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The Bible, Creationism, and Prophecy (part 1)
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Your idea of answered prayer would certainly convince only a fool. But I mean something quite more significant, because quite more unnatural. Specific needs met specifically - one could write them off as marvellous coincidences, but only a fool would allow for several such answers in one's experience.Improbable wrote: »What you call answered prayer, I call self delusion. I could pray to the wild Ququ god that I do well on a test and hey, presto, it happens. Doesn't mean that the Ququ god did it. There is no reason to believe that your god is any more valid than that.
You can certainly choose to believe whatever you wish, but nothing is 100% certain. It defies all logic and reason to think that it is.
I don't actively sit around pondering my existence, especially in a danger situation, to do so would be foolish. There is nothing wrong with uncertainty. It's quite alright to have doubts and questions.
Well, OK, as long as you're not certain about that.You can certainly choose to believe whatever you wish, but nothing is 100% certain. It defies all logic and reason to think that it is.
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1 Thessalonians 5:21 Test all things; hold fast what is good.0 -
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Helloha everybody. Nearly back to normal after my operation. Getting stronger by the day and today I feel well enough to be able to start posting again. Very rough last two weeks but more or less over it now and thanks to all for your get well wishes.
OK where did we leave off from last time? Ah yes, Morbert and I were discussing how life came about. How could I forget?
But ask yourself why scientists are not saying the hardware DOS is run on, let alone DOS itself, could develop by chance. The spontaneous generation of even a simple MOSFET is far too improbable. So instead, we have to look at the differences between the 'hardware' of biology (organic compounds), and the hardware of artificial computers (semiconductor material, plastic, etc.). When we do this, we will understand why natural abiogenesis is plausible for life, but not for standard computers. Organic chemicals are far more versatile when it comes to self-organisation than the materials we use to build things. They can naturally form complex ecosystems of interacting and communicating molecular species.
So before we begin, let's be clear that scientists are proposing that a spontaneous formation was necessary in the beginning, as chemicals per se do not evolve. The question we must therefore ask is what probabilities are associated with this spontaneous formation. If it as improbable as, say, the spontaneous generation of DNA, or MOSFETs for DOS programs, then abiogenesis will be considered implausible. If it is much much more probable, then abiogenesis is plausible.
Key phrase emboldened above. This is the crux of the whole argument. At this particular juncture we are presented with two plausible causes for the generation of the first self replicating system, be that RNA or DNA, both of which contain the instructions for building the various components in the cell and in turn the instructions for what type of tissue the cells are to be made into and in turn what function that tissue is supposed to perform within the various organs that the organism (i.e. ant, mouse, man etc) as a whole cannot function properly without.
So if the the process which brought about the first self replicating system was the result of chance, then what must have happened is akin to the chance assemblage of say; a sonnet of Shakespeare (I'm being liberal), just by throwing scrabble letters onto a table and expecting it to come out. That is what the chance hypothesis is, there is no escaping that.
So the only way that such a configuration could have come about by chance is to have enough time to be able to have enough throws of the scrabble letters that at some point it will come out. Now ask yourself; how long do you think you would have to randomly throw scrabble letters onto a table in order to at some point have the fallen letters read out just one of Shakespeare's sonnets? I use his sonnets because they are small in comparison to his plays, because even the most basic cellular life has billions of lines of code that need to be arrange into a particular sequence else you don't have proper function.
Now I'm not against anyone using the chance hypothesis as a basis to then go on an do good science, what I'm against is chance proponents saying that any conflicting theory is not science by virtue of the fact that it contradicts the chance hypothesis. That approach and attitude IMO is more non-scientific than anything.There are two issues here. One issue is the development of self-replicating systems with high-fidelity, and the other is the development of the information stored by these systems to produce instruction sets for building cells and eyes and brains. For the time being, let's focus on the former. I.e. How self-replicating systems can form. Afterwards, we can talk about how natural selection can generate an increase in biological information, and thus generate complex lifeforms.
Chance is relevant. I was referring to the calculations of the probabilities of certain nucleotide sequences forming by chance. I.e. No scientists is claiming life is as lucky as a 1 in 10^130 shot. If the spontaneous generation of the first self-replicating system was as probable as, say, 1 in 10^12 (and not 1 in 10^130), would you have the same objection to abiogenesis?
I don't have any objection to anyone holding to the view that life arose by chance from nonliving matter in the very early history of the primordial earth. That is a position that one takes or doesn't take. But why can't the same compliment be returned to scientists who simply disagree with this hypothesis? The chance hypothesis cannot be tested in nature given that life has already arisen. And it can't be simulated in the lab either because the lab is an environment which is intelligently designed to bring about a desired outcome. So the chance hypothesis is as unfalsifiable as the God did it hypothesis is. So that being the case why is it OK scientifically to hold to the chance hypothesis but not OK scientifically to hold to ID theory?
At this point, as we need to understand the laws of chemistry that determine what the chances of a self-replicating system forming are.
The first principle we must understand is autocatalysis. Autocatalysis occurs when the result (product) of a chemical reaction causes the reaction to speed up. I.e. A reaction increases the rate of itself. Or, in otherwords, a molecule instigates the further production of itself. This is a result of the laws of chemistry, and so is not a chance occurence in any meaningful sense of the word.
OK, so at this point necessity as apposed to chance is running the show?Now consider a set of autocatalytic chemicals in the same environment, with limited reactant resources. Some autocatalytic chemicals are better at sparking the production of themselves than others, then those chemicals will grow more numerous, and become more dominant. Autocatalysis will propagate.
