The Dishonesty Of "Design" Apologetics

Meanwhile, I’ve just uploaded the 2024 update to the Emergence of Life on Earth exposition, but unfortunately, Google Docs is throwing wobblies and at the moment won’t let me share the document. I’m working on ways of trying to overcome this. The moment I succeed, I’ll provide the link. The diligent will find the contents interesting as usual, though of course the usual suspects will probably peddle more ex recto apologetic lies to try and hand-wave away the science documented in that exposition. For the record, the number of cited papers has now risen to 96.

EDIT: try this link:

This appears to be working now. Enjoy the contents.

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Meanwhile, I’ve just run through my collection of peer reviewed scientific papers devoted to the evolvabliity of the “genetic code”, and it turns out that no less than twenty–three such papers were published as of 2011. Of course, more may have been added since, but I’ve yet to check for additions, which may appear later. For the meantime, here’s the 23 citations in question:

[1] A Co-Evolution Theory Of The Genetic Code[/i] by J. Tze-Fei Wong, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 72(5): 1909-1912 (May 1975)

[2] A Mechanism For The Association Of Amino Acids With Their Codons And The Origin Of The Genetic Code by Shelley D. Copley, Eric Smith & Harold J. Morowitz, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 102(12): 4442-4447 (22nd March 2005)

[3] An Expanded Genetic Code With A Functional Quadruplet Codon by J. Christopher Anderson, Ning Wu, Stephen W. Santoro, Vishva Lakshman, David S. King & Peter G. Schultz, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 101(20): 7566-7571 (18th May 2004)

[4] Collective Evolution And The Genetic Code by Kalin Vetsigian, Carl Woese and Nigel Goldenfeld, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 103(28): 10696-10701 (11th July 2006)

[5] Emergence Of A Code In The Polymerization Of Amino Acids Along RNA Templates by Jean Lehmann, Michael Cibils & Albert Libchaber, PLoS One, 4(6): e5773 (3rd June 2009) DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0005773

[6] Encoding Multiple Unnatural Amino Acids Via Evolution Of A Quadruplet Decoding Ribosome by Heinz Neumann, Kaihang Wang, Lloyd Davis, Maria Garcia-Alai & Jason W. Chin, Nature, 464: 441-444 (18th March 2010)

[7] Evolution And Multilevel Optimisation Of The Genetic Code by Tobias Bollenbach, Kalin Vetsigian & Roy Kishony, Genome Research (Cold Spring Harbour Press), 17: 401-404 (2007)

[8] Evolution Of Amino Acid Frequencies In Proteins Over Deep Time: Inferred Order Of Introduction of Amino Acids Into The Genetic Code by Dawn J. Brooks, Jacques R. Fresco, Arthur M. Lesk & Mona Singh, Molecular & Biological Evolution, 19(10):1645-1655 (2002)

[9] Evolution Of The Aminoacyl-tRNA Synthetases And The Origin Of The Genetic Code by R. Wetzel, Journal of Molecular Evolution, 40: 545-550 (1995)

[10] Evolution Of The Genetic Code: Partial Optimization Of A Random Code For Robustness To Translation Error In A Rugged Fitness Landscape by Artem S Novozhilov, Yuri I Wolf and Eugene V Koonin, Biology Direect, 2: 24 (23rd October 2007) DOI:10.1186/1745-6150-2-24

[11] Exceptional Error Minimization In Putative Primordial Genetic Codes by Artem S Novozhilov & Eugene V. Koonin, Biology direct, 4(1): 44 (2009)

[12] Expanding The Genetic Code Of Escherichia coli by Lei Wang, Angsar Brock, Brad Herberich & Peter G. Schultz, Science, 292: 498-500 (20th April 2001)

[13] Experimental Rugged Fitness Landscape In Protein Sequence Space by Yuuki Hayashi, Takuyo Aita, Hitoshi Toyota, Yuzuru Husimi, Itaru Urabe & Tetsuya Yomo, PLoS One, 1(1): e96 (2006) DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0000096

