Faith

TagliatelliMonster

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The reality of the nature of the history of life even the concept of species is questionable, where species are described at a given point in time, but evolution is not a stair step progression of one species to another. It is a change in genetic diversity of populations over time in response to the environment and environmental change, which are described as species, subspecies and related variations,

Yes, as the science of evolution progresses we discover the fossils which are representatives of evolution in the diversity of populations over time.
 

TagliatelliMonster

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I think the problem may be that creationists do not understand the concept of a transitional fossil. From the Wiki article on them:


A transitional fossil is any fossilized remains of a life form that exhibits traits common to both an ancestral group and its derived descendant group.[1] This is especially important where the descendant group is sharply differentiated by gross anatomy and mode of living from the ancestral group. These fossils serve as a reminder that taxonomic divisions are human constructs that have been imposed in hindsight on a continuum of variation. Because of the incompleteness of the fossil record, there is usually no way to know exactly how close a transitional fossil is to the point of divergence. Therefore, it cannot be assumed that transitional fossils are direct ancestors of more recent groups, though they are frequently used as models for such ancestors.[2]

Take Pakicetus, Basilosaurus, and the modern whale. They all have a whale's ear, among other traits, Pakucetus is clearly four limbed, basilosaurus is four limbed with family fins, and modern whale only has fins. Basilosaurus has traits of both modern whales and Pakicetus.
 

TagliatelliMonster

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Fossils Are Filling Out the Human Family Tree

Fossils Are Filling Out the Human Family Tree
The more fossils we find, the more we learn that many kinds of humans have lived on Earth.



[IMG]


A reconstructed Neanderthal skeleton, right, and a modern Homo sapiens skeleton, left.Credit...Frank Franklin II/Associated Press
[IMG]
By Nicholas St.

Fleur
Homo sapiens is a pretty impressive species. We built the pyramids, landed on the moon and connected the internet. All of our successes are the fortunate result of a tremendous evolutionary journey from ape to the hominins who would become modern humans.

Along the way, other human relatives emerged and disappeared. Most lived before we did; some of the more recent ones met up with our species before going extinct, for reasons that are still mysterious to scientists.

On Wednesday, researchers welcomed the newest long-gone relative: Homo luzonensis. Here’s a quick guide to some of the other archaic humans that filled out the branches on our evolutionary tree, and what we have learned from them.
 

Red Sky at Morning

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Come on! This is the same tired approach that confuses “true” and “scientific”. Scientific method yields a subset of truth but is unable to speak positively or negatively at the macro level. Creation and evolution are frameworks for understanding the world. To call evolution “science” and creation “religion” is just sophistry.
 

A Freeman

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The Gene Pool

In all communication systems, the encoding/decoding process of an idea starts at the top, goes to the alphabet for encoding, and then the alphabetic/symbolic representation of the idea gets transmitted to the recipient, where it is subsequently decoded. As we know, information does NOT occur naturally and ALL information is based on language.

While language may take on many different forms, there is no other way to convey information from design to implementation aside from language. DNA is not only a language; it is the most exquisitely engineered communication protocol that anyone has ever seen. In humans, it is a three-billion lettered program communicating to the cell to carry out specific functions in a very calculated and specific way. And DNA is unrivaled in its sophistication, elegance, precision, repeatability and in its storage density.

Which begs the question: Does anyone really believe that this highly complex, highly reliable molecular machinery could come about by chance or by random mutation? Without solid proof, wouldn't such a belief amount to a blind leap of faith?

It has been said that "...the point of evolutionary theory is to explain phenomena without having to appeal to intelligence or divine design8". Indeed. That is precisely the point and therein lies the fundamental flaw in reasoning.

Regardless of the field of study, the goal of all scientific research should be the pursuit of truth. We should all feel as Henry David Thoreau did when he said "Any Truth is better than make-believe…rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth." So if someone rules out certain possibilities beforehand, how can their evaluation method be valid? How can any conclusions they may reach be objective? We have a long history of selfishly manipulating scientific theories into scientific “fact” only to have them later disproved when the truth can no longer remain hidden.

