Two Jehovah's Witnesses came to my door...

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You said that you had ended the discussion, so when I reply by way of a criticism of you then it's a different matter by your admission.
Also I am not attacking your beliefs, I was telling you that they are wrong and why. Furthermore I am not attacking you, I am criticizing your actions. If you can't accept that what you did is wrong then that's your fault, not mine.


No, you simply accused someone of not being willing to change his beliefs simply because he told you your beliefs. If you see that an attack then that's because you realize the gravity of the charge, not because I am wrong. You did do that.


You haven't stopped though, and whenever you seem to think that you have a chance to make some wildly unfair accusation you take it. You say you were leaving and then you come back to make some backhanded insult to lecks. You left lecks by accusing him of being unconvinceable just because he told you what he believed and why.


Are you blind? How is this respectful?:


In the first you return after saying that you would exit a topic in order to restate an accusation you made against lecks. How is that respectful?
Furthermore Lecks makes a point about how a lot in the bible seems to simply be unproven scientifically and you instantly accuse him of saying that he will never change his views despite the fact that you never tried to challenge this. Only when you challenge it logically and he doesn't admit can you say that he's set in his ways and can't be reasoned with. Otherwise you make a presumtuous statement that is not respectful. Can you dispute this?

I'd rather that you'd not be disingenuously forgiving to me after trying to accuse me of making personal attacks when I said that presuming something is presumptuous.

Even more damning is that although you complain heartily about lecks being impossible to convince your prelude to that your previous statement reveals the hypocrisy of that accusation:

Not only is this a major failure in the understanding of the word theory, the fact is that you said no matter what scientists say it is still unproven. Since a scientist is anyone that uses experiments in order to draw conclusions about the universe and all concerns within, saying that it doesn't matter what scientists have said is basically saying that you don't care what evidence is given to you.

Your otherexcuse is by misreading the word theory, theory being a word that means explanation. Gravity is theoretical. Quantum mechanics is theoretical. Our understanding of newtonian mechanics is made up of many theories. People have just tried to focus as hard on the word theory of evolution and have used high redefinition in order to say that theory means that there is no proof when there is actually more proof than can fit in a whole series of apartment blocks.

I'll tell you if you give me the chance.

It's like walking on eggshells. You have absolute missed the meaning of what I wrote. I don't want to continue this. It has now descended into areas I KNEW would go. I am NOT going to go there.

Take care.

And please don't read "take care" to mean something other than a sincere expression of good will, because that's exactly what it means.

I have nothing left to say on this matter except:

May Jehovah be with YOU ALL!

May the Force be with you too

None of that connects evolution and cosmological origins. I was merely referring to cosmology in which various origins theories have been and continue to be debated. There remain unknowns when it comes to the development of species. So why is evolution such a sacred cow?

I think you confuse these two concepts as most people do:

A. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/evolution

has only a passing reference to:

B. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ ... +evolution

Cosmological evolution has something to do with "Theory of Evolution", but "Theory of Evolution" has nothing to do with cosmological evolution.

It goes like this:

1. Something happened and the universe began. Acosmogenesis for the Atheists. Cosmogenesis for the Theists.
2. Cosmological evolution begins.
3. Abiogenesis happens.
4 Theory of Evolution begins.

That is the order of things in a structured universe where the arrows of time are held true. Timeline is greatly reduced.

"Two Jehovah's Witnesses came to my door..."

I'm still waiting for the rest of the joke; something like:

Two Jehovah's Witnesses came to my door. I opened the door and asks who they were. They told me that they were Jehovah's Witnesses and I invited them inside. I asked if they would like tea or coffee.

"Two teas would be nice, please," came the reply.

Then I asked if they would like biscuits with their tea.

"Oh, yes please, that would be lovely," came the response.

A few minutes later I returned to the parlor, placed the drinks and biscuits on the table, sat down, and said, "So what is it that you want to talk to me about?"

The first Jehovah shrugs her shoulders and says, "We don't know, this is the furthest that we have ever got."

Just FYI the person most likely to make a fallacious jump from evolution to cosmology is Richard Dawkins. Go check out his central argument.

Richard Dawkins couldn't find his ass with both hands.

Because you say so.


Well given your accusatory behaviour and constant contradiction that is your fault.

I am not exactly sure why people are saying that the development of the cosmos and biological evolution don't have something to do with each other when they naturally follow each other.

Furthermore I have never heard of this cosmological evolution. I am going to look for it.

That's evolution as a word. I think your term cosmological evolution is actually a mistake. What you should actually say is cosmogony. Also It doesn't have a passing reference to the theory of evolution. It takes upp all of definition three.

Well, they do have SOMETHING to do with each other, but here's the point they are trying to make:

Big bang, string theory, M theory, membrane theory all have to do with how the universe started. They don't explain the origins of life.

Evolution (biology) is about where species come from. It has nothing to do with how life STARTED. It's only concerned with how life developed into what it is now.

