Did you know that the eye has 40,000,000 nerve endings, the focusing muscles move an estimated 100,000 times a day, and the retina contains 137,000,000 light sensitive cells?

Charles Darwin said,

"To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection, seems I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree."

Hmmmmm....

-- Athiest Corner (Truth or@Consequences.con), May 03, 2001

Answers

EYE has not seen-ear has not heard-niether has it entered the heart of [blind] men. the things GOD has prepared for them that love=HIM!!!

-- al-d (dogs@zianet.com), May 03, 2001.

Key word in the Darwin quote: seems. He wasn't saying the idea was absurd, only that it seemed so.

The fact remains that natural selection is far and away the best explanation for the existance of the human eye in its present form. It is an explanation so simple and so powerful that it is likely never to be replaced, but merely refined, no matter how many centuries the question is studied in the future.

If you want to inject God into the process, you may do so. But ask yourself why would God design a universe that required His constant supervision just to run? The answer is He didn't design the universe like a machine that could wear out or break, instead, he designed a universe that could grow and evolve. That's one smart god if you ask me.

-- Little Nipper (canis@minor.net), May 03, 2001.

Not to be disrespectful, but if you believe that the eye is so complex it demands a creator, then surely the creator of that eye must be more complex than the eye itself and must have been created. Likewise, the creator of the creator of the eye must also have a creator. And on and on and on for infinity.

-- Tarzan the Ape Man (tarzan@swingingthroughthejunglewithouta.net), May 03, 2001.

" Not to be disrespectful, but if you believe that the eye is so complex it demands a creator, then surely the creator of that eye must be more complex than the eye itself and must have been created. Likewise, the creator of the creator of the eye must also have a creator. And on and on and on for infinity."

Shame Tarzan. You know better than to invoke bogus arguments like this. By definition, God is unknowable, unexplainable. There is no need to ask who created The Creator. There is no answer. Just as there is no answer to the one-word question "Why"?

I like LN's response much more.

"If you want to inject God into the process, you may do so. But ask yourself why would God design a universe that required His constant supervision just to run? The answer is He didn't design the universe like a machine that could wear out or break, instead, he designed a universe that could grow and evolve. That's one smart god if you ask me.

LN says that "he (God) designed a universe that could grow and evolve". That goes down with me much smoother. It says that evolution is part of creation.

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), May 03, 2001.

Shame Tarzan. You know better than to invoke bogus arguments like this. By definition, God is unknowable, unexplainable. There is no need to ask who created The Creator. There is no answer. Just as there is no answer to the one-word question "Why"?

Bullshit, Lars. If you say that this earth is so complex as to require a creator, then it goes without saying that the creator is so complex that it requires a creator. Otherwise, why not just say that the earth is "unknowable, unexplainable"?

-- Tarzan the Ape Man (tarzan@swingingthroughthejunglewithouta.net), May 03, 2001.

That's your problem Tarzan. You keep expecting religionists to make sense. Their whole illusion depends on not thinking too long or too hard about little things like the nature of god. When they're confronted with questions like yours, they'll demand you stop asking questions and put their hands over their ears and go "STOP ASKING QUESTIONS FOR WHICH THERE ARE NO ANSWERS!!!!!!!!" I call this the Copernicus treatment. If someone asks a question about your god that you can't answer you shut him up in any way that you can.

-- (out.for@daily.troll), May 03, 2001.

The symbiotic relationship between animals should be enough to illustrate creation.

For example, ants that farm grubs and aphids.

There is a spider on Madagascar that eats toads, except for one kind. This toad sits under the spiders stomach. When the spider hatches a new brood of spiders, ants come to eat the new spiders. The toad laps up the ants, before they can do much damage.

These two animals are programmed to do what they do.

-- KoFE (your@town.USSA), May 03, 2001.

Well, two can play that game, Tarzan.

What happened a nanosecond before the first inert molecule morphed into a living community of self-organizing molecules? How did life emerge from nonlife----just give me a theory if you can't replicate the phenomenon in a lab.

What existed before Sagan's primordial Campbell's soup? It's not so hard, just say it: "I dunno".

Right, and we never will.

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), May 04, 2001.

OFTD--

Why?

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), May 04, 2001.

And this is why the non-religionists MUST have Darwinism. To them, the only alternative explanation for existence is God.

Since the assumption has already been a priori made that there is no God, then the dogma to adhere to- even blindly- is Darwinism. Such an adherence to Darwinism is not scientifc or logical, but emotional.

Although Darwinism cannot explain the eye-- or why eons of cells that did not transmit light, and hence had no logical relationship to each other, at one point suddenly and coincidentally worked together to provide vision. SInce this is unreasonable, metaphors are used ("so simple, so perfect an explanation..."), and the mystery is embraced-- sounding suspiciously like an approach to the Ineffable.

Why are there only two alternatives?

If I were a clever atheist, while I was rejecting God I certainly would not replace it with the battered and tattered remnants of Darwinism, an inconsistent and, after 150 years, undemonstrable theory that has outstayed its welcome. I'd just say I don't know how things got here.

-- DeadDogmaofDarwinism (Why@Two.Only), May 04, 2001.

Lars-

The origins of life are unknowable, unexplainable. There is no need to ask how life got started. There is no answer.

Damn, that's fun!

Seriously, we don't yet know how life got started in the universe. But if we simply chalk it up to an unsolvable mystery, we never will know. Does this mean we should give up, cover ourselves with sack cloth and ashes, head to Tibet, and wait for enlightenment?

