Creationism Vs Evolution

ZOMG RANT ALERT

It sickens me how many people in this country don't believe in evolution.  I heard a statistic that it's around half, but I doubt it's that many.  Science is about rational thought and testable ideas and experiments.  Rejecting the scientific theory of the origin of the human race is like not believing in friction, saying something like that it's god's will that things don't move infinitley.  Even though most fundamental scientific principles are proved indirectly at first (like the spherical nature of the earth), when we are able to directly observe it, we are right because it has been tested indirectly so much.  Religious extremists dismiss evidence like fossils as "tricks by god to test our faith" or something like that.  I bet if someone took a born again christian or another religious extremist in a time machine back 65 million years ago, observed dinosaurs, and returned, they would still reject their direct observations as "hethanistic trickery" or something like that.  Courts have ruled in some places that scientific arguments in favor of creationism can be taught in public schools, what will they have to show?  This intelligent design theory they yammer about is nothing more than pseudoscience, and a lazy underestimation of the power and magnitude biodiversity, natural selection, and time can accomplish.

>>103
>>who said anything about personality?

I did.  Please try to keep up.

>>and his personality degraded... as with most brain injuries - this is a surprise to you?

No, it isn't a surprise, because the mind is, as far as science can determine, 100% a phenomenon of the meat.  Damaging the meat damages the mind.

>>"non-physical plane"
>>think of the brain as an interface for "mind" and the body as an array of peripherals

Can I think of it as an invisible pink unicorn?

>>this interface analogy is related to jung's "collective subconscious" as an extension

Maybe it's related to "an invisible pink unicorn" as an extension.

>>if archetypes can be distributed by sheer biomassive conception...

Leaving aside the questions of what an "archetype" is and what "sheer biomassive conception" even means, that's a pretty big "if."  As my mother would say, "You're trying to make an awful lot of soup out of one onion, aren't you?"

>>there have been mountains of anecdotal evidence..

"Anecdotal evidence" is an oxymoron.  As Heinlein said, "if you don't have facts and figures, it is opinion."

There are "mountains of anecdotal evidence" that Elvis Presley is flipping burgers at a Dairy Queen in Chattanooga, Tennessee with Richard Nixon running the cash register.  There are "mountains of anecdotal evidence" that little green men from Neptune are raiding rural America in flying saucers, performing disturbing proctological experiments on hillbillies.  There are "mountains of anecdotal evidence" for the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, ghosts, elves, leprechauns, dragons, and the Boogie Man.  Do you find these claims as plausible than mystical conjectures about "souls" and "gods?"  If not, why not?

>>it is far from completely implausible, how much coincidence will you ignore

As Douglas Adams said, "It's only 'coincidence' in the same sense that it's a 'coincidence' that a puddle of water is shaped EXACTLY like the depression in the ground where it lies."

>>a cold purely accidental universe

This is the logical fallacy of argument from adverse consequences.  Two and two make four regardless of whether you personally feel bad about that fact or not.

>>looking only with our 5 senses

Which of our 5 senses do we use to perform positron emission tomography?  Which of our 5 senses do we use to examine human heredity in the Human Genome Project?

>>and based on the limited experimental verification

Well, yes.  If it's not experimentally verifiable, it's meaningless noise.

Occam's Razor is simple:  "do not multiply entities beyond what is needful."  If you have multiple hypotheses to choose from, you start with the one that assumes the fewest number of things to exist that you didn't already know to be real.  So far neuroscience is making rapid advances without requiring any hypothesis involving a "soul."