.....Faith comes from knowing that the reason is insufficient.......
That is the best statement you have made. You are quite good at expressing some thoughts. God challenges us to reason with Him in Isaiah 1:18. It is not necessary, nor even good, to park reason outside of the church door.
(.....Let me put it this way, let's just suppose for the sake of argument that ID is correct. Then what? What are the consequences for medicine?....)
That's easy. God came up with this design, let's try to figure out how He did it and see how we can improve certain aspects of the design for our use. We do this with human designs all the time. Just giving credit where credit is due for a design or invention doesn't at all negate it's usefulness or clever solution to accomplish a task. When a programmer comes up with a clever piece of code, does giving him/her recognition for that reduce the usefulness of the program? We imitate God's designs in our technology. Survival aids, such as the echo location system used by bats and dolphins still outdo our sonar and radar copies. No human has yet designed a light source that converts 100% of its energy input into light. Fireflies and certain other luminescent creatures do. Let's learn how God figured this out and make use of it for our light sources.
The early scientists who laid the discovery foundations for our modern technology were almost all Christians. They believed that God designed an orderly universe with consistent, discoverable laws, mirroring His own nature. They believed that this God had communicated to mankind through the written record of the Bible, as well as through the things He had made.
We live our everyday, practical lives much more by faith and trust than reason. When you get into an elevator, train, airplane etc. you trust that the people who designed, maintained and operate these conveyances did their jobs faithfully. When you are about to drive your car across a bridge, you don't first stop and examine with your reason whether that bridge is safe. Every once in a while though we learn that those responsible for that bridge or conveyance did not do their job or were ignorant of some factors. Still, exercising faith, I'm sure you have crossed a few bridges since the one in Minneapolis collapsed. It would be totally unreasonable for you to now refuse to have faith in all bridges, just because of a major collapse of one. You still have reasonable faith that the next bridge you cross will not collapse, but you do not KNOW it won't.
We exercise reason based on faith in the designers, builders, maintainers and operators of almost all of our modern infrastructure and technology. Reason then is built on a foundation of faith, whether in God or other people. I have faith that God is truthful in what He has communicated.
.......The scientific process is either useful or it is not,.....
The scientific process is very useful. It is when the scientific measurements are interpreted under certain assumptions, that different conclusions are drawn than if other assumptions are made.
(...Evolution theory predicts change by mutation...)
I have never made a statement about any mechanisms that are theorized to drive evolution. Evolution is based on descent, whatever the mechanism for change may be. It is the idea of descent that is assumed. ID assumes re-useable components and processes. Whatever evidence you present, can be interpreted based on good logic derived from either assumption. There is NO way to prove either assumption is correct. ID is certainly closer to way we humans as intelligent beings operate our technologies.
(.....Junk DNA, and long strings on non-functional DNA is not an efficiency that humans would replicate.....)
It used to be thought by medical science that certain organs, such as, for example, the appendix or the tonsils, were superfluous leftovers for which there seemed to be no discernible function. Only after years of painstaking research was it discovered that these things did have important purposes. Could it be that these so called "non-functional" DNA sequences do have purpose which has not yet been discovered? After all, as far as genetic science goes, we are still in the crystal radio stage right now.
(......And how is this at all relevant?......)
I have no quarrel with the logic of any inferences, only upon the basic, underlying assumption upon which the house of logic is built. Evolution in itself is a very logical, beautifully built house. However it is built upon a foundation of certain assumptions which cannot be proven any more than certain axioms in geometry are ever proven. These axioms are just accepted, without any questions or proof. One of the axioms of evolution is the constancy of our MEASUREMENTS of time, as based on certain relations in physics which we assume (believe) to be constant. Another axiom of evolution is that in living things, change is successive descent from one generation to another.
ID can explain or interpret all of the evidence in an equally logical way, but there is a different set of underlying assumptions (beliefs) as the foundation. The axioms of ID or evolution are unproven and unprovable.
(......you probably don't understand the difference between faith and reason either........)
Yes I do. Reason is based on faith. We have faith that the laws of physics were the same yesterday and will be the same tomorrow as we observe them today. We have ONLY access to the present. Yesterday is gone forever and tomorrow is not here yet. There is NO way we can KNOW for sure, but we believe this and it is a REASONABLE belief, but a belief, nevertheless. Science then is based on belief.
You believe that you will wake up tomorrow, but there is NO way you can know this. If you are young, it is highly probable that you will be alive tomorrow. Yet there were many of people alive yesterday, even young ones, who believed and hoped that they would be alive today to do this or that and they are dead. They never made it to today. Yesterday was their last day. One day it will be your turn. You do not believe that at that time you will face your Creator, but what if your belief about God and judgment were wrong? What if Jesus was right about the things He said and did?
.....Palatability is not a requirement for good theory.....
No it isn't, but then what is your definition of a "good" theory. Is your theory (if you believe in evolution) that you are descended from a rock, via worms and finally through apes better than my theory that I am a creation of a loving God who desires to have me in His presence now and forever?
.....We do find similarities in the DNA between closely related modern animals as well as anatomical similarities in fossilized ancestors REPEATEDLY just as evolution predicts we should........
