Just Accidental?

[Deeje]

ROTFL science never said that life spontaneously popped into existence abiogenesists say life is due to chemical evolution. You're the one who says a god made life spontaneously pop into existence.

So what is science's definition of life? Can a microbe be sort of alive?....a little bit alive? Can a microbe suddenly become "alive" and then spend the next few billion years turning into dinosaurs and other assorted animals?
Who is telling the fairy tale? Ours is tame by comparison to yours.

 

[ArtieE]

So what is science's definition of life?

Have you tried writing "life" and "definition" into a search engine?

Can a microbe be sort of alive?....a little bit alive? Can a microbe suddenly become "alive" and then spend the next few billion years turning into dinosaurs and other assorted animals?
Who is telling the fairy tale? Ours is tame by comparison to yours.

Let's see... evolutionists believe that all organisms evolved naturally via mechanisms such as natural selection from a first cell. You believe that a god you can't explain why would exist in the first place spent billions of years personally designing and making millions and millions of different species of organisms. Gee, such a difficult choice picking what to believe...

 

[gnostic]

LOL Your ID theory doesn't have any power of explanation. Your "explanation" is that a "creative agency" did it. And? What does that "explain"? Does it say anything about exactly who or exactly how or exactly why or for over how long a period of time exactly? Please tell us in detail what it is that we are supposed to believe so we can determine if what you say is logical and rational or not.

Well it's your answer, so just ask yourself; who set up that page of War & Peace in the analogy? how? why?

Those are good questions that are raised. And we can avoid them all by simply assuming the monkey did it by chance. Why not? That would be more complete, conclusive right? but more logical,rationale, probable?

The simplest answer is often the most tempting, but how much has reality shown to be restrained by Occam's razor so far? By necessity it is not.

You are evading and deflecting, Guy.

That doesn't answer artieE's questions.

Can you explain how this Intelligent Designer "design" or "create" things?

The author of War and Peace was written by a real person. We know that Leo Tolstoy is not some imaginary author. He did live, write a number of works, married and had children, then he died 1910. There is even some photographs of Tolstoy.

Do you have photos of the Designer? Have anyone seen the Designer himself?

Your comparison of the Designer and Tolstoy are not the same. You cannot provide evidences that this imaginary Designer is real.

Believing in the Intelligent Designer is no better than believing in unicorns and fairies.

 

[Hockeycowboy]

Literary proof that the scriptures accepted the geocentric model. Look at Joshua, when God supposedly stopped the Sun and moon from moving, while battle was raging. This clearly demonstrated that the ancient Israelites and the author of Joshua never thought the Earth can rotate:

No, it doesn't! It simply is in agreement with the point-of-view promulgated by Deeje and myself concerning the Genesis creation account, that it was happening from the pov of someone standing on the planet! Thanks for bringing that out.

Many people today say the sun is moving across the sky! Or say the sun is setting, or rising.

 

[Hockeycowboy]

The religions of man....wildly variant and seemingly opposed in many respects, have the same author.....and it isn't the Creator.

Oh really? Could you please supply us with one piece of objective evidence to support your assertion?

Simply because of their being 'wildly variant and opposed' to each other! Metis, just think about this: Does it seem reasonable to consider that God, Creator of all men, would really be the author of "wildly variant and seemingly opposed" religions? Would He offer support to anything -- beliefs included -- that would cause His intelligent creation to fight with each other? Acts of the Apostles 10:35; 1 Corinthians 14:33; James 3:17-18

 

[Deeje]

There has been a good deal of accusation about "quote mining" on this thread. I just thought I might address this by quoting some of Evolution 101's "Lines of Evidence" for the validity of the theory....I chose this site because the majority of us do not have science degrees and this is in plain English.

From Lines of evidence: The science of evolution
It begins with.....

Lines of evidence: The science of evolution. (I will put my own commentary in red.)

"At the heart of evolutionary theory is the basic idea that life has existed for billions of years and has changed over time."

