New guy who believes in God

…(jumping up and down excitedlywaving arms in the air)… Oo-oo-oo… Me-me-me! I’ve got this one! I’ve got this one!..

Yes, life is a product of complex chemical and electrical reactions taking place at astronomically high rates in your body even as I type this. If you doubt that, try removing any one of the multiple chemicals/basic elements from your system and see how long you last. Magnesium, potassium, sodium, and calcium come to mind right off the top of my head. Get rid of, or severely alter the level of, either one of those, and you will discover the hard way how much your heart relies on them to properly function.

As for why doctors are unable to “revive” a person who has been dead for a significant amount of time (especially if the individual died from extreme blood loss), it really doesn’t take a doctorate in medicine to figure that out. Actually, a high school Basic Human Biology class should have covered that. But since you seemed to have slept through that class, please pay attention. Keep in mind, though, what I am about to tell you is VERY BASIC, just to give you the general idea. The reality, naturally, is considerably more involved and complex. But I don’t want to overload your circuits. Okay, ready? (Take notes if you need to.)…

The body, and all its various tissues and muscles, is “fueled” primarily by oxygen. The oxygen we breath is VITAL to our system, especially in the area of the brain. (You know what the brain is, right?.. Cool.) So, that vital oxygen we require is carried throughout our system by the specialized cells in our blood. That blood is circulated by the pumping of our heart. At this point, I feel the need to tell you that all of our different body parts are made up of many different types of cells. And all those different cells require oxygen to live. If they do not get their oxygen, they die and immediately start to decay. (Remember that. It’s important.)

Okay, still with me? So, in case you didn’t get the memo, the human brain is an INCREDIBLY COMPLEX organ. It operates in an amazingly critical balance of chemical and electrical reactions. And those fascinating reactions are what give us our memories and determine our personalities. And those “neural pathways” responsible for that are formed and reformed over the entire course of our lives. Formed from the unique experiences of each individual person. So singularly unique that even identical twins develope different neural pathways and, thus, different personalities. Alrighty. Moving right along…

Now, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, the brain, too, is composed of… (wait for it)… CELLS. Therefore (here’s the punchline), when a person dies (especially from severe blood loss), there is no blood pumping to the cells. Therefore, the cells do not get oxygen, causing those cells to die. Upon death, the cells immediately start to decay. (In other words, they shrivel up and become deformed and useless… non-functional.) In the case of the brain, this is especially troublesome. Because with the “crumbling” of the brain cells comes the destruction/disruption of all those BILLIONS of highly intricate neural pathways. Thus… Even if doctors could “refill” the body with blood and somehow get a few vital organs jumpstarted, it would not matter. Because all those vital pathways in the brain that controls those organs and makes each person an individual have been completely WRECKED. Cannot be repaired with current medical technology. A junior high school student could understand that. It’s a no brainer. (Yes, pun intended.) Again, an incredibly general/basic explanation, but you get the idea… (I hope).

(Edits for minor spelling and punctuation errors.)

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You forgot to also explain to @Cr2187 that his/her argument (if you want to stretch as far as calling it that) has a name – Junkyard tornado argument, or Hoyle’s fallacy. It is also a straw man argument. It assumes that all chemicals and structures suddenly assembled and worked correctly, perfectly synchronized, from day one. But of course this is not what happened, and is not what evolution claims. It is a (rather bad) way of distracting the reader from the real issues by presenting a caricature of real science, and then arguing against and ridiculing this very caricature.

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abiogenesis , the idea that life arose from nonlife more than 3.5 billion years ago on. Abiogenesis proposes that the first life-forms generated were very simple and through a gradual process became increasingly complex.

Oparin-Haldane Theory; Primordial Soup (1920s)
Conditions in the early earth could create the building blocks of life form organic molecules like amino acids. (Amino Acids - Benefits, Structure & Function | Biology Dictionary). I like the ‘Clay Theory.’ The first cells did not even need cell walls, occuring as life inside vacuoles’ in clay.

The Miller-Urey Experiment (1953) Demonstrated evidence for Oparin-HJaldane’s hypothesis.
In 1953, chemists Harold Urey and Stanley Miller designed an experimental apparatus which duplicated the atmospheric conditions on Earth proposed by Oparin and Haldane. After one week, they analyzed the material in the chamber and found a variety or organic molecules including amino acids, verifying this aspect of the Primordial Soup theory. (Verifying the elements of life from non-life.)

