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Theory Of Evolution


Anonymouse

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I turn to you, . . I poke you in the arm with my finger and I ask, "Is this your body?" You answer, "Yes." I then ask, "Well,.... if that's your body, WHAT are you?" The answer of course is something not of the physical, a spiritual being.

 

Perhaps the only evidence of our spiritual existence is our self consciousness and our free will. You cannot "know" this. Knowledge, or human intelligence is finite. You must feel this and faith. Two different realms.

 

Hmm... I'm not trying to be sarcastic here, but I just started wondering if humans are spiritual beings and have souls, so could maybe animals? What do you all think? Could dogs and elephants and spiders etc. have a soul?

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wow anon!, I think this thread has made a believer out of me (again) :)

 

As for 'evidence' that there really are things that are beyond our comprehention (that we MAY have been aware of and have forgotten) one can look to the ancient cultures - ALL had some 'spiritual beliefs' in one form or another.

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Okay back to topic. Some how the lack of evidence for evolution translates to evidence of evolution.

Anonymouse, what I can't figure out about you is how you can be so sure of the "forgotten spirituality" of humans while at the same time being soooo skeptical of evolution for lack of evidence. Where's your evidence of "spirituality" other than your gut feeling?

 

I think the two are fundamentally related in that if one is going to reject evolution for lack of evidence, then one should probably also reject all other current explanations for lack of evidence ... unless you can show me something with more real evidences than evolution.

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The following text is obviously heterodox and loosely related to the topic at hand yet interesting in that it asserts the symbiotic relationship between spirituality and culture. If we agree to this relationship, then the mere existence of ancient cultures stands as an evidence of early spirituality.

 

A boundless mass of human Being, flowing in a stream without banks; upstream, a dark past wherein our time-sense loses all powers of definition and restless or uneasy fancy conjures up geological periods to hide away an eternally unsolvable riddle, downstream, a future even so dark and timeless - such is the groundwork of the Faustian picture of human history.

 

Over the expanse of the water passes the endless uniform wave-train of the generations. Here and there bright shafts of light broaden out, everywhere dancing flashes confuse and disturb the clear mirror, changing, sparkling, vanishing. These are what we call the clans, tribes, peoples, races which unify a series of generations within this or that limited area of the historical surface. As widely as these differ in creative Power, so widely do the images that they create vary in duration and plasticity, and when the creative power dies out, the physiognomic, linguistic and spiritual identification-marks vanish also and the phenomenon subsides again into the ruck of the generations. Aryans, Mongols, Germans, Kelts, Parthians, Franks, Carthaginians, Berbers, Bantu's are names by which we specify some very heterogeneous images of this order. But over this surface, too, the great Cultures accomplish their majestic wave-cycles. They appear suddenly, swell in splendid lines, lessen again and vanish, and the face of the waters is once more a sleeping waste.

 

A Culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the proto- spirituality of ever-childish humanity, and detaches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded and mortal thing from the boundless and enduring. It blooms on the soil of an exactly-definable landscape, to which plant-wise it remains bound. It dies when this soul has actualised the full sum of its possibilities in the shape of peoples, languages, dogmas, arts, states, sciences, and reverts into the proto-soul. But its living existence, that sequence of great epochs which define and display the stages of fulfilment, is an inner passionate struggle to maintain the Idea against the powers of Chaos without and the unconscious muttering deep-down within. It is not only the artist who struggles against the resistance of the material and the stifling of the idea within him. Every Culture stands in a deeply-symbolical, almost in a mystical, relation to the Extended, the space, in which and through which it strives to actualise itself. The aim once attained - the idea, the entire content of inner possibilities, fulfilled and made externally actual - the Culture suddenly hardens, it mortifies, its blood congeals, its force breaks down, and it becomes Civilization, the thing which we feel and understand in the words Egypticism, Byzantinism, Mandarinism. As such they may, like worn-out giant of the primeval forest, thrust their decaying branches towards the sky for hundreds or thousands of years, as we see in China, in India, in the Islamic world.

