Conclusive evidence for Design!

[prodigalson2011]

There are a couple of obvious counters to this - one is that the first organism capable of replication only had to emerge once - once in 13.7 billion years (approximately) in order for life as we know it to get started.

This is not really a counterpoint. I said nothing about how many times a self-replicating organism would have to emerge. What I said is that given the statistical improbability of life emerging at all, given the extraordinarily quick appearance of life in the geological record, it would be gratuitous to claim that any life at all, whether self-replicating or not, emerged more than once. In other words, the very first and only time life came from non-life, it would have had to be self-replicating.

Secondly, no matter how improbable the emergence of life, or even the conditions that might give rise to life, might have been, the improbability of a vastly intelligent being capable of creating such conditions is more improbable by far. And if the claim is that God has always existed, then it’s also much simpler to suppose that a far simpler entity, such as a quantum vacuum, has always existed. That is all that is ultimately necessary for a universe to arise.

To begin with, probability only applies to contingent beings, i.e. those things that are effected by external circumstances. God is not a contingent being, He is necessary being: that upon which all other things, including quantum vacuums, are contingent. Moreover, being pure undadulterated being and having no parts or divisions, God is simpler than a quantum vacuum.

But enough with the theological speculation; let’s get down to brass tacks. Even if it were simpler to assume a quantum vacuum, you are then left with the question of how and why it should have exploded in just such a manner as to cause the energy it released to expand and condense into simple matter like hyrdrogen and helium. Why a force like gravity should have pulled that hydrogen into stars which would further compress and compound those particles into more complex elements and then explode into solar systems, planets, and ultimately: us. The conditions necessary for this process to carry out are so incredibly intricate and delicate that the slightest perturbance in one of a multitude of factors would have rendered us impossible. Suddenly your quantum vacuum doesn’t sound so simple.

Yes, this is definitely a materialist interpretation. But materialism is all we have evidence for, all we have to go on. It’s not enough to say, “Well, I don’t understand how this could have arisen in a purely physical universe, therefore God.” You need to have substantive evidence for your God - that is, evidence that is not explicable in terms of detectable, measurable, physical phenomena.

The evidence of God is the intelligibility of the universe. The very word “intelligible” itself makes sense only in light of the existence of intelligence. In other words, intelligibility presumes the existence of intelligence. The universe bears the mark of an incomprehensibly complex order. It is unreasonable to assume that a mindless vacuum should produce and adhere to laws that give rise to an intelligible world. If you bought the raw material to build a house, left in a heap on an empty lot and came back after a few weeks and found a house, would you assume that it had been built by the blind forces of nature? Or would you assume that something conscious and creative had assembled it?

If the necessary being, of which there must be at least one, were not a mind but a blind force, the odds would be heavily in favor of a completely disorganized, chaotic universe.

Your demand for evidence that is not explicable in terms of physical phenomena is completely absurd. You are demanding direct evidence within the universe for something that is, by definition, outside of it. Like someone looking at a car and saying, “Well, we can explain the activity of the engine by means of various laws of combustion and mechanics so there’s no need to assume a manufacturer.” Only the case is more remarkable here. For, in the case of our world, we have to ask why the laws which govern it exist at all and, furthermore, why they so fortuitously allow matter to exist in the brilliant array of forms it does.

So, rather than finding evidence outside of that which can be explained by physical laws, the evidence is precisely the fact that the universe is filled with such remarkably creative laws that produce observable, detectable, verifiable phenomena–the most striking of which is that curious phenomena which can observe, detect and verify all the others. Modern science has a very bad tendency to diminish the significance of that fact. William Paley wasn’t too far from the mark with his watchmaker analogy. His mistake was applying it to specific things within the universe, rather than the universal system as a whole.

