Life From Dirt?

[Heyo]

You had already introduced the soul.



I can't promise anything, the line gets blurred when science does not even recognise any distinction between life and bodily life and spirit life etc.

Scientists don't comment on "spiritual life" because it is outside of their magisterium. They don't tell you what to believe. Science strictly deals only with what is real.

 

[Brian2]

Scientists don't comment on "spiritual life" because it is outside of their magisterium. They don't tell you what to believe. Science strictly deals only with what is real.

Science deals with what it can see, measure etc and in the case of life, science cannot see or measure it, all it can do is see and measure bodies and chemicals. So it defines life in terms of the physical.
To do anything else and to, for example, just say what it is doing, analysing chemicals and possible body and structure evolution, would be to bow to the possibility that life is more than just chemicals. That would be unscientific.

 

[Heyo]

To do anything else and to, for example, just say what it is doing, analysing chemicals and possible body and structure evolution, would be to bow to the possibility that life is more than just chemicals. That would be unscientific.

I don't understand that sentence. Maybe it would help if you expanded the pronouns. (What is "it" in the bold part?)

 

[Brian2]

I don't understand that sentence. Maybe it would help if you expanded the pronouns. (What is "it" in the bold part?)

"it" refers to science.

 

[Heyo]

"it" refers to science.

Yes, it sounds a bit like circular reasoning. Life is just chemicals because chemicals is all we are looking at. But it is not just chemicals scientists are looking at, it is evidence. And there is no measurable evidence for anything else than chemicals.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

All I said it that science can only see the physical evidence and come up with an answer to how bodies might have evolved from atoms. Then what? Then it seems the presumption after that is that they have discovered how life evolved from atoms and that life is chemically based. But that would be a presumption, it would be based on naturalistic methodology and would be paining the bullseye around the arrow.
So is it science that will say "Look we know how life evolved naturally without the need for a God" or will that be skeptics and atheists putting words in the mouth of science for their own ends?
Yes I believe God created the universe and life and you believe it came about naturally. 2 beliefs that make us see things in different ways. I won't deny science if science actually does something but I would need to be convinced that is what science has done and not just assumed it had done something because of it's naturalistic methodology, when in fact it had not done it.
You otoh seem happy enough to say even now that life is chemically based, when science has not shown that.

No. Science says that we don't know yet. It explores hypothesis for which there is evidence, suggested by the facts.
There are no facts that suggest anything supernatural. There are only facts that suggests chemical processes.
This is why they explore hypothesis for natural processes. That is all.

If there were facts suggesting other things, they would explore other things.

No, it is you who has predetermined the answer of science.
Science does not look at evidence that it cannot answer in science.
Some things aren't scientific questions and science cannot say yay or nay, but you are happy to say nay.

I don't. At best, I say "there is no reason to explore such ideas".

Science follows the evidence (or the evidence that it can follow) and you say what science has found even before science says so.

I don't.

You cannot really say that witness evidence is not evidence.

I said it is unreliable evidence. Science requires reliable evidence. It requires independently verifiable evidence.

It is however not something that science can answer.

Because science requires independently verifiable evidence. Testimony is not necessarily independently verifiable.
If it were, then there is no need for the testimony. Then we can just deal with the independently verifiable data.
If testimony is all there is, then there isn't anything reliable.

You have answered for yourself when you say that people only thought they saw Jesus do miracles and die and then be alive after a few days and ascend into heaven.

Those are claims. Claims require evidence.

And yes I answer the same way about many things.
Witnesses do give evidence, as in all those things that you put forward, (Loch Ness, Bigfoot, alien abductions etc) and we, the jury, each make up our mind about the validity of the evidence.

And we do so on the basis of "is there independently verifiable evidence for these claims?"
And when it turns out that there isn't, then the claims fail to meet their burden of proof.
You can still choose to believe them anyway off course. But I have higher standards.

But it is evidence.

Unreliable evidence.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

It means that the definition of causality as only happening in time is something that is made up and it is plain how that is relevant.

