Perguntas ....

cellular coordination
heart-stopping level
astounding admission
twist the science to fit his worldview
There are two directions in which things can go wrong—or they can be “just right”. It happens that our universe is extremely perfectly calibrated, just right.
unanimate
super-intelligent ultra-design.
ATGC quartet
adios, evolution.
biologically disastrous
carefully crafted solutions
carefully planned inventions
chemical architecture
crucial reaction
could not come one after the other
could make it work
crucial selective criteria
crucial-for-life reason for this amazing chemical trick.
dauntingly improbable
engineering marvel
engineering cleverness
example of high technology
exquisite balance
exquisite interplay
exquisitely designed biomolecules
exquisitely engineered molecular arrangement
exquisite molecular machines
“Fantastic Four”
finely engineered
hallmark of foresight and sound engineering
How did this perfect,  molecular wonder form without anything telling it to?
have to be in place at the same time
highly intricate network
incredible process
indication of the planning involved
If only one exists without the other, no cell at all
incredible bioengineering
ingenious solutions
ingeniously crafted devices
It’s make or break
it’s far and away the best
large multimolecular machines
let’s reason through the claim
life’s long-term storehouse of genetic information
making, finding, and specifically selecting this particular and life-essential
many orders of magnitude
mastery
masterful information-storage molecule
miniaturized technology
molecular architecture
must also be incredible
purely blind chemical forces have accomplished this challenging
putting it mildly
ready to go in the very first organism
wonderful array
wonder of engineering finesse
wonderful chemical trick!
striking solutions
superb atmosphere
superb for the job they have
perfectly suited
perfect link to construct
set of problems that had to be solved and implemented virtually simultaneously,
this stability control for both DNA and RNA had to be anticipated ahead of time and the solution provided with just-in-time delivery
to drive home the point
very elegant and ingenious process
“were born” to make
which came first, the DNA or the correction machinery?




phosphate anion PO4 3- , with its four oxygen atoms distributed in a tetrahedral fashion around the phosphorous atom producing a triple-negative charge.
Another is the five-membered cyclic sugar molecule—ribose—with four available OH linking sites.
four different kinds of stable, rigid, and heterocyclic bases, two purines and two pyrimidines, each with the ability to firmly attach to ribose via covalent bonds and to each other via two or three H-bonding “supramolecular” arms




But before that, he made an interesting remark, outlined on the left in red: The only way to find out is to make every possible effort to explain things naturally. Only if one fails—assuming failure can ever be definitely established—would one be entitled to state that what one is studying is not naturally explainable.

And that is precisely what was done in regards to the attempt to discover a natural mechanism to select right-handed RNA's for life. No mechanism has been found, and De Duve himself basically raised the white flag to confess: Chance !! Chance did it !! 


William Dembski, The Design Revolution, page 220 
Eliminative inductions argue for the truth of a proposition by arguing that competitors to that proposition are false. ( Contrast this with Popperian falsification, where propositions are corroborated to the degree that they successfully withstand attempts to falsify them ) Provided the proposition, together with its competitors, form a mutually exclusive and exhaustive class, eliminating all the competitors entails that the proposition is true. 

As Sherlock Holmes famous dictum says: when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. This is the ideal case, in which eliminative inductions, in fact, become deductions. If normally, in practice, we don't have a neat ordering of competitors that can then all be knocked down with a few straightforward and judicious blows, in case of the origin of life, there are just two possible options:




Either life was created by an intelligent creator, or life started by  random unguided chemical reactions. Some try to sugar-coat the mechanism of abiogenesis as " chemical evolution", and a considerable number of science papers do smuggle the evolutionary jargon into abiogenesis, but there has to be made a clear distinction. Evolution is only a possible candidate to explain origins once DNA replication was set up.




Some have also tried to brandmark this dichotomy as a black and white fallacy, or "false dilemma" fallacy.  When only two choices are presented yet more exist, or a spectrum of possible choices exists between two extremes.  False dilemmas are usually characterized by “either this or that” language, but can also be characterized by omissions of choices. So is either intelligent design or chance, a false dilemma?

Many times, proponents of natural causes try to argue in that manner.


"The more statistically improbable a thing is, the less can we believe that it just happened by blind chance. Superficially the obvious alternative to chance is an intelligent Designer. But Charles Darwin showed how it is possible for blind physical forces to mimic the effects of conscious design, and, by operating as a cumulative filter of chance variations, to lead eventual to organized and adaptive complexity, to mosquitoes and mammoths, to humans and therefore, indirectly, to books and computers.
"Darwin's theory is now supported by all the available relevant evidence, and its truth is not doubted by any serious modern biologist...

What Dawkins however conveniently overlooks is the fact that the origin of life cannot be explained through evolution.


Koonin, the logic of chance, page 266
Evolution by natural selection and drift can begin only after replication with sufficient fidelity is established. Even at that stage, the evolution of translation remains highly problematic. The emergence of the first replicator system, which represented the “Darwinian breakthrough,” was inevitably preceded by a succession of complex, difficult steps for which biological evolutionary mechanisms were not accessible . The synthesis of nucleotides and (at least) moderate-sized polynucleotides could not have evolved biologically and must have emerged abiogenically—that is, effectively by chance abetted by chemical selection, such as the preferential survival of stable RNA species. Translation is thought to have evolved later via an ad hoc selective process.  

Did you read this ???!! An ad-hoc process ?? That's true. That's all which is left when the design is dismissed.


Koonin states clearly as the proposed mechanism to explain the origin of RNA monomers, chance, and in order to remain in the realm of materialism, multiverses as a possible explanation. So we remain at the dichotomy of two possible explanations in regards to the Origin of Life: Chance and Intelligent design, 

and as well, in a broader sense, in regards to possible worldviews: 


Any worldview is limited in that it does not grant absolute truth, but only yields degrees of probability or likelihood. Bayesian inference is a method of statistical inference in which Bayes' theorem is used to update the probability of a hypothesis as more evidence or information becomes available. Bayesian inference has found application in a wide range of activities, including science, theology, and philosophy. After careful examination, all we can do is come to instant-deduction to the best explanation.


A common attempt of refutation by unbelievers is that there might be other possible options of worldviews, not just two - we have just not figured out yet. We can apply Russell's Teapot. If the unbeliever wishes to claim that there are other options, its upon him to demonstrate it. Assertions without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.


Darwin wrote: To be brief I assume that species arise like our domestic varieties with much extinction;  And it seems to me, that supposing that such hypothesis were to explain general propositions, we ought, in accordance with a common way of following all sciences, to admit it, till some better hypothesis be found out.   July 20, 1857 The Correspondence of Charles Darwin

It asserts the superior explanatory power of a proposed cause based upon its proven—its known—causal adequacy and based upon a lack of demonstrated efficacy among the competing proposed causes.  The problem is that nature has too many options and without design couldn’t sort them all out.

Natural mechanisms are too unspecific to determine any particular outcome. Luck/chance/probability could theoretically sort out right-handed RNA's  with the right size and form, and arrange to find out the right place where to bond the base and phosphate, but it could  also bind it at any of the five ribose carbons, and grow and attach them anywhere, most of which have no biological advantage or are most probably deleterious.

Natural mechanisms have no constraints, they could produce any kind of novelty. Its however that kind of freedom that makes it extremely unlikely that mere natural developments provide new specific arrangements that are advantageous to form an information storing polymer.  Nature would have to arrange almost an infinite number of trials and errors until getting a new positive arrangement.

Since that would become a highly unlikely event, design is a better explanation. This situation becomes even more accentuated when natural selection is not a possible constrained since evolution depends on replication, which did not exist prior to DNA replication



So is the design inference not a God of the gaps inference, after all ?  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? It's 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.

We also know from broad and repeated experience that intelligent agents can and do produce information-rich systems: we have positive experience-based knowledge of a cause that is sufficient to generate new instructing complex information, namely, intelligence.  the design inference does not constitute an argument from ignorance.

Instead, it constitutes an "inference to the best explanation" based upon our best available knowledge. Now, of course, are immediately the ones at the corner raising concern and objection, claiming that " inference to the best explanation" rather than falsifiable science is another cop-our of Intelligent Design promoters. Well, this epistemological approach is a littlebit older than some might expect.


The fallacy of Personal Incredulity goes as follows: Because something is so incredible or difficult to imagine, it is wrong. "Incredulous" basically means "I don't believe it". It is at least disingenious, when atheists accuse theists to be incredule towards the No-God hypothesis, when they commit the same, by being incredulous towards the God hypothesis, because they can't imagine how an invisible God could exist.

Well, why should someone believe a "just so" story about HOW reality, the physical world, and in our special case, RNA, DNA, and nucleotides came to exist, if all the scientific evidence points to the fact that it cannot occur ? That is the THING that we are incredulous about - a *certain scenario* ( naturalism, cosmological, chemical, and biological evolution, abiogenesis and Neo-Darwinism)

and that irreducibly complex biological systems, coded, instructional or specified complex information, and entire factory complexes composed of myriads of interconnected factories, full of computers and robotic production lines could emerge naturally ) that's only *imagined* about how various amazing abilities of animals and plants happened all by themselves, defying known and reasonable principles of the limited range of chance, physical necessity, mutations and  Natural selection.

The proponent of naturalism is "incredulous" that an intelligent creator/designer could exist, beyond and behind our entire space-time continuum, who is our Creator. But there is nothing ridiculous about that - especially if you can't personally examine reality to that depth - how do you know nature is all that exists?

What IS ridiculous (IMO) is trying to imagine a *naturalistic origin* of these things.  What we need, is giving a *plausible* account of how it came about to be in the first place, and the " No-God hypothesis" simply doesn't cut the cake.

Is it reasonable to assume, that unguided random events, self-assembly, spontaneously by orderly aggregation and sequentially correct manner without external direction would produce a polypeptide chain of RNA on early earth, which somehow would have started to self replicate and produce a useful product for distant life, in face of all difficulties to produce even one functional RNA molecule?

If you can't make a brick, you can't make a house. Naturalistic beliefism is an anecdotal pseudo-scientific House of Cards.
If you can't make right-handed nucleotides, you cannot make life essential information storage and transmission mechanisms, consequently no proteins, nor biological cells.

ATGC quartet
adios, evolution.
biologically disastrous
carefully crafted solutions
carefully planned inventions
chemical architecture
crucial reaction
could not come one after the other
could make it work
crucial selective criteria
crucial-for-life reason for this amazing chemical trick.
dauntingly improbable
engineering marvel
engineering cleverness
example of high technology
exquisite balance
exquisite interplay
exquisitely designed biomolecules
exquisitely engineered molecular arrangement
exquisite molecular machines
“Fantastic Four”
finely engineered
hallmark of foresight and sound engineering
How did this perfect, molecular wonder form without anything telling it to?
have to be in place at the same time
highly intricate network
incredible process
indication of the planning involved
If only one exists without the other, no cell at all
ingenious solutions
ingeniously crafted devices
It’s make or break
it’s far and away the best
large multimolecular machines
let’s reason through the claim
life’s long-term storehouse of genetic information
making, finding, and specifically selecting this particular and life-essential
many orders of magnitude
masterful information-storage molecule
miniaturized technology
molecular architecture
must also be incredible
purely blind chemical forces have accomplished this challenging
putting it mildly
ready to go in the very first organism
wonderful array
wonder of engineering finesse
wonderful chemical trick!
striking solutions
superb atmosphere
superb for the job they have
perfectly suited
perfect link to construct
set of problems that had to be solved and implemented virtually simultaneously,
this stability control for both DNA and RNA had to be anticipated ahead of time and the solution provided with just-in-time delivery
to drive home the point
very elegant and ingenious process
“were born” to make
which came first, the DNA or the correction machinery?




phosphate anion PO4 3- , with its four oxygen atoms distributed in a tetrahedral fashion around the phosphorous atom producing a triple-negative charge.
Another is the five-membered cyclic sugar molecule—ribose—with four available OH linking sites.
four different kinds of stable, rigid, and heterocyclic bases, two purines and two pyrimidines, each with the ability to firmly attach to ribose via covalent bonds and to each other via two or three H-bonding “supramolecular” arms



Report of the Discovery Summer Seminar 2019 experience in Seattle

Otangelo Grasso

From the 5th to the 13th of July 2019, the Discovery Institute did hold its annual Summer Seminars on Intelligent Design in the Natural Sciences, the 12th, since it was started in 2007.

The Brazilian branch of Discovery Institute, headed by the distinguished scientist Marcos Eberlin, is in preparation of the book: " first Brazilian Collection of Intelligent Design arguments", where several of leading Brazilian scientists  are writing on various topics of Intelligent Design, which they endorse. I will write together with a scientist a chapter on the complex molecular machinery of the Cell. My co-writing partner told me that she applied to join the Summer Seminar in Seattle, so I thought it would be a good idea to apply, too, and was selected together amongst 52 mostly young scientists to join. People from ten different countries, from all parts of the world, received the privilege to attend. Daniel Reeves was in charge to organize our voyage and stay. Communication was excellent, and the whole organization of the event carefully and meticulously planned. The accommodations at Pacific Seattle University were also very good and comfortable, and so was the varied cuisine during our stay.

Since this was my first experience, I had no idea what to expect, and who would do the teachings in the classes, and when Daniel send us the Syllabus of Sessions and information of the program, listed was the who's who, all the great names of the ID movement, which I never met before. So-exciting days ahead, and my expectations did Skyrock. The program was well organized into various interesting topics:

The first day, on Saturday, Ann Gauger & Brian Miller were going to make the Introduction to the Seminar. Followed by John West on the Teleological v. Materialistic View of Man and Nature. Next was an Overview of Intelligent Design & Design Detection by Ann Gauger & Brian Miller, and at night:  Philosophy of Mind and Neuroscience by J.P. Moreland

Monday morning, Guillermo Gonzalez & Jay Richards spoke about  Big Bang Cosmology and the Kalam Cosmological Argument. Next was Luke Barnes: A Fortunate Universe: Cosmological Fine-Tuning. Building upon these two lectures, Stephen Meyer gave a lecture on a New Cosmological Argument, which is also the matter of his new forthcoming book. This was for me the highlight and best lecture at the Seminar, to which I will come to talk later. Next, Guillermo Gonzalez spoke about Research Topics in Astrobiology and Bruce Gordon on Multiverses, and last lecture of the day: Guillermo Gonzalez & Jay Richard: The Privileged Planet.

On Tuesday we had: Evidence of Intelligent Design in the Origin of Life by Brian Miller, which was also an excellent lecture, which demonstrated, Brian is a true expert on the topic of the Origin of Life. After this lecture, another true highlight of the Seminar: Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design by Stephen Meyer. In the afternoon, Günter Bechly was lecturing from the Austrian Alps, via life broadcasting on the internet, about The Fossil Record: A Problem for Neo-Darwinian Evolution, and after a break, Michael Behe about  Irreducible Complexity, and then, Further Presentation on Co-Option, by Ann Gauger. The last lecture of the day was: Population Genetics, Part 1: The Edge of Evolution, by Michael Behe

Wednesday started with: Population Genetics, Part 2: Whale Evolution, by Richard Sternberg, followed by Ann Gauger about Obstacles to Evolution, and in the afternoon,    Winston Ewert gave a bit more theoretical & technical lecture: A Design-Based Model to Explain the Pattern of Nature. Then came Douglas Axe on Using Stylus, and another lecture which I really liked, was Developmental Mutations, given by Paul Nelson.

Thursday started with Jonathan Wells about Ontogenetic Information, followed by  Richard Sternberg about the Immaterial Genome. In the afternoon,  Douglas Axe's lecture was:  Natural Selection is Not Inventive, and after a break, Paul Nelson on  Challenges to Common Descent.

Friday morning, Günter Bechly & Ann Gauger's lecture was: The Biology of Human Uniqueness. In the afternoon, Robert Marks lectured about Artificial Intelligence & Human Uniqueness, followed by John West, on  Social Darwinism & Public Policy, and How to Survive Academia.

The last lecture was on Saturday, by John West: Science, Faith, and Intelligent Design

There were over 60 hours of lectures. All lecturers were great, but I cannot do justice to all, go in-depth in a rather short post, and mention all relevant points and arguments that were made. I will constrain to mention and outline a few key points, and did stand out and gave me new inputs for further investigations and learn more about the subjects presented. 

Stephen Meyer's lecture of his new argument, based on astronomical observations ( which will be also the topic of his forthcoming new book ), did stand out. First of all, it was unprecedented ( at least to me ) to see Stephen giving a lecture on Cosmology. Secondly, he did it with eloquence, without reading from a script, and even if he used cosmological parlance which I was not familiar with, the overall argument was presented in a clear understandable manner. 

He said: 

" There is an agreement that the energy condition is positive during all the time of this expansion.  But now there is this weird quantum dimension. So when the universe is very very small, it would be indeterministic, and so it is when crossing the point of singularity, some physicists say, well wait, we could have points of fluctuations, that would cause the universe to violate the energy conditions, where you have temporarily a negative energy condition. 

Those initial conditions that give rise to the expansion of the universe have to be finely tuned. The information has to be provided to the laws in order for them to do any good at all. In any case, in order to solve this big equation, you need to have boundary constraints and the boundary constraints will contain an outcome, that includes our universe is a reasonably probable outcome, which is very precisely chosen. " 

My comment: Indeed. 
Fine-tuning of the Big Bang 

https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1866-fine-tuning-of-the-big-bang

The Big Bang was the most precisely planned event in all of history

Professor Stephen Hawking: 
'If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the Universe would have recollapsed before it ever reached its present state.' -

Steven Weinberg Department of Physics, University of Texas 
There are now two cosmological constant problems. The old cosmological constant problem is to understand in a natural way why the vacuum energy density ρV is not very much larger. We can reliably calculate some contributions to ρV , like the energy density in fluctuations in the gravitational field at graviton energies nearly up to the Planck scale, which is larger than is observationally allowed by some 120 orders of magnitude. Such terms in ρV can be cancelled by other contributions that we can’t calculate, but the cancellation then has to be accurate to 120 decimal places.

When one calculates, based on known principles of quantum mechanics, the "vacuum energy density" of the universe, focusing on the electromagnetic force, one obtains the incredible result that empty space "weighs" 1,093g per cubic centimetre (cc). The actual average mass density of the universe, 10-28g per cc, differs by 120 orders of magnitude from theory. 5 Physicists, who have fretted over the cosmological constant paradox for years, have noted that calculations such as the above involve only the electromagnetic force, and so perhaps when the contributions of the other known forces are included, all terms will cancel out to exactly zero, as a consequence of some unknown fundamental principle of physics.  But these hopes were shattered with the 1998 discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, which implied that the cosmological constant must be slightly positive. This meant that physicists were left to explain the startling fact that the positive and negative contributions to the cosmological constant cancel to 120-digit accuracy, yet fail to cancel beginning at the 121st digit.

Curiously, this observation is in accord with a prediction made by Nobel laureate and physicist Steven Weinberg in 1987, who argued from basic principles that the cosmological constant must be zero to within one part in roughly 10^123 (and yet be nonzero), or else the universe either would have dispersed too fast for stars and galaxies to have formed, or else would have recollapsed upon itself long ago. In short, numerous features of our universe seem fantastically fine-tuned for the existence of intelligent life. While some physicists still hold out for a "natural" explanation, many others are now coming to grips with the notion that our universe is profoundly unnatural, with no good explanation.

Lee Smolin wrote in his 2006 book The Trouble with Physics:
We physicists need to confront the crisis facing us. A scientific theory [the multiverse/ Anthropic Principle/ string theory paradigm] that makes no predictions and therefore is not subject to experiment can never fail, but such a theory can never succeed either, as long as science stands for knowledge gained from rational argument borne out by evidence.


DNA can be read in the forward direction, backwards, and Stephen Meyer told us that there is an ongoing scientific research of bacteria, where a strand of their DNA information can be read in the forward direction, and  have three different meanings when read forwards, and the same strand can provide three different kinds of information to produce different proteins as well when reading backwards,  !! That means, one single blueprint can be used in a variety of different ways and build different products. Thats striking evidence of design. 

I asked Richard Sternberg, where epigenetic information, like the splicing Code, is stored, and he said, that science has no answer to this (yet).

Another interesting point was brought up by Ann Gauger in one of her lessons. The placenta of mammals provide common structural and functional features, but there are striking differences among species in gross and microscopic structure of the placenta, and there is a classification of placentas of several fundamental types.  The reproductive strategy of birthing live young in special in mammals is different in many species.
So the evolutionary narrative goes that the placental mammals have evolved a variety of placental types. Convergent evolution is a common cop-out. But that goes straight against evolutionary predictions. 

“…No finale can be specified at the start, none would ever occur a second time in the same way, because any pathway proceeds through thousands of improbable stages. Alter any early event, ever so slightly, and without apparent importance at the time, and evolution cascades into a radically different channel."
Stephen J. Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989), 51.

Gould’s metaphor of “replaying life’s tape” asserts that if one were to push the rewind button, erase life’s history, and let the tape run again, the results would be completely different.  The very essence of the evolutionary process renders evolutionary outcomes as nonreproducible (or nonrepeatable). Therefore, “repeatable” evolution is inconsistent with the mechanism available to bring about biological change.

Paleontologist J. William Schopf, one of the world’s leading authorities on early life on Earth, has made this very point in the book Life’s Origin.
Because biochemical systems comprise many intricately interlinked pieces, any particular full-blown system can only arise once…Since any complete biochemical system is far too elaborate to have evolved more than once in the history of life, it is safe to assume that microbes of the primal LCA cell line had the same traits that characterize all its present-day descendants.

Brian Miller gave a great lecture on the Origin of Life. 

Here the highlights:
From a synthetic chemical perspective, neither I nor any  of my colleagues can fathom a prebiotic molecular route  to construction of a complex system. We cannot even figure out the prebiotic routes to the basic building blocks of life: carbohydrates, nucleic acids, lipids, and proteins. Chemists are collectively bewildered. Hence I say that no chemist understands prebiotic synthesis of the requisite building blocks, let alone assembly into a complex system.
James Tour, Rice University

Summary:
1. The chances for the first cell forming is too small if all arrangements of atoms are equally probable.
2. Those arrangements which correspond to life are far less probable than all possible starting points.
3. All-natural processes move toward higher entropy and/or lower energy (lower free energy), but the origin of life has to move in the opposite direction.
4. Systems far from equilibrium are no more likely to generate the first cell since they also tend toward higher entropy and the release of energy, while life requires the opposite.
5. Molecular machinery is needed to convert one form of energy into the high-energy molecules needed to drive reactions.
6. Life requires a very specific set of interconnected reactions to proceed and other destructive reactions to be prevented.
7. Enzymes drive the correct reactions, and they direct the energy from the breakdown of the high-energy molecules toward the enabling of energetically unfavourable reactions.
8. The enzymes are the result of sequences of amino acids containing to the right information like letters in a sentence.
9. Proteins eventually break down, so amino acid sequences must be stored in (encoded into) RNA/DNA.
10. Encoding involves each amino acid being represented by sequences of three nucleotides called codons (e.g. Ala à GCA).
11. No physical connection exists between any amino acid and its corresponding codons, so no physical process could have driven the encoding of the information.
12. The decoding process must use the same code as the encoding, but they cannot have any physical connection.
13. The information and code must have preexisted the cell.
14. DNA contains the encoded schematics for the cell in the same way that the signal from space in the movie Contact contained the schematics for a spaceship.
15. A minimally functional cell must have the machinery for numerous processes such as information processing, manufacturing and assembly of parts, and self-replication.
16. The cell’s processes demonstrate clear evidence of foresight, coordination, and goal direction which point unambiguously to intelligent design.
17. An intelligence had to create the information for the structure/operation of the cell and then construct it in world.


I can recommend anyone interested in Intelligent Design, to apply for next years Summer Seminar. It is a great experience, and i am thankful to all the Discovery staff and lecturers, which provided such a great experience !! 


Otangelo Grasso

Brian Miller's lecture:  detecting design:
Modern approaches to inverse modelling use approaches from heuristic optimization (Corne et al., 1999) to search the model space efficiently. Recent advances in multiobjective optimization (Fonseca and Fleming, 1996) are particularly promising in this regard since the quality of a model can usually be evaluated only by considering several, often conflicting criteria. A hope for understanding complexity in biology then is to uncover operational principles through a “calculus of purpose” (Lander, 2004)—by asking teleological questions such as why cellular networks are organized as observed, given their known or assumed function. At a more abstract level, we see highly organized and structured networks that facilitate global and coordinated responses to variations in the environment on all time scales, using local and decentralized mechanisms. Clearly, from an engineering point of view, biology is a marvel of technological “design.” We argue that analogies with engineered systems, in particular regarding how to generate appropriate responses to variations, are one major requirement on all highly integrated systems that can help us grasp biological complexity.

 The concept of “highly optimized tolerance” (HOT) relies on the very idea that robustness has to be regarded as a limited and conserved resource… In addition, HOT emphasizes a necessary connection between complexity and robustness. Making certain functions of a system more insensitive to disturbances, for instance, may require additional control loops. This, in turn, leads to higher complexity and to new potential sources of fragility. The effect is a “spiralling complexity” in which new features expose new fragilities to be “fixed” by further additions to the system (Carlson and Doyle, 2002). Clearly, evolvability is of paramount importance for living systems (Kirschner and Gerhart, 1998). Here, we think of evolvability simply (maybe naively) in the sense of controlled and structured change in lineages, rather than cells, on long time scales in response to perhaps large variations in the environment. At the population level (of all engineered systems of one type), evidently, progress in engineering fulfils similar criteria. From engineering, it is known that feedback control (plus feedforward control) enabled by fast and if possible remote advanced-warning sensing is the most powerful mechanism for providing robustness to fluctuations in the environment and the component parts. The heat-shock response in E. coli appears to employ exactly the same principles as shown by detailed modeling and subsequent model reduction to the core elements (El-Samad et al., 2005).

From engineering, it is known that feedback control (plus feedforward control) enabled by fast and if possible remote advanced-warning sensing is the most powerful mechanism for providing robustness to fluctuations in the environment and the component parts. The heat-shock response in E. coli appears to employ exactly the same principles … we adopted a high-level view of cellular systems by combining biology and engineering approaches. This perspective does not want to disguise large differences between the two types of systems; in fact, biology often shows a more remarkable “design” than technology.

