110 replies to this topic

[Steel Samurai]

Normally I am highly, highly skeptical of videos like these. I've been around here long enough to get to know how atheists, agnostics, and others think, what arguments will immediately fall down flat, and what arguments will stand. This video actually impressed me, and as someone who is normally hugely critical of most modern christian media, that means something. Check it out, and let me know what you think.

[Egann]

My problem is that he seems to forget what he's doing and digress into a ramble over why he disagrees with the position he's questioning. Besides, these aren't really "problems" with atheism, but rather pointing out hypocrisies. Bait-and-switch, given the title and intro.

I really don't like question #3. It's got potential, but he didn't phrase it correctly to get the full impact. What he SHOULD have said is something more along the lines of "morals come from looking to the future possibilities, while atheism can only discern morals by looking to the past because it has no means of judging the present..." Or something like that.

He's on new turf. Pointing out that evolution is descriptive while morals are prescriptive is something I've not heard before, but it isn't phrased tightly enough to be formed into it's own resolution.

[Reflectionist]

Philos71... Hmmm. Well, I've made a video response to him in before, on his "Ex-Christian" video. I'm not really a big fan of him. The logic he uses is forgivable, he IS a theist, and this is the perspective from which his questions come from. He berates chance because, as a Christian he believes that humanity is a divine creation. This is a lot like a corruption of your typical Teleological Argument. A lot of people say that it can't possibly be a mistake that the Earth is in just the perfect place to sustain life, and lo and behold, there is life on it.

What's impossible for this point of view is the idea that "If it wasn't this way, it would be another, and we'd still be having the same question," which is the answer to the question. If chance is part of it, sure... but even if things had turned out differently, would we not still have the same questions and the same position?

That being said... this isn't particularly my 5 questions to answer. I don't really bother with dedicating myself to a particular affirmative religious stance, because I find that it limits what you do, what you see, and who you're able to talk equally to. That first question depends on the "God of the Gaps," argument. It's a leading question, and by answering it, you're endorsing the God of the Gaps argument. I think that's a little disingenuous of Mr. Philos71 here, but the same problems are there in the "10 Questions Every Intelligent Christian Must Answer" video as well.


I'm going to look into this video a bit more then probably make a video response, anyway.

Edited by Reflectionist, 09 July 2009 - 08:22 PM.

[SteveT]

....This is why religion and science need to stay on opposite sides of the room.

I'll admit I skipped past a few sections, but here's some atheistic answers.

1. Aren't you using chance in the same way in which you accuse Christians of using "God of the Gaps?"

- The question assume that the atheist answering the questions is making that accusation
- Probabilistic models are well understood and well established in science, statistical mechanics and quantum physics in particular. These methods have shown empirical, predictive power, and are therefore quite reliable. (Now, I don't know if anyone's modeled abiogenesis.)

"God of the gaps" is the scientific equivalent of "A Wizard Did It." Furthermore, over history, that argument pushes God into a smaller and smaller corner until he there's no longer a place for him in the universe. It's religions who have to stop thinking about how God created the universe; not scientists.

2. Why should there be something instead of nothing?

- Who cares? There is something, or we wouldn't be around to ask the question. Questioning the purposes of the universe is for philosophers, and has no bearing on the existence or non-existence of any deities.

3. Where do you get your morals from? How did morals evolve?

- I would say that the atheistic answer to both these questions is the same: Humans evolved with a social survival strategy; and morality, at its core, are rules for keeping groups of people functioning. As Spock says, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one." Human groups care about the survival of the group (sometimes the strategy for an individual is to ensure that relatives reproduce, to further spread your genes go on through them). Altruism (the basis of morality in a system with no deities), evolved to keep this group structure intact. The most able to contribute to a group, and foster strong social connections were more likely to survive.

Short version: morality evolved as a method to keep our social groups stable, thus keeping more humans alive to make babies.

5. Can nature generate complex organisms?

This one rapidly turned into the question of intelligent design. There are plenty of atheistic answers to intelligent design, such as all the useless parts of the human body. Also, there's the matter of the fossil record containing increasing peak complexity in organisms over time.

Edited by SteveT, 09 July 2009 - 11:03 PM.

[Wolf O'Donnell]

Atheists come up with morals by thinking over what they know about what is deemed good and what is wrong. Some may argue that this means that atheistic morals are arbitrary but I'd like to counter that by invoking a modified version of Euthyphro's Dilemma.

The original dilemma is put like this:

"Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious? Or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?"

The modified version I will use is actually two questions. We will focus on the first one for now.

"Is what is moral deemed good by God because he says so, or is it good because it has all the properties of goodness?"

If it is the latter, then whatever God says is good must be so. Hence, if he says it is right to let's say drive the Canaanites out of a land or commit genocide, then it must be good. He said so. If he says you must stone homosexuals to death, then it must be good to do so because he said so. If it is right to execute someone for working on the Sabbath, then it must be right because he said so. If God doesn't say that paedophilia isn't wrong, then he mustn't think it's wrong. However, we know that genocide is wrong. We know that we shouldn't be killing people just because of the way they are, or if they work on a Sabbath and that paedophilia is wrong. So therefore what is moral must be deemed good by God, because of its very nature, otherwise theistic morality is arbitrary. Now if a theist insists on answering the former, then they cannot chide atheists for having arbitrary mroals, so they have to answer the latter.

This means that morals must be something separate from God.

Now here is where the Euthyphro dilemma needs modification.

Someone can reply that God is essentially good, so therefore the former is true and that God is the source of morals because he is essentially good and therefore he would never choose a moral that is inherently evil.

Here comes the second question of the modified Euthyphro's dilemma.

"Is God good because to be good just is to be whatever God is; or is God good because God has all the properties of goodness?"

Once again, we come to the same problem as the first question. If God is a sadist, then to be good must be to be a sadist. If God is a genocidal maniac, then to be good is to be a genocidal maniac. Goodness becomes arbritrary depending on what God is. Therefore, if Christians are to accuse atheists of having arbirtrary morals, they cannot answer the former, because then they themselves are admitting that their morals are also arbitrary. God therefore must be good because God has all the properties of goodness. But then, that also means that goodness is something separate from God.

The former answer to all questions means that theistic morals are arbitrary. If anyone tries to cope out answer both, then that doesn't matter. By answering yes to the latter, the theist is admitting that morality is independent of God. If it is independent of God, then an atheist can have morals that are not arbitrary.

We know that even Christians can create their own morals by looking at their responses to paedophilia and abortion. Neither is outright condemned in the Bible or by God. It takes some mental gymnatics and cutting and pasting of morals in order to come up with an argument to say that the Bible does. Disgust at paedophilia is a manmade moral. It has no Biblical basis or basis in a deity to say otherwise is to delude yourself. You made up that moral. We made up that moral. Is it what we came up with after thinking things through and thinking, what is bad, what is immoral and wondering whether paedophilia has any of these properties.

Those who think that abortionists should die for their crimes are also creating their own morals. The worst punishment the Bible ever asks of a person who kills a fetus is a monetary fine. Compare that to homosexuality or working on the Sabbath, both of which are punished by death. Obviously the Old Testament God doesn't think abortion is a very great crime. Yet there are anti-abortionists who think death is a suitable crime. That's not God's word. That's not God's morality. That's theirs. They came up with that moral outlook themselves. Granted, they built on something that was already there, but once again, they came up with it by thinking about what is good and what is not.

That many different cultures, some without deities, have managed to come up with the same ideas, must mean that morality is a manmade concept and that goodness is a relatively objective thing that is near consistent throughout all humanity. In fact, some many argue it is consistent throughout all groups of social animals.

That is my response to quesiton 3.

EDIT: I've given the other questions a bit more thought.

1. Aren't you using chance in the same way in which you accuse Christians of using "God of the Gaps?"
2. Why is there something instead of nothing?

The only reasonable answer to question 2 is I don't know. I will not invoke God as an explanation, because I have no reason to believe he exists. The absence of an explanation for something is not a reason to believe in the presence of God. Ultimately, I doubt the existence of God due to an absence of evidence for his existence, so I'm not going to believe in him if someone can point out a gap in our knowledge to me because that is also an absence of evidence. If you add two negatives, you still get a negative.

