...You can drive nearly five Priuses for the amount of fuel that one single vehicle consumes...
Before you spout off like that get your facts straight. We happen to have a Prius, which if you drive it nicely gets about 50MPG, not the "advertised" 70 or whatever. We also have a Ford 250 V8 truck, slightly smaller the the 350. It gets about 22MPG on the highway and roughly 18MPG in the city. Even when we pull a heavy horse trailer with 2 horses loaded, we still get 13-14MPG
I'll leave it to you to strain your brain to do the arithmetic.
I agree though that we should minimize the amount of environmental stress we create.
At least he is not a coward, an anonymous one at that is! Why don't you get an account and enlighten everyone here, since you appear to have an exclusive patent on truth.
And since when has the vast majority of scientists or even people in general been right? Truth is an independent variable. It has no relationship to how many believe or disbelieve a given theory.
The number of things that the majority of people, even scientists, have believed throughout history, that were dismally and totally wrong can fill books.
Need evidence? Take a look at the relatively recent history of the "science" of climate change and the media hype surrounding it:
In the Feb. 24, 1895 issue of the NY times the headline was: "GEOLOGISTS THINK THAT THE WORLD MAY BE FROZEN UP AGAIN". The same paper on May 15, 1932 headlined: "EARTH IS STEADILY GROWING WARMER". Again on May 21, 1975, in the Times, "MAJOR COOLING IS WIDELY CONSIDERED INEVITABLE" and also on the cover of TIME magazine of Dec 3, 1973, "THE BIG FREEZE". Finally recently, again on the front of TIME, April 3, 2006, "SPECIAL REPORT ON GLOBAL WARMING
Scientists today have fancier computer models and a little better data gathering capability than back in 1895, but are likely just as wrong as their ancestor scientists were over time. Those guys back then just as sincerely thought THEY were right as today's chicken little "scientists" think they must warn us that the temperature sky is REALLY going to fall THIS time.
So if you believe them, get out of your SUV now and WALK! If the gasoline prices keep going up at the pace they have recently, that problem will be solved, since everybody will be walking, or at least riding a bicycle.
...would decisively display the difference between a flood and a drought...
Sedimentary rocks are evidence of water and the preservation of fine details of fossils preserved in these sediments is evidence of a sudden catastrophic death and burial. There are fossils of fish in the act of trying to swallow their just caught prey. There are also fossil footprints of dinosaurs and other creatures and fossil dinosaur eggs.
Today no fossils get made because living things simply decay almost immediately. Footprints in sand or mud are also rather transient and don't last long enough for any slow, gradual process over eons of time to preserve them in silt and mud turned to stone.
(..Could the Noah story be an allegory written after the fact..)
It is remarkable how consistent the flood legends are from cultures scattered all over the globe. Humans living on every continent, except Antarctica, have accounts of a water deluge and only a few people and animals saved in a boat. The details of these stories, passed by word of mouth for generations, have gotten a little muddled, but the essential elements of the waters and the boat holding only a few people to be saved are uncannily consistent. The old Chinese glyph for flood is a depiction of 8 people in a boat.
This forum would not be the place to go into more details, but there have been numerous books written on the evidence for a global flood. I'm sure that if you want to pursue this, you can find them on places like Amazon.
...Could it have been a cataclysmic flood and not a drought?...
The same book where we may read about the (almost) extinction of humanity by water, informs us that the next time God will use fire!
2Peter 3:6..through which the world that then was, being flooded by water, perished. 7 But the present heavens and the earth being kept in store by the same word, are being kept for fire until the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.
According to that book, Universe was stretched out (Big Bang) at the Beginning
Isaiah 45:12 I have made the earth, and created man on it; I with My hands have stretched out the heavens; and all their host have I commanded.
Isaiah 48:13 My hand also has laid the foundation of the earth, and My right hand has stretched out the heavens. I called; they stood up together.
And it will end up in "The Big Crunch" that follows "The Big Bang" that began it.
Isaiah 34:4 And all the host of the heavens shall be dissolved, and the heavens shall be rolled like a scroll; and all their host shall droop, as a leaf falls off from the vine, and as the falling from the fig tree.
2Peter 3:10 But the Day of the Lord will come like a thief. On that day the heavens will disappear with a roaring sound, the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done on it will be burnt.
Revelation 6:14 And the heaven departed like a scroll when it is rolled together. And every mountain and island were moved out of their places.
Now you don't HAVE to believe the things written in the Bible, but what if the above and everything else therein is true after all? Something to think about.
...where novel information is developed independently...
Oh yes, really, where?
(..Mathematical extrapolation..)
For that you have to know the initial conditions and the exact function involved. For data or records from the past we have neither.
(..The barrier between macro and micro is an artificial barrier..)
NO, it's an unbridged and unbridgable gulf that no PRESENT experiment or observation has crossed. We do not have direct access to the past, but have to BELIEVE whatever records we have. We are creatures of the present only. Manipulating belief dependent records by fancy math doesn't make them any less based on belief and interpretation.
As long as there is breath in you, it is not too late. God has a time and place where and when you will experience you own personal crisis and will after that KNOW the truth. Like the prodigal son Jesus speaks of, you may have to eat some pig food and come to the end of your self and your own efforts. However, the Father is waiting for you with open arms.
Even in the Old Testament God says this:
Jeremiah 29:13 And you shall seek Me and find Me , when you search for Me with all your heart. 14 And I will be found by you, says the LORD;
Notice He doesn't say MAY find, but SHALL find. That is a personal certain promise the eternal God makes to you also. Actually it isn't so much that we find Him, but He finds us. That was true right there in the garden when God went looking for Adam who was hiding from God. Adam did not look for God, but God came looking for Adam.
God knows where you are and your state of mind right now. He WILL call you on HIS schedule and you will know when He does. I hope and pray that when that call comes, you will answer affirmatively and with joy.
....Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the standard Christian theology that everybody goes to hell for bad behavior?...
Actually no, people go to hell because of unbelief. We read:
John 3:16-18 -- For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. 17 For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but so that the world might be saved through Him. 18 He who believes on Him is not condemned, but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only-begotten Son of God.
You cannot go to heaven because of your good works and you cannot go to hell because your bad deeds.
A condemned, obviously guilty criminal on death row is told he has a pardon from the governor waiting for him, on condition of admitting to the crimes and accepting that pardon. If that criminal refuses to believe and thereby not accept that free pardon, is that the fault of the governor or state when he ends up in the execution chamber?
