Allow me to correct some assumptions about what I said, and then address your questions. You said “because you seem to think that in order for a thing to change there must be some radical ‘creation’ to transmute it into something else.“

Leaving transmutations aside, why assume creation is radical and evolution is not? Intelligent order / structures arising from chaos, without a higher power or intelligence to trigger and sustain it, is the most radical notion anyone could entertain. I think that you’re missing the point of the very miracle of everyday existence, this because certain things appear to be familiar to you, yet you still have no clue how they work and can’t reproduce them in a laboratory or otherwise. Again I will draw your attention to the most mundane things. You cannot heal even a paper cut with your mind, yet life does it for you while you sleep. Surely you deserve no credit for that and a thousand other life processes that occur totally unaware of your conscious mind. The complexity and sheer orchestration of it all is mind-boggling if you were able to see even a fraction of it, yet your personal so-called intelligence would deny the existence of a higher intelligence that handles all the issues and processes you cannot. (The real question is why does It even bother with you.) Intelligent Design simply infers a Creator, not a religion. How you choose to acknowledge the Creator (or not) is really up to you. Personally, I’m not too interested in religion, and evolution comes close to being one.

What is the difference between a dead duck and a live one? Obviously the answer is life. So what is life? Why is it that when we remove life, that duck carcass immediately starts to decay? Ditto for people. You think a gene code means something MUST occur, and yet it doesn’t always. Please create a gene code manually without living aid, and then animate it. Just because you’ve seen a thing a thousand times doesn’t mean you have an inkling how or why it works. Life is still an advanced technology for science.

If science understood gravity then surely it could produce its opposite, Simple folks have demonstrated antigravity while cosmologists engage in circular reasoning but no working models. But antigravity/dimensional jumps would support the Ascension, a real can of worms for aetheists. Super-natural events according to true scientific principles laid down by a real Creator—what a concept!

Miracles happen and God proves Himself to the sincere, but not those who tend to be so full of themselves. Visit Lourdes and witness the crutches and supports people entered with and left behind when they walked away, with sound bodies. Check their medical records. There are holy men and women in india who work miracles today. (Not religion-specific.) Doctors see enough cases of spontaneous remissions to know something else is at work of which they have no control. Quantum physics has mathematically proven the existence of multiverses (places for angels to hide.) Thousands of people throughout history have seen and interacted with angels and higher beings, but it’s easy to mock their claims and say they were hallucinating, because you’re too lazy to do any research that really means anything. Proof is found by those who seek it. Nothing I’ve personally seen would convince you. You need to get your own. Nothing else will satisfy.

I have to give zilch credit for his awareness (however dim) of open (free energy) systems. None of you explain though, how or why the nonintelligent universe manages to suck energy from the surrounding chaos while maintaining coherency, creating planet, suns and galaxies AND growing your toenails.

The problem is you aetheists want to take God out of His universe. He laughs, even gives you your way. So God is absent and you complain about that too. If there’s anything divinity can depend upon humanity for, its psychosis and ingratitude. I’m sure you enjoy your meaningfully contrived lives as best you can, and your own company. If you want to assert a common ancestor where your first genes randomly coalesced in some slime pool, at least you’re not insulting the Creator for producing such idiots. You did it to yourselves. Thanks for an entertaining weekend.

If you want to assert a common ancestor where your first genes randomly coalesced in some slime pool, at least you’re not insulting the Creator for producing such idiots. You did it to yourselves.

I was going to jump into this discussion, but quite frankly, it’s not worth the effort. Your last post contained so many ridiculous claims that to refute them one by one would take hours of my time and your attempts at sophistry were child like at best.

Shana, Swine, Zilch, Elwed, Eric….

I don’t know where you get the patience to argue with twits like this, but I admire you one and all. I read posts like that and have to pace the room to burn away the compulsive desire to crawl through the computer cable and slap some sense into them.

KP,

Ummm, I wouldn’t say that I was arguing or that I’m particularly patient.  I was having more fun at thrival’s expense then anything.

thrival,

The error that you’re making is that you believe that evolution is about the origin of life.  It’s not, it’s about the origin of diversity.  As for how biogenesis originally happened that’s completely a different topic, and one that’s fraught with speculation at this time.  However, the ribosome hypothesis does seem promising.