 

It was thus that the Classical Civilization rose gigantic, in the Imperial age, with a false semblance of youth and strength and fullness, and robbed the young Arabian Culture of the East of light and air. This - the inward and outward fulfilment, the finality, that awaits every living Culture - is the purport of all the historic " declines, " amongst them that decline of the Classical which we know so well and fully, and another decline, entirely comparable to it in course and duration, which will occupy the first centuries of the coming millennium but is heralded already and sensible in and around us today - the decline of the West. Every Culture passes through the age-phases of the individual man. Each has its childhood, youth, manhood and old age. It is a young and trembling soul, heavy with misgivings, that reveals itself in the morning of Romanesque and Gothic. It fills the Faustian landscape from the Provence of the troubadours to the Hildesheim cathedral of Bishop Bernward. The spring wind blows over it. " In the works of the old-German architecture," says Goethe, " one sees the blossoming of an extraordinary state. Anyone immediately confronted with such a blossoming can do no more than wonder; but one who can see into the secret inner life of the plant and its rain of forces, who can observe how the bud expands, little by little, sees the thing with quite other eyes and knows what he is seeing." Childhood speaks to us also - and in the same tones - out of early-Homeric Doric, out of early-Christian (which is really early-Arabian) art and out of the works of the Old Kingdom in Egypt that began with the Fourth Dynasty. There a mythic world-consciousness is fighting like a harassed debtor against all the dark and daemonic in itself and in Nature, while slowly ripening itself for the pure, day-bright expression of the existence that it will at last achieve and know. The more nearly a Culture approaches the noon culmination of its being, the more virile, austere, controlled, intense the form-language it has secured for itself, the more assured its sense of its own power, the clearer its lineaments. In the spring all this had still been dim and confused, tentative, filled with childish yearning and fears - witness the ornament of Romanesque- Gothic church porches of Saxony and southern France, the early-Christian catacombs, the Dipylon vases. But there is now the full consciousness of ripened creative power that we see in the time of the early Middle Kingdom of Egypt, in the Athens of the Pisistratidae, in the age of Justinian, i that of the Counter-Reformation, and we find every individual trait of expression deliberate, strict, measured, marvellous in its ease and self-confidence. And we find, too, that everywhere, at moments, the coming fulfilment suggested itself in such moments were created the head of Amenemhet III (the so-called " Hyksos Sphinx " of Tanis), the domes of Hagia Sophia, the paintings of Titian Still later, tender to the point of fragility, fragrant with the sweetness of late October days, come the Cnidian Aphrodite and the Hall of the Maidens in the Erechtheum, the arabesques on Saracen horseshoe-arches, the Zwinger of Dresden, Watteau, Mozart.

 

At last, in the grey dawn of Civilization the fire in the Soul dies down. The dwindling powers rise to one more, half-successful, effort of creation, and produce the Classicism that is common to all dying Cultures. The soul thinks once again, and in Romanticism looks back piteously to its childhood; then finally, weary, reluctant, cold, it loses its desire to be, and, as in Imperial Rome, wishes itself out of the overlong daylight and back in the darkness of protomysticism in the womb of the mother in the grave. The spell of a "second religiousness" comes upon it, and Late-Classical man turns to the practice of the cults of Mithras, of Isis, of the Sun - those very cults into which a soul just born in the East has been pouring a new wine of dreams and fears and loneliness.

 

Oswald Spengler, excerpt from Der Untergang des Abendlandes

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Also I believe Anonymouse has bashed the mathematical part of evolution.

Well..not...and aprently very few - if any have bothered to read my extensive clips and links etc which very clearly detail why eveolution is - for all intensive purposes - fact - and why creation theory is in no way scientific or at all plausable....anyway...as to what can be proven by mathmatics - I have come accross this (LOL):

 

http://history.mithec.com/updated-7search.html

 

Oh and BTW - I am still awaiting - with baited breath - Domino's take on all of this..and wonder if he will address real meaningful issues in this debate or just spin off on some (for all intensive purposes) meaningless logic and or semantics tangent...or if he will just do his usual of late and take up a position in opposition to anything I might say...sad really...oh well...

Edited by THOTH
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Saying that evolution is bs is not automatically agreeing with creationism Thoth.

No but it is rejecting science (and all evidence) as any kind of revelation of truth and relying instead on the theory that if you chew bubble gum your headache will be cured or brush your teeth 3 times daily to get into heaven - all very nice - and perhaps there is some remote chance that indeed it might be true - but you could claim that many millions of other arbitrary statements are true as well - just because you believe them to be - with no wweight of any evidence of any kind...etc...so sorry...

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Hmm... I'm not trying to be sarcastic here, but I just started wondering if humans are spiritual beings and have souls, so could maybe animals? What do you all think? Could dogs and elephants and spiders etc. have a soul?

Yes Anoushik, animals, plants and minerals have souls according to Eastern teachings. Just like there is a physical evolution for plants and animals there is also soul's evolution from mineral to plant, from plant to animal, and from animal to human. Human stage of evolution is not the end, there is much more room to evolve for us human beings. Here is where the task of evolution must be taken into our hands rather than leave to the nature to do it in millions of years.

