God could be real! (1 Viewer)

[Uncle Gizmo]

Donald Hoffman may have discovered god, (with a little g)

See time index 16min

And time index 40min on the nature of consciousness. Consciousness doesn't have any attributes that would allow it to evolve, so in effect, the current view of evolution cannot account for it...

 

[Isaac]

Donald Hoffman may have discovered god

I would say the hundreds of random people who personally eye witnessed Jesus after his resurrection and many who wrote their stories, and thousands who witnessed miraculous things shortly thereafter (predictably contributing to the fastest growing Church imaginable in the years soon after) are the closest we can say to "discovered God" !

 

[Mike Krailo]

I don't know where you find all the stuff Uncle.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Consciousness doesn't have any attributes that would allow it to evolve, so in effect, the current view of evolution cannot account for it...

That statement only would be valid if consciousness were an independent entity. But if consciousness developed as a property of something else that was the result of evolution, then it becomes a member of the class of apples vs oranges comparison. See also "emergent property."

 

[Mike Krailo]

Why This Atheist Scientist Became a Believing Christian

A longtime atheist scientist becomes an Agnostic and finally a Christian because evolution is simply too glib to explain God away. There are key things that evolution cannot explain like the origin of life and he wanted to know about that. Well, your not going to get any good explanation from a scientist or an atheist. They simply do not have an explanation.

After this man read the book of Acts, he was sure that this was something that no one made up. Listen to his reasonings from a scientific perspective.

 

[Uncle Gizmo]

evolution is simply too glib to explain God away.

God created evolution . .

 

[The_Doc_Man]

If you count life and consciousness as emergent properties then you need no glibness.

God created evolution . .

God created evolution, but evolution created Man, but Man created God... in his own image. (See, e.g., ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.)

 

[Mike Krailo]

If you count life and consciousness as emergent properties then you need no glibness.

But something does not and cannot emerge from nothing, there has to be something before that. It's pretty obvious to me what that something is. The harder you look into the genesis of life from the point of origin, the sooner you will see just how complicated it really is. Just creating a habitable place for it work at all is incredibly complicated. The more anyone looks into that aspect alone should be enough proof of higher power.

 

[Isaac]

I'm with Mike on this one. No matter how many creative hypothesis people come up with, it has been self-evident to mankind for thousands of years that life came from somewhere. It has to have come from a higher form of life that was not created. Things do not come from nothing. That power I choose to call God and various events throughout history have lent credibility to certain manifestations of same, although that (understandably) has a lot of different interpretations.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Neither of you see the self-contradiction of a God that is only of the spirit world, not of the material world.

But something does not and cannot emerge from nothing, there has to be something before that.

Not provable, and in fact matter has been proven to come from "nothing" in the form of Spontaneous Pair Production. Look it up.

No matter how many creative hypothesis people come up with, it has been self-evident to mankind for thousands of years that life came from somewhere. It has to have come from a higher form of life that was not created.

I can easily dispute the idea that it is self-evident, and I absolutely have to dispute the idea that it came from something that was not created. There is no evidence of such a thing. There is in fact the absence of evidence. If you believe your own scripture, there CAN be no evidence, for if there were, faith would be immaterial. So... do you believe religion requires faith or did Jesus lie when He said, "Only through faith shall you come to me" (or words to that effect)? Absence of evidence is NOT the same as evidence of absence, so my point here is that you cannot use religious teachings that are made on faith, not evidence, to prove ANYTHING. Religious faith is the most unstable of all shifting sands on which to build something.

various events throughout history have lent credibility to certain manifestations of same, although that (understandably) has a lot of different interpretations.

And therein lies the problem. Many of these "different interpretations" are scientifically plausible and eliminate the need for the torturous logic of "miracles."

