On the origin of life

The thing that I find the weirdest is not that Faith says she expects reality (the world) to contradict scripture, but that she then spends so much time here trying to prove that it doesn't!

I think you got something wrong here. The physical world, which I guess you are calling reality, can't contradict scripture. What contradicts scripture is the thinking of fallen humanity, which of course includes fallen thinking about the physical world.ABE: Ah yes, now I get it. To you the "world" is the physical world. I should have been clearer what I meant. "The world" in scripture usually refers to the world of fallen humanity, not to the physical world. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I apologise Faith, yes I did misunderstand you. In my defence you were responding to Coyote who was talking about physical evidence contradicting scripture, but I accept your explanation that when you said the world you were referring to humanity, not natural evidence.Given this miscommunication, rather than make any assumptions, can you please explain to me what you mean when you say What is this lie, who/what is perpertatrating it, and do you have any idea of their motivation?

The lie is the fallen human denial of God the Creator with the substitution of the idea of great ages and evolution that can explain everything as an automatic natural process that doesn't require God. More than that it's ALL of fallen humanity's efforts to understand the world (in the sense of everything that exists) in a-theistic human-oriented terms and get rid of God altogether. It's just how the human fallen mind works since we lost our spiritual connection with God due to the Fall. The motivation I suppose comes down to the ancient desire "to be as God" which the serpent proposed would be the result of eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Well, I'm back. Apologies to all the posters here for my tardiness; it's been a particularly rough week here and I'd much rather put it behind me.Now- to begin with just one aspect of that website. I didn't read the whole thing...I think my eyes glazed over as so much of it was just a rehash of arguments I first heard twenty years ago- and they were probably old then. But what caught my eye initially was the section containing calculations for the probability of life forming. In my view, just because something is "improbable" doesn't mean it's "impossible". I'll try to illustrate with an example.Where I live (Victoria) registration plates on cars are numbered like this:LETTER-LETTER-LETTER-NUMBER-NUMBER-NUMBER- so you could have (for example) an rego plate of ABC-123 or FTH-677. That gives approximately 17,576,000 different unique plates for the cars here. So, if I take a quick walk down my street and I go past ten cars, what is the probability that the ten cars have the plate combinations that I actually see? I work it out to this number:1 chance in 2.81x10^69(but correct me if I've got this wrong!)Now, you'd say that's impossible. Just by going thorough the calculations- and yet it happened. And if I go for another walk tomorrow, that nigh-on-impossible figure will appear again with absolute 100% certainty. That's how I see it anyway, in that something can be almost impossible and absolutely certain at the same time.Thoughts?

And God confirmed that that happened:

quote:

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Genesis 3:22-23 And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.

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The serpent was telling the truth and the "Fall" was a step toward maturity.

You choose to believe the serpent; I choose to believe God. There's really nothing more to any of this than that. Whatever the reason God didn't want us to have "the knowledge of good and evil" it was not a good thing for us or God would not have forbidden it and punished us for it. I know this because I know that God is good and means good to us; I know this from experience and I know it from the whole context of scripture. Whatever the knowledge of good and evil means it most likely doesn't mean the simplistic things so many make of it. You either believe God means good to us or not. Obvious you believe the latter, you believe the serpent, and I believe the former.I don't fully understand why the knowledge of good and evil was bad for us but I know from the context and the results that it was. There are lots of explanations online including different understandings of what the knowledge of good and evil means, but I don't find any of them completely convincing probably because I don't think the meaning of that phrase is clear. I am certain, however, that your understanding of it is completely wrong. I figure I'll eventually understand it and that's all I need to know for now.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

1 in 1.7 million, is approximately what I would work it out to be. But I don't pretend to have advanced knowledge of probability nor do I study the symbology in order to pretend to be smart about it like most people seem to. No doubt I am wrong in my fairly simplistic level of education in maths.Are you saying "it happened" in that you are saying you walked past such a car with that registration? Because in fact the probability is not qualified.It's all about the relevance beforehand. For example, I read online someone said the probability of winning the lottery twice is billions and billions to one but an expert gave the correctly relevant probability, here in this link, and the probability of A person winning it twice, or, ANY person, is qualified by the number we know are playing it.
Page not found - Stats & Data Science ViewsHere's what he said; If you have already walked past the car with that registration plate the probability that is relevant is 1 in 1.Now if you predict a certain plate by choosing the plate from known plates, randomly, then walk past ten cars and you get the number, THEN AND ONLY THEN will your large improbability-figure count.You see improbable things only happen each day because VAST NUMBERS mean they aren't really unlikely. But think of it this way, if there had only ever been one lottery and your chance was about 1 in 14 million, and you were going to be the only player to ever play it, and the lottery would only happen once, because there aren't on average, 14 million attempts, the true chance you would win is NO CHANCE.The problem with abiogenesis is the probability is so vast that in realistic terms, the probability of life assembling itself, is so close to 0% that basically it is 0%.You might say, "but it's not 0 percent." So then think of it in terms of this analogy; imagine you run a marathon and I run a marathon, and it is a mega-marathon, your finishing time is 100 hours, 5 minutes and 5 seconds. Now imagine my finishing time is 100 hours, 4 minutes and 4.999 seconds. IN REALISTIC TERMS, there is no difference that means anything.For example, imagine I took a fifty pence coin, placed it on my patio, took a pen marker, and drawn a red outline around it, then gave the fifty pence to an astronaut, and said, "blindfold your fellow astronaut, have him randomly drop the fifty pence from orbit and let's see if it lands exactly inside the outline I drawn on the ground".Let's face it, if you have 5 million astronauts on 5 million planets, attempting it for each day of their lives, it would just never happen. If you got the coin in my garden that would be a miracle.So the question is, is abiogenesis trying to happen at times, all over the universe? So that is the difference mathematically, because the lottery or registration plates are true statistics, but as for primordial worlds, who knows how many exist, and who knows if it truly is possible for an abiogenesis to break all of the rules of entropy?So IMHO, it's a false comparison because you have to assume abiogenesis is being played like the lottery, all over the universe.Is it? I don't know. If it is, perhaps then your argument might have something to it but the problem is, this still doesn't give physical material things any reason to build themselves. For example, an amino acid is not alive, the same as a brick, therefore many bricks even if they could form themselves into a wall, in 10 trillion brick-worlds full of bricks, would have no reason to continue with the build. They would never build themselves into a cathedral because they are not trying to. It is the mistake of anthropomorphism, to give physical elements, designer-ambitions. Edited by mike the wiz, : No reason given.Edited by mike the wiz, : No reason given.Edited by mike the wiz, : No reason given.

You still have not addressed any of the responses to the OP.

The situation is a little more complicated than that. God confirmed that eating from the Tree of Knowledge had made man just like God and that if such a thing were followed up by eating from the Tree of Life, man would also be eternal. Apparently, the serpent's deception including, at least in part, telling the truth.

What did I say that you think missed the point? He believed the serpent, I believe God, and I know the story, so what did I miss?Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Howdy, Sepo.

Thats's weird. The current scheme in Victoria is
NAA-NAA.
Vehicle registration plates of Australia - Wikipedia
Just a moment...

Except in the story the God character is the one who lies while the serpent character tells the truth.

There is no "god character" in the Bible, there is only God Himself. God cannot lie but obviously you can. There is only one Flood in the Bible. Your two floods are just two different accounts of the same Flood.