Originally posted by chaney3The 'appearance' of food, while trivial to some, and 'classic' to others needs as much explaining as does the Big Bang.
Okay, if I used the incorrect word, I can accept that.
I go back to the food issue though, because to me it's a very relevant topic......we would obviously die without it. However a particular atheist thinks humans evolved, and what they may have evolved from.....it still is amazing that when we finally became 'human', that there was food at all to susta ...[text shortened]... does the Big Bang.
My opinion, of course. No Phd after my name. 🙂
Er.....hang on....🙂🙂
Humans can use a wide range of organic material as food just as there are many predators that can use humans as food. The presence of organic material on a planet where human life evolved is not surprising - it is blindingly obvious - since human life could only evolve in the context of organic life in diverse forms with which humans share common ancestors and from which both humanity and the other organic life forms currently present have all evolved.
What might be surprising is if intelligent life appeared by random chance on the moon where absolutely no other conditions for the evolution of intelligent life are to be found. That would indeed invoke thoughts of divine intervention. Such intervention is not required to account for human evolution as one of a great many living species on earth. It may seem marginally surprising that humanity has the attributes it does have, including the ability to think reflexively about our own existence, but there is nothing surprising about the presence of organic materials that we can use as food. When such blindingly obvious phenomena are invoked in evidence for intelligent design and divine intervention, we have truly reached the bottom of the barrel, because it demonstrates a total poverty of the imagination and an utter failure of basic science education.
Originally posted by chaney3You've got this on its head. It is not food that evolved it is predation. At one stage all organisms were what are called chemoautotropes, meaning they use chemicals in their environment to produce the energy they need to maintain a metabolism. As a development of that organisms evolved predatory behaviour - in a very real sense food is just chemicals in our environment. Photoautotropes (photosynthesisers) evolved later.
Okay, if I used the incorrect word, I can accept that.
I go back to the food issue though, because to me it's a very relevant topic......we would obviously die without it. However a particular atheist thinks humans evolved, and what they may have evolved from.....it still is amazing that when we finally became 'human', that there was food at all to susta ...[text shortened]... does the Big Bang.
My opinion, of course. No Phd after my name. 🙂
Er.....hang on....🙂🙂
Originally posted by twhiteheadThe probability that life exists is 1 (since it does exist). If your question pertains not to the existence of life now, but rather to how it got going initially, then the probability that God was necessary to initiate life cannot be higher than the probability that God exists.
This keeps coming up so I thought it worthy of its own thread.
Assertion: Anyone who claims to have worked out an explicit probability for life occurring 'at random' or what they really mean 'without the aid of God', is talking nonsense.
Is anyone able to counter this assertion? ie can anyone give a reasonable scenario in which such a probability can be calculation and have useful meaning?
I doubt that there is any meaningful calculation for the probability of the existence of God, the reason being that God is sui genris. I believe that probability calculations can be meaningfully applied only to events which recur or at least may possibly recur (such as the frequency of earthquakes or lightning strikes in a certain region), or to events which are likely to occur an indefinite number of times across a given population (such as death by cancer or automobile accident) or within a set of possible outcomes (such as flipping a coin and its landing heads up).
God is not a 'possible outcome' in the requisite sense for probabilistic calculations to be applicable.
Originally posted by moonbusIt pertains to how life could get going in the universe. It could apply to any life anywhere in the universe, not just us. Although I am also willing to discuss calculations that apply to just us there are a number of conceptual issue with doing to.
The probability that life exists is 1 (since it does exist). If your question pertains not to the existence of life now, but rather to how it got going initially,
...then the probability that God was necessary to initiate life cannot be higher than the probability that God exists.
My challenge does not involve God at all. It starts with the assumption that there is no God and then asks what the probability of life arising may be.
I believe that probability calculations can be meaningfully applied only to events which recur or at least may possibly recur
Actually they have more applications than that. Probability calculations can be done with regards to singular entities which do not recur. It is of course important to understand the meaning of such calculations but they can be done.
We can for example look at the orbits of dwarf moons in the outer solar system and make a reasonable estimate of the probability that there is a 10th planet approximately the size of the earth. There is, or is not such a planet. There is only one, or isn't one. It will not recur.
Similarly such calculations were used to determine that the Higgs Boson ( God particle ) is very very very likely to be a real thing.
So if it works for the God particle, why not God?
It pertains to how life could get going in the universe. It could apply to any life anywhere in the universe, not just us. My challenge does not involve God at all. It starts with the assumption that there is no God and then asks what the probability of life arising [on earth or somewhere else in the universe] may be.
Given that organic compounds have been detected on comets which congealed during the very early formation of our solar system, it seems likely that if life arises where conditions for it are suitable, then life is probably not unique to this planet. I'm not sure though what putting a number between 0 and 1 on this probability would mean.
One point where the Creationist position falls down is its insistence that life cannot come from not-life. This is to assume a false dichotomy, namely that there are only two mutually exclusive states in the universe: "the living" and "the not-living" without any in-between states. Of course, a fully-formed creature, such as a mouse, cannot come directly from non-living matter, such as dust or mud--in that, the Creationists are right, but ridiculous to point it out.
