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

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Then it's unfalsifiable.

Wrong. Formation of stars take millions of years, formation of mountains take millions of year, even the aging of a person takes many years. That does NOT make them unobservable. We can observe movement of the crust millimeter by millimeter, we can observe millions of star at different ages. Then the laws of physics that have been tested can tell us what have or could or cannot happen.

Abiogensis is falsifiable by, say, proving the Earth is 6000 years old.


Protein is not life either. Indeed there is NO single thing that define life.

We still haven't seen a sherd of substance for creation 'theory'.

That is the same as Dawkin's central argument, step three. Elementary rules of inference tells us that this sort of logic does not work because it leads to an infinite regress. One does not need an explanation of the explanation in order to make an inference.



There have been many theories but so far few results. I personally think the question will be answered but I don't think it has been answered sufficiently as yet that we should slam the intellectual door shut on people for doubting that abiogenesis could be alternatively caused. Lets not forget that Dawkins himself is open to the idea that life on Earth was seeded by intelligent life. Considering the abiogenesis question still open is intellectually viable; doubting most elements of evolution however is not.



Surely we can all agree that the Millter-Urey experiment was an abject failure. It's only real success was in telling scientists that they need to look elsewhere.

I have already given my opinion on Intelligent Design within other threads. But in short. Their falsifiable positions such as irreducible complexity have been falsified. Their science is mostly bogus. What I do agree with is their challenge to the presumption of naturalism; which I see as placing an ideology above research.

No I don't.

AngelRho is attempting to prove creationism and debunk the Theory of Evolution by claiming that the Theory of Evolution is somehow tied to the big bang. Having made his strawman he then decides to attack it.

In this context AngelRho is talking about the Theory of Evolution.

His argument is absurd as mounting a legal defence by trying to redefine murder as giving sweets to children and claiming that you are not guilty of murder because you don't give sweets to children.

You can not study biology past school level without studying some chemistry.

For example - Where does a cow get it's energy from?

It eats grass. - Congratulations that is primary school biology.
Mitochondria in it's cells. - Congratulations you have made it to secondary school biology.

The second you mention ATP or the Krebs Cycle you have to do chemistry.
If you want to look in more detail at how that works you have to do some physics.


At no point do you have to study the big bang to understand the topic and you can not seek to disprove the 'Cows Eat Grass Theory' by debating the supernatural origins of the universe and decide that cows don't eat grass they are instead nourished by the divine love that comes out of Shiva's bottom.

I'm not the one with the strawman, Strawman! I didn't set out to prove creationism. I never claimed that the Theory of Evolution is tied to the big bang. All I said was that life origins and species origins are LIKE big bang theory in the sense that there are too many unknowns to make them all workable as a natural facts. We have never, for example, observed and documented common proto-ape knuckle-draggers turn into humans/apes after successive generations. We have never seen amino acids spontaneously morph into working, living cells. And we've never seen a flash of light and, BOOM, universe.

I'm not saying these things DIDN'T happen, either. I'm just saying that I don't find the evidence as convincing as others say it is. And if there's room for doubt, alternatives should be explored. That's all I'm saying. I can't reasonably attack evolution if it is an observable phenomenon--which it is to an extent. But beyond that you have little more than some cute fossils and speculation.


If you can demonstrate that protein polymers can spontaneously form, then it might be possible for cellular structures to form. My issue is that the probability of that happening anywhere either matches or exceeds the geological age of the earth, making life virtually impossible. Either the proteins would have had to have formed on an older piece of dirt than anything found on earth, or something extraordinary had to happen to start the process. And you know what they say about extraordinary claims... If you don't have that piece of evidence, then we're left to draw the conclusions on our own.

As to what defines "life," I'm referring to any organic life form capable of sustaining itself and reproducing, even if it's a single cell.

Without cosmic evolution there would be no "Theory of Evolution" which is merely the study of biology. Cosmology invokes everything. Evolution occurs in many systems e.g. language, culture, chemistry, geology; it means change. "Theory of Evolution" means change in DNA only.

Exactly.

Proteins does nor self replicate. DNA and RNA do. And cells are not the simplest thing that self-replicate.

Ok simple explanation.

Let us say we are having a discussion about the applicability of Newton's second law to the flow rate of oil through a pipe.

You decide that you don't like this Newton fellow and that the reason oil is moving more slowly is because the invisible pixies are upset and have stopped farting. In order to make the oil move quickly we should paint the pipe pink because pixies like the colour pink and more happy pixies will come and fart near the pipe.

I say you are nuts and laugh at you.

Your insane delusional belief in pixies means that you also believe the universe was crapped into existence by the Great Pixie King after a particularly large curry one night.

You decide that you can disprove the Newton's second law by changing the subject to cosmological origins and correctly pointing out that I can not prove that the universe WASN'T created by the Great Pixie King.

