lpetrich

First off, I wish to apologize for not completing an earlier posting. I had wished to ask what opinion Ed has of my derivation of the Jeans Mass. This is significant in this discussion because it provides a very good demonstration that a seemingly low-complexity material (homogeneous gas) can spotaneously produce higher-complexity material (lumps of collapsing gas).

What makes you sure that there wasn't more than one "designer"? If these abilities had been designed this seems like the work of multiple designers to me. And why was none of these designers capable of giving termites the ability to directly digest wood? Or else willing to do so? Those termites would be more efficient termites if they could; they would not have to have lots of wood-digesting intestinal microbes.

Please be more explicit than that. Just because you've made yourself believe in one set of miracles and not some other set does not make those miracles fundamentally different from all the others.

Ed

And it is the one facet that if literally true, would destroy science.

Ed

I didnt say that all genetic mutations are deleterious. I said that they either maintain the status quo or they result in a loss of information, which in the short term may not hurt the organism's survival and may in fact enhance its survival, but in the long term stops macroevolution dead in its tracks. This has been demonstrated in studies with penecillin resistant bacteria. They have a mutation that protects them from penecillin but it is accomplished with the loss of a genome's function.


[b] I never denied that, but given the small difference in size that breeders have tried to accomplish I would think that it would be quite easily done unless there was something built into the animal that is blocking such a thing. And also all those other characteristics that are needed for one minor change to an animal demonstrate the high improbability that relatively minor evolutionary events can occur.

Ed

Yes, I did. And I also recommended reading a real myth or one of the apocryphal gospels like the gospel of Peter (which is a real christian myth) and you will see MAJOR differences. If you don't see the differences yourself you are not a very observant reader and there is not much more I can do for you. I showed in another post how all the similarities of the Mythic heroes with Christ are very superficial and that if looked at deeper the differences are quite significant.

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Ed: There is a Law of Biogenesis, read "Aristotle to Zoos: A Philosophical Dictionary of Biology" by P. Medawar and J. Medawar. Actually YOU ARE claiming that bacteria came from thin air, with maybe a little soup mixed in. lp: That is a reasonable generalization for PRESENT-DAY CONDITIONS. However, in the absence of life, it is expected that an abundace of prebiotic chemistry to flourish, allowing some organism to get started. The reason that such chemistry does not flourish on the present-day Earth is because it has a tendency to get eaten by existing Earth microbes, many of which have no trouble living off of simple organic molecules. IIRC, Charles Darwin had pointed out that difficulty long ago.

Actually conditions are much more conducive to life today rather than the so-called hypothetical early earth conditions, ie protective ozone layer, abundance of oxygen and carbon dioxide, much less volcanism, and etc.

[b] I never said it falsified the earths great age and in fact the scriptures dont give an age of the earth so that point is irrelevant to our discussion. I am not sure what you mean by "geological" evolution but I assume you are referring to "biological" evolution. And in fact there is not an abundance of evidence for biological macroevolution in the fossil record and even less so in the laboratory.

Datheron

Ed, Ed, Ed...when will you learn? I'm not even remotely close to a biologist or a pre-historian, but even I know why your arguments are faulty. This:

<strong> ...is basically a load of crap, because the friendly conditions for us are hardly friendly conditions for life. If you look at microorganisms, I think lp will tell you that oxygen kills a majority of organisms, and UV was a potent source of energy. In either case, I'm not sure how you call yourself a biologist, Ed, when even the more remedial of University introductory astrobiology classes has material to disprove your point.

And no, Ed, I'm not answering any of your posts. I find it quite boring to have to go over the same things over and over again, especially when it's apparent that you're just going to respond with one-liners. As such, I now only respond to you when I find things amusing - tadbits such as the above.

lpetrich

However, all that is necessary for being understandable is for that indeterminacy to follow regular statistics. Which quantum-mechanical indeterminacy does.

How are substitutions and additions and gene duplications "losses of information"? Ed, explain why that is the case; you have evaded doing so for a long time.