We humans are ALL condemned to eternal death sinners and are all offered an everlasting pardon and freedom. The conditions are admitting we have committed crimes (sins) against a perfect and holy God and accepting, believing and trusting Him who offers the pardon, as made possible by the sacrificial death of Jesus.
After that acceptance, a Christian may still fall and sin, even many times, but the desire to sin and enjoy its pleasure disappears. We now have the freedom to do acceptable works of God, because we are already bound for heaven. We do not now or ever, earn the right to become the children of God. That is a gift of grace we may accept or refuse.
...Are you implying I don't want to believe? That if I wanted to believe, I would?...
In a way yes, in a way no. We read this in Mark 9:23-24 - Jesus said to him, If you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes. 24 And immediately the father of the child cried out and said with tears, Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.
You too can cry out to Him: Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.
The account of "doubting" Thomas after the resurrection of Jesus is very instructive:
John 20:24-29 But Thomas, one of the twelve, called the Twin, was not with them when Jesus came. 25 The other disciples therefore said to him, We have seen the Lord. But he said to them, Unless I shall see the print of the nails in His hands, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into His side, I will not believe. 26 And after eight days the disciples were inside again, and Thomas was with them. Jesus came, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst and said, Peace to you! 27 Then He said to Thomas, Reach your finger here and behold My hands; and reach your hand here and thrust it into My side; and do not be unbelieving, but believing. 28 And Thomas answered and said to Him, My Lord and my God! 29 Jesus said to him, Thomas, because you have seen Me you have believed. Blessed are they who have not seen and have believed.
You too may, though filled with doubt, but may, like Thomas, call Jesus Lord and God in worship. Be careful though that you really mean it, for it carries with it that you are freely giving Jesus the right to run your life, rather than you running it as you have up to now. It's not so much your emotions that hold you back but your Will. Jesus too had to struggle to submit His will to the will of the father. He literally sweat blood in Gethsemane over the prospect of the horrible suffering that humble submission would bring.
In our human way of operation we say: Show me and I'll believe. God turns that around and says: Believe and I'll show you.
You are basically confusing the mere existence of software/mind and the actual RUNNING or actualizing thereof. Of course software requires some sort of hardware to execute and so does mind need some sort of "wetware" ie. brain to actualize it.
Since we are physical beings, confined to a physical universe, for us it has to be that way. Products of the mind can and do exist, whether they are at the moment in an environment for their realization in a form we can perceive or not.
If I start a given program in your computer and then unplug all input and output devices from it, the software can still be running or not. You will never know. Does a tree fall in the forest if there s no observer? Of course it does. Immaterial information can certainly EXIST apart from being in an environment wherein in can be executed.
Software/information can be shown by experiment to be an immaterial massless entity. A new, blank HD will weigh no more (or less), once you load Gigabytes of data on it, even using the most sensitive weighing apparatus available. A printed page with a given number of letters on it will always weigh the same, no matter how you arrange those letters.
(..Just because I created the master program in my mind is immaterial..)
No it is not immaterial, because your "master" program is not random and specifically instructs the computer to produce whatever output you specified. Just because your program may invoke a pseudo random number generator to make its output unpredictable, at least to a degree, it nevertheless does exactly what you instructed it to do. A normal computer is a deterministic device, the output of which will always be a repeatable function of its inputs. It may be very difficult at times to determine all the variables, but if you do know their values its output will always be the exactly predictable.
We presently think a quantum computer may be different here, but I don't think so. It may APPEAR to be non-deterministic because we, at least at this time, CANNOT determine all of its variables. The very act of trying to find out their values by trying changes the variables.
(..It is actually possible to modulate matter itself into a light wave..)
No it is not. It possible to modulate an arbitrarily accurate DESCRIPTION or abstraction of matter, but not matter itself. Any description is still immaterial information. Nothing affected by gravity (ie. mass) can go at the speed of light.
(..And these symbols must themselves have a carrier..)
Yes they do, but only for us to be able to perceive them. Because we are presently confined our physical senses, this is true, but is not a requirement for information to exist. Again, think of the tree falling in the forest. A caterpillar has within it, all information needed to become a butterfly or moth. Until it actually does so, that information is there, although not actual and the caterpillar is forced to crawl around, rather than take to the air.
In short then, you're right that software/mind requires hardware in order for us to sense/interact with it, but it can and does exist quite independently of our ability to perceive it.
...Ever try to think after a day or so without eating?....
Personally I feel crummy if I don't eat, whether I do much thinking or not. Those sugars get metabolized even when you're asleep. It's just a normal function of your body. So how much of this metabolic "disorder" is added when you do finally get around to cleaning up? Probably that is much harder to quantify than the nice looks of your place after you get done with all that expenditure of brainpower and muscle effort.
The whole point is that undirected energy alone doesn't result in a clean room or a 747 airliner. You also have to add intelligence in order to get either.
...In essence, macroevolution is just microevolution over a long enough period time...
There you go substituting the power of time and random chaotic events for the power and intelligence of the Creator. Evolutionists posit that large amounts of time can do what nobody has ever seen happening today, or even by best efforts of intelligent? humans caused to happen. Science is about DEMONSTRATING by experiment and observation TODAY how things work and the laws by which nature operates NOW.
(..However, from time to time, the chaotic randomness may carve out a new path..)
Science is NOT about what MAY have taken place in the distant past, but what can be observed and experimented with TODAY. The past is not directly accessible to us humans and neither is the future. We are creatures of the present and have to depend on the RECORDS of the past and how we interpret those records.
Nobody TODAY has ever seen macro-evolution take place. Whether God wound up the Universe, like a big clock and is now letting it run down or whether He is actively involved in tweaking it now and then is also not directly accessible to us. Again we have to depend on the records and BELIEVE the various people's interpretations thereof or not.
The study of the past depends on records and how they are interpreted and those interpretations are believed. ID, evolution and creationism are all in a boat named belief.
...area means increased disorganization in another...
So when you apply your mind AND energy into ordering the mess in your room, in what or where is there a decrease of order? In the attic or garbage can?
(..you can't have increased organization without supernatural interference..)
So again when you tidy up your room, by the application of thought and planning as to where to put stuff, what to keep and what to toss, and then applying your muscle energy to actually carry it out, where does the supernatural enter in? It may seem sometimes it takes a supernatural effort to clean up the mess, but it really isn't at all anything extraordinary.
...I could take people back with me to the present...
That assumes that the hypothetical time travel device permitted this. If it did not you'd still have to be believed on the basis of what you could do to try to get the people to believe you.
