To add a little more fuel to the never-ending Creationism v evolution fire, I offer a great website, target=_blank>http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Hangar/2437/target=_blank>. There is plenty to read here for those who are interested.
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Creation Science Debunked
- Thread starter BlueSubmarine
- Start date
I know. "Creation science" is an oxymoron, unless it is about God creating the universe through evolution.
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Originally posted by Hank
Speaking of which; are ALL theist, me included, who believe in God and subsequently that He created humans classified as creationists?
If you believe that humans have always been humans and your ancestors a billion years ago weren't some earlier species, then yes, you are a Creationist.
If you didn't realize this, well, welcome to the Science forum!
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DNAunion: Im afraid I have to disagree with my old arch enemy Lenny Flank *sigh*, *shrug*.
Note that the Creationist in EVERY ONE of the 3 quotes Lenny provided said that all systems TEND to move towards a state of greater. This is a pretty much TRUE statement. It doesnt matter if the system is open, closed, or isolated, the system still TENDS to move towards greater disorder. The systems actual BEHAVIOR, on the other hand, can go against this TENDENCY.
Let me use an analogy to explain. I say that all objects released from above the ground TEND to fall towards the Earth because of the law of gravity. Does a helium balloons rising refute my claim? No. Even a helium balloon TENDS to fall towards the Earth because helium (as well as the rubber of the balloon) has mass. The helium balloons BEHAVIOR, on the other hand, is to rise up away from the Earth because airs mass is greater than heliums.
A second better - example. Youre laying flat on a weightlifting bench with a 200-lb barbell held above your chest with your arms locked out. You can feel the TENDENCY of the barbell to move towards the center of the Earth, yet its BEHAVIOR is to remain at rest. You now unlock your elbows but do not push up hard enough to fully resist its TENDENCY to move towards the Earths center, so it gradually lowers now its TENDENCY and BEHAVIOR are IDENTICAL. Once it gets just above your chest, you give a might heave and now the barbell moves upwards its BEHAVIOR is OPPOSITE its TENDENCY. At no time did the barbell lose its tendency to move towards the center of the Earth it had only one tendency throughout. Yet its behaviors were (1) to remain at rest, (2) to move towards the center of the Earth, and (3) to move away from the center of the Earth. The input of energy did not change the barbell's gravitational tendency, just its behavior.
TENDENCY and BEHAVIOR are not the same thing Lenny conflates the two in making his argument, which is thus invalid.
If Lenny (who believes is a fruit cocktail God made up of bits and pieces of several offbeat religions) had better evidence/quotes, he should have presented them.
PS: Reading farther down in Lenny's page, he actually says about the same thing. He notes that streams and rivers flow downhill because of gravity (their tendency due to gravity) but that if they encounter rocks, a vortex can form in which some of the water goes temporarily uphill (their behavior differing from their gravitational tendency).
PPS: Funny, reading even farther down Lenny presents the following quote the same Creationist:
DNAunion: Gee, I thought Lenny's claim/point was that Morris said an increase in order couldn't occur? Yet here is Lenny quoting Morris saying - multiple times - that an increase in order CAN occur. What was Lenny's long rant about then???
DNAunion: Came back with something else.
DNAunion: Notice how similar the two are - it's almost as if they were written by the same author. Yet the first is from the Creationist Lenny attacks - you know, the guy who doesn't know a thing about thermodynamics - and the second is Lenny's own words - you know, the world's expert on thermodynamics.
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DNAunion: They are also the same laws that govern the formation of a four-stroke, reciprocating, internal combustion engine yet one will not form spontaneously.
DNAunion: So surely if we just throw a lump of coal into a solution of water and ammonia and jolt it all with some free energy, well get life, right? Or at least proteins. Shoot, after all, well have not only carbon but hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen as well everything needed to make amino acids. Yet, sadly, this simply wont work. Then there must be some difference in the chemistry, no?
Lenny is wrong. The chemistry of life IS different from the chemistry of coal and other inanimate matter. What Lenny should have said is that At the ATOMIC level, there is nothing different about life A CARBON ATOM ITSELF is the same whether it is part of a DNA molecule or whether it is part of a lump of coal.
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DNAunion: Is Lenny Flank under the delusion that life = amino acids?
