(June 17, 2014 at 1:52 pm)Harris Wrote:

(June 9, 2014 at 8:13 am)Fidel_Castronaut Wrote: Please explain for my benefit because I'm trying to understand what the fallacious opening your reply to esq was supposed to prove or add to the discussion.

Theory of Evolution is not a conventional scientific fact. It is an ideological tool for atheism and secularism. This is what I am proving and adding to the discussion.

Ok, so, to translate, you don't really have any explanation as to why you used fallicious reasoning, then?

Again, you'll have to elucidate how in a earth evolution is linked to either atheism or secularism? I want you to demonstrate the link for me, please.

Do you have any idea what the terms you're using actually mean? Or what they even are?

Can you demonstrate, clearly and concisely for my benefit, how a reformation demand for independence in sovereign state craft from the papacy, culminating in the treaty of Westphalia in 1648, was impacted at all by evolution? A couple of centuries before evolution was even theorised?

Again, I'm trying to work out how you've managed to try and sidestep stating a reason for using fallicious reasoning that added nothing to the discussion by outright lying about the the links between evolution and secularism and atheism (until proven otherwise).

Please don't let yourself become another lunatic on there Internet. I demand to see reasoning behind your post.

Thanks in advance.

(June 17, 2014 at 1:52 pm)Harris Wrote:

(June 8, 2014 at 5:39 pm)pocaracas Wrote: DNA didn't just pop into existence all built up. It must have evolved from simpler self-replicating structures... RNA being a close relative.

I see Evolution as the process from zero to human in mother’s womb.

And, with your very first sentence, you show just how deep your ignorance runs.
I told you to go learn about evolution.
You refuse to do so and, instead, provide us with your version of what "evolution" means. Thank you, but that's not what the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection states as "evolution".
Either you go learn about it, or remain in your own delusional world.... but don't mix them, as they're clearly not compatible.

(June 17, 2014 at 1:52 pm)Harris Wrote: However, you seem to be very confident in your verdict that the universe popped out from nothingness. On what bases can you make this claim? Does Nature exhibit spontaneous appearances of things! Or, perhaps you had visited every planet and every star in the universe!

I am not a creationist; I have not ever made that claim. You are making it for me, so you tell me on what basis you are making it.

Incidentally, I have visited every star and planet in the Universe. So there.

Crap - double post. Stupid 'phone.

Consider this a blatant and shameless attempt to increase my post count.

Genesis 1:3 "Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light."

"Light," OUT OF NOTHINGNESS!

Well looks like Harris was exposed for another dishonest unoriginal hack. I love when they get that snobbish tone and then trip over their own arrogant misapprehension of the facts, trying to quote Darwin to refute Darwin and failing miserably as anyone with half a brain could have predicted they would.

(May 10, 2014 at 5:50 pm)Harris Wrote: Many contemporary scientists believe that universe came into being about 15 billion years ago. Despite of this fact, a clear majority of scientists in today’s world agree that universe has a beginning.

To be precise, the universe began to exist in this form. Prior to that, it was in a very hot, dense, state. We have no idea how long the universe existed in this state. We know it suddenly began to expand, and we have several plausible hypotheses, but we don't really understand what preceded the expansion very well.

(May 10, 2014 at 5:50 pm)Harris Wrote: At the beginning of 20th century, scientists believed that the universe has always existed and matter-energy had always been around. That was, “The Steady-State Model.” In the last hundred years, the counter evidences have blown that model away.

Yes, the universe has definitely not always existed in a steady state. It may, however, have always existed in some form. Disproving a steady state doesn't disprove an eternal universe. I suspect quantum vacuum fluctuation may turn out to be the case, but an eternal universe can't be ruled out.

Some facts that we agree with you on and already know about snipped here.

(May 10, 2014 at 5:50 pm)Harris Wrote: If the universe has a beginning then it should has a cause and that cause should be immaterial and beyond space and time.

Mere assertion, unsupported. It could be dismissed on those grounds alone, not just the fallacy of composition that because effects in the universe must have causes, the universe itself must have one; or the counterfactual that virtual particles begin to exist without a cause.

(May 10, 2014 at 5:50 pm)Harris Wrote: There are only two things, which can fit to explain this cause.

a. Abstract objects and
b. Embodied mind.

The problem with the abstract objects is that they are causally effete, meaning, they cannot cause anything.

There are several plausible hypotheses that explain how the universe could have begun or wound up in it's current state, none of them violate the laws of physics or contradict the evidence. No abstractions or embodied minds needed.

(May 10, 2014 at 5:50 pm)Harris Wrote: The laws of nature (including entire mathematics) are abstract concepts and they cannot produce any event.

The laws of nature are descriptions of ways in which nature behaves consistently. If nature behaved differently, the laws would be different. They are not abstract in the sense that you need them to be in order for your argument to work.

(May 10, 2014 at 5:50 pm)Harris Wrote: The rules of arithmetic state the Pattern to which all transactions with money must confirm, if only you can get hold of any money. Consequently, in one sense, the laws of nature are existent only because there exist a physical universe.

No kidding.

