Tuesday 29 May 2012

Creationism again

I recently got this comment:
"Evolution is not a fact, it is a delusion brought on by atheists who are desperate to grasp onto any crackpot explanation for how man came to be."

And the followup:

"A Christian who believes in macro evolution is as deluded as a satanist who goes to church every Sunday. As a Christian I don't claim to know exactly how old the universe is, but I do know God created man as he is today, not as a microorganism that slowly and randomly 'evolved'. This is the real world bro, not some Pokemon knockoff."

Let me see: Pokémon created by Satoshi Tajiri for Nintendo in 1996.
On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin in 1859
There's a 137 year gap there that the commenter can't explain because he/she pulled this comment out of their butts in an attempt to ridicule evolution, but only managed to show the lack of real arguments to present.

As for the use of "randomly 'evolved'" that pretty much tells me this person has no understating of natural selection. Natural selection is not random. Evolution is the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators. Using the word random to describe evolution just exposes your lack of understanding. The process is not random at all, there is randomness involved; just as in nuclear fission, but the process is in no way random. 

To enforce my point, I am going to take the example of the card game poker. In poker you get a number of random cards. Depending on what type of game you play you can choose to keep or discard certain cards. We can all agree that there is randomness involved, but for some reason the same professional players still rise to the top over and over again. So we are no left with the big question, if poker is truly a game of chance, why are the same group of people always winning? We are therefore forced to conclude that poker is not a random game even thou there is an element of randomness in it. 

Sunday 27 May 2012

About evolution

I am going to do another of my short two-paragraph rants, this time about evolution and creationism. I'll start out by saying that evolution is a biological process; anyone who writes an argument that is not about biology, do not understand evolution. Secondly origins of life is abiogenesis, not evolution. Thirdly the second law of thermodynamics say that "[I]n a closed system, you can't finish any real physical process with as much useful energy as you had to start with[.]" and "Entropy in a closed system can never decrease."[1] Creationists love to quote this on, but they fail to notice that the earth is not a closed system. Look out of your window, do you see that big ball of Hydrogen and Helium plasma? That is an outside energy source. The second law of thermodynamics does allow for local decreases of entropy within a system; an AC unit is a perfect example. Every solar storm that doesn't hit any thing will increase the entropy of the the universe as a whole. However any energy or radiation that hits earth will add energy to the localized system called earth effectively destroying that argument.
To sum up, if I in any argument tell you that "that has nothing to do with evolution" I really mean it, and I am not going to debate you on that subject unless you add the proper label to it. And the "biology is a subset of chemistry which in turn is a subset of physics" argument is stupid too. Just look at this:

A = {1,2,3} B = {5,6,7} C = {0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9}
It is true that both A and B are both subsets of C, but there is no intersection between A and B so you can't use B to make a proof on A and any thing that applies to B may not necessarily apply to the entirety of C. QED.
[1] http://www.panspermia.org/seconlaw.htm

Friday 18 May 2012

Religious neutrality

I've had a discussion lately on separation of church and state. And for some reason, theists (mostly Christians) seems to be having problems seeing the difference between an atheistic state religion and "no state religion" also known as "neutral state religion". Because they see atheism as a religion; atheism is not a religion, just as "not smoking" is a habit, and not collecting stamps is not a hobby. Atheism literally translates to "no god". This includes agnostics by the way, because they have no God. Now, remember I am talking about religious neutrality here, a religiously neutral state has to be agnostic by definition, because acknowledging a God, any god, is taking sides, and breaching neutrality.

Just a little note at the end. In a neutral state, the state do not care if "God hates fags", if someone want to smoke those horrible things and poison themselves, they should be free to do so. Allowing cigarettes is not going to infringe on your rights not to smoke them, so why are you complaining anyway? And by the way, pun intended, and it applies to both interpretations.

Richard Feynman

I'm making a habit out of posting youtube videos, but I really don't care. Here are some videos of Richard Feynman on science.

Stupid arguments #1

The other day I got the following argument thrown at me from a creationist: "Newton didn't believe in evolution"
Why is this wrong on so manny levels, and why is this argument stupid? Lets's start off:
Sir Isaac Newton, 4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727 (Gregorian calendar)
Charles Robert Darwin, 12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882
Darwin's Book: "On the Origin of Species" where evolution were introduced. - 1959
Isaac Newton died 132 years before the theory of evolution were even coined, did you really think nobody would realize that? Or is it a habit of young earth creationists to ignore documented death dates in favor of imaginary ideas.
One phrase comes to mind: "Shame on you"

Monday 7 May 2012

Godwin's law

I see a lot of "pulling Godwin's law" in my future, so I'm going to do some clarification on exactly what that means.
When I pull Godwin's law that means that somebody used the argument "The Nazis (...) so therefore (...)" Same goes for Hitler, Al Qaeda, Stalin, Lenin, Marx, Mao etc. I'll even extend it to "Jesus". And the argument I make is this: Just because someone liked or disliked something does not mean that thing is automatically good or bad; and if you make such an absurd claim you automatically lost your credibility in the conversation.
When I pull a Reverse Godwins law, that means I'm using a Godwin's Law analogy to show that your argument is absurd; usually by injecting the Nazi's or Hitler into your argument. For instance: Hitler probably won a lot of debates; killing jews is still bad and winning a debate is not evidence of truth.

Friday 4 May 2012

If you want to prove creation by God, explain this.

This goes for Intelligent design, and creationist.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9136200/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/chimp-genetic-code-opens-human-frontiers/
The only catch is: You need to do it without using the argument "Well, that's how God crated it", that argument is not scientific, I'll leave the explanation of why to Richard Feynman.


Look at the part when he says: so vague it can predict anything.

If you are of the people who believe God designed the laws of nature and set off the big bang, you probably do believe in evolution, and therefore this challenge do not apply to you.