Aw, Zilch, I still love you!  I gots more than enough love when it comes to people who induce audible gales of laughter from a mere comment.

This is of course the argument from design, a bit gussied up with an implied allusion to the
Second Law of Thermodynamics- “Design requires a Designer. Left to their own accord, things proceed from order to disorder, rather than the other way around.  Thus, God existsâ€?.
-Zilch

Leaving transmutations aside, why assume creation is radical and evolution is not? Intelligent order / structures arising from chaos…
-thrival

But nothing evolved from chaos…the properties of the universe are what dictated the process of our evolution from primordial goo.
(Of course, if you want to discuss the big bang, that’s another thing.)

I hold that simply because we don’t yet know how those properties came to be doesn’t discount their existence and effectiveness.  The truth of the matter is, those properties are in place, and have been for as long as we can tell.  We can observe those properties every day.  Are you saying that everytime I place an alka-seltzer in a glass of water, God is there to fuel the reaction?  That’s one hell of a busy mother.  No wonder he has no time for larger issues like Iraq and the Israeli-Palestine conflict.

(I anticipate comments that the alka-seltzer reaction is a movement toward chaos.  That does not matter, really—it’s a chemical reaction and in the right situation, those create order, too.)

Now, my mind does not see the need to imagine a catch-all higher power to take care of all the things I don’t understand.  It doesn’t bother me that many things lie unexplained because I’ve seen so many mysteries become understood through the scientific method in my lifetime.

Of course I marvel at the complexity and beauty of life, what a fool you are to assume that I do not!  Indeed, studying biology and anthropology has led me to an even greater appreciation of those things than religion or theism ever did.  (My appreciation of things was in fact more contrived when I believed in God…it was a relief to stop believing.) 
Because to my mind, the processes of life are amazing in and of themselves.  Can’t you stop bickering and whining about ID for a second to see how amazing life is?  Stop worrying about the ultimate cause of it all and live in the here and now.

I find it positively hilarious that you accuse us of being self-aggrandizing when that is precisely how you are acting.  Get off your high horse, buck-o.

Proof is found by those who seek it. Nothing I’ve personally seen would convince you. You need to get your own. Nothing else will satisfy.

Another cheap ass escape.  Have fun in your corner with that big, heavy burden of proof.  You, sir, are the one who is too lazy to read up on anything we’ve discussed or provide evidence to your claims of the existence of god.

Here I was, just about to give up on thrival, and he goes and says

I have to give zilch credit for his awareness (however dim) of open (free energy) systems.

Coming from someone of his scientific acumen, that’s heady praise.  Thus invigorated, I will throw caution and good sense to the winds, and say I agree with him when he says

Intelligent order / structures arising from chaos, without a higher power or intelligence to trigger and sustain it, is the most radical notion anyone could entertain.

...and that’s why I go along with Daniel Dennett in saying that Darwin’s dangerous idea is the best single idea anyone has ever had.  Nothing other than such a radical notion can account for the evolution of order from disorder.

I suspect, however, that thrival is using the word “radical” as a synonym for “absurd” or simply “false”.  If this is the case, then he’s stuck in the standard fundy pickle of explaining how God, presumably an intelligent order or structure, arose from chaos.  Did God evolve too?  Or does God have a permission slip to not have a beginning, permission denied (by God?) to the mere physical universe?  Pretty silly stuff.

Thrival, if you’re still there, come back after you’ve read up a bit of science, and cut out the arrogance, and we’ll try again.

Or does God have a permission slip to not have a beginning, permission denied (by God?) to the mere physical universe?  Pretty silly stuff.

Indeed, and I’d like to take it a step further.  Scientists may not know for sure how the universe began, but science-y people search for the answers in a logical way.  They go from nothing to something, or possibly just something to something else.  But ID hits a major roadblock when it tries to go from nothing to god to something.  ID advocates are throwing in a whole extra middle man, namely, The Big White Guy in the Sky.  But real scientists would never do such a thing because it’s illogical, thanks to Occam’s Razor:

Quoting from Wikipedia, “In its simplest form, Ockham’s Razor states that one should not make more assumptions than needed.“

God is one too many assumptions, and you know what they say about assumptions.
So, there’s a little BOO-YAH from the 14th century for ya.