Substitutions result in the same length of gene, while the others result in increased length -- which means more information necessary.

I still don't see the difference.

Ed, point that out. I've never seen you challenge my Lord Raglan scoring of him. You've never tried to demonstrate that he scores only 0 or 1 or 2 instead of 18 or 19.

Just because Ed would be asphyxiated in a few minutes if he went back to the early Earth in a time machine does not prove that no organism could possibly have survived back then. That is because there are many present-day microbes that survive under similar circumstances.

In fact, use of oxygen gas is a late add-on in metabolic pathways, as comparative study shows. It is the first step in full-scale photosynthesis, and the last step in respiration -- a step that was apparently invented several times. All the rest is oxygen-free, and in fact, many organisms have enzymes that scavenge wayward oxygen byproducts, like catalase and the peroxidases.

Furthermore, being oxygen-free is helpful for prebiotic synthesis; Urey-Miller experiments simply do not work in atmospheres such as ours, though they have limited success in neutral atmospheres (nitrogen, carbon dioxide, water) and great success in reducing atmospheres (ammonia, methane, hydrogen, water). It had been thought half a century ago, on cosmochemical grounds, that the Earth's early atmosphere was reducing, but it is nowadays thought to have been neutral.

However, hot springs and hydrothermal vents release hydrogen gas, which can make them reducing; furthermore, their rocky structures can serve as convenient catalysts. Thus, such hot springs are a likely place for the origin of the first microbes long ago.

What do you consider macroevolution, Ed?

Jack the Bodiless

Ed:

I've givn up trying to point out that this is a lie, you're obviously never going to listen. However, since we've long since left the real world and entered a realm where truth and falsehood don't matter, I can make up any number of similar "facts":

1. The preface to the Bible is the first recorded instance of the phrase "this is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any persons living or dead...".

2. According to the Gospel of John, the last words of Jesus on the Cross were "It was a JOKE, you morons!".

3. Genetic analysis has shown that not all humans are descended from apes, as previously believed. Many of America's "Bible Belt" fundies are actually descended from a recently-discovered prehistoric American relative of the Howler Monkey.
Domestic dogs show a huge range in size: what other animal varies bwtween a Chihuahua and an Irish Wolfhound between adults of supposedly the same species? So you're attempting to argue that evolution is bunk because there's none smaller than the smallest or larger than the largest. If the smallest was the size of a mouse and the largest was the size of a pony, this would not affect your argument in the slightest, you'd simply move the goalposts.
No, this "significance" is all in your head. Fairies don't exist, no lizards breathe fire, the dead don't get up and walk about, seas don't part to let armies through. No "major" differences.
Evolution is fact, and that includes "macro" evolution. If you wish to pretend otherwise, here is a challenge: give a definition of "macro-evolution" as a process which is fundamentally different from "micro-evolution" and which has never been observed. If it isn't "a lot of micro-evolution over time", then what exactly IS it? (hint: beneficial mutations have been observed, increased information has been observed, speciation has been observed).

Ed

That is basically what they were saying in different words and they were so sure that they were right that they threw in a curse on themselves if they happened to be wrong.

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lp: Also, John makes Jesus Christ stay in Jerusalem much longer than the Synoptic writers do; and in John, JC's temple temper tantrum does not provoke the Jewish authorities the way it does in the Synoptics (Matthew, Mark, and Luke). Ed: You will have to provide some specific verses as far as your first comment goes. And given that none of the gospels is written in chronological order. There is evidence that Christ cleansed the temple twice, probably the second one led to the provocation. lp: I shouldn't have to summarize the Bible for you. And how were the Gospels not written in chronological order? Chronological order the default order for storytelling everywhere that I know of, with departures explicitly indicated, as in flashbacks.

I don't know of anywhere in John where he makes Jesus stay in Jerusalem longer than the synoptics. In ancient times biographies were not usually written in chronological order.

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lp: And it's curious that Jesus Christ is never described as having had two temple temper tantrums -- only one.

