Common sense says there’s design. Honesty says there’s a design. Logic and inference which we all use says there’s a design. Human intervention, design and information are in the origin of life experiments as well as eye witness reports. There are no hands free experiments in origin of life research.
Well, I just looked in the mirror, and I must admit I look pretty damn good as a god. Okay, okay, I really need to shave, I know. Otherwise, I think I make an excellent god. Pray to me, and I’ll get back to you with an answer… eventually… in some vague and ambiguous manner. But if you never hear back from me, just assume my answer is “No.” I’m mysterious like that sometimes.
I then went outside and looked up at the sky. Saw a cloud shaped like Bozo the Clown. Does that mean anything?.. (scratching head)…
(Edit to let there be light!)
No it doesn’t, and that is simply another unevidenced assertion.
Nope, and again bare assertion.
No it doesn’t and again an this is an unevidenced claim it’s pure rhetoric, and I cited a circular reasoning fallacy you used in your previous post, making your argument illogical by definition. So I doubt you have even the most basic grasp of informal logic.
Pure gibberish, what on earth are you talking about?
Again gibberish, your point escapes me, I have made zero claims about the origins of life, evolution makes zero claims about the origins of life, is it possible that even now you don’t know the difference between evolution and abiogenesis? This does seem to be a very common error creationist make in conflating the two.
Evolution evidences and explains the origin of species and why we see the diversity of life we do. Abiogenesis deals with origins of life from inorganic material.
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Common sense is notoriously garbage.
I’m pretty sure that is a lie.
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Well, 50 years ago, humans weren’t smashing particles together well enough to discover that the theorized Higgs boson really exists. Does that mean that the people who said Higg’s postulation that it exists was bupkus were correct? Just because an achievement has not been made yet doesn’t necessarily mean it never will.
And it certainly doesn’t justify complete belief that an outside entity is responsible for whatever it happens to be. We’ve seen repeated demonstrations that this fails. For instance, the earth is not the center of the universe. We now know this because scientists used science to demonstrate it.
I’m pretty sure he couldn’t tell us how logic is defined without plagiarising it from a dictionary, he has made several irrational claims using known logical fallacies, and rolled right passed them when they are explained, his use of the word logic is pure rhetoric, we’ve seen this all before, like children repeating arguments back at you they don’t understand, or like people who think emphasising the word fact at the end of a sentence, is all that is needed to magically make something a fact.
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Why would I want to look in a mirror? All that would prove according to your reasoning is that your god made some ugly ass people.
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A facility you have yet to demonstrate.
None of which need an imaginary cartoon magic man from a goat herder mythology. We have detailed and robust scientific explanations for all of these.
Oh look, boys and girls, he’s resurrecting tired and repeatedly destroyed canards about “information”. Which I dealt with in detail in this document that I’ve made publicly available. In particular, we’re seeing Canard #23 in action here. Inded, I’ll repreise the requisite part of that document to make the issue explicit:
I also discuss in detail when demolishing that canard, the difference between information and ascribed meaning, two quantities that frequently duplicitous conflation in creationist apologetics. Which demonstrates that I’ve done plenty of thinking about the issues, and throughout said thought, never once needed to call upon a cartoon magic man to “explain” anything, though of course “Magic Man did it” isn’t an “explanation”, it’s merely an admission of ignorance.
Then of course, as I’ve repeatedly presented here, we have a robust scientific explanation for DNA, an explanation called chemistry. It was chemists who first discovered DNA, it was chemists who elucidated its structure, and it is chemists that have developed prebiotic reaction pathways for the synthesis thereof, that have been demonstrated experimentally in the laboratory to work. We have nothing of the sort accompanying the “Magic Man did it” assertion.
