Limited causal alternatives do not justify to claim of " not knowing "
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1810-its-not-justified-to-claim-ignorance-limited-causal-alternatives-for-origins-do-not-justify-to-claim-of-not-knowing#2991
Hosea 4:6 People are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Claiming of not knowing of something, despite the evident facts easy at hand and having the ability to come to informed well-founded conclusions based on sound reasoning, and through known facts and evidence, is not only willful ignorance but plain foolishness.
In special, when the issues in the discussion are related to origins and worldviews, and eternal destiny is at stake.
If there were hundreds of possible statements, then claiming not knowing which makes the most sense could be justified. In the quest of God, there are just two possible explanations. Either there is a God, or not. There is however a wealth of evidence, which can lead us to informed, well-justified conclusions.
We KNOW HOW to detect the action of intelligence by a mind when we see :
- written messages
- something made based on mathematical principles
- systems and networks functioning based on logic gates
- something purposefully made for specific goals
- specified complexity, the instructional blueprint or a codified message
- irreducible complex and interdependent systems or artifacts composed of several interlocked, well-matched parts contributing to a higher end of a complex system that would be useful only in the completion of that much larger system.
- order or orderly patterns
- hierarchically arranged systems of parts
- artifacts which use might be employed in different systems ( a wheel is used in cars and airplanes )
- Fine-tuned things
We KNOW by observation and experience that the origin of blueprints containing the instructional complex information, and the fabrication of complex machines and interlinked factories based on these instructions, which produce goods for specific purposes, are both always the result of intelligent setup, and never the result of the spontaneous emergence through self-organization by unguided natural events in an orderly manner without external direction, chemical non-biological, purely physicodynamic processes and reactions.
Living Cells store very complex genetic and epigenetic information through the genetic code, and over twenty epigenetic languages, translation systems, and signaling networks. These information systems instruct the making and operation of cells and multicellular organisms. Each cell hosts millions of interconnected molecular machines, production lines and factories analogous to factories made by man. They are of unparalleled gigantic complexity, able to process constantly a stream of data from the outside world through signaling networks. Cells operate robot-like, autonomously. They adapt the production and recycle molecules on demand. The process of self-replication is the epitome of manufacturing advances and sophistication.
Therefore, the origin of biological information and self-replicating cell factories is best explained by the action of an intelligent designer, who created life for his own purposes.
This is a question, to which I have yet to see an atheist give a consistent, rationally sound reply, and not the usual " I don't know ":
If God is not the metaphysical, supernatural, primary ultimate essential eternal necessary irreducible personal being upon which all other temporal natural things, humans with personality, consciousness, and rationality causally derive and depend, what is, and why? If there was not an eternal being, an agency with a will, that caused all physical and contingent mental conscient beings, the cosmos and/or our universe into existence, how could an alternative substance without qualia be an explanation, and on top of that, a better explanation? That, in special, in light of the fact that consciousness, an irreducible, fundamental property of mind cannot, even in principle, be reduced to known physical principles? To ascribe to the electrons in our brain the property to generate consciousness, and not to ascribe the same property to the electrons moving in a bulb, is in contradiction with quantum physics, which establishes that all electrons are equal and indistinguishable, that is they have all exactly the same properties.
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1810-its-not-justified-to-claim-ignorance-limited-causal-alternatives-for-origins-do-not-justify-to-claim-of-not-knowing
If atheists expect theists to take the rejection of theistic beliefs seriously, they need to offer an explanation that tops theism in explanatory power. Yet weak atheism can’t explain even the most basic facts about reality and its origin. In order to avoid the burden of proof, there is clearly a double standard applied by atheists. If we’re going to reject an explanation because it is supposedly unconvincing, atheism has to be rejected long before there is a justification to reject theism.
The universe had a beginning and must have had a cause. The universe and the laws of physics are interdependent and irreducible, and the universe obeys laws and rules of mathematics and physics which evidence an intelligent rational agency behind it. The fundamental physical constants, the universe, and the earth are finely tuned for life. Over 100 constants must be just right. Fine-tuning points to a fine tuner. Life comes only from life. Abiogenesis has never been demonstrated to be possible despite over half a century of intensive scientific research. Blueprints, instructional information and master plans, and the make of complex machines and factories upon these are both always tracked back to an intelligent source that made both for purposeful, specific goals. The blueprint stored in DNA directs the make of biological cells and organisms. DNA, biological Cells and organisms are therefore most probably the result of intelligent design. Biological cells ARE an industrial park of millions of interconnected complex factories, full of machines. Factories are always designed. A minimal Cell requires 560 proteins with an average size of 400 amino acids, which totals 224.000 amino acids. That requires to select 1 out of 40^224.000! Biological cells require a minimal number of parts, which have no use by themselves, and would never accumulate on the prebiotic earth. The Fossil record, and in special the Cambrian explosion, demonstrates the sudden appearance of lifeforms, without intermediates. Conscience, mental reality, language, logic, free will, moral values, are immaterial entities, and cannot emerge from physical matter. Human objective logic depends and can only derive from a pre-existing necessary first mind with objective logic. Theology and philosophy. Both lead to an eternal, self-existent, omnipresent transcendent, conscious, intelligent, personal and moral Creator.
Claim:
We replace God with honesty by saying "we don't know" and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that... The fact that we don't currently know does not mean we will never know because we have science, the best method we have for answering questions about things we don't know. Simply saying "God did it" is making up an answer because we are too lazy to try to figure out the real truth. Science still can't explain where life came from and is honest about it.No atheist believes "the universe came from nothing". Science doesn't even wastes its time trying to study what came before the big bang and creation of the universe (based on the first law of the thermodynamics, many think matter and energy are atemporal, and before the Big Bang, everything was a singularity, but very few people are interested in studying that because it won't change anything in our knowledge about the universe).
Answer:
We can make an inference to the best explanation of origins, based on the wealth of scientific information, philosophy, theology, and using sound abductive, inductive, and deductive reasoning. Either there is a God, or not. So there are only two hypotheses from which to choose. Atheists, rather than admit a creator as the only rational response to explain our existence, prefer to confess ignorance despite the wealth of scientific information, that permits to reach informed conclusions.
John Lennox:
There are not many options. Essentially, just two. Either human intelligence owes its origin to mindless matter, or there is a Creator. It's strange that some people claim that all it is their intelligence that leads to prefer the first to the second.
Luke A. Barnes:
“I don’t know which one of these two statements is true” is a very different state of knowledge from “I don’t know which one of these trillion statements is true”. Our probabilities can and should reflect the size of the set of possibilities.
Greg Koukl observed that while it’s certainly true atheists lack a belief in God, they don’t lack beliefs about God. When it comes to the truth of any given proposition, one only has three logical options: affirm it, deny it, withhold judgment (due to ignorance or the inability to weigh competing evidences). As applied to the proposition “God exists,” those who affirm the truth of this proposition are called theists, those who deny it are called atheists, and those who withhold judgment are called agnostics. Only agnostics, who have not formed a belief, lack a burden to demonstrate the truth of their position.
Are those who want to define atheism as a lack of belief in God devoid of beliefs about God? Almost never! They have a belief regarding God’s existence, and that belief is that God’s existence is improbable or impossible. While they may not be certain of this belief (certainty is not required), they have certainly made a judgment. They are not intellectually neutral. At the very least, they believe God’s existence is more improbable than probable, and thus they bear a burden to demonstrate why God’s existence is improbable.
So long as the new brand of atheists have formed a belief regarding the truth or falsity of the proposition “God exists,” then they have beliefs about God, and must defend that belief even if atheism is defined as the lack of belief in God.
Objection:
Farting pixies could be in both a universe with and without a god, it's literally a third option of possible worlds.
