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Well, the way I view the marvels of the world, I don't see how some intelligence could be behind it. I see evolution as being the only possible explanation. My whole picture is a rather complex one. If I had the mental energy right now I might begin to explain my view, but alas, I am tired. I have just come home and had to stop over on the way and do a shopping list ..... Ok so I got her an orange - which was supposed to have been an orange bag of slaw .... let's not go there.
Anyway, I see more and more of nature at work. I think I understand the processes and it all makes sense to me. I have said before that I do not rule out the 'something more' but that to me means the possibility of some form of ethereal reality. Or it may come down to a very subtle and complex subconscious working of the mind. I don't know. It may come down to nothing at all or there may be level of existence that we cannot detect as yet.
The way you see it and most of the advanced world I think...
Most of us well understand and accept the theory of evolution, but of course there is a good deal more going on in the universe beyond just life here on Earth. Certainly something else and/or more, but why we need claim God or intelligent design simply because we don't know what we don't know, I find sorely lacking. Fortunately there are lots of people who also think we can do better than that.
Bears destroy Bee nests to get that that food. This is why Bees can sting. They are not creating honey for us, we are just taking it. That is not cooperation.
That is not symbiosis.
Depends on how you look at it, and we'd all do well to watch this documentary that helps better explain what I mean...
There is obviously a complex symbiotic relationship in play all around us, but we don't need to call it anything other than what it is at face value while also continuing to study what we don't yet understand about it. Like how we've come to understand what is so nicely explained in this film. Most not at all understood just a short time ago!
Well, the way I view the marvels of the world, I don't see how some intelligence could be behind it. I see evolution as being the only possible explanation. My whole picture is a rather complex one. If I had the mental energy right now I might begin to explain my view, but alas, I am tired. I have just come home and had to stop over on the way and do a shopping list ..... Ok so I got her an orange - which was supposed to have been an orange bag of slaw .... let's not go there.
Anyway, I see more and more of nature at work. I think I understand the processes and it all makes sense to me. I have said before that I do not rule out the 'something more' but that to me means the possibility of some form of ethereal reality. Or it may come down to a very subtle and complex subconscious working of the mind. I don't know. It may come down to nothing at all or there may be level of existence that we cannot detect as yet.
I hear you about being tired, having tried to explain my views soooooo man y times, only to generate a thousand "What in the....are you jabbering about?????" to one, "Oh, I see."
Anyway, the reason I don't give nature the credence to accomplish what we see on earth is a plethora of explanations (sigh) I'll try once more:
1. A single primitive cell would have to have undergone millions of years of attempts to get to where it is while occupying an environment SO hostile it likely would have been destroyed going out the gate. Reboot the whole process over another couple million years to get to a 2nd cell facing the same hostile environment. Rinse, repeat.
2. Assume a hundred billion cells were able to beat the odds (mathematically impossible, actually) and organize. Then we might get a sea slug or similar. Now it has taken a billion years to beat the odds of dying, organize, specialize and generate life. But that's all we've got--a sea slug. Now we have to get from a sea slug to 5 BILLION varied species
More than 99 percent of all species, amounting to over five billion species, that ever lived on Earth are estimated to be extinct. Estimates on the number of Earth's current species range from 10 million to 14 million, of which about 1.2 million have been documented and over 86 percent have not yet been described.
Let's just say that getting from A (a primordial ocean of 118 elements) to B (elements combining to form a primitive amino acid) to Z (current life on earth i.e. botanical, entomological, animal, etc.) requires a set of favorable circumstances so odds-defying that I don't think the number could be written out, I don't care how many billions of years you give it to try.
I hear you about being tired, having tried to explain my views soooooo man y times, only to generate a thousand "What in the....are you jabbering about?????" to one, "Oh, I see."
Anyway, the reason I don't give nature the credence to accomplish what we see on earth is a plethora of explanations (sigh) I'll try once more:
1. A single primitive cell would have to have undergone millions of years of attempts to get to where it is while occupying an environment SO hostile it likely would have been destroyed going out the gate. Reboot the whole process over another couple million years to get to a 2nd cell facing the same hostile environment. Rinse, repeat.
