Tell me how long has the earth been around?? let’s say 1 billion years (I know it is more) and with all the death, things that have rotten, the disgusting smells built up in the world over the years, how do we still have fresh air to breathe? no air leaves the earth and no new air enters the earth. The world has been around 1 billion years, no water leaves the earth, no new water enters the earth it goes through us( we have water which keeps us alive), evaporates into the atmosphere and rains down in another area, the ground is full of rotten things but yet we are able to grow food which taste nice. my point is if there was no one watching over us we would not be able to breathe fresh air and we certainly would not have edible food which does not make us ill or kill us, and the water we would drink would taste and smell horrible.
Oh my, @Soldier4christ, there are just so many things in what you wrote that are so….I just can’t find the words.
Did you ever take a science class in school? Have you been educated? Was that post serious or are you trolling? Do you know what soil is? Do you know where plants get much of their nourishment? Do you know what crude oil is made of? Do you actually think that the body of a dead animal putrefies forever? Do you not understand that when you smell something you are inhaling particulate matter? And do you think all particulate matter stays airborne forever?
I could go on, but I won’t. It’s bed time. I’m going to read a bit before sleep. I’ll be reading something that teaches me things. You might give that a try.
Excuse me, but, are you 12 years old? Or were you homeschooled?
Not to insult but curious as to how such elementary knowledge could have escaped being absorbed.
Uhhhhh… Not trying to be an ass here (Seriously, I’m not.), but, uh, did your school not teach anything about biology, chemistry, physics, or ecosystems? Because it sounds like you have never even opened a book on any of those subjects.
If he’s trolling, he’s good. Let’s keep him around!
Well, this is quite simple. God comes down from heaven to earth every quarter millennia and brings his “holy HEPA filter”!
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@Soldier4christ … tell me, did you have an actual school to attend as a child? Only those of us who did, and who paid attention in class, are observing your display of frankly incandescent ignorance with bewilderment.
First of all, do you know how much volume the Earth’s atmosphere occupies?
Here’s the fun part. We can calculate this. Here’s how it’s done. From basic geometry, we learn that the volume of a sphere is given by:
V = (4/3)πr3
where r is the radius of the sphere. Treating the Earth as a sphere to make the calculation simple (I don’t think you’re ready for volume integrals of the geoid function just yet), we note that the mean radius of the Earth is 6,371 km. The atmosphere extends to approximately 150 km above the Earth’s surface, which gives us a sphere of radius of 6,512 km. This is the sphere that consists of both the Earth’s solid mass and its atmosphere combined.
We calculate the volume of the solid mass of the Earth thus:
Vs = (4/3)&960; × (6,371)3 = 1,083,206,916,846 km3. That’s over a trillion cubic kilometres.
We calculate the volume of the solid mass of the Earth plus the atmosphere thus:
Vs+a = (4/3)&906; × (6,512)3 = 1,156,729,429,252 km3.
Therefore the volume of the atmosphere is given by:
Va = Vs+a - Vs = 73,522,512,406 km3.
So, the volume of the Earth’s atmosphere, to within about 2% of the actual figure, is over 73 billion cubic kilometres.
I can perform a similar calculation for the oceans if required.
Now, the decay processes arising from bacterial decomposition of dead matter only produce a limited number of volatile molecules of a sort detectable by olfactory senses - much of that decay process results in the breakdown of proteins, and the bacteria absorb the resulting amino acids for their own metabolic processes. As a consequence, the production of odouriferous volatiles is a tiny fraction of the volume of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Then of course, there’s the little matter of wind dispersal, diluting the concentration of those volatiles in the atmosphere, to the point where they cease to be detectable by our nostrils, and you need a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer to detect their presence. (As a tangential diversion, I’ll note that modern GCMS instruments can detect the presence of a compound in a sample, when there are as few as fifty molecules of that compound present in the sample).
Then, there’s the little matter of what happens to those volatiles in the atmosphere. Which are frequently broken down into simpler compounds (most of which do not trigger human olfactory senses) by a process known as ultraviolet photolysis. Basically, UV light from the Sun energises chemical reactions breaking down those volatiles.