It is an established fact that ALL information is based on language and does NOT occur naturally. Information is neither matter nor energy and neither matter nor energy can produce information. Information CANNOT be created without intent, and intention (or will) is the property of a conscious mind, NOT the result of senseless, unconnected random mutations no one has ever observed and which have been proven to be impossible.

Impossible?

DNA carries the encoded hereditary assembly instructions in the form of base pairs or letters which form the connecting "rungs" of the double-helix ladder of life. Sections or "words" of DNA can be formed from these letters and are referred to as genes. Typically a single gene will code for a single protein chain.

In the smallest theoretical living thing, the average gene would still consist of over 1200 letters, or base pairs. For reference, the smallest living cell contains 600 genes while a set of human chromosomes consists of over 2 million genes. So what is the statistical probability of a series of the DNA code letters arranging themselves in order to form just one…JUST ONE…usable "word" (gene) by chance?

To give chance the best hope of success, the following assumptions have been made:

  1. All of the atoms in the entire cosmos have been made into base pairs and are ready and available for use/linking up.
  2. The linking/polymerization process will take place at the fastest known speed of atomic processes (estimated to be around 10^16 per second)
  3. At this polymerization rate, the number of complete chains/words (genes) per second is 8.3 x 10^12 in any one set. In a year, a set of nucleotides/base pairs would produce 2.6 x 10^20 genes, which we will round off to 10^21.
  4. Chance is trying for the first gene in the universe, so there is no pattern strand of DNA or RNA existing. The four different nucleotides will occur only in random order in the chain.
  5. If just one side of the ladder or double helix is obtained, it will be considered sufficient, in the thought that if one is obtained, the other side might form by base pairing.
  6. Nucleotides are made of atoms of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus, of which phosphorus is the least plentiful and therefore the limiting element.
  7. There are estimated to be 1.5 x 10^72 phosphorus atoms in the universe, which will make 10^68 sets, so that one copy of each of the four kinds of nucleotides is present at each point of the 1,200-unit chain being formed.
  8. Three atoms of phosphorus are needed for each activated nucleotide. This will make 10^68 sets, so that if each set is producing 10^21 sequences per year, that will be a total of 10^89 different chains annually, using all of the appropriate atoms of the universe.
  9. Each chain will be dismantled immediately and another one built until there is a usable gene. This will be done at the prodigious speed of eight trillion chains per second.
  10. There are no duplicate codons.
  11. Nothing will interfere, so chance will have an ideal opportunity. And if a usable sequence is ever obtained, the action will stop so it may be preserved.
  12. The probability of getting a meaningful amino acid sequence to produce a usable protein for an amino acid chain 400 long is 1 in 4^400, which is equal to 1 in 10^240.
With 4 kinds of nucleotides and a chain 1200 units in length, the total possible arrangements would be 4^1200, which is approximately 10^722. The letters of a gene though are read in triplicate codons, comprising 64 kinds of triplets. A chain this size would contain 400 of these triplets, or 64^400 possible combinations, which is the same as figuring the possible orders by individual letter arrangements, namely 10^722.

Many of the twenty amino acids though are coded by more than one triplet, and though some believe these duplicate codons represent "historical accidents” or "junk DNA" there is a growing body of evidence that this isn't the case9, 10. If there is no such thing as junk DNA, the probability of a single gene arranging itself by chance in the entire universe is simply one chance in the total number of possible arrangements. In other words,

The probability of just one gene in the entire universe arranging itself by chance is 1 in 10^722.

Which could be expressed as 1/10^722, or 10^-722. But even if we assume that junk DNA does exist, and decided to treat all of the duplicate codons as if they were useless extras, the odds don't get much better. With only twenty-one different possible primary outcomes for each codon position (twenty amino acids plus the "end of the chain"), for a chain 400 amino acids long the potential outcomes are 21^400, which is approximately 10^528. Allowing one substitution per chain, the equivalent total of different sequences would reduce to 10^524.

