[From a General Authority of the LDS Church, in the Church's official magazine]
Naturalism’s explanations of the origins of life and the miracle of our bodies often appear convoluted when placed side by side with the simple truths of the revealed word and divine scripture.
With its 107 million cells, connected to the brain by over 1 million neurons, the eye is more perfect than any camera ever invented. It caused Charles Darwin to humbly admit, “That the eye with all its inimitable contrivances ... could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest sense.”
[...]
This earth departs from its orbit of the sun by only one-ninth of an inch every 18 miles. If, instead, it changed by one-tenth of an inch every 18 miles, we would all freeze to death. If it changed by one-eighth of an inch, we would all be incinerated. Did this all happen by accident?
[...]
The doubter requires too much of us when he asks us to believe that the miracles of eyes and hands and DNA and order in the universe all happened by chance. The passage of time, even long intervals of time, is not a “cause” and provides no answers without an intelligent designer.
67 comments
1.Fundies hate Darwin, yet fundies quote mine Darwin for the sake of maintaining a lie.
The quote in context:
"To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of Spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei ["the voice of the people = the voice of God "], as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certain the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, should not be considered as subversive of the theory."
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
2. From what deep dark cravass of your colon did you pull this?
3. Natural selection =/= chance. Look up chaos theory too, it explains quite well how order can arise in the natural world and the universe. And without the need of a creator!
Joshi:
It's an appeal to the Pangloss Principle -- everything is the way it is because it has to be. Creationism almost requires that the universe be in exactly perfect balance because if it isn't, it invalidates the idea of a perfect creator. If there was any significant amount of slop (as we know for a fact that there is), creationists would have to explain why a perfect being would create a manifestly imperfect world.
1. I think you'll find that quote continues "To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound. (and continues for several paragraphs)". To paraphrase Bob Dole (only with harsher language), quoting out of context makes you a deceptive cunt.
2. Yes. When can you get it through your thick skull that we were made for the Earth and not the other way around?
3. No, we don't. The evolution of eyes and hands are well documented and the order of the universe is the result of the laws of physics. I'm a bit fuzzy on abiogenesis, but just because we don't have an explanation for everything doesn't mean the explanations we have are wrong.
Lord, here we go again...
1. quote mining (see cool cats for whole quote)
2. puddle analogy goes here
3. natural selection =/= chance
Seriously, we should number these fallacies so we can refute them in "computer error" style: "fallacy #38 has occurred".
If the earth was an eight of an inch closer to the sun we'd all be incinerated? That's mind-bogglingly stupid even by fundie standards.
Elder Douglas L. Callister, living proof that there's no fool like an old fool.
1. It didnt start out perfect. Look at less-developed creatures. Some can only sense changes in light. Some can only sense movement. Some can't register color. It was a gradual proces.
2.Do you know why we can exist in this environment? Because we evolved in it. If the earth had 'departed from its orbit' by 1/10 inch every 18 miles, guess what? Life would have evolved for THAT climate.
3. Process by which the organisms most capable of surviving survived the best is not chance.
With its 107 million cells, connected to the brain by over 1 million neurons, the eye is more perfect than any camera ever invented.
Most cameras don't have blind spots and the wiring installed so that it blocks the photosensitive surface.
I suppose at the time cameras nearly as sophisticated as a human eye seemed impossible, but now it's quite clear that we caan engineer cameras more perfect than eyes. Shit, I have to suppliment my eyes with lenses developed by technology to make them work properly. Why'd this perfect creator of yours allow me to have vision that deteriorates? My camera certainly doesn't seem to have that problem, among other things.
Also, if we were closer or further from teh sun by such ridiculously small amounts we wouldn't fucking notice! Seriously, that's like saying birds should burst into flames when they fly rather high because they're closer to the sun.
This earth departs from its orbit of the sun by only one-ninth of an inch every 18 miles. If, instead, it changed by one-tenth of an inch every 18 miles, we would all freeze to death. If it changed by one-eighth of an inch, we would all be incinerated.