Jesus gave a very instructive glimpse into the heavenly realms in the story of the rich man who died and poor Lazarus. You can read it in Luke 16:20-31. He concludes it with "And he said to him, If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, they will not be persuaded, even though one rose from the dead."
That tells me a simple fact: If someone doesn't WANT to believe, no amount of evidence will convince them.
...don't you think it's a wise idea to stop fucking polluting...
Since YOU brought Jesus into the discussion and Jesus is God, indeed we should take care of God's property. It's not OUR earth. We did not make it. He commanded the first humans to take good care of it, not rape and destroy it. However, it was to be done in harmony and interaction with our creator. Instead man has declared his independence from God and has done and still is doing his own thing.
God is the ultimate environmentalist, since He created the environment in the first place. Just because some of those claim to speak for Him participate in the destruction of His creation doesn't make them right.
I simply pointed out that those who claim knowledge keep saying one thing for a time and then the opposite. Why do you have to resort to profanity over established historical publication of this flip-flopping masquerading as science?
...Prove that it is physically impossible for self-replicating molecules to arise spontaneously through random chemical reactions...
I am not a chemist, but an electrical engineer so I cannot really speak on that. Even granted that there may be some self replicating molecules, that is still a very very long way from even only a single living cell, in terms of complexity and functions.
(..Prove that randomly changing self-replicators cannot stumble upon chemical isomorphisms..)
Again, that is question for a chemist and I am not qualified to address that.
(..Prove that there is anything that can be called "mind" that is not a function of real, physical hardware..)
I am not a neurologist either, but as an engineer I do know that there are certain similarities and characteristics common to the brain/mind system and the computers hardware/software system.
Computer software is created in a human mind, as is the hardware. However it can be shown that software, analogous to the mind is independent of a particular hardware. I can run a Windows program written originally for an x86 type hardware on a PPC Mac which has entirely different hardware and even a totally different OS. The entire "personality" of the Windows programming and the Windows OS itself is transportable to, theoretically _any_ hardware. Most of Apple's old PPC programs run unmodified on the newer Intel based Macs.
Software as such is independent of certain physical constraints. Material objects having mass cannot attain the speed of light. However it is common practice to load software (a form of information) as an immaterial product of mind, onto a light beam or radio wave and transmit that data at light speed.
Since information, thoughts, ideas as such are immaterial constructs of mind, they are not subject to material constrains and therefore are also independent of any particular physical brain. You may have had the experience of having the same thought or simultaneous blurting out the same words or ideas as someone else you were interacting with. We do not know for sure how that happens sometimes, but I do know it has happened to me at times. Can thoughts transfer from one brain to another by a channel outside of what we call "normal"? How about quite consistent accounts of "out of body experiences" (OBE)?
What is the speed limit for thought? Since thoughts are not material and cannot be modulated (at least not yet) onto a physical carrier, we don't really know. In my imagination I can travel to the most distant corners of the universe even though physically I am bound by time and place.
I believe there is still a lot of research needed into the mind/brain system, since it is orders of magnitude more complex than any computer we can even dream about and operates on fundamentally different principles. There are however certain, rather striking similarities.
...If you accept that organisms changed over time to reach their current capabilities...
That's a big IF to accept (believe) without evidence of this happening today. Evolution believers generally trot out small observed changes due to organisms adapting to environmental stress. There is no doubt that living things are very adaptable, but to extrapolate from that adaptability, to the large jumps in complexity and structure in the huge variety of living things is not observed or observable. It is believed to have occurred in the distant past, but is has never been demonstrated to happen today.
(..an organism at some point in the past emerged fully formed from nothing..)
Thats pretty much the evidence we see in the fossil record. There is the sudden appearance of fully formed rather complex creature and no transitional forms, such as there should be if the gradual change mechanism were at work. Evolution believing scientists even have a fancy name for this. They call it "The Cambrian Explosion". Now we all know that an explosion is s sudden event.
(.. but not "how did it get there"..)
It isn't the business of science, nor is science equipped to ask those kinds of questions. Science is about experiments to determine how things work presently. How can we utilize quantum effects or build a space elevator. Is it even theoretically possible to make a material strong enough? That's real science.
We as limited humans have no direct access to the past nor the future. We are limited to the present for direct experimental evidence. We are limited to *believing* and _interpreting_ whatever we think may have happened in the past. We have no direct evidence, for example, as I read recently. A Muslim Saudi Professor denied that the Holocaust of the Jews of WW2 occurred. Nobody can time travel to that time, but we can and should BELIEVE the records thereof and the testimony of those who are still alive and experienced its horrors. However history cannot be _demonstrated_.
(..How can you test that god built something?..)
We can't test WHETHER and how God built something, but we can test to determine HOW whatever He made operates. We can determine the laws He formulated by which the Universe operates. Once we know something about these laws, we can build devices and processes that use these laws to either good or evil. Attributing a law or process to God is entirely separate and distinct from learning how that law or process works and using it to build up our knowledge of nature.
(..If we were content with the creationist account of life, we would likely have never discovered DNA as the carrier of heredity..)
Why do you assert that? DNA has information codes required for cells to make proteins. However, DNA itself is made of proteins. So where did the information arise for the protein making instructions. This question cannot be and need not be answered by science any more than science can answer; what came first, the chicken or the egg. We have chickens and they lay eggs. We have DNA making proteins. We can learn how it works, entirely apart from asking or answering the question of where or how DNA or chickens originated and we can also eat eggs for breakfast and chicken for dinner, all without asking or answering the chicken and egg question.
(..Natural selection also provides a great deal of explanatory information regarding animal behavior and development..)
Indeed it is a valid observed mechanism that shows how living things cope with and adapt to stress. Extrapolating from this adaptability and trying use that as a mechanism to explain the large complexity chasm between the various living things is a belief that has never been observed today or verified by present experiments. Natural selection can never explain the gap between reptiles and birds, even though evolutionists postulate that the latter descended from the latter.
(..instead of looking for a purpose rooted in the physical world..)
Sure you can, in your mind, using intelligence, not randomness.
(..The relationship between DNA and amino acids..)
tells you no more about the information or codes the DNA carries than the chemistry of paint on a canvas tells you about the Mona Lisa.
(..But by that definition of information, everything in the universe (the force between two electrons, the distance between Earth and the Sun) can be called as information!..)
It is rather amazing that these forces, parameters and relationships are CALCULATED by someone to amazing precision. For example, we measure the mass ratio between a proton and an electron to be 1836. Any other ratio, and there could be no life. The distance between the Earth and the Sun, their respective masses and the power output of the sun are all finely tuned to make life possible. I have a hard time to believe that all these and many more such fine tunings are random accidents. To me that takes more faith in randomness than faith in a transcendent, intelligent Creator God. Apparently you and many others have more faith in random chance combined with lots of time than I can muster.
