Thread: Why Christians are not just a load of backwards imbeciles.

Originally Posted by ChaybaChayba

1. DNA is structured like a book, so who is the writer?

That's a poetic analogy. A poetic analogy is a lot of things, but it isn't:

1) Logic
2) Data
3) Scientific
4) Conducive to any objective conclusions about anything.

The argument that DNA was randomly created is a mathematical impossibility.

Natural selection is not the same as "randomness" - it is mathematically shown that there is convergence. Here's a poetic analogy of my own, just so you have a different way of thinking of said "randomness" (I'm not claiming it's data - it's just a useful mental model): In computing, there is a concept called a "Monte Carlo algorithm." It's a way to solve a hard problem by introducing some "randomness" (i.e. randomly determine certain aspects of it), which usually converges to a correct solution (as opposed to a random solution). Wikipedia has a simple article on it:

Monte Carlo method - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


I've used such techniques myself in a basic AI class in university, so this stuff isn't exactly super esoteric. You can simulate converging properties while introducing randomness into your method. I hope this clears up a bit of the reasoning.

2. In the future we will be able to create a virtual reality similar to the matrix, who says God has not done this before us?

Nobody says god hasn't done this before us, and for us. But this is an argument in favour of "we cannot know" which is NOT the same as an argument in favour of believing in god. I've long accepted that we cannot know, but if you're going to argue, as it seems, OBJECTIVELY, in favour of there being a god, the burden of objective proof is on YOU. "We cannot know" is not an argument in favour of anything specific.

3. We can recreate the entire universe inside our dreams, we play God each night yet we deny the possibility of God?

I'm not denying the possibility of God. Again, "not denying the possibility" is nowhere near "an argument for god" - you NEED faith to really believe in god, and faith is a subjective experience. That's as good as it'll ever get, until said god shows himself in an objectively measurable way.

4. Chicken or egg? Who was first? Only possible solution is that someone created either the chicken or egg. The argument of a proto-chicken only evades the question and does not solve it.

I'm not gonna pretend I know the exact, specific answer to that question. I have not yet delved that deeply into evolutionary biology. However, if you're GENUINELY interested in finding an answer to that question, you should either go to the literature, or ask an expert. If you're NOT genuinely interested in finding the answer, and you're just using it as a way to get a rise out of people, then you're just being closed-minded. If you're asking someone a hard question about deep science, and then assuming that them not knowing the answer is a victory of your belief over someone else's, then you're using fox news' intellectually bankrupt argument strategies, and should be ashamed.

But I'll assume the best of you, and assume you will actually ask someone who has studied the field, for the sake of satisfying your curiosity about how this wonderful world works. Here's to genuine curiosity, my friend!

5.The main argument against God is that if there is God then why is there evil?

I don't think that's the main argument against god. You just decided that that was the main argument against god. Please provide evidence from the census bureau of a peer-reviewed poll that has shown that the main argument against god is the existence of evil. This is a silly premise. Please spare us the strawmen in the future.

It is because God gave us free will.

If god can't control me, then he is not omnipotent. (I don't really like using that argument, but when someone brings up the tired old free will thing, then anything goes)

On top of that, success is only achieved through failure.

Again, an assumed premise. What does that even mean? More poetic quotes on top of which to build your actual message. Listen, I successfully microwaved a pizza pocket today, and have achieved that without failing. I know you mean something else with that, but it's not really relevant to your next point.

Therefore, it is impossible for an evolving world to be without evil.

You went from "success is only achieved through failure" to "it is impossible for an evolving world to be without evil." To quote your elementary school math teacher: show your work.

I'm inclined to say that "evil" is relative. Morality is just an opinion. There is no such thing as "objective morality" - there is only "the vast majority of people agree with the idea that X is right/wrong"

Going against God is going against logic.

Once again: Please show your work. You've presented an amorphous blob of unconvincing arguments, and you're trying to pass it off as logical steps; an objective proof of there being a god. A belief in god is a _subjective_ experience only. You're welcome to it, but "faith" and "logic" are not the same thing. You have not shown any logic that objectively argues in favour of god in your post. If there were such an argument, the word "faith" would no longer be needed.

