11. Cells aren't irreducible complex, see answer #6.
The irreducible, code-instructed process to make cell factories and machines points to intelligent design
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t2364-the-irreducible-code-instructed-process-to-make-cell-factories-and-machines-points-to-intelligent-design
Would you also say that it is plausible that a tornado over a junkyard could produce a 747?
Would you also say that it is plausible that mindless random chance can write a book?
The cell is a factory, that has various computer like hierarchically organized systems of hardware and software, various language based informational systems, a translation system, hudge amounts of precise instructional/specified, complex information stored and extract systems to make all parts needed to produce the factory and replicate itself, the scaffold structure, that permits the build of the indispensable protection wall, form and size of its building, walls with gates that permits cargo in and out, recognition mechanisms that let only the right cargo in, has specific sites and production lines, "employees", busy and instructed to produce all kind of necessary products, parts and subparts with the right form and size through the right materials, others which mount the parts together in the right order, on the right place, in the right sequence, at the right time, which has sophisticated check and error detection mechanisms all along the production process, the hability to compare correctly produced parts to faulty ones and discard the faulty ones, and repeat the process to make the correct ones; highways and cargo carriers that have tags which recognize where to drop the cargo where it's needed, cleans up waste and has waste bins and sophisticated recycle mechanisms, storage departments, produces its energy and shuttles it to where its needed, and last not least, does reproduce itself.
The salient thing is that the individual parts and compartments have no function by their own. They had to emerge ALL AT ONCE, No stepwise manner is possible, all systems are INTERDEPENDENT and IRREDUCIBLE. And it could not be through evolution, since evolution depends on fully working self-replicating cells, in order to function.
How can someone rationally argue that the origin of the most sophisticated factory in the universe would be probable to be based on natural occurrence, without involving any guiding intelligence?
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,"
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
Evolution has been a central point of the origins debate. Abiogenesis, however, provides far better elucidation of what mechanisms explain the origin of biological systems better: an intelligent designer, through power, information input, wisdom, will, or natural, non-guided, non-intelligent mechanisms, that is: random chance or physical necessity, long periods of time, mutation and natural selection, or self-organisation of matter.
Behe's definition of Irreducible complexity can be expanded and applied not only to biological systems, but also to systems, machines, and factories created by man, that require a minimal number of parts to exercise a specific function, and this minimal number of parts cannot be reduced to keep the basic function. The term applies as well to processes, production methods and proceedings of various sorts. To reach a certain goal, a minimal number of manufacturing steps must be gone through. That applies in special to processes in living cells, where a minimal set of basic processes must be fully functional and operational, in order to maintain cells alive.
Following irreducible processes and parts are required to keep cells alive and illustrate mount improbable to get life a first go:
Reproduction. Reproduction is essential for the survival of all living things.
Metabolism. Enzymatic activity allows a cell to respond to changing environmental demands and regulate its metabolic pathways, both of which are essential to cell survival.
Nutrition. This is closely related to metabolism. Seal up a living organism in a box for long enough and in due course, it will cease to function and eventually die. Nutrients are essential for life.
Complexity. All known forms of life are amazingly complex. Even single-celled organisms such as bacteria are veritable beehives of activity involving millions of components.
Organization. Maybe it is not complexity per se that is significant but organized complexity.
Growth and development. Individual organisms grow and ecosystems tend to spread (if conditions are right).
Information content. In recent years scientists have stressed the analogy between living organisms and computers. Crucially, the information needed to replicate an organism is passed on in the genes from parent to offspring.
Hardware/software entanglement. All life of the sort found on Earth stems from a deal struck between two very different classes of molecules: nucleic acids and proteins.
Permanence and change. A further paradox of life concerns the strange conjunction of permanence and change.
Sensitivity. All organisms respond to stimuli— though not always to the same stimuli in the same ways.
Regulation. All organisms have regulatory mechanisms that coordinate internal processes.
The cell is irreducibly complex
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t1299-the-cell-is-irreducibly-complex
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
http://www.ru.nl/english/@893712/protocells-formed/
Behes definition of Irreducible complexity can be expanded, and applied not only to biological systems, but also to systems , machines and factories created by man, that require a minimal number of parts to exercise a specific function, and this minimal number of parts cannot be reduced to keep the basic function. The term applies as well to processes, production methods and proceedings of various sorts. To reach a certain goal, a minimal number of manufacturing steps must be gone through. That applies in special to processes in living cells, where a minimal set of basic processes must be fully functional and operational, in order to maintain cells alive.
Following irreducible processes and parts are required to keep cells alive, and illustrate mount improbable to get life a first go:
Reproduction. Reproduction is essential for the survival of all living things.
