A Question which Atheists could not answer

[MohammedK]

I have debated with all religions and atheists are the top on the list due to many of them having serious bigotry and hatred for Islam. You ask for evidence that Islam is true : the miracle to prove it is from god: we have that. It is the Quraan. A book that has not been matched in over 1400 years.

You claim there is no god. So prove that. Any claim must be proven. Atheists claim Energy/ Atoms is the result of the universe and everything in it; because they claim it always existed. As some scientists claim. That has been proven false by other scientists see the links at the end.

Also Atheists claim people evolved from apes : over 1400 years ago Islam told us that is false and told us nothing always exists except Allah . The ape theory has also been proven false by scientists see links at the end.

So both of your "facts " have been debunked. So explain who created the universe your old lies have been debunked.

 

[Muhaba]

Why should TOE be more logical than God creating each specie individually? Also, how do we know that fossil record really prove theory of evolution? For one thing, the fossil record is so incomplete that it can't prove anything. Second, it's very much possible that only those fossils are being presented by the scientific community that show TOE. Those that go against it are ignored. Third, it's possible that wrong and exaggerated conclusions are being reached due to bias and to promote a certain theory. For example, how can a single finger or tooth fossil be used to show what kind of creature the fossil belonged to and what were that creature's living habits, intelligence, etc.? Was the creature human or nonhuman? That it wasn't an ape but a specie similar to humans but not human? That it used tools? That it had an underdeveloped language? etc. etc.

 

[greenhill]

A lot of people here seem to think that atheists are desperate for evolution to be true, that it confirms our "agenda". That's just not true. If evolution is false, then that's incredible - whatever replaces it will be just as interesting. We push the case for evolution because, evidentially speaking, it is the only plausible case at the moment.

I would not refute that there is 'some' degree of evolution and it occurs strictly within a specie. Not evolution that jumps from one specie to another. TOE does not prove there is a jump either, merely infers that it is a most likely scenario based on their findings. But it is not a fact, just a possibility which is treated like a fact.

eace:

 

[observer]

You claim there is no god. So prove that.

A negative can't be proved in this way. If I say "prove there are no pink unicorns in the world" you can't do it.

Atheists claim people evolved from apes

Not true - evolution says that people and apes evolved from a common ancestor. Man did not come from monkeys. Man and monkeys came from the same place.

Atheists claim Energy/ Atoms is the result of the universe and everything in it; because they claim it always existed.

I'm not sure anyone says the universe has always existed - science more or less universally accepts the idea of a big bang, a creation moment.

As for the Quran being a proof of god, that's only true for muslims. Christians believe the Bible does the same, Jews the Torah etc. You saying that your holy book is proof of god is not proof by any "scientific" sense of the word. Faith - absolutely, if you see something in the Quran that makes you believe in god then great, but it is not proof of god to a non-believer.

 

[observer]

TOE does not prove there is a jump either, merely infers that it is a most likely scenario based on their findings. But it is not a fact, just a possibility which is treated like a fact.

But everything in science is a best guess. There are no "facts" like 1+1=2. The theory of gravity is not a fact - but you catch a plate to stop it falling. The theory of electromagnetism is not a fact but it powers your house and lets you use a computer. There are no 100% facts in science - only best theories.

Science starts by saying "We don't know how this works - let's find out" and then introduces theories and experiments to test those theories. If the experiments fit the theory then it becomes scientific "fact" (until a better theory comes along).

Religion says "We know how it all happened, let's prove it" and any evidence which doesn't fit the book in question is disregarded and often, as with TOE, attacked. For that reason, religious reasoning will never convince someone who wants proof - testable theories.

Science will never prove there is no god. Never. It's impossible. But it doesn't try to.

 

[Independent]

Also, how do we know that fossil record really prove theory of evolution? For one thing, the fossil record is so incomplete that it can't prove anything. Second, it's very much possible that only those fossils are being presented by the scientific community that show TOE. Those that go against it are ignored

You misunderstand. This would be a valid objection if I were trying to say that one fossil is the direct ancestor of another and prove a line of descent. But I'm not. And this claim is (generally) not made by modern evolutionists. Like many TOE critics, you are arguing against a version of TOE which is itself ancient history.

