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Charlemagne_III
Guest
I thought you were an atheist?
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C
Charlemagne_III
Guest
Because people like you deny that this is what happened, that there was no instigation by God.
More negativism, of course.
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Bradski
Guest
Aa I said, and will say again…I am more happy to concede for the sake of this discussion that God instigated everything.Because people like you deny that this is what happened, that there was no instigation by God.
More negativism, of course.
That said, everything has happened because of the natural laws that God has put in place. But you seem to want to argue that specific point. Why? Why do you need a miracle for life when literally everything else is accepted as natural (guided and sustained by God, for the sake of this discussion).
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Bradski
Guest
So who says it includes being able to control what happens after they are created? You don’t.
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Charlemagne_III
Guest
All of nature is a miracle. Why is that so difficult to fathom?
By the way, when Einstein talks about an intelligent designer, he doesn’t use the word miracle, but he clearly connects God with all of nature, as you will see below.
“I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. May I not reply with a parable? The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations.” Albert Einstein
Do you find that Einstein’s language absurd because he sees intelligent design everywhere?
Here is someone who said pretty much the same thing in somewhat different language nearly 8 centuries ago:
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Book I,
Chapter 1: The function of the wise man
“Now the last end of everything is that which is intended by the prime author or mover thereof. The prime author and mover of the universe is intelligence, as will be shown later (B. II, Chap. XXIII, XXIV). Therefore the last end of the universe must be the good of the intelligence, and that is truth. Truth then must be the final end of the whole universe; and about the consideration of that end wisdom must primarily be concerned. And therefore the Divine Wisdom, clothed in flesh, testifies that He came into the world for the manifestation of truth: For this was I born, and unto this I came into the World, to give testimony to the truth (John xvii, 37).”
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Charlemagne_III
Guest
How’s the weather in Sydney?
It’s brutal here, 8 inches of freezing snow.
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Aloysium
Guest
We’ve gone over this before and got nowhere; so why not try again.
God creates the universe.
He is the Source, the Ground, the uncaused Cause of all being.
All being, everywhere and every time, He brings it into existence as loving Father.
I cannot prove this to you, but you can know Him through the building of your relationship with Him.
You and I are in time. We are located in a moment that has no boundaries and is the centre where we create ourselves (becoming the fixed past) from the potential that is the future. Time passes; change occurs. Our rational soul experiences a cross section of creation unfolding, a cosmic symphony of different events of varying durations, playing in eternity. We participate in this dance, in the moment with a past and future, becoming the person we will be in the fullness of our time, for all time.
Maybe we can think of creation as one dream containing every thing, place and time including ourselves, who are living our lives, deciding which direction we will take. The Dreamer would be God.
God lies at our Foundation, bringing us into being as He brings every other moment. He is the same One at our conception, in this moment and at our death. He brings the supernova into existence as it carries out the destiny that is carried in its material existence, blowing itself up. We follow our destiny, to choose for ourselves from what we are given, who we will be eternally.
Mankind has not been on earth forever; at some point we were created as a spirit-body unity. We each enter at conception, into time as eternal souls who will face death. God was with us at the beginning and will be with us at the end because He is always here, whenever that has been, is and will be.
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zyzz
Guest
You cannot define something to your liking. Or… you can but don’t be surprised if no one takes you or your “definitions” seriously.
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Regular_Atheist
Guest
When I was a staunch atheist I used to go around claiming it was better because it was closer to the truth since I didn’t think there was enough evidence for God. I probably would have argued that the pursuit of truth is a positive better than any personal gain, or something like that. You’d probably get a similar argument from most New Atheist types, which is what most atheists seem to be nowadays.
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Bradski
Guest
I’m agreeing with you, Charles. For the purpose of this discussion we both agree that the natural laws that God has put into place are miraculous. They have done everything. Formed suns and planets, galaxies, black holes, literally and unequivocally everything.
But you want life to be something other than that? Something that isn’t natural as God ordained? Why, for heaven’s sake? Why do you accept literally everything except life as being entirely natural (that is, obeying laws that God instigated and sustains)?
Why the need for this Kazam! moment? Why the need for something extra? You are arguing that God’s natural laws weren’t enough to produce life. We can still all agree that God did it (or not, as befits one’s particular belief). Is it that agreement with people who don’t have your beliefs is something to be avoided.
There’s no ‘Gotcha’ moment coming up. Charles. You are not being hoodwinked. All we atheists aren’t furiously PM-ing each other and suggesting ways to catch you out. It was nature, Charles. You believe it was and is controlled by God. I don’t. That’s all…
Incidentally, if you are posting reams and reams of quotes over and over again from Einstein and Sagan for my benefit, then here’s a heads-up. I stopped reading them a long time ago
Bloody hot. Just heading off to walk along the beach and follow the coastal path to a nearby beer garden. I think I prefer two coats of sunscreen rather than two layers of thermal underwear. Snow is only any use when it’s on the side of a hill that also has a ski lift.How’s the weather in Sydney?
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Oreoracle
Guest
Hasn’t God already made enough rules pertaining to sex to separate the good from the evil without deliberately making evil actions pleasurable? One could argue by a strict interpretation of Catholic morality that oral sex, anal sex, extramarital sex, protected sex, foreplay, and masturbation are all immoral. Any sexual act that isn’t conducted between married persons to the explicit end of bearing children is immoral.
So if you think about it, it’s completely unnecessary to give humans the extra test of declining anal sex because anal sex is a popular option when one doesn’t wish to procreate. The other option is protection, which is already immoral. And anal sex is recreational sex, which is again already immoral.
But I know the capacity to make excuses for one’s deity is infinite, so what say you to the non-moral bodily issues I pointed out? I notice you avoided them every time thus far.
