Nonsense. The problem with origin of life research is precisely the opposite: not that there is no plausible scenario, but instead that there are far far too many possibilities that we do not know enough about to rule out this or that one. Legitimate science lies in trying to learn more and nail down information that can help us figure out what is and isn't plausible. But simply declaring that its impossible isn't based on anything: it's an empty, pragmatically unprovable claim.
Darwin speculated about "warm ponds" in a private letter, not in his major published works. If you knew anything about his actual work, its scope, and so forth, you'd see that any claim that his theory rested on or required abiogenesis is pure nonsense. The origin of a hereditary metabolism is a very different sort of thing than the evolution of a hereditary metabolism, involving very different sorts of processes.
Please provide some evidence that you are thinking "scientifically" about the issue of evolution or life's origins. Merely looking at a cartoon in a textbook written for children is not the same thing as having any clue what the evidence for something is, or having sufficient knowledge to be able to judge whether something really has the sort of "holes" you assert it does.
Ah, yes, a worldview in which wrong belief is the ultimate wrong to be punished by the worst thing imaginable... and its OTHER views that don't accept that which are bigoted.
The Chinese (and by this, I mean the current government and the culture it enforces) apologize? The one true chosen people who are destined to rule the world?
What universe are you living in?
Remember, this is the same country that once inspired mobs to slaughter these very animals en masse because their glorious leaders declared that they were enemies of the revolution or something (I'm not kidding) because they were magical sacred symbols of a decedent past. That's some scary crazy.
I'm not saying that these attitudes are inherently Chinese or that all Chinese people agree with them, but that's most certainly the prevailing attitude of the Chinese government and the ultra-nationalists whose views rule. Any Chinese citizen who too loudy criticizes the motherland for things like this without official approval would risk their (and their families, since the Chinese government loves to punish and threaten not simply yourself, but ones family as well) well being.
Comfort to me? I don't understand. Yes the other Gospels only list the one. They also had different textual agendas. Matthew was written in a time when it was clear that Christianity was failing to catch on with educated Jews even as it was spreading like wildfire amongst pagans and Christians were getting desperate about the disconnect.
For the Jews and Scripture, there is no "fulfill them later." Either they are fulfilled or they aren't. If they aren't, then there is no messiah, end of story: any nut can do claimed miracles and then make promises about the future that never come to pass: Scripture warns against PRECISELY that sort of trickster.
Furthermore, nothing in the Torah suggests that the messiah has to be a son of god (whatever THAT is), commit selfless suicide, or be anything more than a human being. In fact, who the messiah is isn't even important: it's the messianic age that they bring that is important. Since original sin doesn't exist in Scripture, and since there are ALREADY paths to salvation and forgiveness in Scripture, the entire problem that Jesus supposedly comes to solve don't even exist.
You can see why Jews that actually knew Scripture, as opposed to the illiterate, dropout cranks like Paul, and non-Jews, would find the claims of Christianity rather unconvincing.
Few Biblical scholars outside theologians who think it necessary to believe so think that the Gospel of Matthew was actually written by the apostle Matthew: the oldest texts we have say nothing about this internally, and it is merely a tradition to ascribe "according to Matthew" to it.
Matthew 21:7, by the way. The use of two animals is an echo of the Scriptural reference to "an ass, the foal of an ass" but this is actually read as a poeticism, not a reference to two animals as Matthew seems to believe. And, as with all the others, are not the core signs of the messiah, none of which Jesus, I guess rather embarrassingly, fulfilled.
It's ambiguous. Regardless, Jewish scholars never considered that passage to be one of the core messianic prophecies to begin with, given that it refers to events that come to happen in the OT. When early Christians decided that Jesus must have been the messiah, they hit the snag that none of the actual major "signs" of the messiah had come to pass. So they scrambled for trying to read all sorts of other possibilities out of Scripture.
Did Mary have any free will or was she simply a robot designed to deliver babies? If she had free will, why not simply preform this magical voodoo on all humans?
Of course, that's assuming that the concept of "free will" even makes any sense, much less "original sin."
Those same Jewish scholars also understood that the passage in question was referring to events that happened not long after in the history, and have nothing to do with the Jesus or any paganite miracle. Shouldn't that also be given special weight? Or only when you like?
This is said BY the gospel interpreting the prophecy, not by any actual known person in Jesus' life. There are no references at all to anyone calling Jesus this UNTIL one of the later Gospel writers decided that, given the fact that Jesus had clearly failed to fulfill any of the actual messianic prophecies, they needed to figure out some backup ones to cover. Things like riding on two asses at once (because, yet again, they didn't understand hebrew very well) and just inserting a random angel mentioning a name that no one used are part of that.