The tree of descent has far more branches and cross overs than we first realised. Although an individual species may be of the correct family and a relative of what comes next, we can't be sure that it was this particular line that continued, as opposed to one of the others with similar characteristics. Unless we can get more information (eg ancient dna from all remains) then we can't be so precise.

(By the way, the often quoted line from Darwin about the paucity of the fossil record no longer applies. We have vastly more fossils than in his day, including many of the famously misnamed 'missing links').

BUT the fossil record can tell us with certainty that there is a general trend from only simple creatures to a mix of simple and more complex. Every single fossil that we have found, as well as all species known today, fit into an order and pattern consistent with TOE. We don't find homo erectus remains in the Jurassic, nor do we find kangaroo ancestors in Europe. And each detailed evolutionary characteristic (eg changes in the spine connected with bipedalism) occur in the correct order in the correct species and never elsewhere.

100% of the time.

That's why many scientists say, evolution is a fact, the only issue is how it happened. In a way the criticism of TOE fits this idea because it's always about the mechanics.

Third, it's possible that wrong and exaggerated conclusions are being reached due to bias and to promote a certain theory. For example, how can a single finger or tooth fossil be used to show what kind of creature the fossil belonged to and what were that creature's living habits, intelligence, etc.?

There is room for debate here which is why I haven't made it part of the 100% claim for TOE. Individual fossils may indeed be re-classified. However, it is possible to extrapolate a great deal from a few bones, because some characteristics are very revealing (eg changes in lordosis verterbrae in women). All creatures are the way they are for a reason - whether that is because of adaption or any other reason.

I repeat, TOE does not disprove the existence of God. It's possible to believe in God and TOE and many people do. But, it means a change in the way we understand God's role - from continuous creation to creating a set of laws. This is exactly parallel with what you already believe in relation to the laws of physics. (ie God did the Big Bang and afterwards His laws did the rest.) Why accept it for physics but get angry when it's suggested for biology?

 

[greenhill]

But everything in science is a best guess. There are no "facts" like 1+1=2. The theory of gravity is not a fact - but you catch a plate to stop it falling. The theory of electromagnetism is not a fact but it powers your house and lets you use a computer. There are no 100% facts in science - only best theories.

But in most cases they are replicable, and can be used to extrapolate data and prediction of blackholes etc.. Even as you say theory of electromagnetism (as I say I'm not scientist) things can measure up in terms of power, output, and changes in 'a' will affect whatever in 'b' and be testable. Gravity too. But evolution is entirely a different thing altogether.

I have read somewhere about studies into wood. They know the molecular structure and how simple it is, but it cannot be replicated. Life is a force on its own, it cannot be re recreated at will. Just because a body can made (even if it could) does not mean it can be brought to life. So life is not about chance, hence there must be a Creator.

eace:

 

[greenhill]

“. . .when your Lord said to the angels, "Indeed, I will make upon the earth a successive authority." They said, "Will You place upon it one who causes corruption therein and sheds blood, while we declare Your praise and sanctify You?. . .” 2:30

This refers to the creation of Adam (pbuh)

We as muslim know that the angels and jinns know nothing of the future, then how can they be saying that? The only thing I can reason is that there were similar creations in the past that 'resembles' human that behaved despicably. Perhaps what we are seeing now as potential evidence for TOE.

eace:

 

[observer]

So life is not about chance, hence there must be a Creator.

But why do you say life is not about chance? How do you know?

The problem with all of this, is that we have only 1 example: Earth. It could be that, given the right conditions on a planet, life is inevitable. It could be that it's incredibly unlikely and that we are the result of a huge stroke of random fortune. We don't know. But that's what I love! It's looking for the answers which is the interesting part - not assuming that we already have them all.

