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Author | Topic: abiogenesis | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 304 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
In other words, when a scientist uses the word ''abiogenesis'', no one ever thinks he is referring to supernatural creation of life. We all know he is talking about scientific hypothesis about a natural explanation to the origin of life. This is in fact the general understanding of the definition of the word as of today in both layman and scientific terms ... Well, for that matter, if you were to ask an —nologist, or look in a dictionary, you would be told that wine was an alcoholic beverage produced by the fermentation of grape juice or other plant juices. And yet I should think it a strange semantic quibble if someone were to argue that in that case, by definition, Jesus couldn't have turned water into wine; and stranger still if this argument came from a Biblical literalist.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 304 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
I don't think any person, biblical literalist or otherwise, would call Jesus turning water-to-wine ''fermentation'' Touch. I see your point. But then, you see mine --- according to the sort of reasoning you're invoking, you would then have to admit that whatever Jesus made, it wasn't wine.
This is why I don't think anybody should call God turning Dust-to-man ''abiogenesis''. You wish, I gather, to make the word refer to a sort of process, albeit one that neither of us can adequately describe --- you want it to mean the production of life from non-life by possible means to the exclusion of the production of life from non-life by impossible means. I think that (especially when having these sorts of discussions) it makes sense for the word to refer to the event, whether it took place in accordance with or contrary to the laws of nature. Perhaps we should invent two new words with no ambiguity, but how would we make them stick? Until then, I would point out that the person who made the OP wasn't actually confused by what the folks at talkorigins said, he just wanted to complain about those pesky scientific folk using a word differently from him. My heart bleeds for him.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 304 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
I wonder what Jesus drinked ... "Drank". I'm not being snippy, it's just that I thought you'd like to know. Also, the word "sensical" that you've invented doesn't really exist. Yes, I know, logically, if the word "nonsensical" exists, then the word "sensical" should, and maybe you would find it in a sufficiently large dictionary, but no-one ever uses it except you. There are a number of English words that are like that: people say "immaculate" but not "maculate", for example. "Maculate" is a word, it means "spotted", but no-one ever uses it. Anyway, back to the topic.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 304 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
Mmm yeah, well we have no other way to do wine but through fermentation, and so we include this in the definition. But we all know wine simply is the chemical mixture of alcool+whatever other organic molecule is in there, so he can still miraculously make some. I agree that he can. My point is that if we're going to define wine by the process that the experts talk about and the dictionary talks about, then no he can't. But I think that you see my point, as I see yours.
No need to invent words, just use 'special creation' when talking about the first case ... Only the phrase "special creation" means so much more than that. It would not, for example, incorporate the case where God created the first primitive life and then sat back and let evolution roll.
Talkorigins seems to be a bit outdated at times. It is, 'cos they've stopped doing it. There's so many cool intermediate forms they could have written about since then, but it's frozen. Worse, they can't do anything about their mistakes. There's one thing they cite there where the scientist in question made a mistake, and he found it out himself, and published a retraction, but the retraction was too late, so the mistake is still on talkorigins, and the only thing I can do it write to people who've got it from talkorigins. I can't correct talkorigins, their archive is frozen in time. I can only correct the people who are still using their outdated information. I always get thanked for the correction, which is a difference between evolutionists and creationists which you might like to make a note of.
Sometimes, it will be very insightful and a good read, but I remember when I was patrolling it a lot it wasn't uncommon to see a strawman, Red Herring or equivocation. My experience of creationists is that, like 9/11 conspiracy theorists, they tend to shout "strawman!" whenever they watch someone debunk some aspect of the great tangled ball of creationism / conspiracism that they themselves do not happen to believe in.
But aside from that, I don't know if marc9000 is still around, but I would have liked to know what he meant by that last part in his OP: Well, we may never know.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 304 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
Thanks, every bit counts to improve my English It is already excellent, but the very fact that your English is so good suggests to me that you're the sort of person who would appreciate advice and correction on this subject. Because if you weren't, you wouldn't be nearly so good at it.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 304 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
You do make a lot of stuff up, don't you?
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 304 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
As soon as a supernatural being would come in and create something (without using the natural laws) then this should be included into 'special creation'. So the man who wrote this about the theory of evolution:
There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. ... should be described as a "special creationist"? --- I have always understood special creationism to be that strong version of creationism in which God creates not in general but in particular, individually creating giraffes, crocodiles, spiders, oak trees, and so forth, rather than simply creating the conditions that would produce such things. This is what makes special creationism "special", and distinct from the sort of notion of a creator that might be held by, for example, a deist. Now, if I am wrong, please tell me in what way the adjective "special" does qualify the noun "creationism". It must after all be there to distinguish one particular kind of creationism from creationism in general.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 304 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
You seem to be more interested in discussing your fantasy world than any particular scientific issue. Perhaps you could stop amusing us with your paranoia and talk about ... abiogenesis?
