Moved Another step towards answering the question of life's origins - religion

[Loren Pechtel]

There's that word again.
reCREATE

Of course we, as agents, can imitate a process which involves agency.

Yesterday I created a pile of dirt.
Therefore should I conclude that it's impossible for a pile of dirt to arise without the actions of a conscious entity?

No. There's no necessary logical inference to conclude that.

I also created a hole in the ground.

Should I likewise conclude that holes in the ground require the actions of a conscious entity? The lunar craters are all from a deity playing spitball?

No. There's no necessary logical inference to conclude that.

Then why do you say that other things we can do must be the act of an intelligent entity and can't happen naturally? "Created" can be natural or by the act of an intelligent entity.

 

[Lion IRC]

I always defer to science.

No you don't.

Yes I do.

 

[pood]

I always defer to science.

No you don't.

Yes I do.

So you defer to science when it finds no evidence of God?

 

[Lion IRC]

My baby brother died from throat cancer. Yes, he smoked. Also Fuck you very much.

I didn't bring up the topic of cancer. (It's not really on topic but folks seem keen to argue about theodicies wherever I go.)

Now, there's lots of places in this forum where people say some pretty brutal stuff that can be triggering depending on your previous or current life experience in the real world outside this forum.

If the topic of cancer is extremely upsetting to you because of your baby brother, you have to put yourself first and stop reading when you see the topic is being discussed. (It's been popping up in this thread very frequently.)

I don't want to discuss your baby brother. And I'm not sure why you have chosen to bring his death into the discussion.

 

[Lion IRC]

So you defer to science when it finds no evidence of God?

Science can and does find plenty of evidence for God.

 

[Lion IRC]

Then why do you say that other things we can do must be the act of an intelligent entity and can't happen naturally? "Created" can be natural or by the act of an intelligent entity.

You're gonna have to show me where I said that. Use the quote function.

I can show you plenty of places where I said the opposite. (Want me to quote me?)

Humans are natural. They can copy/mimic the act of deliberate creation/causation.

 

[TomC]

So you defer to science when it finds no evidence of God?

Science can and does find plenty of evidence for God.

Maybe finds plenty that you consider evidence for God.
That's a huge part of the reason that community consensus is such an important part of the scientific method. You might find evidence for your God image, but without broad consensus it's not science. That's why publishing results is so crucial.
Tom

 

[bilby]

Humans are natural.

Yes. Yes they are. No supernatural "creators" required.

They can copy/mimic the act of deliberate creation/causation.

Copy or mimic what? To what non-human act(s) of deliberate causation is a human referring as his template or guide when he causes something?

When did any human create anything? Creation ex nihilo is a violation of the first law of thermodynamics; It has never been observed, much less copied or mimicked.

Using a less strict definition of "create" here is equivocation; When religionists say that the universe was created by their gods, they are attempting to explain why there is something, and not nothing. If by "create" they were to mean "made using existing raw materials", they would have failed to address the question at all; While if they do (as seems more likely in this context) in fact mean "caused to exist ex nihilo", they are describing an event no human has ever observed, much less copied or mimicked.

 

[pood]

So you defer to science when it finds no evidence of God?

Science can and does find plenty of evidence for God.

Oh, it does? But it doesn’t find evidence that God is responsible for bad stuff, is that it? And what about good stuff? Does science find evidence that God is responsible for good stuff, but not for bad stuff?

Please list this evidence, which exists entirely in your own mind. Your fantasies should be fascinating.

 

[pood]

My baby brother died from throat cancer. Yes, he smoked. Also Fuck you very much.

I didn't bring up the topic of cancer. (It's not really on topic but folks seem keen to argue about theodicies wherever I go.)

Now, there's lots of places in this forum where people say some pretty brutal stuff that can be triggering depending on your previous or current life experience in the real world outside this forum.

If the topic of cancer is extremely upsetting to you because of your baby brother, you have to put yourself first and stop reading when you see the topic is being discussed. (It's been popping up in this thread very frequently.)