Inferences, logical or otherwise are based on certain fundamental assumptions. One of the key evolutionary beliefs in interpreting the evidence of similarities in life forms and chemistries is the BELIEF that the more complex DESCENDED from the simpler. Another way of INTERPRETING the very same evidence is the belief (both are beliefs) that components and processes that work well get reused by the designer. The DNA data storage and coding system far exceeds in density, anything human designers have come up with. It is so flexible and robust the designer used it again and again, just as human programmers aim for re-useable code.
We use this idea of re-useable parts and processes in our own designs. The basic idea of the wheel is recycled for many uses. Nobody would suggest that modern wheels on cars descended from those on horse carts in the same sense that humans are thought to have descended from apes. Its just that elements of design that worked well for cart wheels have been incorporated into cars by their designers as well. We can even say that the cart wheel is the ancestor of the automobile wheel. However we use the idiom of ancestor here to mean common principles of design. This is not how the word "ancestor" in used by evolutionists when applied to living things.
The idea of descent, in the sense of lineage, is not used in other sciences. Even in physics certain assumptions, especially pertaining to time, are made. For example, we measure certain relationships and find that they have not changed much or at all since we developed the ability to measure these. We assume (believe) that we can extrapolate this short term constancy far into the past and future. Based on these assumptions we can calculate when certain events must have taken place or will take place. The "constants" upon which radioactive decay is based are BELIEVED to be invariant, but recent evidence has shown that this is not the case. We can make very logical inferences and come to good conclusions based on these only if they are not based on assumptions, but sure knowledge.
Evolution, just like religion, is based on certain fundamental assumptions (beliefs) that simply cannot be known. You can believe or not in the existence of God, but you cannot prove or disprove this.
..... Evolution doesn't predict that lizards turn into birds in a single generation,.......
Nobody has seen this happen in a thousand or a million generations either. Evolutionists tell us that reptiles evolved into birds over large amounts of time. We can grow many generations of e-coli for example, and produce all sorts of variations thereof, but they will ALWAYS remain basically e-coli. You will never get an amoeba or a paramecium, no matter how many generations of e-coli you grow, though the latter two are also single cell organisms..
Evolution is faith, not science. Science is when a REPEATABLE experiment yields the same result each time. Drop a rock a million times and it always gains speed at the same rate. We can make observations of the behavior of natural phenomena again and again, but only in the present. That is science. When we try to INTERPRET the past or future from present observation, often, certain assumptions (beliefs) come into play.
We see and measure certain processes and then assume (believe by faith) that these processes are constant and extrapolation into the past or future is based on that belief. Such a belief may be well founded or maybe not. We cannot KNOW for sure because we have only such a minute time snapshot. Any logical inferences based on an assumption (belief) makes the conclusion, however logical the thought process may be, also a belief, not science.
Fossils, for example do not form today because of decay and oxidation after an organism dies. We do find fossils all over the planet. If we cannot watch them form or make them by a plausible mechanism, then all we can do is conjecture about how or why the decay that happens today did not happen in the past.
You cannot refute what I am saying and so, like usual, you resort to a personal attack. That is always a sure sign that you have lost the debate.
....From clay. Go read up on abiogenesis and clay.....
Where did the information in the clay come from? Proteins are not simple and require detailed instructions to make them. The chemistry of ink on blueprint paper doesn't explain or address the instructions printed thereon how to build a house. Information can only come from a MIND, not some inanimate object. The latter can be carriers, but not originators of information.
.......Most theories say that RNA came first........
Maybe so. However both RNA and DNA are only information CARRIERS in the same way that a floppy disk or a piece of paper is. In a disk or paper, the source of information is ALWAYS a mind, a human mind. DNA and RNA have been called the blueprints of life. A blueprint carries information of how to build a house, an airplane or even a paper mill.
The DNA and RNA carry information how to make proteins, including the proteins they themselves are made of. Where did the instructions encoded into the DNA originate? In the mind of God? If not from the mind of God, then where?
......On a side note I find it incredible that people persist in clinging to narrow minded beliefs such as those imposed by religious observance.......
Indeed so do I. Man, no matter where he resides on this planet is incurably religious. Religions take precious resources away from the evolutionary drive for the "survival of the fittest" and should have, according to the theory died out long ago.
The Biblical view of God creating man in such a way as to include within that human creature a yearning and attraction to Himself, explains the deep seated religiosity of mankind much better than evolutionary theory. Despite years of atheistic, evolutionary indoctrination, the vast majority of Americans still believe in God.
....The biggest problem with God is that he has never been found......
True, but the subject of God is taught in religion classes and is a matter of faith. You can choose to believe in God or not and it is unconstitutional to teach about Him in public schools.
Fiction, like the Oort cloud and evolution, also based on belief, is taught in science class, pawned off as true and factual and paid for by my tax dollars. There is no evidence for much of the fiction concerning origins, taught as science.
My dictionary states that probability is the likelihood of something happening or being the case. The likelihood for ALL conditions to fall into place by chance is extremely small. The earth is a special place in the galaxy. The likelihood of winning the lottery jackpot is far greater than a planet like earth happening by randomness.
No, not totally, but nearly so. If the earth rotated as slowly, there would be no life on it. One side would be too hot and the other would be too cold anyway. The planet has to have a rate of rotation fast enough to prevent temperatures outside the life hospitable zone. If it spins too fast, its atmosphere becomes too turbulent for many life forms.
.....And yet, the fact is, nobody has ever actually seen a uranium atom split......
