What would that look like?

[IMINXTC]

There is that old standard of posting where users relentlessly demand further inqury from each other as a means of diminishing counter arguments by sheer exhaustion and hair-splitting - the debate never actually settled.

This I found frustrating from the get-go, as the notions of edification and fellowship are redefined as endless argument and the champions of debate dominate, regardless their mannerisms and frequently seeming high-mindedness.

Traditions I have also, alas, followed at times.

Now, they are mostly gone or silent.

The local church, of course, remains the corpus of our responsibility, imo.

[ProDeo]

There is that old standard of posting where users relentlessly demand further inqury from each other as a means of diminishing counter arguments by sheer exhaustion and hair-splitting - the debate never actually settled.

This I found frustrating from the get-go, as the notions of edification and fellowship are redefined as endless argument and the champions of debate dominate, regardless their mannerisms and frequently seeming high-mindedness.

Traditions I have also, alas, followed at times.

Now, they are mostly gone or silent.

The local church, of course, remains the corpus of our responsibility, imo.

With the words of Clint Eastwood,  There's two kinds of people: Those who want to learn and those who want to win.

[ProDeo]

but I can tell you flat out that I am an atheist and I do not believe that there is anything for me to be restored to.

On a scale from 0% to 100%, how sure are you that there is no Creator?

100% ?

Note, I deliberately use the word Creator, someone Who set the Universe in motion. It's not about religion. Quite a difference.

I'm genuinely not trying to overcomplicate this, but it really does depend on the characteristics of the creator that is being conceived, some seem more likely than others or at the very least some are impervious to falsification. Generally speaking though I'm as sure that there aren't any gods as I am that there are no psychics, telekinetics, reincarnated people or kung fu masters that can remotely knock you out using Qi...so idk 93.67221%

That's a quite high number, but fortunately you did not say 100%. Mine is based on pure intellectual reasoning and thus without religious argumentation and is about 0% based on what science is telling me.

1. Big Bang... so first there was nothing and then the nothingness exploded. As an atheist you must have a big faith to believe that, I say faith because it is impossible to proof. For people who believe in a Creator no problem at all, Creation ex nihilo is widely accepted in Judaism, Christianity, Islam.

2. Bangs don't create anything, they destroy. So this begs the question what's so special on the Big Bang that it created? Up to the point it created life from dead material. And all those poor scientists in their labs who have tried for decades to do the same, create life from dead material and failed. But a mysterious bang, unaware of itself (so we are told) by randomness did the job. Heck, that bang even created life that is aware of itself!

3. Complexity, the first cell, the 43 universal constants, I could go on. Natural selection -> mind blowing. Science and what it is doing is nothing more than the study how the Creator created.

[Oscar_Kipling]

but I can tell you flat out that I am an atheist and I do not believe that there is anything for me to be restored to.

On a scale from 0% to 100%, how sure are you that there is no Creator?

100% ?

Note, I deliberately use the word Creator, someone Who set the Universe in motion. It's not about religion. Quite a difference.

I'm genuinely not trying to overcomplicate this, but it really does depend on the characteristics of the creator that is being conceived, some seem more likely than others or at the very least some are impervious to falsification. Generally speaking though I'm as sure that there aren't any gods as I am that there are no psychics, telekinetics, reincarnated people or kung fu masters that can remotely knock you out using Qi...so idk 93.67221%

That's a quite high number, but fortunately you did not say 100%. Mine is based on pure intellectual reasoning and thus without religious argumentation and is about 0% based on what science is telling me.

1. Big Bang... so first there was nothing and then the nothingness exploded. As an atheist you must have a big faith to believe that, I say faith because it is impossible to proof. For people who believe in a Creator no problem at all, Creation ex nihilo is widely accepted in Judaism, Christianity, Islam.

2. Bangs don't create anything, they destroy. So this begs the question what's so special on the Big Bang that it created? Up to the point it created life from dead material. And all those poor scientists in their labs who have tried for decades to do the same, create life from dead material and failed. But a mysterious bang, unaware of itself (so we are told) by randomness did the job. Heck, that bang even created life that is aware of itself!

3. Complexity, the first cell, the 43 universal constants, I could go on. Natural selection -> mind blowing. Science and what it is doing is nothing more than the study how the Creator created.

first, thank you this is the kind of thing I like to talk about.

You're right, I'm not at 100%, as a person i'm not 100% on much if anything, so if you also want to make an argument for remote kung fu powers there is room for that too lol ( just a joke not making fun of you).