Ultimately, I'm not using chance in the same as Christians use "God of the Gaps", because we know that chance occurs in biological systems. We know that when every animal reproduces sexually, they shuffle genes by chance. We know that DNA damage can occur randomly. We know that mistakes are made in DNA replication. We know that all of this can result in mutations. We know that natural selection can select for these mutations. We have shown this to be true. Richard Lenski has shown this to be true through his work with E. coli. There is documented evidence to show that it can happen and I can invoke the evolution of nylonase as a documented piece of scientific evidence.

And no, don't go on about that BS about the Earth being perfectly placed for life. That's like me walking up to a puddle and saying, isn't it amazing that this indentation is perfectly suited to contain this water? That's rubbish. We all know that the water settles in the shape of the indentation because it is fluid and any excess ran off because it could no longer fit.

Life is like the water. It adapts to the environment, to the planet's environment. That life which did not adapt was like the water which could not fit in the indentation and hence ran off, away from the indentation to perhaps other indentations elsewhere in the road. In the case of life, it died.

And if Intelligent Design is a fact or not is relevant to your statement. If life bears the mark of intelligent design, but there was no intelligent design then how is that proof of God? If Intelligent Design is not a fact and Evolution is true, then so what are you asking me to think about? It must mean that human beings have minds that see patterns where there aren't any. Need I post an optical illusion here to prove my point?

* * * * * *
* * * * * *
* * * * * *

Stare at the above and soon or later, you'll start to see patterns. Your mind may trick you into seeing a cross shape. It may try to mentally subdivide the dots into groups of three or two groups of nine. It may make you see an arrangement of squares of dots. It'll make you see patterns there, where the only pattern is three repeating lines of six asterisks. Or maybe it's a repeating pattern of six columns of three asterisks. If we see patterns with a bunch of asterisks, we're bound to see patterns in life. We're bound to see intelligent design where there is none.

3. I've just actually looked at the video proper this time round and I object again.

Evolution is a descriptive theory about how morals came about. Atheists wishing to create a moral framework use ethics, which is a completely separate discipline from evolution. We can also use Game Theory to help us determine a moral framework. Furthermore, the Bible itself was not very good at determining the future, as it did not envisage the mroal quandries we now have. Ultimately, then we have to use our own mental initiative to figure out a new moral framework regarding the problems of euthanasia, digital privacy and so forth.

Q4: How did morals evolve?

In a social society, morals need to be in place to ensure that the group maintains itself. In order for a social animal group to survive, morals need to evolve. Without morals, such societies would decay and be selected against.

Question 5: Can nature generate complex organisms?

Yes. In fact, we have the mathematics to prove it. http://www.math.vand...es/wolfram.html

I was going to give more detailed answers for all the questions, but I've given up now. It's taken a good four hours to get to this point and I just don't have the energy to continue.

Edited by Wolf_ODonnell, 13 July 2009 - 02:23 PM.

[Egann]

Proof that the whole issue is philosophic, despite what the Darwinists/atheists say:

Technically speaking, abiogenesis is NOT part of evolutionary theory. It (abiogenesis) cannot be tested because it is essentially a fluke. Think about it. Abiogenesis can be rationalized because it only needed to happen ONCE to explain the universe...which means that it is given special pleading status over scientific repeatability. IF IT CANNOT BE REPEATED, IT IS NOT SCIENTIFIC. IT IS A PHILOSOPHICAL ASSMPTION.

Here's my paradox. It has long been known (since the Miller-Urea experiment) that HCN -better known as cyanide- is an important molecule for synthesizing amino acids, genetic bases, and other precursor molecules. (I can produce citations, but seeing how this is general knowledge in the abiogenesis field, why bother?) HCN is so reduced it is fatal in trace amounts to any life because it interferes with metabolism. In other words a molecule that must be present in HUGE concentrations to form precursor molecules must drop in concentration to essentially zero AND THEN life can originate. HOWEVER, according to Le Chatelier's principle of chemical equilibrium, as soon as the reactant (the HCN) is removed the chemical equilibrium will shift to begin forming HCN out of the precursor molecules.

In other words life must originate in a soup that is not just toxic, but toxic in trace amounts. The toxin cannot be removed from the soup without breaking the laws of chemistry.

Edited by Egann, 10 July 2009 - 12:08 PM.

[Selena]

The "God of the Gaps" issue.

Atheists do tend use chance in a heavy handed manner, yes. But evolution isn't exactly 'random' in the typical sense, so that part of the argument didn't really fly for me.


Why should there be something instead of nothing?

Isn't this a question that everyone - not just atheists - has to answer? Judaism and Christianity, for example, describe how the world was created and how it was then subsequently managed by God. I don't recall the Bible stating why God made the heavens and earth and all the things living on it. Just that he saw fit to do so. God doesn't really need the physical universe. He doesn't really need people to worship him. I don't recall Buddhism or Hinduism explaining why the world was created, either. Just that it was. The same is true for most mythologies. The world is created by one or many gods, but there's little explanation for why they actually do it. I suppose because it amused them.

But you could answer the question with "Because God wanted there to be life." But that's about as weighty as "Because the Big Bang exploded." Both are lacking real causes for creation.

Also, the "Earth is perfectly suited for life, which must be on account of God!" argument is a very weak one. There is nothing in the rulebooks that says a planet (or moon!) has to be Earth-like for life to exist. We're only familiar with life on Earth because we don't have the ability to adequately go anywhere else. For all we know, there could be marine life under the ice sheets of Europa. Not to mention the many extrasolar worlds we are now finding in their respective solar systems' habitable zones. As research and exploration continues, Earth looks less and less unique. And that's only from scanning the stars within our reasonable view. Which is just a sliver of the entire universe. On a universal scale, there may be countless Earth-like planets.

Life here is perfectly suited to Earth because Earth is all life here had to work with.



Where do you get your morals from? How did morals evolve?

If morals came from a common, spiritual source, then why does every society have a different set of morals? Individuals, for that matter, have wildly different morals even within the same society. In previous debates this has commonly been explained away by "Well, the people who don't think like [insert my religion here] have been denying God's message due to their human arrogance." Which is in itself an arrogant statement, and then we get lost in the endless "Which religion is right?" debate. Saying that morals stem from a common, spiritual source is contradicted by the world's societies.

Even mere animals demonstrate moral code and 'laws' within their complex societies - we just dismiss that because, as humans, we're far above the likes of fuzzy forest creatures and are much more civilized and intelligent. Of course, you might argue that animals, too, are subject to a sort of 'spiritual moral order.'


We're left with the following options:

1) Human morals all stem from a spiritual source. Variations in human morality are explained by humans believing more in themselves than in God.
2) Human morals all stem from a spiritual source. Variations in human morality are explained by there really being multiple gods all along, each one instilling different moral codes!
3) Human morals all stem from a spiritual source. Variations in human morality are explained by God amusing himself by creating dramatic conflict due to different morals.

4) SOME human morals stem from a spiritual source, but only the basic ones (do not kill). The rest are from culture.

5) The basic morals and inherent laws of all social animals (humans, chimps, horses, wolves, ants, so on) purposefully stem from a spiritual source in the fashion of intelligent design. The other morals of modern society come from culture.

6) The basic morals and inherent laws of all social animals are a product of evolution. The other morals of modern society come from culture.


Although I am a spiritual person, I lean toward option 6. Of course, I see evolution as a tool of creation and a means for life to survive without the constant hands on intervention of god. But I don't believe in intelligent design in regards to life. Or at least not individual species.



Can nature generate complex organisms?

To randomly create a complex organism independent of the evolutionary tree? This question will inevitably take you back to when and how life itself began. Which is a question that science cannot accurately answer yet, but it also seldom tries to with current levels of research. Religion often answers this question at the expense of what science has been uncovered so far (all the animals and the first people magically poofing into existence at the predetermined start date). So neither side seems to be well informed about this.

It's my general belief that god allowed life and the physical universe to exist and implanted various natural laws to prevent it from going haywire, but has also mostly stayed 'hands off' since creation. Leaving evolution and the spread of life to its own natural devices.

