>Not in Conservative Christian Logic. "If I were a homosexual/atheist/non-Christian I'd want someone to pressure me and make things difficult so that I would have no choice but to accept Jesus and be saved from the fires of hell."
Which is pretty flawed logic. A much more valid version would be: "If I lived in a muslim/atheist/budhist nation, I would like them to allow me to practice my beliefs freely without persecution or pressure. Therefore in the nation my faith rules I should treat those with different beliefs with the same courtesy."
This applies just as much to believes which are in fact biological realities such as "I am gay".
Oh right. Because suggesting that we protect vulnerable communities with sensitive speech is the same as demanding viewpoints you dislike be kept from others at gunpoint
Maybe because liberals don't believe that censoring conservatives is justified and believe in respecting the views of others even if they disagree with them. Notably to respect their rights to air views even if you utterly despise those views.
The trouble with respecting the views of conservatives is that they'll never afford you the same courtesy.
Which, for at least Christian Conservatives go directly against their Jesus's direct order to "do unto others as you would have them do unto you".
So you say then it's unreasonable to consider the proof we DO have ? We do know from verifiable, testable research how we came to ever propose the idea of any non-physical world in the first place and that the hypothesis was fundamentally flawed. The only reason we don't outright reject it is because of it's age. It's a mistake so old that we treat it differently. If a modern scientist today got an experiment which behaved contrary to how his theory expected it to and then claimed that some immeasurable factor had influenced the outcome he'd be decried for "theory saving" and his "explanation" would never make it into any peer reviewed journal. This is true even if that factor is "God" - but for the general populace this explanation is apparently good enough ?
The closest anybody has ever come to a scientific theory relying on anything like that was dark-matter and those scientists work very hard to FIND ways to detect what they predict is there and their version of relativity is frankly weakened until they can do so conclusively (so far they've found evidence that dark matter bends light, which may provide a way to detect and verify it's presence).
The reality is that the God-hypothesis has been thoroughly debunked. In the words of Isaac Asimov - we know where lightning comes from now, and rationality won the war with religion the day churches began to put up lightning conductors. Not paying much mind to the death rattles of a popular but debunked theory is neither irrational nor extraordinary.
There is nothing extraordinary about saying a theory that is untestable and demands that untestability as a virtue is a bad theory that merrits no serious consideration.
Not really. A few thousand years ago - it was a sensible explanation for why the world worked as it did, which is why it was introduced in the first place.
However over time we have found better (testable) explanations for almost every aspect of how the world works that the God hypotheses was initially introduced to explain and thus greatly reduced the scope of it's applicability. To the point now where virtually all assertions of God's existence rely on the presumption of a non-physical additional layer of reality that cannot be tested at all. Quite literally that God exists on some different plain of existence (much like "souls") that is non-material, most believers then claim that he can influence the physical universe (particularly that part that forms our brains) from there without leaving any evidence of his actions.
If the latter statement doesn't apply to your belief - then whether God exists or not is a moot point, if he cannot influence the physical reality then he has absolutely no impact on our knowledge there-off and quite literally only STARTS to matter when we die as his existence only influences whether there is an afterlife and what it entails. If you do believe he can influence the world yet chooses to do so without ever leaving any evidence of his influence (hiding it behind the immeasurabilities of chaos and the like) then your belief IS an extraordinary claim. You are quite literally claiming that either God ONLY influences those matters which are impossible to predict over (relatively) long periods, or God's influence is always done in such a way as to also destroy the evidence. In that case all experiments are potentially false, no science is worth knowing, no proof of anything is even remotely reliable. Quite literally the only explanation you can trust for anything anymore is "God did it".
Well, when we all said that - we weren't putting men on the moon now were we ?
That is a truly extraordinary claim which requires massively extraordinary evidence which the claim itself makes impossible to ever provide.
From the atheist perspective the only extraodinary claim would be to say there CANNOT be a non-material plane of existence that cannot be detected from the material plane and hold a God who influences a non-material aspect of ourselves after death.
Even so - it's not an unreasonable assertion to say that even this is hugely unlikely. Firstly it depends on humans being special enough to have this unique non-material aspect of ourselves that can live on - most religions claim just that - but evolution conclusively proves (and so does DNA) that we're really just another animal, we've achieved some pretty great things but not because we're MADE special, because we took our ordinary abilities and subverted them in special ways. That is the hypotheses with strong supporting evidence, the one that we were created special and different has no evidence whatsoever.
Either way - I think that the idea of a God the creator is now truly extraordinary. It's not entirely unfeasible since the big bang theory creates a singularity - a creator action "iniating" said event would by the very definition of a singularity be untestable and undetectable from the other side. But then again both quantum-loop theory and string theory make the emergence of the universe mathematically inevitable results of the fundamental building blocks of matter - the big bang not a special event iniated but a guaranteed outcome out of a series of outcomes that had to be one of them along the way.
In short, the claim is quite extraordinary already since it's the original reasons we even conceived of the idea don't apply anymore and what's left requires massive untestable assumptions (some actually ludicrous, others just less so).
At least string theorists WANT to find ways to test their ideas - and I'm sure they will eventually. When they do, they'll either confirm it or reject it or possibly amend it - and all that is the beauty of science.
>This brings us back to the famous quote from carl sagan: "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
This quote is useless and quite incorrect without the context of another famous Sagan quote: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The simple reality is that at this stage - the claim of the existence of any deity is extraordinary and with each passing day is bordering ever more on the definition of completely deranged and certainly divorced from reality.
The earliest home-use example of what may be called a "scanner" was known as "digitizers" and those were available as an addon device for the very first Macs. I learned quite a lot of early graphics programming (on PC) from a book written for the 64mb macintosh which had a whole chapter dedicated to them (I however was more interested in learning the formulas used for pixel plotting in graphics code - and those were still relevant on a different platform).
Those digitizers themselves had earlier industrial precursors though I can't say how far back. I would wager that some version of this basic technology would have been available in large academic institutions and the like at least as far back as the late 1970s.
It is legal, and done. Usually it's done in the name of charity in fact. KFC here in my country has a promo on at the moment where if you buy a meal over a certain amount they donate a meal to charity. Effectively - they are charging me full price, and giving the same product to somebody else for free (based on income) - not only do they do so legally, they do it as a marketing tool. The idea being that when I choose where to get take-out I may say "I would rather go to KFC and feed somebody else who is hungry as well as myself tonight".
It's not quite the same product with two prices at the counter but the effect is identical - it's merely a matter of execution. Having the same product differently priced at the counter would be a massive overhead of enforcement and calculation and could open them to complaints of discrimination. Donating the product to charity while charging me full price (or offering some charitable discount to some people) is not only legal but quite common.
Nobody has every complained when you discriminate IN FAVOR of the needy. That's what charity MEANS.
Lenin's 'From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs'.
