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Old 2010-06-10, 10:44 PM   #99
sperry
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Real Name: Scott
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Joel, I'm not going to line by line your massive cut and paste for the same reasons that you're not going to tackle Knucklesplitter's links.

But some quick points of contention:

A scientific "theory" is not the same thing as a layman's theory. A scientific theory is a hypothetical prediction, the strength of which is determined by the evidence gathered via experimentation. A theory can be either very strong or very weak... to write off something as "just a theory" simply because it's called a theory is to totally miss the whole point of the scientific method. In science, everything we know is "just" a theory... and every theory can be improved, modified, thrown out, revised, etc as more evidence is discovered. That's the most useful thing about science... it doesn't get bogged down in absolutes because things can change based on our better and better understanding of reality.

More specifically, the theory of evolution is very strong not because there is only X amount of fossils, but because there is zero conflicting evidence. Every challenge at the core of evolution has only resulted in minor changes to the details of the mechanisms of evolution. Nothing has yet been discovered to suggest that evolution is false. That's not saying that we won't eventually find that evidence, but for now, evolution is a fantastically strong scientific theory.

Regarding Rob's comment about life elsewhere, he did in fact state that it appears likely that there is life within our own solar system besides earth, even if it hasn't been confirmed by direct observation yet. He was not just making an assumption as you suggest.

This comment "It shows evidence of having been specially built to accommodate living things comfortably." is patently false. There is no evidence that the earth was designed to accommodate life comfortably. It would be just as likely to assume life on another planet would fit into that planet's ecosystem even if that ecosystem were violently fatal to the life that developed on earth. Life on earth lives comfortably on earth because it evolved here. Life elsewhere would appear just as comfortable there. Your argument is actually a very good argument explaining why life on earth is a result of evolution.

I'm not sure what your point is about the light from Andromeda... but FYI the Hubble telescope has imaged galaxies around 13B light years away, so the universe is at least 13 billion years old... which fits right in with the current estimates of the age of the universe.



Every spec of light there in that tiny, tiny picture is made up of billions and billions of stars. It's kinda hard to imagine that god made all that just for us fragile humans that are bound to the thin layer of air surrounding a small rock to peak at through our telescope. Not that I can question god's purpose... maybe he's crazy into the details... but it just seems super unlikely that the universe was build as our playground.
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