So they argue against their own understanding of the Bible and doctrine, rather than trying to understand your view. They are so happy to try to prove that you are an idiot!

Posted by Xei:

You've conflated truth with knowledge. They're totally different.

they are different, and they are similar. Knowledge is knowing the truth. The truth exists whether it is known or not. Scientism believes that the truth can only be known through natural sciences. And for this, the only proof acceptable is scientific proof. We see this all throughout atheist/Theist arguments. The atheist knows that God is outside the realm of scientific verification, but drags the argument into his own turf of science in order to gain the upper hand. He knows that the theist cannot prove scientifically the existence of God, but challenges him to do so. He then thinks that he has defeated the theist in debate, but he has limited his argument only to the realm of natural science. This is the same as the theist disregarding science and using only the Bible as his "proof". Both ways are for trying to convince the other is wrong, without even trying to understand what it is that you actually believe. Rather, they would tell you what you belief, so they can argue against it.

In my opinion, some beliefs are ridiculous. But that is nobody's business. Many people think that my belief's are also stupid, but they don't understand them, nor are they willing to.

Do you think that knowledge can only be obtained through the sciences?

Who me? I think there are many ways of obtaining knowledge, but they basically can be narrowed down to two ways: inner and outer. Out of the outer ways, science is supreme, out of the inner ways, meditation is supreme. But the outer ways also include studying and researching, and common sense and logic. The inner ways include all the arts, dreams, myths, etc. There is a left hemisphere and right hemisphere of the brain approach to knowledge. Neither has a monopoly on truth or knowledge. There is also direct experience and inference. There are assumptions both conscious and unconscious. etc. etc. etc.

@Replicon

1. The book argument is not mere poetic analogy. I came to this conclusion as it is impossible to program a randomly generated book, so it is impossible for DNA to be randomly generated. This is coming from a programmers perspective. Randomness is nothing but a mechanism undiscovered.
2. Agreed
3. Agreed
4. The chicken or egg issue is not a hard question about deep science. It's a logical question any person could answer or think about. It doesn't require any scientific knowledge whatsoever.
5. Success only being achieved through failure is not poetry, it is reality, it is logic. Basically it means you need alot of experimentation to arrive at your goal. What else would be the point of the word "experiment" or the word "trying"? Before you can know how this and that works, you need to try it out, and you see, this type of trying out or experimentation is what other people might perceive as evil. Failure is evil, success is good. But if you want to arrive at success, you will have many failures. Say for example in your case, can you write a program without needing to debug it? This is nearly impossible. Ok I've done it a few times, wrote small programs without having any failures, no bugs, but those are exceptions, and usually there are always bugs.

Chayba, I see you learned nothing from your previous thread were you were consistently destroyed post after post as you've repeated the exact same nonsense here. I really wish you would stop derailing threads as your nonsense is like water to a buffalo.

I'll do the chicken/egg one cause it's so obvious/easy and I calculate a 0.0001% chance that it will allow you to think outside the box.

One thing we have to keep in mind is that every species is constantly changing through evolution so first of all you'd have to clearly define the characteristics of a chicken. Since birds are descendants of dinosaurs I'll be making a lot of exaggerated comparisons with lizards.

So once you've clearly defined what defines a chicken, at some point in the past there would obviously have been the first chicken born that meets these criteria. The parents of this chicken would all but completely match the criteria necessary to be a chicken, they are the last of a more lizardy bird that is now extinct. There's no consensus on exactly when the more lizardy bird became a chicken, nature doesn't label its animals. The important thing to take away from this though is that at some point, the offspring of a lizard bird mutated slightly to meet enough criteria to be called chickens. So obviously this first chicken hatched from the egg that its parents laid. Therefore the egg came first.

I've heard of people say that it should be the chicken because the original is egg is not a true chicken's egg (since it was laid by lizard birds), but that's not how I see it.

Originally Posted by ChaybaChayba

@Replicon

1. The book argument is not mere poetic analogy. I came to this conclusion as it is impossible to program a randomly generated book, so it is impossible for DNA to be randomly generated. This is coming from a programmers perspective. Randomness is nothing but a mechanism undiscovered.

