Answerer

Well, if it is highly unlikely that bible was written in a symbolic way, for the people of the past are not so clever and so it defeats the purpose of making the bible symbolic. Those who say bible is symbolic are trying to find excuse to cover up their doubts of the bible, which seems like a way of deceiving oneself.

Ed

Quote:

Ed: Granite by itself IS inadequate to produce a statue. You need an intelligent creator. A hammer by itself IS inadequate to kill a president, it needs an intelligent murderer. Jack: And hydrogen and helium need the operation of various physical principles (gravity, nuclear fusion, chemistry) to produce a personal being. But not intelligence: all known intelligence is the end product of millions of years of evolution. If you wish to argue otherwise, please give an example of intelligence that has been observed to arise without evolution (even computer "artificial intelligence" is a product of OUR evolution).

No, that is begging the question. You are assuming what we are trying to prove. AI is the product of OUR intelligence which you believe is the result of atheistic evolution. There is no empirical evidence that the impersonal can produce the personal or that non-intelligence can produce intelligence.

Quote:

jack: Can a hammer kill a President if it falls off a high shelf? Is a pretzel adequate to kill a President? Must it be planted by an Al-Quaeda terrorist to be effective?

Yes, but killing a president is far easier than murdering a president or producing complex living organisms or producing a statue out of granite.

Quote:

Ed: Now volcanic activity utilizing simple geologic laws CAN produce a mountain without an intelligent creator. And in fact has been empirically observed doing so. jack: No mountain comparable in size to Vesuvius has ever been observed to form from a volcano. You're taking about "micro" mountain-building: "macro" mountain-building has never been observed, and is therefore impossible. Standard creationist logic.

Mountain building is a simple lawlike process ie the buildup of molten rock, it is rational to assume that such a process could build a larger mass given enough time. However, living things are much more complex than the piling of rock, and there is nothing magical about time causing greater complexity or order, and in fact usually the reverse occurs.

Quote:

Ed: Personal beings cannot be produced by any known natural laws... jack: Evolution, Ed. EVOLUTION. We already know (from computers) that evolutionary algorithms can solve problems intelligently. Evolution is sufficient to produce personal beings.

While algorithimic laws may produce some complexity they cannot produce the specified complexity of living things or the personal attributes of personal beings. But you also must remember these algorithmic programs are specifically programmed to solve problems intelligently so using this evidence as part of an argument against design is flimsy at best.

Automaton

Ed, do a web search for Tierra.

Ed

Quote:

Ed: No, because more personality requires more genetic information, but natural selection by mutation is inadequate to increase information given that all studies so far show that mutation either maintains the status quo or results in a loss of information. jack: Ed, how many times must I point out that this claim is a LIE? It is not true. It is false. It is bogus. It is a creationist invention. It is bullshit. It is a fairytale. It is factually incorrect. It just ain't so. Geddit?

Fraid not, read R. Bone et al., "Structural plasticity broadens the specificity of an engineered protease", Nature(1989), vol. 339, pp. 191-195.

[ February 23, 2002: Message edited by: Ed ]</p>

Automaton

Ed, the abstract for that article is: So, how exactly does this prove your point?

HRG

I think he is using the idea (Spetner et al.) that information is tied to the specificity of an enzyme: the less substrates it can act on, the larger its information content.

This is of course completely bogus. An enzyme which acts on no substrates at all would contain the most information .....

Regards,
HRG.

Automaton

So if hypothetical enzyme A can only work with an RNA substrate and hypothetical enzyme B only DNA, and C both, A alone conveys more information than C?

Ed

Quote:

Ed: Actually there is evidence that we all descended from one woman, ie mitochondrial Eve. Again as I stated before, the scriptures do not tell us WHEN humans were created. jack: It is inevitable, given the fact of common descent, that we will all have a shared female ancestor at some point (and, indeed, a shared male ancestor). Family trees converge as you go back in time. But neither of these individuals are the first woman or man, simply the most recent common ancestor of all in the group. But the scriptures DO tell us when humans were created. The genealogies clearly indicate 4000 BC or thereabouts (the only uncertainty being the date of Solomon's temple, known to within 50 years or thereabouts). It's amusing to watch the mental gymnastics of apologists trying to wriggle out of what the Bible clearly states.

