An argument foe Grand Design, maybe?

[Melchior]

Strangely, Melchior asked,

P.S. -- Seriously, Mel, don't even waste our time with pretending that adaptation is somehow indicative of evolution. That's not even remotely logical. My cat doesn't need to "evolve" to shed hair in the Spring. And moths don't need to evolve for a population of them to favour white, grey or black depending on tree soot. Those are simply non-sequiturs in any case for evolution.

What you need to show is animals crossing the species boundaries, not merely adapting to local conditions. For no Creationist, no matter how basic, needs to be troubled by mere adaptation, since it is wholly the sort of phenomenon that fits neatly inside the concept of created species.

You completely missed the point. 'Design' and 'creation' are completely different things. Nature shows evidence of design (adaptation) but not of creation. Moreover, it does not show signs of intelligence at all. The problem is the polysemy of 'design'. Engineering, done efficiently, makes use of previous work. An 8-cylnder engine is adapted from a 6-cylinder, or vice versa. You don't reinvent the wheel. Nature works the same way. Throw a bunch of fish in a pond, and gradually let the water evaporate. Some of the fish will die before the others. Take the survivors and let them breed. Do this enough times, and eventually the stock of fish you have will be more tolerant of low oxygen than you started with. Do it 5,000,000 times and guess what....you have animals that can breathe air.

I have always found it amazing that some people have trouble accepting that you can go from gills to lungs in a few million years, when frogs do it in a few weeks.

[Immanuel Can]

Ah, Melchior:

Actually, I'm really not the one who missed the point. Believe me, I get it: you've got nothing.

You've got raw speculation, not a stitch of evidence where we ought (by your own account) to have a vast quantity of it, and not even one transitional form.

I get it.

[Melchior]

Ah, Melchior:

Actually, I'm really not the one who missed the point. Believe me, I get it: you've got nothing.

You've got raw speculation, not a stitch of evidence where we ought (by your own account) to have a vast quantity of it, and not even one transitional form.

I get it.

There are lots of 'intermediate' forms (Tiktaalik, for instance). The word 'transitional' is incorrect. Only from the standpoint of history can one regard something as 'transitional', and at the time they are just living like everything else. It is a little different from its parents, and its offspring will differ a little too.

See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiktaalik

[Arising_uk]

...

You've got raw speculation, not a stitch of evidence where we ought (by your own account) to have a vast quantity of it, and not even one transitional form.

I get it.

No you deliberately don't.

[Melchior]

Ah, Melchior:

Actually, I'm really not the one who missed the point. Believe me, I get it: you've got nothing.

You've got raw speculation, not a stitch of evidence where we ought (by your own account) to have a vast quantity of it, and not even one transitional form.

I get it.

What most people who appeal to the Teleological Argument as a proof for the existence of God don't understand is that it actually is counter-productive. The biological world does show evidence of Zweckmäßigkeit (design, adaptation), but not the geological world. But 'design' must be understood not as something conscious.

[Greylorn Ell]

One of these spaces (I've named it Aeon Space) is hypothetical...the existence of Aeon Space and its properties are empirically verifiable-- just not in my lifetime.

Or maybe not. Absent empirical evidence, it is a faith position. But it a rightly privileged one, or a low-probability one? I guess that's the question, isn't it?

Not until I understand the question. What's a "rightly privileged" position? (Whatever, it does not sound like one that I would ever take, being inherently non-privileged.) How is it contrasted with a low-probability position?

Essential to Beon Theory: Aeon space's natural force property is a counterforce to dark energy's similarly natural 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. This means that if the two independent spaces happen to collide, a serious explosion will result. Aeon will be split into individual components, beons. Of course I hypothesize that such a collision did occur, the real Big Bang, long, long before the universe went under construction.