My comment: 
What i outlined in Brian Miller's lecture above, adds to refute common arguments brought forward against Bad design:
Imperfection merely raises the question of why an intelligent designer used plan A, rather than plan B.
Some, for example, point to the cruelty in nature, arguing that no self-respecting designer would set things up that way. This argument assumes an infallible knowledge of the design process. But that need not be the case. It may well be that the designer chose to create an “OPTIMUM DESIGN” or a “ROBUST AND ADAPTABLE DESIGN” rather than a “perfect design.” Perhaps some animals or creatures behave exactly the way they do to enhance the ecology in ways that we don’t know about. Perhaps the “apparent” destructive behaviour of some animals provides other animals with an advantage in order to maintain balance in nature or even to change the proportions of the animal population.

Evolution, adaptation, homeostasis, and the essential preprogrammed processes essential for life to survive in a changing environment 
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2724-evolution-adaptation-homeostasis-and-the-essential-preprogrammed-processes-essential-for-life-to-survive-in-a-changing-environment

Microevolution is better described as adaptation and is an engineered process, which does not happen by accident. The Cell receives macroscopic signals from the environment and responds by adaptive, nonrandom mutations. The capacity of Mammals and other multicellular organisms to adapt to changing environmental conditions is extraordinary.  In order to effectively produce and secrete mature proteins, cellular mechanisms for monitoring the environment are essential. Exposure of cells to various environmental causes accumulation of unfolded proteins and results in the activation of a well-orchestrated set of pathways during a phenomenon known as the unfolded protein response (UPR). Cells have powerful quality control networks consisting of chaperones and proteases that cooperate to monitor the folding states of proteins and to remove misfolded conformers through either refolding or degradation. Free-living organisms, which are more directly exposed to environmental fluctuations, must often survive even harsher folding stresses. These stresses not only disrupt the folding of newly synthesized proteins but can also cause misfolding of already folded proteins.  In living organisms, robustness is provided by homeostatic mechanisms. At least five epigenetic mechanisms are responsible for these life-essential processes :

- heat shock factors (HSFs)
- The unfolded protein response (UPR)
- nonhomologous end-joining and homologous recombination
- The DNA Damage Response
- The Response to Oxidative Stress

The cell modulates the signalling pathways at transcriptional, post-transcriptional and post-translational levels. Complex signalling pathways contribute to the maintenance of systemic homeostasis. Homeostasis is the mechanistic fundament of living organisms. 

Homeostasis, from the Greek words for "same" and "steady," refers to any process that living things use to actively maintain fairly stable conditions necessary for survival. It is also synonymous with robustness and adaptability.

This essential characteristic of living cells, homeostasis, is the ability to maintain a steady and more-or-less constant chemical balance in a changing environment. Cell survival requires appropriate proportions of molecular oxygen and various antioxidants. Reactive products of oxygen, calles Reactive Oxygen Species ( ROS) are amongst the most potent and omnipresent threats faced by cells. Cells, damaged by ROS, irreversibly infected, functionless and/or potentially oncogenic cells are destined for persistent inactivation or elimination, respectively. If mechanisms that do not trigger controlled and programmed Cell death ( apoptosis) are not present at day 1, the organisms cannot survive and dies. Simply put, the principle is that all of a multicellular organism's cells are prepared to suicide when needed for the benefit of the organism as a whole. They eliminate themselves in a very carefully programmed way so as to minimize damage to the larger organism.  On average, in human adults, it’s about 50-70 BILLION cells that die per day. We shed 30,000 to 50,000 skin cells every minute.

1. The control of metabolism is a fundamental requirement for all life, with perturbations of metabolic homeostasis underpinning numerous disease-associated pathologies.
2. Any incomplete Metabolic network without the control mechanisms in place to get homeostasis would mean disease and cell death.
3. A minimal metabolic network and the control mechanisms had to be in place from the beginning, which means, and gradualistic explanation of the origin of biological Cells, and life is unrealistic. 
Life is an all or nothing business and points to a creative act of God.

Following  molecules must stay in a finely tuned order and balance for life to survive:
- Halogens like chlorine, fluoride, iodine, and bromine.  The body needs to maintain a delicate balance between all these elements.
- Molybdenum (Mo) and iron (Fe) are essential micronutrients required for crucial enzyme activities and mutually impact their homeostasis, which means, they are interdependent on each other to maintain homeostatic levels. 
- Potassium plays a key role in maintaining cell function, and it is important in maintaining fluid and electrolyte balance. Potassium-40 is probably the most dangerous light radioactive isotope, yet the one most essential to life. Its abundance must be balanced on a razor’s edge.
- The ability of cells to maintain a large gradient of calcium across their outer membrane is universal. All biological cells have a low cytosolic (liquid found inside Cells ) calcium concentration, can and must keep this even when the free calcium outside is up to 20,000 times higher concentrated! 
- Nutrient uptake and homeostasis must be adjusted to the needs of the organisms according to developmental stages and environmental conditions.
- Magnesium is the second most abundant cellular cation after potassium. The concentrations are essential to regulate numerous cellular functions and enzymes
- Iron is required for the survival of most organisms, including bacteria, plants, and humans. Its homeostasis in mammals must be fine-tuned to avoid iron deficiency with a reduced oxygen transport 
- Phosphate, as a cellular energy currency, essentially drives most biochemical reactions defining living organisms, and thus its homeostasis must be tightly regulated. 
- Zinc (Zn) is an essential heavy metal that is incorporated into a number of human Zn metalloproteins. Zn plays important roles in nucleic acid metabolism, cell replication, and tissue repair and growth. Zn contributes to intracellular metal homeostasis. 
- Selenium homeostasis and antioxidant selenoproteins in the brain: lack of finetuned balance has implications for disorders in the central nervous system
- Copper ion homeostasis is maintained through regulated expression of genes involved in copper ion uptake. 

In the early 1960s, Ernest Nagel and Carl Hempel showed that self-regulated systems are teleological.

In his book: THE TINKERER’S ACCOMPLICE, How Design Emerges from Life Itself  J . SCOTT. TURNER, writes at page 12 :
Although I touch upon ID obliquely from time to time, I do so not because I endorse it, but because it is mostly unavoidable. ID theory is essentially warmed-over natural theology, but there is, at its core, a serious point that deserves serious attention. ID theory would like us to believe that some overarching intelligence guides the evolutionary process: to say the least, that is unlikely. Nevertheless, how design arises remains a very real problem in biology.  My thesis is quite simple: organisms are designed not so much because natural selection of particular genes has made them that way, but because agents of homeostasis build them that way. These agents’ modus operandi is to construct environments upon which the precarious and dynamic stability that is homeostasis can be imposed, and design is the result.

The author does not identify these agents, but Wiki describes agents as CONSCIOUS beings, which act with specific goals in mind. In the case of life, this agent made it possible for biological cells to actively maintain fairly stable levels of various metabolites and molecules, necessary for survival. We are once more, upon careful examination of the evidence in nature, justified to infer an intelligent designer as most case-adequate explanation of the origin of homeostasis and the ability of adaptation, commonly called evolution, of all living organisms. 

Brian Miller, Origin of life

Below, Brian Miller presented a good overview of what is required for life to begin:

Stages to Origin of Life
• Prebiotic Synthesis of Building Blocks
– Amino Acids, Sugars, Nucleotides, Lipids
• Linking of Building Blocks into Macromolecules
– Proteins and RNA/DNA
• Self-Organization of Metabolism
• Enclosure in Cell Membrane
• Encoding/Decoding of Protein Sequences in DNA
• Fully Functional Cell
– Information Processing, Energy Production, Manufacturing
– Auto Assembly, Feedback Control, Self-Replication

what I would outline however is, that the list above clarifies the required elements that could not emerge in stages, or an increase, evolutionary manner, as often depicted in science papers, as below, by Eugene Koonin:


but, as chemist Wilhelm Huck, professor at Radboud University Nijmegen outlined:

A working cell is more than the sum of its parts. "A functioning cell must be entirely correct at once, in all its complexity" :





To go from a bacterium to people is less of a step than to go from a mixture of amino acids to a bacterium. — Lynn Margulis

http://news.illinois.edu/news/11/1005LUCA_ManfredoSeufferheld_JamesWhitfield_Caetano_Anolles.html
New evidence suggests that LUCA was a sophisticated organism after all, with a complex structure recognizable as a cell, researchers report. Their study appears in the journal Biology Direct.The study lends support to a hypothesis that LUCA may have been more complex even than the simplest organisms alive today, said James Whitfield, a professor of entomology at Illinois and a co-author on the study.

From a synthetic chemical perspective, neither I nor any  of my colleagues can fathom a prebiotic molecular route  to construction of a complex system. We cannot even figure out the prebiotic routes to the basic building blocks of life: carbohydrates, nucleic acids, lipids, and proteins. Chemists are collectively bewildered. Hence I say that no chemist understands prebiotic synthesis of the requisite building blocks, let alone assembly into a complex system.
James Tour, Rice University

Summary:
1. The chances for the first cell forming is too small if all arrangements of atoms are equally probable.
2. Those arrangements which correspond to life are far less probable than all possible starting points.
3. All-natural processes move toward higher entropy and/or lower energy (lower free energy), but the origin of life has to move in the opposite direction.
4. Systems far from equilibrium are no more likely to generate the first cell since they also tend toward higher entropy and the release of energy, while life requires the opposite.
5. Molecular machinery is needed to convert one form of energy into the high-energy molecules needed to drive reactions.
6. Life requires a very specific set of interconnected reactions to proceed and other destructive reactions to be prevented.
7. Enzymes drive the correct reactions, and they direct the energy from the breakdown of the high-energy molecules toward the enabling of energetically unfavourable reactions.
8. The enzymes are the result of sequences of amino acids containing to the right information like letters in a sentence.
9. Proteins eventually break down, so amino acid sequences must be stored in (encoded into) RNA/DNA.
10. Encoding involves each amino acid being represented by sequences of three nucleotides called codons (e.g. Ala à GCA).
11. No physical connection exists between any amino acid and its corresponding codons, so no physical process could have driven the encoding of the information.
12. The decoding process must use the same code as the encoding, but they cannot have any physical connection.
13. The information and code must have preexisted the cell.
14. DNA contains the encoded schematics for the cell in the same way that the signal from space in the movie Contact contained the schematics for a spaceship.
15. A minimally functional cell must have the machinery for numerous processes such as information processing, manufacturing and assembly of parts, and self-replication.
16. The cell’s processes demonstrate clear evidence of foresight, coordination, and goal direction which point unambiguously to intelligent design.
17. An intelligence had to create the information for the structure/operation of the cell and then construct it in world.

This adds to following:
Bill Faint: Life in any form is a very serious enigma and conundrum. It does something, whatever the biochemical pathway, machinery, enzymes etc. are involved, that should not and honestly could not ever "get off the ground". It SPONTANEOUSLY recruits Gibbs free energy from its environment so as to reduce its own entropy. That is tantamount to a rock continuously recruiting the wand to roll it up the hill, or a rusty nail "figuring out" how to spontaneously rust and add layers of galvanizing zinc on itself to fight corrosion. Unintelligent simple chemicals can't self-organize into instructions for building solar farms (photosystems 1 and 2), hydroelectric dams (ATP synthase), propulsion (motor proteins) , self repair (p53 tumor suppressor proteins) or self-destruct (caspases) in the event that these instructions become too damaged by the way the universe USUALLY operates. Abiogenesis is not an issue that scientists simply need more time to figure out but a fundamental problem with materialism


On homeostasis: 
Brian Miller presented following quote in one of the slides: 
Noteworthy, the probability of instability of a (randomly selected) state increases rapidly with increasing size of the system…the simple example clearly shows that the static picture of pathways and flux distributions, as often encountered in textbook diagrams, is highly misleading. A flux distribution is no static entity. Its stability, and thus its existence over a prolonged period of time, depends crucially on the numerical values of kinetic parameters and regulatory interactions: Only an intricate network of mutual interactions ensures metabolic homeostasis, prevents depletion of metabolic intermediates and allows for an optimal response to changing environmental conditions.
Ralf Steuer and Björn H. Junker, “Computational Models of Metabolism: Stability and Regulation in Metabolic Networks,” Advances in Chemical Physics 142, no. 105 (2008): 110–13

If one insists on attributing the pathway from mundane chemistry to life as the outcome of fixed dynamical laws, then (our analysis suggests) those laws must be selected with extraordinary care and precision, which is tantamount to intelligent design: it states that “life” is “written into” the laws of physics ab initio [from their inception]. There is no evidence at all that the actual known laws of physics possess this almost miraculous property. On practical grounds alone, we need to remain open to the possibility that the causal efficacy of information may amount to more than a mere methodological convenience, and might represent a new causal category not captured in a microstate
description of the system. What we term “the hard problem of life” is the identification of the actual physical mechanism that permits information to gain causal purchase over matter. This view is not accommodated in our current approaches to physics.
Davies and Walker, “The ‘Hard Problem’ of Life”

My comment: 
Homeostasis  in cells, and origin of life scenarios
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2447-homeostasis-in-cells-and-origin-of-life-scenarios

1. The control of metabolism is a fundamental requirement for all life, with perturbations of metabolic homeostasis underpinning numerous disease-associated pathologies.
2. Any incomplete Metabolic network without the control mechanisms in place to get homeostasis would mean disease and cell death.
3. A minimal metabolic network and the control mechanisms had to be in place from the beginning, which means, and gradualistic explanation of the origin of biological Cells, and life is unrealistic. 
Life is an all or nothing business and points to a creative act of God.


On proteins: 
Overall, what the field of protein evolution needs are some plausible, solid hypotheses to explain how random sequences of amino acids turned into the sophisticated entities that we recognize today as proteins. Until that happens, the phenomenon of the rise of proteins will remain, as Tawfik says, “something like close to a miracle.”
- Rajendrani Mukhopadhyayover, American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology

My comment:
Proteins: how they provide striking evidence of design
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2062-proteins-how-they-provide-striking-evidence-of-design

Proteins are evidence of intelligent design par excellence. Instructional/specified complex information is required to get the right amino acid sequence which is essential to get functionality in a vast sequence space ( amongst trillions os possible sequences, rare are the ones that provide function ), and every protein is irreducibly complex in the sense, that a minimal number of amino acids are required for each protein to get function. This constitutes a unsurmountable hurdle for the origin of life scenarios based on naturalistic hypotheses since unguided random events are too unspecific to get functional sequences in a viable timespan. Another true smack-down is the fact that single proteins or enzymes by themselves confer no advantage of survival at all, and have by their own no function. There is no reason why random RNA strands would become self-replicating. And even IF that were the case, so what? There would be no utility for them unless at least 50 different precisely arranged and correctly interlinked enzymes and proteins, each with its specific function, would interlink in a complex, just right metabolic network, and be encapsulated in a complex membrane with gates and pores, and in a precisely finely tuned and balanced homeostatic ambiance. Energy production and supply to each protein would also have to be fully setup right from the start...... hard to swallow. But if your wish of naturalism to be true is strong enough, just shut your reason up, and believe this. Blindly.

Proteins can be considered as information enriched polymers. In fact, the instruction for the 3-D structure of a protein is embedded in the sequences of amino acids and the electrochemical attractive forces among them.

DNA can be read in the forward direction, backwards, and Stephen Meyer told us that there is an ongoing scientific research of bacteria, where a strand of their DNA information can be read in the forward direction, and  have three different meanings when read forwards, and the same strand can provide three different kinds of information to produce different proteins as well when read backwards,  !! That means, one single blueprint can be used in a variety of different ways and build different products.

I asked Richard Sternberg, where epigenetic information, like the splicing Code, is stored, and he said, that science has no answer to this (yet).





This site reports:

Like many bacteria, Geobacter has long, filamentous appendages, pili, extending from its body. Pili allow bacteria to sense their environment, similarly to whiskers or antennae. Sometimes, bacteria use pili to directly interact with their environment, releasing chemical compounds or exchanging genetic information with other bacteria. It turns out Geobacter’s pili are highly electrically conductive- as conductive as synthetic organic metals. This discovery has led scientists to hypothesize Geobacter’s pili serve as “electrical wires” that conduct electrons from inside the cell to iron in the environment.

Before we get to electrical conductivity, a bit of background on iron breathing, or “iron-reducing”  in technical lingo. All life on earth requires energy. On a molecular level, all life acquires energy in much the same way: stripping electrons from one substance (usually, but not always, carbon.) and transferring said electrons to another substance- an electron acceptor. Oxygen is the preferred electron acceptor among multicellular organisms because of its high electron affinity. This just means you get more “bang for your buck” using oxygen to strip electrons off your food than using, say, iron or sulfur. But oxygen is not found everywhere, and many microbes have become adapted to using other electron acceptors in lieu of oxygen. In theory, this makes sense. In practice, iron is a bit of a head-scratcher. In its oxidized (i.e., electron-depleted) form, iron is a heavy, insoluble metal that cannot easily cross cell membranes. For decades, scientists have assumed that iron-reducers like Geobacter have some adaptation that allows them to use iron outside of their cells for respiration.

In 2016, Nature magazine reported the molecular Pilus  Structure that could Account for Electrical Conductivity of Geobacter sulfurreducens Pili 7



In their conclusive remarks, they wrote:

These results demonstrate that it is feasible for the pilin monomers of G. sulfurreducens to assemble into a highly stable filamentous structure in which a core chain of aromatic amino acids facilitate electron transport along the length of the pilus. This finding is consistent with multiple lines of experimental evidence that have consistently suggested that G. sulfurreducens pili have metallic-like conductivity

And a paper , peer reviewed by the Royal Society of Chemistry reported:

Charge transport along the pili requires aromatic residues, which cluster once the peptide subunits (pilins) assemble keeping inter-aromic distances and geometries optimal for multistep hopping. The presence of intramolecular aromatic contacts and the predominantly α- helical conformation of the pilins has been proposed to contribute to charge transport and rectification. 

 Without those aromatic residues where they were, Geobacter had no zip in its pili. 10


Schematic diagram showing the progression of the aromatic clusters up the pilus structure. The aromatic band is coloured blue, and the aromatic devoid band is coloured yellow. 11

A periodic 3.2-Å spacing in conductive, wild-type G. sulfurreducens pili that was missing in the nonconductive pili of strain Aro5, which lack key aromatic acids required for conductivity. These results suggest a clear structure-function correlation for metallic-like conductivity that can be attributed to overlapping π-orbitals of aromatic amino acids.

A study that modeled the G. sulfurreducens PilA monomer structure noted the likely role of aromatic amino acids in electron transfer in G. sulfurreducens pili but concluded that their arrangement provided “an optimal environment for the hopping of electrons”

E-pilin genes are primarily restricted to a tight phylogenetic group in the order Desulfuromonadales, which are an order within the Proteobacteria. 14 95  Fe(III)-reducing micro-organisms are known, and of these, 80 % lack e-pilin genes. The pilA genes encode mature pilin structural proteins with 60–90 amino acids that give rise to conductive pili. Longer type IVa pilA genes that are more commonly found in bacteria (>120 amino acid residues) yield pili with poor conductivity. The shorter amino acid sequence is due to lack of the C-terminal portion of the amino acid sequence which permits the pilin monomers to pack more tightly than the larger pilin monomers found in most bacteria, yielding a thinner pilus diameter and positioning amino acids in patterns that confer conductivity.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/science/bacteria-microbes-electricity.html?fbclid=IwAR26kSnwQQrhGj1PANHBpm-BWlP5obvt3B_ogt2ExZBmS9_U_guIfsRTROc
2. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF00290916
3. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19804-life-electric-microbes-wire-up-to-share-energy/
4. https://asknature.org/strategy/microbial-nanowires-transfer-electrons/
5. https://phys.org/news/2017-01-green-electronics-team-microbe-potomac.html
6. https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/docserver/fulltext/micro/162/12/2017_micro000382.pdf?expires=1563676889&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=ADF94981720AF9EBFE6736A003965374
7. https://www.nature.com/articles/srep23385
8. https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2017/cp/c7cp00885f#!divAbstract
9. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18393985
10. https://phys.org/news/2013-11-bacterial-nanowire-protein-hints-secrets.html
11. http://www.jbc.org/content/288/41/29260/F5.expansion.html
12. https://prelights.biologists.com/highlights/structure-of-a-cytochrome-based-bacterial-nanowire/
13. https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2013/ee/c3ee40441b#!divAbstract
14. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5320591/
15. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4453548/
16. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23698325/
17. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1462-2920.14638
18. http://cronodon.com/BioTech/Bacteria_pili.html
20. https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(19)30291-0.pdf
21. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0262407910604472
22. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1751-7915.13280
23. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5320591/

Stephen Meyer's new cosmological argument
Stephen Meyer's new argument is based on astronomical observations. Fine-tuning and cosmological arguments rely on invoking an external cause of the universe. Stephen began, building on the lectures given previously by Richards and Gonzalez on the expansion of the universe and the necessity of a beginning.


An interesting convergence came in the 1920s after Hubble came up with the Hubble constant, the relationship of the expansion rate, and the distance to distant galaxies.


But who gets less attention is the Belgian priest, Father Lemaitre, in 1927, about what was already known about the redshift, the theoretical physics coming from general relativity, where Einstein the first time introduced the cosmological constant,  


but then, later, physicists, Friedman, and Lemaitre himself said: Wait a minute, the value, assigned to the cosmological constant, to get the outward force of expansion, and the contracting force of gravity, is balanced just right, is extremely contrived, and is, therefore, unrealistically fine-tuned, 


and the vast range of possible solutions, of possible values for that cosmological constant, that gives a dynamic universe, and since the redshift evidence was already available, LeMaitre said, and he introduced this evidence to Einstein in a Taxicab ride (that's how science was done back then ), and he said: 


the better solution is a conjoined solution in astronomy and that gives you an expanding universe from some kind of beginning of the expansion. And that's the birth of the Big Bang. That's 1927.


In the sixties, Hawking began to think about Black hole physics. A black hole is a place where the gravitational forces are so intense, they bend space so tightly, that not even light can get out. 


The core concept of general relativity is that matter is actually bending space, is curving space, creates lines of trajectories, even light, as light passes through a massive object, and in fact the way of thinking of general relativity from the field of equations is to think that matter tells space how to curve, and space tells matter, how to move, so this is a reciprocal relationship.


So Hawking is thinking about all this in relation to black holes because a black hole is a place of matter so densely compacted  and space is so densely curved that no light can get out, so Hawking has an insight, and says, why do we not apply what we know about black holes and general relativity, to the question of cosmology. To the origin of the universe itself.


If we realize that the universe is expanding outwards, if we extrapolate back, that means that the matter in the universe is getting more and more densely compacted. So more or the same amount of matter, and a smaller and smaller and smaller volume, so space will get tightly curved until eventually, you arrive at some kind of a limit.


So Hawking presented this idea in his PhD. thesis and Penrose said: Congratulations, Dr Hawking, now go out working out the maths.  So in 1968 and following, Hawking worked with Penrose and Ellis to prove the singularity theorem, which basically shows that  as you go back in time you go to a point where the universe is past geodesically incomplete, 

which means there is a beginning in time, and its not perfectly homogeneous, and the universe begins from zero spacial volume, and, basically, everything begins from there.


In order for the conditions of the theorem to be met, the universe cannot be completely homogeneous, which the universe meets. Another matter is which energy conditions neet to apply, and there is an agreement that the energy condition is positive during all the time of this expansion.

But now there is this weird quantum dimension. So when the universe is very very small, it would be indeterministic, and so it is when crossing the point of singularity, some physicists say, well wait, we could have points of fluctuations, that would cause the universe to violate the energy conditions, where you have temporarily a negative energy condition. 


And one model adopted the eternal chaotic inflation idea, where the universe expanded very very rapidly, called inflation.  But, an extension of that idea was that chaotic inflation had gone infinitely in the past, and was continuing infinitely in the future. And while the inflation goes on, the field, called infinite time field, would occasionally, shut off, just the right measure, and cause all the universe.


That also came associated with the multiverse. So since that inflation was going back infinitely, there was no beginning. Two physicists began to explore that inflation cosmology, Borden and Vilenkin. And they had an initial proof in 1994, that showed that even a chaotic inflation model would have a beginning as well. 


Then, in 2003, they developed a model, that was not subject to any energy condition at all, which was called the Borden-Guth-Vilenkin theorem. It is based on special relativity, and what they showed was that 


even if the universe is expanding infinitely into the future, it must have had a temporal beginning, it must be geodesically past, incomplete. It traded on quantum indeterminacy, in the very tiny time when the universe was small enough to be described by quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is the physicism of the very small, and the very weird. 

So, Einsteins ideas give us a very straightforward, a theoretical physics confirmation and an indication of a very beginning, which confirms the testimony of observations astronomy.

Inside that tiny window of Planck time, we have quantum mechanics, so we may not extrapolate back all the way to the beginning, using straightforward mathematical considerations from Einstein's theory of general relativity. We now think about what gravity would be like in the so-called quantum domain, where it's really really small.  

And so, theories, that became known as quantum gravity, or quantum cosmology, became a way of go-to when thinking about the origin of the universe, in a post - Einsteinian way, in a domain, where Einstein's physics may not apply. So quantum cosmology is describing the early stages using the maths of quantum mechanics. 

So the discussion of the origin of the universe started in the eighties and shifted away from Einstein's general relativity, to better considerations with quantum mechanics.


So the first to work on this was Stephen Hawking. He wrote a book in 1988, called, a brief history of time. So quantum cosmology in addition to the new way of thinking about the origin of the universe has been posed, and it has been posed by Hawking himself as essentially an argument against the Kalaam cosmological argument of Gods existence.


Hawking took that argument and famously said: What need is there for a creator ?! That followed after the presentation of the Hawking Hartle model quantum cosmology. 


What they basically claimed was that the laws of the universe came from nothing and that nothing was unstable, this is Lawrence Krauss formulation of it.


Hawking in his last book before he died wrote because there is such a law as gravity, he is speaking about quantum gravitational laws, the universe can and does create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason why there is something rather than nothing, why we exist, why the universe exists, is not necessary to invoke God, that set the universe going. 