Answer:
They could not exist in a reality without God, as they would be a contingent being, depending on a necessary God with attributes of Aseity creating them. So they could ONLY exist in option one in a reality with God. If the claim goes that they have the same nature of an eternal God, then they would be indistinguishable from God, and as such, be God. A worldview where God exists does not limit the number of Gods. They would be just one of them. In fact, the trinity is One God in Three Persons. So the objection fails. There are only two options. One: A worldview where there is a limitless, spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, intelligent and personal creator, which brought space, time, matter into being, or two: not.
It is not justified to say " We don't know". It is suppressing the obvious inference that:
the universe had a beginning, therefore a cause
the physical universe and the laws of physics are interdependent and irreducible, therefore they had to be created together.
The fundamental physical constants, the universe, and the earth are finely tuned for life. Over 100 constants must be just right. Therefore, a fine-tuner is required.
Life comes only from life. Abiogenesis has never been demonstrated to be possible. Eliminative induction permits to posit a Creator as the best explanation of the origin of life.
Biological cells ARE an industrial park of millions of interconnected complex factories, full of machines. Factories are always designed.
Blueprints, instructional information and master plans, and the make of complex machines and factories upon these are both always tracked back to an intelligent source that made both for purposeful, specific goals.
Biological cells require a minimal number of parts, which have no use by themselves, and would never accumulate on a prebiotic earth
Biological systems appear designed. Therefore, most probably, they are designed.
DNA stores the blueprint of life. Blueprints can always be tracked back to intelligence
The Fossil record, and in special the Cambrian explosion, demonstrates the sudden appearance of lifeforms, without intermediates.
Conscience, mental reality, language, logic, free will, moral values, are immaterial entities, and cannot emerge from matter
Both lead to an eternal, self-existent, omnipresent transcendent, conscious, intelligent, personal and moral Creator.
The Old Testament is a catalogue of fulfilled prophecies of Jesus Christ, and his mission, death, and resurrection foretold with specificity.
Archaeology demonstrates that all events described in the Bible are historical facts.
Historical evidence reveals that Jesus Christ really did come to this earth, and really did physically rise from the dead
There are many testimonies of Jesus doing miracles still today, and Jesus appearing to people all over the globe, still today.
The signs of the end times that were foretold in the Bible are occurring in front of our eyes. New world order, microchip implant etc.
Credible witnesses have seen the afterlife and have come back and reported to us that the afterlife is real.
Nothing cannot produce something, and non-being cannot produce being.
Chaos cannot produce order
Non-reason cannot produce reasoning.
Either there is a God - creator - causal agency of the universe, or not. God either exists or he doesn’t, and there is no halfway house. These are these two possible explanations. Upon the logic of mutual exclusion, they are mutually exclusive (it was one or the other) so we can use eliminative logic: if no God is highly improbable, then the existence of God is highly probable. Now here's the trick. When faced with limited options you don't have the liberty not to believe something. If you reject the idea that somebody baked the cake for you, you must assert in its place that the cake either materialized out of nothing or formed itself by accident. When you reject one option you are asserting an alternate option when all the options are clear. When we are faced with just a limited number of choices if we reject one choice we've got to opt for one of those that remains. So the question is, which option makes the most sense? Thus, the evidence against the existence of God is evidence of God. is evidence for creation. The evaluative status of non-design (and thus design) can be decreased or increased by observable empirical evidence, so a theory of design is empirically responsive and is testable. When we are faced with just a limited number of choices if we reject one choice we've got to opt for one of those that remain. So the question is, which option makes the most sense? While the honest thing is to say, I don't know, at the beginning of a journey of research which worldview makes the most sense, it's dishonest to say that God cannot be known, and indeed, egotistical to claim to remain in ignorance, when the opportunity to know is readily available. If you are undecided, then that's fine too. But the reason that you are undecided is not a lack of evidence on either side...it's your own unwillingness to make a decision and support a position.
No known third option exists. Claiming that " We don't know " as a third option is a logical fallacy. Ignorance is not an explanation of causality, but an admission of ignorance. We aim to explore and evaluate both hypotheses. Both possible causal mechanisms of origins, intelligent and mental, and natural ( non-intelligent ) causation can be scrutinized, tested, elucidated and analyzed, in order to find the best, case-adequate answers of origins. To say, that just two worldviews exist, then it means that theism does not restrict itself to the supernatural, but in a broader sense, it is an umbrella name that englobes all views where a superior being equipped with intelligence and conscience is inferred. Pantheism is in that broader sense, a form of theism.
As far as the existence of the universe goes, it was either created or it was not created (that is the logical axiom called the Law of the Excluded Middle). If God as a causal agent is excluded, the only two alternatives to explain the origin of the universe are either an eternal universe in some form, or it came into existence without a cause. Both alternatives are impossible. We cannot reach now by successive additions of past events from no starting point. Nothing is the absence of anything and has no causal powers. Atheists escape of not knowing is as claiming ignorance of how much is 0 + 0.
Paul Davies:
The universe obeys mathematical laws; they are like a hidden subtext in nature. Science reveals that there is a coherent scheme of things, but scientists do not necessarily interpret that as evidence for meaning or purpose in the universe. The only rational explanation is however that God created this coherent scheme of things since there is no other alternative reasonable explanation. That's why atheists rather than admit that, prefer to argue of " not knowing " of its cause.
1. Contingent or non-necessary beings depend on an external cause that made them come into existence - the physical universe – is also contingent.
2. Since that external cause has to be outside the whole aggregate of contingent things, it cannot itself be contingent. So it is necessary.
3. Hey presto, we’ve demonstrated that there is a necessarily existent, uncreated, non-contingent being which causes all other things! And this, of course, is God.
1. The universe is either eternal, or it had a beginning. Most probably it had a beginning, based on philosophical and scientific considerations. Everything which has a beginning has a cause.
2. The Universe had a beginning.
3. Therefore, the Universe had a cause.
In regards of Abiogenesis: A common answer is: Science does not know yet. And what cannot yet be explained, is postponed to " science is working on it". What we are constantly being accused of doing ( unjustly ), namely of using a God of the Gaps argument, is what agnostics use to fill the gaps with naturalism.
1. DNA stores information based on a code system, and codified, complex, instructional information, with the same function as a blueprint.
2. All codes and blueprints come from intelligence.
3. Therefore, the genetic code and the instructions to build cells and complex biological organisms, stored in DNA, were most likely created by an intelligent agency.
1. Cells use sophisticated information selection ( the Gene regulatory network ) encoding and transcription ( DNA & RNA polymerase machines ) transmission (mRNA), and decoding ( Ribosome ) systems.
2. Setup of information transmission systems, aka. Selection, encoding, transmission, and decoding are always a deliberate act of intelligence
3. The existence of the genetic information transmission system is best explained by the implementation of an intelligent designer.
1. Complex machines and factories are intelligently designed
2. Biological cells are factories full of complex machines
3. Biological cells are intelligently designed...
1. Cells components are part of a complex system that is useful only in the completion of that much larger system. A minimal Cell, in order to make life possible, requires at least 500 interdependent protein - molecular machine complexes fully functional. Basic building blocks and Intermediate biosynthesis products do have no biochemical function on their own, that's why evolution could and would not select them.
2. A discrete minimal size of each individual molecular machine, aka. proteins and holo-protein complexes made of multiple subunits and cofactors are necessary for these to be functional.
3. Each protein and holo-protein requires a minimal size and complexity to be functional. And it has only function interdependently, and correct precise energy supply, and when interconnected with other molecules in the Cell. Irreducibility and interdependence cannot evolve but depend on intelligence with foreknowledge on how to build discrete parts with a distant goal.
Either life was created, or it emerged through self-organization by natural, unguided, random events. Physical laws or necessity cannot be the driving force of the origin of the genetic code and the genetic information for the first living being. The simplest known free-living organism, Mycoplasma genitalium, has 470 genes that code for 470 proteins that average 347 amino acids in length. The odds against just one specified protein of that length to emerge randomly are 1:10^451. According to Borel's law, any occurrence with a chance of happening less than in one out of 10^50 is an occurrence with such a slim a probability that is, in general, statistically considered to be zero.
