Why there almost certainly is No God!!

[kawilt]

World's Top Scientists Ponder: What If The Whole Universe Is, Like, One Huge Atom?

http://www.theonion.com/articles/worlds-top-scientists-ponder-what-if-the-whole-uni,712/

The universe-as-possible-giant-atom theory originated in May with a team of Cal Tech particle physicists, who developed the theory late one night while sitting around on a couch in the Physics Department's cyclotron and foosball facility, "just shooting the shit." The theory, which was reportedly conceived after the group became highly engrossed in ceiling-tile patterns for several minutes while waiting for a pizza to arrive, is said to be so advanced that only a few scientists in the world even have their heads together enough to really, you know, deal. Yet even among this elite group, many are said to be "seriously thrown for a loop" by its implications.

Well...shit.. This is the way I have always described the universe to my daughter while she was growing up. Maybe 30 years or more ago. Their a little late!

 

[CensoredBoardsSuck]

Well...shit.. This is the way I have always described the universe to my daughter while she was growing up. Maybe 30 years or more ago. Their a little late!

You should have published, Kawilt. You might have won the Nobel Prize.

I haven't read the paper but here's some speculation: Perhaps stars are the nucleus of atoms and the planets are the electrons. IOW, solar systems are atoms that make up compounds, i.e., galaxies. And the galaxies together make up some kind of matter, or maybe even a living organism.

 

[kawilt]

You should have published, Kawilt. You might have won the Nobel Prize.

I haven't read the paper but here's some speculation: Perhaps stars are the nucleus of atoms and the planets are the electrons. IOW, solar systems are atoms that make up compounds, i.e., galaxies. And the galaxies together make up some kind of matter, or maybe even a living organism.

My daughter was in a parochial school and reading the bible a lot. She was beginning to ask me a questions that I couldn't answer. So I told her know one really knows, but maybe God is the universe, maybe God is everything and we are just inside and a part of God, sort of like the atoms and molecules that make up everything around us. At this point I'm beginning to suspect we may be a cancer.
By the way, my daughter is rather an atheist, and can argue scripture with the best of them.

 

[CensoredBoardsSuck]

So I told her know one really knows, but maybe God is the universe, maybe God is everything and we are just inside and a part of God, sort of like the atoms and molecules that make up everything around us.

Einstein was reportedly a pantheist.

At this point I'm beginning to suspect we may be a cancer.

You would. smh

 

[greenddog1]

If we weren't created by God,then
What is the reAl answer, I keep hearing different viewpoints but no matter of fact.

Facts? What are the facts that prove that God indeed created man. Written testimonials from individuals that spoke to God and recorded deeds, centuries before they were even alive? Your belief in God is solely based on faith not facts.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Researchers may have solved origin-of-life conundrum
http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2015/03/researchers-may-have-solved-origin-life-conundrum

The origin of life on Earth is a set of paradoxes. In order for life to have gotten started, there must have been a genetic molecule—something like DNA or RNA—capable of passing along blueprints for making proteins, the workhorse molecules of life. But modern cells can’t copy DNA and RNA without the help of proteins themselves.

To make matters more vexing, none of these molecules can do their jobs without fatty lipids, which provide the membranes that cells need to hold their contents inside. And in yet another chicken-and-egg complication, protein-based enzymes (encoded by genetic molecules) are needed to synthesize lipids.

Now, researchers say they may have solved these paradoxes.

Chemists report today that a pair of simple compounds, which would have been abundant on early Earth, can give rise to a network of simple reactions that produce the three major classes of biomolecules—nucleic acids, amino acids, and lipids—needed for the earliest form of life to get its start. Although the new work does not prove that this is how life started, it may eventually help explain one of the deepest mysteries in modern science.

“RNA World” proponents, for example suggest RNA may have been the pioneer; not only is it able to carry genetic information, but it can also serve as a proteinlike chemical catalyst, speeding up certain reactions.

Metabolism-first proponents, meanwhile, have argued that simple metal catalysts, as opposed to advanced protein-based enzymes, may have created a soup of organic building blocks that could have given rise to the other biomolecules.

The RNA World hypothesis got a big boost in 2009.

Chemists led by John Sutherland at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom reported that they had discovered that relatively simple precursor compounds called acetylene and formaldehyde could undergo a sequence of reactions to produce two of RNA’s four nucleotide building blocks, showing a plausible route to how RNA could have formed on its own—without the need for enzymes—in the primordial soup. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7244/full/nature08013.html

Critics, though, pointed out that acetylene and formaldehyde are still somewhat complex molecules themselves. That begged the question of where they came from.

For their current study, Sutherland and his colleagues set out to work backward from those chemicals to see if they could find a route to RNA from even simpler starting materials.

They succeeded.

In the current issue of Nature Chemistry, Sutherland’s team reports that it created nucleic acid precursors starting with just hydrogen cyanide (HCN), hydrogen sulfide (H2S), and ultraviolet (UV) light. http://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nchem.2202.html

What is more, Sutherland says, the conditions that produce nucleic acid precursors also create the starting materials needed to make natural amino acids and lipids. That suggests a single set of reactions could have given rise to most of life’s building blocks simultaneously.

