Why Evolution?

[Caecilian]

Evolution is the explanation of our existance that kills God stone dead. Many religious world view shoe horn God into the creation myth. Undermine the creation myth and you undermine the majority of Gods and thus faiths. All other sciences simply explain Gods creation. Biology and in particular evolution through natural selection is the absolute antithesis of a creation myth, it is a watertight explanation of why there is no need for an interventionist deity.

I think tank hits the nail on the head here. With evolution, god is no longer necessary.

Another issue is that evolution, psychology and neuroscience undermine the whole idea of an immaterial soul with libertarian free will. Science points towards minds being physically instantiated in physical systems (the brain, mainly), and cognition being subject to all sorts of limitations, bottlenecks and biases. These are the products of our evolutionary history- the particular way in which the physiological substrate of cognition has developed.

[The Black Jester]

Evolution is the explanation of our existance that kills God stone dead. Many religious world view shoe horn God into the creation myth. Undermine the creation myth and you undermine the majority of Gods and thus faiths. All other sciences simply explain Gods creation. Biology and in particular evolution through natural selection is the absolute antithesis of a creation myth, it is a watertight explanation of why there is no need for an interventionist deity.

I think tank hits the nail on the head here. With evolution, god is no longer necessary.

Another issue is that evolution, psychology and neuroscience undermine the whole idea of an immaterial soul with libertarian free will. Science points towards minds being physically instantiated in physical systems (the brain, mainly), and cognition being subject to all sorts of limitations, bottlenecks and biases. These are the products of our evolutionary history- the particular way in which the physiological substrate of cognition has developed.

+1

[The Magic Pudding]

In Galileo's day, what happened if someone said something against doctrine?
If they were a person of worth they would be pressured to recant.
Otherwise they would be tortured and killed.
By Darwin’s day what was happening?
Darwin a rich man of good family a believer, felt compelled to hide his discovery.
I think the church had a greater share of intelligent thinkers in Darwin’s day.
When Darwin’s theory was presented the clever Christians just subsumed the evolutionary process as god’s tool.
As far as I know the pope still accepts evolutionary theory.
I don't know what to make of people who make the pope look like a progressive free thinker.

[Cite134]

[/quote]
This is almost definitely true, but to not be able to deal with the truth one would have to accept evolution as the truth in the first place. Many evolution deniers don't see it as the truth so they are not in the position of not dealing with it as 'truth', it's a lie from their perspective. Let's face it, if a person is delusional enough to accept the existance of the supernatural realm, and that part of that realm is a sentient entity, and that entity created humans, and then gave them free will, and then gets snotty that humans had the audacity to use that free will to enjoy themselves. If one can convince oneself of that chain of events one can easily convince oneself that evolution isn't true or that it is guided by said supernatural entity.[/quote]


I see what you mean...but: "Facts do not cease to exist just because they are ignored"-Aldous Huxley.
On the other hand, I know what you mean. Unfortunately delusion is very powerful.  

[Kylyssa]

Very cool stuff.  I've never taken a real look at this site and I might have even asked this before but, what exactly is Squidoo?

Squidoo is a content site.  Squidoo allows users to post whatever rated G content they own rights to and Squidoo puts some ads on the page.  In return, Squidoo distributes half of their advertising income to the writers of the pages that averaged in the top 85,000 for that month.  The top 2,000 get round about $20 per page per month, the next 8,000 take in between $2-$6 per page per month, and the next 75,000 get about $0.08 per page per month.  

Additionally, one may put up Amazon, eBay, Zazzle, Etsy, or other such modules and earn a percentage of sales made through your page.  These commissions are not put into a common pool but go directly to the writer of the page.  

I first joined Squidoo to create funnel pages to lead to my Associated Content pages.  But I started earning a few dollars from the link funnels - more than from the pages they were funneling to.  

I now supplement my freelance writing income with Squidoo and I've almost given up on Associated Content other than as a place to put backlinks to my Squidoo lenses.  I get a zero effort residual income from my Squidoo lenses of about $150 per month.  It pops up much higher than that during the winter holidays as that's when people suddenly become interested in homelessness issues, which is a niche I write about quite a bit.  It isn't a fortune but it is dependable.

Squidoo also serves as a free platform for me to use to provide information on homelessness and to shed light on that issue.  I've also used it to put up editorials on atheism to try to help spread understanding and tolerance.

If you are interested in joining Squidoo, I'd be pleased if you used my referral link.  The referrer gets $5 once the referred earns $15 or more.

[Squid]

I looked it over a couple of days ago and decided to go ahead and sign up, I started a Psychology and Neuroscience one but I'm thinking about breaking in down into different ones about neuropharmacology and biopsychology of mental illness.  That way I don't have so much stuff under just one lens.  Although I think my stuff may be a bit too academic and I need to go back and loosen the technical writing a bit.  I'm also thinking about starting one about evolution but I want to be a bit more specific than just that wide reaching topic such as looking at dating methods or something.