(..if minds require hardware, what "hardware" is running God's mind, and how did it "get there"?..)
You ignorantly assuming that God is a physical being with physical limitations like us. God came to us from beyond time and space, and confined Himself, for a while, to the same limitations of time and space and became mortal like us. Jesus was His human name. He told his followers that God is an eternal Spirit, whatever that means.
If you could time travel to that time, how would you try to communicate where you came from and the technology you are familiar with? Any technology demos you did would be deemed "supernatural miracles". Now you would still be a mortal being confined to this time-space physical condition we call reality. There would be no way you could "prove" that you are a human from the distant future. All you could really tell people there is that they should BELIEVE you are telling the truth. You might be labelled an evil magician and put to death by the standard method of execution of that day, crucifixion.
Jesus, as the God-Man, faced a far greater obstacle. Coming from beyond our dimensions, He too did technological demos, including conquering death. Even today, we still call the things we read in scripture "miracles" and tend to doubt what is written. Therefore, to an infinitely greater extent, we too are only left with belief, faith in accepting who Jesus claimed to be and what He said and did -- or rejecting Him and His message.
..never a good excuse to induce magic to explain how something works..
If you could time travel to the time of Christ or even even a few centuries into the past, you'd have a hard time to explain modern technology or convince people there that you really came from the future. They'd think your technological demos are magic.
Turning water into wine, multiplying bread, raising the dead and all the other "miracles" we read about in the Bible are "supernatural" to us, only because even today we don't have the technology to explain these "miracles".
All of what we call "reality" comes to us via our senses. Even the physical things which our senses tell us are "real", are nothing more than charges in motion separated by mostly what we think is empty space. Is a thought or an idea less real than the chair you are sitting on?
(..the software is always encoded in a language in some physical representation..)
Yes, but I can run the same software in vastly different kinds of hardware. It is the software, the equivalent of thought, that makes a computer do its job. We can load some OS and all its software into a VM and that software cannot tell nor care what the underlying hardware is.
If we can load the complete "personality" of a computer into some higher performing hardware or virtual machine, is it not possible to conceive of God having the technology to someday load our complete personality, everything we are and think into some better hardware, not subject to death? Is it so impossible to conceive of God having the technology to by some means transmit the software (soul) of a human being onto a cosmic hard drive or other backup device, for the time when He will reload that software into some new hardware no longer subject to failure and death.
(..but there is no evidence for it..)
There is plenty of evidence that cannot be perceived with physical instruments. We know that non-tangible things like compassion, love, beauty, generosity or their opposites are also real and in some measure have a greater effect on us than the physical objects conventional science deals with.
...Does a snowflake contain more or less information than the molecules from which it formed....
The information is not contained in the molecules, but in the relationships and forces they operate under. The information in a novel or musical score is not determined by the chemistry of the ink on paper, but by the arrangement and meaning of the symbols placed by one intelligent mind communicating to another mind.
The codes in DNA are carried by the arrangement and order of the four amino acids. The codes of bits on a computer disk determine information, not the magnetic structure of the disk itself.
Information often transmits INSTRUCTIONS in how to accomplish an objective determined in the will of a mind. When you teach you kid to ride a bike, you are transmitting information that is hopefully, eventually transmitted into a MEANINGFUL result. So then another characteristic of information is that it is meaning and purposeful.
(..Which has more, a solid black image or a random arrangement of black and white pixels?..)
Neither of these images carries any information because the do not convey meaning and/or purpose to any mind. ALL information is ultimately destined to be evaluated by a mind.
The beauty of a sunset or of a cuddly kitten were DESIGNED to be appreciated by our minds by the designer of all minds.
Has any code, say for a computer or Morse code or any code ever come into being apart from the processes of thought?
DNA has been called the blueprint of life. A blueprint is a representation of a house or machine. It is neither a house nor a machine, but represents the INSTRUCTIONS of how the workers are to build the object depicted by that blueprint. The DNA contains instructions how to build an organism. Both the information on the blueprint and the DNA code originated in a mind.
When you give someone instructions on how to do a task, you are imparting INFORMATION to them. Hopefully, they will then use that information to accomplish what you have willed in your mind.
(..Further, it is quite easy to write computer programs..)
Has any useful computer program ever come about outside of the activity of thought arising in a mind? Information can be hidden, even encrypted. If you write a letter on your computer and encrypt it, does the encrypted letter not still contain all the information of the original clear text? Information content and information accessibility are not synonymous. If you mine data or recover encrypted text with the right password, you are not creating information, but merely making that already existing information useable.
...According to reports of exceptionally dubious reliability...
Well in the end you don't have to BELIEVE anything recorded in the ancient writings. However, just know that there are more written copies of the ancient scripts of the Bible than all other ancient records combined.
The dead sea scrolls show that the scripture documents handed down by repeated copying survived essentially unchanged, despite all that copy work.
No, you can say that the DESIGN of hydrogen atoms and oxygen atoms and the force that governs them is such that two of the former will combine with one of the latter in such a way to make the only natural substance that expands when transitioning from a liquid state into a solid form.
....We've seen the production of (fairly) complex organic chemicals from non-organic mixtures...
That is like saying we've been able to make nuts, bolts, valves, pistons, crankshafts and other components of an internal combustion engine, but have not yet built any engine that actually runs. Most, if not all of these organic components were assembled from bits and pieces that were once part of a living organism. Nobody has yet constructed even a simple protein from the available 92 or so basic elements. Nobody has yet duplicated the process of photosynthesis. All scientists ALWAYS have to start with pieces that were once alive.
(..You get to a point and you say "OK. I don't know. God did it. Let's put down our tools and go have lunch...)
No you don't. You can say God did it and now let's do experiments to figure out how He might have done that. A theory of how God may have built something can be tested just as readily as a theory that postulates time and chance was the originator. We reverse engineer human creations all the time. So now the scientists can and do reverse engineer some of the things that God first came up with. Cameras and Sonar are just two examples of man copying God's designs. Good thing He doesn't sue us for patent and copyright infringement. Science can work just as well or even better with the underlying idea of investigating God's clever designs and make them useful for the service of humanity.
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...You can drive nearly five Priuses for the amount of fuel that one single vehicle consumes...