Metabolism. Enzymatic activity allows a cell to respond to changing environmental demands and regulate its metabolic pathways, both of which are essential to cell survival.
Nutrition. This is closely related to metabolism. Seal up a living organism in a box for long enough and in due course it will cease to function and eventually die. Nutrients are essential for life.
Complexity. All known forms of life are amazingly complex. Even single-celled organisms such as bacteria are veritable beehives of activity involving millions of components.
Organization. Maybe it is not complexity per se that is significant, but organized complexity.
Growth and development. Individual organisms grow and ecosystems tend to spread (if conditions are right).
Information content. In recent years scientists have stressed the analogy between living organisms and computers. Crucially, the information needed to replicate an organism is passed on in the genes from parent to offspring.
Hardware/software entanglement. All life of the sort found on Earth stems from a deal struck between two very different classes of molecules: nucleic acids and proteins.
Permanence and change. A further paradox of life concerns the strange conjunction of permanence and change.
Sensitivity. All organisms respond to stimuli— though not always to the same stimuli in the same ways.
Regulation. All organisms have regulatory mechanisms that coordinate internal processes.
12. Cells can self replicate yes, and? How is mitosis or meiosis relevant to this?
DNA replication, and its mind boggling nano technology that defies naturalistic explanations
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t1849-dna-replication-of-prokaryotes
The Argument of the Original Replicator
In prokaryotic cells, DNA replication involves more than thirty specialized proteins to perform tasks necessary for building and accurately copying the genetic molecule.
Each of these proteins is essential and required for the proper replicating process. Not a single one of these proteins can be missing, otherwise the whole process breaks down, and is unable to perform its task correctly. DNA repair mechanisms must also be in place, fully functional and working properly, otherwise the mutation rate will be too high, and the cell dies. 18
The individual parts and proteins require by themselves complex assembly proteins to be built.
The individual parts, assembly proteins, and proteins individually would have no function by their own. They have only function interconnected in the working whole.
The individual parts must be readily available on the construction site of the rna replication complex, being correctly interlocked, interlinked, and have the right interface compatibility to be able to interact correctly together. All this requires information and meta information ( information that directs the expression of the genomic information for construction of the individual proteins, and correct timing of expression, and as well the information of the correct assembly sequence. )
Evolution is not a capable driving force to make the dna replicating complex, because evolution depends on cell replication through the very own mechanism we try to explain. It takes proteins to make DNA replication happen. But it takes the DNA replicationprocess to make proteins. That’s a catch 22 situation.
DNA replication requires coded, complex, specified information and meta-information, and the DNA replication process is irreducibly complex.
Therefore, DNA replication is best explained through design.
13. Cells don't have error detection necessarily, if they did, cancer wouldn't be an issue.
DNA damage and repair
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t2043-dna-repair?highlight=dna+repair
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t1849p30-dna-replication-of-prokaryotes#4401
Replication forks may stall frequently and require some form of repair to allow completion of chromosomal duplication. Failure to solve these replicative problems comes at a high price, with the consequences being genome instability, cell death and, in higher organisms, cancer. Replication fork repair and hence reloading of DnaB may be needed away from oriC at any point within the chromosome and at any stage during chromosomal duplication. The potentially catastrophic effects of uncontrolled initiation of chromosomal duplication on genome stability suggests that replication restart must be regulated as tightly as DnaA-directed replication initiation at oriC. This implies reloading of DnaB must occur only on ssDNA at repaired forks or D-loops rather than onto other regions of ssDNA, such as those created by blocks to lagging strand synthesis.Thus an alternative replication initiator protein, PriA helicase, is utilized during replication restart to reload DnaB back onto the chromosome
Question: Could the first cell, with its required complement of genes coded for by DNA, have successfully reproduced for a significant number of generations without a proofreading function ? A further question is how the function of synthesis of the lagging strand could have arisen, and the machinery to do so. That is, the Primosome, and the function of Polymerase I to remove the short peaces of RNA that the cell uses to prime replication, allowing the polymerase III function to fill the gap. These functions all require precise regulation, and coordinated functional machine-like steps. These are all complex, advanced functions and had to be present right from the beginning. How could this complex machinery have emerged in a gradual manner ? the Primosome had to be fully functional, otherwise polymerisation could not have started, since a prime sequence is required.
14. You have taken biology 101, yey. How is this relevant
Homeostasis in cells, and origin of life scenarios
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t2447-homeostasis-in-cells-and-origin-of-life-scenarios
One of the key properties of life is Regulation, including homeostasis.