 

[kawilt]

The Origin of Life: An RNA World? - Evolution News & Views

..a week or two ago JonathanM made a post on [Uncommon Descent] that claimed various half-baked problems for the natural origin of life, one of which was that the assembly of RNA was difficult, because nature would have to separately [sic] sugars, bases, and phosphates separately, and then assemble them. The only problem with this argument, whatever its original merits, is that it was directly falsified by the Sutherland Group's famous experiments in 2009. Oops! I pointed this out on UD, and although it took some tooth-pulling, got some UD people to more-or-less admit that JonathanM made a mistake there. JonathanM, though, seems to be acting like his sure-thing takedown of the origin of life from a few weeks ago never happened.

I guess their still trying!

 

[greenddog1]

Researchers may have solved origin-of-life conundrum
http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2015/03/researchers-may-have-solved-origin-life-conundrum

The origin of life on Earth is a set of paradoxes. In order for life to have gotten started, there must have been a genetic molecule—something like DNA or RNA—capable of passing along blueprints for making proteins, the workhorse molecules of life. But modern cells can’t copy DNA and RNA without the help of proteins themselves.

To make matters more vexing, none of these molecules can do their jobs without fatty lipids, which provide the membranes that cells need to hold their contents inside. And in yet another chicken-and-egg complication, protein-based enzymes (encoded by genetic molecules) are needed to synthesize lipids.

Now, researchers say they may have solved these paradoxes.

Chemists report today that a pair of simple compounds, which would have been abundant on early Earth, can give rise to a network of simple reactions that produce the three major classes of biomolecules—nucleic acids, amino acids, and lipids—needed for the earliest form of life to get its start. Although the new work does not prove that this is how life started, it may eventually help explain one of the deepest mysteries in modern science.

“RNA World” proponents, for example suggest RNA may have been the pioneer; not only is it able to carry genetic information, but it can also serve as a proteinlike chemical catalyst, speeding up certain reactions.

Metabolism-first proponents, meanwhile, have argued that simple metal catalysts, as opposed to advanced protein-based enzymes, may have created a soup of organic building blocks that could have given rise to the other biomolecules.

The RNA World hypothesis got a big boost in 2009.

Chemists led by John Sutherland at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom reported that they had discovered that relatively simple precursor compounds called acetylene and formaldehyde could undergo a sequence of reactions to produce two of RNA’s four nucleotide building blocks, showing a plausible route to how RNA could have formed on its own—without the need for enzymes—in the primordial soup. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7244/full/nature08013.html

Critics, though, pointed out that acetylene and formaldehyde are still somewhat complex molecules themselves. That begged the question of where they came from.

For their current study, Sutherland and his colleagues set out to work backward from those chemicals to see if they could find a route to RNA from even simpler starting materials.

They succeeded.

In the current issue of Nature Chemistry, Sutherland’s team reports that it created nucleic acid precursors starting with just hydrogen cyanide (HCN), hydrogen sulfide (H2S), and ultraviolet (UV) light. http://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nchem.2202.html

What is more, Sutherland says, the conditions that produce nucleic acid precursors also create the starting materials needed to make natural amino acids and lipids. That suggests a single set of reactions could have given rise to most of life’s building blocks simultaneously.

I speed read this article so I may have missed the answer to my own question, which is: Why haven't new forms of life ( human forms) continued to be created? Was it a one time thing or a series of perfect situations similar to the big bang theory involving some unique atmospheric spark that has not been repeated since? Why did it stop?

This is a question we enjoy to to try to solve, but I doubt if a 100% answer will ever be produced. I'm just happy be here for the ride and it's been a hell'va ride!

 

[kawilt]

I agree gdog... A hell'va ride. All this is so over my humble head. If there were some unique atmospheric spark involved in the big bang theory, I would think there would have to be somewhere for the spark to happen in the first place.

 

[greenddog1]

So over my head as well.
Well, I've still got my own spark and for the time being that's good enough for me!

 

[WesternWay]

America, founded in secularism as a beacon of eighteenth century enlightenment, is becoming the victim of religious politics, a circumstance that would have horrified the Founding Fathers. The political ascendancy today values embryonic cells over adult people. It obsesses about gay marriage, ahead of genuinely important issues that actually make a difference to the world. It gains crucial electoral support from a religious constituency whose grip on reality is so tenuous that they expect to be 'raptured' up to heaven, leaving their clothes as empty as their minds. More extreme specimens actually long for a world war, which they identify as the 'Armageddon' that is to presage the Second Coming. Sam Harris, in his new short book, Letter to a Christian Nation, hits the bull's-eye as usual:

It is, therefore, not an exaggeration to say that if the city of New York were suddenly replaced by a ball of fire, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver-lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen: the return of Christ . . .Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government actually believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this, purely on the basis of religious dogma, should be considered a moral and ?intellectual emergency.
Does Bush check the Rapture Index daily, as Reagan did his stars? We don't know, but would anyone be surprised?