1. As an atheist I don't believe that first there was nothing and then the nothingness exploded, as far as the science goes they can really only wind the physics clock back as far as there were some physics (at least the kind that we understand pretty well) to talk about, prior to that is unknown. What I believe is that I do not know and have no solid basis to have any sort of confidence about why there is stuff instead of no stuff, and that isn't anything like the only unanswered question/mystery  in physics/cosmology (what happened to all the antimatter? what is dark matter yada yada yada). Physics and cosmology is super fun, and if you follow it you will find that for every discovery like the higgs boson scientist find something surprising or that lets us know that we don't quite know, like the recent discrepancies in the predicted and measured hubble constant. As an atheist I'm faced with accepting that there are things that I don't know and that the things that I do know are tentative and may be changed or updated with new information....While I love to speculate for fun and profit "i don't know" has to be the ultimate answer I land on when I in fact do not know.

I sometimes think that its possible that "the answer" to where did all of this come from might be one that doesn't have a satisfying answer to a thing that lives in the universe. God, for me doesn't stop the questions, ie nearly everything ended up as matter instead of antimatter of equal matter and antimatter that annihilated because God can do anything is of course a thing one could say, but its not really an answer to the anisotropy problem more than anything else posed without evidence or even internally coherent mathematics.  Or to put it another way you could say that the precession of the parhelion of mercury is caused by God, but what does that really tell you....I'd argue nothing of any consequence.

2. Hopefully we won't get bogged down in what creation is, but bangs create all sorts of stuff, Some of the stuff that you are made of most likely is only created in big ole star explosions. Undoubtedly the big bang appears to have been a very special kind of inconceivably low entropy & high energy bang, but the idea that bangs and crashes and such don't result in anything new is very very wrong and if you gave it a go I'd bet you could think of several kinds of explosions that you use everyday for locomotion or energy or movie snacks. I don't usually associate big bang with life, that is to say that no one that I'd take seriously would say photosynthesis is explained by big bang full stop as other fields speak more specifically about that phenomena.....without going into it too much I don't believe that there is evidence that what living things are ultimately made of is anything but stuff that is itself not alive and that's not any more of a problem for me to accept than that birds aren't made up of flying humors or that the sun isn't made of phlogiston or hotness. If you aren't proposing that life has some non material spark, that is grass and ducks and humans alike all have some supernatural quintessence that animates them outside of the mechanics of their rare arrangements of material stuff then I can't imagine how my view of life is significantly different than yours. I don't know how life got started and neither do you, but again merely invoking God doesn't answer a single question and so far in the ways that science has found the mechanism behind this or that thing it has yet to require God, I don't think you get to say well science discovered that the sun is fusion powered therefore they now know how God makes stars hot because the addition of God does nothing to add to the scientific explanation it just swoops in to take some indistinct credit.

3. I mean would it make any sense to say that because you don't know how the translation lookaside bus works that the only conclusion left to draw is that God makes it work? For me when I don't know , I just don't know, I mean again I enjoy speculation perhaps more than the next guy, but the reason why God and Qi and gremlins don't move me is because they don't explain anything they are placeholders for explanations, but I already have a placeholder it's called not knowing a thing.

[ProDeo]

Indeed, we don't know, what is left is imagination and as a number guy I am deeply impressed with probability calculation. A few quotes from my notes,

Sir Fred Hoyle

The notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.

Hoyle compared the random emergence of even the simplest cell to the likelihood that "a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein." Hoyle also compared the chance of obtaining even a single functioning protein by chance combination of amino acids to a solar system full of blind men solving Rubik's Cube simultaneously. [1]

A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing-747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there?

The human genome is made up of DNA, which has four different chemical building blocks. These are called bases and abbreviated A, T, C, and G. In the human genome, about 3 billion bases are arranged along the chromosomes in a particular order for each unique individual. To get an idea of the size of the human genome present in each of our cells, consider the following analogy: If the DNA sequence of the human genome were compiled in books, the equivalent of 200 volumes the size of a Manhattan telephone book (at 1000 pages each) would be needed to hold it all.

It would take about 9.5 years to read out loud (without stopping) the 3 billion bases in a person's genome sequence. This is calculated on a reading rate of 10 bases per second, equaling 600 bases/minute, 36,000 bases/hour, 864,000 bases/day, 315,360,000 bases/year.

Storing all this information is a great challenge to computer experts known as bioinformatics specialists. One million bases (called a megabase and abbreviated Mb) of DNA sequence data is roughly equivalent to 1 megabyte of computer data storage space. Since the human genome is 3 billion base pairs long, 3 gigabytes of computer data storage space are needed to store the entire genome. This includes nucleotide sequence data only and does not include data annotations and other information that can be associated with sequence data.

Source: http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/faq/faqs1.shtml

At least it was there once.

Carl Sagan estimated that the chance of life evolving on any given single planet, like the Earth, is one chance in 1x102,000,000,000 [that is one chance out of 1 followed by 2 billion zeroes] (1973, p. 46). This figure is so large that it would take 6,000 books of 300 pages each just to write the number.

Etc.