It isn't "made up". It's, again, what causality IS.
Causes preceed effects. Effects follow after causes.
That's just how it is.

As I said, that causality has to be in time only is made up to suite a conclusion.

No.

The conclusion for you being that the first cause is the BB and no other cause is needed. That idea certainly is not scientific, just a speculation which you are happy to call a fact.
Even the BB had a cause, one that is not known even though it is speculated on and there are many such speculations. And I for one do not think that just because something happens at a quantum level that it is not a cause and did not have a cause.
And I doubt that any of the mathematical speculations about the cause of the BB begins with absolutely nothing, so there is no first cause in any of them probably.

The big bang itself is the "first cause" of everything that happened after it inside the space-time continuum.

Because it came into existence, it has not always been.

We don't know that. What we know is that expansion had a beginning. Something had to already be there for it to start expanding.
So the universe existed at T = 0.

I may be naive to think that things that come into existence need a cause, or that they did not just appear from absolute nothing, or that they are not of a different nature to something that always was, or is. This last thing, the first cause, of course has special pleading, but only because it is special.

Special pleading is a logical fallacy.
And now, you are combining it with an argument from incredulity also.

Yes I have an issue with the BB having no cause, or starting from absolutely nothing and having no cause. I don't think I'm alone in that, I think many scientists would back me.
Starting from "nothing" which isn't actually "nothing" means a cause is needed for what is in that "nothing"
But it is not really a matter of not being able to conceive of it. That doesn't stop me from believing in a God existing in some sort of timeless state. You better come up with something else.

It baffles me why you can't accept a causeless universe but you can accept a causeless god.
Clearly you believe causeless things can exist.

This is going around in circles.

You can't wrap your mind around the fact that phenomenon of the space-time continuum can't be invoked in a context where said space-time continuum don't exist.
As long as you insist on that, there really is no point in continuing this conversation.

Causality is a phenomenon of the physics of the universe. These physics don't exist if the universe doesn't exist. It really is that simple.
I don't know what else to tell you.............

We are temporal beings and have no experience of atemporality or what is possible in it.

Likewise, we are beings that live at a classical level of physics. We are macroscopic objects that deal with medium gravity and medium speeds.
We have no experience or affinity with what happens near extreme gravity or at light speeds or at the quantum level.
This is why the stuff that pours out of the mathematical models of quantum physics and relativity are so bizar.
This is why even quantum physicists themselves consider it "spooky".

Whatever the nature of the big bang was, it is bound to be at least just as spooky to us - likely even the most spooky of all.
Your common sense evolved to avoid being eaten by lions on the plains of africa. It can not deal with the "logic" of quantum events or alike.
So for such contexts, we can only rely on the math that models such environments. And those math models tell us that there is no causality at , or a "before", T = 0.

It is what it is. No matter how "spooky" it feels to us.

It is also not right to say that an effect has to happen after a cause when the 2 can happen together.

Then they are just simultaneous events without a causal relationship between them.
For a cause to produce an effect, it necessarily has to happen BEFORE the effect.

And I don't think there would be a problem in knowing which is the cause and which is the effect.................... especially if the effect tells us that it caused things to be.

That makes no sense.

 

[Brian2]

Yes, it sounds a bit like circular reasoning. Life is just chemicals because chemicals is all we are looking at. But it is not just chemicals scientists are looking at, it is evidence. And there is no measurable evidence for anything else than chemicals.

There should be a realisation in science of just what is being studied however. It should be plain that it is the possible evolution of bodies from chemicals that is being studied and that it is not really being accurate about it to call it "life", and it can be and is downright deceptive imo.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

Would that include something like the resurrection of Jesus, which has witness accounts to what happened. That is some objective evidence.

People making claims, is not objective evidence.

So the resurrection has more than one witness in independent accounts verifying it and at the same time verifying each other. Is that what you mean?

Eum, first of all, there are multiple version of that story that don't match at all.
Secondly, claims are claims. No matter how many people make and / or believe them.