Before you spout off like that get your facts straight. We happen to have a Prius, which if you drive it nicely gets about 50MPG, not the "advertised" 70 or whatever. We also have a Ford 250 V8 truck, slightly smaller the the 350. It gets about 22MPG on the highway and roughly 18MPG in the city. Even when we pull a heavy horse trailer with 2 horses loaded, we still get 13-14MPG
I'll leave it to you to strain your brain to do the arithmetic.
I agree though that we should minimize the amount of environmental stress we create.
...You are arguing with a religious nut...
At least he is not a coward, an anonymous one at that is! Why don't you get an account and enlighten everyone here, since you appear to have an exclusive patent on truth.
...vast majority of scientists agree...
And since when has the vast majority of scientists or even people in general been right? Truth is an independent variable. It has no relationship to how many believe or disbelieve a given theory.
The number of things that the majority of people, even scientists, have believed throughout history, that were dismally and totally wrong can fill books.
Need evidence? Take a look at the relatively recent history of the "science" of climate change and the media hype surrounding it:
In the Feb. 24, 1895 issue of the NY times the headline was: "GEOLOGISTS THINK THAT THE WORLD MAY BE FROZEN UP AGAIN". The same paper on May 15, 1932 headlined: "EARTH IS STEADILY GROWING WARMER". Again on May 21, 1975, in the Times, "MAJOR COOLING IS WIDELY CONSIDERED INEVITABLE" and also on the cover of TIME magazine of Dec 3, 1973, "THE BIG FREEZE". Finally recently, again on the front of TIME, April 3, 2006, "SPECIAL REPORT ON GLOBAL WARMING
Scientists today have fancier computer models and a little better data gathering capability than back in 1895, but are likely just as wrong as their ancestor scientists were over time. Those guys back then just as sincerely thought THEY were right as today's chicken little "scientists" think they must warn us that the temperature sky is REALLY going to fall THIS time.
So if you believe them, get out of your SUV now and WALK! If the gasoline prices keep going up at the pace they have recently, that problem will be solved, since everybody will be walking, or at least riding a bicycle.
...I'll give you $100 for being right. If it does turn out to be a problem...
Is it OK with you to wait 200 to 300 years to collect on that bet?
...would decisively display the difference between a flood and a drought...
Sedimentary rocks are evidence of water and the preservation of fine details of fossils preserved in these sediments is evidence of a sudden catastrophic death and burial. There are fossils of fish in the act of trying to swallow their just caught prey. There are also fossil footprints of dinosaurs and other creatures and fossil dinosaur eggs.
Today no fossils get made because living things simply decay almost immediately. Footprints in sand or mud are also rather transient and don't last long enough for any slow, gradual process over eons of time to preserve them in silt and mud turned to stone.
(..Could the Noah story be an allegory written after the fact..)
It is remarkable how consistent the flood legends are from cultures scattered all over the globe. Humans living on every continent, except Antarctica, have accounts of a water deluge and only a few people and animals saved in a boat. The details of these stories, passed by word of mouth for generations, have gotten a little muddled, but the essential elements of the waters and the boat holding only a few people to be saved are uncannily consistent. The old Chinese glyph for flood is a depiction of 8 people in a boat.
This forum would not be the place to go into more details, but there have been numerous books written on the evidence for a global flood. I'm sure that if you want to pursue this, you can find them on places like Amazon.
...Could it have been a cataclysmic flood and not a drought?...
..through which the world that then was, being flooded by water, perished. 7 But the present heavens and the earth being kept in store by the same word, are being kept for fire until the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.
The same book where we may read about the (almost) extinction of humanity by water, informs us that the next time God will use fire!
2Peter 3:6
According to that book, Universe was stretched out (Big Bang) at the Beginning
Isaiah 45:12 I have made the earth, and created man on it; I with My hands have stretched out the heavens; and all their host have I commanded.
Isaiah 48:13 My hand also has laid the foundation of the earth, and My right hand has stretched out the heavens. I called; they stood up together.
And it will end up in "The Big Crunch" that follows "The Big Bang" that began it.
Isaiah 34:4 And all the host of the heavens shall be dissolved, and the heavens shall be rolled like a scroll; and all their host shall droop, as a leaf falls off from the vine, and as the falling from the fig tree.
2Peter 3:10 But the Day of the Lord will come like a thief. On that day the heavens will disappear with a roaring sound, the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done on it will be burnt.
Revelation 6:14 And the heaven departed like a scroll when it is rolled together. And every mountain and island were moved out of their places.
Now you don't HAVE to believe the things written in the Bible, but what if the above and everything else therein is true after all? Something to think about.
...where novel information is developed independently...
Oh yes, really, where?
(..Mathematical extrapolation..)
For that you have to know the initial conditions and the exact function involved. For data or records from the past we have neither.
(..The barrier between macro and micro is an artificial barrier..)
NO, it's an unbridged and unbridgable gulf that no PRESENT experiment or observation has crossed. We do not have direct access to the past, but have to BELIEVE whatever records we have. We are creatures of the present only. Manipulating belief dependent records by fancy math doesn't make them any less based on belief and interpretation.
...and I will come to belief...
As long as there is breath in you, it is not too late. God has a time and place where and when you will experience you own personal crisis and will after that KNOW the truth. Like the prodigal son Jesus speaks of, you may have to eat some pig food and come to the end of your self and your own efforts. However, the Father is waiting for you with open arms.
Even in the Old Testament God says this:
Jeremiah 29:13 And you shall seek Me and find Me , when you search for Me with all your heart. 14 And I will be found by you, says the LORD;
Notice He doesn't say MAY find, but SHALL find. That is a personal certain promise the eternal God makes to you also. Actually it isn't so much that we find Him, but He finds us. That was true right there in the garden when God went looking for Adam who was hiding from God. Adam did not look for God, but God came looking for Adam.
God knows where you are and your state of mind right now. He WILL call you on HIS schedule and you will know when He does. I hope and pray that when that call comes, you will answer affirmatively and with joy.
....Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the standard Christian theology that everybody goes to hell for bad behavior?...
Actually no, people go to hell because of unbelief. We read:
John 3:16-18 -- For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. 17 For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but so that the world might be saved through Him. 18 He who believes on Him is not condemned, but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only-begotten Son of God.
You cannot go to heaven because of your good works and you cannot go to hell because your bad deeds.
A condemned, obviously guilty criminal on death row is told he has a pardon from the governor waiting for him, on condition of admitting to the crimes and accepting that pardon. If that criminal refuses to believe and thereby not accept that free pardon, is that the fault of the governor or state when he ends up in the execution chamber?
