That to justify your religion you have to drag mine into it? I sure don't justify my Christianity by citing Brahma or Buddha or anything outside of the bible. Yet you have been using the Lord Jesus Christ in an attempt to mainstream eastern religions. Your tactic merely shows that the legitimacy rests on the Lord Jesus, and that you're trying to leverage that.
Your desperate manuverings with statements like "Christianity can be considered a small part of Hinduism (philosophically)" show that either you are tragically misinformed or intentionally making wrong statements. Christianity makes sense logically, but Hinduism is so logically internally inconsistent on the other hand.
For example, Hinduism teaches that one works out, via karma, the sins of past lives by experiencing the victim instead of the perpetrator side of each sin in the past life. However this only causes a perpetual presence of things like wife beating, since if person A beats his wife in one lifetime, then in the next he is a beaten wife. This means there is another beater, and the cycle goes on forever, with no net reduction in sin possible ever. The logic of this is so {supply your own term} that it does take vast amounts of faith to believe in that religion.
I realize that you've stated your mind is closed to alternative thoughts, but for lurkers out there who want to study the topic of eastern religions vs. Christianity, I highly recommend a book by a former Hindu, ISBN 0849943272 at wherever you like to get books (I just looked at amazon and it's there).
There is no difference between Buddhism and Christianity
That is so amazingly inaccurate that it boggles the mind. Implicit in your post is that you would consider Hinduism and Christianity close as well, I gather.
You are however quite correct if you change one significant point: there are really only two forms of religion in the world. There is biblical Christianity, and there are works-based religions. In all non-biblical belief systems, humans must do something (works as in Mormonism or Catholicism or Buddhism) to earn something (godhood in Mormonism, heaven in Catholicism, nirvana in Buddhism). In contrast, in the biblical system, no works we can do will earn our way into heaven. Attending church, giving money, sacrificing, singing hymns, none of these are going to get us to heaven. As the bible says, all of our works are as filthy rags. The point is that God is perfect, and He cannot allow sin in His presence. And every human sins. Who taught you to lie the first time? It just came naturally, it is our sin nature. We cannot do anything to pay for our sins (past, present, future), since the wages of sin (note: singular) is death. Only if some one perfect were to give His life for our penalty can we be absolved of our sins. That one sinless person is the God-man, the Lord Jesus Christ. Only if we accept His free gift can we be absolved of sin.
If you want to see where you are heading, check out the sin-meter here.
Since the ultimate goal of Buddhism is to achieve nirvana, which is also known as nothingness, it would seem to be the most amazingly depressing religion around. Christianity offers eternal fellowship with our perfect Creator, a remarkable difference from buddhism's goal of achieving relief from a cycle of reincarnations.
Some examples of buddhist teachings:
If desire or craving, which is the complex system or process of constantly becoming, is the cause of suffering, then the elimination of desire would also cause the disappearance of suffering. The cessation of suffering is called Nirvana or the extinction of the flame of greed, hate and delusion. Nirvana is release from the Wheel of Samsara or the unending cycle of becoming, of reincarnation.
And another:
Samadhi (mental discipline) composed of right effort (purification through elimination of suffering), right mindfulness (getting rid of the ego) and right contentation (quieting the mind so to reach altered states of consciousness and thus dissolution into Nothingness or Nirvana).
That's awfully depressing; whereas a born-again Christian has a guarantee:
John 6:47 "Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me hath everlasting life."
and
John 14:2-3 "In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also."
So which makes more rational sense: to achieve nothingness by relief from an otherwise unending cycle of pain through reincarnations, or eternal joy with our Creator God?
Another fairly spectacular example is the collapse of Husky Stadium in Seattle in 1987 while it was under construction. Another is the sinking of the Mercer Island bridge, and the sinking of half of the Hood Canal bridge.
Gee, some things just aren't built that well out here in the Seattle area, are they? Or maybe it's the weather...
which is more than Dalrymple or anyone else has managed to do. In fact Dalrymple, Barnes, et al. have all based their work on the energy going from the dipoles into non-dipoles, that being the source of increase and decrease in what they claim are cycles of the field in the past. What Humphreys shows is, based on a century or so of evidence, a continuous decrease in the overall energy in the field. That very directly contradicts the models of Dalrymple and Barnes - their point is that the energy is moving between dipole and non-dipole portions of the field, and they are proven now to be incorrect. Your statement about the geologic record is partially based on a billions of years assumption; if you release that assumption, the record is in fact consistent with Humphreys' paper.