It is rational to believe in a BB at the start of this universe, but it is a belief held on faith.

No. There's much objective evidence of it. Expansion, CMB, etc
The BB model makes predictions that have been independently verified objectively

Nothing that happened 2000 years ago I guess.

No matter. Objective evidence is objective evidence.
But all yo have are subjective claims.

 

[Brian2]

No. Science says that we don't know yet. It explores hypothesis for which there is evidence, suggested by the facts.
There are no facts that suggest anything supernatural. There are only facts that suggests chemical processes.
This is why they explore hypothesis for natural processes. That is all.

If there were facts suggesting other things, they would explore other things.

Yes true, but they should know enough to realise that there is other evidence that could be correct in religions and that they should not be claiming things unless they are 100% certain that those things in the religions are not true.
And yes I know, I'm just another complaining Christian but I wouldn't be surprised if science is not trusted in the US because of stuff like this.

I don't. At best, I say "there is no reason to explore such ideas".

Well there is no reason to explore such ideas with science, but science is not the only way to analyse ideas.

I don't.

Good to hear, I must be thinking of someone else.

I said it is unreliable evidence. Science requires reliable evidence. It requires independently verifiable evidence.

With the gospels there are independent reports of the same things.

Because science requires independently verifiable evidence. Testimony is not necessarily independently verifiable.
If it were, then there is no need for the testimony. Then we can just deal with the independently verifiable data.
If testimony is all there is, then there isn't anything reliable.

I suppose if you mean by "independently verifiable", something like finger prints or maybe testimony about the resurrection from people who do not believe it happened, I suppose it would be silly to think you would find either of those.

Those are claims. Claims require evidence.

Witnesses in a court is evidence. If they were not witnesses then I suppose it is hearsay.

And we do so on the basis of "is there independently verifiable evidence for these claims?"
And when it turns out that there isn't, then the claims fail to meet their burden of proof.
You can still choose to believe them anyway off course. But I have higher standards.

So I suppose you leave the claims in the undecided basket until you have something that you can call better evidence.
I like fulfilled prophecies but skeptics by name, skeptics by nature, so fulfilled prophecies and miracles somehow become lies and the gospels somehow become lies or hearsay by people who did not even know Jesus up close. All circular reasoning because the writing dates are assumed to be after 70AD because of the temple destruction prophecies. And around and round we go.

Unreliable evidence.

But verified by the same story independently told by others.

 

[Brian2]

It isn't "made up". It's, again, what causality IS.
Causes preceed effects. Effects follow after causes.
That's just how it is.

The cause can produce an effect simultaneous to the cause, and the effect can thereafter last for billions of years,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, coming out of the first moment when the first cause produced the effect.

We don't know that. What we know is that expansion had a beginning. Something had to already be there for it to start expanding.
So the universe existed at T = 0.

So the universe at T=0 caused the BB? (and by the universe at that stage I suppose I am talking quantum stuff which may have caused a vacuum bubble and expansion and etc).

It baffles me why you can't accept a causeless universe but you can accept a causeless god.
Clearly you believe causeless things can exist.

This is going around in circles.

You can't wrap your mind around the fact that phenomenon of the space-time continuum can't be invoked in a context where said space-time continuum don't exist.
As long as you insist on that, there really is no point in continuing this conversation.

Causality is a phenomenon of the physics of the universe. These physics don't exist if the universe doesn't exist. It really is that simple.
I don't know what else to tell you.............

Being can exist without the space time continuum, a being who was just being. Then the being could act and that act would be the start of the space time continuum. It really is that simple, what else can I tell you.
It does not prove the being exists but just the possibility. And you do believe in the possibility of something being causeless, so you're half way there.
It is just the idea that something happens without a cause that you have trouble with. With the being, He can purpose something to happen, cause a vacuum bubble from which the universe can spring.

Then they are just simultaneous events without a causal relationship between them.
For a cause to produce an effect, it necessarily has to happen BEFORE the effect.