For me the question is not if there is a Creator, there is, but what the Creator had in mind when He set our self maintaining Universe in motion and let it run. We can't know, except by revelation.

A lighthearted joke to conclude.

One day a group of Darwinian scientists got together and decided that man had
come a long way and no longer needed God. So they picked one Darwinian to go and
tell Him that they were done with Him.

The Darwinian walked up to God and said, "God, we've decided that we no longer
need you. We're to the point that we can clone people and do many miraculous
things, so why don't you just go on and get lost."

God listened very patiently and kindly to the man. After the Darwinian was done
talking, God said, "Very well, how about this? Let's say we have a man-making
contest." To which the Darwinian happily agreed.

God added, "Now, we're going to do this just like I did back in the old days
with Adam."

The Darwinian said, "Sure, no problem" and bent down and grabbed himself a
handful of dirt.

God looked at him and said, "No, no, no. You go get your own dirt!!!!"

[Oscar_Kipling]

Indeed, we don't know, what is left is imagination and as a number guy I am deeply impressed with probability calculation. A few quotes from my notes,

Sir Fred Hoyle

The notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.

Hoyle compared the random emergence of even the simplest cell to the likelihood that "a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein." Hoyle also compared the chance of obtaining even a single functioning protein by chance combination of amino acids to a solar system full of blind men solving Rubik's Cube simultaneously. [1]

A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing-747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there?

The human genome is made up of DNA, which has four different chemical building blocks. These are called bases and abbreviated A, T, C, and G. In the human genome, about 3 billion bases are arranged along the chromosomes in a particular order for each unique individual. To get an idea of the size of the human genome present in each of our cells, consider the following analogy: If the DNA sequence of the human genome were compiled in books, the equivalent of 200 volumes the size of a Manhattan telephone book (at 1000 pages each) would be needed to hold it all.

It would take about 9.5 years to read out loud (without stopping) the 3 billion bases in a person's genome sequence. This is calculated on a reading rate of 10 bases per second, equaling 600 bases/minute, 36,000 bases/hour, 864,000 bases/day, 315,360,000 bases/year.

Storing all this information is a great challenge to computer experts known as bioinformatics specialists. One million bases (called a megabase and abbreviated Mb) of DNA sequence data is roughly equivalent to 1 megabyte of computer data storage space. Since the human genome is 3 billion base pairs long, 3 gigabytes of computer data storage space are needed to store the entire genome. This includes nucleotide sequence data only and does not include data annotations and other information that can be associated with sequence data.

Source: http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/faq/faqs1.shtml

At least it was there once.

Carl Sagan estimated that the chance of life evolving on any given single planet, like the Earth, is one chance in 1x102,000,000,000 [that is one chance out of 1 followed by 2 billion zeroes] (1973, p. 46). This figure is so large that it would take 6,000 books of 300 pages each just to write the number.

Etc.

back before we knew that the sun was fusion powered its temperature and longevity was absolutely nonsensical. When we started measuring the neutrino flux from the sun it seemed like our sun might be much older than possible, until we learned something neat about kinds of neutrinos ( I know I use the sun as an example alot but the story of how we learned about the sun is a pretty mind blowing epic tale imo). The point is we still don't know how life began, but we do know a whole heck of alot more about things like self organizing systems than we did in hoyle's time. I don't exactly now how hoyle arrived at his stats, but he could not have been factoring in any knowledge we have gained since his time. Regardless of that I would be extremely skeptical of such a broad conclusion by a modern day biologist because we still don't know enough to properly put margins around biogenesis to arrive at anything so broad with a high degree of confidence. All that to say that however Hoyle arrived at his conclusion even if he reasonably and meticulously factored in the state of the art biology of his day he had a whole heck of alot of missing pieces, and we still do.

