God doesn't seem to exist!

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BS.

I am quite aware that some herbal medicines have a mountain of anecdotal evidence supporting it, I am also quite aware that most common remedies have not had the necessary research done on them and that this does not make them ineffective.

I do not reject things because they have not been tested, I reject things that A, Have been tested and are shown to be no better than placebo eg Homeopathy, or B, Violate natural laws. Your post is simply one big infestation of logical fallacies.

Well I suggest you look back at some of your previous vitriol concerning modern understandings of the natural world. As to abiogenisis your are very very wrong. that the research has not produced life does not mean the conception of how life formed is wrong. There are very clear paths to how life could have formed and these paths all obey the laws of geo chemistry. The tricky part is finding the correct combinations that will overcome the various hurdles. I find it interesting that you freely admit that you do not have a good grasp of biology and this hinders you understanding of origins of life(which again shows that you do not really understand the research into Origins of life. As all of the pathways to biology are geo chemical) and yet you feel free to assert that the people doing the research are guilty of some kind of fraud.

I also note that you have avoided answering my question on what you actually believe regarding life on earth?

More personal attacks David!

Not believing in God may not necessarily make you a materialist, especially if you happen to think that the materialist paradigm cannot account for all we know, or if there are reasons to believe there is evidence to support the notion of what we could call a supernatural realm (but no evidence for God/gods).

If material reality is all there is, if we have no free will, determinism predominates from the lowest order of reality to the highest, and who we are is basically accounted for by what happens in our brains, then you have no choice but to accept that your - for example, daughter - is nothing more than a pre-programmed, DNA-determined automaton, a bag of complex chemistry with no will, purpose, or ultimate meaning. To pretend that life has purpose or meaning, or that lives actually matter, or that certain things are right and wrong, whilst also believing what I have outlined above, is inconsistent at best, and downright delusional at worst.

Yes, it's true that materialism isn't a religion, but it is a belief system nontheless, a philosophical prejudice that one cannot use science to justify, for the practice of science itself is based upon the acceptance of certain axioms of philosophy (ex. the existence of objective reality) that cannot be demonstrated scientifically.

No of course you wont, obviously maths has nothing to do with nature, it shows us nothing and logically fallacious analogies about housewives are all that is needed.

Once again you have demonstrated that you are either not prepared to or are unable to support you claims with anything even remotely resembling empirical evidence.

Oh and btw energy applied to non biological systems also provides order, so your personal attack laden example of morphology is yet another logical fallacy.

What 'vitriol'? Where? Point it out to me!



How could it not? If the results are ALL negative, then the underlying theory is wrong. What could be more obvious?



Yes, 'could' have formed, and that was what I pointed out. The fact of the matter is that no one knows how or why life arose in the first place. Why can't you just admit as much?



I did NOT accuse anyone of fraud. It's strange that even I, someone who usually cannot discern emotional states in others, can clearly see that my disagreement is making you angry. It's as clear as day. Why are you becoming emotional about this? Have I raised issues that you, as a confirmed atheist, cannot address? Yes, that would have to be it.



I have not avoided anything, because up until now you had not asked me about this. The truth of the matter is that I simply don't know how or why life began, and I am willing to admit this. You, on the other hand, just parrot the sayings of people who insist that nothing beyond the material exists, and that therefore whatever it was that was ultimately responsible for the emergence of life it could not have involved anything that may sound to die-hard philosophical materialists like 'woo'.

Homeopathy is not my thing actually.
As for what exactly would violate natural laws in what I wrote is beyond me
Very vague...

No you are not making me angry. Maybe I am wrong, but I seem to recall many posts where you describe the fallacious nature of modern science and how the gullible lap it up.

As to

"The fact of the matter is that no one knows how or why life arose in the first place. Why can't you just admit as much?"

I acknoweldge this all the time. What I don't acknowledge and what you seem to believe is that we have no idea how life arose. In fact we have a good many plausible scenarios, many of which can interlink. Now you may see this as having no idea how life arose, but that is a bit like say researchers into what became understood as DNA had no idea. Like the researchers into lifes replication, life of origin researchers know what to look for, how to look for it and are able to make predictions on what they should find from the experiments they are doing. This is hardly having no idea. As to why? why should there be a reason, this is purely a human construct.