Thus beons came into existence as the result of a natural and inherently simple process, involving two independent, simple, non-complex, and non-conscious spaces. The buck stops at the existence of those spaces

Not quite, I think. When we speak of "natural" processes, we are positing a pre-existing "nature." That's immediately problematic, since "laws" about how things like Aeons and beons must interact have already to be in place. So how did they come to be in place?

You've thrust several notions into this statement that have nothing to do with my comments. The most obvious is the implication that I've mentioned laws describing aeon/beon interactions. I think that it would be helpful for you to seriously peruse my above post of 5/6/15 6:46am, because you clearly do not yet understand it. For example, I refer to Aeon as a space. It is singular. You seem to have imagined that aeons are some kind of entity. Not so.

Upon carefully perusing the aforementioned post you'll see that I hypothesize a collision between Aeon and dark energy, no more.

The greatest difficulty I've found in explaining Beon Theory is getting past readers' mental blocks, particularly the tendency to interpret my ideas in terms of their own beliefs. That appears to be what you've done. It is an inevitable property of human nature, and should we manage to pursue the subject further I will likely be reminding you in the future to conceptualize what I wrote without conflating it with any of your beliefs.

That is essential because Beon Theory is independent of and entirely different from your beliefs. I can safely make the same statement to an atheist.

In this context, let's discuss "natural processes" and "physical laws."

I would prefer not to refer to fundamental physics principles as "laws," using the term only because it is conventional. In the future I'll try to eschew "laws" in favor of "principles," and will be referring to The Three Principles of Thermodynamics. Early physicists must have used the poor term, laws, ignoring the fact that laws are entirely arbitrary rules of behavior established by civilizations. A city might have a jaywalking law one year and repeal it the next, if enough dimwits protested for their right to jaywalk.

Human laws are sometimes derived from valid principles. It is dangerous and stupid to cross the street amid large moving vehicles whose drivers are not expecting such easy targets. Nonetheless, for the furtherance of a clear conversation, let us make keen distinctions between laws and principles.

The most important distinction is that a law can be violated but a principle cannot. You are free to jaywalk, and there may be consequences-- a ticket for violating the law or a broken neck for trying unsuccessfully to violate physics principles about energy exchanges.

You are free to violate the 10 commandments, even though they were allegedly God's Laws. Of course there may be consequences. However you are not free to violate the principles of gravity or thermodynamics.

Beon Theory states that neither are Geon, the consortium of beons responsible for much of creation, because they cannot change any principles by which dark energy operates, including its existence principle.

Whether we like it or not, the advantage of a supernatural explanation is that it can actually step to the end of the causal chain.

I profoundly disagree. The pre-existing God hypothesis (functionally identical to the Big Bang theory) presupposes the existence of a highly complex entity at entropy 0. This means that like a wound-up clock, each is predisposed to unwind and do something. The complexity demands an explanation. Put more simply, what wound the clock?

Beon Theory hypothesizes the pre-existence of the most absolutely simple entities possible, both at Entropy 1. This is the most useless possible state of being-- like an unwound clock, except even simpler because the unwound clock has a mechanism and structure, whereas neither of our hypotheses possess any structure whatsoever. It is inconceivable that such apparently useless things would be created by something more powerful or complex. Therefore, the buck stops dead at Beon Theory.

You seem to appreciate Behe's concept of irreducible complexity. Beon Theory takes that notion to its end point by proposing that the original pre-universe states of being were irreducible simplicity.

I think you've perhaps just added one link, not terminated the sequence, since you're still looking to "natural" explanations. You're missing the consciousness that makes rational the original laws that make "nature" possible at all.

Or so it would seem. Thoughts?

I'm not missing a thing. I've invited you to slowly, carefully, and repetitively peruse my book, in which consciousness is explained. So long as you insist upon learning little bits and pieces of Beon Theory, dribs and drabs at a time, via intermittent posts where I spend most of my time helping people read more effectively, why do you feel qualified to make assumptions about what I've missed?

