Post Any Evidence For God Here

[crispybits]

Everyone seems to know so much about science and not Godin this thread so I thought I would ask questions. Now I have nothing but goofballs answering my questions. Still looking for an answer to my questions. Anyone with a reasonable answer please reply. If not please go eat a PBJ and get back to me when you have protein from peanuts in your butt.

Why are you asking questions about quantum physics and the philosophy of conciousness in a thread about evidence for God?

How do quantum particles compose an atom, how does an atom compose a molecule, how does a molecule compose a chemical? Can anyone show or guide me through the process?

Still wondering how matter can become conscious.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness

I suspect if you ask questions that indicate you have at least a passing understanding of everything in those two pages in a thread where it's relevant to the topic you'll get better responses...

[Gillipig]

I'm not addressing your questions right now. I'm having fun with my pal after establishing Gillipig could not tell the difference between your statement and one you quoted.

Max Troll

As played by Shatner.

Could anyone else do the part justice?

Pitt, Norton, Kilmer... There's quite a few but I see what you're saying. If you were to direct the project Shatner might be your preference.

He should've put the part he quoted within quotation marks, how else is an upstanding gentleman supposed to know who's saying what?
planck

See what I did there? Confusing isn't it? Yeah, next time warmonger, try to quote your idols properly, like this:

"I have no physical evidence of any sort and I'm just pulling assumptions out of my ass."
-Planck

[warmonger1981]

Uneducated people assume I have an idol.

See what I did there?

You assume the physical realm is all there is. Silly. Are your dreams physical? They seem so until you wake up. So now how can matter dream? Please answer me Gillipig.

If you can contribute please do, if not please stop trolling. I'm not a fish but I will bite.

[AndyDufresne]

Fast fact: We are all actually fish at keyboards in fish bowls -- even though warmonger1981 denies it above -- he's just lost his way and now the world is less wet place. We'll bring him back into the fold our fish-based reality.


--Andy

[warmonger1981]

Andy has yet to acknowledge that he lives to appease me. My court jester in a monkey suite. I love monkeys, especially ones that are curious. NOW DANCE MONKEY!!!

[Gillipig]

Uneducated people assume I have an idol.

See what I did there?

You assume the physical realm is all there is. Silly. Are your dreams physical? They seem so until you wake up. So now how can matter dream? Please answer me Gillipig.

If you can contribute please do, if not please stop trolling. I'm not a fish but I will bite.

Oh I think I just shit myself out of fear, what are you going to bite me with? The only kind of bite that gets through my skin is a bite containing actual scientific research, and since you demonstratively don't have any of that you're basically toothless. But go ahead, tell me I'm going to that imaginary hell of yours and see how many fucks I give.

[warmonger1981]

Ok little man. I'm simply asking questions. I'm not implying I know anything that would be an absolute and neither have you. You just come off as a person with many accusations. I still have my teeth and don't truly believe in Hell, but how are we to know smartypants? The reason for this topic is to bring knowledge and questions to a debatable subject with no definitive answers. BTW you haven't brought any scientific evidence so does that make you toothless? Just trying to keep up with your reasoning.

[crispybits]

Warmonger it's not possible (on universal questions like "does God exist") to bring scientific evidence for a negative without complete knowledge of the entire universe, which obviously nobody has or most likely ever will have.

The point is that if you said "I have a Toyota car and I drive it most days" that's something we would most likely take on trust. We know Toyota cars exist, we've all seen Toyota cars, and we've all seen people driving them. Now if you said "I have a flying Toyota car and I drive it around in the sky every day" then we would have good reason not to take that on trust. We've never seen a flying Toyota car, we've never heard Toyota say in a press release that they have made a flying car, we've never looked up in the sky and said "wow - that guy owns a nice Toyota flying along up there"

The default position when a claim is made is to not believe it. Not to believe it's false, but to reserve belief or disbelief and stay neutral. To say "I don't know". Then from that starting point we look for evidence for the truth or falsity of the claim. Have we ever seen examples of what is being claimed? Has anyone ever been able to produce any sort of demonstrable real world evidence for the claim? Have there been any examples of anything that would prove the claim false? Has anyone ever been able to produce any real world demonstrable real world evidence that would be impossible if the claim were true? If the claim were true, what effects would we expect that to have upon the world, and is this what we experience and observe when we investigate the claim?