God acting causes time/space. And we know that God is the cause and time space is the effect.
You can understand something like you having a closed fist and then opening it to cause the space. The cause and effect are simultaneous.
It's a simple concept really. The cause can begin right on the border of timelessness and time and can proceed into time a certain amount, just as the effect begins right on the border and continues on into time.

 

[Heyo]

There should be a realisation in science of just what is being studied however. It should be plain that it is the possible evolution of bodies from chemicals that is being studied and that it is not really being accurate about it to call it "life", and it can be and is downright deceptive imo.

Not if a definition is given of what is meant by "life". (I think I gave one above.)
If you object, then give your own definition.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Life is measurable, it is a physical thing. The soul is not

That is the difference between something that exists and something that is only imagined. One might say that just because something is necessarily undetectable, meaning distinct from something that can be discovered but hasn't yet, that it might exist anyway, but if its description makes it indistinguishable from the nonexistent, which never manifest anywhere in time or space, it can be treated as nonexistent. This is how the agnostic atheist views god claims, and why he lives his life as if gods do not exist without saying that they don't.

The soul can be treated the same. For me, it's a poetic term for the qualities of one's personality - his urges, ambitions, etc., which as far as we can tell are a byproduct of the circuits and chemicals of the brain. There is no evidence that it is a substance that enters and exists people, so nothing that would require hypothesizing a soul to explain. It's also not difficult to imagine the origin of the concept - the difference between a live, animated body and what is seen following its death. Something changed, and it's simple subtraction to conceive of a soul, but what left that body was the organization of matter that causes it to live at the level of the chemistry of the cell.

Science should not touch on non measurable things like a soul

It can't. That's a job for philosophy, and you've seen mine. Unfalsifiable claims have no truth value. They are neither correct nor incorrect, but what is often called, "not even wrong," and can be set aside from further consideration until something becomes evident that suggests or requires the existence of something previously not needed to explain evidence.

religion should stay out of the realm of science.

All are welcome to do science. The method works even when popes employ it.

And we all do it every day, albeit informally, that is, not in laboratories or observatories, but walking down the street detecting, interpreting, and acting on the evidence of daily life.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

it seems the presumption after that is that they have discovered how life evolved from atoms and that life is chemically based. But that would be a presumption, it would be based on naturalistic methodology and would be paining the bullseye around the arrow.

Painting the bullseye around the arrow is also called the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy, and refers to overemphasizing the importance of evidence that seems to support a belief while downplaying or ignoring the rest. An example is creationists comparing Genesis to science and picking out the parts that look alike, like life coming from the sea, in order to make it appear that the myth anticipated the science, while ignoring all of the places they contradict one another (not to mention where the two creation myths in Genesis contradict one another).

What you're describing sound like what the ID people did. They presumed that their god existed and then set out to find it in the form of irreducible (and specified) complexity, and not surprisingly, kept seeing it where it didn't exist. This is observer bias, and great pains are taken to eliminate it from science. Peer review does that, as do double-blinded therapeutic trials.

science that will say "Look we know how life evolved naturally without the need for a God" or will that be skeptics and atheists putting words in the mouth of science for their own ends?

That's you putting the words in mouths. What you described is not the position of science. More correct is that scientists investigating abiogenesis (and those underwriting their research) believe that life may have arisen spontaneously and without intelligent oversight, and that at this point in time, there is no evidence that needs an intelligent designer to account for, so adding one to the narrative adds useless complexity, useless meaning adding no predictive or explanatory power. This is a defensible position, whereas the way you wrote is not. That would be a faith-based opinion.

Some things aren't scientific questions and science cannot say yay or nay, but you are happy to say nay.

A proposition is considered scientific if it is falsifiable, that is, if it is a wrong, there can be physical evidence of that somewhere. These are really the only ideas about reality that can be used to anticipate outcomes, and thus the only ones worth thinking about. This idea has been called Popper's Razor. Claims about entities that are said to be undetectable can be put in the same category as all other unsupported claims (Hitchen's Razor) or insufficiently supported claims (Dawkin's Razor). The can all be disregarded without refutation or counterargument.