An ordinary person looking at this statement might be tempted to think about something ontological that he is saying here since spontaneous creation means that something happens spontaneously for no apparent reason at all, and then saying, that there is no reason at all, that there is something rather than nothing, and why the universe exists, for no reason at all.    

And the problem in Hawking's book is, that you can't really understand, what the argument is. 


There is a lot of assertions and analogies, but it's not really going into the physics, at least not in regards to this statement, so let's look a bit more deeply into quantum cosmology. 


First, physicists where first uncomfortable why quantum cosmology and the singularity. Hawkins didn't like the implications of the singularity and looking for a way to solve the problem within the confines of physics itself, but secondly,  the extrapolation that is involved,  in a singularity, is obtained, let's take into account what is called Planck time, the tiny little time,  where things are so small, where quantum effects take route,


so, two different versions of quantum cosmology were developed, one is the Hawking- Hartles, where the singularity is eliminated, and the second one is the Borden-Vilenkin, where it proposes to explain the origin of the universe from the singularity, from nothing at all.

In order to understand what these guys are up to, one has to do an excursion back into ordinary quantum mechanics, but nothing is not ordinary at all. Quantum mechanics was describing how waves and particles are essentially two of the same manifestations of fundamental reality.


Fundamental units can act like waves or particles, be it photons or electrons. There was a famous equation, the Schroedinger equation, which was used to calculate the probability that an electron or photon might be at many possible positions,  and the electron might be at any point of many possible positions, that consequence is that it might be a wave or particle, so, a couple of these experiments gave us these strange concepts. The first actually in the 19th century.  


Before 1802, when an experiment was performed by Thomas Young,  the famous double-slit experiment, prior it was thought that light is just particles, but light, put through  the single and double-slit experiment produced kind of an interference pattern,  like concentrating or being less intense,  alternately, it was as he dropped something in the water, and it gave waves where they were inforced, where the pit came together or cancelled each other out, where the waves crossed and hit each other.


So that interference pattern characteristic of waves, with light, that suggested that light might be a wave. At the beginning of the 20th century, there was a very interesting experiment made by British physicist Geoffrey Taylor, which made a different version of this double split experiment,

which was able to lower the intensity of light, passing through the double split, where he was able to make that one particle was going through at the time, and what he was able to produce, again, was an interference pattern, that emerged progressively over time, so the light that was manifesting  as particles, 


but the longer the particles were collected at the detection plate, the more the interference pattern became evident, suggesting that light even as the individual particles of light that were passing the double slits interfering with themselves, so they were both manifesting wave light and particle light at the same time.


So in order to describe this mathematically, and to get an idea where the particle might show up, manifesting itself at the detection plate, physicists developed the famous mathematics of the Schroedinger equations, which permits us to calculate the probability of the particle manifest itself at a particular point.

The weird thing is that acting itself as a wave until it hits the detection plate it can end up at a whole lot of different places, that is it will not be at any specific place until it is observed, that is the weird thing about quantum mechanics. 


Feynman used to say if you think you understand quantum mechanics, well, no, no one really understands quantum mechanics. It's really bizarre. This is the collapse of the wave function.  That's ordinary quantum mechanics. All this ordinary quantum mechanics it's even a more exotic situation when it comes to the beginning of the universe.

Quantum mechanics in regular cosmology describes all the possible positions and momenta associated with the waves and particles. In quantum mechanics, the particles can be at one point, even if its smeared out, they can be at lots of different places all at once. 

Now, quantum cosmology applies this idea, not to particles and waves of light or electrons, but it defies the idea that different possible geometries and configurations of matter that the universe might have. 


We have the shape of our universe, and the configurations of matter are just described by general relativity. General relativity is concerned about the shape of space, and how matter affects them. So there is a matter field, and there is a geometry of space, in general relativity. So we are thinking about the origin of the universe, we are thinking about something intrinsic, about spacial geometry, and the configuration of matter.

Inside Planck Time, we have quantum indeterminacy, so maybe what we are dealing up there, is lots of possible universes, with lots of possible shapes, and geometries, and configurations of matter. And so what happens is, there is a wave theory of equations, the Wheeler-DeWitt equations, which basically synthesizes the Schroeder equation with considerations of Einsteinian gravity, it becomes gravity, plus quantum physics together. 

And to describe what the universe might be in that light, in that early dimension of time, it turned to definite characteristics, to a definite expansion.

The philosophical point will be very easy to grasp.  There is a kind of conversion, in ordinary quantum mechanics, to describe the equation that describes where the particle can be and allows us to calculate the probabilities associated with whether it is the ones that are observed. 

In quantum cosmology, we apply the same kind of math,  but you are not looking for particles, you try to calculate the probability at a given type of universe. In particular, ours, because this theory becomes an origins theory, when the equations or the functions, or, this function is the solution to the Wheeler–DeWitt equation.

In ordinary quantum mechanics is a function to describe the probabilities of all the created particles. Lots of different possibilities are described by this function.  That function, or the wave function, is a solution in ordinary quantum mechanics for the Schroedinger equation, and in quantum cosmology, its a solution to this Wheeler–DeWitt equation, which is the Schroedinger equation, adapted to try to describe the gravitational fields or possible gravitational fields of the early universe.

So if we can solve these equations, we can get a function that describes all the possible geometries, all the possible shapes that the universe might have, and the different distributions of matter within those shapes. Lots of possible distributions of shapes, lots of possible distributions of matter. So that's the wave function.  Quantum cosmologists believe they can explain our universe and in case, that, or if this wave function includes a universe like ours.


Ours is a reasonably probable outcome of this wave function, then we can explain our universe. That's the idea, upon cosmology. So the Wheeler–DeWitt equation is just an analogue to the Schroedinger equation in regular quantum mechanics, describing all the possible, if you solve the equation, you get a side-function to describe all the possible places and the particles could be, 

and then if, that's the side function happens to produce or happens to include a universe like ours, explaining the origin of the universe, and without, one place would be without a beginning, as Hawking says, and one would be with a beginning, but coming essentially from nothing. It's just the physics doing the explaining.

We don't need a God hypothesis. We don't need a transcendent cause, the Wheeler–DeWitt equation solves to produce a wave function, ours is included, then we say, the universe emerged out of nothing, out of the physics, the laws of physics now describe, the universe came from, we don't need to invoke God. That's Hawkins argument.


So this is mainly an attempt to address the ultimate cosmological origins questions, without invoking a transcendent cause according to the beginning of the universe. Hawking btw. gets away with a beginning the way he did fix the space-time geometry of the beginning of the universe, 


but only by the means of a mathematical trick  where he changes the time variable  t, and he exchanges it with It, for imaginary time,  and so he converts a problem of equation in a real domain into an imaginary domain  of complex numbers and solve the problem in complex numbers, and then convert back. 

They applied imaginable math and applied it to the real world. And you should not apply real metaphysical implications of what you are doing in an imaginary mathematical domain.


Vilenkins theorem is much more philosophically sensitive, and there is a passage in his book, Many worlds in one, where he is describing the kind of philosophical paradox associated with the whole enterprise of quantum cosmology. He asks this interesting question: 


Where does the universe come from? The quantum cosmological answer comes from the side-function.  It comes from the universal wave function. Describing all these possible universes, not which actually exist yet, but which are all mathematical possibilities. What does this mean, that the laws are not a mere description of reality, but could have an independent existence of their own, we are talking about the side functions of quantum cosmology.

In the absence of space, time and matter, what tablets could they be written on? The side functions can explain the ways they could exist, it is not a thing yet. The laws are expressed in a form of mathematical equations.


If the means of the equations is the mind, this is mean that mind should create the universe? After he raises this provocative rhetorical question, he completes and doesn't answer us.

Hawking did raise a similar question. Also, in the  A brief history of time, he says:  what puts fire into the equation that gives a universe to describe? Should mathematical equations have causal power? Are they substantive in the real world? Usually, mathematical equations are what we use to describe the universe. 

Wheeler said: One of the equations we construct or dream up, did make things happening in the real world, it is as to say that the latitude and longitude on a real map are responsible for the height of the Himalayan mountains.


The maths in their mind does not cause things to happen in the real world.  To say otherwise is a fallacy of ratification. To compute substantial causal powers to concepts. That is as to say that nature has mathematics build into it.


But math is the expression of a powerful mind over nature. But that would be a theistic interpretation.

That is what cosmologists generally won't do.  Vilenkin is saying that we need a God.  This is sort of the very least point in cosmology, this has an implistic mathematical platonism about. Possible with a theistic twist. We are talking of a mind, pre-existing all of physics, that is pretty close to theism.

There is one more aspect, which is even more profound. We want to explain our universe. That's what the philosophers call the explanandum. The explanandum is a universal wave function that explains our universe as one of the reasonable, probable outcomes. How do we get to that universal wave function? By solving the Wheeler–DeWitt equation. 

By solving the Wheeler–DeWitt equation by itself, is a functional differential equation, and that has an infinite number of solutions. How do you solve these equations, by having an infinite number of solutions? You have to restrain the number of solutions. You have to restrain the degree of mathematical freedom, associated with these mathematical equations.  And you do that by imposing boundary constraints on the equations.


Let me give an illustration of what that means. There is a law in physics, which is called Poe's law, which describes the harmonic motion of vibrating strings. The law of physics describes the possible harmonic motions, but that does not tell me how hard the string was plucked, that's information extrinsic to the law, that's called an initial condition.

That doesn't tell me how hard a harp player plucked the strings. I have to get that information from observation. From the experiment. Similarly, the string will vibrate differently, depending on how far the bends are. Where they are fixed.

And those are the boundary constraints, particularly in this equation. And that, also, is determined by observation. And you have to know. How the experiment was set up.

So, laws of physics are bound, they get the boundary constraints. You cant get any predictions out of them,  you can't get any explanations out of them, you have to know the boundary constraints, and the laws themselves don't give them. That's an additional sort of information.


Think about the fine-tuning. The fine-tuning of those initial conditions. The information has to be provided to the laws in order for them to do any good at all. In any case, in order to solve this big equation, you need to have boundary constraints and the boundary constraints will contain an outcome, that includes our universe is a reasonably probable outcome, which is very precisely chosen. 

And Vilenkin does it one way, Hawking and Hartle do it another way. Hawking and Hartle do it with what they call superspace, but the bottom line is, in both cases,  both quantum cosmological models, are extremely constrained on degrees of mathematical freedom, are applied to the Wheeler–DeWitt equation, in the wave function, they include a universe like ours, as a reasonably probable argument. How do they choose these boundary rates? It's a bit of a teleological process.


They look forward to the universe they want to, and then they might choose constraints that they get a wave function that includes a universe like that. It's a bit like Dawkins simulation: METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL He wants to get the Computer program to simulate that directed evolution.


And so he gives it a target sequence, METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL, and gets the computer program to randomize a string of characters, and he selects those strings that get most similar to those strings he wants, and then he gets eliminating the wrong ones until he gets the outcome he wants. The original sequences have no meaning at all.

So what these guys do, there is some kind of circularity here, where they figure out the universe they want, and then they constrain the solutions to the Wheeler–DeWitt equations and the wave functions, which includes our universe as a possible outcome to get the solution they want. 

Obviously, there is circularity in that, there is no problem with modelling ours, but the claim is that this explains the origin of our universe. So, they are doing this modelling. So how does this modelling get off? It gets off by constraining the reason for mathematical freedom. What is that? At the meantime you say: It can be zero or one.

 I go and choose one. What if I don't? I constrained it. But I also,  in part, I also omit the information. The fundamental definition of a bit of information is chosen between two options, is choosing between.


So what is going on? Theoretical physicists solving the Wheeler–DeWitt equation by infusing information in a form of restricted value constraints, and get an outcome, which is desirable. So what do they actually model? They model for a big amount of information. And in their model, where does information come from? 

From the mind of the theoretical physicists themselves. 


This reminds me of the origin of life research. Where you have the stimulation experiments. And you know what is a good example? The chemicals are in the bath. Like the byproducts, you get the amino acids, you get a whole lot of other things that you don't want. So what do you do? 

Chemically, you remove those other chemicals, so you don't have the interfering cross-reactions, so this is an informed intervention. I want this, not that. All prebiotic simulation experiments are able to move the biochemistry into a life-friendly direction only on the expense of information is being applied by the experimenter. I think that tells us something.  


With the expanding universe, that is mathematically analogous. Theoretical physicists providing the information by the boundary constraints, you get the solution that is necessary. This is a fine-tuning problem. The fine-tuning is being manifestly applied or provided by the intelligent physicists.  So I think this is actually illustrating the need for mathematical platonism,

I think it actually provides support for intelligent design. So what is being modelled is by intelligence a universe like ours. There are other things that can be said about this, for example, if you take a standard Copenhagen interpretation for example of the collapse of the wave function, what is it that posits the collapse?

It's an observation. What we want to say is, there is a cosmic observer that is responsible for all these possible actualizing universes like ours? Well, no, not for the materialist, so that problem is solved for example by invoking the many-worlds interpretation in quantum mechanics in all possible and impossible worlds but notice, the problem of providing prior information precedes any interpretation of the side function or whatever.  So even if you are involved in the mere interpretation of the side function, you still have the problem of getting to the side function, by constraining or increasing the mathematical freedom. There is a big infusion of mathematical information by the theoretical physicists.

If you have a straightforward singularity, you have obviously an infinite of materialistic implications. Borde Guth Vilenkin has pure conditions that have to be met, by establishing a beginning. Hawking - Penrose and Frank Tipler has fewer mathematical conditions that might strengthen the singularity condition,  but even if you don't accept the singularity or the past temporal beginning, the reason you would not accept that would be the fact that the universe is behaving like a quantum system in that early time, anyone that is going with a quantum cosmological approach,  that has theistic implications, and other reasons. So that is the cosmological trilemma for the naturalists.

- Science
- Philosophy
- Theology

The basic epistemological framework to research about origins, and the fundamental question of why there is something, rather than nothing, is best based on the faculties of science, philosophy, and theology/religion. 

Gods existence, without attempting to identify his nature, can be done by evaluating science, and philosophical considerations. 
The identity of God is a matter of religion and theology.   



The steps of progression to elaborate an epistemologically solid world view goes as follows:

1. Defining a solid epistemological framework, excluding scientism or verificationism, and permitting a holistic examination of evidence including philosophical and theological considerations.
2. Disposition to analyze the evidence as much honest and unbiased as possible, permitting it to lead wherever it is.
3. Clarifying how the action of (past) intelligent action can be recognized in nature.   
4. Research of scientific evidence and philosophical considerations which after careful evaluation point to Intelligence as a better mechanism to explain our origins than naturalistic explanations.
5. The inference of intelligent design/creationism leads to deism, theism or pantheism.
6. Philosophical considerations lead  to agnostic theism
7. Specifics about various evidence leads to the conclusion of Infinite Creator.
8. Comparative religions and historical evidence point to God of the Hebrews/Abraham.
9. Internal evidence constrains the choice of Judaism. Islam, Christianity, and born-again Christianity.
10. How we proceed in the cumulative case for Christianity is a much more detailed step. Ultimately we are not talking about "proof" like in repeated experimentation...but rather a preponderance of the evidence.  Ultimately it is the conviction of the Holy Spirit to believe in the miracles of Jesus and His Lordship/Deity.

Concluding and pointing to a specific God can be done rationally by adopting a cumulative case, which in my view, in the end, points to the God of the Bible. Point 1 to 5 point to a Creator as a better explanation rather than none. 
Point 6 - 10 deal with the identification of a specific God.  



Above is a list of positive evidence of Gods existence, not depending on gaps or lack of knowledge.  We will be giving a closer look at each of these in the forthcoming videos. 

1. Existence of the universe. The universe had a beginning, therefore a cause
2. The universe obeys laws and rules of mathematics and physics. Its implementation depends on the action of an intelligent rational agency.
3. The physical universe and the laws of physics are interdependent and irreducible. There would not be one without the other.
4. Fine-Tuning. The fundamental physical constants, the universe, and the earth are finely tuned for life. Over 100 constants must be just right.
5. Formation of life. Life comes only from life. Abiogenesis has never been demonstrated to be possible despite over half a century of intensive scientific research.
6. Cells ARE literally factories. Biological cells ARE an industrial park of millions of interconnected complex factories, full of machines. Factories are always designed.
7. 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! 
8. Irreducible complexity. Biological cells require a minimal number of parts, which have no use by themselves, and would never accumulate on a prebiotic earth
9. The appearance of design. The universe and biological systems appear designed. Therefore, most probably, they are designed. 
10. Codified Information. DNA has the highest storage density known, and stores the blueprint of life. Blueprints can always be tracked back to intelligence
11. The Fossil Record. The Fossil record, and in special the Cambrian explosion, demonstrates the sudden appearance of lifeforms, without intermediates. 
12. Consciousness and language. Conscience, mental reality, language, logic, free will, moral values, are immaterial entities, and cannot emerge from physical matter. 
13. Human objective logic depends and can only derive from a pre-existing necessary first mind with objective logic.
14. Theology and philosophy. Both lead to an eternal, self-existent, omnipresent transcendent, conscious, intelligent, personal and moral Creator.
15. The Bible. The Old Testament is a catalogue of fulfilled prophecies of Jesus Christ, and his mission, death, and resurrection foretold with specificity.
16. Archaeology. Demonstrates that all events described in the Bible are historical facts. 
17. History. Historical evidence reveals that Jesus Christ really did come to this earth, and really did physically rise from the dead
18. The Bible's witnesses. There are many testimonies of Jesus doing miracles still today, and Jesus appearing to people all over the globe, still today.
19. End times. The signs of the end times that were foretold in the Bible are occurring in front of our eyes. New world order, Israel as a nation, microchip implant etc.
20. After-life experiences. Credible witnesses have seen the afterlife and have come back and reported to us that the afterlife is real.

1. something made based on mathematical principles




Johannes Kepler, Defundamentis Astrologiae Certioribus, Thesis XX (1601)
"The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God and which He revealed to us in the language of mathematics."

Kepler formulated three major laws of planetary motion which enabled Isaac Newton to devise the law of gravitation. Working from the carefully measured positions of the planets, Kepler mathematically deduced his three laws from the data.


Besides Kepler, Newton,


Galileo, and


Copernicus--viewed the universe as orderly and capable of mathematical description precisely because a rational God had fashioned it so. These brilliant scientists and mathematicians believed that, since God had designed the universe, then "all phenomena of nature would follow one master plan.

One mind designing a universe would almost surely have employed one set of basic principles to govern all related phenomena.





2. The fundamental laws of physics
  Newton’s Three Laws of Motion.
  Law of Gravity.
  Conservation of Mass-Energy.
  Conservation of Momentum.
  Laws of Thermodynamics.
  Electrostatic Laws.
  Invariance of the Speed of Light.





 
Only in the 20th century, it became clear that the incredibly diverse phenomena that we observe in nature are based on just six physical laws, each of which may be described by a simple mathematical relationship. The brilliant mathematical encoding of nature's deep structures, these physical laws can all be written on one side of one sheet of paper.

On the deepest level of the universe, there is cosmic harmony and coherence of the elemental forces and universal constants which govern all of nature. There are certain universal constants that describe the universe mathematically, and, remarkably, this set of constants is critical to the formation of a life-permitting universe.



"The naive view implies that the universe suddenly came into existence and found a complete system of physical laws waiting to be obeyed. Actually, it seems more natural to suppose that the physical universe and the laws of physics are interdependent." —*WH. McCrea, "Cosmology after Half a Century," Science, Vol. 160, June 1968, p. 1297.


As Richards and Gonzalez write: Our very ability to establish the laws of nature depends on their stability. (In fact, the idea of a law of nature implies stability.) Likewise, the laws of nature must remain constant long enough to provide the kind of stability life requires through the building of nested layers of complexity.


The properties of the most fundamental units of complexity we know of, quarks, must remain constant in order for them to form larger units, protons and neutrons, which then go into building even larger units, atoms, and so on, all the way to stars, planets, and in some sense, people.

The lower levels of complexity provide the structure and carry the information of life. There is still a great deal of mystery about how the various levels relate, but clearly, at each level, structures must remain stable over vast stretches of space and time.


And our universe does not merely contain complex structures; it also contains elaborately nested layers of higher and higher complexity. Consider complex carbon atoms, within still more complex sugars and nucleotides, within more complex DNA molecules, within complex nuclei, within complex neurons, within the complex human brain, all of which are integrated into a human body.

Such “complexification” would be impossible in both a totally chaotic, unstable universe and an utterly simple, homogeneous universe of, say, hydrogen atoms or quarks.



So the question arises: 


These Laws of Physics, where did they come from?
What is their origin?
Can laws come about naturally?
How did they come about fully balanced to create order instead of chaos?

The laws themselves defy a natural existence and science itself has not even one clue on how to explain them coming into being naturally. So when you use deductive reasoning, cancelling out all that does not fit or will not work, there is only one conclusion left that fits the bill of why the laws exist, and why they work together to make order instead of chaos.

Deny it as naturalist may, their way if thinking cannot explain away a Creator creating the laws that exist and the fact that they create order instead of chaos. That they are put together and tweaked to be in balance like a formula making everything work together to create all that we see. 

Always ignoring that even one notch off in how one law works with another that total and complete chaos would be the result. And that they cannot even contemplate the first step in an explanation that would fit their world views.
Applying the scientific method:

When all conclusions fit and point into one direction only, what is science supposed to do? According to the scientific method you are supposed to follow the evidence regardless of where it leads, not ignore it because it leads to where you don want to go.


In 1952, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to Maurice Solovine, where he expressed how he was struck by the wondrous orderliness of the world.  He wrote:

You find it strange that I consider the comprehensibility of the world (to the extent that we are authorized to speak of such a comprehensibility) as a miracle or as an eternal mystery. Well, a priori one should expect a chaotic world, which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way.

The next evidence  

At least one hundred requirements constrain the selection of the universal constants to a remarkable degree.




3. Fine-tuning 

Fine-tuning of the Big Bang
Fine-tuning of the  cosmological constant
Fine-tuning of the initial conditions of the universe
Fine-tuning of the  fundamental forces of the universe
Fine-tuning of the subatomic particles
Fine-tuning of  our Galaxy
Fine-tuning of the Solar System
Fine-tuning of the sun
Fine-tuning of the earth
Fine-tuning of the moon

Fine-tuning of the electromagnetic spectrum
Fine-tuning in biochemistry



It is known now that relatively small changes in any of the constants produce a dramatically different universe and one that is not hospitable to life of any imaginable type. Over one hundred requirements constrain the selection of the universal constants to a remarkable degree.

Gribbin stated for example that the flatness of the Universe must have been precise to within 1 part in 10^60. This makes the flatness parameter the most accurately determined number in all of physics, and suggests a fine-tuning of the Universe, to set up conditions suitable for the emergence of stars, galaxies, and life, of exquisite precision.

If this were indeed a coincidence, then it would be a fluke so extraordinary as to make all other cosmic coincidences pale into insignificance. 


Astrophysicist Paul Davies declared:  Our complex universe could have emerged only if the laws of physics are very close to what they are....The laws, which enable the universe to come into being, seem themselves to be the product of exceedingly ingenious design. If physics is the product of design, the universe must have a purpose, and the evidence of modern physics suggests strongly to me that the purpose includes us.
Superforce (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 243.











Following is amazing evidence that the world was expressly designed to conform to simple laws that man would readily discover is furnished by the universal law of gravitation: F= Gm[1]m[2]/r^2. Notice the exponent 2. Why is it not 1.9999999 . . ., or 4.3785264 . . ., or something else hard to use in computations? Yet research has been able to specify the exponent as far as the first six digits, giving 2.00000.

Thus, so far as we can tell, the exponent is exactly 2. Coulomb's law of electric force is similar: F = kq[1]q[2]/r^2. In this case, research has established that the exponent is no different from exactly 2 as far as the first 17 digits. Would we find such laws in an accidental universe?

Of course, atheists will immediately claim that they tried, but were unable to recognize such evidence and become believers.

https://rationalreligion.co.uk/legendary-evolutionary-biologist-calls-out-modern-atheism-in-final-interview
http://inters.org/Einstein-Letter-Solovine
https://web.archive.org/web/20110805203154/http://www.leaderu.com/real/ri9403/evidence.html









"The naive view implies that the universe suddenly came into existence and found a complete system of physical laws waiting to be obeyed. Actually, it seems more natural to suppose that the physical universe and the laws of physics are interdependent." —*WH. McCrea, "Cosmology after Half a Century," Science, Vol. 160, June 1968, p. 1297.


As Richards and Gonzalez write: Our very ability to establish the laws of nature depends on their stability. (In fact, the idea of a law of nature implies stability.) Likewise, the laws of nature must remain constant long enough to provide the kind of stability life requires through the building of nested layers of complexity.


The properties of the most fundamental units of complexity we know of, quarks, must remain constant in order for them to form larger units, protons and neutrons, which then go into building even larger units, atoms, and so on, all the way to stars, planets, and in some sense, people.

The lower levels of complexity provide the structure and carry the information of life. There is still a great deal of mystery about how the various levels relate, but clearly, at each level, structures must remain stable over vast stretches of space and time.


And our universe does not merely contain complex structures; it also contains elaborately nested layers of higher and higher complexity. Consider complex carbon atoms, within still more complex sugars and nucleotides, within more complex DNA molecules, within complex nuclei, within complex neurons, within the complex human brain, all of which are integrated into a human body.

Such “complexification” would be impossible in both a totally chaotic, unstable universe and an utterly simple, homogeneous universe of, say, hydrogen atoms or quarks.



So the question arises: 


These Laws of Physics, where did they come from?
What is their origin?
Can laws come about naturally?
How did they come about fully balanced to create order instead of chaos?

The laws themselves defy a natural existence and science itself has not even one clue on how to explain them coming into being naturally. So when you use deductive reasoning, cancelling out all that does not fit or will not work, there is only one conclusion left that fits the bill of why the laws exist, and why they work together to make order instead of chaos.

Deny it as naturalist may, their way if thinking cannot explain away a Creator creating the laws that exist and the fact that they create order instead of chaos. That they are put together and tweaked to be in balance like a formula making everything work together to create all that we see. 