Since this is still less likely than the sequencing to produce a single, usable protein, 1/10^240 will be used for the probability of obtaining a usable gene on any try for the very first gene11. This probability reduces to 1/10^236 by allowing for one substitution. Multiplying this by the total orders produced in a year of all of the nucleotide sets from the entire cosmos, the probability of getting a usable gene in a year is 1089/10236, or 1/10^147. So with all of the concessions given in the list of assumptions above, a usable gene could be expected to occur in 10^147 years12. And that's just to produce ONE gene working with all of the nucleotide sets of all of the atoms of the universe at incredible speed. Let's not forget that the smallest known cell has about 600 genes.

For reference, if we assume that the universe is 15 billion years old, we would need trillions of trillions of trillions of trillions...repeat this 12 times total...of times the assumed age of the universe to produce one gene by chance even working at the astronomical speed assumed. So anyone who mistakenly thinks that enough time can magically produce extremely improbable results is choosing to believe in a proven fantasy. The fallacy of such a mistaken belief lies in the size of the figures.

To better understand just how big a number like 10^147 really is, consider that one trillion trillion is only 10^24. Written out, 10^147 is a 1 followed by 147 zeros. And we're still talking about just ONE gene arranging itself by dumb luck during that period of time. Each subsequent gene match would be another order of magnitude less likely to occur. Common sense should make it clear that getting hundreds or even millions of genes to arrange themselves by chance given these odds is completely ridiculous. But does that mean life by the Darwinian evolutionary theory is absolutely impossible?
 

TagliatelliMonster

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Come on! This is the same tired approach that confuses “true” and “scientific”. Scientific method yields a subset of truth but is unable to speak positively or negatively at the macro level. Creation and evolution are frameworks for understanding the world. To call evolution “science” and creation “religion” is just sophistry.
It is sad that so often we keep stumbling upon this kind of claim.

Truth is, it is seriously obsolet and misinformed. Evolution is not only scientific and in fact a significant scientific tool for all kinds of biological technology, it has been so for decades.

The vigor of its adversaries is due to emotional trouble with the idea and a jumbo-sized lack of proper information.
 

Lisa

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Isn’t creationism like evolution in that all this came from nothing? We just don’t think it was the Big Bang that did it. God spoke and nothing became something. He produced a world that fits perfectly together.
 

A Freeman

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Understanding the Law of Chance

Émile Borel, a distinguished French expert on probability, stated what he called “the single law of chance”, or merely “the law of chance”, in these words:

“Events whose probability is extremely small never occur”13.

He calculated that probabilities smaller than 1/10^15 were negligible on the terrestrial scale, and he went on to say:

"We may be led to set at 10^-50 (1 in 10^50 odds) the value of negligible probabilities on the cosmic scale. When the probability of an event is below this limit, the opposite event may be expected to occur with certainty, whatever the number of occasions presenting themselves in the entire universe."

By “opposite event”, he means no event, or failure to occur. So thinking that even one gene could arrange itself by chance into any usable order in the entire universe isn't remotely realistic, if we apply this statement by the eminent mathematician. Simply stated another way, by the single law of chance, it will NEVER occur.

Not in a million years. Not even in 15 billion.


The Darwinian Leap of Faith

Dr. Joseph L. Henson, biologist, stated that to believe in Darwinian evolution, one has to have “faith to believe that the statistically improbable is going to happen again and again and again.”14 But when the statistically improbable is as completely improbable as 1/10^722 for just the first gene to arrange itself, consider what kind of unfounded leap of faith would be required!

There is absolutely nothing scientific about believing in Darwinism. Contrary to the popular Darwinian-inspired pick-up truck bumper sticker, "stuff" doesn’t just happen. No matter how much time is provided, inanimate objects NEVER reorganize themselves into life and DNA didn't program itself nor will it ever do so. The theory that this was possible was based on completely erroneous assumptions without any scientific proof at the time, much less all of the information that is now available about DNA and how it works. And we've really only begun to scratch the surface of understanding this extraordinarily engineered basic building block of life.

DNA is a code. DNA is a language. DNA is the most efficient data storage device known to man. DNA is an assembly line for life, carrying out incredibly detailed instructions on a molecular level in every single cell of every single living organism everywhere. And most importantly, DNA is proof positive that NOTHING happens by chance, just as the probability statistics have clearly shown.

So let's call Darwinism what it really is: an organized religion.