 

[PJM]

=Sair;10189100]The problem is perhaps that the Biblical myth of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden is a bit too easy to understand, and doesn’t square with the actual evidence we have of human and other animal evolution - which, it has to be said, is just a bit more complicated. There is genetic evidence for a ‘first’ man and a ‘first’ woman, who have been nicknamed ‘Y-chromosomal Adam’ and ‘Mitochondrial Eve’, and are the earliest identifiable common ancestors of all modern humans - only ‘Eve’ has been dated at least 80,000 years older than ‘Adam’…

My friend; humanity cannot possibily have evolved. PLEASE SEE MY POST #1073

How come science even today do not and cannot explain the evolution of sight and hearing?

And where do humanities EXCLUSIVE Spiritual attributes of a mind, intellect, freewill and Soul originate:shrug:

 

[prodigalson2011]

If the universe was ‘perfectly rigged’ to give rise to life as we know it, why would a perfect - and perfectly benevolent - God rig it such that horrific suffering was a necessary part of the process of evolution? Either God has vastly different plans in mind than any compassionate human would ever formulate, or he is not as competent as he is claimed to be, or he doesn’t exist.

This question has been addressed so many times by so many theologians, I can only assume that you abandoned Christianity without ever seriously engaging any of its most lucid thinkers.

The geological record supports a materialistic account of the evolution of life. How could it do otherwise, being a material record? There is no evidence that points unambiguously to divine intervention - all that supports the god hypothesis is supernaturalist speculation.

I wasn’t talking about the development of life, I was talking about the origin of life. Given the age of the earth, scientists expected life to appear in the geological record much later than it did. But, in fact, life appears almost simultaneously with liquid water. This renders the possibility of life arising on earth due to chance chemical interactions a moot hypothesis and has in fact led many well respected scientists (Fred Hoyle among them) to postulate such theories as “directed panspermia”, the idea that life was seeded on earth by extraterrestrials.

As I said before, life only had to arise once in order for the whole process of evolution by natural selection to get started.

It had to arise once already capable of self-replication; an ability which it would superfluous to assume as intrinsically necessary to an accidental organism. What this suggests, it seems, is that the necessity of reproduction for the flourishing of life was a foresight on the part of whatever it was (obviously, I believe it was God) that gave rise to the process.

And natural selection, as a process, is as inherently cruel as it is potentially benevolent. I am reminded of David Attenborough’s response to those who castigate him for not acknowledging and praising God for the wonders of creation - such people are always thinking about the beautiful things in nature, which are most certainly present; but they forget the ugly, cruel, painful and horrific aspects of nature which, if God made all, he also created. Why would a god that cared for humans make a parasitic worm that could only survive by burrowing into the eye of a human child? And would this God ever bother to furnish his human worshippers with a plausible explanation for doing so? Or would he just let them gloss over it and say, “Well, it’s all part of God’s plan…”?

But natural selection as the sole driving force of evolution is precisely what is in question. There are a multitude of good reasons to doubt it. As for the rest of this particular paragraph, I think tonyrey already fairly well addressed it. “You can’t have an omelet without breaking a few eggs,” as the saying goes. In this case, you can’t have creatures with any significant kind of free will in a completely safe, sterile universe. The possibility of suffering is, undoubtedly, a necessary condition for such an arrangement.

 

[PJM]

=prodigalson2011;10190466]This question has been addressed so many times by so many theologians, I can only assume that you abandoned Christianity without ever seriously engaging any of its most lucid thinkers.

I wasn’t talking about the development of life, I was talking about the origin of life. Given the age of the earth, scientists expected life to appear in the geological record much later than it did. But, in fact, life appears almost simultaneously with liquid water. This renders the possibility of life arising on earth due to chance chemical interactions a moot hypothesis and has in fact led many well respected scientists (Fred Hoyle among them) to postulate such theories as “directed panspermia”, the idea that life was seeded on earth by extraterrestrials.

It had to arise once already capable of self-replication; an ability which it would superfluous to assume as intrinsically necessary to an accidental organism. What this suggests, it seems, is that the necessity of reproduction for the flourishing of life was a foresight on the part of whatever it was (obviously, I believe it was God) that gave rise to the process.