 

[Mike Krailo]

So I'm supposed to become a scientist/astrophysicist and understand your "Spontaneous Pair Production". Maybe you can dumb it down for me if you yourself understand it. A demo would be most welcome. But when someone writes "It has been proven" and simply points to a bunch of technical jargon related papers only someone in the field could understand, I lose interest fast. Break it down for me if you can, but I don't get it. Nothing like technical jargon and obfuscation to keep everyone in a black hole of darkness.

Doc, seeing (understanding) is relative to one's perception based on experience. If you have not experienced a miracle, does that mean there is no higher purpose to your life? God has given you something special inside that will allow you to see and experience way beyond what you could ever do on your own.

Let's go under the microscope for a moment. Just look at cellular replication for a miracle that happens daily and no one even bats an eye in amazement. It is just taken for granted as if, "yea, that's just how and works and we all know about it." Just how does a single cell replicate itself? I don't want to torture you but, that is something biologists just don't have an answer for. They cannot create a cell out of nothing and make it reproduce. No one can, but for the exception of you know who. How many elements make up a single cell? For example, like the one that divided into two identical cells created when your mother conceived you. That one biological mystery is mind bogglingly complex, made up of millions of elements itself that somehow execute the code within itself to duplicate itself (self replication). We are all made up of the exact same identical genetic code. The tree's have it, the fish, the birds, and the venerable bee's. It's the exact same code, just a different sequence. It would take a mountain of faith to believe that just happened from primordial soup sometime in the distant past by accident. Do not take that miracle for granted or assume that it is insignificant or normal. Think long and hard on this.

Remember, the same scientist(s) that are squawking about having proved that you can create something from nothing cannot make even a single cell for starters and cannot make it self replicate. Even with all his tools and books and computers and all of the paraphernalia which did not exist prior to creation. We are just talking a single cell here, how hard can it be? If you find one that claims that ability, I'll sign up for the demo because I want to see that.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

I'll address the "spontaneous pair production" (SPP) question first.

SPP specifically has been observed in a vacuum on many occasions. Out of nowhere, a pair of particles springs into existence, one an ordinary particle and the other its corresponding anti-particle - e.g. an electron and a positron. The two particles each have non-zero energy in that they move apart from one another. Their energy, however, balances in the sense that even though the particles are moving, adding the vectors that describe their movement will result in a zero sum. Their charges will be balanced. Their quantized spins will be balanced. Since one is matter and the other is an anti-particle (i.e. anti-matter) their masses balance to zero as well. But once they interact with something, they are detectable and, thanks to that interaction, they become differentiated from one another. I would LOVE to have enough money to be able to give you a full demonstration, because that would mean I could afford a high-precision particle physics lab. But as I am retired, I think I'll take a hard pass on the request for a demonstration.

Doc, seeing (understanding) is relative to one's perception based on experience.

Arthur C Clarke is noted for his "three laws" (not to be confused with Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics). The third law is simple:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

The corollary is that if you see something and think it is magic, your science must not be sufficiently advanced to understand it.

Miracles don't exist. Scientifically unexplained events, however, CAN and DO exist. (In line with another of Clarke's Laws, I am not denying the existence of the unexplained. I am denying a particular characterization of them.) Postulating an explanation of that unexplained event using magic and miracles is simply saying "I don't know so must be God." This is also known as "God of the gaps." The problem with Man is that it is hard for mankind to say "I don't know" and as a result they INVENT explanations - such as God.

That one biological mystery is mind bogglingly complex, made up of millions of elements itself that somehow execute the code within itself to duplicate itself (self replication). We are all made up of the exact same identical genetic code. The tree's have it, the fish, the birds, and the venerable bee's. It's the exact same code, just a different sequence. It would take a mountain of faith to believe that just happened from primordial soup sometime in the distant past by accident. Do not take that miracle for granted or assume that it is insignificant or normal. Think long and hard on this.

Nature has had BILLIONS of years starting from innumerable primordial ponds all over the world, where literally thousands of molecular collisions occur every second in every milliliter of your "primordial soup." That is being VERY generous to your position because in warm water, it would be a lot more than 1000 reactions per ml per sec.