My scientific colleagues have additional reasons to declare emergency. Ignorant and absolutist attacks on stem cell research are just the tip of an iceberg. What we have here is nothing less than a global assault on rationality, and the Enlightenment values that inspired the founding of this first and greatest of secular republics. Science education - and hence the whole future of science in this country - is under threat. Temporarily beaten back in a Pennsylvania court, the 'breathtaking inanity' (Judge John Jones's immortal phrase) of 'intelligent design' continually flares up in local bush-fires. Dowsing them is a time-consuming but important responsibility, and scientists are finally being jolted out of their complacency. For years they quietly got on with their science, lamentably underestimating the creationists who, being neither competent nor interested in science, attended to the serious political business of subverting local school boards. Scientists, and intellectuals generally, are now waking up to the threat from the American Taliban.


Scientists divide into two schools of thought over the best tactics with which to face the threat. The Neville Chamberlain 'appeasement' school focuses on the battle for evolution. Consequently, its members identify fundamentalism as the enemy, and they bend over backwards to appease 'moderate' or 'sensible' religion (not a difficult task, for bishops and theologians despise fundamentalists as much as scientists do). Scientists of the Winston Churchill school, by contrast, see the fight for evolution as only one battle in a larger war: a looming war between supernaturalism on the one side and rationality on the other. For them, bishops and theologians belong with creationists in the supernatural camp, and are not to be appeased.

The Chamberlain school accuses Churchillians of rocking the boat to the point of muddying the waters. The philosopher of science Michael Ruse wrote:

We who love science must realize that the enemy of our enemies is our friend. Too often evolutionists spend time insulting would-be allies. This is especially true of secular evolutionists. Atheists spend more time running down sympathetic Christians than they do countering ?creationists. When John Paul II wrote a letter endorsing Darwinism, Richard Dawkins's response was simply that the pope was a hypocrite, that he could not be genuine about science and that Dawkins himself simply preferred an honest fundamentalist.
A recent article in the New York Times by Cornelia Dean quotes the astronomer Owen Gingerich as saying that, by simultaneously advocating evolution and atheism, 'Dr Dawkins "probably single-handedly makes more converts to intelligent design than any of the leading intelligent design theorists".' This is not the first, not the second, not even the third time this plonkingly witless point has been made (and more than one reply has aptly cited Uncle Remus: "Oh please please Brer Fox, don't throw me in that awful briar patch").

Chamberlainites are apt to quote the late Stephen Jay Gould's 'NOMA' - 'non-overlapping magisteria'. Gould claimed that science and true religion never come into conflict because they exist in completely separate dimensions of discourse:

To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth millionth time (from college bull sessions to learned treatises): science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can't comment on it as scientists.
This sounds terrific, right up until you give it a moment's thought. You then realize that the presence of a creative deity in the universe is clearly a scientific hypothesis. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more momentous hypothesis in all of science. A universe with a god would be a completely different kind of universe from one without, and it would be a scientific difference. God could clinch the matter in his favour at any moment by staging a spectacular demonstration of his powers, one that would satisfy the exacting standards of science. Even the infamous Templeton Foundation recognized that God is a scientific hypothesis - by funding double-blind trials to test whether remote prayer would speed the recovery of heart patients. It didn't, of course, although a control group who knew they had been prayed for tended to get worse (how about a class action suit against the Templeton Foundation?) Despite such well-financed efforts, no evidence for God's existence has yet appeared.

To see the disingenuous hypocrisy of religious people who embrace NOMA, imagine that forensic archeologists, by some unlikely set of circumstances, discovered DNA evidence demonstrating that Jesus was born of a virgin mother and had no father. If NOMA enthusiasts were sincere, they should dismiss the archeologists' DNA out of hand: "Irrelevant. Scientific evidence has no bearing on theological questions. Wrong magisterium." Does anyone seriously imagine that they would say anything remotely like that? You can bet your boots that not just the fundamentalists but every professor of theology and every bishop in the land would trumpet the archeological evidence to the skies.

Either Jesus had a father or he didn't. The question is a scientific one, and scientific evidence, if any were available, would be used to settle it. The same is true of any miracle - and the deliberate and intentional creation of the universe would have to have been the mother and father of all miracles. Either it happened or it didn't. It is a fact, one way or the other, and in our state of uncertainty we can put a probability on it - an estimate that may change as more information comes in. Humanity's best estimate of the probability of divine creation dropped steeply in 1859 when The Origin of Species was published, and it has declined steadily during the subsequent decades, as evolution consolidated itself from plausible theory in the nineteenth century to established fact today.

The Chamberlain tactic of snuggling up to 'sensible' religion, in order to present a united front against ('intelligent design') creationists, is fine if your central concern is the battle for evolution. That is a valid central concern, and I salute those who press it, such as Eugenie Scott in Evolution versus Creationism. But if you are concerned with the stupendous scientific question of whether the universe was created by a supernatural intelligence or not, the lines are drawn completely differently. On this larger issue, fundamentalists are united with 'moderate' religion on one side, and I find myself on the other.