I just can't accept the religious argument that "This is all so wonderful - only god could do this". That just seems like such a cop-out. At the end of the day, like I said, science can never disprove the existence of god. And whilst I don't believe in god, I like the idea (eternal life in paradise? Yes, please!) but what I see just does not tally with there being a god - at least, not with a god of any religion.

 

[RedGuard]

But why do you say life is not about chance? How do you know?

The problem with all of this, is that we have only 1 example: Earth. It could be that, given the right conditions on a planet, life is inevitable. It could be that it's incredibly unlikely and that we are the result of a huge stroke of random fortune. We don't know. But that's what I love! It's looking for the answers which is the interesting part - not assuming that we already have them all.

I just can't accept the religious argument that "This is all so wonderful - only god could do this". That just seems like such a cop-out. At the end of the day, like I said, science can never disprove the existence of god. And whilst I don't believe in god, I like the idea (eternal life in paradise? Yes, please!) but what I see just does not tally with there being a god - at least, not with a god of any religion.

Life is not entirely about chance. Randomness is involved but given right environmental conditions, life becomes certain or at least highly probable.

 

[wizra]

Life is not entirely about chance. Randomness is involved but given right environmental conditions, life becomes certain or at least highly probable.

Completely contradicting yourself. Randomness in right conditions is chance itself!

Atheists are excellent are spilling out pseudoscience day & night. But in the end, all they've got is uncertain theories & guesses.

Brother Karl wraps it up pretty nicely:
http://www.islamicboard.com/clarifi...-atheists-could-not-answer-8.html#post1603488

10:36. And most of them follow not except assumption. Indeed, assumption avails not against the truth at all. Indeed, Allah is Knowing of what they do.

 

[RedGuard]

I don't want to derail the topic so let's go back to life/evolution.

In our galaxy alone there are 100-400 billion stars and there are more than 150 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Even if we assume that only one in 1000000 stars has any planets and out of them 1 in 1000 have planets capable fo supporting life, that would give us between 100-400 planets with possible life in our galaxy alone. Multiply it by the total number of galaxies and you've got a mind-blowing number of possibly habitable places. And this is not the whole picture. Scientists from University of California, Berkeley, and University of Hawaii have determined that twenty percent of Sun-like stars in our galaxy have Earth-sized planets that could host life.

 

[greenhill]

That just seems like such a cop-out

To me it is futile.

In one of the documentaries I saw about the creation of the universe, about 2 hour long, it goes on about the Big Bang and all the stuff and it kind of concludes that all the permutations from the density of clusters (why not all uniformly spread etc) to whatever else, it correlates it to a combination that is like the number of sand of the beaches on earth, that if only 3 grains were taken out, we would not have the world as we know it today.

The absolute precision in the 'throw of dice' to have this chance happening is between absurd to ridiculous. It cannot be chance. People would not normally accept a million to one odds, let alone these kinds of figures. I don't know how they can come up with that analogy, but hey, they did their research and that was their conclusion. So there must be a 'force' to steer it. Couple that with another analogy where, if the earth was created 12 hours ago, human life counts for only about 3 seconds. We are really that insignificant in the overall scheme of things. For the Creator, time is relative(?) or perhaps even no time? Don't we want to consider the prospects of the larger space out there that is not restrained by the living body? Like what happens after humanity's 'few seconds' spell on earth?

It really is not a cop-out. It is a non issue. There is no need for a proof. We believe Allah created Adam. That we did not descend from apes. What we try to do is to increase our taqwa. When TOE suggested we came from apes, we objected. Does not mean TOE is about everything else is entirely wrong. Just that we did not come from apes. Just don't mix the two.

 

[observer]

The absolute precision in the 'throw of dice' to have this chance happening is between absurd to ridiculous. It cannot be chance.

It kind of depends how you look at it - it's easy to say that talk of chance like this is futile, because if the universe hadn't been this way, then we couldn't exist. Or there's the many worlds hypothesis, that there are actually many different universes, many of which would be "dead" as conditions were not right. I can totally see how the "fine-tuning" of the universe would lead people to conclude that god did it - but it's not a prerequisite.

