MovieChat Forums > General Discussion > People who still deny evolution, are the...

People who still deny evolution, are they real?


Like wtf

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Yes. They're called fundamentalists.

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They’re called idiots

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Also true.

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Yes, and they are here on Moviechat. I had a debate with someone about this maybe a year ago and it was a trip. Honestly, I think evolution denial is on the same page as flat earth and chem trails.

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Earth being round is directly observable. You can look at pictures of Earth being round. If you wanted to, you could sail or fly all the way "around" Earth. Evolution is an abstract concept that is only visible in patterns that most people do not have the training to analyze. It's really not the same thing. Because it cannot be directly observed, accepting evolution requires a certain level of trust in scientists, who nowadays are usually part of the elite class, and often talk down to regular people. If I weren't a scientist, I don't know that I would trust them (us). Many scientists present evolution as "evolution is real therefore God does not exist" and that is a non sequitur that they are not entitled to impose on other people.

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You don’t have to be well versed in molecular biology to observe evolution on the grand scale. Why wouldn’t I trust science? It’s not infallible but it’s usually the most accurate assessment of the observable world we have. We have fossils, skulls and corresponding timelines Also, I think it sort of goes without saying that evolution and everything we know about the history of the natural world and universe pretty well disproves theism.

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You seem to be just the kind of smug person, that Iffy762 was describing.
Is it really necessary to call people who disagree with you "idiots"?
Feeling a need to disprove theism also makes you come across as very arrogant.

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Well, I can understand why you might hold that point of view, and I think many scientists have the same view, but I don't agree with it. I used to feel the same as you, but actually I think something is lost when people accept evolution as the only way to understand the origin of human life, without really understanding what it means. Theistic views of the origins of the world contain a lot of moral information (some creation stories more than others), whereas evolution contains none. Seriously, from an evolutionary viewpoint, you and I don't matter. We're just biological machines that may or may not produce other biological machines. Teaching children evolution as the sole understanding of the universe forms them in a mechanistic view of the world that is fundamentally empty.

Evolution, understood thoroughly, neither proves nor disproves theism. But most people do not understand both evolution and theism well enough to realise that.

What most people need to know about evolution is that they need to take their entire course of antibiotics and they cannot heal their illnesses solely with faith. (In fact, attempting to heal illness with faith is not ONLY a failure to understand science but ALSO a failure to understand faith. It's trying to use faith as magic.) Getting people to take their antibiotics depends on their trusting you. If you ask them to trust you and then turn around and mock their religion, you are not likely to succeed in your goal of gaining their trust.

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What I don’t understand is why science and religion need to be intertwined or why shaping their moral identity needs to use the vehicle of science. Two entirely different focuses, why make the child believe science and religion are mutually inclusive? We’ve been fighting that for centuries.

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I'm not sure what you mean. Can you explain some more?

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For me, science explains the way the physical universe works. More is always being learned; but with that comes the knowledge that there's even more to learn. It's an ongoing process.

Religion, or spirituality if you prefer, is about the inner universe of meaning, personal experience, awe, wonder, etc. It's about psychological/emotional reality for human beings, not literal, tangible reality. It's as much poetry & art as anything else, and it shouldn't be put in opposition to science. Only fundamentalists do that, which always results in their literalist view not standing up to science.

An example: science can explain the biochemical, neurological, physiological aspects of being in love. That tells us what's happening physically when we're in love. But it can tell us nothing about the experience of it, which will be generally similar but still very intimately personal for each individual. Is your love for your spouse, children, parents, etc., just something physical? I know some people might say so. I don't feel that's enough. I don't deny the physical aspect by any means, but it falls short of the whole experience for me, which is more than just the sum of its parts.

Science tells us how things work. Religion, in its best aspects, gives us ways to talk about what those things mean to us, why some are considered important, others not so much. Psychology, philosophy, the arts in general, are all part of that. Science is mechanics, often dazzling & wondrous to observe & contemplate, certainly capable of inspiring awe in us. But assigning/finding/making meaning, purpose, value? That's a function of the inner universe.

At least, that's how I've always seen it. And while it works very well for me, I won't insist that anyone else should or must subscribe to my worldview. That would be succumbing to blind, rigid dogma. It would also reveal a fatal insecurity within me, by insisting that my worldview must be the only valid one. Why should it be? It's valid for me, and that's enough for me.

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Perhaps chem trails are only a problem on flat planets?