Freeman Dyson, Origins of Life, page 73:
The essential characteristic of living cells is homeostasis, the ability to maintain a steady and more-or-less constant chemical balance in a changing environment. Homeostasis is the machinery of chemical controls and feedback cycles that make sure that each molecular species in a cell is produced in the right proportion, not too much and not too little. Without homeostasis, there can be no ordered metabolism and no quasi-stationary equilibrium deserving the name of life. The question Why is life so complicated? means, in this context, Given that a population of molecules is able to maintain itself in homeostatic equilibrium at a steady level of metabolism, how many different molecular species must the population contain? From the fact that bacteria have generally refused to shrink below a certain level of complexity, we may deduce that this level is in some sense an irreducible minimum. I am conjecturing that the minimum population size required for homeostasis would be ten or twenty thousand monomer units. And more important, I am suggesting that the most promising road to an understanding of the origin of life would be to do experiments like the Spiegelman and Eigen experiments but this time concerned with homeostasis rather than with replication.
The essence of life from the beginning was homeostasis based on a complicated web of molecular structures. Life by its very nature is resistant to simplification, whether on the level of single cells or ecological systems or human societies. Life could tolerate a precisely replicating molecular apparatus only by incorporating it into a translation system that allowed the complexity of the molecular web to be expressed in the form of software. After the transfer of complication from hardware to software, life continued to be a complicated interlocking web in which the replicators were only one component. The replicators were never as firmly in control as Dawkins imagined. In my version the history of life is counterpoint music, a two-part invention with two voices, the voice of the replicators attempting to impose their selfish purposes upon the whole network and the voice of homeostasis tending to maximize diversity of structure and flexibility of function. The tyranny of the replicators was always mitigated by the more ancient cooperative structure of homeostasis that was inherent in every organism.
Homeostasis is the mechanistic fundament of biology, beginning with the protocell 1 Two fundamental properties of life as we recognize it are homeostasis and redox chemistry. Redox homeostasis is defined here as the maintenance of a constant electrochemical potential and ionic concentration gradient across a cellular boundary, despite fluctuations in the electrochemical potential of the external environment and despite changing identities and activities of electron donors and acceptors. 2 The transition to free-living cells depends on the proto-cells’ ability to maintain a proton motive force for energy conversion, providing for metabolism, for active transport, and for synthesis of informational and structural macromolecules. A feature that distinguishes living from non-living matter is homeostasis – the maintenance of a constant internal environment despite changes in the external environment. A second feature of all known life is that living things are composed of spatial compartments, called cells. Cellular homeostasis requires a system of integrated feedback and feedforward, producing adaptive responses to, and anticipation of, ultimately uncontrollable changes in the properties of the outside world.
I have been trying to imagine a framework for the origin of life, guided by a personal philosophy that considers the primal characteristics of life to be homeostasis rather than replication, diversity rather than uniformity, the flexibility of the genome rather than the tyranny of the gene, the error tolerance of the whole rather than the precision of the parts.
A Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) research team investigating how the earliest stages of life might have developed has discovered a way the first living cells could have met a key challenge -- maintaining a constant internal environment, a process called homeostasis, even when external conditions change. "Modern cells are constantly regulating what they are doing -- synthesizing, degrading and exporting a whole suite of RNAs and proteins -- depending on the cell's particular needs at the time," says Aaron Engelhart, PhD, of the MGH Department of Molecular Biology and the Center for Computational and Integrative Biology, lead author of the paper. "One would expect that the earliest cells weren't nearly as complex as today's cells, but they still had the need to regulate their internal environment. 1
Iron Uptake and Homeostasis in Cells 1
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t2443-iron-uptake-and-homeostasis-in-prokaryotic-microorganisms
The origin of life required two processes that dominated:
(1) the generation of a proton gradient and
(2) linking this gradient to ATP production in part and in part to uptake of essential chemicals and rejection of others. The generation of a proton gradient required especially appropriate amounts of iron (Fe2+), levels for electron transfer and the ATP production depended on controlling H+, Mg2+ and phosphate in the cytoplasm. 8
Iron serves essential functions in both prokaryotes and eukaryotes, and cells have highly specialized mechanisms for acquiring and handling this metal. 2
Organisms use a variety of transition metals as catalytic centers in proteins, including iron, copper, manganese, and zinc. Iron is well suited to redox reactions due to its capability to act as both an electron donor and acceptor. In eukaryotic cells, iron is a cofactor for a wide variety of metalloproteins involved in energy metabolism, oxygen binding, DNA biosynthesis and repair, synthesis of biopolymers, cofactors, and vitamins, drug metabolism, antioxidant function, and many others. Because iron is so important for survival, organisms utilize several techniques to optimize uptake and storage to ensure maintenance of sufficient levels for cellular requirements. However, the redox properties of iron also make it extremely toxic if cells have excessive amounts. Free iron can catalyze the formation of reactive oxygen species such as the hydroxyl radical, which in turn can damage proteins, lipids, membranes, and DNA. Cells must maintain a delicate balance between iron deficiency and iron overload that involves coordinated control at the transcriptional, post-transcriptional, and post-translational levels to help fine tune iron utilization and iron trafficking. 4
Question: Had this coordination not have to be fully setup right when cells first became alive ?
