Proof of intelligent design

It seems my pointing out you were confusing abiogenesis with evolution in an earlier post in this thread got under your skin. The anger you exibit suggests deep seated fears that you might be wrong. Or a fear others may agree with the information concerning abiogensis, not evolution as you mistakenly thought.


I love your million dollar words. Does it make you feel above everyone else when you use words like pseudoscientific, or quasiscientific? I think it's a sign of covering one's lack of understanding of the topic. It also is how one tries to intimidate others who are watching on, letting them know you are ready to pounce on anyone who dare question your facts of how life began.

I don't think you understand the definition of 'impossible' and 'probability', Kevin.





You don't seem to understand the differences in concept between 'probable' or 'improbable' and 'possible' or 'impossible'. Being struck by lightning is improbable, but it is not impossible. The building blocks of life coming together at the exact right place at the exact right time and creating the first living organisms is highly improbable, but not impossible.

Given infinite time and infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters, they will eventually produce all the works of Shakespeare: extremely improbable, and the monkey poo smeared all over the manuscripts might render the final products illegible, but it could, in theory, happen. Just because it is really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really unlikely does not automatically make it unable to occur.

Your bogus "Scientists agree if the chances are more than 10 to the 50th power, it's impossible" quote is completely intellectually bankrupt: if something has a probability then by definition it is possible!

As for the "there wasn't enough time" argument, you're still missing the boat. If I flip a coin ten times in a row and count that as a 'set', I will eventually produce a 'set' in which I flipped heads for every toss. I could do this on my first 'set', or I could do this on my 150th 'set'; the time frame doesn't matter. The fact I can do it at all makes it possible, and therefore probable.

Now, perhaps, do you have a better understanding of why people won't even give you a faint chance if you're not able to even keep your im-words straight?

"Is it possible for atoms to materialize, organize themselves, and combine to form living things without the influence of an intelligent creator? We have considered the effects of the second law of thermodynamics, which shows that the natural tendency in the universe is toward decay, disorganization and death. In the physics and chemistry of life, is that law reversed? If we use the laws of probability and chance, we can show what it would take for life to form independently of God.

The Improbability of Probability

To understand probability, let us look at a few examples. The probability of a flipped coin coming up heads is 1 chance out of 2. What is the chance of three coins coming up heads? It is one out of 2 X 2 X 2 or eight. As we increase the number of coins flipped, the probability of getting all heads decreases rapidly. With ten coins, the probability is 1 in 1024. With 20 coins, it is 1 in 1,048,576.

The Left* Handed Amino Acid Dilemma

Let us now apply the principles of probability to the problem of origin of life. Proteins are an important family of molecules that make up life. They are gigantic in comparison to ordinary chemicals found outside life. Typically, a protein is 400 to 1000 times larger and more complex than the molecules that make up gasoline. A protein is a polymer, which is a chain of components all linked together. We call these links in the chain amino acids.

If you chemically build amino acids in a test tube, they will form into equal amounts of "right handed" and "left handed" isomers. This concerns the three dimensional shape of the molecules. Chemically, the right handed and left handed forms react the same, and are indistinguishable apart from their three dimensional orientation. The two forms are mirror images of each other.

There are twenty different amino acids used as building blocks in proteins. The sequence of the amino acids and the three dimensional shape determine the function of the protein. Therefore, let us look at what it would take to create a functional protein or enzyme.

A typical protein is made up of a chain of 445 left-handed amino acids. No protein found in nature contains right handed amino acids. Though origin of life experiments produce equal mixtures of both, all proteins use only the left-handed variety. Therefore, in order for the original protein to be formed, all amino acids used out of the original mixture needed to be left-handed.

We can now apply the laws of probability to this. The chances of an average protein consisting of 445 amino acids forming by chance are one chance out of 2410 or 10123 (35 of the amino acids would be glycine, which is symmetrical).

To illustrate the magnitude of this impossibility, let's have a contest. Suppose we give a snail moving at the speed of one inch every million years the task of moving the entire earth atom by atom over to the other side of the universe and back.

Then, imagine the length of time it takes light to travel one millimeter, and a million proteins forming in that length of time hoping to form one protein with all left-handed amino acids. Guess what! The snail would win, many millions of times over before even one left-handed protein would be formed!

