(November 11, 2017 at 1:34 pm)alpha male Wrote:(November 11, 2017 at 11:01 am)emjay Wrote: On further reflection on this... if the technical definition of a delusion is relative to cultural/group norms, what would you call, if not a delusion, a belief system that displays, when viewed independently of any of that relativity, all the hallmarks (ie 'symptoms' as it were) of a belief system that is irrationally protected, maintained, and argued?
Then the belief that life can spontaneously arise from inanimate matter is a delusion. Every day there are billions of experiments on this, and it has never once happened - even with much better building blocks as starters than were presumably available in the past.
Chemicals react, that's one thing they do, they also bond and form more complex structures (molecules etc), so it's not that much of a leap to think that given those two things, with enough time and the right conditions, self-supporting structures could be formed... in other words, little steps, which eventually amount to something much bigger. I'm no expert on all that but that's enough for me; it's perfectly plausible to me based on how systems evolve in other respects. It's certainly more plausible to me than the earth only being six thousand years old despite all the geological evidence that suggest that can't be the case. But if I'm wrong, so what? ...if it's proven to be impossible, then I'll just wait for the next theory to be put forward, which will again likely be more plausible than a six thousand year old earth and a magical being creating life, despite all the evidence of evolution. And more to the point, the truth, or not, of that, has no bearing on the existence of God or which specific God out of the many that are posited, it would be if there was; so there's no way I could use that theory being falsified to promote a belief in God, even if I wanted to, because one does not speak to the other.