Dr. Matthew Powner, a Reader of Organic Chemistry with UCL’s Department of Chemistry, and included Pierre Canavelli and Dr. Saidul Islam – both of whom are researchers with UCL’s Organic and Biological Chemistry Section. The process consisted of combining hydrogen sulfide with aminonitriles and the chemical substrate ferricyanide ([Fe(CN)6]3?)in water, which yielded peptides.

"“Peptides, which are chains of amino acids, are an absolutely essential element of all life on Earth. They form the fabric of proteins, which serve as catalysts for biological processes, but they themselves require enzymes to control their formation from amino acids. So we’ve had a classic chicken-and-egg problem – how were the first enzymes made?” demonstrating that peptides could be made directly from energy-rich aminonitriles.

“Controlled synthesis, in response to environmental or internal stimuli, is an essential element of metabolic regulation, so we think that peptide synthesis could have been part of a natural cycle that took place in the very early evolution of life.”

“This is the first time that peptides have been convincingly shown to form without using amino acids in water, using relatively gentle conditions likely to be available on the primitive Earth,” added co-author Dr. Saidul Islam.

All "EVIDENCE’ leads us to think ‘LIFE’ is a natural process. A result of chemical interactions. We have NO evidence for magic, gods, creator beings. NONE.

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To be fair, the peach :peach: tree dish to test stuff is currently being used :smirk:
image

Ah, the in tray is full again …

First, it isn’t “my” theory, it’s the product of the two scientists I named in my relevant exposition.

Second, in case you failed to understand this, the braneworld is postulated as having existed into an infinite eternal past.

Though I’m already anticipating you summarily rejecting this idea, whilst clinging to the idea that a merely asserted cartoon magic man existed into an infinite eternal past, despite this requiring that your cartoon magic man spend eternity twiddling its thumbs, then suddenly at one monent deciding “Oh, let’s poof a universe into existence”.

I already dealt with this in a previous post, or did you fail to read my exposition on the interesting nature of the problem of determining species identity?

At bottom, species identity isn’t magic, it’s simply the data informing us of the reproductive status of the population in question. That, ultimately, is IT. Of course, biology has a habit of being messy in this regard, and throwing up examples that don’t fall neatly into convenient pigeonholes - ring species being possibly the canonical example thereof, but that doesn’t invalidate the concepts in question, it merely informs us that the concepts are special cases. But I’m used to observing this sort of failure of understanding on the part of people who need a cartoon magic man in their lives.

Except that as I already told you in that previous post, speciation is NOT a matter of one organism “turning into something else”. Drop this canard once and for all.

The only reason, at bottom, that we think of say, cats and dogs as being purportedly “separate”, is because humans have a habit of relying upon visual cues, including ones that are actually superficial, which is part of the underpinning of racism, for example. What actually matters, namely the underlying molecular basis, tells us that cats and dogs are merely divergent offshoots from a common ancestor, one which quite possibly looked completely different in life, from either of the two modern lineages it spawned. Indeed, given that organisms resembling modern cats did not appear until around 35 million years ago, in the form of Proailurus, this means that there existed mammals before that time that didn’t resemble modern cats, but one of those mammals must necessarily have given rise to the Felidae lineages.

All that happens, at bottom, is that a lineage gives rise to offspring, some of which move into a new niche, and then start diverging from their ancestors as a result of such processes as assortative mating. They don’t “turn into something else” because they retain the ancestry in question. They may acquire new features that cause naive humans to think they’ve “turned into something else”, because naive humans like easy categories to work with, but your canard is a non-problem for biologists how actually bothered to learn something about this.

Oh, and I’ve already dealt with your canards about “information” in this previous post. The moment the state of a physical system changes, that system provides us with new information by definition.

Poppycock. See above.

Guess what, Looby Loo? Life IS chemistry writ large. Millions of chemical reactions are taking place in your body right now, and if some of those reactions STOP, then you DIE.

Furthermore, in case you failed to receive the memo, vitalism was killed off back in 1828 by Wöhler, when he launched organic chemistry.

What an utterly fatuous and palsied misunderstanding of the science.