The Bible supports the view that we are living on an old earth and that life has existed on this planet for eons of time.
Evolution does not want to touch abiogenesis for very good reasons......its not their problem. They somehow assume that how life changed is so much more important than how it first appeared. But if the first cause of all life on Earth is an intelligent and powerful Creator, then they pretend that it doesn't matter.....but the whole theory would be rendered baseless if that was the case. Saying I don't know if there is a God, or I don't believe in him, doesn't necessarily make him non-existent.

"Overwhelming evidence supports this fact.

If "interpreted evidence" is "overwhelming", it is only so to those who believe that it ever happened. It is a suggestion with lots of conjecture and assumption however, not a proven fact. The "evidence" just as easily points to Intelligent Design.

Scientists continue to argue about details of evolution, but the question of whether life has a long history or not was answered in the affirmative at least two centuries ago."

Yes, just two short centuries ago, man came to the conclusion that he was too intelligent to believe in God. That probably had more to do with the ignorance of 'the church' than the intelligence of scientists. But what an evolutionary triumph! Or perhaps it was an exercise of pure human imagination of the kind that they accuse ID'ers of inventing?

I find that the Bible attests to a long history of life...just not a long history of human life. There is no real evidence for a slow evolution of life from amoeba to huge land and aquatic animals, it's just that science interprets its "evidence" to fit its pet theory. It has fossil evidence that these creatures existed at some time, but not not a shred of evidence that one evolved from another. The evolution part is pure guesswork.There is not a single thing that links evolution's "chain" but wishful thinking.

"The history of living things is documented through multiple lines of evidence that converge to tell the story of life through time. In this section, we will explore the lines of evidence that are used to reconstruct this story."

The "multiple lines of evidence" are all produced by a system with the same pre-conceived idea about how they "think" life appeared to evolve down through time.
All evidence is judged by how well it fits with the notion of organic evolution.....a Creator cannot even be mentioned in the scenario because......he is...well...unscientific! "Reconstruction" is done with much license.


"Fossil evidence

"Nicholas Steno's anatomical drawing of an extant shark (left) and a fossil shark tooth (right). Steno made the leap and declared that the fossil teeth indeed came from the mouths of once-living sharks."

Wow! what a leap! Sharks teeth came from the mouths of once living sharks.....!! Very scientific.

"The fossil record provides snapshots of the past that, when assembled, illustrate a panorama of evolutionary change over the past four billion years. The picture may be smudged in places and may have bits missing, but fossil evidence clearly shows that life is old and has changed over time."

There is no panorama of evolutionary change over the past four billion years.....there is however, loads of speculation about what might have happened when no one was there to document any of it. The "smudges" and "bits missing" are filled in by nothing more than imagination. Guesswork and preconceived ideas are not the same as facts. If snapshots are out of focus, the detail remains a mystery.

"Early fossil discoveries

Two centuries later, Mary Ann Mantell picked up a tooth, which her husband Gideon thought to be of a large iguana, but it turned out to be the tooth of a dinosaur, Iguanodon. This discovery sent the powerful message that many fossils represented forms of life that are no longer with us today."

Wow again! The large iguana turned out to be a dinosaur! So extinction was discovered two hundred years after Nicholas Steno's fossil shark tooth. Does the Bible say that extinction of previous animal species is not possible? NO! It doesn't mention them at all since they were long gone when history began to be recorded. But it does focus on the creatures that share the planet with humans......like the ones we see today. They are not evolving but are presented as fully designed and made to thrive in an environment created for them.

Transitional forms

Fossils or organisms that show the intermediate states between an ancestral form and that of its descendants are referred to as transitional forms. There are numerous examples of transitional forms in the fossil record, providing an abundance of evidence for change over time.

There are no proven transitional forms at all. It is speculated that some "may be" a transitional form, but there is no proof of one species evolving into another. It is nothing more substantial than a suggestion.