On your question of "how does matter dream?" the simple answer right now is "we don't know". Have we ever seen examples that matter does dream - yes we've all had that experience. Can we produce demonstrable real world evidence - yes we can reliably look at electronic scans of people who are sleeping and when they wake up ask them about their dream experiences and we know the kind of brain wave patterns that occur during dreams. What scientists say about conciousness with a very strong degree of certainty is that it is some sort of brain phenomena. What would we expect to happen if conciousness is a brain phenomena, well we'd expect people with abnormal or damaged brains to experience conciousness differently. Is this what we see when we look at the evidence? Yes - there have been thousands of instances of a brain trauma radically affecting the sensation of what it is like to be concious.

Can we go further and posit some form of supernatural element to conciousness? Sure we can make a guess as to how that might work. The thing is nobody has demonstrated any evidence for the supernatural elements (like an eternal soul for one example), and nobody has been able to make predictions about any affects that are not already predicted by basic, materialist science and neurology about how this supernatural element in any way influences the quality of conciousness that we experience.

[warmonger1981]

DNA carries information. According to Information Science, information always comes from a mind, it never comes from matter.

So dreams are no more than a chemical reaction producing a false reality with a false representation of matter in your mind? We know little about how the brain functions but yet people are so absolute about there not being a God. All I'm really saying is its foolish to say with an absolute conviction there's no God or there is one.

[crispybits]

DNA carries information. According to Information Science, information always comes from a mind, it never comes from matter.

So dreams are no more than a chemical reaction producing a false reality with a false representation of matter in your mind? We know little about how the brain functions but yet people are so absolute about there not being a God. All I'm really saying is its foolish to say with an absolute conviction there's no God or there is one.

Not quite. According to information science information conveyed through language always comes from a mind.

There is lots of information in nature. Take tree rings for example. If you know the science of dendrology (sp?) you can "read" tree rings. You can tell what the seasons were like in the location where that tree grew. That ring there indicates a long, hot, dry summer. This ring here indicates a prolonged wet winter. This other ring here indicates a very very cold dry winter. That is all information, but it's not a language, it's just natural processes decribed fully by physics, chemistry and biology and almost totally understood by us that produces predictable results. The ONLY difference in an information science context between tree rings and DNA is complexity. DNA is much more complex than tree rings in terms of information storage. If you claim that DNA is a language, then you are opening the door for tree rings to be called a language and then for things like wind erosion on rock faces or the shapes of clouds to be called languages. Natural processes like these all contain information, but they are not languages, and DNA is part of a natural process.

Most atheists do not have absolute conviction that there is no God. We simply have not been convinced by any of the current God claims. To return to my previous analogy we do not say "no flying Toyota car exists anywhere in the universe or beyond", but rather we say "we have not seen any evidence that a flying Toyota car exists, therefore until we do we will not trust claims that they do exist.". A purely deist, non-intervening creator God is impossible to disprove even if we did have 100% perfect knowledge of the universe, because it can always be said to exist beyond our perception horizons. But that's not what religions claim to have access to. They all claim that God intervenes in some way or another, otherwise they would not pray, because what would be the point? They make claims that trespass into realms where scientific enquiry can provide answers, and they are ALL regularly proved to be full of BS when the testable, falsifiable elements of their supernatural claims fail.

So if you're talking about full on non-interventionist deism then go for your life (although something that has precisely zero effect on the universe is exactly equivalent to nothing so I don't see where that gets you). But if you're talking about any of the interventionist God concepts espoused by religion, then please specify, and I'll tell you why I AM certain that THAT God doesn't exist.

[warmonger1981]

Language does come from mind. Thanks for the correction.

Ive seen a flying Delorean. Does that count?