The standard crutches and claim are that evolution is a fact, and has been observed, and as such, the quest of origins is a settled issue, evolution replaces a creator, and that settles the issue for most.
In the same manner, as I use my mind and intelligence to make a blueprint of a factory, a mind is required to make the blueprint of life. In the same sense, as a piston has no function by its own, an enzyme in a prebiotic soup or hydrothermal vent would have no function on its own.
A piston has no use if not installed in the cylinder of the engine, and the engine is fully functional. Similarly, a protein has no function if not installed in the cell in the proper location, and the cell is fully functional. So why would a prebiotic soup, or hydrothermal vents, produce proteins that have no purpose by their own? A factory with machines, production lines, computers, software/hardware, waste bins, recycle devices, quality check , control and repair, communication lines, and internal delivery mechanisms etc., always has an inventor. The building instructions for a factory or machine always have an intelligent origin. Biological cells are factories, full of machines, computers, and building instructions, stored in DNA. Abiogenesis is impossible. Life can only come from life.
Biological systems are functionally organized, integrated into an interdependent network, and complex, like human-made machines and factories. The wiring or circuit board of an electrical device equals to the metabolic pathways of a biological cell. For the assembly of a biological system of multiple parts, not only the origin of the genome information to produce all proteins/enzymes with their respective subunits and assembly cofactors must be explained, but also parts availability ( The right materials must be transported to the building site. Often these materials in their raw form are unusable. Other complex machines come into play to transform the raw materials into a usable form. All this requires specific information. ) synchronization, ( these parts must be read on hand at the building site ) manufacturing and assembly coordination ( which required the information of how to assemble each single part correctly, at the right place, at the right moment, and in the right position ) , and interface compatibility ( the parts must fit together correctly, like lock and key ) . Unless the origin of all these steps is properly explained, functional complexity as existing in biological systems has not been addressed adequately.
How could the whole process have started " off the hooks " from zero without a planning intelligence?
Why would natural, unguided mechanisms produce a series of enzymes that only generate useless intermediates until all of the enzymes needed for the end product exist, are in place and do their job?
My conclusion is: The origin of biological cells, and life, can only be explained by the acting agency of an intelligent mind.
Resumed: For the assembly of a biological system of multiple parts, following steps must be explained: the origin of the genome information to produce all subunits and assembly cofactors. Parts availability, synchronization, manufacturing and assembly coordination through genetic information, and interface compatibility. The individual parts must precisely fit together. All these steps are better explained through a super intelligent and powerful designer, rather than mindless natural processes by chance, or/and evolution since we observe all the time minds capabilities producing machines and factories, producing machines and end products.
Everything *has* to be in place at once or else an organism has no survival advantage. The thing is, there's no driver for any of the pieces to evolve individually because single parts confer no advantage in and of themselves. The necessity for the parts of the system to be in place all at once is simply evidence of creation. Photosynthesis missing one piece (like chlorophylls) is like a car missing just one piece of the drive train (such as a differential); it's not that it doesn't function as well - it doesn't function at all!
So we can by simple reason conclude that a creative agency is the best explanation for our existence. The ONLY, unique, exclusive, possible, rational, obvious mechanism and cause of the physical universe and life is GOD. Atheists often excuse of " not knowing " is, because there is no other mechanism. So claims of not being able to conclude what makes the most sense is not an honest position, but wilful unjustified irrational untenable ignorance at its best.
When you see a factory production line, a complex machine, a computer, a message, a translation dictionary, a watch, do you intuitively conclude somebody made it? Yes, of course.
Would you say that it is plausible that a tornado over a junkyard could produce a self-replicating machine, like John von Neumann's Universal Constructor?
Would you say that it is plausible that mindless random chance can write a book like a random letter generator using a computers number generator? if you see a message on a sand dune, like " John loves Sandy ". Would you intuitively and immediately recognize that someone past there a short time ago, and wrote the message on the sand dune? Or would you be unable to recognize that intelligence was required to write the message? The universe, the cell, and organisms are far more complex than the most complex machines made by man, and the simplest cell stores as much information as contained in a CD.
There are only these options. Either is there an intelligent creator, or there is not. Those are the only options. If there is no God, then everything is a result of ..... what exactly?
Chance, as exposed above, isn't a thing. Physical necessity could only act once a physical universe exists. Beyond the universe, there were no physical laws.
Once it granted that nothing has no causal powers, it's evident the universe could not have emerged from absolutely anything. Nobody times nothing equals everything is irrational to the extreme ( nonetheless, some very "smart" people think that proposition makes sense, and write extensive books about the subject ). Or, behind this complex universe is an incomprehensibly intelligent and powerful eternal being who made everything.
The capacity of atheists to invert things is remarkable. They claim to not being able to know what can be known and understood easily. And claim to know what nobody really knows for sure.
They claim to not being able to know how the universe and life might have emerged and what mechanism was most probably in play, based on the evidence. And on top of that, argue that this is the most honest position someone can take. But they are absolutely certain of common ancestry, and that microevolution leads to macroevolution and biodiversity during long periods of time. That - they claim, is an unquestionable fact.
The inversion is evident. Based on logic and reasoning, and the scientific evidence, we can infer with certainty that a causal agent was required to create all physical things, the universe, life, and biodiversity.
But in regard to chemistry, biochemistry, biology, evolutionary and ecological mechanisms, we know that things are EXTRAORDINARILY COMPLEX, cannot be easily known and understood. And in fact, many things, we still don't know. But atheists think they do. The proponent of evolution believes that a theory from the 19th century is right, despite the fact that back then, knowledge in biology was limited, and that its rather simplistic explanation through mutations and natural selection is supposedly able to account for all biodiversity, bacterias, plants, fish, birds, apes, humans, body plan development, histology, and cell differentiation, the origin of pluripotent stem cells, and the enormous complex modifications observed in living beings , which are able to adapt to the environment. Be aware of all these ultracrepidarianists. If you do not agree with them, they call you a pigeon playing chess, Dunning-Kruger and alike, but never really look into the mirror to see who is in front of them !!
5 Easy Steps to refute naturalism
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1877-easy-steps-to-refute-naturalism
Either the cosmos
(1) had no beginning, or
(2) it had a beginning.
(1) If the cosmos had no beginning, then there must be an infinite series of past events. However, it is impossible to traverse an actual infinite. Therefore, the universe cannot be infinitely old. Besides that, If the cosmos was infinitely old, it would have reached maximum entropy a long, long, time ago. Since it has not reached maximum entropy, it cannot be infinitely old without violating the second law of thermodynamics.
(2) If the cosmos had a beginning, then it must have come from (A) nothing or (B) something.
2.A. Although physicists such as Krauss and Hawking talk about "the universe creating itself from nothing," they are using the word "nothing" to mean the vacuum energy, which is not a true nothing. To be more precise, being cannot emerge from non-being. That would violate the first law of thermodynamics: energy can be neither created or destroyed; it can only change form. So the cosmos did not emerge from non-being.
2.B. If the entire cosmos came from something, that thing must transcend our cosmos, that is, it must exist beyond the limits of our space/time continuum. It must also possess more energy (power) than the total energy within our cosmos. We may call it the First Cause.
Fine-tuning of the universe
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1277-fine-tuning-of-the-universe
1. If our universe is random, then it is very unlikely that it permits life.
2. Our universe permits life.
3. Therefore, the existence of our universe is very likely due to something other than chance.
“The really amazing thing is not that life on Earth is balanced on a knife-edge, but that the entire universe is balanced on a knife-edge, and would be total chaos if any of the natural ‘constants’ were off even slightly. You see,” Davies adds, “even if you dismiss the man as a chance happening, the fact remains that the universe seems unreasonably suited to the existence of life — almost contrived — you might say a ‘put-up job’.”