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 304 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
The Templeton Foundation, a major supporter of projects seeking to reconcile science and religion, says that after providing a few grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, they asked proponents to submit proposals for actual research. "They never came in," said Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, who said that while he was skeptical from the beginning, other foundation officials were initially intrigued and later grew disillusioned. Yes, I remember reading this at the time. It seems to me the most damning thing of all. When they're given money to propagandize, they'll take it and welcome, but offer them money to do scientific research, and they literally can't think of anything to do with it.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 304 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
To go further with the junk DNA thing, we find this link, including this paragraph;
quote: Intelligent design really can sometimes correct mistakes of the Neo-Darwinian mindset. But, of course, it didn't. How naive are you? Do you really suppose that the discovery that some non-coding DNA was functional was prompted by the ravings of a bunch of creationist halfwits --- ravings which only started after evolutionists discovered that non-coding DNA had function and told them about it? Here, let me quote you some more from your link:
quote: Wow, as far back as 1994, eh? So, that would be only three decades after real scientists described the structure of tRNA, right? And only two decades after the discovery of introns and alternative gene splicing? And ... I can't even find out how long ago scientists discovered promoter regions. If I google on "discovery of the promoter region", I get such hits as this paper from 1981, but they're talking about the discovery of a particular promoter region for a particular gene, not the discovery of promoter regions in general. That seems to be lost in the mists of time ... can anyone tell me whe the concept was discovered? But, hooray!, "as far back as 1994", creationist nutters started lecturing scientists on how it was possible that one day scientists might make the discoveries that they had already made, and when these discoveries had, presumably via the medium of popular science articles, been spoon-fed to the creationists. Now, how is that "Intelligent design correcting mistakes of the Neo-Darwinists"? And how does it constitute predictive power of creationist mumbo-jumbo for creationists to start talking about what real scientists had discovered decades earlier as though creationists had thought of it and had to drag scientists kicking and screaming towards the truth. You know, a thread was recently started specially for me to defend the proposition that creationists are sincere. Well, you poor dupes who lap up this nonsense may be sincere, but right now I'm thinking that your masters who feed you these lies are just lying lumps of crap.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 304 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
It’s understandable that how ID research is released is something that must be done very carefully ... But in complete secrecy? What's the point? Either their research supports or refutes their position, and either way they should publish.
... considering the emotion and personal attacks by the scientific community over Michael Behe’s work, as well as Dembski’s mathematical applications concerning probabilities in biology. The scientific community’s success in shouting down ID so far has been to declare it religion, and disregard it without addressing the scientific challenges it provides to naturalism. But this is not true, is it? They've proved that Behe and Dembski are talking nonsense. Which wasn't difficult.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 304 days) Posts: 16113 Joined:
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Maybe we’re getting somewhere, you’re right, my problem IS with science, because it’s controlled by atheists! Interesting. Is this, in your opinion, because the only people smart enough to do science are atheists, or because anyone who learns enough science becomes an atheist as a result of this study? Do expand a little on your fantasy.
They don’t even seem to bother to separate the vast differences between atheistic speculation of billions of years ago vs the here-and-now applications of scientific material processes. In the first place, the age of the earth is accepted by people of all religious views except nutty fundamentalists; in the second place it is not speculation but proven fact, in the third place, geology has immense practical applications, and in the fourth place it is not possible to separate the science you like from the science you don't like. There's a reason, you know, why there are no creationist oil companies, and that reason does not involve your fantasies about atheism, it involves dollars and cents.
If any here-and-now scientific applications had the gaps that abiogenesis has, it wouldn’t be able to accomplish anything — it certainly couldn’t be considered science. But there are many such practical goals which are equally elusive, and yet working on them --- and with hope of success --- is indeed considered science. Gene therapy, nanotechnology, a cure for HIV, manned interplanetary travel, high-grade automated translation, economic cold fusion, the abolition of polio, economic nuclear fusion ... are these scientific endeavors to be deemed unscientific because they are as yet incomplete?
Physics is incomplete. Chemistry is incomplete. That's why people are still working on them. Are these not to be considered scientific endeavors? Is no field of science to be considered science until all the answers have been found?
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 304 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
Science that disregards religion completely is what students are being taught. Miller writes it exactly the same way an atheist would. He also writes the multiplication table the same way an atheist would.
If church and state are separated, atheism and state also should be separated. They should be and they are. That's exactly how courts interpret the First Amendment. There is a wall of separation between the state and atheism. But only actual atheism, not "atheism" in the non-sense of "science that conflicts with marc9000's religious beliefs". Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 304 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
Yes, I know I'm off-topic, but I have to say:
The best thing about Obama is still that he's not George W. Bush. Some people may think that he's a bit of a let-down in certain respects, but damn, he's still not George W. Bush. It still makes me feel happy and warm inside just to have a President who isn't George W. Bush. Anyway, back to the topic.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 304 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
The time has come. All closing insults are welcome. Why would I bother? You're being wrong on other threads. I'll mock you there.
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