Why do people laugh at creationists? -only creationists don’t know why

Originally posted by Andrew Hamilton
….even given 15 billion years of energy and matter interacting with each other in planless and goalless and purposeless "blind LUCK."
..… (my emphasis)

The natural selection part of evolution is not "blind LUCK" but rather just “blind” -how can it be “LUCK” when it is a non-random process? This clearly demonstrates you don’t understand evolution thus you don’t know what you are talking about.[/b]

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The natural selection part of evolution is not "blind LUCK" but rather just “blind” -how can it be “LUCK” when it is a non-random process? This clearly demonstrates you don’t understand evolution thus you don’t know what you are talking about.
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From the standpoint of survival, useful modifications are the result of probability working on behalf of the fitness of the organism.

In the argots of the street you certainly could call that "luck."

The "lucky" fit organisms survived. The unlucky ones did not. They died and discontinued.

All the living organisms in the world are the ones who came out so far on the lucky side of your process. That is from the standpoint that it is more desireable for living things to survive than to die out.

Back to the digestive system. There is a substance that coats the walls of your stomach that helps the process of chemicals being absorbed into your blood. If it were not there you would die a very agonizing death.

If you're not writhing in excrutiating pain after dinner and you don't believe any intelligence designed your stomach to work the way it does, then you are lucky. Blind luck of natural selection has worked on your behalf to exclude human beings from this very unpleasant and painful way to go after eating.

Originally posted by jaywill
Back to the digestive system. There is a substance that coats the walls of your stomach that helps the process of chemicals being absorbed into your blood. If it were not there you would die a very agonizing death.

Which is why people have digestive systems that don't condemn them to such a death before reproducing! That's the whole point behind natural selection -- maybe there were people without this stomach lining, but they died, and the ones who had the lining survived and reproduced, and here we are today!

Originally posted by Andrew Hamilton
[b]….But we can observe suns being born and dying, therefore, we have the scientific ability to OBSERVE these phenomenon. Life being generated from nonlife, however, is quite another matter.
..…

If we assume life had a beginning then LOGIC determines that life must have come from non-life because if it hadn’t then that first life would ha ...[text shortened]... arted just as we should use LOGIC to calculate the probable cause of how avalanches get started?

My only point here is the scientific assumption that there was no supernatural involvement in the process of life coming into existence is bunk simply because it has never been observed, nor can it be duplicated no matter how hard we try. In short, we are encouraged to believe that a process occurred devoid of intelligent intervention and a random when those who have intelligent thought cannot duplicate the same outcome yet they claim they know how it came about.

Originally posted by twhitehead
Now that is a more reasonable argument, though hardly conclusive. So why did you start out with the strawman? It is the frequent use of strawmen and lies that causes creationists to get laughed at. If you have reasonable concerns about the theory of Evolution or the various hypothesis regarding abiogenesis then I and others would treat you with respect an ...[text shortened]... hen work out what signs such a hypothesis implies should be observable then try to observe them.

Our existence and the existence of the entire universe has arisen from the unseen. Both matter and life have burst into existence unobserved but from what? This delimma will never be solved from science because, like the existence of God, they can NEVER be studied using the scientific method of observation. In short, the unseen and unobservable has brought about the observable univerrse we know today. All that is then left is theory and conjecture. At this stage both theology and science meet as equals.....that is unless one could create matter and/or life.

Originally posted by whodey
Our existence and the existence of the entire universe has arisen from the unseen. Both matter and life have burst into existence unobserved but from what? This delimma will never be solved from science because, like the existence of God, they can NEVER be studied using the scientific method of observation. In short, the unseen and unobservable has brought ...[text shortened]... both theology and science meet as equals.....that is unless one could create matter and/or life.

Now that is why creationists get laughed at. They make up statements to try to protect their beliefs. You don't actually believe that, nor have you even bothered to think about whether you are making much sense. All you want is to protect your beliefs.
As far as we can tell the origin of life can and has been observed. There is no reason to think otherwise. The fact that you are so sure that I am wrong and that it is impossible for it to have ever been observed is what makes people laugh at you. You don't even have Biblical reasons for such a claim. It simply came to you that if you made the claim it would keep your beliefs safe and sound.