ALL
organized religion is based on lies with a little bit of the truth mixed in to sell it, to lead us away from God. Darwinism is no different. There has never been any actual scientific proof of evolutionary theory which at best was based on flawed assumptions. It's really always been about one thing and one thing only:

"...the point of evolutionary theory is to explain phenomena without having to appeal to intelligence or divine design".

Starting with a theory and ignoring the overwhelming body of evidence that disproves that theory isn't logical or scientific at all. It's simply dishonest. We haven't gone for a walk in the forest and found a watch; instead we've found a watch factory of unparalleled ingenuity, intricacy and precision, which is well beyond our comprehension. We then arrogantly/ignorantly questioned the existence of the factory Owner because He didn't make a special appearance as we thought He should despite His EXPLICIT contact instructions being ignored.

He told us NOT to go to a church to talk to Him. A church is just a building, and it can have stained glass windows and crosses or it can have textbooks and lab equipment. God isn't human and He doesn't live in a building; He wants to live in the hearts of each and every one of us as an invited guest. The only thing that stands in the way of this happening is our own arrogance/ignorance. And this egotistical and self-destructive approach to life will NEVER lead to the Truth.

Romans 1:18-25
1:18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all unGodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the Truth as unrighteousness;
1:19 Because that which may be known of God is manifest to them; for God hath showed [it] unto them.
1:20 For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, [even] His eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:
1:21 Because that, when they knew God, they glorified [Him] not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.
1:22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,
1:23 And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.
1:24 Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves:
1:25 Who changed the Truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, Who is blessed for ever. Amen.
 

TagliatelliMonster

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Isn’t creationism like evolution in that all this came from nothing? We just don’t think it was the Big Bang that did it. God spoke and nothing became something. He produced a world that fits perfectly together.
No one claims the Big Bang "came from nothing", so your starting premise is wrong.
 

TagliatelliMonster

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Physicists Say They've Manipulated 'Pure Nothingness' And Observed The Fallout

Physicists Say They've Manipulated 'Pure Nothingness' And Observed The Fallout

FIONA MACDONALD
19 JANUARY 2017
According to quantum mechanics, a vacuum isn't empty at all. It's actually filled with quantum energy and particles that blink in and out of existence for a fleeting moment - strange signals that are known as quantum fluctuations.

For decades, there had only ever been indirect evidence of these fluctuations, but back in 2015, researchers claimed to have detected the theoretical fluctuations directly. And now the same team says they've gone a step further, having manipulated the vacuum itself, and detecting the changes in these strange signals in the void.

We're entering the territory of high-level physics here, but what's really important in this experiment is that, if these results are confirmed, the researchers might have just unlocked a way to observe, probe, and test the quantum realm without interfering with it.

That's important, because one of the biggest problems with quantum mechanics - and our understanding of it - is that every time we measure and observe a quantum system, we destroy it, which doesn't bode well when we want to tease out what's really going on in the quantum world.

This is where the quantum vacuum comes into it.

First of all, let's think of a vacuum in a classical way - as space entirely devoid of matter, with the lowest possible energy. There are no particles there, and nothing to interfere with pure physics.

But a byproduct of one of the most fundamental principles in quantum mechanics, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, states that there's a limit to how much we can know about quantum particles, and as a result, a vacuum isn't empty, it's actually buzzing with its own strange energy, and filled with particle-antiparticle pairs that appear and disappear randomly.

These are more like 'virtual' particles than physical matter, so ordinarily you can't detect them. But although they're invisible, like most things in the quantum world, they subtly influence the real world.

These quantum fluctuations produce randomly fluctuating electric fields that can affect electrons, which is how scientists first indirectly demonstrated their presence back in the 1940s.

For decades, that was all we had to go on.

Then, in 2015, a team led by Alfred Leitenstorfer from the University of Konstanz in Germany claimed they'd directly detected these fluctuations, by observing their influence on a light wave. The results were published in Science.

To do this, they fired a super short laser pulse - lasting only a few femtoseconds, which is a millionth of a billionth of a second - into a vacuum, and were able to see subtle changes in the polarisation of the light. They said these changes were caused directly by the quantum fluctuations.