How intracellular Calcium signaling, gradient and its role as a universal intracellular regulator points to design
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t2448-howintracellular-calcium-signaling-gradient-and-its-role-as-a-universal-intracellular-regulator-points-to-design
In view of the importance of calcium (Ca2+) as a universal intracellular regulator, its essential role in cell signaling and communication in many biological intra and extra cellular processes, it is surprising how little it is mentioned in the origins ( evolution/ID) debate. Most discussions about the origin of life start with RNA worlds versus metabolism first scenarios, panspermia, hydrothermal vent theory etc. The origin of life cannot be elucidated, without taking into consideration and explaining how the calcium signaling machinery and cell homeostasis appeared.
The Calcium gradient :
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! The first forms of life required an effective Ca2+ homeostatic system, which maintained intracellular Ca2+ at comfortably low concentrations—somewhere around 100 nanomolar, this being ∼10,000–20,000 times lower than that in the extracellular milieu. Damage the ability of the plasma membrane to maintain this gradient and calcium will flood into the cell, precipitating calcium phosphate, damaging the ATP-generating machinery, and kill the cell. At millimolar concentrations, calcium competes with Mg2+ ( magnesium), binds to DNA and RNA, and clogs it up. Ca2+ binds to nucleotides, so they do not work properly. And crucially Ca2+, at too high concentrations, precipitates carbonate, phosphate, and sulfate. So if a primeval cell was to work, it had to get rid of Ca2+, lowering it at least to submillimolar levels, if not submicromolar. In fact, without control of intracellular Ca2+, life would never have got off the ground! Control of intracellular Ca2+ had to be a crucial step in allowing the original cells to survive and replicate, even before RNA or DNA synthesis could begin in earnest. The evidence we have from molecular biology, together with the toxic nature of prolonged high Ca2+ levels inside cells, argues strongly that primeval cells must have had Ca2+ pumps to keep their free intracellular Ca2+ low, setting the scene for the ‘calcium pressure’ across then plasma membrane to be exploited to act as the source for cell activation.
In order to maintain such a low cytosolic calcium concentration, Ca2+ ions thus have to be transported against a steep concentration gradient. In addition, the positively charged molecules are often transported against a very negative membrane potential, contributing to a large electrochemical gradient for Ca2+ ions. The concentration is tightly regulated by Ca 2+ -binding proteins, Ca 2+ pumps and other transporters. This gradient has to be maintained by the continuous exclusion of Ca2+ from the cell. The removal of Ca2+ by active extrusion requires energy to pump the Ca2+ against the electrochemical gradient. The metabolic apparatus that serves this function involves Ca2+ protein-based and non-proteinaceous channels, Ca2+ antiporters (Ca2+/2H+, Ca2+/Na+), and ATP-dependent Ca2+ pumps.
The making of a power gradient ( which is a thermodynamically uphill process ) is always an engineering achievement, and a lot of knowledge, planning, and intelligence is required for setup. Hydroelectric dams are highly complex, and always the result of years of planning by the most skilled, educated and knowledge engineers of large companies. As for many human inventions, the engineering solutions discovered by man are employed in nature at least since life began in a far more elaborate and sophisticated way. So inanimate chemistry had the innate drive of trials and errors to produce a cell membrane, and amongst tons of other things, a Ca+ gradient through highly complex [b]Calcium channels to keep a 10 000-fold higher concentration of calcium outside the cell than inside the cytosol in order to create a environment suited for a protocell to keep its vital functions and not to die ? Why would chemical elements do that? Did they have the innate drive and goal to become alive and keep an ambiance prerequisite, homeostasis of various elements, to permit life ?[/b]
15. Yes, this is called symbiotic relationships. How is this fine tuning or relevant?
Viruses, another mistery of origin of life scenarios
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t1433-viruses-another-mistery-of-origin-of-life-scenarios?highlight=viruses
http://christiananswers.net/q-crs/abiogenesis.html
Many bacteria and all viruses possess less complexity than required for an organism normally defined as “living,” and for this reason must live as parasites which require the existence of complex cells in order to reproduce. For this reason Trefil noted that the question of where viruses come from is an “enduring mystery” in evolution. Viruses usually are much smaller than parasitic bacteria and are not considered alive because they must rely on their host even more than bacteria do. Viruses consist primarily of a coat of proteins surrounding DNA or RNA that contains a handful of genes, and
since they do not reproduce in the normal way, its hard to see how they could have gotten started. One theory: they are parasites who, over a long period of time, have lost the ability to reproduce independently… Viruses are among the smallest of “living” things. A typical virus, like the one that causes ordinary influenza, may be no more than a thousand atoms across. This is in comparison with cells which may be hundreds or even thousands of times that size. Its small size is one reason that it is so easy for a virus to spread from one host to another--its hard to filter out anything that small (Trefil, 1992, p. 91).
