Vochensmut "You can choose to ignore the evidence"

What evidence, please demonstrate the best objective evidence for any deity or deities?

So, if "design" is so fucking "obvious", which of those rocks in that photo I posted is the "designed" rock?

@Randomhero82

Indeed.

The claim that an omniscient god negates free will is one which any apologist with half a brain will try to refute.

I first made that claim at my Catholic boys school in about year 8. The teaching brother replied that :" Knowing the future does not make it happen" . I wasn't happy with that in year 8, and remain unconvinced.

. One hurdle seems to be that the free will/determinism dichotomy has not been resolved. It seems to be another of those pesky unfalsifiable metaphysical propositions.

@reedemption: Also, if we originate from one source, Why then do we speak different languages ?

Languages evolve, just like species. Speakers get isolated from each other and their languages evolve in different directions. Sometimes invasion and migration bring them back to together, which is why we have so many Latin, Norse, and French words in English. Beowulf and the Canterbury Tales were both written in English in England. Yet most English-speaking people wouldn't even recognize them as English, because our language has changed radically in the past millennium. Imagine how much change could happen over tens of 1,000s of years as humanity migrated globally. By the time the Tower of Babel fantasy is supposed to have happened, there had been countless languages for millennia.

reedemption "I believe the Male and Female sex organs is an evidence of design, What do you guys think ?"

I think you need to demonstrate some objective evidence for your claim, and since all the objective evidence shows that species evolution through natural selection is a scientific fact you'll need to undo 160 years of global scientific research from multiple scientific disciplines. I think it's as likely we'll discover the world is flat and at the centre of the universe after all.

reedemption"Also, if we originate from one source, Why then do we speak different languages ?"

That question is so breathtakingly stupid I have to ask if you are you being facetious? You do understand that humans create languages, make them up, and that they evolve over time? What has that to do with species evolution, and common ancestry?

I believe the Male and Female sex organs is an evidence of design, What do you guys think ?

I don't even need to be an invertebrate zoologist, to regard this as an admission of ignorance. But, as shall be seen shortly, it helps. But before delving into the minutiate of other species, it's pretty obvious to anyone who exerts even an elementary level of effort studying the requisite output, that creationists don't give a flying fuck about any other species, except when they want to press those species into service in duplicitous apologetic fabrications. All that creationists care about, is maintaining a mythical "special" status for human beings, and they'll make up whatever shit they think will purportedly uphold and preserve this mythical "special" status. Instead of regarding the biosphere as a vast treasure house of diversity from which we can learn genuine, substantive knowledge, creationists routinely demonstrate that for them, the biosphere is nothing more than a supplier of burgers and fries. Indeed, many of them haven't even seen a live cow or chicken, and as for invertebrates, asking the typical creationist to name ten species of Diptera, is like watching that video clip of Justin Bieber floundering when asked to name the continental land masses of the planet. Though geography is another subject that creationists, American ones especially, tend to have bugger all understanding of, but that's properly the subject for another thread.

Now, moving on to sex organs .... well, whoop de doo, what do we find when we scan the biosphere? Oh wait, even if we ignore the asexually reproducing organisms altogether, which means we're ignoring two entire Kingdoms of organisms (Archaea and Eubacteria), along with a large swathe of Protista, and concentrate for a moment solely on the sexually reproducing organisms, a good many of those don't possess copulatory organs at all. Organisms as diverse as mosses and sedentary Cnidarians, just toss their gametes into the environment, and let such environmental features as turbulent water currents bring them into contact with each other. Even among vertebrates, we find, whoops, most of the Teleost fishes don't have copulatory organs either (as a tropical fishkeeper of 35+ years' standing, I've observed a lot of fish breeding behaviour). Many of the Teleosts just swim side by side and squirt out their gametes - the Ostariophysans in particular exhibit this particular mechanism. In the case of fishes such as the Cichlids, females lay their eggs on flat surfaces, and then the male swims up behind and squirts out his milt - the two fishes participating in this process, sometimes don't even engage in physical body contact during this critical part of the reproduction process. Don't even get me started on the hilarity that is the Corydoras catfishes, which can truly be claimed to be the one group of organisms that reproduce via oral sex. In the case of the Corydoras panda I bred three generations of back in the early 2000s, they keep up a frenetic level of activity in this vein for five hours at a time, and if I tried emulating their sexual stamina, I'd end up in a jar at the hospital. But I digress.

