer who is indifferent to suffering. Or an incompetent. Or a fool. Or any, or all the above. Whatever it is, it makes us humans look caring and decent by comparison. And that is no mean feat.

[navarth]

8. If there was a 'god'

he'd have a hell of a lot of explaining to do.

[paleotn]

14. Amen....

....couldn't have said it better. He's the most boring, uninspired biological engineer of all time. That backwards wiring of vertebrate eyes business convinces me that god should be fired immediately.

[Yavin4]

22. "Basically, this god is a heartless,..self-absorbed tinkerer who is indifferent to suffering"

Wow. God really is a Republican.

[Paka]

5. Boring indeed!

Why shouldn't "The Omnipotent One" have a little entertainment?

Great video, kpete. Thanks for posting.

[ffr]

13. Your next step is philosophy and word definitions, particularly synthetic a-priori knowledge

The problem becomes deductive thought in a natural world, the one God is said to have created, and the supernatural world, where Gods and deities can exist. How does knowledge or any interaction transcend from one to the other when, by definition, the two are separate and do not commingle? They can't, because to do so dilutes one or the other as semi-natural or semi-supernatural. It also would violate the definitions of words we use in our language to define anything.

So the philosophical question is: how does one acquire knowledge of supernatural beings, deities, when we know we live in a natural world? The answer is, we'd have to transcend our evidentiary deductive a-posteriori thought with synthetic (a-priori) verifiable independent of experience thought, also known as, evidence before the fact. You can test this reasoning with one simple question of yourself. Think about it and answer it honestly:

If there is a supernatural God and he had a book called a Bible that proved his existence beyond a shadow of a doubt, but the Bible was (somehow) buried and never discovered, how would you know there was a God given your ability and all those that preceded you in the natural world to collect evidence and deduce conclusions based on a-posteriori knowledge? The rules above bind your answer.

You can only conclude that if there is a God and a supernatural world, that you could not know of him in the natural world. There may be a God, but there is no evidence to support such a belief. It just means that everything you think you know about him so far is probably false.

If you conclude anything else, then you have to also accept that you don't live in the natural world, but a sem-natural world and everything that that connotes. Your world and the one that the rest of us live in would have to be one that has interaction with the supernatural world.

[Volaris]

15. "There may be a God, but there is no evidence to support such a belief."

And there never WILL be either, for the following reasons
1) Believers are to take as a matter of FAITH (belief WITHOUT evidence) that God exists, so fuck you for trying to PROVE Gods existence.
2) If the God of your professed faith is actually omniscient, what in your head makes you think that God would be dumb enough to leave a bunch of Evidence for himself just kind of lying around in the dirt for you to find (see #1).


Evolution IS. If that FACT of God's functional Creation undermines your Faith, then that Faith isn't all that secure to begin with, and what you mark as Faith is really Fear masquerading as RELIGION. I know people of REAL FAITH, (such as it is). NOT ONE of them has any problem with the FACT of evolution.

My experience with this has been that attacking BAD Faith (which they DO understand) works much better than defending good science (which they DON'T understand).

[ffr]

18. Relax already. It is fair to ask questions and find answers to those questions.

To answer your #1, 'believers are to take as a matter of FAITH'... Faith that God (a supernatural deity) exists would be an unfounded belief system that would place the believer in a world that is either semi-natural or supernatural. If semi-natural, there would be interaction between the two worlds supporting their faith. If we lived in a supernatural world, by definition, we would all be deities with supernatural abilities. Unfortunately, the problem with either belief is that physical rules that apply to the natural world only, would have to be tossed out as unreliable, because of the existence of supernatural factors that could always upset a known theory, like gravity for instance. They would have to accept that things like gravity are not reliable, because they have proof of synthetic a-priori knowledge that proves the theory as a hypothesis, not a theory. That's how they could support their faith and believe that we live in, at the very least, a semi-natural world.

#2. I don't see the correlation between an all-knowing deity and that deity being labeled as dumb for leaving evidence for himself lying around. His capacity for all-knowing knowledge shouldn't bear on whether or not there is evidence of his existence. In this case we have a granted: God created heaven and Earth in seven days. The evidence from the heavens and the Earth would either deductively support or not support that.

It is fair to ask such questions regardless of your beliefs, instead of just saying to someone who asks such questions, fuck you. 'Fuck you' does not answer the question, leaving the question on the table to be answered at some later time and making the person you just insulted defensive.