Has anyone heard anything about the soul being a frequency or vibration. Not physical but like an energy that never stops. The soul is trapped in the physical world because that's all humans know. Once the body dies this energy travels through space.
Does anyone know anything about death and maybe a frequency being given off.
Or anything about frequency being recorded in space and using that info to pick up recordings of vibration? Or something similar to a record player but in specific times in history.

[patches70]

Language does come from mind. Thanks for the correction.

Ive seen a flying Delorean. Does that count?

Has anyone heard anything about the soul being a frequency or vibration. Not physical but like an energy that never stops. The soul is trapped in the physical world because that's all humans know. Once the body dies this energy travels through space.
Does anyone know anything about death and maybe a frequency being given off.
Or anything about frequency being recorded in space and using that info to pick up recordings of vibration? Or something similar to a record player but in specific times in history.

You know how people can't survive underwater, or in space unless they are wearing a specially designed suit?

Well, it's like that for the soul as well. The soul cannot exist in the physical plane, so it also requires a special suit. A nice bio-mechanical meat suit.

[AndyDufresne]

Language does come from mind. Thanks for the correction.

Ive seen a flying Delorean. Does that count?

Has anyone heard anything about the soul being a frequency or vibration. Not physical but like an energy that never stops. The soul is trapped in the physical world because that's all humans know. Once the body dies this energy travels through space.
Does anyone know anything about death and maybe a frequency being given off.
Or anything about frequency being recorded in space and using that info to pick up recordings of vibration? Or something similar to a record player but in specific times in history.

You know how people can't survive underwater, or in space unless they are wearing a specially designed suit?

Well, it's like that for the soul as well. The soul cannot exist in the physical plane, so it also requires a special suit. A nice bio-mechanical meat suit.

I'd like to purchase one meat suit, please.


--Andy

[warmonger1981]

Talk to Lady GaGa. She seems to know a good meat tailor.

[universalchiro]

@ crispybits: not so fast. You don't believe in flying toyotas because you have not seen any evidence, but you believe in spontaneous life from non-living material and no one has ever seen that. And you believe in spontaneous information from non-living material and no one has ever seen that either. So please be consistent with your arguments, associating flying toyotas with the belief in God is not a fair argument when you utilize faith as well. So your strategy of invalidating God by utilizing an extreme is equally returned back on you

[crispybits]

I believe that the life/non-life distinction is a false dichotomy in that context. Biology, in every observable respect, is explainable by chemistry and physics. Now there are certainly some contexts in which making distinctions between living and non-living things is useful. Ethics is one easy example. It's impossible to cause suffering to a stone. But in the context of the science of origins, I don't think that the distinction has any useful purpose. There is no clear dividing line between complex organic chemistry that we would not consider to be "alive" and the very slightly more complex organic chemistry that we would consider to be "alive". The world doesn't work in black and white like that, there are always a million shades of grey in between.

And yes I believe in information being spontaneously generated by non-living material. Imagine walking along a river bed in summer. You can see the stream trickling along the low-lying portions of the river bed. You can see the bare worn stones uncovered by the receding water. You can look into the trees along the bank and see debris stuck up higher along the trunks and branches. What does this tell us? Well the bare dry stone tells us where the river normally flows, at least often enough to prevent vegetation from growing. The fact that the river is only a trickle in the low-lying parts of the larger bed tells us that there hasn’t been much rain. The debris stuck up higher in the trees tells us that the area is prone to flash floods, and gives us a good idea of how high those waters can rise. These decipherable, regular, and repeatable signs tell us a great deal about the area. The debris stuck high in the trees tells us the exact same information that a sign reading “Flash Flood Area” would, it just conveys the information through a different medium. The bare river bed and small trickle of water tells us the same information that the word “Drought” would. It's all information. None of it comes from living material. And all of it is explainable using the same sciences we use to explain how living things work.

[universalchiro]

@Crispybits,<said in the minions voice from Despicable me> WHAT??
A primordial mixture of complex chemicals has never been any shade of grey near being alive. Its either living or non-living, and its concrete information that before the first amoeba spawned spontaneously, there was no life in the mixture, that's the prevailing accepted evolutionary hypothesis. Now if you are branching out with your own hypothesis that's fine. But don't pass off this shade of grey as though there was life already in the mixture, because it will just lead to, where did that life come from?