No, the genealogies are not that definite. The term "son of" can also be translated "descendant of". So we don't really know exactly when humans were created.

Quote:

Ed: Some scientists have proposed that there was a vapor canopy over the earth prior to the flood or that the water came from under the earth's crust. jack: The weight of the water is the same whether it's in liquid or vapor form. You're talking about a surface atmospheric pressure of many tons per square inch in the pre-Flood world, and searing heat generated when it falls. Noah and his family would be crushed, then poached. I suggest you learn some physics.

Well maybe it came from beneath the earth's crust.

Quote:

Ed: Modern linguistics says that there was originally one language, so does the scriptures. The fact of God causing the diversification of language cannot be discovered by studying language alone. jack: The diversification of languages was a gradual branching process similar to biological evolution: there was no "Tower of Babel incident".

How do you know? Were you there?

Quote:

Rim: I suggest you carefully study the actual work of Louis Pasteur before twisting around his actual experimental results. Ed: Well maybe disprove is too strong a word but it is just one piece of the evidence against abiogenesis. jack: No, it isn't. Abiogenesis cannot possibly occur under the conditions in Pasteur's experiment. This is like claiming that the non-flammability of concrete is evidence against the existence of fire.

His experiment was the first step in demonstrating that life cannot come from nonlife.

Quote:

Ed: Your analogy fails. You need to provide an example where something is produced from something else that does not contain what is sufficient to produce that effect. Such an event would disprove the Law of Sufficient Cause thereby disproving my point. But of course, disproving the Law of Sufficient Cause would destroy science. jack: Given that we believe hydrogen, helium and various natural interactions ARE sufficient to produce "personal beings", why should we "provide an example where something is produced from something else that does not contain what is sufficient to produce that effect"? This makes no sense.

Ok, give empirical evidence of helium, hydrogen, and various natural interactions producing a personal being.

Quote:

Ed: How do you determine what is immoral, barbarous and evil? Atheism does not provide a rational basis for making such judgements. jack: Neither does aSantaism, aleprechaunism or adragonism. These are the rules of human societies. Their "rational basis" is that societies need such rules in order to function.

Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union functioned fairly well. Does that mean they were not barbarous, immoral, or evil?

Quote:

Rim: I wonder if Ed really has such low esteem for his God's intellect as to presume that he didn't know before hand that innundating the entire Earth was going to kill an awful lot of animals, some with partial personalities. Ed: No, he probably allowed it to show the extreme seriousness of man's rebellion against God's moral law so that man would never consider doing it again. Jack: The gratuitous slaughter of innocent bystanders during assassinations was known as "termination with extreme prejudice" by the Mafia. Maybe they got the idea from the Bible.

No, gratuitous means meaningless, the death of the animals had great meaning and purpose as I stated above.

[ February 24, 2002: Message edited by: Ed ]</p>

Secular Pinoy

Yep, just like clockwork. There ought to be a forum rule banning the use of this non-argument.

Oolon Colluphid

<img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" /> <img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" /> <img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" />

Did you have a great great grandfather? How do you know? Were you there?

Did Hitler invade Poland? How do you know? Were you there?

Were Mesolithic hunter-gatherers present at Star Carr in Yorkshire? How do you know? Were you there?

Are dachshunds and dobermans the same kind, ie derived from a common ancestor? How do you know? Were you there?

If our only knowledge was about things in the present, if we could not know about the past, then you don’t know what you did yesterday. We base what we know (and can know) about the past on evidence. (Just how stupid do you have to be not to know that?! ) Thus some things are more certain than others, since the effect of evidence is cumulative. We know, for instance, very little about early bat evolution, since the evidence is scant, so what we can say about it is more speculative. Details here and there may not be known, and are being filled in all the time. However, the cumulative effect of all the evidence is to make common descent in general a fact.

Ok, give empirical evidence for the existence of your Big Sky Friend, o faecal-brained one. We know that carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen etc exist, and an awful lot about how they interact. Demonstrate the bare existence of your alleged creator, then we can talk about hows and wherefores of its creation. Till then, you are a mountebank.

Oolon

[ February 25, 2002: Message edited by: Oolon Colluphid ]</p>