The origin of Life

[lucaspa]

Ok, some obvious question lucaspa. Why should any atheist accept the hypothesis that God created and ordered the universe when everything else seems purely natural?

I'm not saying they have to. Are you thinking this is a method of converting atheists? Heavens no! What I am saying is that the "seems purely natural" cannot be said to actually be "purely natural". From the pov of science, we don't know that it is. You have to take it on faith that everything is "purely natural".

If you are trying to use science to convert atheists, you are doomed to failure. But why are you concerned with converting atheists? Why not let them stay atheist?

Is that not a God of the gaps argument too? We don't know why there is a universe, and so ordered, so let's fill it in with God?

The Chrisitian belief of 'no gaps' and thus no direct action by God applies [B]within[/B the universe. It doesn't apply to getting a universe in the first place. This is like the First Law of Thermodynamics: it applies now within the universe, but doesn't apply to getting a universe.

]Second, there may actually be supernatural gaps - perhaps God did supernaturally at least start biological life on earth, there is no biblical understanding that would prevent this conclusion.

Yes, there is. Such gaps would mean that God did not create a complete univesre an their existence would reduce God to a creature of the universe. Both are contradicted Biblically. Read the quote by Allen again, please.

Third, you don't believe that biblical miracles can be explained "naturally"- correct? They were cause by direct supernatural intervention - right?

Judeo-Chritian belief is that God intervened in human history. Sometimes that intervention was by miracles. Here's where I have to explain science again. Science can only work with evidence that exists today, so that everyone can study it. Yes, the meteor impact that generated Meteor Crator can be studied by science, but that is only because Meteor Crator exists today.

So, if the miracle left evidence we can study today, then science can study that. However, the miracles I think you are referring to -- the Parting of the Red Sea, Daniel not burned in the furnace in Babylon, the loaves and fishes, the healing miracles, and the Resurrection -- did not leave evidence that persists to today. So these cannot be studied by science. Science has no comment on them.

I, personally, choose to believe they happened. But the reasons for that choice are not in science.

[seer]

I'm not saying they have to. Are you thinking this is a method of converting atheists? Heavens no! What I am saying is that the "seems purely natural" cannot be said to actually be "purely natural". From the pov of science, we don't know that it is. You have to take it on faith that everything is "purely natural".

Ok, but they will hate the idea that they too take it on faith.

If you are trying to use science to convert atheists, you are doomed to failure. But why are you concerned with converting atheists? Why not let them stay atheist?

Because I want them to be saved? OK, maybe not phank - but the rest of them... ; )

The Chrisitian belief of 'no gaps' and thus no direct action by God applies within the universe. It doesn't apply to getting a universe in the first place. This is like the First Law of Thermodynamics: it applies now within the universe, but doesn't apply to getting a universe.

Ok, but it still seems like a gap argument. No known cause - insert God.

Yes, there is. Such gaps would mean that God did not create a complete univesre an their existence would reduce God to a creature of the universe. Both are contradicted Biblically. Read the quote by Allen again, please.

You can't quote Allen to me - quote scripture. And there God seems quite hands on. And no, perhaps God takes pleasure in acting or intervening at every step. Or some steps. A man buys a stallion - he could just leave it out to pasture, but perhaps he takes pleasure in actually riding it.

Judeo-Chritian belief is that God intervened in human history. Sometimes that intervention was by miracles. Here's where I have to explain science again. Science can only work with evidence that exists today, so that everyone can study it. Yes, the meteor impact that generated Meteor Crator can be studied by science, but that is only because Meteor Crator exists today.

So God does intervene in the universe outside of the normal cause and effect model. But isn't that what you are arguing against?

[phank]

Atheists are just so adorable when they say that. It does negate, however, any claim you may make for the ability to "think critically".

Translated, this means it's lucaspa's devout belief that those without devout beliefs HAVE devout beliefs, and if they don't admit he's right, they can't think critically. lucaspa is so adorable every time he repeats this mistake. Why, EVERY atheist makes the same mistake, which means they are ALL unable to think critically. And lucaspa, who has NO CLUE what being an atheist is like, has set himself up as the experts on the "devout belief" of atheism.

This is your brain on religion.

[Tiggy]

Yes, the meteor impact that generated Meteor Crator can be studied by science, but that is only because Meteor Crator exists today.

Unless your name is Jorge Fernandez. Then all the evidence science has learned about the impact, like the multiple independent methods that all date it circa 49,000 YBP, suddenly no longer exists because you don't want it to exist.

- T

[lucaspa]

I think you are adding quite a bit of baggage to the term Atheist. Do you mean to say individuals that happen to be atheists usually make such and such an argument?

Yes. It's a very common claim among atheists. Not universal, mind you. Some atheists (such as Michael Shermer) have done enough examination of atheism to realize (and state publicly) that atheism is a faith.