Dr. Paul Davies, noted author and professor of theoretical physics at Adelaide University
Abiogenesis is impossible
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1279-abiogenesis-is-impossible
The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution, Eugene V. Koonin, page 351:
The origin of life is the most difficult problem that faces evolutionary biology and, arguably, biology in general. Indeed, the problem is so hard and the current state of the art seems so frustrating that some researchers prefer to dismiss the entire issue as being outside the scientific domain altogether, on the grounds that unique events are not conducive to scientific study.
Would you say that it is plausible that a tornado over a junkyard could produce a self-replicating machine, like John von Neumann's Universal Constructor?
Would you say that it is plausible that mindless random chance can write a book?
Objection: Marcello Barbieri writes: Comparing living cells to man-made self-replicating machines, and books is a false analogy
Answer: Molecular biology has proved that there is a genetic code in every cell and that genes and proteins are molecular artifacts because they are manufactured by molecular machines. Coding and artifact-making, in other words, take place both in our society and inside the cell, and this does create a parallel between culture and molecular biology. Code Biology A New Science of Life, page 28
In other words. Intelligence produces self-replicating machines and books. And so only intelligence can produce life, that depends on coded information, proteins, and molecular machines.
If the analogy of two phenomena are very close and striking while at the same time, the cause of ONE of the phenomenon is very obvious; it becomes scarcely possible to refuse to admit the action of an analogous cause of the other phenomenon, though (the cause of the other phenomenon is) not so obvious in itself"
--- in "Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy", London, Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1831, page 149.
When you see that:
the way genetic information encoded in the DNA is exactly the same as what we humans would do to encode information in our books, computers, etc;
the way that the nucleus communicates with its ribosome is similar to how we humans has designed computers to communicate with one another,
then one has to AT LEAST stop and wonder whether some intelligent being has designed the genetic code and made the communication system between the nucleus and its ribosomes....
Perry Marshall, Evolution 2.0, 1
Although this is not a conclusive proof of the existence of God, it should AT LEAST make one STOP and THINK about the possibility of the existence of God....
In regard to origins, either there was a causal agent, or there was not. It's not sufficient to say: I don't believe in God and think this is a solid epistemological framework. All possible mechanisms of origins need a serious consideration, including design. The question: What would have to be observed in the natural world to detect design ? is essential.
Abiogenesis, Dawkins blind watchmaker hypothesis, and common ancestry is all based on indirect observations. That is, from today's observed evidence, past causal action is inferred, similar to a detective getting his conclusions on a crime scene from the evidence on the crime scene. To do so, it must be established what could be recognized as a designed structure and patterns of intelligent interference.
In the design revolution, Dembski writes on page 220:
So see that the argument from ignorance objection is not a magic wand for silencing intelligent design, let's begin with a reality check. When is the argument from ignorance objection raised against intelligent design, who exactly is being accused of being ignorant? Its natural to think that the ignorance here is on the part of design theorists, who want to attribute intelligent agency to biological systems. If only those poor design theorists understood biology better, those systems would readily submit to mechanistic explanation. Matter of fact IMHO is, that despite decades of research, the scientific community has been desperately and unsuccessfully tried to discover how such systems could have formed, what mechanism exactly was in charge. Who is ignorant here? The Scientific community as a whole. In fact, it's safe to say that the biological community is clueless about the emergence of biological complexity. How so?
Because the material mechanisms to which the biological community looks to explain biological complexity provide no clue for how those systems might realistically have come about. the problem, therefore, is not ignorance or personal incredulity, but global disciplinary failure, and gross theoretical inadequacy of Darwin's theory. James Shapiro, the molecular biologist at the university of Chicago, conceded that system that exhibits specified complexity are likely to be designed. Design theorists, in attributing design to systems that exhibit specified complexity (SC), are simply doing what scientists do generally, which is an attempt to formulate a causally adequate explanation for the phenomenon in question. To attribute specified complexity, and thereby design, to a biological system is to engage in an eliminative induction, a form of reasoning, used throughout the sciences. Eliminative inductions argue for the truth of a proposition by arguing that competitors to that proposition are false.
Pretend you wake up in the morning and there's a birthday cake sitting on your kitchen table, and it just happens to be your birthday. What do you think? You ask yourself, "Where did this cake come from?" There are only a couple of possibilities, theoretically. It could have just materialized out of nowhere on your kitchen table coincidentally on your birthday. It could have just "poofed" into existence. I guess that would be in the realm of theoretic possibilities. Or maybe a great, hot, wet wind blew through your neighbor's kitchen gathering up a bunch of ingredients and kind of accidentally baked a cake that landed on your table. The fact that it happened on your birthday is a coincidence. I guess that would be "possible" too. The cake could have come out of nowhere or could have just assembled itself by chance. Or the other alternative would be that a person baked the cake for you and dropped it off in the middle of the night.
http://enrichmentjournal.ag.org/201303/201303_026_Athiests.cfm
The Christian Geneticist Francis Collins of Human Genome Project fame said he was an agnostic in college. Yet he confesses that his “I don’t know” was more an “I don’t want to know” attitude — a “willful blindness.” This agnosticism eventually gave way to outright atheism — although Collins would later come to faith in Christ. He began reading C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, and Collins realized his own antireligious constructs were “those of a schoolboy.”
Because the existence of God is a massively important topic, we cannot afford not to pay attention — especially in an age of so many diversions. Philosopher Tom Morris points out that sports, TV, restaurants, concerts, cars, billiards, and a thousand other activities can divert us from the ultimate issues of life. As a result, we don’t “tune into” God. And when a crisis hits (death, hospitalization, natural disaster), we are not really in the best condition to process and make accurate judgments about those deep questions. The person who says, “I do not know if God exists,” may have chosen to live by diversions and distractions and thus to ignore God. This is not an innocent ignorance; this ignorance is the result of our neglecting our duty.
So the theist, atheist, and militant (ornery) agnostic all bear a burden of proof; the theist does not have a heavier burden since all claim to know something. Furthermore, even the alleged ordinary agnostic still is not off the hook. For one thing, one cannot remain neutral all his life; he will make commitments or hold beliefs all along the way that reflect either an atheistic or theistic worldview. He is either going to be a practical atheist or practical theist (or a mixture of the two) in some fashion throughout his life. But he can’t straddle the fence for long. Also, the ordinary agnostic may say, “I do not know,” but this often means “I do not care” — the view of an “apatheist.” Refusing to seek out whether God exists or not; refusing to humble oneself to seek whatever light about God is available; living a life of distractions rather than thoughtfully reflecting about one’s meaning, purpose or destiny leaves one culpable in his ignorance, not innocent.
Paul Davies, the fifth miracle: At that time, the very notion that life might spring into being spontaneously from a nonliving chemical mixture was greeted with fierce criticism from theologians, and even from some scientists. The eminent British physicist Lord Kelvin dismissed the whole idea as “a very ancient speculation,” opining that “science brings a vast mass of inductive evidence against this hypothesis.” He stated unequivocally, “Dead matter cannot become living without coming under the influence of matter previously alive.” This left only two alternatives: either life has always existed or its origin was a miracle.
It's not justified to claim " we don't know ", when a limited range of alternatives and options are available. If you assert that there is a god...then ok, let's move on. If you assert that there is no god, then let's lay your evidence and argumentation for that assertion against the evidence and argumentation for the existence of god...and let's get on with it.
The real-world consequence of agnostic atheism is that objective physical evidence is being effectively denied in favor of the mere presumption that we "just don’t yet know the details" of how a dimensional semiotic system came into being "by material processes alone". The problems with this position should be obvious to anyone. Firstly, this presumption completely ignores the intractable evidence against it. Secondly, if the opposing position is true, there will not be a purely material explanation to be found in the first place. This effectively cements science into the unfortunate position of forever searching for the details of an explanation that does not exist, while systematically ignoring the explanation already clearly indicated by the evidence.