[14] Importance Of Compartment Formation For A Self-Encoding System by Tomoaki Matsuura, Muneyoshi Yamaguchi, Elizabeth P. Ko-Mitamura, Yasufumi Shima, Itaru Urabe & Tetsuya Yomo, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 99(11): 7514-7517 (28th May 2002)

[15] On The Origin Of The Genetic Code: Signatures Of Its Primordial Complementarity In tRNAs And Aaminoacyl-tRNA Synthetases by S. N. Rodin and A. S. Rodin, Heredity, 100: 341-355 (5th March 2008)

[16] Origin And Evolution Of The Genetic Code: The Universal Enigma by Eugene V. Koonin & Artem S. Novozhilov, IUBMB Life, 61(2): 99-111 (February 2009) (Also available at arXiv)

[17] Protein Evolution With An Expanded Genetic Code by Chang C. Liu, Antha V. Mack, Meng-Lin Tsao, Jeremy H. Mills, Hyun Soo Lee, Hyeryun Choe, Michael Farzan, Peter G. Schultz & Vaughn V. Smider, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 105(46): 17688-17693 (18th November 2008)

[18] Protein Stability Promotes Evolvability by Jesse D. Bloom, Sy T. Labthavikul, Christopher R. Otey & Frances H. Arnold, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 103(15): 5869-5874 (11th April 2006)

[19] Reassigning Cysteine In The Genetic Code Of Escherichia coli by Volker Döring and Philippe Marlière, Genetics, 150: 543-551 (October 1998)

[20] Recent Evidence For Evolution Of The Genetic Code by Syozo Osawa, Thomas H, Jukes, Kimitsuna Watanabe & Akira Muto, Microbiological Reviews, 56(1): 229-264 (March 1992)

[21] Rewiring The Keyboard: Evolvability Of The Genetic Code by Robin D. Knight, Stephen J. Freeland & Laura F. Landweber, Nature Reviews Genetics, 2: 41-58 (January 2001)

[22] Thawing The Frozen Accident by C. W. Carter Jr., Heredity, 100: 339-340 (13th February 2008)

[23] A Simple Model Based On Mutation And Selection Explains Trends In Codon And Amino-Acid Usage And GC Composition Within And Across Genomes by Robin D. Knight, Stephen J. Freeland & Laura F. Landweber, Genome Biology, 2(4): research0010.1–0010.13 (22nd March 2001)

I’ll take that as confirmation that you are not serious.

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The coding mechanism embodied by DNA is actually quite simple. There’s nothing particularly sophisticated about it and it could (and probably did) evolve from even simpler precursors.

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Inferior to whom? That’s just subjective bias on your part, and if nature has an intelligent designer, then you need to demonstrate some objective evidence that it exists, or that it is even possible. So far you have pointedly failed to even try and do this.

All you’re offering here is a false equivalence fallacy.

Nailed it…

What’s interesting is this rather telling and blatant lie, it’s theists who indulge in this hypocrisy, since they go see a doctor whose treatments are based on scientific rigour and evidence when they’re sick, take medicines that are created using research based on the scientific fact of species evolution, they don’t pray their cars will work, or that plane designs will be safe, they don’t eschew medical science, and stick solely to prayer, and when they very rarely do of course it ends in well publicised disasters, instead they lie as you have done here, by pretending their beliefs have real world efficacy, but then quietly and hypocritically use science the same as anyone else, all the while decrying it when it contradicts parts of their archaic superstitious doctrine.

So what, and this is a begging the question fallacy, you cannot demonstrate that anything was created, you just keep asserting it over and over, and this is of course an argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy, to reverse the burden of proof your claim incurs.

Where did your deity come from by the way? Oh look, your rationale has just defeated itself. Time for you to leap to a special pleading fallacy, one that claims your deity has always existed, thus breaking this rule you’ve conjured up here.

So no then, you have nothing to justify your subjective bias, that was clear from the original assertion of course, and we didn’t really need this additional circular reasoning fallacy.

