Saint Philip said:
In reading this thread, I did not get as far as your first post. But, you essentually said what I said. "Scientifically Impossible" is not the issue, but whether the evidence refutes the occurence of the event. But, this raises a question.
I disagree. "scientifically impossible" is the issue. This is what ArkGuy said "The problem is when one continues to interpret the rest of the bible with this same biblical/scientific logic. For example, if a man dies science says that it is medically impossible to come back to life on the third day."
Arkguy was using a theory -- dead people don't come back to life on the third day -- to deny the
data that a dead guy came back to life on the third day. This is
not science. Theory
always bends or breaks in the face of data. Data
never goes away in the face of theory.
If you had sufficient data, how do you know the resurrection wouldn't be shown false? I've heard of faith in the unknown, but this looks like faith in ignorance.
I don't. Just as I don't know that mammalian fossils in Cambrian strata might be found tomorrow and show common ancestry to be false. You go with the data you have
today and change your view if and when new data becomes available.
However, faith in the Resurrection is not based solely on the fact that the Resurrection is not falsified, just like acceptance of evolution is based solely because it has not been falsified.
Faith in the Resurrection is based on three general types of personal experience:
1. Trust in the gospel accounts.
2. Experience of the risen Jesus, either firsthand or trust of those who report such experience.
3. General agreement with the idea of Resurrection with your own personal life experiences.
Now, science works
only with a
subset of personal experience. Personal experience that is the same for
everyone under approximately the same circumstances. The three types of evidence above don't fit that subset.
"Sid was also the first to synthesize a protein by heating amino acids under conditions found here on planet earth. Also, he was the first to show that these new thermal proteins, when placed in water, would self-organize into a living cell."
http://www.theharbinger.org/articles/rel_sci/fox.html
So, Sid made living cells just by heating a few amino acids and dropping them in water? Sorry, a few bubbles are an insignificant step toward life.
Yes. And do you seriously think the speaker, and I, would say the cells were living if that was
all they were? Of course not!
What is life? Life is defined as having
all of the following characteristics:
1. Metabolism (anabolism and catabolism)
2. Response to stimuli
3. Growth
4. Reproduction.
The protocells do all three. They are alive.
Seriously, Saint Phillip, you need to check your facts before you just go into denial.
The interesting obstacle is not to discover whether the laws of chemistry are the same outside as inside of living creatures, but to explain where the genetic information came from in the first place.
Oh, that's easy. Been done.
1. The thermal proteins already have information. In fact, protocells have more information in them than modern cells. You see, the amino acids in the proteins made by chemistry is not random. The sequences are ordered. That means information.
2. Protocells make RNA/DNA. That gives you the genetic material.
3. There is selective binding between particular types of proteins and certain types of DNA (see below). That is the beginning of coding.
4. Natural selection, like all selection, generates information.
What I find disturbing in your argument is god-of-the-gaps and violation of Christian doctrine about creation. What you are doing is saying that God did not create a
complete universe. God has to directly intervene to connect two parts of the material universe. This makes God a material creature, which is directly counter to Christian doctrine.
"In more recent work, Fox and his colleagues have shown that basic proteinoids, rich in lysine residues, selectively associate with the homopolynucleotides poly C and poly U but not with poly A or poly G. On the other hand, arginine-rich proteinoids associate selectively with poly A and poly G. In this manner, the information in proteinoids can be used to select polynucleotides. Morever, it is striking that aminoacyl adenylates yield oligopeptides when incubated with proteinoid-polynucleotide complexes, which thus have some of the characteristics of ribosomes. Fox has suggested that proteinoids bearing this sort of primitive chemical information could have transferred it to a primitive nucleic acid; the specificity of interaction between certain proteinoids and polynucleotides suggests the beginning of the genetic code." A. Lehninger, Biochemistry, 1975, pp 1047-1048