I guess the fact that two cities have disappeared under a mushroom cloud and that there are numerous fission reactors doesn't prove anything about splitting uranium atoms. What is your definition of "seen"? We can measure and observe the effects of electrons tunneling and even use it in many of our technical gadgets. NOBODY has ever turned a lizard into a bird or an ape into a man. Evolution believers always tell everyone that sort of "evolution" takes time, lots of time and cannot be made to happen in our lifetime or even over many generations.
Evolution theory has become a catch all for trying to answer the question of origins. Only very narrow aspects of evolution have been and can be shown to take place repeatedly and reliably TODAY. These all have to do only with organisms adapting to their living conditions. Bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics and Finches with thicker beaks surviving because they can eat tougher, harder to crack seeds. Darwin observed this on the Galapagos Islands. Science is about observation and experiments TODAY. Conjecturing about processes and procedures that may have happened in the past, but cannot be made to happen today or observed to be happening today is NOT science. Nobody has ever made a fossil, especially by any conceivable method that could occur naturally, without the application of intelligence. Again the magic of time is brought into play to explain the existence of fossils.
.......The most popular theory for the origins of the Oort Cloud......
The biggest problem with Oort cloud is that it is has never been found. It is a pure fiction with some unfounded assumptions (beliefs) and dubious math to give it an aura of credibility.
.... if energy is ultimately the major engine driving the evolution of life from organic molecules into forms we could confidently call living organisms,.......
The problem is that energy alone is insufficient to build something complex out of simple parts. The ingredient of Information must also be present. Proteins are quite complex. DNA and RNA are proteins which store the information to make proteins. What came first, the DNA made from proteins that holds the information to make proteins or the proteins? It's the ultimate chicken and egg problem. The likeliest solution is that someone made them both together in their lab and put them here together. Someone also made a whole chicken, which subsequently laid eggs.
You can supply all the parts of a mouse trap, but without some sort of direction, energy alone will NEVER assemble these into a functioning device for catching mice.
.....We can start with the fact that macro-evolution (as defined by biologists, and not creationists) has been observed (that is to say, evolution beyond the species level)......
Are sure that is a FACT, scientifically observed? Can you give an example that shows where someone has observed in nature today or made this happen in a lab?
In the Bible the word "kind" is used and that is not the same as the scientific idea of "species". Dogs, cats, snakes, birds etc. are different kinds. There are many species within each kind.
To contradict the Biblical record upon which the Creationists base their theory, someone would have to DEMONSTRATE the evolution of one kind of creature into another kind. Saying that this only happens over large amounts of time doesn't demonstrate this. That simply makes time equivalent to magic. Anytime you postulate that a certain process happened in the past, it should be possible to demonstrate this process in the present.
In physics we can emulate with powerful particle accelerators, many of the conditions that are theorized to have existed at the "big bang". That gives us real science understanding of what likely took place way back then. Nothing similar has ever been done in the life sciences.
Evolution from one kind of creature to another has been postulated, but has never been demonstrated TODAY.
Has anybody ever made any such molecules? If so, were the conditions under which they were made even remotely close to what is imagined to be the environment of the early earth? Science is about observation and experiment. These theories postulate process nobody has ever seen or made happen in a real science lab. Just because you can make bricks, doesn't mean you can make a house by the same methods you made the bricks.
....There are likely to be 1000s of Earth-like planets in the galaxy....
That is wishful thinking. There are simply too many parameters that have to be "just so" in order to build a laboratory where the conditions for life exist. There is likely only one such lab, our earth. That lab, like any science lab did not just happen, but was planned and executed by a superb engineer.
To me it is preferable to believe we are the children of the God who also made the stars. Because we are His children, we are also brothers. That is the truth that is more palatable to me and many others than the idea that we are a cosmic accident flung to earth by a comet.
.....Having a temperature range that allows liquid water to exist.....
That is a rather narrow range as a matter of fact. A planet with an orbit stable enough for such a narrow temperature spec can only exist if the primary star has no similar sized neighbor closer than about 3.8 light years. That alone excludes more than half of all known stars in our galaxy. Most stars are too close too each other.
In addition, any life hosting planet has to meet a number of other critical specs. One of them is the correct spacing to a properly sized star. Huge stars vary their energy output too much over time to keep the temperature stable for any given planetary orbit. If the star is too small, then the planet has to be too close to that star to get enough heat. In that case, the planet can no longer rotate independently. One side, such as Mercury or our own moon will always fact the body it orbits.
The planet also has to be the correct mass. To little and the water and atmosphere will evaporate into space until life can no longer happen or be sustained if it did happen. Too big a mass will let ammonia and methane accumulate, killing or at least severely stifling life. Mars and Venus are only a little smaller and larger respectively than earth.
There are many other specs a planet-star system has to meet, but the ones I mentioned are the most obvious. The spectrum of the star should be a close match for a process of converting light into complex compounds needed by all life forms. The Sun's spectrum is well matched to the energy exchanges and chemical binding forces as evident in photosynthesis. The atmosphere must allow the relevant wavelengths through and screen out the most harmful rays from the sun and outer space.
A little math of probabilities soon reveals that our earth is indeed a very special place. It is highly unlikely that there is another planet like ours in this galaxy. Could it be, just maybe, that some engineer figured out all the needed parameters? Could it be that this One, knowing that He would want to create life, had to first come up with a carefully designed laboratory where His great experiment we call "life" could be performed?
