@krellin

Fair enough. Feel free to PM me, if you feel like talking about it.

@sic..."isnt that the only follsils we have?"

lol...wow. EPIC FAIL. Wow...just wow. You think we *only* have fossils of failed random chance? I don't even know where to begin...

No I'm saying extinct creatures failed to adapt to new circumstances. Thus in the correct light all fossils are a record of the 'failure' of evolution. Though I am not trying to imply evolution is some kind of progress march, ever forward.

Yes there are indeed differing types of eyes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye#Early_eyes

"I was simplifying the discussion...you are right...now explain it in detail for us taking the path that I have just eluded to. Tell me how vision evolves..."

Oh please, you're trying to play the game where you ask me to be a evolutionary historian about how every specific function evolved until I say "I don't know how that would have happened" so you can pretend that proves it COULDN'T have happened. As for the evolution the eye just use read wikipedia and other sources, the information is freely available and there is no need to clutter the thread with it.

As Draugnar pointed out you are assuming there is no benefit to light sensitivity such that a light sensing organ is useless unless it can observe high resolution images like the eyes of higher animals. This is just not true.

http://redwood.berkeley.edu/bruno/animal-eyes/nilsson-evolution.pdf

Yes mutations can and do stack up to form novel functions. For example, a gene with a specific function can be duplicated by a number of mechanisms so that the genome now has two copies. Mutation can therefore occur in one copy without losing the original function and these mutations can result in a new gene which is similar to the original, but performs a different function. This process can contain non-functional intermediates. Rinse and repeat. This is clearly shown in families of proteins which share sequence or structure homology that allows them to use the same 'molecular technology' to perform different, but similar functions. Additionally superfamilies of proteins show less homology, but still have some related structure/sequence motifs that allow them to carry out completely different functions using modifications of the same 'molecular technology'.

If you want to respond then make a new thread, I'm not derailing this one anymore.

Yay! Wikipedia has solved evolution....<rolls my discreetly designed eyes...>

Some people need to go back to school and learn what "continuity" mean...here, I'll give you an example...look at a rainbow...a continuum of color. THAT's what the evolution of the eyeball should essentially be like in the combined record of fossil and existing life. It *is not*...period.

@Hyperactive...whah...you complain that you can't answer evolution because you don't have all the answers, and then ask us to have infinite knowledge of the universe to explain God. Hypocrite, anyone????

As for mutations...Your fantasy world in which mutations stack up and become useful is belied by the observation that *until* such time that they become useful, they instead are deviations and...well...mutations that rob the creature. they use more energy and provide little to no benefit. But...here's teh catch...this is one of those "WATCH THE REAL WORLD moments..." The mutant generally get's shunned by the herd/pack/whatever. Momma bird kicks the deviant out of the nest. the tired creature with the useless lump doesn't' get to procreate because it's a mutant...and thus your useful mutation doesn't even get passed on anyway...

There are so many problems with so many aspects of the **theory**....

Nice...13 mouse clicks to scroll through the entire evolution on the eye on Wiki.

Well...that's proof enough for me. damn....God ceases to exist...<sigh...>

"semck is correct that it was not my intention to start a thread about whether god exists or not, but to ask those who believe in god how they respond to my situation."

First, my sympathy for your illness. It sounds truly terrible and I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
I'm not really certain how to respond to your specific situation since I don't know you, but I'll share personally about how I responded to the loss of two children through miscarriage - probably my biggest personal confrontation with the horror of the unfair universe.
I started with unashamed grief. My wife and I wept together in the ultrasound room, then went home and wept some more. The Bible, as I read it, gives us permission and even encouragement to vent our grief and/or anger to/at God. We certainly aren't guarenteed a quick, easy fix to our grief, but we are guarenteed a God who is there, listening a lot and speaking occasionally. As you've likely found with your friends, simply having them there listening is one of the best means of dealing with grief. We were blessed to have great friends at the time, and blessed all the more to have God too.