[Wolf O'Donnell]

Proof that the whole issue is philosophic, despite what the Darwinists/atheists say:

Technically speaking, abiogenesis is NOT part of evolutionary theory. It (abiogenesis) cannot be tested because it is essentially a fluke. Think about it. Abiogenesis can be rationalized because it only needed to happen ONCE to explain the universe...which means that it is given special pleading status over scientific repeatability. IF IT CANNOT BE REPEATED, IT IS NOT SCIENTIFIC. IT IS A PHILOSOPHICAL ASSMPTION.

That's not entirely true, Egann. Richard Lenski's experiment can technically be repeated, but I don't think you'd get the citrate gene evolving a second time round unless he were to ensure the conditions were exactly the same. Also, you can't say it cannot be rationalised and then talk about the Miller-Urey experiment (I think you should apologise to Harold C. Urey for mistyping his name). What is the Miller-Urey experiment? It is an attempt to find out whether life could have been created in early Earth conditions, or at least, conditions we think the early Earth should have based on evidence we've gathered from ice cores and so forth.

Here's my paradox. It has long been known (since the Miller-Urea experiment) that HCN -better known as cyanide- is an important molecule for synthesizing amino acids, genetic bases, and other precursor molecules. (I can produce citations, but seeing how this is general knowledge in the abiogenesis field, why bother?) HCN is so reduced it is fatal in trace amounts to any life because it interferes with metabolism. In other words a molecule that must be present in HUGE concentrations to form precursor molecules must drop in concentration to essentially zero AND THEN life can originate. HOWEVER, according to Le Chatelier's principle of chemical equilibrium, as soon as the reactant (the HCN) is removed the chemical equilibrium will shift to begin forming HCN out of the precursor molecules.

In other words life must originate in a soup that is not just toxic, but toxic in trace amounts. The toxin cannot be removed from the soup without breaking the laws of chemistry.

Surely, though, this applies to a reversible reaction. Would you care to tell us why you think the reactions were reversible?

[spunky-monkey]

#1. Aren't you using "chance" in the exact same way in which you accuse Christians of using "God of the Gaps"?

No, and that is actually a rather dumb question. Chance and probability are an explanation for any possible series of events that could ever possibly occur, granted being somewhat vague. Difference between an atheist and a theist is, an atheist doesn't automatically assume a God or intellect designer is responsible for everything that ever was, or ever will be. Just because the dice rolled on a four doesn't mean an unseen deity willed it.


#2. Why should there be something... instead of nothing?

GIGO - "I think therefore am I".


#3. Where do you get your morals from?

What a philosophical no-brainer. Better question is "Where do you get your rhetorical questions from?"

And I had to laugh when the guy completely overlooked Symbiosis in Nature just to prove how awesomely bad he is.


#4. How did morals evolve?

Again, he's completely neglected to touch upon all, or for that matter, any form of symbiosis existing in the Universe.


#5. Can nature generate complex organisms, in the sense of originating it, when previously there was none?

Firstly: an organism is both natural and complex.
Secondly: Philos71's rhetorical quips don't support the existence of God, only serve to show how incredibly arrogant and self-serving he ultimately is.
Thirdly: What on earth was he arguing on about with that ridiculous arrow & bull's-eye clause?

[Wolf O'Donnell]

I've just been looking into Egann's supposed paradox a little bit more and have realised something.

HCN would be in solution in the experiment designed to mimic hypothesised environmental conditions of the early Earth. It dissolves weakly in water to form an aqueous solution of H+ and CN- ions. If we apply the Le Chatelier's process, removal of these ions to generate amino acids would actually drive more creation of those ions, which would feed the later reactions that create more amino acids. I ran your question by a very knowledgeable friend who reads scientific articles for a living (he works on a scientific journal, but I keep forgetting to ask him which one) and he basically said I was right to point out that your paradox only applies if the reaction itself is reversible and then gave an example of how the principle itself could be overcome if you alter the environmental conditions of the reactions.

Here, I'll quote his entire post for you:

React any acid with any inorganic carbonate. What happens? The reaction runs to completion, resulting in a solution of an inorganic salt, and the production of carbon dioxide gas. That reaction is wholly one way. Indeed, many chemical reactions are wholly one way, because they are exothermic (energy is liberated, usually in the form of heat), and the reverse reaction requires an energy input. Yet none of these reactions violates Le Chatelier's principle.

Oh, and any elementary study of the Haber process will teach the astute student that a naive application of Le Chatelier's principle doesn't work. According a naive, first-approximation view of the relevant equation for the reaction of nitrogen and hydrogen to produce ammonia, because the reaction is exothermic in the direction of ammonia production, one would naively assume that cooling the reaction would push the equilibrium in favour of ammonia. Industrial plants using the Haber process, however, increase the temperature of the reaction mixture. What happens in the Haber process is that the reaction mixture is heated to speed up the reaction kinetics, at the expense of lower ammonia production on each pass of reactants into the vessel, but then, the reaction mix (plus product) is removed from the reaction vessel, the ammonia extracted (courtesy of the fact that it is extremely soluble in water, whereas the reactant gases are far less soluble), and the gases recycled into the reactor until around 98% conversion is achieved. in any case, the catalyst that is used for the reaction doesn't work unless it is heated to 400°C. To obtain an economically viable yield, the reaction is performed at high pressure.

The importance of the Haber process cannot be understated. it is estimated that approximately one third of the entire human population of the planet relies upon the Haber process to stave off famine, by ensuring that sufficient agricultural fertilisers are available for efficient crop production. Therefore a proper understanding of its operation, and the application of Le Chatelier's principle thereto, is vital.

Incidentally, since HCN is an acid in solution (it ionises weakly to form H+ and CN- ions in aqueous solution), and reactions usually involve the ionised form, by Le Chatelier's principle, removal of the ions would shift the ionisation equilibrium to remove non-ionised HCN from the system, and provide more ions in solution, which would then provide more reactants. If the reaction removing those H+ and CN- ions from a given system is exothermic, which means that an energy input is required to drive the reverse reaction, then this doesn't pose a problem.

Plus, if the products formed from a reaction involving HCN are much more stable than the reactants, then the reverse reaction again is not going to take place unless there is a large energy input.

[Raien]

I don't see why chance is a necessary part of an atheistic position. I don't believe in the existence of chance because every effect must have a necessary cause. To assume the existence of possible alternative effects is to assume that such effects happen without a cause.

But even without chance, there can still be coincidence. Cause and effect does not require deliberate intent, and thus it does not require the existence of God.

[Egann]

I don't see why chance is a necessary part of an atheistic position. I don't believe in the existence of chance because every effect must have a necessary cause. To assume the existence of possible alternative effects is to assume that such effects happen without a cause.

But even without chance, there can still be coincidence. Cause and effect does not require deliberate intent, and thus it does not require the existence of God.

Clarify: Exactly what is the distinguishing factor between chance and coincidence. As far as I can tell, what you're thinking is that chance is when you are dealing with one factor while coincidence is how several factors interplay...which doesn't seem to make sense because then coincidence would be an extension of chance and not different in any substantive way.

Wolf, you might want to paraphrase what your "scientificly knowledgeable" friend says in the future because:

Oh, and any elementary study of the Haber process will teach the astute student that a naive application of Le Chatelier's principle doesn't work.

Is an elitist snub on my education and a negative stereotype that creationists are uneducated. I'll give a coherent response once I've cooled down a bit.

Edited by Egann, 11 July 2009 - 07:01 PM.

[wisp]

I wonder if I'm getting old and testy or something, because normally I would've jumped all over a topic like this... today, however, trying to get through this video and the wall of text accompanying it is just not happening. It takes far too much energy to take my abstract thoughts about this and translate them into something readable for the rest of you, but suffice to say most of the "points" the guy made in the video just made my eyes roll. Some good points have been made by other responders in this thread, so there's yet another reason for me not to bother trying to say the same thing all over again... but I'd propose that perhaps the creator of this video should invest in an evolutionary psychology text before he goes trying to insinuate that a species can't develop its morality without the help of a deity.

Bottom line: don't bother being taken in by this guy's attempt at oversimplifying you into an intellectual mistake.