We humans are ALL condemned to eternal death sinners and are all offered an everlasting pardon and freedom. The conditions are admitting we have committed crimes (sins) against a perfect and holy God and accepting, believing and trusting Him who offers the pardon, as made possible by the sacrificial death of Jesus.
After that acceptance, a Christian may still fall and sin, even many times, but the desire to sin and enjoy its pleasure disappears. We now have the freedom to do acceptable works of God, because we are already bound for heaven. We do not now or ever, earn the right to become the children of God. That is a gift of grace we may accept or refuse.
...Are you implying I don't want to believe? That if I wanted to believe, I would?...
In a way yes, in a way no. We read this in Mark 9:23-24 - Jesus said to him, If you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes. 24 And immediately the father of the child cried out and said with tears, Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.
You too can cry out to Him: Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.
The account of "doubting" Thomas after the resurrection of Jesus is very instructive:
John 20:24-29 But Thomas, one of the twelve, called the Twin, was not with them when Jesus came. 25 The other disciples therefore said to him, We have seen the Lord. But he said to them, Unless I shall see the print of the nails in His hands, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into His side, I will not believe. 26 And after eight days the disciples were inside again, and Thomas was with them. Jesus came, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst and said, Peace to you! 27 Then He said to Thomas, Reach your finger here and behold My hands; and reach your hand here and thrust it into My side; and do not be unbelieving, but believing. 28 And Thomas answered and said to Him, My Lord and my God! 29 Jesus said to him, Thomas, because you have seen Me you have believed. Blessed are they who have not seen and have believed.
You too may, though filled with doubt, but may, like Thomas, call Jesus Lord and God in worship. Be careful though that you really mean it, for it carries with it that you are freely giving Jesus the right to run your life, rather than you running it as you have up to now. It's not so much your emotions that hold you back but your Will. Jesus too had to struggle to submit His will to the will of the father. He literally sweat blood in Gethsemane over the prospect of the horrible suffering that humble submission would bring.
In our human way of operation we say: Show me and I'll believe. God turns that around and says: Believe and I'll show you.
Wow, that was a long and good reply. Thanks.
You are basically confusing the mere existence of software/mind and the actual RUNNING or actualizing thereof. Of course software requires some sort of hardware to execute and so does mind need some sort of "wetware" ie. brain to actualize it.
Since we are physical beings, confined to a physical universe, for us it has to be that way. Products of the mind can and do exist, whether they are at the moment in an environment for their realization in a form we can perceive or not.
If I start a given program in your computer and then unplug all input and output devices from it, the software can still be running or not. You will never know. Does a tree fall in the forest if there s no observer? Of course it does. Immaterial information can certainly EXIST apart from being in an environment wherein in can be executed.
Software/information can be shown by experiment to be an immaterial massless entity. A new, blank HD will weigh no more (or less), once you load Gigabytes of data on it, even using the most sensitive weighing apparatus available. A printed page with a given number of letters on it will always weigh the same, no matter how you arrange those letters.
(..Just because I created the master program in my mind is immaterial..)
No it is not immaterial, because your "master" program is not random and specifically instructs the computer to produce whatever output you specified. Just because your program may invoke a pseudo random number generator to make its output unpredictable, at least to a degree, it nevertheless does exactly what you instructed it to do. A normal computer is a deterministic device, the output of which will always be a repeatable function of its inputs. It may be very difficult at times to determine all the variables, but if you do know their values its output will always be the exactly predictable.
We presently think a quantum computer may be different here, but I don't think so. It may APPEAR to be non-deterministic because we, at least at this time, CANNOT determine all of its variables. The very act of trying to find out their values by trying changes the variables.
(..It is actually possible to modulate matter itself into a light wave..)
No it is not. It possible to modulate an arbitrarily accurate DESCRIPTION or abstraction of matter, but not matter itself. Any description is still immaterial information. Nothing affected by gravity (ie. mass) can go at the speed of light.
(..And these symbols must themselves have a carrier..)
Yes they do, but only for us to be able to perceive them. Because we are presently confined our physical senses, this is true, but is not a requirement for information to exist. Again, think of the tree falling in the forest. A caterpillar has within it, all information needed to become a butterfly or moth. Until it actually does so, that information is there, although not actual and the caterpillar is forced to crawl around, rather than take to the air.
In short then, you're right that software/mind requires hardware in order for us to sense/interact with it, but it can and does exist quite independently of our ability to perceive it.
...Ever try to think after a day or so without eating? ....
Personally I feel crummy if I don't eat, whether I do much thinking or not. Those sugars get metabolized even when you're asleep. It's just a normal function of your body. So how much of this metabolic "disorder" is added when you do finally get around to cleaning up? Probably that is much harder to quantify than the nice looks of your place after you get done with all that expenditure of brainpower and muscle effort.
The whole point is that undirected energy alone doesn't result in a clean room or a 747 airliner. You also have to add intelligence in order to get either.
...In essence, macroevolution is just microevolution over a long enough period time...
There you go substituting the power of time and random chaotic events for the power and intelligence of the Creator. Evolutionists posit that large amounts of time can do what nobody has ever seen happening today, or even by best efforts of intelligent? humans caused to happen. Science is about DEMONSTRATING by experiment and observation TODAY how things work and the laws by which nature operates NOW.
(..However, from time to time, the chaotic randomness may carve out a new path..)
Science is NOT about what MAY have taken place in the distant past, but what can be observed and experimented with TODAY. The past is not directly accessible to us humans and neither is the future. We are creatures of the present and have to depend on the RECORDS of the past and how we interpret those records.
Nobody TODAY has ever seen macro-evolution take place. Whether God wound up the Universe, like a big clock and is now letting it run down or whether He is actively involved in tweaking it now and then is also not directly accessible to us. Again we have to depend on the records and BELIEVE the various people's interpretations thereof or not.
The study of the past depends on records and how they are interpreted and those interpretations are believed. ID, evolution and creationism are all in a boat named belief.
...area means increased disorganization in another...
So when you apply your mind AND energy into ordering the mess in your room, in what or where is there a decrease of order? In the attic or garbage can?
(..you can't have increased organization without supernatural interference..)
So again when you tidy up your room, by the application of thought and planning as to where to put stuff, what to keep and what to toss, and then applying your muscle energy to actually carry it out, where does the supernatural enter in? It may seem sometimes it takes a supernatural effort to clean up the mess, but it really isn't at all anything extraordinary.
Now smile! Have a good day!
...I could take people back with me to the present...
That assumes that the hypothetical time travel device permitted this. If it did not you'd still have to be believed on the basis of what you could do to try to get the people to believe you.