But natural selection as the sole driving force of evolution is precisely what is in question. There are a multitude of good reasons to doubt it. As for the rest of this particular paragraph, I think tonyrey already fairly well addressed it. “You can’t have an omelet without breaking a few eggs,” as the saying goes. In this case, you can’t have creatures with any significant kind of free will in a completely safe, sterile universe. The possibility of suffering is, undoubtedly, a necessary condition for such an arrangement.

MAN IS AN INVENTION OF OUR GOOD, JUST AND PERFECT GOD

SIN IS A USURPTION OF SATANS PRIDE MADE MANIFEST THROUGH MEN: “BECAUSE WE CAN; WE CHOOSE TOO.”

“FREEWILL” ALONG WITH OUR MINDS, INTELLECTS AND OUR SOULS ARE:

1. HOW WE DO EMULATE OUR GOD [GEN. 1:26-27]
2. MANS SPIRITUAL-GIFTS ARE ESSENTIAL BECAUSE GOD LOVES US PERFECTALLY AND DEMANDS PERFECT LOVE IN RETURN. I…N ORDER FOR OUR LOVE TO BE PERFECTED IT HAS TO BE FREELY GIVEN AND JUST.

Isa.43 Verses 7 and 21: “every one who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made." AND the people whom I formed for myself that they might declare my praise.”

 

[Jesusaves777]

The problem is perhaps that the Biblical myth of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden is a bit too easy to understand, and doesn’t square with the actual evidence we have of human and other animal evolution - which, it has to be said, is just a bit more complicated. There is genetic evidence for a ‘first’ man and a ‘first’ woman, who have been nicknamed ‘Y-chromosomal Adam’ and ‘Mitochondrial Eve’, and are the earliest identifiable common ancestors of all modern humans - only ‘Eve’ has been dated at least 80,000 years older than ‘Adam’…

So, can we have the evidence to your hypothesis? And can you prove that the Biblical account of Adam and Eve is mythical?

 

[Jesusaves777]

And then there is an issue to many evolutionary theories and some creationist theories called chromosomes…



Merry Christmas
God bless

There is only one creation story and it is found in the Bible///In the beginning GOD!! No one including atheists have refuted it, because they can’t. I have given quotes the debate is over, creationism wins…AGAIN!! Atheists we love you with all God’s love, but you have to understand you think that what you believe is new and it’s not. There were atheists in the Bible, read Acts 17 and many others I will list later. Atheism gives way to tyranny, you have been duped!! Plus, you also have to look at the real dark ages which was actually called the “enlightenment”. Please learn some history and real science instead of ridiculous garbage. And for heaven sake, if your going to call the Bible a myth…how about try reading and studying it.

 

[Sair]

So, can we have the evidence to your hypothesis?

Well, it’s not my hypothesis, for a start - and I’ve already pointed you in the direction of the evidence. This might help you along.

And can you prove that the Biblical account of Adam and Eve is mythical?

The question is not whether I can prove that it’s mythical, but whether you can prove that it’s factual. The evidence I’ve proffered above, along with the now vast body of evidence demonstrating the fact of biological evolution, certainly goes a long way to establishing the Biblical creation story as fiction. It’s also the case that the creation story recorded in the Bible is just one of many such told by a variety of human cultures throughout the world. So you not only have to demonstrate that the creation of the world was the act of a divine being - or divine beings - but you also have to show why the specific story contained in the Bible (or one of the two, anyway) is factual when you have already rejected every other ancient creation story as fiction.

 

[Sair]

This question has been addressed so many times by so many theologians, I can only assume that you abandoned Christianity without ever seriously engaging any of its most lucid thinkers.

Clearly this doesn’t trouble you enough to offer your own summation of their ever-so-lucid arguments…most of which, from what I have read, are just games with words and purely speculative philosophy in any case.

As for the rest of this particular paragraph, I think tonyrey already fairly well addressed it. “You can’t have an omelet without breaking a few eggs,” as the saying goes. In this case, you can’t have creatures with any significant kind of free will in a completely safe, sterile universe. The possibility of suffering is, undoubtedly, a necessary condition for such an arrangement.