In short, what enables us to enjoy fresh air and clean water, is a combination of biochemistry, photochemistry and the sheer size of the planet. No cartoon magic man from a goat herder mythology needed.
Try 4.543 billion years, you could Google it as well. Oh and this has to be hands down one of this stupidest lines in apologetics I’ve ever seen. You do know that decomposition is a finite process right?
Nope, this is still laughably wrong. Pause for a moment and try to imagine how someone’s argument looks when they get a basic fact so badly wrong, and they could check it in literally a few seconds online?
Mama mia, this has to be a windup, surely? I can only imagine this clown has never been anywhere near a farm, and someone else washes his vegetables. I can’t decide if it hilarious or cringeworthy embarrassing, no scratch that it’s both.
Yes we got that, what’s astonishing is you seem to actually believe that. For many years people believed in the erroneous notion that bad smells caused diseases like cholera and typhoid, and in a London borough during a cholera outbreak a young doctor noticed that all the victims drank water from the same water pumps, he convinced the council authorities to close these pumps and the outbreak ceased. Though they didn’t understand why at the time, he had demonstrated using the scientific method that cholera was a waterborne disease. Eventually they realised this was caused by human sewage seeping into and contaminating the water supply. No magic, no deity, nothing supernatural, we have clean water because of science, before that deaths from such diseases would have been commonplace. Among many many other diseases of course that science has help fight, cure and even eradicate. You are dealing in risible fantasy.
If it wasn’t cleaned to remove contaminants yes. The more people who live near water sources the more risk there is they’ll contaminate it, which is why we have large reservoirs outside of cities and well away from sewage systems and the water is cleaned to remove dangerous contaminants. it’s not cleaned by an unevidenced deity using magic ffs. good grief this is astoundingly ignorant nonsense.
I think you may need to help him understand that, maybe a catchy title like “Where do smells go?” would help?
Not need, and not evidenced either, even were this embarrassing display of ignorance true, it still would be no more than yet another appeal to a mystery magic man in the sky. Where he answers the question why does stuff happen, with goddidit. Blimey oh riley though, I am still struggling to close my widely opened gob after that one.
Well, I think it’s worth noting that scientists have studied gender and sense of humour and have generated some interesting results.
The data was taken from random test tickles.
Men seemed to react to the test tickles differently than the women.
Woman on average enjoyed the test tickles more when on the sensitive area on the back of their knees, while men seemed to enjoy the test tickles more when on their belly.
Future research is in the works.
From an established scientific fact, as opposed to inexplicable magic from an unevidenced deity, derived from an iron age superstition you mean? I think whilst your humour is not entirely inappropriate, it is entirely misdirected. I also think that given the sheer embarrassing howler of your last post, sarcasm and humour directed at scientific facts is something of an own goal.
Edit you were wise to delete that.
Now one more time: Can you demonstrate any objective evidence for any deity? So far you have failed to do so.
I feel everyone is searching for the truth, part of having a faith you do not always have the complete picture or all the answers, but it is your faith which guides you through, you cannot look at everything in a logical manner to make sense of it because if you did, explain why we are in a globe floating in the middle of nowhere with dead planets all around us? I can honestly say from personal experience prayer does and can work and for me this strengthens my faith.
You can look at the detail in the creator’s creations from peacock feathers, to a zebra or panda or butterfly, ladybird, bee, flowers/plants (the list goes on and on) a great amount of effort has been put into their design (seemingly from a designer) why and how? , the human body is probably one of the biggest creations it is so complex but everything has its purpose, but how is it possible to hear your own thoughts and say things to yourself within your mind? what causes us to have dreams and nightmares? how does your heart beat however many times a minute, hour, year for the rest of your life? Can you honestly say everything in this world can be explained? Yes there are loads of scientific theories but no concrete evidence. I am not trying to convince or convert anyone to my faith because it is a personal journey and if/when the time is right if the most high creator would see fit then you will come to your own realisation.