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I CAN ACCEPT A HIGHER POWER & EVOLUTION HAND IN HAND...EVOLUTION COMPLETELY OFF THE TABLE IS IGNORANT.

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But that is not necessarily true. It is a choice and often a matter of faith to believe in evolution or not.

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NO...IT REALLY ISNT...THINGS EVOLVE...ITS SCIENCE...THE GIANT LEAPS HUMANKIND MADE COULD BE A HIGHER POWER...BUT EVOLUTION IS FACT.

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When it comes to matters of faith, it is never that simple. You have to respect that some people don't think like you.

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ACCEPT & RESPECT...TWO VERY DIFFERENT CONCEPTS.

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Facts are facts, not a choice. Within the study of genetics, there is empirical evidence of evolution. Arguing otherwise is not an intellectual choice for you to make. It's like asking if you believe the sun is hydrogen and helium. It just is.

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What exactly do you want to do then? Force people to believe what they can't believe?

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Yes, just like Communist China.

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Right! It is rather disturbing to see how arrogant some people can be.

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"It's like asking if you believe the sun is hydrogen and helium"

I was gonna go with something simpler, like "does the sun come up in the morning?"

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Uh-huh.
Except that people have always known that the sun comes up in the morning.
When it comes to evolution, it is much easier to choose to not believe in it.
And I don't get why some people are so provoked by others having a different belief.

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I can totally handle you believing in God, i just think if there is a god , it must have done "creation" very early , probably even before our planet was formed, and then evolution happened afterwards, as it definitely seems to have happened , almost (albeit not quite) as clearly as the sun rinsing in the morning

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The reason why people deny evolutionary theory is far more complex than the proponents would give them credit for.

People reject evolution on ethical grounds, and with good reason. Evolutionary theory became either indirectly or directly responsible for almost every social and political evil of the late 19th to 20th century, from White Man's Burden and eugenics to Communism and predatory capitalism. It even gave fuel to racism. Literally, the reason why blacks=monkeys became a thing is that racists said that if humans descended from apes, then that must mean that blacks were closer to ape than white people.

Another example: the reason why we don't have national healthcare and social programs is because of what's called "Social Darwinism." If Darwinism held that life is all about "survival of the fittest," then Social Darwinism argues that we shouldn't help people with benefits or healthcare because they're not fit enough to support themselves.

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If people can’t separate sound science from fanatical eugenics they are the problem, not science. You can’t neglect science on the grounds that it will be corrupted by immoral people, you could say that for anything, and we’d never evolve 😉 as a species. Look at technology. Like Elon Musk said, you can’t stop automation. I would agree that it is a negative side effect, but nothing about it is sophisticated or warrants suppressing science.

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I would argue that, while scientific information itself is morally neutral, technology is not. eg nuclear weaponry. I agree it is true that you can't stop automation. I see this as a consequence of original sin - people will sometimes do bad stuff no matter what. I think that whether communities suppress the use or development of particular technologies is part of their general negotiating about any activity with moral implications.

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Automation evolves from original Sin. Interesting.

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I know, right? Although, [this] in my sentence referred to [you can't stop] and not specifically to [automation]. That is, automation itself is not necessarily a sign of original sin, but, the fact that you can't completely stop bad examples of automation from being developed and used (nuclear weaponry, payday lending, social media data mining) is such a sign.

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Well, what people will call science evolves too over time.
Eugenics was the new and hot science a century ago and wasn't debunked until the 1950s.

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If people can’t separate sound science from fanatical eugenics they are the problem, not science.


You're missing the point.

You can argue that people are "the problem". But the fact is that for over a century, Darwinism has become much more than a mere scientific theory. It's become a powerful ideology. This is why there's push back against it.

For example, look at what's happening right now with COVID-19. What's some people's reasoning for not wearing masks, even if you tell them that they could expose others to the risk? "It's old, weak and frail people, anyway, so what does it matter?" We can call people like this aholes but the fact of the matter is that this is Darwinism. This is people saying in so many words, "Darwin said that only the strong survive, so it's nature taking its course if the sickest and oldest among us die."

Eugenics, the Holocaust, racism, Communism and so many other problems were all indirect causes of Darwnism. For example, in 19th century England, Christian charities used to help the poor. Then when Darwinism became all the rage, the English decided that it was wrong for the poor to be helped; the logic was that they were just "weak".