Of course, even if we did decide to arbitrarily chalk the whole thing up to a creator god(s)(ess), that still doesn't give us any answers. Is this creator god a single god, or one of many? Does this god demand worship, or is s/he/it/they unaware or unconcerned about our existance? Is this god even still in existance? Is this creator god a personal god, or merely a catalyst? And if this creator god is a personal god, does s/he/it/they bear malice toward some or all of her/his/its/their people?

In the abscence of any hard data, human beings came up with an astounding array of explanations for how existance came into being and why it was created in the first place. As we have questioned and studied the natural world, some of these explanations have morphed and others have died out. To suddenly insist that we accept a non- answer in place of a quest for knowledge is to embrace ignorance.

-- Tarzan the Ape Man (tarzan@swingingthroughthejunglewithouta.net), May 04, 2001.

I'm constantly amazed at folks who think that the theory of evolution is incompatible with religion. It simply is not incompatible.

-- Buddy (buddydc@go.com), May 04, 2001.

Thought of the day, huh

Just peeking, so where are the quotes?

-- (cin@cin.cin), May 04, 2001.

al-d, I-m with you!

-- A Friend (-@of.al-d), May 04, 2001.

Buddy-

I've always considered evolutio to be belief-neutral. It doesn't disprove the existance of a god, nor does it prove the existance of one, or one over another. In other words, if evolution needed a catalyst or devine architect, that architect could have been Jehovah, Allah, Amun-Ra, Krishna, Thor, or even (dare I say it?)Goddess Venus.

-- Tarzan the Ape Man (tarzan@swingignthroughthejunglewithouta.net), May 04, 2001.

Oh, Dear, this is the sort of junk science claptrap we see to support Darwinism. I'm not a Creationist by any means, but this sort of stuff is embarassing:

>>>Creationist claims that organs like eyes are too complex to have evolved naturally are way wide of the mark, says Richard Dawkins.

1) Again, the argument is not creationism vs darwinism. Rather, the simple quesiton is, is Darwinism true. False dichotomy in action.

>>>In fact, eyes have evolved many times, often in little more than a blink of geological history

2) Facts not in evidence. This is what you're trying to prove, and is therefore scientifcally wrong as an a priori assumption.

>>>Thus the creationist's favourite question "What is the use of half an eye?" Actually, this is a lightweight question, a doddle to answer. Half an eye is just 1 per cent better than 49 per cent of an eye, which is already better than 48 per cent, and the difference is significant. A more ponderous show of weight seems to lie behind the inevitable

3) What exactly are they saying here? I'm not following...

>>>"Speaking as a physicist, I cannot believe that there has been enough time for an organ as complicated as the eye to have evolved from nothing.

4) Who cares what he speaks as-- this statement has nothing to do with physics, and everything to do with emotion and- dare I say it- religion.

>>>It now appears that the shattering enormity of geological time is a steam hammer to crack a peanut.

5) This is neither here nor there. If time is so long, why not millions of more species? If it is so hard to maintain species, why not millions fewer? The mere passage of time says nothing about an event occuring or not occuring, and is a spurious argument, more akin to the 'ageless universe' sort of reigion.

>>>When one says "the" eye, by the way, one implicitly means the vertebrate eye, but

serviceable image-forming eyes have evolved between 40 and 60 times, independently from scratch

6) Facts not in evidence. One may say there are 40 or 60 different kinds of eyes (well, which is it?), but if one is trying to push darwinism, one may not say that these 'evolved' a priori. This is not scientific, and is a sort of circular thinking of the sort employed by some religionists.

>>>Their task was to set up computer models of evolving eyes to answer two questions. The first was: is there a smooth gradient of change, from flat skin to full camera eye, such that every intermediate is an improvement?

7) Okay...

>>started their story after the invention of a single light-sensitive cell--it does no harm to call it a photocell.

8) What? Where did this light-sensitive cell come from? Sounds like creationism- it just sort of appeared. Where? How? Can I expect such things to spontaneously appear on my nose?

>>>The results were swift and decisive. A trajectory of steadily mounting acuity led unhesitatingly from the flat beginning through a shallow indentation to a steadily deepening cup, as the shape of the model eye deformed itself on the computer screen

9) I'm sure these are nice computer graphics and all, but I too can make a computer graphic morph from one thing to another. How does the eyelid and tear duct and cornea and rods and cones and optic nerves and gel and lenses all get there?

>>>And so to the question of how long all this evolutionary change might have taken. In order to answer this, Nilsson and Pelger had to make some assumptions about genetics in natural populations

10) OK, so we're back to guess work to support an a priori finding.

-- GetReal (OhByGosh@By.Golly), May 04, 2001.

I've always considered evolutio to be belief-neutral. It doesn't disprove the existance of a god, nor does it prove the existance of one, or one over another. (Tarzan)

Yes, and going farther, why LIMIT the possible answers to "no god, one god, or multiple gods?"

How about OUR limitations in measuring and perceiving?

An ant does not have the consciousness of a cat; why is it that how OUR consciousness is wired is supposed to be able to lead to the ultimate in truth, even if our consciousness does include the tools of science, language, and the ability to reason which theirs doesn't?

Perhaps "causation / design theory" itself is a limited concept based on the tools that we have available, that we are born with and develop ... which are 'wonderfully and fearfully made', but still limited. If time is an illusion, it is suggestive that many bets are off.

Not for one minute could any human ever say they know the "origin" of our universe until we can actually see it! ..we can't even see all of it today, We see a very small portion.. and we see it in the distant past.

"Origin" is a concept that might be rendered meaningless in some other context that is beyond our ability to grasp. Not that we should stop trying.

-- Debbie (dbspence@usa.net), May 04, 2001.