That was Marx, not Lenin - and that's a (common) misquote, the proper quote is a little more detailed actually...
Just how much do you need to advertise your ignorance ? Really, just shut up because you are embarrassing yourself.
How can I put this in terms you'll understand... erm... if you make these statements down at the pub and the rednecks start laughing - they'll be laughing AT you, not WITH you - even THEY aren't stupid enough to think your ideas are good... in fact, until today I never would have thought ANYBODY could be THAT stupid.
When most rightwingers talk of a flat tax they mean a flat percentage regardless of income... you're the first person in HUMAN HISTORY who can't figure out that a flat SUM would be fucking STUPID !
>Right, so now PETA are at fault for not being soft on animals?
Isn't that their whole point of existence ? Anyway, they are at fault for being hypocrites and liars. They claim to be opposed to all animal use by humans, they encourage people to bring abandoned animals to their shelters rather than those of other organizations like the NSPCA - and then treat those animals far worse. The NSPCA does everything reasonable to rather get that abandoned pet a new home and euthanize only as a last resort. PETA makes the time as short as they can to deliberately euthanize as many animals as possible. Why ? PETA is opposed to pet ownership - if they actually get most of those animals adopted then they would be seen encouraging it. So they kills many of them... oh wait, no, I'm being way too generous. Keeping an animal for six months costs a lot more money than keeping it for 14 days. They kill them fast so they can pocket more of their donation money while doing less for animal wellfare, then rationalize it by pretending that it's okay because they don't like the idea of pets anyway.
>How does the super class of "government" gain powers that the individual does not have?
Like the power to print money ? Make Laws ? Incarcerate Criminals ?
Sorry - the super class government consists of nothing BUT powers the individual does not (and should not) have ! While there are arguments supporting your conclusion that are worthy of consideration (despite being generally false) YOUR argument is of the variety I like to call "fucking idiotic".
Oh right, because an economy that pushes everyone to seek a career based on expected income rather than "maximising their talents and interests" and completely ignoring "value contributed to society as a whole" is really working for the people.
Nevermind that philosophers are among the most important people in our society - it's they who set the bars by which we will live in the future (and even they who determine what the scientific method actually IS so that science can progress), yet if that's what you wish to study and pursue you accept that you'll be spending your life in academia earning very little. Nevermind that writers who create stories are probably the most important single educational system in all of human civilization - yet most of the people with the passion and the talent to go there and try to contribute to that system (by studying literature) will struggle to make ends meet their whole lives - not because there isn't money, but because it's distribution is hugely unequal and not truly representative of quality. Sure not everybody can write a Lord of the Rings or a Stranger in a Strange land but to get the Tolkien's we have to have the people who will at best write a half-way decent spy thriller (and we need those written as well). Trouble is, for a million books that barely cover their costs (or don't even get printed because they are TOO good - remember "Gone with the wind" was turned down by 14 publishers !) - we end up paying billions to the women who wrote Twilight and Harry Potter instead... About the best thing we can say about either is that they may have somewhat increased the propensity of the current young generation to read at all.
That's a systemic issue - and it's why historically most writers had some other way to pay the bills. Many of the best books were written by people who were technically journalists or teachers - and ironically it's one of the few fields where women had historically had better odds. A massive proportion of the books on our shelves were written by housewives - because it's much easier to bare the cost of the first "I have no contract yet" book when your spouse is paying the bills so you actually have time to write.
I studied English literature myself (co-major with computer-science, hey I liked both) and I remember sitting through course orientation for hours hearing how it's structured to maximise our ability to earn in language related fields after university... until I piped up and asked : "So what if we want to be authors or poets ? Did we choose the wrong major ? Because I thought we were here to study the masters of those crafts and hone our skills by learning from how they did it !"
Your question is a non-sequitor. Family members raise the whole incest issue which bothers most people. So you're not treating them differently from other people- at least not MORE differently than before.
Not wanting to be aroused by a family member is fine, not wanting to be aroused by your wife would be stupid. If I found out my fiance had made a porno before she met me ? Hell yeah I'd want to watch that ! I LIKE being aroused by her. Now she's with me, making one would involve sex with somebody else (well unless I was the co-star... oh wait we HAVE done that, for our own pleasure). But frankly if she told me she really wanted to try, and would I come and be on set, and support her and no it's not LIKE what she and I have ? You know, I think I WOULD support her.
The idea that people need to be protected from (being in) porn is at the very least outdated. The porn industry is NOT the sex industry and the vast majority of women involved are college graduates who do what they do BY CHOICE. Alt-porn star Andy Sandimas has stated that she chose her career (as in: I want to be a porn star) many years before she even had sex the first time and used to sit in class writing her porn stage name over and over to practice signing it. The name she chose is a reference to her favorite movie as a teenager (a geek classic at that) - Bill and Ted's totally excellent adventure.
This is what she feels makes her happy - who am I not to support her ? And I'd give the same support if it was my sister (despite her being my little sister whom I'm terribly protective over). On the contrary - I think encouraging those woman who enjoy the exhibitionism of it to be allowed to pursue the career they want without feeling bad about... now THAT is empowering women !
>Would you be okay with your mother, wife, or daughter performing in the local theater's production of Hamlet?
No, all of them have the acting skills of a lead anvil. Well I dunno about my daughter, don't have one yet.
>Would you be okay with your mother, wife, or daughter performing in a porn flick?
If that would make her happy ? Sure. I wouldn't want to watch that particular pornflick but that's because I'm not into incest, but if that's what she (any of the she's) told me she wanted to do, what would turn her on and get her off and make her happy ? I'd be cheering her on, hell I'd offer to be her manager. Not everybody is a stupid-ass prude you know.
>A defect/feature? in the design of HSP, (Mutation maybe?) which will lead to other mutations.
HSP90 is an evolved feature. It's good for organisms to mutate, it's even better to only mutate when the environment changes, so those organisms that used a proteine like HSP90 for proteiene folding quite accidentally ended up with a way of doing it that had an advantage- once there though, it was a major advantage and thus survived.
>I agree, falsifying the latest beliefs in evolution wont stop it. You should not ever question evolution because that is unscientific.;-) That's not what I said. I said if you falsify evolution, you would have too use science to do so, and we would get a NEW theory that is also science. It may not be evolution (though reality is it will almost CERTAINLY be a variant of evolution - the evidence for it is just too damn strong, just like relativity isn't a REPLACEMENT for Newtonian physics but a REFINEMENT). One thing I can say with absolute certainty. This theory will NOT be creationism. ID tries to be scientific but it fails because of bad assumptions. The whole watch (in a field not on a beach btw) argument has been thoroughly debunked and proven false. Even when it was first proposed by Palley 350 years ago it was already out of date with the science that was current THEN.
The entire rest of your post is basically stuff that is so thoroughly proven false and just plain wrong that it's not worth trying to explain further. Yes, all modern biology not only benefits from but DEPENDS on evolution. Our entire understanding of all life is built on that theory.