Not yet, but then that was once true of everything we know through science, so it’s both meaningless and trivially true, and of course the claim goddidit, has no explanatory powers, and this is also another argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy. Not knowing something might encourage the superstitious to insert their deity in those gaps in our knowledge, but it is irrational, and therefore poor and weak reasoning.

Fnarrr, you don’t know what a scientific theory is do you? FFS man, you can Google the definition in seconds. Here it is for you then, since you’re too lazy or dishonest to do this yourself:

“A scientific theory is an explanation of an aspect of the natural world and universe that can be (or a fortiori, that has been) repeatedly tested and corroborated in accordance with the scientific method, using accepted protocols of observation, measurement, and evaluation of results. Where possible, some theories are tested under controlled conditions in an experiment.[1][2] In circumstances not amenable to experimental testing, theories are evaluated through principles of abductive reasoning. Established scientific theories have withstood rigorous scrutiny and embody scientific knowledge.

Educate yourself…

You don’t get to just assert the universe is fine tuned, this is just bias on your part again, and just because physical characteristics of the universe required to allow carbon based life seem extremely unlikely, does not mean they were “fine tuned” to do so, an equally plausible explanation would they happened that way, and thus the carbon based life we see was thus the one that emerged. Adding a deity and a creation myth from an unevidenced archaic superstition, that you can’t even demonstrate is possible, hardy lowers those odds, it simply violates Occam’s razor.

Wow another bare unevidenced claim, impressive. Though of course we could replace any of the countless deities humans have imagined, with just about anything, and the claim neither loses or gains anything.

Though objectively the claims are the same.

Nope, wrong again, code is just a descriptor we use, like fine tuning is used as metaphor to describe the appearance of the narrow parameters of the universe required for the carbon based life we currently observe.

Circular reasoning fallacy, and humans wrote the code to describe and explain something. You’re making the common error apologists often commit, and conflating the descriptive with the proscriptive.

It most certainly was, by among others Francis Crick and James Watson, both atheists by the way.

Hahahahahhaha, not this stupid lie again, just turn on any news channel, and try to imagine the kind of global reaction to any accepted scientific theory being substantially reversed, or even entirely falsified, let alone the reaction of superstitions theists to such news. Do you think no one will notice theists only attack scientific theories, when they directly contradict their religious doctrine, like the creation myths in the bible and koran? You never see creationists asserting that germ theory or the theories of gravity or relativity or probability theory, or atomic theory…are just theories and we all know why obviously.

That’s just a subjective claim, not objective evidence at all, I don’t believe the universe was fine tuned, now off you go and demonstrate some objective evidence it was. Then you can demonstrate that a deity exist or is even possible, then that it is the deity you imagine to be real, and then finally that the deity you’ve imagined actually did this…so far you have an empty bag.

Don’t make me laugh, you don’t know what logic is, or what it is designed to achieve, your posts make that abundantly obvious.

Circular reasoning fallacy, so much for logic, as that is irrational by definition, and again the claim something is “favourable” to something is just subjective bias on your part, as you offer no objective metric for measuring favourable here, and thus it is a meaningless assertion.

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Mr. Dawn said:
Quoting another Apologist is like quoting from the Bible. His opinions are influenced by Christianity. Nice try, but sorry.

NeutralZone said:
MrDawn:
The problem with your above reply is that it is lame, because you have yet to prove the findings of Lee Strobel to be erroneous. You are now pretending as if Strobel were the only person who gave that assessment of the DNA code and that Strobel made it all up merely because Strobel is an Apologist. Furthermore, you have yet to dispute the fact that all codes require the intervention of an intelligent person who wrote the particular code.

FYI: Strobel’s report is backed up by dozens of other sources that cannot all be accused of being “Apologists.” Below is one such source giving similar information to what Strobel gave about the DNA code.