Of course, this all presupposes that the God we are talking about is a personal intelligence such as Yahweh, Allah, Baal, Wotan, Zeus or Lord Krishna. If, by 'God', you mean love, nature, goodness, the universe, the laws of physics, the spirit of humanity, or Planck's constant, none of the above applies. An American student asked her professor whether he had a view about me. 'Sure,' he replied. 'He's positive science is incompatible with religion, but he waxes ecstatic about nature and the universe. To me, that is ?religion!' Well, if that's what you choose to mean by religion, fine, that makes me a religious man. But if your God is a being who designs universes, listens to prayers, forgives sins, wreaks miracles, reads your thoughts, cares about your welfare and raises you from the dead, you are unlikely to be satisfied. As the distinguished American physicist Steven Weinberg said, "If you want to say that 'God is energy,' then you can find God in a lump of coal." But don't expect congregations to flock to your church.

When Einstein said 'Did God have a choice in creating the Universe?' he meant 'Could the universe have begun in more than one way?' 'God does not play dice' was Einstein's poetic way of doubting Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle. Einstein was famously irritated when theists misunderstood him to mean a personal God. But what did he expect? The hunger to misunderstand should have been palpable to him. 'Religious' physicists usually turn out to be so only in the Einsteinian sense: they are atheists of a poetic disposition. So am I. But, given the widespread yearning for that great misunderstanding, deliberately to confuse Einsteinian pantheism with supernatural religion is an act of intellectual high treason.

Accepting, then, that the God Hypothesis is a proper scientific hypothesis whose truth or falsehood is hidden from us only by lack of evidence, what should be our best estimate of the probability that God exists, given the evidence now available? Pretty low I think, and here's why.

First, most of the traditional arguments for God's existence, from Aquinas on, are easily demolished. Several of them, such as the First Cause argument, work by setting up an infinite regress which God is wheeled out to terminate. But we are never told why God is magically able to terminate regresses while needing no explanation himself. To be sure, we do need some kind of explanation for the origin of all things. Physicists and cosmologists are hard at work on the problem. But whatever the answer - a random quantum fluctuation or a Hawking/Penrose singularity or whatever we end up calling it - it will be simple. Complex, statistically improbable things, by definition, don't just happen; they demand an explanation in their own right. They are impotent to terminate regresses, in a way that simple things are not. The first cause cannot have been an intelligence - let alone an intelligence that answers prayers and enjoys being worshipped. Intelligent, creative, complex, statistically improbable things come late into the universe, as the product of evolution or some other process of gradual escalation from simple beginnings. They come late into the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it.

Another of Aquinas' efforts, the Argument from Degree, is worth spelling out, for it epitomises the characteristic flabbiness of theological reasoning. We notice degrees of, say, goodness or temperature, and we measure them, Aquinas said, by reference to a maximum:

Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus, as fire, which is the maximum of heat, is the cause of all hot things . . . Therefore, there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.
That's an argument? You might as well say that people vary in smelliness but we can make the judgment only by reference to a perfect maximum of conceivable smelliness. Therefore there must exist a pre-eminently peerless stinker, and we call him God. Or substitute any dimension of comparison you like, and derive an equivalently fatuous conclusion. That's theology.

The only one of the traditional arguments for God that is widely used today is the teleological argument, sometimes called the Argument from Design although - since the name begs the question of its validity - it should better be called the Argument for Design. It is the familiar 'watchmaker' argument, which is surely one of the most superficially plausible bad arguments ever discovered - and it is rediscovered by just about everybody until they are taught the logical fallacy and Darwin's brilliant alternative.

In the familiar world of human artifacts, complicated things that look designed are designed. To na?ve observers, it seems to follow that similarly complicated things in the natural world that look designed - things like eyes and hearts - are designed too. It isn't just an argument by analogy. There is a semblance of statistical reasoning here too - fallacious, but carrying an illusion of plausibility. If you randomly scramble the fragments of an eye or a leg or a heart a million times, you'd be lucky to hit even one combination that could see, walk or pump. This demonstrates that such devices could not have been put together by chance. And of course, no sensible scientist ever said they could. Lamentably, the scientific education of most British and American students omits all mention of Darwinism, and therefore the only alternative to chance that most people can imagine is design.

Even before Darwin's time, the illogicality was glaring: how could it ever have been a good idea to postulate, in explanation for the existence of improbable things, a designer who would have to be even more improbable? The entire argument is a logical non-starter, as David Hume realized before Darwin was born. What Hume didn't know was the supremely elegant alternative to both chance and design that Darwin was to give us. Natural selection is so stunningly powerful and elegant, it not only explains the whole of life, it raises our consciousness and boosts our confidence in science's future ability to explain everything else.

