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Neurosis:
Call it the irrational belief category. Instead of having the not so quite irrational belief, and the not hurting me irrational belief and etc. Just call a pig a pig and a dog a dog etc. It is not a war on people but a war on the irrational. Not on people but on ignorance.

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Originally posted by Kil

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Neurosis:
Call it the irrational belief category. Instead of having the not so quite irrational belief, and the not hurting me irrational belief and etc. Just call a pig a pig and a dog a dog etc. It is not a war on people but a war on the irrational. Not on people but on ignorance.

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As I said, we can disagree over the God question. I don't suggest that religion should get a pass there. As skeptics, we can continue to question irrational beliefs. What I do suggest is a kind of pragmatism when dealing with those of faith, since I see no reason to believe that religion will ever go away. Those people of faith who accept and are not threatened by science, as a legitimate part of our growing knowledge base should be thought of as allies in the battle of reason, at least in that department.

In a time when we are literally at war with those who would make this country a theocracy in order to force a very narrow interpretation of the Bible on all of us, we need those voices who take a dissenting view from the inside. We should be supporting them over and above any disagreements we may have with them over whatever reason they have for their continuing faith in God.

I would argue against throwing out the baby with the bathwater. We need the Kenneth Miller's and the Hal Bidlack's of the world…

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Originally posted by Dave W.

There's no good reason to label someone who reads his horoscope "just for fun" an "enemy" in the war on science, just as there's no good reason to label a liberal Christian evolutionary biologist an enemy. The battle lines are drawn where people claim their faith overrides scientific knowledge.

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Originally posted by ergo123

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Originally posted by Dave W.

There's no good reason to label someone who reads his horoscope "just for fun" an "enemy" in the war on science, just as there's no good reason to label a liberal Christian evolutionary biologist an enemy. The battle lines are drawn where people claim their faith overrides scientific knowledge.

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... The battle lines, according to Dawkins, are drawn between those who believe in the supernatural and those who don't.

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Originally posted by ergo123

The battle lines, according to Dawkins, are drawn between those who believe in the supernatural and those who don't.

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Originally posted by Dave W.

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Originally posted by ergo123
The battle lines, according to Dawkins, are drawn between those who believe in the supernatural and those who don't.

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Which is exactly why I don't take my cues from Dawkins - he's far too black-and-white, and likely to lead his "troops" into destruction due to his blindness to the subtleties of reality.

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Originally posted by Kil
since I see no reason to believe that religion will ever go away. Those people of faith who accept and are not threatened by science, as a legitimate part of our growing knowledge base should be thought of as allies in the battle of reason, at least in that department.

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Originally posted by Dave W.

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Originally posted by Bill scott

I see your point, Dave. I should have been more specific and said, a spontaneous abiogenesis, driven by random chance, by chemicals that may, or may not, have held an eternal existence?

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No, no chemicals have "held" any sort of "eternal existence."

But even so, how do you intend to debunk "spontaneous abiogenesis, driven by random chance?"

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No, no chemicals have "held" any sort of "eternal existence."

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But even so, how do you intend to debunk "spontaneous abiogenesis, driven by random chance?"

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Originally posted by Dr. Mabuse

I have an objection to the use of the terms Random, and Chance when referring to the emergence of Life.

It's not religion, but a reasonable hypothesis.

The chemical reactions that eventually lead to life wasn't purely random, but follows logical steps of increasing chemical complexity.

While the direction and speed of any single atom or molecule is random, they are but a microscopic part of a huge system.
Let's examine an example:

We have a container. Within the container there are a few billion gas molecules. Any single molecule at any given point in time is travelling in a random direction. Regardless of the molecule's direction, it also independently has a speed that is random but representing an instance in a bell curve.
If you take the vector of the molecule's momentum, and add it with another molecule's momentum, the two molecule's total momentum might be higher or it might be significantly lower because they cancel themselves out.
However, if we extend the measurement to more molecules, even the entire system, the sum of all the molecules momentum will be zero, especially over a period of time.
Statistically there will be as many molecules travelling right, as there are travelling left.
If you examine a space in the container with a volume only a percent of the original size, there will still be so many molecules adding to the sum that the net result will be zero. The density throughout the container will be constant.

That was the point of this?
It was to show that even though individual entities behave randomly, the net result of a large system is everything but random.

Let's go back to the "Primordial soup (on planet Earth)". Bill do you understand what we and scientists mean when we use that term? Its immediate origin? Your seemingly semi-rhetorical questions about it makes me believe that you don't, but I'd like you to either confirm or infirm (refute?) my suspicion.

Chemical reactions are not purely random. There are strict physical laws that govern how atoms may react and interact with each other. That makes the formation of molecules not-random.
If you take a glass of water from a spring, river, or the sea, and disregard impurities like salt and minerals and other pollutions, what you have in the glass is not only H₂O.
You will also have a small amount of HO^- and H₃O⁺. The net mass will equal out to H₂O when we view the glass as the large system.
If you burn methane in air, you don't get just water and carbon dioxide. The energy from the reaction will cause other molecules to form too. The chemical reactions can go both ways. If you have carbon oxide and water and apply energy, you get Carbonic Acid.
An electrical arc through air can combine Nitrogen and Oxygen into Nitrous Oxide. Add a water molecule, and you can get Nitric Acid...
If you blend other chemicals into the mix, like water, Methane, Hydrogen gas and Ammonia too, they don't just break down to its simplest combinations... Add a little energy, perhaps from some ionising UV light, or some electricity from a static discharge, and a more complex molecule will be able to form, more than just Carbonic acid or Nitric acid.
This is what the Urey-Miller experiment was partly about. It showed that from simple chemical molecules that was present on Earth after its formation could produce amino acids.
And most laymen recognise "amino acids" as something crucial for life, or at least intimately connected to living.
Hydrogen cyanide (HCN) and ammonia in a water solution can produce adenine, which is one of the nucleotides that makes up DNA.

