Posted on 05/02/2003 10:26:29 AM PDT by Remedy
Please grace us with and example of something proven to not have a cause. This would be a violation of the law of cause and effect, another miracle! I am continually amazed at how you evos will point the finger at creationists and reduce their explanations to "goddidit!" while your explanations remain "itdidititself!"
Sure, his origin wouldn't be via anything *in* this Universe, but you've hardly "proven" that he therefore could exist without a "Cause" of some sort, from somewhere *other* than our universe.
For you, I'm sure there is no proof of anything but evolution. Please detail your thinking on how an Ultimate Being could have an origin.
It only proves that if they have a Cause (and as far as we know, everything *needs* a Cause), it lies somewhere *else*.
If everything needs a cause -- and I'm surprised to see that you agree with this law-- then what caused our universe?
Ah yes. The old "quote out of context" game. Your Gould quote is most probably bogus.
Database entry #126Source: Antievolution Quotes and Misquotes: The Archive.
Quoted by: UCSD IDEA student club
Quoted in: The IDEA Club Fossil Record Quote Collection web page (Last accessed 2001/10/14).
Your Einstein quote, even if accurate, is worthless. He was great in physics, and a bust just about everywhere else (he was, after all, a socialist). Count on Big Al for relativity; be skeptical about the rest of his output.
As for your Darwin quote, it may be bogus, but even if not, it's typical of the way he wrote. He would ask the question, which a skeptical reader might ask, and then he would go on to answer it. Such passages are a creationist's delight, as they are so frequently taken out of context.
Hoyle's "747 in a junkyard" is absurd. I'll leave it so some of the others to refute it. It's easily refuted. The Denton quote, if genuine, is flat-out erronious. I'll leave it to someone else to fill in the details (it's been done over and over in these threads, and I'm getting lazy).
He did that already. Nevertheless, I think it's an excellent post, especially for those who even reject continental drift.
Well, apparently.
Ping
481 posted on 05/04/2003 2:17 AM PDT by bondserv
Bringing in the weapon of mass disruption, eh? That's pretty low.
One of my favorites is a classic: the two-phase nozzle optimized by H. P. Schwefel.
A well-placed bullet?
FRegards, MM
Yeah, it mostly is, but some of the assays and analyses of these things clearly show the prerequisites required, and that a lot of the catalytic bootstrapping that would need to happen actually is happening. Of course, a very simple single-celled organism emerging from this is highly improbable, but given billions of years, it at least seems plausible for these systems since they are constantly producing non-functional cell-like structures (sacks o' complex chemicals, really). As someone who was a theoretical chemist at one point in time, I would say that these systems exhibit all the potential required to accidentally produce a primitive organism, though whether it actually happened is up for grabs. It is a more thorough story than goop floating in the ocean anyway.
This is not an meaningful argument. "Irreducible Complexity" is a new phrase invented to replace "I don't know". You cannot make any assertion from a null premise i.e. this does NOT support Design. The only valid assertion that can be made is that we do not know what process made a particular molecular construction. Note that all these things are chemically possible, but our technology still isn't all that hot at reverse engineering complex chemical systems (though it gets better every day).
Irreducible Complexity is just a restatement of the "God in the Gaps" argument, not a technical one. As history has shown, humans are pretty horrible judges of what is and isn't possible, so it is generally best to reserve judgment until we actually have the facts.
The general conclusion of most theologians for centuries is that the theological work of Newton was almost pure gibberish. A lot of his writing was nonsense and does not work well with traditional Christian doctrine. Or "safely ignored" as he put it. Newton fancied himself a theologian, who dabbled in science and math as an adjunct to his theological studies. As it happens, his science and math work had great value even though the theological context in which they were discovered is widely considered to be garbage within theological circles. I find it fascinating that such a fundamentally influential figure in the math and sciences developed these theories almost as a historical accident that resulted from his "lunatic fringe" obsession with Christian theology. Apparently his mind served him much more poorly in his theological pursuits than in his accidental incursions into math and science, but then there are many that believe Newton wasn't entirely "right in the head". A mad genius perhaps?
The language I was using was math and science. What language are you using? Note that increases in entropy are increases in information by definition. Entropy is a measure of information content, so it shouldn't be surprising that when one goes up, so does the other.
If you are going to argue with the math/science/engineering fellas, you can't make up you have to speak the language that their assertions and theory are written in.
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