You claim that life started as something very simple. Yet natural selection could not operate on something that was incapable of nearly perfect replication, as otherwise the inherited positive characteristics would not be replicated with sufficient fidelity for accurate selection. It's the core of the insurmountable barrier - there has to be a near-perfect quality of reproduction for natural selection to be operative, yet to get there requires such a vast amount of organization and information that it cannot happen via stochastic processes. Your belief that we may see in this century self-replicating molecules made in HS chem labs merely points out that centuries of effort by intelligent forces can bring about something that won't happen spontaneously. Thanks for making my point.
Your claim that life is steady-state chemical reactions is, quite frankly, amazing and amusing. By that definition, many high school chemistry labs create life frequently. It is most effective to just leave your claim alone, as it's self-refuting.
Your statement
Don't try to B.S. me about magnetic fields. You don't have to read past the first paragraph of your link to know its wrong: it outright states that it is extrapolating a given rate of decay for the field. Even if the field is decaying now -- and it doesn't even matter whether it is -- it is simply false that the field has been steadily decaying over the history of the planet.
is quite fascinating in that were I to say "radiometric dating is suspect because it assumes constant rate of decay over time" you'd be all over me for that non-uniformitarian suggestion. Yet you make such a statement (clearly you have not read Humphreys' article or you'd see that he deals quite well with your objection) about magnetic fields while casting aspersions in the process.
Please at least read and comprehend the article before you dismiss it. Or at least admit you're too closed-minded to do so.
The refutations you seem to have missed are above. You claim you don't hold time to be your god, yet you entrust time to be the agent to bring about the miraculous: abiogenesis. At least be honest enough to admit where your faith is - there is no experiment you can conduct to show abiogenesis in action (the Miller-Urey absurdity being one particularly weak and useless attempt). Given that there is no experiment you can conduct to show abiogenesis occuring, you can only extrapolate and claim that if a to b happens, then A to Z happens, obscuring the nature of the intervening steps.
An alternative of who your god might be is from Kauffman (cited above several times) who said of natural selection
we might as well capitalise [it] as though it were the new deity.
You argue that time did wonders, I argue that the LORD God did.
So this distills down to: you (and evolutionists in general) believe life was created by your god, which is time. I (and young-earth Bible Believers in general) believe in the LORD God who created your god (time) and space and matter and physical laws and life.
As Dave Moore puts it: "I'd rather believe in a big God and have small problems that believe in a small god and have big problems".
Firstly, you're using the definition of life as essentially steady-state chemical reactions. That's awfully far from what most reasonable individuals would consider life. If you are open to investigating details on the probability of life arising, look here.
The point of the peanut butter illustration was perhaps a bit abstract, but still a key point. Inside that jar are amino acids, nucleic acids, sugars, carbohydrates, fats; basically a choice collection of key chemicals of life (that's why it's nutritious). Your claim therefore " Peanut butter doesn't have a sufficiently complex chemical mix... [for] the arisal to life on the early Earth..." is somewhat inaccurate. The chemicals are there.
If you have anything of an open mind and are willing to look beyond the highly variable quality found on talkorigins, please read the detailed refutation of Barnes' work on the magnetic field here.
But life is not as random as that. What we know about the formation of organic molecules seems to show that they will form almost every time they are given the chance. Given the right ingredients (some of which we know, some we don't), the right conditions (which we are learning to be varied beyond what we ever imagined), enough energy and time, and organic molecules will form. There is organic matter (not life, certainly, but still organic matter) iin the heads of comets. If organic matter can form there, it must be able to form almost anywhere that doesn't actively destroy it.
The issue here is that to form life takes very specific combinations, not just combinations. To have a biochemically reproducing system with sufficient accuracy to allow natural selection to be effective takes something of overwhelming improbability. To make goo does not. Chemisty is indeed nonrandom; that erects further barriers to abiogenesis. Such as the tendency of ordered things towards disorder in the absence of an organizing force. Since you're arguing for a non-directed abiogenesis, you must posit no organizing force. Without that, things break down, and time leads to degeneration of the precursors, not to their accumulation.
Otherwise, the packaged foods industry would be in big trouble. Billions of times a year, a jar of peanut butter is opened by someone in the world. Never is a new life form found in that act. Those billions of experiments, by your reckoning, should have produced something by now. The right chemicals for life are all there, but nothing happens.
You further stated that there have been fossils found which are of
... a fish with fins capapble of acting like legs?