This of course PROVES that the universe was in fact created by a bowel of the Supreme Pixie Overlord therefore the big bang didn't happen therefore atoms do not exist therefore oil does not exist and we should all bow down and worship pixies.

There is not a single thought, or argument, or debate about any topic in existence which can not be 'won' by following the same logic.

OK, but this is nearly all non sequitur. I was never trying to change the subject, nor did I assert that creationism/ID were superior or provable alternatives. Biology is ONE scientific discipline; chemistry is another; astronomy and related fields are others. Abiogenesis remains unproven. The Big Bang remains unproven, but background radiation is evidence that the universe "flashed" into existence somehow and spread out from a central origin. Any number of theories can be derived from variations in the interpretations of the same data. Macroevolution is just the more dominant of interpretations at the moment within the scientific community relating to biology, just as a number of alternative theories exist that attempt to resolve the problems that classic big bang theory has left unanswered.

Also, in re Gedrene's comments: The developments, if we assume evolution, do naturally follow each other since you can't have evolution without the emergence of life forms, life forms without the supported chemistry base from which to form protein polymers, etc., an environment for that to happen without planetary/stellar formation, planetary/stellar formation without the universe, and the universe from, well, whatever formed the universe--we'll say Big Bang.

HOWEVER--Biology is the study of life. Chemistry is the study of elemental interactions. A biologist is the person you might likely go to if you're concerned about the impact an oil spill has on marine and coastal life. A chemist is more likely able to analyze toxic sludge floating on the ocean and tell you what's in it. It's up to the biologist to understand the effects of those chemicals on life. But I wouldn't ask a biologist to prepare anesthesia for a surgical operation. Nor would I expect a chemist to perform the operation.

Similarly, a specialist in chemistry may suggest initial conditions for amino acids to form and perhaps also for protein polymers to form. A biologist is more concerned about what happens to a cell that is already formed and self-replicating. While there is SOME overlap, they are not that concerned with each other. Chemistry is concerned with abiogenesis. Biology is concerned with evolution.

And now we're going in to fine definitions that you didn't care about earlier. Also you're wrong:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proteinoids


No we aren't. We are talking about two very closely related fields: organic chemistry and biochemistry.


Strawman.[/quote]
Strawmen aren't true.

If you don't want to feel stereoyped then don't act like one


You can admit to it rather than hazard at it. Life has never spontaneously formed in a test tube.


Fossils do not have to be alive for fossils to exist. I said that it took biollions of years of evolution for toads to come about, not for cells to exist. You're extrapolating my words to say what you want.


You haven't even tried to look at the abiogenesis page on wikipedia have you? If you studied it you'd know that there are so many different theories that your assertion that atheists find abiogenesis a problem is patently false.


And your assertion that atheists are automatically biased is highly offensive, not to mention a charlatan-like ad hominem atack. You decided that they are biased because they are atheists whilst ignoring the possibility that they are atheists because they have evidence. I don't need this forum plagued by wan bigotry.


You know if you didn't delete half of my response and your response then you couldn't make this argument:
You said this:

And I said that's untrue and explained what is true. No point trying to fudge in your biology and chemistry have nothing to do with eachother rubbish by way of a diversion.


That isn't begging the question for the start. Begging the question goes like this:
God exists. Why? Because the bible says so? Why? Because he exists. I say this because a Jehovah's witness was basically saying that all the time.
Second I wasn't even talking about that at all. I was talking about howyou were wrong about there being no diriving mechanism and that the creation of cells isn't evolution, it's abiogenesis as you said yourself. You were trying to change the meaning of evolution by widening its definition so you could then make a criticism of it.


I think you're psychologically projecting now. Quit being so precocious. I already said that isn't true. You're just trying to tell me what to think.


And now you're you're just openly trying to discriminate against me because of another's behaviour. Fantastic.


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.


I don't need frogs to evolve froma primitive substrate in order to prove abiogenesis and I don't need frogs to evolve in order to prove evolution. I have already provided links that solve the problems you make referred to by abiogenesis. Saying that just because a theory doesn't have evidence is therefore science fiction is a comment worthy of a person who has no understand of how science actually works.

There's no need to selectively quote in order to worm through:

That's not the only way of proving it.

Your shallow attempt to turn scientific experimentation in to your own personal circus is garrulously self-centred.

I'd like to see where you got that from.


I didn't dispute this.


On whose authority and what reason? The Miller-urey experiment itself managed to form many different organic molecules. If anything the experiment was too conservative in the mixture of volcanic gases that might have been present.

Miller thought that he produced twenty amino acids. Many scientsists found that in 2007 by analysing Miller's sealed tubes they found far over 20 amino acids.

Let's be patient DC. Least let them make egregious fallacies first. As for Shiva's bottom that's a great name for a rump steak dish.

I didn't say Cosmology. I said Cosmogony. Cosmological evolution isn't a phrase anyone uses scientifically unless they're trying to make some pedantic argument about the theory of evolution.