Life From Dirt?

[exchemist]

Meaning...God is becoming smaller than the mouse?

Are you thick or wot?

 

[Heyo]

Meaning...God is becoming smaller than the mouse?

At least so small that you can drown them all in a bathtub.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

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.

This condradicts what causality is.

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).

No. The big bang at T =0 is the first cause of the events that follow it at T > 0

Being can exist without the space time continuum, a being who was just being.

Que?

Then the being could act and that act would be the start of the space time continuum.

You are describing a sequence of events which happen through time in a context where time itself doesn't exist.
"the being was and then acted ..." ==> those are temporal things that require time to flow to occur.

It really is that simple, what else can I tell you.

It doesn't make sense.

It does not prove the being exists but just the possibility.

No it doesn't. You are in fact describing the equivalent of a married bachelor.

And you do believe in the possibility of something being causeless, so you're half way there.

I accept potentialities when they are at least not in contradiction with things we actually now.
Your thing is in contradiction with what we actually know.

Things aren't possible just because you can dream them up.
I can talk of a married bachelor as well, doesn't mean it actually makes sense or is actually possible in reality.

It is just the idea that something happens without a cause that you have trouble with.

That's quite ironic.

With the being, He can purpose something to happen, cause a vacuum bubble from which the universe can spring.

And you know this, how?

God acting causes time/space.

That's quite a claim. Can you support it with proper evidence?

And we know that God is the cause and time space is the effect.

No. That's what you believe.

You can understand something like you having a closed fist and then opening it to cause the space. The cause and effect are simultaneous.

False. Opening my fist is very much a temporal flow of events.
How you figure such to be a causeless event or instant where cause and effect are simultaneous is a mystery to me.

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.

The "border" would be T = 0.
ie, the moment of the big bang.
So as I said, the first cause is the big bang itself.

 

[gnostic]

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).

No, you it backward.

T is simply the “time” of WHEN “event” began. And the “event” is the “initial expansion” or what astrophysicists & cosmologists call the “Big Bang”.

The “initial expansion” then as expand the universe continuously, the universe is becoming less dense and therefore cooler, which would cause a number of other events to occur.

The Big Bang theory have a timeline of when each events took place, and these events are described and explained in numbers of periods, beginning with the Planck Epoch, which lasted from t = 0 second to t = 10^-49 seconds. Other periods followed in succession (eg Grand Unification Epoch, the Electroweak Epoch, the Inflation Epoch, and so on), and each epochs described other events.

If you want to talk about the “First Cause”, then the very first, the initial expansion (within the Planck Epoch) is the 1st cause.

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.

You would need evidence to support that such a “being” (eg God) exist in the first place, but no such observations exist.

God, whether you call him Yahweh, Allah, Creator, Designer, etc, don’t exist beyond the stories by superstitious people, who have no real understanding of nature, no real knowledge of astronomy, no real knowledge of the planet Earth, and no real knowledge of biology.

The Bible, the Quran, and all other religious scriptures or texts, offered no real testable explanations. The “God did it” isn’t an explanation, it is a “claim” based on false belief and ignorance.

As to the “space time continuum”, @TagliatelliMonster have already given a logical answer:

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.

Your claim that your “Being” exist outside of the universe, and therefore outside of the “space time continuum”, while still be able to cause the “creation” of the physical universe, not only you have no such evidence to support your claims, you are being illogical, with no understanding of reality.

 

[gnostic]

Yes and no. It is hard to tell just where the machine becomes more than a machine, so maybe not all biochemical systems need a spirit to be called alive.

That’s just special pleading, argument from ignorance, and confirmation bias, all rolled into one.

 

[gnostic]

Science ignores the religious writings about life and reports of spirits etc because that evidence is not something that can be tested and the question about what life is, is not really a scientific question. iow it cannot be shown that spirit does not exist.
There is only one creation account in Genesis imo.

No, Brian, there are simply no evidence to test.

Beside that, religious writings only offered claims; they offered no explanations to WHAT spirits are, nor offer how to observe spirits. The scriptures only offered claims, not evidence-based explanations. You would accept claims or beliefs with faith.

Faith isn’t evidence. Faith is a “personal acceptance” of personal belief. Faith requires no evidence.