"Note that the nostril placement in Aetiocetus is intermediate between the ancestral form Pakicetus and the modern gray whale — an excellent example of a transitional form in the fossil record!
Pakicetus (below left), is described as an early ancestor to modern whales. Although pakicetids were land mammals, it is clear that they are related to whales and dolphins based on a number of specializations of the ear, relating to hearing. The skull shown here displays nostrils at the front of the skull."

This is pure speculation. The existence of a number of similar earbones is not clear evidence that Pakicetus is related to whales and dolphins. What good are these earbones to a land dweller?

"A skull of the gray whale that roams the seas today (below right) has its nostrils placed at the top of its skull. It would appear from these two specimens that the position of the nostril has changed over time and thus we would expect to see intermediate forms."

The location of the nostrils is not necessarily an indication of evolution, but can as easily be the product of intelligent design. Why can't these just be two different species. One lived on land and the other in the water. Who said Pakicetus was a whale ancestor? Where is the skull of an amphibious creature with the nostrils half way up? I notice that the transitional form is one of the smudges. Funny that.....

"Our understanding of the evolution of horse feet, so often depicted in textbooks, is derived from a scattered sampling of horse fossils within the multi-branched horse evolutionary tree. These fossil organisms represent branches on the tree and not a direct line of descent leading to modern horses.
But, the standard diagram does clearly show transitional stages whereby the four-toed foot of Hyracotherium, otherwise known as Eohippus, became the single-toed foot of Equus. Fossils show that the transitional forms predicted by evolution did indeed exist."

"As you can see to the left, each branch tip on the tree of horse evolution indicates a different genus, though the feet of only a few genera are illustrated to show the reduction of toes through time."

Is this what we are really seeing? Or is this what scientists are suggesting that we see? Where is the evidence that these are not separate species that existed at different times and simply had different shaped feet? There is no evidence for an evolutionary line of decent in any of them.....it is a suggestion. What was "predicted" by evolution is just as easily explained by ID.

This is just a small sample of what evolution is trying to do......the suggestions are presented as facts and people trust that the scientists actually know what they are talking about.....

 

[Deeje]

Do you have photos of the Designer? Have anyone seen the Designer himself?

Since we are talking about a being who is able to create the universe, would you think we should be able to see him? The Bible says that no one can see the Creator and live to tell the story. This is why he had to use human representatives to communicate with mankind.

You cannot provide evidences that this imaginary Designer is real.

But we can! His designs are all around you. If you visit the Louvre in Paris and you get to see the Mona Lisa, are you in doubt as to who the artist was? Have you ever seen him? Do you have a photo of him? Have you ever spoken to him?

This is the Creator's artistry.....

Look closely....do you really think you are seeing creatures that came about by undirected chance?

Believing in the Intelligent Designer is no better than believing in unicorns and fairies.

And as long as you relegate him to that kind of imagery, you will never appreciate his existence until you are confronted with him. What will you have to say then? He did not create belief in unicorns and fairies....humans did that.

 

[Kelly of the Phoenix]

The Bible says that no one can see the Creator and live to tell the story. This is why he had to use human representatives to communicate with mankind.

LOL. When He walked and talked with Adam and Eve, there were no other humans to act as representatives, so ...

Look closely....do you really think you are seeing creatures that came about by undirected chance?

Limited chance ... evolution is not totally random.

If I ask a bunch of people to pick out one red bean from a can of white beans, the chances of getting red bean will become less and less likely as each red bean is removed from the can. Evolution is not perfectly random: it must go with what changes came before.

And as long as you relegate him to that kind of imagery, you will never appreciate his existence until you are confronted with him. What will you have to say then? He did not create belief in unicorns and fairies....humans did that.

But interacting with Koko or something is not the same thing as meeting God, though, right? (I mean, Koko, IIRC, said "God is me" or something like that, but still ...)

If you wanted to interact with your children, do you go to their pet and claim it is the same thing?

 

[ArtieE]

No, it doesn't! It simply is in agreement with the point-of-view promulgated by Deeje and myself concerning the Genesis creation account, that it was happening from the pov of someone standing on the planet! Thanks for bringing that out.