It's a claim that's still being debated, but the researchers have now taken their experiment to the next level by 'squeezing' the vacuum, and say they've been able to observe the strange changes in the quantum fluctuations as a result.

This isn't just further evidence of the existence of these quantum fluctuations - it also suggests that they've come up with a way to observe experiments in the quantum world without messing up the results, which is something that would ordinarily destroy the quantum state.

"We can analyse quantum states without changing them in the first approximation," said Leitenstorfer.

Usually when you're looking for the effects of quantum fluctuations on a single light particle, you'd have to detect that light particle, or amplify it, in order to see the effect. And this would remove the 'quantum signature' left on that photon, which is similar to what the team did in the 2015 experiment.

This time, instead of looking at the changes in quantum fluctuations by absorbing and amplifying photons of light, the team studied light on the time domain.

That sounds weird, but in a vacuum, space and time behave in the same way, so it's possible to examine one to learn more about the other.

Doing this, the team saw that when they 'squeezed' the vacuum, it worked kind of like squeezing a balloon, and redistributed the strange quantum fluctuations within it.

At some points, the fluctuations became way louder than the background 'noise' of an unsqueezed vacuum, and in some parts, they were quieter.

Leitenstorfer compares this to a traffic jam - when there's a bottleneck that cars build up behind, in front of that point, the density of cars will decrease again.

The same thing happens in a vacuum, to a certain extent - as the vacuum gets squeezed in one place, the distribution of the quantum fluctuations changes, and they can speed up or slow down as a result.

That effect can be measured on the time domain, which you can see below charted out on space-time. The bump in the middle is the 'squeeze' in the vacuum:



As you can see, as a result of the squeeze, there are some blips in the fluctuations.

But something else weird happens too, the fluctuations in some places appear to drop below the background noise level, which is lower than the ground state of empty space, something the scientists call an "astonishing phenomenon".

"As the new measurement technique neither has to absorb the photons to be measured nor amplify them, it is possible to directly detect the electromagnetic background noise of the vacuum and thus also the controlled deviations from this ground state, created by the researchers," explains a press release.

The team is now testing just how accurate their technique is, and how much they can learn from it.

Even though the results so far are impressive, there's still a chance the team might have only achieved a so-called weak measurement - a type of measurement that doesn't disturb the quantum state, but doesn't actually tell researchers very much about a quantum system.

If they can learn more using this technique, they want to continue to use it to probe the 'quantum state of light', which is the invisible behaviour of light at the quantum level that we're only just beginning to understand."
 

Lisa

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TagliatelliMonster

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So something out of nothing?
Ex Nihilo, out of nothing, was originally a religious and philosophical idea, not a scientific one. Which you can read about at Wiki: Ex nihilo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It's been adopted by some scientists, but not all. It's not a common idea by scientists that the world came out of nothing. Some do, but not all. There are other views on how the world started, but many of them consider that there were pre-existing conditions and things, and not nothing.

This is a common view:
Initial singularity
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The initial singularity was the gravitational singularity of infinite density thought to have contained all of the mass and spacetime of the Universe[1] before quantum fluctuations caused it to rapidly expand in the Big Bang and subsequent inflation, creating the present-day Universe.
[2]
(From wikipedia as well.)

So put it this way, there is no serious problem of "from nothing" in science since that's not a set idea in the theories.

A universe from nothing does not violate the law of conservation of energy. The total energy of the universe is zero. Therefore a universe from nothing and a universe with a total energy of zero is not a problem.
The answer is in the concept of negative energy. Positive energy is obvious to all of us, negative energy can be seen in gravitational potential energy. When they measure the curvature of the universe and find that as closely as they can measure it that it is flat that is telling us that the energy of the universe is zero since either a net positive or negative would cause a curved universe.

First of all, there are *many* proposed descriptions of what (if anything) happened 'before the Big Bang'. NONE have any actual observational support, so should be regarded as pure speculation, although based on laws of physics we either know or suspect.

What Kraus has popularized, but others pointed out quite long ago, is that gravitational energy (curvature) has to be considered as negative energy if we want to do large scale energy calculations. Otherwise, the curvature of spacetime alone makes it tricky to even define 'the total energy of the universe'. Also, the amount of gravitational energy associated with a given mass exactly balances the energy from that mass according to E=mc^2. That means on this scale, to total energy is zero.