Having “report of spirits”, are just more claims, and hearsay. There are no evidence to verify any of these so-called “reports” of yours.

 

[Brian2]

Yeah, that is not from God. That is a corruption from Satan.

I would think that God wants us free and Satan wants us locked up in a prison. So free will is from God.

 

[Brian2]

Aha now we're getting somewhere. I should have thought that the classical Christian view would be that Man being made "in the image of God" refers him having, possibly uniquely in the animal kingdom or possibly not, an immortal soul. So I presume that is where you are coming from. Fair enough.

As you may be aware, there has been considerable theological debate over the centuries about the point at which "infusion" of the soul is believed to take place, during the development of a human foetus. But what that tacitly implies is that, up to that point, there is no supernatural component. So there is no requirement in any Christian doctrine, so far as I am aware, to believe there is an intrinsic supernatural component to all living organisms.

I can therefore see no religious reason not to accept that life can arise by natural chemical processes, subject to the same physical laws that guide the formation of inorganic features of the natural world.

Yes something like that might be possible. I don't think it has anything to do with where a foetus becomes a human however, as I believe the humanity is passed from parents to children at conception.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Yes something like that might be possible. I don't think it has anything to do with where a foetus becomes a human however, as I believe the humanity is passed from parents to children at conception.

Why believe that? The Bible does not seem to support it.

 

[Brian2]

Yes, these are good questions and in science correspondingly works in progress.

I don't see how anything can come from a literal nothing, since a literal nothing is nowhere in space or time and has no dimensions, no energy, no anything else of any kind.

A changeless God could exist in timelessness and in no space imo. When the God acted to create, then the changing things of space time existed.

But I've played with the idea that the dimensions of time and space are properties of or from mass-energy, and if that's the case, then time and space exist because mss-energy does, and not vice versa. And while I'm speculating in this manner, I wonder whether time, being ex hypothesi a property of mass-energy, may stop, or run backwards, or exist in more than one temporal dimension just as space exists in more than one spatial dimension and so on. The attractive thing about that idea (and ideas like it) is that they might do away with the question of beginnings and literal eternities.

I would say that the whole concept of cause effect get tossed away with the B theory of time. And even though a "beginning" exists in the B theory, it seems to not be a real beginning as we know it.

But as for abiogenesis, yes, it's still a work in progress, and no, nothing capable of biological reproduction has been put together in a lab so far. However, every few years, some or other extra piece of relevant information is found about the chemistry at the borders of life and non-life, and I don't share your confidence that the question is unsolvable by its very nature.

If I'm right and we indeed discovered how to make life from non-life, would that change your views about your religion? I'd be surprised if it did, but it seems fair to ask.

In the real world it might change my mind, but in theory it should not since in the Bible God said "Let the earth bring forth,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, plants and animals etc" as if the whole thing could be chemical based and there in the earth with the potential to come forth.

 

[Brian2]

You keep conflating complexity with design. Undesigned things can be complex. I might have blown the line a bit.


Complexity is not a hallmark of design. Simplicity is. A device that does a job efficiently and simply shows design. Life is not like that. It is overly complex. It has inefficient work-arounds. Life is essentially a kludge. Many structures would be better if they were designed anew from scratch. But evolution cannot work that way. It has to build off of existing structures.

True, and from my pov the whole evolutionary process is the thing that was designed to produce life for all nooks and crannies in the environment. So the design of the forms worked through evolution and from form to form and so was not simple and efficient as it probably should be if it happened in a YEC way.

 

[Brian2]

No, the miracle stories are no more credible than the miracle stories of other religions and folk tales. None of the authors ever met an historical Jesus. None of their accounts is a first-hand account ─ all are hearsay. And Paul's visions are all mental events personal to Paul, not accounts of events in reality.

No, from the point of view of providing evidence of the resurrection, the bible fails outright. It has no eyewitness account, it had no contemporary account, it has no independent account. The first time we meet it is the very brief references to it in Paul, twenty or more years after the event, which he only heard about. There is no detailed account until Mark, written about 75 CE ie some 40-45 years down the track. We then have Matthew, Luke, John, and references in Acts 1. Each of the six accounts contradicts the other five in major ways.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinarily persuasive demonstration. On the evidence available we can only conclude the resurrection was not an historical event.