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1810-its-not-justified-to-claim-ignorance-limited-causal-alternatives-for-origins-do-not-justify-to-claim-of-not-knowing#2991
Hosea 4:6 People are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Claiming of not knowing of something, despite the evident facts easy at hand and having the ability to come to informed well-founded conclusions based on sound reasoning, and through known facts and evidence, is not only willful ignorance but plain foolishness.
In special, when the issues in the discussion are related to origins and worldviews, and eternal destiny is at stake.
If there were hundreds of possible statements, then claiming not knowing which makes the most sense could be justified. In the quest of God, there are just two possible explanations. Either there is a God, or not. There is however a wealth of evidence, which can lead us to informed, well-justified conclusions.
We KNOW HOW to detect the action of intelligence by a mind when we see :
- written messages
- something made based on mathematical principles
- systems and networks functioning based on logic gates
- something purposefully made for specific goals
- specified complexity, the instructional blueprint or a codified message
- irreducible complex and interdependent systems or artifacts composed of several interlocked, well-matched parts contributing to a higher end of a complex system that would be useful only in the completion of that much larger system.
- order or orderly patterns
- hierarchically arranged systems of parts
- artifacts which use might be employed in different systems ( a wheel is used in cars and airplanes )
- Fine-tuned things
We KNOW by observation and experience that the origin of blueprints containing the instructional complex information, and the fabrication of complex machines and interlinked factories based on these instructions, which produce goods for specific purposes, are both always the result of intelligent setup, and never the result of the spontaneous emergence through self-organization by unguided natural events in an orderly manner without external direction, chemical non-biological, purely physicodynamic processes and reactions.
Living Cells store very complex genetic and epigenetic information through the genetic code, and over twenty epigenetic languages, translation systems, and signaling networks. These information systems instruct the making and operation of cells and multicellular organisms. Each cell hosts millions of interconnected molecular machines, production lines and factories analogous to factories made by man. They are of unparalleled gigantic complexity, able to process constantly a stream of data from the outside world through signaling networks. Cells operate robot-like, autonomously. They adapt the production and recycle molecules on demand. The process of self-replication is the epitome of manufacturing advances and sophistication.
Therefore, the origin of biological information and self-replicating cell factories is best explained by the action of an intelligent designer, who created life for his own purposes.
This is a question, to which I have yet to see an atheist give a consistent, rationally sound reply, and not the usual " I don't know ":
If God is not the metaphysical, supernatural, primary ultimate essential eternal necessary irreducible personal being upon which all other temporal natural things, humans with personality, consciousness, and rationality causally derive and depend, what is, and why? If there was not an eternal being, an agency with a will, that caused all physical and contingent mental conscient beings, the cosmos and/or our universe into existence, how could an alternative substance without qualia be an explanation, and on top of that, a better explanation? That, in special, in light of the fact that consciousness, an irreducible, fundamental property of mind cannot, even in principle, be reduced to known physical principles? To ascribe to the electrons in our brain the property to generate consciousness, and not to ascribe the same property to the electrons moving in a bulb, is in contradiction with quantum physics, which establishes that all electrons are equal and indistinguishable, that is they have all exactly the same properties.
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1810-its-not-justified-to-claim-ignorance-limited-causal-alternatives-for-origins-do-not-justify-to-claim-of-not-knowing
If atheists expect theists to take the rejection of theistic beliefs seriously, they need to offer an explanation that tops theism in explanatory power. Yet weak atheism can’t explain even the most basic facts about reality and its origin. In order to avoid the burden of proof, there is clearly a double standard applied by atheists. If we’re going to reject an explanation because it is supposedly unconvincing, atheism has to be rejected long before there is a justification to reject theism.
The universe had a beginning and must have had a cause. The universe and the laws of physics are interdependent and irreducible, and the universe obeys laws and rules of mathematics and physics which evidence an intelligent rational agency behind it. The fundamental physical constants, the universe, and the earth are finely tuned for life. Over 100 constants must be just right. Fine-tuning points to a fine tuner. Life comes only from life. Abiogenesis has never been demonstrated to be possible despite over half a century of intensive scientific research. Blueprints, instructional information and master plans, and the make of complex machines and factories upon these are both always tracked back to an intelligent source that made both for purposeful, specific goals. The blueprint stored in DNA directs the make of biological cells and organisms. DNA, biological Cells and organisms are therefore most probably the result of intelligent design. Biological cells ARE an industrial park of millions of interconnected complex factories, full of machines. Factories are always designed. A minimal Cell requires 560 proteins with an average size of 400 amino acids, which totals 224.000 amino acids. That requires to select 1 out of 40^224.000! Biological cells require a minimal number of parts, which have no use by themselves, and would never accumulate on the prebiotic earth. The Fossil record, and in special the Cambrian explosion, demonstrates the sudden appearance of lifeforms, without intermediates. Conscience, mental reality, language, logic, free will, moral values, are immaterial entities, and cannot emerge from physical matter. Human objective logic depends and can only derive from a pre-existing necessary first mind with objective logic. Theology and philosophy. Both lead to an eternal, self-existent, omnipresent transcendent, conscious, intelligent, personal and moral Creator.
Claim:
We replace God with honesty by saying "we don't know" and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that... The fact that we don't currently know does not mean we will never know because we have science, the best method we have for answering questions about things we don't know. Simply saying "God did it" is making up an answer because we are too lazy to try to figure out the real truth. Science still can't explain where life came from and is honest about it.No atheist believes "the universe came from nothing". Science doesn't even wastes its time trying to study what came before the big bang and creation of the universe (based on the first law of the thermodynamics, many think matter and energy are atemporal, and before the Big Bang, everything was a singularity, but very few people are interested in studying that because it won't change anything in our knowledge about the universe).
Answer:
We can make an inference to the best explanation of origins, based on the wealth of scientific information, philosophy, theology, and using sound abductive, inductive, and deductive reasoning. Either there is a God, or not. So there are only two hypotheses from which to choose. Atheists, rather than admit a creator as the only rational response to explain our existence, prefer to confess ignorance despite the wealth of scientific information, that permits to reach informed conclusions.
John Lennox:
There are not many options. Essentially, just two. Either human intelligence owes its origin to mindless matter, or there is a Creator. It's strange that some people claim that all it is their intelligence that leads to prefer the first to the second.
Luke A. Barnes:
“I don’t know which one of these two statements is true” is a very different state of knowledge from “I don’t know which one of these trillion statements is true”. Our probabilities can and should reflect the size of the set of possibilities.
Greg Koukl observed that while it’s certainly true atheists lack a belief in God, they don’t lack beliefs about God. When it comes to the truth of any given proposition, one only has three logical options: affirm it, deny it, withhold judgment (due to ignorance or the inability to weigh competing evidences). As applied to the proposition “God exists,” those who affirm the truth of this proposition are called theists, those who deny it are called atheists, and those who withhold judgment are called agnostics. Only agnostics, who have not formed a belief, lack a burden to demonstrate the truth of their position.
Are those who want to define atheism as a lack of belief in God devoid of beliefs about God? Almost never! They have a belief regarding God’s existence, and that belief is that God’s existence is improbable or impossible. While they may not be certain of this belief (certainty is not required), they have certainly made a judgment. They are not intellectually neutral. At the very least, they believe God’s existence is more improbable than probable, and thus they bear a burden to demonstrate why God’s existence is improbable.
So long as the new brand of atheists have formed a belief regarding the truth or falsity of the proposition “God exists,” then they have beliefs about God, and must defend that belief even if atheism is defined as the lack of belief in God.
Objection:
Farting pixies could be in both a universe with and without a god, it's literally a third option of possible worlds.