>`It has no whims and no desires. It has no demands and no opinions or thoughts or will': interesting, can one not use an extension to the eminently un-bodily of empirical induction (in view of our being thus), to give some vraisemblance to His existence; or, could it be not frighteningly probable that a Being of which we are but restrictions, actually exists?
That suggestion would only be worthy of consideration if the universe behaved inconsistently. A being with a mind would not be at all times perfectly predictable, and if he was then his presence would change absolutely nothing about the outcome of anything and could therefore be safely ignored.
> that's of course very convenient. Indeed, we never have to worry that the universe will make the rain stop if we don't do enough human sacrifices. Atheism is not devoid of morality, it merely personalizes it. Instead of doing good because a God told us to, we do good because we believe in doing good. The counterpoint is we also don't get to blame God for anything. When people are hungry, or poor, or their homes get flooded. We can't conveniently declare it "God's will" or "lazy people" or best of all "both" and just ignore the problem. We have to say "It's MY responsibility to help". So atheism among kind-hearted people promotes MORE charity. We never think the misfortunes of others are caused by God punishing bad behavior, wanting to test and strengthen them or any of the other religious excuses. We blame them as faillures of society to truly provide for all it's members -and as part of that society, it places the blame on ourselves. If we don't help, we are the CAUSE of their suffering. Religious folks get off easy.
> We are heading to an infinite regress here (as in nihilism), whence these forces? Nowhere, "Forces" is a simple metaphor that our minds can understand. There isn't really such a thing, we use the metaphor even if we know that because it's very useful. Some scientists focus on whats REALLY there, and as their work gets better understood we can improve the metaphors we use for other work based on it.
Your last paragraph utterly missed the point of mine. Jesus's humility is not the same as being ordered about at the whim of people. But we can effectively order the universe about by understanding it. By understanding how it works we can change our world. Nothing is more improbably than a few hundred tones of steel and metal suddenly flying off the earth and landing on the moon with some people inside, but we could MAKE it happen. By understanding our universe, we could manipulate it's history. I did also say VERY clearly that "servant" was a METAPHOR, not a description of reality. The universe doesn't do what we want because it's kind, or chooses to or humble. When it does what we want it's because WE understand it well enough to manipulate it so that what we want becomes inevitable.
Frankly, I don't think your IQ is high enough for this discussion or, for that matter, for this site if I have to explain these things - and if you genuinely believe the arguments you make. I have debated usefully with some believers who are intelligent, rational people who raise interesting questions and thoughts... so far, you're boring me.
>Evolution is taught as a concept things changing but it makes the grand claim of things improving upon themselves to do it, by gaining complexity and self forming into "higher" life forms.
No, it does not. Evolution simply favors that which survives the best. Sometimes it does so by REDUCING complexity. A good example: frog genomes are nearly 500 times more complex than human genomes (that is - they have about 500 times as many genes as we do). Yet frogs have been around a lot longer than we are and are way more primitive. But frog DNA has to deal with all sorts of things - a tadpole in an egg needs to develop at a certain rate, that implies chemical reactions and chemical reactions are temperature sensitive. So if it gets warmer the enzymes need to have things added that slow down the reactions, if it gets colder other things are added to speed them up. Frog DNA are filled with countless little variations of "if temperature is between X and Y add enzyme Z" for every proteine in their bodies. Humans (in fact all mammals) get to grow in a climate controlled environment so we have long since discarded all that extra DNA which egg-layers have. We've evolved to survive better by getting SIMPLER - not more complex.
Most of the rest of your post is common and well debunked arguments. They are based on truth but the conclusions are false since they are massively oversimplified.
Here's a little example of such an oversimplification. Humans (and most other mammals) contain a protein called HSP-90. HSP-90 is one of those special proteines which fold other proteins into shape. It is very rigid, and will fold them into the "orthodox" shape EVEN IF the DNA has mutated, suppressing mutations from being realized into grown cells. Call it a checker for copying errors in DNA. But HSP means "Heat Shock Proteine", HSP proteins are a family of proteins that the body uses in cases of sudden temperature change to help regulate our warm-blooded body temperatures. So if during early gestation there is a sudden temperature change- HSP gets diverted from folding proteins into it's "adult" job of regulating body temperature. Now the folding gets done by other folders - which lack it's rigidy and will simply do whatever the DNA says.
Look what's happening here - usually the body will suppress mutations, they could lie dormant for thousands of years without a single person born in which they have actually been realized, there's a sudden climate change - now the body stops suppressing, mutations galore get allowed to be realized into offspring. Evolution reached the point of doing it on-demand. When there is sudden climate change, it allows every mutation it has available to occur. This is beautiful. When things are stable - stick to what's working, when things change - the species tries everything. It uses every weird mutation it has to try and produce a version that may be suited to surviving in the new conditions. One form of rapid speciation is triggered by HSP-90's effects. Of course MOST of those mutations die out, but if one is better suited to the sudden ice-age (or whatever) then it survives and breeds better- and once it goes to a second generation that DNA is now treated AS the orthodox, so it's not suppressed anymore. Voila - species change in a single generation. Using saved up mutations over thousands or even millions of years, that never ever showed up as organisms until the time when the world changed and sticking to "what always worked" is no longer a good idea.
>Charles became an atheist. I think it happened when one of his children died, but I could be wrong on that.
He died a troubled agnostic, but at the time when he was writing his grand works he was definitely a believer and in fact Origin of Species and Descent of Man both directly credit God for starting the process (multiple times). He actually held back on publishing Origin for nearly a decade because he feared that people could interpret it in ways that could harm his beloved church.
>Did you know that carbon 14 dating is pretty erratic, and to such an extent that one can interpret the given as he wishes?
Did you know that only an idiot doesn't know that ? Scientists don't rely on ONE test. We combine carbon dating with geological evidence and literally THOUSANDS of other pieces of evidence to date things. The "deep time" theory started in geology and goes back Hutton in the 18th century. That is to say - we knew the earth was billions of years old nearly 150 years before we knew enough about nuclear physics to develop carbon dating.
>is it not because in your eyes they appears as negated (or unnecessary, and thus Occam's) by today's science, that you don't accept certain existences?
I didn't say they were negated, I merely said they were not required. I did however say that they cannot be scientifically tested therefore they cannot be allowed to influence scientific thinking or theories. Since the very things that first made humans propose these existences as explanations have now been BETTER explained by things with PROOF - THAT is a negation. It's not an absolute negation (it could just be a limitation on their activity) but it does cast doubt on the very idea (a LOT of doubt) since we never would have considered the possibility of their existence in the first place if our ancestors could have known about evolution and the big-bang theory.