The second piece of this puzzle (according to Krauss and others) is that even empty space will continually have quantum level fluctuations, with particle/anti-particle pairs being produced, and destroyed at a predictable rate. If one of these fluctuations, statistically, got 'out of hand', the idea is that you would get a 'hot bubble' with the characteristics of the early Big Bang.

This all happens in a background space-time called 'Anti-DeSitter space', which is always expanding exponentially, is infinite in extent, and has no beginning. So, yes, a background space-time is assumed in this model. But it is one with no beginning, and with nothing other than quantum fluctuations in it (i.e, a vacuum).

It should be emphasized that this is just *one* model out of many being studied. It shows that the laws of physics that we know *allow* the universe to come 'from nothing' in the sense of coming from a space-time with a vacuum. But, there is a *great* deal we do not understand about quantum gravity, even in the case of a vacuum. In particular, a naive calculation leads to a cosmological constant (which is a sort of vacuum energy density) that is 120 orders of magnitude off what we observe. NOBODY understands what is going on here.
 

Lisa

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Ex Nihilo, out of nothing, was originally a religious and philosophical idea, not a scientific one. Which you can read about at Wiki: Ex nihilo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It's been adopted by some scientists, but not all. It's not a common idea by scientists that the world came out of nothing. Some do, but not all. There are other views on how the world started, but many of them consider that there were pre-existing conditions and things, and not nothing.

This is a common view:

(From wikipedia as well.)

So put it this way, there is no serious problem of "from nothing" in science since that's not a set idea in the theories.

A universe from nothing does not violate the law of conservation of energy. The total energy of the universe is zero. Therefore a universe from nothing and a universe with a total energy of zero is not a problem.
The answer is in the concept of negative energy. Positive energy is obvious to all of us, negative energy can be seen in gravitational potential energy. When they measure the curvature of the universe and find that as closely as they can measure it that it is flat that is telling us that the energy of the universe is zero since either a net positive or negative would cause a curved universe.

First of all, there are *many* proposed descriptions of what (if anything) happened 'before the Big Bang'. NONE have any actual observational support, so should be regarded as pure speculation, although based on laws of physics we either know or suspect.

What Kraus has popularized, but others pointed out quite long ago, is that gravitational energy (curvature) has to be considered as negative energy if we want to do large scale energy calculations. Otherwise, the curvature of spacetime alone makes it tricky to even define 'the total energy of the universe'. Also, the amount of gravitational energy associated with a given mass exactly balances the energy from that mass according to E=mc^2. That means on this scale, to total energy is zero.

The second piece of this puzzle (according to Krauss and others) is that even empty space will continually have quantum level fluctuations, with particle/anti-particle pairs being produced, and destroyed at a predictable rate. If one of these fluctuations, statistically, got 'out of hand', the idea is that you would get a 'hot bubble' with the characteristics of the early Big Bang.

This all happens in a background space-time called 'Anti-DeSitter space', which is always expanding exponentially, is infinite in extent, and has no beginning. So, yes, a background space-time is assumed in this model. But it is one with no beginning, and with nothing other than quantum fluctuations in it (i.e, a vacuum).

It should be emphasized that this is just *one* model out of many being studied. It shows that the laws of physics that we know *allow* the universe to come 'from nothing' in the sense of coming from a space-time with a vacuum. But, there is a *great* deal we do not understand about quantum gravity, even in the case of a vacuum. In particular, a naive calculation leads to a cosmological constant (which is a sort of vacuum energy density) that is 120 orders of magnitude off what we observe. NOBODY understands what is going on here.
So did they update the Big Bang because people were coming up with the same thing I just mentioned and they couldn’t deal with the similarity of it?
The actual facts are no one knows how this life really came into being since none of us were there in the beginning when it was all created. I’m of the opinion that this world couldn't have happened by accident we all fit too well together on it..which would explain intelligent design..God created it this way.
 