(May 10, 2014 at 5:50 pm)Harris Wrote: To think the laws can produce, it is like thinking that you can create real money by simply doing sums. As said by Hawkins, “it is the laws of physics, not the will of God, that provide real explanation to how the universe came into being. The big bang,” he argues, “was the inevitable consequence of these laws.”

Does that lead to the concept, if the law says; gravity controls the motion of earth around the sun so is it the gravity that endeavoured the creation of sun or other celestial objects or is it other way round. Law is descriptive and predictive but not creative. It is even worse as laws of physics cannot even cause anything to happen. It is logically impossible for a cause to bring about some effect without already being into existence.

Nonsense remains nonsense even when talked by world famous scientists.

Nonsense is a good description of the above paragraphs and your misrepresentation of Hawking.

(May 10, 2014 at 5:50 pm)Harris Wrote: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.”
Stephen Hawking.

One of the outdated philosophical clichés, “who created God?” is an oblivious platitude because if there is no cause which is uncaused there simply be no existence.

Or existence always existed. In any case, a first, uncaused-cause, does not imply that it was a conscious being. It seems quantum foam may have the property of necessarily existing, and is, at least in theory, capable of generating a universe, maybe even trillions of universes.

(May 10, 2014 at 5:50 pm)Harris Wrote: Laws of physics are extremely precise to enable complex life to exist.

If you know (and can show your work) why the laws of physics are what they are, there's a Nobel Prize in it for you. If you know (and can show your work) they could have been otherwise, there is a Nobel Prize waiting for you. The reason you're not getting a Nobel Prize is because the idea that the laws of physics are fine-tuned is a thought experiment based on no evidence whatsoever.

(May 10, 2014 at 5:50 pm)Harris Wrote: It is exceptionally unlikely that this precision could have happened by chance.

To know the odds, you have to know what the possible range of values could have been and exactly how the different laws relate to each other. That is unknown. For all we know, it is inevitable for the laws of physics to be what they are, or very close to it. If there are trillions of universes, ones that are capable of harboring life may be very rare or very common, no one knows, including you.

Irrelevant factoids snipped here for brevity's sake.

(May 10, 2014 at 5:50 pm)Harris Wrote: It is rather hard to estimate what the probability is, but it is clearly very, very unlikely that those fine tunings, which allowed this Pyramid of complexities to arise, would be there as consequence of chance.

It is completely impossible to estimate what the probability is. For instance, we do know that the 'energy budget' of our universe is either exactly zero or so close to zero that we can't tell the difference. It may be impossible for a universe without an energy budget of zero or nearly so to be produced by a quantum vacuum fluctuation. If that is the case, it narrows the range of possible values for the physical constants dramatically: only physical constants consistent with a zero energy universe may be possible. It's entirely possible that our particular physical constants are highly probable, or even inevitable.

(May 10, 2014 at 5:50 pm)Harris Wrote: As we look at the details of nature, one thing stands out:
This is the order, the pattern, and the symmetry. Everything in the universe has a mathematically precise structure.

Mathematics is a language we invent to describe things precisely. If the universe were different and there were beings capable of inventing math in it, they would invent different math from ours. You're mistaking the map for the territory.

(May 10, 2014 at 5:50 pm)Harris Wrote: As one example, consider Double helix of DNA in living beings. Try to assess how likely is it that we find a protein by chance with all the amino acids in that Pre-biotic soup interacting with each other for, say, billions of years?

Proteins form spontaneously all the time in nature, so I'm going to go with 100%. If you meant the odds of DNA forming spontaneously, no one thinks that's how DNA first formed, so you're barking up the wrong tree.

(May 10, 2014 at 5:50 pm)Harris Wrote: “Welcome Collection” in London has a unique publication. This publication is 100 volumes long each with thousands of pages and text so small that it is barely legible. Together, these books represents only a single human genome. Only four chemicals or letters made this Genome, 3.2 billion of them. A disorder of only one letter in the sequence leads to serious illness in the living being.

Utter BS. The average human carries upwards of sixty mutations, most of which have no ill effect.

(May 10, 2014 at 5:50 pm)Harris Wrote: Question is how common or how rare are the functional sequences of amino acids among the big space of all possible amino acids there are?

The REAL question is how many times did a sequence of amino acids capable or replicating itself have to form out of all the hundreds of billions of potential life-bearing before natural selection would take effect to conserve sequences that are funtional and weed out sequences that aren't. The answer is: once.

(May 10, 2014 at 5:50 pm)Harris Wrote: Nobel laureate, organic chemist and a leader in origin of life studies, Professor deDuve writes in his excellent book, Tour of a Living Cell,

"If you equate the probability of the birth of a bacteria cell to chance assembly of its atoms, eternity will not suffice to produce one...”

That would be relevant if anyone thought that's how life started, instead of with a single self-replicating protein strand (probably RNA, which forms spontaneously under the right conditions).