Next, one of the core parts of Christian belief which, sadly, doesn't get enough press, is that the universe is not here for my pleasure. We hear a lot about God being good, and I certainly believe that, but God being good does not mean that God intends to arrange life for my personal convenience. That's a different religion, which we might call "therapeutic moralistic deism", and I wouldn't defend that religion for a moment and I'm not surprised or disappointed when atheists reject it. Choosing to follow Jesus is a matter of setting aside my own personal agenda for life and accepting God's agenda (and then doing that every day for the rest of my life, not exactly an easy thing in my experience).

So we lose two babies in the span of four months. Why? I don't know. Will I ever know? I don't know. Does it matter why? I don't know. But what I do know is that somewhere in the middle of the pain, God has an agenda, and apparently his agenda is not to magically bring my babies back to life. And if I can quiet myself long enough to stop demanding answers from God, God might start asking me some questions.

Are you willing to love without condition? Are you willing to give your heart completely to another human, even if their life only lasts ten weeks? Will you love, even if pain and loss is all you get in return?
What will you do with your pain? Will you turn hard and bitter, shut yourself off from your wife, walk out of the room while she's talking, turn your anger against your two-year-old son? Will you decide that the universe is cold and empty of meaning, will you embrace cynicism, or will you continue to believe that hope is real, life is worth it, love has substance?
Is your faith a matter of convenience or a willingness to serve God, come what may? Do you love the real, rough, bloodstained cross - or just the pretty gold necklace cross?

Anyway, those were some of the kind of questions I wrestled with during my period of grief as I tried to hear from God about what his agenda was. I'm not even going to hazard a guess about what God's agenda for you might be in your illness. That would be between you and God, if you cared to find out. I will try an honest answer at another question though.

"I do have a further question for semck (and other Christians) which is fundamental to why I cannot get my head around Christianity:
semck: "The people in this painful universe have all sinned, and according to Christian doctrine, do deserve punishment"
What was my sin, please? I know what Adam and Eve's sin was, but what sin did I commit? I wasn't present in the garden of Eden. My free will did not cause me to accept an apple from a snake. It wasn't my choice. It wasn't my act. How is it my sin?"

First, I wouldn't care to say that each and every bad/painful thing that happens to us has a direct causal relationship with a specific sin. Sure, if you wreck your car because you were drunk then there would be clear causation, but that kind of clarity is pretty rare.

So, what is your sin? I have no clue, but a cursory read of Matthew chapters 5-7 should give just about anyone a good idea of at least a few of the sins they've committed. Whether or not that gives you a personal sense of true moral guilt I wouldn't be able to say, but I think that is the crux of wrapping your mind around Christianity. If you don't have a sense of true moral guilt, you won't get the religion thing.

Personally I think the sense of guilt is enobling. It means that my actions actually count for something, my choices have meaning, I am more than a machine acting out what I have been programmed to do. Of course moral guilt brings horrifying consequences, but that shouldn't be surprising - there is no choice without a consequence, is there? But it's hard to impossible to deal with guilt and get on with the work of forgiveness and redemption if you can't see or admit the guilt, and I'm a pretty big fan of forgiveness and redemption.
Enough for now, hope you found that to be an honest answer to your honest question, I'll feel bad if I rambled that long and totally missed the point of the OP.

@Sic - fossil record has nothing to do with failure. It only has to do with death. Some animals "extinction" isn't really extinction as much as old animals passed away and their replacements via evolution or ID or what have you are different enough. It doesn't mean evolution failed. It just means that particular animal died in such a way his remains became fossilized. Point in fact, most of the animals we have fossil records for have modern day counterparts that likely came from their ancient versions evolutionarily. Some did die out completely (the whole damn near planet killing asteroid that did in the dinosaur and yes I know some people say dinos turned into birds), but that may have been a complete inability for any large, complex creature to adapt to a sudden choking death cloud of dust and no more light for however long it took the earth engulfing cloud to dissipate sufficiently to let sunlight through again. Adaptation rarely works in extreme climatic changes (there are exceptions where entire groups of amphibians spontaneously changed sex when forced into a monosex environment, but these are very rare).