Yes, but without any "moment of conception" which nutjobs have declared is the magic process that fills a bunch of dividing cells with magic soulpowers that, say, a tumor or adult stem cells doesn't have.
Of course, in most cases, homo sapien partho lines do NOT naturally develop normally: that's whats interesting about this research is that its been more normal in its development than most.
Well, given that there is no evidence at all that any Mary was actually a virgin (and all the ways virgins can be impregnated even without breaking their hymen, which ancient peoples were likely ignorant of), its far more likely that she just got knocked up... or that the whole story was rumor-milled into the Jesus story because you weren't considered cool in the Roman Empire unless you were born of a virgin.
That's right kids: every month a woman murders a precious potential life with her sinful menstruation. No wonder the OT made them sit out alone and think about what they had done.
Remember guys: everytime you allow a fertile woman to go a month without being impregnated, you make God very very angry.
I'm 100% with you. This is just one of those articles that mostly wastes space itself. There ARE situations in which there is a trade-off between funding for one and the other, and there IS a pretty legitimate dispute there, and so far, that dispute doesn't seem to be a problem for actually getting things done.
You're right. Also all these people getting so worked up over abortion, no abortion. Why can't everyone just call it even and then go out have have some abortions WITHIN MODERATION, right?
Seriously though: sometimes one side of the argument really IS right, and in such a case, we really are better off figuring out which side that is. I don't see any reason to think that robot/human exploration can happily coexist: we just had a ridiculous amount of funding cut from one so that a vanity project to Mars could be funded. Isn't that a pretty legitimate reason for the dispute?
But you can't just assume the things are constant that you want and ignore those you don't. The fact is that multiple independent means of measure do things like establish the old age of the earth, and all of these things are consistent with chemistry and direct extrapolations from everything we see in the present, within our own time span. You're the one trying to introduce evidenceless claims about how all of these things varied.
"You tell me how a pile of reptile s**t can be preserved in sediment by any slow process. "
That's exactly the point: you don't need me to tell you. You yourself can go and LEARN about how it can happen: the resources to learn this are widely available. Heck, most scientists are pretty nice people: you can actually even email them right off their department websites and they'll be happy to explain. You aren't willing to listen learn, or care. That's the rub.
People have done these experiments: people have looked at the evidence. It's all out there to look at and read.
"You tell me how a slow burial over time could eliminate decay and oxidation of soft tissues. "
Not all fossil burials are slow: there is no one single process by which fossilization occurs. Soft tissues are very rarely preserved unless the conditions are exactly right, and indeed it isn't the soft tissues that are actually themselves preserved, as I keep trying to tell you, and as you keep failing to understand.
"You tell me how the mammoths and archsaurs could be preserved by anything OTHER than an overwhelming, sudden catastrophe."
First of all, the majority of the mammoths that have been found are not preserved intact, and none are without signs of pre-freeze decay and/or predation. There are clearly many different causes of death for the mammoths we have, and even different methods of mummification. Yet again, you are just repeating a one or two line creationist claim without having any real idea about the subject you are discussing (the "food still in its mouth" thing is a dead giveaway).
You really are going to Gish gallop with one after another of these quick creationist tropes, aren't you? On to asteriods. What's next, the amount of dust on the moon?
Lower rates of teen sex, lower rates of teen pregnancy, lower rates of STDs, fewer abortions: do we REALLY want to subject our children to those sorts of trends?
"If you could, you'd tell me how to make a fossil or cite someone who did make one. You KNOW you can't and neither can anyone who believes the evolutionary fairytale."
I've already pointed out things like diatoms, which fossilize in succesive beds, right to this day. I've already noted that we find fossils in all steps of the process of mineralization. I've already pointed out that your original discussion of fossils demonstrated that you were ignorant of how fossilization worked, meaning that your claim that it could not was fatally undermined (how can you know it can't work if you don't even understand how it is claimed to work?) You ask for cites, but of course the whole point is that you can go to nearly any chemist, biologist or other expert, or any textbook and journal you want all the evidence for my position. Heck, wikipedia even has a decent article on the subject. I don't need to rely to links to crackpot websites.
"No, it is an experiment I repeat every night in the PRESENT, not the past. So far nothing unusual has happened. I usually sleep fine each night unless I ate too much for dinner."