Anyone else notice a certain pseudo-new agey bent to Thrival’s latest postings? It’s almost like he’s trying to meld the harmonic convergence crowd with all of the world’s religions at once. Very amusing stuff.

Yet he still suffers from that same mind blockage that Fundy Xians suffer from, which is for some odd reason simply can not fathom what the word “Theory” means in the context of “Scientific Theory”.

The “theory� (belief system / philosophy) of evolution

Allow me to edumakate you on this very simple definition.

A Theory is an explanation of a set of related observations or events based upon proven hypotheses and verified multiple times by detached groups of researchers, in the case of Evolution for instance has been proven, verified, by 100s of 1000s of Scientist the world over for 150 years, Evolution is one of the most proven FACTS in all of Science. One scientist cannot create a theory; he can only create a hypothesis. Proven= to well beyond any reasonable doubt, thus as close to fact as Science is capable of achieving.

Hypotheses are deductions based on observations and what is known to be true at the time. They are educated deduction, not haphazard or wild guesses. They are based on testable experimentation that is repeatable, verifiable, thus provable.

A scientific law is like the law of gravity or Newton’s laws of motion. They are simple, direct, truthful statements that define a very specific observation. Laws are simply statements that everyone agrees to be true, so that they can move on.

In general, both a scientific theory and a scientific law are accepted to be true by the scientific community as a whole. Both are used to make predictions of events. Both are used to advance technology. In the case of Evolution it is the cornerstone of ALL of the life Sciences, without it virtually everything Science has done in 150 years in Biology & all the life Sciences would have all been based on a lie and have to be completely rewritten, reevaluated, obviously that is simply NOT going to happen as Evolution has proven itself to be fact countless times for well over a century.

The biggest difference between a law and a theory is that a theory is much more complex and dynamic. A law governs a single action, whereas a theory explains a whole series of related phenomena.

Compare a slingshot to an automobile. A scientific law is analogous to a slingshot. A slingshot has but one moving part - the rubber band. If you put a rock in it and draw it back, the rock will fly out at a predictable speed, depending upon the distance the band is drawn back.

An automobile, on the other hand, has many moving parts, all working in unison to perform the chore of transporting someone from one point to another point. An automobile is a complex piece of machinery. Sometimes, improvements are made to one or more component parts. But the function of the automobile as a whole remains unchanged.

A theory is like the automobile. Components of it can be changed or improved upon without changing the overall truth of the theory as a whole.

Some scientific theories include the theory of evolution, the theory of relativity and the quantum theory. All of these theories are well-documented and proved beyond reasonable doubt. Yet scientists continue to tinker with the component hypotheses of each theory in an attempt to make them more elegant and concise, or to make them more all-encompassing. Theories can be tweaked, but they are seldom, if ever, entirely replaced.

Most importantly, scientific theories are a part of how science works. You start with a question to which you do not know the answer. You observe, collect data, perform experiments and then come up with a hypothesis to explain it.  Other scientists take your hypothesis and verify it with observations of their own, OR the hypothesis is “Disproved” if the facts, the verifiable data does not support it.

Over time, it develops into a theory, which nearly all scientists can then use to predict what will happen next. Or if the facts do not support the hypothesis, it is abandoned, even if the hypothesis was an elegant one. Thomas Huxley once wrote, “The great tragedy of Science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.“  Tis a pity we can not seem to slay the ugly fantasy of creationism no matter how much fact is presented, that is the insidious nature of this extremely aggressive & debilitating “Mind Plague” called religion.

Creationism is not a theory, nor even a hypothesis, because it was not arrived at by the scientific method. Creationism starts out with the answer - that God created everything. Then it works backward to try to find pieces of “evidence” to support the conclusion that has already been made. It is the opposite of science. It is the exact opposite of “truth”. The answer that god created everything will never be thrown out regardless how many times it has been disproved, regardless of the fact that there is not a single shred of verifiable evidence to support such a magical fantasy.
Creationism/ID can NEVER attain the pinnacle of “Theory” nor even the profundity of hypothesis, Creationism will never be more than what it is which is nothing but an “argument” against the proven fact of Evolution. Its not even a good argument.
Yet in parts of the USA this garbage is being pushed onto young malleable minds of school children in order to proselytize as many as possible, as young as possible. This is nothing short of “Child Abuse”.