I feel red is a nicer colour than blue.
Religious faith is defined as strong belief in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual conviction rather than proof. It does not nor can it help in ascertaining the truth of that doctrine, by definition.
Your question is assuming there is an overarching reason, you would need to demonstrate this before the question would make any sense.
I don’t believe you, and you’d need to offer more than an unevidenced anecdotal claim, There is no objective evidence prayer works, and when tested properly it had no discernible effect. The claim for the efficacy of intercessory is either based on a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy or is simply an appeal to mystery or both.
There is no objective evidence for any creator, species evolution explains those phenomena, and it is supported by w eight of objective evidence that makes it an irrefutable scientific fact. Endless attaching the word “creation” to claims does not evidence a creator.
That one is called a straw man fallacy, as no one here has claimed this. However you are making a very common mistake in religious apologetics, and assuming not knowing something justifies unevidenced assumptions, this is called an argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy.
That’s embarrassingly wrong, you need to learn some basic facts about the methods of science before commenting. A scientific theory is is an explanation of an aspect of the natural world and universe that has been repeatedly tested and corroborated in accordance with the scientific method, using accepted protocols of observation, measurement, and evaluation of results.
I don’t believe that for a second, else why bring your spiel to an atheist forum?
This creator is either incompetent or unbelievably tardy then, as I am nearly 58 years old, and not one shred of objective evidence has been demonstrated that any of the thousands of deities humans have imagined, is in fact real.
Now once again, can you demonstrate any objective evidence for any deity, yes or no? Do you even understand what objective evidence is?
@Soldier4Christ … oh dear, you really are determined to make a sorry spectacle of yourself before a global public audience, aren’t you?
Guess what, Looby Loo? Your failed attempt to convert your smug, self-satisfied complacency and snide condescension into a species of virtuoso satire is failed, and dismally so, because you’re manifestly ignorant yet again of facts that many of us here learned when we were 11 years old.
Once again, I am led to ask if either [1] you never had a proper school to attend as a child, or [2] slept through all the classes presented in any school you did attend. the observational data you provide, with respect to your fulminating ignorance of basic facts, leads inexorably to that question. Indeed, such is your level of palsied failure in this regard, that several here are wondering how you manage to function as an adult in any reasonably developed 21st century society, and wonder in addition how you came, in such an environment, to possess a knowledge base that a 10th century peasant would have been ashamed of.
Now, let’s deal with the facts you never bothered to learn, and apparently are too indolent to look up before posting here.
First, the Solar System did not exist until eight billion years AFTER the Big Bang. So that’s your first point of dismal failure. Second, we have evidence for the Big Bang, an important example thereof being the cosmic microwave background, which is as close to being the output of a perfect black body radiator, that the error bars are too small to plot on the graph. This is the sort of accomplishment that diligent, trained minds, working to understand with honesty and fidelity, the universe and its contents, are capable of delivering. Along with, of course, the two current pinnacles of physics, both of which are quantitatively accurate in their predictions of relevant behaviours to fifteen decimal places, an achievement that the Bronze Age nomads that scribbled your sad little mythology could never hope to match.
Before covering the Big Bang in a little more detail, I’ll deal with the formation of the Solar System. Which was the result of gravity acting upon a large assemblage of gas and dust in space. The fun part being, of course, that Isaac Newton, fully four hundred years ago, worked out a model of gravity and its operation that was sufficiently successful at a quantitative level, to be useful for 350 years, and has only been supplanted in precise work by General Relativity.
Indeed, the reasons we still teach Newtonian physics in modern classes, are [1] because it’s still an excellent quantitative approximation, whose error when dealing with everyday phenomena is somewhere around the 15th decimal place, and [2] because the underlying mathematics are simple enough to understand, to be taught in high school. Contrast with General Relativity, which requires mastery of tensor analysis and the Ricci Calculus, subjects that are intimidating to approach even for undergraduate mathematics students in the absence of world class teaching.