It is not in particular reference to anything. Just simply I reject anything that appears to reject natural laws unless there is testable evidence supporting its existence, or at least predictions based upon the hypotheses. You are claiming that people like myself will not accept anything that is not backed up by empirical evidence, this is clearly wrong as there are many instances of annecdotally accepted things that have not yet been tested, however once these things have been tested REPEATEDLY and all the evidence shows them to be false then it would be stupid to continue believing them. A perfect example of this is Time. Once thought by literally everyone (who gave it thought) to be invariant, we now know it is not. It is even possible that people may have thought that Time not being invariant would be a violation of natural laws, which is why I qualified my statement regarding natural laws. Another example of common belief formed by anecdotal evidence is the bite of the White Tail spider here in Australia. Despite repeated checks of hospital records showing that the bite of this spider DOES NOT cause a necrotic sore, people refuse to accept the evidence. Prior to the publication of all the metadata I was wary of these spiders as the anecdotal evidence suggested they were dangerous, it is now clear that they are not.

As for all forms of mysticism, these clearly violate natural laws and there is know evidence supporting the claims, and despite repeated attempts by adherents to prove otherwise nothing has shown this assesment to be wrong.

I never made this claim, but perhaps you are confusing me with someone who did. That's understandable enough, I guess.



Okay, my position on this perhaps needs to be clarified. I will not claim that this mystery is a complete one, where we have absolutely NO idea how or why life arose, but it needs to be pointed out that thus far every attempt to create life in the lab that has used our current theories about life and abiogenesis as their basis, has failed to produce life. Amino acids are not life, and yet to my knowledge that is as complex as the recreation of the hypothetical 'primordial soup' ever gets (I'm primarily thinking, of course, of the Miller-Urey experiments of the '50's and variations thereof). However, it needs to be pointed out that subsequent, and hence more advanced, experiments have been equally negative. All of this suggests to me - suggests, it does not 'prove' - that we are on the wrong track here.

If life were to prove common in the universe, I do not see how that would make any life emerging at all less remarkable. Given the sheer numbers it might be odd to speak of improbable, but I would have thought that would merely compound the mystery/problem. You declare that there is no direction to the factors that drive change in the Universe.

Could you define how you are using natural and supernatural, and what your criteria for plausibility are? Whoever or whatever were the origin, in one sense that would surely be more natural than anything else, in another beyond nature as familiar to us. I realise some of these questions may be irritating, and may come across as being games with words, but that is not my intention.

I still do not understand what some people mean by speaking of time being produced as part of the Big Bang - surely before and after already implies time? Note that I am not attacking the theory, merely asking for a point of clarification. Nor do I understand space being similarly so originated. Surely however dense the point were, it would have to exist with dimensions and within a space of some sort, or what could be expanded into? I may be merely having trouble understanding admittedly counterintuitive concepts.

Out of curiosity, do you have a philosophical base or general principle to guide your ethical decisions or judgments? Given as we have both acknowledged some details of ethical boundaries are historically conditioned, how would you judge between values and actions?

But our knowledge of the natural laws has undergone not only expansion but correction as you point out. I was not aware of any knowledge conclusively ruling against a variety of phenomena classified as mystical, many of which are rejected. by adherents of other forms of mysticism any way. Certainly many specific forms of "mysticism" do seem to have no basis in science. But claims about the existence of God are difficult to falsify or verify. Certain specific beliefs and interpretations may have been either debunked or rendered highly improbable by scientific advances, but conflating these does not help the issue.

I suppose we could accept the world that we actually live in as the result of blind chance, which would still be remarkable, but this seems an inadequate answer. Of course it could be argued that merely that humans find something insufficient would not change truth or falsity, it is just that a degree of credulity seems to be demanded by that hypothesis also. If, as seems to be the case, you are following a principle similar to Occam's Razor, then surely some attempt must be made to account for reality as we actually find it, or else reject the evidence of our senses and with it the whole argument becomes futile.