" The code itself

The code is written using the four nucleic acids found in RNA: adenine (A), uracil (U), cytosine (C) and guanine (G). Assembling the four bases into triplets (codons) produces 64 combinations: 61 coding for amino acids and the remaining 3 coding for stop signals instructing the translation machinery to stop making a polypeptide chain.

Though there are more codon combinations than amino acids, this is not a biological slip-up, as having more codons than amino acids allows for a degree of error. For instance, the codon UCA codes for the amino acid serine. If the A in the third position were to be changed to a C (UCC), the codon would still code for serine. This property, known as redundancy, reduces the chance of mistakes in the DNA being translated into proteins, which could be detrimental to the organism."

Now, do you expect this forum to believe that the people at the Genomics Education Program who approved the publication of this article did so because they are all Apologists?

Let us know.

MrDawn said:
That is a claim. Not an answer. Where is your objective evidence to back this claim?

NeutralZone said:
The objective evidence is in the precision we see in the universe and everything around us, indicating it all required an Intelligent Designer who intervened and guided the outcome.

Tell you what: as soon as you can direct the rest of us to a box of crayons that self-created, you will have made a point. Never mind that the box of crayons pales in comparison to our fine-tuned universe that you and other atheists insist simply popped up out of nowhere.

Calilasseia:

Now, that’s the perfect example of a bare-faced lie. The willingness of atheists to lap up every theory that scientists come up with is astounding. Take, for example, Charles Darwin’s Evolution Myth for which there is no credible evidence in the fossils records.

And let’s not talk about Big Bang Theory for which there is no credible explanation for why the supposed big bang occurred in the first place. Much less is there a reasonable scientific explanation of where all those materials came from that are expanding the universe. They created themselves; right?

Calilasseia:

Responding to a legitimate question during debate with schoolyard insults says one thing about you: You know when you’re licked, and so you strike out as a means of talking loud and saying nothing. I will give you another chance to answer the question.

QUESTION TO CALILASSEIA: Where did the materials come from that scientists and other humans use, when they are creating various things, in light of the fact nothing they have ever used was made from scratch.

The forum is waiting for an intelligent answer.

Lee Patrick Strobel is an American Christian author and a former investigative journalist. That qualifies him for FUCK-SHIT-NOTHING.

His claim to fame is that he hosted a television program called Faith Under Fire on PAX T That does not get him any more qualified as a TV host than me.

Apparently, he got a law degree and that helped him learn how to cherry-pick facts for his side of an argument, so he did a bunch of cherry-picking and then went out and wrote a book with the same old bullshit apologetics in it we have all grown to love to debunk.

Just another apologist leading the ignorant by their noses.

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You are citing a crackpot, who is citing a crackpot. It is crackpots all the way down.

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Oh look, the ex recto apologetic fabrications are coming thick and fast …

We don’t “lap up every theory that scientists come up with”, this is your next bare faced lie. First, we accept scientific postulates PRECISELY BECAUSE scientists provide EVIDENCE for the postulates in question, something mythology never do for any of their frequently ridiculous assertions.

Second, as for your failed attempt to slip in the duplicitous “only a theory” creationist lie into your post via the back door, I’ll deal with this in my usual manner.

In the realm of science, a theory is an integrated explanation for a class of entities and interactions of interest, that has been tested experimentally to determine its accord with observational reality, and found via said testing to be thus in accord.

As a corollary, a scientific theory is as far removed from the duplicitous creationist caricature of “made up shit guess” as it’s possible to be outside the realm of pure mathematics, PRECISELY BECAUSE ITS POSTULATES HAVE BEEN SUCCESSFULLY TESTED EXPERIMENTALLY.

Now if you want to double down on this creationist lie, here’s a suggestion forvyou - go to Hiroshima or Nagasaki, and tell the locals that atomic tneory is “only a theory”.

Moving on to the rest of uour specious and mendacious garbage …

Oh look, another creationist lie.

Evolution isn’t a “myth”, unlike your tendentious creationist fantasies. Evolution has been observed taking place in numerous lineages of living organisms, and has been the subject of countless successful direct experimental tests of its postulates. For example, Theodosius Dobzhansky performed a successful direct experimental test of natural selection way back in 1948, and followed this up with laboratory experiments on speciation.

