Origin-of-Life Expert Jokes about Becoming a Creationist

Creation-Evolution Headlines ^ | 11/05/2004 | Creation-Evolution Headlines

[bondserv]

PING!

[IllumiNaughtyByNature]

Intelligent Design (ID) Ping

[IllumiNaughtyByNature]

Intelligent Design (ID) ping

Thought you would want to see this and know that you'd have done the same for me.

K4

[snarks_when_bored]

If a designing intelligence is needed to get life going, then all the questions and answers change. The fluff about finch beaks and peppered moths and Lucy is irrelevant, because a totally new approach to looking at the world is needed: an approach that recognizes that information from an intelligent cause is a fundamental property of life.

Suppose biologists were to suddenly, en masse, agree with this position. How, then, would they be able to determine the difference between questions whose only possible answer is "God made it that way", and questions for which a less terse answer is appropriate?

Remember the comic, Flip Wilson? One of his most famous lines was "The devil made me do it!". The slightly serious undertone of that was, of course, if the devil made him do it, he wasn't responsible for what he did, and the result of his not being responsible for what he did was that he couldn't be blamed or punished for it. "The devil made me do it!" is both a discussion stopper and an 'out'.

I fear that "God made it that way", when invoked in what ought to be a scientific context, serves the same function.

[Tom Bombadil]

Each problem was a show stopper, yet his show went on.

Molecular Chomsky.

[general_re]

His name will be withheld for this report...

How convenient. Not only is it withheld from this "report", but there's no mention of it at all in recent issues of JPL's employee newsletter, not even a squib about such an upcoming event. More proof of the Darwin conspiracy, no doubt....

[AndrewC]

That means figuring out how it can form, how it can avoid destruction in water, and how it can avoid clumping into useless globs of tar.

Chemistry is a wonderful science.

Cellulose, does it form abiotically?

[beezdotcom]

I fear that "God made it that way", when invoked in what ought to be a scientific context, serves the same function.

I really think that scientists have to be prepared to acknowledge that explanation at the lowest level, but still treat every question as if it has not yet necessarily been decomposed down to that root level.

In other words, I agree that there are some questions that can only be answered "because." - but a scientist should always be looking to see if there is further knowledge to be gleaned before the final "because."

[Selkie]

life didn’t form in the water, but in a desert>>>>>

Fascinating stuff ! Thanks for posting this.

[PatrickHenry]

This thread is mildly amusing (a report from a creationoid website about an unnamed "expert"), but it isn't worth the time of the folks on my ping list.

[snarks_when_bored]

Indeed, that was the point I was making.

It would be a mistake to have recourse to the hands-in-the-air, I-give-up option before rational inquiry has exhausted itself. We're only at the beginning of understanding how things stand in our little corner of the cosmos.

[RadioAstronomer]

At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Great place to work. :-)

[general_re]

I figured it was worth a mildly amusing ping to you. Note also that this thread didn't start out in Religion ;)

[PatrickHenry]

I figured it was worth a mildly amusing ping to you.

Yeah, but crop circles are even funnier.

Note also that this thread didn't start out in Religion

No, but that's certainly where it belongs. (I had nothing to do with moving it!)

[AndrewC]

It seems evident that the scientist mentioned in the article is very likely to be this person.

Steven A. Benner

He presented(along with others) this paper, Borate Minerals Stabilize Ribose, in January of this year.

Some people that have commented on this thread are so close minded that they cannot rationally discuss this topic because it was presented by a creationist. It is typical of them.

[Michael_Michaelangelo]

Thanks for the ping!

[Marine_Uncle]

Look the subject cannot be adequately discussed in this type forum. And many folks have little background in what is involved. But I would just bring out one thing.

And that is this:
Starting "loosely" if one wants to accept the geo-column as really being as "uniform" as many books would have one believe, I assure you it is not...............

Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian.......upward from this Paleozoic period into the Messozioc, then Cenozoic periods.....(remember I am being very very general here to try to make a point).............

Where are the required hundreds of thousands of transitionary forms in the fossil record?
For instance, lets take the Cambrian period (570 million years ago..........LOOK I AM VERY AWARE IT DEPENDS ON WHO'S FRIGEN TABLE YOU WANT TO LOOK AT............what year in what text book etc....
But read carefully any modern text book on in-vertebrae paleontology, and find any reference to where the perhaps
hundreds of thousands of transitory forms within a given species are found.
Put another way. World wide in museums and hold areas associated with those that collect and study fossil remains have many BILLIONS OF FOSSILS of in-verterbrates from the above mentioned epochs. Often huge slabs of lets say limestone are carefully broken up, layer by layer etc., to extract all the hundreds of thousands of lets say trilobites, brachiopods and other sea creatures in the slab.
Now show me gentle reader one book or museum display that shows a transitionary form between any of those species and sub species present.
Every honest palentologiest over the last half century has been at least honest in stating that no one has found any intermediatory forms that represent the tens of thousands of known final forms of any given type. Now. This is the case as we move up in what they love to call "complexity of form and design", etc..
If evolution took place, should we not expect in the fossil record to see hundreds of thousands of well defined transiant forms? Remember, we could be looking at lets say a ten foot thick twenty by twenty foot piece of limestone say from the Cambrian period, that could supposedly represent millions of years of continuity. And perhaps the slab might contain a hundred thousand speciment,
everyone, being fully formed and classified as a given species, based on the accepted and practiced rules of taxomity, etc..

Now I do not intend to be trying to answer rebuttals. Because the obviouse is known to me. But perhaps this can be viewed as food for thought.

[GummyIII]

Thank you, and you bet!!!

[PatrickHenry]

If evolution took place, should we not expect in the fossil record to see hundreds of thousands of well defined transiant forms?

This post (#65), by a freeper named VadeRetro, gives you what you're looking for:
VadeRetro's multiple links to transitionals.