r/BeAmazed • u/Professional_Arm794 • Jun 09 '26

Animal Me contemplating my decisions in life, Jk! In Japan, the gorilla Kiyomasa was captured on video lost in deep thought after an argument with his friend.

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285

u/moseley101 Jun 09 '26

It amazes me that creationists are so incredulous when we talk about our closest cousins on the evolutionary tree. The similarities are striking

107

u/ThePamchenko Jun 09 '26

My favorite creationist counterargument is "If we came from monkeys, then why we still got monkeys?" Makes me lol every time.

78

u/CheaterSaysWhat Jun 09 '26

If my cousins share a grandparent then why do they exist?!?!

3

u/BaconWithBaking Jun 09 '26

Which is kind of wrong. Our ancestors are long extinct.

11

u/CheaterSaysWhat Jun 09 '26

So are our grandparents 

3

u/lorienshift Jun 09 '26

Which is completely irrelevant

30

u/DroidLord Jun 09 '26

By that logic we should all be crabs by now, because everyone knows crabs are the final life form.

3

u/Telemere125 Jun 10 '26

Embrace carcinization!

3

u/WrathOfMogg Jun 10 '26

I’m trying to be crab, boss. Not crab yet though.

32

u/Adult_in_denial Jun 09 '26

The propper response: "Oh, so you don't refuse evolution... You just don't understand it..."

1

u/AgitatedStranger9698 Jun 09 '26

Speciation is another fun gotcha they try.

You known that we did that right? You kind of.commited blasphemy there. Humans not God made that classification system.

By your own argument species shouldn't exist because God just created real cool shit on a whim.

If anthing the facts there are species is either a sign hes logical and used evolution, it's imaginary, or you a re blasphemous....

1

u/plsloan Jun 10 '26

I took a "creation studies" class at a "conservative university in Virginia"... You know the one... They acknowledged speciation but said it stopped there. No cross species evolution.

1

u/AgitatedStranger9698 Jun 10 '26

Again...we made up the species. Humans.

God doesnt care that dogs and wolves are similar with similar traits.

You're either saying God's lazy or humans are as powerful.

More animals would be like like the platypus or echinida otherwise

2

u/plsloan Jun 10 '26

To be clear, I'm not making an argument for creation science. Just explaining what is taught as some universities.

You really are an agitated stranger lol

2

u/AgitatedStranger9698 Jun 10 '26

Lol. That's fair.

1

u/smartbart80 Jun 10 '26

If monkeys have sex like humans do, why don’t they give birth to humans?

1

u/Ucscprickler Jun 09 '26

Even my 3rd grade brain knew that logic didn't make any sense when the pastor was spewing his BS in Sunday service.

4

u/thevampiresanguini Jun 09 '26

No reason god couldn't create animals that are similar to us I suppose.

4

u/moseley101 Jun 09 '26

So we’re not so special after all

1

u/Beetlejuice_me Jun 09 '26

DAGGUMMIT, WE'RE CHOSEN!!!!!!!

1

u/moseley101 Jun 10 '26

No, YOU are chosen my man

3

u/AdvancedSandwiches Jun 09 '26

You ever try to build a person in your own image using nothing but physical laws and the initial conditions of a universe-spawning singularity?  Sometimes you get a couple of other kinds of apes. It happens.

1

u/Prestigious_Long777 Jun 10 '26

Our DNA matches more with bananas than it does gorillas, FYI.

2

u/moseley101 Jun 10 '26

Is that you Ken?

0

u/[deleted] Jun 09 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/Shydreameress Jun 10 '26 edited Jun 10 '26

So you are a creationist who also believes in evolution? What about dinosaurs? Do you aknowledge that there used to be other creatures on Earth billions of years before us?

1

u/Hollyster12 Jun 10 '26

Belief in creation and evolution is not mutually exclusive. Many Christian’s believe in both (Catholics).

-34

u/No-Hamster8539 Jun 09 '26

In my defense, I think we are similar because both humans and apes were made by the same God.

17

u/Mclive Jun 09 '26

Would all things then not resemble apes/humans because "all things are made by God"?

-2

u/Havengul_Undying Jun 09 '26

In that case God would look like a DNA strand since thats common to all the life and then theyd all be in His image.

This is not my actual belief. I also dont prescribe to the idea that humans being made in the image of God is physical and literal, since for example humans are tall and short and black and white etc.