Apart from the fact that it’s been demonstrated in the laboratory, that RNA strands can replicate and undergo Darwinian evolution long before we reach anything as sophisticated as a cell, there’s also this little matter for you to ponder. Namely, ask a chemist to provide two samples of pure glucose, one from a biological source, the other produced by laboratory synthesis. You won’t be able to tell them apart, and both samples will appear to be “non-living” to every observer.

Likewise, if I provide you with two samples of insulin, one generated by a living organism, and one synthesised using Merrifield peptide synthesis in a laboratory, you won’t be able to tell which is which.

Life isn’t a magic spell cast by a cartoon magic man, it IS chemistry.

Only to the naive.

Oh, and your fatuous “why can’t we bring a dead man back to life?” canard is precisely that - a canard, and if you need a 10,000 word dissertation on why this is so, then you merely demonstrate once again that you slept through your science classes.

And here we have another canard.

Mutations are changes to a gene sequence, and not all of them are “mistakes” by any reasonable use of the term. First of all, thanks to the redundancy in the genetic code, there exist what are known as synonymous mutations, which leave the final protein coded for unaltered. An organism can acquire any number of synonymous mutations from its ancestors, and its fitness remains unchanged.

However, even non-synonymous mutations can be neutral. The existence of a large number of different sequences for the insulin gene across the vertebrates illustrates this nicely. what is selected for isn’t sequence, but function. If several million sequences can perform the requisite function successfully, mutations aren’t a problem (as biologists of course already know) and even a gene subject to high degree of conservation can vary, if the function space permits.

Indeed, when Motoo Kimura launched neutral theory in a seminal paper in 1989, he also provided us with a neat molecular test, that allows us to determine whether or not a gene has been subject to drift, purifying selection, or positive selection. Let N be the number of non-synonymous mutations that the gene has acquired in its history, and S be the number of synonymous mutations it has acquired. Then compute

α = log(N/S)

if α is close to zero, then the gene has been subject to neutral drift. If α is significantly negative, then the gene has been subject to purifying selection and is highly conserved. If α us significantly positive, then the gene has been subject to positive selection, possibly yielding a new feature in the organism inheriting it.

Oh, and as for the matter of refuting the creationist lie that mutations cannot generate new features, first of all, this neglects the role of selection in evolution, the part that creationists always omit. Biologists have understood ever since genetics was first established as a properly constituted scientific discipline, that deleterious mutations are a dead end, and no one who paid attention in a biology class thinks otherwise. On the other hand, all those neutral mutations, that have no effect on the fitness of an organism, will be passed on to future generations the moment the inheritors thereof produce offspring. There’s no magic barrier preventing this from happening.

Better still, the moment advantageous mutations appear, selection will act in such a manner, that the inheritors thereof will produce more offspring than their coevals, and that mutation will become, over time, more and more firmly established in the population, as the number of offspring inheriting the mutation increase over time. Indeed, one favourite example of mine centres upon Antarctic Notothenioid fishes, which in their distant past experienced a gene duplication event. The gene for trypsinogen, a digestive enzyme produced by the pancreas, was duplicated in the ancestral fishes, and as a consequence, the duplicated copy was free to undergo mutation without affecting the fitness of the fishes. So long as one copy of the gene was subject to purifying selection and continued working as usual, the other copy was a free-fire zone for whatever mutations it was capable of undergoing.

Now, for a long period of time, that mutated copy didn’t code for anything particularly special, just another protein that floated aimlessly about in the bloodstream of these fishes. But, at some point, those mutations accumulated to the point where they produced a protein that did turn out to be special, because it allowed those fishes to move into colder waters without their blood freezing. This allowed the Notothenioids to move into Antarctic waters, and take advantage of new, previously inaccessible food sources. Whereupon positive selection started acting upon those that did move into those waters - those that lost the antifreeze glycoprotein after the move to Antarctica died out, and those that kept the antifreeze glycoprotein after the move continued prospering in their new home.

This isn’t difficult to understand, at least for those of us who haven’t had our brains palsied by magical thinking, and cartoon magic men from goat herder mythologies. Indeed, at bottom, selection is nothing more than the action of environmental variables, to determine which variations work and which don’t at a given location and time. And, because those environmental variables are variables, the question of what works can also change with time. We’re about to find this out on a grand scale thanks to climate change, but I digress.

Those 1½ million peer reviewed scientific papers aren’t “opinion”, they document fact. Do learn this elementary lesson, before embarrassing yourself even more before the current audience.