Can you elaborate a bit more on what you're trying to get at with this point? If I were to "randomly" generate a book, I would follow these steps:

1) Randomly generate (large number) of books (these will contain random characters and words, etc.)
2) Have some reviewers evaluate which books make the most semantic/linguistic sense (or, which books look the more like shakespearean works ).
3) Feed the books and my score back into the neural net/system that generates the books
4) Repeat the whole process, taking the newly learned feedback in mind.

Over time, the books would converge more and more into books that made sense.

Now you could argue that these peer-reviewers knew what books look like, and so I'm cheating... but the "review" can be a completely unconscious process. In a DNA analogy, the "review" process would consist of "who lives and who dies"

But I'm still not sure exactly what direction you're taking with this. Technically, if I have the full sample set of all possible ways to put DNA together, and I pull one at random, I have a (very very remote) chance of randomly picking the one we have today, which goes against your "impossible" statement. Maybe improbable, absolutely. But if you repeat the process iteratively, and in parallel, and put in a natural feedback system that doesn't need to know what the final result looks like, I think you'd speed up the process of getting somewhere with non-random-seeming order.

It's like Simulated annealing.

4. The chicken or egg issue is not a hard question about deep science. It's a logical question any person could answer or think about. It doesn't require any scientific knowledge whatsoever.

Well, that depends on how you want to consider it. As a toy philosophical question, sure, that's fine. You can use it as an analogy to say "everything has a creator" but then it's fair for me to ask you that if everything has a creator, who created god? If it's then fair for you to say "nobody" then it's also fair for me to ask, "well if something can have no creator, why not our universe?"

But I didn't think you asked it like that. I assumed you were literally saying "how is such recursion possible without a creator who sets initial conditions into motion?" And I think that's a fair question, but you DO need some deeper science for it. For one, the question, "which came first" presupposes that one of them necessarily came first. Well... how do you know that one of them had to come first? I think if you did dive into the deeper science of it, you would very likely find that the answer is "neither." I don't know much about the "proto-chicken" but it's probably the kind of thing that sounds insane if you haven't studied the deeper pieces of it (kind of like how advanced physics isn't something you can explain in a satisfactory manner without going all-out).

Though "which came first, the chicken or the egg" is probably not the interesting question, is it? I mean, with enough mutation, at some point, you wouldn't call it a chicken anymore, but that thing might have laid eggs, so... then we can say technically, it was likely the egg.

But if you're asking, "when did creatures start laying eggs?" Well, when did they go from just "splitting in two" to mammalian births? That's just as interesting a question! I don't think the chicken/egg paradox, taken literally, can be answered by just about anyone with any amount of knowledge, because it inevitably goes into "how did reproduction evolve?" which IS a deep question. I will concede that if you don't have the knowledge, it's easier to say it has to have been created by god... but then, that's also true of any other phenomena that require a bit of science to explain. Like Rainbows.

5. Success only being achieved through failure is not poetry, it is reality, it is logic. Basically it means you need alot of experimentation to arrive at your goal. What else would be the point of the word "experiment" or the word "trying"? Before you can know how this and that works, you need to try it out, and you see, this type of trying out or experimentation is what other people might perceive as evil. Failure is evil, success is good. But if you want to arrive at success, you will have many failures. Say for example in your case, can you write a program without needing to debug it? This is nearly impossible. Ok I've done it a few times, wrote small programs without having any failures, no bugs, but those are exceptions, and usually there are always bugs.

I know what you meant. I was poking a bit of fun with the pizza pocket thing.

I totally agree that in order to be good at something, you need to learn from mistakes (yours and others), and most first attempts at something will not be what you want them to be.

Extending this to the bigger picture, you have to define "success" and "failure" and it'll be different for everyone. Sure, everyone can define "success" as "meeting your desired outcome within x% accuracy" but the leap of calling "evil" "failure" is a bit hasty. Every person in the world has a different desired outcome; a different definition of "success" and "failure"... It's all someone's opinion. If we agree that person X is "evil" (which is also just an opinion) then to person X, "success" is doing something we consider to be evil.