Continuing with the fishes for the moment, there's a brace of Families within the Order Cyprinodontiformes, that contain live bearing species. Of these, the Family Goodeidae, exhibit in the males, a modification of the first two rays of the anal fin, to form an intromittent organ (see, for example, Skiffia bilineata), but this isn't particularly elegant as intromittent organs go, and only the tip thereof slots into the female urogenital opening for a brief second or two. The Family Poeciliidae, containing the familiar Guppies, Platies and Swordtails that have been a staple of the aquarium trade for decades, have the entire anal fin of the male thus modified, but again, only the tip thereof contacts the female's urogenital opening, and only for a brief moment. More hilariously, you have the Family Jenynsiidae, whose females have a genital pore covered by s scale, which can only open to one side. Likewise, the males have "handed" intromittent modification of the anal fin, which can only swing to one side. So left handed males can only mate with right handed females, and vice versa, a situation replicated in the Four Eyed Fishes of the Family Anablepidae. Anyone who thinks this was "designed", needs to think long and hard about the mentality of any entity that would intentionally "design" this.

Oh, and returning to the Poeciliidae for a moment, those Swordtails (Xiphophorus hellerii), exhibit another interesting feature. Namely, they all start out female. Once the age of sexual maturity is attained, the largest fish in the shoal turns into a male. Then, that fish stops growing. For a time, that male enjoys the privilege of being able to mate with a raft of available females ... until one of the females grows to be bigger than he does. Then, that female turns into a male, and becomes the dominant male, courtesy of larger size. Eventually, the last female in the shoal from the original generation, becomes bigger than all the surrounding males, and becomes male herself, at which point, this female turned male has a nice selection of females from later generations of past matings to copulate with. This species isn't unique here - fishes that change sex at certain key points in their lives, are numerous and well documented in the scientific literature, including fishes with no copulatory organs whatsoever, though I chose the Swordtail as one to focus on, because it's one of the odd ones that do possess copulatory organs.

But now, we move on to invertebrates. And oh, boy, do they take the rule book and rip it up wholesale in numerous ways.

Take spiders, for example. These organisms introduce a whole new chapter of hilarity all on their own. At the front end of spiders, there are a pair of limb like organs known as labial palps, which are used for food manipulation. In essence, spiders have their own built in cutlery to handle their food. But the males throw an extra piece of hilarity into the mix. Courtesy of the fact that the males don't have copulatory organs where you'd normally expect them. Instead, what happens when a male is out looking for a female to inseminate, is this. The male spins a silk pad on some suitable surface, and deposits a spermatophore upon said silk pad. Then, the male reverses, and inserts his labial palps into the spermatophore. The male's labial palps are equipped with an extra set of appendages, known collectively as the palpal bulbs, which are, in effect, the spider substitute for a penis. The male then tracks down a likely female, and, if successful at persuading her to mate, inserts each palp, one after the other, into the female epigyne. In short, spiders are organisms that use their cutlery for sex.

But it gets better. In some spider species, a classic "Red Queen" arms race has emerged, in which picky females have acquired, over evolutionary time, genital tracts that incorporate "blind alleys", or diverticulae, into which females can divert an incoming male's labial palpal projection, if she decided during copulation, that he's not fit to fertilise her eggs. Males have acquired, in turn, various behavioural and anatomical means of subverting this choice on the female's part. Including such fun developments as bits of the labial palp that break off during copulation, and become lodged in the female epigyne, preventing her from mating with another male until the next episode of ecdysis (body moulting). In one extreme example, the aptly named Harpactea sadistica, the male's solution is to avoid the female epigyne altogether, but to aim straight for her ovaries by stabbing her with labial palps equipped with a hypodermic inseminator. Juicy. Again, anyone wishing to claim that this was "designed", needs to think long and hard about the mentality behind a "design" like this.

Oh, and that business of hypodermic insemination isn't unique to Harpactea sadistica by any stretch of the imagination, though thus far, this is the only spider exhibiting this mode of reproduction. The insect Order Hemiptera is replete with hypodermically inseminating species, whose males, instead of bothering with the usual sexual etiquette, simply walk up to the female and stab her through the side of the abdomen, with a penis that's more mediaeval assault weapon than instrument of love. As if this weren't enough, some of those true bugs in this order, add to the mix by engaging in gay sex. Yes, that's right, we have scientifically documented instances of gay insects. Even more hilariously, these are hypodermically inseminating gay insects, the classic example of which is the Australian flower bug Xylocoris maculipennis. Whose males offer themselves up to other males for this activity, in what appears to be a seriously masochistic move to the untrained eye, in order to decommission the genitalia of rival males, so that they can move on and mate with the females. Even more interestingly, these bugs have developed the ability to dismantle enzymatically the incoming sperm from their gay partner, and use the protein and nucleic acid resources therefrom, to make more of their own sperm.