Always ignoring that even one notch off in how one law works with another that total and complete chaos would be the result. And that they cannot even contemplate the first step in an explanation that would fit their world views.
Applying the scientific method:

When all conclusions fit and point into one direction only, what is science supposed to do? According to the scientific method you are supposed to follow the evidence regardless of where it leads, not ignore it because it leads to where you don want to go.


In 1952, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to Maurice Solovine, where he expressed how he was struck by the wondrous orderliness of the world.  He wrote:

You find it strange that I consider the comprehensibility of the world (to the extent that we are authorized to speak of such a comprehensibility) as a miracle or as an eternal mystery. Well, a priori one should expect a chaotic world, which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way.

The next evidence  

At least one hundred requirements constrain the selection of the universal constants to a remarkable degree.




3. Fine-tuning 

Fine-tuning of the Big Bang
Fine-tuning of the  cosmological constant
Fine-tuning of the initial conditions of the universe
Fine-tuning of the  fundamental forces of the universe
Fine-tuning of the subatomic particles
Fine-tuning of  our Galaxy
Fine-tuning of the Solar System
Fine-tuning of the sun
Fine-tuning of the earth
Fine-tuning of the moon

Fine-tuning of the electromagnetic spectrum
Fine-tuning in biochemistry



It is known now that relatively small changes in any of the constants produce a dramatically different universe and one that is not hospitable to life of any imaginable type. Over one hundred requirements constrain the selection of the universal constants to a remarkable degree.

Gribbin stated for example that the flatness of the Universe must have been precise to within 1 part in 10^60. This makes the flatness parameter the most accurately determined number in all of physics, and suggests a fine-tuning of the Universe, to set up conditions suitable for the emergence of stars, galaxies, and life, of exquisite precision.

If this were indeed a coincidence, then it would be a fluke so extraordinary as to make all other cosmic coincidences pale into insignificance. 


Astrophysicist Paul Davies declared:  Our complex universe could have emerged only if the laws of physics are very close to what they are....The laws, which enable the universe to come into being, seem themselves to be the product of exceedingly ingenious design. If physics is the product of design, the universe must have a purpose, and the evidence of modern physics suggests strongly to me that the purpose includes us.
Superforce (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 243.











Following is amazing evidence that the world was expressly designed to conform to simple laws that man would readily discover is furnished by the universal law of gravitation: F= Gm[1]m[2]/r^2. Notice the exponent 2. Why is it not 1.9999999 . . ., or 4.3785264 . . ., or something else hard to use in computations? Yet research has been able to specify the exponent as far as the first six digits, giving 2.00000.

Thus, so far as we can tell, the exponent is exactly 2. Coulomb's law of electric force is similar: F = kq[1]q[2]/r^2. In this case, research has established that the exponent is no different from exactly 2 as far as the first 17 digits. Would we find such laws in an accidental universe?

Of course, atheists will immediately claim that they tried, but were unable to recognize such evidence and become believers.

https://rationalreligion.co.uk/legendary-evolutionary-biologist-calls-out-modern-atheism-in-final-interview
http://inters.org/Einstein-Letter-Solovine
https://web.archive.org/web/20110805203154/http://www.leaderu.com/real/ri9403/evidence.html

Do the laws of physics point to the existence of God?



The universe obeys laws and rules of mathematics and physics.  They constrain how physical stuff behaves in the universe. The force of Gravity does not change, a hot cup of tea will always get cold, rather than hotter, the earth rotates constantly 24 hours, and the speed of light doesn't change anywhere in the universe.


These Laws of Physics, where did they come from? This is one of the very fundamental questions we can ask.  What is their origin? Can laws come about naturally? How did they come about fully balanced to create order instead of chaos?


Descartes ( 1596 – 1650) and Newton ( 1643 — 1727 ) established the discovery of natural laws as the central aim of inquiry. Since they presupposed that God exists, there was no problem to think of physical laws as rules,  laid down by God that move the universe in accordance with His divine determinations.



Johannes Kepler, Defundamentis Astrologiae Certioribus, Thesis XX (1601)
"The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God and which He revealed to us in the language of mathematics."

The greatest science fathers thought so. Kepler formulated three major laws of planetary motion which enabled Isaac Newton to devise the law of gravitation. Working from the carefully measured positions of the planets, Kepler mathematically deduced his three laws from the data.


Newton, Galileo, and Copernicus viewed the universe as orderly and capable of mathematical description precisely because a rational God had fashioned it so. These brilliant scientists and mathematicians believed that, since God had designed the universe, then "all phenomena of nature would follow one master plan.

One mind designing a universe would almost surely have employed one set of basic principles to govern all related phenomena.


And Einstein said: I want to know how God created this world. I’m not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the properties of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details. 

The supreme task of the physicist’ was to comprehend the order that underlies the workings of the entire cosmos – from the behaviour of the tiny particles jiggling around inside atoms to the convulsions of galaxies in outer space.



In 1952, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to Maurice Solovine, where he expressed how he was struck by the wondrous orderliness of the world.  He wrote:

You find it strange that I consider the comprehensibility of the world (to the extent that we are authorized to speak of such a comprehensibility) as a miracle or as an eternal mystery. Well, a priori one should expect a chaotic world, which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way.

With the advent of secular materialism, that view was challenged. Does the implementation of the law of physics depend on the action of an intelligent rational agency?


According to Einstein,  there is one and only one way in which all the components — matter, radiation, forces, space and time fit together to make reality work, just as the gears, springs, dials and wheels of a mechanical clock uniquely combine to keep time.








And in his article: The Evolution of the Physicist's Picture of Nature (1963) 1
It seems to be one of the fundamental features of nature that fundamental physical laws are described in terms of a mathematical theory of great beauty and power, needing quite a high standard of mathematics for one to understand it. You may wonder: Why is nature constructed along these lines? One can only answer that our present knowledge seems to show that nature is so constructed. We simply have to accept it.

One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe. Our feeble attempts at mathematics enable us to understand a bit of the universe, and as we proceed to develop higher and higher mathematics we can hope to understand the universe better.

MOVIE
"Mathematics is a game where mathematicians invent the rules. Physics is a game where the rules are given to us by nature. What is interesting is that the rules of nature appear to be in the same mathematical rules as the mathematicians have concocted" So, of course, the question is:  what is the source of the rules of nature?

Physics is the manifestation or effect of mathematic interacting with matter in our "real world".






Mathematics IS the true fabric of reality. Mathematicians can't invent any rules. Everything is already there or here.. Mathematicians just uncover.. not discover the rules of the game. The rules are embedded in everything in the known universe.


Feynman said: "Why nature is mathematical is a mystery...The fact that there are rules at all is a kind of miracle." The laws of nature can be described in numbers. They can be measured and quantified in the language of mathematics.


And Paul Davies: Our complex universe will emerge only if the laws of physics are very close to what they are.... Over the years I have often asked my physicist colleagues why the laws of physics are what they are. The answers vary from “that’s not a scientific question” to “nobody knows.” The favourite reply is, “There is no reason they are what they are—they just are.” 
Superforce (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 243.

The mysterious coherency of the mathematical forms underlying the cosmos is solved if we recognize these to be the result of the action of a powerful designer who created them with the goal to make the universe life-permitting.


According to Hawking, the laws of physics, not the will of God, provide the real explanation as to how life on Earth came into being. 

movie
The Big Bang, he argues, was the inevitable consequence of these laws 'because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.'



The laws of physics do not stand in a causal relationship. They cannot cause something to happen. They can explain how a jet engine works but not how it came to exist in the first place. Evidently, a jet engine does not emerge merely by the laws of physics on their own— intelligence and creative engineering is required.


The Standard Model of physics comes with several constants of nature — numbers like the mass and charge of the electron — that have to be measured in experiments. The values of these “free parameters” seem to be without any deeper meaning. Despite of it, particle physics is a wonder of elegance.

But is it even conceivable that there is no necessary intentional agent at the bottom of all existence giving the rules? Why did all physical start, constrained by these rules? If there was no divine agency, how can the existence of physical laws be explained? With an ur-simulator? by a random fundamental " law generating machine"? 

That alternative to God would have,  for no known reasons, start generating every possible process of chaotic trial and error of potential laws. Testing every circumstance, every possible niche, exploring every escape hatch, until getting a state of affairs that works, giving a sudden rise by a lucky accident to physical laws, going hand in hand and start imposing their rules to physical stuff, created at the Big bang.

But how could all this occur without physical stuff?  The rule is just an expression of a constraint that is actually enforced by interaction with the physical system. Furthermore, if the laws of nature had been different so that they forced electrons to attract rather than to repel one another, the universe as we know it, would not exist.


Marco Biagini, Ph.D. in Solid State Physics: 
Science has proved that the state of the universe is determined by some specific mathematical equations, the laws of physics; the universe cannot exist independently from such equations, which determine the events and the properties of such events (including the probability for the event to occur, according to the predictions of quantum mechanics). 

However we know that a mathematical equation cannot exist by itself, but it exists only as a thought in a conscious and intelligent mind. In fact, a mathematical equation is only an abstract concept, which existence presupposes the existence of a person conceiving such a concept. Therefore, the existence of this mathematically structured universe does imply the existence of a personal God; 

this universe cannot exist by itself, but it can exist only if there is a conscious and intelligent God conceiving it according to some specific mathematical equations. 


Is it even conceivable that the existence of natural laws can exist without physical things to act upon, and a lawgiver? Would it not be utterly mysterious and border to the nonsensical to claim no lawgiver nor physical stuff to act upon is necessary? 


How could it be honest simply to claim of not knowing, and leaving it by that? Things could just happen, for no reason at all.

If God is killed off,  the laws just free-float in a conceptual vacuum without explanation.

How could it be imagined, that abstract, non-physical objects -- laws of nature, would be living in their "transcendent state" , and by the advent of the Big bang, physical stuff would find them suddenly starting to impose their rules on matter, energy and space, as if abstract things would be able to move from non-causality, to force physical things to behave in a certain manner, obeying their rules ?



A  suggestion is that physical necessity could eventually have enforced these laws to come into play, and, for example, forcing electrons by their creation and first appearance, start to attract one another. In other words, other laws would eventually not even be possible, and there were no other options, but the state of affairs had to be the way it is.   How can we reject that this was not the case?

Could it be said that rather than thinking of laws as rules that have an existence above and beyond the objects they govern, these laws are reduced to particularly concise and powerful descriptions of regular behaviour, but nothing more than that?

If these laws are a mere descriptive conception, they do not exist independently and transcendently. They do not exist in some platonic form beyond the behaviour of matter and energy. The laws are just descriptions of the inherent nature of physical things which could not behave and be differently.  But is that so?


Sean Carroll: There are an infinite number of self-consistent quantum-mechanical systems that are different from our actual universe. And there are presumably an infinite number of ways the laws of physics could have been that aren’t quantum-mechanical at all. Many physicists now suspect that the laws of physics in our observable universe are just one possibility among a very large “landscape” of physically realizable possibilities.

There is no reason why there could not be a universe hostile to any life form. Universes of black holes, high-entropy universes, a universe that changes its underlying structure with great frequency making it impossible for life to exist for long periods of time, a universe that does not permit the formation of stars, galaxies etc. 


Some argue that physical laws are just described, but not prescribed. On the prescriptive view, these laws explain why all electrons attract one another, whereas on the descriptive view the laws just restate the fact that all electrons attract one another. The problem with the descriptive view is that it does not give any explanation whatsoever why the behaviour is the way it is.

Is it justified to say simply: laws of nature do have a privileged role in physical explanation, but that privilege is due to their simplicity and generality, and not going further to attempt to explain why they exist in the first place? The problem is, that this does not explain anything at all in regards to their origin !!


Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate from the University of Texas, Austin, described himself as “pretty Platonist,” saying he thinks the laws of nature are as real as “the rocks in the field.”


MIT physicist Max Tegmark goes that far to claim that mathematics does not describe the universe — it is the universe.  “Everything in our world is purely mathematical — including you,” he claims. In 2014 he argued in “Our Mathematical Universe” that mathematics is the fundamental world reality that drives the universe.

His claim is basically that mathematics is operating in a god-like fashion. Does it not make more sense, in the end, to conclude that God used beautiful mathematics to create the world? And there, we have the three ingredients that make up reality: Conscious intelligence, abstract mathematics, and the material world.

Our nonphysical thoughts somehow mysteriously guide the actions of our physical bodies. This is no more scientifically explicable than the mysterious ability of nonphysical mathematical constructions to determine the workings of a separate physical world.



  The fundamental laws of physics
  Newton’s Three Laws of Motion.
  Law of Gravity.
  Conservation of Mass-Energy.
  Conservation of Momentum.
  Laws of Thermodynamics.
  Electrostatic Laws.
  Invariance of the Speed of Light.

Each one of the fundamental laws of nature is essential for life to exist. A universe lacking any of the laws shown in Table above would almost certainly be a universe without life. 



Only in the 20th century, it became clear that the incredibly diverse phenomena that we observe in nature are based on just a small number of physical laws, each of which may be described by a simple mathematical relationship. 


The brilliant mathematical encoding of nature's deep structures, these physical laws can all be written on one side of one sheet of paper.

On the deepest level of the universe, there is cosmic harmony and coherence of the elemental forces and universal constants which govern all of nature. There are certain universal constants that describe the universe mathematically, and, remarkably, this set of constants is critical to the formation of a life-permitting universe.


The listed universal constants are indispensable for the mathematical description of the universe. Is there scientific evidence for the existence of God?  When cosmological models were first developed in the mid-twentieth century, cosmologists believed that the selection of a given set of constants was not critical to the formation of a life-permitting universe.

Through subsequent parametric studies that varied those constants, scientists began to realize that relatively small changes in any of the constants would produce a dramatically different universe and one that would not be life-permitting in any way.



In our universe, energy is manifest through four fundamental forces: gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear, and weak. In order for our universe to be life-permitting,  then each of these fundamental forces requires fixed parameters over long periods of time. If they were not, then the interaction amongst each other and with space and time would be random and chaotic, and the universe would not be life-permitting.

The operation of these constants within the universe gives rise to a variety of interactions and interrelationships from which the equations of physics are derived.


As Richards and Gonzalez write: Our very ability to establish the laws of nature depends on their stability. (In fact, the idea of a law of nature implies stability.) Likewise, the laws of nature must remain constant long enough to provide the kind of stability that life requires through the building of nested layers of complexity.

If a universe is not to be random and chaotic but permitting life, the interactions and interrelationships among space, time, and the different kinds and emissions of energy require unchanging universal constants. These quantitative parameters control virtually every interaction in the universe, and they are integral to the equations of physics. 

Why are there laws of nature that never change? Why is the universe so orderly, so reliable? The greatest scientists have been struck by this fact. There is no logical necessity for a universe to obeys rules, even less by the rules of beautiful mathematics. But nature obeys the laws of physics without exception.


The properties of the most fundamental units of complexity we know of, quarks, must remain constant in order for them to form larger units, protons and neutrons, which then go into building even larger units, atoms, and so on, all the way to stars, planets, and in some sense, people.

The lower levels of complexity provide the structure and carry the information of life. There is still a great deal of mystery about how the various levels relate, but clearly, at each level, structures must remain stable over vast stretches of space and time.


And our universe does not merely contain complex structures; it also contains elaborately nested layers of higher and higher complexity. Consider complex carbon atoms, within still more complex sugars and nucleotides, within more complex DNA molecules, within complex nuclei, within complex neurons, within the complex human brain, all of which are integrated into a human body.

Such “complexification” would be impossible in both a totally chaotic, unstable universe and an utterly simple, homogeneous universe of, say, hydrogen atoms or quarks.



. . . the numerical coincidences [necessary for a life-permitting universe] could be regarded as evidence of design. The delicate fine-tuning in the values of the constants, necessary so that the various different branches of physics can dovetail so felicitously, might be attributed to God. It is hard to resist the impression that the present structure of the universe, apparently so sensitive to minor alterations in the numbers, has been rather carefully thought out. Such a conclusion can, of course, only be subjective. In the end it boils down to a question of belief. Is it easier to believe in a cosmic designer than the multiplicity of universes necessary for the weak anthropic principle to work? . . . Perhaps future developments in science will lead to more direct evidence for other universes, but until then, the seemingly miraculous concurrence of numerical values that nature has assigned to her fundamental constants must remain the most compelling evidence for an element of cosmic design

The laws themselves defy a natural existence and science itself has no clue on how to explain them coming into being naturally. So when you use deductive reasoning, cancelling out all that does not fit or will not work, there is only one conclusion left that fits the bill of why the laws exist, and why they work together to make order instead of chaos.

Even one notch off in how one law works with another that total and complete chaos would be the result.  When all conclusions fit and point into one direction only, what is science supposed to do? According to the scientific method you are supposed to follow the evidence regardless of where it leads, not ignore it because it leads to where you don want to go.

The existence of laws of physics… strongly implies that there is a God who formulates such laws and ensures that the physical realm conforms to them.’ There has to be some organizing principle. God is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence—why there is something rather than nothing. The existence of these mathematical equations implies the existence of a personal, conscious and intelligent Creator. Atheism is incompatible with the view of the universe, presented by modern science, since the intrinsic abstract and conceptual nature of the laws ruling the universe, implies the existence of a personal God.

First, the basic building blocks of life need to be synthesized. Amino Acids, nucleotides, fatty acids, and sugars. They are produced in the Cell through very complex metabolic and catabolic processes, and complex, instructional information. But these were not existent on prebiotic earth. 

So scientists must come up with a scenario and explanation, where these molecules emerged naturally, without the complex cellular processes, and then, somehow, grew into the first self-replicating, living cell.  



Sugars are Carbohydrates,  the suppliers of energy. Amino Acids are the building blocks of Proteins,  the working horses of the cell, molecular machines that exercise the most important manufacturing tasks. Fatty acids are the ingredients of Lipids, essential to build the cell membranes, and compartments. 

Nucleotides form the genetic alphabet, essential to store the blueprint of life, complex, instructional information that is transcribed and translated to make proteins. None of these basic building blocks has EVER been synthesized in the lab simulating a natural, unguided emergence as supposedly happened



Carbohydrates such as glucose serve a structural role as well as providing energy for the cell.  It is the most important source of energy in all organisms.


It is a monosaccharide containing six carbon atoms


















Glucose, a six-carbon sugar, is used by Glycolysis which is the most universal pathway in all energy metabolism, occurring in almost every living cell. 


The glycolytic pathway is multifunctional. Thus it provides the cell with energy from glucose catabolism - the process that breaks down molecules into smaller units.  

Through glycolysis and later in the reactions of the citric acid cycle and oxidative phosphorylation, glucose is oxidized to eventually form CO2 and water, yielding energy mostly in the form of ATP.



Only a non-thinker and wilful ignorant asks for proofs and to demonstrate that absolutely nothing has no causal powers.

Only a non-thinker and wilful ignorant asks for proofs that intelligence comes only from intelligence.

Flowering plants of the genus Musa will always only generate Bananas. Citrus species will always only produce citrus fruits like Orange, lemon etc.
Only an intelligent mind, capable of logical reasoning, is an adequate cause to create other minds able to reason. If we as humans possess the capability to intellectually understand and to know, then the cause must have the same or better capabilities of the same sort.
Questioning and doubting that matter can not produce a mind, consciousness, intelligence, and the capability of logical reasoning is the expression of stupid skepticism to the extreme.

Only a non-thinker and wilful ignorant claims that the laws are not descriptive. Obviously the laws are laws because a law-giver did set them up to be laws, and so the order upon which the universe works.

The physical universe and the laws of physics are interdependent and irreducible. There would not be one without the other. Origins make only sense in face of Intelligent Design.

"The naive view implies that the universe suddenly came into existence and found a complete system of physical laws waiting to be obeyed. Actually, it seems more natural to suppose that the physical universe and the laws of physics are interdependent." —*WH. McCrea, "Cosmology after Half a Century," Science, Vol. 160, June 1968, p. 1297.

Only a non-thinker and wilful ignorant asks for 15 years for evidence of Gods existence.

Something that is self-evident, and the Bible does not even question, but clarifies in Genesis 1:1 with exceptional information content, and the highest semantic weight in worlds literature.

In information theory, semantics can be defined as the weight of the meanings” per sentence or per paragraph. There are literally thousands of books about origins, the beginning of the universe, life, and biodiversity, but none provide genuine answers. Max they can say is; " probably, most likely, we suggest, it seems, it appears " etc. That extends through ALL evolutionary biology. Nobody provides clear certain answers. The Bible, on the other hand, describes the origin of the physical universe in one remarkable sentence:

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.  

And the origin of man:    “And the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being” (Gen 2:7). These few words comprise a remarkable information content, since they provide answers to many questions.    A well-known scientist named Herbert Spencer died in 1903. He discovered that all reality, all reality, all that exists in the universe can be contained in five categories...time, force, action, space and matter. Herbert Spencer said everything that exists, exists in one of those categories...time, force, action, space, and matter.

Now think about that. Time, force, action, space and matter. That is a logical sequence. And then with that in your mind, listen to Genesis 1:1. "In the beginning," that's time..."God," that's force, "created," that's action, "the heavens," that's space, "and the earth," that's matter. Everything that could be said about everything that exists is said in that first verse.

The sentence can be divided in two categories: the physical universe: time, matter, and space
And the second:
God = the cause
action = the creation event.

Everything that BEGINS TO EXIST ( action ), has a cause. ( God ).

Once this is compared with the scientific evidence, and philosophical considerations, it provides an intellectually SATISFACTORY explanation of our origins. An epistemological sound triple team in action: science, philosophy, and theology.

In order to understand our place in the cosmos, and the reason of our existence, we need to know about our origins. The Bible gives that answer in an epic, remarkable, unique sentence in Genesis 1. The highest weight of meaning in one sentence.  

There is a dictum:   “Truth does not require many words, but a lie cannot use enough words”,

What we have here represents the highest possible semantic information density. Other passages in the Bible also exhibit superlative semantic densities (e. g. John 3:16 contains all the information necessary for man’s salvation).










And by hanging up on four of my five calls, Matt Dillahunty has demonstrated that the security of how he defends his views are just a fassade. A mask. Behind the man, is emptiness and insecurity. No. It was not a lie to point out that the card house of faulty epistemology  is based on extreme bias against a creator.

I do not wish you happy holydays. But a time of reflection of what you think you are achieving in your life and through your militant atheism, besides preying on the ignorance and gullibility of your fans, many of which are on the highway to hell because of you, as you are. Yes. Misery seeks companions. And you have many. That will make your burden and responsability upon which you will be held accountable only worse.

There is still time to repent..... God is gracious. He waited 400 years before he  ordered the erradicatation of the Canaanites which committed horrendous crimes by offering their babies to Moloch and burned them,  from the holy land......

think you're making a huge leap there to claim that being must come from a non-physical being.
When it comes to the origins of our universe, there are two possibilities. Either our universe formed from nothing or out of something.
If our universe comes out of nothing, it now becomes scientific fact that not only can something come out of nothing, but everything within the observable universe can form out of nothing completly by chance. If it can happen by chance, it can be recreated intentionally by any intelligent being who posses the knowledge, tools and desire to do so.
It is a inevitable fact that, if they survived long enough, intelligent lifeforms would eventually develop the technology which can produce a universe from nothing. Not only would this lifeform develop the technology but it would tweak it and adjust it over time, eventually mastering the very power to create anything it desires.
In other words, if our universe can form out of nothing, God's are an inevitable fact of a ever progressing society.
It is even possible that we could develop this technology, destroy ourselves in it the moment we activate this power while creating the very universe which formed us simultaneously.
The end is the beginning is the end.

The other possibility is that our universe comes out of something. If our universe forms from something, then something has always been.
A 'big bang' event is unlikely to occur within a singularity which has always been. An infinite singularity would almost certainly exist within a stable state of existence, and so we can conclude that this is probably not the case.
Instead, it is mostly probable that a sea of particles smaller than we can measure exist within a infinite but ever changing state. These particles all carry the properties of attractive and a repulsive forces, the separate point's of which are randomly oriented. If a particle bonds with another, it's attractive force's increase, forming new bonds at a rapidly and ever increasing rate. New particles which behave variably are born from the various combinations which form over time.
Each bonds carries a "memory" of previous bonds, each particle carrying its own unique electric imprint which are exchanged in the event of a new bond.
These bonds become increasingly complex in their structure as time progresses.
If a particle clashes with another particle it can be broken apart, the particle with a larger mass has a lower chance of being split into piece's and so it is advantageous to obsorb more of this primary substance.
These particles "learn" that they can change their orientation to some degree by releasing some energy, thus allowing them to accept or reject a bonding event with a near by particle.
Certaint structured bonds increase bonding potetional, bonds which offer a decreased potential are rejected, they don't grow and are torn apart by competing particles.
The structure's of particles which favor higher bonding potentials outcompete the particles that don't. Each particle within a structure carries an eletric imprint of the structure. Particles which break away from the structure reform the parant structure if they aren't first absorbed by another particle structure.
Some particle structure's begin to selectively pair up with other particles, increasing the growth potential for all of them.
The particle structures grow in size and complexity over time and become more efficient, however if too many bonds are being formed at the same time, or if a collision occurs; it can destroy the entire structure. It becomes unstable and breaks apart or collapses into itself. The good news however is that the energetic imprint of the parent structure exist within some of the surviving particles and they begin to reform themselves.
Our universe is likely one of many, born from this process, it restructures itself.
This is why our universe appears to obey certain mathematical and geometric laws, everything in our universe is imprinted with the electric imprint of the parent particle. The singularity.
All moving, all bonding, sharing, changing, copying and reproducing. Rearranging ourselves into new structure's, still heavily influenced by the parent particle. If we can learn to willingly alter the particle structure's, we can again become God's.

God's might exist, they might not, it's highly probable that they do or will but it's completely impossible that they are non-physical. Any god which might exist is simply a master and the result of a natural, physical process.
There is no soul, there is no afterlife.
Your memory is absorbed by the structure's which absorb you, kept if it's useful, ripped apart and restructured if it isn't.

rescuetalk888@gmail.com
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Hi, I am inviting you to join:

World sailing cruising routes
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2071412252869580/

YouTube Sailing Channels
https://www.facebook.com/groups/877211516012399/

YouTube Sailing channels, CREATORS ONLY group
https://www.facebook.com/groups/378939793046998/?ref=linked_groups_manage_links

The group also HELPS to PROMOTE new and established channels to reach new viewers.