Only if there is no such thing as a personal, benevolent, all-powerful god. That’s the thing you have to explain, that no-one ever has explained. Either your god does not exist, or does not measure up to human assertions made about him. Come back to your speculative arguments about the origins and development of life when you have independent, unequivocal evidence for the existence of a supernatural, designing intelligence that actually cares about its creations.

 

[Sair]

This is not really a counterpoint. I said nothing about how many times a self-replicating organism would have to emerge. What I said is that given the statistical improbability of life emerging at all, given the extraordinarily quick appearance of life in the geological record, it would be gratuitous to claim that any life at all, whether self-replicating or not, emerged more than once.

You argued from improbability - the fact that life only had to emerge once demonstrates that it doesn’t have to be a likely phenomenon in order to be possible in a completely natural universe.

To begin with, probability only applies to contingent beings, i.e. those things that are effected by external circumstances. God is not a contingent being,

Are you saying that God’s affectivity only operates one way? Much as I do believe that God is effected by human fancy, I would question how one-way interaction is possible.

He is necessary being: that upon which all other things, including quantum vacuums, are contingent.

Why would a quantum vacuum be contingent? What’s the substantive explanation for why God is necessary but a quantum vacuum is contingent?

Moreover, being pure undadulterated being and having no parts or divisions, God is simpler than a quantum vacuum.

What is a pure, unadulterated being? It might as well be nothing, for all it can be defined. How can you make any claims as the the abilities or characteristics of such a being? Much less insist that it is identical with the personal god of Christianity.

But enough with the theological speculation; let’s get down to brass tacks. Even if it were simpler to assume a quantum vacuum, you are then left with the question of how and why it should have exploded in just such a manner as to cause the energy it released to expand and condense into simple matter like hyrdrogen and helium. Why a force like gravity should have pulled that hydrogen into stars which would further compress and compound those particles into more complex elements and then explode into solar systems, planets, and ultimately: us. The conditions necessary for this process to carry out are so incredibly intricate and delicate that the slightest perturbance in one of a multitude of factors would have rendered us impossible. Suddenly your quantum vacuum doesn’t sound so simple.

It is the nature of a quantum vacuum, at least as far as I understand it - and I’m no theoretical physicist, that’s for sure - that it is continually generating such conditions as could potentially result in an event such as the Big Bang. As with the origin of life, the origin of the universe only had to happen once in order to set in motion the chains of events that constitute its development. No amount of working backwards from our present position can justify the (rather arrogant) belief that the universe was planned such that it would give rise to humans.

And whilst it’s easy enough to conjure a mess of words around the supposed ‘simplicity’ of your god, you are still talking about an entity which, despite existing as ‘being-itself’, still somehow has specific components like intelligence and deliberate creativity, and apparently body parts, if you take the Biblical accounts seriously. Physicists are working on explaining how a quantum vacuum could give rise to a universe; as far as gods are concerned, there’s nothing to go on, and no explanation offered as to how or why a perfect, necessary being would - or even could - bother to create a universe.

The evidence of God is the intelligibility of the universe.

No. The intelligibility of the universe is evidence of the intelligibility of the universe.

The very word “intelligible” itself makes sense only in light of the existence of intelligence. In other words, intelligibility presumes the existence of intelligence.

But there’s no specifying at which end the intelligence is required.

It is unreasonable to assume that a mindless vacuum should produce and adhere to laws that give rise to an intelligible world.

Not at all, if the universe is indeed constrained by specific laws - in other words, limited in its possibilities. You introduce the action of a supposedly limitless being, like your god, and suddenly intelligibility no longer applies - there’s no reason to suppose, when magic and miracles are in the picture, that anything should be ordered or predictable.

If you bought the raw material to build a house, left in a heap on an empty lot and came back after a few weeks and found a house, would you assume that it had been built by the blind forces of nature?

I think you’ll find that the universe has had a bit more than a few weeks to get to its present condition.

If the necessary being, of which there must be at least one, were not a mind but a blind force, the odds would be heavily in favor of a completely disorganized, chaotic universe.

If the universe had been made by a perfect, unconstrained being for whom anything was possible, the chances of its being intelligible or orderly would be even more remote.

