The Miracles of God!

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(daniel @ Mar 8 2007, 10:47 AM) [snapback]402218[/snapback]</div>

I spoke to Evolution the other day. He/she(I can't tell from it's voice) said that he/she DID have a goal of creating the perfect organism. He/she said that organism is not yet defined but will know it when he/she sees it. He/she said we are not it. He/she said that he/she can only manipulate dna with the blunt instruments of radiation, carcinogenic agents and good old random molecular entropy. He/she said that when the perfect organism is finally created he/she can retire. He/she said that when this happends he/she will take up golf, his/her true passion.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Darwood @ Mar 7 2007, 11:33 AM) [snapback]401837[/snapback]</div>

The figures I have read are estimate to be 10^80(?) more than all the atoms, quarks, lepons etc. in the entire universe. Also please show me your source for spontaneously assembled amino acid chains, please.

Wildkow

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(keydiver @ Mar 8 2007, 02:12 PM) [snapback]402343[/snapback]</div>

I thought it took god 7 days, a tiny blip compared to 6000 years of suffering.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(efusco @ Mar 8 2007, 02:16 PM) [snapback]402350[/snapback]</div>

I take it that ISN'T a compliment? <_<

When was the Koran written? Do some research. Originally the Islamic people did believe in the same god as the Jews, if you go way back to their ancestor Abraham. They do believe in the first 5 books of the Bible. Muslims believe that their faith is the culmination of the revelations given to the faithful Hebrews and Christians of old. * However, their teachings diverge from the Bible on some points. The Muslim religion as we know it, and the Koran, date from ~600 years after Christ. They are actually very opposed to the Trinity Doctrine, which is one reason they dislike Christianity.
As said before, if you REALLY do your research you will find common threads in many false religions, such as the Muslim belief in a firing, torturous afterlife, belief in the immortality of the soul, or the belief in fate, where god has pre-planned your entire life and outcome. All these beliefs can be traced back to ancient Babylon/Sumeria, and were never in the teachings of the Bible, or ancient Jewish or early Christian thinking.
They do get some things right, like their belief in the restoration of an earthly paradise, their monotheism, their rejection of the use of idols in worship which is so prevavent in many Christian sects, and their belief in the Devil as an enemy of God. But, as has happened to most other religions they have allowed their teachings to become corrupted by the influence of pagan teachings and Greek philosophy.


* “Almost all the historical narratives of the Koran have their biblical parallels . . . Adam, Noah, Abraham (mentioned about seventy times in twenty-five different sūrahs and having his name as a title for sūrah 14), Ishmael, Lot, Joseph (to whom sūrah 12 is dedicated), Moses (whose name occurs in thirty-four different sūrahs), Saul, David, Solomon, Elijah, Job and Jonah (whose name sūrah 10 bears) figure prominently. The story of the creation and fall of Adam is cited five times, the flood eight and Sodom eight. In fact the Koran shows more parallelism to the Pentateuch than to any other part of the Bible. . . .
“Of the New Testament characters Zachariah, John the Baptist, Jesus (‛Īsa) and Mary are the only ones emphasized"—History of the Arabs.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(keydiver @ Mar 8 2007, 11:12 AM) [snapback]402343[/snapback]</div>

What about the billion years that animals were savagely devouring each other, and infested with disease and parasites, and starving, and all sort of other suffering, before modern humans evolved, a few hundred thousand years ago? Adam's sin can hardly be a justification for all the suffering of animals during a billion years?

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(keydiver @ Mar 8 2007, 11:12 AM) [snapback]402343[/snapback]</div>

The NT is pretty clear about there being only one god, but the OT tacitly admits that there were many gods, of which one, named Jahwe, demanded that the Jews give him exclusive worship.

But the Bible is not a reliable source. We now know the true nature of the creator. See The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster for the only true account of all things spiritual. You cannot dispute the correlation between global warming and the number of pirates, and this proves conclusively that the FSM is the only true god. Just thinking of him makes me want to have spaghetti for supper. RAmen.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Wildkow @ Mar 8 2007, 01:13 PM) [snapback]402412[/snapback]</div>

Any estimate of the improbability of life is necessarily pure speculation. You take a wild guess about half a dozen parameters, and then multiply them all together.

Several things have changed since that figure was calculated by creationists twenty years ago, with the intention of making it seem necessary to invoke god as an explanation:

For one, astronomers now know there are far more planets than previously thought. For another, tremendous strides have been taken in the study of the origins of life (see The Teaching Company's lecture series titled "The Origins of Life.") Scientists now think the improbability of life is far lower than once thought. I.e., the chances of life arising, where conditions permit, are much greater. Some respected scientists now believe that where conditions permit, the emergence of life is virtually inevitable.

We do not know for sure. But the 10^80 figure is both outdated and unreliable.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(efusco @ Mar 8 2007, 07:38 AM) [snapback]402214[/snapback]</div>

Hmmm, how do you resolve these two posts?

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(keydiver @ Mar 8 2007, 02:12 PM) [snapback]402343[/snapback]</div>

"I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." --Stephen F. Roberts

I was raised catholic. It was, in my case as I assume many others, force-fed to me from day one. My parents were well-meaning people, I believe they (well, mom at least) truly believed in what was being force-fed to me; they were doing what they thought was right.

