Re: Making money from Java

"Oliver Wong" <owong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> "Judson McClendon" <judmc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> 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.

Now, Oliver, who's being 'tricky' here? You know full well that it is
perfectly valid and acceptable to assume a hypothesis to be correct, in
order to test the validity of the results. Sometimes, it is the only way to
test a hypothesis. There is no 'logic trick' in doing this. My point is
perfectly valid and defensible: If you assume the Bible is correct, then
there can be no evidence to demonstrate it to be false, because God could,
by definition, do anything, so any "evidence" we found could simply be a
Devine artifact. There's no way we could tell. But the reverse is not true.
If you assume the Bible to be false, there *can* be evidence of Creation,
either by the expedient of showing that no other explaination makes sense,
or by finding some phenomena that has no other explaination. This is a
perfectly logical and correct definition, here. If you intend to refute it,
you have to do so by showing a logical flaw in the above, not by calling it
a 'trick'. :-)

> 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 follow your logic, but it is based on a false definition: your definition
of 'infallible' does not necessarily match God's definition. It is pretty
clear to me, from much study of the Bible, that God's definition of
"perfect", as in His Word is 'perfect', is far closer to (as He might say)
"says what I want it to say, and accomplishes what I want it to accomplish"
than your definition of "doesn't even have any spelling errors." A long time
ago I became aware of the fact that human ideas of perfection (e.g. mine)
are far more 'technical' and 'narrow' than God's. He sees things from a
vastly wider perspective than we do. There is a passage in the Bible that
says:

"For as the rain comes down, and the snow from heaven, And do not return
there, But water the earth, And make it bring forth and bud, That it may
give seed to the sower And bread to the eater, So shall My word be that goes
forth from My mouth; It shall not return to Me void, But it shall accomplish
what I please, And it shall prosper in the thing for which I sent it."
(Isaiah 55:10-11)

See, it's not the technical details like spelling, different phrasing, etc.
that we would look at to decide if something is "perfect", but that it
accomplishes what God intends it to accomplish. From that perspective, how
do we know that God isn't perfectly happy with varying translations, or that
He isn't making sure that they all wind up saying what He wants said, to
accomplish what He wants accomplished? Certain phrasing may speak to certain
individuals, other phrasing to other individuals, all to accomplish His
will.

> 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.

Having spent almost 40 years in a profession that lives by logic, I also
believe in logic. But the grist I accept for my logic mill may differ from
the grist you accept for your logic mill. :-)

> 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

Oh, were it only so that science truly worked that way! In reality,
scientists are as opinionated, hard headed and cantankerous about their pet
theories as anybody else. There is a medical doctor in England who has been
saying since the 70's that ulcers were caused by bacteria, and thet he was
having great success treating them with antibiotics. Was he listened to? Did
those open minded academics check it out? Ha! The poor family doctor didn't
have "The Right Credentials", and he was widely censured and castigated as a
fruitcake in medical circles until the 90's, when Lo and Behold, the man had
been absolutely right from the beginning. Do you have any idea how many
ulcer sufferers paid the price, including death, for that kind of blind
arrogance? My dad suffered from ulcers almost his whole life, but in the
90's he took *four* doses of antibiotics and never had another ulcer. During
the 90's it was announced that doctors had finally discovered by using
thermocouples that menopausal women having hotflashes did, in fact, have a
skin temprature increase. All I can say is, I've been married to a woman who
had hotflashes, and anyone in the same situation who *did not* know there is
an abrupt skin temprature increase either suffers from whole body numbness
or is a nitwit. Since this condition has been around as long as women, I
have been searching in vain how to describe a medical profession that can be
so obtuse as not to know this until the 1990's. I was born after WWII, in
which there were literally millions of burn victims. Yet the conventional
medical wisdom of whether you should, after a burn, immediately place your
(whatever was burned) into warm or cold water has changed *three* times.
Once again, a scientific community that cannot determine, after millions of
trials, something as simple and testable as that, defies description. And
you want me to believe these people when they tell me they *know* life got
here without God? Uh, huh. :-)

> 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.

In God's first command to Adam and Eve He said:

Then God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply; fill
the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the
birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth."
(Genesis 1:28)

It is my personal belief that the command to "sudue the earth" includes
science. I believe God wants us to study and learn about the universe we
live in. My objection is that for 200 years, the majority of "scientific"
study has started with an a-priori assumption of "this must be explained
without God". This is not true science, true science should not assume there
is no God, just because it pleases men to think that way. There is a word
for this, it is "bias".