In order to reproduce, a virus's genes must invade a living cell and take control of its much larger DNA. A bacterium is 400 times greater in size than the smallest known virus, while a typical human cell averages 200 times larger than the smallest known bacterium. The QB virus is only 24 nanometers long, contains only 3 genes and is almost 20 times smaller than Escherichia coli, billions of which inhabit the human intestines. E. coli is 1,000 nanometers long compared to a typical human cell that is about 10,000 nanometers long (1 nanometer equals 1 billionth of a meter, or about 1/25-millionths of an inch) and contains an estimated 100,000 genes. Researchers have detected microbes in human and bovine blood that are only 2-millionths of an inch in diameter, but these organisms cannot live on their own because they need more than simple inorganic, or common inorganic molecules to survive.
Since parasites lack many of the genes (and other biological machinery) required to survive on their own, in order to grow and reproduce they must obtain the nutrients and other services they require from the organisms that serve as their hosts. Independent free-living creatures such as people, mice and roses are far more complex than organisms like parasites and viruses that are dependent on these complex free-living organisms. Abiogenesis theory requires that the first life forms consisted of free-living autotrophs (i.e. organisms that are able to manufacture their own food) since the complex life forms needed to sustain heterotrophs (organisms that cannot manufacture their own food) did not exist until later.
The simplest microorganisms, Chlamydia and Rickettsea, are the smallest living things known, but also are both parasites and thus too simple to be the first life. Only a few hundred atoms across, they are smaller than the largest virus and have about half as much DNA as do other species of bacteria. Although they are about as small as possible and still be living, these two forms of life still possess the millions of atomic parts necessary to carry out the biochemical functions required for life, yet they still are too simple to live on their own and thus must use the cellular machinery of a host in order to live (Trefil, 1992, p. 28). Many of the smaller bacteria are not free living, but are parasite like viruses that can live only with the help of more complex organisms (Galtier et al., 1999).
The gap between non-life and the simplest cell is illustrated by what is believed to be the organism with the smallest known genome of any free living organism Mycoplasma genitalium (Fraser et al., 1995). M. genitalium is 200 nanometers long and contains only 482 genes or over 0.5 million base pairs which compares to 4,253 genes for E. coli (about 4,720,000 nucleotide base pairs), with each gene producing an enormously complex protein machine (Fraser et al., 1995). M. genitalium also must live off other life because they are too simple to live on their own. They invade reproductive tract cells and live as parasites on organelles that are far larger and more complicated but which must first exist for the survival of parasitic organisms to be possible.
16. Yes, consciousness exists, it's how life responds to it's environment. Hell, we could argue plants have consciousness, as they will adjust their growth to obtain more life, some release hormones and scents to trigger other plants of infestations, and some are carnivorous and can determine edible from not.
What comes first, mind or matter?
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t1380-what-comes-first-mind-or-matter
Energy, rather than an eternal, conscious mind as the first cause of the universe?
Some try to substitute God as a first cause by claiming that energy was always there, eternally, stored in a singularity, and caused the universe suddenly into being by a quantum fluctuation event. Planck regarded matter/energy as derivative from consciousness. What would be the contrary? Consciousness derivative from energy. If it were so, over an unknown length of time, energy would have become cognitive and self-aware, even learning the how's and why's of becoming other perceivable forms. It would gain perception, thinking, free will, moral judgment, and memory. But logical laws must be already a priori existent to make distinctions, syllogistic thinking with induction and deduction at play. Einstein recognized the absurdity of this claim. He described the "gulf' that logically separates the concrete world of hard objects on the one hand from the abstract world of ideas on the other. A small part of the materialist's problem is that hard objects are never observed spontaneously to transform themselves (on their own recognizance) into abstract ideas.
W.L.Craig writes :
The only way to have an eternal cause but a temporal effect would seem to be if the cause is a personal agent who freely chooses to create an effect in time. For example, a man sitting from eternity may will to stand up; hence, a temporal effect may arise from an eternally existing agent. Indeed, the agent may will from eternity to create a temporal effect, so that no change in the agent need be conceived. Thus, we are brought not merely to the first cause of the universe, but to its personal Creator.