Presumably you're talking about the Coelacanth. This is indeed a marvelous example of problems with old-earth dating scenarios (you know, the "fossils date the rock, but the rock dates the fossil" circular reasoning issue). The Coelacanth has been found quite alive and unchanged from its fossil record in the Indian ocean. However what was supposed to be fins in transition to legs is nothing of the sort (see here for details, or just google around). Yet it is still used as an index fossil for 70-400 MYA.
And yes it's very interesting that few T Rex skeletons have been found in the fossil record, while the trilobyte is relatively ubiquitous. Kind of like there were a giant flood, which would have buried bottom-dwelling sea creatures first and most efficiently. That also explains why there are trilobytes on top of Mt. Everest. But you probably don't believe in a worldwide flood either.
Actually some of the best evidence for a very young earth are things like the declining energy in the magnetic field of the planet (including the non-dipole moments), and the amount of He in the atmosphere and in deep rocks.
If there were aerosols or volatile organics, they would also interfere with the experiment in significant ways, particularly if they were of a concentration sufficient to block UV.
Photolysis of NH3, over the time periods considered, is sufficiently rapid with unshielded sunlight (i.e., ozone layer-free sunlight) that it would render the experiment moot.
There's a very good reason it would not work for you, one that is why Miller's experiment is not very useful. Hard UV (which you probably didn't have due to HS safety concerns, and which would have been blocked by the glass most likely anyway) would have dissociated the NH3 fairly rapidly.
That leads to a basic problem with the Miller-Urey experiment: their assumption was no free oxygen (they assumed a reducing, not an oxidizing, atmosphere). Free oxygen would completely mess up the reactions, so they excluded it from the experiment.
But without O2, there would be no O3 (aka ozone) in the upper atmosphere. That would mean that lots of hard UV would be coming into the lower atmosphere. That hard UV would dissociate any NH3 around, and without the ammonia, the experimental conditions would not have a good source of nitrogen, as N2 is so tightly coupled that it's close to inert under the conditions they were using.
So the experiment, while interesting, was pretty useless. With O2, it wouldn't work. Without O2, there would be no NH3, and it wouldn't work. Joseph Heller wrote a book about that basic concept once, called "Catch-22".
Re:It's life, Jim, but not as we know it...
on
Life on Mars? Why Not?
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
1. I said nothing about notions of conspiring atheists; you introduced that. 2. I never introduced theology, you did. It's true evolution is a religion, but I did not introduce religion as a topic, that was your action. 3. Can you defend Miller-Urey? It would be fascinating to see you try. Even Stanley Miller refused to do so when attending a presentation by Duane Gish some years ago.
"hundreds of elements" -- well not really. There are nowhere near 200 elements, which would be the minimum for a plural amount of hundreds of elements. You also err in saying that inorganic chemists don't touch anything with C in it. Diamond is a mineral studied far more by inorganic chemists than by organic chemists, who consider it merely a crystalline oddity. Silicon can hybridize to form large molecules and polymerize as carbon does; it's just not as stable in its four-bonds configuration (it has d orbitals that provide flexibility in the hybridization that the sp3 hybridized carbon does not).
Re:It's life, Jim, but not as we know it...
on
Life on Mars? Why Not?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
What a nice fantasy:
There was life that used only RNA. In this life, or proto-life, RNA served as both the store of genetic information (we use DNA for this) and as the catalytic workhorse of life (we use Protein for this). RNA has unique chemistry which may make it the only chemical, in the universe, capable of originating life - RNA can catalyze it's own synthesis, so it can reproduce all by itself.
This is just plain hooey. The only way life could evolve would be once it achieved nearly perfect self reproduction. It can't get to perfect, or there are no mutations. It can't be too far short of it though, or you wind up with gelatinous goo instead of descendants that natural selection can act upon.
Problem is the chicken and egg scenario. To get the base pairs in RNA, you need to have a collection of molecules (guanine, adenine, cytosine, and uracil) which cannot be synthesized in mono-enantiomers. Furthermore while HCN plus NH3 plus cyanogen and cyanacetylene can be used to generate those four bases, no mechanism for the synthesis of just ribose without enzymes has been shown. The synthetic processes to get ribose have very low yields - which means there are a lot of impurities, and they tend to be things that preferentially combine with the nucleic acids, therefore blocking ribose from getting together with the nucleic acids. And of course the ribose made this way is racemic, so we're back to the stereochemistry conundrum. This doesn't even cover the problems with phosphate interference and other issues, nor does it address the gibberish vs. meaning question.
Bottom line here is that RNA as the mechanism of abiogenesis is just as corrupt as the Miller-Urey experiment that is touted so highly in introductory bio textbooks.
