RE: If evidence for god is in abundance, why is faith necessary?
November 2, 2017 at 5:49 pm
(This post was last modified: November 2, 2017 at 6:07 pm by speedyj1992.)
Cheers and come again soon!
Best of luck with all your endeavors!
I appreciate your chipper attitude in this - I deleted the quotes as I replied to make scrolling less painful in this (something I need to work on as I post here). Ok, I'll respond in order:
It's unfortunate that the other believers on this forum aren't representing Christ well, so I'm going to try and be better.
Regarding your point on God creating time and all - first, I think because your comment about not caring about what people said in the Bible might make it harder to have a discussion, because that's where I'm drawing my points from. With that said, the link you posted (and I cannot WAIT to have enough posts under my belt to post links!) is a pretty good link for verses on God being omniscient according to the Bible. To actually answer your questions: the first verse there is probably the best verse in the OT regarding God's sovereignty. Feel free to look up verses on this, as well. So we can conclude that, Biblically, God created EVERYTHING, which means not only did God create time, but God created the rules of our universe, aka cause-and-effect. If God exists out of time, and is sovereign over everything, it would make sense God can do what He wants, when He wants, meaning He can be a part of time even though He transcends time.
I never said "magic" was what God used to create, and I don't use terminology like that on purpose. I actually did peek into Hoyle and even a pretty good (but still not entirely convincing) argument against him, and to make a long story really short, I agree, the man did not do a completely thorough calculation. The experiments that have been done have shown that it is within the realm of possibility for amino acids to form themselves, and even for a base pair gene to be formed from that - but highly unlikely. And that's just 1, and the simplest organisms that exist, the archea (which evolutionists believe we came from) are composed of HUNDREDS of base pair proteins. The odds of 1 forming on its own is 1/100,000,000,000,000,000,000 - 1 in 10^20. The odds of something happening is 1/10^50, as established by Lecomte duNuoy (I THINK that's how you spell his name), which is actually very liberal (it's 1 trillion times 1 trillion times 1 trillion times 1 hundred trillion), and the number of electrons in the known universe is estimated to be 1/10^80. If it's 1/10^20 times EACH base pair in an archea to form, and they're composed of HUNDREDS of base pairs, even in an ideal situation, even if we're talking about every planet and every moon and every asteroid and interactions that increase the odds of something happening just by happening more (which is not how probability works, you flip a coin, you're just as likely to get heads or tails each time you flip it), there's no way we can get down to that 1/10^50 that would still be possible, albeit barely. So, TLDR, I have done the math, and from what I can tell, based on what we know, it's not possible based on probability science that an award-winning scientist came up with. Even when you take into account the many combinations of base pairs you can get from an organism with hundreds of base pairs, that still gets you hundreds of zeroes.
Hoyle never accepted the God of the Bible, even if he did say that we couldn't have formed from nothing, which indicates he wasn't entirely biased because otherwise he would've advocated for the God of the Bible. I say that because people who DO accept Jesus are forever changed, and act like it, which is frustrating because there are people who claim to have accepted Him and their actions clearly don't reflect that. I wouldn't consider them true believers - if you really believed the world was going to end tomorrow, you wouldn't make plans for a week from now. You might still instinctively notice yourself acting like the world is going to go on beyond tomorrow, but as soon as you notice it or someone points it out to you, you'll modify your behavior.
Best of luck with all your endeavors!
I appreciate your chipper attitude in this - I deleted the quotes as I replied to make scrolling less painful in this (something I need to work on as I post here). Ok, I'll respond in order:
It's unfortunate that the other believers on this forum aren't representing Christ well, so I'm going to try and be better.
Regarding your point on God creating time and all - first, I think because your comment about not caring about what people said in the Bible might make it harder to have a discussion, because that's where I'm drawing my points from. With that said, the link you posted (and I cannot WAIT to have enough posts under my belt to post links!) is a pretty good link for verses on God being omniscient according to the Bible. To actually answer your questions: the first verse there is probably the best verse in the OT regarding God's sovereignty. Feel free to look up verses on this, as well. So we can conclude that, Biblically, God created EVERYTHING, which means not only did God create time, but God created the rules of our universe, aka cause-and-effect. If God exists out of time, and is sovereign over everything, it would make sense God can do what He wants, when He wants, meaning He can be a part of time even though He transcends time.
I never said "magic" was what God used to create, and I don't use terminology like that on purpose. I actually did peek into Hoyle and even a pretty good (but still not entirely convincing) argument against him, and to make a long story really short, I agree, the man did not do a completely thorough calculation. The experiments that have been done have shown that it is within the realm of possibility for amino acids to form themselves, and even for a base pair gene to be formed from that - but highly unlikely. And that's just 1, and the simplest organisms that exist, the archea (which evolutionists believe we came from) are composed of HUNDREDS of base pair proteins. The odds of 1 forming on its own is 1/100,000,000,000,000,000,000 - 1 in 10^20. The odds of something happening is 1/10^50, as established by Lecomte duNuoy (I THINK that's how you spell his name), which is actually very liberal (it's 1 trillion times 1 trillion times 1 trillion times 1 hundred trillion), and the number of electrons in the known universe is estimated to be 1/10^80. If it's 1/10^20 times EACH base pair in an archea to form, and they're composed of HUNDREDS of base pairs, even in an ideal situation, even if we're talking about every planet and every moon and every asteroid and interactions that increase the odds of something happening just by happening more (which is not how probability works, you flip a coin, you're just as likely to get heads or tails each time you flip it), there's no way we can get down to that 1/10^50 that would still be possible, albeit barely. So, TLDR, I have done the math, and from what I can tell, based on what we know, it's not possible based on probability science that an award-winning scientist came up with. Even when you take into account the many combinations of base pairs you can get from an organism with hundreds of base pairs, that still gets you hundreds of zeroes.
