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To: qam1
Not at all what this article presents it to be. Now how strong can your position be if in order to prop it up you have to LIE and take a dead man's quotes out of context? Do Creationist / IDers have any shame?

Let's see...the article states that he was an agnostic. It then gives a direct quote where he *admits* that an HONEST man (not deceitful, not malacious) ARMED WITH ALL KNOWLEDGE THAT SCIENCE HAS NOW...WOULD CONCLUDE THAT THE ORIGIN OF LIFE IS ALMOST A MIRACLE.

You can draw your own inferences, but obviously the man felt that there wasn't sufficient scientific evidence to prove that that the beginning of life was anything but a miracle.

86 posted on 05/06/2005 8:51:49 PM PDT by DouglasKC
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To: DouglasKC
Let's see...the article states that he was an agnostic.

Which right off the bat is wrong. Crick was an Atheist and a hard core one at that

It then gives a direct quote where he *admits* that an HONEST man (not deceitful, not malacious) ARMED WITH ALL KNOWLEDGE THAT SCIENCE HAS NOW...WOULD CONCLUDE THAT THE ORIGIN OF LIFE IS ALMOST A MIRACLE.

Which continues

But this should not be taken to imply that there are good reasons to believe that it could not have started on the earth by a perfectly reasonable sequence of fairly ordinary chemical reactions.

What part of  "fairly ordinary" don't you understand?

You can draw your own inferences, but obviously the man felt that there wasn't sufficient scientific evidence to prove that that the beginning of life was anything but a miracle.

Here is a real quote from Crick's book What Mad Pursuit

The second property of almost all living things is their complexity, and in particular, their highly organised complexity. This so impressed our forebears that they considered it inconceivable that such intricate and well-organized mechanisms would have arisen without a designer. Had I been living 150 years ago I feel sure I would have been compelled to agree with this Argument from Design. Its most thorough and eloquent protagonist was the Reverend William Paley whose book, Natural theology -- or Evidence of the Existences and Attributes of the Deity collected from the Appearances of nature, was published in 1802. Imagine, he said, that crossing a heath one found on the ground a watch in good working condition. Its design and its behaviour could only be explained by invoking a maker. In the same way, he argued, the intricate design of living organisms forces us to recognize that they too must have had a Designer.

This compelling argument was shattered by Charles Darwin, who believed that the appearance of design is due to the process of natural selection. This idea was put forward both by Darwin and by Alfred Wallace, essentially independently. Their two papers were read before the Linnean Society on July 1, 1858, but did not immediately produce much reaction. In fact, the president of the society, in his annual review, remarked that the year that had passed had not been marked by any striking discoveries. Darwin wrote up a "short" version of his ideas (he had planned a much longer work) as The Origin of species. When this was published in 1859, it immediately ran through several reprintings and did indeed produce a sensation. As well it might, because it is plain today that it outlined the essential feature of the "Secret of Life". It needed only the discovery of genetics, originally made by Gregor Mendel in the 1860s, and, in this century, of the molecular basis of genetics, for the secret to stand before us in all its naked glory.

and even more

An atheist, Crick once said he entered the field of molecular biology because he hoped to expunge from biology the last traces of "vitalism." This 19th century theory, advocated by some religious scientists, held that living organisms possess some special, metaphysical spark that distinguishes them from ordinary matter.

To the contrary, Crick replied: Even the most complex living organism, the human brain, contains no spirit, no "ghost in the machine," as philosophers have called it. Rather, it's just a machine composed of atoms and molecules. He argued this view throughout his life, most notably in his 1994 book, "The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul," which opened by informing readers that the soul doesn't exist: "Your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules."

Crick is not on your side, To even suggest such a thing is disingenuous at best

149 posted on 05/06/2005 9:34:16 PM PDT by qam1 (There's been a huge party. All plates and the bottles are empty, all that's left is the bill to pay)
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