Monotheism...

[Oddish]

So because you've been a moderator elsewhere, that gives you dictatorial rights here? Funny... I'm a moderator and admin on other forums, yet I know that doesn't give me the right to dictate what's allowed on this forum.

No. But it gives me an obligation to follow the rules of the forum as I understood them. And I think you know that. You're just casting my actions in the worst possible light. It's called an ad hominem attack, and it will not work against me.

For some reason I'm having thoughts of going to the kitchen and pouring myself a glass of milk. That's about the sum total of what Pasteur means to me at this point.

Ignorance of that magnitude says far more about you than it does about me.

You have just shown that you have no clue what atheism is. Your second sentence doesn't even make sense.

I know what it is. I would wonder, however, if you truly understand what the greater implications of it are. To truly believe that no Supreme Being exists or has ever existed, you have to look at life, the universe, and everything... and declare that it just randomly "came into existence". So YES, I regard that as a fantastical belief. And there is NOTHING you can say or do to change my opinion.

And what is it exactly that science currently debunks?

Pasteur's experiments, since some of us freely admit they have no clue about them, are that life can only be generated by life. Abiogenesis declares that Pasteur was wrong and life can just "happen".

Further, Darwin's theory of evolution (only it's not a theory, it's a fact) runs on one principle: evolution is fueled by death, so it is nonfunctional in the absence of life. Only life can evolve. So, while Darwin's theory calls six-day creationism into question, it in NO WAY backs abiogenesis.

And life is very, very complex, even in its simplest form. Saying that it can form on it's own, at random, is like saying that the Great Wall of China built itself.

 

[Admiral2]

Clearly you're not the only one who believes this stuff, or you'd be a church of one.

Really? Show me who else you know that believes The Holy Spirit is God's power tool!

I never said YOU are going out of your way. But there are many who do go out of their way.

Go complain to THEM.

If you post in a public thread, you shouldn't be surprised to discover that some people discover something you've said that either pleases or displeases them and they may decide to comment on it.

Yeah, people like to use that line a lot in threads like this, as if the mere fact that a poster should expect a response precludes said poster from asking whether the response is appropriate to what was originally said. It doesn't.

The response i expected would have come from Swedish Borg, the poster I was actually addressing in my initial post, and I was ready for anything from "Okay I got it" to "Still more bullshit." Instead what I got was Chaos Descending getting on my case for apparently violating every letter of dogma written since Christ promised Peter he'd be the foundation of the Church and you, who's line is "Hey, it's not you, it's just your stated belief is the bane of my existence and I'd rather complain to you about it than actually solve my own problems." And the thing is, Chaos Descending's comments make more sense to me as they at least are a response to what I actually wrote, whereas you've been responding to things I never said, never intended and have absolutely no control over.

Don't flatter yourself, btw. I'm hardly "shaken to the bone" by what you've said here.

You could have fooled me!

You're not among the politicians who are determined to do an end run around the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (hint: I'm Canadian) and proselytize public school kids as young as 5 years old.

No shit! That's what I've been trying to get through your head!

Okay, we agree on this (except I attended public schools and had to put up with mandatory morning prayer depending on which teachers did it, from Grade 1 until the year I was a student teacher at a public elementary school and was ordered to participate in religious rituals against my will and conscience).

My sympathies, but neither of us can change the past. You should instead be working harder to deal with the future Minister Whozits is trying to bring about.

Oh, please. Spare me the "land of the free" speech.

I wil give the "Land of The Free" speech whenever I please to whomever I please because it's more true for the United States than any other country on Earth, including yours, as you keep proving with your posts. After all, you act like there's nothing you can do about zealous Minister Whozits, whereas I have plenty of options if I want to tell the Education official in my state to go fuck himself.

The last time I was in your country was in 1987, at a weekend Doctor Who fan event, and have had no reason to want to return since then.

Except the ability to tell the Education official of the state you move to (or any politician really) to go fuck himself.