Meanwhile, let’s take a look in more depth at the sort of apologetic propaganda that is routinely pushed by the various shills for the Duplicity Institute, of which William Dembski stands out here as a particularly egegious example. Indeed, we know that this individual isn’t interested in science, but interested instead in achieving hegemony for his particularly foetid brand of mythology fanboyism. A look inside his book, bearing the title Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science And Theology alone betrays his ideological presuppositions on a grand scale:
Later on, after he penned that tedious screed, he attended a religious panel discussion arranged by creationists, with the typically telling title of Defeating Darwinism In Our Culture (how they love their “Darwinism” meme, and the duplicitous misrepresentation of valid, evidence-based science as some sort of “doctrine”), where he uttered the following drivel:
Then he uttered the following, when interviewed about his forthcoming appointment to an “academic” position at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (surely this appointment alone betrays his real agenda?):
Oh, and then we have this laughably failed prediction, dating from 2004, and originally published here:
Here we are, in 2023, and if anything, evolutionary biology and prebiotic chemistry are going from strength to strength. On the other hand, it’s “intelligent design” that’s now dead in the water, especially after its farcical exposure in the Dover Trial, as being nothing more than creationism in a stolen lab coat. Indeed, the number of peer reviewed scientific papers being published in evolutionary biology runs to something like 18,000 per year at present, hardly the sign of a discipline that has undergone a “Taliban style collapse”. Though I expect the usual tinfoil hat cospiracy theorising will be peddled at some point to “explain” this. Likewise, the prebiotic chemistry literature is xpanding at the rate of several hundred papers per year.
But I digress. Moving on, we have the following infamous utterance, which he presented as the “vise” strategy (here in the UK, we refer to the machine shop tool in question as a “vice”, just to clarify matters), dating from May 2005:
The fun part being of course, that when he was given the opportunity to act as a champion for ID in the Dover Trial in September 2005, he chickened out, along with several other Duplicity Institute “fellows”, who presumably took the advice of Philip Johnson (the serious lawyer in the organisation) that the vacuity of their case would be made so embarrassingly public at that trial once the scientific big guns turned up, that it was best to leave Michael Behe to carry the can and flush his reputation down the toilet on their behalf. Of course, what Dembski really wants, as that above quote reveals, is the erection of a creationist Inquisition against anyone who does not conform to creationist doctrine and orthodoxy.
Even more telling is this quote he posted over at Uncommon Descent (most observers more properly think of its as “Undecent Common”), where he delivered the following blatantly ideology-driven view of evidence:
Oh look, it’s the “you ignore my evidence because of presuppositions” piece of blatant projection, right after admitting that his brand of “evidence” is itself the product of manifest presuppositions.
How often have we seen creationists misrepresent the proper process of letting data shape ideas as purportedly constituting an “ideology”? It’s a tiresomely predictable creationist trope, trotted out whenever real world data doesn’t conform to their doctrine and ideology.
Of course, all this carping and sniping on his part (an activity for which he became infamous - see the “fart noises” response to Judge Jones for an example), is basically butthurt because his wank fantasies were destroyed by real world data. He wasted fully twelve years of his life trying to define “complex specified information” and failed, during which time he repreatedly had his arse cheeks handed to him on a plate by genuine tenured mathematicians. This was, of course, because he was trying to force-fit probability to religion, which was doomed to crash and burn right from the very start.
I don’t even have to dig up the Wedge Strategy document, in order to establish that the Duplicity Institute isn’t interested in genuine science, but in peddling apoligetic lies about science for Republican Jeebus.
Moving on …
Well since we have a vast mountain of scientific evidence for human evolution, from both palaeontology AND molecular phylogeny, while we hae ZERO evidence that a cartoon magic man from a goat herder mythology exists, this isn’t “dishonest”, it’s proper acceptance of the demonstrable facts.
Indeed, if creationist assertions were something other than the product of their rectal passages, the entire scientific discipline of moelcular phylogeny would not even exist.
Tell us all, was it your childhood ambition to become a public shill for the lies of the Duplicity Institute?
Ahem, we have the scientific data informing us of the processes in operation. Once again, it’s called chemistry. Not magic poofing by a cartoon magic man waving its magic todger about.
Oh look, it’s Paley’s Watchmaker bullshit being resurrected. I dealt with that not only as Canard #20 in my previously linked exposition, but devoted a complete, separate document to the dishonesty of “design” apologetics. Thje appropriate part here being this:
Of course, there’s much more in that document exposing the mendacity of the whole “design” schtick by mythology fanboys.
“Common sense” told many people in the past that the Sun moved round the Earth. We’ve learned otherwise. This should be telling you something important.
Also see my multiple refutations of the “design” bullshit.
No it doesn’t. All the “design” apologetics are dishonest.
Bullshit. Once again, see my multiple refutations of the “design” bullshit.