Since no one followed my earlier attempts to simply describe the theory and be done with it, and no one reads my book, I'm stuck trying to address complaints that might not have been posed by a careful reader. It's tiresome, but I'm giving it a try.

Frustrated, and best regards anyhow
Greylorn

[Greylorn Ell]

Greylorn wrote:

Why the squabble? It turned out that the female in question was his ex-girlfriend.

Nice. Diplomacy at its best. I'm vastly entertained.

I'm in complete agreement about the correspondence-causality relationship, yet I cannot help but notice how well it works as a determinant of human behavior, and how effective it has been throughout the history of science. Had this relationship been ignored, for example, you'd not know of Louis Pasteur.

If a particular cause-effect sequence occurs once, it is likely to be coincidence. However, if the same sequence occurs repetitively, it is conveying useful information...

Well, can I agree but modify? I would say if a cause-effect sequence occurs more than once it can increase the likelihood there's a common cause worth detecting; but what it still cannot imply is that we know what that cause is. In my example of the tea-drinking woman, she may have repeated her "experiment" a hundred times or one; but either way, her attribution of cause was simply wrong, and repeated trials increased her certainty she had a problem, perhaps, but led to no increased likelihood that tea was hurting her eye.

That's a distinction worth noting, I think.

Huh?
I think what you've noted is the propensity of philosophers to think that there is something to be gained from repetitively reiterating essentially the same thought process and obtaining a negative result, without trying Plan B. (redundancy for emphasis)

A scientist would stop the experiment and say, "Let's isolate the variables and see what happens." (different cups, different teas, etc.).

An engineer would say, "Drink coffee instead. I do, and my eyes are fine."

An etiquette expert (husband) would say, "It's your pinky that's supposed to be sticking out. Leave the fucking spoon on the saucer."

Now back to point. As a philosopher I don't give a shit about proving anything.

Not even rationally? Not even to yourself?

I misspoke here. I'm not a philosopher, and have no business pretending to be one. As a kid I was taught Catholicism and the usual school stuff. At college I was trained in physics, EE, math, and computers, and later made my living in astronomy, engineering, biochemistry, and computers. My style of thinking was shaped by my experiences in these fields, and by the realization that the religious teachings I had so happily embraced as a child (serving mass and all) were utter bullshit. At that point I realized that I could not trust the teachings of any believers, particularly those who regarded anyone who disagreed with their beliefs as somewhat stupid, or wrong.

Regrettably, all of science fell into the same category as all religious beliefs. After many intense conversations I realized this:

• Trust my own mind, my own ideas.
• I will often be wrong. When that happens, simply acknowledge the error, correct it, and move on.
  
  This is so much more powerful than when I found myself wrongly defending foolish religious beliefs, the opinions of others. In those instances I could not do a damn thing about the source of my mistakes except to be pissed off and embarrassed at having been conned.
  
  Believe me, it is much easier to admit a personal mistake than to admit that you've been conned.
• Proof is overrated. For example:
  1. You can prove (as per Descartes' reasoning) that you exist, but only to yourself.
  2. You can prove mathematical and geometrical theorems, but not the axioms from which they are derived.
  3. You can prove the validity of certain physics and engineering principles-- but you cannot prove that the assumptions upon which they are based are true.

Like nearly everyone else on this silly forum, I don't know jack shit about philosophy. I learned about the relationships between logic and implementation, theory and practice, my high opinion of my logic and how it actually worked out, truth and bullshit; all by writing machine-language programs to control telescopes and their instrumentation. I apologize for implying that I am or ever will be a philosopher.

Finally, you wrote, " So the existence of HT doesn't prove his causality (or invention) of monotheism. He may, in fact, have discovered it."

I have several quibbles with this, and should precede them by noting that there is no evidence for HT's existence, just like there is no evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ. Neither of them wrote down anything that they supposedly taught. There is only lore, third-hand or derivative information about either of them. Yet, cults have formed around their alleged teachings.

