Posted on 07/16/2013 11:44:20 AM PDT by Heartlander
I’m glad you’re feeling better.
Somebody ping me when they come up with the experiment that will test the existence of God.
Which God?..... A designer God, a perceived God, the christian God, a generic God; a nebulous God?
There could a thread on just what God is and/or isn’t..
The very term “God” has not been identified yet...
Mumbling the word God is done quite easily..
It could be “God” is still in the closet..
Unless the bible lore is true.. which seems to generate the very controversy..
When I look around I see a plethora of Gods..
If there is a God it may not be a He or a She it may be an “IT”..
What is... “IS”.... and what ain’t..... “AIN’T”...
The God “thing” maybe be Un-describable.. in language..
Tempting some primate to ignore the subject completely..
It makes their heads hurt.. dealing with it..
I expect not. They figured out a long time ago no such test or experiment could ever be devised.
Outstanding observation, dear sister in Christ! And, oh so very true.
He doesn't need to explain it, because Borde-Guth-Vilenkin themselves not only don't claim any such thing, they actually wrote:
"What can lie beyond the boundary? Several possibilities have been discussed, one being that the boundary of the inflating region corresponds to the beginning of the Universe in a quantum nucleation event."
Vilenkin himself suggested one such possibility. http://mukto-mona.net/science/physics/a_vilinkin/universe_from_nothing.pdf
There are others. There is the possibility, for example, that time is finite but has no boundary. Another possibility is that time has only recently become time-like (in the sense of Lorentz invariance) and at the boundary was actually a space-like dimension. The authors you cite actually don't talk in the absolute terms you're suggesting; and they certainly don't rule out a uniquely quantum beginning to the universe.
The abiogenesis does not imply the Standard model, evolution does not imply abiogenesis, and neither does the chain of implication go in the opposite direction. None of these things argue against intelligent design, under certain definitions, but all of them argue against Young Earth Creationism, a "theory" which is actually sillier than the idea that the Earth is flat.
If you're arguing that it's really cool that it was low enough to make life possible, we are in agreement. If you're arguing that this somehow proves there's a creator, you're wrong.
It could have been even lower at the beginning, in which case even cooler things would have been possible (and even better arguments for your God might be made.) But those things -- now unknown and forbidden by the laws of physics -- didn't happen. Does the fact that it might have been even lower, allowed even more possibilities, and certainly a longer-lived universe prove there is no God? Nope. Doesn't say one thing about Him either way.
It's a big ball of fire in the sky called "the Sun." You may have heard of it. It's even in the Bible...
Well, I suppose it would have been nice to have another degree under one's belt. But you eschewed that pursuit, and it would seem on reasonable grounds.
Perhaps you would agree with an observation from "my friend, the astrophysicist," Attila Grandpierre (in "Fundamental Complexity Measures of Life," in Divine Acton and Natural Selection: Science, Faith, and Evolution, 2008:
It becomes more and more clear that Darwinian theory is so logically flabby that it can "explain" anything by subtly changing the terms of the debate. Evolutionary theory can show only that systems of functions may evolve in a changing environment, but does not explain how the individual cell selects from the astronomically large domain of biological possibilities. Evolutionary theory concerns only the historical life forms appearing on earth. It considers only a part of biological phenomena, instead of working out the general theory of biological processes and deriving the more special phenomena from the more general laws as it is possible [to do] in physics.... These arguments indicate that selection is not the cause but the result of biological organization.BTW, my friend is not a fan of "intelligent design."
Thanks so much for writing, dear brother in Christ!
I expect not. They figured out a long time ago no such test or experiment could ever be devised.
Who knows what EVER could be devised?..
It takes real faith to believe that and that faith should be honored..
Takes humility to say “I don’t know”.. cause if you “know” you no longer need faith..
To the extent this is true, it's a reflection of the multiple senses of the word "faith." Let's say I have the kind of faith in science that you and TS assert that I do. If so, it's because it has worked and continues to work; it produces results that lead to predictions of future results, which then are borne out (or the predictions are revised). It's reliable in that sense--in the sense that my Saturn is a reliable car, and I trust it will get me where I want to go.
Is that really the kind of faith you have in Christ--that He will dispense reliable results if you push the right buttons? I doubt it--if so, I'd call that (to borrow betty boop's term) a "low-quality faith."
Faith in God does not require real-world results and so is an entirely different thing than faith in science. It suits your purposes to elide that difference so you can imply that I've replaced faith in God with faith in science. But in fact, it's why the two can co-exist: one can have faith in a transcendent God who loves us and willed the universe into being, as well as faith that science is able to discover how that universe works.
Seriously? You're going to claim that science is characterized more by its failures than its successes? When we live in a world that science made, for better or for worse? That sounds desparate.
You'd think so, but the idea seems to be they should be castigated and villified for saying they can't theorize about what they can't test for. Go figure.
You’d think so, but the idea seems to be they should be castigated and villified for saying they can’t theorize about what they can’t test for. Go figure.
Much like a primate considering a Rolex watch..
They soon bore of it.. a Rolex don’t “tick”..
Very “shiny” indeed but it don’t tick even though the second hand “moves”..
And you can’t eat it.. or copulate with it.. licking it produces a metallic taste....
What monkey ever considered “God”?..
To a monkey God and a Rolex watch are dalliances between meals.. and copulating..
If you don't like science, don't use it. You have free will.
"Real-world results" are the consequence of God's act in the beginning. That is my "faith." I have known this since I was a small child, even before I started going to school, just from observing the world around me.
I have "faith" in science, too — so long as it is operating within its proper sphere of competence.
What I do not have faith in, however, is any form of materialism or physicalism as an exhaustive explanation for the world we see all around us.
As my friend the astrophysicist puts it,
The central thesis of physicalism proclaims the causal closure of the physical. Ashby's Law and Kahre's Law of Diminishing Information stated that physical systems cannot produce more information at their output than was present at their input. This means that for physical systems, complexity jumps are simply not possible.Or, to put it more crudely, a living system — an "open" system — cannot "emerge" from a causally closed system as defined by physical, material, or mechanical presuppositions. Something else is required for life. And as increasingly recognized these days, that something else is information — which is not a tangible, material thing.
To the extent that Neo-Darwinist theorizing restricts itself to physicalist/materialist presuppositions, it cannot explain the emergence of life. Period. End of story.
This vast and very diverse collection of essays on life and evolution was edited by Joseph Seckbach and Richard Gordon.
” he would know evolution not to be gradual and that every once in a while a rare combination of mutations would lead to the quantum leap”
Then are you saying that all of those years scientist were trying to convince me that it was indeed a fact that we were “randomly mutated from ocean slime to our knuckle-dragging neanderthal long-long lost cousins to our current incarnation was wrong”?
Sounds like just another "just-so story" to me. Blame the primitives. They were ignoramuses. We know better than they did, today. Because we know something they didn't know: That mental phenomena are merely epiphenomena of processes in the physical brain. And as such, can have no value or meaning. Sheesh....
What better way to dismiss the supernatural than to write it off as *hallucinations*?
It sure makes it easier than really trying to address the reality the scientific method is singularly ill equipped to deal with.
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