Natural selection is not just an alternative to chance. It is the only ultimate alternative ever suggested. Design is a workable explanation for organized complexity only in the short term. It is not an ultimate explanation, because designers themselves demand an explanation. If, as Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel once playfully speculated, life on this planet was deliberately seeded by a payload of bacteria in the nose cone of a rocket, we still need an explanation for the intelligent aliens who dispatched the rocket. Ultimately they must have evolved by gradual degrees from simpler beginnings. Only evolution, or some kind of gradualistic 'crane' (to use Daniel Dennett's neat term), is capable of terminating the regress. Natural selection is an anti-chance process, which gradually builds up complexity, step by tiny step. The end product of this ratcheting process is an eye, or a heart, or a brain - a device whose improbable complexity is utterly baffling until you spot the gentle ramp that leads up to it.

Whether my conjecture is right that evolution is the only explanation for life in the universe, there is no doubt that it is the explanation for life on this planet. Evolution is a fact, and it is among the more secure facts known to science. But it had to get started somehow. Natural selection cannot work its wonders until certain minimal conditions are in place, of which the most important is an accurate system of replication - DNA, or something that works like DNA.

The origin of life on this planet - which means the origin of the first self-replicating molecule - is hard to study, because it (probably) only happened once, 4 billion years ago and under very different conditions from those with which we are familiar. We may never know how it happened. Unlike the ordinary evolutionary events that followed, it must have been a genuinely very improbable - in the sense of unpredictable - event: too improbable, perhaps, for chemists to reproduce it in the laboratory or even devise a plausible theory for what happened. This weirdly paradoxical conclusion - that a chemical account of the origin of life, in order to be plausible, has to be implausible - would follow if it were the case that life is extremely rare in the universe. And indeed we have never encountered any hint of extraterrestrial life, not even by radio - the circumstance that prompted Enrico Fermi's cry: "Where is everybody?"

Suppose life's origin on a planet took place through a hugely improbable stroke of luck, so improbable that it happens on only one in a billion planets. The National Science Foundation would laugh at any chemist whose proposed research had only a one in a hundred chance of succeeding, let alone one in a billion. Yet, given that there are at least a billion billion planets in the universe, even such absurdly low odds as these will yield life on a billion planets. And - this is where the famous anthropic principle comes in - Earth has to be one of them, because here we are.

If you set out in a spaceship to find the one planet in the galaxy that has life, the odds against your finding it would be so great that the task would be indistinguishable, in practice, from impossible. But if you are alive (as you manifestly are if you are about to step into a spaceship) you needn't bother to go looking for that one planet because, by definition, you are already standing on it. The anthropic principle really is rather elegant. By the way, I don't actually think the origin of life was as improbable as all that. I think the galaxy has plenty of islands of life dotted about, even if the islands are too spaced out for any one to hope for a meeting with any other. My point is only that, given the number of planets in the universe, the origin of life could in theory be as lucky as a blindfolded golfer scoring a hole in one. The beauty of the anthropic principle is that, even in the teeth of such stupefying odds against, it still gives us a perfectly satisfying explanation for life's presence on our own planet.

The anthropic principle is usually applied not to planets but to universes. Physicists have suggested that the laws and constants of physics are too good - as if the universe were set up to favour our eventual evolution. It is as though there were, say, half a dozen dials representing the major constants of physics. Each of the dials could in principle be tuned to any of a wide range of values. Almost all of these knob-twiddlings would yield a universe in which life would be impossible. Some universes would fizzle out within the first picosecond. Others would contain no elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. In yet others, matter would never condense into stars (and you need stars in order to forge the elements of chemistry and hence life). You can estimate the very low odds against the six knobs all just happening to be correctly tuned, and conclude that a divine knob-twiddler must have been at work. But, as we have already seen, that explanation is vacuous because it begs the biggest question of all. The divine knob twiddler would himself have to have been at least as improbable as the settings of his knobs.

Again, the anthropic principle delivers its devastatingly neat solution. Physicists already have reason to suspect that our universe - everything we can see - is only one universe among perhaps billions. Some theorists postulate a multiverse of foam, where the universe we know is just one bubble. Each bubble has its own laws and constants. Our familiar laws of physics are parochial bylaws. Of all the universes in the foam, only a minority has what it takes to generate life. And, with anthropic hindsight, we obviously have to be sitting in a member of that minority, because, well, here we are, aren't we? As physicists have said, it is no accident that we see stars in our sky, for a universe without stars would also lack the chemical elements necessary for life. There may be universes whose skies have no stars: but they also have no inhabitants to notice the lack. Similarly, it is no accident that we see a rich diversity of living species: for an evolutionary process that is capable of yielding a species that can see things and reflect on them cannot help producing lots of other species at the same time. The reflective species must be surrounded by an ecosystem, as it must be surrounded by stars.

The anthropic principle entitles us to postulate a massive dose of luck in accounting for the existence of life on our planet. But there are limits. We are allowed one stroke of luck for the origin of evolution, and perhaps for a couple of other unique events like the origin of the eukaryotic cell and the origin of consciousness. But that's the end of our entitlement to large-scale luck. We emphatically cannot invoke major strokes of luck to account for the illusion of design that glows from each of the billion species of living creature that have ever lived on Earth. The evolution of life is a general and continuing process, producing essentially the same result in all species, however different the details.