 

Here is what I mean that has to do with the soul and evolution, it is actually an introduction to Integral Yoga as a means to continue human evolution (quote from http://www.sriaurobindoashram.org/yoga/index.htm ).

 

The teaching of Sri Aurobindo starts from that of the ancient sages of India that behind the appearances of the universe there is the Reality of a Being and Consciousness, a Self of all things, one and eternal. All beings are united in that One Self and Spirit but divided by a certain separativity of consciousness, an ignorance of their true Self and Reality in the mind, life and body. It is possible by a certain psychological discipline to remove this veil of separative consciousness and become aware of the true Self, the Divinity within us and all.

 

Sri Aurobindo's teaching states that this One Being and Consciousness is involved here in Matter. Evolution is the method by which it liberates itself; consciousness appears in what seems to be inconscient, and once having appeared is self-impelled to grow higher and higher and at the same time to enlarge and develop towards a greater and greater perfection. Life is the first step of this release of consciousness; mind is the second; but the evolution does not finish with mind, it awaits a release into something greater, a consciousness which is spiritual and supramental. The next step of the evolution must be towards the development of Supermind and Spirit as the dominant power in the conscious being. For only then will the involved Divinity in things release itself entirely and it become possible for life to manifest perfection.

 

But while the former steps in evolution were taken by Nature without a conscious will in the plant and animal life, in man Nature becomes able to evolve by a conscious will in the instrument. It is not, however, by the mental will in man that this can be wholly done, for the mind goes only to a certain point and after that can only move in a circle. A conversion has to be made, a turning of the consciousness by which mind has to change into the higher principle. This method is to be found through the ancient psychological discipline and practice of Yoga.

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Oh and BTW - I am still awaiting - with baited breath - Domino's take on all of this..and wonder if he will address real meaningful issues in this debate or just spin off on some (for all intensive purposes) meaningless logic and or semantics tangent...or if he will just do his usual of late and take up a position in opposition to anything I might say...sad really...oh well...

You have to wait a little bit more, as I do not find it "meaningful" to reply to you, as it is evident that you are far from mastering the subject you are trying to discuss about.

 

I just have run a retrospectif of your posts here Thoth, and read the links you have providen, to my amazement they all bring the ellements which you even refused to listen to... I must admit that the best of all came when you wrote:

 

You exactly "prove" my point...you fail to understand the difference between a "proof" - which exists only in mathmatics and "eveidence" which is in the realm of science.

 

You repeated what I kept repeating you over time, something you refused to even consider... now you come and post articles and links which discuss exactly what you were refusing to discuss, and the pathetic is that you only take from those texts what you want from them, you make them speak and bring no valuable opinion by yourself.

 

But that is OK! Thoth, right now I have nor the energy nor the interest to discuss those topics with you, you are acting like an immature kid that is disperatly trying to attract attention, just ignore me and I will ignore you... don't wait too much, afterall even if I answer you, it would be meaningful... don't waste your time on such meaningful things.

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Possibilities and probabilities are very different than certainties. If you read some of the posts above, you will see that not too many are willing to acknowledge (myself included) that there is a probability :D We all sound like we know exactly what we are talking about and that's just wrong :blink: :D

You know what I like from you? It is your consistancy Sip. It is in my opinion your strongest character.

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Well Domino - i fail to see at all where I have been inconsistant or where I have posted anything which contradicts my points. in addition I have very much given my opinions in addition to the links - and have painted a fairly complete picture IMO. I am no biologist I admit - but I have read darwin as well as more recent texts and I think i understand and have presented the issues and essential points pretty well. So yes - go ahead - take your time - or whatever...not that i am expecting much form you as I have said...
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Well..not...and aprently very few - if any have bothered to read my extensive clips and links etc which very clearly detail why eveolution is - for all intensive purposes - fact - and why creation theory is in no way scientific or at all plausable....anyway...as to what can be proven by mathmatics - I have come accross this (LOL):

 

http://history.mithec.com/updated-7search.html

 

Oh and BTW - I am still awaiting - with baited breath - Domino's take on all of this..and wonder if he will address real meaningful issues in this debate or just spin off on some (for all intensive purposes) meaningless logic and or semantics tangent...or if he will just do his usual of late and take up a position in opposition to anything I might say...sad really...oh well...