This is what I would call an unjust analogy. There are multiple sources and witnesses, plus written accounts for the latter, plus demonstrable after effects of His activities, and only speculation for the former. From a dispassionate historiographical perspective, the high degree of agreement in disciples' testimony has to be viewed as useful evidence and considered. After all, even today eyewitness testimony is enough to send a man to jail for life. So to reject coordinating testimony merely because it is from a bygone age would seem an arbitrary decision, especially if we continue to accept present-day testimony on a more generous footing, wouldn't you say? I dare say we would have little or no historical knowledge of any kind if we imposed so stringent a standard.

We don't have any historical knowledge. History is bullshit invented by victors and losers and modified with time to say whatever puts their actions in the best light. Repeating the lies convinces the bulk of ignorant history students. The Kennedy assassination is an excellent example. The "History" Channel is still showing films of Kennedy's head being blown rearward, supposedly by a single killing shot from above and behind. No one with a three digit IQ and a knowledge of simple physics could possibly believe such bullshit. That hardly matters, since the percentage of people with 3-digit IQs and a knowledge of simple physics is no higher than 4%, thus irrelevant.

Biblical history? The O.T. is interesting, IMO, but the N.T. is a joke. I read the first four books and found them highly divergent, especially John, who writes like someone on mushrooms and wine. When young I was impressed by J.C's first miracle. Then after a course in nuclear physics settled in and a conversation raised the subject, I looked at the energies involved. The amount of energy and pressure necessary to construct the large molecules present in wine from water (oxygen and hydrogen), is normally present only at the core of a star. Had Christ actually created carbon, nitrogen, sulphur, potassium, sodium, etc. from oxygen and hydrogen, the amount of energy released would have vaporized the entire modern city of Jerusalem and most of Israel.

Even more tragically, it would have ruined the wine.

It is so much simpler to figure that Jesus, with the help of followers, bought a barrel of really good wine and stashed it in a back room. As the wine at table was running low, predictably, since they'd kept a barrel of it to themselves, they swapped the good wine with a water barrel. All Jesus had to do was saunter into the wine room, perform incantations over the subtly-marked "water" barrel, and, Voila!

"History" is a concatenation of "his story," and the wise man should treat it as such. Nothing wrong with enjoying a good story, unless you confuse it with truth. One of my neighbors is an intelligent and capable person who believes that the WWII Holocaust was a lie, and that the photos Eisenhower ordered were faked. The Japanese are now taught that they were victims in WWII, and know nothing of the atrocities committed by their soldiers. Modern USSR history is a joke. The Nazi party is alive and well in Germany and elsewhere. Why? Everyone rewrites their history in a politically favorable manner, and a majority believe it.

H.T. is clearly a story. J.C. likewise. You would do well to read "The Passover Plot," and "Those Incredible Christians," by Hugh Schonfield. He is a historian.

By way of historians, you might appreciate Herodotus, who provides various stories for the same historical event.

HT cannot have "discovered" monotheism, no more than LeMaitre "discovered" Big Bang theory or Darwin discovered how life evolved. The only things that can be discovered are those which actually exist. The rest is invention.

I don't disagree with your last two sentences. But I see no warrant for your first claim. It would be pure assumption to say "monotheism cannot be discovered," if it is an existent fact. That is, in fact, the important question.

I don't believe monotheism is a relevant question, much less important.

The real question of value: Is the universe entirely the result of naturally occurring random events, or is it in any respect deliberately created? The answer to this question affects another issue: whether or not an individual person has purpose and existence beyond his current life. Ultimately that is the only issue people care about, when they care about such things, which is not frequent.

In the context of this larger picture, what difference does is make if the creator was Islam's genuinely monotheistic Allah or Christianity's three Gods, or Beon Theory's Geon plus myriad assistants?

My goal is to elucidate a creator-concept that works in the context of scientific knowledge, and I have no interest in quibbling over the quantity of creators. One or many, whoever is needed to get the job done.