As a corollary, I’ll stick with Newton for the following exposition, because the error involved in doing so is so tiny that it can be effectively ignored. I don’t need to resort to four-dimensional Minkowskian tensors in a system where velocities are far smaller than the speed of light.
Quite simply, gravity will drive the coalescence of any assemblage of matter in space. The moment you have two masses, m1 and m2, separated in space by a distance r, Newton postulates that an attractive force exists between them given by the equation:
F = Gm1m2/r2
Now, because gas molecules happen to have tiny individual masses, it takes time for this coalescence to result in macroscopially observable changes of state. But, if you have a sufficiently large number of such molecules in an ensemble, then each molecule will be attracted to trillions of others in that ensemble. As a result, the vector sum of those tiny forces starts to become sufficient to cause the entire cloud to coalesce. As the separation between the gas molecules decreases, the force increases, and the process accelerates. Eventually, the portion of that gas at the centre of the ensemble will migrate into a compact, spherical region, within which interesting phenomena occur, described by the Gas Laws.
The Gas Laws basically state that a balance exists between pressure, volume and temperature. As the volume of that compact, spherical region of gas molecules decreases, both the pressure and the internal temperature will increase. Eventually, with sufficient mass present in that contracting spherical volume, the temperature and pressure rise to the point where nuclear fusion of hydrogen ignites in the core. Thus, to use familiar words, a star is born.
The matter on the periphery orbits that star, and undergoes coalescence of its own, which is the mechanism by which planets are formed. Not only do scientists have exquisitely constructed computer simulations of the processes in question - both star formation and planet formation - but they have observed instances of these processes in action, courtesy of images provided by space based telescopes of various interesting regions of the night sky. Indeed, those computer simulations tell scientists what to look for through their telescopes, and the requisite structures have been found, providing us with data on the various stages of the star formation and planetary accretion process that can be fed back into the computer models to refine them.
It’s as a result of the decades of diligent work on this matter by astrophysicists, that we know that the Solar System formed via this mechanism. Indeed, those computer simulations are now so refined, thanks to the data from space based telescopes, that scientists can vary the starting parameters and model the formation of different types of stars and planetary systems. They can model the formation of stars, from red dwarfs all the way up to luminous blue hypergiants two billion kilometres in diameter. They can model the formation of different planetary systems, from systems with one or two planets, to systems that have 20 or more. Furthermore, the resulting simulations now match the data from space based telescopes to an extent that would have been considered magic by the authors of your favourite mythology.
Indeed, the corpus of scientific knowledge with respect to the above processes is now majestic in scale, and microscopic in accuracy.
I’m reminded at this juncture, of a certain Giordano Bruno. Who, as far back as 1584, postulated that the Sun was simply another star, like the distant stars in the night sky, and that some of those other stars may have planets orbiting them. Modern astrophysicists have confirmed his hypothesis in spectacular manner - as of 1 May 2023, there are 5,366 confirmed exoplanets in 3,962 planetary systems, with 856 systems having more than one planet (a catalogue of all currently known exoplanets can be found here, and that list is growing an an almost daily basis).
I mention Bruno because he was burned at the stake by murderous mythology fanboys for presenting this postulate. Not the only example history provides, of course, of the religious trying to strangle any science that didn’t conform to doctrine, but probably the most nefarious. If your religion is so afraid of scientific development, that it exhorts its followers to murder scientists, then said religion is worse than worthless.
Now, onto the Big Bang, which I shall cover briefly, because the intricacies of csomological physics are numerous, and would probably be wasted upon you anyway. But there’s one matter I want to cover, and that’s the little matter of the cosmic microwave background. Which scientists have determined propagated into space on a macroscopic scale some 370,000 years after the Big Bang.
There’s a reason for scientists postulating this. Which centres upon two key facts, the first of which being, that scientists have been able to develop a well-defined relationship between the time elapsed after the Big Bang, and the temperature of the universe. Which, at bottom, centres upon the relationship between energy, volume and temperature, which can be thought of as the vacuum equivalent of the Gas Laws I mentioned earlier. This rapidly takes us again into the world of tensors in order to provide a proper treatment, and is beyond the scope of this rather more elementary exposition. But, that relationship exists, and has been devised by cosmological physicists.
