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The Origin of GOD


Kizzi

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...Though all of the details are not known, there’s really no intractable mystery about how a single zygote cell becomes the trillions of specialized, organized cells in an adult human (or animal) body....
Really? You discuss "all the details" as if we know some significant fraction of them. Every advance in biochemistry surfaces more questions than it answers. And the questions get harder and harder to explain, in terms of how this much complexity was "selected". This is significantly different than the advances in particle physics. There is no endpoint in sight to the apparent complexity of biochemical systems. There are many intractible mysteries in this schema.
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Evolution tells us we came from a rock.

 

Pay attention when you get to high school and you'll learn otherwise. Evolution says nothing about where anything came from, only how it changed over time. Evolution is compatible with creation, abiogenesis and/or other theories of a beginning of life.

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Pay attention when you get to high school and you'll learn otherwise. Evolution says nothing about where anything came from, only how it changed over time. Evolution is compatible with creation, abiogenesis and/or other theories of a beginning of life.

And he results to insults. :) Does that make you feel any smarter?

 

What about that primortal soup? Some Theory :)

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There is something wrong with evolution that was mentioned before we left the topic of the origin of God. If the matter from which the big bang originated did exist for eternity, then the same thing applies to what was said if God had existed for eternity. It could never reach the present! There is no way anything could have existed for eternity and reach where it is today, infact, it could never change at all, because there would always be unlimited time before it reached the point of that change, and the change would never come. The only acceptable possibility in my oppinion is the one of God having created time.

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i am the wrong person to ask because i am still learning and do not possess all knowledge like you theists think you do. i do not yet have the ability to fully explain to a closed-minded individual why evolution is the most accepted theory.

i do not even want to try, i've tried a hundred times before and it's all the same.

it is so tedious and boring and not worth it. there are hundreds of other people on this forum that can, and will.

for their 53897th time.

so repetitive.

good day.

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here we go again. the uneducated claim there's something wrong with evolution when they barely know anything about it.

I didn't say there was something wrong with it, I said the form you believe in that points to how Man came into existance is a lie. Learn how to read before you chime in.

 

My whole agruement is that the Universe might not be 13 to 15 billion years old. It could be that it's only a little over 6000 years old and if it in fact was a young earth then the existance of God would be more likely.

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And he results to insults.

Not really, facts. Evolution is not about any beginning. This is simple high school biology. Evolution is simply a theory about lifeform A leading to lifeform B. It theorizes nowhere that any life came from a rock and any claim that it says this comes from someone that is ignorant of what the theory is about.

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I'm sorry....we are getting off topic anyway.

 

My whole point was mabye the Earth is younger but now that I think about it, whether it's billions or years or 6000 years, God is eternal. Isn't time a unit of measure created by man anyway? Maybe there is a larger picture that we don't see yet. Maybe we are thinking about a "flat earth" instead of a "round earth" currently when it comes to time.

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… Though all of the details are not known, there’s really no intractable mystery about how a single zygote cell becomes the trillions of specialized, organized cells in an adult human (or animal) body.
Really? You discuss "all the details" as if we know some significant fraction of them.
You’re correct, I should have said “though we’re only beginning to learn the details”, or something similar.
Every advance in biochemistry surfaces more questions than it answers. And the questions get harder and harder to explain, in terms of how this much complexity was "selected". … There is no endpoint in sight to the apparent complexity of biochemical systems. There are many intractible mysteries in this schema.
True, every question raises more questions, but this still represents progress. We don’t seem to be running into significant dead end questions, questions too difficult to grapple with, intractable questions, hence my optimism.

 

I’d say that an endpoint in understanding biochemistry is in sight, but that the difficulty lies in making out the points between what we know and that endpoint. We’re reasonably sure we know the kinds of phenomena involved in a specific organisms function, that we know its scale – microscopic/molecular, vs. subatomic. Exluding some of the speculations of folk like Roger Penrose, it’s reasonable to expect that all bio function is similar to the chemistry behind “simple, well understood” processes like cellular energy metabolism. Concretely, I believe a reasonable endpoint can be envisioned as a day when we possess the ability to model cells, tissues, and whole organisms and ecosystems of organisms in completely artificial media, such as digital computers.

 

I’d be very surprised if this progress is interrupted by the discovery of a mysterious supernatural entity regulating a biochemical process.

 

That said, there clearly are some major barriers around which no obvious paths present themselves. I believe the major ones involve measuring, AKA imaging, complex functioning biochemistry. Despite the wonders of fMRI, etc, and the scale of biological function not being subject to quantum-level measurement impossibilities, practical techniques are several orders of magnitude coarser than required to make the necessary measurements. (I’ve tried to stir up some discussion of this in the Upload your mind into a computer by 2050? and Mental processing is continuous, not like a computer threads, without much success)

 

This is significantly different than the advances in particle physics.
Though biochemistry and particle physics are very different scientific domains, they share the quality that we don’t have to understand everything about them in detail to enjoy may practical benefits of understanding. We don’t know, and absolutely can never observe, the exact complex quark-gluon interactions that occur at as fast a rate as can occur within ordinary atomic nuclei, yet we can predict how these nuclei will interact and decay as a consequence of this interaction. We don’t, and may never need to know the detailed mechanics of DNA transcription, yet because we know it in outline, yet we can identify and insert useful genes into cells to create cheap human insulin. I suspect that, within my lifetime, similar advances in understanding of genetics and embryology will lead to therapies to do things like repair damaged heart, nerve and organ tissue, increasing the span and quality of human life.
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Are all of you, my fellow explorers, familiar with the ontological argument for the existence of God? I think it’s a useful idea to wheel out when discussing God.

 

Paraphrasing, modernizing, and expanding Anselm’s argument, it’s this:

1) All things – rocks, trees, you, me, God, imaginary friends - are collections of attributes

2) To speak about things, we must agree on their definitions

3) The definition of God is “that which nothing greater can be imagined”

4) Any attribute can be classified as making a thing “greater” or “less”. For example, the attribute of strength makes a thing greater. The attribute of pointless cruelty makes a thing less.

5) From 3 and 4, we can select from any list of attributes the ones possessed or not possessed by God, eg: omniscient = yes; evil = no.

6) The question “does God exist?”, then, equals “does God have the attribute ‘exists’?”

7) Clearly (in the opinion of Anselm, and likely most people), having the “exists” argument makes a thing greater.

Therefore, God must have it, therefore God must exist.

 

This clever argument alone is enough to win Anselm the title of famous philosopher. It has some serious vulnerabilities, though. Here are my favorites:

Re #3: Why should Anselm get to define “God”, rather than, say, a famous atheist philosopher? The atheist might chose to define it as “that which nothing greater can be imagined, excepting the ‘exist’ attribute”, and the argument will conclude that God does not exist.

Re #5, 7: Can we human beings really reliable distinguish a “greater” from a “less” attribute? And if not, can we with certainty conclude that “exists” make a thing greater? And what about attributes, such as “allows good people to suffer for reasons no human can understand”, or “comes out to meet and greet ones public”?

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