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Quotes critical of evolution

T'ai Chi said:
With strawmen like that, who needs skepticism? :D
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That was a bona fide question. I guess you're not up to answering that one, huh?

Then answer the one that followed that one but that you snipped: How is your hypothesis falsifiable? If you don't answer, I'll figure you cannot. :confused:
 
pgwenthold said:
I never said they were lesser in their faculties. Indeed, they were as smart as all get out.

However, they did not have our capabilities. That's not smugness, that is just the fact of the matter (although we would likely not have the capabilities we have today if not for them - that's where we stand on their shoulders).
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pgwenthold, I have to apologize. I posted that in agreement with your post, not in opposition. Seems like I was too vague. You and I are in total agreement

Your statement that the perennial quest by creationists to discredit Darwin is a fool's errand is exactly correct. All research will invariable contain bias, systematic or human. Pointing out the elephant's damaged toenail does not make the animal about to squash a fool any less of an elephant. You put it better than I can. :o
 
Rodney said:
So you have a classic faith-based belief that can never be falsified.
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Huh? :confused: I don't remember AZAtheist stating any conclusion or belief that could not supported by fact. He merely said that life may be manufactured someday or maybe it won't be. What's the faith-based belief?
 
So Rodney, after reading the actual quote, how do you feel about the fact the creationist source lied to you about that quote, distorting it so to change the author's intent? Are these people the virtuous sort whose word you want to rely on? Will you oppose those who are lying for God?


TonyL said:
Well, check the quote mine project (quote #70). If you do, you'll find out that not only has that been peiced together out of order, it clearly misrepresents the authors meaning. The actual quote is:

"Scientists have no proof that life was not the result of an act of creation, but they are driven by the nature of their profession to seek explanations for the origin of life that lie within the boundaries of natural law. They ask themselves, "How did life arise out of inanimate matter? And what is the probability of that happening?" And to their chagrin they have no clear-cut answer, because chemists have never succeeded in reproducing nature's experiments on the creation of life out of nonliving matter. Scientists do not know how that happened, and, furthermore, they do not know the chance of its happening. Perhaps the chance is very small, and the appearance of life on a planet is an event of miraculously low probability. Perhaps life on the earth is unique in this Universe. No scientific evidence precludes that possibility.

But while scientists must accept the possibility that life may be an improbable event, they have some tentative reasons for thinking that its appearance on earthlike planets is, in fact, fairly commonplace. These reasons do not constitute proof, but they are suggestive. Laboratory experiments show that certain molecules, which are the building blocks of living matter, are formed in great abundance under conditions resembling those on the earth four billion years ago, when it was a young planet. Furthermore, those molecular building blocks of life appear in living organisms today in just about the same relative amounts with which they appear in the laboratory experiments. It is as if nature, in fashioning the first forms of life, used the ingredients at hand and in just the proportions in which they were present."
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Rodney said:
So when do you forecast that life will be created in a laboratory?
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AZAtheist said:
Maybe never, so what?
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AZA is right, but what does us creating life in the laboratory have to do with abiogenesis? We can't recreate the Permian Sea in a laboratory either, does that mean we can't study it's geology, climate and lifeforms?

I've never understood people who think science is reducable to mixing vinegar and baking soda in a papier mache volcano.
 
UnrepentantSinner said:
AZA is right, but what does us creating life in the laboratory have to do with abiogenesis? We can't recreate the Permian Sea in a laboratory either, does that mean we can't study it's geology, climate and lifeforms?

I've never understood people who think science is reducable to mixing vinegar and baking soda in a papier mache volcano.
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The existence of the Permian Sea is a fact, abiogenesis is a hypothesis. How do you propose to test that hypothesis?
 
Rodney said:
The existence of the Permian Sea is a fact, abiogenesis is a hypothesis. How do you propose to test that hypothesis?
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So you're conceding that geology is valid science? Then the the only difference between it and abiogenesis is that we have more and more conclusive data about geology.

Why are you asking when we can create life in the lab then?
 
Slimething said:
Huh? :confused: I don't remember AZAtheist stating any conclusion or belief that could not supported by fact. He merely said that life may be manufactured someday or maybe it won't be. What's the faith-based belief?
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AZAtheist appears to have a faith-based belief in abiogenesis because he doesn't think it's relevant to that hypothesis whether life is ever created in a laboratory. But if a failure to ever create life in a life doesn't falsify that hypothesis, what would?
 
