By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close

Forums - General Discussion - Ben Stein to take on Darwinism on April 18

bobacob said:
Yeah ill say that it is lacking:D a membrane bound life cannot reproduce its DNA to make RNA without the use of enzymes.

phospholipids can form bilayers and micelles quite easily alone. This is where the chicken or the egg thing comes into play, I dont understand where transport proteins, transcription factors, DNA polymerases and intra membrane content comes to stabilize the cell, let alone stabilization of DNA to stop degredation.:S

Even if the cell itself were to be alive it wouldnt even have the necessary DNA requirements to to sustain its own reproduction let alone contain the enzymes to commence division.

I guess this is where the god arguement comes into play, I am a fan of procrastination.

==> Actually, people think the firsts RNA possess some autoreplicative properties even without the presence of proteins. The problem is that to build a closed environnement u need phopholipides and phospholipides are not know to be generated spontaneously. that a big problem I agree.

But even if u believe in God u dont answer to the question :

 Where God comes ?



Time to Work !

Around the Network

I wasn't saying whether i thought god was real or not, i was just merely saying that when people do not know how to explain events or phenomina god usually pops up somewhere along the line.



Endure. In enduring, grow strong.

ID is an unprovable idea. If it belongs anywhere in school, it belongs in a philosophy class. It isn't science. If people want to teach that crap to their kids, fine, but in school the kids need to be taught what we have actually discovered. Presidential candidates being exceptions, most of the time being ignorant just limits your options.



Thank god for the disable signatures option.

I'll watch it looks interesting, could be true. Gotta see the film to find out. Luckily for me im going into stocks and bonds, (yes I know todays market blows) so my future can't be harmed by watching!



Xbox Live Gamertag - Deathscythe X

AIM SN - Alexie Di Onie

 

Profcrab said:
ID is an unprovable idea. If it belongs anywhere in school, it belongs in a philosophy class. It isn't science. If people want to teach that crap to their kids, fine, but in school the kids need to be taught what we have actually discovered. Presidential candidates being exceptions, most of the time being ignorant just limits your options.

You know, philosophy should be taught in school, it just to help kids think better.



A flashy-first game is awesome when it comes out. A great-first game is awesome forever.

Plus, just for the hell of it: Kelly Brook at the 2008 BAFTAs

Around the Network

Intelligent Design isn't philosophy. It's theology. Which still has a place in school, but not in the way Ben Stein would like.



I'm a mod, come to me if there's mod'n to do. 

Chrizum is the best thing to happen to the internet, Period.

Serves me right for challenging his sales predictions!

Bet with dsisister44: Red Steel 2 will sell 1 million within it's first 365 days of sales.

You know what I find laughable, the fact that people say 'If life can come about by chance why can't humans create life in the lab?'. The reason why its laughable is because it is exactly equivalent to saying 'If earthquakes can come about by chance why can't humans create earthquakes?'

The answer is nature is pretty damned powerful. We can't do what it can.



The movie came out yesterday and I went to see it.
It made over 1 mil. on Friday - pretty good for a documentary.

I thought the movie was interesting, but now funny. i was disappointed by this fact.

The movie is about how the science community rejecting anything religious - including intelligent design -pretty convincing.

Then the movie shows some historical events (like holocaust) that was inspired by evolution theory. - very moving.

It also shows the positive side of intelligent design and pretty convincing scientific evidences - but nothing i can really defend cause I'm not a scientist.

Pretty informative. I recommend it!
but do remember, it's not funny. Except, of course, Ben Stein's voice



timmah said:
Escherichia said:

Is Ben Stein a creationist? I thought he was smarter than that. But wait, he's a comedian so he probably is. 

Then again after seeing the trailer I'm not so sure. 

 


Sorry, but comments like that really bother me as a creationist. 

Cmon, seriously. Are you that immature?? You don't have to be stupid to believe in creationism, and I am truly bothered by comments like this. There are many brilliant people that believe in creationism, and many brilliant people that beileve in evolution. It's simply a difference in point of view. I concider myself to be of decent intelligence, and I'm a creationist. Your immature comment suggest, however, that I have to be unintelligent to believe in creation rather than evolution. On the contrary, there are many intelligent arguments to be made by creationists...