You're making quite a number of unjustified assumptions. I know that the zealots running my province (Alberta, which is in Western Canada) will not have any effect on you or your family.

Yet you still don't seem to understand that my belief as stated will have no effect on your family.

What they are gung-ho about doing is shoehorning their religious beliefs into the K-6 school curriculum, no matter which system the kids attend. This stuff is already taught in the Catholic system, so I assume those parents don't mind. But to proselytize kids in the public system and other systems - some of which are faith-based but not Christian - is unacceptable. It goes against the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that guarantees freedom of religion

And I offered you options for dealing with your gung-ho religious zealots. The fact that you'd rather complain about them in response to my posts is a "you" problem.

(the conservatives in this country can't seem to wrap their minds around the idea that this part of the Charter also means freedom from religion as well)

This conservative understands that perfectly, but again, I have no control over what the conservatives of your country do.

For some bizarre reason, I and people like me tend to feel rather insulted when told that because we're atheists, we are immoral people with no reason not to commit every crime or unethical act imaginable. And this is the kind of bullshit school kids will be exposed to with this curriculum.

See, this is what I mean! Show me anywhere in any of my posts where I stated anything of the kind about you or atheists in general! I have no such beliefs about Atheism. I'm perfectly capable of understanding that not having religious beliefs is as acceptable as having them. I am also capable of understadning that there are some instances in human history when Atheism would have been much more beneficial to humankind than the most fervent zealotry. Go ahead and be an atheist. I don't care!

The only part of your long-winded list of "remedies" that is actually realistic in this situation is what I've been suggesting to the numerous people who are angry about this situation and considering steps such as leaving the province (since you could run a cow pie under any conservative banner here and it would be elected)

So, argument settled. what's the problem?

: Homeschooling. It's what I'd be doing if I had kids who would be subjected to this. Most people think of homeschooling as faith-based, done by parents who don't think any formal school system could ever be "moral" enough, but of course anyone can homeschool their kids as long as they jump through all the legal hoops.

And I have a sister who jumped through those hoops to home school her eldest, and it wasn't about any question of morality, but simply her judgment that it was the best thing for him. And anyway, who cares what the motivation behind it is as long as you achieve the desired result, which is greater control over your kids' education, which it seems to me would be something you'd want.

Religious proselytizing isn't the only problem with this new curriculum, of course. There are other issues that have teachers and parents and many of the general public angry about it. But since we're not discussing those issues here, I won't go into them.

You've already brought up a bunch of stuff irrelevant to the thread discussion. Why stop now?

Y'know, people on this forum like accusing me of taking things personally...

Says the person complaining about atheist insults to a poster who's said nothing about Atheism at all until just now.

like I said, it's not you I have the problem with. It's the beliefs.

Which to most people is like saying "I like you fine. It's the fact that you're breathing that I can't stand. If it weren't for your pesky lungs i wouldn't be bothering you." Stop It! You know damned well people's beliefs are part of who they are as people, so trying to say you only have a problem with the beliefs is bullshit.

If you insist on taking that as a personal affront, be my guest. It's your blood pressure.

I can always take an extra pill. What I won't do is find somebody talking about The Walking Dead and use their posts to rail about my hypertention.

 

[Stoo]

Saying that it can form on it's own, at random, is like saying that the Great Wall of China built itself.

It might if stone blocks were self-replicating systems, and being in a big wall gave those blocks an increased likelihood of sticking around long enough to make more of themselves (when faced with, I dunno, some sort of stone-destroying entity).

and yeah life is complex. That's why it took about a billion years to get going.

 

[Stoo]

It's doesn't make sense to me that a god would be his own son or own father? These are words that normally have a meaning but in this context, they sound like gobbledygook.

I think the word that lacks meaning is "god".

 

[Avro Arrow]

I was hoping that there would be no need for me to say anything here, but this is starting to veer too much into the personal side.

and you, who's line is "Hey, it's not you, it's just your stated belief is the bane of my existence and I'd rather complain to you about it than actually solve my own problems."