While it is not explicitly described that way, there is evidence in the text for it having occured twice.

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Ed: No, it looks more like Josephus, Cornelius Tacitus, Lucian of Samosata, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, Thallus, Phelogon, amd Mara Bar-Serapion. lp: Most of which are ambiguous, secondhand, or controversial. Josephus's reference is often thought to be a forgery. Ed: The only one that is ambiguous is bar Serapion, and yet given that no other known person who claimed to be king of the Jews was formally executed it strongly points to Jesus. lp: Here's a word-for-word quote about that "wise king" from the Mara bar Serapion letter: What advantage did the Athenians gain from putting Socrates to death? Famine and plague came upon them as a judgment for their crime. What advantage did the men of Samos gain from burning Pythagoras? In a moment their land was covered with sand. What advantage did the Jews gain from executing their wise king? It was just after that that their kingdom was abolished. God justly avenged these three wise men: the Athenians died of hunger; the Samians were overwhelmed by the sea; the Jews, ruined and driven from their land, live in complete dispersion. But Socrates did not die for good; he lived on in the teaching of Plato. Pythagoras did not die for good; he lived on in the statue of Hera. Nor did the wise king die for good; he lived on in the teaching which he had given. This seems more like a moralistic fable than real history; Pythagoras was never executed by his fellow citizens of Samos, and that "wise king" could easily have been someone other than JC. For more, see this critical discussion

No other Jewish king that was considered wise was executed by his own people. Solomon died of old age and etc.

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Ed: Josephus' reference to Jesus and his half brother James has never been considered a forgery or controversial. And in the more controversial passage, only the references to him as Christ and his resurrection have been considered later insertions. lp: Ed must only be familiar with the Josh McDowell genre of apologetics; among serious scholars, those passages are much more controversial.

No, Dr. Louis Feldman, professor of classics at Yeshiva Univesity states regarding the passage about his half brother, "Few have doubted the genuineness of this passage." And this man is not a Christian.

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lp: And I wonder if Ed enjoyed reading those references -- some of them view early Christianity as some sort of bizarre cult. Ed: I did enjoy reading them because they made my point and they are evidence of the fulfillment of Christ's prediction that his follwers would be hated by the rest of the world. lp: Some "prediction" (sarcasm).

Nevertheless it was fulfilled.

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lp: Paul had nearly zero interest in the putative historical Jesus Christ. Which has led some to conclude that JC was a myth; see <a href="http://www.jesuspuzzle.com" target="_blank">http://www.jesuspuzzle.com</a> Huh? You're kidding right? Paul stated that his preaching was meaningless if Christ had not historically risen from the dead. He didnt spend much of his letters reviewing Christ's life on earth because it would have been redundant with the gospels already definitely circulating verbally and probably parts were also circulating in written form. lp: Earl Doherty has done a good job of exposing the absurdity of that position in his book "The Jesus Puzzle"; according to him, it was a heavenly Christ that had lived and died, in the fashion of a deity in a pagan mystery cult. Also, the Gospels have been the favorite "source" on Jesus Christ ever since they were written; Paul's ignoring them suggest that they had never been in existence when he wrote, and very likely that a historical Jesus Christ, if any, had been far from the JC of the Gospels.

It is extremely unlikely and in fact irrational for Paul to have emphasized the importance of Christ's resurrection if it had occurred in heaven! That means he never was a living human and never was truly dead if he only lived in the heavenly realm and a resurrection in that realm is meaningless. That position is far more absurd than the traditional understanding! Paul would also ignore the gopels if all the churches were already very familiar with them and the evidence points to that fact. Especially if he felt his mission was to move them beyond the milk and on to the meat of Christ's teachings and this is in fact what he says in his epistles. And as far as Jesus' historicity, the historian Dr. Otto Betz says "No serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus."

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lp: Such evidence does not prove anything about JC; does the existence of mosques indicate that there is no god but Allah and that Mohammed is his prophet? Ed: It does if it is in combination with other evidence. And in Christ's case there is other evidence. lp: The same can be said of Islam; what's the difference?