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cornbread_r2
Guest
See this TED talk about proto-cells produced in a lab and which seem to straddle the line between life and non-life. They were apparently produced using chemicals, processes and conditions that were likely available on a young Earth. While they don’t reproduce, and therefore can’t be strictly classified as living organisms, they do have mobility and metabolism. At the least, I think this demonstrates that the emergence of life here may very well have been an incremental, natural process that didn’t necessarily require all three of those functions to be present for the other functions to be operable.It is duly pessimistic that no progress will be made in the next few decades. We cannot recreate the conditions that prevailed on Earth when the first living organism appeared. There is every reason to believe that the first living organism was decidedly complex, endowed with the power of metabolism, movement and reproduction simultaneously.
That’s called irreducible complexity. Case closed.
Now that I’ve read your responses to others in the thread I’m not really sure just what your position is.
Are you saying that an intelligent designer simply created the natural laws that inevitably led to the emergence of life through natural processes or are saying that the intelligent designer intervened at some point to create life or something else all together? If it’s the first option, then I would agree with others that that position is a far cry from that held by intelligent design proponents like the Discovery Institute and appears to be more like that of the so-called theistic evolutionists like Ken Miller.
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Aloysium
Guest
A natural process involving someone to bring chemicals together in the proper amounts under the correct conditions in the right sequence . . . I think you just posted support for intelligent design.
And as you indicate, life was not produced produced there anyway.
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cornbread_r2
Guest
As noted, the researchers were apparently using chemicals, processes and conditions that were likely present on a very volatile young Earth. I personally wouldn’t bet that the same result couldn’t have been obtained naturally – in a few hundred million years – instead of just the few years the researchers had.
Do you think it was necessary for the intelligent designer to intervene and create life because it wouldn’t have emerged naturally on its own?
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Bradski
Guest
I always thought that this was a given, but over the last few months I am beginning to realise that a lot of people have this ‘3:35pm’ version of abiogenesis.
That is, they seem to have a mental impression that life started in a specific little pond in a specific part of the world at a specific time: 3:35pm, 4.5 billion years ago next Tuesday. This, as the TED talk explained, is a very long way from what almost certainly happened.
Say hi to your next door neighbour. He looks a bit like you, talks a bit like you. Because, not surprisingly, he is the same species and probably speaks the same language and is approximately as intelligent as you are.
That will be the same situation if you go back a few hundred years or even a few thousand. But go back a few million, and then a few tens of millions, and then a few hundreds of millions and the DIRECT ancestor of Jim next door won’t look a lot like either of you. Go back a billion and there will be no resemblance at all. Even though Jim is DIRECTLY related.
At any given moment, the father and son and the grandfather of whatever it happened to have been which was related to Jim would be IDENTICAL to each other, yet totally different from Jim in almost every way conceivable.
This is the way that life emerged. From non-life to life happened over periods with which we are not mentally capable of imagining. And at each stage, the differences were non-existent. But over millions, and tens of millions, and hundreds of millions of years, there was a significant difference.
But it didn’t happen at 3:35pm or any other specific time. Just like there was no specific time when a small mammal turned into a human.
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inocente
Guest
I think it’s do to with animism. The common element, in many cultures going back to primitive man, is belief in a life force. Anything alive has the force, and when the force leaves, it dies, as in A Candle In The Wind, etc. In some systems, rivers, mountains and everything else is alive, and we still call ships “she” and so on. I’m no expert on Aristotle, but I think he only allows plants and animals to have the life force, which is synonymous with a soul. To him the soul is what animates, as in the Morse code save our souls, and in his system only humans have a immortal soul.
So I’ve learned that the words “life” and “soul” have lots of different meanings, even among people in your home town. But in any form of animism, life is always binary, two-state dead or alive, and that doesn’t gel with modern biological conceptions of a continuum. Not sure ID fans realize this gives them a big problem in reconciling how we naturally think and talk with their claim to be uber-scientific.
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tonyrey
Guest
Modern atheists reject “life-force” as a very primitive notion. Their faith in the power of time is touching but it doesn’t correspond to reality. Why have scientists been unable to reproduce the sequences of events you describe? It seems “uber-scientific” to claim mindless molecules are capable of becoming rational beings when given the opportunity to do so no matter how long it takes. For all intents and purposes atheism is the epitome of negativity. It is soul-destroying in all senses of the term and deifies matter as the Supreme Reality at the expense of the mind that conceives that hypothesis. There can hardly be a greater example of self-contradiction but of course for materialists the “mind” and “self” are illusions discarded for the benefit of their hypothesis. For them it is irrelevant that in practice no one lives as if they are impersonal collections of purposeless atomic entities blundering their way past all obstacles, totally unaware of what they are doing and imagining they are free to choose what to believe, how to live and who to love. In their scheme of things persons, freedom, truth and love are no more than fortuitous “isomorphisms” of mindless particles. Long live the reign of the irrational Goddess and all her equally irrational disciples! May Chance alone dictate the sequence of events to its final absurd conclusion: a return to the meaningless, valueless chaos from which it has miraculously emerged for no reason or purpose whatsoever!
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tonyrey
Guest
Your faith in the power of nature is inconsistent with your reliance on the power of reason. Have scientists ever produced a computer capable of thinking** for itself** or having a right to exist or being capable of love or responsible for its activity? If not why not?
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tonyrey
Guest
Can you justify your faith in time alone as the supreme cause of all development - including your power to decide what is the best explanation of reality? Is it reasonable to believe reason is an accidental product of unreasoning molecules?
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tonyrey
Guest
Only hedonists believe pleasure is the supreme criterion of what is good or evil. Can you justify that hypothesis? Or in your scheme of things is there anything more valuable?
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