Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Proof

@galveston75 said
Wow. Satan is twisting the truth of God more and more isn't he? The more crap he throws out at humans the more he is diminishing the love of a God that makes it possible for you to be alive on this planet today and then have the nerve to condemn him? Unbelievable that so many have become blind to the simple truth that it is Satan that makes Jehovah look bad and you all ac ...[text shortened]... pt it.!!! How much farther can humans go from their maker Jehovah? Apparently there is no end to it.

@galveston75 said
Of course we are going to have many things that animals also have. Noses, eyes, feet, blood, hair, etc, etc.

Nothing about that "theory" proves anything at all but what I said before why wouldn't God use many of the same designs that all life on earth need to live by to survive?

Would he create something that has 40 wings or twenty hearts or has blood that is as h ...[text shortened]... ir different models of cars. If a design works and does exactly what it was made for, keep using it.

@philokalia said
This is an interesting topic to me so I am going to jump in a bit...

We are related to other species because we do have bodies that, while they come from God, were designed to live right on this earth just like other animals. We also share a lot of genes with plants.

For instance, we share 60% of our DNA with a banana [1].

So, the fact that we share ...[text shortened]... /www.saps.org.uk/saps-associates/browse-q-and-a/473-how-much-dna-do-plants-share-with-humans-over-99

@indonesia-phil said
The point is that by measuring our genetic similarity with other life forms we can calculate our relationship to them, i.e. how closely we are related to them. Genetic similarities point to a common beginning for all life, do they not?

And as for 'while they come from god', that is an unproven assumption.

@Indonesia-Phil

And as for 'while they come from god', that is an unproven assumption.

@galveston75 said
Wow. Satan is twisting the truth of God more and more isn't he? The more crap he throws out at humans the more he is diminishing the love of a God that makes it possible for you to be alive on this planet today and then have the nerve to condemn him? Unbelievable that so many have become blind to the simple truth that it is Satan that makes Jehovah look bad and you all ac ...[text shortened]... pt it.!!! How much farther can humans go from their maker Jehovah? Apparently there is no end to it.

@caissad4

And Theists have none, zip, zero and nada for their extraordinary claims.

What Are the Odds of Life and the
Universe Forming if God Does Not Exist?


A look at the mathematical odds of abiogenesis, biopoesis, and our universe forming by chance. In light of these odds, is theism or naturalism the best explanation for our existence?

A condensation of some of the chapters in the author's book, God vs. Chance.

by Marshall "Rusty" Entrekin

Part 1:
Do you owe your existence to God or to blind chance? How you choose to answer this question will be one of the most pivotal decisions of your life. A very sensible way to approach it would be to try to determine, "Which of these two alternatives is the most probable explanation?"

The philosophy that there is no God and that the entire universe, including the life within it, was formed by natural processes, is called metaphysical naturalism (MN). If metaphysical naturalists are correct, and there is no God who created life, the first cell had to come into existence through chemical processes. This idea is called abiogenesis (life arising from non-life).

Abiogenesis, if it ever actually happened, would have been an extremely rare exception - perhaps the only exception ever to have occurred in our universe - to the law of biogenesis made famous by Louis Pasteur. This is simply the observation that "living things come only from other living things."

According to Webster’s dictionary, a law is "a statement of an order or relation of phenomena that so far as is known is invariable under the given conditions." Biogenesis has traditionally been considered to be a law of biology because life has always only been observed coming from previously existing life.

Abiogenesis, on the other hand, has never been observed happening. It is an unproven hypothesis, as is acknowledged by all honest and informed metaphysical naturalists.

Part 2:

The Simplest Conceivable Evolvable Self-Replicator (SCESR)

Even the simplest form of free-living life that we know of, Pelagibacter ubique, is incredibly complex. Although this single-celled organism has the smallest known genome of any free-living organism, it still has 1,308,759 base pairs of DNA! 1 Because its genome is only one of its many components, the odds of this organism forming spontaneously are so low as to be virtually impossible.

Because of the complexity of even the simplest free-living organisms, scientists who are metaphysical naturalists speculate that abiogenesis must have happened by means of a simple, non-living replicator gradually evolving into life. This idea is known as biopoesis (From bio, meaning "life," and poieo, meaning "to make"😉.

What qualities must this hypothetical replicator have had? For one thing, it must have been evolvable. It also must have produced many intermediate forms of increasing complexity as it evolved into a single-celled form of life. However, there is not a shred of evidence that anything like it ever existed on earth. Nor has evidence of any intermediates between such a simple replicator and life ever been found.