Presume now that we can make amino acids ambidextrous for the moment and ignore this problem for the evolutionists' sake. We now have a problem making sure that the amino acids are in the right order to give the protein its function. Each amino acid has a characteristic that forms weak bonds, giving the protein its three dimensional shape. It is this shape that gives the protein its activity in living systems. "

You see the odds are so great the proabiblity goes to 0.

Snide comment ignored

Gee golly whiz, Kevin! I didn't read anything in that text that said there was a zero percent chance of it happening, just that a space snail is more likely to move the Earth atom-by-atom across the universe than life occuring. That is, by definition, *still a chance*.

The moral of the story: When someone says "a one in a hojillion chance is impossible," they have already lost the argument, and just don't have the ability to comprehend this failure.

Actually, the real moral of the story: don't use statistics you don't understand to back up your ID theories.

Edity #2: The probabilty does not -become- zero, it approaches zero. A one in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 probability means that it can still happen.

I'd say I'm sorta half way between that guy and Chester Brown. Maybe I'm their long lost love child or something. Don't you be calling my mom stingy!

It could be that or it could be that I was tactfully trying to tell you that you have the education and intellect of a high school student and because of your limited schooling and faculties, you are unable to understand the replies that are given to you by those who are not cursed with your limitations.

Keep going, though. You almost have me convinced.

~Ulrika~

I've just flipped the equivilent of 2,000 coins, the results are as follows (H = Heads, T = Tails):


The probability of me flipping 2000 coins and getting that exact sequence is 1 in 2^2000 (a number MUCH bigger than 10 to the power of 50), but guess what -- IT HAPPENED.

Therefor, it's not impossible for it to happen again, it's highly unlikely -- but it happened already.

Likewise, the process believed to be the cause of the creation of the first life on this earth, is highly improbable, but it happened. Life could have formed in another weird and wonderful way. Who's to say that 'our kind of life' is the only possible feasible form of life, it's quite possible that other kinds of life could have occured, and may occur in the future from other random sequences.

Just because the event is highly improbable, does not mean it's impossible, and disproving this theory would not automatically make 'Divine Intervention' the next logical choice; since there is still no real evidence supporting a Intelligent designer.

-Adam

Sometimes when I flip coins, they land on the skinny, ridged rim.

I try not to think too much about it.

There was a pilgrim on the road to Mecca seeking truth. During his journey he passed 80 prophets sitting by the road each asserting their view of received wisdom. However, this earnest and dedicated pilgrim had an impairment which was impossible for others to discern but made the pilgrim's quest rather troubled. His impairment was this: for fully half of the prophets that he passed, he was only able to see that they were talking, but he was unable to hear, let alone understandstand what they were trying to say. Upon the end of his journey, the pilgrim was left with only some vague understanding of what any of the prophets had said, as even the ones he could hear often were responding to what some prior prophet had said which often made them as unintelligible as the ones the pilgrim could not hear. At the end of his journey, the pilgrim, no wiser than when he began decided to cling to the beliefs he held at the start of his journey as they were what he knew and understood and was comfortable with. Thus the question: was the pilgrim any better off for having made the journey?

The above is a parable on two levels. As I scrolled through this thread of 80 posts, a significant number of the posts were by people on my ignore list. If you think you are one of them, fret not, as you are not on my ignore list. However even the posters like you who are not on my ignore list really didn't make much sense at all. Thus I am no more enlightened for having viewed this thread as if I hadn't.

The second way in which this is a parable is that it has given me a much more clear idea of what it must feel like to be someone who has aribtrarily chosen what voices to listen to while seeking truth. I now understand how chaotic and incomprehensible the world must appear to people who have so deafened themselves. And I find it not surprising at all that the beliefs that they held prior to their journey are far more comfortable and comprehensible than anything they might have gleaned on the road. I now consider myself enlightened; perhaps the journey was useful after all.

The beauty of this accidental journey is that you too can simulate the pilgrim and his befuddlement with nothing but these very forums and a simple coin. Pick a thread of moderate length and upon each posting, flip that coin. If it comes up heads, read the post, if it does not come up heads, do not read the post and continue on to the next post. Enlightenment is within your grasp, you need merely reach up and take it.

ROFL!

LMFAO! MON! PMP!