But I think we're bumping up against our "agree to disagree" boundary here, because you and I probably have different beliefs about the existence of absolute "good" and "evil" - because if you believe in a god, and the god is absolutely good, then you define good and evil relative to that static point, which makes it look like there is "absolute good and evil" which I don't believe. In fact, IF there is a god, I wouldn't say they are absolutely anything. If they say something is good, it's still their opinion, so my belief in the lack of "absolute good/evil" extends beyond whether or not there is a god.

cheers

Originally Posted by stonedape

No clue about the chicken or the egg, but I hypothesize it was the chicken. I'm not expert on evolution, but it seems the chicken could have evolved from some other organism that did not need eggs to reproduce.

For what it's worth, the chicken most definitely did not evolve from an organism that didn't need eggs. It's widely believed that the chicken evolved from the Red Jungle Fowl although some people have recently been claiming that another one of the Jungle Fowl's (forget which) got involved through a hybridization process. At any rate, all jungle fowls rely on eggs for reproduction. Indeed, the entire quail family does so.

So eggs were around long before chickens or even amphibians. The egg most definitely came first. This is unequivocal.

Good to know. I really don't know what I'm talking about when it comes to biology, but I try to learn what I can.

Not to derail your logical thread in which you make logical conclusions that are scientific and logical, Chayba, but to go back to something that was posted earlier...

Originally Posted by Rickrold

How does he make it difficult?

The better question is what has he done to make it easy? The answer is, apparently, absolutely nothing.

First of all, he forgot to write the Bible in every language, necessitating translations which inherently are prone to mistranslations. You can blame humans for the mistranslations and misunderstandings all you want, but the truth is that god should have known better. It was short sighted beyond what I would even expect from a half-competent human, let alone a god. Secondly, the Bible is written in such a way that it "requires interpretation." This is about as egregious of an error as not writing it to be readable to all people in that it's not clear which parts require interpretation or how we're supposed to interpret them. If it was clearly applicable and, well, just made sense it wouldn't really need interpretation. But it's glaringly obvious that the Bible should not be taken literally. Some of it is outright insanity. Some of it seems barbaric even for the time it was written. And yet as a couple of the examples given in this thread show, are apparently specific instructions. Are they metaphorical specific instructions? You say that some of those rules don't apply anymore. Okay, so why didn't god release a memo stating they should be removed? That'd be convenient, but for whatever reason he seems to be fine to leave them in there, despite knowing that: 1. They don't apply anymore and no longer accurately represent Christianity, even though the Bible is held to be the source from which Christianity is derived. 2. Are quite disgusting, turning people away from the religion. 3. Make it appear that the books of the Bible were written by ancient savages, rather than a god.

Basically nothing that god has supposedly done makes any sense nor is at all consistent with his description. While it may seem obvious to you that your religion is true, to an outsider every brand of Christianity seems mostly the same, yet with important differences. Yet they all claim to be derived from the same book and nigh identical arguments are given in support of their truth. Not only that, people of other religions entirely provide essentially identical arguments in support of theirs. So what we're left with is what appears to be a bunch of ancient myths which are all claimed to be 100% true, yet all incompatible with each other, all proved by the same types of bad arguments. Your religion is not special. It does not stand out and I reckon not going to appeal to the average non-religious person any more than any other religion. They all seem equally false.




PS

(I realize no one has said this, but I'm just mentioning this in anticipation of it/as a related thought)

"God works in mysterious ways" is an excuse used when you realize that your idea of god is incompatible with reality or inconsistent with itself. That line might reassure you, but don't waste my time with it. Saying "god works in mysterious ways" is what you do to ignore the complications and inconsistencies presented by your mixed up idea of god rather than accepting the simple answer which removes all such mysteries and inconsistencies; God does not exist.

Originally Posted by Replicon

Can you elaborate a bit more on what you're trying to get at with this point? If I were to "randomly" generate a book, I would follow these steps:

1) Randomly generate (large number) of books (these will contain random characters and words, etc.)
2) Have some reviewers evaluate which books make the most semantic/linguistic sense (or, which books look the more like shakespearean works ).
3) Feed the books and my score back into the neural net/system that generates the books
4) Repeat the whole process, taking the newly learned feedback in mind.

Over time, the books would converge more and more into books that made sense.