Second, Lenny basically contradicted himself. He first said that also [needed is] a mechanism to capture that energy and use it for biological processes. Thats a correct statement. Yet he next turns around and claims that the simple chemistry of carbon itself is enough to do the trick (given free energy). What happened to the mechanism? Whered it go?
Back to photosynthesis. I got out into the desert and never eat again. Will I be able to maintain my highly ordered, living state, or will I die and decay? Lets see, Ive got free energy in abundance and Ill be darned if I dont have tons of carbon atoms with their simple and unique chemical properties right there in my body yep, everything Lenny claims is needed. Yet I will surely die and decay. I need those mechanisms that Lenny ditched!
DNAunion: Hogwash. The chemical processes that allow life to grow in complexity are vastly different from the kind of chemistry that produces amino acids out in space.
The charge Lenny is guilty of is downplaying the complexity of BIOchemistry. He does this in hopes of creating the illusion that there really is no major difference between life and an amino acid (or even a lump of coal!), for example: both of them follow the same laws of physics and chemistry and are made of aggregates of the same carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen atoms.
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DNA: You're doing a fine job of arguing the negative here. I appreciate your role as debunker of claims that are oversimplified, poorly thought out, and overly specious.
But how about a positive statement from you for a change. How do YOU think life got started?
But how about a positive statement from you for a change. How do YOU think life got started?
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lucaspa
Legend
Originally posted by Hank
Speaking of which; are ALL theist, me included, who believe in God and subsequently that He created humans classified as creationists?
According to Phillip Johnson, yes. But, if you believe God created through evolution, then no.
Yes, Johnson is inconsistent here. No big surprise, huh?
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DNAunion: Here's a version of my "official position".
I am highly skeptical that something as ordered, organized, complex, and intricate as a autonomous cell could have arisen by purely natural means alone here on Earth under the conditions thought to have been present in the amount of time thought to have been available.
Over the last several years I've looked at the various mainstream OOL positions and I see major problems with them all: I don't know of one that I would be willing to bet on.
I have often offered -- as nothing more than unsupported speculation -- a form of Crick's Directed Panspermia, in which a form of life unlike our own arose on some other planet and then intelligently designed life as we know it (in the form of bacteria) and seeded Earth with it. But I wouldn't be willing to be on that either.
As far as supernatural cause, well, first it's not science. And, no experiment can confirm the notion. Second, it's overkill - cellular life is a lot like an internal combustion engine in that neither requires a miracle to arise (humans have already made the latter and probably will soon make the former).
So I'm afraid I don't actually have a true position. But I do believe in keeping the discussions in line with scientific evidence, so if someone says something I know is wrong, I point it out.
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DNAunion: Uhm, I didn't show that the Creationists are in error - I showed that Lenny Flank made a lame, inconsistent, and unsupported claim that the Creationists are in error.
Now, does life or evolution defy the second law? No, of course not. And I've posted material about that - at great length - several times on the web.
Two Examples from October of 2000:
http://www.asa3.org/archive/evolution/200010/0587.html
http://www.asa3.org/archive/evolution/200010/0610.html
Simply put, If Lenny had been a good little boy - if he had done things correctly - I wouldn't have had anything to say. But he botched it.
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How come you're "highly skeptical" of theories of natural origin, yet you're willing to offer an alternative that you admit is nothing but "unsupported speculation"? What makes you more confident in your unsupported speculations than in theories with at least some empirical basis?
Cellular life is also a lot NOT like an IC engine in that is capable of reproducing itself. That makes the "where did it come from" question a lot tougher to answer.
I think you do. I think you're an IDist in sheep's clothing. Subtler and less dogmatic than the Dembski/Behe mold, to be sure, but an IDist nonetheless.
I could be wrong...
Hear! Hear! Unsupported speculations are the first things to go, right?
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DNAunion: Yes.
DNAunion: Not really.
The higher the carbon content, the more energy the coal will produce when burned: the best coal is around 90-95% carbon. In such a case:
(1) The vast majority of carbon atoms in coal are bonded to 4 other carbon atoms, thus making each of its four bonds NONPOLAR covalent. However, in amino acids, sugars, and even lipids, the vast majority of carbon atoms are bonded to at least one non-carbon atom, making at least one of its bonds POLAR covalent (even the hydrocarbon chains in lipids have a polar nature since the electronegativities of carbon and hydrogen differ).