> 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.

Actually, only if I restrict myself to theories that leave out God do I get
those things. :-)

> 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 am familiar with those experiments, and they conclusively show that dirt
can get perhaps as much as a hundred billionth of the way from nonliving to
living. Sorry, but that does not impress me. The leap from basic organic
(note, that the classification of 'organic' here is manmade. Since they
occur in nature, including outer space, without life, they could have been
as accurately described as non-organic) compounds to a living cell with
multiple interdependent systems that *all* must be in place for the cell to
live, is vast indeed from the tiny step of forming compounds. You would be
extremely better justified in comparing the geological formation of a spec
of metal ore to a flying 747. The complexity of a single living cell is
comparable to the complexity of the entire world economy, down to the
economy of each individual person. Makes a 747 look like a tinker toy. :-)

One other thing to ponder. If we sent a probe to Mars and located a single
fragment of paper with one symbol printed on it, everybody in the world
would declare that as undeniable proof that some intelligence had placed it
there. I would agree. Yet, the structure of living things is complex, almost
beyond belief, and organized down to the tiniest detail. The function of a
living cell is like billions of tiny nano machines, all working together
busily to sustain life. The way DNA works just boggles my mind at the
incredible intricacy and precision of design. No machine made by man even
comes close. Yet, you look at that incredible example of obvious intelligent
design, designed by an intelligence vastly beyond man, and say it got here
strictly by accident, all without any intelligent design.

> 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).

Every such attempt to explain autogenesis has been a complete failure. It
has come to the point that, when in a argument with an evolutionist who
knows biochemistry well, if you mention autogenesis, they will change the
subject. Why do you think they came out with the wacky space seed idea? It
was because autogenesis was so ludicrously impossible, and the more we learn
about how complex cell biology really is, the worse it gets.

> 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).

Officially, what you say is correct. But like everybody else, scientists let
their personal opinions and bias affect their judgment. There is no question
that the academic community is generally hostile toward the Christian
viewpoint. Any Christian who has ever been exposed to a secular college or
university environment knows this.

>> 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.

I don't think that question is so difficult. Anything that can function,
consume nutrient and produce waste, on its own (asuming the proper
environment of stuff that is not itself) is "a living organism". A "living
organism" must be at least partially composed of things that are alive (e.g.
cells). A bacteria is a "living organism", a human is a "living organism", a
skin cell may be alive, but is not a "living organism". A virus is strange,
not a living organism, not alive, but capable of interacting with a living
cell. I suppose a virus is the most complex non-living thing, but even they
must have living cells to reproduce. All virus would be gone shortly without
living organisms.

> 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".

I agree that the difficulty is one of complexity, but it is hard to
overstate the truly vast difference in complexity between non living things
and living things. One living organism is vastly more complex than say, the
entire Moon.

>> 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.

Well, this is something you will never accept on anyone's say-so, you would
have to experience it yourself to accept it. But the reason for a true
Christian to have faith is not based on logic, and it's certainly not blind,
illogical believing. The real evidence to a Christian is how God's Spirit
interacts with our spirit. I *know* God is real, because I can feel God's
presence inside me. I was 27 years old when I asked God to come into my
life, and I know full well what it felt like beforehand and what it feels
like now, and it is *real*. I know what delusions are, and imaginations, and
fantasies, and this is none of those things. So I have complete confidence
in my destiny, because I have the testimony of that from God's Spirit into
my own spirit. No one else can see this internal evidence, so it appears
from the outside to non believers that Christians are deluded, or spouting
nonsense. I understand this, but it is frustrating.

> 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."

I can appreciate your reasoning. I have a suggestion to break the logical
dilemma: give God an honest test. If you are honestly open to the
possibility that God may exist, and you simply seek confirmation, then tell
that to God. Put the ball in His court and see what He does. If He does
respond, then you have your answer. If He isn't there or He doesn't respond,
then at least you tried, and you can proceed with greater confidence that
God isn't there, or doesn't care. Either way, you lose nothing. It's a
win-win deal.
--
Judson McClendon judmc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (remove zero)
Sun Valley Systems http://sunvaley.com
"For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that
whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life."


.

Relevant Pages

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