Hoyle never accepted the God of the Bible, even if he did say that we couldn't have formed from nothing, which indicates he wasn't entirely biased because otherwise he would've advocated for the God of the Bible. I say that because people who DO accept Jesus are forever changed, and act like it, which is frustrating because there are people who claim to have accepted Him and their actions clearly don't reflect that. I wouldn't consider them true believers - if you really believed the world was going to end tomorrow, you wouldn't make plans for a week from now. You might still instinctively notice yourself acting like the world is going to go on beyond tomorrow, but as soon as you notice it or someone points it out to you, you'll modify your behavior.
(October 23, 2017 at 6:26 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote: When you calculated the odds, did you take into account the number of opportunities? If I enter a lottery with the odds of 1 in a million, on average I'll win once for every million tickets I buy. If I buy a million tickets, I'm almost certain to win...if the people running the lottery are smart, the ticket price will be over a dollar if the prize is a million dollars.
After it became possible for life as we know it to exist on Earth towards the end of the Hadean eon. Oceans formed about 4.4 billion years ago, the earliest known life forms detected (there are contenders for earlier) existed about 3.48 billion years ago. So several hundred million years after the oceans formed, we get life. Assuming the odds you give are calculated correctly, how many opportunities do you suppose there were, around the world, over several hundred million years, for it to occur. It could easily have been a billion per day; or a trillion per day, or more. Those 50 zeroes don't mean anything if you don't know the number of opportunities there were for it to happen.
As far as experiments go, spontaneous generation of RNA chains of up to 120 nucleotides has been observed in water without enzymes or inorganic catalysts. What are the odds if you start from the knowledge that RNA chains up to 120 nucleotides long are already present?
My response
*Yes, I did actually - the math I did was actually throughout ALL of time, in the ENTIRE UNIVERSE, as opposed to just earth, which are more liberal than the numbers you gave me by a longshot. Regarding probability, yes, if the lottery is POSSIBLE to win (and it's always possible to win the lottery), with enough tries, yes, the lottery could be won. But we're talking about an event that is statistically impossible based on what I've read. With that said ...
If we need to form an organism that's composed of 100 base pairs (the smallest number of base pairs in any known organism is 500), and we are talking about the experiments where the odds are that 1 base pair will form at 1/10^20, then the odds of 1 of these organisms forming all on its own would be 1/10^2,000. If we can get 1950, multiplying that times 1/10^2000 would get the realm of possibility. Now let's say there are 100 QUATRILLION tries at this happening per SECOND on every PLANETARY BODY in the entire known universe - there are roughly 10^25 planets. You multiply that times 1 million and you get the number of moons, asteroids, and such that are not planets, and you get 10^31. Multiply that times 100 quatrillion (10^17) times 3600 (number of seconds per hour) and multiply that times 24 (let's round way up for simplicity's sake) and you get 10,000, aka 10^4, and let's multiply that by 1000 as opposed to 365 to keep the numbers simple, and you get 10^7 for the number of seconds per year (rounded way up). With a universe that's roughly 21.4 BILLION years old, rounded up to 100 billion, aka 10^11, and you multiply that times the original 10^17 tries and then again times 10^31 for EACH PLANETARY BODY IN THE UNIVERSE and you get 10^59. Which are extra liberal numbers, and yet we're still nearly 1900 ZEROES shy of the realm of possibility so far. Even with 10^46 combinations possible for this organism, you still get 10^105, 1845 zeroes too short, and even if you take into the equation (literally, for once) that leftover enzymes can interact and make things 1 quatrillion times more likely, then you STILL only get 10^200, times 1/10^2000 and you get 1/10^1800.
So, you said that "a requirement of an abiogenesis hypothesis is that it be POSSIBLE". This is the only one I know of in terms of a hypothesis that has actually been experimented on (and presenting a theory without an experiment is just a theory, it doesn't really hold much value beyond being an idea), so if you have another that has an experiment involved, please let me know. I'd love to take a look.
speedyj1992 Wrote:And I don't see gravity as anything other than an impersonal force. But your claim is that we live in a chaos-driven universe, and right now, we have no current explanation with scientific backing behind it as to how organic matter could've come about within that aforementioned realm of possibility (which is highly liberal) - if, as you put it, organic material hasn't been around since the beginning of time, it must've formed somewhere. Where do you believe that happened, and how, since our current attempts at recreating it aren't working and would require something that isn't within the realm of possibility based on current research?
Repeating the same assertion over and over doesn't make it truer. There is no shortage of natural explanations for abiogenesis, just a shortage of a way to determine which particular explanation is most likely given that the evidence is nearly 4 billion years old, and therefor scarce. We may never know with certainty which abiogenesis scenario is correct, or if it's one we haven't yet thought of. But a requirement of an abiogenesis hypothesis is that it be possible.
I certainly did not 'put it' that organic matter has been around since the beginning of time. Where did you get that idea? Search 'timeline of the universe' on Wikipedia if you want to know when and where various types of matter came into being. The short version is that carbon is formed by the collision of three helium nuclei in the cores of large stars, distributed when they explode. Star formation started occurring about 560 million years after the Initial Expansion, and organic matter (molecules containing carbon) would have existed thereafter.