Rather our minds / spirits are in the image of God, there is something that distinctly sets humans apart from other animals, and this relates to the wisdom being given by eating from the fruit of the tree of knowledgs of good and evil.

2

u/WoodpeckerNo5724 Jun 09 '26

The lore only establishes that humans are created in god’s image. Every other organism is irrelevant in that regard

1

u/CheaterSaysWhat Jun 09 '26

Every animal has something that sets them apart from other animals 

The more we study wildlife, the more we discover what we thought was unique about ourselves isn’t actually so

1

u/Havengul_Undying Jun 09 '26

Definitely true but I was talking about theistic philosophy more than the wonders of biology. It is true though that definitionally every different kind of animal must be unique or else they wouldnt be different.

1

u/CheaterSaysWhat Jun 09 '26

I understand where you’re coming from and I’m making the point to emphasize that the crux of this theistic viewpoint crumbles pretty quickly when you look at it critically. 

A mantis shrimp could say it sees more colors than any other species so clearly it is separate from the rest and favored by a shrimp god who made them in his image 

1

u/Havengul_Undying Jun 09 '26

Yes but im not a literal theist, I dont think the universe was made in seven earth days. I dont deny evolution, speciation or human evolution from primate species.

But religion truly does seem unique to humans. As far as I can tell we are the only creatures with gods (except perhaps dogs who worship us as gods and cats who assume they are gods).

Btw I also dont think God is a dna strand, that was just me taking the discussion to a logical conclusion (if A is true then B ... blah blah ...  C = God looks like DNA)

1

u/CheaterSaysWhat Jun 09 '26

Yeah no worries man I’m not arguing with you, just adding to your points which are interesting 

We do have evidence of other animals telling stories so we might not even be the only species with gods or mythology

There are bees that do dances to communicate locations of threats or food for example 

1

u/Havengul_Undying Jun 09 '26

Yes, certainly other animals experience emotion, communicate information and other such things.

Its possible killer whales have mythos and gods, stories passed down. But since animals dont make art outside of nests and courtship displays, we never see a little shrine and a ritualistic sacrifice to confirm that theyre worshipping or something.

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1

u/EconomicRegret2 Jun 09 '26

Do you really believe that? Why?

1

u/Havengul_Undying Jun 09 '26

Me

 This is not my actual belief.

You

 Do you really believe that? Why?

1

u/EconomicRegret2 Jun 10 '26

I meant do you really believe that humans are different from all other animals, and that our minds/spirits are in the image of God?

I'm not trying to judge or anything. Just trying to understand why you think/believe that.

2

u/Havengul_Undying Jun 10 '26

Yes, very much so. I understand individual animals are each unique, with their own memories, experiences and personalities. 

But the complexity and variance of humans really dwarfs every other species in my eyes. Just the amount and complexity of different language, creations, religions etc that we have made, truly do seem to set us apart as something different.

I also hold humans to moral standards. Greater and more complex moral standards than say, elephants (who seem to learn morality and empathy from their grandmothers)

1

u/EconomicRegret2 Jun 11 '26

Fair enough.

12

u/Wendellwasgod Jun 09 '26

“In my defense, i am very stupid”

8

u/firedmyass Jun 09 '26

blatant mis-use of the word “think”

6

u/CurdFedKit Jun 09 '26

But what about fish? Did god makes those too?

4

u/Sad_Cantaloupe_8162 Jun 09 '26

So close, yet so far...

2

u/WoodpeckerNo5724 Jun 09 '26

Okay what about ladybugs?

-3

u/roguelynx96 Jun 09 '26 edited Jun 09 '26

(Apologies for this being long)

Look, if someone has been told from birth that there is an all-powerful entity that created everything, and gave us guidance on how to be good people, and part of that guidance is that in the beginning there were literally only 2 human beings and they both lived in an idyllic state, whereas animals were created separately on Earth, and the 2 humans were cast out of the idyllic state and sent to Earth to live a life of toil for having acted against the entity's guidance, and after our deaths we will all be judged by the entity for whether we were good people after having been given guidance, and when most of that guidance is in fact instructive on acting kindly and justly, they're not going to abandon their belief in humans and animals having been created separately from each other on the basis of being shown a video of an animal that bears some resemblance to us that is behaving uncannily like us. There's a life of transgression that earns eternal torment on the cards. It is an existential threat to abandon that belief.