Jesus gave a very instructive glimpse into the heavenly realms in the story of the rich man who died and poor Lazarus. You can read it in Luke 16:20-31.
He concludes it with "And he said to him, If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, they will not be persuaded, even though one rose from the dead."
That tells me a simple fact: If someone doesn't WANT to believe, no amount of evidence will convince them.
...don't you think it's a wise idea to stop fucking polluting ...
Since YOU brought Jesus into the discussion and Jesus is God, indeed we should take care of God's property. It's not OUR earth. We did not make it. He commanded the first humans to take good care of it, not rape and destroy it. However, it was to be done in harmony and interaction with our creator. Instead man has declared his independence from God and has done and still is doing his own thing.
God is the ultimate environmentalist, since He created the environment in the first place. Just because some of those claim to speak for Him participate in the destruction of His creation doesn't make them right.
I simply pointed out that those who claim knowledge keep saying one thing for a time and then the opposite. Why do you have to resort to profanity over established historical publication of this flip-flopping masquerading as science?
...Prove that it is physically impossible for self-replicating molecules to arise spontaneously through random chemical reactions...
I am not a chemist, but an electrical engineer so I cannot really speak on that. Even granted that there may be some self replicating molecules, that is still a very very long way from even only a single living cell, in terms of complexity and functions.
(..Prove that randomly changing self-replicators cannot stumble upon chemical isomorphisms..)
Again, that is question for a chemist and I am not qualified to address that.
(..Prove that there is anything that can be called "mind" that is not a function of real, physical hardware..)
I am not a neurologist either, but as an engineer I do know that there are certain similarities and characteristics common to the brain/mind system and the computers hardware/software system.
Computer software is created in a human mind, as is the hardware. However it can be shown that software, analogous to the mind is independent of a particular hardware. I can run a Windows program written originally for an x86 type hardware on a PPC Mac which has entirely different hardware and even a totally different OS. The entire "personality" of the Windows programming and the Windows OS itself is transportable to, theoretically _any_ hardware. Most of Apple's old PPC programs run unmodified on the newer Intel based Macs.
Software as such is independent of certain physical constraints. Material objects having mass cannot attain the speed of light. However it is common practice to load software (a form of information) as an immaterial product of mind, onto a light beam or radio wave and transmit that data at light speed.
Since information, thoughts, ideas as such are immaterial constructs of mind, they are not subject to material constrains and therefore are also independent of any particular physical brain. You may have had the experience of having the same thought or simultaneous blurting out the same words or ideas as someone else you were interacting with. We do not know for sure how that happens sometimes, but I do know it has happened to me at times. Can thoughts transfer from one brain to another by a channel outside of what we call "normal"? How about quite consistent accounts of "out of body experiences" (OBE)?
What is the speed limit for thought? Since thoughts are not material and cannot be modulated (at least not yet) onto a physical carrier, we don't really know. In my imagination I can travel to the most distant corners of the universe even though physically I am bound by time and place.
I believe there is still a lot of research needed into the mind/brain system, since it is orders of magnitude more complex than any computer we can even dream about and operates on fundamentally different principles. There are however certain, rather striking similarities.
...If you accept that organisms changed over time to reach their current capabilities...
That's a big IF to accept (believe) without evidence of this happening today. Evolution believers generally trot out small observed changes due to organisms adapting to environmental stress. There is no doubt that living things are very adaptable, but to extrapolate from that adaptability, to the large jumps in complexity and structure in the huge variety of living things is not observed or observable. It is believed to have occurred in the distant past, but is has never been demonstrated to happen today.
(..an organism at some point in the past emerged fully formed from nothing..)
Thats pretty much the evidence we see in the fossil record. There is the sudden appearance of fully formed rather complex creature and no transitional forms, such as there should be if the gradual change mechanism were at work. Evolution believing scientists even have a fancy name for this. They call it "The Cambrian Explosion". Now we all know that an explosion is s sudden event.
(.. but not "how did it get there"..)
It isn't the business of science, nor is science equipped to ask those kinds of questions. Science is about experiments to determine how things work presently. How can we utilize quantum effects or build a space elevator. Is it even theoretically possible to make a material strong enough? That's real science.
We as limited humans have no direct access to the past nor the future. We are limited to the present for direct experimental evidence. We are limited to *believing* and _interpreting_ whatever we think may have happened in the past. We have no direct evidence, for example, as I read recently. A Muslim Saudi Professor denied that the Holocaust of the Jews of WW2 occurred. Nobody can time travel to that time, but we can and should BELIEVE the records thereof and the testimony of those who are still alive and experienced its horrors. However history cannot be _demonstrated_.
(..How can you test that god built something?..)
We can't test WHETHER and how God built something, but we can test to determine HOW whatever He made operates. We can determine the laws He formulated by which the Universe operates. Once we know something about these laws, we can build devices and processes that use these laws to either good or evil. Attributing a law or process to God is entirely separate and distinct from learning how that law or process works and using it to build up our knowledge of nature.
(..If we were content with the creationist account of life, we would likely have never discovered DNA as the carrier of heredity..)
Why do you assert that? DNA has information codes required for cells to make proteins. However, DNA itself is made of proteins. So where did the information arise for the protein making instructions. This question cannot be and need not be answered by science any more than science can answer; what came first, the chicken or the egg. We have chickens and they lay eggs. We have DNA making proteins. We can learn how it works, entirely apart from asking or answering the question of where or how DNA or chickens originated and we can also eat eggs for breakfast and chicken for dinner, all without asking or answering the chicken and egg question.
(..Natural selection also provides a great deal of explanatory information regarding animal behavior and development..)
Indeed it is a valid observed mechanism that shows how living things cope with and adapt to stress. Extrapolating from this adaptability and trying use that as a mechanism to explain the large complexity chasm between the various living things is a belief that has never been observed today or verified by present experiments. Natural selection can never explain the gap between reptiles and birds, even though evolutionists postulate that the latter descended from the latter.
(..instead of looking for a purpose rooted in the physical world..)
Again, purpose is beyond science, but is a v
...I can create a mathematically...
Sure you can, in your mind, using intelligence, not randomness.
(..The relationship between DNA and amino acids..)
tells you no more about the information or codes the DNA carries than the chemistry of paint on a canvas tells you about the Mona Lisa.
(..But by that definition of information, everything in the universe (the force between two electrons, the distance between Earth and the Sun) can be called as information!..)