This is a really good book on just that topic http://www.amazon.co.uk/Just-Six-Numbers-Universe-SCIENCE/dp/0753810220 - I think that if you are religious and read it, it will actually probably increase your faith!

For the Creator, time is relative(?)

As Einstein showed - time is relative for everybody! :shade:

We believe Allah created Adam. That we did not descend from apes.

Just remember, TOE doesn't say that we came from apes - that's a common misrepresentation. It says that we and apes had a common ancestor.

The way the universe is, it seems to me completely normal to postulate a god as creator. But it also seems pretty clear that there are plenty of scenarios where there is no need of a creator. Again - we'll never know. But there are so many problems with religion that I can't believe any of them.

 

[~Zaria~]

Greetings,
[MENTION=33838]observer[/MENTION]: In response to your previous query (I can no longer access the required page) -
The website is run by 'creationists' - the belief that GOD created mankind from naught, as evidenced from His untainted scriptures.
This is the belief held in Islam.

In addition, please note that the website itself has little to do with the contents of this particular article: Neanderthals are Still Human! - an author can chose to publish his work in any journal or website. What matters to the critical reader is whether or not the information is well-referenced (as it is) as well as the academic background of the author - in this case Dr Dave Phillips has a degree in Physical Anthropology and is working on his Ph.D. in paleontology.

(Please do not attempt to draw away from the contents of the article by means of diverting our attention onto a non-issue - as this seems to be a common pattern in your discussions.)

BUT the fossil record can tell us with certainty that there is a general trend from only simple creatures to a mix of simple and more complex.

^ Even if this were true, it is a long way away from linking fossils to evolution.

Every single fossil that we have found, as well as all species known today, fit into an order and pattern consistent with TOE.

No it does not.
Please can I request that you save these un-substantiated and false claims for another forum.

We don't find homo erectus remains in the Jurassic, nor do we find kangaroo ancestors in Europe. And each detailed evolutionary characteristic (eg changes in the spine connected with bipedalism) occur in the correct order in the correct species and never elsewhere.

100% of the time.

Lets get this clear:

"Evolution" mixes two things together, one real, one imaginary. Variation (microevolution) is the real part.

The types of bird beaks, the colors of moths, leg sizes, etc. are variation.

Each type and length of beak a finch can have is already in the gene pool and adaptive mechanisms of finches.

Creationists have always agreed that there is variation within species.

What evolutionists do not want you to know is that there are strict limits to variation that are never crossed, something every breeder of animals or plants is aware of.

Whenever variation is pushed to extremes by selective breeding (to get the most milk from cows, sugar from beets, bristles on fruit flies, or any other characteristic), the line becomes sterile and dies out. And as one characteristic increases, others diminish.

But evolutionists want you to believe that changes continue, merging gradually into new kinds of creatures. This is where the imaginary part of the theory of evolution comes in. It says that new information is added to the gene pool by mutation and natural selection to create frogs from fish, reptiles from frogs, and mammals from reptiles, to name a few.

Believing in beneficial mutations is like believing a short-circuit in the motherboard of your computer could improve its performance.

To make any lasting change, a beneficial mutation would have to spread ("sweep") through a population and stay (become "fixed"). To evolutionists, this idea has been essential for so long that it is called a "classic sweep", "in which a new, strongly beneficial mutation increases in frequency to fixation in the population."

Some evolutionist researchers went looking for classic sweeps in humans, and reported their findings in the journal Science. "To evaluate the importance of classic sweeps in shaping human diversity, we analyzed resequencing data for 179 human genomes from four populations".

"In humans, the effects of sweeps are expected to persist for approximately 10,000 generations or about 250,000 years." Evolutionists had identified "more than 2000 genes as potential targets of positive selection in the human genome", and they expected that "diversity patterns in about 10% of the human genome have been affected by linkage to recent sweeps."

