How come Atheists are against anti blasphemy laws but are OK with bashing other .....

Well show me a picture of an atom and ill believe it.

You can put a thermometer into water and it will give you the temperature but it won't tell you whether the water is clean or dirty.

What I'm trying to say is there is more to atoms than meets the eye.

Would it be naive of me to think that the universe can have a transmitter that can have infulence on our atomic make up and have infulence on the health of our mind and bodies.

Now don't bring any diety or God into this discussion.

Oranage2 wrote: »

Well wrote but my main concern with evolution is that I just cant phantom that what we are now has evolved from nothing - perhaps my imagination isnt that good.

Well imagining the entire process in one go is impossible, it is like trying to imagine how a river can make the Grand Canon or how the Alps can be pushed up by sliding plates. These processes take millions of years, and trillions upon trillions upon trillions of localised events.

Same is true with evolution. It would be impossible to visualise in your head all the mutations required to go from a single proto-cell to a human. But luckily you don't have to.

Just like you can study the effect of a single rain fall on some rock (where only a tiny amount of material is removed) and then extrapolate that out over the entire length of time required to form the Grand Canon, you can look at the individual mutations that happen to an animals DNA.

Oranage2 wrote: »

Though I dont think it's stupid to believe in evolution, whats ever is hard wired into your brain to make you believe it is the same hard wiring that makes it easy for me not to believe.

Well to be honest I think your only problem is ignorance with what the theory says, the evidence for it and what it explains. It is not really a question of how your brain works.

I would educate yourself to the theory and then see if you still don't accept it or cannot imagine how it can work.

Oranage2 wrote: »

TBH I just dont trust scientists, they could easily have alternative motives and the fact that there isnt any profit to be made from exploring evolution really makes me not trust them.

A few points.

Firstly the great thing about science is you don't have to trust scientists. You can trust scientists if you couldn't be bothered to research what they are saying, and to be honest that is what most of us do most of the time. I don't independently research Steven Hawkin's work on black holes, I'm happy to trust that others in his field have done that and if there they are happy I'm happy. I don't independently research how my solid state hard drive works, the theories that go into it, I'm happy that the engineers at Cosair know what they are doing and that I haven't bought a 150 euro paper weight.

But the point is that if you were so inclined you could. Science is an open enterprise. Scientific research is published and it expected that others will independently verify the work.

If a scientist got up and said "I've made this amazing discovery but you can't see it you are all going to just have to trust me" he would be laughed out of where ever he was giving such a ridiculous statement. In fact a chief motivator (other than money which we will get to in a sec) for scientists is showing up other scientists, demonstrating that they have missed something or that they have measured something wrong. This competition is healthy and expected in science. While lay people who couldn't be bothered doing the research themselves might trust scientists, scientists don't trust other scientists.

The second point is that there is in fact tons of money to be made in evolutionary biology. And not just in the "Oh we got a research grant from the local university" kind of way, though there are of course those types of funding. Bio-engineering and genetic engineering are massive industries, and they all rely on the theory of evolution being sound. If it isn't they are in a lot of trouble, pouring billions into an areas that is ultimately a dead end. But of course it isn't a dead end because they wouldn't be putting this money into if it was. It is a bit like solar power. We might be still arguing about the details over what is the best way to get the energy from the sun light. But no one seriously thinks any more that there is no energy in the sun light to begin with.

So there is a lot of money to be made. But also each individual scientist will be motivated both by money (do good research get a better salary) and by prestige. A scientist who making interesting and relevant discoveries is going to do well. It is not in a scientists interest to make stuff up, since as we saw above other scientists will not simply take their word for it. Make stuff up and others will expose you for doing so, and your career (and earnings) will be seriously effected.

Oranage2 wrote: »

People are easily led and I'm just not prepared to commit to something I dont care all to much for by people I dont trust.

What do you mean you don't care too much for it? You seem to know very little about it (which again is fair enough, there are lots of things I've very little interest in), so how do you know you don't care too much for it.

I could say I know very little about the Higgs Boson. But it would be a bit silly for me to follow that up by saying I don't care for it that much.

Oranage2 wrote: »

Also science is forever changing, whats fact today may be a myth tomorrow for example we're told today that we're more related to the gorilla than the chimp so from my point of view it's actually just a waste of time learning whats fact, and what's fact is actually less important than what popular opinion.

Science does change as we learn more. That is why science isn't finished. If we knew everything we would be done by now.

Science is a continuous process of making "theories" (which in science simply means testable models of what we think is happening in the world around us) more and more accurate. As we develop better methods to test our theories we discover areas where they are not accurate.

Newtonian physics is the classic example. That seemed pretty accurate for a few hundred years based on our ability to measure the predictions it made. But then we eventually got to the point where our instruments were so sensitive that gaps appeared in what the model was saying should be happening and what was actually happening. So new more accurate theories were needed to explain these measurements, which lead to General Relativity.

It is a bit like a map. Say you are Google Maps and you zoom in to street level. You might go That is fine, all I want to know is where that building is and this map tells me.

But imagine now you were a telephone operator and you need to know the individual wires laid under the road. Google Maps wont' tell you. You need a more accurate map of wires.

That doesn't mean that the Google Maps map was "wrong". It just means it wasn't accurate enough for what you needed. Science sometimes gets things completely wrong. But more often than not it is a case that it gets things accurate to a degree and then through advances in measurement an even more accurate theory is required.

There you go I can study the heliotrope and get the right answer and someone else can study astronomy and get a similar answer.

A dog with a mallet up his ar$e could answer that question

Wait until the sunflowers start to flower in the summer and figure it out for yourself.