Contrary to what is sometimes alleged, evolution is a predictive science. If you pick any hitherto unstudied species and subject it to minute scrutiny, any evolutionist will confidently predict that each individual will be observed to do everything in its power, in the particular way of the species - plant, herbivore, carnivore, nectivore or whatever it is - to survive and propagate the DNA that rides inside it. We won't be around long enough to test the prediction but we can say, with great confidence, that if a comet strikes Earth and wipes out the mammals, a new fauna will rise to fill their shoes, just as the mammals filled those of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. And the range of parts played by the new cast of life's drama will be similar in broad outline, though not in detail, to the roles played by the mammals, and the dinosaurs before them, and the mammal-like reptiles before the dinosaurs. The same rules are predictably being followed, in millions of species all over the globe, and for hundreds of millions of years. Such a general observation requires an entirely different explanatory principle from the anthropic principle that explains one-off events like the origin of life, or the origin of the universe, by luck. That entirely different principle is natural selection.

We explain our existence by a combination of the anthropic principle and Darwin's principle of natural selection. That combination provides a complete and deeply satisfying explanation for everything that we see and know. Not only is the god hypothesis unnecessary. It is spectacularly unparsimonious. Not only do we need no God to explain the universe and life. God stands out in the universe as the most glaring of all superfluous sore thumbs. We cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we can't disprove Thor, fairies, leprechauns and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But, like those other fantasies that we can't disprove, we can say that God is very very improbable.

http://r.neilrogers.com/cgi-bin/loc...awkins/why-there-almost-certainl_b_32164.html

 

[WesternWay]

Fuck Jesus

 

[BBC3]

While it would be sad to think that all this, all this damn WORK to evolve to live human lives on Earth could potentially add up to nothing in our ends. That's a lot of effort gone to waste it would seem. To raise, protect, and teach a child how to survive. ALL THE WORRY. All the learning. Is it really just for nothing in the end? And it MUST be that way because anyone to see the age of 40 has some idea now that the human brain must break down too. The question of sanity comes to mind and the potential for inevitable mental malfunction. So there can just be no freggin way that we ascend from our bodies and keep on THINKING. We have got to know that one is out, and if you don't you will have an idea what I am talking about some day. I used to not understand folks becoming apathetic and describing that "they had lived life" with the undertone that they were pretty much thru and just waiting for their time. I used to. I used to travel knowing life was ahead of me. Now if I AM FORCED to travel then every day away is a precious day I am missing my loved ones.

I can say that I have been incapacitated in every way possible short of death and there has never been any glimmer of any spiritual consciousness away from my physical self. Hell, I was told I even lack a pulse for a brief while recently ! .. Even in a past five hour general anesthesia - nothing interesting to report. In fact, I've heard tales of guys heavily experienced in opioid modulating narcotics being put down for surgery, clearing the shelves and having to order out just to keep them down, and then waking up telling the punch line to the joke they were telling going down. So it makes sense that there is no chance for any celestial grand tours around the galaxy as long as life remains in our bodies. We do seem CONFINED and the only way to find out is big ticket day. You have to wonder will it be some grand sensation of spiritual being where you just realize "ahh, so this is what I always knew it was - the harmony and peace"... OR are we just gone. Those two options kinda work. Non-believers had better hope they placed their money well. The irony being that there is no harm in believing. At least for the "poli-sci" today's christian. Or yesterday's for that matter. Because to do and act as the Holy Scriptures say is really NOTHING like any of us act. Pretense and pagan idols seem to be the name of the game. To believe would be a whole other ballgame. And then who to believe. How about all the self service in Holy Interpretation? The Church, FIRE, Hypocrisy, FEAR, biological Governance to live and survive...! By these standards then Righteousness is only hanging on by a thread and Evil must be everywhere..!

To step outside your own shoes I think is the term that guy tried to publicize and market as a QUANTUM LEAP. Imagining for the sake of experience alone to be someone else less fortunate, as least as we perceive, seems to be the easier but also the one no one wants to do. Perhaps that is what is wrong with the world precisely...

Being born with a cord around your neck and a strange limp and debilitation for life. Sustaining a terrible disease and whatever survival remains. I once saw a kid on the swing set at PE in the second grade who was swinging real high and all by himself. He was always a bit odd. It was like he just passed out at the top of a swing and remember him just floating up and off into the air and like slow motion just landing right on his head. And let me tell ya he was rockin for outer space..! I recall everyone standing around like retards, but remember someone with some sense running for the teacher. That kid was done and nothing else was said. I knew a kid in the 3rd grade who was paralyzed in some kind of accident and I recall seeing him in a wheelchair with a straw in his mouth a couple of years later. I never saw him again. Poor kid I heard and not much was said. No one said anything about the HORRIBLE life he would live for maybe 10 or 20 years more who knows. The kid ain't never even jak'd it much less got to master his manhood in the fun unobtainable chase to please a woman. More like please ourselves. He never even go to see what his pecker felt like fully operational. I can't seem to come off mine. Shit, I ran into the local tree guy in town that fell a few years back and there he was paralyzed from the waist down. At least he lived before he died. He was a pro and damn good at his job. The riddle is why do we do the things we do it seems...

