YES!!! "God did it" is ALWAYS a simpler answer! Every other answer means you have to do at least a little bit of work.
That is not what that chart shows. It shows the earliest and latest known fossil specimens of each species. By no means are those endpoints accepted as the "start and finish" of those species, and species don't have starting endpoints like that anyway.
You mean,you don't need an explanation. Good for you. How things happen, of course. But you are free to believe, for instance, that demons cause disease. Something tells me you will abandon this belief in favor of evolutionary theory, when it comes time to visit the doctor.
No, that's not what it shows. The problem we have is that finding fossils is incredibly difficult, so the record is highly incomplete. So, what that chart shows is the time periods of specific cases we've found. Those cases were undergoing constant change. For example over the last 20,000 years, modern humans gained blue eyes, gained the ability to digest milk as adults, and lost about one tennis ball's volume of brain matter. That chart didn't show that. It simply shows that those classified as homosapiens have been around for 100,000 or 200,000 years. It doesn't show the change that was happening over that time and it is limited to what we have actually found. The hope is that over time we'll continue to find more fossils and thus be able to give a more detailed account.
^^Not sure why this is disregarded as an answer. Notice where I said "I don't know"? Yea it's there. Excuse me while I kiss the sky! You can scream at the sky if you wish.
Because it explains exactly nothing. It may or may not be true, but that has zero bearing on our pursuit of knowledge.
Ha! I can honestly tell you that you will never know. Kudos for searching but you may want to ditch this question and move on to another.
Will never know....what, precisely? Please articulate your points, so that others don't have to extract them from you.
Maybe I am mistaken but didn't this thread devolve into where life came from and how? I don't want to go back and look now that you are responding with a fervor, I am eating dinner and there is a football game on. I came in and made a simple explanation that you outright declined. I even said I didn't know but you wanted to let me know that it doesn't advance knowledge that you are seeking.
Oh, well then, you were wrong before you even commented. We do know it arose via abiogenesis, itself the product of selection by natural laws on physical systems of chemicals. And maybe gods did that, and maybe gods didn't do that. It matters not either way to the study of abiogenesis.
That would be accurate, if gods did it all. Maybe they did. The truth of that has no bearing on understanding how it happened, so you can say rainbow unicorns did it all, for all I care . That information will be no more or less useful than saying gods did it.
Well, I don't have any misperception that I PERSONALLY would "know it all". But, I absolutely do agree that mankind is and should be increasing knowledge of how things work.
Religion doesn't have any methodology for determining HOW things work in our universe. That is the realm of science, not religion. On the other hand, science has nothing at all to say about the supernatural - including questions of WHY we're here - what our purpose might be. There just has to be a division there.
I read this thread from the beginning. I in NO WAY tried to inject religion but rather added my opinion that maybe it was as simple as a god created everything with us in mind, simple. I did not intend to ruffle feathers but I guess it's inevitable when one brings god into the discussion.
Which is a valid idea for discussion, and has already been touched upon in this thread. Have we not become more clear on each other's position, since you mentioned it?
Okay. And i don't really see the quarrel with a claim that god did it all, or that he did it all just for us, and scientific pursuit. I see no overlap there at all. Well, unless you want to somehow enforce that second part, and stop us from searching for life elsewhere, or stop us from planning for the future (because it will be fine, it's all made just for us!). Fine by me to believe those things...
I do know what you mean. It's a one word comparison, so it probably takes more to really separate the two. By why, I'm pointing to the religious realm. What is our purpose wrt God? Why would god create a universe? What does that mean for how we carry out our lives on earth. My concern with the division is that I think it is important for religion and science to coexist. The chief direction for that seems to me to be separating what issues are best resolved by science and what issues are best resolved by religion.