........I have a hard time believing that a small, cold (even with radiation) clump of ice is somehow a more optimal place for life to begin than a warm planet 90 million aways from a star.......
Why not? The magic of time and chance, like any other magic can work anywhere, even in space, on a comet. The evolutionary fairy tale for adults, mislabeled science can work anywhere, after all it's all by the magic of immense amounts of time. With enough of this time magic, any rock, whether on earth or somewhere in space can turn into a frog. After more time Billions of years worth of magic, the frog turns into a man. Inevitably, with more time working together with chance one of these men WILL become a prince. There IS a Santa Claus and according to fairy tale evolutionary theory, frogs DO become princes, eventually, after enough time. No kiss from a beautiful maiden is needed, only time, lots of it. Evolution depends on time, great amounts thereof. Without the magic of time, evolution cannot work, on earth nor in space, period.
.......melding all elements in one flat sound, tiring your ears......
Indeed, true for most modern pop music. But this is not only in the recording process, but intrinsic to the types of music listened to by the majority today. In classical music, such as some of my old LPs there is much more of a dynamic range from a pianissimo solo flute passage to the triple forte of the full orchestra in the finale. Encoding some of these into AAC files onto an iPod doesn't materially affect the dynamics and listening pleasure. Also much of the modern music is originally produced electronically, rather than by purely acoustic means.
Music is in itself a highly subjective art that everyone perceives differently, depending on mood, age of the listener and who knows how many other factors. The saying "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" applies. So yes, if the signal is broken at the level of the live performance already, the recoding can never be better.
To you it was trivial, because you have a mind and you DESIGNED that program with that particular goal. The computer did not come up with new information. Information obeys rules of its own that are different from the laws that apply to physical things. A computer can be and usually is better at certain tasks than its designer. That's a major reason we find it useful. It can even come up with new combinations of patterns. A list of names carefully alphabetized contains no more information than that same list of names in random order. The alphabetized list is much more useful to humans, but a computer can find a given name just as fast or nearly so, even in that same random list. There is however no new information generated by arranging that list in any particular order. Your "crit" was akin to a list arranged in a certain, albeit more complex order, as specified by the program you wrote, governing the behavior of these crits.
Original information has never been demonstrated to come from anything other than a mind. All software comes from a mind, but expresses itself in hardware, often in unforeseen and unplanned ways. Ask Bill Gates about that!
(.....Let's talk about the liver for a moment......)
I was not talking about the complexity of the brain or any other organ, but that the mind and its products are not physical in the same sense as the brain or liver are. The liver deals with and operates only on physical "stuff", but the brain APPEARS to be involved somehow with non-physical things such as consciousness, self awareness, thoughts and other items of that nature. Whether the brain generates mind or is simply a conduit for a distinct entity called the mind is not answerable yet and may never be, at least not "scientifically". That question has been and still is being wrestled with by religion and philosophy.
.....that the brain obeys the physics that everything else has turned out to obey........
How do we know we have discovered ALL the laws of physics? How do we KNOW that time-space-matter-energy is all there is? We can BELIEVE that, but we cannot know. Is a thought, idea, emotion bound by the same laws that govern the physical world? It appears not. Thoughts and ideas and such find physical expression. Love may express itself as a gentle hug and a warm smile, but these physical manifestations are not love itself.
No matter in how much detail you examine the chemistry and interactions of ink and paper, those researches will tell you absolutely NOTHING about the arrangement of symbols on that paper. The arrangement thereof constitutes information which is not subject to all the laws of physics.
Just as in a computer there is a distinction between hardware and software, so also is there a distinction between the brain and the mind. If you can show any example, where software arises purely from the hardware ie. a self programming computer, then it could be true that the brain in and of itself is the source of intelligence.
.......We know of one world with life, and on that world, intelligence developed........
Do we really KNOW whether life and intelligence simply developed or have most modern people chosen to BELIEVE this? It has never been demonstrated in a lab or observed anywhere in nature, that information and life can arise from the action of matter and energy alone. Many believe this somehow happened in the past, but cannot be shown happening today.
In all of our human experience, we find that technological complexity always begins in a MIND. Many are not willing to accept the possibility of a mind, God if you will, behind the complexity of the natural world. Acceptance of such a Mind immediately implies responsibility and accountability to such a mind and the possibility that there is a purpose and goal of our existence. Many, if not most of us, do not like the idea of being held accountable about the way we live.
Only the One who created Space-TIME-matter-energy knows the time component and therefore can accurately foretell the future. Even so, it is fun to speculate about future technology and events.
........You now have a machine that is slightly more intelligent than a human......
The assumption of course may be wrong. Could it be that intelligence is more or even something entirely different than any arrangement of matter and energy, could ever produce, no matter how many components are used and how complex their arrangement? We have no proof even, that human intelligence, the center of consciousness, indeed life itself is confined to that collection of cells we call "brain". Making a machine that can always win at a game like chess or checkers or outdo a human at anything else, doesn't make such a machine "intelligent". Is it even our intelligence that makes us human? What is the essence of human-ness? Philosophers and sci-fi writers have pondered this and the latter have written many entertaining stories.
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.....Faith comes from knowing that the reason is insufficient.......