To the mod's: Hope there is no problem in this group with my post. If there is, I remove it, no problem.



I am the founder of the two other groups with the same name on Facebook. Facebook blocked my previous account. I joined FB again and starting these two groups. You can help to build this new  ( and not so crowded) sailing community, and also become a moderator ( if you like ). Keep safe.  



VITARA00402




think you're making a huge leap there to claim that being must come from a non-physical being.
When it comes to the origins of our universe, there are two possibilities. Either our universe formed from nothing or out of something.
If our universe comes out of nothing, it now becomes scientific fact that not only can something come out of nothing, but everything within the observable universe can form out of nothing completly by chance. If it can happen by chance, it can be recreated intentionally by any intelligent being who posses the knowledge, tools and desire to do so.
It is a inevitable fact that, if they survived long enough, intelligent lifeforms would eventually develop the technology which can produce a universe from nothing. Not only would this lifeform develop the technology but it would tweak it and adjust it over time, eventually mastering the very power to create anything it desires.
In other words, if our universe can form out of nothing, God's are an inevitable fact of a ever progressing society.
It is even possible that we could develop this technology, destroy ourselves in it the moment we activate this power while creating the very universe which formed us simultaneously.
The end is the beginning is the end.

The other possibility is that our universe comes out of something. If our universe forms from something, then something has always been.
A 'big bang' event is unlikely to occur within a singularity which has always been. An infinite singularity would almost certainly exist within a stable state of existence, and so we can conclude that this is  probably not the case.
Instead, it is mostly probable that a sea of particles smaller than we can measure exist within a infinite but ever changing state. These particles all carry the properties of attractive and a repulsive forces, the separate point's of which are randomly oriented. If a particle bonds with another, it's attractive force's increase, forming new bonds at a rapidly and ever increasing rate. New particles which behave variably are born from the various combinations which form over time.
Each bonds carries a "memory" of previous bonds, each particle carrying its own unique electric imprint which are exchanged in the event of a new bond.
These bonds become increasingly complex in their structure as time progresses.
If a particle clashes with another particle it can be broken apart, the particle with a larger mass has a lower chance of being split into piece's and so it is advantageous  to obsorb more of this primary substance.
These particles "learn" that they can change their orientation to some degree by releasing some energy, thus allowing them to accept or reject a bonding event with a near by particle.
Certaint structured bonds increase bonding potetional, bonds which offer a decreased potential are rejected, they don't grow and are torn apart by competing particles.  
The structure's of particles which favor higher bonding potentials outcompete the particles that don't. Each particle within a structure carries an eletric imprint of the structure. Particles which break away from the structure reform the parant structure if they aren't first absorbed by another particle structure.
Some particle structure's begin to selectively pair up with other particles, increasing the growth potential for all of them.
The particle structures grow in size and complexity over time and become more efficient, however if too many bonds are being formed at the same time, or if a collision occurs; it can destroy the entire structure. It becomes unstable and breaks apart or collapses into itself. The good news however is that the energetic imprint of the parent structure exist within some of the surviving particles and they begin to reform themselves.
Our universe is likely one of many, born from this process, it restructures itself.
This is why our universe appears to obey certain mathematical and geometric laws,  everything in our universe is imprinted with the electric imprint of the parent particle. The singularity.
All moving, all bonding, sharing, changing, copying and reproducing. Rearranging ourselves into new structure's, still heavily influenced by the parent particle. If we can learn to  willingly alter the particle structure's, we  can again become God's.

God's might exist, they might not, it's highly probable that they do or will but it's completely impossible that they are non-physical. Any god which might exist is simply a master and the result of a natural, physical process.
There is no soul, there is no afterlife.
Your memory is absorbed by the structure's which absorb you, kept if it's useful, ripped apart and restructured if it isn't.

+79981388987
2711vitara

The Days of Noah 2 - Apocalypse (deutsche UT)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wy76_LqXkNs&t=2087s

http://www.noahsarksearch.net/arkmovie/eng/

THE DAYS OF NOAH 2: APOCALYPSE
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_days_of_noah_2_apocalypse
A large scale adventure documentary film The Days of Noah 2: Apocalypse reveals one of the biggest discoveries under extreme conditions in the recent history. In October 2009, an ark expedition team made up of Chinese and Turkish explorers climbed up the snow capped mountains of Mt. Ararat at 4000 meters above sea level. In the end, a giant wooden structure with seven rooms is discovered sealed in glacier. World premiere of exclusive footage. International experts exclaim at the perseverance of the Chinese Expedition Team which leads to this remarkable discovery.

In 2010, news reported that a Chinese team did find Noah's ark. After some investigation, I concluded that the news report was fake, and the whole thing a hoax. The key claim that made me dismiss the story  was that :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searches_for_Noah%27s_Ark

" the discovery was probably the result of a hoax, perpetrated by ten Kurdish workers hired by the Turkish guide used by the Chinese, who planted large wood beams taken from an old structure near the Black Sea at the cave site "

for me, the issue was settled.

But tonight, i stumbled on a post of   Greg Thurston, and Philip Williams was interacting at the comments section and informed that he did visit the site at Mount Ararat, in Turkey. That, of course, got my attention. So he did send me a link of a video of the expedition:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQDmBA9TuD0

and :

https://video.foxnews.com/v/4561729115001?fbclid=IwAR1fzlUE1xyQXQmJfsDfRlALZgA-uyp0fgHpwzc_U0kXXN1tWDozo81hjVQ#sp=show-clips

this is, of course, a highly controversial issue, but if the evidence has enough weight, worth to be used in apologetics A LOT !!

Answers in genesis dismissed the finding by claiming that the wood, by radiocarbon dating, is too young.

https://answersingenesis.org/noahs-ark/noahs-ark-found/is-the-wood-recently-found-on-mt-ararat-from-the-ark/

I regard these dating methods as suspicious.

Has Noah’s Ark been found?

I’ve just had an extended conversation with one of my Facebook friends, buried deep in another post, which I’ve decided to summarize and present here. (For those who have looked into that topic, no, this is not the Ron Wyatt site.)

Philip Williams Williams claims to have actually visited the site on Mount Ararat, and has written a book entitled “ The Archaeological Evidence of Noah's Flood”, describing it, and presenting considerable research on other aspects of evidence, such as pre-flood evidence of humans. (I read all the Amazon reviews, and one reviewer described it as a “tome”.)

He also claims to have worked closely for some time with Norman Geisler, a well known, and (largely) highly respected Christian apologist, who passed away last year. (I have my own experience and opinions, regarding Geisler, which I expressed in the conversation, but I won’t go into that here.)

It was not clear to me exactly what Philip believed, as he seemed to have strong opposition to a biblical timeline, but seemed strongly supportive of a global flood. So I asked for some clarification.

Here is the bulk of one of his comments, in response to my request for more information:

//it’s a worldwide Flood. I have written a book on the archaeological evidence of the Flood showing a world full of drowned people and land animals, not fish like the YEC “Flood.” I have traced a new migration from Mount Ararat and have actually been inside the Ark on the top of the mountain. I am currently writing a book on the discovery, the greatest archaeological discovery in human history.

I work with the world’s top biblical archaeologists on this project. The late Norm Geisler became my disciple on the matter of the Ark and Flood. What more would you like to know?

I also discovered the geological evidence of the Flood which Lyell and Agassiz changed to an Ice Age.//

I responded with a number of points on //What more would you like to know?//, which it is not necessary to get into here, as some of it was answered by this next comment:

//I do hold to 6000 on man, also a more literal view of Genesis than probably you. I do very much dislike you grouping me with the evolutionists when you have a more scientifically imposed view of Genesis 1 than me. You assume what you intend to prove. If there is 24-hour or solar day duration in Genesis 1, why not translate that way? You impose a certain theological view on this chapter and demonize those who don’t agree with you.// He also included an Amazon link to his book (see that later).

This of course resulted in a further response from me, as it seemed to raise more questions than were answered.

He replied with //you seem to think that you are very important?//, to which I said (I include my comment in its entirety):

//LOL. Is that a fairly common human trait? Adamic nature?

And isn’t it actually TRUE, if you understand anything about how God looks at you and me?

Sigh. Let me try a different approach.

I ask a question. You send me a link to the book and don’t answer the question.

I ask another question, and the same thing happens.

I can understand that anybody who writes a book thinks their book is really important. They also hope that lots of people will buy it. I don’t imagine you are any different on that account.

Lots of people buy books that they’ve heard about, that others have recommended, or that hold some promise for some reward (learning something, entertainment, whatever).

Your comments have not done much to make me want to buy your book and read it. I’m trying to ask you to give me more incentive to buy it or to read it.

I won’t try to describe how all this is coming across to me, because it will sound like I’m attacking you.

But I will point out, again, that you didn’t answer my question!

Come on. I’m trying to have a conversation, not playing a game.//

Bear with me, please. There are only two more comments. Then I will tell you what I found in four hours, as I took it upon myself to do some research specifically on this. If the topic interests you at all (which it indeed may, if you’ve read this far), my research will save you some time!

Philip’s final comment was //i see not one ounce of humility in you, as I do in the world’s most accomplished thinkers that I have personally known, but the self-righteous pompous arrogance that I see in little minds, as if satisfying you ought to be my objective.

I don’t mind sincere questions. But some things are too deep to discuss without spending the time. So good bye, and best to you.//

My final reply, in turn, was //that is a good resolution to this impasse.

Since you were not forthcoming with any links, answers to my questions, or supports of your claims, I spent some considerable time looking into it myself.

My memory was rather quickly refreshed on the NAMI charade, by several articles I found which specifically named you as being involved.

I looked into that years ago, and was utterly convinced that it is not authentic, but that it is a complex fraud, perpetrated by at least one charlatan, and believed by an undetermined number of other people. Including you, I guess.

Then I found the “arkapology“ site, with extensive writings evidently by you, confirming your involvement, and that you are convinced it is genuine.

I know what it is like personally, to have been duped in the past, so I understand.

I will leave it there, with whatever measures of pride and humility you yourself have, and I wish you all the best in your pursuit of truth.//

So, there you have it: what led to this post. Below are brief descriptions and links to what I found, in case you would like to look into it further, and form your own opinion.

****

An excerpt from an article which mentions Philip Williams (which I include here because I thought it was quite informative, generally speaking, while the article was *specifically* quite informative on this “find“) https://creation.com/hong-kong-ark-fiasco

”C-14 results crucially depend on the carbon cycle in nature, which is why the effects of the industrial revolution (with its burning of large amounts of carbon from fossil fuels, carbon that has been out of that cycle and is now being returned to it) have to be adjusted for by radiocarbon labs. So, obviously, given that a global Flood event would have buried most of this carbon in the first place to take it out of the carbon cycle, that needs to be adjusted for, too, i.e. carbon that was once in the cycle, then removed en masse. Secular radiocarbon labs won’t make that second adjustment, of course, because they reject that there was a global Flood—but for obvious reasons, NAMI cannot logically deny a global Flood in order to protect their claim of Noah’s Ark from scrutiny! ... All this has been pointed out to NAMI, incidentally.”
*
An article discussing pre-flood archaeology, which in the summary seemed to mention Philip Williams, although I could not find the reference. I may be wrong in that recollection, but there’s wonderful information in that article, nonetheless.
https://creation.com/thinking-about-chronology

Link for the Amazon book by Philip Ernest Williams
The Archaeological Evidence of Noah's Flood

https://read.amazon.com/litb/B07JB5B7JX…

ICR article mentioning Fox interview with Geisler and Williams https://www.icr.org/arti…/noahs-ark-discovery-likely-sinking
Excerpt: “... NAMI, a group of Ark explorers based in China, which in 2010 told Fox News that they were “99.9 percent [sure] that this is it.” Well, it wasn’t.”
*
Finally, the “Arc Apology” site (http://arkapology.com), which includes a tribute to Geisler and a plenitude of various other writings, possibly from Williams.

One excerpt: “I have personally interviewed 5 eyewitnesses who have been in the structure—all of whom are convinced that it is Noah’s Ark (see photos at http://christianleadersandscholars.com/…/video-and-photogr…/“

So, go to it (or not), and let me know what you think!

we have cruised since 1995 on RTW trip, Angelo, and have experienced all types of weather from becalmed to in excess of 80knts, from sub zero to in excess of 50°C and from glass flat water to monster waves. Comfort on board has always been paramount as a family (four children born during sailing) - comfort includes reasonable sailing performance on all points of sail, space for everyone on board to have their own quiet area, the ability to feel safe moving around in all conditions, the capacity to carry the luxuries as well as necessities (eg second hard rib dinghy for the kids as well as water 'toys'), the easy ability to clock mileage, the matter of having the redundancy of two engines, the sheer joy of having enough beds to be permanent features as well as deck space, the safety of a fairly stable platform to work on, and two that are often overlooked:- that the cockpit and saloon being one level and that we can with a little work make our vessel a floating platform in the event of hitting something like a shipping container. As most boats spend upwards of 70% of their time at anchor the indoor/outdoor space, much of which is on about the same level, makes for comfortable living. Being able to produce hot meals and drinks in poor conditions has also proved a boon. The ability to have two on watch in a sheltered cockpit or in the saloon is another bonus although this can apply to many monohulls as well, of course. When I read of people commenting about turning turtle it is a direct result of no knowledge of the subject. Those comments usually come from people that have gathered their sailing experiences whilst sat under a tree.

not all marinas charge silly premiums - talking to other cats you quickly locate the better value marina's. Most cruising boats anchor, once away from the 'first world'. Good ground tackle can reduce the scare factor of anchoring. For me, that means 300ft of chain and a decent anchor. Yes, cats can carry that. There are so many fallacies surrounding cats and systems. I'm changing boats shortly (selling our Voyage 44) but some things never change: a protected helm, raised dinghy storage, a big water maker, a washing machine, plenty of diesel storage for extended range under engines (mostly on time frames rather than distance) the ability to have a goal post arrangement and to have >1500 watts of solar, able to have a 25hp outboard on the dinghy (need to be able to secure this in passage), able to have decent food storage/refrigeration, space for tools and spares etc. I do most of my own work including engines and rigging but not major sail work.

Lastly, for a cruising boat I won't look at front cockpits, either. They scare me. I do look at the motors and sail drives and any issues they have (Yanmar sail drives and slipping cones etc) as well as ensuring the main can be reefed from the helm; current boat has two reefs back to the helm so reef 1 is done at the mast.



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This was my introduction discourse in my debate with Leophilius:

Intelligent Design in Abiogenesis? DEBATE | Otangelo Vs Leophilius
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eb1YWZz4-d0&lc=z23zub5o0sznuvfyn04t1aokgo0f1ajzwhxo0vjnxnxpbk0h00410.1594768575517304

The origin of life is widely regarded as one of the most difficult open problems in science.  ‘Bottom-up’ approaches in the laboratory have not generated anything nearly as complex as a living cell. And what has been achieved, is a far cry from the complexity of anything living. The total lack of any kind of experimental evidence leading to the re-creation of life; not to mention the spontaneous emergence of life…  undermines the worldview of who wants materialism to be true. But of course, there is always an excuse: Science is working on it. But is it really justified to put hope that one day a materialistic explanation will be found?

David Denton stated:
We now know not only of the existence of a break between the living and non-living world but also that it represents the most dramatic and fundamental of all the discontinuities of nature. Between a living cell and the most highly ordered non-biological systems, such as a crystal or a snowflake, there is a chasm as vast and absolute as it is possible to conceive.

And Lynn Margulis stated: To go from a bacterium to people is less of a step than to go from a mixture of amino acids to a bacterium.

And Eugene Koonin advisory editorial board of Trends in Genetics stated:
A succession of exceedingly unlikely steps is essential for the origin of life, from the synthesis and accumulation of nucleotides to the origin of translation; through the multiplication of probabilities, these make the final outcome seem almost like a miracle. The difficulties remain formidable. For all the effort, we do not currently have coherent and plausible models for the path from simple organic molecules to the first life forms. Most damningly, the powerful mechanisms of biological evolution were not available for all the stages preceding the emergence of replicator systems. Given all these major difficulties, it appears prudent to seriously consider radical alternatives for the origin of life. "

And in fact, there are basically just two options to consider: Either life emerged by a lucky accident, spontaneously through self-organization by unguided natural events, or through the direct intervention, creative force, and activity of an intelligent designer. Evolution is not a possible explanation, because evolution depends on DNA replication. Many have claimed that physical necessity could have promoted chemical reactions, which eventually resulted in the emergence of life. The problem here however is, that the genetic sequence that specifies the arrangement of proteins can be of any order, there is no constraint by physical needs.

To understand why random events are not a good explanation, we best have a look at the deepest level, on an atomic scale. Life uses just five nucleobases to make DNA and RNA. Two purines, and three pyrimidines. Purines use two rings with nine atoms, pyrimidines use just one ring with six atoms. Hydrogen bonding between purine and pyrimidine bases is fundamental to the biological functions of nucleic acids, as in the formation of the double-helix structure of DNA. This bonding depends on the selection of the right atoms in the ring structure. Pyrimidine rings consist of six atoms: 4 carbon atoms and 2 nitrogen atoms. Purines have nine atoms forming the ring: 5 carbon atoms and 4 nitrogen atoms.

Remarkably, it is the composition of these atoms that permit that the strength of the hydrogen bond that permits to join the two DNA strands and form Watson–Crick base-pairing, and well-known DNA ladder.  Neither transcription nor translation of the messages encoded in RNA and DNA would be possible if the strength of the bonds had different values. Hence, life, as we understand it today, would not have arisen.

Now, someone could say, that there could be no different composition, and physical constraints and necessity could eventually permit only this specific order and arrangement of the atoms. Now, in a recent science paper from 2019, Scientists explored how many different chemical arrangements of the atoms to make these nucleobases would be possible. Surprisingly, they found well over a million variants.   The remarkable thing is, among the incredible variety of organisms on Earth, these two molecules are essentially the only ones used in life. Why? Are these the only nucleotides that could perform the function of information storage? If not, are they perhaps the best? One might expect that molecules with smaller connected Carbon components should be easier for abiotic chemistry to explore.

According to their scientific analysis, the natural ribosides and deoxyribosides inhabit a fairly redundant ( in other words, superfluous, unnecessary, needless,  and nonminimal region of this space.  This is a remarkable find and implicitly leads to design. There would be no reason why random events would generate complex, rather than simple, and minimal carbon arrangements. Nor is there physical necessity that says that the composition should be so. This is evidence that a directing intelligent agency is the most plausible explanation. The chemistry space is far too vast to select by chance the right finely-tuned functional life-bearing arrangement.

In the mentioned paper, the investigators asked if other, perhaps equally good, or even better genetic systems would be possible.  Their chemical experimentations and studies concluded that the answer is no. Many nearly as good, some equally good, and a few stronger base-pairing analog systems are known. There is no reason why these structures could or would have emerged in this functional complex configuration by random trial and error. There is a complete lack of scientific-materialistic explanations despite decades of attempts to solve the riddle.

What we can see is, that direct intervention, a creative force, the activity of an intelligent agency, a powerful creator, is capable to have the intention and implement the right arrangement of every single atom into functional structures and molecules in a repetitive manner, in the case of DNA, at least 500 thousand nucleotides to store the information to kick-start life, exclusively with four bases, to produce a storage device that uses a genetic code, to store functional, instructional, complex information, functional amino acids, and phospholipids to make membranes, and ultimately, life.  Lucky accidents, the spontaneous self-organization by unguided coincidental events, that drove atoms into self-organization in an orderly manner without external direction, chemical non-biological are incapable and unspecific to arrange atoms into the right order to produce the four classes of building blocks, used in all life forms.

ATGC quartet
adios, evolution.
biologically disastrous
carefully crafted solutions
carefully planned inventions
chemical architecture
crucial reaction
could not come one after the other
could make it work
crucial selective criteria
crucial-for-life reason for this amazing chemical trick.
dauntingly improbable
engineering marvel
engineering cleverness
example of high technology
exquisite balance
exquisite interplay
exquisitely designed biomolecules
exquisitely engineered molecular arrangement
exquisite molecular machines
“Fantastic Four”
finely engineered
hallmark of foresight and sound engineering
How did this perfect,  molecular wonder form without anything telling it to?
have to be in place at the same time
highly intricate network
incredible process
indication of the planning involved
If only one exists without the other, no cell at all
ingenious solutions
ingeniously crafted devices
It’s make or break
it’s far and away the best
large multimolecular machines
let’s reason through the claim
life’s long-term storehouse of genetic information
making, finding, and specifically selecting this particular and life-essential
many orders of magnitude
masterful information-storage molecule
miniaturized technology
molecular architecture
must also be incredible
purely blind chemical forces have accomplished this challenging
putting it mildly
ready to go in the very first organism
wonderful array
wonder of engineering finesse
wonderful chemical trick!
striking solutions
superb atmosphere
superb for the job they have
perfectly suited
perfect link to construct
set of problems that had to be solved and implemented virtually simultaneously,
this stability control for both DNA and RNA had to be anticipated ahead of time and the solution provided with just-in-time delivery
to drive home the point
very elegant and ingenious process
 “were born” to make
which came first, the DNA or the correction machinery?




phosphate anion PO4 3- , with its four oxygen atoms distributed in a tetrahedral fashion around the phosphorous atom producing a triple-negative charge.
Another is the five-membered cyclic sugar molecule—ribose—with four available OH linking sites.
four different kinds of stable, rigid, and heterocyclic bases, two purines and two pyrimidines, each with the ability to firmly attach to ribose via covalent bonds and to each other via two or three H-bonding “supramolecular” arms

You are a dishonest disrespectful liar, which makes unfounded accusations against me. Shame on you. God will judge you unless you repent. Revelation 21. Those who are victorious will inherit all this, and I will be their God and they will be my children. 8 But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters AND ALL LIARS—they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.”

How you can get Saved!
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2501-how-you-can-get-saved

The doctrine of hell
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1772-the-doctrine-of-hell

Claim: If Shannon Q hangs up on you, there is something wrong with you.
Reply: No, Jimmy, there is nothing wrong with me. I was not inpolite with Shannon, nor did i say anything that would or could have offended her. Neither was i rude or anything of the sort. Shannon most probably got cranky because i asked her a question, which she was not expected to hear. Theists usually call in to these shows, in the attempt to justify their beliefs. But rarely, someone calls in to actually defy the person on the other side to provide a justification for her own beliefs. Atheists think, that the burden of proof relies only on the theist, which is obviously not true. If an atheists wishes to have a dialogue with a believer, he needs to be prepared to provide better explanations of  our origins that top theistic explanations. Shannon was unprepared to give that explanation, did pass the microphone to Paul, which basically said that science based on materialism does not have an answer, but hopefully one day it will find out, and it will most likely be a naturalistic explanation. This is of course a position , which we, theists, are called out of, ( without justification, by the way ), namely, a view based on lack of understaning, therefore, a materialism of the gaps. So Shannon did not like my observation, and got cranky. 

Claim: because evolution has already been demonstrated to be a fact
Reply: Jimmy you try to sneak in evolution as an explanation where it does not belong.  DNA stores a computer program, or better, it contains precise complex instructions that guide the making of proteins, besides other kind of instructions. It entails the requirement to explain the origin of the RNA and DNA molecule, which can be compared to the hard disk of a computer, the origin of the genetic code, that is the language, and using it, the origin of the first instructions to make the minimal proteome to get life a first start, and all the machinery of encoding, sending, and decoding of the information stored in DNA, that is transcription of DNA to messenger RNA, and translation of the messenger RNA to amino acid sequences, which bear function, that means, as consequence of the right amino acid sequence, these amino acids will fold into three dimensional form, and turn into molecular machines, exercising all kind of life essential functions in the cell. All these things had to be there fully developed in order for life to start, and as a consequence, evolution. So that shifts its explanation and the origin therefor to abiogenesis, and cannot be explained through evolution, because evolution depends on all this complexity to be there. 
 
Claim:  we already have plenty of evidence that you can create abiogenesis events via chemical means
Reply: NO, Jimmy, science has NO CLUE how chemical reactions on early Earth could have created life. Here is a quote from

Eugene Koonin which is is part of the advisory editorial board of Trends in Genetics. He writes in his book from his book: The Logic of Chance, from 2012: 
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.

Origin-of-life research has evolved into a lively, interdisciplinary field, but other scientists often view it with skepticism and even derision. This attitude is understandable and, in a sense, perhaps justified, given the “dirty,” rarely mentioned secret: Despite many interesting results to its credit, when judged by the straightforward criterion of reaching (or even approaching) the ultimate goal, the origin of life field is a failure—we still do not have even a plausible coherent model, let alone a validated scenario, for the emergence of life on Earth. Certainly, this is due not to a lack of experimental and theoretical effort, but to the extraordinary intrinsic difficulty and complexity of the problem.


Claim: on this planet but since nothing seems to escape this natural production we don't have a good reason to believe that abiogenesis didn't either however I'm not going to sit here and say the abiogenesis event was a b or c until we have adequate evidence 
Reply: What does that even mean: " Nothing seems to escape this natural production ". Atoms and molecules are just as happy to be as they are. Higher levels of structures for SURVIVAL are never needed. Atoms never need DNA programming to function. They don't need Molecular machinery to exist. Life is not even supposed to be here. There is no NEED for it to exist. It is not natural, and would of itself with high probability never came about. So you think life was due to physical necessity? Let me quote what actual scientists have to say in this regards, like Steven A. Benner former Harvard University professor  about the Asphalt Paradox
 
Systems, given energy and left to themselves, DEVOLVE to give uselessly complex mixtures, “asphalts”.  the literature reports (to our knowledge) exactly  ZERO CONFIRMED OBSERVATIONS where “replication involving replicable imperfections” (RIRI) evolution emerged spontaneously from a devolving chemical system. it is IMPOSSIBLE for any non-living chemical system to escape devolution to enter into the Darwinian world of the “living”. Such statements of impossibility apply even to macromolecules not assumed to be necessary for RIRI evolution. 

 
Claim: and in fact i'm very clear that i don't claim to know the specific event that happened them only thing as i've already stated during this episode is thatit appears to be likely a chemical by chemical means some kind of chemical reaction
Reply: NO chemist who actually understands this stuff would agree with you, Jimmy.

