worship4ever said:
I noticed that you guys loved to talk about odds. I agree with you to a point, odds are not that important in day to day activities, yet when your talking about the beginning of life, or life from non-life i think its important. When a odd is so high the only chance you have to make it is thur eternity i believe it needs some discussion. This is a good site just about evolution and odds. Yes, its a christian site, go away, say it baised. When are you people going to stop seeing a christian site and turn it away for fear of bais.
http://www.christianforums.com/showthread.php?t=43841&page=3&pp=10
I am not turning away in bias against "Christian". I am refuting it based on the fact that the calculations are based on wrong premises. If you start out with garbage, the math is only going to give you garbage.
But to put you guys at ease, this is a non christian site about the same subject
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/addendaB.html
Science and reason are based on observation of evidence and logical inference. What do we observe? That life comes only from existing life and not from inanimate matter.
Unfortunately, that is NOT what we observe. We have observed life coming from non-living matter.
http://www.siu.edu/~protocell/
http://www.theharbinger.org/articles/rel_sci/fox.html
I've posted this to you at least 2 other times. When are you going to pay attention?
If the odds of life forming on its own are even as low as one in a trillion, then the odds of life not forming on its own must be a trillion to one.
But that "If" that starts off the sentence is wrong. The odds are not a trillion to one, but only about 1.2 to one. IOW, it's nearly a virtural certainty that life will form by chemistry.
Wouldn't these observations and inferences lead anyone acting without bias or preconceptions about God and religion to conclude that intelligent design is far more reasonable than life happening on its own?
If we liked god-of-the-gaps theology, we might be impressed. But since your whole argument is non-Biblical and non-Christian, I'm not impressed theologically. Instead, the data is pretty clear that it is easy by chemistry to make life from non-life.
Everything that we know with certainty to have been created in our own lifetime was only done so with purpose and intelligence. We've never observed non-living matter to have either intelligence or the ability to create life, so how and why would matter have created it to begin with?
The premise is that you have to have mind to make life. It is that premise that we are saying is in error. You DO NOT NEED MIND to make life. You need chemistry. And we have observed non-living matter give rise, through chemical reactions, to life. Also, there are designs created in our own lifetime -- such as DNA enzymes -- that were not created by purpose and intelligence but by natural selection.
An intelligence and power capable of creating the universe is far beyond our comprehension, yet it shouldn't be difficult to see that this is the more reasonable choice of faith. It's just putting mind over matter.
And right here you have the pre-Darwin philosophy in a nutshell. The top down universe with Mind at the top, creating Design, then with Order under Design, and Chaos under Order.
But when Darwin discovered natural selection and the way that Order could make Design WITHOUT mind, that blew this philosophy (and proof of God) away. Chaos by self-organization thru the laws of physics and chemistry can give Order. Natural selection makes Design out of Order, and can even make Mind -- our human minds.
You are trying to prove God by science. Can't be done. Science has found that the scientific data is inconclusive on the existence of God. What was once thought as proof of God -- designs in nature -- we now know are due proximately to natural selection. The "gap" you have -- first life -- we now know is filled by chemistry.
The god-of-the-gaps road to find God simply isn't going to work. All you do is squeeze God out.