Check out the article which explains that researchers now
think that there is now abundant evidence that most and probably all of the magnetites in ALH 84001 formed because of shock heating of carbonate. Faceted magnetites resembling the supposedly biogenic magnetites are crystallographically oriented in the carbonate lattice and could not have formed inside bacteria. We infer that ALH 84001 magnetites differ from abiogenic terrestrial magnetites because terrestrial carbonates never experienced the unique impact history of ALH 84001.
So if NASA is looking for hematite in order to prove something, they'll just be proving that the rocks they found got banged around.
Somehow that seems like a colossal waste of time and money, so hopefully they have some more noble, or more useful, reason to pick that location.
Re:The real story is tech progress, not Venter...
on
Life Made to Order
·
· Score: 1
Snowflakes are indeed complex, but they aren't designed, they are just random repetitions of crystalline formations. It appears you may be confusing "order" with "complexity". Order can be created simply by repeating patterns, as in many minerals. Specified complexity is required to produce the mechanisms of DNA replications.
Order (like XYXYXYXYXY) is different than complexity. This is how snowflakes and crystalline minerals are produced.
DNA (and the proteins encoded by the genes in the DNA) are non-random aperiodic sequences which are not caused by the quantum, physical and chemical properties of the constituent molecules (nucleotides and amino acids). This is immensely different that crystalline structures, which are caused by the inherent physical and chemical properties of the constituent atoms. DNA and protein structure and sequence must be imposed from outside by some intelligent process as they are nonrandom.
To quote the evolutionist Leslie Orgel,
Living things are distinguished by their specified complexity. Crystals such as granite fail to qualify as living because they lack complexity; mixtures of random polymers fail to qualify because they lack specificity. [L. Orgel, The Origins of Life, John Wiley, NY, 1973, p. 189]
Re:The real story is tech progress, not Venter...
on
Life Made to Order
·
· Score: 1
That is really cool stuff. The amount of ingenuity and excellence of design involved in making machinery that can generate DNA from a given sequence with an error rate of.01 percent is quite remarkable.
So (this is a genuine question) please explain why it is that the cellular level machinery which does this same task (assembly of DNA) but with more inherent complexity (built in error correction for example) is not viewed as a result of design but of stochastic processes?
I love your points, and I'd like to add a few more to the collection.
First is Robert Gentry's pleochroic halos research in granites with Po-218. These papers, published in Science and in Nature in the 60's and 70's, show that the foundation rocks (granites) of our continents were formed in seconds, not m|billions of years. Basically it shows there to be halos which could only exist from an isotope with about a three minute half-life as the initial phase. If the rocks were molten, the halos would not form with Po-218 as the parent. Only by either radically changing the radioactive decay rate, or by solidifying rapidly could they contain these halos. For details, see his book or summaries at his web site. Note that his research was never refuted in peer-reviewed journals equivalent to the ones his work was published in. There's a really weak attack on him at talkorigins, and if someone wants to try to defend Brawley's post there, go right ahead.
Next I'd like to highly recommend Russ Humphrey's paper on the decline in total energy in the earth's magnetic fields. The traditional response by evolutionists and old-earth advocates has been that the magnetic field energy is shifting from the dipole to nondipole moments (quadrapoles, octapoles, etc.) in preparation for an eventual field reversal. However Humphreys shows from detailed data that both the dipole and non-dipole moments are decreasing (non-dipole is slower but definitely decreasing). See his paper at CRSQ.
Further work by Gentry is about helium retention in deep rocks. Basically this comes down to two points: helium in deep rocks has not escaped, although it should have if they were the billion-year old strata they are claimed to be. Second, the amount of He in the atmosphere is 0.05% of what would be expected over 5 billion years (including the rate of He escape from the atmosphere over that time). Gentry's paper is: Gentry, R.V. et al., "Differential helium retention in zircons: implications for nuclear waste management", Geophys. Res. Lett. Vol 9, Oct 1982, 1129-1130. It's also in his book.
Further examples are salinity of the ocean, mud in the sea, comet deterioration rates, and too few "stone age" skeletons.
I have made no accusations of dishonesty on geologists; read the evolutionists' posts about Steve Austin if you want to see vitriolic attacks. I have questioned the accuracy of certain methods; that's not attacking individuals.
The idea that radiometric dating methods are unrealiable is not limited to creationists, there are evolutionists that have real problems with it as well. For example, William D. Stansfield, Science of Evolution (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1977), p.84:
"It is obvious that radiometric techniques may not be the absolute dating methods that they are claimed to be. Age estimates on a given geological stratum by different radiometric methods are often quite different (sometimes by hundreds of millions of years). There is no absolutely reliable long-term radiological 'clock.'"