Like James Tour, for examples, states: 
It is clear, chemists and biologists are clueless. I wrote, “Those who think scientists understand the issues of prebiotic chemistry are wholly misinformed. Nobody understands them. Maybe one day we will. But that day is far from today. It would be far more helpful (and hopeful) to expose students to the massive gaps in our understanding. They may find a firmer—and possibly a radically different—scientific theory. The basis upon which we as scientists are relying is so shaky that we must openly state the situation for what it is: it is a mystery.”
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2617-james-tour-on-abiogenesis

Claim: so there you see what i actually said and in fact i'm very clear that i don't claim to know the specific event that happened the only thing as i've already stated during this episode is that it appears to be likely a chemical by chemical means some kind of chemical reaction
Reply: So you are just playing wordgames here. While you confess that you don't know the specific event that it happened, you actually double down your claim again, and say that it appears to be likely a chemical by chemical means some kind of chemical reaction. Not only are you begging the question, because natural chemical reactions are not the explanation by default, but, on top of that, you claim that a some kind of chemical reaction is appears to be likely, but you entirely omit and do not give any compelling explanation whatsoever, why such an event appears to be likely, and also ignore that there is actually an alternative explanation, which is design.

Claim: not to mention that these same individuals don't want to talk about the concept of god as probabilities because there's no demonstration of the supernatural world which makes probabilities pretty extremely high if not actually zero
Reply: Neither view, theism, nor materialism can be proven. Science will never demonstrate how reality came about. We can only look at the science available to us and find adequate philosophical explanations based on the evidence. The Scientific method nor any other will never be able to demonstrate God's existence or the claim that the material universe is all there is. Historical events cannot be repeated. From what we know, we can decide which is the bigger leap of faith - which materialism as well requires. Any view, conclusion, and position, is based on a leap of faith. It is just that - a leap of faith.  Upon my understanding, there is extraordinary evidence FOR a creator, therefore, theism requires the smallest leap of faith and that points to a creator. In my view, it is the best hypothesis based on evidence. Without God's hiddenness, we would not have any significant freedom. Even those that hate God would be unable to fully live according to their wishes; much like a criminal would find it intolerable living in the police station. God stays hidden to a degree, He gives people the free will to either respond to His tugging at their hearts or remain autonomous from Him. There is enough light for those who desire to find him, and enough darkness for those that prefer to live autonomously to HIM. If you prefer being an atheist, God values your free will more than His desires for you. If you are really after truth, then have an open mind and follow the evidence wherever it leads, even if you don’t like the conclusion.

Claim: that'd be weird though so anyway the conversation develops and it gets to the question that i actually find very interesting and an answer that keeps coming up that's actually nonsense so at one point during the call as well as in the comments which he leaves a ton of them that are just copy and pasted from his scripts he talks about the improbability of the development of life and the development of uh the arrangement of nucleotides and and he talks about how it is so improbable that it is ignorant to say that it happened or that it would happen by chance and so this is one of those moments the chance to have a minimal genome of one three million nucleotides would would be one to tens to the seven hundred thousands of power so it's at most irrational to believe that such complexity could come up by random chance all right see ya so the interesting thing we see there is the fact that otangelo had been trying to hold my feet to the fire for claiming i knew something about the abiogenesis event which i had never claimed despite the fact that there he is claiming that the that the abiogenesis event resulted in that monumentally improbable arrangement of nucleotides and that that is what the first cell would have resembled even though we don't know that to be a fact.  this is a person claiming knowledge about what the abiogenesis event was when no such knowledge is cur has currently been obtained by science  or by anybody at least anybody i know of

Reply: chemist Wilhelm Huck, professor at Radboud University Nijmegen
A working cell is more than the sum of its parts. "A functioning cell must be entirely correct at once, in all its complexity

Pelagibacter ubique is known to be one of the smallest and simplest, self-replicating, and free-living cells.  It has complete biosynthetic pathways for all 20 amino acids.  They have about 1,300 genes and 1,2 million base pairs and code for about 1,300 proteins.  What is the probability that the instructional code sequence would emerge by unguided random events ? It is about  10^700,000. This probability is hard to imagine but an illustration may help.  

Imagine covering the whole of the USA with small coins, edge to edge. Now imagine piling other coins on each of these millions of coins. Now imagine continuing to pile coins on each coin until reaching the moon about 400,000 km away! If you were told that within this vast mountain of coins there was one coin different to all the others. The statistical chance of finding that one coin is about 1 in 10^55. 

Claim: i guess for all i know somebody in a basement somewhere has figured it out but we currently don't know so we have to talk about this argument in two ways one will grant him those monumental odds and say that that was the abiogenesis event but then two we'll talk about what the actual odds of an abiogenesis event on the earth would be so in granting him that argument about the odds that that is what it is it's still not an impressive argument because anything that happens on a cosmic scale is monumentally improbable so for example right now somewhere in the world a piece of space debris of some kind or a small asteroid or something is falling to the earth and will make contact with the earth and you figure if you go pick up that rock and you go what are the odds of it landing here well with everything we know now the odds are actually 100 because the event happened
Reply: One shouldn't be surprised to find the right nucleotide sequence because if it were not so, we wouldn't exist, but eventually, something else. Therefore, the fact that a life giving sequence exist means that such odds should only be expected by the mere fact of our own existence - not at all surprising. This is obviously a response begging the question.  This argument is like a situation where a man is standing before a firing squad of 10000 men with rifles who take aim and fire - - but they all miss him. According to the above logic, this man should not be at all surprised to still be alive because, if they hadn't missed him, he wouldn't be alive. The nonsense of this line of reasoning is obvious. Surprise at the extremly unlikelyness to have the right nucleotide sequence giving rise to proteins, which are essential for life to start, given the hypothesis of a mindless origin, is only to be expected - in the extreme.

Your claim, Jimmy, is that every sequence is just as improbable as another.  It's true that any particular equal-length sequence is just as improbable as any other. But if the goal is to have a sequence, a particular string with a prescribed specificiation, because a particular goal or  function eventually be achieved, starting at 1, then 2,3,4,5,6 ............ 500, then intuitively you know there sequence has a specific order. The sequence 1,2,3,4 ..........  500, exhibits a specification or particular pattern. What must be explained, is the origin not of any kind of sequence, but a particular, specific sequence. Suppose you see a blueprint to make a car engine with 300 horsepowers to drive a Mercedes. Not any blueprint will produce this particular car engine with the right size and fit and power. Only a blueprint with the precise, specific, complex arrangement of orders that is understood by the common pre-established agreement between the engineer, and the manufacturer, will permit to be encoded, transmitted, decoded and transformed in an equivalent artifact that has the specific, recognizable function which meets the pre-established goal. The information for that particular car engine can be encoded in Bits. Let's suppose its the size of a CD, 600mb. What has to be calculated, are the odds to get that specific sequence of instructions, which permit to give rise to that particular car engine. Not any sequence will do.

Claim: one spot because we already know how the mechanism by which our dna and stuff has become so complex and these apparent programs that we are reading that way that we are describing that way that aren't actually prescriptive in that way the moment you would have to say something was designed or programmed would have to precedes evolution and be that very first moment of a biogenesis

picture.

Claim: so when you're identifying the odds of an event that has already happened something that has already occurred you can put them in these cosmically ginormous numbers now as you add factors like this planet will be here to bend it this way you reduce those odds and technically if you knew everything about the universe if you just had a sort of all-knowing omniscient knowledge you could actually add so many factors that you would get the odds to 100 but just at their base odds like with a biogenesis and evolution yes they seem very improbable however things of that level of improbability happen all the time

Reply: I disagree, Jimmy, and this is, why:
1. The more statistically improbable something is, the less it makes sense to believe that it just happened by blind chance.
2. Statistically, it is practically impossible, that the primordial genome, proteome, and metabolome of the first living cell arose by chance.
3. Furthermore, we see in biochemistry purposeful design.  
4. Therefore, an intelligent Designer is by far the best explanation of origins.

Claim: now the term a biogenesis refers to essentially the event
that took non-life and produced life and the best theories right now or hypotheses are that it was by some sort of chemical means however we don't know despite the fact that otangelo insists that during the call i said i do know and in fact you can see this comment he left in this comment that he says to anybody who will listen at jimmy snow you claim to know how life came from non-life since you gave me only 30 seconds in the end for a final statement i was unable to ask so what do you explain here how you know that science has an answer to that question genuinely wondering now grammatical errors aside english is in his first language i don't feel the need to be critical of that and i'm trying to cut off anybody who might try to go down that road here is what i actually said about a biogenesis something you're going to notice about if you go and find other otangelo calls or you go and watch this call which i will give you a link to the whole call so you can go check it out for yourself is that one you can tell he's reading

Reply: Jimmy, i think i was listening careful enough to hear the following positive claims of yours:

agagadsfa


Claim: and so to say an event that didn't happen that must have happened because we see that it happened because we have the product of it afterwards the rock that we have picked up or we have all of life on earth and no reason to believe that it didn't come from natural means despite not knowing yet the natural means by which it got here we're still picking up the rock it isn't compelling to go this event is so improbable it mustn't have happened
Reply: That is precisely what we are justified to say, Jimmy. Eliminative inductions argue for the truth of a proposition by arguing that competitors to that proposition are false. Provided the proposition, together with its competitors, form a mutually exclusive and exhaustive class, eliminating all the competitors entails that the proposition is true. Since either there is a God, or not, either one or the other is true. As Sherlock Holmes famous dictum says: when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however not fully comprehensible, but logically possible, must be the truth. Eliminative inductions, in fact, become deductions.


Claim: not to mention that these same individuals don't want to talk about the concept of god as probabilities because there's no demonstration of the supernatural world which makes probabilities pretty extremely high if not actually zero
Reply: Neither view, theism, nor materialism can be proven. Science will never demonstrate how reality came about. We can only look at the science available to us and find adequate philosophical explanations based on the evidence. The Scientific method nor any other will never be able to demonstrate God's existence or the claim that the material universe is all there is. Historical events cannot be repeated. From what we know, we can decide which is the bigger leap of faith - which materialism as well requires. Any view, conclusion, and position, is based on a leap of faith. It is just that - a leap of faith.  Upon my understanding, there is extraordinary evidence FOR a creator, therefore, theism requires the smallest leap of faith and that points to a creator. In my view, it is the best hypothesis based on evidence. Once that happens,  the truth seeker can choose to investigate which creator best fits the bill. Without God's hiddenness, we would not have any significant freedom. Even those that hate God would be unable to fully live according to their wishes; much like a criminal would find it intolerable living in the police station. God stays hidden to a degree, He gives people the free will to either respond to His tugging at their hearts or remain autonomous from Him. There is enough light for those who desire to find him, and enough darkness for those that prefer to live autonomously to HIM. If you prefer being an atheist, God values your free will more than His desires for you. If you are really after truth, then have an open mind and follow the evidence wherever it leads, even if you don’t like the conclusion.


Claim: without knowing for sure what event either did happen or perhaps other ways it could happen because for all we know life has multiple ways of starting
Reply: We do not know if life has multiple ways of starting naturally if science has no clue how it could have happened even once. But besides the problem of having the right informational sequence, another striking problem plagues abiogenesis research. The basic molecules to kick-start life are complex, and no route of any of them has been successfully demonstrated to be possible to occur on the early earth. The problems and open questions are monstrous. I have listed in one of my scripts 27 open questions in regards to the origin of RNA and DNA on the early earth, 14 unsolved problems in regards to the origin of amino acids on the early earth, 12 in regards of phospholipid synthesis, and also unsolved problems in regards of carbohydrate production. The open problems are in reality far greater. This is just a small list. Now, this is not an argument of ignorance, to say, because materialistic claims are not substantiated, therefore God.  If a theist would say, ''We don't know what caused 'x', therefore, God.'', it would be indeed a 'God of the gaps' fallacy. What we say however, is: ''Based on current knowledge, an intelligent creative agency is a better explanation than materialistic means."  If one is not arguing from ignorance, but rather reasoning from the available evidence to the best explanation, is it not rather a strawman to accuse us of launching a 'god of the gaps argument'?  Randomness is a hugely overplayed idea in modern science, a desperate attempt to fill a shrinking corner for materialist reductionism


Claim: but until we know at least one of them we can't even begin to calculate the odds we don't even know whether or not we have life in this solar system other than on earth that started in other places, in fact, our closest neighbor that we actually have a presence on we haven't ruled it out for mars yet
Response: We know more, Jimmy, than you think.

Life on other planets, a real possibility?
The data demonstrate that the probability of finding even one planet with the capacity to support extraterrestrial intelligence ( Peti ) falls short of one chance in 10^122 (that number is 1 followed by 122 zeros).

THE LOG LOG PRIOR FOR THE FREQUENCY OF EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCES September 21, 2016
This log log prior can handle a very wide range of PETI values, from 1 to 1010^122 while remaining responsive to evidence about extraterrestrial societies.

Claim: The odds to have a lift hosting planet are extremely low
Reply: 

Claim: there could be there's a potential for silicon-based life for example uh that would have a different set of parameters
Reply: The fact that silicon oxidizes to a solid is one basic reason as to why it cannot support life. Silicon doesn't form many compounds having handedness. Thus, it would be difficult for a silicon-based life-form to achieve all of the wonderful regulating and recognition functions that carbon-based enzymes perform for us. Despite years of work--and despite all the reagents available to the modern alchemist--many silicon analogs of carbon compounds just cannot be formed. Thermodynamic data confirm these analogs are often too unstable or too reactive.
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2858-could-silicon-be-the-basis-for-alien-life-forms-just-as-carbon-is-on-earth

Claim: this is just a new version of the watchmaker argument and it is this concept that because complex functions happen something must have given the organism that complex function
Reply: This is my argument Jimmy: Blueprints, machines, and factories come only from Intelligence
1. The origin of blueprints containing the information to fabricate complex machines and interlinked factories which produce goods for specific purposes are both always the result of intelligent setup.
2. 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 advance and sophistication.
3. Therefore, the origin of biological information and self-replicating cell factories is best explained by the action of an intelligent designer, who created a life for his own purposes.
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2895-syllogistic-arguments-of-gods-existence-based-on-positive-evidence

Claim: despite the fact that evolution has no problem accounting for that complexity
Reply: Evolution by mutations and natural selection do not explain the origin of life since evolution depends on DNA replication. The only alternative to design are random unguided lucky events. 
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2515-abiogenesis-the-possible-mechanisms-to-explain-the-origin-of-life


Claim: in the events complexity that we see now compared to the past and how if you look at the fossil record life becomes simpler
Reply: At the time of the Cambrian Explosion, nearly every animal phyla (=the major taxonomic group of animals and plants) on Earth (more than 70) suddenly appeared). So that is as well an inaccurate claim. 



Last not least, Jimmy. In the title of your video, you called me dishonest. 
One thing that I really can't stand is to be called intellectually dishonest, or when I am explicitly out called as a liar, but my opponent uses that tactic just to hide his incompetence to deal with the issues raised in a grown-up manner, as an adult. If my opponent feels I lied, he should first quote the sentence where he feels i was dishonest, and then clearly outline why he felt it was a lie. Unless he does this, i call such accusations coward and anti-intellectual. 

NOTHING of what i said during my call, or here, is dishonest. You, on the other hand, Jimmy, have exposed a lack of real understanding of scientific principles, once again, brought evolution into the mix which has nothing to say about abiogenesis, made tons of unfounded pseudoscientific claims. And worse than that. You are an influencer. You are a blind, leading the blind. 

I wish you sincerely that you evaluate the information I have provided through my reply, and your entire worldview, which is, upon my understanding, deceptive, irrational, illogical, and not plausible. But there is hope for you. God loves you, and you have still time to repent and return back to the Lord, who gave his life for you on the cross. God will judge you unless you repent. Revelation 21. Those who are victorious will inherit all this, and I will be their God and they will be my children. 8 But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters AND ALL LIARS—they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.”

How you can get Saved!
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2501-how-you-can-get-saved

The doctrine of hell
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1772-the-doctrine-of-hell

Reply to Tony

https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2203p25-perguntas#7923

You wrote -The big bang theory makes no such claim. Which model are you referring to?
Reply: I suppose i don't have to post the Kalaam, right?
--
You wrote - Mathematical rules are human descriptions, not universal prescriptions.
Reply: “the discovery of quarks” in the 1960s “is a good example of the paramount role played by mathematics in science.” Quarks “were predicted not on the basis of physical data, but on the basis of mathematical symmetry patterns.” Physicists then made an educated guess that certain physical phenomena would later be found to correspond to these mathematical patterns. It turned out in this case, as in many other great scientific discoveries, to be true. As Frenkel explains, “this was a purely theoretical prediction, made within the framework of a sophisticated mathematical theory of representation of the group SU.”

For life to exist, we need an orderly (and by implication, intelligible) universe. Order at many different levels is required. For instance, to have planets that circle their stars, we need Newtonian mechanics operating in a three-dimensional universe. For there to be multiple stable elements of the periodic table to provide a sufficient variety of atomic "building blocks" for life, we need atomic structure to be constrained by the laws of quantum mechanics. We further need the orderliness in chemical reactions that is the consequence of Boltzmann's equation for the second law of thermodynamics. And for an energy source like the sun to transfer its life-giving energy to a habitat like Earth, we require the laws of electromagnetic radiation that Maxwell described.

Our universe is indeed orderly, and in precisely the way necessary for it to serve as a suitable habitat for life. The wonderful internal ordering of the cosmos is matched only by its extraordinary economy. Each one of the fundamental laws of nature is essential to life itself. A universe lacking any of the laws  would almost certainly be a universe without life.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110805203154/http://www.leaderu.com/real/ri9403/evidence.html

--
You wrote -You're going to have to show some sort of testable hypothesis based on the assumption that the big bang, subatomic particles, fine-tuned.
Once you've done that, we can discuss this question. Until then, there's no reason to believe it is (or was) fine-tuned.
Reply: Is the fine-tuning real?

Yes, it’s real and it is conceded by the top-rank of atheist physicists. 

Atheist Physicists Prove God. Anthropic Principle Fails
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4E_bT4ecgk

Paul Davies, How bio-friendly is the universe ?
“There is now broad agreement among physicists and cosmologists that the universe is in several respects ‘fine-tuned’ for life. This claim is made on the basis that existence of vital substances such as carbon, and the properties of objects such as stable long-lived stars, depend rather sensitively on the values of certain physical parameters, and on the cosmological initial conditions. ”  1

Martin Rees is an atheist and a qualified astronomer. He wrote a book called “Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape The Universe”, (Basic Books: 2001). In it, he discusses 6 numbers that need to be fine-tuned in order to have a life-permitting universe.

Rees writes here:
These six numbers constitute a ‘recipe’ for a universe. Moreover, the outcome is sensitive to their values: if any one of them were to be ‘untuned’, there would be no stars and no life. Is this tuning just a brute fact, a coincidence? Or is it the providence of a benign Creator?
There are some atheists who deny the fine-tuning, but these atheists are in firm opposition to the progress of science. The more science has progressed, the more constants, ratios and quantities we have discovered that need to be fine-tuned.

The fact that the cosmos seems exactly balanced and designed for life is just an inescapable scientific observation
Biocentrism, Robert Lanza, MD, page 84

No competent scientist denies that if the laws of nature were just a little bit different in our universe, carbon-based life would never have been possible. Surely such a remarkable fact calls for an explanation. If one declines the insight of the universe as a creation endowed with potency, the rather desperate expedient of invoking an immense array of unobservable worlds [i.e., the “many worlds/multiverse/’unlimited horizons'” proposals] seems the only other recourse.”
John Polkinghorne  Mathematical Physicist, one-time Dean of Queen’s College at Cambridge 
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1112.4647v2.pdf

Let’s be clear on the task that Stenger has set for himself. There are a great many scientists, of varying religious persuasions, who accept that the universe is fine-tuned for
life, e.g. Barrow, Carr, Carter, Davies, Dawkins, Deutsch, Ellis, Greene, Guth, Harrison, Hawking, Linde, Page, Penrose, Polkinghorne, Rees, Sandage, Smolin, Susskind, Tegmark,
Tipler, Vilenkin, Weinberg, Wheeler, Wilczek. They differ, of course, on what conclusion we should draw from this fact. Stenger, on the other hand, claims that the universe is not
fine-tuned.

You wrote -What's your definition for life?
I think I've already discovered the futility of asking you for a criteria for establishing something, but unless you have an actual definition for what constitutes life, we have nothing to talk about on that topic.
Reply: What is life ?

https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1435-paul-davies-what-is-life

NASA’s current working definition of life
is “a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.”

Paul Davies:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/d/davies-miracle.html

Reproduction.
Metabolism. 
Homeostasis
Nutrition.
Complexity.
Organization. 
Growth and development.
Information content. 
Hardware/software entanglement. 
Permanence and change. 

You wrote - how familiar are you with the work of Claude Shannon?
Reply: Shannon is only about statistics in information theory. But the origin of much more must be explained:

The four interdependent requirements to have an information transmission system
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t3030-the-four-interdependent-requirements-to-have-an-information-transmission-system

Information is what is conveyed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things. To have an information transmission system, following things are indispensable, essential, and required ( if any of those is missing, information transmission cannot be established - all have to be precisely defined in advance before any form of communication can be possible at all): 

1. A language, 2. the information (message) produced upon that language,  the 3 .information storage mechanism ( a hard disk, paper etc.), 4. an information transmission system, that is: encoding - sending and decoding) and eventually fifth, sixth, and seventh ( not essential): translation, conversion, and transduction

1. The rules or protocol of any informational communication and information system  must be preestablished and agreed in advance between those that communicate with each other, through establishing in common agreement of the meaning where a symbol, letters, words, waves or frequency variations, sounds, pulses, or a combination of those are assigned to something else,  otherwise the transmission of information is not possible. A message can only be created once a language has been established.  A code is an abstract, immaterial, nonphysical set of rules. Statistics, Semantics, Synthax, and Pragmatics are used according to combinatorial, context-dependent, and content-coherent rules. 
2. This set of rule, code, or language, permits to produce a blueprint, which contains instructional complex information, that permits to produce goods for specific purposes, control or maintain the operation of factories.  
3. Then there has to be a device, that is the harddisk, a paper, or any hardware upon which the information can be recorded.
4. And there has to be a system to encode, send, and decode the message. 
5. Eventually, during the transmission of information, it can be translated from one language to another. That requires a system of translation/cipher.  It’s like when you visit a Russian website and your browser has the language plug-in for Russian. Conveying meaning of the Russian and english language must be established in advance, that is the alphabet (symbols), syntax (grammar), and semantics (meaning) before any translation can take place. Otherwise, it would never be certain that what the transmitter is communicating is the same as what the receiver is understanding.
6. Eventually signal conversion ( digital-analog conversion, modulators, amplifiers)
7. Eventually signal transduction converting the nonelectrical signals into electrical signals

In Cells, we see all these things.

You wrote - We already see them in nature emerging through chemical processes. Let me know if you need me to cite references.
Reply: Feel free to provide answers to following questions:  Open questions in prebiotic chemistry to explain the origin of the four basic building blocks of life
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1279p75-abiogenesis-is-mathematically-impossible#7759


You wrote - They aren't machines, robots, or factories:
Reply: Nature's Robots point to design

1. Machines, robots, fully automated manufacturing production lines, transport carriers, turbines, transistors, computers, and factories are always set up by intelligent designers
2. Science has discovered, that cells are literally chemical nano factories, that operate based on molecular machines, protein robots, kinesin protein carriers, autonomous self-regulated production lines, generate energy through turbines, neuron transistors, and computers
3. Therefore, most probably, Cell factories containing all those things are the product of an intelligent designer.

https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2978-nature-s-robots-point-to-design

You wrote: and none of it is "prescriptive".
Reply: Dichotomy in the definition of prescriptive information suggests both prescribed data and prescribed algorithms: biosemiotics applications in genomic systems
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3319427/
"Functional Information (FI)" has now been formalized into two subsets: Descriptive Information (DI) and Prescriptive Information (PI). This formalization of definitions precludes the prevailing confusion of informational terms in the literature. The more specific and accurate term "Prescriptive Information (PI)" has been championed by Abel to define the sources and nature of programming controls, regulation and algorithmic processing. Such prescriptions are ubiquitously instantiated into all known living cells

You wrote The genetic test we use to show relationship between different species is the very same genetic test we use to show relationship between people. It constitutes legal proof of common descent.
Of course I can also go over how we predict fossils and their locations long before they are discovered, but I'm sure we'll be addressing it below.
Reply: Common descent, the tree of life, a failed hypothesis

https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2239-evolution-common-descent-the-tree-of-life-a-failed-hypothesis

1. The DNA replication machinery is not homologous in the 3 domains of life. The bacterial core replisome enzymes do not share a common ancestor with the analogous components in eukaryotes and archaea.
2. Bacteria and Archaea differ strikingly in the chemistry of their membrane lipids. Cell membrane phospholipids are synthesized by different, unrelated enzymes in bacteria and archaea, and yield chemically distinct membranes.
3. Sequences of glycolytic enzymes differ between Archaea and Bacteria/Eukaryotes. There is no evidence of a common ancestor for any of the four glycolytic kinases or of the seven enzymes that bind nucleotides.
4. There are at least six distinct autotrophic carbon fixation pathways. If common ancestry were true, an ancestral Wood–Ljungdahl pathway should have become life's one and only principle for biomass production.
5. There is a sharp divide in the organizational complexity of the cell between eukaryotes, which have complex intracellular compartmentalization, and even the most sophisticated prokaryotes (archaea and bacteria), which do not.
6. A typical eukaryotic cell is about 1,000-fold bigger by volume than a typical bacterium or archaeon, and functions under different physical principles: free diffusion has little role in eukaryotic cells but is crucial in prokaryotes
7. Subsequent massive sequencing of numerous, complete microbial genomes have revealed novel evolutionary phenomena, the most fundamental of these being: pervasive horizontal gene transfer (HGT), in large part mediated by viruses and plasmids, that shapes the genomes of archaea and bacteria and call for a radical revision (if not abandonment) of the Tree of Life concept
8. RNA Polymerase differences: Prokaryotes only contain three different promoter elements: -10, -35 promoters, and upstream elements.  Eukaryotes contain many different promoter elements
9. Ribosome and ribosome biogenesis differences: Although we could identify E. coli counterparts with comparable biochemical activity for 12 yeast ribosome biogenesis factors (RBFs), only 2 are known to participate in bacterial ribosome assembly. This indicates that the recruitment of individual proteins to this pathway has been largely independent in the bacterial and eukaryotic lineages. 22

You wrote - Speciation. We've observe this all the time too.
Reply: Primary, and secondary speciation
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2360-evolution-speciation-primary-and-secondary-speciation

There are observed instances of secondary speciation -- which is not what Darwinism needs -- but no observed instances of primary speciation, not even in bacteria.

primary speciation
The splitting of one species into two, usually resulting from natural selection favoring different gene complexes in geographically isolated populations.

secondary speciation
the fusion through hybridization of two species that were formerly geographically isolated, followed by the establishment of a new adaptive norm ...