That is the best statement you have made. You are quite good at expressing some thoughts. God challenges us to reason with Him in Isaiah 1:18. It is not necessary, nor even good, to park reason outside of the church door.
(.....Let me put it this way, let's just suppose for the sake of argument that ID is correct. Then what? What are the consequences for medicine?....)
That's easy. God came up with this design, let's try to figure out how He did it and see how we can improve certain aspects of the design for our use. We do this with human designs all the time. Just giving credit where credit is due for a design or invention doesn't at all negate it's usefulness or clever solution to accomplish a task. When a programmer comes up with a clever piece of code, does giving him/her recognition for that reduce the usefulness of the program? We imitate God's designs in our technology. Survival aids, such as the echo location system used by bats and dolphins still outdo our sonar and radar copies. No human has yet designed a light source that converts 100% of its energy input into light. Fireflies and certain other luminescent creatures do. Let's learn how God figured this out and make use of it for our light sources.
The early scientists who laid the discovery foundations for our modern technology were almost all Christians. They believed that God designed an orderly universe with consistent, discoverable laws, mirroring His own nature. They believed that this God had communicated to mankind through the written record of the Bible, as well as through the things He had made.
We live our everyday, practical lives much more by faith and trust than reason. When you get into an elevator, train, airplane etc. you trust that the people who designed, maintained and operate these conveyances did their jobs faithfully. When you are about to drive your car across a bridge, you don't first stop and examine with your reason whether that bridge is safe. Every once in a while though we learn that those responsible for that bridge or conveyance did not do their job or were ignorant of some factors. Still, exercising faith, I'm sure you have crossed a few bridges since the one in Minneapolis collapsed. It would be totally unreasonable for you to now refuse to have faith in all bridges, just because of a major collapse of one. You still have reasonable faith that the next bridge you cross will not collapse, but you do not KNOW it won't.
We exercise reason based on faith in the designers, builders, maintainers and operators of almost all of our modern infrastructure and technology. Reason then is built on a foundation of faith, whether in God or other people. I have faith that God is truthful in what He has communicated.
.......The scientific process is either useful or it is not,.....
The scientific process is very useful. It is when the scientific measurements are interpreted under certain assumptions, that different conclusions are drawn than if other assumptions are made.
(...Evolution theory predicts change by mutation...)
I have never made a statement about any mechanisms that are theorized to drive evolution. Evolution is based on descent, whatever the mechanism for change may be. It is the idea of descent that is assumed. ID assumes re-useable components and processes. Whatever evidence you present, can be interpreted based on good logic derived from either assumption. There is NO way to prove either assumption is correct. ID is certainly closer to way we humans as intelligent beings operate our technologies.
(.....Junk DNA, and long strings on non-functional DNA is not an efficiency that humans would replicate.....)
It used to be thought by medical science that certain organs, such as, for example, the appendix or the tonsils, were superfluous leftovers for which there seemed to be no discernible function. Only after years of painstaking research was it discovered that these things did have important purposes. Could it be that these so called "non-functional" DNA sequences do have purpose which has not yet been discovered? After all, as far as genetic science goes, we are still in the crystal radio stage right now.
(......And how is this at all relevant?......)
I have no quarrel with the logic of any inferences, only upon the basic, underlying assumption upon which the house of logic is built. Evolution in itself is a very logical, beautifully built house. However it is built upon a foundation of certain assumptions which cannot be proven any more than certain axioms in geometry are ever proven. These axioms are just accepted, without any questions or proof. One of the axioms of evolution is the constancy of our MEASUREMENTS of time, as based on certain relations in physics which we assume (believe) to be constant. Another axiom of evolution is that in living things, change is successive descent from one generation to another.
ID can explain or interpret all of the evidence in an equally logical way, but there is a different set of underlying assumptions (beliefs) as the foundation. The axioms of ID or evolution are unproven and unprovable.
(......you probably don't understand the difference between faith and reason either........)
Yes I do. Reason is based on faith. We have faith that the laws of physics were the same yesterday and will be the same tomorrow as we observe them today. We have ONLY access to the present. Yesterday is gone forever and tomorrow is not here yet. There is NO way we can KNOW for sure, but we believe this and it is a REASONABLE belief, but a belief, nevertheless. Science then is based on belief.
You believe that you will wake up tomorrow, but there is NO way you can know this. If you are young, it is highly probable that you will be alive tomorrow. Yet there were many of people alive yesterday, even young ones, who believed and hoped that they would be alive today to do this or that and they are dead. They never made it to today. Yesterday was their last day. One day it will be your turn. You do not believe that at that time you will face your Creator, but what if your belief about God and judgment were wrong? What if Jesus was right about the things He said and did?
.....Palatability is not a requirement for good theory.....
No it isn't, but then what is your definition of a "good" theory. Is your theory (if you believe in evolution) that you are descended from a rock, via worms and finally through apes better than my theory that I am a creation of a loving God who desires to have me in His presence now and forever?
.....We do find similarities in the DNA between closely related modern animals as well as anatomical similarities in fossilized ancestors REPEATEDLY just as evolution predicts we should........