Indeed, I’m aware of successful direct experimental tests of evolution that can be performed in a high school laboratory. Such as Diane Dodd’s generation of an incipient speciation event in Drosophila pseudoobscura , Mavárez et al’s replication of a speciation event in Heliconius butterflies, and Ole Seehausen’s direct experimental test of sexual selection in Cichlid fishes.

The last of these three examples is one that YOU YOURSELF can conduct in your own home, if you exert the effort required to maintain two fish tanks containing some Lake Victoria Cichlid fishes, specifically members of the Pundamilla nyererei species complex, and I’ve covered that one in some detail in another post here.

For the record, the scientific papers on question are:

[1] Dodd, 1989

[2] Mavárez et al, 2006

[3] Seehausen et al, 1998

Another bare faced and infantile lie. The tetrapod sequence alone from Eusthenopteron, through Panderichthys and Tiktaalik to Acanthostega and Ichthyostega, is a classic example from the fossil record of the evidence you dishonestly summarily dismiss. Likewise the sequence from maniraptorian theropods to birds, the sequence from Eohippus to modern horses, and tne sequence from Ambulocetus to modern whales.

But of course, we not only have fossil evidence, we also have a vast body of evidence from direct experimental tests on living organisms, along with the exabytes of genetic data now extant. In the case of whales, our first clue sbout their ancestry came not from fosdils, but from serum antibody reaction tests pioneered around 1900. It was discovered, that if you took a small sample of blood from one species, and injected it into a second species, that second species would produce antibodies to the blood of the first species, that could be harvested and used to test tissue samples.

During the requisite experimental investigations, it was found that the strength of the antibody reaction varied with phylogenetic distance. Rat binding antibodies, for example. would still exhibit a relatively strong reaction with material from guinea pigs and squirrels (relatively close phylogenetic rodent relations), a much weaker reaction with, say, material from Perissodactyl mammals, and none at all with material from fish.

Here’s the fun part. When whale binding antibodies were tested in this manner, the strongest outgroup match was with Artiodactyl mammals such as hippos. This work was conducted decades before whole genome sequencing became a laboratory reality.

What happened when genome sequencing became a reality? The data therefrom matched the earlier serum antibody reaction test data almost perfectly. DNA from whales grouped phylogenetically with Artiodactyl mammals as the closest sister clade to whales.

Moreover, when the fossils of land ancestors of whales were found, they exhibited classic Artiodactyl limb morphology, and also exhibited a gradation of festures leading toward those found in later whales - the more aquatic the lifestyle, the greater the tendency to exhibit more whale like anatomy with respect to such features as skull structure and the gradual reduction of hindlimbs.

Once again, you’re lying.

Next …

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

You really are failing dismally here, aren’t you?

If you had exerted even a bare minimum of basic diligence here,you would have learned that I’ve devoted numerous column inches here to relevant research in cosmological physics, such as Steinhardt and Turok’s braneworld collision model for the instantiation of the observable universe, and more recently, the work of Hawking and Hertog on their holographic principle. The former of these two examples includes a direct, experimentally testable prediction, while the latter points to the possibility of, wait for it, Darwinian style evolution of physical laws .

You really are becoming a poster child for creationist stupidity and duplicity, aren’t you? Indeed, your repeated regurgitation of the Duplicity Institute as a purported “source” makes both myself and others here wonder if you’re one of their paid shills. Your incompetence suggests that they should ask for their money back if so.

Heard of E=mc² have you? The equation that describes matter and energy equivalence, and the ability of one to be converted into the other? The principle upon which the operation of both nuclear weapons and particle accelerators are based? You don’t get out much, do you? And again, the locals at Hiroshima and Nagasaki are laughing at you.