So please don't confuse the fossil record as being nothing but failed evolutionary lines. The record includes lines that continued to evolve and still exist today as well as those that didn't evolve and so died out. What I would like to see is a large collection of WTF Epic Fucking Fail records that show animals never seen before in fossil records but who display differences from their "parent" animals as well as from their "siblings" on the evolutionary tree. This series of failed and short lived attempts might make me reconsider if the idea that God guided evolution. Instead, we have successes that continued to change and succeed further and not random shots that were inappropriate for the chnage they experienced. The randomness of the universe would make all changes be equal and thus would result in many changes trying and failing. Because we seem to see all success for a time (species that lived for at least several hundreds to several thousands of years with relatively little change) this convinces me someone guided that process.

"@Hyperactive...whah...you complain that you can't answer evolution because you don't have all the answers, and then ask us to have infinite knowledge of the universe to explain God. Hypocrite, anyone????"

I asked no such thing of anyone, I said absolutely nothing about God or religion. I can answer mechanisms of evolution, not the specific history of evolutionary events. I also said "and other sources", wikipedia science articles in general cover basics only. You have the means to learn about the subject if you really want to. Your last paragraph show you really don't understand the molecular/biological processes involved. That is all I am going to say about evolution in this thread. Feel free to make a thread about evilution.
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Jamiet, I'm sorry to hear about your disease and that you need a such a violating surgery. Is this a temporary ileostomy?

About God, there are two explanations that make sense to me. God could be indifferent simply because his existence is so far above us that he views us as a person would view an ant. I feel this perspective is well characterized in Mark Twain's story "The Mysterious Stranger", which is good read.

"But it made you seem sorrowfully trivial, and the creature of a day, and such short and paltry day, too. And he didn't say anything to raise up your drooping pride - no, not a word. He always spoke of men in the same old indifferent way - just as one speaks of bricks and manure-piles and such things; you could see that they were of no consequence to him, one way or the other. He didn't mean to hurt us, you could see that; just as we don't mean to insult a brick when we disparage it; a brick's emotions are nothing to us; it never occurs to us to think whether it has any or not.
Once when he was bunching the most illustrious kings and conquerors and poets and prophets and pirates and beggars together - just a brick-pile - "

"I wondered what poor little Lisa's early death would save her from. He answered the thought:

"From ten years of pain and slow recovery from an accident, and then from nineteen years' pollution, shame, depravity, crime, ending with death at the hands of the executioner. Twelve days hence she will die; her mother would save her life if she could.- Am I not kinder than her mother?""

http://www.shsu.edu/~eng_wpf/authors/Twain/Mysterious-Stranger.htm

Another view I would consider is one that has been expressed earlier in this thread, that God does care about us and our trials in life are a way to mature us spiritually. God can directly control the material world, but the soul is immaterial and made of the same 'substance' as God. So suffering in the world is there to improve us before the afterlife. Though there are a number of problems here, suffering does not occur especially to those who would need it and occurs often to those who don't, and it seems to breed cynicism and hatred as often as enlightenment.

@ Hyperactive Jam: "Jamiet, I'm sorry to hear about your disease and that you need a such a violating surgery. Is this a temporary ileostomy?"

Thank you for your concern. I've had an ileostomy, yes. I'm waiting to find out if it will be temporary or permanent. They are going to *attempt* the reversal but it only has about a 70% success rate or so I'm told.

"suffering in the world is there to improve us before the afterlife"

I see no possible reason to believe in an afterlife so this is of little comfort to me.

@ FlemGem: Thank you for your kind words. I am also very sorry to hear of your painful losses - both of them. I find it remarkable that you are able to rationalise this as "part of god's agenda" and then accept it - really that's mind boggling to me, but interesting to hear your viewpoint.

@ FlemGem: Also, when I said to semck:

"I know what Adam and Eve's sin was, but what sin did I commit?"

...I was talking about *original* sin. That is, why do Christians believe that I am inherently sinful because of a bad choice made by Adam and Eve (if they ever existed) many hundreds of generations ago?

