Creationism and the like have gotten a strong hold in the United States because the educated have been too polite to say "BULLSHIT!". There is no debate in other parts of the world. Seriously. In Japan, arguments over whether evolution is fact or not are not happening. This is true for many other countries as well.
A lot of pseudo-scientific arguments have been trotted out. If you're going to say that your arguments are scientific and logical then they have to stand up to the light of reason. Hand waving doesn't count.
I think most of them have been handled but this is one that I haven't seen an answer to and it's been bugging me for a while now:
Just as you aren't going to see a computer glitch out, and create a full OS from it's random 1's and 0's anytime soon,
Given mutations and natural selection (that is an environment that the OS is more or less suited for) you just might. The amount of time required would be fairly long (millions to billions of years probably).
Genetic algorithms are doing exactly that - having an algorithm be evolved out of random 1's and 0's.
the possibility of all the things left up to chance that are required in order for us to reach our current state of existence, with the current life forms on our planet, the state of our planet supporting our kinds of life forms, and the positioning of our planet from the sun so it's gravitational pull is not to strong to suck us in or to weak to let us drift out of orbit
The positioning of the planets is well explained by cosmology and physics and does not need "God" to explain how they got in their orbits. You're arguing backwards. Oh, I see a planet in an orbit. Therefore something must have placed it just so. An orbit is
defined as being where the pull of gravity and the centripetal force on a body are in balance. It's a description of how things are, not a place that you go to.
Most of these arguments are simply driven by a misunderstanding of the numbers and timescales involved (billions of planets in the galaxy and billions of years for evolution to work) and a belief that we are unique.
, the structure of the universe and the laws of nature
Now here you can start having a discussion
(I'd like to see you explain how gravity works )
Umm, God makes things fall? Is that the answer you want? Gravity is well described but the mechanism is not understood yet. No one ever claimed that science knows everything. That's why people become scientists - to learn how things work. 150 years ago we did not understand quantum mechanics or even have more than an inkling that it existed but today a large piece of our civilization is based on it (semiconductors or "chips" are quantum mechanical devices)
, you could hardly be surprised that many people, when faced with these facts, would think to themselves "Gosh! It's almost like it's all been set up intentionally!"
When you don't understand what you're talking about (like orbits above) yah, it's pretty easy to come up with some weird conclusions. People like to make up explanations. Doesn't mean their explanation has any validity. Leaving God and religion out of it entirely, I have had people who were mystified by the things a computer was doing come up with some pretty interesting hypotheses about what was going on. And, in those instances being the author of the software, I knew their hypotheses were dead wrong.
) which was waaaayyyy at the beginnning, maybe they just aren't the type for this forum. *shrug*
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