In lectures delivered in 1948 and 1949, as a "thought experiment," the mathematician John Von Neumann developed a conceptual model of a "kinematic self-replicating machine" that in many ways was amazingly predictive of the molecular machinery later to be found in cells. To simply summarize Von Neumann’s ideas, he hypothesized that such a self-replicator must have:

A reservoir or "sea" of readily available parts.
A memory "tape" that stores instructions for assembling a copy of itself.
A manipulator or "constructor" that follows the instructions on the tape to assemble a copy of itself, and then copies its contents onto the duplicate’s tape.
In addition to its mechanical elements, it would also need some structural components, and at least four logic elements to send and receive stimuli. 2
In 1961 the information scientist Marcel Golay estimated what he believed to be the minimum amount of structure or information that a self-replicator like this must have. But before I share his conclusion with you, it will be helpful for you to know that information scientists such as Golay like to measure information content by using a very convenient unit called the bit. A bit is simply the correct choice needed between two equally likely alternatives, in order to accurately construct a message or something orderly, functional, or meaningful.

Here are a couple of illustrations to help you to understand how the bit is used to measure information. Suppose that an entrepreneurial farmer made a corn maze. In this particular maze, there were many left turns available, and many right turns available, but no places, except at the end of hallways, where you could turn either left or right. Because of this, each time you came to a turn in his maze, you had one of two choices to make. To help a friend of his get through the maze as quickly as possible and thereby impress a beautiful date with his supposed brilliance, the farmer gave his friend a tiny cheat sheet. The cheat sheet contained the code: "LLRLRRRL". This code told the farmer’s friend what to do each time he came to a turn, by using the following two symbols:

L= Turn left, or if there is only a right turn available, continue to go straight.
R=Turn right, or if there is only a left turn available, continue to go straight.

How much information is in this code? Exactly eight bits of information, because the correct choice between two equal alternatives must be made eight times. This can be written out as ½ x ½ x ½ x ½ x½ x ½ x ½ x ½, or (½😉8.

Interestingly, this number also represents the chances of someone randomly guessing his or her way out of the maze correctly on the first try. On average, only one out of 256 visitors to the corn maze will make it out on the first try, because (½😉8=1/256.

This means that the bit is not only useful as a means of measuring information content, but is also useful for determining the odds of correct information being randomly selected or assembled.

Likewise, suppose that I am giving you directions to my office. There are eight buildings in my office park, numbered 1 - 8, and eight suites in each building, labeled A-H. I tell you to go to suite 3C. How many bits of information have I given you? I have given you the correct choice out of 64 possible office suites. That equals exactly six bits of information, because ½ x ½ x ½ x ½ x ½ x ½=1/64. If you were to forget my suite number, and tried to take a guess at finding it, your chances of finding my office on the first try are only 1 in 64.

With that in mind, let’s read what Golay had to say:

"Suppose we wanted to build a machine capable of reaching into bins for all its parts, and capable of assembling from these parts a second machine just like itself. What is the minimum amount of structure or information that should be built into the first machine? The answer comes out to be of the order of 1,500 bits - 1,500 choices between [two different] alternatives which the machine should be able to decide. This answer is very suggestive, because 1,500 bits happens to be also of the order of magnitude of the amount of structure contained in the simplest large protein molecule which, immersed in a bath of nutrients, can induce the assembly of those nutrients into another large protein molecule like itself, and then separate itself from it. 3

Golay never shared how he arrived at this figure, however, or identified what specific protein he was referring to. Clearly, in order to come up with an accurate figure, he would have needed to develop an actual replicator design, which would have been a daunting and complex task. And so this figure was probably an estimate. When I wrote to a friend with a PHD in biology to ask him what protein Golay might have been referring to, he responded, "I have no idea what protein he is talking about, and the real proteins that do this type of work are a whole lot more complicated than that and need things like ATP (produced by an entire set of complex proteins arranged like a motor) to function."

To make his idea of a self-replicator easier to analyze with mathematical precision than a true three dimensional machine, Von Neumann’s fellow mathematician Stanislaw Ulam suggested the idea of a two dimensional model of it, called a "cellular automation". This consisted of two-dimensional squares called "cells" that could exist in different states. Each cell behaved differently depending on its current state. Von Neumann’s work on this was completed and published post-humously by Arthur Burke in the book Theory of Self Reproducing Automata.4 When a computer model of a cellular automation (with three more states than Von Neumann had envisioned) was finally successfully implemented by Nobili and Pesavento in 1995, the tape was 145,315 cells long, and replication required 63 billion timesteps. 5

Given the complexity of the 2-D model, and the actual complexity of self-replicating proteins, it looks as if real 3-D Von Neumann machines may require considerably more complexity than Golay had estimated. But for argument’s sake, and since Golay was such a brilliant man, let’s extend the benefit of the doubt to him, and to biopoesis in general, and assume that a self replicator that simple can exist. It is highly doubtful, however, that an evolvable self-replicator any simpler than that which could survive in the wild could exist. Indeed, this was the minimum amount of information that Golay thought possible.