Now you could argue that these peer-reviewers knew what books look like, and so I'm cheating... but the "review" can be a completely unconscious process. In a DNA analogy, the "review" process would consist of "who lives and who dies"

But I'm still not sure exactly what direction you're taking with this. Technically, if I have the full sample set of all possible ways to put DNA together, and I pull one at random, I have a (very very remote) chance of randomly picking the one we have today, which goes against your "impossible" statement. Maybe improbable, absolutely. But if you repeat the process iteratively, and in parallel, and put in a natural feedback system that doesn't need to know what the final result looks like, I think you'd speed up the process of getting somewhere with non-random-seeming order.

It's like Simulated annealing.



Well, that depends on how you want to consider it. As a toy philosophical question, sure, that's fine. You can use it as an analogy to say "everything has a creator" but then it's fair for me to ask you that if everything has a creator, who created god? If it's then fair for you to say "nobody" then it's also fair for me to ask, "well if something can have no creator, why not our universe?"

But I didn't think you asked it like that. I assumed you were literally saying "how is such recursion possible without a creator who sets initial conditions into motion?" And I think that's a fair question, but you DO need some deeper science for it. For one, the question, "which came first" presupposes that one of them necessarily came first. Well... how do you know that one of them had to come first? I think if you did dive into the deeper science of it, you would very likely find that the answer is "neither." I don't know much about the "proto-chicken" but it's probably the kind of thing that sounds insane if you haven't studied the deeper pieces of it (kind of like how advanced physics isn't something you can explain in a satisfactory manner without going all-out).

Though "which came first, the chicken or the egg" is probably not the interesting question, is it? I mean, with enough mutation, at some point, you wouldn't call it a chicken anymore, but that thing might have laid eggs, so... then we can say technically, it was likely the egg.

But if you're asking, "when did creatures start laying eggs?" Well, when did they go from just "splitting in two" to mammalian births? That's just as interesting a question! I don't think the chicken/egg paradox, taken literally, can be answered by just about anyone with any amount of knowledge, because it inevitably goes into "how did reproduction evolve?" which IS a deep question. I will concede that if you don't have the knowledge, it's easier to say it has to have been created by god... but then, that's also true of any other phenomena that require a bit of science to explain. Like Rainbows.



I know what you meant. I was poking a bit of fun with the pizza pocket thing.

I totally agree that in order to be good at something, you need to learn from mistakes (yours and others), and most first attempts at something will not be what you want them to be.

Extending this to the bigger picture, you have to define "success" and "failure" and it'll be different for everyone. Sure, everyone can define "success" as "meeting your desired outcome within x% accuracy" but the leap of calling "evil" "failure" is a bit hasty. Every person in the world has a different desired outcome; a different definition of "success" and "failure"... It's all someone's opinion. If we agree that person X is "evil" (which is also just an opinion) then to person X, "success" is doing something we consider to be evil.

But I think we're bumping up against our "agree to disagree" boundary here, because you and I probably have different beliefs about the existence of absolute "good" and "evil" - because if you believe in a god, and the god is absolutely good, then you define good and evil relative to that static point, which makes it look like there is "absolute good and evil" which I don't believe. In fact, IF there is a god, I wouldn't say they are absolutely anything. If they say something is good, it's still their opinion, so my belief in the lack of "absolute good/evil" extends beyond whether or not there is a god.

cheers

About randomly generating a book, the moment you let reviewers review the book you have human input and this process is no longer automated and surely not random. The moment you take the new learned feedback into account, the process is no longer random, it is intelligent. The moment you let the environment decide, like you put it "who lives and who dies" then this process, is no longer random, but again, dependant on the environment and completely predictable. I'm not arguing against evolution, I'm arguing against the fact people seem to believe evolution is happening randomly, while there is completely nothing random about it. My point here is that random is not an explanation. Also what you forgot to take into account is that this very improbable chance needs to be repeated each generation to prevent extinction, and this is what leads to a mathematical impossibility.

Also, how would you explain a lizard being naturally selected into a chameleon through the process of random mutation? How could an ability to be able to change the color of your skin, be generated through randon mutation and gradual change? Are you saying that one day, the lizard had a random mutation giving him the ability to change one single cell on his skin onto another color giving him evolutionary advantage? Would it really be possible to program the evolution from lizard into chameleon?

