Life From Dirt?

[Brian2]

It's not merely an option.
It's as good as certain that you'll end up believing rubbish.


As Fox Mulder used to say: "I want to believe...."

You have chosen non belief in a designer but belief in chance and natural forces.
If you want to go on the journey you need to begin.

 

[LuisDantas]

I really have a hard time attempting to put myself in the place of people who find it "necessary" for life to have been intentionally created.

 

[Brian2]

Not "certainty". Rather "rationality".

If the evidence said "no" then it would be irrational to say "yes".
What is irrational about believing in God?

"know by faith" is a contradiction in terms.

If I do not believe in the theory of evolution then I cannot know anything about evolution because I have not even the basic necessity of belief, which can carry me forward in my knowledge, knowledge in this case being something that we believe to be the truth, as opposed to just knowing what is inside the Bible without believing it.

 

[Brian2]

Intuition is very, very unreliable. This is easily shown even in fairly simply, everyday situations, like the Monty Hall problem or meet Mary. It gets even worse when we try to apply it to fundamentals. Relativity is counterintuitive and quantum mechanics even more so, you they work. They are telling us that human intuition is very blinkered.

This really isn't a surprise. It evolved to keep our ancestors safe in their environment, there is no reason at all to think it should be applicable to fundamentals.

There are others who have gone deeper into it and can explain it rationally.

 

[YoursTrue]

I really have a hard time attempting to put myself in the place of people who find it "necessary" for life to have been intentionally created.

Why?
But I must say that's not what drew me to God or put in another way, to believe in God.

 

[YoursTrue]

I really have a hard time attempting to put myself in the place of people who find it "necessary" for life to have been intentionally created.

Why?

If the evidence said "no" then it would be irrational to say "yes".
What is irrational about believing in God?



If I do not believe in the theory of evolution then I cannot know anything about evolution because I have not even the basic necessity of belief, which can carry me forward in my knowledge, knowledge in this case being something that we believe to be the truth, as opposed to just knowing what is inside the Bible without believing it.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean here, but I do understand the theory. I do not ascribe to it any longer in its vast diversion. Meaning I do not believe God created malformations but rather did enable the life process.

 

[Brian2]

Cause and effect is about the relationships between events* in space-time. It isn't even universally applicable in that setting and it loses all meaning when we talk about a cause for space-time. How can cause and effect work without time?

---

* In this context an 'event' is a point in space-time.

Cause and effect tell us the direction of time, that it goes in a direction.
A cause and effect can begin at the same time, the beginning, and continue through time.

 

[Brian2]

Genetic facts aren't speculative.

The speculation comes in deciding what are the facts.

 

[LuisDantas]

Why?
But I must say that's not what drew me to God or put in another way, to believe in God.

Because it is so... well, so clearly wishful thinking.

Life is so patently a chaotic thing, arisen out of chaos and ample opportunity for random attempts at reproduction of molecules. And it is all so well evidenced at this point.

If I had any doubts, I would only need to remember things such as progeria and anencephaly to be reminded.

 

[Brian2]

Here's an honest and interesting question for you....

What are the criteria by which you think you can "detect" design in things of unknown origins?

That is like the question that asks: What are the criteria by which you can say that something was not designed?
I might decide intuitively but others, who work in science, want to try to do it rationally and so Michael Behe came up with the idea of irreducible complexity.

 

[YoursTrue]

Because it is so... well, so clearly wishful thinking.

Life is so patently a chaotic thing, arisen out of chaos and ample opportunity for random attempts at reproduction of molecules. And it is all so well evidenced at this point.

If I had any doubts, I would only need to remember things such as progeria and anencephaly to be reminded.

I no longer believe that life emerged from a chaotic scene.

 

[YoursTrue]

Because it is so... well, so clearly wishful thinking.

Life is so patently a chaotic thing, arisen out of chaos and ample opportunity for random attempts at reproduction of molecules. And it is all so well evidenced at this point.

If I had any doubts, I would only need to remember things such as progeria and anencephaly to be reminded.

I do not agree. Deformities do not lend to continued regeneration. I also do not believe that anyone is tortured as some believe the unsaved might be.

 

[Subduction Zone]

If the evidence said "no" then it would be irrational to say "yes".
What is irrational about believing in God?