[Reflectionist]

I wonder if I'm getting old and testy or something, because normally I would've jumped all over a topic like this... today, however, trying to get through this video and the wall of text accompanying it is just not happening. It takes far too much energy to take my abstract thoughts about this and translate them into something readable for the rest of you, but suffice to say most of the "points" the guy made in the video just made my eyes roll. Some good points have been made by other responders in this thread, so there's yet another reason for me not to bother trying to say the same thing all over again... but I'd propose that perhaps the creator of this video should invest in an evolutionary psychology text before he goes trying to insinuate that a species can't develop its morality without the help of a deity.

Bottom line: don't bother being taken in by this guy's attempt at oversimplifying you into an intellectual mistake.

Well said. I didn't even watch the video past the first question. I know the guy's logic. He once tried to prove that there are no ex-Christians because:

1. Being a Christian entails that something supernatural happens to you.
2. You used to believe in the supernatural, now you do not.
3. Therefore, you believe that the supernatural never existed.
4. Thus, you were never a Christian in the first place.

Yes, there are problems with everything listed above. *headdesk*

I'm sure this video is no different, if I could bring myself to wade through the condescension...

[Wolf O'Donnell]

Egann, you're right in the sense that I needed to be more careful. I actually did strip out two other paragraphs I presumed would insult you, as Cali has a rather abrupt and abrasive nature when it comes to Creationists or IDers, so I apologise for that.

I would also like to add one more nail to the coffin of your paradox by providing an extract from the eMedicine website on cyanide (bold and underline are mine):

Cyanide poisoning occurs when a cyanogenic substance is ingested, inhaled, smoked or absorbed through the skin. Exposure to only small amounts of the toxin can result in serious poisoning and death. Cyanide readily and reversibly binds to all enzymes and proteins that contain iron (including hemoglobin, myoglobin, catalase, and the cytochrome system) and those containing cobalt.

Cyanide's main pathological effects derive from its interaction with the cytochrome aa3 complex. When bound to the iron moiety of the cytochrome, it inhibits oxidative phosphorylation and paralyzes cellular respiration. This results in anaerobic metabolism, increased lactic acid production, reduced ATP stores, and anoxic cell death. The organ systems that are most sensitive to cyanide toxicity are those with the highest oxygen use that cannot tolerate hypoxic stress, namely the CNS and the myocardium.

Source: http://emedicine.med...165886-overview

Seeing as the earliest life forms are not presumed to have contained iron or cobalt, your statement is still not a paradox because in order for the cyanide to be toxic, it would need to bind to iron or cobalt containing proteins.

EDIT: I really do need to proof-read my posts before clicking on the button. My wireless keyboard is really acting up.

Edited by Wolf_ODonnell, 12 July 2009 - 12:44 PM.

[Egann]

^ Point conceded. Apparently Cyanide is rather specific in the metabolic paths it blocks.

I still have lots of questions about that -like if Cyanide DOESN'T bind to other organic molecules, how is it supposed to be involved in synthesizing them in the first place- but it's nowhere near the theorematic proof I thought it was.

That said, I'm still far from accepting abiogenesis as being possible. I'm one step less far away. The idea that a self-replicating molecule could form and actually be able to replicate itself successfully in an organic soup with literally millions of different compounds is, frankly, beyond incredible. Yes, they've made successful replicating molecules, but in order to get them to work they generally must be placed in soups of their constituent molecules so that all the replicator has to do is act as an assembly line for parts already produced.

I'm still of the persuasion that the issue is philosophical in nature, not scientific.

[Reflectionist]

I'm still of the persuasion that the issue is philosophical in nature, not scientific.

Which, at best, makes it just as implausible as Creationism. If purely philosophic, then it's no more, and no less plausible than Creationism.

But it's not purely philosophical. There IS science that supports it, as Wolf proved, even though there's not much, it's science that stands on its own merit, instead of Creationist 'science,' which: 1) is built solely around disproving evolution instead of finding affirmative proof of creationism, and 2) begins with the conclusion, and then looks for evidence to support that instead of forming the conclusion based on evidence. Both of those disqualify creationism as being science, because they both are in direct violation of the scientific method, so all you've got is... hollow gesticulation.

The second is what really bugs me, though, because as with every case, when you're looking for something specific, you tend to ignore everything that isn't that. It's just a simple distortion, kind of like projection in psychology. Here's a good illustration of what I'm talking about, but it's not quite exactly what I'm talking about. This video is about approaches to belief, not approaches to science, but in this case, they're similar enough.



And the point of that isn't an attack on Creationists, or scientists who support I.D., but rather that there is a thick line between what is and what isn't science. About what is and isn't able to be called 'scientific.' A bit more specific on that, if Intelligent Design needs to be taken as science, there needs to be a way to falsify it, if even hypothetically. It has to be possible, or at least plausible, but there needs to be some way to falsify it. Obviously we cannot go in time and test whether or not God created the Universe.

And it's not that science is a dogma unto itself, but if there's no way possible to test a hypothesis and come up with a conclusion on your own independent of personal beliefs, or no way to 'check your work,' through peer review or some other method of measuring scientific consistency, what is Intelligent Design but a naive conjecture? The problem isn't that I.D. doesn't stand up to science (science itself doesn't care what's true or not, it doesn't have an agenda, it's a method of induction that just cannot account for the objectively supernatural), it doesn't stand up to itself.

Kind of a tangent:

As far as the distinction 'objectively supernatural,' subjective spirituality is a different story and can be subjected to that process of induction. Similarly to "Want to know if it's raining outside? Go to the window, and look," there's: "Want to know what satori is? Start counting your breaths." Or something along the lines of that; "Want to know if Chakra meditation is effective? Start meditating." The trouble comes when you answer the question, "Want to know if the Universe was designed by a supernatural being?" because the only answer is "Go back to the beginning of the Universe and look." But that's not possible, which most of what makes I.D. not science, but as long as there's an experience attached with the induction, as long as there is repeatable data coming from the experience, then go for it. (This would be like answering the question about rain with "Go to the window and look," and you open the door and find yourself in outer space... where rain does not, and cannot exist. Ever.)

To tie into the other thread a bit, this is where the culture war comes in. The faith-heads say it's a matter of science and the science heads say it's a matter of faith. Neither one of them know or care what the crux of the arguments are, they just believe what they do and take sides. So there IS a bit of a culture war going on for that. As ThereminTrees says, "What's so fragile that it can't stand up to sustained scrutiny and needs threats to protect it?" (Egann, I know you're agreeing with that, but thinking that the I.D. camp is dealt more threats, but that's just not the case--no one's damning creationists to hell, or threatening God's judgement on them. It's all an ideological battle primarily, then possibly a philosophical one, and lastly a scientific one, and only because science is the one place I.D. literally cannot go.)

I guess that's really all I have to say on that. But I have some questions:

1. Are there any scientists that would consider themselves creationists that converted to their religion AFTER they became scientists?

2. Regarding my 2 first points about the flaws of Creationism-as-science above, if Creation 'scientists' do not create their conclusion first and then look for data to support that conclusion instead of creating a conclusion that fits the data, why do they bother calling themselves 'Creation scientists,' as if they are a Creationist first and a scientist second? If I were a scientist, that would be the very last thing I would do, because absolutely no-one could trust my results (save for those who agree with my personal beliefs), yet these people do it extremely openly. (I'm almost tempted to say that that's what gives your Argument from Authority / argumentum ad populum the appearance of credibility. You know, the one where you listed out the three scientists in their respective fields that are Creationists. Do their secular counterparts take them seriously?)

Edited by Reflectionist, 12 July 2009 - 11:10 PM.

[Raien]

Clarify: Exactly what is the distinguishing factor between chance and coincidence. As far as I can tell, what you're thinking is that chance is when you are dealing with one factor while coincidence is how several factors interplay...which doesn't seem to make sense because then coincidence would be an extension of chance and not different in any substantive way.

Chance is the idea that an event could have happened differently, but chance doesn't really exist because it disconnects an effect from its causes. It's like the idea that a coin could land on tails when all the causative factors make it land on heads. In short, chance is mathematical speculation.

Coincidence is the idea that two similar or comparable events did not occur due to the same causative factors, which is entirely possible.