Origin of life has to do with how life started. Creationism led to the Intelligent Design theory, and the only assumption anyone has to make for that to work is that a Designer exists. A commonly-held but mostly debunked alternative is abiogenesis. But even non-theists are starting to catch on to how problematic it is. The few hangers-on out there are just still gawking over the results of some experiments back in the 1950s that showed that amino acids COULD form under certain natural circumstances. But not a single toad has spontaneously hopped out of a test tube yet. So the more sensible of even the non-theists out there have concluded that if abiogenesis occurred, it had to have a little help. Alien proteins are the most likely catalyst for abiogenesis according to that view.

Abiogenesis has more to do with chemistry than biology, whereas evolution is within the field of biology and not chemistry. They have nothing to do with each other.

So if you understand all that, you're caught up. DC seems to be insinuating that I don't know the difference and that I'm conflating cosmology/cosmogony with life origins with evolution. I was merely pointing to other scientific areas in which, like evolution, there remain unknowns and alternative explanations exist. Evolution is only ONE interpretation of that available data. My whole point is that if we're being intellectually honest, we shouldn't be so quick to hold so firmly to one explanation like it's not even open for debate. It's basically a sacred cow.

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The main problem with evolution is its lack of a driving mechanism. Evolution traces all life back to common ancestor(s). It doesn't address where those ancestors came from, and the best defense of evolution anybody can come up with is "evolution has nothing to do with origins of life." Entirely just my opinion here, but I find that funny. In order to make a convincing argument of evolution as an absolute fact, someone has to address this. Biology is staying out of that debate. Chemistry has failed to produce the results. So, basically, if you fail to produce life, you fail to produce evolution. End of story.

And THAT is where the hard-evolution proponents will scream "for the billionth time..." Which I guess is fine by me. If they want to ignore the fact that there is no place for evolution to even get started and conveniently deny that either they're taking it on faith that evolution got started somehow or that it's ad hoc, that's their problem and not mine.
[/rant]

[EDIT] "Evolution" as I'm talking about here is evolution that goes back to common ancestors. The part I take issue with is that if there isn't a workable life-origins theory that can tie in with evolution, then non-theistic evolution cannot be firmly established as a fact. As I mentioned several posts ago, evolution IS an observable phenomenon and speciation through evolution HAS been demonstrated. If this is the evolution we're talking about, I can go along with that. But I'm not convinced that we've really established anything more that.

Rejection of creationism has nothing to do with abiogensis. According to Intelligent Design 'theory' what is the designer like? How such designer make life that is supposedly physically impossible? What falsiable prediction does Intelligent Design theory give or does Intelligent Design theory follows from other accepted scientific theory as a result? Really, Intelligent Design 'theory' does not qualify as a theory. It is just nonsense.

Your request that a complex life form has to come out from the lab is absurd, given that the actual process takes millions of years and probably one in billions of Earth like planets.

It's a christian belief, an abrahamaic belief. It is obvious that there have been beliefs of creation, religious beliefs, that do not have anything to do with creation. Take the Dream-time of Aborigone culture or the containment of Pan-Ku in the egg of creation. The Hindu idea of creation was a natural process from which Gods were not involved. Buddhism has no creation theory and says that the universe is infinite and goes through cycles.

It's obvious that intelligent design is just a costume for Abrahamic religious doctine on how the universe came to be so that it can be stuffed in to science lessons.


That's untrue. You are reading people not knowing as people thinking it is unsolvaeable unsolvable. In fact there have been many theories scientifically about how abiogenesis occured actually, however scientists don't claim to know until they actually have a definitively proven explanation that isn't based on doctrine.


Like who? Methinks you are just saying what you want people to think.


Which sort of puts a damper on your idea that it can't when it can.


That isn't how evolution works. You aren't spontaneously going to have a toad form from nothing. Evolution is a gradual process. Toads arrived on the planet about 3 billion years after the first cells formed. It's ironic really because you use a metaphor which is more consistent with the instant creation as typified by the abrahamic god, not gradual evolution. You have failed to comprehend the actual system by which evolution works. It's like a child saying that something doesn't happen because they have a 2-second attention span.


Not really :/ since you already said that amino acids could form spontaneously.


This is a weak excuse. Science isn't cut in to separate categories that have no overlap. You ever hear of a biochemist?


No you weren't. You were basically saying that abiogenesis didn't occur because organic molecules didn't instantly form in to toads and you readily admit that amino acids can be formed. You also tried to put across this theory which is basically a christian creation doctrine in disguise and has no significant scientific basis except by using it as a convenient stopgap.


Not true, all of the atheists here have readily provided explanations of evolution through links and by criticizing extremely fallacious arguments on religious people's part. The truth is important and anyone who is convinced by the logic of the theory of evolution is always fighting for that. Ironically given the tempestuousness and acusations, not to mention the blind assertion that a God exists as the basis of their arguments on the behalf of religious people it is they who are defending their sacred cow.


