abiogenesis

I don’t think you understood what I said — time and rearrangement is all that can be scientifically studied. Physics is about nothing more than rearrangement. Humans can’t create nor destroy matter, and they can’t directly comprehend its actual creation or destruction, and humans can’t comprehend a realm outside of time.If you light a piece of paper with a match and burn it up, you haven’t actually destroyed anything. You’ve just rearranged it into smoke & ashes. Every product we have and use wasn’t created by us, we just rearranged what we already had.

Human witness from the past fits the sight sense. Authorized written history counts as fact, because the acceptance of it’s accuracy almost always transcends worldviews. Because atheists don’t have a perfect record in presenting evidence before presenting their godless views. Surely you’ve seen the ape-to-man picture (who hasn’t) that shows the progression of 8 or 9 gradual steps as a chimpanzee turns into a caveman. That illustration actually originated in Darwin’s time before there was any evidence for ape-to-man evolution. It’s clear that religious people aren’t the only ones who start with a pre-existing concept and then try to make evidence fit what they want it to fit.

No, I’ve proven it. It’s a fact that ID is required to conform with many formal requirements to become science, and it’s a fact that no one here can show me where abiogenesis ever had to do that as a requirement for entrance as a scientific subject. It’s not a research volume thing. It’s a research-pathway thing, and both have the experimentation/curiosity/speculative principles/predictions requirements satisfied to comparable ways. might form — may spontaneously form — might have formed? I wonder how thick the stack of paper was that contained his outlines. The thicknesses of only Dembski’s and Behe’s books in one stack would probably be measured in feet. But it’s never enough, I know. It had everything to do with it at the Dover trial. ID is religion in disguise — that was the main case made by..the ACLU.

AtheismPolls, statistics, political action, the movie "Expelled", reviews and references to the list of books I showed in message #171, etc. I hope to have a discussion with a theistic evolutionist here someday.

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No, I’ve proven it. It’s a fact that ID is required to conform with many formal requirements to become science, and it’s a fact that no one here can show me where abiogenesis ever had to do that as a requirement for entrance as a scientific subject.

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I haven't seen any formal requirements, and it is pretty clear that abiogenesis currently meets the standards - and that ID does not, and maybe never will.

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It’s not a research volume thing. It’s a research-pathway thing, and both have the experimentation/curiosity/speculative principles/predictions requirements satisfied to comparable ways.

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Now THAT is just an assertion and one that appears to be untrue. But please tell us of the research ID enables, with detailed examples.

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might form — may spontaneously form — might have formed? I wonder how thick the stack of paper was that contained his outlines. The thicknesses of only Dembski’s and Behe’s books in one stack would probably be measured in feet. But it’s never enough, I know.

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In other words Oparin offered quite detailed ideas on how things may have occurred. Dembski and Behe have not done so - Dembski has even suggested that ID should not do so.
Comparing the thickness of books with no regard to the content is not valid.

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It had everything to do with it at the Dover trial. ID is religion in disguise — that was the main case made by..the ACLU.

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However, neither the Constitutional separation of Church and State nor the ACLU dictate whether a field is considered religion or not. Even if the inclusion of abiogenesis in school tests was wrong at some point in time - and you have not shown that it was - two wrongs do not make a right.

Abiogenesis is a Biblical concept? Why do so many atheists and atheist organizations propose it as a naturalistic, godless method for life to be generated from non life? Richard Dawkins has said this;

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‘Nearly all peoples have developed their own creation myth, and the Genesis story is just the one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants’.

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Do you think most people in the scientific community agree more that abiogenesis is a Biblical concept, or a godless, naturalistic concept?[though interesting, I'd rather not respond to most of this, it's too far off topic]Why should I stop claiming it when so many atheists claim it’s completely naturalistic and has nothing to do with the Bible? That it proves Genesis false? What is the good fight? That abiogenesis is Biblical, or that abiogenesis is completely naturalistic? How can increasing studies of it CONFIRM both positions indefinitely?