DNA: When scientists look for proof of intelligent life in outer space, they point their radio telescopes at the sky and search for ANY repeating, logical 'code' in the radio waves. It could even be a simple code, but science says even that would be solid evidence for intelligent life, as nature cannot produce such codes on it's own. DNA, on the other hand is the most complex code known to man, how then, is that not concidered to indicate the possiblity of intelligence behind the code?

DNA could have evolved gradually from a simpler replicator; RNA is a likely candidate, since it can catalyze its own duplication (Jeffares et al. 1998; Leipe et al. 1999; Poole et al. 1998). The RNA itself could have had simpler precursors, such as peptide nucleic acids (Böhler et al. 1995). A deoxyribozyme can both catalyze its own replication and function to cleave RNA -- all without any protein enzymes (Levy and Ellington 2003).

Then how could information, such as in DNA, assemble itself?

  1. This question is based on some major misconceptions (addressed below). Its overriding logical error, however, is that it is an argument from ignorance. One's inability to find an answer to a question does not imply that the question has no answer.

  2. Information is not meaning and does not, per se, imply any special structure or function. Any arrangement implies information; the information is how the arrangement is described. If a new arrangement occurs, whether spontaneously or from the outside, new information is assembled in the process. Even if the arrangement consists of shattering a glass into tiny pieces, that means assembling new information.

  3. Nothing needs to assemble itself. Evolution and abiogenesis do not exclude outside influences; on the contrary, such outside influences are essential. In abiogenesis, it is observed that complex organic molecules easily form spontaneously due to little more than basic chemistry and energy from the sun or from the earth's interior. In evolution, information from the environment is communicated to genomes indirectly via natural selection against varieties that do not do well in that environment.

The laws of physics:

Newton's first law of motion: This states that 'an object at rest will stay at rest, and an object in motion will stay in motion UNLESS something acts upon it. The 'big bang' theory has absolutely no way of explaining this. It claims that an infinitely small, infinitely compact ball of matter exploded WITHOUT anything acting upon it, on it's own. This is completely contradictory to this well known law of physics.

Newton's third law of motion: This states (in a nutshell) that For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In other words, for a 4000 pound load to be lifted, it would have to have a force of 4000 pounds or more pulling it upwards. Where, then is the action that caused the 'big bang' to happen?? Where did the infinite energy required to explode a stagnent object of infinite density that had been there for an infinite amount of time come from without some kind of 'creator' force?? Physics cannot answer this without the inclusion of an infinite amount of energy at one end of the formula to create the energy at the other.

  1. Formation of the universe from nothing need not violate conservation of energy. The gravitational potential energy of a gravitational field is a negative energy. When all the gravitational potential energy is added to all the other energy in the universe, it might sum to zero (Guth 1997, 9-12,271-276; Tryon 1973).

 

The big bang is supported by a great deal of evidence:

Einstein's general theory of relativity implies that the universe cannot be static; it must be either expanding or contracting.

The more distant a galaxy is, the faster it is receding from us (the Hubble law). This indicates that the universe is expanding. An expanding universe implies that the universe was small and compact in the distant past.

The big bang model predicts that cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation should appear in all directions, with a blackbody spectrum and temperature about 3 degrees K. We observe an exact blackbody spectrum with a temperature of 2.73 degrees K.

The CMB is even to about one part in 100,000. There should be a slight unevenness to account for the uneven distribution of matter in the universe today. Such unevenness is observed, and at a predicted amount.

The big bang predicts the observed abundances of primordial hydrogen, deuterium, helium, and lithium. No other models have been able to do so.

The big bang predicts that the universe changes through time. Because the speed of light is finite, looking at large distances allows us to look into the past. We see, among other changes, that quasars were more common and stars were bluer when the universe was younger.

Note that most of these points are not simply observations that fit with the theory; the big bang theory predicted them.