Near Death experience , evidence of dualism
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t1284-near-death-experience-evidence-of-dualism
The Mind is Not The Brain
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t1662-the-mind-is-not-the-brain#2581
Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness: 5 Experiments
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rqqkxxQighIbyqtE0VeBZmu9D3GvUQfO5v1xwOTyp_E/edit
17. Morality is not objective. We can make well reasoned generalizations about morality, but it is not objective.
The moral argument for Gods existence
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t1369-the-moral-argument-for-gods-existence
If you agree, that its wrong in any circumstances to rape, torture and kill little babies for fun, then you agree that objective moral values exist. Since that is the case, this takes you to really believe much more than you might think you do. This is a very big thing that you are admitting here. I don't think you realized how big. You are saying that you are confident -- you have a reasonable certainty -- that something exists somewhere in a realm which you can't see, taste, touch, smell or hear. You believe something exists that you can't prove empirically. Think for a moment about a moral absolute. Where did it come from?
The implications of this fact you believe that that rule applies to everyone, in other words, it is a moral absolute, then you have just affirmed a belief in something that is immaterial that you don't access by your five senses but you do access with some certainty by some other means. There is a sense of moral intuition that has a play here. If a moral absolute exists, it's fair to ask the question, what kind of thing is it? It's not a physical thing. A moral thing is not physical. It doesn't extend into space, it doesn't weigh something, it has no physical qualities or characteristics. It is a non-physical thing that really exists. It's an immaterial thing, something that you know exists but you can't get at with any of your five senses. If it seems that the moral thing exists and has moralforce on our behavior, then it seems to me the most reasonable option is that Someone made that moral thing and so that moral rule is a rule of Somebody's, and it's not just a disembodied principle. When you break the moral rule, you offend the Person Who made the rule itself.
That's true for a lot of people who object to the idea of God because they can't find Him with their senses. In other words, there are other ways to learn about things than just the five senses. I think there is a sense of moral intuition that has a play here. But in any event, you can be considered rational in believing that such a rule actually exists. Once you do that, it does a lot of work for you.
Well, when you say that a thing like an absolute moral rule exists, you've made an admission that has profound implications for many other beliefs. In other words, a whole bunch of other beliefs are bound up in that statement.
For example, when you say that some absolute moral laws exist, you're saying that immaterial things -- like moral laws which aren't made out of physical stuff -- certainly do exist. Therefore, materialism as a worldview is false. Instead, it is reasonable to believe in things you don't see and can't test with the five senses. Strict empiricism would be false, then. Now this is a big step, because in the case of many atheists one of their frequent arguments against God is that He hasn't shown Himself to us. But by your own admission, it can be reasonable to believe in something you simply can't see. In other words, there are different ways to "show" things to people, ways that don't involve the senses.
Given that this moral rule is out there somewhere, where did it come from?
You have only a limited number of options.
1. It could have just come into existence out of nowhere. It could have just "poofed" into existence.
2. It could have self-created itself. Though if it did then one could ask how is it that an arbitrary thing like a moral rule could have any moral force? If it is an accident, if it just comes from nowhere, why would it have any moral force on me? And part of our argument is that a moral rule does have moral force. Maybe it assembled itself by accident out of available immaterial stuff floating around in wherever that world is that morals float around in. Of course, if it happened by accident then you'd still have to answer the question, how does an accidental thing have moral force? Or,
3. it could be that the moral law was made by Someone Who lives in that immaterial realm. Now, those are your options. I don't know how many other options there are, but it seems to me you are stuck with these three.
You see, you do not have the liberty of standing in a neutral place on this issue. You've got to believe something. If you refuse to believe God made moral laws, given that you admit that they are there, then you're opting for one of the other two alternatives. And if you say that they just popped into existence or that they assembled themselves by chance, you have new problems to solve. In other words, I don't think those are tenable alternatives.
My point is to look at what seems to be the obvious existence of moral absolutes and to then look and see where that observation leads us, and it seems to lead us to the existence of a God who makes those moral rules because moral rules are designed kinds of things that don't make themselves, it appears. And it seems that a very good explanation for their existence is that a God with moral character made a set of moral rules that express His character and those rules then become absolutes which are incumbent upon us
Apart from God, there is no ultimate reference point to distinguish between what is human and what is inhuman. There is no ontological human compass - certain actions may be held in contempt by society because those actions jeopardise the safety and flourishing of others, but there is no ultimate anchor in which to place those OPINIONS – no commandments from the Divine to endorse or condemn
18. Logic is influenced and inspired by physics, same with reasoning, but true, these are social inventions of a civilized society. Now we are entering anthropology and philosophy...more my department.
The Practical Impossibility of Atheism
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t1375-schaeffer-the-practical-impossibility-of-atheism
“Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It's like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can't trust my own thinking, of course I can't trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.”