TagliatelliMonster

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So did they update the Big Bang because people were coming up with the same thing I just mentioned and they couldn’t deal with the similarity of it?
Yes, that's Science

Science (from the Latin word scientia, meaning "knowledge")[1] is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.[2][3][4]

Science is not about holding unprovable dogmas, it is about developing models and theories to increasingly better represent and understand what we empirically observe, test and predict.
 
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Intelligent design is disproven by any number of structures but perhaps the most telling is the giraffe's Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve.

I point to Casey Luskin's (a primary shill for the intelligent design advocacy group the Discovery Institute) Point I (1):

“ Ways Designers Act When Designing (Observations):"
the
(1) " Intelligent agents think with an "end goal" in mind, allowing them to solve complex problems by taking many parts and arranging them in intricate patterns that perform a specific function (e.g. complex and specified information)


No competent designer would design a structure like the Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve, which can be spotted in a wide variety of animals, from fish to mammals. In fish, exhibiting as they do the primitive condition, the nerve heads straight from the brain, down to the larynx. However, in mammals, the structure of the head and development of the neck from fish-like organisms causes the recurrent laryngeal nerve to become "trapped" under the aortic arch in the thorax and thus forces its path down and around the aortic arch.

The gradual change from the anatomy of a fish to that of a mammal means that there is no way for the nerve to magically jump from one side of the aortic arch to the other. So, in mammals, the nerve controlling the larynx by necessity drops deep into the chest cavity and then reverses up to the larynx.

This considerable detour is consistent with how embryological development entwines with evolution, but inconsistent with the ID wrongheaded idea that insists organisms were made as they appear to day, individually, by an intelligent designer.

In his book Why Evolution is True, Jerry Coyne claims that "Imperfect design is the mark of evolution; in fact it's precisely what we expect from evolution." (p. 81) He makes this prediction because "... we have to work well with the parts that have already evolved. Because of this, we should expect compromises: some features that work pretty well, but some not as well as they might, or some features--like the kiwi wing--that don't work at all, but are evolutionary leftovers." (p. 81)

Even Luskin gets it right when he says, "Thus according to Coyne, evolution predicts that some features will work well, some will work not-so-well, and some will work not at all." But then Luskin drives off the road with typical IDer apologium: "This is not exactly a useful set of predictions, but when he couples the argument with the dubious assertion that intelligent design (ID) requires 'perfect design,' then Coyne places evolution in a unique position to explain such examples of allegedly 'imperfect design.' The fact remains that only the invocation of evolution provides a rational and reasonable explanation for the observed structure ... and that is at it's core the way science works and ID fails.
Imperfection in creation is by no means evidence that there's no intelligence behind creation. In data transmission, you will eventually have bit errors no matter how well you can program due to a variety of possible circumstances (eg. noise, interference, etc). If you're going to hold the creator of the universe to a perfect, flawless standard however, then we can have a theological discussion about that.
 

Lisa

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Mar 13, 2017
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20,288
Yes, that's Science

Science (from the Latin word scientia, meaning "knowledge")[1] is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.[2][3][4]

Science is not about holding unprovable dogmas, it is about developing models and theories to increasingly better represent and understand what we empirically observe, test and predict.
Sure science can try to come up with how things began...but how close to the truth can they really get when they want to delete intelligent design? That means they have to come up with anything else to explain something that’s really unexplainable.
 

TagliatelliMonster

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Dec 29, 2019
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Sure science can try to come up with how things began...but how close to the truth can they really get when they want to delete intelligent design? That means they have to come up with anything else to explain something that’s really unexplainable.
As opposed to claims of inerrant accuracy without evidence? Meh...give me a changing landscape and a willingness to learn.
 

TagliatelliMonster

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Dec 29, 2019
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Sure science can try to come up with how things began...but how close to the truth can they really get when they want to delete intelligent design? That means they have to come up with anything else to explain something that’s really unexplainable.
The difference between what scientists make up and what you make up to justify your fixed interpretation of your favourite myth is that science requires testable predictions. That's why it gets modified when new evidence comes to light. That's the difference between blind faith, in which you already 'know' the truth, so all observations must be bent and twisted to fit your 'knowledge', and genuine interest in the reality of the matter, where you modify your theories when something doesn't fit.

Your blind faith approach has never achieved anything. Science has given you the technology you use to preach your blind faith.
 
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