Indeed, particle accelerators generate previously unobserved particles, via the simple process of taking existing low mass particles, giving them enormous amounts of kinetic energy by accelerating them to near the speed of light, then colliding them. That’s how such particles as top quarks and the Higgs Boson were found - squeeze a huge amount of energy into a tiny volume, and let energy-time uncertainty deliver the goods.

Quite simply, primordial matter arose from the condensation of the enormous free energy present in the earliest moments of the newly instantiated universe.

Did you have a school to attend as a child?

Still entertaining your sad, impotent quasi wet dreams?

First of all, I’m familiar with the manner in which lying creationists like you resort to specious tone policing as a failed substitute for the substance your ilk never have. That, and of course, those other tiresomely familiar and well-documented aspects of lying creationist aetiology, such as Gish Gallops, quote mining, playing duplicitous apologetics with science, and outright ex recto fabrication.

Why am I thinking “Monty Python’s Black Knight” about you at this juncture?

Plus, you ilk never ask legitimate questions, you instead try to concoct fake “gotcha’s” that end up being shredded.

Meanwhile …

You mean the question I’ve now already answered twice?

Read the above and weep.

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That’s an argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy, to suggest any claim has credence because it has yet to be disproved is fallacious, so it is irrational by definition.

If his claims had scientific validity then there’d be a global scientific consensus supporting them, as of course there has been for species evolution since Darwin first published his seminal work. Species evolution is an accepted scientific theory, supported by an overwhelming amount of objective evidence, based on over 164 years of global scientific scrutiny.

He doesn’t need to dispute your bare claim, just point out it is a circular reasoning fallacy, you are assuming your conclusion in your opening premise. If you understood that, you’d realise yourself how weak and poorly reasoned your reasoning is in the statement. Again no one has to disprove a claim, the person making the claim has to properly evidence it.

It is still just an unevidenced subjective religious belief, it has no scientific support. This one is a bare appeal to numbers, it’s called an argumentum ad populum fallacy, what is that now, three separate logical fallacies in one post, do I need to point out what this means? If these religious claims had any scientific credence, then what do you imagine the global scientific reaction would be to such a paradigm shifting event?

Turn a news channel on and see if “science evidences god” is being ticker taped across the screen. Has this guy won a Nobel prize, has he claimed the Templeton prize? Is his work being lauded and celebrated by theists the world over? So far all you have presented is a bare claim, that doesn’t seem to reflect objective reality.

Could you quote where in that link you think it evidences any creator deity? Otherwise we are back to your circular reasoning fallacy that a code requires a writer.

That’s a subjective opinion, and again it is circular reasoning, you would need to demonstrate that what we perceive as precise requires any creator, you don’t get to just assert this in circular reasoning fallacies.

As @MrDawn pointed out, that is a subjective religious claim, used in a circular reasoning fallacy, you have failed to offer any objective evidence, merely pointed to objective facts, and then claimed they require a deity.

Straw man fallacy, and a false equivalence fallacy to boot. If you want to believe a deity used inexplicable magic to create everything then groovy, but you will need to demonstrate sufficient objective evidence before I will accept your bare claim.

You have not demonstrated that the universe is fine tuned, how many universes were in your test group for this? Or are you just looking at this universe, and making an arbitrary and unevidenced assumption based on it’s complexity?

Straw man fallacy, I have yet to see any atheist claim this, as beyond the big bang we have only theoretical ideas of what may or may not have existed, you and you alone are claiming to know what happened before this, and you have failed to offer any objective evidence to support your claim, indeed you don’t seem to have a very good grasp of what such evidence would look like, simply reeling off irrational arguments using logical fallacies.

And you know this how? Simply lacking a scientific or natural explanation, does not mean there isn’t one, and assuming your unevidenced deity did it because we don’t currently have a contrary explanation is of course another argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy. It does not bode well for your belief, that your arguments for it are relentlessly irrational.

A false equivalence there, as atheism has nothing whatsoever to do with science, it is imply the lack of belief in any deity or deities, and given you have failed to demonstrate any objective evidence a deity exists or is even possible, that’s more than sufficient reason for me to withhold belief, as I would from any claim.