You wrote - Both, logic and languages, are human constructions.
Reply: How could consciousness, logic and language evolve from matter?

https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1334-the-origin-of-language#6045

1. Minds exist which have and use objective logic.
2. Objective logic cannot be based on our subjective minds, a non-static universe or immaterial abstractions outside of a mind.
3. Objective logic depends and can only derive from a pre-existing necessary first mind with objective logic.

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constantingiurgiu@g.harvard.edu
tanush@g.harvard.edu
lelyveld@molbio.mgh.harvard.edu
ll@molbio.mgh.harvard.edu
mittal@molbio.mgh.harvard.edu
pazienza@molbio.mgh.harvard.edu
aradakovic@g.harvard.edu
strom@molbio.mgh.harvard.edu
Todisco@molbio.mgh.harvard.edu
logicalandscience@gmail.com
wright@molbio.mgh.harvard.edu
stephaniezhang@g.harvard.edu
j-coyne@uchicago.edu
j.a.dupre@exeter.ac.uk
sgilber1@swarthmore.edu
kalevi@ut.ee
denis.walsh@utoronto.ca
jonathan.delafield-butt@strath.ac.uk
olivier.pertz@izb.unibe.ch
logan@physics.utoronto.ca
ehud.lamm@gmail.com
lhwest@uoregon.edu
Keith@kbaverstock.org
andreas.werner@ncl.ac.uk
jsapp@yorku.ca
abejan@duke.edu
gca@illinois.edu
stevet@netfuture.org
archives@cshl.edu
dmoore@pitzer.edu
licklite@fiu.edu
gbernardi@uniroma3.it
mavoytek@elsi.jp
hernlund@elsi.jp
piet@elsi.jp
irena.mamajanov@elsi.jp
mcglynn@elsi.jp
desmith@elsi.jp
mavoytek@elsi.jp
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hbs@elsi.jp
deleeuw@nioz.nl
Paul.Davies@asu.edu
sodre.siman@gmail.com
massimo@platofootnote.org
jorronet@gmail.com
brr@unife.it
info@greathomeschoolconventions.com
jneiswinger@belhaven.edu
charlie@sixdaycreation.com
biosemiotics2018@gmail.com
feedback@biosemiosis.net
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romeucardosoguimaraes@gmail.com
snoke@pitt.edu
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gmontane@alumni.cmu.edu
Timsmith7343@gmail.com
sbenner@ffame.org
q.tran@student.unsw.edu.au
zadam@email.arizona.edu
a.fahrenbach@unsw.edu.au
yufei13579@gmail.com



The owner which is selling his Catana is french, and his boat is currently in Martinique. VAT is not paid. I am a Swiss and Italian citizen (I have both passports) but live in Brazil. Let's suppose I buy the boat, and I do not intend to Europe, is there a way to avoid paying VAT? Or to register the boat where tax is minimal?


Debate Review for David Neff and Otangelo, Crushed Jello

4:00 Claim: Intelligent design cannot tell us what this designer is
Reply:  Slide 1 and 2: The only characterization that the proposition of Intelligent Design uses is that the designer is a conscious, intelligent, powerful personal agency. It does not attempt to identity more, because that goes into religion.
But in a broader sense, I will characterize the God I believe in as the Christian God. That is not an inference solely based on the Biblical text, but as well based on the Kalaam Cosmological argument. 

Claim: They have no mechanism
Reply: Atheists must accept that no cause at all is a better creator and mechanism than an intelligent creator, in order to believe that strong atheism is true, and that the universe is either eternal, or popped up out of nothing for no reasons, by no means, or agency. How does that make sense?

What's the Mechanism of Intelligent Design?
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1794-how-exactly-did-god-create-the-universe-and-the-world-what-process-was-involved
A intelligent designer creates  through power, information input ( words ), wisdom, and will. But how exactly does this work ?

We don't know how exactly a mind might can act in the world to cause change. Your mind, mediated by your brain, sends signals to your arm , hand and fingers,  and writes a text through the keyboard of the computer  I sit here typing. I cannot explain to you how exactly this process functions, but we know, it happens. Consciusness can interact with the physical world and cause change. But how exactly that happens, we don't know. Why then should we expect to know how God created the universe ? The theory of intelligent design proposes a intelligent mental cause as origin of the physical world. Nothing else. 

W.L.Craig :
First, in order to recognize an explanation as the best, one needn't have an explanation of the explanation. This is an elementary point concerning inference to the best explanation as practiced in the philosophy of science. If archaeologists digging in the earth were to discover things looking like arrowheads and hatchet heads and pottery shards, they would be justified in inferring that these artifacts are not the chance result of sedimentation and metamorphosis, but products of some unknown group of people, even though they had no explanation of who these people were or where they came from. Similarly, if astronauts were to come upon a pile of machinery on the back side of the moon, they would be justified in inferring that it was the product of intelligent, extra-terrestrial agents, even if they had no idea whatsoever who these extra-terrestrial agents were or how they got there. In order to recognize an explanation as the best, one needn't be able to explain the explanation. In fact, so requiring would lead to an infinite regress of explanations, so that nothing could ever be explained and science would be destroyed. So in the case at hand, in order to recognize that intelligent design is the best explanation of the appearance of design in the universe, one needn't be able to explain the designer.
 
The best explanation of the origin and life and biodiversity is: intelligence. Conscious activity. The deliberate choice of a rational agent. Indeed, we have abundant experience in the present of intelligent agents generating specified information. Our experience of the causal powers of intelligent agents -- of "conscious activity" as "a cause now in operation"-- provides a basis for making inferences about the best explanation of the origin of biological organisms  in the past. In other words, our experience of the cause-and-effect structure of the world -- specifically the cause known to produce large amounts of specified information in the present -- provides a basis for understanding what likely caused large increases in specified information in living systems in the past. It is precisely my reliance on such experience that makes possible an understanding of the type of causes at work in the history of life.

12:40 Claim: PNAS quote: How did the first cells on earth arise ?
Reply: Slide 3 This has nothing to do with how first eukaryotic cells arose.

Claim: https://www.pnas.org/content/116/35/17239.abstract?etoc
How did the first cells on Earth arise? In a minimal cell, a membrane separates proteins and RNA from the surrounding aqueous environment. Cell-like membranes spontaneously assemble from simple prebiotic surfactants called fatty acids. However, fatty acid membranes are unstable in solutions containing salts that were likely present in environments of the early Earth. We find that amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, bind to fatty acid membranes and stabilize them against salts. Moreover, enhanced stabilization persists after dilution as would occur when a dehydrated pool refills with water—a likely setting for the emergence of cells. In addition to explaining how the first membranes were stabilized, our findings answer how key components of the first cells co-localized.

Reply: This is a prime example of pseudo-science, and defintively far from being a death knell of intelligent design. When certain biologists discuss the early stages of life there is a tendency to think too vaguely. They see a biological wonder before them and they tell a story about how it might have come to be. They may even draw a picture to explain what they mean. Indeed, the story seems plausible enough, until you zoom in to look at the details. I don't mean to demean the intelligence of these biologists. It's just that it appears they haven't considered things as completely as they should. Like a cartoon drawing, the basic idea is portrayed, but there is nothing but blank space where the profound detail of biological processes should be.

In that paper, they give the origin of fatty acids, RNA, and the right set of amino acids as a given. That is unwarranted. I have listed  27 open questions in regard to the origin of RNA and DNA on the early earth, 14 unsolved problems in regard to the origin of amino acids on the early earth, 12 in regard to phospholipid synthesis, and also unsolved problems in regard to carbohydrate production. The open problems are in reality far greater. This is just a small list. It is not just an issue of things that have not yet been figured out by abiogenesis research, but deep conceptual problems, like the fact that there were no natural selection mechanisms in place on the early earth.   
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1279p75-abiogenesis-is-mathematically-impossible#7759

16:00 Claim: This is one of the things that turned me off, what is he even talking about. Engulfing other cells is definitively something that prokaryotic cells can do. 
Reply:  Slide 4


37:00 Claim: You have to have those ( the energy cycles) to have life? No, life evolved alongside those particular processes. Some sort of puddle analogy.
Reply: I will give just one example: The availability of nitrogen in the form of fixed ammonia is life essential to make the basic building blocks of life,  There would have been no alternative source on the prebiotic earth.

Availability of nitrogen and ammonia on early earth
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2689-availability-of-ammonia-in-a-prebiotic-earth











 The problem is so severe, that a science paper from nature magazine in 2016 did include the nitrogenase enzymes which fixes nitrogen as being part of the minimal proteome of the Last Universal common Ancestor, LUCA. 

John Maddox <logicalplausibleprobable@gmail.com>,
Daniel Stern Cardinale <cardina3@gmail.com>,
Saulo Reis <saulocreis@gmail.com>
jacksonwheat15@gmail.com
olufemi.olu@outlook.com
James Carter - biochemist <chemistryofcreation@gmail.com>,
James Downard <rjdownard@aol.com>,
Jessi Warthen <shadowdancer3531@gmail.com>,
Kobus.VanDerWalt@nwu.ac.za
dale <dale@dalekelly.org>
eastside.erik@gmail.com
gcbaileyiii@gmail.com
rdhallman224@gmail.com
Ron Dean <rdhallman224@gmail.com>
Jkirkb@gmail.com
brandonpetaccio@gmail.com
yufei13579@gmail.com
SpeedOfSoundOfGravity <SpeedOfSoundOfGravity@gmail.com>,
Sy Garte <sygarte@gmail.com>,
Immutable Destiny <andreusb01@gmail.com>,
Just A Walking Fish <justawalkingfish@gmail.com>,
Aron Ra <aronra@gmail.com>,
George Bond <georgebond1955@gmail.com>,
Lena <lenavelarion@gmail.com>,
Rulon Downard <RJDownard@aol.com>
rbrown1205@aol.com


Biology for dummies: How does programming in biology point to God?

https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t3083-biology-for-dummies-how-does-programming-in-biology-point-to-god

Maybe you are a layperson, and are curious to understand a bit better what the "central dogma in biology" is about - see me maybe constantly posting about DNA, information, etc. but have a difficult grasp to understand what it is all about. I like to use analogies from real life to make things more clear. I am trying to do this in this post.  If you think the text can be modified to be more clear, or still have difficulties to understand, just ask.

Cells host and use algorithmic programs for all sort of things, as for example for cell division, programming cell death, enzymes are pre-programmed to perform DNA splicing, other programs for dynamic changes of gene expression in response to the changing environment. Cells use pre-programmed adaptive responses to genomic stress,  pre-programmed genes for fetal development regulation, temporal programs for genome replication, pre-programmed animal genes dictating behaviors including reflexes and fixed action patterns, pre-programmed biological timetables for aging etc.

A programming algorithm is like a recipe that describes the exact steps needed to solve a problem or reach a goal. We've all seen food recipes - they list the ingredients needed and a set of steps for how to make a meal. Well, an algorithm is just like that.  A programming algorithm describes how to do something, and it will be done exactly that way every time.

Okay, you probably wish you could see an example, how that works in the cell, right? Let's make an analogy. Let's suppose you have a recipe to make spaghetti written on a Word document saved on the hard disc of your computer.  You have a Japanese friend and only communicate with him using the Google translation program. (He doesn't speak English, only Japanese). Now he wants to try out that recipe and asks you to send him a copy per email. So you write an email, annex the Word document, and send it to him. When he receives it, he will use Google Translate and get the recipe in Japanese, written in kanji, in logographic Japanese characters which he understands. With the information at hand, he can make the spaghetti exactly as described in the recipe. In order for that communication to happen, you use at your end 26 letters from the alphabet, syntax,  semantics, and pragmatics, to write the receipt, and your friend has 2,136 kanji characters that permit him to understand the receipt in Japanese. Google Translate does the translation work.

While the recipe is written on a Word document saved on your computer, in the cell, the recipe (instructions or master plan) for the construction of proteins which are the life-essential molecular machines, veritable working horses, is written in genes through DNA, which are extremely long chains of molecules that contain all the information necessary for the life functions of a cell. The individual molecules that make up DNA are called nucleotides. In order to get proteins, a similar process has to occur inside the cell, as with the recipe for your friend to be able to make spaghetti in Japan. The information in the genome has to be sent to the Ribosome, the factory that makes proteins, which does the translation (remember Google Translate). While your Japanese friend, once he receives the message in Japanese, in Kanji, still has work to do, namely to follow the instructions to make Spaghetti, the Ribosome does both jobs, translation of the information AND making proteins, the final product, all in one step. Smart, that !! The very translation also will produce the desired end product, proteins. 

While you use the 26 letters of the alphabet to write your recipe, the Cell uses DNA, the nucleotides, four monomers "letters". In kanji there are 2136 characters, the alphabet uses 26 letters, and computer codes being binary, use 0,1. The language of DNA is digital, but not binary. Where binary encoding has 0 and 1 to work with (2 - hence the 'bi'nary)  DNA uses four different organic bases, which are adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C) and thymine (T)

The way by which DNA stores the genetic information consists of codons equivalent to words, consisting of an array of three DNA nucleotides. These triplets form "words". While you used sentences to write the spaghetti receipt, the equivalent sentences are called genes written through codon "words". With four possible nucleobases, the three nucleotides can give 4^3 = 64 different possible "words" (tri-nucleotide sequences). That's the entire genetic language, consisting in 64 words.  In the standard genetic code, three of these 64 codons (UAA, UAG, and UGA) are stop codons. That is like punctuation marks in the alphabet. It instructs when a sentence ends. 

There has to be a mechanism to extract the information in the genome, and send it to the ribosome, which is at another place in the cell, often free-floating in the cytoplasm. The message contained in the genome is transcribed by a very complex molecular machine, called RNA polymerase. (That's like making a copy of the recipe and annex it in the email) It makes a transcript, a copy of the message in the genome, and that transcript is sent to the Ribosome. (The email with the recipe arrives in Japan) That transcript is called messenger RNA or typically mRNA. Once the messenger RNA arrives at the Ribosome, translation can begin (what Google Translate does)

In communications and information processing, code is a system of rules to convert information—such as assigning the meaning of a letter, word, into another form, (as another word, letter, etc.) In translation, 64 genetic codons or "words" are assigned to 20 amino acids. (equivalent to the 2136 kanji characters)  It refers to the assignment of the codons to the amino acids, thus being the cornerstone template underling the translation process. Assignment means designating, ascribing, corresponding, correlating.
 
The Ribosome does basically what Google Translate does. But while Google Translate just gives the receipt in another language, and our Japanese friend still has to make the spaghetti,  the Ribosome actually makes in one step the end product, which are proteins. That translation process is staggeringly complex. 

Imagine the brainpower involved in the entire process from inventing the receipt to make spaghetti, until the spaghetti is on the table of your Japanese friend. What is involved? We have to start from scratch.

1. Inventing an alphabet, a language, syntax, grammar, and semantics, and using the English language
2. Inventing kanji and using the Japanese language
3. Inventing a computer with a hard disc.
4. Inventing the recipe to make spaghetti and store the Word document on the PC hard disc.
5. Inventing another computer to perpetuate the information (otherwise the PC can break, and the information is lost)
6. Inventing an email service and using it to create an email, and annex the Word document
7. Sending the Word document with the recipe to Japan
8. Inventing the software (Google Translate) to run the translation program
9. Using the computer platform to receive the email with the Word document, and use Google Translate to generate the translation
10. Using Google Translate from the computer to perform the translation
11. Taking the recipe in Japanese and make the spaghetti

Now compare this process to what happens in the cell:

1. Required is an alphabet, letters, (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C) and thymine (T), and 64 codon "words", a language, syntax, grammar, and semantics
2. Required is the second language  (setting up the amino acid alphabet consisting of 20 amino acids)
3. Required is the medium to store the message (DNA, genes, the genome)
4. Required is the recipe (genetic information) and store it in DNA.
5. Required is the medium to duplicate the information (DNA replication, we know only of that mechanism generating heredity)
6. Required is the medium to extract  the message (RNA polymerase)
7. Required is the medium to send the message (transcribed messenger RNA)
8. Required is the translation code/cipher ( genetic code) from mRNA to amino acids
9. Required is the machine that performs the translation (the ribosome)
10. Required is the programming of the machine to know both languages, to make the translation (making the adapter molecules, tRNA, and aminoacyl tRNA synthetases which recognize which amino acid to charge and add to the nascent polypeptide chain)
11. Now the translation can be performed (which produces the proteins)

Inventing, making, programming, translating, are all actions performed by intelligence.  How can someone ascribe all these things to random chance ?








ATGC quartet
adios, evolution.
biologically disastrous
carefully crafted solutions
carefully planned inventions
chemical architecture
crucial reaction
could not come one after the other
could make it work
crucial selective criteria
crucial-for-life reason for this amazing chemical trick.
dauntingly improbable
engineering marvel
engineering cleverness
example of high technology
exquisite balance
exquisite interplay
exquisitely designed biomolecules
exquisitely engineered molecular arrangement
exquisite molecular machines
“Fantastic Four”
finely engineered
hallmark of foresight and sound engineering
How did this perfect,  molecular wonder form without anything telling it to?
have to be in place at the same time
highly intricate network
incredible process
indication of the planning involved
If only one exists without the other, no cell at all
incredible bioengineering
ingenious solutions
ingeniously crafted devices
It’s make or break
it’s far and away the best
large multimolecular machines
let’s reason through the claim
life’s long-term storehouse of genetic information
making, finding, and specifically selecting this particular and life-essential
many orders of magnitude
masterful information-storage molecule
miniaturized technology
molecular architecture
must also be incredible
purely blind chemical forces have accomplished this challenging
putting it mildly
ready to go in the very first organism
wonderful array
wonder of engineering finesse
wonderful chemical trick!
striking solutions
superb atmosphere
superb for the job they have
perfectly suited
perfect link to construct
set of problems that had to be solved and implemented virtually simultaneously,
this stability control for both DNA and RNA had to be anticipated ahead of time and the solution provided with just-in-time delivery
to drive home the point
very elegant and ingenious process
“were born” to make
which came first, the DNA or the correction machinery?

Without peer
the veil began to lift
glimpse the sophistication
extraordinary pieces of matter
further depths of complexity
intricate structures and systems
vastly complex DNA topologies
vast and growing inventory of mini-RNA regulator molecules
the complexity unearthed by cell biology
zooming into a Mandelbrot set…
Intricate patterns as one peers closer at its boundary.
tiny unit of compact, adaptive sophistication
the cell feels infinitely complex.
Complex beyond any sensible measure and beyond any other conceivable material form
in so many ways supremely fit to fulfill their role as the basic unit of biological life
incomparable diversity of form
the universe of ciliate form is absurdly diverse
the diversity of cell forms is stunning
unique fitness of the cell
amazing abilities and the diversity of functions it performs
spectacular capabilities
E coli, a tiny organism, less than one-millionth of a meter in diameter and two-millionths of a meter long, so small that “20 would fit end-to-end in a single rod cell of the human retina,”
perfectly adapted to their assigned task
astound us
extraordinary fitness
stunning prior fitness
serve highly specific ends essential for the assembly of the core macromolecular constituents and the physiological functioning of the cell. I call this the unique fitness paradigm.
the fitness of the cell depends on a deeper fitness prefigured into the very fabric of reality.
Profoundly biocentric whole.

There are systems that look recognizably like manufactured artifacts

Constrain combinatorial space with distant information-rich outcomes in mind.
Intelligent agents also have the capacity to introduce complex technological systems into the world fully formed.
Mental mode of causation.
Prior to their material instantiation
Designed systems, whether automobiles, airplanes, or computers, invariably manifest a design plan that preceded their first material instantiation.
The parts do not generate the whole. Rather, an idea of the whole directed the assembly of the parts.
Overarching function.
Specifically, by engineers.
Tightly and functionally integrated system of parts and subsystems,
linear sequence-specific arrangements of characters.
Ultimately derives
conscious activity.
Rational agents
functionally integrated complex systems
applied constraints on the possible arrangements of matter to limit possibilities in order to produce improbable forms, sequences, or structures.
Constrain possible outcomes to actualize improbable but initially unrealized future functions.
Uniquely possess
highly specified, tightly integrated, hierarchical arrangements of molecular components and systems
design information-rich hierarchies, in which both individual modules and the arrangement of those modules exhibit complexity and specificity.
Specificity of design.

vastly complex DNA topologies
complexity unearthed by cell biology

vitriolic
vile
disgusting
horrendous
bully
profane
rotten
foul
spurious
evil
bad
obnoxious

carl sagan and he said that the origin of life must be a highly probable affair because as soon as conditions permit up it pops  this is unobservable no one has observed it and yet he can make such a bold claim as this  carl sagan is also famous for another quote which is extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and certainly this is an extraordinary claim and there's not a lot of evidence for it and then we have jeremy england who is a physics professor at mit and he's now at georgia tech but he's well known for for this quote you start with a random clump of atoms and if you shine light on it for long enough it should not be so surprising that you get a plant fascinating and then we have our friend bill nye who wrote a book called undeniable and in that book there's a quote the origin of life just requires some raw material that could allow the spark of life to emerge this quote kind of reminds me of walt disney's movie pinocchio where you have a wooden puppet and it just needed the spark of life to turn into a boy and i think that's it's almost that kind of imagination i think that is leading bill nye to believe this although he would say it is a science-based statement and then perhaps most disturbing of all is what our kids in school are being taught in the public schools in the biology class here's a biology textbook that says life began when organic molecules assembled in a coordinated manner within a cell membrane and began reproducing and then another biology textbook even more succinct life arose from non-life via chemical evolution and chemical evolution is a process where molecules reproduce a hypothetical process where molecules reproduce themselves and have some errors perhaps occasional errors in reproducing themselves and maybe that occasional error led to a better molecule that's better at reproducing and it's sort of a natural selection then makes for better molecules a chemical evolution so these two statements from biology textbooks are so disturbing because they they don't they they exude confidence there's not a hint of any uncertainty here like we think lifebegan or maybe  perhaps life began they just say it very strongly and this is what our kids are being taught so what's what's really going on here and um this book really simply tries to answer the question of what would it take to start life by purely natural  processes and so uh change 10 and i built this into a staircase or a stairway we call it the stairway to life and it's basically a set of requirements almost like engineering requirements we have to meet each of these requirements in order to advance up this staircase starting from chemistry starting from very basic molecules very simple molecules and building up to where you get to a life form and then you have biology so we're trying to get from chemistry to biology and we have all these requirements 'm not going to claim these are in the proper order you know there we can i don't want to argue about the order but the order doesn't matter you still have to meet each of the requirements at some point because we know life has all of these things and simple molecules do not have all of these things and we also know as we already discussed that there's almost like a gravity that pulls down the staircase you know we know that death and decay is a natural process that very easily very readily always goes down the staircase and and we're going to talk about what could possibly get you to go up the staircase here which is this hypothetical process called abiogenesis so we're not going to look at every step in the staircase we're just going to hit a few highlights pull out some interestingparts so the first one i'd like to look at is what's called homochirality um and homochirality we'll see is a very unnatural phenomenon meaning it cannot happen from you know prebiotic or just through natural laws so some of you may know but if you take an organicmolecule that has a carbon atom with four different groups attached to it if the four groups are all different each one of them is different then that molecule will have what's called chirality which means it can be in a left-handed form or a right-handed form and those two forms sure look the same just like your hands do but they're not superimposable they're not the same and if you produce them in a laboratory you'llget a 50 50 mixture of the left and the right handed it's just natural because the reaction will randomly pick this kind or this kind and so you end up with a 50 50 mixture because they're energetically the same so it would bvery natural if life contained 50 50 mixtures whenever you have a chiral location because that's what natural processes do but what we find in life is is dramatically different than that for example in proteins proteins are made up of amino acids and here we have four amino acids hooked together in a chain and almost every amino acid is is a chiral has a chiral location indicated by the arrows here but we find in life that all of these chiral locations in all proteins are left-handed always exclusively left-handed and it turns out that they need to be left-handed because if only one amino acid was replaced by a right-handed you know the the counterpart then the protein that you form would not fulfill ts task properly it wouldn't work because having the wrong chirality you know reshapes the molecule and it won't have this nice structure of alpha helices or beta sheets that are very common in proteins and if if you didn't realize if you didn't know this fact hen then perhaps you you don't know jack shits the name of the first author here in this very interesting name for guy but that's not all we also have homochirality in dna so we have the dna molecule here you're all familiar with that and dna is made up of a bunch of nucleotides this is one nucleotide each nucleotide every nucleotide has three chiral locations so you could have two kinds of stereoisomers here two here to here wo times two times two means eight there's eight possible chiralities in this molecule but it turns out that every nucleotide in every dna in all of life

