(December 13, 2015 at 10:29 am)athrock Wrote:(December 12, 2015 at 9:40 pm)Evie Wrote: No they're not dimwit.
If you think you can provide a sound premise by logical argumentation alone then you are clearly falling into circular reasoning - or question begging - which is fallacious by the way.....................
...........but if you don't know that that may explain why you're Christian. "The Bible is true because God wrote it, and we can trust God because he wrote the Bible."
In which post did I say that I am a Christian? Or have you assumed this simply because (like Aractus) I take issue with stupid arguments even when they are made by atheists?
It doesn't matter if you're a Christian or not, with respect to this particular argument. You're still plugging in one data-set (the earth's conditions for life) and assuming it's the only way. We simply don't know if life found elsewhere will be based on carbon (it's likely, because of carbon's properties) or DNA. On earth, DNA took over for two prior "precursor" chemicals, but we don't know if that's the process we'll find when we start seeing other forms of life, elsewhere. Earth may well be unique, or rare, in how life evolved here. I personally think it's common, and we'll find the process that happened here repeated elsewhere.
But all of that is irrelevant, in terms of this "God of the Gaps" discussion. We have zero reason to think that the Big Bang was "caused", in the Kalam (or Augistinian) sense, by some form of intelligence, or that the universal constants are anything but random settings or emergent properties of the very nature of particle physics. Inserting an intelligent agent into the mix is entirely unnecessary, a fabrication by those who seek to affirm their pre-set beliefs about God... perhaps someday we'll find true evidence of such a Prime Mover, but the reality is that until the moment we have such evidence, it's all Projection of our desires onto a universe that frankly couldn't care less about what our religious ideologies are.
Most important in this discussion is what has been pointed out to you repeatedly, that arguments themselves are not evidence. Arguments only tie together pieces of evidence into a (hopefully) cohesive whole-- the formulation of a hypothesis, and nothing more. Until you have enough evidence to build a predictive model that can be independently tested and confirmed, you have nothing even resembling a scientific theory, and you cannot expect us to take it seriously.
Intelligent Design proponents like to claim they have a working theory, but it fails at every level, including cohesion of ideas and the need for falsifiable hypotheses and predictive capabilities. This was demonstrated quite handily in the Kitzmiller case, in front of a hyper-conservative US District Judge who is a Christian and had no reason to side with the scientists other than the utter failure of the ID "experts" to demonstrate that their ideas held merit in the face of modern scientific knowledge and methodology.
Instead, the ID experts were forced to move the goalposts and claim that science's definition was too narrow (as you are doing)... the problem was that, once those goalposts were moved, things like astrology fell into their new definition of theory. There's a reason science operates as it does, and you ignore it at your peril. And you can expect us to call you out on it.
A Christian told me: if you were saved you cant lose your salvation. you're sealed with the Holy Ghost
I replied: Can I refuse? Because I find the entire concept of vicarious blood sacrifice atonement to be morally abhorrent, the concept of holding flawed creatures permanently accountable for social misbehaviors and thought crimes to be morally abhorrent, and the concept of calling something "free" when it comes with the strings of subjugation and obedience perhaps the most morally abhorrent of all... and that's without even going into the history of justifying genocide, slavery, rape, misogyny, religious intolerance, and suppression of free speech which has been attributed by your own scriptures to your deity. I want a refund. I would burn happily rather than serve the monster you profess to love.
I replied: Can I refuse? Because I find the entire concept of vicarious blood sacrifice atonement to be morally abhorrent, the concept of holding flawed creatures permanently accountable for social misbehaviors and thought crimes to be morally abhorrent, and the concept of calling something "free" when it comes with the strings of subjugation and obedience perhaps the most morally abhorrent of all... and that's without even going into the history of justifying genocide, slavery, rape, misogyny, religious intolerance, and suppression of free speech which has been attributed by your own scriptures to your deity. I want a refund. I would burn happily rather than serve the monster you profess to love.