The second fact centres upon the opacity of plasmas to the transmission of light. At elevated temperatures (above 10,000 K certainly counts as an elevated temperature), all matter exists as ionised plasma. Now it transpires that plasmas are opaque to the transmission of light over long distances. Photons can travel for relatively short distances in a plasma, but are rapidly absorbed and then re-emitted in such an energetic environment.
Indeed, scientists can determine what is known as the extinction coefficient of plasmas via very simple experiment - generate a plasma, introduce a light source at once side of the container, and a photodetector at the other. The difference between the amount of light energy entering the plasma from the light source, and the amount of light reaching the photodetector, allows the extinction coefficient to be calculated. Plasmas have a sufficiently large extinction coefficient to prevent light travelling across astronomical distances.
However, once the universe expanded to the point where the temperature fell below that heating matter to a plasma, neutral atoms can form. At which point, the extinction coefficient of the matter in the universe plummets, and light can travel over astronomical distances. Thanks to that relationship I mentioned above, relating the temperature of the universe to the time elapsed after the Big Bang, that epoch can be dated to 370,000 years after the Big Bang. This date also matches the date determined from the cosmological redshift of the CMB, from its original infrared wavelengths to the microwave background we observe today. Ah, consilience, a quality science possesses in abundance.
And now, it is time to address this foetid drivel:
Bullshit.
First of all, I’m an invertebrate zoologist, and I can point to numerous scientific papers covering the evolution of the relevant features, including the genes controlling them.
Second, I’ve already dealt with the dishonesty of “design” apologetics, first of all here, and second, in more detail in the document I linked at the start of this thread (which of course you manifestly never bothered even to acknolwedge the existence of). In the case of the other thread I’ve just linked to, I not only dismantle the whole “design” garbage, but along the way, provide an example of how scientists are pressing evolution into service to “design” a range of useful products, and cover that additional topic in more detail in the document linked in this thread.
The short version of the above - your assertion is horseshit.
Now, it’s time to deal with this piece of blatant mendacity:
This is such a blatant lie, that it will not surprise the regulars to see my response below.
In case you never learned this, scientific theories are BASED upon concrete evidence, and are based upon concrete evidence by the supertanker load. Since you’ve resurrected a variant of one of the very canards I cover in my Google Docs document, namely the tiresome and duplicitous “only a theory” canard, sit down and take note of this:
IN THE REALM OF SCIENCE, A “THEORY” IS AN INTEGRATED EXPLANATION FOR A CLASS OF ENTITIES AND INTERACTIONS OF INTEREST, WHOSE POSTULATES HAVE BEEN TESTED EXPERIMENTALLY TO DETERMINE THEIR ACCORD WITH OBSERVATIONAL DATA, AND FOUND VIA SAID TESTING TO BE THUS IN ACCORD.
In short, a scientific theory is such, PRECISELY BECAUSE IT’S BEEN EXPERIMENTALLY TESTED, AND FOUND TO BE IN PRECISE QUANTITATIVE AGREEMENT WITH REAL WORLD DATA.
Do NOT post this “no concrete evidence” lie EVER AGAIN. If you were in any class I was conducting, and you peddled this lie, you would be subject to the nuclear option.
Uh, is this the same “creator” that instructed one of his human pets to line up different colored sticks in front of certain animals as they had sex so that the baby animal would be born with stripes? Did that same “loving” creator also create the heartworms that live and grow inside the hearts of dogs and other animals, thereby killing the animal slowly and painfully over a lengthy period of time? Oh, and let’s not forget the duckbill platypus! What the hell was your creator smoking when he/she/it designed THAT acid-trip wonder?
(Edit to check my appendix.)
Ratty, you out-did yourself on that one, you little oily furball. 
Well, they were the obvious choices. I wanted to use the parasite that survives by digging into the eyeball of its host, but I couldn’t think of the name of it.
Isn’t God wonderful? 