― C.S. Lewis
Atheism shoots science in the foot and then shoots itself in the head! Atheism cannot account for the existence of logic and it has to deny the existence of truth ( Darwin himself doubted that the human brain which was the result of irrational processes could be trusted to be rational ) Without this two science is impossible! If you take the view of common ancestry and macroevolution as true, you cannot trust anything about what you think is true. How are you sure your thoughts are logical if they derive from a lucky evolutionary accident that was not logical at all?
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/344552-but-then-with-me-the-horrid-doubt-always-arises-whether
“But then with me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?
[ Charles Darwin To William Graham 3 July 1881]”
You believe ON SHEER FAITH, that something came from nothing (absolutely nothing?) -for no reason. Therefore, according to your belief system, non-material entities such as objective truth is a myth since even the most basic principles of logic are all produced by a random accident, as is even your brain. This, in turn, means that your every thought is a random, meaningless chemical fizz. So, if your belief system is true, then the comment you just made is nothing more than the accidental result of a meaningless chemical reaction, in a randomly formed chunk of brain matter. Newsflash my friend. No one gives a hoot about any so-called data produced by a randomly programmed computer. Such a computer would be inherently unreliable and the data would be presumed faulty. Therefore, when atheists say that the Universe is an accident, and nothing within it is designed for a purpose, including their own brains, they cede any right to have their randomly produced thoughts taken seriously. So, when you call anything "superstitious", your comment is nothing more than a bad joke, or more accurately, a self-deception that you pull on yourself. Like all atheists, you want to have your cake and eat it too when you claim that 1. God is a superstition and 2. You'd do well to constantly remind yourself that your thoughts,(according to atheism) are completely meaningless chemical reactions, occurring in a long chain of cause and effect from mechanical, purposeless physical forces acting on your equally random and accidentally produced brain chemistry and therefore, within an atheistic framework, your thoughts could never be meaningful or worth sharing.
The difference is not in the existence of the soul, or mind itself but in the concept of a designed, planned product of an intelligent Mind, as opposed to an accident generated from blind random chance. If your brain is designed to think according to rational, logical patterns and if it comes with an organic version of pre- installed software that allows it not only to function rationally but also to recognize its own rationality, then you can proceed to analyze problems with confidence that your thoughts truly possess rationality, meaning, value, and purpose.
The only design gives you that certainty of rationality, meaning, value and purpose. Blind chance can only produce a more random blind chance. Without the prospect of an Eternal Mind, all is meaningless. Plato and Aristotle recognized this and hence their concepts of non-material Forms and the Unmoved Mover. Later, Aquinas realized that the great minds of Plato and Aristotle had paved a road that can only possibly lead to the Triune God of the Christianity.
from all practical appearances we just shouldn't be here but here we are, you and i, and although we disagree on fundamental issues of life we are both apparently rational beings. But where does rationality come from? Ask that and we're back in the loop of causation. Every effect has a cause. That is, as you well know, one of the Basic Principles of Logic. It follows then that no effect is greater than its cause and as we observe our material world, sure enough, we can point to nothing that was not caused by something that was powerful enough as a secondary, instrumental, or material cause, to cause that effect. But when we come to the sticky, no material effects that we observe and even intuitively acknowledge, such as rationality, morality, objective truth, and objective standards of aesthetics, as well as the Virtues such as, "love of our family and fellow man is better than hate" suddenly atheism chokes! Thanks to Mac Howell
If a man, obviously drunk, whom you have never met, stumbles up to you on the street and says to you "Your mother told me to tell you not to go home, the house is full of spiders." You will not trust what he says. Why? Because he is irrational, because, he is drunk, and we know that we cannot trust irrational sources.
But if our brains are ultimately the product of a series of blind, irrational causes then how could we possibly know what truth is?
You might suggest that natural selection is not blind in the sense of being irrational, it picks the best, or picks what works. But blind, deaf, senseless random mutation has to produce anything and everything from which natural selection selects. Natural selection cannot create ANYTHING. It cannot select a green bug from four brown bugs. It is totally dependent on totally random forces.
It may select what works, but how or why would we imagine we could know "truth". Why would we imagine the idea of truth? Why would we imagine? And yet we do. And we believe there is such a thing as truth and that we can know it. Credit to Rick Swindell
19. DNA very well may have arisen from early proteins in the right conditions, again; if it is so fine tunes, how is this a problem for you? Are you admitting that the universe wasn't designed for us, and that life is a beautiful rarity?
DNA synthesis - what came first, the enzymes to make DNA, or DNA to make the enzymes that synthesize DNA?