One good thing that “could” become of this is that unwittingly creationist are ignorantly asking Scientist, teachers, etc to place creationism along side of the proven theory of Evolution, which in turn does exactly what clergy for millennia have ran from like a wild fire, which is put religious dogma in a public arena to be critically examined, to demand verifiable evidence to support a fantasy of which not a shred of such evidence exist. This is a ploy that very well may backfire.

Nunya,

I’m on board with your analysis with the exception of the following claim:

A scientific law is like the law of gravity or Newton’s laws of motion. They are simple, direct, truthful statements that define a very specific observation. Laws are simply statements that everyone agrees to be true, so that they can move on.

I would have replaced “truthful” with “usefully generalizable” for example Newton’s Laws are no longer considered to be literally true.  They’re only “true” in idealized circumstances (namely one’s that allow for absolute frames of reference, versus relative frames of reference).  That said, Newton’s Laws are still taught because they allow for useful generalization, they’re accurate enough to allow us to build structures to resist various forces, and predict the motion of various bodies over time and so on.  However, to say that they are true would be somewhat inaccurate.  Also, given the pessimistic meta induction argument (namely that since all past scientific laws have been eventually demonstrated to be inadequate we can assume that moden scientific laws will eventually become obsolete as well) it would be going out on a limb a bit to say that modern scientific laws are sacrosanct.

The only thing evolutionary theory has proven is that mutations occur, and that some stuff got buried in mud a while back. All the beautiful illustrations of tax-on oh-me’s are fanciful conjectures by active imaginations. Holes in evolutionary theory are routinely found, and not just by religious folks. I think I recall photos of dinosaur footprints and human footprints, side by side along a mudbank. Also fossilizations occur a lot quicker than archeologists previously thought, and live toads are often found often enough when cracking solid limestones.

God made the laws of attraction that holds stuff together, that is chemistry. Science can’t tell us why the elements behave as they do or even always predict correctly that they will. You think God isn’t necessary but space is a particle soup of everything you and the planet is made of. Science doesn’t know how or why those dumb particles ‘decide’ at a given time to coalesce into coherent spheres on their own. We can even see it happening thru telescopes in the fringes of cosmic dust. I assert some divine will and intelligence(s) (higher dimensional beings) direct those particles to assemble, ‘cause they just don’t appear motivated to do it on their own.
That’s where fundamentalist christians have it wrong you see; creation is STILL HAPPENING. Dr. Dino never responded when I pointed that out to him.

Lifeforms are yin and yang. Life is the invisible organizing energy and yin is the matter. Remove the life energy and the matter dissintegrates back to chemicals. That’s why I assert life is an energy from another place, and no I don’t mean merely sunlight as they found tube-worms near undersea volcanic vents that get no light to speak of. You could assert that the worms evolved to their conditions (yawn) but again I’ll say that something doesn’t spontaneously generate from nothing. We use life daily and still have not a clue how it works or why it bothered to make us.

Virtually every primitive culture on this planet recognized the existence of nature spirits / faeries, and some like the hawaiian kahunas could even control the weather, just like Jesus. Only western scientific sceptics find these facts unworthy of their time or investigations. I believe Jesus was just a natural scientist who discovered that God is a real entity, who’s personality at least, can be known, and said any of us can do likewise. He even revealed his methods. Whether we want to test his hypothesis is another matter, but let’s at least be honest about that. Because if evolutionists are correct, (thank goodness they’re not) our having been here will have meant exactly zero, and everything we held of importance in our minds will be gone.

Evil ducks can hypothesize about universes where everything is known, but this ain’t one of them.
Chat-bots are a wonderful way to avoid engaging the issues in a personal way. It lets a person fancy themselves intelligent while discovering nothing.

thrival drivaled:

I think I recall photos of dinosaur footprints and human footprints, side by side along a mudbank.

Nope! That claim is bollocks.

live toads are often found often enough when cracking solid limestones.