No, there are major historical errors in the Koran and also allah as creator of the universe can be shown using the law of sufficient cause to be inadequate as the cause of the universe.

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lp: Why don't you study their views directly? The mainstream view is that the Big Bang can be traced back to a quantum-gravity era, from which we cannot proceed any further with any confidence. Ed: Of course they are not going to proceed any further because they will branded as that horror of horrors, a theist! lp: How so? There are much better reasons, such as having to explain where a Universe-designer being had come from. According to the Argument from Design, such as being would have had to be designed.

No, not if that being is a cause and not an effect. Also, given that there is only one primary effect ie the universe, using Occam's razor we only need one primary cause.

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lp: And the most one can cough out of the the Big Bang is some kind of very distant deist god. Not one who inspires sacred books and answers prayers.

No, by studying the characteristics of the universe, ie its diversity within a unity, the existence of personal beings that communicate verbally, and etc., the deist god can be shown to be logically insufficient to cause this universe.

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LP: There is a story of someone in Genesis making some solid-color cattle give birth to spotted and striped cattle by showing them sticks with striped painted on. Ed: That was a supernatural event not a lesson in genetics. lp: How is that supposed to be the case? Ed: From the context, why do you think his father in law got so angry? If it was just an ordinary genetic occurence it would not have alarmed him. lp: Genesis 30: Jacob accepts employment caring for Laban's cattle and sheep and goats, distinguished by being solid-colored; Jacob gets to keep all the spotted and streaked ones that appear in the flock. So Jacob decided on a trick to breed some ones that he could keep; he shows some of Laban's cattle some striped sticks when their offspring are getting conceived. Those cattle have a lot of spotted and streaked offspring, which Jacob keeps for himself, as per the deal. This story is a classic bit of pre-Mendelian folklore called "maternal impressions"; it is not treated as anything miraculous, because maternal impressions are generally not considered miraculous.

You still have not explained why Laban was so upset. If he considered it a regular occuring event he would not have reacted the way he did.


[b] At one time it was thought that language had multiple origins.

lpetrich

Which is atypical behavior of lynch mobs; the usual view of lynch mobbers is that their victims deserved their fate, not that the lynching is a black mark on their records.

Says who, Ed?

What evidence? Temple temper tantrums were thought worth writing about; if JC had had two such TTT's, then that would have been in all the Gospels, not none.

Read the actual letter. It contains lots of unhistorical things, and the execution of some "wise king" could have been one of them.

Which is consistent with the view of Christ as being a divinity without an earthly career.

A laughable view; he would have thought the Gospels worth discussing if he had heard of them; I wonder if Ed would enjoy it if his pastor took that approach to the Gospels.

What kind of argument is that? There is always a first time.

But I would not be surprised if Mr. Betz considers much of the Gospels to be mythical. The Virgin Birth reminds me of the numerous pagan divine impregnations, for example.

Being omnipotent, omniscient, and sentient is enough capability for creating a Universe.

Also, the Bible also has historical errors; check the Biblical Errancy section of this site.

Correction: only one primary effect directly accessible to us. Our Universe could be a bubble in a super-Universe.

Ed, you have done nothing to demonstrate your position other than make unsupported assertions of impossibility.

OTOH, the idea of creation by a deist god suggests something interesting about that entity: that entity must be capable of easily comprehending quantum gravity and elementary-particle physics. So that entity must be very unlike us.

Most cows aren't shown spotted sticks when they are conceiving calves.

By who?

Ed

See my post where I show the similarities are superficial.

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Ed: I didnt say that they are absolute proof. They are just one part of the huge obstacle against abiogenesis. There are major problems with most of the origin of life scenarios. lp: I will concede that there is much that is poorly understood in this field. But I don't think that abiogenesis has been convincingly ruled out, at least not yet.

The key words are "not yet", it is looking weaker every year.

[b] There is more evidence that the gospels are historically accurate than there is for abiogenesis.