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Author | Topic: What IS evidence of design? (CLOSING STATEMENTS ONLY) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
havoc Member (Idle past 4776 days) Posts: 89 Joined: |
Ok. Then I expect to see you back here in probably 5 to 10 years, when we do exactly that. Its a date...unless the rapture comes first.
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Perdition Member (Idle past 3259 days) Posts: 1593 From: Wisconsin Joined: |
Its a date...unless the rapture comes first. I'll make a deal with you. If the rapture comes, I'll convert to Christianity, if scientists show that life can occur naturally, you accept science over dogma. How about it?
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havoc Member (Idle past 4776 days) Posts: 89 Joined: |
Is ice freezing in a refrigerator evidence that water does not freeze naturally? Not what I said, but you allready know that. Is water freezing below 32 degrees proof that it can freeze at 50 degrees? What is up with the insults? I’m sure you are an intelligent person who happens to be wrong.
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
Coragyps writes:
Not at all. Pasteur proved that if you kill all the bacteria in a flask of nutrients and prevent outside bacteria from entering, bacteria don't grow in that flask. How hard can this be to understand? The distinction between spontaneous generation and abiogenesis is explained in the high school biology texts used in essentially every US public high school. Well, at least the texts that creationists haven't gotten to. Yet a web search for biogenesis turns up countless creationist web pages that take the ridiculous position that Pasteur's experiments proved that abiogenesis and even evolution are impossible. My favorite "Law of biogenesis" example is Chuck Missler's argument that every time we open a jar of peanut butter we prove that God exists.
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havoc Member (Idle past 4776 days) Posts: 89 Joined: |
I'll make a deal with you. If the rapture comes, I'll convert to Christianity, if scientists show that life can occur naturally, you accept science over dogma. How about it? Point 1: you might want to move your time table up you dont want to miss the flight. Point 2: already have.
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Perdition Member (Idle past 3259 days) Posts: 1593 From: Wisconsin Joined: |
Point 1: you might want to move your time table up you dont want to miss the flight. Point 2: already have. Considering the "flight" has been "imminent" for about 2000 years now, I'm not going to hold my breath, If you're arguing that Pasteur's experiments "prove" abiogenesis is impossible, then either you don't understand science, or you're letting your dogma override the scientific proces.
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jar Member (Idle past 416 days) Posts: 34026 From: Texas!! Joined: |
havoc writes: Is ice freezing in a refrigerator evidence that water does not freeze naturally? Not what I said, but you allready know that. Is water freezing below 32 degrees proof that it can freeze at 50 degrees? What is up with the insults? I’m sure you are an intelligent person who happens to be wrong. Now that is an even sillier assertion. Freezing water in a refrigerator is exactly analogous to a scientist creating life. Both are examples of simply replicating natural systems. I'm still waiting for you or any other marketeer of Special Creation or Intelligent Design to present evidence similar to what I or others have presented, but have no real expectation that will ever happen. Until it does, Special Creation and Intelligent Design will remain just stuff to laugh about. Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!
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havoc Member (Idle past 4776 days) Posts: 89 Joined: |
How hard can this be to understand? The distinction between spontaneous generation and abiogenesis is explained in the high school biology texts used in essentially every US public high school. Well, at least the texts that creationists haven't gotten to. Please explain how abiogenesis and spontaneous generation differ?
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jar Member (Idle past 416 days) Posts: 34026 From: Texas!! Joined: |
havoc writes: How hard can this be to understand? The distinction between spontaneous generation and abiogenesis is explained in the high school biology texts used in essentially every US public high school. Well, at least the texts that creationists haven't gotten to. Please explain how abiogenesis and spontaneous generation differ? But not in this thread. Thanks. Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
havoc writes: Please explain how abiogenesis and spontaneous generation differ? I recommend reading the Wikipedia article on Spontaneous Generation. I think that would be enough, but you can also take a peak at the article on Abiogenesis. I'd also recommend that you examine descriptions of the experiments that Louis Pasteur and Francesco Redi actually performed and that you seriously consider the scope of the conclusions you would reasonably draw from those experiments.
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slevesque Member (Idle past 4662 days) Posts: 1456 Joined: |
The fact that we've hardly looked can hardly be used as evidence to say that life doesn't exist anywhere else. We've also only looked at places that are very different from Earth, if it turns out that certain requirements for life arising naturally don't exist in the small smaple we've looked at, we're left with an empty sample and trying to determine anything from an empty sample is problematic at best. Well I'm not the one who brought this up. All I am saying is that, if anything, observed lack of extraterrestial life is evidence against the existence of a naturalistic mechanism to get life. But of course, and I'll repeat myself, I totally agree we haven't searched enough for this to hold any weight
Beyond that, the argument for design fails the same test. We haven't found designed life anywhere we've looked in the universe (setting aside the debate about life on Earth). Why would a designer not design more life considering the vast universe he obviously created for it? You can't really apply this ''test'' (I wouldn't have chosen that word but oh well) to a supernatural designer, unless you are willing to embark on the theology of what a designer would or would not do.
I'm not sure how you feel, but I certainly hope we're both participating here when the discovery of life outside of Earth is discovered, and I look forward to us discussing it. Seeing you speak in absolutes, I assume you are very near 100% sure that we will eventually find extraterrestial life. Seems like a faith-based statement, however.
I guess it depends on exactly what you mean by saying "life." Being self-perpetuating is an emergent property of the alignment of the molecules in DNA and RNA, but that emergent property can be explained, and even predicted by studying chemistry and physics. You need more then physics to explain DNA, RNA and life. You also need information theory.