Your demand for evidence that is not explicable in terms of physical phenomena is completely absurd.

Yes. And I’m glad you pointed this out, not me. The thing is, the minute you demonstrate that God has any effect upon our existence, you are demonstrating that there is physical evidence for God. If there is no such evidence for God, then we may assume that even if God exists, somewhere, somehow, he is irrelevant to our existence, which is constrained by physical phenomena.

 

[tonyrey]

The fact either is or is not sufficient to convince a jury and obtain a lawful conviction for the perpetrator. The evidences of evolution and the origins of the universe are of this kind - perhaps we will never know exactly what happened, but there is sufficient evidence to make some possibilities far more plausible than others. The operation of a vast supernatural intelligence is a proposition for which there remains no evidence other than pure speculation and wishful thinking.

No response!

(In any case, I might point out parenthetically, you are incorrect in stating that the mechanisms that drive evolution, for example, are not repeatable or observable - they have indeed been observed, both in the field and the laboratory; as for the conditions obtaining at the origin of the universe, well, that’s pretty much what the Large Hadron Collider was built to replicate…)

What precisely is the mechanism that was initially responsible for the Big Bang? Your thinking certainly appears to be quite mechanical - i.e. totally devoid of insight (as one might expect from some **body **which rejects the primacy of reason in favour of unreasoning processes)…

No response!

Philosophy is impotent if it ignores science; and theology is largely impotent anyway, even when it pays lip service to the existence of scientific discovery - its spiel is easy to summarise: “Well, science has made these discoveries, but it won’t ever impinge on our beliefs because if it does, we’ll just deny its validity, or seek refuge in the fact that science doesn’t know everything, so there’s still room to slot in the workings of God.”

I wonder what the workings of science are slotted into - if not the machinations of the blind Goddess… Her power is obviously beyond all dispute and never to be questioned - the sole source of light in the eternal darkness…

No response!

My motives for criticising supernaturalist religion are only the ones I will happily and openly acknowledge - namely its persistent failure to tell us anything useful or valuable about our existence that cannot, and has not, been told by the manifold stories we have made up about ourselves throughout our history - a pantheon to which the indigenous peoples of Australia and the Americas, the Ancient Greek and Roman dramatists, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen, Hugo, Dickens etc all belong as well; and its propensity to dance around the difficult questions - like the problem of evil - attempting to justify that which cannot be justified, at least not without denying the very faculty of reason that you so loudly cry up as the greatest attribute of humanity.

As far as science is concerned evil doesn’t even exist. There is really no problem at all because nothing makes sense in a senseless world - including the conclusions of its purposeless inhabitants who imagine they are rational but are merely the hapless and helpless victims of happenstance…

Sooner or later the blind Goddess always returns to the scene of the crime - of having created life!

No response!

 

[prodigalson2011]

Clearly this doesn’t trouble you enough to offer your own summation of their ever-so-lucid arguments…most of which, from what I have read, are just games with words and purely speculative philosophy in any case.

Clearly I have a life outside of these forums and might not have time, especially around the holidays, to go into explicit detail on questions of such redundant commonality that one could easily find a plethora of different responses. I’d recommend starting with C.S. Lewis’ “The Problem of Pain.”

Only if there is no such thing as a personal, benevolent, all-powerful god. That’s the thing you have to explain, that no-one ever has explained. Either your god does not exist, or does not measure up to human assertions made about him. Come back to your speculative arguments about the origins and development of life when you have independent, unequivocal evidence for the existence of a supernatural, designing intelligence that actually cares about its creations.

Not even God can perform an absurdity. It is impossible to create beings with moral autonomy and simultaneously shield them from all harm. The latter completely negates the former. God can only do one of two things: create beings with free will who can choose to do right or wrong and, thus, leave them open to the possibility of suffering, or he can make ecstatic robots. Free will is meaningless if it is inconsequential.

 

[PJM]

=Sair;10193182]Well, it’s not my hypothesis, for a start - and I’ve already pointed you in the direction of the evidence. This might help you along.