If you believe that the theory of evolution is fact, then you must accept everything that goes along with it, like the fact that you live in a natural world and everything that is bound to it. Just like with the theory of gravity. Theories are based on deductive a-posteriori knowledge that can be tested and retested to prove them. Which brings us back to the original problem. How does one go about proving synthetic a-priori knowledge when it cannot be tested and retested? This may be why the words theory and religion are never used hand in hand. When you think about it, if there is a supernatural deity and a supernatural world, their would be no possible evidence we 'natural world' beings could know of it. Everything that we think we know of it or have been told about it, would probably be false.

[Volaris]

20. Your last paragraph is entirely correct,

It's NOT possible to prove the existence of God through "natural" means. As such, it seems a REQUIREMENT that belief in such a thing require faith. Given that God is supposedly all knowing (and all-powerful), IF God wanted this particular set of circumstances to exist in any other form than they currently DO, it follows that they WOULD, right?

The conclusion that I have reached for MYSELF, is that the Universe as it exists, is the way God WANTS it to be (if such a thing exists).
I DO want people asking questions. I also want them (though this may sound counter-intuitive) to examine their Faith is as LOGICAL a way as possible.

I didn't mean to come off as overly-excitable. If I did, I'm very sorry.

[Old Crow]

6. Woo-hoo! Good video!

I recently read an introductory text on paleontology, which described the evolution of whales from a wolf-like quadruped that splashed around the shallows of rivers, so I really enjoyed this. If the book I'd read had mentioned that blow-holes are bifurcated like nasal passages, then I'd forgotten it. Loved that detail in this video.

Thanks for posting.

[MoonchildCA]

7. That would be assuming they have rational thought. n/t

[WinstonSmith4740]

16. My thoughts exactly.

We're dealing with facts and rational thought here, something that creationists reject outright. This is the mind-set that made it illegal to teach critical thought and "higher" thinking in Texas schools. They don't care about those troublesome things the rest of us call "facts". This quote from Ron Suskind, (which was later attributed to Karl Rove...big surprise there) was from a NYT magazine article in 2004, and it says it all. (Emphasis mine)

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

These guys see themselves as puppet masters...we're here to do their bidding. There's an old legal adage...If the law is on your side, argue the law. If the truth is on your side, argue the truth. If neither is on your side, pound on the table. Neo-cons have been pounding on the table since Reagan, and the gutless, spineless media has let them do it, with the help of the gutless, spineless Democrats.

[sorechasm]

21. I would like to see the video on the de-evolving species...

In a similar way that the nostrils evolved onto the top of the head for dolphins and whales, there is a species in which the butt overwhelmed the head. This species is most closely observed in capital cities with vocal traits known as 'speaking out of their ass', and physical mannerisms reflecting 'head up their ass'.

Also known as 'butt-heads', this species is ever resilient to back-ass-ward decisions that would have doomed a more self-reflective species, due to a self-righteous determination, or possibly an avoidance mechanism for fear that self-reflection may prove them wrong.

[Tikki]

9. Creationist have no intellectual curiosity, at all.

You'd lose them at the phrase ...'Fields of Study'.


Tikki

[Gothmog]

10. Great video on evolution

Thanks for posting

[yuiyoshida]

11. That was like watching a PBS show..I used to love those...

Thanks for posting.

[SheilaT]

12. Once, many years ago, while wandering through the Natural History Museum

of the Smithsonian, I spent a couple of hours in the osteology hall, the one with all the bones and skeletons. I looked and looked and looked at all the different bones of all the different creatures, and by the time I was done, I realized that all vertebrates were descended from a common ancestor. I have to say, it felt as if the insight were brand new to me, even though I'd already known that was the case. But looking at so many different skeletons, from so many different species, just finally drove it home.

If, instead, you simply compare a cat to a snake, the similarities won't be very obvious. But once you've seen creature after creature, some of which are more closely related than others, you can see evolution at work.

One problem with the creationists is they want to (metaphorically at least) compare a cat to a snake and say, See? There's no relationship here. Or they come up with nonsense like how the eye couldn't possibly have evolved, when yes, it can, because there are even now creatures that don't have as complicated an eye as we have.

And so on.

[markpkessinger]

24. Embryology will drive it home as well . . .

. . . since virtually all embryos (including human ones) start out looking remarkably alike!

[MissKat]

17. There is no boundary that can confound a blind believer

There are those who are so blind that they can not see. They are so confounded by the need to believe their connection to the Bible that their is no opening for anything outside of that. I heard a person tell me that the reason dinosaur bones are on the Earth was so that God would know who was faithful and who wasn't.
There is no way to counter that. It's insane, blind faith that makes no sense.

[cantbeserious]

19. Thank You For Sharing

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