Many people today say the sun is moving across the sky! Or say the sun is setting, or rising.

Of course it was written from the pov of people standing on the planet as it was people who wrote it.

 

[ArtieE]

This is just a small sample of what evolution is trying to do......the suggestions are presented as facts and people trust that the scientists actually know what they are talking about.....

Then give us a detailed account of why your god would exist in the first place, which organisms he designed and created, how he did it and when he created the different organisms. Just so that we know exactly what it is we are supposed to believe. You see, it would appear that you theists don't know what you are talking about since you can't even agree among yourselves what to believe and then you expect us to take you seriously...

 

[ArtieE]

Since we are talking about a being who is able to create the universe, would you think we should be able to see him? The Bible says that no one can see the Creator and live to tell the story. This is why he had to use human representatives to communicate with mankind.

That's a joke right?
"Jacob Wrestles With God" ... "30So Jacob called the place Peniel,f saying, “It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.”
Genesis 32 NIV

 

[ArtieE]

Look closely....do you really think you are seeing creatures that came about by undirected chance?

And exactly how and when did those creatures come about then? What are we supposed to believe?

 

[gnostic]

LOL Your ID theory doesn't have any power of explanation. Your "explanation" is that a "creative agency" did it. And? What does that "explain"? Does it say anything about exactly who or exactly how or exactly why or for over how long a period of time exactly? Please tell us in detail what it is that we are supposed to believe so we can determine if what you say is logical and rational or not.

Well it's your answer, so just ask yourself; who set up that page of War & Peace in the analogy? how? why?

Those are good questions that are raised. And we can avoid them all by simply assuming the monkey did it by chance. Why not? That would be more complete, conclusive right? but more logical,rationale, probable?

The simplest answer is often the most tempting, but how much has reality shown to be restrained by Occam's razor so far? By necessity it is not.

You are evading and deflecting, Guy.

That doesn't answer artieE's questions.

Can you explain how this Intelligent Designer "design" or "create" things?

The author of War and Peace was written by a real person. We know that Leo Tolstoy is not some imaginary author. He did live, he did write a number of works, marry and have children, then he did die in 1910. There is even some photographs of Tolstoy.

You cannot provide evidences that this imaginary Designer is real. Do you have photos of the Designer? Have anyone seen the Designer himself?

Your comparisons of the Designer and Tolstoy are not the same.

 

[metis]

I don't think that there is such thing as 'objective' evidence for anything spiritual metis. Belief is based on faith....

Exactly, and that's why when people post their beliefs are as if they were objective facts, they actually undercut their own credibility.

 

[metis]

Simply because of their being 'wildly variant and opposed' to each other! Metis, just think about this: Does it seem reasonable to consider that God, Creator of all men, would really be the author of "wildly variant and seemingly opposed" religions? Would He offer support to anything -- beliefs included -- that would cause His intelligent creation to fight with each other? Acts of the Apostles 10:35; 1 Corinthians 14:33; James 3:17-18

But please note your assumptions above. One is that there is one creator-god, and the other is that somehow this creator-god has made it clear that there's only one true path and has supplied solid objective evidence for that. The reality is that we have literally no objective evidence for either scenario.

Now, if one says "I believe in God(s)", that's a different matter, and I'm not going to argue against that.

 

[Monk Of Reason]

You think you know where the bus comes from because you read the badge...it is from a reputable company....right? What if the badge is phony, put on by a rival bus company who sold you a faulty piece of machinery that they knew would explode after 50,000 miles on the clock?
The signage is a red herring designed to make you feel confident about the vehicle, but the 50,000 miles is just about up.... What will you do?

I know how cars are made. If I see a car and I can deduce that it was made in a factory. With people we can look at the evolutionary line. Simple as that.