[Egann]

I really wish that people would get over the "ID is Creationism" thing. The two are correlated, not identical. And like I've said elsewhere, as a theist, I'm not that enthralled with ID. The only people who should really concern themselves with it are theistic scientists and atheistic scientists because -let's face it- the premise of ID is that by looking at the natural order we can infer what is above, whereas the very idea of theism is the other way around; knowledge of what is above is predicated entirely on it revealing itself.

ID is predicated on humanism just as much as it is on theism, and in that regard, it doesn't and cannot make for good apologetics for theists...although unfortunately it being used for this is part of it's general reception. As that I've beaten that dead horse, I see no reason in reviving it besides in passing. Suffice to say, in a secular sense of defending the generic idea of God, ID kind of makes sense, but only as long as it remains secular, and in that sense it cannot be equated with Creationism, which flows between secular and sacred without a problem.


Really, science proper is philosophically neutral. The scientific method is a means of answering specific questions about the workings of the natural order in the present via experimentation. Strictly speaking, in the scientific method, there's no such thing as peer review, just peer repeatability.

As long as the results are repeatable, the experiment itself is inevitably honest. It's interpretation is not. More on this in a moment.

The real problem however, is that when you leave studying the present and either go into the future or the present, barring the possibility of time-travel, you have left the realm of scientific experiments. What you have left is observations, evidence, and interpretations from those observations and evidences.

As that there always are many ways to interpret evidence, so how you choose to interpret a given result from either an experiment or an observation is, inevitably, philosophical in nature. Peer review becomes less about repeatability and more about peer pressure to conform to the group philosophically. Reflectionist's video demonstrates this point rather well.

What I'm getting at is that there are very few sciences which are really "scientific" if you think about it. Pretty much all you have is chemistry and physics because both of these fields are entirely about studying the how of the present. There's no real interpretation to be done, just reporting results. However, there are LOTS of sciences which actively look to study the past. These fields, such as anthropology, paleontology, cosmology, and to a lesser extent astronomy, geology, and biology all involve interpretations, most of them inherently. This means that the results from these fields are inevitably philosophically tainted and there's not much you can do about it besides discourage interpretation, or encourage either placing a great ephasis on where the evidence ends and interpretation begins or an active attempt to systematically list the assumptions behind a specific interpretation.


EDIT: Think about the assumptions involved in the relatively simple task of Potassium-Argon dating a rock. A lot of the numbers for how old the rock is are going to depend on how much Argon effused from the rock...which has a bigillion assumptions attached. Did the rock ever pass through the water table and if so, how long was it there and how much Argon or Potassium was removed as a result? What pressure was the rock buried at and what was the relative Argon content of the rocks around it? Not much of the Argon is going to effuse if it's got nowhere to go, and pressure radically affects effusion rates. Was the final density of the rock constant or was it compressed somewhere along the line?

Lots of these are guesses, and which factors you take into account along with what numbers you plug into them are depend on if you are philosophically predisposed to the rock being 10 million years old as opposed to ten weeks old. This is precisely why most labs won't even accept a sample for radiometric dating unless there's a form attached telling them how old the scientist who found it thinks it is. It also explains some embarrassing results for radiometric dating, such as dating a Hawaiian lava flow known to be 200 years old to be 2 million years old.

Edited by Egann, 13 July 2009 - 11:20 AM.

[Wolf O'Donnell]

ID is predicated on humanism just as much as it is on theism, and in that regard, it doesn't and cannot make for good apologetics for theists...although unfortunately it being used for this is part of it's general reception. As that I've beaten that dead horse, I see no reason in reviving it besides in passing. Suffice to say, in a secular sense of defending the generic idea of God, ID kind of makes sense, but only as long as it remains secular, and in that sense it cannot be equated with Creationism, which flows between secular and sacred without a problem.

Well, here's the problem. ID proposes a Creator. We all know that the original proponents had a huge Christian bent to it, so ID is really proposing the Christian God without mentioning him. You could possibly turn it secular, but seeing as it originated from the Discovery Institute, I severely doubt that you could do so.

ID is a terrible bit of theology as well as a terrible bit of science. It basically proposes that God is too stupid to have created a fully automatic system that could have created all you see around us. Surely, an omnipotent God could have made sure that Evolution could do everything he wanted it to do? The very proposal of ID makes God look like a dunce and as such, Christians themselves, if they know what's good for them and their faith, should be opposing ID too as its proponents make them look bad.

Really, science proper is philosophically neutral. The scientific method is a means of answering specific questions about the workings of the natural order in the present via experimentation. Strictly speaking, in the scientific method, there's no such thing as peer review, just peer repeatability.

As long as the results are repeatable, the experiment itself is inevitably honest. It's interpretation is not. More on this in a moment.

The real problem however, is that when you leave studying the present and either go into the future or the present, barring the possibility of time-travel, you have left the realm of scientific experiments. What you have left is observations, evidence, and interpretations from those observations and evidences.

Not so, Egann. You yourself mentioned the Miller-Urey experiment, which has not left the realm of scientific experiments at all. It shows us what happens to chemicals in the sort of conditions scientists expected would have been present in the early days of the Earth. Scientists try to figure out what carbon dioxide levels used to be, by examing ice cores that would have trapped carbon dioxide gas from the atmosphere. You could tell much from the climate by looking at the growth rings of trees as the size of the ring indicates how good conditions were in the environment.

As that there always are many ways to interpret evidence, so how you choose to interpret a given result from either an experiment or an observation is, inevitably, philosophical in nature. Peer review becomes less about repeatability and more about peer pressure to conform to the group philosophically. Reflectionist's video demonstrates this point rather well.

What I'm getting at is that there are very few sciences which are really "scientific" if you think about it. Pretty much all you have is chemistry and physics because both of these fields are entirely about studying the how of the present. There's no real interpretation to be done, just reporting results. However, there are LOTS of sciences which actively look to study the past. These fields, such as anthropology, paleontology, cosmology, and to a lesser extent astronomy, geology, and biology all involve interpretations, most of them inherently. This means that the results from these fields are inevitably philosophically tainted and there's not much you can do about it besides discourage interpretation, or encourage either placing a great ephasis on where the evidence ends and interpretation begins or an active attempt to systematically list the assumptions behind a specific interpretation.

Uh, I don't think so.

Science rewards those who go against dogma and succeed. There's the Nobel prize, and then there's fame. There's the fame of being the first scientist to overturn conventional scientific understanding and force science along a new paradigm. Those who publish work that manages to overturn conventional wisdom completely become famous. Their names go into textbooks and their work is quoted in other people's work. Scientists are rewarded by having their names on research articles, being searched for by students, being cited by other researchers.

Did Darwin not go against popular thought in his time?
Did Einstein not go against the establishment's accepted belief in Newton's theories?
Did Stanley B. Prusiner not prove that prions, proteins themselves, could be infectious agents and not things with DNA or RNA, thus overturning cell biology's greatest dogma that infectious agents have to have nucleic acid?
Did Dr. Barry James Marshall not win the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine by proving that H. pylori was responsible for stomach ulcers at a time when most scientists said it was a result of stress? (Heck, he even went so far as to experiment on himself).

Fame, the Nobel prize, practical immortality in scientific textbooks, these all reward those scientists that go against the grain and succeed.

The progress of science is a bit like the energy requirements for a chemical reaction. You keep adding energy or in the case of science, information, but nothing happens until you get over a certain plateau and then bang, a reaction happens; states change and things progress.

Scientists are very welcome to present information that goes against common wisdom, but only as long as they can provide the evidence to back their statements up. And if they don't, they at least have to explain their reasoning and provide a way to ensure that people can falsify their idea.

And the only interpretation that scientists do is what the results tell us.

EDIT: Think about the assumptions involved in the relatively simple task of Potassium-Argon dating a rock. A lot of the numbers for how old the rock is are going to depend on how much Argon effused from the rock...which has a bigillion assumptions attached. Did the rock ever pass through the water table and if so, how long was it there and how much Argon or Potassium was removed as a result? What pressure was the rock buried at and what was the relative Argon content of the rocks around it? Not much of the Argon is going to effuse if it's got nowhere to go, and pressure radically affects effusion rates. Was the final density of the rock constant or was it compressed somewhere along the line?

http://geology.about...rgon_dating.htm

http://www.talkorigi...e-of-earth.html

I think scientists do take these factors into account when dating the age of the Earth, otherwise the research article wouldn't have been accepted. It's not just potassium-argon dating that's used. Other lines of evidence are also used to provide the picture in question.

http://www.talkorigi...ron-dating.html

Edited by Wolf_ODonnell, 13 July 2009 - 02:18 PM.