If this is what Darwinism has become, what is the point of just saying that people are the problem? That's not addressing the issue of why people are pushing back against it.

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Evolution is a fundamentally flawed theory. It is illogical that fish walked out of the ocean and became dinosaurs, were killed off, and what was left (cockroaches and alligators) evolved to become humans. Laughable!

Every specie has a spectrum of possibilities ( look at the variations in birds) but random mutations will never create a new specie. Impossible. Everything is locked into it's own spectrum.

Mutations are not positive and their offspring don't generally have that mutation.

There are humans born with six fingers and that doesn't mean that we're all collectively evolving to have more fingers. It's a mutations, an accident.

Design is the only explanation.

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'Design' has a problem: who designed the designers? Back to square zero. You're not engaging the problem, you're just delaying it.

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I believe that the process of evolution is more complex than a lot of people think.
So that is why they don't understand what is going on and have misconceptions.
Humans didn't evolve from cockroaches or alligators, like you think that others claim.
But a kind of small primitive mammals lived along with the dinosaurs and became our ancestors.

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Not to sound full of myself, but here is an explanation of evolution using highly technical scientific terms that most of you wont understand. So here it goes (try to keep up):

In the beginning, we were all fish. Swimming around in the water. And then one day a couple of fish had a retard baby, and the retard baby was different, so it got to live. So retard fish goes on to make more retard babies, and then one day, a retard baby fish crawled out of the ocean with its mutant fish hands and it had butt sex with a squirrel or something and made this retard frog-squirrel. And then that had a retard baby which was a monkey-fish-frog. And then this monkey-fish-frog had butt sex with that monkey, and that monkey had a mutant retard baby that screwed another monkey. And that made you!

Simple!

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MR GARRISON HAS SPOKEN!

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Oh yeah! I’m a monkey!

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Now we know where Man-Bear-Pig came from

Thanks Mr. Garrison

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Regardless of how mammals supposedly survived something that killed off dinosaurs, had life evolved for millions of years already, those species would be locked into their genetic profile.

Study of genetics shows that there is only flexibility within the specie. There is no room for spontaneous mutations creating new species.

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MovieBuff224 explained how mammals survived while most dinosaurs didn't better than I could.

And as for the rest of your post, I won't claim that I'm an expert.
But I don't believe that mutations will always create a new spieces, since a lot of mutations aren't healthy.
There will be a new spieces only if some members of a former spieces find a new niche, have their own kids and start evolving until they can't reproduce with the old spieces anymore.

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I blame silly videos that depicted an amoeba slowly transforms into a fish, and the get off the sea and grows legs, then morphs into a dinosaur, then morphs again into a bird, etc.

It's repeated again and again even on Youtube, even Discovery Channel. They give people skewed picture of how evolution works. When they see it they repulsed by it and forever believe evolution is bullshit.

The only bullshit about this are the stupid videos.

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Well, I have to say that those videos are basically correct.
But it sure is a simplified depiction of a long process, that took hundreds of millions of years.
And yes, that is maybe part of the problem.

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No it's not correct. They blatantly skipped the one most important process in evolution: the reproductions.

A dinosaur would never, ever, morphs into a bird. Not in a million years. Not in a hundred million years. Never.

The video simply depicted ONE instance of a creature that are slowly transforms into other creature but still the same instance. In reality, they are NOT ONE and NOT THE SAME living being.

It's like depicting your granpa slowly morphing into you. Which is obviously wrong (and freaky!) But many people can not grasp this simple fact. They would imagine that human were monkeys that were slowly morphing into us.

So they would ask, "if we came from monkeys, then why are there still monkeys?"

Would you ask, "If I came from my grandparents, then why my grandparents are still there?"

This question is proof that many people were misled into thinking that monkeys they saw in the zoo, given enough time, say millions of years, would morph into humans. No. Given enough time, those monkeys would just die. They would not become anything else other than monkeys. This is so easy yet so hard to understand.

Those vidoes are the culprit!

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I repeat: it is a simplified depiction of an extremely long process, but it's not all wrong.
No, it is not like any spieces literally just morphed into another like that.
Then again, I believe that most people are smart enough to understand that it's just a simplification.
And that you have to do a bit of research to get a better grasp of the full story.

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I can also repeat. If people are smart enough to understand that it was a simplification, then how do you explain why people are asking "if we came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?"