What makes a bug's life inconsequential? Cattle all lined up and so friendly just waiting for a bolt to the head. Chickens slaughtered by the gazillions / so delicious. A hamster given to children for simple amusement, but really to learn life values, OR not.. More importantly the value of the power to farm, raise, buy, even DESIGN creatures for our purpose. And what are we... I teach my girls to be respectful of other life, and to especially be respectful of the dangers other life can pose. While I sit here typing this pompous idealistic dissertation on how blindly fortunate we are, it was not too long ago that 2 or 3 coyotes could easily cross a man and end his life. Today I was thinking about the fox I've seen running through the neighborhood, and then you realize you STILL don't leave infants unattended as that fox could easily straggle into your yard and change your perspective could you imagine watching one trot off with your 1 year old infant!!?!!? DID YOU KNOW THAT FOLKS ARE SO FUCKING STUPID TODAY THAT WALKING AROUND SENSE HAS LEFT THE BUILDING..!!!!

THE REAL QUESTION is all this ENERGY that we hold in our bodies. Is it SOUL, SPIRIT, or JUST a biological and chemical reaction as we are really just big masses walking compost piles who think we think. Just electricity arcing from cell to cell, or a fundamental spirit driving it all. I just said goodbye to the man that put me here. I hoisted his lifeless ankles from his hospice bed to the gurney off too whatever happens next for lifeless corpses. Chemotherapy gone bad and calcium exodus ensuing. No more electrical signals there. Was is spirit and soul assigned and confined now free? Or was it just a massive conundrum of biological mass chemically sparking in symphony by chance? Do we examine a soul in someone's eyes? Or just the quantity and quality of electrical signal their bodies are generating. While still defining either way you slice it, the question is the quality & origin. This would weigh big on actual PURPOSE. When posed with a Riddle to which there is no clear answer nor anyone around who can document it, the clear answer is Faith. But what kind of faith... The only thing that I can see for sure is that emotion seems to trade for logic. However, logic defines emotion. A big ol fukin riddle indeed... And nothing shall stand in the way of our love for our offspring. Not a chance in hell..

 

[marcscofild]

I think that each person is own God for him- or herself. Everybody can just have the faith in own strengths and decide what's right and what's not rather than rely on some religious tenets.

 

[big boi]