[Egann]

ID is predicated on humanism just as much as it is on theism, and in that regard, it doesn't and cannot make for good apologetics for theists...although unfortunately it being used for this is part of it's general reception. As that I've beaten that dead horse, I see no reason in reviving it besides in passing. Suffice to say, in a secular sense of defending the generic idea of God, ID kind of makes sense, but only as long as it remains secular, and in that sense it cannot be equated with Creationism, which flows between secular and sacred without a problem.

Well, here's the problem. ID proposes a Creator. We all know that the original proponents had a huge Christian bent to it, so ID is really proposing the Christian God without mentioning him. You could possibly turn it secular, but seeing as it originated from the Discovery Institute, I severely doubt that you could do so.

ID is a terrible bit of theology as well as a terrible bit of science. It basically proposes that God is too stupid to have created a fully automatic system that could have created all you see around us. Surely, an omnipotent God could have made sure that Evolution could do everything he wanted it to do? The very proposal of ID makes God look like a dunce and as such, Christians themselves, if they know what's good for them and their faith, should be opposing ID too as its proponents make them look bad.

Why Muslims should Support Intelligent Design

Any assertion that ID is "purely Christian" or "Christianity incognito" is said out of pure ignorance.

Really, science proper is philosophically neutral. The scientific method is a means of answering specific questions about the workings of the natural order in the present via experimentation. Strictly speaking, in the scientific method, there's no such thing as peer review, just peer repeatability.

As long as the results are repeatable, the experiment itself is inevitably honest. It's interpretation is not. More on this in a moment.

The real problem however, is that when you leave studying the present and either go into the future or the present, barring the possibility of time-travel, you have left the realm of scientific experiments. What you have left is observations, evidence, and interpretations from those observations and evidences.

Not so, Egann. You yourself mentioned the Miller-Urey experiment, which has not left the realm of scientific experiments at all. It shows us what happens to chemicals in the sort of conditions scientists expected would have been present in the early days of the Earth. Scientists try to figure out what carbon dioxide levels used to be, by examing ice cores that would have trapped carbon dioxide gas from the atmosphere. You could tell much from the climate by looking at the growth rings of trees as the size of the ring indicates how good conditions were in the environment.

Again, wrong. The Miller-Urey experiment is actually a good illustration of a philosophically neutral experiment being twisted at the interpretations and -in this case- the sales-pitch. In truth, the Miller-Urey experiment was an experiment to see if a specific context could synthesize organic compounds useful for abiogenesis. Specifically, he wanted to form amino acids which could form into prions which could be construed as basic self-replicating molecules. In this regard, it was a complete failure as that, when carried to completion, it DID form several amino acids... which then combined to form mellanoids and precipitated as a useless brown tar on the bottom of the flask. This is exactly why whenever someone talks about Miller-Urey, they alway mention the genetic bases and not amino acids.

It was the interpretation which fabricated success from failure and made Miller-Urey what it is today.

Besides, like I said earlier, the highly reductive atmosphere used in Miller-Urey has fallen out of sorts, especially the methane. You don't hear about them because these less reductive atmospheres tend to not even yield as good failures as Miller-Urey did.

As that there always are many ways to interpret evidence, so how you choose to interpret a given result from either an experiment or an observation is, inevitably, philosophical in nature. Peer review becomes less about repeatability and more about peer pressure to conform to the group philosophically. Reflectionist's video demonstrates this point rather well.

What I'm getting at is that there are very few sciences which are really "scientific" if you think about it. Pretty much all you have is chemistry and physics because both of these fields are entirely about studying the how of the present. There's no real interpretation to be done, just reporting results. However, there are LOTS of sciences which actively look to study the past. These fields, such as anthropology, paleontology, cosmology, and to a lesser extent astronomy, geology, and biology all involve interpretations, most of them inherently. This means that the results from these fields are inevitably philosophically tainted and there's not much you can do about it besides discourage interpretation, or encourage either placing a great ephasis on where the evidence ends and interpretation begins or an active attempt to systematically list the assumptions behind a specific interpretation.

Uh, I don't think so.

Science rewards those who go against dogma and succeed. There's the Nobel prize, and then there's fame. There's the fame of being the first scientist to overturn conventional scientific understanding and force science along a new paradigm. Those who publish work that manages to overturn conventional wisdom completely become famous. Their names go into textbooks and their work is quoted in other people's work. Scientists are rewarded by having their names on research articles, being searched for by students, being cited by other researchers.

Did Darwin not go against popular thought in his time?
Did Einstein not go against the establishment's accepted belief in Newton's theories?
Did Stanley B. Prusiner not prove that prions, proteins themselves, could be infectious agents and not things with DNA or RNA, thus overturning cell biology's greatest dogma that infectious agents have to have nucleic acid?
Did Dr. Barry James Marshall not win the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine by proving that H. pylori was responsible for stomach ulcers at a time when most scientists said it was a result of stress? (Heck, he even went so far as to experiment on himself).

I don't think citing the Nobel Prize is a good idea. Al Gore won the Peace Prize for a documentary on Global Warming with known factual inaccuracies.

That said, please note that -with one exception- all of these are cases of HOW the universe of the present works...which means my explanation still is valid.

The one exception is Darwin. And please note that the theory that all life is related from common decent is NOT a scientifically testable hypothesis as that it deals with the past and not the present.* Most of the support Darwin gleaned was philisophical in nature, seeing how evolution was pseudo-scientific and became a scientific justification for Marxism. (It pays to know your social history.)

EDIT: Think about the assumptions involved in the relatively simple task of Potassium-Argon dating a rock. A lot of the numbers for how old the rock is are going to depend on how much Argon effused from the rock...which has a bigillion assumptions attached. Did the rock ever pass through the water table and if so, how long was it there and how much Argon or Potassium was removed as a result? What pressure was the rock buried at and what was the relative Argon content of the rocks around it? Not much of the Argon is going to effuse if it's got nowhere to go, and pressure radically affects effusion rates. Was the final density of the rock constant or was it compressed somewhere along the line?

http://geology.about...rgon_dating.htm

http://www.talkorigi...e-of-earth.html

I think scientists do take these factors into account when dating the age of the Earth, otherwise the research article wouldn't have been accepted. It's not just potassium-argon dating that's used. Other lines of evidence are also used to provide the picture in question.

http://www.talkorigi...ron-dating.html

I wasn't talking about dating the earth. I was talking about the problems you get when you apply scientific studies to the past. Yes, they tell you OFFICIALLY that their dating is accurate, but what they don't tell you is that there are enough factors that influence the results that you just don't know the answer to that you can fudge the numbers to say whatever you want.

This is often the case whenever you're talking about inferring something that can't be experimentally verified.

* I find it ironic that the problem you cling to tenaciously about calling ID "scientific" in that it isn't testable, is in fact a problem shared with the theory you are so keen on defending. Common decent cannot be experimentally verified.

[Wolf O'Donnell]

Egann, re-read my post. ID's original proponents had a Christian bent and that its original intention was to ensure that children in school were taught a Christian viewpoint to the origins of species and life. That a group that also dislikes Evolution seeks to use ID for their own anti-Evolution tactics doesn't surprise me one bit. Both mistakenly presume that Evolution is an atheist attack against their religious worldviews, whereas Evolution is perfectly compatible with theistic beliefs without invoking an not-so Intelligent Designer.

Again, wrong. The Miller-Urey experiment is actually a good illustration of a philosophically neutral experiment being twisted at the interpretations and -in this case- the sales-pitch. In truth, the Miller-Urey experiment was an experiment to see if a specific context could synthesize organic compounds useful for abiogenesis. Specifically, he wanted to form amino acids which could form into prions which could be construed as basic self-replicating molecules. In this regard, it was a complete failure as that, when carried to completion, it DID form several amino acids... which then combined to form mellanoids and precipitated as a useless brown tar on the bottom of the flask. This is exactly why whenever someone talks about Miller-Urey, they alway mention the genetic bases and not amino acids.

