IF, as evolutionists claim, the earth is billions of years old, and mankind has evolved from a lower and simpler form of life, then why has mankind gone from writing upon stones to laser printers in just the past 3,500 years? When God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, they were written upon stone. It is abundantly clear that the Egyptians carved messages into stone (hieroglyphics). So why is it that mankind has only discovered better inventions in the past few thousand years? If mankind had evolved, as evolutionists claim, then why didn't man discover ink a million years ago?
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Wow, just wow. I'd recommend a book, Radical Evolution, which discusses probable causes and results of our exploding base of knowledge...but methinks you'd missunderstand it.
Discover ink? Well it wasn't really there for discovering, unless you're speaking of the squid variety. Man has for a VERY long time created paint and ink like substances to paint with. Ever heard of cave paintings?
Also, evolution has absolutely nothing to do with technology.
This is one of the weirdest arguments against evolution I've seen.
And what about asking if God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, why did he write them upon stone? Why not give Moses the DVD version (along with a player and a really cool plasma TV) so he could watch them during those boring nights at the desert?
If, as fundies claim, man was intelligently designed, why is David J Stewart so spectacularly unintelligent?
In fact, man did discover ink millions of years ago! It was discovered by "Thrunge the black fingered" in 1,005,204 BC, but as he didn't discover paper at the same time, he couldn't write his discovery down and so it was soon forgotten.
(It's ironic that paper was actually invented before ink, but again the discovery could not be written down and was soon lost again. The discoverer of paper was "Gru!it with the very clean anus".)
Because there's no reason the evolution of organisms and the evolution of ideas should start at the same time or proceed at the same rate; they are distinct and operate via different mechanisms (reproduction of organisms with chemical mutation and the exchange of ideas with mutation via misinterpretation, respectively). In fact, some kinds of idea exchange are much faster than evolution, because new ideas can be formed by the logical combination of existing ideas in a single step, rather than getting to the same idea by gradual selection and amplification of beneficial traits over many generations, coupled with mutation in transmission. Of course, the ideas of formal logic and rationalism can only have been generated by processes without reference to formal logic or rationalism, ie modelled on an evolutionary pattern. Thus, there is a gradual development of ideas via conventional evolution prior to the rise of rationalism and logic, but once we have them they can be used to short-circuit the evolution of knowledge, leading to a sudden, massive increase in the rate of generation of ideas.
Mankind had to break out of the centuries-long European christian lockdown to promote widespread literacy, and the propagation of ideas.
Most of the early technology of literacy was imported from other cultures.
The Industrial Revolution began, thanks to the Enlightenment. The typewriter was developed in the 19th century, and the electronic technology after the 1950s.
We have laser printers now, thanks to the technology that was recovered from the Roswell NM crash debris, and reverse-engineered by American companies.
Believe it.
Davie,
I told you earlier this morning that the meds are in the cabinet behind the Maalox. I am really sorry that I didn't check them first, because it is now apparent that you have been OD'ing on them and have, consequently, dulled your thinking.
It's Cold Turkey Time, Davie!... I've made some really strong coffee, and we're gonna ride this out!!
Man did not develop a civilization until about 10,000 years ago. Meanwhile, mankind in it's present form has only existed for about 130,000 years. Once Humans figured out that they could plant their own crops 10,000 years ago they had a stable source of food and were able to settle down in large groups. From there part of the population would harvest the food for a larger population which could now focus on tasks that did involve survival. Thus inventions began to become more complex. This is pretty basic stuff, kiddo.
The Ten Commandments were not 'written upon stone' at all, at least in the earlier versions.
Technology and human knowledge both follow an exponential progression up to the degree supported by communications systems. The faster people can communicate, the faster new things can be learned and discovered. That's why "the singularity" slides around and can't have a definite date. Relative to us today, it's maybe another 50 years out. Relative to people in 1700, it was closer to 100 years away.
For those who don't know, "the singularity" in this context is essentially the estimate of the next point after which current predictions of technological understanding at a future date fall apart. The point by which time, we can no longer predict what new discoveries could be made and how they would shape our future understanding. Things like the discovery of the transistor or fundamental shifts in the type of technology (printed word to phones, for instance).
Because we've only been able to progress with science without religion clouding our judgement for less than a thousand years. The Renaissance was the first step forward, because religion took a back seat to the quest for knowledge. Even then, it wasn't all science. For example, Galileo was imprisoned for his radical claim that the earth was not, in fact, the center of the universe.
Paper is, uh, perishable. And there's not that much of a difference between ink and paint.
As for science, human social groups were mostly isolated until the invention of urban culture. For all we know someone actually had a working battery someplace and could never find a place to use it because the person who could have invented the blasting cap or lightbulb didn't know where to find the ingredients or the battery.
(Also, can we not throw around the phrase "exponential progression"? It makes the bad man come back.)
"IF, as evolutionists claim, the earth is billions of years old, and mankind has evolved from a lower and simpler form of life, then why has mankind gone from writing upon stones to laser printers in just the past 3,500 years?"
Because, there are some smart people - unlike you - around.
most inventions in the west happened in the enlightnment, when the backward and dead hand of religion lost a lot of its influence.
Had it been left to the fundies we'd have no antibiotics, anaesthesia, computers, aeroplanes etc, 'cos they'd all be counter to the word of god
Because technology doesn't advance at a static rate. It's exponential, which is how we got from the Wright Bros to Concorde in little more than sixty years and how we got from chunky brick-like cell phones to smart phones in less than two decades.
In these and many other instances (including printing), once the ball was set in motion it grew like an avalanche. If god was so smart, why didn't he give Adam and Eve a Blackberry and the keys to a brand new Porsche, instead of twiddling his thumbs for 6000 years waiting for one of "his children" to invent them?
Maybe according to some ancient prophecy, writing with ink would signal the coming of the Anti-Something and people were afraid to do it. You know, kind of like with microchips and social security numbers today.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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