The question is not whether I can prove that it’s mythical, but whether you can prove that it’s factual. The evidence I’ve proffered above, along with the now vast body of evidence demonstrating the fact of biological evolution, certainly goes a long way to establishing the Biblical creation story as fiction. It’s also the case that the creation story recorded in the Bible is just one of many such told by a variety of human cultures throughout the world. So you not only have to demonstrate that the creation of the world was the act of a divine being - or divine beings - but you also have to show why the specific story contained in the Bible (or one of the two, anyway) is factual when you have already rejected every other ancient creation story as fiction.

MY FRIEND YOUR WRONG!

YOUR the One opposing truth so it IS up to you to prove your position

PLEASE see post #1073 and rspond to it

 

[Charlemagne_II]

Sair

**The question is not whether I can prove that it’s mythical, but whether you can prove that it’s factual. The evidence I’ve proffered above, along with the now vast body of evidence demonstrating the fact of biological evolution, certainly goes a long way to establishing the Biblical creation story as fiction. It’s also the case that the creation story recorded in the Bible is just one of many such told by a variety of human cultures throughout the world. So you not only have to demonstrate that the creation of the world was the act of a divine being - or divine beings - but you also have to show why the specific story contained in the Bible (or one of the two, anyway) is factual when you have already rejected every other ancient creation story as fiction. **

Would you like to explain away the convergence of science and Genesis in the following two quotations?

Is one fact and the other fantasy?

Genesis, 1000 B.C. : “Let there be light.”

Carl Sagan in Cosmos, 1980 A.D.

“Ten or twenty billion years ago, something happened – the Big Bang, the event that began our universe…. In that titanic cosmic explosion, the universe began an expansion which has never ceased…. As space stretched, the matter and energy in the universe expanded with it and rapidly cooled. The radiation of the cosmic fireball, which, then as now, filled the universe, moved through the spectrum – from gamma rays to X-rays to ultraviolet light; through the rainbow colors of the visible spectrum; into the infrared and radio regions. The remnants of that fireball, the cosmic background radiation, emanating from all parts of the sky can be detected by radio telescopes today. In the early universe, space was brilliantly illuminated.”

 

[Sair]

Clearly I have a life outside of these forums and might not have time, especially around the holidays, to go into explicit detail on questions of such redundant commonality that one could easily find a plethora of different responses. I’d recommend starting with C.S. Lewis’ “The Problem of Pain.”

Considering CS Lewis’s efforts with the ‘Lord, liar or lunatic’ argument, I can’t say I’d be entertaining any hope that his response to the problem of evil/suffering/pain will be particularly convincing.

Not even God can perform an absurdity. It is impossible to create beings with moral autonomy and simultaneously shield them from all harm. The latter completely negates the former. God can only do one of two things: create beings with free will who can choose to do right or wrong and, thus, leave them open to the possibility of suffering, or he can make ecstatic robots. Free will is meaningless if it is inconsequential.

That’s not even scratching the surface of what a perfect God could do - clearly (assuming, of course, that he actually exists and has a hand in creation) he already makes humans who have a greater tendency to choose good than evil; he could have made all humans this way, without compromising free will and at no cost to himself. It would not be that difficult for an all-powerful deity to make the world subjectively better for innocent beings. That includes all the suffering caused by natural disasters and the suffering that occurs as a matter of course in the operation of the natural world. The only absurdity is that people continue to invest belief in a personal, benevolent god in the light of the deep implications of the problem of evil.

 

[Sair]

Would you like to explain away the convergence of science and Genesis in the following two quotations?

Is one fact and the other fantasy?

Genesis, 1000 B.C. : “Let there be light.”

Carl Sagan in Cosmos, 1980 A.D.

“Ten or twenty billion years ago, something happened – the Big Bang, the event that began our universe…. In that titanic cosmic explosion, the universe began an expansion which has never ceased…. As space stretched, the matter and energy in the universe expanded with it and rapidly cooled. The radiation of the cosmic fireball, which, then as now, filled the universe, moved through the spectrum – from gamma rays to X-rays to ultraviolet light; through the rainbow colors of the visible spectrum; into the infrared and radio regions. The remnants of that fireball, the cosmic background radiation, emanating from all parts of the sky can be detected by radio telescopes today. In the early universe, space was brilliantly illuminated.”