That's untrue. Evolution's driving mechanism is the theory of natural selection and the Selfish Gene theory. The Theory of natural selection states that those who are most adaptable will survive, whilst the selfish gene theory states that genes are naturally honed towards their survival, otherwise they would simply stop existing, thus leaving those that help drive the gene's survival on are left.
Furthermore Evolution does explain very clearly a line of proggression from basic prokaryotic cell to Human being. I can show you if you want. And it is true, before cells form evolution doesn't occur. People haven't used that as a defence here. All they have said is that Cosmogony and evolution are not particularly related, which for the most part they aren't.


Now we're making a non sequitur. Evolutin has much evidence. I doubt that knowing how or whether abiogenesis will instantly discount evolution as an explanation of adaptation when evidence of evolution is independent of abiogenesis. One might as well say that the theory of relativity is wrong because nobody knows how the universe was created. despite the fact that the evidence for the theory of relativity exists independently of the brith of the universe.


Because you say so. Also you did say that chemistry has produced results, it's just that for you the evidence has to be some sort of magician's trick where toads instantly appear for your amusement.


If you make a bad argument then pre-empting people will challenge it is probably easy to predict.


Despite the fact that you not only admitted to experiments, made a false speculation of what scientits think about abiogenesis but are also trying to make a fallacy of uncertainty.


Your explanation is ad-hoc and relies on a misrepresentation of actual ideas. Your only reason is by misconstruing not knowing everything as not being able to prove anything. It's an argument from uncertainty and a complete misrepresentation of other's ideas.


Well we can credibly claim a progression of common ancestry between us up to a hagfish so yeah...


Untrue. You already mentioned the miller-urey experiment. Argumentum ad infinitum. You say that organisms could have been formed and then decided that this wasn't good enough because frogs didn't instantly form despite the fact that frogs take billions of years to evolve.
You obviously haven't read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis#Current_models
This is probably because you have absolutely no understanding of evolution. You're the guy who said evolkution can't happen by referring to genes for hands, when that isn't how genes work at all.


Please read above.

Yes, really. Life doesn't spontaneously leap out of amino acids. Your confusing life with amino acids. As I recall, those early experiments couldn't even produce protein polymers. If organic life as we know it is to be the end result, there MUST be some way that proteins can form some kind of "container" to reproduce that result. The best possible explanation if you want to go that route is that proteins formed somewhere else in the universe, otherwise given the timeline of life on earth doesn't work out probabilistically. Basically life would have to have begun about the same time the earth was formed, and that just doesn't work. An asteroid collision, for example, would be more likely. That's why "alien" proteins are a more sensible explanation.


On a personal note I agree with you here. I'm just saying I've had this discussion before with macro proponents and this is the argument they'll use every time. I checked it out, and they are right. Weak excuse or not, they will make the distinction between different scientific disciplines or fields of study. Yes, I've heard of a biochemist. I've also heard of a molecular biologist. So if you think that whole argument is silly, then I agree. The "categories," though, may have some overlap--but they are separate disciplines. In medicine, which is a branch of science as well, you wouldn't see a heart specialist to clean your teeth or a dentist to do a heart cath. There are good reasons for the separation based on a scientist's area of expertise and experience. So apart from the facts we DO agree on, be careful not make the mistake of asserting that one necessarily HAS to do with the other since we are talking about separate scientific disciplines--chemistry and biology.


Strawman. Amino acids are NOT life. Maybe I was exaggerating, but the point still stands. Life has never spontaneously formed in a test tube.

If you say it takes billions of years, then you are admitting that it is essentially unobservable and thus unfalsifiable. Alternatives are worthy of investigation. I've even suggested the possibility of proteins forming elsewhere and surviving a collision with earth. That's not observable, either, but it's a better hypothesis than classic abiogenesis.


Well, there you go. You have people providing explanations that are biased by anti-supernatural presuppositions. Bias is very unscientific, wouldn't you agree?


OK, but now you're separating the biology from the chemistry. And that's my central criticism of macro-evolution. If DNA/amino acids/protein polymers/reproductive cells (even single-cell organisms) cannot form, you get no life to even evolve. Without a working origins hypothesis or theory, you can't get even the beginnings of evolution. THAT kind of evolution is nothing but question-begging. You can cry and scream "chemistry and biology have nothing to do with each other," but you can't have life without a precursor. Chemistry has yet to provide a precursor. Without a chemical foundation, you get NOTHING.


Look, ask DC if you don't believe me. That's the whole point he was trying to make. Chemistry and Biology are TWO SEPARATE DISCIPLINES.


You need a better handle on philosophy, then. I'm barely a hack at this kind of thing, but at least I know the difference between ad hoc and strawman. If I've actually purposefully misrepresented anything, that would be straw man, not ad hoc. Ad hoc means that something is either too complicated or requires too many assumptions. Read up on Occam's razor.


So it's unfalsifiable, then? If you can't falsify (test) something, it's not science. It's science fiction. And I repeat: Amino acids are NOT life.