Since Ninja copped to the fact that they were just playing around, the conversation seems to have veered of into several different directions. This is so easy to do because we have all repeated these arguments over and over again.
I don't see any strong reason to go back to add the citations and so on to the earlier post I had made on Tuesday.
hippie said:
[font="]This makes the ToE a religious belief even if you choose not to accept it. It is a belief system that cannot be proven or disproven and is a foundational belief
.ie the bedrock of a belief system.
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hippie, "belief" is not the least equated with "religion" as someone who holds forth as you do should be well aware. I
believe I exist, I
believe I'll have another beer, I (provisionally)
believe that the theory of evolution is true, but I worship none of these beliefs, I practice no ritualized observation of these beliefs.
Further, like every scientific proposition, the theory of evolution is subject to fasification. But, when a scientific proposition is true (whether we can confirm this or not) it will never be falsified. We can't
prove it true, but we have after 150 years of effort failed to disprove the theory of evolution.
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hippie said:
Note the underlined bold face statement: NO UNIVERSALLY ACCEPTED PROOFS FOR ANY OF THE MAIN MAJOR BELIEF SYSTEMS
. ie you cant prove that I am wrong any more than I can prove you are wrong. We are simply left with our own beliefs concerning the matter
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This is another error of reasoning. We can not ever in principle disprove miracles, or the supernatural by emperical science, because these ultimately have an infinite retreat into more and more miracles. Newton correctly proposed some of the ordered behavior of gravity and mass, but thought that angels pushed the planets around the sun as instructed by God. He has never been
proven wrong about that, merely that we "have no need of that hypothesis." The scientific issue of Newton's laws was subject to test, and were found to be false under certain conditions at the same time as unfalsified under others.
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hippie said:
So what do I mean when I say evolution? Heres my answer:[/font] [font="]the idea that living things in our world have come into being through unguided naturalistic processes starting from a primeval mass of subatomic particles and radiation, over approximately 20 billion years.[/font]
[font="]Abiogenesis refers to the beginnings of life from inanimate objects. [/font]
[font="]Darwin[/font][font="]s ToE (which is what I learned all those many many years ago in public school) says basically the same thing. All life is related and started from the same common source; over time that life has evolved into evertything from bananas to people.[/font]
[font="]If Im wrong about any of these please let me know what the correct interpretation should be, in your opinion.[/font]
Well that is all just so wrong in so many ways I
believe I'll have another beer. (Prediction confirmed)!
One at a time;
hippie said:
So what do I mean when I say evolution? Heres my answer: [font="]the idea that living things in our world have come into being through unguided naturalistic processes starting from a primeval mass of subatomic particles and radiation, over approximately 20 billion years.[/font]
1) The theory of evolution is independent of cosmology, and the origin of life. While there are seemingly chance events such as giant meteror strikes that have had a profound effect on life as we see it today, these events are
not part of the theory of biology. Evolutionary theory says that life responds to changes in the environment by changing.
2) The universe today is a "mass of subatomic particles and radiation." Your body is a "mass of subatomic particles and radiation." The current universe has mass that is differently organized that it was originally. The current universe is differently organized today than it was yesterday.
This is indisputable. To deny that the organization of the universe is not driven by "naturalistic processes" is to argue that Newton's angels are pushing planets around, and that sneezes are expelled demons.
3) Your "approximate" age of the universe is off the mark by about 30 percent. Lousy approximation. You can read up on the current cosmology at
Ned Wright's "Cosmology Tutorial" and at the NASA website on the
Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). The current estimate of the age of our universe is 13.7 billion years old with an error estimate of +/- 0.01.
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hippie said:
Abiogenesis refers to the beginnings of life from inanimate objects.
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[font="]Almost, but I would clarify the important point regarding "animate" and "iananimate" objects. First, there is no sense in the hovindesque claim that science claims that rocks turned into people, or in the [/i]Answers in Genesis[/i] gang's "rocks to you via the zoo" ditty, NO sense, as in nonsense. [/font]
The basic error is that there is some "special" difference between "alive" matter and "not alive" (animate and inanimate). This was disproven by the synthesis of urea by Wöhler in 1828. Urea, an "animate" molecule was shown to also be produced by "inanimate" chemistry.
So the question of what is "alive" and what is not, becomes a question of the organization of matter, not the "sort" of matter being organized. A trivial example in illustration is the production of living (bacterial) matter from such "inorganic" chemicals as hydrogen sulfide when a bacteria uses hydrogen sulfide as a source of electrons. This is just the same as when plants turn carbondioxide into tissue.
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hippie said:
Darwin[/font][font="]s ToE (which is what I learned all those many many years ago in public school) says basically the same thing. All life is related and started from the same common source; over time that life has evolved into evertything from bananas to people.
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Darwin had next to nothing to say about the origin of life, so either you are making things up, you have a poor memory, or you had a crummy education.
Here is all that Darwin had to say about the origin of life in his
Origin of Species.
" I believe that animals are descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lessor number.
Analogy would lead me one step farther, namely, to the belief that all animals and plants are descended from some one prototype. But analogy may be a deceitful guide. Nevertheless all living things have much in common, in their chemical composition, their cellular structure, their laws of growth, and their liability to injurious influences. ... Therefore, on the principle of natural selection with the divergence of character, it does not seem incredible that, from some such low and intermediate form, both animals and plants may have been developed; and, if we admit this, we must likewise admit that all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth may be descended from some one primordial form. But this inference is chiefly grounded on analogy, and it is immaterial whether or not it be accepted. No doubt it is possible, as Mr. G. H. Lewes has urged, that at the first commencement of life many different forms were evolved; but if so, we may conclude that only a very few have left modified descendants."
And, from the books last sentence;
"There is grander in this point of view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one ; ...."
So I note that Darwin was consistent in his opinion that there were few first life forms, and merely a possibly that there could have been only one. Also note that Darwin is little interested in the issue using well under one page of text from a 450 page book.
From the 6th edition,
"The Origin of Species"
Charles R. Darwin, in a letter to the botanist Joseph Hooker (1871) wrote, "It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are present, which could ever have been present. But if (and Oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etc., present, that a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed."
Later in the same letter, he observed,
"It is mere rubbish thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter."
Modern biology has progressed a long way from Darwin's concepts, but they did form the cornerstone of all that followed. We no longer need to speculate that all life is related, we can know it with the same certainty that we expect the sun to appear at dawn, or our ability to predict the tides.