THOT, you are not reading what i am saying, yet you tell people they dont read your links and extensiv info. Well, if you give us a link once in a while, i might read em, but your whole argument is based on the written words of other scientists.. And you KEEP!!! on repeating that creationism this and creationsim that, mmm... For the third time, we are not arguin creationsim against evolution, we are arguing the inconsistincies and failure of evolution. Which, if you were to answer any of my simple question from before, you would see that youd go in circles and never come to an answer in which will even satisfy your own perception of all this.

 

So, Please THOT before telling us of not reading your posts (which are mostly links and words of others) read and answer some of the ones allready posted by other members ... this way you arent being a hypocrit,, (no offense meant)

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No but it is rejecting science (and all evidence) as any kind of revelation of truth and relying instead on the theory that if you chew bubble gum your headache will be cured or brush your teeth 3 times daily to get into heaven - all very nice - and perhaps there is some remote chance that indeed it might be true - but you could claim that many millions of other arbitrary statements are true as well - just because you believe them to be - with no wweight of any evidence of any kind...etc...so sorry...

Basically your tautological assertions aside, where is the "proof"?

 

Fossil A, Fossil B, it is only assumed that Fossil A evolved to Fossil B. That is not proof, but an assumption.

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Anonymouse, what I can't figure out about you is how you can be so sure of the "forgotten spirituality" of humans while at the same time being soooo skeptical of evolution for lack of evidence. Where's your evidence of "spirituality" other than your gut feeling?

 

I think the two are fundamentally related in that if one is going to reject evolution for lack of evidence, then one should probably also reject all other current explanations for lack of evidence ... unless you can show me something with more real evidences than evolution.

But Sip, science and reason are in a different realm than faith.

 

Science is the study of how our natural world works and reacts, now what lies behind or beneath it. Thus science is very useful, but limited, just like human reason and intelligence, both useful yet limited. We are finite creatures. Thus we cannot know what lies beyond in the infinite.

 

That all knowledge comes from carefully scrutinized observation, in other words what we call research, is just another metaphysical assumption.

 

The scientific method simply cannot answer all questions, therefore cannot be possibly the only source of knowledge. Science has a very important job which I do not dispute. But why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind the things science observes, that is not a scientific question.

 

Whether or not an intelligence beyond our universe and comprehension exists, reason and the scientific method cannot answer. Anyone who attempts to answer that question, even scientists with their "big bang" are making a philosophical or metaphysical assumption, not a scientific statement.

 

I don't wanna stray too off topic, but then this discussion would evolve further into God and morality, etc., etc.

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Just like there is a physical evolution for plants and animals there is also soul's evolution from mineral to plant, from plant to animal, and from animal to human. Human stage of evolution is not the end, there is much more room to evolve for us human beings.

Sasun, as always, thank you. :)

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... what's the point here, really... why are we debating about things that we know there is no anwer to... everything seems so pointless...

well anoushik jan, its not that there is no answer to it, its that in essence both sides of the argument, (or more than 2 side of it) think they are right. I admit, i do think i am right, but the problem is so does Thot, and seapan and etc...

 

But, i still have not found enough evidence that (again going back to the bare essential) a globe of bacteria can force itself into (and through millions of years) what we are today, yet alone seperate right from wrong, female and male..??/ with out the explanation (and hope) of a greater being, there is no (has not been) any evidence for the drive to survive....

 

I have asked many professors and teachers and stuff thourhgout my life, this very same and simple question which they always avoid and change the subject.. and the same goes on with evolutionists even in here....

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Well Domino - i fail to see at all where I have been inconsistant or where I have posted anything which contradicts my points. in addition I have very much given my opinions in addition to the links - and have painted a fairly complete picture IMO. I am no biologist I admit - but I have read darwin as well as more recent texts and I think i understand and have presented the issues and essential points pretty well. So yes - go ahead - take your time - or whatever...not that i am expecting much form you as I have said...

I will not take my time to answer you, you were the one destroying the others opinion without even trying to understand it, if you think that I will waste my time on answering you here now, when I did that in the past when you just killed the discussions by rejecting my entire presentation on no bases at all, other than your "it is proven" insinuations, when you yourself here repeat exactly what I kept telling you, when I told you that "proof" only existed in mathematic.

 

I am tired with such discussions thoth, I realise that I am too old for this stupid ball shuting game with people that have absolutly no interest to read and understand what the other party is trying to say, they are just here to present their own opinions and practice their masturbation on public. This does not only concern you here. I am even more embarassed, when I realise that I participated in the decline of this forum. But you thoth, it is you that got the gold medal in your role of the big baby.