Hi, Marc. I still believe that the "formal requirements" for ID are neither formal nor any different from what they were/are for abiogenesis. But, just to humor you a little, let's summarize the history of the contenders:Abiogenesis has never been superseded by a hypothesis or theory that explains the evidence better than it does.
Intelligent design, however, was superseded by a succession of several evolution-like theories that explain the evidence much better than ID does, culminating in the current champion, which we call the Theory of Evolution.Abiogenesis still has no viable competitors in the race to explain what it intends to explain.
Intelligent design is massively outclassed by pretty much every alternative hypothesis and theory that has ever been proposed to explain the same data set.Abiogenesis is the only hypothesis to have ever risen in a tiny, sparsely-populated field of study that still has not produced a single, actual theory; while ID is the revival of a long-ago debunked piece of pseudoscientific piffle from a field in which a very strong and well-supported other theory has proven its utility in generating predictions and satellite theories.You can’t seriously expect the conditions of admittance/re-admittance into the science club to be the same for these two entities. It’s like comparing a newly-graduated businessman who thinks Athens, Georgia is ready for a minor-league water polo team to a convicted felon who wants to put a third American football team in New York City. The first is an uncertain risk with only minor consequences to the investor (it's cheap); the second is widely recognized as a completely stupid move destined for failure and bankruptcy.Edited by Bluejay, : singularizing "businessman"Edited by Bluejay, : "other" added before "theory"

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Not a problem! Because they’re more confident in their position. They don’t see gaps and inadequacies in like minded members posts, and don’t feel compelled to attack from every possible angle. You asked! It’s a little unfair for you to label people without a naturalistic worldview as anti science. That’s exactly the same as my labeling a godless person immoral. I can believe the scientific community should restrain itself, or follow certain paths, without being anti-science, just the same as a godless person can practice morality without acknowledging the actual source of their morality. It can correspond to what goes on in other sciences that seek to determine if an event was caused by an intelligent cause or an unintelligent one. In the forensic sciences, an investigator investigating a death uses scientific evidence to determine whether the death was caused by unintelligent causes (i.e., by accident), or by intelligent causes (i.e., murder). It’s similar in archeology, arson investigation, and SETI. Dembski has described a three-part Explanatory filter that, very briefly summarized, looks like this;

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The filter first asks whether a given pattern is best explained by some chemical or physical necessity or law? If not, can it be explained by chance. If chance and necessity can’t explain the pattern, does it exhibit a specification or apparent purpose? If a complex pattern reflecting the integration of numerous stopping points does exhibit purpose and can’t be explained by chance or necessity, then the scientific, logical inference to the best explanation is design.

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However beautiful and amazing and comforting naturalists find abiogenesis (and evolution) to be, it’s a fact that material causes can’t comprehend the past, present, or future. They can’t plan for the future, or know their environment and then seek to change it for a purpose. Humans are designers, and through science, are learning more and more about it. Scientists have found that minds engage in subconscious pattern matching, which is a means of intuitively distinguishing between designs and random occurrences. Patterns produced by a mind, whether it be the mind of an animal in nests or dams, to the countless things designed by humans, reflect starting and stopping points not found in systems driven only by the uniform motion of purposeless natural forces, stopped only by accidental opposing forces. Patterns produced by intelligent causes integrate starts and stops for a purpose. The integration becomes clear to any open minded person, when the pattern is both complex and useful. It’s a human desire, a human stretch, to insist that patterns produced only by chemical and physical changes in matter by natural uniform motion, will have the required starts and stops necessary to produce and maintain life. The window of perfect natural conditions for life to exist, let alone form by chance, is very small. Probably far smaller than evolutionists care to admit, and of course, far smaller than students in only naturalistic science classes are learning.An inference of design, an inference of purpose in nature, comes naturally to many people. Subconscious pattern matching that alerts the mind to a pattern that reflects a purpose or pre-existing intention. It’s like seeing a knife in the back of a dead man - the one who did it can testify in court about all the perfect naturalistic conditions - the wind blowing, the rain falling, the guy backing up REALLY FAST - to show that blind natural processes killed the guy. But someone in the jury won't believe him, and his fanaticism about purpose won't be the only reason. Starting with Dembski’s words;