I wonder how many accepted scientific theories you reject, that don’t in any way contradict any part of your subjective religious beliefs? Whenever i ask apologists this, they always become reticent, and their subjective bias is thus manifest. Accepting all scientific theories isn’t dishonest or biased, since in order for any scientific model or idea to become an accepted scientific theory it must be objectively evidenced beyond any reasonable doubt.

It’s impossible to take such blatant mendacity seriously, but HERE is a link to the talkorigins website, and it has a massive database of the scientific evidence, including the fossil record that supports species evolution. It also has a section debunking commonly used creationist lies and propaganda. Here’s a snippet for you…

"Fossil Hominids

The Evidence for Human Evolution"

So despite your duplicitous claim, the scientific world disagrees. Worth pointing out here that atheism is far higher among elite scientists, and almost universe among elite biologists, higher than in any other scientific field, odd that, if as you claim there is scientific evidence in the field of biology for a deity, surely those experts are best placed to know this, and they obviously don’t agree, else they’d all be theists.

That one is called a false dichotomy fallacy, it also uses another straw man, and implies yet another argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy, so well done, three logical fallacies in a single sentence is some achievement. FYI, I can simply not know what caused the big bang, or if it needed a cause, and still disbelieve your claim an unevidenced deity did it using inexplicable magic, as you have failed to demonstrate any objective evidence to support this subjective religious belief.

You’re simply using a god of the gaps polemic, one could of course ask where your deity come from? If you can offer an answer that isn’t unevidenced subjective opinion, then you will be the first theists I’ve encountered who can do so.

Well there it is, your question is fallacious, as it implies not understanding the origins of the universe we currently observe, lends credence to your unevidenced subjective religious belief, this is an argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy.

Quelle surprise.

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[Calilasseia] Atheist

Bullshit.

“Fine tuning” is a myth. We are here because the laws of physics permitted our emergence, and the relevant, physically permitted interactions took place. That it IT. Your garbage about “fine tuning” was satirised neatly via Douglas Adams’ Puddle.[/quote]

NeutralZone said:
Anything that an Atheist Religionist cannot overcome is dismissed as a myth. Nuff said.

[Calilasseia] Atheist
Worse still for you, I have in my collection two peer reviewed scientific papers, destroying the “fine tuning” myth. The first demonstrates that stellar nucleosynthesis and organic chemistry would remain essentially unchanged, even if key physical constants varied by as much as five orders of magnitude. The second demonstrates that the same would be the case, even if we deleted the weak nuclear force from the universe wholesale.

Try bringing something other than vacuous ex recto apologetic fabrications to the table.[/quote]

NeutralZone said:
No legitimate scientist would deny the fine-tuning seen in our universe and in the world around us. That should have been the first red flag that you’re reading the writings of quacks. But in your desperation to prove there is no Jehovah, you are willing to lap up anything published by people who share your disdain for the Creator. I could quote dozens of scientists that would debunk the claims made by your “scientists” who claim there is no fine-tuning.

FYI: The expression “peer reviewed” means nothing, if the people who are the peer reviewers are not willing to honestly evaluate what they are reading by doing so with open minds. For example, Charles Darwin’s science fiction book Origin of Species was peer reviewed by his associates who went along with his fairytale because, like him, they thumbed their noses at the Almighty and were searching–in vain–for an alternative to Jehovah.

Well, guess what? It turns out Darwin was wrong about just about everything he wrote in his book. His claim about survival of the fittest was debunked when “less fit” species survived after the “more fit” versions of the same species died out. Notice how paleontologist David Raup said it. Focus on the bolded words.

“Instead of finding the gradual unfolding of life, what geologists of Darwin’s time, and geologists of the present day actually find is a highly uneven or jerky record; that is, species appear in the sequence very suddenly, show little or no change during their existence in the record, then abruptly go out of the record. and it is not always clear, in fact it’s rarely clear, that the descendants were actually better adapted than their predecessors. In other words, biological improvement is hard to find.” (Raup, David M., “Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology,” Bulletin, Field Museum of Natural History, vol. 50, 1979, p. 23.)