Inferences, logical or otherwise are based on certain fundamental assumptions. One of the key evolutionary beliefs in interpreting the evidence of similarities in life forms and chemistries is the BELIEF that the more complex DESCENDED from the simpler. Another way of INTERPRETING the very same evidence is the belief (both are beliefs) that components and processes that work well get reused by the designer. The DNA data storage and coding system far exceeds in density, anything human designers have come up with. It is so flexible and robust the designer used it again and again, just as human programmers aim for re-useable code.
We use this idea of re-useable parts and processes in our own designs. The basic idea of the wheel is recycled for many uses. Nobody would suggest that modern wheels on cars descended from those on horse carts in the same sense that humans are thought to have descended from apes. Its just that elements of design that worked well for cart wheels have been incorporated into cars by their designers as well. We can even say that the cart wheel is the ancestor of the automobile wheel. However we use the idiom of ancestor here to mean common principles of design. This is not how the word "ancestor" in used by evolutionists when applied to living things.
The idea of descent, in the sense of lineage, is not used in other sciences. Even in physics certain assumptions, especially pertaining to time, are made. For example, we measure certain relationships and find that they have not changed much or at all since we developed the ability to measure these. We assume (believe) that we can extrapolate this short term constancy far into the past and future. Based on these assumptions we can calculate when certain events must have taken place or will take place. The "constants" upon which radioactive decay is based are BELIEVED to be invariant, but recent evidence has shown that this is not the case. We can make very logical inferences and come to good conclusions based on these only if they are not based on assumptions, but sure knowledge.
Evolution, just like religion, is based on certain fundamental assumptions (beliefs) that simply cannot be known. You can believe or not in the existence of God, but you cannot prove or disprove this.
..... Evolution doesn't predict that lizards turn into birds in a single generation,.......
Nobody has seen this happen in a thousand or a million generations either. Evolutionists tell us that reptiles evolved into birds over large amounts of time. We can grow many generations of e-coli for example, and produce all sorts of variations thereof, but they will ALWAYS remain basically e-coli. You will never get an amoeba or a paramecium, no matter how many generations of e-coli you grow, though the latter two are also single cell organisms..
Evolution is faith, not science. Science is when a REPEATABLE experiment yields the same result each time. Drop a rock a million times and it always gains speed at the same rate. We can make observations of the behavior of natural phenomena again and again, but only in the present. That is science. When we try to INTERPRET the past or future from present observation, often, certain assumptions (beliefs) come into play.
We see and measure certain processes and then assume (believe by faith) that these processes are constant and extrapolation into the past or future is based on that belief. Such a belief may be well founded or maybe not. We cannot KNOW for sure because we have only such a minute time snapshot. Any logical inferences based on an assumption (belief) makes the conclusion, however logical the thought process may be, also a belief, not science.
Fossils, for example do not form today because of decay and oxidation after an organism dies. We do find fossils all over the planet. If we cannot watch them form or make them by a plausible mechanism, then all we can do is conjecture about how or why the decay that happens today did not happen in the past.
You cannot refute what I am saying and so, like usual, you resort to a personal attack. That is always a sure sign that you have lost the debate.
....From clay. Go read up on abiogenesis and clay.....
Where did the information in the clay come from? Proteins are not simple and require detailed instructions to make them. The chemistry of ink on blueprint paper doesn't explain or address the instructions printed thereon how to build a house. Information can only come from a MIND, not some inanimate object. The latter can be carriers, but not originators of information.
.......Most theories say that RNA came first........
Maybe so. However both RNA and DNA are only information CARRIERS in the same way that a floppy disk or a piece of paper is. In a disk or paper, the source of information is ALWAYS a mind, a human mind. DNA and RNA have been called the blueprints of life. A blueprint carries information of how to build a house, an airplane or even a paper mill.
The DNA and RNA carry information how to make proteins, including the proteins they themselves are made of. Where did the instructions encoded into the DNA originate? In the mind of God? If not from the mind of God, then where?
......On a side note I find it incredible that people persist in clinging to narrow minded beliefs such as those imposed by religious observance.......
Indeed so do I. Man, no matter where he resides on this planet is incurably religious. Religions take precious resources away from the evolutionary drive for the "survival of the fittest" and should have, according to the theory died out long ago.
The Biblical view of God creating man in such a way as to include within that human creature a yearning and attraction to Himself, explains the deep seated religiosity of mankind much better than evolutionary theory. Despite years of atheistic, evolutionary indoctrination, the vast majority of Americans still believe in God.
....The biggest problem with God is that he has never been found......
True, but the subject of God is taught in religion classes and is a matter of faith. You can choose to believe in God or not and it is unconstitutional to teach about Him in public schools.
Fiction, like the Oort cloud and evolution, also based on belief, is taught in science class, pawned off as true and factual and paid for by my tax dollars. There is no evidence for much of the fiction concerning origins, taught as science.
My dictionary states that probability is the likelihood of something happening or being the case. The likelihood for ALL conditions to fall into place by chance is extremely small. The earth is a special place in the galaxy. The likelihood of winning the lottery jackpot is far greater than a planet like earth happening by randomness.
....Mercury isn't tidal-locked.....
No, not totally, but nearly so. If the earth rotated as slowly, there would be no life on it. One side would be too hot and the other would be too cold anyway. The planet has to have a rate of rotation fast enough to prevent temperatures outside the life hospitable zone. If it spins too fast, its atmosphere becomes too turbulent for many life forms.
.....And yet, the fact is, nobody has ever actually seen a uranium atom split ......