I am not sure what atheism has to do with this discussion, but it does seem that you like to use the term. Do you actually mean to say naturalism? You realize that naturalism could be completely wrong, yet still exist, as some would say is the case with theism or even atheism for that matter, right?

Philosophical naturalism and atheism are pretty much the same thing. Both state that there are no supernatural entities or forces and that "natural" processes work on their own.

Now it is true that if it can be shown that a deity actually exists, then atheism would probably be an untenable position.

And an experiment that had deity in one test tube and no deity in the second, and the process proceeded would show that deity actually exists, wouldn't it? Unfortunately, we can't run that experiment.

I am not asking you whether science contradicts christianity. I am asking you to indentify the predictions of evolution that require a deity and that, if there are no such predictions, why posit a deity in the first place?

I'm not confining this to evolution. We are talking about all of science here. Why posit any entity in science? We posit entities all the time, make predictions, and then go looking for those predictions. Again, the statement hearkens back to Positivism, where entities are only posited if there is already scientific evidence for them. But Positivism fails because science simply doesn't work that way. Look particularly in the signal transduction and gene control literature. Entities are posited all the time without evidence. The idea in science is to refute ideas. Ideas that can't be refuted stay on the table as possibilities.

God was posited long before evolution, from evidence outside of science. And the idea that God is required for all natural processes to work was put forward long before evolution (which is why Darwin could put it in the Fontispiece to Origin). So the hypothesis exists. What matters is whether we can test it. In this case, we can't.

Now, just to add confusion to the situation, there are at least 2 ways that God can influence and direct evolution which are undetectable by science. One was proposed by Dawkins and the other by Dennett. So atheists made the proposals and we aren't dealing with Christian apologetics. These 2 methods make it even harder to say there are no predictions of evolution that don't require deity.

Your earlier comments regarding advances in abiogenesis were very interesting indeed.

And yet we still aren't discussing them. The comments I made to Marke about the relationship of the arguments against abiogenesis and Christianity are to show that creationism doesn't work as Christianity. Creationists think they are helping theism fight atheism. In fact, as abysmally bad creationism is as science, it is much much worse as Christianity. It is the most dangerous thing around for Christianity, fully capable of destroying it.

Number 2 seems a bit strange to me.

You've never done experiments? OK, I posted this in another thread, but I'll repost it here:
Let's say you want to find ALL causes/entities necessary for plant growth. So you go out and get a number of plants. You put them in the following conditions:
1. Sunlight, water, soil, air
2. Sunlight, water, soil, but in a clear box where the air has been pumped out.
3. Sunlight, water, no soil, air.
4. Sunlight, no water, soil, air
5. A darkened box with no sunlight, but with water, soil, air.

This scientific protocol will tell you if these 4 entities/causes are necessary for plant growth. You can add others if you wish but you will follow the same scientific protocol. You always have a control where you know the entity is absent and compare it to an experimental where you know the entity is present.

But what about the supernatural or deity? Where is my control for that? Which plant can I point to and say "this one has no supernatural in it?" or "God is not in this plant?" I can't. Therefore I am limited to looking at only material causes that I can set up "controls" for.

Positivism would say "why posit God at all?", but that same argument applies to every material cause as well. Why posit air? Why water? You would probably reply "there is previous data". But is there? Plant growth is familiar because humans have been observing plants ever since H. sapiens evolved. However, when we face something new, how do we choose what causes to investigate? We just guess.

I do a lot of tissue culture. When I started doing it lo, these 30 or more years ago, I went back and read the papers by Dame Honor Fell and others who started tissue culture. They were guessing, and they tried a lot of things that had nothing to do with keeping cells alive in culture.

Shoot, I can remember back when we worked out the conditions to freeze the adult stem cells. Yes, freezing cells was around, but there were several methods and we had no idea what was the correct one. You wouldn't believe the causes and variations of the causes we tested! Literally hundreds. We posited lots of things we had no evidence for but thought might work.

I do not remember except one of the items had to do with actually growing them.

As I try to educate people about stem cells, I emphasize that, whenever they come across "something" about stem cells, the first thing they ask is: WHICH stem cell? There are dozens, and they are different in what they do and how they behave. Recently we had a journal club talking about cardiac stem cells. One audience member asked if the cells had a particular CD marker. No, they didn't. The questioner stated that a recent paper showed that stem cells had that marker and therefore the cells being talked about were not really stem cells. I went and looked up the paper and the paper was talking about intestinal stem cells. Only those. The pathologist was not educated enough to realize that the marker would only be on those particular stem cells.

[Doug Shaver]

Go for it. Provide the empirical evidence that shows abiogenesis is not just improbable, but 100% impossible. Then we can examine the claim critically.