In order for an evolvable replicator with an information content of only 1500 bits to initially form, the equivalent of 1500 correct chemical events must occur, each with a probability of ½. (This is the same as the odds of flipping a coin 1500 times, and getting heads each time.)

For brevity’s sake, let’s call such a machine a SCESR – for Simplest Conceivable Evolvable Self-Replicator.

Part 3:

What Are the Odds of a SCESR Forming in Our Universe?

What are the odds of a SCESR forming in our universe? 6 If you still remember how to multiply fractions and exponents from high school math, then you should be able to follow what’s next.

Since the bit is useful for determining the odds of information correctly assembling by chance, the odds of any given sequence of chemical events producing one particular working "design" of a SCESR would be ½ 1500, or 1/10450.

However, more than one SCESR design may be possible, and this would increase the odds of a SCESR forming. With that in mind, we can say that…

…T equals the Total number of SCESR designs that would work.

…C equals the number of those designs that could not form, or could not survive due to chemical and environmental Constraints.

…T- C equals P, the number of Possible SCESR designs (P) which could potentially form and survive in our universe.

The odds of any given sequence of chemical events forming any possible SCESR design that could survive in our universe would therefore be P/10450. (We will take more complex designs into account later.)

If I flip a coin ten times, only a small fraction of the possible flips will have an orderly pattern, such as HHHHHHHHHH, HTHTHTHTHT, HTHTTHTTTH, etc. Of course, we need not only an orderly or meaningful pattern, but a self-replicating pattern for a SCESR to form. That would only be a tiny subset of the meaningful or orderly patterns. And so, although we cannot know exactly what the value of P is, we do know that it is an extremely tiny fraction of the 10450 possible chemical arrangements.

Despite that, let’s be generous and assume that P equals 1037, which is more than one trillion times the number of stars in the known universe. I believe that this is a very liberal number to assign to P, because:

This number is probably much higher than the number of meaningful designs, and considerably higher than the number of self-replicating designs, that could be produced.
Despite the incredible chemical variety found on earth, no replicator simpler than life that does not depend upon life to survive, has ever been found in nature.
Because all life on earth is fundamentally similar, only one replicator design is thought to have led to life on earth. If other survivable designs were just as likely to form under those conditions, we would expect to see fundamentally different forms of life on earth exhibiting dissimilar biochemistries. But we do not. Since the evidence indicates that if biopoesis occurred, only one design survived and evolved into life on earth, assigning an average of one trillion different possible survivable SCESR designs for every star system seems overly generous.
No one has ever been able to experimentally induce the spontaneous formation of a molecular Von Neumann replicator, or to determine how one might have formed in an experimentally verifiable way.
A self-replicating molecule like the protein molecule Golay mentioned would have all of the parts it needs to replicate right beside it, inside the cell. But could something that simple survive in the harsh wild, outside of the nurturing environment of a living cell? We do not know. It may be that there are no possible self-replicating designs that simple which could survive in the wild!
No human has been able to intelligently design and build a molecular Von Neumann replicator simpler than life which can survive in the wild to demonstrate that one can exist.
Most stars are outside of their galaxy’s habitable zone.
Most planets are outside of their solar system’s habitable zone.
Most planets within the hospitable zones do not have the right composition of elements to nurture life.
Assigning this very generous value to P, the odds of any given sequence of chemical events in our universe producing any SCESR design would therefore be 1037/10450 =1/(10450 - 1037) = 1/10413.

What is the likelihood of this having happened somewhere in the universe? The latest estimate of the number of stars in the observable universe is 70 sextillion stars. CNN reported that Dr. Simon Driver, when asked "if he believed the huge scale of the universe meant there was intelligent life out there somewhere," replied: ‘Seventy thousand million million million is a big number ... it's inevitable." 7

That is such a large number of stars (70 followed by 21 zeroes, which we can write in shorthand as 70 x 1021) that Driver's conclusion sounds quite convincing, doesn't it? But let’s do the math to see if he is right.

Since Dr. Driver noted that light from the visible universe has not reached us yet, and that the universe could actually be much larger, let’s increase this estimate of stars in the universe to an amount greater than one million times what can currently be observed, to 10,000,000,000 sextillion stars, or 1031 stars.