> is that computer you use not `created'? No, it's produced. There is a core and CRUCIAL difference. Scientific laws say that matter cannot be created or destroyed, it can merely be converted into other matter, same for energy. That was Newtonian physics, Einsteinian adds only one thing to this: matter and energy can be converted between each other as well - but still not created. All the matter/energy total in the universe was there at the moment of the big-bang. No new matter can be, or has been, created. Ever.
More-over, when human convert a bunch of matter between forms and do a bunch of designing and create a computer, that only proves that humans can construct computers out of pre-existing material. It doesn't prove that humans were created. It doesn't even prove that anything not constructed by humans (or other life-forms - say coral reefs and ant-hills) have been constructed ever.
My computer does not prove creation, it does not even SUGGEST creationism.
>Also, removing the need for a Creator of Reality makes that Reality uncreated:
That's not true. It only makes it uncreated by a creator. You assume that creation requires a creator. The atheist position is that creation can be spontaneous.
>what occurs in it can be seen as produced by it; is this not Atheists' god?
There is nothing god-like about it. It has strict rules which we can determine, study and formulate into mathematical principles - and then predict with absolute acuracy and even control. If anything, it's the absolute opposite of a god. It has no whims and no desires. It has no demands and no opinions or thoughts or will. It certainly has no expectation from humans. Quite the contrary, it is simply a universe in which things do what the rules force them to do, and we can influence and control what they do if we know those rules by changing the circumstances so the rules force them to act differently. The universe and reality is not the god of atheism, it is the SERVANT of atheism (and in fact, of all science) if you are to anthropomorphise it at all. A much more clear view is that it simply IS. It isn't someone and it has no relationship with us except "we are part of it". It just is, by understanding it, we can live better.
That is the ancient Lamarckian theorem, just because we've got reason to think that it may have some truth, it says NOTHING about evolution. If anything it strengthens it.
>1. `many scientists today believe this was not required and there are several alternative viable theories': are they really `viable', are todays scientist all that non-error-prone?
You're confusing meanings of "viable". Viable in this context means "could work" not "will work". They are viable in that they make sense, do not violate the known laws of nature and may be true. That is not a claim that they are correct, or that it is what actually happened - we don't have the means (at least not yet) to determine what actually happened, which is the only way to prove any such theory. Even if we used one to create new life tomorrow it wouldn't prove the theory true- it would still remain "viable" only, we'll have given it a LOT more evidence (by showing that it CAN happen that way with absolute certainty) but we would not have proven that it DID happen that way. Science is not non-error-prone, science however has incredibly high standards of testing that it uses to REMOVE errors. Where testing is impossible (or at least very difficult) theories hold less weight. That we can't know for sure if it was crystaline or clay or any of the other theories of abiogenesis doesn't weaken science, it's proof of science's resilience in that it refuses to call a theory "Fact" without being able to check.
2>... Your whole paragraph is entirely non-sensicle. Showing that the universe and life can come to exist in it's present state without a conscious creation process reduces the need to invoke a creator to explain it. All religion, including your own, came from our ancestors inabillity to explain things. Now we can explain (almost) all of them, and their explanation (some big all-powerful guy did it) holds a LOT less water. The simple truth is - if you believe in God, that's your right, but don't mix theology and science because they have NOTHING in common (except origins - a long, long time ago - both tried to explain the world to people). Science questions itself, religion does not - this makes them fundamentally incompatible. You can believe in God and accept science as valuable, but you cannot pretend that the one can enligthen you about the other. To reject a scientific idea on the grounds that it conflicts with religion is hypocrisy unless you are equally willing to reject a religious idea on the grounds that it conflicts with science. Either way you're playing a very difficult mental balancing game between a way of thinking built on rationality and demand of proof and consistent, critical self-questioning versus one built on "do and think as you are told".
>Sure you can. It's a huge amount of work, and generally not worth the effort, but it's certainly possible
It is also, legally speaking, a very bad idea. If you do research into patents you may infringe and miss one, then that research can be taken as evidence that you should have found what you missed. This makes you potentially liable for willfull infringement. The penalties of which are much higher. It is actually (especially if you're an indy coder) a very good idea to not do any checks for patent infringement on your code. You may well end up infringing some (in fact, if your program is remotely complex is just about a guarantee) - but the penalties will be much lower than if you checked - especially since writing a program that infringes no patents at all is outright impossible now.
>Note: I am a creation believing christain. I dont believe in evolution. (I do believe in natural selection)
Congratulations, so was Darwin. Now you only have 150 years of biology left to catch up on...
Actually what I think you MEANT to say is that you don't believe in abiogenesis. Evolution is the concept of organisms changing, natural selection is one of the effects that can drive the direction of evolution and almost certainly the most important one but there are others which have been identified (mostly because they cause occasional anomalies like rapid speciation). So evolution is not quite a synonym for natural selection, we moved away from Darwin's terminology since it describes only ONE of the things that control evolution and we now know it's not the ONLY thing that does (though it's by far the most powerful force involved). But indeed, Darwin believed that God was needed to start the process of life - many scientists today believe this was not required and there are several alternative viable theories. So far none of them are proven... but what would it do to your faith if one was ?
Well, if you're faith is worth having at all... NOTHING. So you figure out another of the tools in God's toolbox, if that means you can't believe in God your faith was worthless in the first place. For those of us who don't believe now, it will be just further proof that there's nothing we can't adequately explain WITHOUT a creator.
> Without self-replication it is not cell or anything resembling life
Nobody ever said self replication has to work the same way it does for us. The article does say he found ways for the cells to use other cells as templates for modification and indeed replication. It's an interesting approach to replication - as it changes one existing cell into a replica of another, but it's quite feasible. More-over we have no actual idea what the earliest organic structures looked like, or even how they came to exist. There are dozens of viable theories on abiogenesis and none of them are currently provable - for all we know, that is exactly how the earliest replicating life began ! What were we BEFORE we were cells ? Surely we were simpler, more primitive cells with less of the features of current ones, and before that ? Well the mitochondria we have INSIDE our cells were once a seperate organism... now what used to be something alive in it's own right, is just a component of our cells. How many other components of our cells began as seperate, simpler, life form but didn't leave us fossils to conveniently prove it with ?
This research is in fact incredibly exciting because it shows a way of experimenting with ways early life may have begun. It's using different materials - but that's actually a GOOD thing, as it stops us from trying to just recreate what we have when we don't know what, what we have, used to be. It forces us to think from scratch, as life would have started... and that IS exciting. More-over, if it works, if it gets far enough... it opens up entire new avenues of consideration in terms of how life may have evolved on other worlds.
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>Not in Conservative Christian Logic. "If I were a homosexual/atheist/non-Christian I'd want someone to pressure me and make things difficult so that I would have no choice but to accept Jesus and be saved from the fires of hell."
Which is pretty flawed logic. A much more valid version would be: "If I lived in a muslim/atheist/budhist nation, I would like them to allow me to practice my beliefs freely without persecution or pressure. Therefore in the nation my faith rules I should treat those with different beliefs with the same courtesy."