That’s stretching credulity a bit far, don’t you think, to suppose that a single poetic phrase in an ancient creation story corresponds to the detail that cosmologists have since discovered with regard to the Big Bang? If they’d gone so far as to write something more like, “And God said, ‘Let there be a vast explosion, giving rise to all the matter in the universe, and let that matter condense into galaxies filled with star systems’,” then we might be getting somewhere.

Besides, if you’re going to push the ‘Bible agrees with science’ angle, I think you’d have a much greater job to explain away all the parts of the Genesis stories that don’t even remotely correspond to the reality elucidated by science. How would God have gone about hanging the two ‘lights’ - sun and moon - in a firmament that was holding back the waters above it…what waters, exactly? The ones that fall from our own atmosphere, having first evaporated from the surface? - when we now know that both our sun and moon are situated well beyond the furthest extent of Earth’s atmosphere; when we now know that not only is the Earth just one of several planets orbiting the sun, but that the sun is just one of countless stars in one of countless galaxies? And I’m not even going to start on the vast discrepancies between Genesis and the scientific accounting of biological evolution…

 

[Sair]

It’s time you thought of an original horror story rather than constantly regurgitate the same old chestnut by a TV celebrity who jumps to conclusions without even having studied the subject in depth…

Oh, there are plenty of horror stories I could find, and biologists in the field are coming up with more every day. Whilst sticking with Attenborough, you might recall the scene in Trials of Life - assuming you’ve seen it, that is - in which a band of chimpanzees (our closest genetic relatives) capture a colobus monkey and tear it to pieces, alive. And as for regurgitating the old chestnut about the worm in the eye, that might be because no-one has ever explained why a benevolent, omnipotent god would design such an organism in the first place. It will keep getting regurgitated until the creationists pony up with the counter-argument.

1. Can you explain how in an immensely complex world with countless billions of organisms struggling for survival there could be not one instance of interference of one with another?

Sure - if that world was presided over by an omnipotent, perfectly benevolent god. Isn’t it your Bible that says, “the lion shall lie down with the lamb”? If God can fix things to be that way, why not make them that way in the first place?

1. Do you believe the occurrence of such meaningless events outweighs the value of all life on this planet and that it would be better if it had remained as sterile as the moon?

Why would I believe that? I’m not the one who’s trying to argue for the existence of a perfect designer who cares about humans and has plans for all our individual lives. I think life is amazing and wondrous, by the very fact that it exists. As Dawkins put it, “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.” The flaw in your argument might be illuminated by a simple (and perhaps somewhat simplistic) analogy - if you are a parent whose child has just produced a pretty drawing, wouldn’t you be inclined to have it framed, hung on the wall, and wouldn’t you appreciate it for its own beauty and the fact that it illuminates your child’s abilities? If you were someone commissioning a painting from a great artist, and said artist produced something roughly equivalent to a child’s finger painting, might you not question the abilities and reputation of the supposedly ‘great’ artist?

1. Do you allow such events to interfere with your enjoyment of life?

I don’t anymore, but that’s because I don’t have to reconcile them with any belief in the existence of a perfect god.

 

[someperson555]

ofcourse theres evidence for design. the laws of physics, mathematics, the world of the forms. all these couldnt have just magically sprung into existence and then magically assembles themsleves.
materialism is bogus and actually requires even more blind faith than believing in God.

 

[Sair]

ofcourse theres evidence for design. the laws of physics, mathematics, the world of the forms. all these couldnt have just magically sprung into existence and then magically assembles themsleves.
materialism is bogus and actually requires even more blind faith than believing in God.

Can you offer any real support for this hypothesis?

Humans are anthropocentric by nature, tending to judge the world in human terms, including the concept that complex entities must have been designed.