How many milliliters were there for any one of them to come up with the answer? I don't know, but odds suggest "a lot." How many BILLIONS of milliliters were running thousands of molecular collisions per second? We have about 1.4 septillion ml in the ocean, but lets limit that to surface only, and I'll be VERY liberal - lets say 1/1,000,000 th of the total, or 1.4 quintillion ml for all of those ponds.

Then, if we have a billion years, that is how many seconds? (Roughly 31,556,926 billion seconds or 3 x 10^16 = 31 quadrillion seconds). So how many reactions? About 31 quadrillion sec x 1000 reactions/sec/ml x 1.4 quintillion ml) or 43 x quadrillion x thousand x quintillion possible reactions. That is 43 x 10^38 chances to get useful reactions. So there nature sits, iterating through millions - or billions - or trillions of solutions, and BINGO, one of them works.

Repeating part of your quote:

We are all made up of the exact same identical genetic code. The tree's have it, the fish, the birds, and the venerable bee's. It's the exact same code, just a different sequence.

Ah, but there is more to it than just that much. If you look CLOSELY at that "just a different sequence" you can even identify the genetic changes from one step of evolution to the next. Which is why we KNOW we are about 1.2% different (DNA-wise) from chimps. We can use genome mapping to SHOW the mutations that led from one species to the next. Merely nature iterating a little bit over what she already has to see what is new on the horizon.

 

[Mike Krailo]

I would LOVE to have enough money to be able to give you a full demonstration, because that would mean I could afford a high-precision particle physics lab. But as I am retired, I think I'll take a hard pass on the request for a demonstration.

Well then I'll have to assume that they have no clue on how to create a living cell, just one biological cell that can replicate itself. I don't think there were any tools like particle accelerators or any other scientific equipment or devices to create anything at the origin of life. If there was, then you would have to explain where all that equipment came from first. It seems ridiculous to me to think that something so seemingly simple (really very complex) as the creation of one single biological cell could come from nothing. I'm not going to pretend such knowledge is knowable at this stage of the game. There most definitely was a beginning to it all and although it might not be self evident to to one who has a closed mind, it is crystal clear to me. There are too many pieces to the puzzle that had to be just right. The billion years fallacy is only imagined to be true (takes lots of faith).

The corollary is that if you see something and think it is magic, your science must not be sufficiently advanced to understand it.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Sure if you could explain everything because you know everything because you are all knowing and omnipresent, then there are no miracles. Duh.... Congratulations, you just discovered God Doc. Let's not get hung up on the word miracle. But I'm sure there are things that if you witnessed them yourself, could be construed as a miracle. I can't wait for that back to the future hover board to get invented. That's gonna be fun.

If there is no scientist who understands something as miraculous as cell replication, then those folks have to admit there may be something that goes way beyond their own intelligence. I don't believe there will ever be a discovery of how that process works until maybe you are granted access to that knowledge by the higher power that protects it. There are parts to the genetic code itself that are restricted for a reason. No one will be able to perform that little miracle that I mentioned earlier. Try as they might, they are not God. It's bad enough the bastards are messing around with the sequences without any clue to what they are doing and what consequences that might have. They could potentially unleash Pandora's box due to sheer ignorance.

Nature has had BILLIONS of years starting from innumerable primordial ponds all over the world, where literally thousands of molecular collisions occur every second in every milliliter of your "primordial soup." That is being VERY generous to your position because in warm water, it would be a lot more than 1000 reactions per ml per sec.

Well if that is your argument, no one could ever prove that either because none of us has billions or even millions of years, at least in bodily form. It's not scientific to extrapolate such nonsense. Where is that in the scientific method? Testing observable things is doable but you don't get to extrapolate billions of years and then pretend to have an iron clad understanding about it. I understand the desire to make excuses if you don't wish to acknowledge the creators work. The formula is to add billions of years and it all just comes together perfectly without any design. We're not talking about millions of parameters here, more like trillions or even more to get this thing we call life right. You go right ahead and try and convince yourself that just happened due to millions of years of unknown un-purposeful stuff happening just by a billion dice rolls. Looks like it will take much more faith than I have in God to believe that something so complex came from an accident millions of years in the making. If your going to die on that sword, then you have that right to do so. The good thing for you and all of us, is that God has been around a lot longer than time can measure and is quite patient with his creation and he still will give you every opportunity to discover the truth because he is forgiving in nature.