And your spontaneous information story was nice, but it based on the viewer of the information being able to process the information, where did the information come from to be able to process the rivers information? Also it presupposes that all the life in your story already has information to able to exist alive, well where did their information come from to be able to utilize the sun's energy for photosynthesis? A belief system with spontaneous information, left science & entered into faith.

[Dukasaur]

@Crispybits,<said in the minions voice from Despicable me> WHAT??
A primordial mixture of complex chemicals has never been any shade of grey near being alive. Its either living or non-living, and its concrete information that before the first amoeba spawned spontaneously, there was no life in the mixture, that's the prevailing accepted evolutionary hypothesis. Now if you are branching out with your own hypothesis that's fine. But don't pass off this shade of grey as though there was life already in the mixture, because it will just lead to, where did that life come from?

The life exists in the eye of the beholder. Essentially, any self-replicating chemical reaction can be described as alive, but people balk at calling it that when the reaction is a very simple one. So, we see an extremely complex system of chemical reactions like an elephant and we call it "alive", and we see a simple one like the crystallization of clay and we call it "not alive", but in between those two extremes there is a huge range of possibilities, and where you draw the line is simply a matter of where you choose to draw the line.

Accordingly, some call viruses life, some call viruses non-life. Some call prions life, some call prions non-life. Some call unborn fetuses life, some call unborn fetuses non-life. Some call sentient computers life, some call sentient computers non-life. Everyone on all sides of those debates will argue until they're blue in the face, but it's all nonsense, because it's entirely dependent on the observer's own definitions. Life is not some inherent property of things, like mass or velocity. Life is entirely a described property, a purely arbitrary term that means whatever the person using it defines it to mean.

[TA1LGUNN3R]

@Crispybits,<said in the minions voice from Despicable me> WHAT??
A primordial mixture of complex chemicals has never been any shade of grey near being alive. Its either living or non-living, and its concrete information that before the first amoeba spawned spontaneously, there was no life in the mixture, that's the prevailing accepted evolutionary hypothesis. Now if you are branching out with your own hypothesis that's fine. But don't pass off this shade of grey as though there was life already in the mixture, because it will just lead to, where did that life come from?

And your spontaneous information story was nice, but it based on the viewer of the information being able to process the information, where did the information come from to be able to process the rivers information? Also it presupposes that all the life in your story already has information to able to exist alive, well where did their information come from to be able to utilize the sun's energy for photosynthesis? A belief system with spontaneous information, left science & entered into faith.

That's nice, chiro, but amoebas were most certainly not the first living organism. They are eukaryotes (which came after prokaryotes) and hence have a nucleus and organelles. They are fairly complex. They also have a very large genome (larger by far than a human's). In fact, your statement that the prevailing hypothesis is that amoebas were spontaneously spawned is also not even close to being correct. Probably the most prevailing hypothesis in evolutionary biology is that our current DNA-based life evolved from a previous RNA-based proto-life, which would make sense when looking at the prevalence of viruses (the only difference between the ribose sugar and the deoxyribose sugar is the loss of an oxygen).

Viruses are the most numerous of any biological "organisms", if you could call them that, and I mean a lot more numerous than even bacteria. At least an order of magnitude more numerous, iirc. And most of them are RNA-based.

So, really, your argument that there is either life or non-life is not really valid. The line between the two is ill-defined, even when looking at today's viruses, and certainly fuzzier when looking at the proto-life of the beginnings of life.

Once again you manage to mash out a fallacious argument by completely misunderstanding the basics. It's a gift you have.

-TG

[crispybits]

If you think that the standard hypothesis is that the first amoeba spawned spontaneously from a primordial soup then you really have no idea what that hypothesis actually says, and you're just constructing strawmen.

A lot of the standard hypothesis right now is "we're not sure about exactly what happened, but we know that this bit and this bit and this bit are possible and have recreated them under labratory conditions, and we're still working to try to understand the bits in between those bits that we still don't have well described."