But the present never demonstrates anything about the future unless you assume the uniformity of the basic interactions of material reality. And you do: implicitly. In fact, you wouldn't have any reason at all to risk lying down on your bed unless you implicitly assumed it. You wouldn't have any cause for treating pretty much any knowledge of the world at all that relies on past evidence or experience as real. Again, without the assumption of uniformity, you really have no grounds at all to believe the universe even existed two seconds ago, much less last night.
"When people run out of reason, they resort to personal attacks, such as you have."
A far more plausible alternative is that when people of reason are confronted with those that have no respect for reason, logic, evidence, or argument, they are exasperated.
Look, you're just so full of falsehoods and ignorance of what you are talking about that it's hard to know where to start, or if its even worth the effort. You're simply all wrong on fossils: you have no idea what you are talking about. I have no doubt that you've been fed a bunch of BS by creationists and are just regurgitating it back to me, rather than you outright lying, but the effect is the same. Nothing about fossils is in the least consistent with flood geology.
"However, I can test such assumptions EXPERIMENTALLY by lying down on one to see if they are valid. "
No, you can't, not in that case, because the test is about past experience being uniform with the present. No amount of testing can ever establish that, and yet you act and live as if the past were real and evidence of past events is real. It's only when you decide that the clear evidence isn't in accord with your religious beliefs that you raise a fuss about it.
Any government willing to deliver unproven, untested treatments, especially those with a very high chance of long-term side effects (and one the major ones in this case are cancer) is not acting responsibly or protecting it's citizens from being used as guinea pigs.
"We're trying to protect the lives of innocent children."
Also, careful not to step on that toadstool over there, tiny invisible pixies live inside it that you might crush to death!
Ah the worries of people who live in a fantasy world where a blastocyst is an "innocent child."
"Why not do medical experiments on random adults? "
Hmmm, let me try to explain this in terms you might understand: Because they have magical glowing balls of spirit energy inside them, put there by the wizard Zanzibar, and such experiments would damage them.
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Nonsense. The problem with origin of life research is precisely the opposite: not that there is no plausible scenario, but instead that there are far far too many possibilities that we do not know enough about to rule out this or that one. Legitimate science lies in trying to learn more and nail down information that can help us figure out what is and isn't plausible. But simply declaring that its impossible isn't based on anything: it's an empty, pragmatically unprovable claim.
Darwin speculated about "warm ponds" in a private letter, not in his major published works. If you knew anything about his actual work, its scope, and so forth, you'd see that any claim that his theory rested on or required abiogenesis is pure nonsense. The origin of a hereditary metabolism is a very different sort of thing than the evolution of a hereditary metabolism, involving very different sorts of processes.
Please provide some evidence that you are thinking "scientifically" about the issue of evolution or life's origins. Merely looking at a cartoon in a textbook written for children is not the same thing as having any clue what the evidence for something is, or having sufficient knowledge to be able to judge whether something really has the sort of "holes" you assert it does.
Ah, yes, a worldview in which wrong belief is the ultimate wrong to be punished by the worst thing imaginable... and its OTHER views that don't accept that which are bigoted.
Right....
The Chinese (and by this, I mean the current government and the culture it enforces) apologize? The one true chosen people who are destined to rule the world?
What universe are you living in?
Remember, this is the same country that once inspired mobs to slaughter these very animals en masse because their glorious leaders declared that they were enemies of the revolution or something (I'm not kidding) because they were magical sacred symbols of a decedent past. That's some scary crazy.
I'm not saying that these attitudes are inherently Chinese or that all Chinese people agree with them, but that's most certainly the prevailing attitude of the Chinese government and the ultra-nationalists whose views rule. Any Chinese citizen who too loudy criticizes the motherland for things like this without official approval would risk their (and their families, since the Chinese government loves to punish and threaten not simply yourself, but ones family as well) well being.
Comfort to me? I don't understand. Yes the other Gospels only list the one. They also had different textual agendas. Matthew was written in a time when it was clear that Christianity was failing to catch on with educated Jews even as it was spreading like wildfire amongst pagans and Christians were getting desperate about the disconnect.
For the Jews and Scripture, there is no "fulfill them later." Either they are fulfilled or they aren't. If they aren't, then there is no messiah, end of story: any nut can do claimed miracles and then make promises about the future that never come to pass: Scripture warns against PRECISELY that sort of trickster.