The whole evolution thing does not and never will show any kind of jumps in species in all those millions of years. A human has always been a human and a cat has always been a cat (lion, leopard, bobcat, housecat are all cats however you gene splice them). You may like to dream differently, but there just is no evidence of such an evolution other than simple natural selection which doesn't prove anything against God at all. We all have the same genetic code. They will see this the more they observe and keep using the scientific method correctly. Adding millions of years to all the equations is not the scientific method, that is the I believe in the miraculous creation of life and everything that supports it was one great big accident that just happened over millions and millions of years. The good thing is the more they look, the more they will see where it all really came from if they are honest with themselves.

The scientist who arrogantly says, "we don't know how a cell is created and how it replicates, but one day we'll find out." That they are so arrogant and their pride has gotten the best of them is enough to know who they really are. That is the same thing that happened to a certain angel in heaven. Pride is what brought him down. Surely you don't want to go down path of darkness.

On the bright side there are some scientists and biologists that have dug deep enough to finally see how complicated the design of nature itself is not something that just happened from an explosion in the cosmos. The idea that one would think such a thing is a slap in the face of the designer. Imagine looking at a famous painting and saying to yourself, that was created from millions of years of evolution. It sound ridiculous, doesn't it. The painting isn't even alive and that would not happen in an infinite amount of years because that is clearly something that was designed and created. The genetic code did not just form out of nothing because a million years of stuff happened along the way. That takes way more faith to believe in than any religion. It is an unprovable statement of faith that there is no God because some poor soul said so.

Life's designs require far more than mere intelligence. They are indicative of a divine agent (God), who used evolution as one of his tools for creation. It's all in the genetic code folks. Code doesn't write itself and it most definitely has a purpose.

I think it's time to change my tag line today.

The Universe is No Accident, Dr. Luke Barnes​

Here is another guy much smarter than myself that might be able to shed some light on the whole universe created by an Accident idea.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Well if that is your argument, no one could ever prove that either because none of us has billions or even millions of years, at least in bodily form. It's not scientific to extrapolate such nonsense.

I'm truly sorry that you see it as nonsense. I don't apologize for having that legitimate belief and I want to be clear that you CERTAINLY may have any belief you wish. My position is simply that if you publicly make a statement that is in some way questionable, I should have the right to question it. Just as I agree that you can ask me questions about my statements.

Well then I'll have to assume that they have no clue on how to create a living cell, just one biological cell that can replicate itself.

This is in the same category of logic flaw. "Failure to understand" does not equate to "God." It merely equates with "I don't know." You CANNOT use that argument to prove God.

I don't think there were any tools like particle accelerators or any other scientific equipment or devices to create anything at the origin of life.

This is a variant of the "watchmaker" fallacy.

I don't believe there will ever be a discovery of how that process works

You know what? It may be that you are right. But for the wrong reasons.

The whole evolution thing does not and never will show any kind of jumps in species in all those millions of years. A human has always been a human and a cat has always been a cat (lion, leopard, bobcat, housecat are all cats however you gene splice them).

Forgive me, but you just showed that you totally DO NOT understand evolution at the macro level because you can't take your eyes off the micro level. Evolution is a journey of a million steps, each one very small in comparison to the journey as a whole. By your statement, species would never evolve - but they did - and still do.

Study of Darwin's finches reveals that new species can develop in as little as two generations

The arrival 36 years ago of a strange bird to a remote island in the Galápagos archipelago has provided direct genetic evidence of a novel way in which new species arise.

www.princeton.edu

I don't want to be what Woody Allen called a "sadistic sodomistic necrophile" (who beats dead horses) so I will leave you with this statement. You believe as you wish. You are aware by now that I will not agree with you on this belief.