I've gone over @Timewalker 's initial post a few times, and it seems clear to me that she was using your post as a springboard to further discussion related to this topic, rather than specifically complaining to you about it. Since she has said that she feels that people are free to believe what they want (in reply to @Oddish ) and you have said that you have no problem with atheists, maybe we can all take a step back from the personal back and forth before it devolves further?

Also, I was OK with the topic straying a little to atheism and religion in schools, since those are still related to the thread topic of religion, and it seemed like a natural outgrowth of the discussion. But, this:

Come to the United States. One of our founding tenets is religious freedom - including the freedom to not be religious - and our president is just letting everybody in right now.

Oh, please. Spare me the "land of the free" speech. The last time I was in your country was in 1987, at a weekend Doctor Who fan event, and have had no reason to want to return since then.

I wil give the "Land of The Free" speech whenever I please to whomever I please because it's more true for the United States than any other country on Earth, including yours, as you keep proving with your posts.

"Who's freer, Canada or the U.S." is wildly off-topic. If the two of you wish to continue debating levels of freedom in various democracies, please feel free to start a new thread, but it's out of place here. Same for coming up with ways to have Adriana LaGrange removed from her post. Thank you.

 

[Swedish Borg]

....

Pasteur's experiments, since some of us freely admit they have no clue about them, are that life can only be generated by life. Abiogenesis declares that Pasteur was wrong and life can just "happen".

You're wrong. What Pasteur proved is that multicellular organisms like maggots come initially from single cells (invisible to the naked eye).

What people meant by spontaneous generation back then is that maggots would appear in rotting meat out of nothing. Pasteur proved that at the origin of that maggot is a single-celled egg. Pasteur overstated his findings but in his defense, he died 126 ago. A lot has happened since.

Modern abiogenesis is the theory that INITIALLY, life appeared out of non-life but that happened 4 billion years ago and it was life in its simplest form. Pasteur wasn't even aware of that theory. How could he disprove it?

What you're saying is like stating that Edison disproved the existence of computers...

Further, Darwin's theory of evolution (only it's not a theory, it's a fact) runs on one principle: evolution is fueled by death, so it is nonfunctional in the absence of life. Only life can evolve. So, while Darwin's theory calls six-day creationism into question, it in NO WAY backs abiogenesis.....

Darwin was an atheist so obviously, he didn't read in his own theory what you're reading in it. Or are you saying that Darwin wasn't as smart as you are?

 

[Swedish Borg]

It might if stone blocks were self-replicating systems, and being in a big wall gave those blocks an increased likelihood of sticking around long enough to make more of themselves (when faced with, I dunno, some sort of stone-destroying entity).

and yeah life is complex. That's why it took about a billion years to get going.

Indeed. He's confusing the idea that rotten meat will spontaneously produce maggots and flies, a theory that was indeed ridiculous and disproved by Pasteur back then with the idea that four billion years ago life in its simplest form appeared out of prebiotic chemicals in primitive conditions that no longer exist.

That's two very different things.

 

[Mytran]

Further, Darwin's theory of evolution (only it's not a theory, it's a fact) runs on one principle: evolution is fueled by death, so it is nonfunctional in the absence of life. Only life can evolve. So, while Darwin's theory calls six-day creationism into question, it in NO WAY backs abiogenesis.

True - the theory of evolution never claimed to explain the origin of life, just the diversity of it.

 

[Swedish Borg]

Pasteur for example couldn't possibly be aware of the Miller–Urey experiment that shows that organic compounds appear spontaneously in an environment similar to Earth's initial conditions.

So it's really disingenuous to say that Pasteur disproved something that happened nearly a hundred years after his death!!!

