No Witnesses

Well, quite apart from life certainly not being random, if it's planned it sure doesn't look like any planning we humans would understand.

Knowing the orgin may change the explanation as to how what happened next. It may in fact be planned rather than random.I will let you know when science supplies an answer. But I would not get my hopes up as to science finding an answer.

It's always best to rehearse - you don't want to be caught wrong footed. There's a lot happening in the microbiology labs now you know.

I suggest you reread your post. Are you stating that there is in fact an accepted Theory of the orgin of life. If not your post makes not sense.The "logic" you attemp to elucidate in your post not quoted above is dependent on there being an accepted theory of the origin of life, otherwise it makes not sense.

How could you tell? What is the evidence for evolution being planned?

Given that you don't recognize or understand the answers that science has already supplied, I hope you'll forgive me if I don't count on you further developments. But thanks anyway.

We do know that there is evidence of natural causes.We also know that no one has ever presented any evidence of any non-natural or supernatural causes.

There are a whole lot of indications of planned in the closed thead about whether Darwin's theory should be modified or replaced. All of the Shapiro stuff and cells being sentient to a degree and the exchange of information et. al.Thats a subject hopefully for another thread.

That seems to be the consensus on this board, but if you will remember, When I discussed Shapiro's views on this board, he in an e-mail said I understood him pretty well.

I will wait until I see something.

How wonderful for you. You claim that one person says you understand one concept pretty well. On the other hand, most everything I've seen you write here indicates you don't understand the first thing about how science works, or what the ToE says.I'll stick to my original position.

Let's put that claim into context. When we questioned you about some concepts expressed in Shapiro's views, in particular "purifying selection" you admitted that you had no clue what Shapiro was talking about. You were not even able to tell when Shapiro was talking about natural selection even while you were attempting to minimize the role of natural selection in relation to Shapiro's work.Anyone who bothers to visit the threads you are talking about is going to find any number of examples of your complete cluelessness regarding biology and the scientific method. If it becomes necessary to do so, I'll provide the pointers myself.

I said exactly what I meant. There is no theory on the origin of life, and no such theory is taught. At best we have working hypotheses and evidence suggesting that abiogenesis is a reasonable explanation.Despite your wish to believe otherwise, we don't need to understand or accept abiogenesis to accept the theory of evolution.My quoted statement addresses your wish to conflate the term theory with guessing. Somehow, no number of attempts to clarify the role of theory in science has made any dent in that osmium cranium of yours.The conflict with own belief's arises not because we've established how life began, but because despite not nailing down the details regarding the ultimate origin of life, science is still incompatible with the idea that man was created directly from dirt. Man evolved from some common ancestor with chimpanzees.

And then you will, of course, simply deny it. After all, if you can just flatly deny 150 years of evidence and facts in several scientific disciplines that proves that complex life evolved from simpler life over millions of years, what chance does a new major discovery like abiogenesis in your own lifetime stand?This is a difference between the rational and the irrational; the believer's mind set and the scientist's.I can still remember years ago when I first heard the ID arguments, I got all excited that evolution theory was possibly wrong. I read everything I could get my hands on wondering whether it could be true. It took me a couple of weeks to work out it was complete and utter bullshit and I was really pissed off. Partly because of the dishonesty of the case but mostly because of the anti-climax.You can see that sense of excitement with the speed of light problem and Higgs boson stuff at CERN. At least half the scientists want their theories to be proven wrong and the other half are trying desperately to prove them wrong too. Scientists are iconoclasts, they want to prove accepted wisdom wrong.You, with your unalterable beliefs, are the exact opposite. No amount of evidence can possibly change your mind and you spend your life denying every new thing that comes along that might challenge those beliefs.Why are you here if you don't want to learn?

Well, I'm still right, aren't I? A literalistic reading of the Bible is known to be false. Our admitted ignorance of the origin of life does not put all hypotheses on the same level, because although we don't know which ones are true, we can at least identify some of them as false.Your own hypothesis about God creating life but not according to Biblical chronology is also not on the same level. Consider this: the proposition that things happen according to natural law and not by God doing magic is the best supported theory in science. Every experiment ever done, every observation ever made, supports this proposition. We should still consider a miraculous explanation as a bare possibility, but it is contrary to our scientific knowledge as it stands just as though someone proposed that the origin of life involved a violation of the law of conservation of energy. We can conceive of it, we can consider it, but everything we know suggests that that wasn't what actually happened.