I agree, your sister is not alive and neither is my father. They are "sleeping in death" according to the Bible, but they are assured of a resurrection...not to heaven, but back here to the earth where God put us in the first place. What a tragedy if they wake up and we are not there to welcome them back..... Death is a foreign concept to humankind because it was never meant to happen. We form strong family bonds that were never designed to be broken. If evolution is true, why have we never 'evolved' an acceptance of death?

Death is th least foreign concept imaginable to life. And if we had evolved an acceptance of death rather than an aversion then we wouldn't survive. Life is really hard to survive and it takes a lot of drive to do it. Species without a strong will to survive and avoid death will not make it.

What is true is that God did NOT "create every single individual perfectly out of his own image for a grand plan and scheme so great and so loving that you can't even imagine it."

He created material creatures to inhabit a material earth in a material universe. He did not design them individually at all.....He created them with the ability to reproduce their kind, like everything else. He made humans in his own image, meaning that they were more intelligent than the animals and were appointed as their caretakers. He allows us to exercise our free will in everything. He has not created us to fail, but to acknowledge his existence and look for answers to life's most perplexing questions. Scripture tells us that when we search for him, (with the right attitude) he will allow us to find him.....if we don't, he will remain hidden until the judgment. He will not force a single person to do anything against their will. Those who have no need of him, will find that he has no need of them. They will get back from him, what they have given him....nothing.

Having been placed in a spacious garden with every fruit tree imaginable as their food supply, God intended that these humans should extend the boundaries of their garden home so that the whole earth would eventually become like the Garden of Eden. Hard, satisfying work is what they were designed for. This is what God meant when he said..."be fruitful and become many and fill the earth and subdue it". Only half of that mandate was carried out.....mankind has "filled the earth" but because of the disobedience of the first humans, this situation has not brought about the second part of the mandate.....to subdue the earth and bring about the paradise conditions that we all desire......its what we were all meant to have, and it was taken away from us by one act of disobedience. Sorting out this situation has taken many earth years, but the final part will come, when God has finished his object lesson, and in the process, testing humans out as to qualifications for citizenship in his kingdom. Paradise conditions will be restored to the earth and death and suffering will be no more. (Revelation 21:2-4) All will return to what God purposed in the beginning. (Isaiah 55:11)

All you need to do is provide the evidence.

You can hardly compare God's existence with gravity. I can test gravity any time I like and it will reveal itself to me every time with no ambiguity. God's existence is testable too if we haven't got blinkers on. Look around you....his creation testifies to his existence in every way imaginable.This much design can't be accidental.

You are right. It is unfair to put them on the same line. I should put it on the same line as Thor or Zenu. The reason they aren't on the same level is because god isn't testable. Nothing in nature provides evidence he exists. You say it came from god but you don't understand that there is no evidence for that. Our world and universe is subject to systems and processes. It isn't "random" or "accidental" in the sense that things just flew together like this. Its because of our complex and universal laws that it takes the course.

Who gets geology lessons from an ancient book? The Bible doesn't really touch on "geology" but it does allow for an old earth and also for the existence of ancient, now extinct creatures. JW's are not YEC supporters....we do however support Intelligent Design because we see design and programming in nature that need a purposer who created everything for a reason. His designs are worthy of imitation as scientists try to replicate the ingenious things they see in nature. It takes intelligence to copy something that had no designer? How does that work?

Taking the bible as any sort of scientific authority is bad. Geology or not.

Is it hard to paint a perfect picture? Can you paint a waterfall or draw a tree perfectly? Engineered tasks that are done on the human scale require our cognitive resoning skills. However nature itself doesn't require it. We don't require engineering to make it rain. Because we already have laws of nature that run the processes. This is just how it manifests. Complexity does not equate to design.

I thought you said that no one in your family had this trait? I assumed that you meant his children as well. But lets examine this scenario for a moment. I included a link that described what 20/20 vision was. It is deemed to be adequate (being able to see objects clearly 20 feet away) and falls in the most common range for human beings. Many people, however, have better than 20/20 vision and probably always have. That doesn't alter the fact that, (according to the Vision Council of America,) approximately 75% of adults use some sort of vision correction. About 64% of them wear eyeglasses, and about 11% wear contact lenses, either exclusively, or with glasses. Over half of all women and about 42% of men wear glasses.