It is rather amazing that these forces, parameters and relationships are CALCULATED by someone to amazing precision. For example, we measure the mass ratio between a proton and an electron to be 1836. Any other ratio, and there could be no life. The distance between the Earth and the Sun, their respective masses and the power output of the sun are all finely tuned to make life possible. I have a hard time to believe that all these and many more such fine tunings are random accidents. To me that takes more faith in randomness than faith in a transcendent, intelligent Creator God. Apparently you and many others have more faith in random chance combined with lots of time than I can muster.
(..if minds require hardware, what "hardware" is running God's mind, and how did it "get there"?..)
You ignorantly assuming that God is a physical being with physical limitations like us. God came to us from beyond time and space, and confined Himself, for a while, to the same limitations of time and space and became mortal like us. Jesus was His human name. He told his followers that God is an eternal Spirit, whatever that means.
If you could time travel to that time, how would you try to communicate where you came from and the technology you are familiar with? Any technology demos you did would be deemed "supernatural miracles". Now you would still be a mortal being confined to this time-space physical condition we call reality. There would be no way you could "prove" that you are a human from the distant future. All you could really tell people there is that they should BELIEVE you are telling the truth. You might be labelled an evil magician and put to death by the standard method of execution of that day, crucifixion.
Jesus, as the God-Man, faced a far greater obstacle. Coming from beyond our dimensions, He too did technological demos, including conquering death. Even today, we still call the things we read in scripture "miracles" and tend to doubt what is written. Therefore, to an infinitely greater extent, we too are only left with belief, faith in accepting who Jesus claimed to be and what He said and did -- or rejecting Him and His message.
..never a good excuse to induce magic to explain how something works..
If you could time travel to the time of Christ or even even a few centuries into the past, you'd have a hard time to explain modern technology or convince people there that you really came from the future. They'd think your technological demos are magic.
Turning water into wine, multiplying bread, raising the dead and all the other "miracles" we read about in the Bible are "supernatural" to us, only because even today we don't have the technology to explain these "miracles".
All of what we call "reality" comes to us via our senses. Even the physical things which our senses tell us are "real", are nothing more than charges in motion separated by mostly what we think is empty space. Is a thought or an idea less real than the chair you are sitting on?
(..the software is always encoded in a language in some physical representation..)
Yes, but I can run the same software in vastly different kinds of hardware. It is the software, the equivalent of thought, that makes a computer do its job. We can load some OS and all its software into a VM and that software cannot tell nor care what the underlying hardware is.
If we can load the complete "personality" of a computer into some higher performing hardware or virtual machine, is it not possible to conceive of God having the technology to someday load our complete personality, everything we are and think into some better hardware, not subject to death? Is it so impossible to conceive of God having the technology to by some means transmit the software (soul) of a human being onto a cosmic hard drive or other backup device, for the time when He will reload that software into some new hardware no longer subject to failure and death.
(..but there is no evidence for it..)
There is plenty of evidence that cannot be perceived with physical instruments. We know that non-tangible things like compassion, love, beauty, generosity or their opposites are also real and in some measure have a greater effect on us than the physical objects conventional science deals with.
...Does a snowflake contain more or less information than the molecules from which it formed....
The information is not contained in the molecules, but in the relationships and forces they operate under. The information in a novel or musical score is not determined by the chemistry of the ink on paper, but by the arrangement and meaning of the symbols placed by one intelligent mind communicating to another mind.
The codes in DNA are carried by the arrangement and order of the four amino acids. The codes of bits on a computer disk determine information, not the magnetic structure of the disk itself.
Information often transmits INSTRUCTIONS in how to accomplish an objective determined in the will of a mind. When you teach you kid to ride a bike, you are transmitting information that is hopefully, eventually transmitted into a MEANINGFUL result. So then another characteristic of information is that it is meaning and purposeful.
(..Which has more, a solid black image or a random arrangement of black and white pixels?..)
Neither of these images carries any information because the do not convey meaning and/or purpose to any mind. ALL information is ultimately destined to be evaluated by a mind.
The beauty of a sunset or of a cuddly kitten were DESIGNED to be appreciated by our minds by the designer of all minds.
...DNA is simply code...
Has any code, say for a computer or Morse code or any code ever come into being apart from the processes of thought?
DNA has been called the blueprint of life. A blueprint is a representation of a house or machine. It is neither a house nor a machine, but represents the INSTRUCTIONS of how the workers are to build the object depicted by that blueprint. The DNA contains instructions how to build an organism. Both the information on the blueprint and the DNA code originated in a mind.
When you give someone instructions on how to do a task, you are imparting INFORMATION to them. Hopefully, they will then use that information to accomplish what you have willed in your mind.
(..Further, it is quite easy to write computer programs..)
Has any useful computer program ever come about outside of the activity of thought arising in a mind? Information can be hidden, even encrypted. If you write a letter on your computer and encrypt it, does the encrypted letter not still contain all the information of the original clear text? Information content and information accessibility are not synonymous. If you mine data or recover encrypted text with the right password, you are not creating information, but merely making that already existing information useable.
...According to reports of exceptionally dubious reliability...
Well in the end you don't have to BELIEVE anything recorded in the ancient writings. However, just know that there are more written copies of the ancient scripts of the Bible than all other ancient records combined.
The dead sea scrolls show that the scripture documents handed down by repeated copying survived essentially unchanged, despite all that copy work.
....We have to tell everyone that H2 + 2O2...
No, you can say that the DESIGN of hydrogen atoms and oxygen atoms and the force that governs them is such that two of the former will combine with one of the latter in such a way to make the only natural substance that expands when transitioning from a liquid state into a solid form.
....We've seen the production of (fairly) complex organic chemicals from non-organic mixtures...
That is like saying we've been able to make nuts, bolts, valves, pistons, crankshafts and other components of an internal combustion engine, but have not yet built any engine that actually runs. Most, if not all of these organic components were assembled from bits and pieces that were once part of a living organism. Nobody has yet constructed even a simple protein from the available 92 or so basic elements. Nobody has yet duplicated the process of photosynthesis. All scientists ALWAYS have to start with pieces that were once alive.
(..You get to a point and you say "OK. I don't know. God did it. Let's put down our tools and go have lunch...)
No you don't. You can say God did it and now let's do experiments to figure out how He might have done that. A theory of how God may have built something can be tested just as readily as a theory that postulates time and chance was the originator. We reverse engineer human creations all the time. So now the scientists can and do reverse engineer some of the things that God first came up with. Cameras and Sonar are just two examples of man copying God's designs. Good thing He doesn't sue us for patent and copyright infringement. Science can work just as well or even better with the underlying idea of investigating God's clever designs and make them useful for the service of humanity.