I guess the fact that two cities have disappeared under a mushroom cloud and that there are numerous fission reactors doesn't prove anything about splitting uranium atoms. What is your definition of "seen"? We can measure and observe the effects of electrons tunneling and even use it in many of our technical gadgets. NOBODY has ever turned a lizard into a bird or an ape into a man. Evolution believers always tell everyone that sort of "evolution" takes time, lots of time and cannot be made to happen in our lifetime or even over many generations.
Evolution theory has become a catch all for trying to answer the question of origins. Only very narrow aspects of evolution have been and can be shown to take place repeatedly and reliably TODAY. These all have to do only with organisms adapting to their living conditions. Bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics and Finches with thicker beaks surviving because they can eat tougher, harder to crack seeds. Darwin observed this on the Galapagos Islands. Science is about observation and experiments TODAY. Conjecturing about processes and procedures that may have happened in the past, but cannot be made to happen today or observed to be happening today is NOT science. Nobody has ever made a fossil, especially by any conceivable method that could occur naturally, without the application of intelligence. Again the magic of time is brought into play to explain the existence of fossils.
.......The most popular theory for the origins of the Oort Cloud ......
The biggest problem with Oort cloud is that it is has never been found. It is a pure fiction with some unfounded assumptions (beliefs) and dubious math to give it an aura of credibility.
.... if energy is ultimately the major engine driving the evolution of life from organic molecules into forms we could confidently call living organisms,.......
The problem is that energy alone is insufficient to build something complex out of simple parts. The ingredient of Information must also be present. Proteins are quite complex. DNA and RNA are proteins which store the information to make proteins. What came first, the DNA made from proteins that holds the information to make proteins or the proteins? It's the ultimate chicken and egg problem. The likeliest solution is that someone made them both together in their lab and put them here together. Someone also made a whole chicken, which subsequently laid eggs.
You can supply all the parts of a mouse trap, but without some sort of direction, energy alone will NEVER assemble these into a functioning device for catching mice.
.....We can start with the fact that macro-evolution (as defined by biologists, and not creationists) has been observed (that is to say, evolution beyond the species level)......
Are sure that is a FACT, scientifically observed? Can you give an example that shows where someone has observed in nature today or made this happen in a lab?
In the Bible the word "kind" is used and that is not the same as the scientific idea of "species". Dogs, cats, snakes, birds etc. are different kinds. There are many species within each kind.
To contradict the Biblical record upon which the Creationists base their theory, someone would have to DEMONSTRATE the evolution of one kind of creature into another kind. Saying that this only happens over large amounts of time doesn't demonstrate this. That simply makes time equivalent to magic. Anytime you postulate that a certain process happened in the past, it should be possible to demonstrate this process in the present.
In physics we can emulate with powerful particle accelerators, many of the conditions that are theorized to have existed at the "big bang". That gives us real science understanding of what likely took place way back then. Nothing similar has ever been done in the life sciences.
Evolution from one kind of creature to another has been postulated, but has never been demonstrated TODAY.
.....They were replicating organic molecules.....
Has anybody ever made any such molecules? If so, were the conditions under which they were made even remotely close to what is imagined to be the environment of the early earth? Science is about observation and experiment. These theories postulate process nobody has ever seen or made happen in a real science lab. Just because you can make bricks, doesn't mean you can make a house by the same methods you made the bricks.
....There are likely to be 1000s of Earth-like planets in the galaxy....
That is wishful thinking. There are simply too many parameters that have to be "just so" in order to build a laboratory where the conditions for life exist. There is likely only one such lab, our earth. That lab, like any science lab did not just happen, but was planned and executed by a superb engineer.
....we are children of the stars.....
To me it is preferable to believe we are the children of the God who also made the stars. Because we are His children, we are also brothers. That is the truth that is more palatable to me and many others than the idea that we are a cosmic accident flung to earth by a comet.
.....Having a temperature range that allows liquid water to exist .....
That is a rather narrow range as a matter of fact. A planet with an orbit stable enough for such a narrow temperature spec can only exist if the primary star has no similar sized neighbor closer than about 3.8 light years. That alone excludes more than half of all known stars in our galaxy. Most stars are too close too each other.
In addition, any life hosting planet has to meet a number of other critical specs. One of them is the correct spacing to a properly sized star. Huge stars vary their energy output too much over time to keep the temperature stable for any given planetary orbit. If the star is too small, then the planet has to be too close to that star to get enough heat. In that case, the planet can no longer rotate independently. One side, such as Mercury or our own moon will always fact the body it orbits.
The planet also has to be the correct mass. To little and the water and atmosphere will evaporate into space until life can no longer happen or be sustained if it did happen. Too big a mass will let ammonia and methane accumulate, killing or at least severely stifling life. Mars and Venus are only a little smaller and larger respectively than earth.
There are many other specs a planet-star system has to meet, but the ones I mentioned are the most obvious. The spectrum of the star should be a close match for a process of converting light into complex compounds needed by all life forms. The Sun's spectrum is well matched to the energy exchanges and chemical binding forces as evident in photosynthesis. The atmosphere must allow the relevant wavelengths through and screen out the most harmful rays from the sun and outer space.
A little math of probabilities soon reveals that our earth is indeed a very special place. It is highly unlikely that there is another planet like ours in this galaxy. Could it be, just maybe, that some engineer figured out all the needed parameters? Could it be that this One, knowing that He would want to create life, had to first come up with a carefully designed laboratory where His great experiment we call "life" could be performed?