Because there are billions of billions of molecules just in the head of a pin, or the smallest drop of liquid you can see, we don't have to rely of random, pure chance, for complex molecules to form. The laws of nature says they can. And since they can, it will only be a matter of time before it happens. Given enough time, it will be inevitable. Once a very large molecule gets the chemical combination that allows it to self-replicate, copies of it will produce even more copies (as long as there are raw materials present).

It does not require religious belief to understand that. Only basic education in sciences like chemistry and physics. The beauty of it is: all the components are already here for us, knowledge of the basic building blocks of chemistry and how they can combine, and physics - the laws on how energy interacts with matter. Many random events in a huge system becomes a clear and significant statistical outfall, even if the probability is low on a molecular level.

There is no need to involve or invoke any supernatural entity.

Even if we don't have any specifics, that's what abiogenesis scientists are working on, it should be obvious that a naturalistic abiogenesis is highly plausible.


(Edited to add the word 'gas' and some bolding for clarification.)

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I have an objection to the use of the terms Random, and Chance when referring to the emergence of Life.

It's not religion, but a reasonable hypothesis.

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The chemical reactions that eventually lead to life wasn't purely random, but follows logical steps of increasing chemical complexity.
From a skeptical perspective I also wonder where the chemicals came from to be begin with? Were they just there?



While the direction and speed of any single atom or molecule is random, they are but a microscopic part of a huge system.
Let's examine an example:

We have a container. Within the container there are a few billion gas molecules. Any single molecule at any given point in time is travelling in a random direction. Regardless of the molecule's direction, it also independently has a speed that is random but representing an instance in a bell curve.
If you take the vector of the molecule's momentum, and add it with another molecule's momentum, the two molecule's total momentum might be higher or it might be significantly lower because they cancel themselves out.
However, if we extend the measurement to more molecules, even the entire system, the sum of all the molecules momentum will be zero, especially over a period of time.
Statistically there will be as many molecules travelling right, as there are travelling left.
If you examine a space in the container with a volume only a percent of the original size, there will still be so many molecules adding to the sum that the net result will be zero. The density throughout the container will be constant.

That was the point of this?
It was to show that even though individual entities behave randomly, the net result of a large system is everything but random.

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Let's g

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Originally posted by GeeMack

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Originally posted by Bill scott...

Your silly little rant has been noted. I ask questions about high priest Dawkins and you fly off the handle in a rant against God. Do you all do this? You actually prove yourself to be the little man here with your elementary grade school playground bully tactics. Your rage is dually noted. Chill out dude.

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I was pointing out how you get a greater opportunity to demonstrate that your fantasy being was responsible for the origin of life than one might get if they proposed muliticomplexialdimensions or sdfh34yohdflhga as being the cause of the origin of life. If you think my commentary was a rant against your god, you're a lot less capable of effective reading comprehension and/or a lot more insecure about your silly superstition than you had previously let on.

There is evidence that chance chemical interactions and known principals of physics offer legitimate possibilities as the cause of the beginning of life. Your failure to understand this, even after the many times it has been explained, is apparently due to some willful ignorance on your part. On the flip side, there is no evidence to show that your bogeyman even exists except in your imagination, yet you seem to believe he/she/it was the creator of life. When you can bring some evidence to the table to support that notion, it will have some merit. Until then, it's a fantasy, a dream, a delusion. That's just the way it is, Bill, and the sooner you understand that the sooner you'll actually be able to make some intellectual headway on the issue.

Oh, and Bill, your reference to Dawkins as a high priest is just another blatant example of your misrepresentation (attempting to make a straw man) of the issue. Nobody here has said anything to that effect. Of course you realize that continuing to misrepresent the comments of people here and the concepts of abiogenesis, however warm and fuzzy you might feel about it, makes you a liar. Doesn't your sky daddy have something to say about that being a sin or something?

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I was pointing out how you get a greater opportunity to demonstrate that your fantasy being was responsible for the origin of life than one might get if they proposed muliticomplexialdimensions or sdfh34yohdflhga as being the cause of the origin of life.

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If you think my commentary was a rant against your god, you're a lot less capable of effective reading comprehension and/or a lot more insecure about your silly superstition than you had previously let on.

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There is evidence that chance chemical interactions and known principals of physics offer legitimate possibilities as the cause of the beginning of life. Your failure to understand this, even after the many times it has been explained, is apparently due to some willful ignorance on your part.

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On the flip side, there is no evidence to show that your bogeyman even exists except in your imagination, yet you seem to believe he/she/it was the creator of life.

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when you can bring some evidence to the table to support that notion, it will have some merit. Until then, it's a fantasy, a dream, a delusion. That's just the way it is, Bill, and the sooner you understand that the sooner you'll actually be able to make some intellectual headway on the issue.

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Oh, and Bill, your reference to Dawkins as a high priest is just another blatant example of your misrepresentation (attempting to make a straw man) of the issue. Nobody here has said anything to that effect. Of course you realize that continuing to misrepresent the comments of people here and the concepts of abiogenesis, however warm and fuzzy you might feel about it, makes you a liar.

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Doesn't your sky daddy have something to say about that being a sin or something?

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