The Old Testament goes out of its way to show God as cruel and vindictive and the whole concept of Hell and a burning pit for sinners shows him to be negligent and uncaring. As I've said before, if current scientific theory is also incorrect about the age of everything, God is also mendacious and manipulative, whom enjoys deceiving his creations.
Mathematics can estimate the date of Adam and Eve
- Thread starter Kruelgor
- Start date
Kruelgor
Emperor
Again, the idea of evolution doesn't even for a second discredit or suggest there is no designer/creator. The creator can easily design rules for evolution.
Berzerker
Deity
Perhaps, unless the same act of creation - a collision between planetary bodies - responsible for life here was also responsible for the alien life... The Sumerians said as much, their "gods" (our term) came from the celestial sky god that slew Tiamat leaving behind "Heaven" and Earth (and life). And I suspect humanoid life everywhere is close enough that minor differences could eventually be over come by science...
Kruelgor
Emperor
Even here on earth, just a slight difference such as blood type can cause the mother's internal defense systems to kill the unborn baby. http://parents.berkeley.edu/advice/pregnancy/oneg.html
If you suppose a creator set forth rules of evolution, you have merely reset the question. For if life on earth is improbable, it must me many orders of magnitude more improbable that a being capable of magic spontaneously come into existence. What would be a simpler explanation is that such a being gradually gained in complexity and hence... well you're back to evolution.
When we are capable of creating truly artificial life, that life isn't going to follow some new rules or laws because it was created by humans. If 5 billion years from now (pretend the sun won't have destroyed the habitability of earth in this time frame) the life we created this century has evolved into complex organisms contemplating their existence, their postulation that they were created doesn't solve the question of their existence. That we created them just opens up a new question: how did we get here in the first place? It would also lead to another point. If the mechanism at work for creating variety in life is indistinguishable from evolution, there is no reason to postulate a creator, as the existence of a creator becomes superfluousness. Only if you truly run into something like irreducible complexity does the question of a creator even bother passing consideration.
Abegweit
Anarchist trader
I'm coming in late and I haven't waded through this entire thread but early on Truronian touched on the real issue here. In short, the math is absolutely impeccable; it's the premises which are false.
From the article: "If the population of the world is 6 billion people in the year 2000 and the population has consistently doubled every 100 years, when were there only 2 people on earth?" While the first part is right (the population was indeed around 6 billion in 2000), the second has absolutely no relationship to reality whatever. Since the math is based on this false premise, the conclusion it draws is completely wrong. Unfortunately, doubling every hundred years does not lead to the conclusion that these folks want so they changed it to every 160 years. Magical! Given that premise, there were two people on the planet about six thousand years ago.
However, why choose 100 or 160 years, or any other number.
The human species is capable of doubling its population far faster than once every 160 years. For example the French Canadian population, with no new immigration, doubled 10 times over from 1700 to 1960, or roughly once every 25 years - going from 15,000 to 8 million. The population of the few Acadians left in Canada after the expulsion of 1745 (remember Evangeline) grew even faster in the following hundred years. At the peak, each woman had 15-20 children who survived to maturity. This implies three doublings every generation.
But this kind of growth can only happen when there are empty lands and untapped resources to support it. Cases like this are truly exceptional. Throughout the vast majority of human existence, the amount of resources available to one generation was pretty much the same as the amount available to the next. So people either limited the number of children they had, or their children died. That was about it.
For all of history prior to agriculture, the population had to have remained roughly stable. Well, it would have grown slowly as people moved to colonise new land masses and developed technologies to exploit new food sources.
It is estimated that the world population was about 1-5 million people at the advent of agriculture around 10,000BC. As agriculture spread, new species were domesticated and new technologies developed, the population grew steadily. It doubled roughly once every thousand years reaching 500 million people around 1500 AD.
Then came the industrial revolution and the liberation of new resources. The next doubling took barely over 300 years when the population reached a billion in about 1805. Next doubling was a mere 125 years and the two afterwards around 45-50 each (do the math, the last one ends in the near future).
In short, the assumption that the growth rate was constant is simply nonsense. And the reasons why it is nonsense are obvious.
From the article: "If the population of the world is 6 billion people in the year 2000 and the population has consistently doubled every 100 years, when were there only 2 people on earth?" While the first part is right (the population was indeed around 6 billion in 2000), the second has absolutely no relationship to reality whatever. Since the math is based on this false premise, the conclusion it draws is completely wrong. Unfortunately, doubling every hundred years does not lead to the conclusion that these folks want so they changed it to every 160 years. Magical! Given that premise, there were two people on the planet about six thousand years ago.
However, why choose 100 or 160 years, or any other number.
The human species is capable of doubling its population far faster than once every 160 years. For example the French Canadian population, with no new immigration, doubled 10 times over from 1700 to 1960, or roughly once every 25 years - going from 15,000 to 8 million. The population of the few Acadians left in Canada after the expulsion of 1745 (remember Evangeline) grew even faster in the following hundred years. At the peak, each woman had 15-20 children who survived to maturity. This implies three doublings every generation.
But this kind of growth can only happen when there are empty lands and untapped resources to support it. Cases like this are truly exceptional. Throughout the vast majority of human existence, the amount of resources available to one generation was pretty much the same as the amount available to the next. So people either limited the number of children they had, or their children died. That was about it.
For all of history prior to agriculture, the population had to have remained roughly stable. Well, it would have grown slowly as people moved to colonise new land masses and developed technologies to exploit new food sources.
It is estimated that the world population was about 1-5 million people at the advent of agriculture around 10,000BC. As agriculture spread, new species were domesticated and new technologies developed, the population grew steadily. It doubled roughly once every thousand years reaching 500 million people around 1500 AD.
Then came the industrial revolution and the liberation of new resources. The next doubling took barely over 300 years when the population reached a billion in about 1805. Next doubling was a mere 125 years and the two afterwards around 45-50 each (do the math, the last one ends in the near future).
In short, the assumption that the growth rate was constant is simply nonsense. And the reasons why it is nonsense are obvious.
Leifmk
Deity
Well, more or less; there would have been the odd dieback incident due to various factors such as disease, climate change etc., and in the wake of such incidents I guess the growth rate could go higher for a while until the carrying capacity was approached again. There's some pretty strong indications that our ancestors passed through a particularly severe population bottleneck around 70k years ago where there were maybe only 15 thousand survivors (see the Toba catastrophe theory), for example. Significant but not really species-threatening dieback incidents have happened many times after the introduction of agriculture as well. The ones we have the best historical records of are obviously the most recent ones, specifically the Black Death and the devastation brought upon the various Native American peoples after contact with Europeans (again, disease).
dido
Prince
Leifmk
Deity
Can you have a 3D space which never ends but which is not infinite?
Yes, if it exists in a higher-dimensional space.
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