Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Proof

@indonesia-phil said
I'm still a Dalek.

Exterminate

You run the numbers yet?

@caissad4 said
Please supply your long list of claims more extraordinary that your claim of the existence of god or gods.

I don't think God is an extraordinary claim, I think life without a guiding force is a greater claim than life with a creator.

@caissad4

Using the Bible to prove the Bible is not a valid response.
Like using Harry Potter to prove the truth of Harry Potter.
Like using Lord of the Rings to prove Lord of the Rings is true history.
What else you got ?

I have other questions on the writing of the New Testament documents.

You know that the age of the first century was a patriarchal society with an emphasis in the superior trustworthiness of men.

Why then would men wanting to invent a new religion portray themselves as cowardly while WOMEN were the first to witness that Jesus had risen from the dead ?

Isn't it more likely that this embarressing detail would have been concealed and embellished to make the men founders of the new religion the faithful heroes ?

Historians detect that candidness of embarrassing details is which would normally detract from the cause is a sign of authenticity.

Why also would the record of Jesus saying "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" (Matt. 27:46) on the cross be concealed? It suggests that Jesus failed His mission from God. This scandalous detail should have been omitted rather then volunteered by Matthew.

Doesn't its candid inclusion lean more towards indicating the authenticity of the record ?

@DeepThought

The reason I think that the Intelligent Design Theory for the Origin of Species is unscientific is because its claims are essentially untestable and therefore unfalsifiable.

The problem of Origin of Species may be untestable for ANY theory.

Wise evolutionists de-couple their theories from the problem of origin and still maintains the theories usefulness. Why can't ID researches have the same option ?

Things like the DNA molecule appear intelligently designed.

I think you are forcing a coupling of origin with ID in order to dismiss the entire ID approach worthless.

I have a hard time shaking the suspicion that the implications to which ID evidence lead is the real problem. An "Anything BUT God" scenario is very pervasive among many modern intellectuals.

Like the scientist who said "We cannot allow a divine foot to get in the door." Naturalism is committed to excluding anything significant transcending the natural world.

@kellyjay said
Exterminate

You run the numbers yet?

Daleks can't use calculators, they only have sink - plungers or exterminators. Very handy for the odd plumbing job, otherwise they get by by exterminating people who disagree with them.

@kellyjay said
Your correct, you did say "almost certainly abound" my bad!

Buy me a coffee sir (and maybe a cake) and all is forgiven.

@kellyjay said
You seem to reject a creator with huge numbers in favor of God doing a work, so why would you then turn around and say there is life else where due to large numbers?

With 1 billion trillion stars in the observable universe alone, do you not think God has 'over-created' if life only exists on this planet?

@sonship said
@caissad4

Because it is an extraordinary claim.

I don't think that is a good enough answer at all.

Which is more of an extraordinary claim ?

1.) Everything came into existence by nothing and for nothing.

2.) Everything came into existence by something for something.

A recurrent fallacy.

Who here has claimed everything came into existence from nothing? Name one person.

@galveston75 said
According to the Bible it says that Jesus is the 1st of all creations.

I do wish you'd stop lying about this.

@kellyjay said
Where did everything come from?

Darwin done it.

@ghost-of-a-duke said
With 1 billion trillion stars in the observable universe alone, do you not think God has 'over-created' if life only exists on this planet?

Well, maybe he thought we'd like the view.

@kellyjay said
I don't believe religious faith and science are the samething, but that said because they are different, but that doesn't automatically mean one is right the other is wrong. It means they approach truth from different perspectives. Truth doesn't change because it is accepted revelation or discovered through study.

Evolution isn't on firm ground by natural selection if you ...[text shortened]... itself from where did it all come from, what is the meaning in life, where are we going, and so on.

I'm happy enough with your first paragraph. The problem I have is when religious narratives are treated as if they are scientific statements, or for that matter vice versa. Science can only deal with material evidence, in the sense that it needs something on which experiments can be performed or repeatable observations made.

I want to make a small point about your computer program analogy:

You take a computer program, start changing the code without intent, it will be non-functioning in short older, it will not turn itself into a new improved operating systems for you PC simply because you work on it a very long time.

Well yes, but genomes don't work like that. One mechanism involves an enzyme called transposase, which when triggered copies an entire gene to another location in the genome. There are now two copies of the same gene, the copy can start to be modified - without losing the functionality of the original gene. Clearly in some individuals it's going to produce a catastrophe and that individual will die. In others it'll produce new characteristics that do not kill the individual and can increase fitness. So, returning to your computing analogy, DNA has a sort of sandbox for new genes.

I'll leave the rest to be debated over in the Science forum in the thread on abiogenesis as that's the appropriate place.

@Ghost-of-a-Duke

A recurrent fallacy.

Who here has claimed everything came into existence from nothing? Name one person.

Well, you presumed to answer for caissadr4.

Atheistic physicist Lawrence Krauss, Though professional philosophers point out that his "nothing" is not really nothing.
[My bolding]

From Wiki

A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing is a non-fiction book by the physicist Lawrence M. Krauss, initially published on January 10, 2012 by Free Press. It discusses modern cosmogony and its implications for the debate about the existence of God. The main theme of the book is how "we have discovered that all signs suggest a universe that could and plausibly did arise from a deeper nothing—involving the absence of space itself and—which may one day return to nothing via processes that may not only be comprehensible but also processes that do not require any external control or direction." [1][2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Universe_from_Nothing

He has been taken to task for word play.

In the New York Times, philosopher of science and physicist David Albert said the book failed to live up to its title; he claimed Krauss dismissed concerns about what Albert calls his misuse of the term nothing.[7]

Stephen Hawking -

In his latest book The Grand Design, Steven Hawking writes, “Because there is a law such as gravity, [b] the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist.”. [/b]

An arguable candidate is British astrophysicist Paul Davies.

From The Creator and the Cosmos by Hugh Ross

Davies began by pointing out that virtual particles can pop into existence from nothingness through quantum tunneling ... Such particles can be produced out of absolutely nothing, provided they are converted back into nothingness before the human observer can possibly detect their appearance. This typically means that the particles so produced must disappear in less than a quintilionth of a second.

With an arguable definition of "nothing" Davies has argued that quantum tunneling may be responsible for the creation of the universe from nothing.

It should be noted that Davies may have moved from his former atheist position a little. He states in The Cosmic Blueprint -

If new organizational levels pop into existence for no reason, why do we see such an orderly progression in the universe from featureless origin to rich diversity?

Ross says Davies concluded that we have "powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all".

So it has been stated. But it has also been backed away from by some.
Don't pretend that it was never claimed.

@DeepThought [my bolding]

One mechanism involves an enzyme called transposase, which when triggered copies an entire gene to another location in the genome. There are now two copies of the same gene, the copy can start to be modified - without losing the functionality of the original gene. Clearly in some individuals it's going to produce a catastrophe and that individual will die. In others it'll produce new characteristics that do not kill the individual and can increase fitness. So, returning to your computing analogy, DNA has a sort of sandbox for new genes.

And it seems unscientific for someone understanding the process and suspecting intelligence was at work in this design ?

It does not seem to you a contribution to science that one suggests that rather than a purposeless non-guiding randomness being responsible for that mechanism, SOME form of intelligence is a better explanation?

Caissad4, what would YOU say?

Which is more of an extraordinary claim ?

1.) Everything came into existence by nothing and for nothing.

2.) Everything came into existence by something for something.

Now that I shown that #1 has been claimed. Which claim do you think is more extra-ordinary?