This applies just as much to believes which are in fact biological realities such as "I am gay".
Oh right. Because suggesting that we protect vulnerable communities with sensitive speech is the same as demanding viewpoints you dislike be kept from others at gunpoint
Maybe because liberals don't believe that censoring conservatives is justified and believe in respecting the views of others even if they disagree with them. Notably to respect their rights to air views even if you utterly despise those views.
The trouble with respecting the views of conservatives is that they'll never afford you the same courtesy.
Which, for at least Christian Conservatives go directly against their Jesus's direct order to "do unto others as you would have them do unto you".
So you say then it's unreasonable to consider the proof we DO have ? We do know from verifiable, testable research how we came to ever propose the idea of any non-physical world in the first place and that the hypothesis was fundamentally flawed.
The only reason we don't outright reject it is because of it's age. It's a mistake so old that we treat it differently.
If a modern scientist today got an experiment which behaved contrary to how his theory expected it to and then claimed that some immeasurable factor had influenced the outcome he'd be decried for "theory saving" and his "explanation" would never make it into any peer reviewed journal. This is true even if that factor is "God" - but for the general populace this explanation is apparently good enough ?
The closest anybody has ever come to a scientific theory relying on anything like that was dark-matter and those scientists work very hard to FIND ways to detect what they predict is there and their version of relativity is frankly weakened until they can do so conclusively (so far they've found evidence that dark matter bends light, which may provide a way to detect and verify it's presence).
The reality is that the God-hypothesis has been thoroughly debunked. In the words of Isaac Asimov - we know where lightning comes from now, and rationality won the war with religion the day churches began to put up lightning conductors.
Not paying much mind to the death rattles of a popular but debunked theory is neither irrational nor extraordinary.
There is nothing extraordinary about saying a theory that is untestable and demands that untestability as a virtue is a bad theory that merrits no serious consideration.
Not really.
A few thousand years ago - it was a sensible explanation for why the world worked as it did, which is why it was introduced in the first place.
However over time we have found better (testable) explanations for almost every aspect of how the world works that the God hypotheses was initially introduced to explain and thus greatly reduced the scope of it's applicability. To the point now where virtually all assertions of God's existence rely on the presumption of a non-physical additional layer of reality that cannot be tested at all. Quite literally that God exists on some different plain of existence (much like "souls") that is non-material, most believers then claim that he can influence the physical universe (particularly that part that forms our brains) from there without leaving any evidence of his actions.
If the latter statement doesn't apply to your belief - then whether God exists or not is a moot point, if he cannot influence the physical reality then he has absolutely no impact on our knowledge there-off and quite literally only STARTS to matter when we die as his existence only influences whether there is an afterlife and what it entails.
If you do believe he can influence the world yet chooses to do so without ever leaving any evidence of his influence (hiding it behind the immeasurabilities of chaos and the like) then your belief IS an extraordinary claim.
You are quite literally claiming that either God ONLY influences those matters which are impossible to predict over (relatively) long periods, or God's influence is always done in such a way as to also destroy the evidence.
In that case all experiments are potentially false, no science is worth knowing, no proof of anything is even remotely reliable. Quite literally the only explanation you can trust for anything anymore is "God did it".
Well, when we all said that - we weren't putting men on the moon now were we ?
That is a truly extraordinary claim which requires massively extraordinary evidence which the claim itself makes impossible to ever provide.
From the atheist perspective the only extraodinary claim would be to say there CANNOT be a non-material plane of existence that cannot be detected from the material plane and hold a God who influences a non-material aspect of ourselves after death.
Even so - it's not an unreasonable assertion to say that even this is hugely unlikely. Firstly it depends on humans being special enough to have this unique non-material aspect of ourselves that can live on - most religions claim just that - but evolution conclusively proves (and so does DNA) that we're really just another animal, we've achieved some pretty great things but not because we're MADE special, because we took our ordinary abilities and subverted them in special ways. That is the hypotheses with strong supporting evidence, the one that we were created special and different has no evidence whatsoever.
Either way - I think that the idea of a God the creator is now truly extraordinary. It's not entirely unfeasible since the big bang theory creates a singularity - a creator action "iniating" said event would by the very definition of a singularity be untestable and undetectable from the other side.
But then again both quantum-loop theory and string theory make the emergence of the universe mathematically inevitable results of the fundamental building blocks of matter - the big bang not a special event iniated but a guaranteed outcome out of a series of outcomes that had to be one of them along the way.
In short, the claim is quite extraordinary already since it's the original reasons we even conceived of the idea don't apply anymore and what's left requires massive untestable assumptions (some actually ludicrous, others just less so).
At least string theorists WANT to find ways to test their ideas - and I'm sure they will eventually. When they do, they'll either confirm it or reject it or possibly amend it - and all that is the beauty of science.
With each bit of kno
>This brings us back to the famous quote from carl sagan: "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
This quote is useless and quite incorrect without the context of another famous Sagan quote: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The simple reality is that at this stage - the claim of the existence of any deity is extraordinary and with each passing day is bordering ever more on the definition of completely deranged and certainly divorced from reality.
The earliest home-use example of what may be called a "scanner" was known as "digitizers" and those were available as an addon device for the very first Macs.
I learned quite a lot of early graphics programming (on PC) from a book written for the 64mb macintosh which had a whole chapter dedicated to them (I however was more interested in learning the formulas used for pixel plotting in graphics code - and those were still relevant on a different platform).
Those digitizers themselves had earlier industrial precursors though I can't say how far back. I would wager that some version of this basic technology would have been available in large academic institutions and the like at least as far back as the late 1970s.
It is legal, and done. Usually it's done in the name of charity in fact. KFC here in my country has a promo on at the moment where if you buy a meal over a certain amount they donate a meal to charity. Effectively - they are charging me full price, and giving the same product to somebody else for free (based on income) - not only do they do so legally, they do it as a marketing tool. The idea being that when I choose where to get take-out I may say "I would rather go to KFC and feed somebody else who is hungry as well as myself tonight".
It's not quite the same product with two prices at the counter but the effect is identical - it's merely a matter of execution. Having the same product differently priced at the counter would be a massive overhead of enforcement and calculation and could open them to complaints of discrimination. Donating the product to charity while charging me full price (or offering some charitable discount to some people) is not only legal but quite common.
Nobody has every complained when you discriminate IN FAVOR of the needy. That's what charity MEANS.
Lenin's 'From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs'.
That was Marx, not Lenin - and that's a (common) misquote, the proper quote is a little more detailed actually...
Just how much do you need to advertise your ignorance ? Really, just shut up because you are embarrassing yourself.
How can I put this in terms you'll understand... erm... if you make these statements down at the pub and the rednecks start laughing - they'll be laughing AT you, not WITH you - even THEY aren't stupid enough to think your ideas are good... in fact, until today I never would have thought ANYBODY could be THAT stupid.
