Interesting video about evolution and origins.

[Brian2]

I asked: "Have you read about the research into chemical biogenesis?"

So, no.

Not much. I read or hear about the research at times, but don't make a point of studying it.

 

[Revoltingest]

Are only scientific arguments for God acceptable to humanity?

That would depend upon the individual,
since humanity has so much diversity.

No.
So why are only scientific arguments acceptable to atheists?

Without belief in gods, we tend strongly to
be materialists, & science applies only to the
material world. The supernatural doesn't lend
itself to testable theories.

 

[Subduction Zone]

By those who argue against the YECers' interpretation of the Bible and say that the Bible God is disproven because of evolution.
@It Ain't Necessarily So for example.

No, that only refutes the YEC God. If you are going to claim that the YEC God is the God of the Bible then so is the Flat Earth God. Sine the Bible only refers to the Earth as being flat in word and deed.

Personally I think evolution goes too far in it's "no supernatural input" approach and answers, but yes I wouldn't be surprised if most Christians accept evolution.

There is no evidence for supernatural input. If you want to claim that there is such input then find scientific evidence for it Otherwise you are complaining about nothing.

 

[The Hammer]

Sue me.

I wish

 

[Valjean]

Maybe let @It Ain't Necessarily So say what he thinks.



All I did was comment on what Sy Garte probably meant.



Yes if you believed that it is all naturalistic then you would see God input as special pleading.
But if you understand that science does not show a universe that came into being without a God or life that developed without a life giver, then you realise that what you said is a statement of faith.

Science does not show that the universe wasn't created by a celestial octopus either. Believing something because it hasn't been shown not to exist isn't rational. It's an argument from ignorance. It uses lack of evidence as evidence.

 

[Valjean]

Not much. I read or hear about the research at times, but don't make a point of studying it.

So any opinion you have on the subject is unsupported?

 

[Valjean]

Are only scientific arguments for God acceptable to humanity?
No.
So why are only scientific arguments acceptable to atheists?

Because we're rational?

By those who argue against the YECers' interpretation of the Bible and say that the Bible God is disproven because of evolution.
@It Ain't Necessarily So for example.

Who says that? You're constructing another strawman. How would evolution disprove God?

Personally I think evolution goes too far in it's "no supernatural input" approach and answers, but yes I wouldn't be surprised if most Christians accept evolution.

So produce some examples of the supernatural/magic. Why should anyone believe in something with no evidence of existence?

 

[Brian2]

That is quite incorrect. Repair mechanisms would have evolved from structures that did another job. They do not have to work "perfectly" from the get go. They only have to work better than what existed before. I can speculate if you wish, but an expert in the field could probably explain it to you much better than I ever could. You don't have to ask here. Just try to ask Google proper questions such as "how did cell repair mechanisms evolve". And viola! here is the top response that I got:

Evolutionary Origins of DNA Repair Pathways: Role of Oxygen Catastrophe in the Emergence of DNA Glycosylases - PMC

It was proposed that the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) evolved under high temperatures in an oxygen-free environment, similar to those found in deep-sea vents and on volcanic slopes. Therefore, spontaneous DNA decay, such as base loss and ...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

If anyone is wondering I was feeling a bit musical.

It's possible that you are right but you also need to remember that any hypothesese for something like this are educated guesses with naturalistic answers as the only possibilities in science.
It is true however that if chance has been kind and something in the genes has afforded some degree of protection from false replication, that it may increase in the population and possibly improve, even if it could be at the expense of some other property.

 

[Subduction Zone]

It's possible that you are right but you also need to remember that any hypothesese for something like this are educated guesses with naturalistic answers as the only possibilities in science.
It is true however that if chance has been kind and something in the genes has afforded some degree of protection from false replication, that it may increase in the population and possibly improve, even if it could be at the expense of some other property.

No, you have to stop that. The problem with the supernatural is that there is no evidence for it.

