I see no empirical evidence that mindless mechanisms can build the integrated structures we find in living things.
Howdy, Hockeycowboy. If it's not personal, what does that name mean to you? Are you a cowboy? Do you play hockey?
Regarding your comment, it happens every day. The mindless mechanisms have names like ribosomes, mitochondria, and enzymes. They manufacture new cells mindlessly.
You probably mean that the first of these mindless machines - the first cells - could not have assembled themselves, but if so, what's your reason for concluding that? There seem to be only two logical possibilities: intelligent design for the first life in the universe (or the first life on earth if you prefer) or blind, naturalistic mechanisms. How did you rule one of those in and the other out? It seems like a hunch or intuition.
I also have a hunch, but that doesn't allow me to rule either of these possibilities in or out. They both remain on my list for candidate causes of the first life. I can order them, however, according to the principle of parsimony. If I invoke an intelligent designer to explain why cells exist because I see them as too complex to exist undesigned, then I have to apply the same thinking to it. How did it come to exist? Presumably, such an entity is even more complex than a cell. This just makes my explanation more complex, not less, and provides an answer for why cells exist, but not for why gods exist.
I can read the details, so can you.
Yes, you can, but my comment was that you don't know them. Your posting reveals that. You seem to be unaware of it.
I guess you have no interest in discussing the material I provided you on the Dunning-Kruger effect. That's too bad. There was the possibility of an insight there for you. I'd love to see you progress from that initial peak of unjustified self-confidence to the valley that comes with early enlightenment.
The first step in enlightenment is getting a more accurate sense of what one knows compared to what others can know. That causes the initial loss of confidence in one's understanding - knowing that you don't know and never did even before being aware of that. This is the stage at which one recognizes the possibility and value of expertise, and knows enough to seek it
Then from this valley, one can then proceed to the second phase of enlightenment: education, wherein his confidence goes back uphill as he achieves competence, and perhaps on to expertise himself.
If you'd like to revisit this and perhaps discuss it, you can find it
here. I exhort you to consider that. Don't be afraid to learn. Nothing here challenges your faith or is incompatible with your creationist worldview. It's only about knowledge: those who have it and know it, those that don't have it but recognize that others do, and those unaware that expertise is possible and who inaccurately estimate their own level of understanding.
If you recall Bush II's Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, he once stated, "... there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know." He was ridiculed for it, but he's correct. And those three categories are similar to what we're discussing here, but instead of answers, we're talking about people, what they know, and what they know about their relative degree of knowledge.
The details of science as scientists look at the composition and motion within a body is not evolution.
Correct. That's physics.
Evolution is at the level of biology. From physics we get chemistry, geology, and astronomy. From chemistry we get biochemistry, and biology. From biology we get evolution science, medicine and psychology (mental states and behavior). And the study of human behavior is the basis of a variety of social sciences. This is a sort of hierarchy of sciences from physical sciences to life sciences to social sciences.
For completeness's sake, we have the non-empirical "sciences" mathematics, logic, and philosophy. They are pure reason.
'secular religion' can be when one looks in a mirror and sees his god, worship of things other than God
I'm an atheistic humanist. I have no god or religion, and I don't engage in worship of gods or anything else.
You do, which apparently causes you to see atheists as having gods and religions and worshiping themselves or money or whatever. There are other ways of thinking and engaging the world.
How do fossils support evolution
They are evidence of life in the past and how much of it was different. They were among the first evidence that Darwin used to formulate his theory, which predicted that man would find more fossils and that some would be intermediate between other known forms.
fossils are part of creation
Creation is a loaded word. It implies a creator. We don't know that nature was created. I prefer to call it nature, or reality.