Depends on the field you study. I was originally an astro-physics major in college. Physics claimed to be the most pure science, since chemistry is simply a subset of physics and biology was a subset of chemistry and any other science was a combination or subset of those three. I will agree that life is a very special type of chemistry, but I won't back away from saying that life, when boiled down to its essence, is chemistry. There's nothing inherently unchemistry-like that prevents chemistry from becoming life naturalistically. I also currently study physics at university, and I understand what you mean, but you are neglecting the information aspect that life contains, and this is what seperates it from simply being ''special chemistry''. The chemical interactions between the molecules of a DNA strand tells us nothing about the information it contains, because it does not depend on the interactions but in the order of those molecules, and this must be viewed from the POV of information theory, not chemistry. This is why it is the fallacy of composition to attribute to life only the characteristics that it's individual components hold.
If I say that I believe pigs can fly, is it up to you to prove me wrong, or should I provide some reason for my assertion before we even begin to debate it? ''Pigs can fly'' isn't a universal negative.
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slevesque Member (Idle past 4662 days) Posts: 1456 Joined: |
BUT, natural processes have been observed. This is a fallacious reasoning once again. You cannot assert natural processes causes a particular thing just because we have observed natural processes in general. Think about it, suppose I turned lead into gold and you told me I did so via a natural mean. But when I asked why you think this is so, you answered ''because I have observed natural processes''. This would clearly be illogical, just because you saw an appl fall to the ground, or an electric current create a magnetic field, or any other natural process it does not mean anything concerning turning lead into gold. You actually need to have at least a plausible naturalistic mechanism, and/or observed revelant natural processes.
When you put your imaginary Designer on the lab table to demonstrate the method and model used, then maybe, just maybe, ID and Creationism might be worth looking at. I'll be honest jar, you have brought very little to this discussion appart from repeating useless things such as this ad nauseam ...
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 306 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
All I am saying is that, if anything, observed lack of extraterrestial life ... But this isn't an "observed lack" --- rather, it's a lack of observation. Which is different.
But of course, and I'll repeat myself, I totally agree we haven't searched enough for this to hold any weight Agreed. In fact, it's not just that we "haven't searched enough" --- we haven't even searched in the right way. So far, the only tests we have made are for life which lives in our near vicinity, which is smart enough to build radios and suchlike gadgets, which is dumb enough not to have built anything better, and which is incautious enough to want to broadcast this fact to the galaxy. That's a much narrower field.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 306 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
Think about it, suppose I turned lead into gold and you told me I did so via a natural mean. But when I asked why you think this is so, you answered ''because I have observed natural processes''. This would clearly be illogical, just because you saw an appl fall to the ground, or an electric current create a magnetic field, or any other natural process it does not mean anything concerning turning lead into gold. You actually need to have at least a plausible naturalistic mechanism, and/or observed revelant natural processes. Well, no. Suppose you actually (apparently) saw me take an ingot of lead and turn it into an ingot of gold. Now, you admittedly believe in supernatural forces. Nonetheless, wouldn't your first hypothesis be that I had used natural means to bring about this effect --- possibly some sort of conjuring trick? Would that not be more "logical" than the conclusion that I actually have supernatural powers? Heck, what do you think when you actually see a conjuring trick? Has it ever even crossed your mind that (for example) Penn & Teller have supernatural powers from Satan, or have you always assumed that they are using purely natural means to produce their effects? Whether or not miracles happen, we must admit that they are rare. Therefore, in the absence of any explanation of a given effect, we are compelled to believe as a default position that the cause was natural. This is not certain, but it is certainly the way to bet.
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8
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slevesque writes: Irreducible complexity is discussed in the litterature, but it is not named this way. For example:
quote: Koch, A.L., Enzyme evolution: I. The importance of untranslatableintermediates, Genetics 72:297—316, 1972. You probably got this from John Woodmorappe's article Irreducible complexity: some candid admissions by evolutionists. If you go back and look more carefully you'll see how you screwed up the citation, since he mentions Koch immediately after that quote, which is actually from the abstract for A yeast prion provides a mechanism for genetic variation and phenotypic diversity (Heather L. True and Susan L. Lindquist, Nature 407, 477-483, 28 September 2000). At least it's not 39 years old, but the abstract continues:
True & Lindquist writes: The Saccharomyces cerevisiae prion [PSI +] is an epigenetic modifier of the fidelity of translation termination, but its impact on yeast biology has been unclear. Here we show that [PSI +] provides the means to uncover hidden genetic variation and produce new heritable phenotypes. Moreover, in each of the seven genetic backgrounds tested, the constellation of phenotypes produced was unique. We propose that the epigenetic and metastable nature of [PSI +] inheritance allows yeast cells to exploit pre-existing genetic variation to thrive in fluctuating environments. Further, the capacity of [PSI +] to convert previously neutral genetic variation to a non-neutral state may facilitate the evolution of new traits. Wow! The abstract concludes with a proposed solution for the conundrum introduced at the beginning and concludes in completely opposite fashion to what you thought! We really should create a quote mining archive. This one would deserve to be featured prominently. Irreducible complexity is the modern form of the argument, "I can't imagine how this could have happened naturally, it must be due to something outside of nature." And no, irreducible complexity is not "discussed in the literature, but it is not named this way." That's because irreducible complexity is not a synonym for "things we as yet have no idea how they happened." --Percy
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