You may be basing your claims upon how you think. For example you may have a bias against leprechauns because your religion says that they do not exist. That is not a rational reason to reject them. I do not believe in them because there is no reliable evidence for them. Show me reliable evidence for leprechauns and I will change my mind. You one the other hand probably won't because of your "Cuz the Bible told me so" reasoning.

And one more point. If you think that evolution is "by chance" then you do not even understand the most simple version of it.

 

[Brian2]

James Tour is far from an authority on abiogenesis. I had this to say when the subject of Tour previously came up:

He's a synthetic organic chemist, who self-identifies as a Messianic Jew. He is not a biochemist. He has done no work on abiogenesis research. His ideas about abiogenesis are phoney and designed to impress creationists (i.e. people who don't know much science), who assume he knows what he is talking about. There was a long thread 4 years ago about Tour, posted by some idiot who has now left the forum:

Shocking claim to Macro-evolution!

Excerpts from a very long, eye-opener of an article by James Tour. I have spoken at length with biologists, philosophers of science, mathematicians and geneticists in order to better understand evolution. Some were gracious in helping me to appreciate their positions based upon the data. Others...

www.religiousforums.com

It's a long read but, in the course of it, I watched a video of Tour giving a talk to Baptist theologians (yes, they do exist!) and identified three specific lies in what he said. Of course these Baptists all believed it. Why wouldn't they? He's a chemist, after all.

He has no theory. All he has to say is that he doesn't believe abiogenesis can have occurred naturally because he, personally, can't see how a human chemist, working in a lab, to human timescales, could synthesise a living biochemical system. And that's it!

Both Tour and Garte are exploiting their status as scientists to give the impression to people like you that they are authorities. Neither of them is. Tour is a synthetic chemist. Garte works in medicine, though he has a biochemistry PhD. If you want to be honest with yourself, you need to stop just cherry-picking the views of people with an axe to grind who don't work in the field of abiogenesis.

By the way, I must say I have never understood why some people feel it is so crucial to maintain that life began as a result of a supernatural intervention from the Almighty. Once you have accepted the science of evolution, the formation of the solar system etc., why does it matter, from a religious point of view, what the mechanism was for the origin of life? You already accept that God can work through nature rather than by interfering with it. So why is the origin of life a special case? What's the reason for all the angst?

The reason for the origin of life being a problem is that science ends up saying that life is only chemistry for a start.
For a Bible believer, life is not just chemistry and is given by God.
I watched this video in the thread you posted.

True it is something that a normal lay person could not fully understand but interestingly he is the one who is claiming in the video that abiogenesis is claiming garbage and has been for 70 years or so and has not advanced much.
He is saying that the hand waving of abiogenesis over areas of chemistry which are very complex is rubbish and that he knows something of how complex the chemistry is and so can make the claims about abiogenesis that he does.
That they are leading people astray and claiming they are closer to making life than they are.
Is this the video you watched? What are the lies that you say he said?

 

[Subduction Zone]

The reason for the origin of life being a problem is that science ends up saying that life is only chemistry for a start.
For a Bible believer, life is not just chemistry and is given by God.
I watched this video in the thread you posted.

True it is something that a normal lay person could not fully understand but interestingly he is the one who is claiming in the video that abiogenesis is claiming garbage and has been for 70 years or so and has not advanced much.
He is saying that the hand waving of abiogenesis over areas of chemistry which are very complex is rubbish and that he knows something of how complex the chemistry is and so can make the claims about abiogenesis that he does.
That they are leading people astray and claiming they are closer to making life than they are.
Is this the video you watched? What are the lies that you say he said?

Sorry, but all that Tour is good at is yelling very loudly. He has been debunked regularly by Professor Dave Explains. Now Dave just has a masters degree, he has taught at colleges, but he makes his money now by making science videos on YouTube. Like Tour he is not an expert in abiogenesis, but unlike Tour he is not afraid to go and see what the experts in the field are actually saying. It is always easy to win a debate if one makes a strawman argument. It is much harder to refute the experts that know more than the persons attacking them Here is the very first video of Dave debunking Tour. By the way, what caught the attention of a lot of people about James Tour was when he lied about the work of Jack Szostak in his videos. His lies were so egregious that he was forced to apologize for making those lies. So if you hear him going after Szostak in that video of yours remember that he had to apologize for those lies he told about him.