2. Assume a hundred billion cells were able to beat the odds (mathematically impossible, actually) and organize. Then we might get a sea slug or similar. Now it has taken a billion years to beat the odds of dying, organize, specialize and generate life. But that's all we've got--a sea slug. Now we have to get from a sea slug to 5 BILLION varied species
More than 99 percent of all species, amounting to over five billion species, that ever lived on Earth are estimated to be extinct. Estimates on the number of Earth's current species range from 10 million to 14 million, of which about 1.2 million have been documented and over 86 percent have not yet been described.
Let's just say that getting from A (a primordial ocean of 118 elements) to B (elements combining to form a primitive amino acid) to Z (current life on earth i.e. botanical, entomological, animal, etc.) requires a set of favorable circumstances so odds-defying that I don't think the number could be written out, I don't care how many billions of years you give it to try.
I respect your reasoning abilities about this topic. There are numerous “miracles” that would all have to occur for life to be possible, let alone intelligent conscious life, that a hand-waving dismissal of any mind and intelligence behind it is UNreasonable. James Tour has credentials far beyond any of us on this forum and this is what he has to say about the origin of life. Especially interesting are his comments about time working against the process.
The effect of the efforts in this forum will have consequences for those who evoke them. I only hope they are not too onerous.
Too soon. Why anyone would allow themselves to be convinced of anything by something they read on a discussion forum is beyond me. Not to mention the fact that it's really scary to acknowledge how often it must happen!
Atheism can take many forms, from disbelief in God to the complete rejection of Him because they view Him as an evil entity by virtue of His unwillingness to stop evil. It was Edmond Burke who said: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men should do nothing.” We might be able to extend that to "A God who is able to stop evil from triumphing and does nothing must of necessity be evil Himself."
This idea is repugnant to theists naturally so they have invented all sorts of excuses for God. We've heard them a million times around here: "God's ways are mysterious" "God is honoring man's free will" "It's Adam's fault, not God's". They're all pretty silly and without merit. The only one that may be closest to the truth is that there must be a system of justice in the supernatural world that is completely unlike the one we have here. In God's world people suffering horribly is not bad or evil, just unfortunate. We down here who do the suffering cannot fathom such a system. It seems abhorrent to us.
It would be so easy for me to just stop believing there is a God were it not for this pesky detail:
"The 2010 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica contains 32 volumes, 50 million words and 300 million characters. It requires roughly 1 gigabyte (GB) of disk space to store. A single byte (or 8 bits) can represent 4 DNA base pairs. In order to represent the entire diploid human genome in terms of bytes, we can perform the following calculations: 6×10^9 base pairs/diploid genome x 1 byte/4 base pairs = 1.5×10^9 bytes or 1.5 Gigabytes, about 2 CDs worth of space!"
I hope you got that. The human genome could hold the entire Encyclopedia Britannica and still have room left over for another half of the set. To my mind this kind of gigantic organization of coded information could not have come about by accident. The odds of something like that happening on its own are so infinitesimal as to render the number virtually incapable of being written out.
So I personally can accept there is a Higher Intelligence out there and I can even accept that this Intelligence operates on a morality totally different from ours, but I cannot accept that this Intelligence chooses to foist its warped sense of morality on we who have to suffer under its pernicious set of evil laws.
So I may believe in God but I am under no obligation morally, religiously or otherwise to acknowledge Him or to hold Him in anything other than complete and total indifference. I think by that definition it makes me an atheist who believes in an evil God, strange as that may sound.
I have been thinking about your post for days, thrillobyte, and I'm genuinely curious: If you do believe in some sort of a Higher Intelligence, you must have some concept of what this entity is really like. I mean, if He's not evil, is He good (perhaps in a way we can't understand)? What do you believe about Him and how have you come to your conclusions?
Well, the way I view the marvels of the world, I don't see how some intelligence could be behind it. I see evolution as being the only possible explanation. My whole picture is a rather complex one. If I had the mental energy right now I might begin to explain my view, but alas, I am tired. I have just come home and had to stop over on the way and do a shopping list ..... Ok so I got her an orange - which was supposed to have been an orange bag of slaw .... let's not go there.
Anyway, I see more and more of nature at work. I think I understand the processes and it all makes sense to me. I have said before that I do not rule out the 'something more' but that to me means the possibility of some form of ethereal reality. Or it may come down to a very subtle and complex subconscious working of the mind. I don't know. It may come down to nothing at all or there may be level of existence that we cannot detect as yet.
for me, the only "more" is "alive". its not an intellect guiding us as much as we are surrounded and part of a system that looks like it matches what happens in a cell more than in something not alive. For comparison, the most complex non living thing I know is LHC.