You might as well show that God's creation of all things is 100% impossible as to try to prove to an evolutionist that abiogenesis is impossible given the impossible mathematical odds of such a thing occurring.

Never mind whether you might convince anyone who disagrees with you. Do you have an argument for the impossibility of abiogenesis or don't you? If you do, let's see it.

[phank]

I'm not saying they have to. Are you thinking this is a method of converting atheists? Heavens no! What I am saying is that the "seems purely natural" cannot be said to actually be "purely natural". From the pov of science, we don't know that it is. You have to take it on faith that everything is "purely natural".

Let's play games with words! So no gods have ever been found? If we assume they're there, the fact that nobody can find any is irrelevant. So no scientific theories have ever required anything remotely supernatural? If we ASSUME the supernatural (undefined, of course) is involved, the vacuousness of this assumption is irrelevant. Lucaspa is, once again, trying to use "you can't prove me wrong" as positive evidence in support of his faith. And he thinks he's being honest with himself. How adorable.

If you are trying to use science to convert atheists, you are doomed to failure. But why are you concerned with converting atheists? Why not let them stay atheist?

AFter all, atheism is just another religious faith like Shinto, right lucaspa?

The Chrisitian belief of 'no gaps' and thus no direct action by God applies [B]within[/B the universe. It doesn't apply to getting a universe in the first place. This is like the First Law of Thermodynamics: it applies now within the universe, but doesn't apply to getting a universe.

The origin of universes is purely speculative right now. Let's stick our god in THERE. Nobody can prove it wrong!

So, if the miracle left evidence we can study today, then science can study that. However, the miracles I think you are referring to -- the Parting of the Red Sea, Daniel not burned in the furnace in Babylon, the loaves and fishes, the healing miracles, and the Resurrection -- did not leave evidence that persists to today. So these cannot be studied by science. Science has no comment on them.

Except, of course, to point out that that IF there are any physical principles that would permit such things, they have never been discovered.. And they would be so self-evident and useful that if they were possible, our entire civilization would be based around them. And, of course, that tall tales are common as dirt. And that no such tales that CAN be examined have survived examination since the advent of the Age of Verification.

I, personally, choose to believe they happened. But the reasons for that choice are not in science.

Unless we consider psychology to be a science. I agree that's kind of a stretch right now...

[Wally]

Why should any atheist accept the hypothesis that God created and ordered the universe when everything else seems purely natural?

It's not that we have to accept it, it's that we can't honestly say that's not possible. All the laws of physics seemed to have coalesced at the moment of the "Big Bang" and they didn't have to be the way they are. Space could have been curved such that Pi = 3.16 rather than 3.14. A creator that set up everything at the beginning is not inconsistent with anything we observe in the reality that surrounds us. Only when historically very recent folk tails and myths make specific claims that could not have happened without leaving overwhelming evidence, can we make a scientific judgment on the validity of those claims.

Don't lose track of the fact that the entire Christian Bible could be proven wrong, and there still could be a creator God. It would only mean that the ancient Hebrews got it wrong.

Is that not a God of the gaps argument too?

It's a Abramic (sp?) God of the gaps argument, but not a general creator God of the gaps argument.

[Jorge]

Let's do it here. You are saying that abiogenesis cannot make information. So your arguments about information are your basis for saying abiogenesis is impossible. I'm not going to ban anyone from a thread. After all, we don'thave to respond to their comments.

Okay, I can and will ignore any riff-raff that steps in.

I don't see how I am doing that, and Dembski certainly emphasized that information is independent of the carrier. After all, the equation is just that, and it's not linked to any single carrier. I used 2 different carriers as examples: a telegraph key and a tripeptide. We could use anything else. For instance, we can calculate the information in this post by calculating the number of possible word combinations that could be used to convey the ideas vs the number (1) that was actually chosen.

Materialism is so heavily imbedded into the psyche of people that they
aren't even aware of it. The telegraph key, the tripeptide, the word
combinations (written in ink or displayed on the screen) are ALL material
carriers. Statistics are obtained on those carriers and those statistics
are what you plug into the Dembski/Shannon equations.

So, you agree with Dembski's measurement. Notice that the equation doesn't measure anything material. Therefore, your assertion that I think of information as something "material" can't be correct, since Dembski doesn't do so, and I am only following Dembski.

Yes it DOES measure the material carrier. It results from statistics derived
from the distributions of whatever the carrier is (be they letters from an
alphabet, smoke signal, dots and dashes, flags, chalk on a board ... whatever).

And please try to be more precise. I did not say that you thought information
was something material. I said that the carrier of information must be
distinguished from the actual information. In today's material-based
thinking, the two are invariably conflated leading to all manner of errors.

