If You Are Certain God Exists Why Prove It?

[Aesthete]

Your question did not interest me because it seems like you are trying to define life out of existence.

I can't speak for any other members...

But this post sure sounds, to me, like "I can't answer your questions without overturning my cart of assertions so I'm not interested."
Assertions like "life cannot come from non-life, except for God".

Evidence suggests differently, even if you prefer not to examine the evidence.
Tom

It does tend to negate all his claims that life can not come from non-life if he is unable (or unwilling) to define what he is claiming is the difference between life and non-life.

Try defending a murderer in a court of law that way. "Your honor, my client is innocent, because there's no difference between life and non-life."

 

[Keith&Co.]

It does tend to negate all his claims that life can not come from non-life if he is unable (or unwilling) to define what he is claiming is the difference between life and non-life.

Try defending a murderer in a court of law that way. "Your honor, my client is innocent, because there's no difference between life and non-life."

You're the one saying you know the difference AND you know it's insurmountable. Except when it is surmountable, of course.
But you won't tell us where the line is, or how you know.
Try telling that to a judge. "The evidence fully exonerates my client?"
"What evidence? And when will you submit it?"
"Fully exonerated!"

 

[skepticalbip]

It does tend to negate all his claims that life can not come from non-life if he is unable (or unwilling) to define what he is claiming is the difference between life and non-life.

Try defending a murderer in a court of law that way. "Your honor, my client is innocent, because there's no difference between life and non-life."

You are still evading and throwing out a strawman. No one said that there is no difference between life and non-life. The question is, where is that line. Now try defending a client in court with "I know he is innocent but I ain't gonna tell you how I know. Now render your verdict of not guilty".

You seem to be only making a distinction between humans as life and rocks as non-life with nothing else being meaningful. Such simplistic ideas lead to simplistic reasoning. The theory of evolution does not propose that rocks mutated into humans in one step although the Bible does say that there was only one step between dust and humans. So, in order for you to poo-poo evolution, you need to show how the many-many steps and branches that led to the current proliferation of life in all its myriad forms do not make sense.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Here’s the post:


Later I added:

I still am curious about how the Genesis magic works when it comes to making life. Aesthete, would you like to enlighten us?

Please tell us the difference between life and what you call non life in terms of its parts. Is CO2 alive, dead, alive, dead, alive, dead, etc? And if life cannot come from what you call non life, how does a magic creature do it? Is it just that it’s magic and that magic creatures can do anything they want?

And if no one saw this magic creature make the universe, how do you know it did? You claimed things don't happen because no one sees them happen. Curious your answers but again, not holding my breath.

Your question did not interest me because it seems like you are trying to define life out of existence. Are viruses alive? Whether they are or not has no real impact on the empirical fact that life exists and doesn't come from non-life (that is, not without the power of God).

So your answer is "blah blah blah ... the power of god." Like I said, I wasn't holding my breath.

And you didn't answer how you know a god made the universe if no one saw it. Or how you know that a god made life if no one saw it.

So hopefully you have some appreciation for why you are so utterly unconvincing in your claims about gods and life.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

It does tend to negate all his claims that life can not come from non-life if he is unable (or unwilling) to define what he is claiming is the difference between life and non-life.

Try defending a murderer in a court of law that way. "Your honor, my client is innocent, because there's no difference between life and non-life."

You're the one saying you know the difference AND you know it's insurmountable.

Correct. No one said there isn't a difference. Aesthete claims some kind of spooky magical difference having to do with creatures that have magical powers. I'm simply asking him what that difference is, and I've given him examples of my thinking to get him to give an answer. But he obviously does not have an answer other than it's very spooky so just believe everything I say because the spookiness salesmen have all the answers and it's all written in the book of spookiness. Not very convincing.

 

[Keith&Co.]

But he obviously does not have an answer other than it's very spooky so just believe everything I say because the spookiness salesmen have all the answers and it's all written in the book of spookiness.

Polar-rectangular conversions were difficult for me in A school, but once i understood them, i could explain them to others, manipulate them in story problems. The classmates who just programmed the conversion into their calculators could only do the problems if asked in that way. They were helpless in story problems that, say, gave the answer and asked for the variables....

I suspect Aesthete accepted these statements uncritically, and thus is helpless to explain how one actually comes to these conclusions by any means other than 'authority figure says.'

 

[Jarhyn]

Here’s the post:


Later I added:

I still am curious about how the Genesis magic works when it comes to making life. Aesthete, would you like to enlighten us?

