Re: Making money from Java

"Judson McClendon" <judmc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:DjAnf.4839
>
> Just consider for a moment. In the Biblical account of Creation, Adam and
> Eve were created as mature humans. The plant and animal life was also
> created in a state that was already self sufficient. To my mind, this
> seems a logical necessity, and consistent, if Biblical Creation is true.
> Okay, if this account is true, then man and his environment were created
> in a state *as if* they had been there for a long time. The one-week-old
> universe had *the appearance of age*. Further, if this account is true,
> then there would be *no basis* on which to form conclusions about
> processes that may have produced those conditions, because they never
> happened. All such reasoning would be fallacious by definition, therefore
> pointless, useless, and *almost certain* to be misleading. This is not a
> 'trick' to get around scientific theories about origins, it is just a
> simple fact that, if Biblical Creation is true, then human theories about
> origins *cannot* be based on physical evidence. Therefore, arguing
> *against* Creationism with "evidence" that couldn't possibly be of any
> value if Creationism is true, is hardly a rational thing, when you have no
> idea how else life could have originated in the first place. The same
> cannot be said for physical evidence that argues *for* Creationism,
> because God very well may have left evidence to tell us that creation
> could not have happened by accident, or by natural processes. I believe
> such is the case with the ubiquitous Polonium halos in granite appear to
> be a kind of 'Divine Signature' of instantaneous creation. I believe the
> same thing about the so-called "Bible Codes". The only thing you can
> deduce from them is that it took God to put them there.

In this form of reasoning, you're assuming what you want to conclude,
and then arrive at the conclusion you wanted. I.e.:

1. Assume the bible is true.
2. [doesn't matter what goes here.]
3. Therefore, the bible is true.

The same logic-game can be played the other way too:

1. Assume the bible is false.
2. [ It doesn't matter if God descends from the skies and reveals himself to
us once and for all. ]
3. Given the above assumption, we can conclude the bible is false.

What CAN be done here, without any "logic tricks" like the above, is to
make no assumption about the Bible, and then try to conclude whether the
bible is true or false. I haven't done this myself, but from what I
understand, other people HAVE tried to do a logical analysis of the bible,
and they've found self-contradicting passages, which means that the bible is
logically false.

Note that if you have a book with a million true statements and a single
false statement, the from the view of formal logic, the book as a whole is
said to be false. This might be of some solace to people who are willing to
pick-and-choose passages from the bible, or people who decide that the Bible
should be taken metaphorically, but it does mean that people who believe
that the Bible is literally the word of God and thus infailable are going to
be at odds with people who believe in logic.

I think this problem can never be resolved, because we're entering into
meta-philosophies, and there's no real way to make an argument for believing
in logic versus not believing in logic. Any (rational) argument you make for
believing in logic will be based on logic, and so falls into the same trap
above (of assuming what you want to be true, to show that it is indeed
true).

In a sense, this is a faith in itself. You have to sort of just believe
that "logic holds". You cannot "prove" it in any way. It just so happens
that I chose to subscribe to the religion known as "logic". I believe it's
true, and so other thought I have is direct consequence of my belief in
logic.

>
> As I see it, the shoe is entirely on the other foot. Until somebody can
> offer at least a reasonable, testable hypothesis about how dirt can
> spontaneously form itself into a living organism, they're simply wishing
> in the dark.

I'm not sure what all the connotations of "wishing in the dark" holds,
but I'd like to point out that science is continually coming up with new
testable hypotheses. In acient Greece, there were theories that matter was
composed of indivisible elements (atoms). The theory of the atomic structure
of matter was completely untestable to them at the time, but that doesn't
mean they were wrong. Of course, I'm not saying every scientific theory ever
posited was always right either.

When you have lots of competing theories, scientists tend to prefer the
one that is the "simplest". The term "simplest" here is a difficult one to
describe precisely, but one property of a "simple" theory is that it doesn't
break all of our existing theories; OR, if it does, it ALSO offers
replacements for them that are themselves recursively simpler. This
principle is known as Occam's razor:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occams_razor

Of course, some people would argue that throwing away ALL of science,
and just answering every "why?" question with "Because that's how God did
it" is the simplest theory of all. But if you subscribe to the religion of
Logic, then this answer is not very satisfying, because an omniscient and
omnipotent God leads to a logically inconsistent universe. If you restrict
yourself to only theories which are simple AND which don't contradict logic,
you get stuff like evolution, the big bang, etc.

I'm digressing here. The point is that I don't think "we don't have a
test which satisfy Christians" is a good argument for dismissing theories in
science. And for what it's worth, there IS a testable hypothesis on the
origin of life. It's called the Miller-Urey experiment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_experiment

<quote>
The experiment used water (H2O), methane (CH4), ammonia (NH3) and hydrogen
(H2). The chemicals were all sealed inside a sterile array of glass tubes
and flasks connected together in a loop, with one flask half-full of liquid
water and another flask containing a pair of electrodes. The liquid water
was heated to induce evaporation, sparks were fired through the atmosphere
and water vapor to simulate lightning, and then the atmosphere was cooled
again so that the water could condense and trickle back into the first flask
in a continuous cycle.