You can get closer to the sun than that just by climbing a mountain. Oddly enough, you need cold weather gear for that.
There seems (reasonably enough) to be some confusion regarding "point" #2. I'm not exactly sure what his "departs from its orbit" means, but whatever... here are some numbers:
Earth's eccentricity = 0.0167 which gives an "orbital variation" = (aphelion - perihelion)/mean distance = about 3%
1/9th inch / 18 miles = about 0.00001%
So I call bullshit on this one (seeing as we quite happily cope with a 3% variation every year).
(And, regardless, it's still all bs because [insert puddle analogy here])
the eye is more perfect than any camera ever invented.
Is that why we have pretty much abandoned the eye in favor of CCDs (digital camera circuit chips) for astronomical observation? The eye isn't perfect at all. For many people, it's focused wrong and they need glasses. For humans, it's wired "backwards", with the light receptors pointing toward the back of our heads and the nerves coming out of the front. It's wired correctly for the squid - did God need practice on humans to get it right with the squid? For humans, we have good color vision, but our night vision stinks. For dogs, it's the other way around. But dogs have color vision genes - they're just broken by mutations. Why would God give dogs color vision genes that don't work? That's like making a color TV, leaving the color circuitry disconnected and selling it as a black-and-white.
And anyway, chimps have hands and eyes, too, so why couldn't chimps and humans have a common ancestor?
"This earth departs from its orbit of the sun by only one-ninth of an inch every 18 miles."
Bullshit
"If, instead, it changed by one-tenth of an inch every 18 miles, we would all freeze to death."
1/10 is a smaller deviation than 1/9. We'd be closer to the sun, not farther away.
"If it changed by one-eighth of an inch, we would all be incinerated."
1/8 is a larger deviation than 1/9. We'd be farther away.
All of the above bullshit. Even where I pointed out flaws in his math (only to a lesser degree). Deviation works both ways. A deviation of 1/9th of an inch could be 1/9th of an inch closer, but also farther away. In this case a larger deviation doesn't mean that you are going farther away, just that the absolute distance to the average orbit is larger.
Darwin is a scientist, so his statement has been updated by more modern scientists who believe that eyes probably evolved from light-sensitive patches on proto-fishs.
The eye is not perfect - It frequently has a defective focusing mechanism, the light sensitive parts are actually behind the other parts of the retina, causing a small blind spot right in the freaking middle of your vision, it has no zoom function, and although it does have a higher resolution than any modern camera on the market, it cannot see infrared, ultraviolet, or even too well in the dark.
Quantum Immortality: If the Earth's orbit was off, I would be telling you this perhaps millions of years later on another planet while Earth struggled to evolve life. It is a freaking coincidence.
These sad, sorrowful, constantly refuted arguments remind me of the Frankenstein movies. No matter how thoroughly you disposed of the monster, he was sure to return for a sequel.
Believers' never-ending love of truncating that Darwin quote demonstrates the wonderful sense of ethics that they have. The technique is the moral equivalent of a deliberate lie.
This earth departs from its orbit of the sun by only one-ninth of an inch every 18 miles.
Does anyone know what the heck he's talking about? The earth never "departs" from its orbit. It's in free fall.
This earth departs from its orbit of the sun by only one-ninth of an inch every 18 miles. If, instead, it changed by one-tenth of an inch every 18 miles, we would all freeze to death. If it changed by one-eighth of an inch, we would all be incinerated. Did this all happen by accident?
Has it escaped this moron that the Earth's orbit around the sun is elliptical, accounting for the change in the seasons from year to year?
Edit: Thanks, Euclid.
My mother and I were playing Zombies!!! earlier. For those of you not familiar with the game, the first step in each turn is placing a map tile to expand the board. Because of the placement rules, the map usually looks like one very, very badly-planned city. We started joking that this was because the plans were signed off on by Mayor "Dumbass" Dave "Knucklehead" Wilson.
If the eye was designed, it was by Mayor Wilson.