And this has happened because REAL WORLD DATA has informed us that said opinion is wrong. What part of this elementary concept do you keep failing to understand?

Oh, and when we have a large body of empirical data supporting a postulate, we’re not dealing with “opinion”. Another elementary concept you need to learn quickly.

Oh look, boys and girls, it’s PROJECTION TIME!!!

The fact that scientists spend time trying to break ideas in their work, on its own demonstrates that you’re merely regurgitating a tiresome creationist lie.

Indeed, numerous scientists gained their Nobel Prizes precisely by this means.

By the way, I don’t need evolution to toss your cartoon magic man into the bin. All I need is the fact that your cartoon magic man is constructed to possess mutually contradictory properties, and is associated within the requisite mythology with absurd and nonsensical assertions, that no genuine god type entity would touch with a barge pole 50 light years in length.

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And were you there when your supposed god created everything? Where you there to see jesus on a cross?

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Can you confirm all of this? Will your church open their books to an independent audit? Have you personally seen any financial records? Can you confirm with 100% confidence that every penny you donated to a good cause was spent on that good cause?

I agree that religion can do good. But do not turn a blind eye to the massive damage religion has done to mankind, from providing support for slavery to keeping women as second class citizens, to prolonging AIDS. Oh yea, I didn’t even get into the wars or having the very devout fly hijacked airliners into buildings.

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Agreed, there have been mistakes in science. But you know what corrected those mistakes? More science. Do you know how many mistakes were corrected by religion? Zero. 0.0000000

Mankind is building a knowledge base, we started from ground zero. Unlike religion which postures as if it has all the answers, science understands that we have only begun on mankind’s learning of this universe.

When you were 16 you knew you were smarter than when you were 12. When you were 20 you knew you were smarter than when you were 16. And so on and so on. Mankind is not even out of diapers. We know a lot, but we have a lot more to learn.

And just like a child learning we will stumble and sometimes get things wrong. Until more science teaches us the correct answer.

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Yeah, I’m quite familiar with the Junkyard Tornado “argument”. But I was trying to stay focused on his question of why a dead/decaying body cannot be revived. And since he seems to have so much trouble understanding basic biology, I didn’t want to risk overloading his circuits with the junkyard distraction. I’m afraid he would have come out of it thinking the lungs send freon to the carburetor, allowing the pituitary glands to stay in sync with the crankshaft while the diaphragm relaxes the shock absorbers to facilitate a softer cushioning effect of the gluteus maximus. I mean, let’s be honest. The poor guy is already confused enough as it is. I just didn’t want to add to his confusion.

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This is bullshit plain and simple.

Guess what, Looby Loo?

We can know what happened in the distant past. All we need is for the requisite interactions to leave behind them persistent physical evidence of their occurrence.

The fossil record is possibly THE canonical example of said persistent physical evidence. Though of course geological strata themselves are another.

In that latter case, scientists determined that Planet Earth experienced a so-called “Snowball Earth” event during the Neoproterozoic Era, by examination of the strata in question. One of the pieces of evidence used to determine this, was the formation of banded iron deposits.

Now banded iron deposits are known from much older strata, and formed before the Great Oxygenation Event around 3.4 billion years ago. The question was, why did similar banded iron deposits form nearly 2 billion years AFTER the Great Oxygenation Event?

You see, banded iron deposits can only form under anoxic conditions. Chemists worked out some time ago, that the chemistry of Fe2+ and Fe3+ ions in aqueous solution is sensitive to the presence of dissolved oxygen, and behaves differently under anoxic conditions.

So, this led naturally to the question of how such anoxic conditions could have arisen during the Neoproterozoic Era.

It turns out that the continental land masses were all grouped around the Equator at the time - we know this courtesy of analysis of palaeomagnetism of the strata in question.

As a consequence, when the ice caps began to expand, there was no land at high Northern or Southern latitudes, to halt their advance, and a runaway albedo effect led to the planet being shrouded in ice.

In turn, this shut down photosynthesis, and dissolved oxygen concentrations fell precipitously. This allowed the formation of banded iron deposits.

Likewise, cap carbonate deposits forming at the end of the glacial period, also point to photosynthesis being shut down, courtesy of their ratio of carbon-13 to carbon-12.

These strata are found globally, at sites as varied as Namibia and Western Australia.