So if what you say is correct, then we should be seeing an improvement in the genetics of vision as time goes on.....but instead we see a decline....the majority of humans need vision correction. Is evolution going backwards?

No one prior to him had this trait.

Evolution does not go backwards. However this is a concerning issue we face. In the past people with **** poor eyesight didn't live very long. Risks were such that they died out before havnig children. Now we have corrective lenses. I, as someone who is visually challenged, can function the same as if I were not. More or less it has ceased to become an issue and the gene pool is reflecting that. We are pushing our own evolution away from eyesight with genetic drift. A perfect example of evolution in action.

Also keep in mind that evolution doesn't always push for bigger better stronger. It simply reflects what has sucessfully passed on their genes and passed through the trails of life long enough to have children. The closest living relative of the T-Rex is the chicken. Evolution did not produce a bigger badder and stronger chicken but a chicken that sucessfully passed on children with their genes.

 

[gnostic]

No, it doesn't! It simply is in agreement with the point-of-view promulgated by Deeje and myself concerning the Genesis creation account, that it was happening from the pov of someone standing on the planet! Thanks for bringing that out.

Many people today say the sun is moving across the sky! Or say the sun is setting, or rising.

It still doesn't say anything about the planet (rotating).

It only say the sun stop moving during battle, and didn't start moving until the battle ended.

Nowhere does it say anything about the earth spinning on its axis.

You are only trying to imply the earth rotate, because you have the benefit of science (astronomy).

The earliest person to proposed the heliocentric model (earth and other planets orbiting around the sun, was a 3rd century BCE Greek astronomer, Aristarchus of Samos. But his proposed model didn't receive much attention, and was never popular. The part about heliocentric is lost, but Archimedes of the famous inventor Syracuse recorded or summarised the heliocentric model.

What is not lost in Aristarchus' work (On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon) that he was also able to calculate size of the earth, as well as the distances of the Earth from the sun and from the moon, based on ratios.

The first person to state the Earth was rotating was another Greek astronomer, earlier than Aristarchus, from the 4th century BCE - named Heraclides of Pontus.

The bible provided no such information about the earth or sun.

 

[SkepticThinker]

Well exactly, once you understand it, it's a little more difficult to believe!



"…Natural selection acts only by taking advantage of slight successive variations; she can never take a great and sudden leap, but must advance by short and sure, though slow steps." Darwin

slight, slow, short, slow, gradual- are all relative/ subjective adjectives of course- but the world 'explosive' hardly complemented the theory!

And hence the Cambrian explosion was predicted to be an artifact of an incomplete record, to be smoothed out over time, whereas the evidence has since gathered to show it ever more distinct and abrupt.

Credit where it's due, the Bible did describe sudden distinct stages, for both physical reality and life- lucky guess perhaps, perhaps not.

Where, exactly, does it do that?

 

[SkepticThinker]

I don't think that there is such thing as 'objective' evidence for anything spiritual metis. Belief is based on faith.....which the Bible says is "not the possession of all men". We decide what we will believe.

There is only the Bible's account of why we are here, what happened to derail God's first purpose, and identifying the mastermind behind the hijacking of the human race. Its understanding who and what Babylon the great is and what God is going to do about her.

We are living in a unique time in history when the "last days" are being played out just as the Bible said it would. The conditions that we see in the world at present....the humanitarian crisis taking place in so many nations, testify to the fact that if God does not intervene soon, then there will be no world left to save.

"Faith is the excuse people give for believing something when they don't have evidence."
-Matt Dillahunty

 

[SkepticThinker]

You can believe that if you like. Its his best tactic ever....."I don't exist and neither does the Creator".

Can science explain spirituality as easily as it explains life just spontaneously popping into existence?

Oh, I forgot...it can't do that either.

What does "spiritual" even mean?