Please tell us the difference between life and what you call non life in terms of its parts. Is CO2 alive, dead, alive, dead, alive, dead, etc? And if life cannot come from what you call non life, how does a magic creature do it? Is it just that it’s magic and that magic creatures can do anything they want?

And if no one saw this magic creature make the universe, how do you know it did? You claimed things don't happen because no one sees them happen. Curious your answers but again, not holding my breath.

Your question did not interest me because it seems like you are trying to define life out of existence. Are viruses alive? Whether they are or not has no real impact on the empirical fact that life exists and doesn't come from non-life (that is, not without the power of God).

Prove it.

There are claims whose facts are not in evidence: that life doesn't come from nonlife. You just assert that without evidence.

See, my own knowledge of O-chem in fact insist that life and complicated carbon chemistries are INEVITABLE when there is no life around to blow away the "fragile" building blocks of it.

It's kind of like flushing a toilet. You have a tank, and the toilet will only "flush" when there is sufficient mass in the tank... The issue with life is that once the toilet flushes once, the tank can no longer refill because it will just drain endlessly at that point: life consumes or coopts the protolife that would "fill the tank" prior to the biogenesis event and immediate proliferation. Rapidly, the carbon out there gets metabolized, eventually something starts consuming the CO2, producing oxygen. Eventually the reactive oxygen prevents the conditions leading to reactive carbon species, and the faucet filling the tank shuts off entirely. It's one of the reasons we have to use a sterile lab: life is just too ready to eat the low hanging fruit of protolife.

The issue is that you are trying to demand that gods exist in this process when the reality is that there is no such need: organic chemistry merely is, particularly near volcanic vents.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Lets see what non life I ate today. Had some soup, non life. Tuna from a can, definitely dead, non life. Cooked squash with a touch of oil and salt, definitely not alive. White and black beans blended with capers and olives with a touch of olive oil, definitely all non life, dead as a door nail. And finally some turkey, definitely dead as a can of corned beef.

So I should be dead, unless my life is being sustained by non life. How can that be?

I think the best way to think about Aesthete's god is to think of a house that someone says is haunted by the ghost of the previous owner who was found dead in the basement. Is the house haunted? Of course it isn't. But our planet is haunted by a ghost called god, according to Aesthete. Very spooky stuff, or just get a life, grow up.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Lets see what non life I ate today. Had some soup, non life.

There was a feedback lettter to TalkOrigins, i dunno, twenty years ago? A creationist chef and his wife had just noticed that everything they served as food came from something that had previously been alive. They were absolute. Nothing in their menu was a non-living, never-been-living component. This proved, they said, that life could not evolve. Needs other life to eat.

The TalkOrigins replies suggested:
Water.
Salt.
Lye (for that Norse way of preserving fish? Tastes like expended uranium? Can't remember the name....).
A couple other minerals.

 

[Aesthete]

Your question did not interest me because it seems like you are trying to define life out of existence. Are viruses alive? Whether they are or not has no real impact on the empirical fact that life exists and doesn't come from non-life (that is, not without the power of God).

Prove it.

There are claims whose facts are not in evidence: that life doesn't come from nonlife. You just assert that without evidence.

See, my own knowledge of O-chem in fact insist that life and complicated carbon chemistries are INEVITABLE when there is no life around to blow away the "fragile" building blocks of it.

It's kind of like flushing a toilet. You have a tank, and the toilet will only "flush" when there is sufficient mass in the tank... The issue with life is that once the toilet flushes once, the tank can no longer refill because it will just drain endlessly at that point: life consumes or coopts the protolife that would "fill the tank" prior to the biogenesis event and immediate proliferation. Rapidly, the carbon out there gets metabolized, eventually something starts consuming the CO2, producing oxygen. Eventually the reactive oxygen prevents the conditions leading to reactive carbon species, and the faucet filling the tank shuts off entirely. It's one of the reasons we have to use a sterile lab: life is just too ready to eat the low hanging fruit of protolife.

The issue is that you are trying to demand that gods exist in this process when the reality is that there is no such need: organic chemistry merely is, particularly near volcanic vents.

Here's a chemist (a practicing scientist) who demolishes the idea of molecules magically turning into life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU7Lww-sBPg

As he says, even if you had all the materials available, you couldn't make a cell. It's far too complex.

 

[skepticalbip]

Here's a chemist (a practicing scientist) who demolishes the idea of molecules magically turning into life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU7Lww-sBPg

As he says, even if you had all the materials available, you couldn't make a cell. It's far too complex.