Inconsistencies are not necessarily unresolvable. The clumpiness of the universe, for example, was resolved by finding unevenness in the CMB. Dark matter has been observed in the effects it has on star and galaxy motions; we simply do not know what it is yet.

There are still unresolved observations. For example, we do not understand why the expansion of the universe seems to be speeding up. However, the big bang has enough supporting evidence behind it that it is likely that new discoveries will add to it, not overthrow it. For example, inflationary universe theory proposes that the size of the universe increased exponentially when the universe was a fraction of a second old (Guth 1997). It was proposed to explain why the big bang did not create large numbers of magnetic monopoles. It also accounts for the observed flatness of space, and it predicted quantitatively the pattern of unevenness of the CMB. Inflationary theory is a significant addition to big bang theory, but it is an extension of big bang theory, not a replacement.

The law of entropy: This law is fully accepted in the scientific community, and states that nature takes a natural course from order to disorder (stars go from burning fission reactions to dead and lifeless over time) without the introduction of an outside force (such as life, a plant turning random molecules into it's cells, or humans turning dirt into bricks into buildings). By this law, it should be impossible for life (perfect order) to come from non-living nature (pure disorder, chaos).

Entropy also states that all differences in energy will equalize themselves naturally over time, eventually becoming inert. (If you turn the heat off in your house at night, it will cool inside to the temperature outside). This makes the big bang impossible without a HUGE outside energy source that is completely independant. Since time is concidered to be infinite, the matter at the center of the 'big bang' would have to be there for an infinite amount of time before exploding. The law of entropy says that the mass would have been in complete equilibrium, no one part would have been at a different energy level/temperature than another, making a reaction or explosion impossible without outside force.

 

The assumption that every event has a cause, although common in our experience, is not necessarily universal. The apparent lack of cause for some events, such as radioactive decay, suggests that there might be exceptions. There are also hypotheses, such as alternate dimensions of time or an eternally oscillating universe, that allow a universe without a first cause.

  1. By definition, a cause comes before an event. If time began with the universe, "before" does not even apply to it, and it is logically impossible that the universe be caused.

  2. This claim raises the question of what caused God. If, as some claim, God does not need a cause, then by the same reasoning, neither does the universe.

It raises the question, cosmologists cannot explain where space, time, energy, and the laws of physics came from.

  1. Some questions are harder to answer than others. But although we do not have a full understanding of the origin of the universe, we are not completely in the dark. We know, for example, that space comes from the expansion of the universe. The total energy of the universe may be zero. Cosmologists have hypotheses for the other questions that are consistent with observations (Hawking 2001). For example, it is possible that there is more than one dimension of time, the other dimension being unbounded, so there is no overall origin of time. Another possibility is that the universe is in an eternal cycle without beginning or end. Each big bang might end in a big crunch to start a new cycle (Steinhardt and Turok 2002) or at long intervals, our universe collides with a mirror universe, creating the universe anew (Seife 2002).

    One should keep in mind that our experiences in everyday life are poor preparation for the extreme and bizarre conditions one encounters in cosmology. The stuff cosmologists deal with is very hard to understand. To reject it because of that, though, would be to retreat into the
    argument from incredulity.

  2. Creationists cannot explain origins at all. Saying "God did it" is not an explanation, because it is not tied to any objective evidence. It does not rule out any possibility or even any impossibility. It does not address questions of "how" and "why," and it raises questions such as "which God?" and "how did God originate?" In the explaining game, cosmologists are far out in front.

s just a brief synopsis of the many credible arguments that can be made for intelligent design. It's not possible to 'prove' either theory, because nobody (but God if you believe in him) was there to see & document what actually happened, but reasonable arguments can be made for either belief.

But I'm apparantly stupid, just like all other 'creationists', so just keep thinking like you do. It's virtually impossible to have an intelligent, civil discussion with people who think of themselves or their group to be superior.

/rant

Edit: @Kasz216, read my post, then come back and tell me there's no 'proof' for my position. We're not just a bunch of blind morons who don't look at the evidence, we just see the evidence somewhat differently than you. The condescension is totally unneccesary.


Ye ....

 That was a fun first post from my part, hi.



I saw the movie and it was good.