So we're still at the stage of simple natural chemical reactions goverened by the laws of chemistry? Fine.Autocatalysis on its own is not enough to be considered life, however, as autocatalyric cycles can't recognise information. I.e. They can't pass on information to their 'offspring' and natural selection can't choose which information should propagate and which shouldn't.
So we are still talking about the time when Natural Selction does not apply yet?For that, we need to turn to the non-enzyme self-replicating systems related to autocatalysis, which have been known since 1986 (in the form of a palindromic hexanucleotide sequence). Such systems heavily employ catalytic processes, and would constitute the "chance event" that must ocur for life to begin to emerge.
I Googled palindromic hexanucleotide sequence but cannot find anything in layman's terms, could you perhaps break what it is/means down for us please?Do you have any objections to this so far?
Hell no, please go on...0 -
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Soul Winner wrote: »Key phrase emboldened above. This is the crux of the whole argument. At this particular juncture we are presented with two plausible causes for the generation of the first self replicating system, be that RNA or DNA, both of which contain the instructions for building the various components in the cell and in turn the instructions for what type of tissue the cells are to be made into and in turn what function that tissue is supposed to perform within the various organs that the organism (i.e. ant, mouse, man etc) as a whole cannot function properly without.
So if the the process which brought about the first self replicating system was the result of chance, then what must have happened is akin to the chance assemblage of say; a sonnet of Shakespeare (I'm being liberal), just by throwing scrabble letters onto a table and expecting it to come out. That is what the chance hypothesis is, there is no escaping that.
So the only way that such a configuration could have come about by chance is to have enough time to be able to have enough throws of the scrabble letters that at some point it will come out. Now ask yourself; how long do you think you would have to randomly throw scrabble letters onto a table in order to at some point have the fallen letters read out just one of Shakespeare's sonnets? I use his sonnets because they are small in comparison to his plays, because even the most basic cellular life has billions of lines of code that need to be arrange into a particular sequence else you don't have proper function.
Now I'm not against anyone using the chance hypothesis as a basis to then go on an do good science, what I'm against is chance proponents saying that any conflicting theory is not science by virtue of the fact that it contradicts the chance hypothesis. That approach and attitude IMO is more non-scientific than anything.
I don't have any objection to anyone holding to the view that life arose by chance from nonliving matter in the very early history of the primordial earth. That is a position that one takes or doesn't take. But why can't the same compliment be returned to scientists who simply disagree with this hypothesis? The chance hypothesis cannot be tested in nature given that life has already arisen. And it can't be simulated in the lab either because the lab is an environment which is intelligently designed to bring about a desired outcome. So the chance hypothesis is as unfalsifiable as the God did it hypothesis is. So that being the case why is it OK scientifically to hold to the chance hypothesis but not OK scientifically to hold to ID theory?
Hmmm... Is it your position that any self-replicating system is too improbable to have arisen by chance? Or do you believe it is not too improbable, but that it was directly and intelligently designed anyway. I was under the impression that it was the former but perhaps it's the latter.
The issue most people have with ID proponents is they are claiming life is too improbable to have arisen naturally. If someone wants to believe that life is intelligently designed then they can go right ahead. But if they assert that abiogenesis is too improbable then that is where they are going astray.
If your position is the latter then there won't be much need to go into probability.0 -
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On another tangentially related note, They found another Goldilocks planet.
Odd considering they are so rare they must be created by God
They have only been looking for a few years, only found 500, and they have already found one. Doesn't bode well for the fine tuned idea.0 -
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That is not what they are saying Soul Winner.
ID is untestable.
Testing the designer is not possible. Testing for ID is. For instance; we can detect ID when we unearth stones that have been sculpted to resemble faces. Without knowing the identity of the designer we do not infer that the stone was not designed to have a particular shape. We say that it was intelligently designed even though we might not be able to test for the designer itself.You cannot tell if something is designed by a supernatural being because we have no idea that that looks like.
That has to be the dumbest argument against ID, why do people still use it?We can make wild guesses, but that isn't the same thing. We can say we don't know how this can arise naturally but that isn't the same thing.
But not only can we not determine how it could have come about naturally but what we observe in the even the most basic of living systems also exhibits similar traits that we know can be found in intelligently designed systems. i.e. information processing systems. And isn't it strange that just as we discovered the structure of DNA and what it does in the cell, we were also in the very early stages of inventing our own information processing systems? i.e. Computers.You can tell if self replicating molecules can arise naturally given circumstances similar to the early Earth (they can)
But we don't even know what the actual conditions on earth were. What we do is set up an environment that we know is favorable for life and use that as a test environment. That's hardly a good test is it?Because it happens in a lab set up by humans does not mean it can't be tested scientifically, any more than saying you can't test gravity if you do it in a padded room with a ball made by NASA.
Gravity is a force of nature with a specific and fixed set of values. Testing life formation is hardly comparable with testing gravity.If you rule out things that are tested in a lab you have ruled out most of physics and nearly all chemistry as being "unscientific". Can you show me a significant scientific discovery in chemistry in the last 200 years that didn't take place in a lab?
You're strawmanning again Wick, (really wish you wouldn't). How did you draw the conclusion from what I have been arguing to mean that every test in the lab over the last 200 years is unscientific?You are ruling things out because they don't fit with your dogma, not because they are actually at fault. This is just what the Creationists do, but you should really know better.
Ah yes, the C word again. When you are running out of good arguments you can always attack the C word to make it look like you have cornered your opponent. How about just showing us why the chance hypothesis is better than the ID hypothesis?0
This discussion has been closed.
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