Oh! Oh! Kevn! Stop, stop! I'm gonna PLOTZ!


(You, too, Ulrika! Stop SCARING me with your MILLION DOLLAR WORDS, girl! OMG! I'm SHAKING in my flip-flops! I'm, like, totally TERRIFIED! You naughty sesquipedalian feminazi, you! More than THREE syllables? AIEEEEEEEEE! Help me, Kevn, she's so inTIMidating!)


BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!

I am surprised at the scope of discussion... it seems to fall short of the core questions.


For instance... what would the probability be of a God willing himself into existence?

Faced with the relative improbability of that (at least, I'm not expecting any new Gods to pop up before the weekend) - the atheist explanations of life are downright Probable by comparison.



But then... for the atheists among us: any idea, explanation, insight, clue, *anything* regarding the existence of the universe?

If any event begged for a cause, the 'big bang' would be it. One really might be led to wonder where the buck stopped.


An honest question. Any atheist willing to take a wild stab at why there is anything at all?

Will you settle for an answer from philosophy instead? The answer to that question is we don't know, we don't have any expectation of knowing, and it may in fact be fundamentally unknowable.

The question can make for interesting gabfests, but answers to that one are pretty damn unlikely to arrive anytime soon, if ever.

I think you'd find theologians respond the same way to why does god exist at all, so I don't think the issue of ultimate explanation of any sort to be around the corner.

You sure are trying very hard to be ignorant.

You argument is totally invalid, which you would know if you had any idea of what you were talking about.

In reality, if you pulled your head out and tried to use it for rational thought for a change, the probability of creating huge molecules of protein in the environment where they are formed, and all with left handed chirality, is nearly 100%.

Does anyone suggest that these are the proteins that gave rise to life in the first place? NO...

Well, you do. What you are suggesting is that the origin of life without divine intervention consists of shaking up a container of amino acids and, by chance, humans are formed.

The proteins needed to form first life are quite small, and therefore quite probable even if they can only have left chirality. Once you have a system that is purely left chiral, the odds that it will produce more complex compounds that are also have purely left chirality is 100%.

In short, an average protein you cite is not needed for life. A simple protein is all that is needed. Once you have life based purely on left hand chirality, all the viable proteins that follow will have left chirality.

so if there were other worlds similar in composition to Earth, approximate same percentages by sheer random chance out of the billions and zillions of planets out there, could a protein grow there? if so then life might form and humans may not be the only intelligent life in the universe. But the bible doesn't mention aliens, well, not in the English version anyways.

You make my point, keep doing that till they all land on heads. The chances you can get 70% to be all H are almost nil. Set your computer to roll those 2000 coins 1 million times a second for 100 billion years and it will not get all Hs. Your results are exactly as expected, about a 50-50 split. Thanks for offering an experment to show it won't be done.

"There are twenty amino acids that make up the basic building blocks of the protein. The order is very important, like the code of a computer program, or a sentence in a book. If just one amino acid is out of sequence, it changes the entire structure of the protein, just like changing a word in a sentence.

This is the effect of a mutation. It weakens the protein's function, usually to the point where it no longer does its job. The origin of disease is simple, it is a departure from the perfect creation of God caused by mutations. Mutations are a degenerative process and not the driving force evolutionists seek to explain the origin of life.

Let us assume in spite of the incredible odds that we now have a protein meeting every requirement, with left-handed amino acids, proper amino acid sequence and three dimensional structure. The next problem to face is configuring the least number of proteins, needed with DNA and associated molecules to form a living cell.

Scientists estimate that 238 proteins would be the absolute minimum number that would be needed to form life. Is it possible to bring together that many proteins and interrelate them in such a way to continuously process food and energy? A problem in doing this is even if we concentrated the right proteins together in the same place at once, they still would have to be configured in the proper structure in order for life to exist.

Coppedge, in his book, Evolution: Possible or Impossible, makes several probability calculations concerning life coming about by chance. Giving evolution all kinds of concessions, he comes up with the probability for the first cell to evolve by accident as one chance in 10^29345. It would take an 80-page book just to print that number. In comparison, the number of inches across the known universe is 10^28. Statistically, scientists consider 1 chance in 10^50 to be impossible. From these figures, you can be certain that the evolution of the cell is impossible!"