UnrepentantSinner said:
So you're conceding that geology is valid science?
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Non sequitur. We're talking about a basin known as the Permian Sea, not whether geology is a valid science.

UnrepentantSinner said:
Then the the only difference between it and abiogenesis is that we have more and more conclusive data about geology.
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You're confusing a scientific discipline with a hypothesis.

UnrepentantSinner said:
Why are you asking when we can create life in the lab then?
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Because until that's done, abiogenesis will remain only a hypothesis -- not even a theory -- let alone a fact.
 
Rodney said:
AZAtheist appears to have a faith-based belief in abiogenesis because he doesn't think it's relevant to that hypothesis whether life is ever created in a laboratory. But if a failure to ever create life in a life doesn't falsify that hypothesis, what would?
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How about Grand Unification Theory? That's proved to be a pretty tough nut to crack. There have been times in the past when scientists thought they were getting closer only to have the path they were following turn out to be a dead end. Should they give up?

"Creating life in a lab" might be impossible. But we don't need to create create a universe in a lab to understand how it works. We also don't need to be able to recreate life in a lab as long as we gain an understanding of how it works. It might take millions of years to generate life in a lab. It takes millions of years for species to evolve into significantly different forms of life. Biologists don't need to watch macro evolution occur to understand how it works. If they understand the processes by which abiogenesis could have occurred then they will have a theory.
 
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Rodney said:
Because until that's done, abiogenesis will remain only a hypothesis -- not even a theory -- let alone a fact.
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Oh please! Everything in science was once "only an hypothesis". Abiogenesis may or may not become a theory, but it will certainly never become a theory if everyone just gives up.
 
Rodney said:
Non sequitur. We're talking about a basin known as the Permian Sea, not whether geology is a valid science.
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Why don't you respond to what I wrote, and not a some straw version of it?

UnrepentantSinner said:
AZA is right, but what does us creating life in the laboratory have to do with abiogenesis? We can't recreate the Permian Sea in a laboratory either, does that mean we can't study it's geology, climate and lifeforms?
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Rodney said:
You're confusing a scientific discipline with a hypothesis.
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And you're confusing astrophysics with mixing chemicals in a beaker. We dont study abiogenesis only by trying to recreate it in the lab any more than we study astrophysics by recreating a star in a lab or the Permian by recreating the Earth of that time in a lab. We're able to do some experiments in the lab (Miller/Urey being the most famous) but like astrophysics and geology we're going to understand abiogenesis mostly by observations of historical evidences outside of the lab - not by creating life in the lab.

Rodney said:
Because until that's done, abiogenesis will remain only a hypothesis -- not even a theory -- let alone a fact.
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No, that's moving the goalposts. We might never be able to create life in the lab, but that doesn't mean we won't be able to find the evidences demonstrating that abiogenesis occured just like we don't need to create a star or the Permian in the lab to understand astrophysics and geology.
 
Rodney said:
AZAtheist appears to have a faith-based belief in abiogenesis because he doesn't think it's relevant to that hypothesis whether life is ever created in a laboratory. But if a failure to ever create life in a life doesn't falsify that hypothesis, what would?
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I think you're putting words into AZAtheist's mouth. S/he did not state that. So, I wouldn't jump to conclusions.

Failure to manufacture life would not falsify any hypothesis unless the hypothesis was that one could manufacture life at that specific time. Abiogenesis is a hypothesis fronted by some that life may have originally arisen from sterile conditions. To my knowledge, there really is no test for this. Even if someone right this minute was able to produce a functional cell from ammonia, carbon dioxide, water and minerals, even that would neither prove nor disprove Abiogenesis. All it would prove is that life may have begun under said conditions, not that it did.

Science has its limits. IMHO, the only real method of scientifically determining how life originally began on this planet is using Mr. Peabody's Wayback Machine but, at the moment, it's unavailable.
 
Is anyone else struck by the irony that apart from his several misconceptions about how abiogenesis is being investigated, that creating life in a lab technically wouldn't be abiogenesis.
 
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