well said stu! i wish i had more time for these boards. i appreciate the clarity of your thinking and the high standards you hold me to. in regards to the notion that an upside requires a downside, i'm not sure if there is an essential argument that can 'prove' the assertion any more than there is a single essential argument that can resolve the broader debate one way or the other. there are only myriad observations of reality as it stands; when we are looking to assign cause we are forced to speculate within the bounds of our rational faculties, just as when we try to figure out what happened just before the big bang or how certain properties of quantum particles seem to contradict the laws of time and space. as in a courtroom where bodies of evidence are presented, there is usually no 'argument to end all arguments' that silences all dissent, only a process of reasoning. i respect axeman's general line of argument, however i think the flaw in the argument is that it is unintentionally anthropocentric and thus rests on flawed presuppositions. If God existed before man and God created man, then God is the measure of man and not vice versa. To properly conceive of a possible world in which God exists, it is necessary to conceive of God as being the first mover and the source of first principles. If God exists, it is not a matter of setting him above man's standards, below man's standards, or anywhere at all in relation to man's standards; it is a matter of reasoning how man stands in relation to his Creator. I think part of the problem is that the question of whether God exists and the question of whether God is moral / worthy of worship etc. are distinctly separate and have to be asked separately. Many atheistic arguments tend to conflate the two and use arguments against one to attack the other (if God is not worthy of worship then why should I believe he exists, and/or if God exists why should he be worthy of worship). To properly debate the second one must hypothetically accept the first in toto for the sake of debate, which is hard to do because many do not realize the large number of hidden presuppositions that color their arguments below the surface. If God exists in omnipotent form, is the source of all rational and moral faculties, and has ordered and created the universe in line with His precepts and desires, then He is the measure of all things whether we like it or not. To dismiss God's position as first mover and author of all things throws logical argument into disarray where theistic morality is concerned. Roles are significantly defined by position- it is right for a father to discipline a child, but not for a child to discipline a father, and so forth. There are many reasons why it is not consistent to assume that if God exists then He is assigned all the same rules and regulations that are applied to man. There is also the philosophical question of who is given authority to assign responsibility to whom, and who has claims on reality. We say things like "if I ruled the world then such and such" without considering that even hypotheticals have significant boundaries and that many things that can be imagined or hypothesized cannot actually be actualized. Final point before I have to run, you may be able to conceive of a painless world in which man could live but I cannot because man is by and large the source of pain. How can a world of moral agents exercising their natural wills be free of evil when the option of choosing evil is necessary? And by what standard is evil determined other than the eternal and omnipotent first mover's?
Morowitz DID say this in his 1968 work Energy Flow in Biology! You see Morowitz, who grew up in a Jewish home but later stated that he was 'pantheist after the tradition of Spinoza, was willing to admit where his theories had difficulties. He wasn't afraid to admit that he couldn't understand everything.
He also wrote: It is always possible to argue that "any unique event would have occurred" but "this is outside the range of probabilistic considerations and, really, outside of science."
**************************************************** Just what "coaxing from the greatest biochemists on the planet¨ are you referring to?? This sounds like false argument by erroneously constructed headline Would "coaxing from the greatest biochemists on the planet¨ include the Nobel prize winners Altman and Cech's work on catalytic RNA which showed the capability of molecules replicating on their own without enzymes assisting was possible. Are you seriously saying this amounts to "zero propensity for self-replication" ?? Do the self replicating RNA polymerase mutations not account for self-replication ?? and doesn¡'t the subsequent Evolution of such molecular mutation describe very effectively the "self-organization¨ ???. **************************************************** You are avoiding the point and I think you know it. The point is this. Chemists have thrown the precursors of amino acids and basic cells into thousands and thousands of "prebiotic soup experiments" in the most ideal of circumstances in the most ideal of ratios and nothing significant has happened. You and I both know that if even a glimmer of hope had emerged from one of these experiments, it would have been front page news on virtually every newspaper on earth. Here's the truth: the odds of RNA and DNA self-organization and self-replication are so bad that Morowitz essentially gave up on it! He began searching for origins in the Kreb's cycle of all things! He wrote, "What the RNA people do is require that there be a world full of RNA and for that to happen w/o living cells, I just think is so massively improbable."