Can you show us some proof, please?

Evil ducks can hypothesize about universes where everything is known, but this ain’t one of them.

Wha..? Wha..?? Howard The Duck??
*Brain slowly craws out ears*

Oh man! This is his best reply so far! I about fell out of my chair laughing at this one. It’s comedy night at SEB!

Thrival regurgitated:

All the beautiful illustrations of tax-on oh-me’s are fanciful conjectures by active imaginations. Holes in evolutionary theory are routinely found, and not just by religious folks.

I assume you mean gaps in the fossil record? What might these holes be?  Just because it’s not yet complete doesn’t mean it won’t be or that it’s wrong.  The Bible doesn’t explain how babies are made, how about that for a gap?

I think I recall photos of dinosaur footprints and human footprints, side by side along a mudbank.

Ya think?  Well, in that case I think I recall that it’s raining men!  Hooray!
If I recall correctly, those were not human prints at all…and, wait for it…I have proof!  To reiterate what Tish posted:

Paluxy River: it has been widely claimed by creationists that fossil human footprints have been found alongside dinosaur footprints at the Paluxy River near Glen Rose, Texas. Parker (1982), for example, claimed that they “are much more obviously human” than the Laetoli footprints. Scientists showed that many of them were indistinct or infilled dinosaur prints. Some other supposed footprints are either erosional features or, in a few cases (such as the Burdick footprint shown at right (Whitcomb and Morris 1961)), carvings. In 1984 the dinosaurian origin of many of the “better” prints was dramatically confirmed when Glen Kuban and Ron Hastings found color markings which preserved the outline of three-toed dinosaur feet. Although there have been some insinuations that these markings could be artificial stains, core samples show that they were caused by an infilling of secondary sediment into the prints. This evidence has caused most creationists to abandon the Paluxy footprints, although claims about them continue to circulate. For further details read Kuban (1996), or Strahler (1987). (See also Kuban’s web site on the Paluxy River controversy at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/paluxy.html.)

From this page.

Also fossilizations occur a lot quicker than archeologists previously thought, and live toads are often found often enough when cracking solid limestones.

That would be paleontologists, and I’d like to see some support.  Yeah, I find live toads all the time when I crack up limestones in southern Ohio—wtf?!
BTW, on toads in rocks…a load of hooey

Science can’t tell us why the elements behave as they do or even always predict correctly that they will. You think God isn’t necessary but space is a particle soup of everything you and the planet is made of. Science doesn’t know how or why those dumb particles ‘decide’ at a given time to coalesce into coherent spheres on their own. We can even see it happening thru telescopes in the fringes of cosmic dust. I assert some divine will and intelligence(s) (higher dimensional beings) direct those particles to assemble, ‘cause they just don’t appear motivated to do it on their own.

As for the bit on yin and yang, which I won’t bother posting again:
Do you smoke pot?  Wait, that insults pot smokers.  For some reason I imagine Keanu Reeves reading your posts.  I bet you’ve never even had a class in intro chem, have you?  If what you’re saying is true, then technology wouldn’t work.  Unless you think god is in the machine.

And again: Being an evolutionist does not make your life meaningless.  I’m sorry that you’re afraid to admit that your superfriend may not be necessary, but that’s not my problem.
If you gave me any provocative evidence, I promise I would consider it.

Just out of curiosity, what are Jesus’ hypotheses?  Lay those out for me, if you will.

Oh man! This is his best reply so far! I about fell out of my chair laughing at this one. It’s comedy night at SEB!

Indeed, but it trivell writing fiction or non-fiction?

Chat-bots are a wonderful way to avoid engaging the issues in a personal way. It lets a person fancy themselves intelligent while discovering nothing.

You are absolutely right and perfectly wrong, all at the cost of a single paragraph.

The issue is that people reject a specific field of scientific endeavor because it typically runs counter to their religious sensibilities. Engaging you, for example, in a personal way is a waste of time. It much more productive and intellectually challenging to reverse-engineer creationist psychology and target a chat bot to deal with them.

There is a lot to discover, too, like how to get creationists to engage the bot and leave the rest of us alone. How to steer conversations into the bizarre. What whitty insults to deliver. To automate answering FAQs.

