Creation vs. Evolution

[Wayward Son]

sometimes I think I was created to evolve. Others I think I evolved to think I was created. then I think that whichever it is doesn't make a fart in a whirlwind & quit pondering it.

 

[nereas]

I was just driving down the road thinking about the difficulty of clear communication, especially as it relates to this conversation ... I mean after all, most of us are friends here, and I realized that two adjectives NEREAS used illustrate the problem rather precisely. Simple and plain. "Simple English." "Plain English." "Simply read." Interesting phrases. Was the Declaration written in "Simple English?" The language of simpletons? Was the Declaration written in "Plain English" or rather ... was it written in a larger, more robust and formal style? Should the Declaration be read "simply" again, as an unschooled simpleton might ... or was it intended to be read by men (and women) of education, discernment and refinement? Would these two disparate groups see the same things in the document? Would they take the meaning to be the same. And that doesn't even take into account the changes in usage and style in the time that's past. Not everything is as plain as the nose an your face and as simple as pie. Plain and simple, plain and simple ... interesting, no?

Yes, Thal, indeed very interesting. And not just in English. This comes up in Greek and in Hebrew as well.

When I read the "Old Testament" in Hebrew, I prefer to think of the words as very simply meaning what they say. Not convoluted by 3,400 years of evolved dogma and doctrine since then.

The same is true of reading the "New Testament" in Greek, simply, and not convoluted by 2000 years of catechisms.

The U.S. Declaration of Independence is very simple: it was a conspiracy of Free Masons intending to evade taxation by Parliament and the King. The co-conspirators were uncertain and trembling, and therefore they invoked the good graces of their god, in it, and they signed it.

Decades later, whether they all became rich and famous, and then atheists as well, does not really matter. With the subsequent drafting of the U.S. Constitution, they left their god out of it, and instead ratified 10 Amendments, the first of which separates completely church and state. This ensures freedom of religion, the freedom to believe in any god of your choice, or no gods at all. Very simple.

Science works best when you leave god(s) out of it.

And religion works best when you leave science out of it.

 

[nereas]

...I'm in my mid 40's- 44 to be exact, which I don't think is too old to serve one's country. The recruiter, however, did not ask what I thought.

I think you can still probably get into the active reserves, but I would not recommend it right now. Because you might end up having to leave your day job and go to Iraq or Afghanistan and actually participate in the "war on terror."

How terrorizing might that in fact be? It would surely be a huge cut in pay. Factories pay better, with 40 hours per week and then overtime after that.

 

[nereas]

"Are you sure you want to add shoredivr to your ignore list?"

Definitely!

 

[nereas]

Tillman was not murdered, and his cause of death is not unknown, a Ranger squad leader mistook an allied Afghan Militia Force soldier standing near Tillman as the enemy, and he and other U.S. soldiers opened fire, killing both men...

I doubt that this would ever be believed by a court martial. However, it did in fact serve as the national cover story. I saw the TV show on PBS too.

 

[sheck33]

Science works best when you leave god(s) out of it.

How true, why then are ID proponents insisting on teaching ID in science classes as an
'alternative' to evolution theory??

 

[Thalassamania]

NEREAS, you are wacked. You make even the bizarre conspiracy buffs that I thought were kind of a home grown American thing seem almost normal.

 

[deco_martini]

When I read the "Old Testament" in Hebrew

Really. For some reason you didn't come off as a Hebrew scholar to me.

If you could actually read the Torah in Hebrew, you would probably understand how little you know about those books. You would become confused as to why an author's style and voice change suddenly in the text. Before he was calling God "Yahweh" and now he's calling God "Elohim". Obvious redactions and additions would stick out at you. You would probably be compelled to learn more about those books in a scholarly way.

I doubt you actually read Hebrew, it sounds cool to say though. Its a good thing you didn't push it more by saying you read in Hebrew plainly as its written starting on page 1.

 

[Potapko]

Can Random Molecular Interactions Create Life?

From John Baumgardner.
The C-Files: John Baumgardner

Many evolutionists are persuaded that the 15 billion years they assume for the age of the cosmos is an abundance of time for random interactions of atoms and molecules to generate life. A simple arithmetic lesson reveals this to be no more than an irrational fantasy.