About chicken and egg, if you believe the problem is to deep to discuss, then leave it at that. You say it's easy to say it has to have been created by God, but what you did was saying that it has to have another explanation, but yet you do not know this explanation because it is too complicated to figure it out. God is still a better explanation than no explanation.

Good point on who created God. But then you would have to ask, who created the guy who created God.. leading to an infinte repitition of the same question. I have no real interest in this question so I just stop at God. But since you asked I could hypothise that God lives in a similar reality to us and just like we are dreaming our dreamcharacters, God is dreaming us, and someone is dreaming God. Maybe we are dreaming up God who is dreaming us. That would resolve the problem of infinite recursivity, the idea of the creation sustaining itself.

About good and evil: Agreed they are relative, but as there is such a thing as evolution, so there is also such a thing as absolute good and evil, which survives the evolution process is good, that which does not survive is bad. It doesn't require a belief in God to arrive at the idea that good and evil can be absolute.

Anyway, very interesting input Replicon, I'll have to give most of your arguments some more thought.

Originally Posted by Spartiate

Chayba, I see you learned nothing from your previous thread were you were consistently destroyed post after post as you've repeated the exact same nonsense here. I really wish you would stop derailing threads as your nonsense is like water to a buffalo.

If my posts are nonsense, illogical, then there is no point in replying to them. It would be pretty much like talking to a brick wall. So why do you keep doing it? First saying someone incapable of logic and then trying to argue with logic, is pretty illogical. You say "You're too stupid to argue with" but then you go ahead and do it anyway?
Anyway your argument, that a lizard layed an egg from which a chicken came was already countered by the proto-chicken argument in my first post. You just move the problem from chicken and egg to lizard and egg. This is no solution.

Originally Posted by ♥Mark

Not to derail your logical thread in which you make logical conclusions that are scientific and logical, Chayba, but to go back to something that was posted earlier...



The better question is what has he done to make it easy? The answer is, apparently, absolutely nothing.

First of all, he forgot to write the Bible in every language, necessitating translations which inherently are prone to mistranslations. You can blame humans for the mistranslations and misunderstandings all you want, but the truth is that god should have known better. It was short sighted beyond what I would even expect from a half-competent human, let alone a god. Secondly, the Bible is written in such a way that it "requires interpretation." This is about as egregious of an error as not writing it to be readable to all people in that it's not clear which parts require interpretation or how we're supposed to interpret them. If it was clearly applicable and, well, just made sense it wouldn't really need interpretation. But it's glaringly obvious that the Bible should not be taken literally. Some of it is outright insanity. Some of it seems barbaric even for the time it was written. And yet as a couple of the examples given in this thread show, are apparently specific instructions. Are they metaphorical specific instructions? You say that some of those rules don't apply anymore. Okay, so why didn't god release a memo stating they should be removed? That'd be convenient, but for whatever reason he seems to be fine to leave them in there, despite knowing that: 1. They don't apply anymore and no longer accurately represent Christianity, even though the Bible is held to be the source from which Christianity is derived. 2. Are quite disgusting, turning people away from the religion. 3. Make it appear that the books of the Bible were written by ancient savages, rather than a god.

Basically nothing that god has supposedly done makes any sense nor is at all consistent with his description. While it may seem obvious to you that your religion is true, to an outsider every brand of Christianity seems mostly the same, yet with important differences. Yet they all claim to be derived from the same book and nigh identical arguments are given in support of their truth. Not only that, people of other religions entirely provide essentially identical arguments in support of theirs. So what we're left with is what appears to be a bunch of ancient myths which are all claimed to be 100% true, yet all incompatible with each other, all proved by the same types of bad arguments. Your religion is not special. It does not stand out and I reckon not going to appeal to the average non-religious person any more than any other religion. They all seem equally false.




PS

(I realize no one has said this, but I'm just mentioning this in anticipation of it/as a related thought)

"God works in mysterious ways" is an excuse used when you realize that your idea of god is incompatible with reality or inconsistent with itself. That line might reassure you, but don't waste my time with it. Saying "god works in mysterious ways" is what you do to ignore the complications and inconsistencies presented by your mixed up idea of god rather than accepting the simple answer which removes all such mysteries and inconsistencies; God does not exist.