FYI, that Woody Allen line comes from the movie What's Up Tiger Lily?

 

[Mike Krailo]

By your statement, species would never evolve - but they did - and still do

Part of communicating a thought is duplicating an effective image of the concept virtually identically. That's not easy to do well without some common ground. There is nothing in Darwins theory that proves every living thing came from one single kind. The human although different looking was still a man. Please don't tell me you think there is an actual jump of one genetic sequence to another. There is simply no evidence of that fictional poppycock. I studied the theory and there is nothing that explains the origins of that unique self replicating cell. By unique I mean the human sequence is always a human no matter how far you go back. A cat cannot under any natural circumstances evolve into human or vice versa. As smart as Darwin and others like him may have been they have no explanation for consciousness and cannot create even one single cell. Biological cells are highly complex and do not just create themselves. It's pretty darn obvious to any rational thinking being. Adding millions of years of micro changes to the equation sounds good to you, but it takes way more faith to believe that even a single cell just appeared out of nowhere some time in the distance past. And let's just say it did happen and one single cell with the cat sequence just popped into existence. Then you have to show proof that cats evolved into humans. No such proof. Total fiction.

 

[Jon]

It seems ridiculous to me to think that something so seemingly simple (really very complex) as the creation of one single biological cell could come from nothing

Yet maybe you believe God can come from nothing. Or that God can create the earth from nothing.

Did the Universe come from nothing? Think Big Bang.

Cells came from evolution, which is not nothing, but a process. If you mean how could something complex come from something simple, are you saying a complex machine is not made of more simple constituent parts? Or perhaps you mean the assembly of simple parts to something more complex requires a designer, i.e. God. If so, how do you explain atoms combining to form compounds? Atoms are one of the most basic elements, or the simplest of things relatively to anything else. Yet they combine to form something more complex. You don't need a chemist in a lab to do it. Just observe something rust to get your answer.

If perhaps you think evolution is not possible because living things are just way too complex, how do you explain the fact that scientists can evolve different traits in fruit flies over a short period of time? Scientists are not God, yet they evolved these flies. This is empirical evidence that requires no faith.

Fruit fly mutation foretells 40 million years of evolution

Small, seemingly insignificant mutations in fruit flies may actually hold clues as to how a species will evolve tens of millions of years in the future.

www.sciencedaily.com

Edit: I understand that these types of arguments will never convince. There is a certain parallel universe of beliefs between the believers and the non-believers.

 

[Jon]

I'm with Mike on this one. No matter how many creative hypothesis people come up with, it has been self-evident to mankind for thousands of years that life came from somewhere. It has to have come from a higher form of life that was not created. Things do not come from nothing. That power I choose to call God and various events throughout history have lent credibility to certain manifestations of same, although that (understandably) has a lot of different interpretations.

It was self-evident to mankind for thousands of years that the earth was flat. Until it wasn't. Progress advances understanding.

In my link above this post, you can see that things do indeed come from evolution. The differences in wing length of the fruit fly is an example. That wing length is a "thing", a property, just like the evolution of fins to legs over long periods of time. Since this is proof that evolution can change properties, evolution is not nothing, but something. And therefore the argument that "things do not come from nothing" has little to do with the evolutionary argument.

If you say, "Well, scientists intervened in the evolution of the fruit fly and therefore the change was as a result of an intelligent designer", my response is man is not God. Therefore, God is not required for intelligent design. But aside from that, the argument is that evolution is not a thing, regardless of an intelligent designer or not. Yet the simple fruit fly experiment shows evolution happens. How do you explain that?

 

[The_Doc_Man]

There is simply no evidence of that fictional poppycock.

Review my post about finches. The test is simple. If two creatures can mate to produce viable offspring that themselves can mate at the next generation, they are the same species. So it takes two generations for that test (plus persuading the test subjects to mate). But once there is a differentiation that makes such cross-mating unproductive, the species in question has "adapted" bit by bit into a new species - which signifies that evolution has occurred.