This is another reason why religious belief requires faith.

The whole idea that the gospel accounts are written by people who did not know or had not seen Jesus come from the imagination of skeptical historians who ignore the early Church evidence, ignore the internal evidence of the gospels and reject the idea that the supernatural can be real and so have to say that the synoptic gospels were written after the destruction of the Temple, which the synoptics say Jesus prophesied. So the idea is the result of circular reasoning which rejects the real historical evidence.
Relatively minor contradictions in the resurrection accounts of the gospels is something that we should expect if the accounts were from actual witnesses and is not what we would expect from a collaboration or from one account that had been copied by others.

 

[Brian2]

I don't want to take up too much of your time, as you are already answering several others, but I don't see that that follows at all. It may be so in particular circumstances, but you still have establish that your "ifs" exist in this case.

The "ifs" are the givens of what the creation has. A creator would surely know about things and have them Himself if He gave them to His creation.
So humans made in God's image.

I was talking about the deist god, who created the universe and didn't intervene afterwards. There's not much to build a religion on there.

Probably not.

As far as the "god of the gaps" goes, it's just an observation that over the years less and less has been attributed to gods as natural explanations are found. So we don't need angels to push the planets round in their orbits, they manage that perfectly well on their own. We can extrapolate from that to expect that eventually science will close all the gaps, but I suspect there will always be some gaps for god to exist in, as you have pointed out.

The God of the Gaps idea is not something that God claims for Himself anyway. It is just stuff that people made up for God because they did not have the scientific knowledge to answer the questions.
I did not think of what I said as being other gaps for God to exist in. They are things which God has claimed to be His from the beginning, and they are the big things along with the creation of everything (to work as it does) being a pretty big thing in itself.

 

[Aupmanyav]

What method, what technique, do you think God employed to bring biology to the earth?

Is His word not enough? He took six days to build the universe. His choice. He could have built it in six seconds too. Am I wrong?

 

[blü 2]

A changeless God could exist in timelessness and in no space imo. When the God acted to create, then the changing things of space time existed.

Hmm. I'd say that if it were possible for anything to exist without a time dimension, it would necessarily ─ by definition ─ be changeless; but given that it existed without time, in what sense it could be said to exist at all without spatial dimensions is a real problem for my way of thinking. What do words such as 'to exist', or 'to be' actually seek to denote?

I would say that the whole concept of cause effect get tossed away with the B theory of time.

I recall reading in the science news from a couple of decades ago (maybe New Scientist?) about a paper exploring the science of a universe in which time ran backwards, and this (given I recall it correctly) concluded that it would be possible to re-express the rules of nature in coherent form ─ implying predictability (postdictablity?) in such a universe. I also recall another one which set out to examine what difference to our physics a second temporal dimension would make, and that author concluded it would be hard to distinguish the results from the results we have with one such dimension. I mention them as interesting incidents, not as assertions of Great Truth.

 

[blü 2]

Is His word not enough? He took six days to build the universe. His choice. He could have built it in six seconds too. Am I wrong?

It's an open question whether or not [he] should have spent all [his] efforts on the earth, with the rest of the cosmos just chucked in as an afterthought. The spec reads, "Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light to the earth [...]". That only took Day Four to design, manufacture and install ─ if there's no life outside the solar system, there's your answer right there.

 

[Aupmanyav]

.. if there's no life outside the solar system, there's your answer right there.

At the moment, I do not know. Though I guess there is no reason for it not to be there in other places also. Only He knows. He might be playing his chess with many living beings around the universe, each with different moves.

 

[blü 2]

At the moment, I do not know. Though I guess there is no reason for it not to be there in other places also. Only He knows. He might be playing his chess with many living beings around the universe, each with different moves.

It would get dull rather quickly playing against an omnipotent, omniscient, perfect being ─ though I haven't done so, and I admit that's just a guess.

 

[Aupmanyav]

Like with free-will, though he know what we will choose, he lets us think that we are the doers.

 

[blü 2]

Beelzebub v God for the title of Chess Champion of the Universe!

Though come to think of it, on all the information available to me, Magnus Carlsen is already the Chess Champion of the Universe.