Oh look, it’s Canard #8 from my list of creationist canards!
Once again …
Got any more of my canards to resurrect in your vapid apologetic screed?
No one asserts there are. This is another of your lies.
The whole point of those experiments, is to determine that the chemical reactions work under the requisite conditions. Which you do by setting up those conditions and then testing to see if the reaction does indeed work therein.
Are you being deliberately stupid here, or just deceitful?
You rang?
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So you’re saying that your god has an asshole? How would you know? Have you checked in person?
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lol kind of hard to get most Christians to move past magic. Some of them believe everything is made up of the holy woo woo and science is just taboo to them. We should start placing bets! $100 bucks says @WhoAreYou dismisses everything you just said with another round of his god of the gaps argument. 
What that makes no sense? Oh wait you said has, I misread that as is, my bad.
The thing is humans have evolved to be disparate in appearance, so what does this deity fucking look like, a mish mash of human ethnicity?
Or how we have thousands of different languages. I found it hilariously stupid on how the Bible explained why we speak in different languages. People were building a stupid tower to heaven in the sky and their god changed the dialects so no one would get along. So much for being a religion of peace. Well boo hoo, NASA proved xtians wrong again when they decided to shoot a rocket through the clouds on the way to the first Moon Landing. Yep, no Heaven there. Silly Christians.
If he had an image and/or likeness, then that would be testable and verifiable…
If he had an image wouldn’t that make him corporeal instead of supernatural?
How can an invisible entity have an “image” or “likeness”? Good luck with that one.
Likewise, given the huge diversity of human phenotypes, which one is supposedly closest to this “image and likeness”? Only different groups of humans have different ideas on this. I suspect that if Cro-Magnon Man had invented your religion instead of the Jews, they would have considered themselves to be the template for the cartoon magic man in question. The Jews, of course, regarded themselves as the “chosen people”, and as a corollary, almost certainly considered their phenotype to be the template in question, though a tangential issue arising from this I’ll cover later.
Then, of course, Europeans got in on the act, and “Aryanised” the cartoon magic man in question - I’ll also say more on this shortly. But of course these choices leave out vast swathes of humanity - the Chinese, the population of the Indian Subcontinent, Australian Aboriginals, the various prehistoric occupants of North and South America, and the vast panoply of African humans. I’ll leave out the hilarity that is Arab exceptionalism within Islam, because I’m only aware of this to a limited extent, but doubtless the diligent here can find parallels therein with the instances I’ve just cited, and then of course, here in the UK, we had the comedy spectacle that was British Israelism. But that one deserves its own thread.
Now it’s time to move on to two other issues, the first being that I notice a striking contrast between the civilisation of early Judea, and the neighbouring civilisations of Classical Antiquity. All of the civilisations in question, of course, had their mythologies, some being more entertaining than others, but those other civilisations left behind them evidence of having written on topics other than their mythologies. Ancient Egypt, for example, left behind the Rhind Papyrus, which was, in effect, a textbook on Egyptian mathematics. The Babylonians left behind numerous treatises on their pursuit of astronomy, and indeed, we still use a modified version of the Babylonian measurement system for modern astronomical coordinates. The Greeks, of course, left a vast body of literature in their wake, ranging from epic drama to comedy (including the first formally documented instances of political satire), along with a corpus of philosophy that is still influential in modern society.
On the other hand, what do we have from contemporary Judea in this vein? Nothing. I am unaware of any writings emerging from Classical Antiquity era Judea, other than the Old Testament. There are no instances of fiction therefrom in the public domain, no exploratory travelogues such as those written by the likes of Herodotus, no explanations of developments in areas such as mathematics, nothing. They left no indication that any of their people had travelled any significant distance beyond the Middle East, there’s no mention of, for example, encounters with the ancient civilisations of the Indian Subcontinent or China, no indications that any of them moved beyond Egypt into sub-Saharan Africa, and only encountered the Romans courtesy of the latter subjecting Judea to military occupation.
Where other ancient civilisations give detailed insights into their culture and their thinking on non-mythological topics, the inhabitants of Judea from 800 BCE to the 1st century CE, left behind nothing informing us of what might have been taking place in these areas of human endeavour, within their society. There’s a giant black hole of missing data. It’s almost as if they had nothing to offer but their mythology, and cared for virtually nothing else. That speaks of a level of intellectual impoverishment that is frightening to behold.