Other absurdities in dating methods are in index fossils. For example, the "lungfish" (more accurately the coelocanth) is an index fossil for 70-300 MYa, yet live ones are swimming around the Indian Ocean right now.
Bio textbooks written in the last five years still use Haeckel's embryos as a "proof" of evolution. Yet in 1906 he admitted forging the drawings, was convicted of fraud by his peers, and forced into retirement. Ninety years after that, his drawings are still in use. What charitable interpretation can be put on that fact?
Of course the problem with the anomalous dates is excess Ar, what else could it be? But knowing the cause of a ratio being incorrect in a rock of known age does not justify greater accuracy to be assigned to unknown age rocks. The topic of this/. story is about footprints found in volcanic material which was dated to be roughly the same as the Mt. St. Helens rocks. So my point is that there could be just as much anomalous Ar in the Roccamonfina samples as there was in the Mt. St. Helens samples. There is no way to prove or disprove the age of the rocks unless there were a reliable observer present at the time who certified the amount of Ar at the formation of the rocks, and then monitored conditions to ensure no other contamination or alteration occurred.
Quite true none of them claim that. But since the confidence intervals in both Dalrymple's results and Austin's results are in the 300K+ range, that's still awfully inaccurate. Would you accept measurements off by four orders of magnitude in something else?
Allowing for the sake of discussion that everything you state is absolutely true, the problem that I originally stated still exists. Yes some of the samples were ten years old (Dalrymple's were older); yet when samples of UNKNOWN age are tested, it is not possible to screen out "too young to be tested" rocks as unknown age rocks are of, well, unknown age.
The point being that if you submit using double-blind techniques both known and unknown age rocks, you will get results which invalidate the radiometric dating techniques. Doing double-blind studies is a way to prove scientifically whether a process actually does produce results that can be relied upon. Until any process has been validated, it should not be accepted as accurate. Would you give your child a medicine that had not been double-blind tested? Why then rely upon a measurement method that has not been so validated?
But given that K-Ar dating is typically used for age ranges in the 10s or 100s of millions of years, these results show that the uncertanty due to primordial argon is small, and hence the method is accurate.
does not agree with sources that believe in K-Ar dating. For example, from here you see
Potassium-argon dates usually have comparatively large plus or minus factors--they may be on the order of ¼ million years for a 2 million year old date. In addition, this dating technique usually is of use only where there is rock rich in potassium. Essentially, it is used only where there has been local volcanic activity. Theoretically, however, it can be used for samples that date from the beginning of the earth (4.6 billion years) down to
100,000 years ago or even more recently. (emphasis added)
Potassium/Argon Dating (K/Ar):
Based on the radioactive decay of 40K
Age is a function of the 40K/40Ar ratio
Application restricted by the formation of potassium
Used mainly for dating basalts.
Age range 100,000 -> 3,000,000 yrs (emphasis added)
40-Potassium/40-Argon Geochronology - 40-K/39-Ar geochronology is one of the most widely used absolute-dating methods. The method relies on samples rich in mineral grains containing potassium, typically an igneous volcanic rock rich in sanidine feldspar. 40-K undergoes natural radiogenic decay through time (converting to argon-40 at a known rate). As the potassium gradually decays to argon, the naturally inert gas accumulates, confined within the mineral crystal lattice. As a result, the ratio of 40-K to 40-Ar derived from mineral grains is compared with the known rate of radiogenic decay of 40-K. By eliminating possible sources of error, this absolute dating method can be used of on selected rock samples typically ranging in ages from
~10,000 years on back in time to billions of years. The USGS maintains a 40-K/39-Ar laboratory (sample extraction equipment and mass spectrometer) in Menlo Park, CA (emphasis added)
So in conclusion, K-Ar dating is widely accepted for a far younger age than the age supposedly found in the Mt. St. Helens or the other sites.
Slashdot Mirror
That to justify your religion you have to drag mine into it? I sure don't justify my Christianity by citing Brahma or Buddha or anything outside of the bible. Yet you have been using the Lord Jesus Christ in an attempt to mainstream eastern religions. Your tactic merely shows that the legitimacy rests on the Lord Jesus, and that you're trying to leverage that.
Your desperate manuverings with statements like "Christianity can be considered a small part of Hinduism (philosophically)" show that either you are tragically misinformed or intentionally making wrong statements. Christianity makes sense logically, but Hinduism is so logically internally inconsistent on the other hand.