So, chat bots are indeed a wonderful way to cease wasting time in a personal engagement. They are also a wonderful intellectual challenge and will lead to discoveries of how to have a bot talk to a boob.

It much more productive and intellectually challenging to reverse-engineer creationist psychology and target

Yeah, it is a pretty difficult task to set for oneself.  Particularly when the group that you’re targeting can bust out with lines like

Science doesn’t know how or why those dumb particles ‘decide’ at a given time to coalesce into coherent spheres on their own. We can even see it happening thru telescopes in the fringes of cosmic dust. I assert some divine will and intelligence(s) (higher dimensional beings) direct those particles to assemble, ‘cause they just don’t appear motivated to do it on their own

LOL.  Yeeessss.  Just like that ‘magical’ force that causes a dropped pencil to ‘fly’ toward the ground, inexplicably.  See?  God is everywhere!

Can someone lend thrival a bit of mental floss?  He’s got some ‘dumb particles’ coalescing between his ears.

Yeah, it is a pretty difficult task to set for oneself.

I know. That’s why I’m asking for help.

To make this explicit, I doubt that there is any possibility of a ‘meaningful’ dialog between such a bot and a creationist, but I’ll gladly settle for a trolling rod. For added amusement, one could train a bot to be a flat earth creationist and rip into the young earth ones as too progressive. Oh, the possibilities.

I’m certain that the positive and negative charges in protons and electrons have nothing to do with elements combining, where would the self-determination of that be? Why must you ascribe motive to inanimate objects and elements? Does the stone I throw at your head ‘decide’ to fly though the air to strike you between the eyes or does gravity, applied force, and mass combine to form a mathmatically predictable (and demonstrable) arc the stone follows without consent?

Maybe it is god that hits you with the stone instead of me, because I can’t arrange the physical universe to do my bidding. What does god have against you trival?

Evil ducks can hypothesize about universes where everything is known, but this ain’t one of them.

Precisely and drivel failed the grade. For the benefit of the other readers, I’ll explain.

Langton’s Ants implement a “universe” governed by extremely simple rules that are known. Demo programs are readily available on the web, if anybody cares to see these “ants” in action.

Interestingly enough, even though the Theory of Everything is known and trivial for this universe, we cannot predict how this universe unfolds from starting conditions without running the program to have a look. It can be observed that highly complex structures appear that can’t be predicted by examining the rules and starting conditions alone.

What’s the relevance of this to our universe, of which we have but limited knowledge, the interested reader (that excludes drivial) may ask?

If a very simple system like Langton’s Ants exhibits emergent phenomena, the same principle can be applied to the observable universe. This very simple mathematical model profoundly demonstrates that complexity can arise from simplicity, without the need of a helping hand. In other words, the case for a creator is vastly diminished.

I’m with you, Les.  This guy is mad and rad.

thrival drivel
goin’ round my brain
ain’t too civil
but he’s way insane

humor him now
or he’ll have a cow
give a little
and he’ll come again

thrival,

There is pretty clear evidence from biomedical research that evolution occurs.  Consider the development of new bacterial and viral strains and species.  If evolution wasn’t happening how would new genera of pathogens develop?  Another example of evolution, or at least natural selection, in action is the development of drug resistant infections.  If one was to deny natural selection in favor of God, or some other divine force, then one would be committed to the claim that God is constantly making pathogens more efficient at killing people.  Now this, to me at least, doesn’t speak to an omnibenevolent deity.  So you’re faced with a dilemma, either you have to accept that selection and the shifting of traits occur as the result of natural forces, or you have to accept that divine forces are trying to make more lethal pathogens.  Personally, I choose the natural forces option because it’s more parsimonious, it allows for prediction, have so far offered options (that are largely effective) for reducing the development of more lethal bacteria and viruses, and has been consistent with observations that I personally have made in the lab (indeed, with bacterial strains, because of their short generational periods, one can see evolution in action if one introduces selective conditions).

The point of a rock being thrown at my head wasn’t a random event. It took some very minor intelligence to throw it. The stone formed according to the laws of chemistry, as set down and manipulated by higher intelligences who formed the planet,  set it (and keep it) in motion.