Stick to abusing your wives, Elder.
@[b]Berny:
You're welcome. But to clarify: the seasons are due to the earth's rotational tilt, not its orbital eccentricity. In fact, that's just added proof that Elder Callister is full of crap: since the seasons are opposite in opposite hemispheres, the seasons are opposite during aphelion and perihelion... but we don't notice it; implication: the effect of the tilt (which we cope with just fine) far outweighs the effect of the eccentricity. So the 3% variation in earth-sun distance has bugger-all effect on life, let alone his 0.1in/18mile crap.
I, for one, would love to join the LSD church.
*man runs into the room to whisper in stogoe's ear*
What? Really? No drugs? Not even alcohol?
*more whispering*
Oh, damn. Well, forget it, then.
Wow. I spotted the fallacies just from skimming over the post.
That's not just bullshit, it's glaringly obvious bullshit.
How about all those other planets that depart by one-eigth of an inch? What, we can't see them, cuz they fell into the sun already? What does this prove again?
So if the earth was created perfect for us, what about all the other planets? Did god fuck all the rest of those planets up? Some success rate. Or maybe each planet was made for a different race. Makes us quite significant.
"With its 107 million cells, connected to the brain by over 1 million neurons, the eye is more perfect than any camera ever invented."
The human eye (at best), is about 81 Megapixels (wikipedia). Humans have made GIGApixel cameras. They also have no blind spots. What's more perfect.
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"This earth departs from its orbit of the sun by only one-ninth of an inch every 18 miles."
'This earth'? Uh, whut?
And wouldn't the sun pull back, due to, the laws of gravity?
Oh, wait. According to you guys they are science. Bad juju.
It's shocking, if not entirely comical, that between all of you there isn't even a remote glimpse of intellegence of any kind. I'm a Mormon. Notwithstanding, the collective stupidity displayed by each of you individually, and collectively, in itself disproves natural selection. You are no more intellegent then the fungus you believe you mutated from.
Somewhere each of you is sitting there right now glued to your computer screen, without a job I'm sure, munching on some old bag of doritos (not the actual chips, you are clearly not smart enough to have figured out yet that you eat the chips, not the bag), snickering to yourself. No doubt each of you will spend the next 4 worthless hours of your pathetic lives coming up with a "clever" response. Know this though, the 25 seconds I've spent posting this message is the biggest waste of my entire existence. I won't give you the pleasure of wasting another second of my time. That's because, unlike you, I have a life and a job and I won't ever find myself back looking at this "forum of intellect" (excuse me for a few minutes, I have to gain my composure...I'm laughing way too hard to continue). Instead, I'll make you a promise. Get out a piece of paper and write this down...here it comes: The day will come when you will realize Elder Douglas Callister is a man called of God. You will regret ever degrading him like you have. Write it down. You may not accept that fact now, and you'll continue with your mocking, but I promise you the day will come when you realize you are wrong. I'd hate to be you.
Dude... Look up perihelion and aphelion, and Kepler's laws of planetary motion when you have a chance.
The Earth's orbit is not a perfect circle, but it's a nice ellipse. Sometime in July, at its closest to the Sun (the perihelion), the Earth is roughly 5 million kilometers nearer the Sun than at aphelion in January.
Besides, one ninth of an inch is actually a larger distance than one tenth of an inch. A pocket calculator will confirm this.
Forget your holy books, and study real science, will ya?
I personally have never met Elder Douglas L. Callister. I don’t know if he is a scientist or has studied science. From what I read of his article these brief comments were secondary to his message. What causes me to shake my head is some of the poor or incomplete physics that some of you are suggesting. You all profess to know of science but your understanding is obviously superficial.
Let’s consider the question that all of you have misconceptions about.
Is the mean orbital radius of the Earth increasing over time?
I am a physicist and I wish to say something concerning this portion. Some of your comments show that you are thinking but perhaps you should look to see if there is any truth before using harsh words with limited understanding. It’s true that the Earth is “falling” around the Sun and Kudos to those that know the Earth travels in an elliptical path around the Sun.