 

I will be replying to this topic, but not you, because you are still with your personal vendata against me which in its bases is innacurate and offensive. But that is OK! My mind is not really sharp right now, so what I am writting may sound out of touch and disconnected, but I don't care, because even if my mind was to be more sharp, one thing I know of, is that I have nothing more to tell you. You played this game alone, you attacked me without any valid reason, between you and me I come clean, because unlike you, in a similair situation in the past i admitted I was mistaken and I apologised.

 

This is all I can say, just leave me alone.

Edited by Fadix
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I started this new topic, since mysteriously the other just disappeared when I decided to reply to it, I guess there is some cleaning done on the previous thread, so this one may be left here temporary until possibly it is injected on the previous one, of course, if the moderators decided it to be so.

 

Before starting to write and present what I think of all this(I am forced to do that as soon as possible, hyeforum is apparently starting to die, there is need to reanimate it).

 

I want to point out an important thing... and it is the selectivity effect.

 

Some times ago, where me and TB were having a discussion, I wrongly presented the fact that the only universe we know of had life in, and he placed in my "place" when he remarked that this is irrelevant since it is the only universe we know of(or something similar)... meditating on this and we come to the selectivity effect. The selectivity effect fools us into believing that natural selection is statistically very unlikely because of every element it takes in order to be evolved species. In fact, if we were to apply statistic into that and multiply a series of statistical probabilities, (1/a)(1/b)(1/c) etc... by including the mass of the proton, electron, the decay of subatomic particles, the quantum state of C etc... and all the rest, the probability that from a universe coming from a nothingness, or a universe having been there for eternity in an equilibrium(no changes in its subatomic particles), to form life as we know now would be one out of 10^1000….

 

Now, if we look at it, we are forced to conclude that there is a designer here, but this is again a problem, because we are facing the selectivity effect... to give an example, we can take the cases of someone choosing the birth dates of his family members and play lottery with it and win the jackpot... this person will find a direct correlation between the fact that he took those numbers and him winning the jackpot, this is a selectivity effect, for the others that did not won, there is nothing in all this but pure chance.

 

The fact that we exist, and then, from this existence (and the fact that we are aware of it), form this selectivity effect.

 

Now, I admit, it is senseless to believe that from one existing universe, there could be by chance life. Statistically it is thousands zero over the symbolic 1/10^50, known as the barrier between what is statistically possible and impossible.

 

There must be something else here, after all, natural selection is so logical, it makes so much sense, so observable, it can't be entirely false... but in the same time, if we consider just this universe, something is wrong... because the problem is not only the formation of amino acids, proteins, cell membranes, etc... The problem as well is about atoms, and the way they are made to permit such formations of complex molecules.

 

Here comes the interesting part, natural selection is fundamental, it isn’t only about creating life, it is the underlying creator and the created... much like the evolution of species, the evolution of universes, the survival of universes, the complexification of extra and intra dimensions, the formation of membranous universes and superposition, billions of billions of frames(frames, because time is virtual).

 

Series of universes have the particles needed, and poof, there is a possibility of life, how this should be seen, is not as the evolved humans we are trying to question how come natural selection, this is selective and we are limited with this selectivity effect, we must see that as infinite, infinite numbers of bubbles coming dying etc... popping from nothingness to return in nothingness... frames, which consciousness uses to create time and order them.

 

There is no starting and ending point, consciousness creates starting, consciousness create ending, ending and starting are just a phenomenology, those frames exist existed and will exist... it is consciousness that passes through them. My mind is a little jammed right now so I may as usual be hard to be clear enough.

 

What I am trying to say here, is that natural selection really exists, and it is even more universal...

 

Is that all, what about a creator a God? What I think of here, is simply an intuition, that appears to not come from my common sense... this idea I had it in my mind while I was a young with my first telescope... this was what I was repeating to myself. "If the universe is at least as mysterious and magical as consciousness as to allow it, a God won't be more mysterious."

 

Do I believe in a God, more I meditate about this subject, more I think that answering this question is irrelevant, since every possibilities exist, we just have to take a look at the opinions theists and atheists have... there is every flavours, we make of this world what we want to make of it. Irrelevant for me to answer to such a question, because I will say, yes and no!... God exist and does not exist in the same time... as the observer you chose in what universe you want to live in... and I am convinced more than ever for what I advance, and there is ways to prove it(not bring evidences, but "prove" it), and I expect that to happen and hope it to happen in my life time.

 

I may have been a little off topic here, but I just presented a brain storming, I will be writing more and more on this topic... and I hope that people will stop turning on the superficial side of the question by being polarised on two sides, atheists and theists... the only way to not believe in anything is to believe in everything... and this is what I am doing.

 

Regards to you all, Domino is back, reloaded more than ever.

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