Your thoughts on the Westboro Baptist Church

The point is that everyone teaches their children what they believe in. Some are more constructive than others - using reason and logic to support those things that they believe in, and some are just repeating back what they have been taught as children without having ever developed an understanding of why they believe it, it is true. All religions have reasonable and unreasonable people in them. That includes Darwinists....

>All religions

How can you teach morality without dogma? There is no reason to be moral without dogma, except that with governmental law it becomes an issue of the preservation of self.

And yes, Darwinists must have faith as well. If you believe that billions of years ago all matter compacted into a ball and then exploded and this caused the processes which eventually resulted in life, but you cannot explain where that matter came from, and cannot explain the astoundingly low mathematical chances that everything would be just right in order to cause this, you are also living by faith.

No need to get PO'd. I'm merely pointing out that Atheists/Darwinists must also have a certain level of faith to believe what they do.

There have been many mathematical studies done of the probability of evolution occurring. What they do is they take the combination of things which must occur in order for an organism to work, and the number of wrong combinations that would not work, and calculate a probability. And the numbers are astounding. Evolutionists will say "well, the numbers are actually less because there are so many planets and the universe is billions and billions and billions and billions of years old." But it doesn't hold water to me. Imagine two ants, Bill and Ted, who come across an airplane. The conversation that follows:
Bill: "Clearly this was designed by a being much bigger than us - it has a function, a level of complexity, there must be a precise combination of parts that are shaped and weighted just right for it to work. It must have been designed."
Ted: "you're stupid. You have no proof of this bigger being. Clearly this came about by chance - a whirlwind swept through a junkyard and out popped this airplane."
Bill: "That can't possibly work - the mathematical chances of the pieces coming together just right are too high!"
Ted: "Well, the earth is billions and billions and billions and billions of years old, and there are many many many many junkyards, and so there have been many many many whirlwinds over this period of time. So the probability is actually much higher than you think."
Bill: "Well, how did all the parts come into being? How did the nuts and bolts get shaped, which were thrown together just right by this astoundingly high number of whirlwinds?"
Ted: "Volcanoes."
Bill: "Volcanoes? The magma was shaped just right by volcanoes? What about the fact that magma is not pure metal?"
Ted: "Well...the magma was sifted just right through...um...sand...and water...and stuff...."
Bill: "You're adding more complexity to this, so your mathematical probabilities are going lower here...."
Ted: "ZILLIONS...ZILLIONS of years. Yes, that'll fix it."

Now, the human cell has been found to be far more complex than an airplane, and has also been found to be irreducibly complex - that is, they require the existence of numerous complex components, each essential for function, but each function being useless on its own without the other functions. So they would have all had to have developed just right, all at the same time.

J-Man wrote: Geoff, I wish you would understand that atheism is simply 'a lack of belief in a god or gods' and accepting a scientific fact does not require faith. If you can't get that basic concept, I don't think the conversation is worth continuing.Also, do you realize how thoroughly debunked the idea of 'irreducible complexity' is? There's a reason why scientists have not accepted this absurd notion - there is no evidence to support it, and it's only another thing imagined by creationists to accommodate for their God. I'm seriously getting the impression that you do not understand what the theory of evolution actually states. You're creating a straw man, and then using that straw man to make way for an argument from ignorance.Can you provide any peer-reviewed journals from reputable sources that actually confirm what you're saying?

How is "irreducible complexity" debunked? Do any of the functions of a cell have meaning without the ability to reproduce itself? I am a computer programmer, so let me speak to what I know - consider a computer virus. I could write one that does nothing but reproduce itself with a few lines of code. None of these lines of code would be a computer virus without the others, and if I did not have all of them the virus would not reproduce itself, and would thus, for lack of a better term, die out. Each line of characters contains a certain number of characters which would mean nothing without the others, and must be in a precise order and must not contain any extra characters or the virus will not compile. Add to this the fact that I am creating this computer virus using code that is based on other frameworks written by other programmers, and the virus will only work in certain operating systems (which are written by many programmers and used many thousands of lines of code) and the probability that the virus would just randomly pop into existence becomes quite small.

Geoff, a computer virus analogy is not evidence in favor of irreducible complexity. That's something that requires actual proof. Do you have a peer-reviewed published work that I could look at to prove this position? Otherwise, we're at a stalemate and the conversation is not worth continuing.

Furthermore, even if I were to grant you irreducible complexity, what difference does that make? Disproving evolution does not add an ounce of credibility to god claims. The only rational position that a person could possibly reach if evolution were proven false is that "we don't know".

In the meantime, I recommend reading this: http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/design2/article.html

Sorry, Joseph. I have a tendency to get a little fired up on this sort of topic. 

If Geoff wishes to continue the conversation, I'd be glad to move it over to private message, although I don't think we'll reach an agreement anytime soon. No hard feelings.