This arithmetic lesson is similar to calculating the odds of winning the lottery. The number of possible lottery combinations corresponds to the total number of protein structures (of an appropriate size range) that are possible to assemble from standard building blocks. The winning tickets correspond to the tiny sets of such proteins with the correct special properties from which a living organism, say a simple bacterium, can be successfully built. The maximum number of lottery tickets a person can buy corresponds to the maximum number of protein molecules that could have ever existed in the history of the cosmos.

Let us first establish a reasonable upper limit on the number of molecules that could ever have been formed anywhere in the universe during its entire history. Taking 1080 as a generous estimate for the total number of atoms in the cosmos [2], 10-12 power for a generous upper bound for the average number of interatomic interactions per second per atom, and 10-18 power seconds (roughly 30 billion years) as an upper bound for the age of the universe, we get 10-110 power as a very generous upper limit on the total number of interatomic interactions which could have ever occurred during the long cosmic history the evolutionist imagines. Now if we make the extremely generous assumption that each interatomic interaction always produces a unique molecule, then we conclude that no more than 10-110 power unique molecules could have ever existed in the universe during its entire history.

Now let us contemplate what is involved in demanding that a purely random process find a minimal set of about one thousand protein molecules needed for the most primitive form of life. To simplify the problem dramatically, suppose somehow we already have found 999 of the 1000 different proteins required and we need only to search for that final magic sequence of amino acids which gives us that last special protein. Let us restrict our consideration to the specific set of 20 amino acids found in living systems and ignore the hundred or so that are not. Let us also ignore the fact that only those with left-handed symmetry appear in life proteins. Let us also ignore the incredibly unfavorable chemical reaction kinetics involved in forming long peptide chains in any sort of plausible non-living chemical environment.

Let us merely focus on the task of obtaining a suitable sequence of amino acids that yields a 3D protein structure with some minimal degree of essential functionality. Various theoretical and experimental evidence indicates that in some average sense about half of the amino acid sites must be specified exactly [3]. For a relatively short protein consisting of a chain of 200 amino acids, the number of random trials needed for a reasonable likelihood of hitting a useful sequence is then on the order of 20-100 power (100 amino acid sites with 20 possible candidates at each site), or about 10-130 power trials. This is a hundred billion billion times the upper bound we computed for the total number of molecules ever to exist in the history of the cosmos!! No random process could ever hope to find even one such protein structure, much less the full set of roughly 1000 needed in the simplest forms of life. It is therefore sheer irrationality for a person to believe random chemical interactions could ever identify a viable set of functional proteins out of the truly staggering number of candidate possibilities.

In the face of such stunningly unfavorable odds, how could any scientist with any sense of honesty appeal to chance interactions as the explanation for the complexity we observe in living systems? To do so, with conscious awareness of these numbers, in my opinion represents a serious breach of scientific integrity. This line of argument applies, of course, not only to the issue of biogenesis but also to the issue of how a new gene/protein might arise in any sort of macroevolution process.

One retired Los Alamos National Laboratory Fellow, a chemist, wanted to quibble that this argument was flawed because I did not account for details of chemical reaction kinetics. My intention was deliberately to choose a reaction rate so gigantic (one million million reactions per atom per second on average) that all such considerations would become utterly irrelevant. How could a reasonable person trained in chemistry or physics imagine there could be a way to assemble polypeptides on the order of hundreds of amino acid units in length, to allow them to fold into their three-dimensional structures, and then to express their unique properties, all within a small fraction of one picosecond!? Prior metaphysical commitments forced him to such irrationality.

Another scientist, a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories, asserted that I had misapplied the rules of probability in my analysis. If my example were correct, he suggested, it "would turn the scientific world upside down." I responded that the science community has been confronted with this basic argument in the past but has simply engaged in mass denial. Fred Hoyle, the eminent British cosmologist, published similar calculations two decades ago [4]. Most scientists just put their hands over their ears and refused to listen.

 

[sheck33]

Can Random Molecular Interactions Create Life?

Typical creationist BS. Molecular interactions in biochemistry are not random.

This arithmetic lesson is similar to calculating the odds of winning the lottery....

No it isn't. Yet another beautiful way in which creationists show how ignorant they really are.