But think about it this way - we actually have no way (yet) of knowing whether the physical constants of our universe could be any different than they are; even probability calculations applied for the ‘fine-tuning’ argument are suspect, since we don’t know whether the physical constants are interdependent, or what the threshholds of possibility are for those physical constants. As for mathematics, it is a means humans have developed to abstract the principles of cause and effect into a logical system. And the world of forms? What other world is there, do you think?

In this thread, it has been argued that the ‘intelligibility’ of the universe requires intelligence. But there’s no reason to suppose this intelligence was front-loaded. Consider the fact that we humans evolved within the system of our planet, in this universe. Given this fact, it should be no surprise that our very intelligence - our specific type of intelligence, and the same type of intelligence that is (perhaps quite misguidedly) extrapolated onto the supposed creator of the universe - should have evolved within the constraints of all the physical laws and conditions in which we exist, and have existed.

 

[Jesusaves777]

Well, it’s not my hypothesis, for a start - and I’ve already pointed you in the direction of the evidence. This might help you along.

The question is not whether I can prove that it’s mythical, but whether you can prove that it’s factual. The evidence I’ve proffered above, along with the now vast body of evidence demonstrating the fact of biological evolution, certainly goes a long way to establishing the Biblical creation story as fiction. It’s also the case that the creation story recorded in the Bible is just one of many such told by a variety of human cultures throughout the world. So you not only have to demonstrate that the creation of the world was the act of a divine being - or divine beings - but you also have to show why the specific story contained in the Bible (or one of the two, anyway) is factual when you have already rejected every other ancient creation story as fiction.

I have looked at your posts, your so called evidence are merely assumptions…So, you know beyond a fact that you said happened happened??? You go off by observations, have you observed these observations for yourself? And I’m not sure what you mean by one of two of the Bible…there is only one could you clarify? Proof of creation? Answer: The Bible. I know you probably scoff at that answer but let’s all admit that it’s as good as yours. Lot’s of famous scientists including Louis Pasteur and many others have dis-proven it where have you been? Have you even studied church history? Yes, there are many stories about creation in other parts of the world, let’s take that and also bring up the fact that Christians brought on education, Christians built most of the colleges we have including Harvard and Yale, Christians built hospitals and so on…Do secularists teach that? Nope!! They claim everything came out of the Enlightenment of the 18th century. There is no evidence that their creation stories are valid. However, the one in the Bible is and written on stone in several countries. The Apostle Paul went all over to preach the good news, but kept finding himself in prison…why was that? Even Bart Ehrman who is an Atheist writer knows that there is evidence for Jesus Christ, and if you like to go through the piles of manuscripts of Greek and Hebrew writings we have those as well. Again I will ask you a question; Why did science fake Lucy and Piltdown man and say that was the ONLY evidence included to prove evolution? Micro-evolution exists that’s how we have different breeds of animals, there are many types of dogs and they have a common ancestor…a dog! Macro-evolution is a lie and cannot be proven. And I’m sorry Sir you have not proven anything here.

 

[Jesusaves777]

Can you offer any real support for this hypothesis?

Humans are anthropocentric by nature, tending to judge the world in human terms, including the concept that complex entities must have been designed.

But think about it this way - we actually have no way (yet) of knowing whether the physical constants of our universe could be any different than they are; even probability calculations applied for the ‘fine-tuning’ argument are suspect, since we don’t know whether the physical constants are interdependent, or what the threshholds of possibility are for those physical constants. As for mathematics, it is a means humans have developed to abstract the principles of cause and effect into a logical system. And the world of forms? What other world is there, do you think?

In this thread, it has been argued that the ‘intelligibility’ of the universe requires intelligence. But there’s no reason to suppose this intelligence was front-loaded. Consider the fact that we humans evolved within the system of our planet, in this universe. Given this fact, it should be no surprise that our very intelligence - our specific type of intelligence, and the same type of intelligence that is (perhaps quite misguidedly) extrapolated onto the supposed creator of the universe - should have evolved within the constraints of all the physical laws and conditions in which we exist, and have existed.

God is infinite…we are finite. Basically you just said in your quote that you really don’t understand the complexity of us and the universe…then you question God??? Interesting.