Greylorn

[Greylorn Ell]

...
If Darwinism is really how DNA molecules developed, every distinct critter must have beaten those ridiculous odds. In order for biological life to exist, the same odds must have been beaten, independently, by every critter on the planet. If the odds against a pig's genome being assembled, Darwinian style, are 1 x 10exp-15,000,000, and if we figure that horses, tigers, elephants, giraffes, whales, bears, wolves, rats, and housecats are about the same, the probability for these 10 critters evolving Darwinian style is 1 x 10exp-150,000,000. ...

But you ignore that these critters pretty much share over 80% of their DNA? That the vast bulk of their genome was formed long before these critters evolved, we share 18% with yeast!

Great. So let's pretend that yeast (which has an improbability of its own) is a kind of freebie starting point.

So lop 18% off my probability calculations. Seems to me that the result is pretty much the same, well beyond the 10 exp -40 point at which legitimate scientists set the standard for impossibility.

Greylorn

[Greylorn Ell]

If a god were to 'design' creatures, he would have no need to adapt and modify (improve) old designs by trial and error; his 'designs' would be perfect from the beginning. And why 'design' so many varieties of crocodilians?

Ask Him. See if He has a mind to tell you.

Either way, His decision to do so is not contingent on your (or my) ability to understand and explain His reasons. He might well have reasons nonetheless, and they might well be very good ones. I suspect they are.

I.C.,

I'm afraid that Melchoir has a valid point, one I'd considered long ago before my rejection of religions. Your riposte reflects this. Rather than your customarily thoughtful philosophical perspectives and reasoned arguments, here you resort to the kind of retort I could get from any Jehovah's Witness who appeared unbidden at my door, practicing the reiteration of complete sentences from his Bible.

Then you retreat into the classical Christian obfuscation, that God is unknowable, and we are therefore incapable of understanding his reasons for doing things. I am sick and tired of that bullshit! It is why Christianity is dying and trying, like a decomposing horror-movie ghoul, to drag any notion of an intelligent God-concept into the grave along with itself.

The hallmarks of intelligence are motivation and intention. You do not get to run away from that. Any reasonably competent human being with a minuscule IQ compared to that of any serious creators is assumed to act with purpose and intelligence. The smarter people are, the more well-considered their motivations. Your dismissal of Melchoir's questions by hiding behind the cloak of almighty inscrutability is an insult to his intelligence, and your own. The more intelligent the creator, the more purposeful must be his machinations and inventions.

The only way to explain it is 'descent with modification'.

Nonsense. Beon Theory explains the evidence of evolution logically, without hiding behind the obfuscations of interpreters for the almighty God, and without the pseudo-scientific bullshit invented by incompetent neo-Darwinians to keep their own absurd beliefs from drowning in the contrary evidence.

It proposes that the beons who constructed biological life on planet earth (and presumably elsewhere) are at best acting on the orders of whatever higher level of beons kick-started the universe that produced our planet (and likely many others). None of these entities is or was almighty, omnipotent, omniscient, etc. Extreme intelligence and the ability to freely violate the 2nd Principle of Thermodynamics is enough for the work, as for any difficult engineering job.

If this aspect of Beon Theory is close to reality, we would expect a concerted but perhaps haphazard development of biological life. The biological engineers had no power to will a complete biosystem into being; they had to develop it with the materials at hand, over time. I can envision the first wave of engineers, terraformers, beginning life with the construction of bacteria that ate the Iron Oxide (rust) in the earth's oceans, shit out the iron into convenient piles, and farted pure oxygen-- thereby oxygenating the planet and cleaning up the oceans in only a billion years.

Then the next batch of engineers returned to develop more complex biological machinery, more bacteria, lots of insects, plants to deal with the CO2 buildup and maintain some O2 in the atmosphere for the next batch of critters. Etc.