You cannot really say that witness evidence is not evidence.

It is evidence that somebody has made a specific claim, not that the claim is accurate. Furthermore, we have evidence that such testimony is unreliable whether due to error or fraud. For example, cross-racial suspect identification is less accurate than when looking at members of one's own race. And the Innocence Project and other examples of prisoners being exonerated by new physical evidence that contradicted eyewitness testimony speaks to that as well.

Elsewhere, you wrote," So the resurrection has more than one witness in independent accounts verifying it and at the same time verifying each other." Eyewitness testimony by itself is weak evidence for the claims made. It becomes stronger as more and more people give the same account independently but requires supporting physical evidence to corroborate. This is why Christians cite that there were many independent reports of miracles as evidence that they occurred. Interobserver subjectivity improves the likelihood that they are all correct when there is consensus. But in the case of the Bible, we only have the claim that there were multiple independent, reliable observers, not their independent eyewitness testimony. It's hearsay.

the definition of causality as only happening in time is something that is made up

Causality refers to the observed fact that some events lead to other events. You move a cueball with a cue stick, which in turn moves an object ball. It always occurs in that order. There is always a before and after state, and the after state is determined by what came before. This pattern is repeated continuously - I lift my cup and it always rises, and always in that order. I sip then swallow some of the contents of the cup, always in that order. Causality refers to that pattern. It makes no sense to say that something outside of time causes something inside it, because causality (like existence itself) requires the passage of time between cause and effect. It also makes no sense to call simultaneous occurrences cause and effect. It becomes an arbitrary assignment which was which, and something never observed. A neutron becomes a proton, electron and anti-neutrino. The neutron existed before the other three, and can be called their source via beta decay. If the three byproducts all appear simultaneously, we cannot call any the cause of the others.

The conclusion for you being that the first cause is the BB and no other cause is needed. That idea certainly is not scientific, just a speculation which you are happy to call a fact. I may be naive to think that things that come into existence need a cause, or that they did not just appear from absolute nothing, or that they are not of a different nature to something that always was, or is

When considering the history of the universe, there are a limited number of logical possibilities, and all either require that something has always existed infinitely back through the past, or something came into existence uncaused. Maybe the universe is all that there is and it has always existed, having already passed through an infinite number of instants to reach this one. Maybe the universe is all that there is and it came into being from nothing uncaused.

Or maybe the universe has a cause like an unconscious multiverse or a sentient deity, in which case the same is true for either of them - they have always existed or came into being uncaused (or were themselves the effect of a prior cause for which that is true). You can see that if this is a complete list of logical possibilities, and one of them is the case, it's something extremely counterintuitive. The point of all of this is that it's a mistake to look at just one of these in isolation and reject it for being counterintuitive: "I just can't see how it's possible." Your comment above is not a criticism of the idea that the universe came into existence uncaused if all of the alternatives are equally difficult to accept, like an eternal, uncaused god. How does that make more sense than an uncaused universe of finite age?

This last thing, the first cause, of course has special pleading, but only because it is special.

Special pleading is a claim that an unjustified double standard is being employed. Calling something special for being first is not justification for exempting it from reason.

It is rational to believe in a BB at the start of this universe, but it is a belief held on faith.

That comment contradicts itself. No belief held by faith can be called correct, and belief in incorrect or "not even wrong" ideas is not rational.

I also can see that naturalistic methodology can be a trap when we get to the things that God actually said in the Bible that He did, if God did them through ways other than nature, and naturalistic methodology demands only a naturalistic answer.

Empiricism and critical analysis are not a trap, but a razor as described above. Claims about reality that aren't amenable to empirical study can safely be ignored, and should be ignored unless and until they become that. Dark matter was proposed to account for findings inexplicable without it. Before these discoveries, had somebody proposed its existence as something undetectable like gods and souls, the idea could be safely relegated to the useless bin and ignored. Gods and souls can be promoted to the ontological status of dark matter IF we detect something requiring their existence to explain. Until then, the claims are unfalsifiable, and this irrelevant to an understanding of nature.