EDIT: I guess I didn't directly address your 747 junkyard analogy, so I will because you thought it was good enough to take the time to post it so I should take the time to respond. It must be asked ,what evolutionary/biological process is this tornado supposed to be analogous to? Is it the very first cell? the very first self strand of RNA? If i'm remembering correctly the oldest fossils are stromatolites, which are thought to be the leavings of fully formed single celled organisms, but I do not know that there are many if any biologists that are suggesting that they just burst forth one dy fully formed and that was the beginning of life because we don't actually know. I would go as far as to say that the most common hypotheses suggest that it was probably a process that began with simpler things that developed over time into the first organisms not a single abrupt tornado-like event, so in that way the analogy doesn't describe the sort of thing that is hypothesised. The other issue is that 747's aren't like organisms, there is no self organizing chemistry involved in a 747. That is unlike many organic chemicals there are not components of a 747 that would organize into structures or molecules or anything but a pile of nuts and bolts if you brought them in proximity with each other, but there are many organic compounds that do behave in that way, this begins to put some margins around the randomness. Maybe to put it another way if the components of the 747 were naturally magnetized such that their poles biased them toward certain configurations over others it would change the likelihood of certain configurations given random turbulence/agitation/mixing. Additionally when speaking of randomness in the physical world sometimes it matters what the random forces are that are acting upon our target, that is for our purposes here a tornado is a random agitator and an earthquake is a random agitator but the configurations of the material affected by these 2 phenomena will be biased by the kinds of things that tornadoes do as opposed to the kinds of things earthquakes do. For instance you might be surprised if after an earthquake you find directional or swirl patterns in your corn field and likewise you might be surprised if after a tornado you find that the main road is perfectly split and shifted 5 feet to the west. When I see arguments like yours I cannot help but wonder how you can fully recognize that our universe and the forces within them are bounded, that there are laws if you want to argue for God, but when you begin to talk about say biology or cosmology you don't seem to be able to recognize that underlying and interacting laws also provide bounds in scientific propositions ...that even complex and intricate patterns should be expected in random events especially as you increase the sample size. I just get the impression that you may not be appreciating some of the implications of randomness and large numbers in the context of the physical world....but maybe you are, i'd be interested in some more specific examples of impossibilities as you see them regarding biology and cosmology.


With Sagan i'd like to check out the math just to see how he got there, but I can't imagine how it would be less speculative than the drake equation. I'm not sure that as stated it even works because I doubt he was just counting earthlike planets which might change that calculus up a bit. but thats all sort of beside the point though because there are probably a 100 billion or so planets just in our galaxy which itself is probably 1 of trillions of galaxies so that's plenty of chances for life even given those long odds. I don't think there is anything wrong with being awed by these numbers and scales that we use to describe facets of our reality, but Just because there are numbers it does not mean that a calculation is not speculation, it may be a useful kind of speculation that allows us to more precisely speculate but its still speculation.

For me the question is not if there is a Creator, there is, but what the Creator had in mind when He set our self maintaining Universe in motion and let it run. We can't know, except by revelation.

A lighthearted joke to conclude.

One day a group of Darwinian scientists got together and decided that man had
come a long way and no longer needed God. So they picked one Darwinian to go and
tell Him that they were done with Him.

The Darwinian walked up to God and said, "God, we've decided that we no longer
need you. We're to the point that we can clone people and do many miraculous
things, so why don't you just go on and get lost."

God listened very patiently and kindly to the man. After the Darwinian was done
talking, God said, "Very well, how about this? Let's say we have a man-making
contest." To which the Darwinian happily agreed.

God added, "Now, we're going to do this just like I did back in the old days
with Adam."

The Darwinian said, "Sure, no problem" and bent down and grabbed himself a
handful of dirt.

God looked at him and said, "No, no, no. You go get your own dirt!!!!"

well, yes that is amusing. You seem to understand that we don't know enough about how life works much less how it started to answer the biogenesis question, but you find arguments that would require such knowledge to be accurate compelling. In my book this is bad reasoning, or at the very least mistaking interesting speculation for proof. You say you are a numbers man, but are you also a falsification and evidence man....I am, and short of that i'm an "I don't know" man. Newton's gravitation math worked, heck he created (or also created) some of the most powerful mathematical tools of all time, but observation, that is evidence is what allowed us to say with confidence that he was describing reality reasonably well, but it also told us that he didn't have the whole picture. Do we need to go into detail about the observations that we do or do not have for you to concede that Hoyle and Sagan face the same issue? As a bit of a challenge can you tell me anything falsifiable about DNA by invoking God? Again I doubt it, and that is a problem for me, God doesn't provide any useful explanation or information .

Question, do you believe that there is any randomness in the universe or is it all determined by God? If there is some randomness then how and where does that come into play. like how noise tolerant did God make the universe? How do you determine when something is inexplicable due to a lack of information as opposed to it being simply explained by invoking God?

[RabbiKnife]

I think the great cosmic joke is man thinking he has some moral right to know everything.

[Oscar_Kipling]

I think the great cosmic joke is man thinking he has some moral right to know everything.

Perhaps many people do feel that way, but I think its extremely difficult to study the history and development of human knowledge and have any confidence that everything can even be known let alone that we have some right to it . I suppose i'm partial to the 20th century being born when I was, but when I first began to understand the work of folks like Goedel's and Schrodinger it struck me that perhaps the un-knowableness and mystery that had been asserted or prophesied in the past had been codified and mathematically proven,the limitations of the tool popped out of the tool itself. It allowed us to peek behind the curtain of intuition at human scale and learn deep truths about the mechanics of the universe and possibly let us see the limits of what can be known...which I guess makes sense as a ruler is useful in part precisely because it tells you exactly what its limits are...Idk man just saying that the entitlement you are describing isn't an inevitable condition and i'd argue that if a person pays attention to what we believe we know and how we came to know it then there is little reason to believe that knowing everything is even possible in principle.