Jamie,

'semck: "The people in this painful universe have all sinned, and according to Christian doctrine, do deserve punishment"

'What was my sin, please? I know what Adam and Eve's sin was, but what sin did I commit? I wasn't present in the garden of Eden. My free will did not cause me to accept an apple from a snake. It wasn't my choice. It wasn't my act. How is it my sin?'

As I answer this, I also want to clear up a misconception. Not uncommonly (unfortunately) I have been somewhat unclear despite rambling on at shocking length. Specifically, you referred earlier today to "semck's view that humans are forced to suffer due to original sin, and that my illness is an example of such suffering." This, along with the above, makes me think I haven't stated my point well.

When I said that humans "do deserve punishment" because they have sinned, I was responding specifically to a point putin had made accusing me of utilitarianism. I was making the point that the suffering we are subjected to is not morally unjustified -- but I was not saying that it is necessarily caused by a desire to punish us. (That may or may not be part of it, depending on circumstances; we can't necessarily know).

To take an analogy, consider a youth who commits a crime and is sent to a reform school by the courts. Now an ordinary youth could not be sent to reform school by the courts, however good an idea it might seem. It would be wrong for them to step in and interfere in his life that way. But this youth committed a crime. He could have been sent to prison if they'd wanted, and so by sending him to reform school, they're well within their rights, and actually being nicer than necessary. That said, their hope in sending him there is probably not mostly to punish him -- it's to reform him and make him a better person.

So my point to putin was not that the _purpose_ of our suffering is punishment for sin, though it is partly that I suppose (much as the reform school is in some ways a punishment). The _moral justification_ for our suffering is our sin -- God has the right to subject us to it because He has the right to punish us much worse, to withdraw life altogether. But the _purpose_ could be much better things: improving us, teaching us lessons as Draug said, in some odd way hopefully drawing us closer to Him, making us realize out dependence on Him so that in the end, we will turn to Him and suffering will end.

The actual specific purpose, as FlemGem and others have pointed out (also I in my initial post, on the book of Job), we cannot know. What we can know, and believe as Christians, is that God has a morally good reason for it, that it will work out for ultimate net good, and that it will work out for ultimate specific good for those who do follow Him.

I hope that clarified my position some. Now, to your question.

"What was my sin, please? I know what Adam and Eve's sin was, but what sin did I commit?"

In my statement to putin on moral justification, I was actually referring to your sin, not Adam's sin. According to Scripture, all (except Christ) are sinful. This, it is true, is because of Adam's sin -- after he sinned, our nature was corrupted so that we are born with broken and sinful wills, in rebellion against God. Why it is that this trait would be inherited is an interesting question, and I don't fully claim to know. (It would certainly be an odd world if it weren't, and only some had fallen, of course!) Anyway, the point is that, born with this nature, you have sinned.

I don't know you and I can't tell you specifically what you have done. As FlemGem (I think) said, read Matthew 5-7 and you'll probably think of something. Meanness to another, jealousy, unjustified anger, selfishness (not just as a way of life, but even in an instance), unfairness, lust, worshipping gods (including material gods) other than God, disrespect of parents, etc., etc. Many of these sins seem trite to us because, well, we're all sinful, we all do it. The Bible makes it clear that they are anything but trite to God. He views them extremely gravely. They must eventually be punished, yet at the same time, He desires to forgive us and to draw us to less sin and to greater love. This is the central Christian message, the reason Christ did come to earth and suffer horribly.

Whether original sin itself would justify subjecting you to a fallen and painful world is an interesting question. It's also one I haven't studied or thought about sufficiently, but in this event, you have yourself sinned, and it was those actual sins of you yourself that I was referring to.

I hope I have addressed your question. Please do let me know if I have not, or if I should address something else. My own lack of clarity through verbosity is something I've become all too familiar with.

Oh and incidentally, I never got around to apologizing to krellin for my jab at him in my first post. While I do think some of his religious posts have been wrong, and occasionally even bizarre, my remark was over-harsh -- there was no need to imply his good posts were unprecedented or would never come again, and he's already demonstrated that a few more times in this thread.