 

[Oddish]

It might if stone blocks were self-replicating systems, and being in a big wall gave those blocks an increased likelihood of sticking around long enough to make more of themselves (when faced with, I dunno, some sort of stone-destroying entity).

and yeah life is complex. That's why it took about a billion years to get going.

Ah, two arguments I've often seen bandied about by atheists trying to "evangelize" me. It took 2.5 billion years just for prokaryotes to evolve into eukaryotes. Statistically, the odds of even prokaryotes (complete with DNA and systems for survival, ingestion of food, and reproduction) just "happening" out of a random swirl of molecules are effectively zero. As in, not gonna happen. Not in a billion years, not in a trillion, not in a quadrillion.

And the whole "self-replicating system" argument is theoretical and involves one very specific chemical compound. It's funny how your ilk seems to expect me to have the atheist equivalent of a Billy Graham crusade "come to Jesus" moment when you present it.

You're wrong. What Pasteur proved is that multicellular organisms like maggots come initially from single cells (invisible to the naked eye).

What people meant by spontaneous generation back then is that maggots would appear in rotting meat out of nothing. Pasteur proved that at the origin of that maggot is a single-celled egg. Pasteur overstated his findings but in his defense, he died 126 ago. A lot has happened since.

Modern abiogenesis is the theory that INITIALLY, life appeared out of non-life but that happened 4 billion years ago and it was life in its simplest form. Pasteur wasn't even aware of that theory. How could he disprove it?

What you're saying is like stating that Edison disproved the existence of computers...

Differentiate the two all you want, spontaneous generation and abiogenesis are basically people at two different levels of scientific advancement postulating the same statistical impossibility: life from lifelessness. One group acts out of ignorance, one out of desperation, but it's a load of crap either way.

Darwin was an atheist so obviously, he didn't read in his own theory what you're reading in it. Or are you saying that Darwin wasn't as smart as you are?

I'm saying Darwin is irrelevant to this discussion. Darwin championed evolution via natural selection. That form of evolution is fueled by death, i.e. the end of life. Organisms that are not and never were alive are not affected by evolution. The chief force acting on them is entropy, or the natural tendency of order to decay into chaos. Entropy does not facilitate the formation of life, it inhibits it. Evolution is powerful enough to counter entropy, but until life forms, evolution is not a factor.

 

[Stoo]

Ah, two arguments I've often seen bandied about by atheists trying to "evangelize" me. It took 2.5 billion years just for prokaryotes to evolve into eukaryotes. Statistically, the odds of even prokaryotes (complete with DNA and systems for survival, ingestion of food, and reproduction) just "happening" out of a random swirl of molecules are effectively zero. As in, not gonna happen. Not in a billion years, not in a trillion, not in a quadrillion.

you do not know me or what my ilk is.

From primordial sludge, building blocks, amino acids, proteins gain a tendency to make more of themselves with increasing complexity until you have a cell nucleus. Marvellous, huh? Give it the right conditions, give it enough time. Maybe a result of mindless natural forces, or maybe the elegant master plan of a deity. Take your pick. This doesn't have to be an atheist thing.

also not really the same thing as life appearing from nowhere in a flask in lab

 

[Oddish]

It IS marvelous. Too marvelous, IMO, to just be a mere accident.

 

[Doom Shepherd]

Five wrong assumptions made by the people who put forth the "probability" argument:

1. They calculate the probability of the formation of a "modern" protein, or even a complete bacterium with all "modern" proteins, by random events. This is not the abiogenesis theory at all.
2. They assume that there is a fixed number of proteins, with fixed sequences for each protein, that are required for life.
3. They calculate the probability of sequential trials, rather than simultaneous trials.
4. They misunderstand what is meant by a probability calculation.
5. They underestimate the number of functional enzymes/ribozymes present in a group of random sequences.

Of course the ultimate irony those Gomers utterly fail to grasp is that IF their argument actually disproved the possibility of the existence of Eukaryotes, it would also necessarily deny the INFINTELY more powerful deity that they insist created them, because it's vastly greater complexity would mean it is even LESS probable.