As a very young child, I was hit by a car while crossing the street from the ice cream truck, directly in front of my house. It was a residential neighborhood, 25 mph speed limit, broad daylight on a fine, summer day. The car that hit me left 120 skid marks before smashing into me (this was 1965; those cars were built like tanks back then), breaking both my legs and dislocating my hip. An interesting early lesson in Newtonian physics, I suppose. The lesson continues to this day, where, at 48 and after 10 knee surgeries, I am a candidate for a double knee-joint replacement; four different surgeons indicated that the car accident was at the root of my knee problems.

I had a lot of visitors in the hospital the day after the accident. Amid all the "Why did this happen?" questions I heard was an answer: "It's part of God's plan". This seemed strange to me, that God 's plan involved breaking my small body almost in two, for the crime of being a child and wanting an ice cream cone. I had the next 58 days in traction to contemplate this, as best a young child could, and so I tried (after all, there really wasn't much else to do) to rationalize it. I also had the next 6 months while going through physical rehabilitation and learning how to walk again to come to some conclusions. My conclusions:

1. There is no god.
2. God exists, but doesn't care.
3. God exists, cares, and thought this would be a neato kind of thing to do to me.

Of the three, #1 seems at least the most benign to me, 40+ years and 10 surgeries later.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Wildkow @ Mar 8 2007, 04:23 PM) [snapback]402478[/snapback]</div>

Easy. If the argument is shite, it's shite. Just because you have an open mind doesn't mean that you embrace every idea out there. You give it a chance but when it breaks down you move on.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(efusco @ Mar 8 2007, 09:33 PM) [snapback]402570[/snapback]</div>

Rats! He's using logic again! The fiend! Is there no end to his rationale thought!?!? B)

 

I think it's almost funny you would use birth defects to show there is no God. When in all likelyhood they were caused instead by man's polution, incest, etc. I truly believe we (Adam & Eve) were created perfect. From there we have slowly destroyed ourselves.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(daniel @ Mar 8 2007, 03:01 PM) [snapback]402465[/snapback]</div>

If the figures are far lower today as calculated 20 years ago why can't scientist, starting from scratch, in a controlled lab setting and giving the environmental conditions as much advantage as necessary assemble a protein, amino acid or create a single cell organism?

Wildkow

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Wildkow @ Mar 8 2007, 09:29 PM) [snapback]402636[/snapback]</div>

Possibly due to the simple fact that our understanding of the complex systems required to ceate life are still very new. We'v only had the mathmatical means to explain and quantify these systems for less than 30 years. Computers powerful enough to run the calcs have been around for fewer years. Simply put, we are not advanced enough yet.

The complex chemical reactions and hypercycles, bifurcation points and spontaneous reorganization that led to self-replicating systems is mind boggling. We knew about a great many things in the past long before we were able to replicate them.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Mirza @ Mar 8 2007, 09:31 PM) [snapback]402637[/snapback]</div>

Ahhhh yes, Time , the actual God of evolutionist. OK, well I have edited my post to also include proteins and amino acids a much simpler feat to accomplish. But, even if they had all the conditions set the main question I would like someone to explain to me is how life could have formed in an oxygen rich environment or how life could have formed in an environment without oxygen. It has to be one or the other and in both environments it would be impossible for life to form. I don't care how much time you have.

Wildkow

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Wildkow @ Mar 8 2007, 09:29 PM) [snapback]402636[/snapback]</div>

How's two out of three? Scientists can create, have created, and do create proteins and amino acids in the labratory. They can also create lipid membranes, which are what cell walls are made of. That part is actually pretty easy, since the lipids align themselves.

It's quite likely that the first single-celled organisms evolved over a very long time period (millions of years, perhaps) from self-replicating two-dimensional films on clay substrates, and that it would be enormously difficult to make this process happen rapidly. It's also possible that the substrate had to have a very particular surface shape, something that present-day technology cannot form, and which in any case the exact form of is not yet known, and that occurs naturally exceedingly rarely.

But the study of the origins of life is making rapid strides. The question may be solved in our lifetimes.

It's also likely that the first life forms could not survive in nature today because they would be immediately eaten by the much more robust present-day microbes. They were probably extremely inefficient in the metabolism of energy, and grew and reproduced so slowly that it would be difficult to identify them as "alive." It is also likely that the line between inanimate and alive will turn out to be so fuzzy as to be difficult to define the exact point where we want to use the term "life" in the evolution of the first living cells.

Source: The Origins of Life lecture series from The Teaching Company.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Wildkow @ Mar 8 2007, 09:51 PM) [snapback]402650[/snapback]</div>

Without knowing ANYTHING at all about what conditions are necessary for life (and I don't), I can nevertheless identify at least two absurdities in your assertion.

First, you posit that either the primordial environment was oxygen rich, or had no oxygen. There're an infinite number of shades of oxygen density between your two extremes, and one (or more) of those densities may have been exactly right for life's genesis.

Second, your phrasing in the second sentence, stated as an absolute, sounds very much like something out of ignorant propaganda, where someone with an agenda took a half baked biological understanding and extrapolated it to the desired conclusion, exactly as so many creationists do when attempting to refute evolutionary theory. A scientist, not your propagandist, would have expressed your sentence as follows: "Knowing what we know today, we think it highly improbable that life could have arisen spontaneously if the oxygen density were above (or below) value X. However, since our knowledge at this point is insufficient for us to duplicate ourselves the spontaneous genesis of life, we cannot say for certain what's impossible." The key, Wildkow, is uncertainty. You pretend to have absolute certainty; no scientist (no good scientist) would ever be that presumptuous.

Mark Baird
Alameda CA