Furthermore, nothing in the Torah suggests that the messiah has to be a son of god (whatever THAT is), commit selfless suicide, or be anything more than a human being. In fact, who the messiah is isn't even important: it's the messianic age that they bring that is important. Since original sin doesn't exist in Scripture, and since there are ALREADY paths to salvation and forgiveness in Scripture, the entire problem that Jesus supposedly comes to solve don't even exist.
You can see why Jews that actually knew Scripture, as opposed to the illiterate, dropout cranks like Paul, and non-Jews, would find the claims of Christianity rather unconvincing.
Few Biblical scholars outside theologians who think it necessary to believe so think that the Gospel of Matthew was actually written by the apostle Matthew: the oldest texts we have say nothing about this internally, and it is merely a tradition to ascribe "according to Matthew" to it.
Matthew 21:7, by the way. The use of two animals is an echo of the Scriptural reference to "an ass, the foal of an ass" but this is actually read as a poeticism, not a reference to two animals as Matthew seems to believe. And, as with all the others, are not the core signs of the messiah, none of which Jesus, I guess rather embarrassingly, fulfilled.
It's ambiguous. Regardless, Jewish scholars never considered that passage to be one of the core messianic prophecies to begin with, given that it refers to events that come to happen in the OT. When early Christians decided that Jesus must have been the messiah, they hit the snag that none of the actual major "signs" of the messiah had come to pass. So they scrambled for trying to read all sorts of other possibilities out of Scripture.
Did Mary have any free will or was she simply a robot designed to deliver babies? If she had free will, why not simply preform this magical voodoo on all humans?
Of course, that's assuming that the concept of "free will" even makes any sense, much less "original sin."
Those same Jewish scholars also understood that the passage in question was referring to events that happened not long after in the history, and have nothing to do with the Jesus or any paganite miracle. Shouldn't that also be given special weight? Or only when you like?
This is said BY the gospel interpreting the prophecy, not by any actual known person in Jesus' life. There are no references at all to anyone calling Jesus this UNTIL one of the later Gospel writers decided that, given the fact that Jesus had clearly failed to fulfill any of the actual messianic prophecies, they needed to figure out some backup ones to cover. Things like riding on two asses at once (because, yet again, they didn't understand hebrew very well) and just inserting a random angel mentioning a name that no one used are part of that.
Yes, but without any "moment of conception" which nutjobs have declared is the magic process that fills a bunch of dividing cells with magic soulpowers that, say, a tumor or adult stem cells doesn't have.
Of course, in most cases, homo sapien partho lines do NOT naturally develop normally: that's whats interesting about this research is that its been more normal in its development than most.
Well, given that there is no evidence at all that any Mary was actually a virgin (and all the ways virgins can be impregnated even without breaking their hymen, which ancient peoples were likely ignorant of), its far more likely that she just got knocked up... or that the whole story was rumor-milled into the Jesus story because you weren't considered cool in the Roman Empire unless you were born of a virgin.
Americans like feeling heroic. Preventing tragedy isn't very telegenic or interesting. But letting things to go shit makes for damn good tv!
That's right kids: every month a woman murders a precious potential life with her sinful menstruation. No wonder the OT made them sit out alone and think about what they had done.
Remember guys: everytime you allow a fertile woman to go a month without being impregnated, you make God very very angry.
I'm 100% with you. This is just one of those articles that mostly wastes space itself. There ARE situations in which there is a trade-off between funding for one and the other, and there IS a pretty legitimate dispute there, and so far, that dispute doesn't seem to be a problem for actually getting things done.
You're right. Also all these people getting so worked up over abortion, no abortion. Why can't everyone just call it even and then go out have have some abortions WITHIN MODERATION, right?
Seriously though: sometimes one side of the argument really IS right, and in such a case, we really are better off figuring out which side that is. I don't see any reason to think that robot/human exploration can happily coexist: we just had a ridiculous amount of funding cut from one so that a vanity project to Mars could be funded. Isn't that a pretty legitimate reason for the dispute?
No, it's not the wrong part: it's an example of the sort of thin reed on which bizarre and arbitrary moral assertions are made.
Of course, I don't believe for a second that the reasoning of the actual Paul is in accord with his character in Acts either.
"I never said that NOTHING is constant."
But you can't just assume the things are constant that you want and ignore those you don't. The fact is that multiple independent means of measure do things like establish the old age of the earth, and all of these things are consistent with chemistry and direct extrapolations from everything we see in the present, within our own time span. You're the one trying to introduce evidenceless claims about how all of these things varied.