At the end of one week of continuous operation, Miller and Urey observed
that as much as 10-15% of the carbon within the system was now in the form
of organic compounds. Two percent of the carbon had formed amino acids,
including 13 of the 21 that are used to make proteins in living cells, with
glycine as the most abundant.

[...]

In 1961, Joan Oro found that amino acids could be made from hydrogen cyanide
(HCN) and ammonia in a water solution. He also found that his experiment
produced a large amount of the nucleotide base adenine. Experiments
conducted later showed that the other RNA and DNA bases could be obtained
through simulated prebiotic chemistry with a reducing atmosphere.
</quote>

If you subscribe to my philosophy (mentioned in another thread) that our
seemingly complex intelligent self-consciouness is merely the emergent
behaviour of complex neuro-chemical and electro-magnetic process in our
mind, then it shouldn't be surprising at all that "life" can form from
"dirt".

I've heard of a book by Richard Dawkins called "The Selfish Gene". I
haven't read it myself, but I heard it gives an argument of how a
self-reproducing chemical structure can spontaneously come into existence
(the RNA and DNA mentioned in the Wikipedia article above), and how the RNA
and DNA can then interact with each other and with their environment to
build single-celled life form; and then how these can interact to form
multi-celled life forms, and how evolution can occur naturally to produce
humans. I believe he further shows how such an occurence is statistically
inevitable (as opposed to the misconception that it is statistically
improbable).

> Believing in God and Creation isn't stupid or ignorant; Isaac Newton was a
> Christian, and possibly the greatest intellect in history.

I have a friend whom I respect a great deal because he is very smart. I
was very surprised when I learned that he believes in (a Christian) God. He
doesn't take the bible literally, but he does believe there is a divine
being that created the universe exactly the way it is. He also "believes" in
science, and believes that God created the laws of science to be exactly
that way as part of the design for the universe.

It was through my discussions with him that I realized this
"meta-philosophy" issue; that if you go far back enough, there is a point
where you just have to (arbitrarily?) choose something to believe in.

I think I'm going to get into trouble here because I've been a bit lax
with my language. I want to point out that neither logic or science is in
the business of disproving the existence of God. A person in either field
(i.e. a logician or a scientist) should answer the question "Does God
exist?" with "I don't know." The question of "Is the bible logically
consistent?" is a completely different one (and which has been answered
already). "What is God like (i.e. assuming a God exists, would it be the
Christian God, or the Islamic God, or the Hindu God, or... etc.)?" Again,
not known. However I've already shown in another thread that for logic to
hold, either God is not omniscient, or God is not fully omnipotent. Also, if
there are multiple Gods, and they either always have to be in agreement with
each other, or they have limits on their powers (or else we have a
contradiction with "omnipotent" again).

So yes, believing in God is not nescessarily "stupid". Not knowing
whether or not God exists *IS* ignorance (by definition). Thinking you know
whether or not God exists is an even graver ignorance (in my opinion).
Believing in the Christian version of creation, while not nescessarily
stupid, is probably "unscientific". Take that as you will. Believing the
bible literally; illogical (and thus unscientific, as science is strongly
based on logic).

> We know today that life is far more complex than anybody in Newton's day
> had any concept, and no one has a better idea of how life could form from
> lifelessness.

This isn't true, as shown above. Isaac Newton died in 1727, and since
(1961) then we've developped our scientific theories on the origin of life.
A key misconception (in my opinion) is that there is a significant
difference between life and non-life. I think some people believe that there
is something magical about life, and that things with life have something
that things without lifes have (e.g. a soul). As I mentioned above, I
believe what is called "life" is merely physical and chemical processes that
happen on matter. There is nothing special about life other than the fact
that it's complicated. It's complexity is a question of degree. How complex
does something have to be, to be considered life? Most people would agree
that I, as a person, am alive. What about my body as a whole? Again, most
people would say yes, I possess a living body. And what about the cells that
make up my body? We speak of "dead skin cells", so there must be "living
skin cells" as well, right? What about the individual DNA and protein that
make up my cells? And the molecules that make up the DNA? And the atoms that
make up those atoms? At what point do we cross from the living into the
non-living? Again, I argue that it's just a question of degree. There is no
clear cut line between living and non-living, and once you realize that,
it's much easier to accept that something "living" can come from something
"non-living".

> Yet so many people today are willing to stake their eternal destiny on
> philosophies based on this happening. They do so because they've been told
> to believe this, happily following in faith like lemmings, closing their
> minds to any other possibility, all the while criticizing faith in God.

Christians are staking their eternal destinies as well. Maybe God
doesn't exist, but Satan does. Then the Christians are screwed. Maybe the
Christian God doesn't exist, but Allah does. Again, the Christians are
screwed. In fact, as long as there exists at least two religions which are
mutually incompatible, and which both say "If you don't believe in our God,
you're screwed." then EVERYONE is gambling their eternal destinies.

My take on this is "There's no real way of determining which religion
(if any) is 'The Right One'. So let's not get worked up over which specific
God to worship. It seems like the majority of the Gods like people who do
good deeds and avoid bad deeds, so let's all try to do as many good deeds as
possible so that when we die, if there IS a God, hopefully he'll forgive us
for not believing specifically in him/her/it, take into consideration that
we were trying really hard to be good, and let us enjoy the rest of eternity
in relative comfort."

- Oliver


.

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