)It is impossible that Christianity is not God's revelation of truth to man. Simply impossible. The math proves it beyond question. It doesn't take faith to believe that one plus one equals two, and it doesn't take faith to identify the religion which has mathematical certainty in its corner.God didn't have to give us mathematical proof of His existence, but He did it anyway. God didn't have to give us proof of Christianity, but He chose to do so. And God didn't have to give us proof of His love for us, but that is exactly what He did. The proof is irrefutable.I live in Nebraska where I serve as a pastor. Imagine someone covering this entire state in silver dollars 6 feet deep. Then mark one coin and bury it anywhere across the state. Next, blindfold a man and have him choose one coin. The odds that he would choose the marked coin are the same odds of getting 8 prophecies all fulfilled in one man. God gave us about 300 fulfilled prophecies in the Person of Jesus Christ.Here are 8 of those 300 prophecies1) The Messiah will be born in Bethlehem. (Micah 5:2; Matthew 2:1; Luke 2:4-6)(2) The Messiah will be a descendant of Jacob. (Numbers 24:17; Matthew 1:2)(3) The Messiah will enter Jerusalem as a king riding on a donkey. (Zechariah 9:9; Mark 11:4-11)(4) The Messiah will be betrayed by a friend. (Psalm 41:9; Luke 22:47,48)(5) The Messiah's betrayal money will be used to purchase a potter's field. (Zechariah 11:13; Matthew 27:9,10)(6) The Messiah will be spat upon and struck. (Isaiah 50:6; Matthew 26:67)(7) The Messiah's hands and feet will be pierced. (Psalm 22:16; John 20:25-27)(8) Soldiers will gamble for the Messiah's garments. (Psalm 22:18; Luke 23:34)There is no way one man could have fulfilled all 8 of these prophecies unless God was making it happen. Who else controls history? Who else could give us such irrefutable proof for Christianity? The odds are one in one hundred quadrillion, or 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000.This mathematical proof was calculated by Professor Peter Stoner. He was chairman of the mathematics and astronomy departments at Pasadena City College until 1953. He then went to Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California, where he served as chairman of the science division.You don't have to be a mathematics professor to see that this evidence is irrefutable. No one would pick the marked coin under those conditions. No one but God could have given us these biblical prophecies, and then brought them to fulfillment right before our eyes. It is impossible that Christianity is false. The math proves it, and the Man behind the math rose from the dead, just as it had been foretold.It doesn't take faith to see how the Bible could only have come from God. It does take faith, however, to accept Jesus as your Savior and to believe in God's promise of eternal life. God has done everything to make this way open to you. If you choose to reject it in spite of the overwhelming evidence and in spite of God's love for you, you will be walking away from an open door to paradise.Some people won't accept proof for the Bible even when it is irrefutable. Man, by nature, is not very good at accepting the evidence which God has laid out for us. The bias against God and against the supernatural is so strong that even irrefutable evidence is viewed with suspicion and doubt.Never mind the fact that the prophecy about Christ's crucifixion was given hundreds of years before that type of execution was being used. And who but God could have identified Bethlehem 700 years before Christ was born? You really have to have a closed mind to miss the supernatural quality of the Bible, especially when you really start to dig into it. The historical and mathematical conclusions all point to God's plan of salvation through His Son.Here is an idea. Try looking at this mathematical proof as if you didn't have any bias against God and against the supernatural, and see how that approach works for you. The end result of your honest evaluation may shock you, and then it will change you from the inside out. That is what happens whenever man embraces the truth as revealed to us in Scripture.One plus one equals two. Old Testament history plus New Testament fulfillment equals irrefutable proof. This is why Christianity is not a "blind faith." It is a faith built on immovable facts. Are you ready to have that firm foundation in your life? Or do you plan to finish out your time here on this planet with nothing more than an unreasonable bias against God?No one ever said man is going to always be reasonable. That's the tragic thing about the human soul ever since sin entered the world. There are some biases which go even deeper than common sense and mathematical certainty. That's what our sin does to us, and this is why you and I need the Messiah. We need Jesus because we are sinners. We have broken God's law. And God has been gracious enough not only to give us His only Son, but even to give us conclusive proof for Christianity.So it's no surprise to find that every other belief system and every other religion lacks even a hint of mathematical evidence, let alone irrefutable proof. The followers of those religions are no less sincere, but the foundation for their faith is not based on irrefutable evidence. Where is your faith based today? Do you have a bias against God which is keeping you from considering the mathematical certainty which supports Christianity?If so, God still loves you, and there is still hope. Many former unbelievers who are now Christians know just what you are going through. This is a critical time for you to consider your sin against God, and your need for His forgiveness.But don't take my word for it. Instead, accept the irrefutable proof which our Creator has kindly given us in the Old and New Testaments. He loves you far more than you can fathom. He proved it at the cross, and through the fulfilled prophecies. You would have to be blind to miss it.

Facts? What are the facts that prove that God indeed created man. Written testimonials from individuals that spoke to God and recorded deeds, centuries before they were even alive? Your belief in God is solely based on faith not facts.

 

[greenddog1]

@big boi It's a great sermon and I enjoyed the read. If it works for you, who's to say your wrong. I'm content with my sense of a god. I just have a discontent with religions.

 

[Kinikuman]

@big boi It's a great sermon and I enjoyed the read. If it works for you, who's to say your wrong. I'm content with my sense of a god. I just have a discontent with religions.

Agreed. Good sermon., @big boi . But you lost me when you used math to support your argument at the outset. At best I would say that there is some mathematical proof for the non-locality of consciousness...

 

[big boi]

I didnt write that obviously I forgot to include the authors name. Anyways I will never judge
Anyone's beliefs n I like to have debates on this topic, this is howwe get ti know each oother. Im just trying to give proof in what I believe in, u can do whatever u want with it. I hate religion as well. I belong to no certain denomination,I found all they do.is talk shit about each other instead reading and teaching the word of God. Yes faith is definitely a factor in my belief but so is truth, everyone makes great points and we will all know the truth one day.

 

[kawilt]

I didnt write that obviously I forgot to include the authors name. Anyways I will never judge
Anyone's beliefs n I like to have debates on this topic, this is howwe get ti know each oother. Im just trying to give proof in what I believe in, u can do whatever u want with it. I hate religion as well. I belong to no certain denomination,I found all they do.is talk shit about each other instead reading and teaching the word of God. Yes faith is definitely a factor in my belief but so is truth, everyone makes great points and we will all know the truth one day.

I love this subject...I'll have to wait till I have a little more mental energy and time to offer some of my opinions. But just "truth" in itself is an interesting topic.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

@big boi It's a great sermon and I enjoyed the read. If it works for you, who's to say your wrong. I'm content with my sense of a god. I just have a discontent with religions.

I didnt write that obviously I forgot to include the authors name. Anyways I will never judge
Anyone's beliefs n I like to have debates on this topic, this is howwe get ti know each oother. Im just trying to give proof in what I believe in, u can do whatever u want with it. I hate religion as well. I belong to no certain denomination,I found all they do.is talk shit about each other instead reading and teaching the word of God. Yes faith is definitely a factor in my belief but so is truth, everyone makes great points and we will all know the truth one day.

A bit of a contradiction!

Judging is good for the mind. You have to arrive somewhere.