For example, Hinduism teaches that one works out, via karma, the sins of past lives by experiencing the victim instead of the perpetrator side of each sin in the past life. However this only causes a perpetual presence of things like wife beating, since if person A beats his wife in one lifetime, then in the next he is a beaten wife. This means there is another beater, and the cycle goes on forever, with no net reduction in sin possible ever. The logic of this is so {supply your own term} that it does take vast amounts of faith to believe in that religion.
I realize that you've stated your mind is closed to alternative thoughts, but for lurkers out there who want to study the topic of eastern religions vs. Christianity, I highly recommend a book by a former Hindu, ISBN 0849943272 at wherever you like to get books (I just looked at amazon and it's there).
You are however quite correct if you change one significant point: there are really only two forms of religion in the world. There is biblical Christianity, and there are works-based religions. In all non-biblical belief systems, humans must do something (works as in Mormonism or Catholicism or Buddhism) to earn something (godhood in Mormonism, heaven in Catholicism, nirvana in Buddhism). In contrast, in the biblical system, no works we can do will earn our way into heaven. Attending church, giving money, sacrificing, singing hymns, none of these are going to get us to heaven. As the bible says, all of our works are as filthy rags. The point is that God is perfect, and He cannot allow sin in His presence. And every human sins. Who taught you to lie the first time? It just came naturally, it is our sin nature. We cannot do anything to pay for our sins (past, present, future), since the wages of sin (note: singular) is death. Only if some one perfect were to give His life for our penalty can we be absolved of our sins. That one sinless person is the God-man, the Lord Jesus Christ. Only if we accept His free gift can we be absolved of sin.
If you want to see where you are heading, check out the sin-meter here.
Some examples of buddhist teachings:And another:That's awfully depressing; whereas a born-again Christian has a guarantee:andSo which makes more rational sense: to achieve nothingness by relief from an otherwise unending cycle of pain through reincarnations, or eternal joy with our Creator God?
Another fairly spectacular example is the collapse of Husky Stadium in Seattle in 1987 while it was under construction. Another is the sinking of the Mercer Island bridge, and the sinking of half of the Hood Canal bridge.
Gee, some things just aren't built that well out here in the Seattle area, are they? Or maybe it's the weather...
You claim that life started as something very simple. Yet natural selection could not operate on something that was incapable of nearly perfect replication, as otherwise the inherited positive characteristics would not be replicated with sufficient fidelity for accurate selection. It's the core of the insurmountable barrier - there has to be a near-perfect quality of reproduction for natural selection to be operative, yet to get there requires such a vast amount of organization and information that it cannot happen via stochastic processes. Your belief that we may see in this century self-replicating molecules made in HS chem labs merely points out that centuries of effort by intelligent forces can bring about something that won't happen spontaneously. Thanks for making my point.
Your statementis quite fascinating in that were I to say "radiometric dating is suspect because it assumes constant rate of decay over time" you'd be all over me for that non-uniformitarian suggestion. Yet you make such a statement (clearly you have not read Humphreys' article or you'd see that he deals quite well with your objection) about magnetic fields while casting aspersions in the process.
Please at least read and comprehend the article before you dismiss it. Or at least admit you're too closed-minded to do so.
An alternative of who your god might be is from Kauffman (cited above several times) who said of natural selection
You argue that time did wonders, I argue that the LORD God did.
So this distills down to: you (and evolutionists in general) believe life was created by your god, which is time. I (and young-earth Bible Believers in general) believe in the LORD God who created your god (time) and space and matter and physical laws and life.
As Dave Moore puts it: "I'd rather believe in a big God and have small problems that believe in a small god and have big problems".
Firstly, you're using the definition of life as essentially steady-state chemical reactions. That's awfully far from what most reasonable individuals would consider life. If you are open to investigating details on the probability of life arising, look here.
... [for] the arisal to life on the early Earth..." is somewhat inaccurate. The chemicals are there.
The point of the peanut butter illustration was perhaps a bit abstract, but still a key point. Inside that jar are amino acids, nucleic acids, sugars, carbohydrates, fats; basically a choice collection of key chemicals of life (that's why it's nutritious). Your claim therefore " Peanut butter doesn't have a sufficiently complex chemical mix
If you have anything of an open mind and are willing to look beyond the highly variable quality found on talkorigins, please read the detailed refutation of Barnes' work on the magnetic field here.
Otherwise, the packaged foods industry would be in big trouble. Billions of times a year, a jar of peanut butter is opened by someone in the world. Never is a new life form found in that act. Those billions of experiments, by your reckoning, should have produced something by now. The right chemicals for life are all there, but nothing happens.