Answer:
They could not exist in a reality without God, as they would be a contingent being, depending on a necessary God with attributes of Aseity creating them. So they could ONLY exist in option one in a reality with God. If the claim goes that they have the same nature of an eternal God, then they would be indistinguishable from God, and as such, be God. A worldview where God exists does not limit the number of Gods. They would be just one of them. In fact, the trinity is One God in Three Persons. So the objection fails. There are only two options. One: A worldview where there is a limitless, spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, intelligent and personal creator, which brought space, time, matter into being, or two: not.
It is not justified to say " We don't know". It is suppressing the obvious inference that:
the universe had a beginning, therefore a cause
the physical universe and the laws of physics are interdependent and irreducible, therefore they had to be created together.
The fundamental physical constants, the universe, and the earth are finely tuned for life. Over 100 constants must be just right. Therefore, a fine-tuner is required.
Life comes only from life. Abiogenesis has never been demonstrated to be possible. Eliminative induction permits to posit a Creator as the best explanation of the origin of life.
Biological cells ARE an industrial park of millions of interconnected complex factories, full of machines. Factories are always designed.
Blueprints, instructional information and master plans, and the make of complex machines and factories upon these are both always tracked back to an intelligent source that made both for purposeful, specific goals.
Biological cells require a minimal number of parts, which have no use by themselves, and would never accumulate on a prebiotic earth
Biological systems appear designed. Therefore, most probably, they are designed.
DNA stores the blueprint of life. Blueprints can always be tracked back to intelligence
The Fossil record, and in special the Cambrian explosion, demonstrates the sudden appearance of lifeforms, without intermediates.
Conscience, mental reality, language, logic, free will, moral values, are immaterial entities, and cannot emerge from matter
Both lead to an eternal, self-existent, omnipresent transcendent, conscious, intelligent, personal and moral Creator.
The Old Testament is a catalogue of fulfilled prophecies of Jesus Christ, and his mission, death, and resurrection foretold with specificity.
Archaeology demonstrates that all events described in the Bible are historical facts.
Historical evidence reveals that Jesus Christ really did come to this earth, and really did physically rise from the dead
There are many testimonies of Jesus doing miracles still today, and Jesus appearing to people all over the globe, still today.
The signs of the end times that were foretold in the Bible are occurring in front of our eyes. New world order, microchip implant etc.
Credible witnesses have seen the afterlife and have come back and reported to us that the afterlife is real.
Nothing cannot produce something, and non-being cannot produce being.
Chaos cannot produce order
Non-reason cannot produce reasoning.
Either there is a God - creator - causal agency of the universe, or not. God either exists or he doesn’t, and there is no halfway house. These are these two possible explanations. Upon the logic of mutual exclusion, they are mutually exclusive (it was one or the other) so we can use eliminative logic: if no God is highly improbable, then the existence of God is highly probable. Now here's the trick. When faced with limited options you don't have the liberty not to believe something. If you reject the idea that somebody baked the cake for you, you must assert in its place that the cake either materialized out of nothing or formed itself by accident. When you reject one option you are asserting an alternate option when all the options are clear. When we are faced with just a limited number of choices if we reject one choice we've got to opt for one of those that remains. So the question is, which option makes the most sense? Thus, the evidence against the existence of God is evidence of God. is evidence for creation. The evaluative status of non-design (and thus design) can be decreased or increased by observable empirical evidence, so a theory of design is empirically responsive and is testable. When we are faced with just a limited number of choices if we reject one choice we've got to opt for one of those that remain. So the question is, which option makes the most sense? While the honest thing is to say, I don't know, at the beginning of a journey of research which worldview makes the most sense, it's dishonest to say that God cannot be known, and indeed, egotistical to claim to remain in ignorance, when the opportunity to know is readily available. If you are undecided, then that's fine too. But the reason that you are undecided is not a lack of evidence on either side...it's your own unwillingness to make a decision and support a position.
No known third option exists. Claiming that " We don't know " as a third option is a logical fallacy. Ignorance is not an explanation of causality, but an admission of ignorance. We aim to explore and evaluate both hypotheses. Both possible causal mechanisms of origins, intelligent and mental, and natural ( non-intelligent ) causation can be scrutinized, tested, elucidated and analyzed, in order to find the best, case-adequate answers of origins. To say, that just two worldviews exist, then it means that theism does not restrict itself to the supernatural, but in a broader sense, it is an umbrella name that englobes all views where a superior being equipped with intelligence and conscience is inferred. Pantheism is in that broader sense, a form of theism.
As far as the existence of the universe goes, it was either created or it was not created (that is the logical axiom called the Law of the Excluded Middle). If God as a causal agent is excluded, the only two alternatives to explain the origin of the universe are either an eternal universe in some form, or it came into existence without a cause. Both alternatives are impossible. We cannot reach now by successive additions of past events from no starting point. Nothing is the absence of anything and has no causal powers. Atheists escape of not knowing is as claiming ignorance of how much is 0 + 0.
Paul Davies:
The universe obeys mathematical laws; they are like a hidden subtext in nature. Science reveals that there is a coherent scheme of things, but scientists do not necessarily interpret that as evidence for meaning or purpose in the universe. The only rational explanation is however that God created this coherent scheme of things since there is no other alternative reasonable explanation. That's why atheists rather than admit that, prefer to argue of " not knowing " of its cause.
1. Contingent or non-necessary beings depend on an external cause that made them come into existence - the physical universe – is also contingent.
2. Since that external cause has to be outside the whole aggregate of contingent things, it cannot itself be contingent. So it is necessary.
3. Hey presto, we’ve demonstrated that there is a necessarily existent, uncreated, non-contingent being which causes all other things! And this, of course, is God.
1. The universe is either eternal, or it had a beginning. Most probably it had a beginning, based on philosophical and scientific considerations. Everything which has a beginning has a cause.
2. The Universe had a beginning.
3. Therefore, the Universe had a cause.
In regards of Abiogenesis: A common answer is: Science does not know yet. And what cannot yet be explained, is postponed to " science is working on it". What we are constantly being accused of doing ( unjustly ), namely of using a God of the Gaps argument, is what agnostics use to fill the gaps with naturalism.
1. DNA stores information based on a code system, and codified, complex, instructional information, with the same function as a blueprint.
2. All codes and blueprints come from intelligence.
3. Therefore, the genetic code and the instructions to build cells and complex biological organisms, stored in DNA, were most likely created by an intelligent agency.
1. Cells use sophisticated information selection ( the Gene regulatory network ) encoding and transcription ( DNA & RNA polymerase machines ) transmission (mRNA), and decoding ( Ribosome ) systems.
2. Setup of information transmission systems, aka. Selection, encoding, transmission, and decoding are always a deliberate act of intelligence
3. The existence of the genetic information transmission system is best explained by the implementation of an intelligent designer.
1. Complex machines and factories are intelligently designed
2. Biological cells are factories full of complex machines
3. Biological cells are intelligently designed...
1. Cells components are part of a complex system that is useful only in the completion of that much larger system. A minimal Cell, in order to make life possible, requires at least 500 interdependent protein - molecular machine complexes fully functional. Basic building blocks and Intermediate biosynthesis products do have no biochemical function on their own, that's why evolution could and would not select them.
2. A discrete minimal size of each individual molecular machine, aka. proteins and holo-protein complexes made of multiple subunits and cofactors are necessary for these to be functional.
3. Each protein and holo-protein requires a minimal size and complexity to be functional. And it has only function interdependently, and correct precise energy supply, and when interconnected with other molecules in the Cell. Irreducibility and interdependence cannot evolve but depend on intelligence with foreknowledge on how to build discrete parts with a distant goal.
Either life was created, or it emerged through self-organization by natural, unguided, random events. Physical laws or necessity cannot be the driving force of the origin of the genetic code and the genetic information for the first living being. The simplest known free-living organism, Mycoplasma genitalium, has 470 genes that code for 470 proteins that average 347 amino acids in length. The odds against just one specified protein of that length to emerge randomly are 1:10^451. According to Borel's law, any occurrence with a chance of happening less than in one out of 10^50 is an occurrence with such a slim a probability that is, in general, statistically considered to be zero.