Your "fact" does not read sensibly. Cells as far back as 3.5 billion years OK but... "These 300 million years were a period of intense bombardment ¨ ?? what does that mean ? It looks like it is YOU who is in disarray here. Do you mean to suggest during the 3.5 billion years when life was estimated to have come about, 300 million of those years were subject to either continuous or sporadic asteroid bombardment, of which AT LEAST 30 were life exterminating?? So according to your "facts".... for 90% of the 3.5Billion years there were NO such 'life exterminating impacts' This is EXACTLY what I am saying, except it's not me saying it. The first 500 million years of our earth was a firestorm of unimaginable intensity. Ask the science community: you will see I am right. And, again, you are imo avoiding the point. Early earth was a LIVING HELL for even the most primitive of life.
Furthermore and using your data, during the 10% of remaining time, how many of the "AT LEAST 30" life exterminating impacts" do you know destroyed ALL life forms, ALL cell forms (including [deep] sea) and All bacteria?? We may have had several afterwards - again, another argument that something incredible may have happened in the early stages of this planet.
Darkhorse - Excellent post. Of course that opinion is tainted by my reality that I agree with it. In a small and simple way part of what you are saying is "We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are" Another small and simpler analogy is that if there are only two people involved then there are two realities involved. But in all cases like that there is another reality involved that is the right reality. Either persons reality may be closer to the right reality or farther away but neither change the right reality. If evil can be part of one or both of those personal realities then the conflict will never be resolved as long as at least one person on earth holds to their reality of evil. There will always be conflict and evil will be part of that conflict. The only other alternative is to have the right reality all the time and that right reality must be free from evil.
Creationist use the argument over and over that Amino acid sequences - RNA molecular mutation - cannot occur purely by chance due to some ridiculous high odds against, for instance "10 to the 100,000,000,000" . Therefore an external Creator controls or determines the âperfect orderâ. Yet simple Chemistry shows the nonsense of this math and the silliness of its assertion. The math used here by Creationists is quite simply faulty and bogus. I'll repeat the same thing I said to LongShot: the big numbers are not being used by a creationist conspiracy! Forget Creationists for a minute! These numbers are being used by guys like Harold Morowitz and others who do NOT believe in a personal God. You keep trying to hold to the argument that this is a big theistic conspiracy. Theists, and Christians in particular, are definitely in the minority. It is skeptics, pantheists, agnostics, Spinozans, etc. that are the leaders. You guys are driving me crazy because you keep trying to make this a religious issue, some sort of weird conspiracy theory... I'll say it again: the big numbers do mean something and a lot of genius-level non-Christians are willing to wrestle with them.
Itâs fallacious (is that illegal in some states? ) to misuse giant numbers as some sort of cosmic wheel of chance. There are â10 to the countless 00000âsâ against you being born, yet there ARE extremely high chances that there will be birth. Youâve won the biggest lottery there could ever be, against countless numbers of other individuals that would have been born had you not been conceived in their place. I think we're okay with that spelling! Actually, the lottery is the perfect example of why big numbers DO matter. Let's say there's 100 million tickets chasing 100 million dollars. Yes, in that case, you've got a reasonable expectation that someone will win even though each individual only has a very small probability. Contrast that with the origin of life scenario which would go something like this: "There's a 100 million dollars being chased by 5 individuals. All stores are closed until AFTER the lottery, not that it matters because each participant must withstand several nuclear blasts at ground zero before any purchase. Oh, and by the way, we're not playing with 7 Lotto balls - we're playing with several 100."
Correct me if I am wrong but to me people of Judeo-Christian persuation are event driven (points in time when a supernatural being they call God entered into time as we know it and did some act that affected the universe or life in it) Science is process driven. ( studying and theorizing about how things happen or happened) When scientists assert that an event happened (big bang, cosmic jerk, life started or other realitively sudden anomalies in the normal progression of time) it tends to affirm the event driven views of the people that believe in the event driven position. The event people don't know what process He used but they are confident that He was involved in whatever happened at that event. I have long maintained that miracles are really natural phenomenon with unexplainable and divine timing.