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[ID] is not like someone claiming that ancient technologies could not have built the pyramids, so gods or goblins must have done it. We can show how, with the technological resources at hand, the Egypitians could have produced the pyramids. By contrast, material mechanisms known to date offer no such insight into biological complexity. Cell biologist Franklin Harold in The Way of the Cell (Oxford, 2001) remarks that in trying to account for biological complexity, biologists thus far have merely proposed a variety of wishful speculations. If biologists really understood the emergence of biological complexity in purely material terms, intelligent design couldn’t even get off the ground. The fact that they don’t accounts for ID’s quick rise in public consciousness. Show us detailed, testable, mechanistic models for the origin of life, the origin of the genetic code, the origin of molecular machines like the bacterial flagellum, and ID will die a quick death. But that hasn’t happened. Nor does it show any signs of happening.

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Now, more of Dembski’s words that I’ve already shown (twice) in this thread;

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ID supplements material mechanisms with intelligent agency — intelligent design can subsume present biological research. Even efforts to overturn the various criteria for detecting design are welcome within the intelligent design research program. (That’s part of keeping the program honest.) Intelligent design can also look for function as a heuristic for guiding research, inspiring biologists to look for engineering solutions to biological problems that might otherwise escape them. Also, Design is always a matter of tradeoffs. ID can help us understand these tradeoffs and clarify the design problems that organisms actually face. This in turn keeps us from sweeping problems under the rug simply because evolution is purported to be a blind and wasteful process. A non teleological approach to evolution has consistently led biologists to underestimate organisms. Is, for instance, junk DNA really junk? Work by John Bodnar and his associates suggests that some of it is not.

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I posted this in message #100, it was completely ignored. Again in post #111, it was again ignored, except for claims that naturalistic science would have reversed its beliefs about junk DNA without challenges from ID. Not convincing claims, considering facts of how sometimes atheistic assumptions are made in science before 'evidence' is produced to support them. Then they shouldn’t say Irreducible complexity has been falsified — that’s not a true statement. . They can claim that it’s not an issue concerning evolutionary processes, but they can’t claim it’s falsified. Every school age child? We’ll never agree on that — school children are impressionable when they see authorities making statements that favor one worldview over another. I’m still wondering. You haven’t misrepresented, you’ve just gone down a path that ignores the big picture. An acceptance of ID into science doesn’t mean a takeover of science by ID. The Wedge Document isn’t about force, it’s about voluntary acceptance, through
common sense. If ID claims it has a last word, a closing of the door on further research, it can’t prevent other people, other scientists in other labs, from doing more research. But an ID claim of a last word can provide a little more of a motive for godless scientists to do something with more time restrained, result oriented research. Science can’t do everything, and maybe it needs something like ID to discourage it from trying to do things that it can’t do. Science doesn’t know what the nature of consciousness is, or how conscious mental activity arises out of physical brain activity. It doesn’t know why the universe exists — why there is something rather than nothing. It doesn’t know why the universe has three spatial dimensions and only one time dimension. It doesn’t know what the nature of mass is. It doesn’t know what the universe is made of (most of it seems to be ‘dark matter, but we don’t know what dark matter is) It doesn’t have a single fundamental theory of physics (the TWO theories it does have, general relativity and quantum theory, are incompatible) Concerning the abiogeneis and evolutionary attacks on religion, it’s constantly stated and implied that all gaps in the past have been naturalistically filled in, so future gaps will be naturalistically filled in as well. It’s not logical for open minded people to assume that — it’s not logical to try to fit all of reality in our limited realm of only time and rearrangement. It’s not logical for abiogenesis to be considered science, with all its promissory notes of the past 90 years, and at the same time declaring ID to not be science. It matters little what the ACLU warchest was able to buy. ID is related to religion just as much as abiogenesis/evolution is related to atheism. The whole controversy wouldn’t exist if science hadn’t been taken over by atheism. I don’t think what ~I’ve~ posted has told you that as much as what others have posted about how only one tiny little Christian sect (mine, which of course, I haven’t detailed at all) has a problem with abiogenesis/evolution, while others don’t have a single problem with it. Again, I hope to discuss that with a theistic evolutionist here sometime.