Just when you though all this hoo-ha with hypodermic insemination had reached its peak of weirdness, then we have Hesperocimex cochimiensis and Hesperocimex sonorensis to contend with. These are two blood-feeding parasites on various birds (owls and martins being targets of choice). However, H conchimiensis has a neat way of dealing with the food resource competition from H. sonorensis, by using sex as a biological weapon. Quite simply, if a male H. cochimiensis inseminates a female H. sonorensis, that female suffers a massive and fatal immune reaction to the sperm she's just been inseminated with. In this way, H. conchimiensis eliminates the competition for all that nice owl blood they're feasting on. And, once again, anyone who wants to claim this was "designed", needs to think long and hard about the mentality of a "designer" that would come up with this.

Then of course, we have that bundle of anatomical joy known as the bilateral gynandromorph, which can appear among various insects with surprising frequency, the Lepidoptera providing particularly spectacular instances thereof. Those who don't know what a bilateral gynandromorph is, well, it's an individual that is half male, half female, divided lengthways, so that, for example, the left hand side is male, but the right hand side is female. This division extends to the internal organs, including the genitalia, so that the individual in question has, for example, male genital morphology on the left hand side, but female genital morphology on the right hand side, with all manner of teratomic anomalies marking the suture junction between the two. I have in my collection of entomology papers, a particularly nice example occurring in the moth species Harmaclona tephrantha from Indonesia, complete with a nice diagram showing the weird nature of the half-male, half-female genitalia. In the case of butterflies or moths exhibiting visible sexual dimorphism with respect to wing colouration, the result can be pretty spectacular, even more so in species with wingless females.

Oh, and we also have some other strangeness to cover here, such as the gall wasp Biorhiza pallida, an individual of which I found during some recent biological sampling work, and which has a seriously weird life cycle. One generation of adults is sexually reproducing, whilst the subsequent generation is asexual, with parthenogenetic females. The species alternates between sexual and asexual adults in this manner. The underpinnings for this life cycle, I have seen described as "Byzantine genetic bureaucracy writ large". Again, who in their right mind would "design" this?

Indeed, given the massive flaws in the whole "design" assertion and its palsied apologetics that I've dealt with here, I would have thought anyone sensible would avoid wading into this territory, but, since the requisite assertion has been peddled here, I thought I'd provide the above Baedecker Tour of biological hilarity, just to ram home the point.

@reedemption

That's the kalam cosmological argument you're trying to pass off as your own, so that's pretty dishonest for a start, and it's a first cause argument, you are simply assuming that cause is your deity. I don't view assumption as sound argument. You're also claiming known scientific laws about the natural physical universe applied prior to the big bang, which is obviously nonsensical since you cannot know they applied. Energy is energy, calling god is no different calling it a leprechaun, and just as meaningless. No physicists share your opinions here based on scientific evidence either. You can't assume something into existence, I'd have thought that was obvious.

Let me put forth a simple argument by deduction.

Why do I detect a fatuous apologetic fabrication about to be presented? Oh that's right, I've seen so many of them from supernaturalists like you.

Within the universe exists a law of conservation of energy as energy is neither created nor destroyed.

Ah, the attempt to treat physics as a branch of apologetics. Don't you supernaturalists ever learn that this is doomed to failure, before an audience that actually paid attention in physics classes?

It is obvious that also the universe is not eternal and had a beginning .

No it isn't. The current observable universe in its current form may have had a "beginning", but as I've already pointed out at length here in several threads, the actual view of cosmological physicists on this matter bears NO relation to your simplistic, mythology-driven view of the topic. That extant cosmological view, among many of the requisite cosmological physicists, is that the entities and interactions preceding the current observable universe are themselves eternal.

Therefore there must a source that existed before the start of time

BZZZT!!!! Those same cosmological physicists don't think time didn't exist before the Big Bang.

and the universe that in itself is eternal.

And those same cosmological physicists postulate instead, that well defined natural entities and interactions preceding the emergence of our observable universe, were the generators of that observable universe. Going to read some of that cosmological physics literature sometime, are you?

Physicists call it energy, I call him God.

So your approach is to assert blindly that a well-documented natural entity is your magic man?

If this is what is considered "sophisticated" apologetics among your ilk, you're easily dazzled and pleased, aren't you?

You can also call it the God of the gaps but that answer is fine by me

Translation: "I can't be bothered learning any actual physics, so I'll make shit up to prop up my attachment to a pre-scientific mythology".