As to "fictional poppycock" there are literally hundreds of thousands of evolution-related papers published after extensive peer review by researchers who jealously seek to undermine their "colleagues" (mostly because they were trying to publish the same thing first.) Mike, precisely because of the religiously sensitive nature of the topic, most of the researchers have been extra-careful to avoid spots where someone could easily nit-pick. Peer review is a sieve that filters out lots of trash as well as some good articles.

In fact, as a grad student trying to publish a paper about my dissertation research I ran into that sieve. I had picked a topic that seems innocuous to most people - a class of molecules called heteropoly anions. They are used in oil-based pigments. If you have ever painted with molybdenum blue or vanadium yellow oil pigments, you are using something I once studied in depth. That sieve trapped me because I was publishing before two of the three people in the review board. My graduate advisor and I had to rebut their complaints and ask for removal of one of the reviewers (who was originally a grad student under the other negative reviewer - i.e. inherited bias.) We did eventually get published and I got my degree - but it was a rocky road to travel.

Back to the more immediate subject... the study of the human genome has led to studies of other genomes, which is why we have so much certainty about our evolutionary path. This article and its references will lead you on a journey of enlightenment. By studying the genomes of similar creatures we can tell where, when, and HOW their species diverged.

Genome evolution - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

No evidence? Ah, but you are terribly wrong, Mike. Precisely because of the controversies implied and explicit in the discussion, primate (more specifically Hominid) evolution is a very active field.

hominid phylogenetic tree - Google Search

 

[Jon]

Something occured to me today, as I was walking the long route to the shops to get my steps in. Do Christians believe the Muslim God does not exist, and is therefore a figment of their imagination? If so, what evidence do they have that theirs is the real one and the Muslim's one is fake?

If they are assumed to be the same God, then my above question is a bit pointless. I do not know if they are the same, which is why I am asking the question.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

There is nothing in Darwins theory that proves every living thing came from one single kind.

You are correct. Darwin merely proposed a functional mechanism. Other people performed the logical step of running the process backwards. I believe the person credited with that part of the current theory of evolution was German Botanist Theodor Schwann, in 1839, noted for his work in cell theory. (He's listed in Wikipedia.)

You are also correct that we have no proof of evolution, but there it is because you appear to misunderstand "proof" in a scientific context. Strictly speaking, we cannot prove evolution, any more than you can use ANY physical entity or object (including the Bible) to prove God's existence. From a strict logical viewpoint, God (being in a kingdom "not of this world") cannot be proven using anything IN this world. But you knew that anyway, since you wouldn't want the Bible to have contained a lie when we were told that we would come to God only through faith.

What we have (by the literal ton) are research papers that extremely strongly support various parts of evolutionary theory, which involves multiple mechanisms. But in the world of science, if you cannot duplicate something in a lab or cannot mathematically derive it ab initio, you don't have proof. What you CAN have - and what evolution DOES have - is strongly corroborating evidence. Strong enough that by the 1870s, most biologists had already accepted the basic tenets of Darwin's theory and the general concepts of evolution. The more evidence you have in corroboration, the more likely it is that the theory is correct.

By the way, though they hedge the bet somewhat, even the stodgy old Roman Catholic Church accepts evolution and the Big Bang.

The Pope Would Like You to Accept Evolution and the Big Bang

The Roman Catholic Church is pro-evolution and Big Bang, but with a twist

www.smithsonianmag.com

Of course, since the BB was postulated by one of their own, the Catholic Church kind of HAS to accept it. Msgr Georges LeMaitre (of the Jesuit order) proposed the Big Bang in the first half of the 20th century. (Oh, how we of the physical sciences would have preferred another name for it.) And another Catholic person proposed details of genetics - Gregor Mendel, a monk in the Augustinian order. His work dovetails with the Darwinian ideas quite well.