I also didnt say there was already life in the mixture. I said using a life/non-life distinction is flawed in the context you and warmonger are implying it exists. It's a construct of the human tendency to pigeon-hole and categorise things into neat, separate compartments. A river is a good anaolgy here too. If you were high up in the hills and found a tiny spring producing a trickle of water you wouldn't call it a river. You could follow the trickle as it turned into a stream a few inches wide at most, and you still wouldn't call it a river. As other streams and run-off areas joined it and it grew at what point does it's nature change from being a trickle to a stream to a river? It's the same water, following the same rules of physics all the way down to the ocean. There is no difference to the water, only human definitions and distinctions. For any point you stand along the course of it and say "to my left it is a stream and to my right it is a river" I could stand 1 foot upstream of you and say "why is this point different from that point?" and you would struggle to properly classify that. It's purely arbitrary. And it's like that with life too. We use an arbitrary point to say "this is living and that is not" but the chemistry between the two is barely different. Do not mistake human categorisation with actual material distinction in gradual natural processes.

And in my riverbed story, all of the same information is there whether there is a viewer there to decipher the information or not. The presence of the viewer does not in any way alter the nature of the width of the riverbed, or the existence of debris in the trees. It presupposes nothing except that reality (the riverbed) exists independent of minds to perceive it. If I gave a 10 metre vertical core sample of soil from a swamp to a geologist, a chemist and a biologist they would all pull very different, but informative, data from that sample. But the chemist would not see the geological distinctions the geologist would see. The geologist would be effectively blind to the complex microscopic biology. But the geological, chemical and biological information is always there, regardless of which scientist, if any, is examining the sample. Perception and interpretation does not create new information, it only accesses the information that already exists. And that information comes from all sorts of sources, a lot of which you would not claim to be even nearly "alive".

Edit - double sniped!

[universalchiro]

I was taught that prokaryotes and eukaryotes are sister amoeba twins, with prokaryotes evolving first and that the first life on earth was a single celled prokaryote organism. so a common single cell organism that people can relate to is the Amoebe. But I did find a web site that said
(http://paleobiology.si.edu/geotime/main ... hean3.html), "Archaea" was the first living thing on earth. But I'll change my nomenclature and not say Amoeba and say the first living thing on earth was a prokaryote single celled organism. Is that satisfactory?. However ya'll want to say what was the first life, the bottom line is always, that from non-living material came life. Spontaneously. So my Amoeba term is unsatisfactory for you, I'll change it to prokaryote single celled organism, but it doesn't matter what term I use, the bottom line is evolutionist believe in something they can't see. That life spontaneously evolved and this is not science, this is faith.

So the simplest self replicating molecule by any name that was the first living thing on earth, it still spontaneous spawned life, and spawned information. This is faith based, not science.

[crispybits]

If the first organisms resembled modern Archaea, they also may have lived in such places, but direct evidence for early life is controversial because it is difficult to distinguish between complex inorganic structures and simple biological ones in the geologic record.

Do not mistake human categorisation with actual material distinction in gradual natural processes.

Take an RNA molecule for example. Nobody considers it to be alive, but it can self-replicate. So replication/reproduction in and of itself is not enough to classify life, but it is enough to understand in theory how we can go from complex organic chemistry to simple proto-biology...

[TA1LGUNN3R]

I was taught that prokaryotes and eukaryotes are sister amoeba twins, with prokaryotes evolving first and that the first life on earth was a single celled prokaryote organism. so a common single cell organism that people can relate to is the Amoebe. But I did find a web site that said
(http://paleobiology.si.edu/geotime/main ... hean3.html), "Archaea" was the first living thing on earth. But I'll change my nomenclature and not say Amoeba and say the first living thing on earth was a prokaryote single celled organism. Is that satisfactory?. However ya'll want to say what was the first life, the bottom line is always, that from non-living material came life. Spontaneously. So my Amoeba term is unsatisfactory for you, I'll change it to prokaryote single celled organism, but it doesn't matter what term I use, the bottom line is evolutionist believe in something they can't see. That life spontaneously evolved and this is not science, this is faith.