In 2014 a group of researchers managed to produce all four components of RNA by simulating an asteroid impact in primordial conditions... How many thousands of centuries SHOULD that have taken, according to creationist math?

And then of course there's the fact that even if one could disprove evolution, it would have no bearing whatsoever on the existence or nonexistence of ANYONE'S favored deity/s. (Conflating evolutionary theory with deistic theory is a common practice of the galactically stupid.)

Because it was clearly actually BELTEMPEST, CAT GOD OF CHAOS who created the universe, not stupid selfish incompetent YHWH, and there is precisely as much evidence for this, according to the Gospel of RAWARRR.

 

[Oddish]

1. They calculate the probability of the formation of a "modern" protein, or even a complete bacterium with all "modern" proteins, by random events. This is not the abiogenesis theory at all.
2. They assume that there is a fixed number of proteins, with fixed sequences for each protein, that are required for life.
3. They calculate the probability of sequential trials, rather than simultaneous trials.
4. They misunderstand what is meant by a probability calculation.
5. They underestimate the number of functional enzymes/ribozymes present in a group of random sequences.

1. I freely admit this, and I explain why: until you have life, you cannot have evolution. You just have random events.
2. Show me a different one.
3/5. With the sheer unlikelihood of something as complex as a bacterium forming at random, it doesn't matter. Even when you factor in the number of atoms in the universe, the increase in probability disappears like a drop of ink in the Pacific Ocean.
4. While my human brain can't comprehend the size of the numbers involved, I know that if the odds against are high enough, an event if effectively impossible.
6. I am a firm believer in evolution. If humans can turn canis lupus into Chihuahuas, St. Bernard's, and everything in between, Mother Nature can certainly do the same. I just see evolution the way I see Lee Harvey Oswald... it didn't act alone.

 

[Doom Shepherd]

4. While my human brain can't comprehend the size of the numbers involved, I know that if the odds against are high enough, an event if effectively impossible.

Ah, but you don't know, (or more likely have been taught to assume incorrectly, without evidence) the odds, otherwise I assume you'd have posted them.

A specific, singular event at a specific time may be highly unlikely, yes. But you ended your assumptions there, and that is why you fail. Your pseudo-statistics ignores the laws of large numbers.*

Say the odds of a person picking a string of numbers "A" out of a bag are 300 million to one. You attempt A. YOUR odds are 1 in 300 million, which seems close to virtually impossible.

But say at the same time YOU are picking from a bag, 1500 million OTHER people are ALSO picking numbers from 1500 million bags.

And then tomorrow they ALL do it again. FOREVER,

How long before ONE of those people manages the right string of numbers?***

Now, say not ONLY do you all pick numbers all the time, but any CORRECT numbers you pull out of the bag, you KEEP for the next drawing? (THAT is part of natural selection. You don't HAVE to start over again from scratch, a fact that once again greatly diminishes the odds against the numbers being drawn.)**

Seems likely that whoever taught you stats never bothered to play around with the birthday problem. (How while the odds of an individual having a specific birthday are only1/365, in any random sample of a mere 23 people, the odds that two will share a birthday are at least 50%.)

*In EXACTLY the same way that anti-maskers ignore the same laws when they blather on inanely about COVID having a"99.whatever% survival rate." <1% is pretty small, but when you have a population of hundreds of millions, even things with long odds happen a LOT, over a relatively short period of time (as we can see from our 562,000+ American dead in just over a year.)

**And these are only TWO factors that massively reduce the odds, which isn't close to covering all of them.

*** The correct answer is "almost immediately."

 

[Oddish]

300 million is a number I can vaguely comprehend, though. It's enough, for instance, to buy every child in the United States a Dairy Queen sundae. When you start talking about the odds of even a basic living thing assembling itself from scratch, you reach gargantuan numbers.