Bodies aren't automatically alive when all the chemicals are assembled correctly.

But there is no evidence to the contrary, and as I've just delineated, until we find some entity or process in a living organism not explained by chemistry, the idea that there might be more to it is less than unhelpful and not worth further consideration.

People saying "I don't believe those claims" is not refutation.

True, but no refutation is needed for an unsupported claim. Now we're back to Hitchens' Razor.

it is just a matter of opinion verses opinion.

Isn't all disagreement? But not all opinions are equal. Sound conclusions are not equal to faith-based opinions.

God acting causes time/space. Being can exist without the space time continuum.

Acting requires the prior existence of time, as does anything that has a before and after state. This is also correct for thinking and existing. All imply the passage from before to after via now. If one wants to say that something exists outside of space and time and makes no detectible impact on nature, then apart from the idea of existence outside of time being self-contradictory, it is also the description of the nonexistent. This is true of leprechauns and vampires, and why we live life as if they don't exist. It's also why I live life as if no gods exist.

 

[exchemist]

Bodies are obviously chemically based. Bodies aren't automatically alive when all the chemicals are assembled correctly.

Ah, so you think there has to be some extra, supernatural ingredient for a biochemical system to become alive? Is that it?

 

[Heyo]

That is the difference between something that exists and something that is only imagined. One might say that just because something is necessarily undetectable, meaning distinct from something that can be discovered but hasn't yet, that it might exist anyway, but if its description makes it indistinguishable from the nonexistent, which never manifest anywhere in time or space, it can be treated as nonexistent. This is how the agnostic atheist views god claims, and why he lives his life as if gods do not exist without saying that they don't.

We disagree here, mostly because I define "existence" different. But that may be off topic here. If you want to know more see 5 Planes of Existence.

All are welcome to do science. The method works even when popes employ it.

Believers can do science, some of the most brilliant scientists were theists - but they left their beliefs at the lab door.

 

[Alien826]

Science I suppose is the neutral. But a universe that just appears with no creator does away with creator gods and all their other attributes.

Maybe so, but my point was that simple creation doesn't establish all the other attributes that people tack on to gods. Incidentally, I don't see why a god with many of the attributes associated with gods couldn't exist without the ability to create the universe. Maybe gods were created in some way as part of the universe? They would need to have some powers over the material world that we don't currently understand, but that has never stopped gods before.

It seems to be skeptics and atheists who use science to say that there was no need for a God in creation but I don't think that science can say that even if many scientists are skeptics or atheists and think it.

I think it would be more accurate to say that they don't see any evidence that a creator god exists. If we ever work out conclusively how the universe was formed (or didn't need to be formed) that would likely change.

Many are also believers in a God and think other things about what science shows theologically.
Having a mechanism for lightning for example does not mean that God did not set up that mechanism.

There's always a gap for gods to retreat into, certainly. What's the relevance of the deist god to our lives though?

 

[Alien826]

Yes, it sounds a bit like circular reasoning. Life is just chemicals because chemicals is all we are looking at. But it is not just chemicals scientists are looking at, it is evidence. And there is no measurable evidence for anything else than chemicals.

To be fair, when the universal scales didn't balance, cosmologist proposed dark matter rather than something supernatural. You could say that is bias, but the supernatural explanation would be a dead end.

 

[Brian2]

Not if a definition is given of what is meant by "life". (I think I gave one above.)
If you object, then give your own definition.

Even if a definition of life is given, that definition can easily overlap into what could be theological.
If an astronomer studies the stars and planets etc and their movements, that does not mean that the astronomer knows what gravity is or can define the movements as gravity.
(sorry I could not think of a better example)

 

[Heyo]

Even if a definition of life is given, that definition can easily overlap into what could be theological.

I don't think so. If it measurable, if you can put a unit next to a number, it is part of the natural world and therefore in the magisterium of science.