Thank you for your wonderful contribution, FlemGem.

@Jamie - thank you for your kinds words. I'm enjoying the parts of this thread that have to do with real humans engaging each other meaningfully instead of just flaming and trolling. Thanks for getting the ball rolling with honest and personal questions.

I think I should clarify what I said about "God's agenda". What I am NOT trying to convey is that I believe God woke up one morning and checked his day planner and said, "Hmm, looks like today is the day to go tear FlemGem's heart out by causing his wife to miscarry". What I'm trying to convey is that I really have no idea why we miscarried and I don't believe God did it - I suppose I have to say God allowed it, but I don't feel that makes God culpable - but rather that in the midst of my personal tragedy God has an agenda that has a lot more to do with some sort of profound redemption than it does to providing quick and easy fixes to my pain. Comfort does come in due season, but it's not always God's first priority.

The following is an extreme case, but it brought a lot of things home to me. Several years ago a man went into an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania and raped and murdered about seven little Amish girls. As details of the man's life came out after the tragedy, it turned out that the rage and depression that led to this horrifying crime began when he and his wife suffered a miscarriage. As I processed the terrible news I wrestled with a lot of questions about myself. Why didn't I go down some dark path when I went through my own time of suffering? Okay, mass murder is pretty extreme, but why didn't I embrace bitterness or cynicism or alcohol or rage or just boring old emotional distancing? A good friend helped me make a little catelog of values that kept me from despair. I find the values rooted especially in the teachings of Jesus, but certainly throughout the rest of the Bible as well.

Human life is inherently valuable because God made it and stamped it with something of his own identity, and that life has value even if the life only makes it to week ten (or is retarded, or has AIDS, or whatever). Love is real and good, even though it may not unravel every mystery of the universe right this instant, and loving is the best thing I can do. Loving will not be easy, because the world is a broken mess, but honestly I've helped create the mess too, so I'd like to help clean up a bit. God is also working on the mess, but for some bizarre reason he decided to include humans on the clean-up crew, and really he could have picked better helpers, but he didn't. It's kind of a one step forward, one step back situation when your coworkers keep tracking mud into the house, but apparently it pleased God to create sentient beings and give true moral freedom, so here we are.

Okay, gotta go, apparently I stink after running and my wife is yelling at me to take a shower. Okay, not yelling, firmly suggesting. Pleading, really. Besides, if I keep writing these tomes semck and Obi will get jealous and respond with even longer missives......

So the way Semck tries to sidestep the "people suffer for the greater good" argument he's been making is to claim that people actually all deserve to be inflicted with gratuitous suffering. I fail to see how the fact that people suffer gratuitously, including small children who don't have the foggiest idea about sin or god, has to do with whether it's for the purpose of punishment or not. If it's not for punishment and you're simply saying whatever torture people endure is well deserved, that does nothing to save you from the fact that your religion is wholly collectivist and looks at people like a bean counter does beans- individual salvation being irrelevant to the grand teleological purpose of the Christian god.

"If it's not for punishment and you're simply saying whatever torture people endure is well deserved, that does nothing to save you from the fact that your religion is wholly collectivist and looks at people like a bean counter does beans- individual salvation being irrelevant to the grand teleological purpose of the Christian god."

Well, putin, if no event that happens is (on the part of God) unjust, that does seem to me relevant in evaluating the analogy to the utilitarianism that Christians actually criticize. So far as I'm aware, when Christians criticize utilitarianism, it's usually because some specific applications of it condone unjust actions by the government in particular cases in order to generate greater happiness overall. There may, of course, be another criticism of it that I'm forgetting. In any event, Christian doctrine is very clear that the story of God's treatment of each and every individual will be fully just (at worst), or sometimes merciful. Suffice to say that I would be thrilled to find a government that could meet that standard, whether it was based on utilitarianism or something else. And that's the end of my getting drawn into a political discussion on this thread. In anticipation of your probable response, I'll just reiterate my prior posts, and those of others, that yes, sometimes it is difficult for us to trace the purposes and balances that are being worked out.