Talk:Arguments evolution supporters shouldn't use

Thinking of adding "babies are born atheist."

Only because it's an argument I see a lot, and it's fundamentally flawed, in that, well... they aren't. Young children, although they haven't been told which nonsense to believe, have a strong tendency toward magical thinking, and could probably be best described as a kind of animist - the earliest humans having no one to talk sense into them, that's kind of how this whole mess started in the first place. And even if it were true, it's not really a very good argument, since all it could conceivably demonstrate is that God is artificial, to which you'll just be told by the average creationist that it's just human understanding of God that's artificial, in the same way children have to be taught mathematics, and disabused of common fallacies well into adulthood. On the other hand, it's a little off-topic for the page, since even though it often comes up in talk over evolution, it's not really much about evolution, and I guess the point itself might be controversial for this community. I don't know. Does anyone have any thoughts? Sake Fueled (talk) 12:49, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

Consider the term "implicit atheism". They don't posses an explicit non-belief because the concept hasn't formed properly yet for them to have an opinion either way, hence the "default" nature of implicit atheism. Much in the same way as you, right now, are implicitly atheistic about the myriad of gods that you're unaware of and haven't professed a non-belief in, or in another way, you're implicitly not a player of countless board games that you've never heard of or haven't been invented yet. The "babies are born as atheists" argument only needs to be used correctly by emphasising the strong categorical differences between implicit and explicit non-belief. ^pathetic 14:50, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

That's just it - the concept has formed in their minds, in a way. To say that one is atheistic about all the gods you haven't heard of is and always has been absurd, since it puts aside the fundamental concept of a godhead, however expressed. There is an enormous difference between arguing over the nature of the godhead and arguing over its existence. Even one of Dawkins' spiels making a similar, but subtly different, argument - "...the human mind is extremely susceptible to hallucination..." - implicitly addresses this fact, as a Youtube theist inadvertently highlights when he tries to claim that Dawkins' atheism is no less a product of his culture than anyone else's religious experiences: when he makes the comparison across cultures of how divine experiences are perceived, he addresses the nature of the godhead, as evidence that it is a product of the human mind, so this counterargument misses the point for the exact same reason Dawkins' own argument that one is implicitly an atheist to unknown gods does. Whatever the nature of the gods, a universe with one - YHWH and Bhagavan alike - and one with trillions are far, far more similar than one with none, so by the modern definition, there is no such thing as an atheist, implicit or explicit, to a particular god, not without sterilizing the word to the point that it could again include refusal to tithe. Young children perceiving an ordered universe, combined with primitive intuition of entropy (boy, that sounds familiar), can only understand this order through personhood - a "universal nous," you might call it, if you're feeling like a pretentious ass. It's partially these studies people are talking about when they say "religion is hardwired"; if this were not the case, there never could have emerged gods at all. Therefore, they cannot be said to be atheists by any reasonable definition, the definition by which they can be said to be atheists being unreasonable. Sake Fueled (talk) 11:08, 11 February 2012 (UTC)

Evolution towards perfection/survival of the fittest

The problem is in defining 'perfection' - if you are perfectly adapted to a particular environment and the environment changes faster than you can evolve you are doomed; if you can make use of any environment tow which you are 60% fitted, you are likely to survive (even if you have personal preferences).

Likewise the experts in any given field are likely to be marginalised come changing technologies - what happened to all the comptometerists, hot metal typesetters and FORTRAN programmers?

There is no direct conflict nor either/or between 'science' and 'God'/religion - a scientist can follow the ethics of a particular faith/be creatively inspired, or see science as one aspect of pantheism (or vice versa) 82.44.143.26 (talk) 16:35, 2 July 2014 (UTC)