The standard crutches and claim are that evolution is a fact, and has been observed, and as such, the quest of origins is a settled issue, evolution replaces a creator, and that settles the issue for most.
In the same manner, as I use my mind and intelligence to make a blueprint of a factory, a mind is required to make the blueprint of life. In the same sense, as a piston has no function by its own, an enzyme in a prebiotic soup or hydrothermal vent would have no function on its own.
A piston has no use if not installed in the cylinder of the engine, and the engine is fully functional. Similarly, a protein has no function if not installed in the cell in the proper location, and the cell is fully functional. So why would a prebiotic soup, or hydrothermal vents, produce proteins that have no purpose by their own? A factory with machines, production lines, computers, software/hardware, waste bins, recycle devices, quality check , control and repair, communication lines, and internal delivery mechanisms etc., always has an inventor. The building instructions for a factory or machine always have an intelligent origin. Biological cells are factories, full of machines, computers, and building instructions, stored in DNA. Abiogenesis is impossible. Life can only come from life.
Biological systems are functionally organized, integrated into an interdependent network, and complex, like human-made machines and factories. The wiring or circuit board of an electrical device equals to the metabolic pathways of a biological cell. For the assembly of a biological system of multiple parts, not only the origin of the genome information to produce all proteins/enzymes with their respective subunits and assembly cofactors must be explained, but also parts availability ( The right materials must be transported to the building site. Often these materials in their raw form are unusable. Other complex machines come into play to transform the raw materials into a usable form. All this requires specific information. ) synchronization, ( these parts must be read on hand at the building site ) manufacturing and assembly coordination ( which required the information of how to assemble each single part correctly, at the right place, at the right moment, and in the right position ) , and interface compatibility ( the parts must fit together correctly, like lock and key ) . Unless the origin of all these steps is properly explained, functional complexity as existing in biological systems has not been addressed adequately.
How could the whole process have started " off the hooks " from zero without a planning intelligence?
Why would natural, unguided mechanisms produce a series of enzymes that only generate useless intermediates until all of the enzymes needed for the end product exist, are in place and do their job?
My conclusion is: The origin of biological cells, and life, can only be explained by the acting agency of an intelligent mind.
Resumed: For the assembly of a biological system of multiple parts, following steps must be explained: the origin of the genome information to produce all subunits and assembly cofactors. Parts availability, synchronization, manufacturing and assembly coordination through genetic information, and interface compatibility. The individual parts must precisely fit together. All these steps are better explained through a super intelligent and powerful designer, rather than mindless natural processes by chance, or/and evolution since we observe all the time minds capabilities producing machines and factories, producing machines and end products.
Everything *has* to be in place at once or else an organism has no survival advantage. The thing is, there's no driver for any of the pieces to evolve individually because single parts confer no advantage in and of themselves. The necessity for the parts of the system to be in place all at once is simply evidence of creation. Photosynthesis missing one piece (like chlorophylls) is like a car missing just one piece of the drive train (such as a differential); it's not that it doesn't function as well - it doesn't function at all!
So we can by simple reason conclude that a creative agency is the best explanation for our existence. The ONLY, unique, exclusive, possible, rational, obvious mechanism and cause of the physical universe and life is GOD. Atheists often excuse of " not knowing " is, because there is no other mechanism. So claims of not being able to conclude what makes the most sense is not an honest position, but wilful unjustified irrational untenable ignorance at its best.
When you see a factory production line, a complex machine, a computer, a message, a translation dictionary, a watch, do you intuitively conclude somebody made it? Yes, of course.
Would you say that it is plausible that a tornado over a junkyard could produce a self-replicating machine, like John von Neumann's Universal Constructor?
Would you say that it is plausible that mindless random chance can write a book like a random letter generator using a computers number generator? if you see a message on a sand dune, like " John loves Sandy ". Would you intuitively and immediately recognize that someone past there a short time ago, and wrote the message on the sand dune? Or would you be unable to recognize that intelligence was required to write the message? The universe, the cell, and organisms are far more complex than the most complex machines made by man, and the simplest cell stores as much information as contained in a CD.
There are only these options. Either is there an intelligent creator, or there is not. Those are the only options. If there is no God, then everything is a result of ..... what exactly?
Chance, as exposed above, isn't a thing. Physical necessity could only act once a physical universe exists. Beyond the universe, there were no physical laws.
Once it granted that nothing has no causal powers, it's evident the universe could not have emerged from absolutely anything. Nobody times nothing equals everything is irrational to the extreme ( nonetheless, some very "smart" people think that proposition makes sense, and write extensive books about the subject ). Or, behind this complex universe is an incomprehensibly intelligent and powerful eternal being who made everything.
The capacity of atheists to invert things is remarkable. They claim to not being able to know what can be known and understood easily. And claim to know what nobody really knows for sure.
They claim to not being able to know how the universe and life might have emerged and what mechanism was most probably in play, based on the evidence. And on top of that, argue that this is the most honest position someone can take. But they are absolutely certain of common ancestry, and that microevolution leads to macroevolution and biodiversity during long periods of time. That - they claim, is an unquestionable fact.
The inversion is evident. Based on logic and reasoning, and the scientific evidence, we can infer with certainty that a causal agent was required to create all physical things, the universe, life, and biodiversity.
But in regard to chemistry, biochemistry, biology, evolutionary and ecological mechanisms, we know that things are EXTRAORDINARILY COMPLEX, cannot be easily known and understood. And in fact, many things, we still don't know. But atheists think they do. The proponent of evolution believes that a theory from the 19th century is right, despite the fact that back then, knowledge in biology was limited, and that its rather simplistic explanation through mutations and natural selection is supposedly able to account for all biodiversity, bacterias, plants, fish, birds, apes, humans, body plan development, histology, and cell differentiation, the origin of pluripotent stem cells, and the enormous complex modifications observed in living beings , which are able to adapt to the environment. Be aware of all these ultracrepidarianists. If you do not agree with them, they call you a pigeon playing chess, Dunning-Kruger and alike, but never really look into the mirror to see who is in front of them !!
5 Easy Steps to refute naturalism
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1877-easy-steps-to-refute-naturalism
Either the cosmos
(1) had no beginning, or
(2) it had a beginning.
(1) If the cosmos had no beginning, then there must be an infinite series of past events. However, it is impossible to traverse an actual infinite. Therefore, the universe cannot be infinitely old. Besides that, If the cosmos was infinitely old, it would have reached maximum entropy a long, long, time ago. Since it has not reached maximum entropy, it cannot be infinitely old without violating the second law of thermodynamics.
(2) If the cosmos had a beginning, then it must have come from (A) nothing or (B) something.
2.A. Although physicists such as Krauss and Hawking talk about "the universe creating itself from nothing," they are using the word "nothing" to mean the vacuum energy, which is not a true nothing. To be more precise, being cannot emerge from non-being. That would violate the first law of thermodynamics: energy can be neither created or destroyed; it can only change form. So the cosmos did not emerge from non-being.
2.B. If the entire cosmos came from something, that thing must transcend our cosmos, that is, it must exist beyond the limits of our space/time continuum. It must also possess more energy (power) than the total energy within our cosmos. We may call it the First Cause.
Fine-tuning of the universe
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1277-fine-tuning-of-the-universe
1. If our universe is random, then it is very unlikely that it permits life.
2. Our universe permits life.
3. Therefore, the existence of our universe is very likely due to something other than chance.
“The really amazing thing is not that life on Earth is balanced on a knife-edge, but that the entire universe is balanced on a knife-edge, and would be total chaos if any of the natural ‘constants’ were off even slightly. You see,” Davies adds, “even if you dismiss the man as a chance happening, the fact remains that the universe seems unreasonably suited to the existence of life — almost contrived — you might say a ‘put-up job’.”
