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To: jennyp
jennyp: The biblical creationist starts out assuming that the Genesis account is literally true.
jennyp: The Intelligent Design scientist starts out assuming that the Genesis account is basically correct, albeit way too specific in its details to pass the Lemon Test.

To anser your question on the same plane:
The ability of science to explain any and everything is what a materialist believes. That has no ability to be proven from science either. It is a pact among equals to say it is so, not science.

From where I sit, the honest observation from nature can only lead one to one conclusion: that all intelligence comes from intelligence, inorganic never births organic, never has never will.

The speculation that it happened once upon a time was called spontaneous generation and mocked. Now it is believed as a scientific explanation? I personally don't think so.

Every experiment to prove spontaneous generation is initiated by a scientist yielding the very model of intelligent design.

77 posted on 10/25/2005 3:01:46 AM PDT by ThirstyMan (hysteria: the elixir of the Left that trumps all reason)
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To: ThirstyMan

OK, I've seen enough in your posts 71-77. Your Chemistry is bad. Your Biology is worse and your knowledge of Evolution is really pitiful. It's a shame.

I tell my sons to look under rocks because one never knows what's there. But you can't pick up the rock if you're standing on it.


83 posted on 10/25/2005 7:41:24 AM PDT by furball4paws (One of the last Evil Geniuses, or the first of their return.)
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To: ThirstyMan
To anser your question on the same plane: The ability of science to explain any and everything is what a materialist believes. That has no ability to be proven from science either. It is a pact among equals to say it is so, not science.

Philosophical materialism isn't an assumption of science - methodological naturalism is. It's axiomatic that the scientific method cannot distinguish between a miracle and a natural occurrence that is yet to be explained. Personally, I think the track record of philosophical supernaturalism has been rather poor. But I don't consider that a scientific conclusion. (Would that be falsifiable? I don't know.)

From where I sit, the honest observation from nature can only lead one to one conclusion: that all intelligence comes from intelligence,

Except when someone is born with an IQ that's higher than that of their parents'.

inorganic never births organic,

As chrisg2001 has pointed out, organic molecules are formed from inorganic all the time. This was first demonstrated in the early 1800's, IIRC. Then of course there was Miller's simple experiment which produced a very impressive variety of organics.

But if you're referring to the first self-replicating thing that we'd call "alive", then yes, it's still in the speculative phase. Abiogenesis researchers are trying to figure out what scenarios were most plausible, given what we know about chemistry and what we think we know about the particular conditions on the early Earth. We're always clear that the origin of life is on the bleeding edge of biological science.

The speculation that it happened once upon a time was called spontaneous generation and mocked. Now it is believed as a scientific explanation? I personally don't think so.

You have it wrong. Spontaneous generation was the theory that multicellular organisms - flies - spontaneously emerged from rotting meat. This is clearly impossible, as multicelled organisms are way too complex to spontaneously come together from random arrangements of organic chemicals.

The real question before actual biologists is: How complex was the first self-replicator? If the first self-replicating entity was something like the Ghadiri peptide, at a mere 32 amino acids long, then it's quite plausible that the process got going early on. If it takes several proteins and/or RNA strands of 200 units or more to get the ball rolling, then it's clearly implausible. Nobody knows yet just how simple such a system can be. To say that it's been proven impossible because nobody has created life in the lab yet is ridiculous. Give it another 20 years, and if they haven't made great strides by then, then you can gloat.

Every experiment to prove spontaneous generation is initiated by a scientist yielding the very model of intelligent design.

Now this I consider an evil argument. (But it's subtle, so I don't blame you for using it.) If the very fact that an experiment is intelligently designed invalidates any finding of non-design in nature, then that automatically invalidates every experiment that has ever been made about anything. It's the very nature of an experiment to have some aspects of the phenomenon under test to be controlled. The purpose of an experiment is to limit the chaos & variability of wild nature so that we can isolate causes. You can't do that without intelligently designing the experiment. Any experiment, about anything.

89 posted on 10/25/2005 12:19:22 PM PDT by jennyp (WHAT I'M READING NOW: Art of Unix Programming by Raymond)
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