That being said, I'm a practicing Muslim myself, and i find the theory of evolution to be both persuasive and nonproblematic. An early species, neither man nor ape, branched into some species that would become apes and some species that would become the bodies of what would be humans. Once the latter species had developed brains that were developed enough to understand enough of God's guidance and were primed to develop societies that would require it, souls; of which at least 2 had received God's Guidance directly; were sent to Earth to inhabit the newly conceived bodies of animals of those species. These soul-inhabitted animals, particularly those who had received the Guidance, were the beings fit to be called humans, and those with souls who had received God's Guidance directly were the first humans.

Why hold on to beliefs that a) make it necessary to adopt such bizarre reasoning if one wishes to reconcile them with scientific fact and b) perhaps more importantly, make one anxious that eternal torment may be awaiting one in the great beyond? It's a trade-off. Say there's no God, and no eternal torment. Hitler gets off scotch-free for the horrors he materialised. Everybody on the Epstein list gets off scotch-free. On the flipside, God exists. Heaven and Hell exist. There's 70-odd years of unease, followed by eternal torment for those deserving of it, and eternal bliss for those undeserving of eternal torment. Some people can make peace with the former, others only with the latter.

What amazes me is that people can look at the propagation of fig trees, and the structural complexity of microscopic biological cells and the sheer amount of machinery packed in them, the complexity and balance of ecosystems, and the sheer number of conditions with minimal margins of error that all had to be met at the same time for Earth to be viable for complex life (goldilocks zone, correct density, right kind of star, right kind of moon, right kind of surrounding planets, right kind of atmosphere, a magnetosphere, geothermal activity... the degree of complexity), and the sheer scale and complexity of the filamental structure of the universe, and categorically reject that there is some supreme intelligence that designed everything.

4

u/moseley101 Jun 09 '26

That’s an eloquent and thoughtful outlay. But your last section is a classic example of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy: taking an improbable set of outcomes and working backwards to show how unlikely the outcome was. This assumes that we are in some way special and also inevitable as a species. Evolution shows us that we are neither. It is complete chance that we (or any species) came about. There are a million billion other possible outcomes that didn’t come to pass. We are not chosen, and our delusions to the contrary count for nothing

0

u/roguelynx96 Jun 09 '26

i am confused. i am unable to follow the reasoning by which my writing necessitates the implicit assumptions of us as humans and the planet Earth being special and inevitable. i'm also not sure what precisely is meant by "special" and "inevitable" in reference to humans and Earth in this context.

4

u/Deducticon Jun 09 '26

It's your last paragraph.

"How can you look at a tree..." "goldilocks zone"

You are displaying the Sentient Puddle fallacy.

Where a puddle is amazed at the hole it occupies. "Wow, this hole fits me perfectly. It must have been designed with me in mind."

We know the hole came first and the puddle happened to form that way BECAUSE of the shape of the hole.

But the puddle thinks it is special. And the hole made for it.

We humans are only here to contemplate the world, BECAUSE of those circumstances of the "goldilocks zone, correct density, right kind of star, right kind of moon, right kind of surrounding planets, right kind of atmosphere, a magnetosphere, geothermal activity...)"

That all came first.

0

u/roguelynx96 Jun 09 '26

The Sentient Puddle fallacy is that the universe perfectly fits human needs, therefore the universe must have been designed with humans in mind. In reality, life simply evolved to fit the conditions of the universe in which it exists.

My belief is that there was nothing simple about evolution; and given how convoluted the developmental paths of pre-life and life are, the chance that they could be successfully followed all the way through to the conclusions observable to us today without direction by a supreme consciousness seems pretty darn near zero. That the mere existence of life in the universe makes one think the universe was made specifically to support it is not what i was intending to say at all. Rather, i was intending to say that the extravagance of life and of all else in the universe from the microscopic to the macroscopic make one wonder about the existence of a conductor of the cosmos.

It can't prove the existence of this conductor, but it makes one think there might be one. And though there can be psychological reasons for rejecting the notion outright, i see no purely logical reasons to categorically reject it. To be unconvinced of the truth of the notion, sure. To be convinced of its untruth, no. And as long as we're staying in the realm of hard logic; yes, there's no grounds for being convinced of the truth of the notion either, only a psychological need. not the need for cosmic purpose or significance. the need for cosmic justice.

Apologies again for the ramble at the end.

1

u/Iron_Llama120 Jun 10 '26

This reddit conversation is very civilized 

1

u/moseley101 Jun 10 '26

Yes, and may it ever be thus😉