Uh, melanoid is not useless.

Catalysts of the melanin-melanoidin type in the abiogenesis of peptides (Katalizatory melanino-melanoidinovogo tipa v abiogeneze peptidov)
TELEGINA, T A | PAVLOVSKAIA, T E
Akademiia Nauk SSSR, Izvestiia, Seriia Biologicheskaia , pp. 112-117. Jan.-Feb. 1988

This paper considers pathways in the abiogenic synthesis of proteinlike substances during prebiotic evolution along with the role of inorganic and organic catalysts in the abiogenesis, with particular attention given to the melanin and melanoidin polymers, which could be formed in the acetaldehyde-ammonium salt systems. These polymers display photoprotective and catalytic properties, which appear to be associated with the presence of nitrogen-containig rings and conjugated double bonds. Such structures enable melanoid-type molecules to strongly absorb UV light. Thus these compounds could have made solar energy available for the first photosynthetic reactions.

Also, I can't help but notice that when I tried searching for mellanoid (because I had no idea what you were talking about) I only came across Creationist pages. This suggests to me that you took your information from these sites. Could you care to show me the actual research paper that shows this information about melanoid?

I'm going to try and go against your counterpoint by mentioning Jeffrey Bada of the Scripps Institute, who reanalysed Dr. Miller's experiment and found 22 amino acids instead of the actual 5 that were reported. He also found in the unpublished "volcano" experiment that the amino acids were far more likely to be reactive and far more likely to create totally new molecules given time.

And you're doing Dr. Miller a complete injustice. Before his experiment, it was thought that amino acids were only the product of living organisms. His experiments showed otherwise. That is why his experiment is so monumental. He showed that these biological molecules could be created through "chemical" reactions, that is, reactions outside of biological organisms.

Besides, like I said earlier, the highly reductive atmosphere used in Miller-Urey has fallen out of sorts, especially the methane. You don't hear about them because these less reductive atmospheres tend to not even yield as good failures as Miller-Urey did.

Not a problem with the volcano experiment. It doesn't need a highly reductive global atmosphere, only a highly reductive local atmosphere.

I don't think citing the Nobel Prize is a good idea. Al Gore won the Peace Prize for a documentary on Global Warming with known factual inaccuracies.

So, basically you're saying the Nobel prize isn't a good incentive for scientists to go against the prevailing scientific consensus because a non-scientist won a Nobel prize that wasn't for science for creating a documentary rather than discovering some new scientific paradigm. I fail to see how that's an effective counter-argument or even relevant to the discussion.

That said, please note that -with one exception- all of these are cases of HOW the universe of the present works...which means my explanation still is valid.

The one exception is Darwin. And please note that the theory that all life is related from common decent is NOT a scientifically testable hypothesis as that it deals with the past and not the present.* Most of the support Darwin gleaned was philisophical in nature, seeing how evolution was pseudo-scientific and became a scientific justification for Marxism. (It pays to know your social history.)

It also pays to know your scientific history and you'd know that Charles Darwin did a lot of work to see whether anything he said would actually work. For example, when he came back from the Beagle, Darwin pondered how plants and animals reached all the corners of the Earth. Conventional wisdom was that God put them there, but Darwin had other ideas. Perhaps seeds survived at sea and used ocean currents...

You will need:

* Seawater (most pet shops sell salt water)
* glass jars
* your choice of seeds
* a sieve
* plant pots
* compost

Darwin used seeds of cress, radish, cabbages, lettuces, carrots, celery and onion. Label jars, fill with seawater and your seeds. After seven days, put the seeds in a sieve, rinse under a tap, and plant out in labelled pots. Darwin also studied longer periods in seawater, the effects of water temperature on germination, and whether seeds float. His experiments overturned the idea that seawater kills seeds. Of the 87 species he used, Darwin found almost three-quarters could tolerate at least 28 days in salt water.

In his "lawn experiment", conducted in 1856, Darwin staked out a plot of old lawn and gave the gardeners strict instructions not to touch it. By mid-summer, once overgrown, it stood out in stark contrast to the lawn around it. "[O]ut of twenty species growing on a little plot of turf (three feet by four) nine species perished from the other species being allowed to grow up freely," he wrote in the Origin.

You will need:

* A tape measure
* 4 pegs
* A hammer
* A ball of twine

Hammer pegs into a patch of lawn to create a plot about 1 square metre. Wind twine around the pegs to make the plot abundantly clear to others. Get down on your knees and count the number of different plants growing in the plot. Count them again when thoroughly overgrown. In a competitive scenario, the tougher species will fare better than others.

Because it is not capable of self-fertilization, clover will not set seed without assistance from insects, making it a suitable common flower with which to explore co-evolution of two rather different species. Darwin studied red clover although you are more likely to come across the white variety.

You will need:

* Several clumps of clover
* A mesh to deny bees access

Before your clover comes into flower, seal several clumps beneath an insect-proof mesh. At the end of the season, compare the number of seeds produced by covered and uncovered flowers. Darwin found that the ones under the mesh failed to produce seed heads, whilst those out in the open did very well.

Furthermore, Darwin even provided a prime example of a way that you could falsify his theory and I quote:

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.

This is the basis for ID. Behe came up with the bacterial flagellum, which has been shown to be reducibly complex. In fact, that's what ID is. It's an attempt to disprove Evolution. It's not a theory or even a hypothesis in its own right. The very fact that ID attempts to falsify Evolution shows that Evolution is falsifiable and therefore testable and therefore that it is scientific. However, ID itself is not because it isn't concerned with testing itself but concerned with testing Evolution.

I wasn't talking about dating the earth. I was talking about the problems you get when you apply scientific studies to the past. Yes, they tell you OFFICIALLY that their dating is accurate, but what they don't tell you is that there are enough factors that influence the results that you just don't know the answer to that you can fudge the numbers to say whatever you want.

Except, we calibrate dating. With carbon dating especially, we calibrate the system with things where we know the age.

Oh and I've just found out the source of your statement regarding recent flows being dated to millions of years. It was Henry Morris and now to save space, I'm going to actually post a link to the rebuttal instead of repeating it here:

http://www.talkorigi...c/CD/CD013.html

You will find the statements have been backed up with references.

Now potassium-argon dating isn't the only thing we can use. Some scientists have used uranium-lead dating on zircons, which actually suggest the Earth is even older than we initially thought. Every time I read an article about how new science proves old science wrong, it almost always suggests that the Earth is older than originally thought. Always the age of the Earth is pushed back. If your problem was really real, we wouldn't see a continual push backwards.

Science looks in all directions. It looks to the future, it looks to the past, it looks to the present. It makes predictions about the future, it makes predictions about the past. Evolution makes predictions about the past. It says we should see transitional fossils that display interspecies characteristics. We do, such as Tiktaalik. It suggests we shouldn't find fossilied rabbits in the pre-Cambrian era. We don't. It also looks to the future. Evolution suggests that if we apply strong enough natural selection pressures against a certain gene, we shouldn't see any organism with that gene surviving. We don't.

Now here's where I'm rather confused. Are you Creationist or an ID proponent? Because right now, you're sounding like a Creationist. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Creationist and ID arguments are the same. They are all negative critique of Evolution without providing positive evidence for themselves. In this sense, they are not falsifiable, because they are philosophical positions that seek to find fault with a different theory not with themselves. You cannot falsify ID, because there is no way to do so until you end up discovering everything there is to know about the Universe only then will you be able to say, no, there are no irreducibly complex organs.

Evolution? Not so. Fossilised rabbits in the pre-Cambrian layer would disprove Evolution to name but one thing to disprove Evolution. Finding an irreducibly complex organ that could never have evolved through numerous successive modifications (these can be gain or loss of information) will also disprove Evolution.

Damn, that took me an hour and a half to finish. Can somebody else take over from me?

Edited by Wolf_ODonnell, 14 July 2009 - 03:28 PM.