(May 10, 2014 at 5:50 pm)Harris Wrote: Humans and all mammals have some 50,000 genes. That implies, as an order of magnitude estimate, some 50,000 to 100,000 proteins active in mammalian bodies. There are some 30 animal phyla on Earth by estimation. If the genomes of each animal phylum produced 100,000 proteins, and no proteins were common among any of the phyla (a fact we know to be false, but an assumption that makes our calculations favor the random evolutionary assumption), there would be (30 x 100,000) 3 million proteins in all life. Now let us consider the likelihood of these 3 million viable combinations of proteins forming by chance: Proteins are complex coils of several hundred amino acids.

Evolution is not guided by chance, it is guided by natural selection. You understand what you are arguing against so badly that you can't conceive what an effective argument against evolution would look like.

(May 10, 2014 at 5:50 pm)Harris Wrote: Take a typical protein to be a chain of 200 amino acids. The observed range is from less than 100 amino acids per protein to greater than 1000. Twenty commonly occurring amino acids join in varying combinations to produce the proteins of life. This means that the number of possible combinations of the amino acids in our model protein of 200 amino acids is 20 to the power of 200 (i.e. 20 multiplied by itself 200 times), or in the more usual 10-based system of numbers, approximately 10 to the power of 260 (i.e. the number one, followed by 260 zeros!). Nature has the option of choosing among the 10 to power of 260 possible proteins, the 3 million proteins of which all viable life is composed. In other words, for each one correct choice, there are 10 to power of 254 wrong choices! Randomness cannot have been the driving force behind the success of life.

It's called the theory of evolution, not the theory of randomness. Natural selection acts as a sieve that preserves variations that increase reproductive success and strains out variations that reduce it. This process basically encodes information about the reproductive fitness environment into organisms that survive to reproduce. It is a process with some random elements, not a random process.

(May 10, 2014 at 5:50 pm)Harris Wrote: Our understanding of statistics and molecular biology clearly supports the notion that there must have been a direction and a “Director” behind the success of life.

No serious scientist think that life is a matter of chance.

Yet you natter on as if they do.

(May 10, 2014 at 5:50 pm)Harris Wrote: Some modern Darwinists defend their case by asserting that about 98 percent of our DNA is similar to that of apes and that this difference is only a few spelling mistakes. Other say, more accurate figure is no more than 95 percent. However, considering that humans have three billion DNA information in each cell, even two per cent difference is actually sixty million spelling errors. Of course, this is not error, but 2,500 pages worth of new information. After all, we do share about 50 percent of our DNA with bananas, but that doesn’t mean that we are half banana.

In genetic terms, we are half banana. We share a common ancestor with bananas if you go back far enough, and most of the genetic similarity is what natural selection conserved as necessary to both bananas and humans.

(May 10, 2014 at 5:50 pm)Harris Wrote: Entire present-day science is based on the inductive reasoning. Using the same inductive reasoning, “one can compare the information stored in DNA molecule to a software program code only much more complex.”Bill Gates.

How much of your post did you mean to be filled with trivia we all already know?

(May 10, 2014 at 5:50 pm)Harris Wrote: We know information comes only from intelligent source.

That is assertion and begging the question, not knowledge. You have assumed your conclusion, sir. Or more likely, your copy pasta source has and you are just parroting their mistake.

(May 10, 2014 at 5:50 pm)Harris Wrote: When we see coded information in a DNA, the most logical thing to conclude, that too, has an intelligent source.

Only if you have established that information can only come from an intelligent source, AND that DNA is sufficiently analogous to a code (it is not actually a code, the components aren't arbitrary, they have chemical functionality, DNA is also analogous to a factory) to infer that the quality of being produced by intelligence applies. You have not supported either contention. Note: quoting someone agreeiing with you is not support, it is argument from authority.

(May 10, 2014 at 5:50 pm)Harris Wrote: “… If you look at the details of biochemistry and molecular biology, you might find a signature of some sort of designer. And that designer could well be a higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe.”
Richard Dawkins
The R. Dawkins Foundation
R. Dawkins Answers Questions

Yet no such signature has been found, which is why Dawkins is a teacher of evolutionary biology and not of creationism.

(May 10, 2014 at 5:50 pm)Harris Wrote: And among His Signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the difference of your languages and colours. Verily, in that are indeed signs for men of sound knowledge.
Ar Ruum (30)
-Verse 22-
Quran

If there's nothing that you wouldn't count as a sign that you're right, the assertion that the signs are on your side is literally meaningless.

(May 10, 2014 at 5:50 pm)Harris Wrote: And in the earth are neighbouring tracts, and gardens of vines, and green crops (fields etc.), and date-palms, growing out two or three from a single stem root, or otherwise (one stem root for every palm ), watered with the same water, yet some of them We make more excellent than others to eat. Verily, in these things, there are Ayat (proofs, evidences, lessons, signs) for the people who understand.
Ar Ra'd (13)
-Verse 4-
Quran

And He shows you (always) His Signs: then which of the Signs of Allah will ye deny?
Al Mu'min (40)
-Verse 81-
Quran


Nay, here are Signs self-evident in the hearts of those endowed with knowledge: and none but the unjust reject Our Signs.
Al 'Ankabuut (29)
-Verse 49-
Quran

You had me thinking you're an idiot with how badly you were mangling science, but now that you're quoting scripture, suddenly you'll be convincing, eh?