So what did they find? "In contrast to expectation," their test detected nothing, but they could not quite bring themselves to say it. They said there was a "paucity of classic sweeps revealed by our findings".

Sweeps "were too infrequent within the past 250,000 years to have had discernible effects on genomic diversity." "Classic sweeps were not a dominant mode of human adaptation over the past 250,000 years." --Hernandez, Ryan D., Joanna L. Kelley, Eyal Elyashiv, S. Cord Melton, Adam Auton, Gilean McVean, 1000 Genomes Project, Guy Sella, Molly Przeworski. 18 February 2011. Classic Selective Sweeps Were Rare in Recent Human Evolution. Science, Vol. 331, no. 6019, pp. 920-924.

An Excellent Read:

Debunking Evolution:problems between the theory and reality;
the false science of evolution
​

That's why many scientists say, evolution is a fact, the only issue is how it happened. In a way the criticism of TOE fits this idea because it's always about the mechanics.

It is far from fact.

We are open to intelligent discussion - which would include proper research and evidence to back the far-fetched claims that have been made.

If this is not available, then not much can be achieved from this discussion.


Something to ponder over:

​

Peace

 

[observer]

(Please do not attempt to draw away from the contents of the article by means of diverting our attention onto a non-issue - as this seems to be a common pattern in your discussions.)

I'd suggest that that's a little unfair.

 

[Muhammad]

Arguments about evolution often get confused. Yet, when you look at the evidence, there are some parts that are completely non speculative and observable. As i described above, whereas the direct descent of one fossil to another is difficult to prove, the overall pattern is 100% clear, consistent and observable. And we can match it against a mountain of biological evidence that suggests a capacity for adaption over time.

To all intents and purposes, this proves that evolution has indeed taken place. The only argument remaining is 'how'?

As I mentioned earlier, many creationists already accept the general concept of adaption over time. To use this point to confirm everything under the umbrella of 'evolution' is misleading. It is only one aspect of what is termed evolution, and one which is redundant to the discussion if the atheist and creationist already agree on it. Likewise, it does not mean God has 'tricked' anyone because it has nothing to do with other issues like life originating from lifeless matter etc.

 

[Independent]

You make a series of comments without support.

Even if this were true, it is a long way away from linking fossils to evolution

In what way is it not true?

No it does not.

Examples?

The rest of your post concerns the difference between macro and micro evolution. This has nothing to do with the question of overall pattern and order which I'm describing, which remains unanswered by anyone in this thread.

 

[Independent]

As I mentioned earlier, many creationists already accept the general concept of adaption over time. To use this point to confirm everything under the umbrella of 'evolution' is misleading. It is only one aspect of what is termed evolution, and one which is redundant to the discussion if the atheist and creationist already agree on it

The pattern shows both separate species and new adaptions appearing over time. The species occur in the correct order as well as the adaptions. TOE is a good explanation for this. Creationism is not. Because if you are creating species from scratch every time, there is no reason for them to bear any relation to other creatures at all, let alone show a pattern of coherent development.

Likewise, it does not mean God has 'tricked' anyone because it has nothing to do with other issues like life originating from lifeless matter etc.

The pattern of species development does not fit what you would expect from Creationism. Of course, it could be true (because in creationism, anything at all can happen without explanation) but it is still not logical.

So, it is in conflict with the notion of a logical and just God.

 

[Science]

I beg to differ. Science has proven nothing. It merely connects the dots (with huge gaps missing still) and provides a 'best' and 'most plausible' conclusion to the partial data it has gathered. It is only what people want to believe.

eace:

No, science has proven many things. There are still many things to discover in science, but what we do know in science is based on evidence. Science does not base things off of partial data, but on full data and all of the evidence. Do you have experimental evidence against evolution? If not, then don't just claim ev-olution is false. It is not just what people want to believe. That is religion. If science is so false, then how is it that it can be applied to technology in our everyday lives? Technology is the application of science. If science is wrong, technology would not work. And BTW: Religion does not count as science or scientific evidence. Don't try to use religion to disprove something in science, as that is unscientific.