I already completely anticpated your reply, check out my first post. My counter argument is that you copy the fake image of God that was depicted in the Bible. If you think the Bible is bullshit, you shouldn't be basing your argumentation on this bullshit. Eventho you totally disagree with the Bible, you still base your concept of God completely on what the Bible said. How about learning to think for yourself? What makes that one guy who wrote the Bible 2000 years ago so much more intelligent than you?

Btw you are making fun of my idea of logic, but if both sides are not capable of logic, what would be the point of talking? My point about logic is that certain truths can be arrived at through debate, because anyone is capable of logic. Babies being able to learn 3 languages at the same time is a pretty good indication of the inherent logic we all possess.

Originally Posted by ChaybaChayba

1. DNA is structured like a book, so who is the writer? The argument that DNA was randomly created is a mathematical impossibility.
2. In the future we will be able to create a virtual reality similar to the matrix, who says God has not done this before us?
3. We can recreate the entire universe inside our dreams, we play God each night yet we deny the possibility of God?
4. Chicken or egg? Who was first? Only possible solution is that someone created either the chicken or egg. The argument of a proto-chicken only evades the question and does not solve it.
5.The main argument against God is that if there is God then why is there evil? It is because God gave us free will. On top of that, success is only achieved through failure. Therefore, it is impossible for an evolving world to be without evil.

Going against God is going against logic.

Damn, did I go back in time again?

Classic.

You duplicitous anti-intellectual dogmatist.

God does not exist.

You're a horrible person. Now I may have a hard time proving this, especially around a group of individuals as equally horrible if not more than yourself, but you're horrible none the less. Horrible.

Chayba is actually right pertaining to DNA. DNA fits the mode conducive to coded information as it fits the properties of design, a language, code and information storage mechanism. These particular properties are very consistent with design efforts. There is currently NO natural process known to Science that creates coded information. Wow this all sounds too familiar. Every single bit of "coded information" you see in your physical world is created because of a conscious mind. Nature simply doesn't produce codes. DNA is not a product of nature and it's randomness.

Originally Posted by Ne-yo

There is currently NO natural process known to Science that creates coded information.

Natural selection acting upon DNA.

Originally Posted by Xei

Natural selection acting upon DNA.

Natural selection doesn't code for DNA. Natural selection doesn't determine what physical characteristics you are going to have in advance. Natural selection doesn't determine whether your eyes are green, blue, hazel. It doesn't determine whether you are going to have hairy chest or not. Whether you are going to go bald when you get older. Whether you are going to be short, tall, slim or obese. DNA fits the mode of a long term information storage mechanism and pre-codes in Advance for what physical characteristics you are going to have.

Okay?

Yup, Chayba makes a good point. Unless you can find a naturally occurring code that occurs by naturalistic means, you and your band of non-believers don't really have an argument. DNA is like a blueprint. It pre-codes in advance for something other than itself. You simply do not get things like that to occur naturally. Which is the reason why there is absolutely no natural process known to Science that creates coded information.

Originally Posted by ne-yo

a naturally occurring code that occurs by naturalistic means

DNA.l

Originally Posted by Xei

DNA.l

So what would be the mechanism in nature that puts that coded information within the cell?

Natural selection acting upon DNA.

Originally Posted by Ne-yo

Natural selection doesn't code for DNA. Natural selection doesn't determine what physical characteristics you are going to have in advance. Natural selection doesn't determine whether your eyes are green, blue, hazel. It doesn't determine whether you are going to have hairy chest or not. Whether you are going to go bald when you get older. Whether you are going to be short, tall, slim or obese. DNA fits the mode of a long term information storage mechanism and pre-codes in Advance for what physical characteristics you are going to have.

And what argument/evidence do you have to support your claim? Why has natural selection nothing to do with DNA?

Originally Posted by Xei

Natural selection acting upon DNA.

How does Natural selection pre-codes DNA for whether or not you're going to go bald? What eye color you're going to have? and a whole multitude of other characteristics.

Originally Posted by Sound

And what argument/evidence do you have to support your claim? Why has natural selection nothing to do with DNA?

Because Natural selection doesn't consist of coded-information in the same means that DNA does. DNA codes for things other than itself.