Abiogenesis is impossible; the P Values are so ridiculous that they would just be rounded to zero in any other field of Science. But because Secular Scientists are rooting so hard for a naturalistic explanation for life they will accept it no matter how improbable. Could you imagine if some Scientist said, “Hey I figured the chances of there being a God is the same as guessing a 5000 digit pin number on your first try (the chances of Abiogenesis happening), we should totally believe in God now!”? He’d be laughed at, but when Scientists say they believe in Abiogenesis, even though the odds of it happening are the same as guessing a 5000 digit pin number on your first try, they get published in Journals. It’s absurd.
As to the open system thing, I am well aware the Earth is an open system, but energy is only necessary for life, it is not sufficient. So the fact that the Earth is an open system really is not sufficient to get life. As I point out (and as you did when you mentioned photosynthesis), there has to be a mechanism already in place to convert the sun’s energy to a form that can be used by the organism. These mechanisms are built using the energy converted by the same mechanisms in other cells. It’s just like saying, “Well if I let a bull out in a china shop we can expect new china to be produced because the shop is now an open system.” No, you would only expect all of your existing china to be destroyed. Now if you tied the bull up and had him turn the crank on a potter’s wheel you could start making new pottery. Until this mechanism is in place, the raw energy from the bull only breaks things down.
Atheism is actually classified as a religion using the “Seven Degrees of Religion” which are used in archeology. However, that is probably a topic for a different thread.
There are Young Earth Scientists who work in every one of those disciplines, and scientific fact and Truth are not based on consensus as I am sure you know. So I guess I don’t really see your point.
(December 12, 2010 at 4:41 am)chatpilot Wrote: Never mind the age of the Earth, there are plenty of civilizations that are known to be older than 7,000 years old. To believe that the Earth is about 7,000 years old is a ridiculous notion.
In Historical Science you never say you "know" anything for sure. It's all based on circumstantial evidence that requires interpretation. This interpretation is made using a framework. The framework that is used to interpret those older dates assumes no global flood occurred. When a global flood is taken into account, the evidence actually puts no civilizations prior to 6000 years.
Brush up on your logic. In a two possibility model, evidence against one possible answer is evidence for the other option. It’s called disjunctive reasoning and it is completely valid. Guys on your side of the aisle (i.e. Darwin and Dawkins) have admitted that the two options are either naturalistic means or supernatural creation. Darwin had no concrete evidence for his theory; he just tried to use evidence against Creation to support it. The fact that his theory still has no concrete evidence and life arising from a single common ancestor who also arose from non-living matter is impossible is evidence confirming supernatural creation. Once you get to the point where you admit supernatural creation occurred, we can then talk as to why it has to be the God of the Bible. Let’s get to step one before we start talking about step 6 or 7 shall we?
Ok, so I promised Darkest Angel and Sam that I would talk about Mitochondrial Eve and Information Theory, so here they are.
MITOCHONDRIAL EVE:
We can make assumptions about when Mitochondrial Eve lived by using mitochondrial clock rates that assume Evolution occurred, or we can actually observe how fast this molecular clock ticks and extrapolate it back to when Eve lived. When we assume Evolution occurred, we assume that mutations occur every 600 generations, which puts Eve at about 200,000-250,000 years ago. However when this rate is actually empirically measured, we find that mutations actually occur around ever 40 generations. According to the article in Science this would make Eve only 6000 years old. Or course this lines up perfectly with the Biblical Account of Creation, so this method is thrown out even though it is based on observation, and the other method is accepted even though it is not based on observation.
Sources
“Mitochondrial Eve: the plot thickens.” From Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 12
“Calibrating the Mitochondrial Clock" from Science 279
“A high observed substitution rate in the human mitochondrial DNA control region” from Nature Genetics Vol. 15
INFORMATION THEORY
Ok, Sam. I didn’t get much to work with because I don’t have all the articles you referenced. However, I did notice that the articles you referred me to were dealing with an increase in genetic or chemical material, but you referred to this as an increase in information. The two terms are not synonymous. Information is a tough thing to define but an easy thing to recognize. The actual definition for information is a bit technical but a short definition that is often used and works most of the time is, “Specified Complexity”.
I think the best way to recognize information and put a general quantity on it is to think of books. Each book contains information; the information is not contained within the actual ink or letters on the page, but rather their specificity. I can take the words in a book and convert them into Morse code (or brail) so a blind person could understand them. I did not change the amount of information present because its specificity did not change. However, I did change the manner in which the information is transmitted. I could also buy a second copy of my favorite book but also not increase the total amount of information present even though I doubled the amount of letters present. It is for this reason that examples of Gene Duplication or even adding new Chemical pairs to genes are not examples of increased information. Now if you could find a mutation that altered an amino acid sequence that actually caused the sequence to fold into a different protein and this protein then helped the organism survive we’d be moving in the right direction. However, this has never been observed to happen once, much less the majority of the time and millions and millions of times like Evolutionary Theory would require. So all the examples of supposed Darwinian Evolution are no different than claiming, “This ball can make it to the top of that mountain on its own! Watch!”, and then proceeding to roll the ball down the hill. Most people would not accept that claim based upon the lack of observed evidence to support it, just like the majority of Americans do not accept Evolution because of the lack of observed evidence to support it.
For more information (pun intended) on the subject I’d encourage you to read the following peer-reviewed article by Dr. Werner Gitt who is one of the World’s leading experts on Information Theory.
[url] http://creation.com/information-science-and-biology[/url]