"You tell me how a pile of reptile s**t can be preserved in sediment by any slow process. "
That's exactly the point: you don't need me to tell you. You yourself can go and LEARN about how it can happen: the resources to learn this are widely available. Heck, most scientists are pretty nice people: you can actually even email them right off their department websites and they'll be happy to explain. You aren't willing to listen learn, or care. That's the rub.
People have done these experiments: people have looked at the evidence. It's all out there to look at and read.
"You tell me how a slow burial over time could eliminate decay and oxidation of soft tissues. "
Not all fossil burials are slow: there is no one single process by which fossilization occurs. Soft tissues are very rarely preserved unless the conditions are exactly right, and indeed it isn't the soft tissues that are actually themselves preserved, as I keep trying to tell you, and as you keep failing to understand.
"You tell me how the mammoths and archsaurs could be preserved by anything OTHER than an overwhelming, sudden catastrophe."
First of all, the majority of the mammoths that have been found are not preserved intact, and none are without signs of pre-freeze decay and/or predation. There are clearly many different causes of death for the mammoths we have, and even different methods of mummification. Yet again, you are just repeating a one or two line creationist claim without having any real idea about the subject you are discussing (the "food still in its mouth" thing is a dead giveaway).
You really are going to Gish gallop with one after another of these quick creationist tropes, aren't you? On to asteriods. What's next, the amount of dust on the moon?
Just because you COULD make that argument doesn't mean that it was wise to actually go and do so, and then end up looking silly.
But just look at what THAT got them!
Lower rates of teen sex, lower rates of teen pregnancy, lower rates of STDs, fewer abortions: do we REALLY want to subject our children to those sorts of trends?
Well, at least they came for you at the end there, so it had a happy ending after all.
"If you could, you'd tell me how to make a fossil or cite someone who did make one. You KNOW you can't and neither can anyone who believes the evolutionary fairytale."
I've already pointed out things like diatoms, which fossilize in succesive beds, right to this day. I've already noted that we find fossils in all steps of the process of mineralization. I've already pointed out that your original discussion of fossils demonstrated that you were ignorant of how fossilization worked, meaning that your claim that it could not was fatally undermined (how can you know it can't work if you don't even understand how it is claimed to work?) You ask for cites, but of course the whole point is that you can go to nearly any chemist, biologist or other expert, or any textbook and journal you want all the evidence for my position. Heck, wikipedia even has a decent article on the subject. I don't need to rely to links to crackpot websites.
"No, it is an experiment I repeat every night in the PRESENT, not the past. So far nothing unusual has happened. I usually sleep fine each night unless I ate too much for dinner."
But the present never demonstrates anything about the future unless you assume the uniformity of the basic interactions of material reality. And you do: implicitly. In fact, you wouldn't have any reason at all to risk lying down on your bed unless you implicitly assumed it. You wouldn't have any cause for treating pretty much any knowledge of the world at all that relies on past evidence or experience as real. Again, without the assumption of uniformity, you really have no grounds at all to believe the universe even existed two seconds ago, much less last night.
"When people run out of reason, they resort to personal attacks, such as you have."
A far more plausible alternative is that when people of reason are confronted with those that have no respect for reason, logic, evidence, or argument, they are exasperated.
Look, you're just so full of falsehoods and ignorance of what you are talking about that it's hard to know where to start, or if its even worth the effort. You're simply all wrong on fossils: you have no idea what you are talking about. I have no doubt that you've been fed a bunch of BS by creationists and are just regurgitating it back to me, rather than you outright lying, but the effect is the same. Nothing about fossils is in the least consistent with flood geology.
"However, I can test such assumptions EXPERIMENTALLY by lying down on one to see if they are valid. "
No, you can't, not in that case, because the test is about past experience being uniform with the present. No amount of testing can ever establish that, and yet you act and live as if the past were real and evidence of past events is real. It's only when you decide that the clear evidence isn't in accord with your religious beliefs that you raise a fuss about it.
Any government willing to deliver unproven, untested treatments, especially those with a very high chance of long-term side effects (and one the major ones in this case are cancer) is not acting responsibly or protecting it's citizens from being used as guinea pigs.
"We're trying to protect the lives of innocent children."
Also, careful not to step on that toadstool over there, tiny invisible pixies live inside it that you might crush to death!
Ah the worries of people who live in a fantasy world where a blastocyst is an "innocent child."
"Why not do medical experiments on random adults? "
Hmmm, let me try to explain this in terms you might understand: Because they have magical glowing balls of spirit energy inside them, put there by the wizard Zanzibar, and such experiments would damage them.