That question doesn't make any sense. Yet many many people asked it. That question is the PROOF that many people still don't understand how evolution works.

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Where did you get your science education?? That’s not accurate at all. Mammals coexisted with dinosaurs and evolved long before the mass extinction. Lemur like tree-dwelling creatures (our earliest ancestors) lived alongside dinosaurs for millions of years and many species survived and continued to evolve after the impact event. It wasn’t a nuclear holocaust, just a severe environmental disruption that destroyed a lot of plant life from the dust blanket blocking sunlight that was kicked up by the asteroid. Most dinos did not survive this major change, many species did however. Luckily for us. Turtles, crocodilians, some small mammals, fish, insects, and the only living dinos - birds.

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Evolution is real. Human beings evolving from a puddle of cosmic slime is absolute horse shit. Somewhere, some when, some being evolved against eons, but it's all been design and time travel paradoxes since. As if any of this reality is even fucking real.

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Science and God are not mutually exclusive. Enlightened people understand this.

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That presumes god is factually real. Yes, since god (in my opinion) is a manmade concept, you can fit him into the story as logically as you want. Even if you are a nonbeliever you can understand how the two are not mutually exclusive on a technical level. I don’t think any of this involves enlightenment.

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I think enlightenment is believing that a creator is not only possible but highly likely.

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The evolution narrative is conjecture by definition, and only an idiot would accept conjecture as fact, which makes your post comically ironic.

Calling a conjectural narrative a scientific theory is an insult to real scientific theories, like electrical theory, the principles of which are all observable and demonstrable, and have been successfully applied in the real world countless times (this post is made possible by the application of electrical theory, for example).

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Its clear that you dont understand what a scientific theory is.

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Your non sequitur is dismissed, and since you have no arguments, your tacit concession is noted.

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It's clear that you don't understand what tacit means, either.

You need a primary school education. Come back after you get one.

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"It's clear that you don't understand what tacit means, either."

Since that assertion doesn't logically follow from anything I said, it's another non sequitur from you, simpleton. Consider it dismissed out of hand.

"You need a primary school education."

Non Sequitur Alert: Part III

Also:

Comical Irony Alert (you know, coming from the clodpate who just tacitly admitted that he doesn't understand what the word "tacit" means).

Since you still have no arguments, your tacit concession remains noted.

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You've misused non-sequiter, as well.

Third term that you've misused. In your third reposte.

As I said, get a third grade education and get back to me.

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"You've misused non-sequiter, as well."

Your tacit admission that you don't know what "non sequitur" means is noted. Also, there is no hyphen in it and you misspelled "sequitur" as well. All you had to do was look at the way I typed it, Special Ed.

"Third term that you've misused."

Non Sequitur Alert: Part IV

I'll explain it to you, simpleton. "Non sequitur", in the general sense (not the formal logic sense), is anything that doesn't logically follow from that which preceded it, which comes from its literal Latin meaning of "does not follow". Since I haven't misused any terms at all, your laughable assertions that I have are all non sequiturs, as they don't logically follow from anything I said.

As for "tacit", when you reply to an argument with something that's not an argument or otherwise logically valid (in your case, you've been replying with mere assertions), that amounts to a concession. Since you didn't explicitly concede by typing something like, "I concede", it's a tacit concession, by definition. And when you assert that someone has misused a term, yet they've used it correctly, that establishes that you don't know what the term means (which is hilarious). Since you didn't explicitly admit to not knowing what the terms mean, it's a tacit admission, by definition.

"In your third reposte."

That's not a sentence, simple fellow, nor is "reposte" a word, at least not in English.

"As I said, get a third grade education and get back to me."

Comical Irony Alert: Part II

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You've misused 3 words in 3 posts.

Go get a 3rd grade education. I'll be waiting.

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"You've misused 3 words in 3 posts."

Your non sequitur is dismissed, clodpate, and LOL at you tacitly conceding to everything I typed in my previous post. That's the second post of mine to which you've tacitly conceded all points.

"Go get a 3rd grade education. I'll be waiting."

Comical Irony Alert: Part III

Since I'd rather not have a buffoon who doesn't know how to argue and does nothing but post non sequiturs and unwittingly concede to everything I say, continue to clutter up my notifications page with utterly worthless replies, consider yourself on ignore.

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Another ad-hominem because you have no idea how to construct an argument.

As I said, you misused 3 terms in 3 consecutive posts. Go get a primary school education and get back to me.

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