including all 3.2 billion nucleotides in one half of your dna all have the exact same chirality and that's very unnatural i mean as far as something that a prebiotic situation through natural laws could produce and it gets worse because in rna rna actually has one extra one has four chiral locations so there are 16 possible chiralities for every rna nucleotide and that's very difficult to imagine that you could get a sequence of these in perfect order all with the same chirality and then one more that the membrane of all of your cells all of your cell membranes are lined by phospholipids this kind of a molecule and phospholipids also have chirality at this location here and it's kind of curious here that there are three domains of life all of life can be put into three different buckets right and you have eukaryotes which is what we are and you have bacteria as another domain and eukaryotes and bacteria all have left-handed chirality in this location but the third domain of life is called archaea and that has right-handed chiralityand um the phospholipids are formed by very different enzymes in archaea as they are in bacteria and eukaryotes so that's kind of curious we also know that homochirality naturally degrades over time you know once a living thing dies as we showed in the first slide everything falls apart but you also start to lose the chirality that naturally have some flipping of the chirality and you lose your homochirality over time so that just shows once again that naturally you have a 50 50 mixture and there's almost like a gravitational pull pulling you toward that 50 50 mixture and yet all of life is is very picky about its chirality and we have extensive homochirality throughout life so this concept of homochirality very consistent homo very consistent chirality is highly unnatural so that's just one of the steps on the staircase and in the book as we go through each of these steps in the staircase we we start each new step by assuming that the previous steps have been met that they could be achieved by natural processes so if you've already completed these okay now let's try the next step and see if we can get through that one so we're going to jump ahead a few steps and go to what's called biopolymer reproduction so in order to have life you certainly have to have the ability to reproduce but reproducing an entire cell is very complex cells are very complex and the origin of life community certainly doesn't think that reproduction started with cells reproduction they think started with molecules that individual molecules were able to reproduce or self-replicate and that makes this process of chemical evolution hypothetical process uh possible in their minds as if you can have a molecule that reproduces itself and occasionally has some errors it may have produced a better molecule by error by mistake and then you have best replicators that win out over time and dominate the populationwhich is through natural selection so you have replication errors and natural selection and that's that's basically evolution but evolution of molecules but of chemicals so um that is an essential part of a biogenesis you've got to have self-replicating molecules and because that's so essential you'll ind a lot of authors that claim that it has already been demonstrated and here's one this is a professor of chemistry from israel and in his book he says molecular self-replication is a reality a reaction that actually does take place and i see lots of people claiming this and i i just want to be very clear here that no one no one has ever seen a self-replicating molecule you got to be very clear on this to people that no it's never been done never been found about 70 years of research trying to find one and there are none even though people claim it a molecule that can reproduce itself like this now maybe we have to get a touch into semantics here because the dictionary definition self-replicating and this is just obvious i think it's exactly what you'd expect but it's the ability to reproduce itself by its own power or inherent nature and that's what i'm saying another definition is reproducing itself autonomously which is basically the same statement but that's what i'm saying is no one has ever seen a self-replicating molecule according to that definition of a molecule that can reproduce itself by its own power but what you will see are papers that claim that
this is the first paper published that kind of kicked off the concept it's now 53 years old so saul spiegelman is kind of famous for this but he called his paper you know a self-duplicating nucleic acid molecule actually rna and he called it self-duplicating but when you actually read the paper you find out that you know he put the the monomers for rna in a solution and he put a template meaning a full rna molecule that he wanted to reproduce and nothing happened so the way to get the rna to reproduce they had to add what's called a q beta replicase and a cube beta replicase is a protein-based enzyme it's a very complicated molecule with four subunits and about 1200 amino acids in a sequence it's made by living organisms found in living organisms it could never be produced on its own through a natural process they borrowed it from a living organism and they put it into the solution and this is actually a nano machine that actually does the replication of a template a template rna molecule and makes more of them an exponential kind of process so if you go back to the definition of what is self-replicating i think this is what's called cheating right when you add a molecular machine that actually does the replicating and then more modern here this is quite a popular series of papers by gerald joyce where he claims a self-replicating rna enzyme and down here you can see he's saying it forms additional copies of itself undergoing self-replication with exponential growth and this is exactly what the origin of life community you know needs and wants to see is a self-replicating molecule well again when you look into the paper and you have to read pretty deep i'm afraid to actually find out what was going on and what's going on is that they took his rna molecule it's called a ribozyme it's like an enzyme but made out of rna so they call that a ribozyme so this is an rna strand each of the letters is a nucleotide an a a g a u or a c and you can see there are 66 nucleotides here all in a string and this is homochiral remember there are 16 possible chiralities for each nucleotide so imagine the chance of getting 1 out of 16 1 out of 16 times 1 out of 16 times 1 out of 16. you quickly get to an impossible situation so forming this molecule just like this in a prebiotic purely natural way is is as close to impossible as you're going to get so they created this molecule in a laboratory and they engineer it it's kind of smartly designed because if they put this in a solution and then they actually broke this molecule inhalfinto two parts and put that those two

parts in the solution also so call it substrate a substrate b so the blue and the green are two separate molecules thrown into the solution along with the yellow molecule now if your eyes are good you can see that blue plus green together actually creates another yellow blue plus green if you flip it vertically and then flip it horizontally you'll see it's the same molecule as this just flipped around and so this yellow molecule naturally grabs onto the green and hooks it up like you see here and it naturally grabs on to the blue and it matches up here and it hooks in so in order to create another yellow all you need is a bond right here between the blue and the green one bond and they actually made that bond very easy to form by putting this nucleotide triphosphate here this triphosphate is a really high energy it's almost like an explosive charge if you will that's very eager to form a bond so just bringing the blue and green together in close proximity boom you have a bond here and you have another yellow you've created another yellow so that's what they're calling self-replication so let me help to explain it with an analogy keep it really simple here imagine i took a brand new car and i cut it in half and then on the inside of each of the two halves i install some strong magnets or some kind of a mechanical clasp device and then i get another car which is intact and i get in the car and i drive and i push it forward a little bit and then click and you have the two halves of the car clicking together through the magnets with a mechanical clasp and now i have a fully functional second car and i claim i jump up and down and claim i have made the world's first self-replicating car so we don't need car factories anymore our cars can just reproduce themselves that kind of a claim of course is ridiculous and that's basically it's very close to what gerald joyce has claimed with his self-replicating rna molecule so this biopolymer reproduction is essential for abiogenesis it's one of the required steps it has never been demonstrated not in the 70 years or so that people have been trying despite all the claims you'll see please don't believe them there is no such thing as a self-replicating molecule let's uh skip a few steps we'll head up here to where it is a means for repairing biopolymers ipicked on this one because i think a lot of people aren't aware that this is in that this is a process in all living organisms that you have to have repair of your biopolymers because just being in water just having your dna or protein sit in water actually is very damaging to them and of course we have uv radiation oxidative damage there's there's plain just radiation on its own constantly degrades your dna and your rna so every cell in your body every cell the dna experiences tens of thousands of damage per day and if you didn't have built-in repair mechanisms you would be very sick soon and you would die so there wouldn't be any life without specific designed repair mechanisms so in living organisms there there are a dozen or so different kinds of repair mechanisms over here i'm showing the the most simple one it's called the base excision repair pathway so here we have a dna with its um you know looks like a ladder you know a double helix ladder and here we have one bad uh nucleotide hat's been maybe water damaged it so there's an enzyme here hat takes out the damaged nucleotide another enzyme that kind of opens up the ladder opens up the dna another enzyme prepares it for being patched and then we have two enzymes here that actually patch back the right kind of dna and repair the problem so this is this is a five enzyme process those five enzymes together probably about a thousand amino acids which means about three thousand nucleotides of dna of code 3000 and you know code entries in order to produce these nucleotides and so this actually gets us into a paradox because dna repair s essential for life but these mechanisms that repair the dna happen to be encoded in the dna and they being encoded in dna need to be protected from damage that dna itself also needs to be repaired so you can't have dna repair mechanisms without having dna repair mechanisms and so how could this have started naturally this is what's called eigens paradox and this is 1971 that manfred eigen realized this was a problem um and and nobody has been able to solve that to this day so biopolymer repair is another process that's required for life and it certainly doesn't come about naturally so let's go up one step to talk about the membranes the membrane surrounding all cells this is an area where the the people that promote a natural process to start life they get really excited about this one because they think they got this one solved membranes in life are all made up of phospholipids and they look each one of these blue and gray is one phospholipid and the phospholipids have one side that ikes to touch water and the other side really hates to touch water so if you put them into water in just the right conditions they will naturally form up into what's called a lipid bilayer it looks kind of like this and it's a lower energy state for them and they will actually also form into a sphere you get a lipid bilayer sphere and uh it under a microscope it looks looks kind of like a cell or maybe a soap bubble but the claim is then from those who support abiogenesis they say hey look we have membranes that form spontaneously from a natural process you just have to put phospholipids in water and you get yourself a cell membrane that is also wrong and that's it's kind of a half truth i guess i would say because no cell no living thing could ever survive with such a simple membrane as this the actual membranes in all of life are they're actually active membranes and they're selectively permeable and the reason why we have to have this is we have kind of a conflicting set of requirements around the membrane the membranes have an essential function to to maintain an electric voltage across them it's actually a difference in proton concentration with a lot more protons outside than inside so the membrane has to be tight enough that it doesn't allow protons to slip hrough that's a pretty tight membrane but to some the same

deroga
sito dell ministerio della salute, sezione viaggi



Today I was at the side chat of the call-in show Truth Wanted. Since I am being blocked if I post with my real name, I used a sock account. I was Daniel Dennet. Matt Dillahunty was co-hosting the show. He claimed that he was fine to support positive or strong atheism. His only issue was that theists had to define their God. So I asked him to back up and provide evidence that we can exist without a creator. His answer demonstrated his dishonesty.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b9k9w1Dw18


caracteristicas de teu projeto, e vejo se posso colocar no meu projeto, preço do conjunto, autonomia, preço das baterias e quanto tempo vão durar, como vão ser recarregado as baterias em um barco tão pequeno, potência de cada motor eletrico, material no brasil, calco energetico do processo dele, de onde tira a energia? gerador aeolico ? hidrogerador ? placa solar?

characteristics of your project, 
what is the source of the energy,
energy generator? ( fossil fuel ) or aeolig generator, or solar energy, or hydro alternator 
price of the set, 
autonomy, 
price of batteries and how long they will last, 
how the batteries will be recharged in such a small boat, 
power of each electric motor, 
material in brazil , 
energetic step of his process, 
where does the energy come from? 
aeolic generator? hydrogenerator? solar plate?

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HIV has undergone every possible combination of 4 mutations, so it's not surprising that it could find gains that require 2, 3, or 4 amino acids at the same time, if each amino acid change doesn't require too many mutations. But probably you don't even need to have them all at the same time though.  

"HIV's acquisition of its ability to counteract human tetherin appears to be a stepwise evolutionary gain where mutations gradually improved the ability, since "chimeras within each region yielded intermediate phenotypes. In other words, each mutation made HIV increasingly better at counteracting tetherin. How can it be IC if it's a gradual path?

From pages 55-56 in chapter 3 of Edge of Evolution:
Suppose that P. falciparum needed several separate mutations just to deal with one antimalarial drug. Suppose that changing one amino acid wasn’t enough. Suppose that two different amino acids had to be changed before a beneficial effect for the parasite showed up. In that case, we would have a situation very much like a combination-drug cocktail, but with just one drug. That is, the likelihood of a particular P. falciparum cell having the several necessary changes would be much, much less than the case where it needed to change only one amino acid. That factor seems to be the secret of why chloroquine was an effective drug for decades. How much more difficult is it for malaria to develop resistance to chloroquine than to some other drugs? We can get a good handle on the answer by reversing the logic and counting up the number of malarial cells needed in order to find one that is immune to the drug. For instance, in the case of atovaquone, a clinical study showed that about one in a trillion cells had spontaneous resistance. In another experiment it was shown that a single amino acid mutation, causing a change at position number 268 in a single protein, was enough to make P. falciparum resistant to the drug. So we can deduce that the odds of getting that single mutation are roughly one in a trillion. On the other hand, resistance to chloroquine has appeared fewer than ten times in the whole world in the past half century. Nicholas White of Mahidol University in Thailand points out that if you multiply the number of parasites in a person who is very ill with malaria times the number of people who get malaria per year times the number of years since the introduction of chloroquine, then you can estimate that the odds of a parasite developing resistance to chloroquine is roughly one in a hundred billion billion. In shorthand scientific notation, that’s one in 10^20 .

page 60:  "Recall that the odds against getting two necessary, independent mutations are the multiplied odds for getting each mutation individually. What if a problem arose during the course of life on earth that required a cluster of mutations that was twice as complex as a CCC? (Let’s call it a double CCC.) For example, what if instead of the several amino acid changes needed for chloroquine resistance in malaria, twice that number were needed? In that case the odds would be that for a CCC times itself. Instead of 10^20 cells to solve the evolutionary problem, we would need 10^40 cells."

A "CCC" is Behe's own term.  "chloroquine-complexity cluster"
 it's what he calls the two simultaneous mutations needed for p. falciparum (the parasite that causes malaria) to evolve resistence to the drug chloroquine.

Above, that, the paper says "the results revealed that four TMD amino acid substitutions (E15A, V19A, I25L and V26L) were sufficient to render the SIVcpz Vpu active against human tetherin"

so they are changing amino acids at positions 15, 19, 25, and 26 in that diagram.

blue is chimp SIV and yellow is human HIV

you can see how they mix and match the pieces.


See FIGURE 4A
The paper says "the results revealed that four TMD amino acid substitutions (E15A, V19A, I25L and V26L) were sufficient to render the SIVcpz Vpu active against human tetherin". So they are changing amino acids at positions 15, 19, 25, and 26 in that diagram.

Blue is chimp SIV and yellow is human HIV. they mix and match the pieces.

- is no anti-tetherin activity
(+) is a little bit
+ is some
++ is a lot.

In the first column under "release". Note how they never test amino acids 25 and 26 separately. Also note how they never test position 15 separately from either position 19 or position 25-26. Since they didn't test every path, they can't say it is or isn't gradual. Also note that some of the paths they tested were gradual.  We go from - to (+) to + to ++. This is on the evolution of HIV-1 group N's anti tetherin activity.

That paper is inconclusive about whether all four amino acids had to change at the same time.

125 billion electronvolts, or 125 GeV.

97,90 x 2000 : 5 = 39160- 41000 = 33270

1000 97,62    97600
200 111          22200
200 115          23000
200 118,40      236,800
200 119,67      239400
11630

10511 + 18700 + 920 + 1300 + 1840 = 


2000 11,89  23800
2000 12.06   24120
2600  13,89 36114
3400  15,60   53050
137074
155800 = 18800

49400+ 10511 = 59900
1300
 
eternit 31.40 x 700 21980 - 22900 
920

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In an article in 2014, The Richard Dawkins Foundation asked: How did the eye evolve? They cited an article published at pbs.org where they wrote:

Zoologist Dan-Erik Nilsson demonstrates how the complex human eye could have evolved through natural selection acting on small variations. Starting with a simple patch of light-sensitive cells, Nilsson's model "evolves" until a clear image is produced.

In the last sentence of Nilsson’s paper, which has been used since it was published in 1994 as a reference to back up the claim that eyes could have evolved, Nilsson wrote:

"the eye was never a real threat to Darwin's theory of evolution."

Back in 1997, Professor Michael J. Behe wrote an article entitled: Molecular Machines: Experimental Support for the Design Inference, where he pointed out that:

In order to say that some function is understood, every relevant step in the process must be elucidated. The relevant steps in biological processes occur ultimately at the molecular level, so a satisfactory explanation of a biological phenomenon such as sight must include a molecular explanation. It is no longer sufficient, now that the black box of vision has been opened, for an ‘evolutionary explanation’ of that power to invoke only the anatomical structures of whole eyes, as Darwin did in the 19th century and as most popularizers of evolution continue to do today. Anatomy is, quite simply, irrelevant.

This is a landmark observation and has guided many of my investigations in regards to Intelligent Design. Has Nilsson’s paper not failed precisely on that very point?

Following Behe’s guideline, I took the same starting point as Nilsson, but not considering the eyespot as an initial stage of the evolutionary trajectory, and then showing a lineup of anatomical development, but rather attempting to understand how evolution could have operated at a molecular level, culminating in supposedly “ primitive” eyespots. What was conveniently ignored by Nilsson, is that eyespots do only perform a function, for example in green algae, like Chlamydomonas, when embedded in a visual system useful for a higher functional end. Phototaxis is essential for green algae; They either move towards light upon which they depend for energy and nutrition, yet also undergoing negative phototaxis to protect themselves against too intense sources of illumination. The eyespot is not the photoreceptor itself but rather a mass of carotenoid pigment shading the photoreceptor from light from one direction. A photosensitive organism needs a photoreceptor that detects the light. But that alone would not allow the organism to determine the direction of the light source. A pigmented spot reduces the illumination from one direction or changes the wavelength of the incident light falling on the photoreceptor, thus allowing the organism to move in the direction of the light or away of it. So next, a mechanism to promote movement is essential. To detect the light is one thing but to move towards or away from it requires a motor system; in green algae, the famous flagellum. But also a mechanism is required by which detection of light can be translated into a change in flagellar movement, generally an ion flux of one kind or another

Which of the following is better explained by design, rather than non-design?

Probability theory is the logic of science, dingdong. You do not need to prove everything absolutely for it to make sense within reason. What you need is a tendency for it to be true statistically. That means evidence of it working repeatedly with low error.

Design can be tested using scientific logic.  How? Upon the logic of mutual exclusion, design and non-design are mutually exclusive (it was one or the other) so we can use eliminative logic: if non-design is highly improbable, then design is highly probable.  Thus, evidence against non-design (against production of a feature by undirected natural process) is evidence for design.  And vice versa. 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.


Upon applying above logic, how is the following better explained, by design, or non-design ?

- Components of a complex system that are only useful in the completion of a much larger system and their orderly aggregation in a sequentially correct manner.

- Intermediate sub-products which have by its own no use of any sort unless they are correctly assembled in a larger system.  
 
- Instructional complex information which is required for to make these sub-products and parts,  to mount them correctly in the right order and at the right place, and interconnected correctly in a larger system.  

- The making of computer hardware, and highly efficient information storage devices.

- Creating software, based on a language using signs and codes like the alphabet, an instructional blueprint.

- Information retrieval, transmission, signaling, and translation

- The make of machine parts with highly specific structures, which permit to form the aggregation into complex machines, production line complexes, autonomous robots with error check functions and repair mechanisms, electronic circuit - like networks, energy production factories, power generating plants, energy turbines, recycle mechanisms and methods, waste grinders and management, organized waste disposal mechanisms, and self distruction when needed to reach a higher end,  and veritable micro-miniaturized factories where all before-metioned systems and parts are required in order for that factory to be self- replicating, and being functional.

- Establishment of advanced communication systems. Signal relay stations. Signal without recognition is meaningless.  Communication implies a signaling convention (a “coming together” or agreement in advance) that a given signal means or represents something: e.g., that S-O-S means “Send Help!”   A transmitter and receiver system made of physical materials, with a functional purpose, performing an algorithm that is not itself a product of the materials or the blind forces acting on them, acting as information processing system ( the interaction of a software program and the hardware )

- Selecting the most optimal and efficient code information system and ability to minimize the effects of errors.

- A system which uses a cipher, translating instructions through one language,  which contains Statistics, Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics, and Apobetics, and assign the code of one system to the code of another system.

- The make of complicated, fast high-performance production systems,  and technology with high robustness, flexibility, efficiency, and responsiveness, and quality-management techniques.

- The setup of 1,000–1,500 manufacturing proceedings in parallel by a series of operations and flow connections to reach a common end-goal, the most complex industry-like production networks known.

- The implementation of a product making system,  only in response to actual demand, not in anticipation of forecast demand, thus preventing overproduction.

- Creating machines, production lines and factories that are more complex than man-made things of the sort.

- The organization of software exhibiting logical functional layers - regulatory mechanisms -  and control networks and systems.

- Error check and detection,  inspection processes, quality assurance procedures, information error proofreading and repair mechanisms.

- Foolproofing, applying the key-lock principle to guarantee a proper fit between product and machine.

- Complex production lines which depend on precise optimization and fine-tuning.

- Create complex systems which are able to adapt to variating conditions.

Biological cells and their extraordinary manufacturing capabilities

It surprises me that the following paper has not been discovered by the ID community yet. A proponent of ID could not have made a better case for ID, than authors of following mainstream science paper did, comparing humanly-made factories and production lines to  Biological cells, which are examples of ID par excellence. The advanced production solutions implemented in cells excel human-made factories, machines, and production lines by far and so point to an intelligent designer/creator. For that reason, I don't think cells are LIKE factories, but they ARE in a literal sense the most advanced factories known in many ways, which following paper outlines extraordinary well. A must read for any advocate and proponent   of ID: following is a resume, the whole paper can be read at the link below at the end:

Organic Production Systems: What the Biological Cell Can Teach Us About Manufacturing
http://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/msom.1030.0033

Biological cells run complicated and sophisticated production systems. The study of the cell’s production technology provides us with insights that are potentially useful in industrial manufacturing. When comparing cell metabolism with manufacturing techniques in the industry, we find some striking commonalities assures quality at the source, and uses component commonality to simplify production.  The organic production system can be viewed as a possible scenario for the future of manufacturing. We try to do so in this paper by studying a high-performance manufacturing system - namely, the biological cell. A careful examination of the production principles used by the biological cell reveals that cells are extremely good at making products with high robustness, flexibility, and efficiency. Section 1 describes the basic metaphor of this article, the biological cell as a production system, and shows that the cell is subject to similar performance pressures. Section 4 further deepens the metaphor by pointing out the similarities between the biological cell and a modern manufacturing system. We then point to the limits of the metaphor in §5 before we identify, in §6, four important production principles that are sources of efficiency and responsiveness for the biological cell, but that we currently do not widely observe in industrial production. For example, the intestinal bacterium, Escherichia coli,  runs 1,000–1,500 biochemical reactions in parallel. Just as in manufacturing, cell metabolism can be represented by flow diagrams in which raw materials are transformed into final products in a series of operations.

With its thousands of biochemical reactions and high number of flow connections, the complexity of the cell’s production flow matches even the most complex industrial production networks we can observe today.  The performance pressures operating on the cell’s production system also exhibit clear parallels with manufacturing. Both production systems need to be fast, efficient, and responsive to environmental change. Speed and range of response, as well as efficiency of its production systems, are clearly critical to the biological cell. Biologists have made the argument that the evolution of the basic structure of modern cells has largely been driven by “alimentary efficiency,” or the input-output efficiency of turning available nutrients into energy and basic building blocks. In addition, it is clear that in dynamic environments, the ability of the cell to react quickly and decisively is vital to ensure survival and reproduction.  Given the “manufacturing” nature of cell biochemistry and the comparable performance pressures on it, one should not be surprised to find interesting solutions developed by the cell that are applicable in manufacturing—especially since “cell technology” is much older and more mature than any human technology. The cell never forecasts demand; it achieves responsiveness through speed, not through inventories.

The limits to responsiveness depend only on the capacity limits of the enzymes in a particular pathway. The corresponding mechanism in manufacturing is referred to as a pull system. It produces only in response to actual demand, not in anticipation of forecast demand, thus preventing overproduction. While it is difficult to make direct comparisons with manufacturing plants, some case examples illustrate that the cell operates with little waste, even in regulating its pathways. In a U.S. electric-connectors factory in the early 1990s, 28.6% of plant labor was devoted to control and materials handling, while the figure was 14.9% in a simpler and leaner Japanese plant. In a house-care products plant, a cost analysis revealed that at least 14% of production costs were incurred by production planning and quality assurance. With its 11% of regulatory genes, the cell seems to set a pretty tight benchmark for regulation efficiency. The cell also uses quality-management techniques used in manufacturing today. The cell invests in defect prevention at various stages of its replication process, using 100% inspection processes, quality assurance procedures, and foolproofing techniques. An example of the cell inspecting each and every part of a product is DNA proofreading. As the DNA gets replicated, the enzyme DNA polymerase adds new nucleotides to the growing DNA strand, limiting the number of errors by removing incorrectly incorporated nucleotides with a proofreading function. An example of quality assurance can be found in the use of helper proteins, also called “chaperones.” These make sure that newly produced proteins fold themselves correctly, which is critical to their proper functioning. Finally, as an example of foolproofing, the cell applies the key-lock principle to guarantee a proper fit between substrate and enzyme, i.e., product and machine. The substrate fits into a pocket of the enzyme like a key into a lock, ensuring that only one particular substrate can be processed.

This is comparable with poka-yoke systems in manufacturing. An everyday example of poka-yoke is the narrow opening for an unleaded gasoline tank in a car. It prevents you from inserting the larger leaded fuel nozzle. The cell’s pathways are designed in such a way that different end products often share a set of initial common steps. For example, in the biosynthesis of aromatic amino acids, a number of common precursors are synthesized before the pathway splits into different final products.  A final concern is that the biological cell is the result of evolution, not design. Consider the cell’s technology, which stabilized about two billion years ago. Interestingly, the intermediates used for “products” and “machines” (enzymes) are identical. In other words, the cell can easily degrade an enzyme into its component amino acids and use these amino acids to synthesize a new enzyme (a “machine”), replenish the central metabolism, or make another molecule (a “product”), e.g., a biogenic amine. It seems an amazing achievement by the cell to build the complexity and variety of life with such a small number of components. Imagine that all industrial machines were made of only 20 different modules, corresponding to the 20 amino acids from which all proteins are made. As we further explain below, this modular approach allows the cell to be remarkably efficient and responsive at the same time.

Basically, with both products and machines being built from just a few recyclable components, the cell can efficiently produce an enormous variety of products in the appropriate quantities when they are needed.  At any moment, synthesis and breakdown for each enzyme happen in the cell. The constant renewal eliminates the need for other types of “machine maintenance.” Assembly and disassembly of the cell’s machines are so fast and frictionless that they allow a scheme of constant machine renewal.  The cell has pushed this principle even further. First, it does not even wait until the machine fails, but replaces it long before it has a chance to break down. And second, it completely recycles the machine that is taken out of production. The components derived from this recycling process can be used not only to create other machines of the same type, but also to create different machines if that is what is needed in the “plant.” This way of handling its machines has some clear advantages for the cell. New capacity can be installed quickly to meet current demand. At the same time, there are never idle machines around taking up space or hogging important building blocks. Maintenance is a positive “side effect” of the continuous machine renewal process, thereby guaranteeing the quality of output. Finally, the ability to quickly build new production lines from scratch has allowed the cell to take advantage of a big library of contingency plans in its DNA that allow it to quickly react to a wide range of circumstances.

Factory and machine planning and design, and what it tells us about cell factories and molecular machines
The Cell is  a Factory
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t2245-factory-and-machine-planning-and-design-and-what-it-tells-us-about-cell-factories-and-molecular-machines

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