Merged (edited) General thoughts about Christianity and the bible

[sinnikal]

Have we reached 'playing chess with a pigeon' yet?

 

[JayUtah]

Yes, but no NEW numbers were used. All came from the original base ten set.

Irrelevant.

 

[Rusty Tyler]

... random mutations of a variable gene...

... random mutations of an AVAILABLE variable gene...
Still nothing new.

 

[Rusty Tyler]

Have we reached 'playing chess with a pigeon' yet?

What if the pigeon wins? - LOL

 

[Rusty Tyler]

Irrelevant.

Where would the numbers from a "wrong" number come from? (the original base ten set)

 

[Jack by the hedge]

Where did the "increased genetic material" come from?
Magically appeared?

Random changes from copying errors, repeated bits, other pieces inserted that came from viruses... If you actually want to know this stuff it's a large field of study.

If phone numbers had gigantic numbers of digits and, by the way, no fixed length, then the vast, vast proportion of possible numbers would never have even begun to be explored.

 

[Olmstead]

Where did the "increased genetic material" come from?
Magically appeared?

1. It really doesn't matter for the argument you're trying to make. We see it happen, over and over again. That's the starting point. After you accept that fact, you can start exploring why it happens.

2. You've been told a dozen times. Random mutations and natural selection. Those two mechanisms really are that powerful. Someone has even simulated it: https://web.archive.org/web/20080515131819if_/http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/97/9/4463

 

[Jack by the hedge]

Where would the numbers from a "wrong" number come from? (the original base ten set)

What don't you get?

I give you my 6 billion digit phone number and you copy it down wrong. You now have a new number which nobody in history has ever dialled.

 

[jimbob]

Therefore not new.

Odd.

Yet you are using combinations of only 26 letters to try to convey information. And I would argue that a good novelist, or authors of scientific papers are generally trying to convey new information.

 

[JayUtah]

Where would the numbers from a "wrong" number come from? (the original base ten set)

You're not listening. You're just hammering on your broken premise. Your broken premise is that information is contained in individual digits for a phone number and individual nucleotides for a genome. It is not.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Yes, but no NEW numbers were used. All came from the original base ten set.

Yes, and your genes all come from the base 4 set. Otherwise you'd suddenly be an alien life form. But the combination may be one that never existed before.

But basically the argument is rather meaningless, since the set of decimal numbers is trivially just N, the set of natural numbers. And so is base-4. It's just N written in a different base. Which is infinite. So that doesn't really mean anything. useful for your argument. You essentially insist that it must choose one out of infinite choices. There obviously haven't been an infinite number of animals, and variants of them, one for each available choice. (They wouldn't have all fit on Noah's Ark, for starters.) So there is always room for to roll another number -- yes, from the same infinite set -- which is different than what existed ever before. Sure, it's still a base 4 number, nobody denies that, but it can well be one that nobody rolled before.

 

[Rusty Tyler]

Here's a two minute video.
Is this a miracle, or easily explainable?

 

[Jack by the hedge]

Odd.

Yet you are using combinations of only 26 letters to try to convey information. And I would argue that a good novelist, or authors of scientific papers are generally trying to convey new information.

Nice analogy. Every new book is a rearrangement of sequences of 26 letters. And Rusty is defiantly sticking to the idea that books cannot say anything new because we already had the 26 letters.

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Where did the "increased genetic material" come from?
Magically appeared?

Like your god?

 

[Jack by the hedge]

Here's a two minute video.

We already have video. It's just a rearrangement of coloured pixels we already have. How can this video contain anything new?

 

[JayUtah]

Here's a two minute video.
Is this a miracle, or easily explainable?

It's a man telling a story.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Have we reached 'playing chess with a pigeon' yet?

I was more getting vibes of our old friend, wossname, arguing against general relativity. That one went in circles like that too. Well, actually we probably went below that level, since even that one didn't insist that it's checkmate because it's one of the infinite possible things.

 

[Rusty Tyler]

You're not listening. You're just hammering on your broken premise.

My premise was that no new information (material) is produced by natural selection.
True, or false?

 

[Rusty Tyler]

It's a man telling a story.

What happens to him is rather improbable as a natural occurrence.

Like new information from natural selection.

 

[JayUtah]

My premise was that no new information (material) is produced by natural selection.

No, that's not your premise. That's your conclusion. The premise is the notion of what constitutes information. Your conclusion only follows if information is contained in individual nucleotides. That is untrue. Genetic information is contained in sequences of nucleotides of varying length. It is nonsensical to say that one nucleotide conveys genetic information.