I don't want to discuss your baby brother. And I'm not sure why you have chosen to bring his death into the discussion.

Stop bullshitting and just tell us please whether God is responsible for brain cancer in children, and if not, why not.

 

[Elixir]

So you defer to science when it finds no evidence of God?

Science can and does find plenty of evidence for God.

If I’m a really good boy would you share one tiny bit of it with me?

 

[lpetrich]

The argument from design, that certain features of our Universe must have had a designer that is not any of us human beings, is an old one, but it has problems.

How does one distinguish a designed feature from a designless feature? Order sometimes seems like evidence of design, but there are oodles of examples of order emerging without a designer being very apparent.

There is also the problem of what one may plausibly infer about the designer(s) of these features. For human designers, one regularly infers that they are multiple, finite in capability, and fallible. Identifying multiple designers is routinely done with handwriting, art styles and writing styles. That is not infallible, because it is always possible to use some other style, but it is usually reliable.

So if one was to infer design of some natural feature, out of analogy with human designers, one ought to conclude that the designers are multiple, finite, and fallible, also in analogy with human designers, and far from single and omnimax.

Furthermore, design can be a mechanism of evolution: genetic engineering, and one that can coexist with natural selection.

 

[Jarhyn]

if one was to infer design of some natural feature, out of analogy with human designers, one ought to conclude that the designers are multiple, finite, and fallible, also in analogy with human designers, and far from single and omnimax.

This is I think the most important part here... That there's the disconnect from the realization "humans could have done this" and that jump to "therefore Omnimax".

 

[Elixir]

Furthermore, design can be a mechanism of evolution: genetic engineering, and one that can coexist with natural selection.

I like that, having long said that if there is a Creator, its greatest creation was evolution.

 

[Lion IRC]

...there are oodles of examples of order emerging without a designer being very apparent.

'Emergence' of the gaps.

 

[lostone]

If RNA can be created in a lab, it can also occur naturally

 

[Lion IRC]

Creating it in the lab is natural.

 

[Jarhyn]

Creating it in the lab is natural.

You fundamentally fail to understand what we mean by "creation". "Creation" in the usage you prefer does not apply here.

You are discussing "creation through the provision of an evolving system with a designed single degree of freedom, such that there is a single, known and knowable outcome."

This "creation" in a lab is "creation through the provision of an evolving system with a WIDE degree of freedoms such that there is no single, known, knowable outcome for the purposes of determining a the range of outcomes for that initial state."

One is turning a dice face up and saying "the number is 5" and ascertaining from this distribution that a 20 sided dice always == 5, and the other is actually throwing it in the box, turning the box in a way controlled by the nuclear decay of some radioactive shit, and seeing that the result is an unpredictable value between 1 and 20.

It's just an observation of "what happens when this stuff is configured this way". It's not creation in terms of wanting a result, just acceptance of whatever result is observed.

In short, lion, you are conflating two different definitions of the word "create".

There have been scientists who have done "special creation" in a lab vis a vis designing a whole cell and it's DNA and letting the chemical system progress through metabolic cycles, but this is more a validation of the statement that there is nothing magical, no soul that humans cannot create or force into existence. It was done to answer a different question than this.

The experiment of the OP was to see if the chaos and environment of the earth supported abiogenesis.

technically, we didn't create the outcome, we created the initial condition, a condition which was apparently invented by chaos, not by planning. It was that condition that was then observed "creating" the outcome, with our hands fully away from the tiller of that ship.

 

[Elixir]

What Jarhyn said.

Creating it in the lab is natural.

Then humans are natural. Duh.

 

[Swammerdami]

FWIW, I find most of this discussion, out of context, to be fruitless. Is it the Christian God whose existence is being disputed? Or just an arbitrary Creator?

Without specific properties, a Creator God is a meaningless abstraction. Or just a grammatical convenience, much like "It" in the English sentence "It is raining."