Posted: Mar 28, 2015 7:44 am
tolman wrote:
No doubt a committed believer in Thunder Gods could try and pretend to themselves that nasty atheist physicists are ideologically committed to explaining thunder and lightning as 'mere' physical phenomena.
The thing is, outside the self-centred wishful thinking of the creationist, there is nothing other than natural change (if 'natural' is taken to include our own species' effects).
It's the creationist who sees natural change as being somehow emotionally insufficient, but there's no more reason for science to try and pander to such feelings than for it to pander to the feelings of believers in Thunder Gods.
If 'mere' reality isn't good enough for some emotional and intellectual children, that's not really science's problem.
Science’s problem is that atheist ideology has been using the framework of Darwinian evolution to build an origin story of self creation when the reality is that we have been made by agency greater than ourselves. A problem that makes for all mankind and all life on this planet is that that part of the creative agency that is immediately above our status can be hurt, so killing us or what is worse, it might destroy creativity on Earth and turn it permanently into a slave planet. The self-creation origin story blinds its believers to the very existence of this creative agent.
tolman wrote:Jayjay4547 wrote:The BBC slide show set out to explain how the supposedly “bizarre” human species came into being.
In fifteen short paragraphs, it was giving a brief look at some selected genetic differences between humans and their ancestors and living close relatives.
It simply wasn't claiming to be a comprehensive and holistic description of human evolution, and it seems only a moron would think or claim that it was.
FFS, the wikipedia page on 'human evolution' is around ten times the size.
If you added the Wikipedia entries on australopithecus, Oldown culture and so on, you could easily get 100 times the length of that slide show. But I showed that one could present a holistic* story in a slide show half as long.
"Fuck Sake" would have noticed that I was giving the actual question the slide show posed: How did such a bizarre creature evolve?. The question “How” does actually imply a holistic answer- not necessarily exhaustive. Like Thomas Eshuis, you are trying to make out that the slide show had restricted what it asked but actually it restricted its answer.
*Holism: a term introduced by General the Right Hon. Jan Christiaan Smuts in 1926, in his book Holism and Evolution