These are some enzyme names of de novo Purine and Pyrimidine biosynthesis, essential to make DNA, and supposedly extant at LUCA ( last universal common ancestor )
to make purines:
amidophosphoribosyltransferase, 2.4.2.14
phosphoribosylamine-glycine ligase, 6.3.4.13
phosphoribosylglycinamide formyltransferase, 2.1.2.2
phosphoribosylformylglycinamidine synthase, 6.3.5.3
phosphoribosylformylglycinamidine cyclo-ligase, 6.3.3.1
and these to make pyrimidines :
Carbamoyl phosphate synthase II
Aspartate carbamoyltransferase
Dihydroorotase
Dihydro Orotate Dehydrogenase
Orotate Phosphoribosyl transferase
Orotidine 5'-phosphate decarboxylase
Nucleoside-phosphate kinase & Nucleoside-diphosphate kinase
How did these enzymes emerge on a prebiotic earth ???
It takes DNA to make these enzymes. And it takes these enzymes to make DNA.......
Biosynthesis of the DNA double helix, evidence of design
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t2028-biosynthesis-of-the-dna-double-helix-evidence-of-design
20. An irreducibly complex enzyme would have been the starting point, or, perhaps it isn't irreducibly complex. Also, do you know how evolution works?
What might be a Cell’s minimal requirement of parts ? [url=file:///E:/Desktop/apdf files/FirstGeneCh10.pdf]1[/url]
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t2110-what-might-be-a-protocells-minimal-requirement-of-parts
How Many Genes Can Make a Cell: The Minimal-Gene-Set Concept
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK2227/
Several theoretical and experimental studies have endeavored to derive the minimal set of genes that are necessary and sufficient to sustain a functioning cell under ideal conditions, that is, in the presence of unlimited amounts of all essential nutrients and in the absence of any adverse factors, including competition. A comparison of the first two completed bacterial genomes, those of the parasites Haemophilus influenzae and Mycoplasma genitalium, produced a version of the minimal gene set consisting of ~250 genes.
Following irreducible processes and parts are required to keep cells alive, and illustrate mount improbable to get life a first go:
Reproduction. Reproduction is essential for the survival of all living things.
Metabolism. Enzymatic activity allows a cell to respond to changing environmental demands and regulate its metabolic pathways, both of which are essential to cell survival.
Nutrition. This is closely related to metabolism. Seal up a living organism in a box for long enough and in due course it will cease to function and eventually die. Nutrients are essential for life.
Complexity. All known forms of life are amazingly complex. Even single-celled organisms such as bacteria are veritable beehives of activity involving millions of components.
Organization. Maybe it is not complexity per se that is significant, but organized complexity.
Growth and development. Individual organisms grow and ecosystems tend to spread (if conditions are right).
Information content. In recent years scientists have stressed the analogy between living organisms and computers. Crucially, the information needed to replicate an organism is passed on in the genes from parent to offspring.
Hardware/software entanglement. All life of the sort found on Earth stems from a deal struck between two very different classes of molecules: nucleic acids and proteins.
Permanence and change. A further paradox of life concerns the strange conjunction of permanence and change.
Sensitivity. All organisms respond to stimuli— though not always to the same stimuli in the same ways.
Regulation. All organisms have regulatory mechanisms that coordinate internal processes.
For a nonliving system, questions about irreducible complexity are even more challenging for a totally natural non-design scenario, because natural selection — which is the main mechanism of Darwinian evolution — cannot exist until a system can reproduce. For an origin of life we can think about the minimal complexity that would be required for reproduction and other basic life-functions. Most scientists think this would require hundreds of biomolecular parts. And current science has no plausible theories to explain how the minimal complexity required for life (and the beginning of biological natural selection) could have been produced by natural process before the beginning of biological natural selection.
In order to make life, and specially multicellular complex life, the building blocks of life, cells, have to be made, which are the tiniest living entities. To build cells requires information and programming, complex protein manufacturing machines and assembly lines, energy, nutrient supply chains, quality control , waste bins, ability to adapt to the environment and to react to stimuli, ability of replicating, and housing ( the cell membrane ).
“The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle.”
― Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory In Crisis
Determination of the Core of a Minimal Bacterial Gene Set
http://mmbr.asm.org/content/68/3/518.full.pdf
[size=12]Based on the conjoint analysis of several computational and experimental strategies designed to define the minimal set of protein-coding genes that are necessary to maintain a functional bacterial cell, we propose a minimal gene set composed of 206 genes. Such a gene set will be able to sustain the main vital functions of a hypothetical simplest bacterial cell.
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21. Considering humans are pretty widespread and traveled in various clans, tribes, and small communities before settling, even more, areas, and that languages have melded and dominated one another over thousands of years, im shocked 116 is all we have
energy winds down, and the universe exists from eternity, we would have reached maximum entropy, and the universe would be in a state of heat death.