A lot of what has been found (or is currently held) to be true seems to defy so called "common sense"; how then can we rule out of court that which is merely inconvenient to us? Plausibility seems a convenient excuse for avoiding anything that would not match one's worldview.

To return to the questions of ethics; not all concepts of virtue actually support mutual self-interest or the continuance of the line.

But plausibility and in one sense natural laws (a terminology of philosophical and religious origin anyway) could be equally so dismissed as human constructs (to be clear, I am not so dismissing them). If the origin of everything is random, then that includes the origin of human consciousness and perception, as of religion, philosophy and science (formerly natural philosophy). What basis for trust is left? Yet it is necessary to assume that there is some relation between perception and reality, or science and religion alike become untenable. Yet in an atheistic model of the Universe there is no particular reason to assume this. Humans would be only one product of many, why should our perceptions be privileged? In any case we need to do so as we have no other source of data to go on. I hope that I am not getting too unclear.

Forgive me if I seem to attack, when on the whole I admire much of your approach.

What it suggests is that origins of life is extraordinarily complex and that there are many plausible routes for it to happen. Finding how it happened is complicated by many factors not the least of which researchers need to devise experiments which mimic early earth conditions whilst at the same time preventing contamination from the present time. Added to this, and I think this is the most interesting part, there appears to be quite a few mechanisms give very tantalizing to accounts for how it happened. Far from God needing to be present the numbers of possible scenarios suggest that what the secular world has been saying for a very long time, that is; Origins of life is a natural event obeying the known laws of nature. Now this may be wrong but looking at the developments in the field I really think it is a matter of when, not if.

Your assertion that the experiments since Miller Urey have "been equally negative" is somewhat fallacious. Many experiment have been carried out, to the point now that pretty much all of the precursors of life have been produced through chemical reactions, to the point they are now working on synthesizing RNA. which is a long long way from creating peptides. like I have said repeatedly science is for the most part a gradual progression of discoveries. To quote Newtons borrowed quote "If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of Giants". The telescope was invented in 1608 and made popular by Gallileo in 1609 yet it was not until 1995 that we discovered the first extra solar planet. That we are on the verge of replicating RNA a little over 60 years after the first synthesis of Amino Acids is simply astounding.

What I find untenable about your position is that you have made a judgment call on the research and where it is at, yet it would appear by your posts that you know very little about the research that you are dismissing.

BTW just curious as to why you seem reluctant to detail how you view life on earth. ie evolution etc.

Ok from what I can tell you are saying that how do we know our understanding of experiment is valid, as our perception might only be relative to ourselves? In that case I might as well say "prove I am not a tree" you might say something like " you are not a tree because you have no roots, or leaves, and you do not photosynthesize" then using your argument I would say "ahh but that is your perception and it is not relative to mine"

There is no answer to this, and to be honest I find discussing anything with people who genuinely debate in this fashion to be an abject exercise in futility.

I also feel linking the natural philosophers with science some what fallacious, as this group includes the likes of Plato and Aristotle along with Bacon and Newton. Aristotelian methods dominated the field of natural philosophy until the time of Bacon. I feel it is a historical glitch that Bacon and Newton and those who followed, are still remembered as natural philosophers only because the term scientist was not coined for several centuries after advent of their methodology (I call it theirs, even though the scientific method was found and lost by Islamic scholars)

The fact that the scientific method demands prediction, and that these scientific predictions are borne out, to me thoroughly distances Science from Religious and other non empirical philosophy, to quote Newton once again:



You also talk about "Blind Chance" I do not see chemical reactions this way. It may very well be that given the available geo chemistry life was inevitable.

I also note you ask about any knowledge conclusively ruling out any form of mysticism. Of course there isn't, but I presume you are aware of Bertrand Russel's thought experiment concerning the T-Pot.

BTW, thanks for the compliment.

To do so gets me a reprimand from the censors and the thread locked.