[SodaAnt] Atheist

SodaAnt said:
The coding mechanism embodied by DNA is actually quite simple. There’s nothing particularly sophisticated about it and it could (and probably did) evolve from even simpler precursors.

NeutralZone said:
Really? Then why did it take scientists so much time to crack the DNA code? It’s a pity you weren’t around then. Maybe you could have shown them how “the coding mechanism embodied by DNA is actually quite simple” and there is “nothing particularly sophisticated about it.”

And why, might I ask, if the DNA code is as simple as you claim it is, why is it considered the most sophisticated code known to man?

What are the attributes of a legitimate scientist?

By what mechanism do you know this was the cause of their reviews? Did they write it down? Did they tell someone?
Do you actually know or do you figure / think / guess / surmise / opine / estimate / suppose / assume / venture it is so?

Perhaps for similar reasons why plate tectonics was only recently accepted: information availability, technology limitations, etc. Science is a process, it takes time to build an infrastructure of information that provides the ability to learn more about a given subject.

Sheldon said:
Inferior to whom? That’s just subjective bias on your part, and if nature has an intelligent designer, then you need to demonstrate some objective evidence that it exists, or that it is even possible. So far you have pointedly failed to even try and do this.

All you’re offering here is a false equivalence fallacy.

NeutralZone said:
Inferior to anyone who has to replace a natural creation with a man-made one. Try talking to someone who lost a limb and had to replace it with an artificial one, and see what they will tell you. Then inform that person that they’re demonstrating “subjective bias” because the artificial limb is stiff, hard to move around with, etc. in comparison to the natural limb that they lost.

Better yet, tell someone that had an artificial heart installed when their natural heart failed that they’re demonstrating “subjective bias.” Jim Lynskey tried it. Notice what he said at the following weblink.

By the way, that last line that I bolded from your above comment (All you’re offering here is a false equivalence fallacy.) is a typical example of denial. Until you can present a credible explanation for how our universe and everything around us is so fine-tuned, yet it did not require the intervention of an Intelligent Being who intervened and guided the outcome, I will have to consider that comment of yours as nothing more than tripe.

Sheldon said:
What’s interesting is this rather telling and blatant lie, it’s theists who indulge in this hypocrisy, since they go see a doctor whose treatments are based on scientific rigour and evidence when they’re sick, take medicines that are created using research based on the scientific fact of species evolution, they don’t pray their cars will work, or that plane designs will be safe, they don’t eschew medical science, and stick solely to prayer, and when they very rarely do of course it ends in well publicised disasters, instead they lie as you have done here, by pretending their beliefs have real world efficacy, but then quietly and hypocritically use science the same as anyone else, all the while decrying it when it contradicts parts of their archaic superstitious doctrine.

NeutralZone said:
You are confused. You apparently believe I am anti-science. I am all for legitimate science. It’s the scientists with questionable behavior that I have a problem with. For example those that lie through their teeth claiming Evolution Theory and Big Bang theory are believable, despite the fact there is no evidence to support either of those theories.

NeutralZone said:
It can be deduced that something in the natural world was created by the mere fact man-made things required the intervention of intelligent human beings. It’s called logic, which you are pretending not to have.

Your question about who created the Creator is similar to a goldfish asking who created the humans who placed it inside a fish bowl. A goldfish is as incapable of understanding the superiority of humans (in comparison to itself), just as humans are incapable of understanding the superiority of Almighty God Jehovah. Why so? Because a goldfish is a lower life form when compared to a human being. Similarly, humans are lower life forms when compared to Jehovah–their Creator.

Simply put, you are attempting to reduce the Almighty to human limitations–namely, because humans had a beginning then everything–including Jehovah–must have likewise had a beginning. That argument is flawed in light of the fact scripture makes it clear that Jehovah is eternal (no beginning and no end).