Abiogenesis is impossible

[The Grand Nudger]

What do you think is happening in that clip Tracks?

[snowtracks]

stein proved God, and rd agreed.

[The Grand Nudger]

Excellent, so, if you would be so kind as to prove god, using steins argument, so that we can all see it and agree with it?

[Jenny A]

Excuse me? What part of "it's just self evident! Shut up!" is logical to you?

as it turns out, even your top echelon guy is not that sure of himself anymore. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-SuMWakNxI

You didn't listen to what he said did you? He said, when pushed, that it is possible that a highly developed civilization might have "seeded" life here and that life may have evolved from that seeding and that if that were so there might be some genetic markers.

What he was very clear about is that we don't know exactly how life began. Not knowing is not a sign of the existence of god. It's a reason to find out.

[Ravenshire]

stein proved God, and rd agreed.

Stein quote mined Dawkins. Stein is a lying fuck!

---

the biblical God invites a testing that's based on logic and testable facts which will result in a biblical faith based on objective evidence.

Bullshit. Buy-bull gawd says not to test him.

[The Grand Nudger]

Lets not give Tracks such an easy time with the shit and run...lol.

[Jackalope]

stein proved God, and rd agreed.

Bullfuckingshit.

[Jenny A]

stein proved God, and rd agreed.

No. You listened to voice over and not what Dawkins actually said. Even as unfairly edited as the video was, and it was, that's not what Dawkins said.

[Cyberman]

as it turns out, even your top echelon guy is not that sure of himself anymore.

Why don't we ask the man himself, rather than go with a notoriously quotemined version?

Toward the end of his interview with me, Stein asked whether I could think of any circumstances whatsoever under which intelligent design might have occurred. It's the kind of challenge I relish, and I set myself the task of imagining the most plausible scenario I could. I wanted to give ID its best shot, however poor that best shot might be. I must have been feeling magnanimous that day, because I was aware that the leading advocates of Intelligent Design are very fond of protesting that they are not talking about God as the designer, but about some unnamed and unspecified intelligence, which might even be an alien from another planet. Indeed, this is the only way they differentiate themselves from fundamentalist creationists, and they do it only when they need to, in order to weasel their way around church/state separation laws. So, bending over backwards to accommodate the IDiots ("oh NOOOOO, of course we aren't talking about God, this is SCIENCE") and bending over backwards to make the best case I could for intelligent design, I constructed a science fiction scenario. Like Michael Ruse (as I surmise) I still hadn't rumbled Stein, and I was charitable enough to think he was an honestly stupid man, sincerely seeking enlightenment from a scientist. I patiently explained to him that life could conceivably have been seeded on Earth by an alien intelligence from another planet (Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel suggested something similar -- semi tongue-in-cheek). The conclusion I was heading towards was that, even in the highly unlikely event that some such 'Directed Panspermia' was responsible for designing life on this planet, the alien beings would THEMSELVES have to have evolved, if not by Darwinian selection, by some equivalent 'crane' (to quote Dan Dennett). My point here was that design can never be an ULTIMATE explanation for organized complexity. Even if life on Earth was seeded by intelligent designers on another planet, and even if the alien life form was itself seeded four billion years earlier, the regress must ultimately be terminated (and we have only some 13 billion years to play with because of the finite age of the universe). Organized complexity cannot just spontaneously happen. That, for goodness sake, is the creationists' whole point, when they bang on about eyes and bacterial flagella! Evolution by natural selection is the only known process whereby organized complexity can ultimately come into being. Organized complexity -- and that includes everything capable of designing anything intelligently -- comes LATE into the universe. It cannot exist at the beginning, as I have explained again and again in my writings.

This 'Ultimate 747' argument, as I called it in The God Delusion, may or may not persuade you. That is not my concern here. My concern here is that my science fiction thought experiment -- however implausible -- was designed to illustrate intelligent design's closest approach to being plausible. I was most emphaticaly NOT saying that I believed the thought experiment. Quite the contrary. I do not believe it (and I don't think Francis Crick believed it either). I was bending over backwards to make the best case I could for a form of intelligent design. And my clear implication was that the best case I could make was a very implausible case indeed. In other words, I was using the thought experiment as a way of demonstrating strong opposition to all theories of intelligent design.

Well, you will have guessed how Mathis/Stein handled this. I won't get the exact words right (we were forbidden to bring in recording devices on pain of a $250,000 fine, chillingly announced by some unnamed Gauleiter before the film began), but Stein said something like this. "What? Richard Dawkins BELIEVES IN INTELLIGENT DESIGN." "Richard Dawkins BELIEVES IN ALIENS FROM OUTER SPACE." I can't remember whether this was the moment in the film where we were regaled with another Lord Privy Seal cut to an old science fiction movie with some kind of android figure — that may have been used in the service of trying to ridicule Francis Crick (again, dutiful titters from the partisan audience).

[Esquilax]

stein proved God, and rd agreed.

Okay, so Stimbo just posted writing direct from Dawkins saying that what you just claimed was wrong, and that Stein was lying. Now I'd like you to admit that you were wrong, and retract this claim of yours.

Shouldn't be hard, since you're interested in true things and honest debate, no?