Apologies for not having toads-in-stone references at my fingertips. Has been a few decades since delving the unexplained mysteries section of books, but they’re there for those motivated to scout ‘em out. Quarrymen are the folks that typically find the toads. You might find something worth rending your garments at http://www.forteantimes.com

You don’t really see new strains of pathogens evolving on their own. Mutations aren’t another form of life (chemical resistant cockroaches, et al.) What we genetically engineer is another matter, my very point being that it took intelligence (a scientist) to make that happen. And I assert that life IS an intelligence, (or its Source is), surely not the matter that fills in the pattern, because when you remove the life, the pattern dissembles back to chemicals. Also you haven’t created life by mixing genes. (you still need to inject them into a living cell.) At best you’ve manipulated life. That still doesn’t mean you understand it. In fact, the fact you yourself ARE life, taints the experiment. You cannot create life from the absence of life because that would remove the experimenter. Something that Gaston discovered; bacteria go through many intermediate stages before becoming specific. Then they encapsulate into nonliving cysts (when the food is gone), which then hatch into completely different species, depending upon the next available food supply. Far from proving evolution, that just proves that life as an organizing energy, is intelligent and purposeful, and spontaneously generates what it needs for the conditions of the moment, i.e. creation is still happening.

What I notice is you all deny the existence of a Designer simply by virtue of His invisibility, giving you license to subscribe to equally “impossible” theories.

And I notice that swine mixes the arguement for or against God with the concern that IF He exists, might not always be benevolent/“nice.“ Well ignorance (willful or otherwise has a cost), and not quite fair to blame the Creator when ‘bad’ things happen, just because of your limited perspectives. Nature has cures for her own bugs (colloidal silver, minerals, essential oils). Otherwise only one superbug/blob would exist to the exclusion of all others, having absorbed everything else. Problem is that drug companies like to fractionate nature into half-assed products that only work for a while.

I really don’t care if evil duck interacts with me personally. What could be interesting would be his discovering something beyond his subjective universes. If complexity can arise from nothing, why aren’t current computers (which have had an organizational assist) evolving to AI on their own? I suppose someday an otherwise intelligent race (but for its one-sided belief in evolution) might visit earth when man is extinct, and discover a race of computers with a common ancestor, the floppy disk. They would be wrong to assume however that the computers created themselves from nothing.

Just because you imagine something could happen doesn’t mean it does or even likely to happen, especially the idea of meaning-motivated, self-repairing structures creating themselves from the ‘laws’ (oxymoron) of chaos. You’re free to fall in love with the manmade and man-explained world, the only problem is, you can’t stay here forever, proving there are real meanings beyond your subjective ones.

Jesus advised fasting, prayer, and seeking the truth, to open supernatural doors. Actually discovering that there is a spirit world comes as quite a shock, and nowhere found in evolutionary theory. And yet transition and translation to the spirit world is an evolutionary leap made possible by the Creator. Go figure.

thrival,

You don’t really see new strains of pathogens evolving on their own.

What are you talking about?  There are new strains of pathogens appearing all the time.  HIV, the various noroviruses, SARS, avian influenza, various novel strains of hemorrhagic fevers, and new strains of tuberculosis have all arisen in the last 30 years. 

As far as your claims regarding mutation.  That’s all that evolution is, the shifting of traits over time.  This can lead to speciation events, but it doesn’t require it.  So if you grant that there exists mutations, and that these mutations lead to the changing of traits within the population (something that’s quite hard to deny, at least in terms of medical science) then you’re granting that evolution occurs whether you realize it or not.

Apologies for not having toads-in-stone references at my fingertips. Has been a few decades since delving the unexplained mysteries section of books, but they’re there for those motivated to scout ‘em out.

Let me get this straight, you’re using decades old books from the “unexplained mysteries” section as your evidence? The same place you can find books on Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and Alien Abduction? And you expect that to be taken seriously?

Actually discovering that there is a spirit world comes as quite a shock,

No, thrival, that was the electro-shock therapy…..

Another reference to the Paluxey River footprints:

http://www.bible.ca/tracks/tracks.htm

Please know this doesn’t mean I necessarily subscribe to everything that sectarian christian fundamentalist have to say.