So the simplest self replicating molecule by any name that was the first living thing on earth, it still spontaneous spawned life, and spawned information. This is faith based, not science.

You aren't getting it. As has been pointed out multiple times, things like viruses and prions are not considered alive, yet are self-replicating biological entities. Something akin to this was likely the first quasi-alive thing. There is not a binary definition of life in this instance. At what point the proto-life becomes the life we recognize today is a mystery and likely to remain that way.

Self-replicating complex chemical-->virus or enclosed (likely some bi-layer) cell with RNA-->prokaryotes-->eukaryotes for a sweeping summary of evolution.

-TG

[notyou2]

I was taught that prokaryotes and eukaryotes are sister amoeba twins, with prokaryotes evolving first and that the first life on earth was a single celled prokaryote organism. so a common single cell organism that people can relate to is the Amoebe. But I did find a web site that said
(http://paleobiology.si.edu/geotime/main ... hean3.html), "Archaea" was the first living thing on earth. But I'll change my nomenclature and not say Amoeba and say the first living thing on earth was a prokaryote single celled organism. Is that satisfactory?. However ya'll want to say what was the first life, the bottom line is always, that from non-living material came life. Spontaneously. So my Amoeba term is unsatisfactory for you, I'll change it to prokaryote single celled organism, but it doesn't matter what term I use, the bottom line is evolutionist believe in something they can't see. That life spontaneously evolved and this is not science, this is faith.

So the simplest self replicating molecule by any name that was the first living thing on earth, it still spontaneous spawned life, and spawned information. This is faith based, not science.

You aren't getting it. As has been pointed out multiple times, things like viruses and prions are not considered alive, yet are self-replicating biological entities. Something akin to this was likely the first quasi-alive thing. There is not a binary definition of life in this instance. At what point the proto-life becomes the life we recognize today is a mystery and likely to remain that way.

Self-replicating complex chemical-->virus or enclosed (likely some bi-layer) cell with RNA-->prokaryotes-->eukaryotes for a sweeping summary of evolution.



-TG

It's kind of like at what point do we consider a homosapian a homosapian? There is no definable moment, it is a gradual transition over time in the evolutionary scale.

[Dukasaur]

I was taught that prokaryotes and eukaryotes are sister amoeba twins, with prokaryotes evolving first and that the first life on earth was a single celled prokaryote organism. so a common single cell organism that people can relate to is the Amoebe. But I did find a web site that said
(http://paleobiology.si.edu/geotime/main ... hean3.html), "Archaea" was the first living thing on earth. But I'll change my nomenclature and not say Amoeba and say the first living thing on earth was a prokaryote single celled organism. Is that satisfactory?. However ya'll want to say what was the first life, the bottom line is always, that from non-living material came life. Spontaneously. So my Amoeba term is unsatisfactory for you, I'll change it to prokaryote single celled organism, but it doesn't matter what term I use, the bottom line is evolutionist believe in something they can't see. That life spontaneously evolved and this is not science, this is faith.

So the simplest self replicating molecule by any name that was the first living thing on earth, it still spontaneous spawned life, and spawned information. This is faith based, not science.

You aren't getting it. As has been pointed out multiple times, things like viruses and prions are not considered alive, yet are self-replicating biological entities. Something akin to this was likely the first quasi-alive thing. There is not a binary definition of life in this instance. At what point the proto-life becomes the life we recognize today is a mystery and likely to remain that way.

Self-replicating complex chemical-->virus or enclosed (likely some bi-layer) cell with RNA-->prokaryotes-->eukaryotes for a sweeping summary of evolution.



-TG

It's kind of like at what point do we consider a homosapian a homosapian? There is no definable moment, it is a gradual transition over time in the evolutionary scale.

That's the point. He doesn't believe in evolution, either, and for much the same reason. In his black-and-white cartoon world, something is either on of off. He just doesn't get the idea of transitional states or gradual continuums.