Of course, as we mentioned above, Golay’s machine must have all of the parts it needs to make a copy of itself right beside it, without pre-existing life to provide those parts. Again we ask, how often does that happen in nature? Let’s assume it happens vastly more often than it actually does, and suppose …

…every star has ten earth-sized planets orbiting it.
…these ten planets are composed of nothing but a prebiotic soup containing all the parts needed for all possible SCESR designs to form. (Note that we are presupposing an environment completely hospitable to the formation of a SCESR design. But this SCESR must be of a design that could survive in the actual inhospitable wild to be a viable candidate that could have led to life.)
We will round the total number of atoms contained in these ten planets up to 1051, which is a little more than ten times the approximately 8.87•1049 atoms on earth.

Now let’s suppose that each of the atoms on these planets takes part in 1022 chemical events per second. Multiply that by 1021 seconds of cosmic history (an amount higher than 1000 times the current maximum estimated age of the universe, which is 6.3•1017 seconds), and you get 1031•1051 •1022•1021 = 10125 possible chemical events that could have been tried out on these planets since the universe began.

Given these extremely generous assumptions, the odds of the simplest conceivable self-replicating molecular system arising would therefore be 10125 /10413 = 1/10288, or 1 chance in

1,000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000!

Of course, if we had calculated using more realistic figures, the odds would be much, much lower.

More complex replicator designs are possible too, but each additional bit of information added to design complexity halves the odds of chance formation. The odds of the chance formation of a 1500 bit replicator such as this are already so incredibly small, that there would be very little increase in the odds by the addition of all possible designs of greater complexity.

Part 4:


Just How Far Can Natural Selection Go?

Each "rung" in the twisted double-helix "ladder" of DNA is one of four different base pairs. These are the four letters of the DNA alphabet. We represent them by the letters A, C, G, and T. Just as the 26 letters of the English alphabet are combined together to represent words and thereby convey information, the letters of the DNA alphabet are combined together to make the instruction set for creating complex proteins.

In other words, DNA is a symbolic language containing information, just as the letters on this page are. The complex, meaningful information contained in symbolic language is called semantic information. To date, we have observed no originating source of semantic information other than intelligence. This observation has been invariable and without exception, so we could justifiably argue that it is a law of nature, just as biogenesis is. In fact, the law of biogenesis seems to be a logical consequence of this unnamed law, which for the sake of convenience, we will call here the Law of Semantic Genesis. We will define it as, "The invariably consistent observation that semantic information is originally generated only by intelligence."

Just as a million monkeys typing since the universe began would be highly unlikely to type the contents of this little book, a little math easily demonstrates that except for very short text strings, meaningful symbolic language of any length or complexity cannot be generated by random chance alone. How then do we explain the instructions for making that complex, wonderful, intelligent being you see in the mirror each morning? Can natural selection, a blind, unintelligent force, not only surmount the law of semantic genesis, but produce meaningful information of a magnitude of complexity that even human intelligence cannot yet comprehend it? Is it really creative enough to do all of that?

To the last question we may reply that despite the miraculous powers often attributed to natural selection in popular media, it is not a creative force at all. It does not create anything; it merely selects what is already there. In fact, we tend to see more variation in a species population when intense survival pressures are not at work! Most of these variations, especially those that govern complex behaviors or systems, are explained not by new mutations, but by genetic information that is already in the gene pool.

So how did that semantic information get there in the first place? Was it placed there in advance by a thoughtful, Intelligent Designer? Did it come from an accumulation of mutations chosen by natural selection? Or did it come from a combination of design and mutations chosen by natural selection? In regard to the hypothesis of it having come from natural selection and mutation alone, there are some rather formidable challenges that this idea must surmount to satisfactorily explain the semantic information found in the DNA code. Let’s consider some of them:

Most mutations are harmful or neutral. If you randomly change the letters in this sentence, what are the odds that you will improve upon its meaning?
Not all harmful mutations completely destroy functionality. Fer nstunz, u can stil nderstan this sentans, cant yew? Can the few beneficial mutations that occur overpower the accumulation of the many slightly harmful but non-fatal mutations that will accumulate in a gene pool?
A few simple, beneficial mutations resulting from single point mutations have been found and demonstrated, such as some that confer immunity to certain antibiotics in bacteria. These are very simple changes. But can incredibly complex biological systems be accounted for in this way?
Most of the examples that evolutionists point to that involve major changes to a species involve a loss of semantic information, such as the ancestors of horses losing two of their three toes, or fish and salamanders that have become trapped in caves losing their eyes. That can easily be explained by natural selection, but it is just the opposite of a net gain in semantic information.
In order for a beneficial mutation to become a distinct characteristic of a species, enough time must pass for it to substitute for the base pair it replaces in the entire breeding population. This is called the rate of substitution. The rate of substitution for humans was calculated by geneticist J.B.S. Haldane to be so slow (one per 300 generations at the most), that only 1667 substitutions could have occurred in the ten million years said to have passed since humans diverged from the hypothetical ape ancestor that we share with chimpanzees. By contrast, even if humans and chimpanzees are only one percent different, halving this amounts to a difference of 1.5 million base pairs between us and our supposed ape ancestor. How then do we explain this huge gap between 1667 substitutions and 1,500,000 base pairs? This is known as Haldane’s Dilemma, and according to Walter Remine, who conducted a thorough analysis of Haldane’s Dilemma in his book, The Biotic Message, it has never been satisfactorily resolved. 8, 9, 10, 11
Selective pressures can move one way, and then move in the opposite direction when environmental pressures change. During dry years, Galapagos finch beaks were observed to get longer. But later when rainy years came again, and human settlers provided food, the trend reversed itself. Are selective pressures consistent enough to produce entirely new systems of higher complexity?
The fossil record seems to indicate otherwise. Every extinct family exhibits stasis in the fossil record. That is, it pops into the fossil record fully formed, and then vanishes from it in essentially the same form. "When we do see the introduction of evolutionary novelty," writes Niles Eldridge of the American Museum of Natural History, "it usually shows up with a bang, and often with no firm evidence that the fossils did not evolve elsewhere. Evolution cannot be forever going on somewhere else. Yet that is how the fossil record has struck many a forlorn paleontologist looking to learn something about evolution." 12
As biologist Michael Behe pointed out in his book, Darwin’s Black Box, some biological systems are irreducibly complex. An example is the bacterial flagellum. It is powered by a tiny molecular motor. Take away just one part, and the motor cannot function. How could such systems have evolved in a step-by-step process?13
Because of the above considerations, we must distinguish between microevolution and macroevolution. Microevolution is indeed a fact and is observed all around us. It happens due to small genetic variations which, because of selective pressures, can become predominant in a breeding population, such as the average length of a finches beak.

Macroevolution, on the other hand, is the hypothetical evolution of entirely new complex structures and organs, such as the bat’s sonar system. Unlike microevolution, macroevolution is not at all an undisputed fact that has gained theory status. It is still an unproven hypothesis. Although natural selection has been observed to account for speciation among very similar kinds, we truly do not know if it can adequately explain the origin of entirely new kinds of organisms (at the family level and higher), or if it can adequately explain the development of new, highly complex organs.

So when someone tells you, "Evolution is a fact," and by that tries to imply to you that macroevolution also must be an undisputed fact, he or she is either making an ignorant assertion, or is not being completely honest with you.

So......Any other theory's on how we got here? Perhaps asking Jehovah yourself would be the way to go?

@indonesia-phil said
The point is that by measuring our genetic similarity with other life forms we can calculate our relationship to them, i.e. how closely we are related to them. Genetic similarities point to a common beginning for all life, do they not?

And as for 'while they come from god', that is an unproven assumption.

"Abiogenesis, on the other hand, has never been observed happening. It is an unproven hypothesis, as is acknowledged by all honest and informed metaphysical naturalists."

If this were to have happened as many times as evolutionist say it would have had to, to get not only humans here today but every type of life form that are also on the earth now. Why do we not ever see this evolutionary process still happening today as it originally did all those gazillion years ago? Is that the only time in history that the 1 in a gazillion chance that evolution could have happened?
Lets say it was the year 8,000,000 BC when it all started. Why hasn't that first initial "magical moment" that life started, not still happening now in 2019? If it could happen then, why can't it still be happening now or 500 years ago or 1000 years ago? Has anyone on the planet ever found even just one example that is in it's infancy stage of just starting a new life ever been seen today?
If it "could" then, what keeps it from not happening continually all the time throughout all the decades and centuries? Anyone here seen anything like that going on in their nearest little pond out in the woods??????

@galveston75 said
"Abiogenesis, on the other hand, has never been observed happening. It is an unproven hypothesis, as is acknowledged by all honest and informed metaphysical naturalists."

If this were to have happened as many times as evolutionist say it would have had to, to get not only humans here today but every type of life form that are also on the earth now. Why do we not ever ...[text shortened]... s? Anyone here seen anything like that going on in their nearest little pond out in the woods??????

@wolfgang59
Where did everything come from ?

Who knows?