When most rightwingers talk of a flat tax they mean a flat percentage regardless of income... you're the first person in HUMAN HISTORY who can't figure out that a flat SUM would be fucking STUPID !
>Right, so now PETA are at fault for not being soft on animals?
Isn't that their whole point of existence ? Anyway, they are at fault for being hypocrites and liars. They claim to be opposed to all animal use by humans, they encourage people to bring abandoned animals to their shelters rather than those of other organizations like the NSPCA - and then treat those animals far worse.
The NSPCA does everything reasonable to rather get that abandoned pet a new home and euthanize only as a last resort. PETA makes the time as short as they can to deliberately euthanize as many animals as possible.
Why ? PETA is opposed to pet ownership - if they actually get most of those animals adopted then they would be seen encouraging it. So they kills many of them... oh wait, no, I'm being way too generous.
Keeping an animal for six months costs a lot more money than keeping it for 14 days. They kill them fast so they can pocket more of their donation money while doing less for animal wellfare, then rationalize it by pretending that it's okay because they don't like the idea of pets anyway.
>How does the super class of "government" gain powers that the individual does not have?
Like the power to print money ? Make Laws ? Incarcerate Criminals ?
Sorry - the super class government consists of nothing BUT powers the individual does not (and should not) have ! While there are arguments supporting your conclusion that are worthy of consideration (despite being generally false) YOUR argument is of the variety I like to call "fucking idiotic".
Oh right, because an economy that pushes everyone to seek a career based on expected income rather than "maximising their talents and interests" and completely ignoring "value contributed to society as a whole" is really working for the people.
Nevermind that philosophers are among the most important people in our society - it's they who set the bars by which we will live in the future (and even they who determine what the scientific method actually IS so that science can progress), yet if that's what you wish to study and pursue you accept that you'll be spending your life in academia earning very little.
Nevermind that writers who create stories are probably the most important single educational system in all of human civilization - yet most of the people with the passion and the talent to go there and try to contribute to that system (by studying literature) will struggle to make ends meet their whole lives - not because there isn't money, but because it's distribution is hugely unequal and not truly representative of quality.
Sure not everybody can write a Lord of the Rings or a Stranger in a Strange land but to get the Tolkien's we have to have the people who will at best write a half-way decent spy thriller (and we need those written as well).
Trouble is, for a million books that barely cover their costs (or don't even get printed because they are TOO good - remember "Gone with the wind" was turned down by 14 publishers !) - we end up paying billions to the women who wrote Twilight and Harry Potter instead...
About the best thing we can say about either is that they may have somewhat increased the propensity of the current young generation to read at all.
That's a systemic issue - and it's why historically most writers had some other way to pay the bills. Many of the best books were written by people who were technically journalists or teachers - and ironically it's one of the few fields where women had historically had better odds.
A massive proportion of the books on our shelves were written by housewives - because it's much easier to bare the cost of the first "I have no contract yet" book when your spouse is paying the bills so you actually have time to write.
I studied English literature myself (co-major with computer-science, hey I liked both) and I remember sitting through course orientation for hours hearing how it's structured to maximise our ability to earn in language related fields after university... until I piped up and asked : "So what if we want to be authors or poets ? Did we choose the wrong major ? Because I thought we were here to study the masters of those crafts and hone our skills by learning from how they did it !"
In retrospect, I think you're right.
Your question is a non-sequitor. Family members raise the whole incest issue which bothers most people. So you're not treating them differently from other people- at least not MORE differently than before.
Not wanting to be aroused by a family member is fine, not wanting to be aroused by your wife would be stupid. If I found out my fiance had made a porno before she met me ? Hell yeah I'd want to watch that ! I LIKE being aroused by her. Now she's with me, making one would involve sex with somebody else (well unless I was the co-star... oh wait we HAVE done that, for our own pleasure).
But frankly if she told me she really wanted to try, and would I come and be on set, and support her and no it's not LIKE what she and I have ? You know, I think I WOULD support her.
The idea that people need to be protected from (being in) porn is at the very least outdated. The porn industry is NOT the sex industry and the vast majority of women involved are college graduates who do what they do BY CHOICE.
Alt-porn star Andy Sandimas has stated that she chose her career (as in: I want to be a porn star) many years before she even had sex the first time and used to sit in class writing her porn stage name over and over to practice signing it. The name she chose is a reference to her favorite movie as a teenager (a geek classic at that) - Bill and Ted's totally excellent adventure.
This is what she feels makes her happy - who am I not to support her ? And I'd give the same support if it was my sister (despite her being my little sister whom I'm terribly protective over).
On the contrary - I think encouraging those woman who enjoy the exhibitionism of it to be allowed to pursue the career they want without feeling bad about... now THAT is empowering women !
>Would you be okay with your mother, wife, or daughter performing in the local theater's production of Hamlet?
No, all of them have the acting skills of a lead anvil. Well I dunno about my daughter, don't have one yet.
>Would you be okay with your mother, wife, or daughter performing in a porn flick?
If that would make her happy ? Sure. I wouldn't want to watch that particular pornflick but that's because I'm not into incest, but if that's what she (any of the she's) told me she wanted to do, what would turn her on and get her off and make her happy ? I'd be cheering her on, hell I'd offer to be her manager. Not everybody is a stupid-ass prude you know.
Now here's the clencher.
SPCA shelter's do the same- and give the animal six months. PETA shelters "euthanize" any animal not adopted after 14 days !
>A defect/feature? in the design of HSP, (Mutation maybe?) which will lead to other mutations.
HSP90 is an evolved feature. It's good for organisms to mutate, it's even better to only mutate when the environment changes, so those organisms that used a proteine like HSP90 for proteiene folding quite accidentally ended up with a way of doing it that had an advantage- once there though, it was a major advantage and thus survived.
>I agree, falsifying the latest beliefs in evolution wont stop it. You should not ever question evolution because that is unscientific. ;-)
That's not what I said. I said if you falsify evolution, you would have too use science to do so, and we would get a NEW theory that is also science. It may not be evolution (though reality is it will almost CERTAINLY be a variant of evolution - the evidence for it is just too damn strong, just like relativity isn't a REPLACEMENT for Newtonian physics but a REFINEMENT). One thing I can say with absolute certainty. This theory will NOT be creationism.
ID tries to be scientific but it fails because of bad assumptions. The whole watch (in a field not on a beach btw) argument has been thoroughly debunked and proven false. Even when it was first proposed by Palley 350 years ago it was already out of date with the science that was current THEN.
Before you try to defend ID to me - I suggest you read this, I have already summed up my biggest argument against it in a blog post, I don't feel like redoing it here: http://silentcoder.co.za/2010/11/how-intelligent-is-the-designer/
The entire rest of your post is basically stuff that is so thoroughly proven false and just plain wrong that it's not worth trying to explain further. Yes, all modern biology not only benefits from but DEPENDS on evolution. Our entire understanding of all life is built on that theory.