Dr. Paul Davies, noted author and professor of theoretical physics at Adelaide University
Abiogenesis is impossible
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1279-abiogenesis-is-impossible
The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution, Eugene V. Koonin, page 351:
The origin of life is the most difficult problem that faces evolutionary biology and, arguably, biology in general. Indeed, the problem is so hard and the current state of the art seems so frustrating that some researchers prefer to dismiss the entire issue as being outside the scientific domain altogether, on the grounds that unique events are not conducive to scientific study.
Would you say that it is plausible that a tornado over a junkyard could produce a self-replicating machine, like John von Neumann's Universal Constructor?
Would you say that it is plausible that mindless random chance can write a book?
Objection: Marcello Barbieri writes: Comparing living cells to man-made self-replicating machines, and books is a false analogy
Answer: Molecular biology has proved that there is a genetic code in every cell and that genes and proteins are molecular artifacts because they are manufactured by molecular machines. Coding and artifact-making, in other words, take place both in our society and inside the cell, and this does create a parallel between culture and molecular biology. Code Biology A New Science of Life, page 28
In other words. Intelligence produces self-replicating machines and books. And so only intelligence can produce life, that depends on coded information, proteins, and molecular machines.
If the analogy of two phenomena are very close and striking while at the same time, the cause of ONE of the phenomenon is very obvious; it becomes scarcely possible to refuse to admit the action of an analogous cause of the other phenomenon, though (the cause of the other phenomenon is) not so obvious in itself"
--- in "Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy", London, Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1831, page 149.
When you see that:
the way genetic information encoded in the DNA is exactly the same as what we humans would do to encode information in our books, computers, etc;
the way that the nucleus communicates with its ribosome is similar to how we humans has designed computers to communicate with one another,
then one has to AT LEAST stop and wonder whether some intelligent being has designed the genetic code and made the communication system between the nucleus and its ribosomes....
Perry Marshall, Evolution 2.0, 1
Although this is not a conclusive proof of the existence of God, it should AT LEAST make one STOP and THINK about the possibility of the existence of God....
In regard to origins, either there was a causal agent, or there was not. It's not sufficient to say: I don't believe in God and think this is a solid epistemological framework. All possible mechanisms of origins need a serious consideration, including design. The question: What would have to be observed in the natural world to detect design ? is essential.
Abiogenesis, Dawkins blind watchmaker hypothesis, and common ancestry is all based on indirect observations. That is, from today's observed evidence, past causal action is inferred, similar to a detective getting his conclusions on a crime scene from the evidence on the crime scene. To do so, it must be established what could be recognized as a designed structure and patterns of intelligent interference.
In the design revolution, Dembski writes on page 220:
So see that the argument from ignorance objection is not a magic wand for silencing intelligent design, let's begin with a reality check. When is the argument from ignorance objection raised against intelligent design, who exactly is being accused of being ignorant? Its natural to think that the ignorance here is on the part of design theorists, who want to attribute intelligent agency to biological systems. If only those poor design theorists understood biology better, those systems would readily submit to mechanistic explanation. Matter of fact IMHO is, that despite decades of research, the scientific community has been desperately and unsuccessfully tried to discover how such systems could have formed, what mechanism exactly was in charge. Who is ignorant here? The Scientific community as a whole. In fact, it's safe to say that the biological community is clueless about the emergence of biological complexity. How so?
Because the material mechanisms to which the biological community looks to explain biological complexity provide no clue for how those systems might realistically have come about. the problem, therefore, is not ignorance or personal incredulity, but global disciplinary failure, and gross theoretical inadequacy of Darwin's theory. James Shapiro, the molecular biologist at the university of Chicago, conceded that system that exhibits specified complexity are likely to be designed. Design theorists, in attributing design to systems that exhibit specified complexity (SC), are simply doing what scientists do generally, which is an attempt to formulate a causally adequate explanation for the phenomenon in question. To attribute specified complexity, and thereby design, to a biological system is to engage in an eliminative induction, a form of reasoning, used throughout the sciences. Eliminative inductions argue for the truth of a proposition by arguing that competitors to that proposition are false.
Pretend you wake up in the morning and there's a birthday cake sitting on your kitchen table, and it just happens to be your birthday. What do you think? You ask yourself, "Where did this cake come from?" There are only a couple of possibilities, theoretically. It could have just materialized out of nowhere on your kitchen table coincidentally on your birthday. It could have just "poofed" into existence. I guess that would be in the realm of theoretic possibilities. Or maybe a great, hot, wet wind blew through your neighbor's kitchen gathering up a bunch of ingredients and kind of accidentally baked a cake that landed on your table. The fact that it happened on your birthday is a coincidence. I guess that would be "possible" too. The cake could have come out of nowhere or could have just assembled itself by chance. Or the other alternative would be that a person baked the cake for you and dropped it off in the middle of the night.
http://enrichmentjournal.ag.org/201303/201303_026_Athiests.cfm
The Christian Geneticist Francis Collins of Human Genome Project fame said he was an agnostic in college. Yet he confesses that his “I don’t know” was more an “I don’t want to know” attitude — a “willful blindness.” This agnosticism eventually gave way to outright atheism — although Collins would later come to faith in Christ. He began reading C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, and Collins realized his own antireligious constructs were “those of a schoolboy.”
Because the existence of God is a massively important topic, we cannot afford not to pay attention — especially in an age of so many diversions. Philosopher Tom Morris points out that sports, TV, restaurants, concerts, cars, billiards, and a thousand other activities can divert us from the ultimate issues of life. As a result, we don’t “tune into” God. And when a crisis hits (death, hospitalization, natural disaster), we are not really in the best condition to process and make accurate judgments about those deep questions. The person who says, “I do not know if God exists,” may have chosen to live by diversions and distractions and thus to ignore God. This is not an innocent ignorance; this ignorance is the result of our neglecting our duty.
So the theist, atheist, and militant (ornery) agnostic all bear a burden of proof; the theist does not have a heavier burden since all claim to know something. Furthermore, even the alleged ordinary agnostic still is not off the hook. For one thing, one cannot remain neutral all his life; he will make commitments or hold beliefs all along the way that reflect either an atheistic or theistic worldview. He is either going to be a practical atheist or practical theist (or a mixture of the two) in some fashion throughout his life. But he can’t straddle the fence for long. Also, the ordinary agnostic may say, “I do not know,” but this often means “I do not care” — the view of an “apatheist.” Refusing to seek out whether God exists or not; refusing to humble oneself to seek whatever light about God is available; living a life of distractions rather than thoughtfully reflecting about one’s meaning, purpose or destiny leaves one culpable in his ignorance, not innocent.
Paul Davies, the fifth miracle: At that time, the very notion that life might spring into being spontaneously from a nonliving chemical mixture was greeted with fierce criticism from theologians, and even from some scientists. The eminent British physicist Lord Kelvin dismissed the whole idea as “a very ancient speculation,” opining that “science brings a vast mass of inductive evidence against this hypothesis.” He stated unequivocally, “Dead matter cannot become living without coming under the influence of matter previously alive.” This left only two alternatives: either life has always existed or its origin was a miracle.
It's not justified to claim " we don't know ", when a limited range of alternatives and options are available. If you assert that there is a god...then ok, let's move on. If you assert that there is no god, then let's lay your evidence and argumentation for that assertion against the evidence and argumentation for the existence of god...and let's get on with it.
The real-world consequence of agnostic atheism is that objective physical evidence is being effectively denied in favor of the mere presumption that we "just don’t yet know the details" of how a dimensional semiotic system came into being "by material processes alone". The problems with this position should be obvious to anyone. Firstly, this presumption completely ignores the intractable evidence against it. Secondly, if the opposing position is true, there will not be a purely material explanation to be found in the first place. This effectively cements science into the unfortunate position of forever searching for the details of an explanation that does not exist, while systematically ignoring the explanation already clearly indicated by the evidence.
Last edited by Otangelo on Fri 29 Dec 2023 - 12:17; edited 50 times in total