In fact, there are in-between states; there are phenomena which are not quite life but nonetheless exhibit life-like properties. Viruses, for example, lack the capacity to reproduce themselves, but when they invade living cells, they can bring the infected cells to reproduce the virus. There are other examples of in-between states, but I won't list them here.
Life is negative entropy. Entropy can be resisted only under certain very limited conditions, within a closed system, for a finite period of time, where there is energy input. This suggests that for life to get going, at least three things are required:
1. the right constituent chemical compounds (amino acids, etc. etc.);
2. energy input, such as sunlight or heat (including subterranean sources);
3. some mechanism for converting, concentrating, and storing energy, something like a battery (photosynthesis is an example of this); in the simplest case, maintaining two different ph-values on different sides of a membrane.
It seems likely that an ocean offers the most suitable mix of chemicals and energy. Abundant forms of primitive life have been discovered on the ocean floor in the vicinity of hot geysers. Given that one of Saturn's moons appears to have an ocean with hot geysers (covered over by a frozen surface), it seems possible that life could get going elsewhere than Earth. How probable it is that there is exo-life, for example on a saturnine moon, is a matter of conjecture, but it seems that the physical conditions for it are at least favorable.
Of the three items necessary for life to get started, the most difficult one for Creationists to get their minds round, I think, is no.3: a purely natural (not divine) mechanism for converting, concentrating, and storing energy. This is the crucial step which bridges "not-life" and "life".
It is a well-documented fact that certain recursive functions, which take their previous results as the operand for the next iteration, produce patterns. Think, for example, of the pattern which emerges when wind blows across water: wave forms appear. When waves from opposite sides of the same body of water (lake or whatever) meet, interference patterns arise; that is, more complicated patterns arise. The same phenomenon can be demonstrated in chemical reactions; that is, so long as energy input continues, certain compounds tend to get more complicated: from atoms come molecules, from molecules come not merely bigger molecules with all the same properties but more complicated molecules with different properties, and so on. If the "and so on" goes through enough iterations, then organic compounds could arise from non-organic constituents through an indefinite number of in-between states.
I recommend a book which explains this in much greater detail: "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" by Daniel Dennett.
The above scenario leaves open the possibility that life got started more than once and at different locations, even on the same planet. Conditions could have been favorable at any number of undersea geysers. Together with deep time, this accounts for the diversity of life forms we observe today. Another weakness of the Creationist position, especially when yoked to the young Earth hypothesis, is that it fails to account for diversity; given the rate at which genetic mutation occurs, 6,000 years is not enough time for the various human races (Negro, Asian, Indian, Caucasian, Aborigine) to have diverged from one initial Adam and one initial Eve. Whereas the fossil record indicates that early hominids were very diverse, suggesting multiple cross-breeding episodes rather than a single moment of creation.
Originally posted by moonbusAnother weakness of the Creationist position, especially when yoked to the young Earth hypothesis, is that it fails to account for diversity; given the rate at which genetic mutation occurs, 6,000 years is not enough time for the various human races (Negro, Asian, Indian, Caucasian, Aborigine) to have diverged from one initial Adam and one initial Eve.
[b]It pertains to how life could get going in the universe. It could apply to any life anywhere in the universe, not just us. My challenge does not involve God at all. It starts with the assumption that there is no God and then asks what the probability of life arising [on earth or somewhere else in the universe] may be.
Given that organic compounds h ...[text shortened]... ry diverse, suggesting multiple cross-breeding episodes rather than a single moment of creation.[/b]
You know this how?
Originally posted by FetchmyjunkHuman evolution is pretty well-documented. Read more here:
[b] Another weakness of the Creationist position, especially when yoked to the young Earth hypothesis, is that it fails to account for diversity; given the rate at which genetic mutation occurs, 6,000 years is not enough time for the various human races (Negro, Asian, Indian, Caucasian, Aborigine) to have diverged from one initial Adam and one initial Eve.
You know this how?[/b]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution
Originally posted by moonbusThe calculations this thread is responding to, put such a fantastically small figure on the probability that a reasonable conclusion would be that it is impossible. The problem is that the figures were not explained. Sonship keeps waffling on about how the figures may be debatable but are still useful, yet fails to explain where they come from or if they are actually meaningful. The reality is that he has no idea where they come from but likes the conclusion that can be drawn. Also he posted a video with them in and sonship is incapable of admitting when he is wrong.
I'm not sure though what putting a number between 0 and 1 on this probability would mean.
The thread is intended to be about the probability of life arising in the universe. A probability for life arising on a planet with suitable conditions would be extremely useful for estimating the number of life bearing planets in the galaxy. It is a key term in the Drake equation. It is also notably an unknown term. Unless we observe new life forms emerging on earth, we will probably never know what the probability is until we discover life on other planets. Certainly there is not enough information available at present to make a reasonable calculation for this figure. And anyone who claims to have done such a calculation and come up with an explicit figure is talking nonsense.