Here’s a comprehensive exposition on how the Snowball Earth proposal was tested:

Geological tests of Snowball Earth proposal

Not “opinion”, but fact arising from proper analysis of real world data. Which has never accompanied mythological assertions.

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Indeed, the bait and switch involved in the “747 from a junkyard” apologetic duplicity, involves pretending that scientists postulate the emergence of modern lineages directly from prebiotic precursors , which is of course a creationist lie.

What scientists actually postulate, of course, is that prebiotic precursors led to extremely simple protocells first, and only AFTER the emergence thereof, did subsequent generations of protocells acquire in incremental fashion, the features that would be observed in later lineages.

The mere fact that creationists have to lie in this manner, in order to prop up their attachment to a risible goat herder mythology, merely demonstrates how utterly worthless their doctrine, and the source mythology upon which it is based, truly are.

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This is your base problem, you think you have such smart answers, but they don’t really provide an explanation. how does plants evolving in water help them develop the necessary features for life on land. My question remains the same. If the first leaf didn’t have stomata or guard cells, how would it survive? Most underwater plants do not have stomata, thus the transition would need to occur on land.

I found that video funny tbh. Notice how he used his intelligent mind to place each of the pieces in the right place, and also notice how he used man made lenses to get the image he did. Also a human eye is much more complex then a few lenses stacked on top of each other. There are many proteins reactions that all work together to acheive vision.
The logic is truly incredible sometimes. “If I use my intellignet mind to put together an eye piece by piece, I will have proven how an eye could evolve without intelligence!”

No I wasn’t. Neither were you. My point is that when specualting about events that happen thousands or billions of years ago we use historical science; we can’t be totally sure of anything. We can make educated guesses on many things, but there are things we just don’t know for sure, such as what sparked the big bang; that is educated speculation.

This is relating to people moving location, not changing their genetic makeup. The main question I wanted to get by was why aren’t there still intermdiate forms alive today inbetween chimps and humans? Not really a super important question, but I was just curious.

Yup, I have personally volunteered at many places, and we do the whole sponsor a child thing. Essentially the church promotes an organization thst gives people the opportunity to sponsor a child. The money goes directly to the organization, which uses it to provide services to children in need, and people can write letters to the children they sponsor so it’s legit.
I have not personally see the financial records, but one that’s not necessary to knowing we are helping people and two I could probably get them if I wanted to.

You kinda missed what I said after that. Sure if a dog gains cat like features over time, it didn’t turn into a cat, that was never my point, what I’m asking is how mutations give the information to build necessary, new systems such as lungs because such things as lungs are not just random changes that happen to give it different features, lungs are absolutely necessary for survival on land.

Also a quick note you all seem to have missed a few of the other questions I asked earlier; I would love to hear what you guys say to those.

I have seen the creationist puddle illistration a few times, but I think a better illistration is in order:

How about tidal areas?

There you go again, asserting a radical change in environment. That is not how evolution works, it takes many generations, possibly millions, for a change to become effective.

Have you ever walked a tidal flat when the tides go out? There is a plethoria of life just under the sand. Those creatures came from the sea, and over many generations adapted and changed to where they could absorb some oxygen from the atmosphere to the point where some now can live 24/7 out of water.

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So you reject his explanation on the evolution of the eye?

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It is all about a changing environment, people moving from Europe, or people moving from Africa to the Arctic North. Or equally compelling, the environment changing.

https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/overview-of-hominin-evolution-89010983/

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What does water change in the scenario I’m describing? I’m saying if one feature of said leaf wasn’t immedaitly there, the leaf would not be able to survive. So plants evolving onto land would have to immediately have stomata, and guard cells just to survive.

I see how your saying it wasn’t a jump directly from sea to land, but the plant either has stomata or it doesn’t; without them it needs to be in water, but to be out of water it must have them.

elaborate on how plants evolving from tidal conditions gets rid of this instant need for all the features of the plant to be there immediately there.

I reject it as an explanation of how it happened on its own. He used his own mind to put everything in the right place and man made lenses to get the amount of vision he did.

Thank you; that is what I was asking. I’ll look into it a bit more now.

Then your mind is closed and for me, there is no reason to interact with you.

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I wouldn’t be closed off to evolution if I thought it was possible as it doesn’t disprove God.

And thank you for the article I will look more into this.