According to Beon Theory the development of biological life should parallel the history of any engineering project, such as the development of automobiles. The answer to 'why various crocodiles?' is probably near that of why so many different models of Chevrolets and Fords. You can figure it out for yourself.

You need to reword this: "The only potential explanation I'm even prepared to consider is..." That's the truth.

I believe that this comment is to the point. Very few people are prepared to abandon ideas that they've chosen and harbored for any length of time. The question is, does your comment reflect upon yourself as well? Is your mind as tightly shackled to your Christian beliefs as Melchoir's to his atheism?

Greylorn

[Greylorn Ell]

Melchior:

If the universe came into existence through the action of a god, then something already existed, and that calls for an explanation as well. See Critique of Pure Reason, bubba.

Hey, I have a new nickname...not that it serves any function in the discussion -- rather like your above supposition, as well.

It doesn't matter whether one is a Materialist or a Theist...one is going to have to face the infinite-regress problem. But the Theist has an answer. God is the First Cause in the causal chain, and by definition cannot be explained further. That's what "Supreme Being" means. "Who created God?" is simply a nonsense question, like "where are the corners in a circle?"

But if one is a Materialist, one cannot find any first cause. The Big Bang had to be caused by something, and it had to be a material cause (by definition). So what was that material cause, and what caused it, and so on?

The Materialist then has to posit some idea like that the universe itself is eternal, which we know is empirically false, or else suppose that material laws *have* no cause -- in which case, the existence of order, to say nothing of the rules themselves, becomes utterly incoherent on the basis of the observable nature of chance effects. From whence all the order?

Which is the better explanation of order and life in the universe? I think the winner is clear.

I.C.

There is no winner here. You and Melchior are doing the same dance that science and religion have been performing for the last half century. You are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Each of you hypothesizes a complex first cause but neither can explain what induced it to become unstable enough to cause our universe.

IMO the notion that an almighty God created the universe and mankind, is no more and no less absurd than the pseudo-scientific Big Bang theory. Why don't you two goobers argue the motivations behind your respective theories for awhile? Your existing exchanges are becoming annoyingly repetitive, like insurance company commercials.

Greylorn

[Greylorn Ell]

Moreover, declaring "mind" as non-physical is an absurd idea. It immediately removes whatever mind concept you are proposing from reality.

I disagree completely. It rather denies the Materialist premise that "real" is coextensive with "material." There is more to this world than the merely material...values, morals, aesthetics, reason, concepts, logic, mathematics, and even personality and personal intention...all depend on things for which "material" is an inadequate explanation, but we all know they exist, and live like they do every day.

I.C.,

As I've noted previously, you've confused the words physical and material. Worse, you seem insistent upon doing so. If you continue to do so, you are no better than the atheists with whom you argue. Moreover, you persist in arguing on their terms. By doing so you will lose.

The word "material" means made of matter. You know--- the stuff on the back side of the equation E = mcc. Matter is the stuff that you imagine that you feel when you touch a tabletop, although no material part of your body can ever come in contact with the matter in a tabletop. What actually happens is that the electromagnetic fields surrounding your fingers contact the same kinds of fields on the tabletop. Matter is but indirectly involved.

Matter is the stuff you imagine that you see. In fact, matter is the stuff that emits or reflects electromagnetic energy as "photons" that enter your eye and trigger biochemical reactions that send discrete pulses of energy into your brain, which somehow manages to construct coherent information patterns and somehow transmit them to you. If you were not PHYSICAL you would be unable to perceive those patterns.

In the interest of overall coherency, I propose that you remove the word "material" and its derivatives from your vocabulary. You live in a physical world, not a material world. It is time enough for you to get that.

Matter, that which is material, comprises about 4.7% of the universe. About 20% of it is dark matter, and the remaining 75% is dark energy. All forms of matter and energy are, by definition, physical. You need to accept that and make it a part of your understanding if you expect to be regarded as a competent interlocutor, by me.