Yet, there are mythology fanboys who think that this sorry excuse for a civilisation, somehow magically alighted upon the keys to the cosmos, and that everyone else, including modern day Nobel calibre scientists, are somehow “wrong” for disagreeing with the frequently farcial mythological assertions generated by these people. This view is ludicrous in the light of the vast mountains of relevant data that have been acquired since.
Now, it’s time to cover the frequently dark farce that is the “Aryanisation” ot Mr Cartoon Magic Man, a tendency that started with all those Orthodox icons and Catholic renditions of various Biblical figures, and which probably had relatively little political significance that far back in European history. However, starting in the 19th century, we started to see the first political Aryanisation of Mr Cartoon Magic Man, which included the output of the likes of Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Movement, and which reached its frankly bizarre quasi-apotheosis in the racial scribblings of one Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels. This defrocked Cistercian monk launched into the world of Aryanising the Christian god, with a tome bearing the wonderfully Pythonesque title of Theozoology, or the Case of the Sodomite Apelings and the Divine Electron.
Anyone needing a change of underpants after laughter induced bladder failure will of course be excused, given that the title of this work alone is an excursion into hitherto unexplored dimensions of comic weirdness. I simply had to obtain a copy, just so that I could savour the wackiness first hand, and boy, is this one strange piece of literature.
Basically, Liebenfels’ scribblings consist of a frankly deranged excursion into the world of Biblical exegesis, in which he rewrites the Genesis creation myth as the emergence of electric Aryan “supermen” possessing the “divine electron”, the Genesis fall myth as miscegenation of the Aryan “supermen” with various racially inferior beast-men (yes, you can see where this is going - no surprise to learn that Liebenfels’ writings were a central influence on Hitler), among which were the Jews, whom Liebenfels characterises in his freaky tome as “Sodomite Apelings”.
Just when you think it can’t become any more cracked, Theozoology then reworks the Crucifixion narrative, to feature an Aryan Jesus being butt-raped by the “Sodomite Apelings”, i.e., the Jews. Liebenfels followed up on this publication with a vanity newspaper, The Ostara, which was in effect a literary rat’s nest of racist völkisch politics and virtual deification of the blue-eyed blond “Aryan” phenotype. Only in the diseased ravings of Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer, do we see Liebenfels being outdone in the pathologically efflorescent moon pie realm.
Of course, those of us who paid attention in class, are well aware that this is the sort of craziness that ensues, when you let unsupported assertions be treated uncritically as fact, and some of the florid nastiness is again rearing its head among newly emboldened racists and proto-fascists at present.Whether they’ll go full bore potato, and embrace Liebenfels-level wackiness on a grand scale, remains to be seen, but there are several right wing public figures in the USA who appear to be launching along that trajectory.
It’s amusing to note that even minor excursions into discoursive Cloud Cuckoo Land on the part of mythology fanboys, provide me with the opportunity to unveil some risible consequences arising from letting mythological assertions take precedence over fact.
Bet he didn’t intend this set of consequences when he posted …
A minor correction, if I may. Just one word change. Substitute “is” in place of “has”. That should make things more accurate.
For what it is worth; Genesis 10 (before the tower of Babel) mentions the descendants of Noah splitting up and speaking different language a few times.
Technically, that would mean that if us humans are created in Her Assholeness’s image, we would all be assholes. Granted, some of us are, but I know a few who aren’t. Hence the “has”.
Fucking theists … I leave for TWO DAYS and the atheists are winning again.
We need a “theist” rally call!!! Ready, theists?
Who loves God?!!!
WE DO! WE DO!
Who inseminated Mary?!!!
GOD DID!!! GOD DID!!!
Who is Jesus Christ!!!
Jesus is God! Jesus is God!
Then, who fucked their own mother and gave birth to themselves!!!
JESUS! JESUS!
Rally! Rally! Rally!
5, 6, 7, 8 - who did Jesus inseminate!!!
MARY! MARY!
7, 8, 9, 10 - if he can’t do it, no one can!!!
Come on team! Let’s bounce back!
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Just change has to is, that would at least reflect the barbarous mass murdering fictional character in the bible.