Hi Bluejay, are you a Kenneth Miller type of Christian? If so, we'll have to go at it about "fundamentalist Christianity" someday. If you're going to label ID as a "revival", you're going to have to do the same for abiogenesis! Aristotle had primitive ideas about life from non life, debunked by Pasteur. If anything has been "revived", it's been abiogenesis!

Hi, Marc. That was not abiogenesis: that was spontaneous generation.The failure of rotting juice to spawn bacteria and fungi after two months in a sealed flask does not debunk the notion that a network of chemical reactions can incrementally increase in complexity until it is as complex as life. Rather, it debunks the notion that rotten juices spawn bacteria and fungi.Incidentally, we could also argue that Redi debunked creationism by showing that maggots are produced by flies, and not created by God. Somehow, I doubt you'll find this convincing, which can only lead me to conclude that either you do not understand the strengths and limitations of these experiments, or you are employing a double standard (or both, I suppose).Earlier on this thread, you made a big stink about how the word abiogenesis shouldn’t be used to include special creation or intelligent design. Now, expect me to make a big stink about how the word abiogenesis shouldn’t be used such that it includes spontaneous generation. And, I will repeatedly paste this very paragraph into my responses to each instance in which you equate abiogenesis and spontaneous generation until you agree to my terms the way I agreed to yours earlier in this thread.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Marc. You're fooling yourself.The only reason science was "taken over" by atheism is because this controversy exists.Edited by Bluejay, : Present tense is better than past tense was.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi Marc9000,Your link's higher percentages of atheism are for those who are members of prestigious organizations like the National Academies of Science and Nobel prize winners and so forth, which represents less than 1% of all scientists. If you were talking about just the tiny group of top scientists then say so. In the general population of scientists more scientists believe in a personal God, just like you, than do not. And they do not find the search for natural answers atheistic.For this reason you shouldn't have any trouble at all finding a scientist who believes in God and accepts the theory of evolution. Francis Collins (he headed the Human Genome Project) is the most famous example I can think of, and he's an evangelical Christian, just like you.--Percy

I did that because it's too confusing to allow one word to be used to refer to naturalistic processes in our time and rearrangement realm as well as to a supernatural action in another realm. There is a really big distinction there. A network of chemical reactions that can incrementally increase in complexity until it is as complex as life falls in the same naturalistic realm as does spontaneous generation (especially since spontaneous generation is referred to in today's abiogenesis studies! We saw it in message 107;

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In 1953, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey demonstrated that many simple biomolecules could be formed spontaneously.....

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Hopefully you now understand that your terms are incorrect. It only makes sense to separate abiogenesis from the supernatural if we are discussing it in scientific naturalistic terms. Why should we separate abiogenesis from spontaneity? It's all naturalism!Now before you say that (in the same way) ID is about the supernatural, its scientific study is not! It's about design! It's no more necessary to connect the design to the designer than it is for an archeologist to connect a clay pot he finds to whatever human designed it. And if it's claimed that there is a correlation, it's no more profound than the correlation that much of science has with atheism.

That may be true of all scientific disciplines, but I don't think it's true of biology. I'll see if I can find some statistics on that in a few days. I'm new at EvC, but at another message board I had a lot of trouble finding a theistic evolutionist who was willing to answer basic questions about his/her Christian beliefs. About Biblical warnings about false teachers, about humans thinking more highly of themselves than they ought to think. Maybe I'll find one here in the coming months.

I'm not sure whether it is stupidity or dishonesty that gave rise to this bizarre conflation, but either way it is way beyond my ability to measure Did you seriously just claim that a generic use of the word "spontaneously" was actually a reference to the specific "Spontaneous Generation"???Really? You can do that with a straight face, and claim that you are not being an idiot? No, what we understand is what we've always understood... that people such as yourself have either too much dishonesty or too little knowledge to be worth anything more than a target for ridicule.