If someone creates life, how will that change your beliefs? What would it mean to you? Do you honestly believe that life contains some magic spark that is passed on and that if we took the necessary atoms and created a copy of a cell that it would not work? Or is this simply a delaying tactic ie "I don't have to think about this until it happens"

Originally posted by twhitehead
If someone creates life, how will that change your beliefs? What would it mean to you? Do you honestly believe that life contains some magic spark that is passed on and that if we took the necessary atoms and created a copy of a cell that it would not work? Or is this simply a delaying tactic ie "I don't have to think about this until it happens"[/b]

For someone to make the claim that life arose from nonlife and at random it would behoove one to have "evidence". Otherwise, it is no different that the religious believing unsubstantiated things that we find in the Bible.

Originally posted by jaywill
[b]=================================
The natural selection part of evolution is not "blind LUCK" but rather just “blind” -how can it be “LUCK” when it is a non-random process? This clearly demonstrates you don’t understand evolution thus you don’t know what you are talking about.
======================================

From the s om the standpoint that it is more desireable for living things to survive than to die out.[/b]

….From the standpoint of survival, useful modifications are the result of probability working on behalf of the fitness of the organism.

In the argots of the street you certainly could call that "luck."
..…

You are talking here about random mutations. The vast majority of random mutations are harmful to survival of the living thing but, given enough of them, there is bound to be a few advantageous ones -that is mathematically virtually inevitable. Random mutations do involve “luck” but they are only one-half of the process of evolution -what about the other half -i.e. what about natural selection? Is that random?
Evolution is only PARTLY random because natural selection isn’t -so it isn’t ALL down to just “luck” as you make out. (I would say mainly in the form of what we can predict will NOT evolve -predicting what will probably evolve would usually be a lot harder but never the less sometimes possible).

…The "lucky" fit organisms survived. ..…

The "lucky" organisms are those that have the most advantageous genome.

….The unlucky ones did not. They died and discontinued.
.…

Why is that if is not as a result of natural selection?
I ask again, is natural selection random?

….All the living organisms in the world are the ones who came out so far on the lucky side of your process. That is from the standpoint that it is more DESIRABLE for living things to survive than to die out.
… (my emphasis)

I don’t understand what you mean by “DESIRABLE” here; “DESIRABLE” to whom? Does, say, a bacterium “DESIRE” antibiotic resistance?

Originally posted by whodey
My only point here is the scientific assumption that there was no supernatural involvement in the process of life coming into existence is bunk simply because it has never been observed, nor can it be duplicated no matter how hard we try. In short, we are encouraged to believe that a process occurred devoid of intelligent intervention and a random when those ...[text shortened]... ntelligent thought cannot duplicate the same outcome yet they claim they know how it came about.

….My only point here is the scientific assumption that there was NO supernatural involvement in the process of life coming into existence is bunk simply because it has never been observed,
..…

How can it ever be an unreasonable “assumption” that there was NO supernatural involvement in something? That is like saying that it is unreasonable “assumption” that there was NO Santa involvement in something just because we weren’t there to observe it.
Even if we were not there to witness something, it is ALWAYS an unreasonable assumption that there WAS supernatural involvement -just one example -hypothetically, suppose it just happens that absolutely nobody ever actually observed an avalanche get started nor does anyone know what makes them start but they DID observed an avalanche -would you conclude from that unknown that it is an unreasonable “assumption” that there was NO supernatural involvement in the creation of avalanches? ( -I would really like you to answer this one question)

There was a time when people generally DID assume that there was supernatural involvement in just about everything -for example, thunder may have been interpreted as angry gods etc.
-do you accept that, like most of us in the modern day (I assume), this type of superstitious thinking is erroneous?

…yet they CLAIM they know how it came about.
..… (my emphasis)

No “they” don’t! who "CLAIMS" to know exactly how the first life got started from non-life? -this is something that is still being researched.

Originally posted by whodey
For someone to make the claim that life arose from nonlife and at random it would behoove one to have "evidence". Otherwise, it is no different that the religious believing unsubstantiated things that we find in the Bible.