........I have a hard time believing that a small, cold (even with radiation) clump of ice is somehow a more optimal place for life to begin than a warm planet 90 million aways from a star.......
Why not? The magic of time and chance, like any other magic can work anywhere, even in space, on a comet. The evolutionary fairy tale for adults, mislabeled science can work anywhere, after all it's all by the magic of immense amounts of time. With enough of this time magic, any rock, whether on earth or somewhere in space can turn into a frog. After more time Billions of years worth of magic, the frog turns into a man. Inevitably, with more time working together with chance one of these men WILL become a prince. There IS a Santa Claus and according to fairy tale evolutionary theory, frogs DO become princes, eventually, after enough time. No kiss from a beautiful maiden is needed, only time, lots of it. Evolution depends on time, great amounts thereof. Without the magic of time, evolution cannot work, on earth nor in space, period.
.......melding all elements in one flat sound, tiring your ears......
Indeed, true for most modern pop music. But this is not only in the recording process, but intrinsic to the types of music listened to by the majority today. In classical music, such as some of my old LPs there is much more of a dynamic range from a pianissimo solo flute passage to the triple forte of the full orchestra in the finale. Encoding some of these into AAC files onto an iPod doesn't materially affect the dynamics and listening pleasure. Also much of the modern music is originally produced electronically, rather than by purely acoustic means.
Music is in itself a highly subjective art that everyone perceives differently, depending on mood, age of the listener and who knows how many other factors. The saying "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" applies. So yes, if the signal is broken at the level of the live performance already, the recoding can never be better.
.....Actually, that's fairly trivial......
To you it was trivial, because you have a mind and you DESIGNED that program with that particular goal. The computer did not come up with new information. Information obeys rules of its own that are different from the laws that apply to physical things. A computer can be and usually is better at certain tasks than its designer. That's a major reason we find it useful. It can even come up with new combinations of patterns. A list of names carefully alphabetized contains no more information than that same list of names in random order. The alphabetized list is much more useful to humans, but a computer can find a given name just as fast or nearly so, even in that same random list. There is however no new information generated by arranging that list in any particular order. Your "crit" was akin to a list arranged in a certain, albeit more complex order, as specified by the program you wrote, governing the behavior of these crits.
Original information has never been demonstrated to come from anything other than a mind. All software comes from a mind, but expresses itself in hardware, often in unforeseen and unplanned ways. Ask Bill Gates about that!
(.....Let's talk about the liver for a moment......)
I was not talking about the complexity of the brain or any other organ, but that the mind and its products are not physical in the same sense as the brain or liver are. The liver deals with and operates only on physical "stuff", but the brain APPEARS to be involved somehow with non-physical things such as consciousness, self awareness, thoughts and other items of that nature. Whether the brain generates mind or is simply a conduit for a distinct entity called the mind is not answerable yet and may never be, at least not "scientifically". That question has been and still is being wrestled with by religion and philosophy.
.....that the brain obeys the physics that everything else has turned out to obey........
How do we know we have discovered ALL the laws of physics? How do we KNOW that time-space-matter-energy is all there is? We can BELIEVE that, but we cannot know. Is a thought, idea, emotion bound by the same laws that govern the physical world? It appears not. Thoughts and ideas and such find physical expression. Love may express itself as a gentle hug and a warm smile, but these physical manifestations are not love itself.
No matter in how much detail you examine the chemistry and interactions of ink and paper, those researches will tell you absolutely NOTHING about the arrangement of symbols on that paper. The arrangement thereof constitutes information which is not subject to all the laws of physics.
Just as in a computer there is a distinction between hardware and software, so also is there a distinction between the brain and the mind. If you can show any example, where software arises purely from the hardware ie. a self programming computer, then it could be true that the brain in and of itself is the source of intelligence.
.......We know of one world with life, and on that world, intelligence developed........
Do we really KNOW whether life and intelligence simply developed or have most modern people chosen to BELIEVE this? It has never been demonstrated in a lab or observed anywhere in nature, that information and life can arise from the action of matter and energy alone. Many believe this somehow happened in the past, but cannot be shown happening today.
In all of our human experience, we find that technological complexity always begins in a MIND. Many are not willing to accept the possibility of a mind, God if you will, behind the complexity of the natural world. Acceptance of such a Mind immediately implies responsibility and accountability to such a mind and the possibility that there is a purpose and goal of our existence. Many, if not most of us, do not like the idea of being held accountable about the way we live.
Only the One who created Space-TIME-matter-energy knows the time component and therefore can accurately foretell the future. Even so, it is fun to speculate about future technology and events.
........You now have a machine that is slightly more intelligent than a human......
The assumption of course may be wrong. Could it be that intelligence is more or even something entirely different than any arrangement of matter and energy, could ever produce, no matter how many components are used and how complex their arrangement? We have no proof even, that human intelligence, the center of consciousness, indeed life itself is confined to that collection of cells we call "brain". Making a machine that can always win at a game like chess or checkers or outdo a human at anything else, doesn't make such a machine "intelligent". Is it even our intelligence that makes us human? What is the essence of human-ness? Philosophers and sci-fi writers have pondered this and the latter have written many entertaining stories.