"Scientist"? I guess so but a really poor one. The "irreducible complexity" argument was attempted by "scientists" in the lawsuit Kitzmiller et al. versus the Dover School District but there were much better scientists that demonstrated during the trial that the complexity argument was pure bullshit based on religion rather than science.

 

[abaddon]

"So, in addition to my chemically based scientific resistance to a macroevolutionary proposal, I am also theologically reticent to embrace it. As a lover of the biblical text, I cannot allegorize the Book of Genesis that far, lest, as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof said, 'If I try and bend that far, I’ll break!'" ~ https://www.jmtour.com/personal-topics/evolution-creation/

Aesthete, referring to another person motivated by the same reason you are, to repeat the non sequitur "it can't happen therefore the bible story is true", doesn't help your case.

The real problem is the huge question-begging claim about the Bible as a true story if science fails to explain origins.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Still looking for a means of measuring complexity.
And an explanation. When is something TOO complex to be an unguided result?
And, how? How does that work? What sort of experiment would one craft to prove that an unguided process with a billion years to attempt it, cannot ever reach a complexity level of X units-of-complexity?

 

[DBT]

If complexity can work fine without someone to make it work, a creator, it's not a big stretch to imagine that the chemistry of life can form spontaneously.

 

[Lion IRC]

Still looking for a means of measuring complexity.
And an explanation. When is something TOO complex to be an unguided result?
And, how? How does that work? What sort of experiment would one craft to prove that an unguided process with a billion years to attempt it, cannot ever reach a complexity level of X units-of-complexity?

Ten thousand monkeys typing random letters for a hundred thousand years and accidentally coming up with a Shakespearean Sonnet is not "complexity".

You're asking...how can I tell the difference between the monkey's unintended output and the real thing. But that's not the test of whether the Sonnet is real or a fake/fluke.

You might as well ask the monkey if it can tell the difference. (Hint - no. It can't.)

 

[ideologyhunter]

At a lower rate of complexity, I could see monkeys coming up with an e.e. cummings poem.

 

[hyzer]

At a lower rate of complexity, I could see monkeys coming up with an e.e. cummings poem.

Well, at least the monkeys would have an easier time signing e.e.'s name as that would be one less time to use the shift key.

 

[hyzer]

Still looking for a means of measuring complexity.
And an explanation. When is something TOO complex to be an unguided result?
And, how? How does that work? What sort of experiment would one craft to prove that an unguided process with a billion years to attempt it, cannot ever reach a complexity level of X units-of-complexity?

Ten thousand monkeys typing random letters for a hundred thousand years and accidentally coming up with a Shakespearean Sonnet is not "complexity".

You're asking...how can I tell the difference between the monkey's unintended output and the real thing. But that's not the test of whether the Sonnet is real or a fake/fluke.

You might as well ask the monkey if it can tell the difference. (Hint - no. It can't.)

If only there were a means of selecting the monkey's output as it got better and better . . . .

 

[4321lynx]

Still looking for a means of measuring complexity.
And an explanation. When is something TOO complex to be an unguided result?
And, how? How does that work? What sort of experiment would one craft to prove that an unguided process with a billion years to attempt it, cannot ever reach a complexity level of X units-of-complexity?

Ten thousand monkeys typing random letters for a hundred thousand years and accidentally coming up with a Shakespearean Sonnet is not "complexity".

You're asking...how can I tell the difference between the monkey's unintended output and the real thing. But that's not the test of whether the Sonnet is real or a fake/fluke.

You might as well ask the monkey if it can tell the difference. (Hint - no. It can't.)

It took "slightly" more than 100,000 years, but it produced one "monkey" with a real intended output not of just one sonnet, but of all the works of W.S. (and all that without a typewriter!!)

 

[DBT]

Still looking for a means of measuring complexity.
And an explanation. When is something TOO complex to be an unguided result?
And, how? How does that work? What sort of experiment would one craft to prove that an unguided process with a billion years to attempt it, cannot ever reach a complexity level of X units-of-complexity?

Ten thousand monkeys typing random letters for a hundred thousand years and accidentally coming up with a Shakespearean Sonnet is not "complexity".

You're asking...how can I tell the difference between the monkey's unintended output and the real thing. But that's not the test of whether the Sonnet is real or a fake/fluke.

You might as well ask the monkey if it can tell the difference. (Hint - no. It can't.)

Evolution isn't random.