>`It has no whims and no desires. It has no demands and no opinions or thoughts or will': interesting, can one not use an extension to the eminently un-bodily of empirical induction (in view of our being thus), to give some vraisemblance to His existence; or, could it be not frighteningly probable that a Being of which we are but restrictions, actually exists?
That suggestion would only be worthy of consideration if the universe behaved inconsistently. A being with a mind would not be at all times perfectly predictable, and if he was then his presence would change absolutely nothing about the outcome of anything and could therefore be safely ignored.
> that's of course very convenient.
Indeed, we never have to worry that the universe will make the rain stop if we don't do enough human sacrifices. Atheism is not devoid of morality, it merely personalizes it. Instead of doing good because a God told us to, we do good because we believe in doing good.
The counterpoint is we also don't get to blame God for anything. When people are hungry, or poor, or their homes get flooded. We can't conveniently declare it "God's will" or "lazy people" or best of all "both" and just ignore the problem. We have to say "It's MY responsibility to help". So atheism among kind-hearted people promotes MORE charity. We never think the misfortunes of others are caused by God punishing bad behavior, wanting to test and strengthen them or any of the other religious excuses. We blame them as faillures of society to truly provide for all it's members -and as part of that society, it places the blame on ourselves. If we don't help, we are the CAUSE of their suffering. Religious folks get off easy.
> We are heading to an infinite regress here (as in nihilism), whence these forces?
Nowhere, "Forces" is a simple metaphor that our minds can understand. There isn't really such a thing, we use the metaphor even if we know that because it's very useful. Some scientists focus on whats REALLY there, and as their work gets better understood we can improve the metaphors we use for other work based on it.
Your last paragraph utterly missed the point of mine. Jesus's humility is not the same as being ordered about at the whim of people. But we can effectively order the universe about by understanding it. By understanding how it works we can change our world. Nothing is more improbably than a few hundred tones of steel and metal suddenly flying off the earth and landing on the moon with some people inside, but we could MAKE it happen. By understanding our universe, we could manipulate it's history.
I did also say VERY clearly that "servant" was a METAPHOR, not a description of reality. The universe doesn't do what we want because it's kind, or chooses to or humble. When it does what we want it's because WE understand it well enough to manipulate it so that what we want becomes inevitable.
Frankly, I don't think your IQ is high enough for this discussion or, for that matter, for this site if I have to explain these things - and if you genuinely believe the arguments you make.
I have debated usefully with some believers who are intelligent, rational people who raise interesting questions and thoughts... so far, you're boring me.
>Evolution is taught as a concept things changing but it makes the grand claim of things improving upon themselves to do it, by gaining complexity and self forming into "higher" life forms.
No, it does not. Evolution simply favors that which survives the best. Sometimes it does so by REDUCING complexity. A good example: frog genomes are nearly 500 times more complex than human genomes (that is - they have about 500 times as many genes as we do). Yet frogs have been around a lot longer than we are and are way more primitive. But frog DNA has to deal with all sorts of things - a tadpole in an egg needs to develop at a certain rate, that implies chemical reactions and chemical reactions are temperature sensitive. So if it gets warmer the enzymes need to have things added that slow down the reactions, if it gets colder other things are added to speed them up. Frog DNA are filled with countless little variations of "if temperature is between X and Y add enzyme Z" for every proteine in their bodies.
Humans (in fact all mammals) get to grow in a climate controlled environment so we have long since discarded all that extra DNA which egg-layers have. We've evolved to survive better by getting SIMPLER - not more complex.
Most of the rest of your post is common and well debunked arguments. They are based on truth but the conclusions are false since they are massively oversimplified.
Here's a little example of such an oversimplification. Humans (and most other mammals) contain a protein called HSP-90. HSP-90 is one of those special proteines which fold other proteins into shape. It is very rigid, and will fold them into the "orthodox" shape EVEN IF the DNA has mutated, suppressing mutations from being realized into grown cells. Call it a checker for copying errors in DNA.
But HSP means "Heat Shock Proteine", HSP proteins are a family of proteins that the body uses in cases of sudden temperature change to help regulate our warm-blooded body temperatures. So if during early gestation there is a sudden temperature change- HSP gets diverted from folding proteins into it's "adult" job of regulating body temperature. Now the folding gets done by other folders - which lack it's rigidy and will simply do whatever the DNA says.
Look what's happening here - usually the body will suppress mutations, they could lie dormant for thousands of years without a single person born in which they have actually been realized, there's a sudden climate change - now the body stops suppressing, mutations galore get allowed to be realized into offspring. Evolution reached the point of doing it on-demand. When there is sudden climate change, it allows every mutation it has available to occur. This is beautiful. When things are stable - stick to what's working, when things change - the species tries everything. It uses every weird mutation it has to try and produce a version that may be suited to surviving in the new conditions.
One form of rapid speciation is triggered by HSP-90's effects. Of course MOST of those mutations die out, but if one is better suited to the sudden ice-age (or whatever) then it survives and breeds better- and once it goes to a second generation that DNA is now treated AS the orthodox, so it's not suppressed anymore. Voila - species change in a single generation. Using saved up mutations over thousands or even millions of years, that never ever showed up as organisms until the time when the world changed and sticking to "what always worked" is no longer a good idea.
>Charles became an atheist. I think it happened when one of his children died, but I could be wrong on that.
He died a troubled agnostic, but at the time when he was writing his grand works he was definitely a believer and in fact Origin of Species and Descent of Man both directly credit God for starting the process (multiple times). He actually held back on publishing Origin for nearly a decade because he feared that people could interpret it in ways that could harm his beloved church.
Everything you said about i
>Did you know that carbon 14 dating is pretty erratic, and to such an extent that one can interpret the given as he wishes?
Did you know that only an idiot doesn't know that ? Scientists don't rely on ONE test. We combine carbon dating with geological evidence and literally THOUSANDS of other pieces of evidence to date things. The "deep time" theory started in geology and goes back Hutton in the 18th century. That is to say - we knew the earth was billions of years old nearly 150 years before we knew enough about nuclear physics to develop carbon dating.
>is it not because in your eyes they appears as negated (or unnecessary, and thus Occam's) by today's science, that you don't accept certain existences?
I didn't say they were negated, I merely said they were not required. I did however say that they cannot be scientifically tested therefore they cannot be allowed to influence scientific thinking or theories. Since the very things that first made humans propose these existences as explanations have now been BETTER explained by things with PROOF - THAT is a negation. It's not an absolute negation (it could just be a limitation on their activity) but it does cast doubt on the very idea (a LOT of doubt) since we never would have considered the possibility of their existence in the first place if our ancestors could have known about evolution and the big-bang theory.
> is that computer you use not `created'?