There are at least two item you did not consider
(1) the tidal forces acting on the Sun due to the Earth. Yes, it is true that the Earth pulls on the Sun just as the Moon pulls on the Earth producing a tidal force on the Earth. Well, this tidal friction force acting on the Sun due to the Earth will actually slow down the rotation of the Sun and by conservation of angular momentum the Earth will in turn increase its mean orbital radius from the sun.
(2) nuclear processes in the core of the Sun are actually reducing the Sun’s total mass by fusing hydrogen to heave hydrogen then eventually to helium, in turn the gravitational attraction force on the Earth due to the Sun is diminishing, see Nuclear Fusion and Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation. The mass lose of the Sun is perhaps 0.1% of its total mass during its entire main sequence stage (about 10 billion years). These two items produce a very small migration of the Earth away from the Sun, perhaps 1.5 cm a year. Don’t discount the physics because you don’t like the message. Think and consider all possibilities before you speak/type in ignorant hast or hatred. If you are scientists, act the part. Discard your feelings of superiority and look for truth.
What's with all the ad hominems from tkp and PhysicsMan? You'd think that two obviously-so-superior-to-us-worthless-mortals beings wouldn't stoop to personal insults.
I, on the other hand, am not perched on a moral horse so high my hair is singed by the sun, so I'm not a hypocrite when I say: Go fuck each other anally, you arrogant, judgmental, sanctimonious, oxygen-thieving wastes of flesh. Your empty claims of superiority are just that.
i you want to quote mine Darwin , at least use something that not EVERYONE knows. Read the very next paragraph and he explains how it may have happened.
The eye is a wonderful thing, but it is a crappy camera. The brain does all sorts of image processing to fix.
The human eye is only more perfect than any camera if you consider it the platonic ideal of an image capturing device. In terms of function, compared to a modern camera it has a large blind spot, poor resolution, is sensitive to a smaller range of frequencies, captures an inverted image, can't detect colour well at night, and has a host of other problems.
2. This is not true, but even if it were, would be a very unsound argument. We could not have evolved to be the way we are in an environment that was lethal. If we were adapted to live only in environments with high mercury content and temperatures between 70 and 130 degrees Celsius, you'd think the fact we were there and not somewhere else would be proof of god's foresight. If we evolved on any other one of the billions of planets nearby, you'd find it amazing how well that planet supported us.
3. Natural processes are not chance. And you ask too much when you request that we believe an invisible magical being created everything just for us because he just did.
1: stop misquoting this, you're dumb.
2: the earth's orbit is elliptical dumbass, between aphelion and perihelion there's a rough distance of 3,106,855 miles, of fucking course a small change in the distance earth moves in under a second would kill us, that's how angles work. Just because earth got lucky and is at the right distance to the sun doesn't prove that it was meant to be.
3: you are stupid, you're literally just saying "wow look at all this neat stuff, clearly space guy did it". Just because something is amazing doesn't mean god did it, if I took an uncontacted tribe from the rain forest and showed them a cassette deck they'd think I was supernatural. You're literally just using big words to say stupid things now, yes a lot of time is how evolution works. Are you so inept that you can't imagine how the same concept that had humans make all these wildly different species of dogs from wolves can't extend over time? Features that are useful get reproduced and those that aren't don't. We made small white lap dogs from wolves by breeding dogs with the features we liked. The only difference is that in nature the deciding factor is whether you live long enough to find a mate rather than whether your owner lets you breed.
What happens at the end of the animated Sci-Fi film "Titan AE", re. the eponymous terraforming ship-cum-DNA-seeder & the main weapon of the Drej mothership, thus resulting in Planet 'Bob'.
"Titan AE" was directed by animator supreme Don Bluth: who is an LDSer himself.
You're no more an 'Elder' than those little more than boys who knock on peoples' doors, Douggie. Don Bluth is the God of Animation.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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