[Jasi]

Intelligent design is certainly a Christian movement. You will see no atheist purporting that ID is their theory on the origin of life. ID is very frequently used as a bait-and-switch to try to convert unsuspecting debaters. ID always has the ulterior motive of conversion.

Forgive me if I'm repeating something, but there is so much text to read here that I really don't have the patience to sift through it all, but the biggest flaw in ID is the problem of an infinite regression. Richard Dawkins talks about this extensively, his main point being something like "If the world was designed, then who designed the designer?" An ID proponent will say that it is impossible for life to have come from non-life, but why does this not apply to the Designer? Why could the Designer have come from non-life? This is ID's biggest problem, and why it is not taken seriously by science.

Another misconception which I haven't seen refuted in this thread is that evolution is based on chance. Evolution does not occur by chance, it is extremely systematic in what does and does not get passed along. The mutations happen by chance, yes, and this is a fact that no one can deny, as it is directly observable. But what results after those mutations are reproduced and multiplied over many many years, resulting in evolution, is not chance at all. It is survival of the fittest. When a mutation benefits a creature--say, provides it with better camouflage--it makes it more likely to survive, and hence, more likely to mate and reproduce. The result is that the next generation has a higher percentage of creatures with the same mutation, and so on. This is not chance. This is a simple process which makes complete sense, and it is a fact. There are no reputable biologists who deny the existence of evolution.

But I believe what we're really discussing is the origin of life. So I refer you to my first (big) paragraph.

[Arturo]

Again, wrong. The Miller-Urey experiment is actually a good illustration of a philosophically neutral experiment being twisted at the interpretations and -in this case- the sales-pitch. In truth, the Miller-Urey experiment was an experiment to see if a specific context could synthesize organic compounds useful for abiogenesis. Specifically, he wanted to form amino acids which could form into prions which could be construed as basic self-replicating molecules. In this regard, it was a complete failure as that, when carried to completion, it DID form several amino acids... which then combined to form mellanoids and precipitated as a useless brown tar on the bottom of the flask. This is exactly why whenever someone talks about Miller-Urey, they alway mention the genetic bases and not amino acids.

How could they seek to form prions when they weren't even characterized as proteins at that time? Check your facts, please.

[Wolf O'Donnell]

Again, wrong. The Miller-Urey experiment is actually a good illustration of a philosophically neutral experiment being twisted at the interpretations and -in this case- the sales-pitch. In truth, the Miller-Urey experiment was an experiment to see if a specific context could synthesize organic compounds useful for abiogenesis. Specifically, he wanted to form amino acids which could form into prions which could be construed as basic self-replicating molecules. In this regard, it was a complete failure as that, when carried to completion, it DID form several amino acids... which then combined to form mellanoids and precipitated as a useless brown tar on the bottom of the flask. This is exactly why whenever someone talks about Miller-Urey, they alway mention the genetic bases and not amino acids.

How could they seek to form prions when they weren't even characterized as proteins at that time? Check your facts, please.

Oh, I missed that. You've got a good point there, Arturo.

[Arturo]

Apart from the fact that prions cannot replicate

[Wolf O'Donnell]

Apart from the fact that prions cannot replicate

Oh, I missed that as well. I don't believe he managed to say all these wrong statements without me noticing.

[TheAvengerLever]

I don't have anything to add to this debate in particular, since you're all spouting a bunch of nonsense, but I must say, the guy in the video SS posted has mastered the art of dramatic pauses. It's quite annoying. I also enjoy the snooty look he has about him.

[Khallos]

EDIT: Think about the assumptions involved in the relatively simple task of Potassium-Argon dating a rock. A lot of the numbers for how old the rock is are going to depend on how much Argon effused from the rock...which has a bigillion assumptions attached. Did the rock ever pass through the water table and if so, how long was it there and how much Argon or Potassium was removed as a result? What pressure was the rock buried at and what was the relative Argon content of the rocks around it? Not much of the Argon is going to effuse if it's got nowhere to go, and pressure radically affects effusion rates. Was the final density of the rock constant or was it compressed somewhere along the line?

Lots of these are guesses, and which factors you take into account along with what numbers you plug into them are depend on if you are philosophically predisposed to the rock being 10 million years old as opposed to ten weeks old. This is precisely why most labs won't even accept a sample for radiometric dating unless there's a form attached telling them how old the scientist who found it thinks it is. It also explains some embarrassing results for radiometric dating, such as dating a Hawaiian lava flow known to be 200 years old to be 2 million years old.

Normally I believe mineral samples are taken from the best suited rocks, of course there's a certain amount of error involved, but in many cases it is possible to give a decent guess by simply looking at the stratigraphy of the area where said mineral was extracted. Obviously this isn't always possible or sensible for example in the case of erratics, a sandstone boulder lodged into limestone might give a clue of the time of lodging (by glacier or God powered flood, if the second is the answer, there's no need to even to date it in a lab) but not much of how old the rock is.

The amount of geologists who would suppose that a rock is ten weeks old unless found near a known volcanic site is very few. Supposedly you can mix "God did it" with geology, but then you have to kill actualism-thus pretty much killing a cornerstone of geology and the science itself.

Most of the support Darwin gleaned was philisophical in nature, seeing how evolution was pseudo-scientific and became a scientific justification for Marxism. (It pays to know your social history.)

You forgot the Holocaust as well. Although I do know people who think Communism is/was a greater bane of humanity than Nazism, but meh.

I did hear that Christianity was the basis for the Crusades however.

[Egann]

Miller-Urey:

Yes, it's true they didn't know what prions were back then. My paraphrase was expressed with the much more articulate modern vocabulary than the older, more period-correct language. It's about like expressing volumetric geometry of curves with the language of integral calculus: if you share the language, it is MUCH faster and more efficient to do things this way. On that note, if they ever DID make prions in a similar experiment, it would be immediately called a self-replicating molecule. Oh, sure, it needs a virtually identical protein to re-fold, but that's beside the point. We've had so-called "self-replicating molecules" come from a variation of PCR in a genetic base soup.

This also brings up an interesting point: we're talking about an experiment 50 YEARS OLD. Why is the furthest we've gotten in 50 years pre-engineered molecules in alphabet soup?

Also, I didn't take all my information from the creationist page Wolf mentioned. I knew before-hand that about 80% +- of the experiment's results were a pseudo-proteinacious low-density plastic/tar. I searched repeatedly for more info...but only found genetic bases. When I found the said creationist page that DID mention this, I copied their name for the substance assuming that if they were willing to write a 4000 word essay with visuals, they cared enough to spell things right.

Regardless, the idea that whatever you call it could do basic UV photosynthesis is ridiculous. The environment is already intensely reduced. Any life processes would have involved oxidizing things to provide energy to make a basic metabolism, not further reducing already highly-reduced chemicals...which effectively shuffles electrons up pointlessly. We're looking to process energy that's already there, not make more energy when there's still no metabolism to use it.


Radiometric Dating:

I'm glad Wolf brought up Radio-carbon dating and calibration-curves. Radio-Carbon dating is the one and ONLY dating method we can verify to be inaccurate. Moreso, we've known this for THIRTY YEARS. You hear this? I thought not.

One of the early attempts to calibrate carbon-dating was to match it to tree anual rings of known ages. The result was that even though carbon dating OFFICIALLY can date things up to 60,000 years old (in theory) the tree-rings showed that it is only truly accurate for up to 12,000. (The 12,000 years is from memory, not the cited abstract.)

Source

Attempts to produce a calibration curve for the radiocarbon timescale by analysis of known age materials have highlighted the inaccuracies of conventional radiocarbon dating methods. The resulting ambiguities have caused a loss of confidence in radiocarbon dating particularly among European pre-historians.

If memory serves, the problem is insoluble. Meaning that one of the assumptions of Radio-Carbon-dating is a constant input of C-14 into the environment and that apparently, 12,000 years ago, that rate changed, so you wind up with multiple dates from one sample when you try to calibrate it to the shift. Even if you could calibrate it, the computation to do the calibration would erase any evidence of another C-14 rate-shift and you just wind up with bad numbers with no way to possibly re-calibrate them.

Don't quote me on that. That's from memory.

Chances are, other dating methods have similar problems. In fact, I'm rather certain that C-14 dating was used to calibrate other dating methods....