No, it's produced. There is a core and CRUCIAL difference. Scientific laws say that matter cannot be created or destroyed, it can merely be converted into other matter, same for energy. That was Newtonian physics, Einsteinian adds only one thing to this: matter and energy can be converted between each other as well - but still not created. All the matter/energy total in the universe was there at the moment of the big-bang. No new matter can be, or has been, created. Ever.
More-over, when human convert a bunch of matter between forms and do a bunch of designing and create a computer, that only proves that humans can construct computers out of pre-existing material. It doesn't prove that humans were created. It doesn't even prove that anything not constructed by humans (or other life-forms - say coral reefs and ant-hills) have been constructed ever.
My computer does not prove creation, it does not even SUGGEST creationism.
>Also, removing the need for a Creator of Reality makes that Reality uncreated:
That's not true. It only makes it uncreated by a creator. You assume that creation requires a creator. The atheist position is that creation can be spontaneous.
>what occurs in it can be seen as produced by it; is this not Atheists' god?
There is nothing god-like about it. It has strict rules which we can determine, study and formulate into mathematical principles - and then predict with absolute acuracy and even control. If anything, it's the absolute opposite of a god. It has no whims and no desires. It has no demands and no opinions or thoughts or will. It certainly has no expectation from humans. Quite the contrary, it is simply a universe in which things do what the rules force them to do, and we can influence and control what they do if we know those rules by changing the circumstances so the rules force them to act differently.
The universe and reality is not the god of atheism, it is the SERVANT of atheism (and in fact, of all science) if you are to anthropomorphise it at all. A much more clear view is that it simply IS. It isn't someone and it has no relationship with us except "we are part of it". It just is, by understanding it, we can live better.
>0. As for evolution, consider this: http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/02/16/0328212/Acquired-Characteristics-May-Be-Inheritable
That is the ancient Lamarckian theorem, just because we've got reason to think that it may have some truth, it says NOTHING about evolution. If anything it strengthens it.
>1. `many scientists today believe this was not required and there are several alternative viable theories': are they really `viable', are todays scientist all that non-error-prone?
You're confusing meanings of "viable". Viable in this context means "could work" not "will work". They are viable in that they make sense, do not violate the known laws of nature and may be true. That is not a claim that they are correct, or that it is what actually happened - we don't have the means (at least not yet) to determine what actually happened, which is the only way to prove any such theory. Even if we used one to create new life tomorrow it wouldn't prove the theory true- it would still remain "viable" only, we'll have given it a LOT more evidence (by showing that it CAN happen that way with absolute certainty) but we would not have proven that it DID happen that way. Science is not non-error-prone, science however has incredibly high standards of testing that it uses to REMOVE errors. Where testing is impossible (or at least very difficult) theories hold less weight. That we can't know for sure if it was crystaline or clay or any of the other theories of abiogenesis doesn't weaken science, it's proof of science's resilience in that it refuses to call a theory "Fact" without being able to check.
2> ...
Your whole paragraph is entirely non-sensicle. Showing that the universe and life can come to exist in it's present state without a conscious creation process reduces the need to invoke a creator to explain it. All religion, including your own, came from our ancestors inabillity to explain things. Now we can explain (almost) all of them, and their explanation (some big all-powerful guy did it) holds a LOT less water.
The simple truth is - if you believe in God, that's your right, but don't mix theology and science because they have NOTHING in common (except origins - a long, long time ago - both tried to explain the world to people). Science questions itself, religion does not - this makes them fundamentally incompatible. You can believe in God and accept science as valuable, but you cannot pretend that the one can enligthen you about the other. To reject a scientific idea on the grounds that it conflicts with religion is hypocrisy unless you are equally willing to reject a religious idea on the grounds that it conflicts with science.
Either way you're playing a very difficult mental balancing game between a way of thinking built on rationality and demand of proof and consistent, critical self-questioning versus one built on "do and think as you are told".
>Sure you can. It's a huge amount of work, and generally not worth the effort, but it's certainly possible
It is also, legally speaking, a very bad idea. If you do research into patents you may infringe and miss one, then that research can be taken as evidence that you should have found what you missed. This makes you potentially liable for willfull infringement. The penalties of which are much higher.
It is actually (especially if you're an indy coder) a very good idea to not do any checks for patent infringement on your code. You may well end up infringing some (in fact, if your program is remotely complex is just about a guarantee) - but the penalties will be much lower than if you checked - especially since writing a program that infringes no patents at all is outright impossible now.
>Note: I am a creation believing christain. I dont believe in evolution. (I do believe in natural selection)
Congratulations, so was Darwin. Now you only have 150 years of biology left to catch up on...
Actually what I think you MEANT to say is that you don't believe in abiogenesis. Evolution is the concept of organisms changing, natural selection is one of the effects that can drive the direction of evolution and almost certainly the most important one but there are others which have been identified (mostly because they cause occasional anomalies like rapid speciation). So evolution is not quite a synonym for natural selection, we moved away from Darwin's terminology since it describes only ONE of the things that control evolution and we now know it's not the ONLY thing that does (though it's by far the most powerful force involved).
But indeed, Darwin believed that God was needed to start the process of life - many scientists today believe this was not required and there are several alternative viable theories. So far none of them are proven... but what would it do to your faith if one was ?
Well, if you're faith is worth having at all... NOTHING. So you figure out another of the tools in God's toolbox, if that means you can't believe in God your faith was worthless in the first place. For those of us who don't believe now, it will be just further proof that there's nothing we can't adequately explain WITHOUT a creator.
>He just put together the right conditions and then left the Laws of Nature - which we cannot change, nor are material - do the rest.
There is a name for what you just described. It's "experimentation".
That is pretty much exactly what every science experiment did, ever.
> Without self-replication it is not cell or anything resembling life
Nobody ever said self replication has to work the same way it does for us. The article does say he found ways for the cells to use other cells as templates for modification and indeed replication.
It's an interesting approach to replication - as it changes one existing cell into a replica of another, but it's quite feasible. More-over we have no actual idea what the earliest organic structures looked like, or even how they came to exist. There are dozens of viable theories on abiogenesis and none of them are currently provable - for all we know, that is exactly how the earliest replicating life began ! What were we BEFORE we were cells ? Surely we were simpler, more primitive cells with less of the features of current ones, and before that ? Well the mitochondria we have INSIDE our cells were once a seperate organism... now what used to be something alive in it's own right, is just a component of our cells. How many other components of our cells began as seperate, simpler, life form but didn't leave us fossils to conveniently prove it with ?
This research is in fact incredibly exciting because it shows a way of experimenting with ways early life may have begun. It's using different materials - but that's actually a GOOD thing, as it stops us from trying to just recreate what we have when we don't know what, what we have, used to be. It forces us to think from scratch, as life would have started... and that IS exciting.
More-over, if it works, if it gets far enough... it opens up entire new avenues of consideration in terms of how life may have evolved on other worlds.