Fine, we accept the definitions and then we have an equation to measure the information.

NO - you are doing it again. What we measure is NOT the information.
What we measure is proportional to the statistical distribution of the carrier
of the information. The whole thing with Shannon/Dembski is based on an
inverse relationship involving statistics from probability distributions.
There is a correlation between low probability and distributions but that
correlation does not imply identity.

Look, begin with the following alphabet of 26 characters:

{a, b, c, d, .......... x, y, z}

Now construct two strings ('words'):

(1) washington
(2) xlrngsuqbm

Without introducing anything else, which string ('word'), (1) or (2),
has more 'information' as per Shannon? As per Dembski?
That is not an easy question so think about it.

By that information the process of thermal polymerization of those 3 amino acids generated 2.17 bits of information. The peptides themselves are not the information, but information was generated. Just as the choice betweenn "dit" and "dah" by the telgrapher generated 1 bit of information. The information is not the sound itself, but the sound represents 1 bit of information.

Let's try the above first - 'walk before running' and all that.

Jorge

[phank]

Yes. It's a very common claim among atheists. Not universal, mind you. Some atheists (such as Michael Shermer) have done enough examination of atheism to realize (and state publicly) that atheism is a faith.

This is a misrepresentation. Shermer has pointed out that there is a qualitative difference betwen lack of belief in any gods, and belief in the lack of any gods. The first is atheism. The second is faith.

[Tiggy]

Look, begin with the following alphabet of 26 characters:

{a, b, c, d, .......... x, y, z}

Now construct two strings ('words'):

(1) washington
(2) xlrngsuqbm

Without introducing anything else, which string ('word'), (1) or (2),
has more 'information' as per Shannon? As per Dembski?
That is not an easy question so think about it.

Cue Jorge's standard equivocation between information and meaning.

- T

[lucaspa]

Translated, this means it's lucaspa's devout belief that those without devout beliefs HAVE devout beliefs, and if they don't admit he's right, they can't think critically.

The evidence and logic are clear: atheism involves beliefs. In order for atheism to be atheism, there must be beliefs that cannot be proven.

Thinking critically has nothing to do with agreeing with me personally. It means following the evidence and reason to the correct conclusion.

Notice that nothing here actually disputes the existence of the statement of faith within atheism. It's all ad hominem.

Why, EVERY atheist makes the same mistake, which means they are ALL unable to think critically.

Let me clarify. I wasn't speaking of "all atheists" (and I thought that was obvious), but those who made that particular claim. Now, if a theist or an agnostic would claim that atheism is not faith, they would be equally wrong. In general, atheism makes the claim that it (and people that adhere to it) engage in critical thinking. Individual atheists often give as the reason that they are atheists. www.worldofdawkins.org and www.skeptic.org state this explicitly. However, when you make a claim that is so easily refutable by evidence and reason, any claim to "critical thinking" is severaly damaged. After all, if the atheist engaged in critically thinking about atheism, they would already have reached the conclusion that atheism is a faith. Many atheists have, as I've quoted from several.

And lucaspa, who has NO CLUE what being an atheist is like, has set himself up as the experts on the "devout belief" of atheism.

I don't ever recall using the phrase "devout belief". It seems, phank, that you are making up things. I have always held that atheism does not forfeit morals, that atheists can indeed be moral. So let me be clear: the failure of honesty here is solely the failure of Phank, not of atheism or atheists in general.

[Jorge]

Never mind whether you might convince anyone who disagrees with you. Do you have an argument for the impossibility of abiogenesis or don't you? If you do, let's see it.

******************************************************

The problem with your request is that it is as firm as a jellyfish.
Anything that is posted as "impossible" can and would surely be
dismissed by a simple, common tactic: invoking an auxiliary
hypothesis. That is what every Materialist / Atheist does when
the scientific evidence weighs heavily against abiogenesis.

My (our) book, Without Excuse (2011), contains an irrefutable
argument for the impossibility of abiogenesis -- "irrefutable",
that is, until rescuing hypotheses are invoked. My own
dissertation contains another argument (on Mass Energy
Management Systems - MEMS) that shows the impossibility
of abiogenesis. Same thing - invoke auxiliary hypotheses
and the "irrefutable" argument vanishes. So try again, Doug.
This time, try thinking beyond the level of a typical Atheist.

Jorge

[Doug Shaver]

There are more quotes, but the point is clear. Life and matter could not possibility have begun apart from the supernatural creative act of God.

Nice proof-texting. Most of the people you're quoting would not agree that your conclusion follows from what they said, if you were to quote what they said in context.

[Jorge]

Cue Jorge's standard equivocation between information and meaning.

- T

*************************************************

It's not your ignorance that is amusing.
It's how you wallow in that ignorance believing it to be a virtue.

Jorge