(2) The vast majority of carbon atoms in coal are bonded to 4 other carbon atoms, thus making each of its bonds a SINGLE covalent bond. However, in amino acids, sugars, and even a lot of lipids, typically one carbon atom will have a DOUBLE covalent bond with another atom (such as the carbon in the carboxyl group of an amino acid, in the carbonyl group of a sugar, and a C=C bond in an unsaturated hydrocarbon).
(3) The vast majority of carbon atoms in coal are bonded to 4 other carbon atoms, thus ensuring that those carbon atoms are all SYMMETRIC. However, in 19 of the 20 biological amino acids and the key biological sugars (such as ribose, deoxyribose, glucose, etc.), at least one carbon atom has attached to it four different atoms/groups, thus making the carbon atom ASYMMETRIC. The asymmetric nature of carbon in these biological molecules is what gives rise to optical isomers (enantiomers) the left- and right-handed mirror images that are non-superimposible one upon the other. Chirality plays an ENORMOUS role in biochemistry, but doesnt mean squat in coal.
And now we can see one reason why the chemistry of the carbons in biological molecules is different from the chemistry of carbon in coal. The asymmetric carbon atoms found in the bioligical amino acids and sugars produce two different optical isomers, only one of which is biologically relevant. The rule is that only left-handed amino acids and right-handed nucleotide sugars are used in biological polymerization, with the opposite handed forms being poisonous. But there is no requirement for homochirality to produce a functional lump of coal - the carbon atoms can be, and in many instance are, mostly symmetric.
In a high-carbon-content coal you have almost exclusively each carbon atom bonded by nonpolar single covalent bonds to other carbon atoms ---- boring. In biological molecules, such as amino acids and sugars, you have a wide range of possibilities actualized: nonpolar single bonds to other carbon atoms, slightly polar single covalent bonds to hydrogen, single polar covalent bonds to hydroxyl groups, nonpolar double bonds to othe carbon atoms, polar double bonds to oxygen atoms, long linear chains - such as DNA, RNA, and proteins - with backbones composed of carbon atoms linked to other atoms in a repeating manner, summetric carbon atoms, asymmetric carbon atoms giving rise to optical isomers, different bond lengths, different bond energies, etc.
The comments I have made about high-carbon-content coal also scale down pretty well to lower-carbon-content coal. But those have not been altered as much - they either are not as old or have not been subjected to as much pressure, or both. They are closer to being their original plant matter than what most of us consider to be "true coal".
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DNAunion: Not a double post just needed the same setup as an earlier post I made in reply to Lucaspa.
DNAunion: Do you think chemistry means only how one atom is bonded to another? Do you think it excludes the chemical reactions that occur, the rate at which those reactions occur, the factors that affect the rate of the reactions, and so on?
Lets look at stereochemistry for a second. Life is dependent upon the biological amino acids and sugars being homochiral, and the existence of two optical isomers in the first place is the result of the chemistry of carbon a symmetric carbon atom does not produce a chiral molecule whereas an asymmetric carbon atom does (this is the rule - as with every other rule, it is not always so cut-and-dry). Coal, unlike life, has no requirement for homochirality. All the carbon in coal could be symmetric and still have coal. You could have both symmetric and asymmetric carbon atoms in coal, in any ratio, and even have both of the optical isomers of every chiral molecule, and still have coal.
DNAunion: Yes there is life depends upon homochirality: coal doesnt.
DNAunion: Do you think chemistry means only how one atom is bonded to another? Do you think it excludes the chemical reactions that occur, the rate at which those reactions occur, the factors that affect the rate of the reactions, and so on?
Lets look at stereochemistry for a second. Life is dependent upon the biological amino acids and sugars being homochiral, and the existence of two optical isomers in the first place is the result of the chemistry of carbon a symmetric carbon atom does not produce a chiral molecule whereas an asymmetric carbon atom does (this is the rule - as with every other rule, it is not always so cut-and-dry). Coal, unlike life, has no requirement for homochirality. All the carbon in coal could be symmetric and still have coal. You could have both symmetric and asymmetric carbon atoms in coal, in any ratio, and even have both of the optical isomers of every chiral molecule, and still have coal.
DNAunion: Yes there is life depends upon homochirality: coal doesnt.
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