Let me illustrate. Note that I am using randomly chosen numbers, but let's say the odds of an event happening are 1 in 10^150. In other words, effectively impossible.

Factor in the 10^80 atoms in the universe.
Factor in 100 (average) interactions every second. 6000 a minute. 360,000 an hour. 8.6 million a day. 3.2 billion a year. Multiplied by 13.7 billion years. Roughly 5x10^19. We'll round up to 10^20.

So... (10^150 ÷ 10^80) ÷ 10^20 = 10^50.

But 1 in 10^50... is still effectively impossible. And the original 1 in 10^150 is far lower than the odds of anything as complex as life just "happening".

You wanted science? I'm a student of cosmology, astronomy, biology, microbiology, mathematics, and statistics. The Goldilocks cosmos, the orderly universe, the principle on entropy, the complexity of life, they all tell me the same thing. I am sorry, but if you are an atheist, your house is built on some very soft sand, and while I respect your God given and constitutionally guaranteed right to live in that house, I have no wish whatsoever to share it with you. I formally refuse to adopt such a depressing, nihilistic, and scientifically unsound faith. And there is, quite honestly, nothing you can do about it.

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

The unwillingness to change your mind on any topic that is inherently falsifiable is not scientific.
It‘s dogmatic.

And in principle the question of abiogenesis is falsifiable.
All you need is one example of it happening to disprove the impossibility.

If you can show a definitive example of a miraculous creation then anyone here with a scientific mind will be at least open to change their mind.

Ignorance on how abiogenesis can happen is no excuse to deny the possibility of it.
You seem to be stuck in the mindset that it was a singular event we all „believe“ in.

IMO, which I can not back up but hear me out anyway, life on Earth was pretty much a perfect storm situation that took many factors to go right.

Age of the universe (inevitable),
type of galaxy (generally very common),
type of Star (extremely common),
position in galaxy (pretty much guaranteed), rocky planet in Goldilocks zone (until recently a bit dodgy, but since Kepler telescope proven to be very common),
Certain composition of planetary material/water present (unclear how common)
Bombardment with meteorites in early solar system (extremely common)
Rare bombardment of meteorites in latter solar system (have to thank mostly Jupiter for that one, seems to be a rare constellation)

That sets the stage, with basically just one rare factor.
The rest seems to be „just“ chemistry and lots and lots of time.

now we have to get away from the notion that a cell will simply spontaneously form in those conditions.
We have pretty good evidence that the modern cell is an amalgamation of several different systems that adapted to work together really well.
You can break those complex systems down into smaller ones.

Each step down is easier and easier to explain/modell.

irreducable complexity has been debunked for ages.

The fact that we have working models should at least give you pause to think and be open to the possibility of „god did it“ (which has no known mechanism and no explanatory power) to be wrong.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

So is it more probable that life arose by abiogenesis through random events, perhaps in a multiverse where every possible thing that can happen does happen, or a sky fairy waved his or her magic wand and said "Fiat vita"? Bayes theorem tells me the posterior probability of the former is greater even if the prior probabilities are equal.

 

[Stoo]

IMO, which I can not back up but hear me out anyway, life on Earth was pretty much a perfect storm situation that took many factors to go right.
.

Furthermore, if one planet in a million has all the right elements for life to maybe arise (liquid water, a star sufficiently long-lived, etc etc), that would still be more planets in the universe than we can possibly comprehend.

And maybe we did get lucky on earth. If we hadn't, we wouldn't be here to talk about it.

I formally refuse to adopt such a depressing, nihilistic, and scientifically unsound faith .

Then don't. I don't care what god you believe in. The argument is only that god has to stay out of scientific discussions for now, because there is no explanatory framework to describe or predict omnipotent megabeings. Also, that it appears possible for life to have arisen spontaneously from the primordial soup.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

I formally refuse to adopt such a depressing, nihilistic, and scientifically unsound faith.

It's an unfeeling, uncaring, dangerous cosmos and one is doomed to die. So it goes.