You further stated that there have been fossils found which are ofPresumably you're talking about the Coelacanth. This is indeed a marvelous example of problems with old-earth dating scenarios (you know, the "fossils date the rock, but the rock dates the fossil" circular reasoning issue). The Coelacanth has been found quite alive and unchanged from its fossil record in the Indian ocean. However what was supposed to be fins in transition to legs is nothing of the sort (see here for details, or just google around). Yet it is still used as an index fossil for 70-400 MYA.
And yes it's very interesting that few T Rex skeletons have been found in the fossil record, while the trilobyte is relatively ubiquitous. Kind of like there were a giant flood, which would have buried bottom-dwelling sea creatures first and most efficiently. That also explains why there are trilobytes on top of Mt. Everest. But you probably don't believe in a worldwide flood either.
Actually some of the best evidence for a very young earth are things like the declining energy in the magnetic field of the planet (including the non-dipole moments), and the amount of He in the atmosphere and in deep rocks.
If there were aerosols or volatile organics, they would also interfere with the experiment in significant ways, particularly if they were of a concentration sufficient to block UV.
Photolysis of NH3, over the time periods considered, is sufficiently rapid with unshielded sunlight (i.e., ozone layer-free sunlight) that it would render the experiment moot.
There's a very good reason it would not work for you, one that is why Miller's experiment is not very useful. Hard UV (which you probably didn't have due to HS safety concerns, and which would have been blocked by the glass most likely anyway) would have dissociated the NH3 fairly rapidly.
That leads to a basic problem with the Miller-Urey experiment: their assumption was no free oxygen (they assumed a reducing, not an oxidizing, atmosphere). Free oxygen would completely mess up the reactions, so they excluded it from the experiment.
But without O2, there would be no O3 (aka ozone) in the upper atmosphere. That would mean that lots of hard UV would be coming into the lower atmosphere. That hard UV would dissociate any NH3 around, and without the ammonia, the experimental conditions would not have a good source of nitrogen, as N2 is so tightly coupled that it's close to inert under the conditions they were using.
So the experiment, while interesting, was pretty useless. With O2, it wouldn't work. Without O2, there would be no NH3, and it wouldn't work. Joseph Heller wrote a book about that basic concept once, called "Catch-22".
1. I said nothing about notions of conspiring atheists; you introduced that.
2. I never introduced theology, you did. It's true evolution is a religion, but I did not introduce religion as a topic, that was your action.
3. Can you defend Miller-Urey? It would be fascinating to see you try. Even Stanley Miller refused to do so when attending a presentation by Duane Gish some years ago.
"hundreds of elements" -- well not really. There are nowhere near 200 elements, which would be the minimum for a plural amount of hundreds of elements. You also err in saying that inorganic chemists don't touch anything with C in it. Diamond is a mineral studied far more by inorganic chemists than by organic chemists, who consider it merely a crystalline oddity. Silicon can hybridize to form large molecules and polymerize as carbon does; it's just not as stable in its four-bonds configuration (it has d orbitals that provide flexibility in the hybridization that the sp3 hybridized carbon does not).
Problem is the chicken and egg scenario. To get the base pairs in RNA, you need to have a collection of molecules (guanine, adenine, cytosine, and uracil) which cannot be synthesized in mono-enantiomers. Furthermore while HCN plus NH3 plus cyanogen and cyanacetylene can be used to generate those four bases, no mechanism for the synthesis of just ribose without enzymes has been shown. The synthetic processes to get ribose have very low yields - which means there are a lot of impurities, and they tend to be things that preferentially combine with the nucleic acids, therefore blocking ribose from getting together with the nucleic acids. And of course the ribose made this way is racemic, so we're back to the stereochemistry conundrum. This doesn't even cover the problems with phosphate interference and other issues, nor does it address the gibberish vs. meaning question.
Bottom line here is that RNA as the mechanism of abiogenesis is just as corrupt as the Miller-Urey experiment that is touted so highly in introductory bio textbooks.
Somehow that seems like a colossal waste of time and money, so hopefully they have some more noble, or more useful, reason to pick that location.
Order (like XYXYXYXYXY) is different than complexity. This is how snowflakes and crystalline minerals are produced.
DNA (and the proteins encoded by the genes in the DNA) are non-random aperiodic sequences which are not caused by the quantum, physical and chemical properties of the constituent molecules (nucleotides and amino acids). This is immensely different that crystalline structures, which are caused by the inherent physical and chemical properties of the constituent atoms. DNA and protein structure and sequence must be imposed from outside by some intelligent process as they are nonrandom.