At any rate here is the first video that Dave made debunking Tour. Tour went nuts over this and made a series of poor videos trying to defend his errors. That only gave Dave more material. As a result he has a whole playlist of videos of him debunking Tour. Enjoy:

 

[Subduction Zone]

The reason for the origin of life being a problem is that science ends up saying that life is only chemistry for a start.
For a Bible believer, life is not just chemistry and is given by God.
I watched this video in the thread you posted.

True it is something that a normal lay person could not fully understand but interestingly he is the one who is claiming in the video that abiogenesis is claiming garbage and has been for 70 years or so and has not advanced much.
He is saying that the hand waving of abiogenesis over areas of chemistry which are very complex is rubbish and that he knows something of how complex the chemistry is and so can make the claims about abiogenesis that he does.
That they are leading people astray and claiming they are closer to making life than they are.
Is this the video you watched? What are the lies that you say he said?

I won't say that he lied, in that video, but I saw some clear errors. He kept comparing how complex modern life is. That can be refuted by a "So what?" Yes, modern life is very complex. That is because even the "simplest" of life has a 3.8 year history of evolution. The early extremely simple life could not compete with modern life. The earliest of life may not have been much more than a naturally forming lipid vesicle surrounding some self replicating RNA. Not much more than that was needed at the time.

 

[exchemist]

The reason for the origin of life being a problem is that science ends up saying that life is only chemistry for a start.
For a Bible believer, life is not just chemistry and is given by God.
I watched this video in the thread you posted.

True it is something that a normal lay person could not fully understand but interestingly he is the one who is claiming in the video that abiogenesis is claiming garbage and has been for 70 years or so and has not advanced much.
He is saying that the hand waving of abiogenesis over areas of chemistry which are very complex is rubbish and that he knows something of how complex the chemistry is and so can make the claims about abiogenesis that he does.
That they are leading people astray and claiming they are closer to making life than they are.
Is this the video you watched? What are the lies that you say he said?

No, I'm not slogging through a James Tour video on the off chance it's the same one. I've posted the links. If you are interested, you can go through them and find out. The lies I identified are described in those links.

I repeat, Tour is just a synthetic chemist. He has no expertise in biochemistry, let alone the chemistry studied by people researching abiogenesis. He is just using his status as a chemist to impress uninformed people and generate rhetorical talking points for creationists to use with one another and with other uninformed people. However as someone with chemistry training myself, I am not bamboozled by his spiel.

All he offers is the usual Argument from Personal Incredulity, which is not a scientific argument. He is entitled to express a personal opinion but he should not be allowed to get away with pretending that he speaks with scientific authority when he does so.

But one thing you say intrigues me. I note you say that "for a bible believer, the origin of life is not just chemistry and is given by God". Why do you single out life, as opposed say to the formation of the Earth, or the Solar System, both of which are also (allegorically) described in the bible?

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

the designer you propose, a deist God.

I don't propose a deist god or an intelligent designer. I'm an atheist. That hypothesis adds no explanatory or predictive power to naturalistic narratives - just unevidenced complexity. The preferred narrative is the simplest one (most parsimonious) that accounts for all relevant observations.

You go by what the words (translations) say but don't care about the meaning. As long as it does not contradict your faith, it is OK with you.

I'd say that you're projecting. You just described your own motivated, tendentious reading of scripture.

And I have no faith. You do, as well as a faith-based confirmation bias for interpreting scripture, one that assumes that scripture contains no errors, its prophecies are impressive and fulfilled, and its god good. The motivated reader engages in whatever mental gymnastics he needs to make the words fit that.

I will not refute it

Correct statements cannot be successfully refuted.

All you can refute is the YEC position.

I noted that science has refuted the Genesis creation story and its account of the creation of the universe. It didn't happen in six days, and there were no first pair of human beings created de novo. That's what the words say happened, and why we can say that they are incorrect.