What are the origins of life? How did things go from non-living to living? From something that could not reproduce to something that could? One person who has exhaustively investigated this subject is paleontologist Andrew Knoll, a professor of biology at Harvard and author of Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Life.

The most categorical Knoll will get on the questions above is this, in answer to the specific question of how life began on Earth:

"The short answer is we don't really know how life originated on this planet. There have been a variety of experiments that tell us some possible roads, but we remain in substantial ignorance. That said, I think what we're looking for is some kind of molecule that is simple enough that it can be made by physical processes on the young Earth, yet complicated enough that it can take charge of making more of itself. That, I think, is the moment when we cross that great divide and start moving toward something that most people would recognize as living."

I can live with this answer: we don't know.

As for randomness, Knoll adds:

"People's ideas on the circumstances under which life might emerge have really changed and developed over the last 30 or 40 years. I think it's fair to say that when I was a boy those few people who thought about the origin of life thought that it probably was a set of improbable reactions that just happened to get going over the fullness of time. And I think it's fair to say that most of those people probably thought that we would find out what those reactions were, that somehow we would nail it in a test tube at some point. "

"Now I think, curiously enough, both of those attitudes have changed. I think that there's less confidence that we're really going to be able to identify a specific historical route by which life emerged, but at the same time there's increasing confidence that when life did arise on this planet, it was not a protracted process using a chemistry that is pretty unlikely but rather is a chemistry that, when you get the recipe right, it goes, and it goes fairly quickly."



The assumptions, presumptions, and hubris behind the religious explanations, those I cannot accept because they are mere assertions based on authoritarian ideologies.

Originally posted by whodey
For someone to make the claim that life arose from nonlife and at random it would behoove one to have "evidence". Otherwise, it is no different that the religious believing unsubstantiated things that we find in the Bible.

We have evidence. Plenty of it. We do not need your strawman version of evidence.

But you haven't answered the question nor the challenge. Why did you make up your claim that no evidence can exist, and what would you do if someone creates life in the lab? Will you become atheist or will you make up a new story?

Originally posted by twhitehead
We have evidence. Plenty of it. We do not need your strawman version of evidence.

But you haven't answered the question nor the challenge. Why did you make up your claim that no evidence can exist, and what would you do if someone creates life in the lab? Will you become atheist or will you make up a new story?

For me if you can show me that life could be formed in lab with much
time and effort by design, I'd say you have given reason to show ID
could be true and not a designless abiogensis solution.
Kelly

Originally posted by twhitehead
We have evidence. Plenty of it. We do not need your strawman version of evidence.

But you haven't answered the question nor the challenge. Why did you make up your claim that no evidence can exist, and what would you do if someone creates life in the lab? Will you become atheist or will you make up a new story?

Stating there is evidence is not producing any, it isn't showing that life
could have come from non-life, it isn't allowing your claims to be
challenged, it simply states your beliefs nothing more.
Kelly

Originally posted by jaywill
Back to the digestive system. There is a substance that coats the walls of your stomach that helps the process of chemicals being absorbed into your blood. If it were not there you would die a very agonizing death.

If you're not writhing in excrutiating pain after dinner and you don't believe any intelligence designed your stomach to work the way it doe ...[text shortened]... r behalf to exclude human beings from this very unpleasant and painful way to go after eating.

Why then do we not have the digestive tract of a turkey vulture?

The turkey vulture can digest things that would kill you or me. Science has proven that a turkey vulture's digestive tract can metabolize anthrax. ANTHRAX.

Why did your intelligent design not convey that digestive ability to other birds and mammals? Why not people?

Originally posted by KellyJay
Stating there is evidence is not producing any, it isn't showing that life
could have come from non-life, it isn't allowing your claims to be
challenged, it simply states your beliefs nothing more.
Kelly

I am fully aware that I did not produce any evidence, nor do I particularly wish to in this thread. My point is that I have evidence which proves whodeys claims false. He prefers to believe that I have no evidence and cannot possibly have evidence because it keeps his creationist faith nice and safe. He even feels the need to create strawmen to support his claims.
It is not stating my beliefs at all. I do not 'believe' I have evidence, I know I have evidence. Whether that evidence is believable or convincing to you or I is another matter entirely.