To quote the evolutionist Leslie Orgel,
That is really cool stuff. The amount of ingenuity and excellence of design involved in making machinery that can generate DNA from a given sequence with an error rate of .01 percent is quite remarkable.
So (this is a genuine question) please explain why it is that the cellular level machinery which does this same task (assembly of DNA) but with more inherent complexity (built in error correction for example) is not viewed as a result of design but of stochastic processes?
I love your points, and I'd like to add a few more to the collection.
First is Robert Gentry's pleochroic halos research in granites with Po-218. These papers, published in Science and in Nature in the 60's and 70's, show that the foundation rocks (granites) of our continents were formed in seconds, not m|billions of years. Basically it shows there to be halos which could only exist from an isotope with about a three minute half-life as the initial phase. If the rocks were molten, the halos would not form with Po-218 as the parent. Only by either radically changing the radioactive decay rate, or by solidifying rapidly could they contain these halos. For details, see his book or summaries at his web site. Note that his research was never refuted in peer-reviewed journals equivalent to the ones his work was published in. There's a really weak attack on him at talkorigins, and if someone wants to try to defend Brawley's post there, go right ahead.
Next I'd like to highly recommend Russ Humphrey's paper on the decline in total energy in the earth's magnetic fields. The traditional response by evolutionists and old-earth advocates has been that the magnetic field energy is shifting from the dipole to nondipole moments (quadrapoles, octapoles, etc.) in preparation for an eventual field reversal. However Humphreys shows from detailed data that both the dipole and non-dipole moments are decreasing (non-dipole is slower but definitely decreasing). See his paper at CRSQ.
Further work by Gentry is about helium retention in deep rocks. Basically this comes down to two points: helium in deep rocks has not escaped, although it should have if they were the billion-year old strata they are claimed to be. Second, the amount of He in the atmosphere is 0.05% of what would be expected over 5 billion years (including the rate of He escape from the atmosphere over that time). Gentry's paper is: Gentry, R.V. et al., "Differential helium retention in zircons: implications for nuclear waste management", Geophys. Res. Lett. Vol 9, Oct 1982, 1129-1130. It's also in his book.
Further examples are salinity of the ocean, mud in the sea, comet deterioration rates, and too few "stone age" skeletons.
The idea that radiometric dating methods are unrealiable is not limited to creationists, there are evolutionists that have real problems with it as well. For example, William D. Stansfield, Science of Evolution (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1977), p.84:Other absurdities in dating methods are in index fossils. For example, the "lungfish" (more accurately the coelocanth) is an index fossil for 70-300 MYa, yet live ones are swimming around the Indian Ocean right now.
Bio textbooks written in the last five years still use Haeckel's embryos as a "proof" of evolution. Yet in 1906 he admitted forging the drawings, was convicted of fraud by his peers, and forced into retirement. Ninety years after that, his drawings are still in use. What charitable interpretation can be put on that fact?
Of course the problem with the anomalous dates is excess Ar, what else could it be? But knowing the cause of a ratio being incorrect in a rock of known age does not justify greater accuracy to be assigned to unknown age rocks. The topic of this /. story is about footprints found in volcanic material which was dated to be roughly the same as the Mt. St. Helens rocks. So my point is that there could be just as much anomalous Ar in the Roccamonfina samples as there was in the Mt. St. Helens samples. There is no way to prove or disprove the age of the rocks unless there were a reliable observer present at the time who certified the amount of Ar at the formation of the rocks, and then monitored conditions to ensure no other contamination or alteration occurred.
Quite true none of them claim that. But since the confidence intervals in both Dalrymple's results and Austin's results are in the 300K+ range, that's still awfully inaccurate. Would you accept measurements off by four orders of magnitude in something else?
Allowing for the sake of discussion that everything you state is absolutely true, the problem that I originally stated still exists. Yes some of the samples were ten years old (Dalrymple's were older); yet when samples of UNKNOWN age are tested, it is not possible to screen out "too young to be tested" rocks as unknown age rocks are of, well, unknown age.
The point being that if you submit using double-blind techniques both known and unknown age rocks, you will get results which invalidate the radiometric dating techniques. Doing double-blind studies is a way to prove scientifically whether a process actually does produce results that can be relied upon. Until any process has been validated, it should not be accepted as accurate. Would you give your child a medicine that had not been double-blind tested? Why then rely upon a measurement method that has not been so validated?