And the YEC position was the original one and the only one before modernity revealed its weaknesses and apologists began reinterpreting the story to conform to the new science once that science was a few centuries old and had become more widely accepted.

So are you saying that the opinion of no scientists matter to Mark or Marty?

No. I asked you why the opinion of that particular scientist should matter to anybody including Mark and Marty. It was a rhetorical question. There is no reason. Nor to me. YOU have a reason - he supports your faith-based beliefs - but that's not a good reason to believe him, and shouldn't be anybody's reason for believing any source.

It seems that in science no argument for or evidence for God is good enough because God has not been shown to exist.

Correct, but not just for science. No argument for god has been sufficient to justify my belief in a god, either. And not just gods. All proposed entities for which there is insufficient evidence to justify belief - a list that offends many believers when its elements are compared to a god, elements like vampires and leprechauns.

 

[Brian2]

No, I am merely stating how evolution works so that a layman can understand it. Do you need sources? I can provide them.

Once again with the projection. Why are you so opposed to reality? No, pseudoscience is what you have been pushing. Evolution says nothing about the existence or nonexistence of a God. It only refutes incorrect claims, such as that the Earth is flat, or that at one time there were only two people. Or that there was a magical flood. Now if your God beliefs cannot deal with those corrections that tells us more about the strength of your faith rather than the existence or nonexistence of a deity.

I shouldn't be arguing against evolution even if it may be not 100% true.
Your faith is that it is true and I suppose 100% true.
Your faith I suppose cannot deal with the suggestion that ToE is not 100% accurate when someone say that a designer and maker was needed for at least parts of it.
But that is OK. That is just my personal belief. I cannot see why the suggestion of a designer is banned from science and science has to push on with naturalism.
I wonder if after another 70 or so years that science will still be claiming abiogenesis and coming up with no real progress (as James Tour says).
And it is origins of the universe and life that is what put's an end to the Bible God claim, and some atheists even want to say that science has shown that God is not needed for those things either.

 

[LuisDantas]

This is just way too misguided.

Garte either has forgotten what he is talking about or he is genuinely confused about the basic ideas of science and truth.

 

[Brian2]

You obviously have an enormous lack of reading comprehension.

Sigh……..Do try to keep up!

Once again:

Read very carefully…..all the words……
Who am I saying has a cognitive bias?
My original posting about the ASA being a religious organization with obvious biases was
post #58

True….. you did attempt to conflate the two when you asked in post #102:

To which I answered in post #118:

Again, read very carefully……all the words……
Who am I talking about here?

I then gave you a link to an explanation of
confirmation bias (which you suffer from in spades!)
You conceded that the ASA is a religious organization in post #112:

Unfortunately you suffered from the misconception that they are also an organization that “does science”, which is absolutely false.

I had eluded to this fact in post #62, which you apparently couldn’t pick up on the nuance.

To help illuminate this for you…an analogy…..
Imagine a baking club called the “Scientist Bakers Affiliation” (SBA) whose members are scientists and people in related fields;
When they get together to bake……
they’re baking, not “doing science”.

From the link about the ASA posted before in post #58:
Scientists who were Christians and had concerns about the quality of Christian evangelism on the subject of religion and science formed the ASA in 1941.
(American Scientific Affiliation - Wikipedia)

Again, read very carefully……all the words……
Nothing about “doing science”….
All about “Christian evangelism”.

As for Sye Garte:
I am not familiar with Sye Garte’s scientific work so I am not in a position to comment about his work within his field of science.
That being said……considering his affiliation with the ASA and as I explained in post #118:

If he is able to compartmentalize his religious beliefs from his scientific work he may be able to perform meaningful scientific work.
If he is not able to compartmentalize his religious beliefs from his scientific work he runs a high risk of biases and thereby discrediting his work.

This may well be too nuanced for you…..
but try to notice the difference between
“is able to” and “is not able to”.