Moreover, by the very definition of what is means to be "physical," anything that interacts with something that is physical is itself physical. Burn that statement into your mind. It is nearly a tautology.

Forget the term "materialism." It is a term used by incompetent philosophers who imagine that they can successfully explain things about reality while ignoring 95% of reality. Unless you want to be just one of the general glut of half-assed Ph.D philosophers; if so, let me know and I'll waste no more time in conversation until you learn some basic physics, or at least stop referring to physics principles of which you've chosen to remain ignorant.

Nagel's not the originator of this sort of observation...both Descartes and Locke had it before him, among others. And he's not the only one to see the Philosophy of Mind as the primary problem for Materialism. I think they're both right on the money. So we'll just have to disagree there.

Only if you insist upon clinging to the philosophical past and its current dogmas.

Descartes was certainly confused about materialism. Big surprise, given that he was a distant contemporary of Galileo, and that his mathematical work preceded Newton's Principia and was essential thereto, as to the subsequent development of physics. Descartes is entitled to be ignorant of distinctions between the physical and the material because the physics he helped kickstart had yet to be discovered. He did more than others with the little he had.

Locke should not even be introduced into this conversation. He was a political/religious philosopher who understood zero physics. I have no idea what he might have said about materialism, but given that any comments he made were written before physics' early understanding of the energy concept, they are irrelevant to this discussion.

Nagel is just an ordinary philosophical dipstick who has access to the finest physicists in the world, and has not bothered to learn physics beyond the high school level, if even that far. He has no excuse.

Look at a dead body...at least in the immediate, it has every cell the live one has. It has all the parts of the brain, and a complete body. But it is missing the metaphysical stuff...call it "mind," "personality," "consciousness," "soul" or even "emotion": all are non-physical but real properties of human beings...as is "reason," upon which philosophy itself depends.

I've looked at wide bandwidth of dead bodies, mostly chickens, fish, and sections of beef in my father's butchershop and various markets. I've also made some once-live bodies dead. Never applied the "soul" concept to them, even back when I was a devout Catholic. As a kid growing up I saw no difference between a dead bird, cat, or dog, and a dead friend-- except that I could once talk to my friend. It never occurred to me that my friend's soul was lost. It was no longer integrated with a functional body that had once enabled it to voice its thoughts.

Earlier in life I'd performed a simpler life/death experiment by collecting some creek water and putting it under a microscope. Awesome! I could watch cells grow and divide and grow. That became boring, so I added a drop of ethanol to the slide. The cells died.
It did not occur to me that they'd even had a soul, much lest lost one. I did not feel remorse.

Are you proposing that all critters have souls? If so, it is getting onto time for you to define precisely what you mean by soul, in physical terms.

I invite you to pick whatever pearls you can find out of the mud and poop, wash them, and in the future, allow pinheads to wallow without disturbance in the mediocre muck of dumb ideas they've chosen. You can't make them smarter. They do not understand what you are writing.

Ha! You're such an aristocrat, Greylorn. Still, you always entertain.

To the best of my knowledge, aristocrats do not cut, buck, split and stack their own firewood. Nor do they kill the better part of a day trying unsuccessfully to fix a broken 40-year old and badly corroded section of plumbing. Those skills are common to ordinary unprivileged dumbfucks who have poorly managed their life and are determined to do worse in the future.

Greylorn

[Greylorn Ell]

Anything you can posit as a cause must itself have an explanation. This is why we cannot, in principle, explain the existence of existence. Read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

Yes. That anything whatsoever exists is an absolute Miracle inexplicable by the mightiest of Gods, who therefore cannot, if it exists, know the core level causes of that existence.

[Greylorn Ell]

Melchior:

Anything you can posit as a cause must itself have an explanation.

This is a Materialist axiom. It does not compel anyone who does not believe that all causes are material. But it creates a huge problem for Materialism, because if true, the Materialist has to admit he has no clue what caused the world or life to exist.

