A closed mind is one closed off to evidence that contradicts a faith-based belief, like Ken Ham's mind. He's happy to brag that his mind is closed for business, seeing it as a virtue. But it's not a virtue. Being closed to evidence means that if one is demonstrably incorrect, he can never discover that. He has no means to correct his error.
There's also such a thing as believing anything, that's a mind that's too open.
You are correct, but that's believing by faith. It's not enough to open one's mind to evidence. He must subject it to critical analysis to separate the wheat (sound conclusions supported by evidence) from the chaff (every other way of processing it).
Time, the magic wand that can make life from nothing! Like I said, comic book stories.
Yes, that's a comic book story, but yours, not mine. I've previously explained what the ingredients are, and they are more than time. Remember this? : "
There is good evidence that life arises spontaneously wherever condition necessary to support it exist. Those conditions include the necessary ingredients, a heat bath, deep time, and likely the absence of other life. Thermodynamics does the rest."
I notice you like to gloss over the tough parts. You ignored both of the following. Is it because they were embarrassing? :
- QUOTE="It Aint Necessarily So"]You also believe in life coming from nonlife, whether you consider God living or not. If God is alive to you, then God is life that didn't come from other life. If life means existing in a body and God is mind but not life to you, then the act of creation would be life coming from nonlife.[/QUOTE]
- QUOTE="It Aint Necessarily So, post: 7690807, member: 61691"]Have you looked at the any of the evidence for abiogenesis yet as I suggested earlier today. Are you making outlines of what you discovered and coming up with questions about the science, or are you planning to never look and just keep repeating that there is no evidence for abiogenesis?[/QUOTE]
And to this one, which explained to you how you could witness abiogenesis, you made an irrelevant comment about not having found life elsewhere yet.
- QUOTE="It Aint Necessarily So"]Find a rocky planet or moon with no life on it that has oceans and relative environmental stability, and watch for a few million years.[/QUOTE]
No, what one gets [with faith] is purpose and meaning for otherwise meaninglessness. You get up and you do the same thing you did yesterday, perhaps you create a product, so you can make money, so you can buy food, you can get up tomorrow and do the same thing over again until one day you die.
I'm sorry that you find life meaningless without a god belief. You seem to see that as a virtue, as if those who find meaning without such a belief are at a disadvantage.
I see it the other way around, as I explained with the eyeglasses metaphor. It's nice for those who can benefit from them to have access to corrective lenses, but such people are not at an advantage. The ones who can see clearly without them are. Likewise, if finding meaning in life requires a god belief for some, great. Go for it.
But I don't envy those people any more than the ones needing glasses. I can find meaning and purpose just going through the day, which is nothing like what you describe. My work was quite interesting and satisfying. So were my main pastimes: travel, collecting and surrounding myself in art, concert going (over 50 Grateful Dead shows alone), live performance in bands with my wife, and now helping place rescue animals in forever homes and playing and teaching contract bridge.
But look at how you depict daily life. That's the influence of religious teaching that depends on cheapening life. How much value can one place in life if he sees the universe as base matter fit to be destroyed in a fiery apocalypse and replaced by something better, if he is told that his existence here is meaningless except as a staging room for something better, and his own body a carnal cesspool to be escaped from as well? What is the value of being convinced one is a member of a sinful race that is born needing forgiveness for being born human, and whose own mind and reasoning faculty is an enemy to be suppressed. Of course many people taught to think that way will experience and depict life negatively.
For others, life is a cabaret, a cafeteria of stimulating and meaningful experiences as I just described, sublime like a "ripple through still waters when there is no pebble thrown nor wind to blow." No gods are needed to appreciate life like that.