Speaking of said mythology, care to explain why it contains so much absurdity and outright dumbfuckery, of a sort that any genuinely existing fantastic magic entity would have proofread out of existence before ink hit papyrus?

have always put it succinctly, I was an atheist

Oh, not THIS tired old piece of shite we keep seeing from supernaturalists ... which is complete fucking bullshit, because it's obvious from your peddling of repeatedly destroyed, tired old canards on the subject, that you never were an atheist, otherwise you wouldn't be peddling this drivel.

my reason for choosing a different worldview is simply because by mere reasoning it is obvious that the universe is not eternal.

No it isn't. Do I have to smack you over the head with Steinhardt & Turok again?

Plus, the moment a supernaturalist says that something is "obvious", those of us who paid attention in class know that what he's really saying is "I'm too stupid to learn the actual science, therefore my magic man from my favourite pre-scientific mythology must have done it".

Except that oops, scientists have already rendered blindly asserted mythological entities superfluous to requirements and irrelevant for vast classes of entities and interactions, and the remaining areas of active research aren't yielding any results breaking that precedent.

It is a consensus with the science community that the universe has a beginning.

No it isn't. How many times do I have to keep schooling you on current cosmological physics?

I choose to worship whatever caused the beginning of the universe .

If Steinhardt & Turok pick up a Nobel in the next 20 years, start worshipping branes.

Secondly atheism leads to nihilism

Bullshit. Far from leading to "nihilism" in my case, being an atheist simply motivated me to learn about the scientific facts, instead of accepting bullshit mythological assertions. Including scientific facts about the origin of our capacity for ethical thought.

short and simple. Nothing means anything, the best atheism can come up with is positive nihilism.

Bullshit. Oh wait, since atheism is nothing more than suspicion of unsupported supernaturalist assertions, it's not required to come up with anything, because, wait for it, atheism doesn't involve erecting blind assertions. It leaves that to mythology fanboys. It also leaves the business of providing postulates about the world, to those disciplines for which this is a remit. What part of "leaving a task to the relevant endeavour" do you not understand?

Christianity gave meaning to my life and I am sure that no argument for God will sway you either .

We've never seen any real "argument" for your imaginary magic man. All we've seen is regurgitation of mythological assertions, and the peddling of fatuous apologetic fabrications. in some cases said fabrications involving blatant outright lies.

Its hard to go down that route and engaging you guys in a conversation

What, because we keep pointing out that the facts destroy your vacuous apologetic fabrications?

especially when your comments are laced with insults and sarcasm.

Oh no, it's TONE POLICING TIME!!!! The tiresome supernaturalist appeal to post style, in order to avoid dealing with post content. Boo fucking hoo.

Quite simply, the maxim in operation here is bad ideas exist to be destroyed. Frequently, before persistence of those bad ideas starts destroying good people. For those of us who paid attention in class, ideas are a free-fire zone for whatever discoursive ordnance we choose to deploy, in order to determine which of those ideas are good ideas, and which are bad ideas. As a corollary, because it is eminently possible to change the ideas one considers to be good ideas, as one learns over time, especially if one applies diligence to the matter of testing assertions to destruction, the principle "you are not your ideas" applies, a principle that we know it's hard for a supernaturalist to understand. But it's precisely because we recognise that ideas onlyu deserve to persist after they;ve survived the appropriate discoursive artillery, that we're ruthless in dealing with unsupported assertions. If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen, or in this case, the blast furnace.

Quite simply, again, we're not going to lower our standards just to accommodate a whiny supernaturalist, who isn't used to having his assertions subject to proper scrutiny. If you don't like the fact that we treat bad ideas with contempt, scorn and derision, and subject the ridiculous to the mockery it deserves, then it's fucking tough. We're not going to lower our standards because your fucking fee-fees are inflamed and in need of the butthurt ointment. This is how proper discourse is conducted - assertions are given whatever carpet bombing is required to expose their weaknesses, and if you think things are bad here, you want to try dealing with some academic environments I'm aware of, where even the smallest of errors invites swift, immediate and ruthless shelling.

Re: Reedemption - "Secondly atheism leads to nihilism short and simple. Nothing means anything, the best atheism can come up with is positive nihilism."

Ya know, even IF that statement were true, I really don't give a shit. After all, what difference does it make what he, I, or anybody else thinks? Because nothing any of us says or does matters anyway, right? We are born, we eat, shit, sleep, have sex, and then we die. What more could a person want? So that whole remark about nihilism is pretty damn ridiculous, if you ask me..... Hmph!... Nihilism.... *chuckle*... Who cares?... *waving hand in dismissal*...
(Dripping sarcasm, in case anyone didn't notice.)

Side note: (Yeah, I know Reed is no longer with us... (God rest his soul.)... But I somehow missed that particular post from him when he was still here, and I simply could not resist in responding... lol)