The more extreme the belief the stronger the evidence that is needed for it. You claim to believe in a god, not only a god, but the God of the Bible that fails again and again when one studies the Bible rationally. You need strong evidence to overturn those failures and yet you have none. That makes belief in him irrational.

If I do not believe in the theory of evolution then I cannot know anything about evolution because I have not even the basic necessity of belief, which can carry me forward in my knowledge, knowledge in this case being something that we believe to be the truth, as opposed to just knowing what is inside the Bible without believing it.

You may not understand evolution, but you have to know that scientists, who go into the sciences because of a love of knowledge and not of money, will attest to the evidence in it even if you do not understand it. You use the technology provided by scientist constantly. You drive a car, which does rely on the theory of evolution when it comes to finding oil. One has to deny all of the sciences to reject evolution and be rather hypocritical to boot.

 

[LuisDantas]

I no longer believe that life emerged from a chaotic scene.

I don't know what to tell you. You will believe what you will, I suppose.

 

[LuisDantas]

I do not agree. Deformities do not lend to continued regeneration. I also do not believe that anyone is tortured as some believe the unsaved might be.

Sorry, I feel that there must be some intermediary steps that you did not come to write down. I am not following.

 

[YoursTrue]

I don't know what to tell you. You will believe what you will, I suppose.

That's ok, and thank you for your reply. I no longer believe it because I believe abiogenesis is impossible to have begun the process. One might deny that, but -- I am convinced that the chances for life to emerged like that are beyond the possibilities. Does that mean that God formed deformaties? No, it does not. But the process for generating life is, insofar as I am concerned, virtually impossible to recreate and analyze by scientists. I'm not speaking here of placement of fossils and times, these things are within the scope of what scientists do, even if I do not agree with their placements.

 

[ratiocinator]

There are others who have gone deeper into it and can explain it rationally.

Dear oh, dear, so much inane nonsense in the first few minutes... Irreducible complexity has long since been debunked and why do people obsess about Darwin? Evolution has come a long long way since 1859.

A cause and effect can begin at the same time, the beginning, and continue through time.

Incoherent. You can't have a cause for (space-)time. The space-time is a 4-dimensional manifold (according to general relativity). Such a manifold is not embedded in a time dimension (various observers see time as various directions through it), so it cannot start to exist or have a cause.

 

[Brian2]

No, it is not.

Beyond Reasonable Doubt: Evolution from DNA Sequences

We demonstrate quantitatively that, as predicted by evolutionary theory, sequences of homologous proteins from different species converge as we go further and further back in time. The converse, a non-evolutionary model can be expressed as probabilities, and the test works for chloroplast...

journals.plos.org

I did not read the whole article but did note that they said they are not certain of the absolute truth of their results as they have not tested all other possible scenarios.
I don't know if they tested on life groups that are completely divergent in the tree of life, such as mushrooms and birds. What I read suggests that it was only things relatively close that were used,,,,,,,,,, things that could have diverged easily on the tree of life.
However bypassing that, I would say that their tests do not show that all life forms evolved from the one life form without any tweaking of genes by God, as opposed to natural processes.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

The speculation comes in deciding what are the facts.

The facts are what they are. There is no "deciding".

Nobody "decided" that the distribution of ERV's follows the pattern of a nested hierarchy that matches the prediction of common ancestry.
It's just what the fact is.

You can deny the facts if you want. You can pretend as if the factual distribution of ERV's in a nested hierarchy pattern is "just an opinion".
But you'll just be missing the reality of it all off course.

 

[Brian2]

IOW, in logica, your conclusion is going to be, at best, only as correct as your assumptions / premises / starting points are.

It's the concept of GIGO = garbage in, garbage out.

This is why in logic, it's kind of important that your premises are justified.
So when you start with baseless, unjustifiable assumptions (like a priori faith based religious beliefs), your conclusion will be just as baseless and unjustified.

At least they are conclusions and not just "We don't know" statements as atheists/skeptics give.
There are no conclusions from science or skeptics and atheists that say there is no God unless a few assumptions etc are thrown into the logic.
Theists have something and atheists have nothing.
But at least atheists can be sure of their conclusion,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, that they don't know and don't have any beliefs about the God hypothesis. LOL