A quick perusal of his peer reviewed work (this is work which as been subjected to scientific scrutiny) seems to predominantly focus on cancers and carcinogens……..
Nothing remotely associated with abiogenesis.
If I missed it please point it out to me.
It is plausible that he is able to compartmentalize his religious beliefs within his actual field of work.

As both you and I have pointed out, the video which you linked was him speaking at a Christian apologist convention and that he wasn’t “doing science”, but rather performing in the role of a Christian apologist.
The fact he began his spiel with:
“How many here have a PhDs in biochemistry?…
Great so I can say anything I want.”
Along with the title “BioChemist Argues God Exists…”
Indicates that he (as have you) is purporting to bring his science training and experience to bear in an attempt to impress the gullible as to be speaking with authority on the subject.
Unfortunately, he is not applying any scientific training to his “argument”.

Now (hopefully after careful reading) show me where I need to “make up my mind”.

Sorry your post was too long and all over the place for me to follow well.
There is nothing in the ASA statement of faith which shows that it or Sy Garte are cognitively biased imo.
Certainly investigating areas relating Christian faith and science does not mean cognitive bias and looking at topics from a Christian pov does not indicate cognitive bias unless doing the same from a humanist or any other pov also indicates cognitive bias.
Opinions are opinions and can usually easily be separated out from scientific facts.
From post 58.
The American Scientific Affiliation (ASA) is a Christianreligious organization of scientists and people in science-related disciplines. The stated purpose is "to investigate any area relating Christian faith and science." The organization publishes a journal, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith which covers topics related to Christian faith and science from a Christian viewpoint.
(American Scientific Affiliation - Wikipedia)

 

[Brian2]

I was pointing out what you and apparently
Sye Garte are mystified about:


To wit I explained:

After ignoring my request for a description of the bias you perceive atheists are harboring;

Which you have yet to answer…..

You retort with

Along with;

Perhaps if you show me the evidence?
I’m an atheist because nobody has yet produced
objective, demonstrable, repeatable, testable evidence.

So we get to the end of your post and you show me a typical cognitive bias of atheists, the denial that evidence for God and the Bible can be anything other than objective, demonstrable, repeatable, testable evidence.
You want this sort of evidence for a being who is not part of this material universe and is not testable by science.
You want this sort of evidence for a book which is mainly ancient history and so cannot be demonstrated as you demand.
You already know these things but still say, as other atheists do, that you want someone to give you this type of evidence.
So knowing that it does not exist but demanding it anyway shows to me that you are not really on this forum to find that evidence. So I ask again as I think I have before, why are you really on this forum?

 

[Brian2]

46 minutes and no summary?

25 minutes of Sy Garte saying that the ToE is probably right but not without a designer and that abiogenesis probably needed a designer also.
Another 24 minutes or so of Q and A time.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

you show me a typical cognitive bias of atheists, the denial that evidence for God and the Bible can be anything other than objective, demonstrable, repeatable, testable evidence.

That's called critical thinking, and as you noted, it is a bias in one's approach to deciding what is true about reality, albeit a rational and highly successful one.

You want this sort of evidence for a being who is not part of this material universe and is not testable by science.

Yes, assuming that you want to be believed that it exists.

You seem to think that if empirical evidence isn't available, we should believe with less. You are not alone. Several argue that if something can't be demonstrated to be correct empirically, that one needs to find other criteria for belief. But that defeats the purpose of the method, which is to identify and weed out ideas that shouldn't be believed.

You want this sort of evidence for a book which is mainly ancient history and so cannot be demonstrated as you demand.

Yes again. If you want to claim that it is more than the musings of assorted ancients who didn't know where the rain came from, then you need to provide evidence of that if you want to be believed by a critical thinker.

knowing that it does not exist but demanding it anyway shows to me that you are not really on this forum to find that evidence.

You are correct that most of us are no longer looking for that evidence. As you just said, you don't have evidence, and I doubt that there are many skeptics who expect evidence from believers. The believer should understand the skeptic not as asking, "Where is your evidence?" which he knows won't be forthcoming, but rather, saying that "You don't have the evidence I need before believing."