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"I have no idea what you are giving me, but tautologies are not nonsense. They could be considered the opposite of nonsense."

By saying Santa is a man with a beard and red suit, and you can take a man and put a beard and red suit on him, and THEREFORE there is a Santa; you are talking in circles.

A tautology becomes nonsense when you try to use it the way you are, to prove something external. Your argument is that this thought experiment has some bearing on the existence of a mythical Santa. It does not. It is an exercise that PROVES nothing.

To say "all crows are black, or some are not black" may be true, but it proves nothing at all about crows. You are trying to use a tautology to prove something, and it is NONSENSE.

"I think I might be able to get you a job with the Polly-Anna universal chamber of commerce. But still, nobody will perform your experiment because neither side of the argument gets much out of it."

You need to read up on nanotechnology. While no one may assemble life in a lab to validate my arguments, they will try because it is useful in other ways. Nano machines will largely mimic existing structures in nature because they are very efficient. When it becomes feasible to assemble life, I expect there will be many to step up to the plate and try.

You need to read up on nanotechnology.

I'm reasonably familiar with the subject.

While no one may assemble life in a lab to validate my arguments, they will try because it is useful in other ways. Nano machines will largely mimic existing structures in nature because they are very efficient. When it becomes feasible to assemble life, I expect there will be many to step up to the plate and try.

You mean like a Sears santa is useful, just like a Montegomery Ward Santa, or a giant elf Santa with magical flying raindeer?

Nano machines will largely mimic existing structures in nature because they are very efficient.

That would be wrong. Compared to machine tool approaches organic structures leave a lot to be desired. We will undoubtedly see hybrids, though.

When it becomes feasible to assemble life, I expect there will be many to step up to the plate and try.

No. You are vastly unaware, apprently, of how much engineering it would take to duplicate a living cell "from scratch" as you have insisted. It won't be done because it proves no point worth proving, by either side of this debate. Do you think we should invent geologic plates "from scratch" to prove or disprove the notion that God created the earth on the 7th day, complete fossils embedded in tectonic plates? If you actually did it, or tried to do it and failed, would it change the confidence you might have in either the godditit theory or the coelescing dust theory?

Ans? No, because, just as in the case of the sears santa experiment--and as, amusingly enough, you have been at pains to point out--my ability to produce a sears santa doesn't have butkus to do with the existence or non-existence of either the Monkey-ward santa or the flying elf santa.

By saying Santa is a man with a beard and red suit, and you can take a man and put a beard and red suit on him, and THEREFORE there is a Santa; you are talking in circles.

If I had said that, it would be a tautology, but it would not be nonsense. Clearly, for a phenomenon to be Santa-istic, it requires a beard and a red suit. Parenthetically, let me assure you that there exist men with red suits and beards for which no claim of santahood is being made, and non-supernatural santas sans red beard and suit. Your claim is spurious, and my experiment is genuine, to the same extent as yours. It is quite conceivable that I might very well fail at the attempt to build an artificial santa in the sears lobby, thereby, according to your rules, casting doubt on the existence of a non-supernatural santa over at monkey-wards. Maybe that really is a supernatural santa over at monkey wards--maybe life really is the product of supernatural intervention.