Book of Acts: Pure Fantasy

[brotherlylove]

Because they're trying to explain a subject to an audience that understands little to nothing about the subject in a language that is understandable to the audience. When an apologist says "The information in DNA" he is talking about an entirely different thing in an entirely different context than a scientist who says "the information in DNA". Because apologetics is a con game, and science is not. I'm criticizing your apologetic bullshit, not their honest inquiry. Next.

It's disheartening to see you so confidently assert your misguided proposition as absolute fact, even using it as a club to ridicule and declare victory. I'm sorry, but you have no idea what you're talking about. I think I am seeing that the mode of your personality is to barrel into everything full steam as long as you perceive there are some tracks in front of you, not checking to see if they are made out of steel or rice paper.

http://bioinfo2.ugr.es/Publicaciones/pat_rec96.pdf

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I would suppose not, but I was wondering what you thought about it.

It is a thinly disguised argument from personal incredulity. Your assertion that something is impossible is effectively worthless and may mean only that you lack the imagination needed.

I agree that if any one of a billion variables in evolution had not happened or had happened in a different way that we would not be sitting here having this discussion....for the umpteenth time in my case.

DNA is a massively complex coding for 4 basic chemicals. That it could attain such complexity in a billion years surprises me not at all. In short, I do not need your 'god' as an explanation. Frankly, what you wrote sounds like little more than creationist drivel.

What do you make of this comment from ex-atheist Anthony Flew (one of the most influential atheists of the 20th century)

"Yes, I now think it does... almost entirely because of the DNA investigations. What I think the DNA material has done is that it has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of arrangements which are needed to produce [life], that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinary diverse elements to work together. It's the enormous subtlety of the ways they work together. The meeting of these two parts by chance is simply minute. It is all a matter of the enormous complexity by which the results were achieved, which looked to me like the work of intelligence."

I was particularly impressed with Gerry Schroeder's point-by-point refutation of what's called 'monkey theorem.' This idea, which has been presented in a number of forms and variations, defends the possibility of life arising by chance using the analogy of a multitude of monkeys banging away on computer keyboards and eventually ending up writing a Shakespearean sonnet.

Schroeder first referred to an experiment conducted by the British National Council of Arts. A computer was placed in a cage with six monkeys. After one month of hammering away at it, as well as using it as a bathroom, the monkeys produce fifty typed pages, but not a single word.

Schroeder noted that this was the case even though the shortest word in the English language is one letter. "A" is a word only if there is a space on either side of it. If we take it that the keyboard has thirty characters, the twenty-six letters and other symbols, then the likelihood of getting a one-letter word is thirty times thirty times thirty, which is 27,000. The likelihood of getting a one-letter word is one chance out of 27,000.

Schroeder then applied the probabilities to the sonnet analogy. "What's the chance of getting a Shakespearean sonnet?" he asked. He continued:

"All the sonnets are the same length. They're by definition fourteen lines long. I picked the one I knew the opening line for, 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?' I counted the number of letters; there are 488 letters in that sonnet. What's the likelihood of hammering away and getting 488 letters in the exact sequence as in 'Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?'? What you end up with is twenty-six multiplied by itself 488 times, or twenty-six to the 488th power. Or, in other words, in base ten, ten to the 690th."

"[Now] the number of particles in the universe, not grains of sand, I'm talking about protons, electrons, and neutrons, is ten to the eightieth power. Ten to the eightieth is one with eighty zeros after it. Ten to 690th is one with 690 zeros after it. There are not enough particles in the universe to write down the trials; you'd be off by a factor of ten to the six-hundredth power."

"If you took the entire universe and converted it into computer chips, forget the monkeys, each one weighing a millionth of a gram and had each computer chip able to spin out 488 trials at, say, a million times a second; if you turn the entire universe into these microcomputer chips and these chips were spinning a million times a second [producing] random letters, the number of trials you would get since the beginning of time would be ten to the ninetieth trials. It would be off again by a factor of ten to the six-hundredth power. You will never get a sonnet by chance. The universe would have to be ten to the six-hundredth times larger. Yet the world thinks the monkeys con do it every time."

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This is a good example of contradictory beliefs you Christians hold. On one hand you believe that life without specific material structure provided by the current universe is impossible. On the other hand, you believe that your life is independent of the material world (eternal life in heaven or hell). If you truly believe the latter, you simply cannot argue that no life would or could be possible without this specific set of universal constants

I never said all life anywhere, I said life here. Yes, there is a spiritual life, and physical life is empowered by spiritual life, otherwise you're just dealing with empty shells. You think the surface is the depth, staring dead into the veil. So, when I say life isn't possible otherwise, I will ammend it to mean, life as you generally understand it.

I don't believe that "nothing created everything". That's because the concept of "being created" simply cannot apply to the universe.

But, since you don't think that these constants are tunable, then you cannot say that they were fine-tuned.

You have faith in a self-creating Universe. I don't believe Universes happen by themselves. So, you actually do believe that nothing created everything, regardless of how you play with definitions.

God could have created it in any given configuration, so therefore they are finely tuned.

There is a timeless efficient cause. And that cause is the universe itself.

How is the Universe timeless? How did the Universe cause itself?

First of all, nothing can exist outside time. The very concept of existence is time-bound.

Something eternal by definition exists outside of time.

Secondly, that is an evasion, not an answer. If god is infinite and actual infinity cannot exist, then god cannot exist. If god exists then he is finite, i.e. limited and therefore not truly god but simply a superior being.

If you want to rehash this point, fine; Gods infinity is qualitative, not quantitative. It is referring to His superlative attributes, such as moral perfection, omnipotence, omnipresence, etc

You do realize that Aristotle is talking about concepts regarding actual infinite, don't you?

Any concept regarding an actual infinite would be complete and therefore not be infinite. Therefore, any concepts regarding actual infinites can only exist as potential infinites.

In that particular instance he was talking about potential infinities. Obviously you can't add anything to an actual infinity, can you?

Yes they are. Just because humans would never be able to count them all does not mean they are limited.

If you don't have an actually infinite amount of things, you are dealing with a finite number. A potential infinite is *potentially infinite* not *actually infinite*