Is the system "intelligent"? that I can't answer that and they are looking into it. I can make a case for yes and for no using the standard model. But its clear, if it is intelligent, it is the same manor that I am intelligent and I can't help my big toe past a certain amount.
Anyway, the reason I don't give nature the credence to accomplish what we see on earth is a plethora of explanations (sigh) I'll try once more:
1. A single primitive cell would have to have undergone millions of years of attempts to get to where it is while occupying an environment SO hostile it likely would have been destroyed going out the gate.
Thank you for illustrating your total lack of understanding.
While the environment may have been hostile to you personally, and to all humans, it wasn't hostile to those cells.
You've also proven beyond any reasonable doubt that you haven't read any science in the last 40 years, because if you had, you wouldn't be making such asinine statements. There are many, many organisms that live on Earth in the most extreme hostile environments, but those environments are only hostile to you, not them. Those organisms are perfectly at home in those environments.
You can't get more ethnocentric than, "Well, if I can't live there then nothing possibly could."
And, for the record, it wasn't "millions of years" it was 4+ Billion years.
Your inability to understand geologic time periods is noted. Life as we know it didn't arise until ~540 Million years ago.
Contrary to your Göbbels-like claim, there wasn't a single solitary cell. There were many.
Had you bothered to read Crick & Watson, the two Nobel Prize-winning scientists who discovered DNA, you'd know life came to Earth from Space, rather than originating here.
Had you bothered to keep current with science, you'd know that 6 months ago a space probe found the building blocks of life on a celestial body, thus confirming what Crick & Watson had been saying all along.
How many generations do you produce in 24 hours?
Some cells produce 24 generations in 24 hours. Other cells produce 72 generations in 24 hours.
The would be part of the extreme overt ethnocentrism I mentioned.
Perhaps you should take a biology course in addition to a zoology course, since you have no understanding of cellular biology.
It would appear you need a course in mathematics, too.
In 1 Million years that would be 26,280,000,000 generations or 26.3 Billion generations with a single cell as the forefather, or I suppose "forecell."
Wanna guess how many cells that would be?
1...2...4...8....16....32....64....128....just keep going another 26,279,999,993 times.
One gets the impression you have difficulty with abstract concepts.
And all the while being bombarded by radiation. Maybe you can't tolerate 30 REMs an hour, but they can.
Quote:
Originally Posted by thrillobyte
2. Assume a hundred billion cells were able to beat the odds (mathematically impossible, actually) and organize. Then we might get a sea slug or similar. Now it has taken a billion years to beat the odds of dying, organize, specialize and generate life. But that's all we've got--a sea slug. Now we have to get from a sea slug to 5 BILLION varied species
It's not mathematically impossible, but you incorrectly frame the argument to give the false appearance that it is, which is very x-tian of you.
Quote:
Originally Posted by thrillobyte
Let's just say that getting from A (a primordial ocean of 118 elements) to B (elements combining to form a primitive amino acid) to Z (current life on earth i.e. botanical, entomological, animal, etc.) requires a set of favorable circumstances so odds-defying that I don't think the number could be written out, I don't care how many billions of years you give it to try.
Again, you're grotesquely misinformed, because you refuse to read any science over the last 40 years.
It's almost as though everything you know was taken from a McGuffey Reader published in 1836.
"Step A" and "Step B" aren't even part of the equation, but you have to crow-bar them into the equation to make it fit your belief system, which is also very x-tian of you.
Too soon. Why anyone would allow themselves to be convinced of anything by something they read on a discussion forum is beyond me. Not to mention the fact that it's really scary to acknowledge how often it must happen!
I look at it like this. If a person is basing what they think about the workings of the universe on not liking christians, I cannot , in all honesty, say that person is working with a full deck.
Can you imagine saying "I am against stating the most valid claims we have about how the universe seems to work because I don't like Christians." or believers?
Thats an indication of a mental disorder.
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Why anyone would allow themselves to be convinced of anything by something they read on a discussion forum is beyond me. Not to mention the fact that it's really scary to acknowledge how often it must happen!
To my mind this kind of gigantic organization of coded information could not have come about by accident. The odds of something like that happening on its own are so infinitesimal as to render the number virtually incapable of being written out. 