IC,

True, as evidenced by the parade of bullshit that has tried to explain the alleged Big Bang since the idea was invented. We don't know where the cosmic micro-pea, singularity, or shit-from-nothing came from, or why.

Now, can you do better by way of the almighty, omnipotent God?

Greylorn

P.S. Has any reader's bullshit detector fired up yet? Nope? Okay. You're all happy with your favorite brand of intellectual dog food.

[Greylorn Ell]

Strangely, Melchior asked,

You don't see it?

What's "it"?

Why would 'progress' be seen in living forms unless those forms were not created?

I thought you might be going there, but couldn't see what cars have to do with it. After all, cars are the worst possible kind of example for your case -- they are manifestly engineered products, obvious artifacts of the design of a higher intelligence, i.e. the automotive engineers. In which case, any analogy from them would, if anything, unfairly favour the Design hypothesis...but I would never stoop to making so poor an attempt at an analogy, myself. So I could scarcely, in charity, attribute it to you...

But I guess you were going there after all. Okay.

Nature behaves is a similar way.

Really???? Okay. If it does, then you're arguing it's designed, engineered and assembled by intelligence. Wow.

But I'm pretty sure you don't really want to do that...

The animals we have today are highly evolved descendants of their distant ancestors.

Your proof, good sir? Those macro-evolved animals? The fish that became a cat, or the dog that became a bird? Let's see those millions and millions of "trial efforts" evolutionary development must have had to make on the way to producing modern animals by pure, random chance plus natural selection...

I can wait while you look for them.

P.S. -- Seriously, Mel, don't even waste our time with pretending that adaptation is somehow indicative of evolution. That's not even remotely logical. My cat doesn't need to "evolve" to shed hair in the Spring. And moths don't need to evolve for a population of them to favour white, grey or black depending on tree soot. Those are simply non-sequiturs in any case for evolution.

What you need to show is animals crossing the species boundaries, not merely adapting to local conditions. For no Creationist, no matter how basic, needs to be troubled by mere adaptation, since it is wholly the sort of phenomenon that fits neatly inside the concept of created species.

You two guys, like Tweedledum and Tweedledee with their resplendent creationist and Darwinists hats on, have both shown one another to be full of shit. Why not admit that, and move on to intelligent ideas that are consistent with the way things are known to work?

[Greylorn Ell]

Strangely, Melchior asked,

P.S. -- Seriously, Mel, don't even waste our time with pretending that adaptation is somehow indicative of evolution. That's not even remotely logical. My cat doesn't need to "evolve" to shed hair in the Spring. And moths don't need to evolve for a population of them to favour white, grey or black depending on tree soot. Those are simply non-sequiturs in any case for evolution.

What you need to show is animals crossing the species boundaries, not merely adapting to local conditions. For no Creationist, no matter how basic, needs to be troubled by mere adaptation, since it is wholly the sort of phenomenon that fits neatly inside the concept of created species.

You completely missed the point. 'Design' and 'creation' are completely different things. Nature shows evidence of design (adaptation) but not of creation. Moreover, it does not show signs of intelligence at all. The problem is the polysemy of 'design'. Engineering, done efficiently, makes use of previous work. An 8-cylnder engine is adapted from a 6-cylinder, or vice versa. You don't reinvent the wheel. Nature works the same way. Throw a bunch of fish in a pond, and gradually let the water evaporate. Some of the fish will die before the others. Take the survivors and let them breed. Do this enough times, and eventually the stock of fish you have will be more tolerant of low oxygen than you started with. Do it 5,000,000 times and guess what....you have animals that can breathe air.

I have always found it amazing that some people have trouble accepting that you can go from gills to lungs in a few million years, when frogs do it in a few weeks.

Mel,
Stop the bullshit. "Design" and "adaptation" are not synonyms. Buy a dictionary.

Greylorn