You keep making everyone else's point. By prespecifying the result you are looking for (2000 consecutive heads) you demonstrate, yet again, deep misunderstandings about the subject of which you attempt to make a cogent case for.

Perhaps if you read something other than vanity press productions by self-proclaimed doctorates, you might learn something that wasn't tired un-science when first published 28 years ago. Hints: When a book is available in its entiretry on-line and is "reviewed" by the author's son, it is typically worth the paper it is printed on.

The probability that someone so boneheaded could possibly be storming into a left-leaning, pro-science forum with an unspecified anti-theory approaches zero with each consecutive post.

How's that for probability?

Snide comments encouraged.

Unless you can prove God not only exists, but created Earth. I'm listening. No really, I am.

Bible doesn't count.

LF

I am willing to do it if you remove all of the chaotic variables that would influence the end results. I would also be willing to do it provided you also remove any chaotic variables that could have influenced/obstructed this so called intelligent desiner. Statistics may work fine and dandy for the stock markets where the human players are all sheep, following the same drum. But statistical data will never hold water against any system(most systems) that can be influenced by one small chaotic event. Also, probabilities are nothing more than educated guesses, if the person making the educated guess has the education from 10,20, even 100 years ago then the guess will be wrong as our understanding of things and abilities to test things improve. It is estimated that our knowledge about anything doubles every 10 years or less now, with double the knowledge the probabilities need to change as well. Probability is not scientific theory, it is more or less hypothesis.

Thank goodness for off-topic eh?

Speaking as fairly left leaning "non-beleiver" myself, I think some of you other "non-believers" are just as dogmatic (and kind of mean at times), if not more so about your own beliefs.

Malachi, Thank you for your opinion, but you aren't reading my posts. This debate reminds me of the debates I had with religious groups, such as Catholics, JWs, Mormons, Baptists etc etc.

Instead of discussing the information they prefer to talk about the messenger rather than the problems within their belief system. Many of them have set in their minds what is truth. Atheists are no different. They hold certain views that can't be questioned. They will attack anyone who dares question their religion of "random chance".

If you read the post you would see, the 2^2000 is just to get the basic protein, on top of that you need 238 of those 2^2000 protiens lined up in perfect harmony. If just one is out of line or out of order, life wouldn't be the result.

Thanks for the personal comments, I know it's human nature to defend one's faith in random chance, because to let your mind even consider for a second the possibility of a creator would be prohibited. I don't blame you or any of the forum atheists for defending your faith, everyone has to have something in which to believe.

Oh, will that perfect, untouched by mutations, genetic code produce a white man? Will this man be blonde? Which eyes colour?

You know, some people still think that some skin colours are better than others.

I mean are genetic illness mutations while other differences arent?

The geographic isolation always produces well recognizable ethnic groups. That's the beginning of speciation (yes, speciaton happens, i am tired of posting the link to ring species...), even if so far we all belong to the same species.
We only need a LOT more time, to produce 2 species out of homo sapiens...

But isn't your post an opinion based upon someone else's work? Just as my post regarding chaos is my opinion based upon the work of others. This will also happen when you mix religion vs science, belief vs testable theories, faith vs actual evidence.




The information is only as good as the messenger. If the information provided only shows one point of view then it is higly opened to any kind of questioning. The same thing about truth can be said about any followers of any faith, they have it set in their minds as to what is truth.




Or would it? that basis is for what type of life? The data sampled is for the life we know about, carbon based life-forms. This data excludes other potential life forms, perhaps those life forms that use a different core material as opposed to carbon. The data presented is also by one author/provider. Provide us with more sources from all over that paint the same picture of life and then perhaps we would not attack the messenger.




I will dismiss this comment about being an Atheist just because I present a different point of view than yours. Just as it is difficult for me to furnish the proof of my view, it is just as difficult for you to furnish proof of your view. Also you are defending your faith in an intelligent designer vs random chance, you have the same right to defend your belief. Also to allow your mind the opportunity to perhaps get a glimpse of the possiblility that there is no creator and it is all in fact random chance is prohibited as well.

Perhaps there is a creator who made one or 2 simple proteins and left the rest to evolution and random chance. Creating a framework for random chance to build off of by using the tried and trued method of trial and error, success and failure.

Thank you for a post on the topic. Yes, you are absolutely correct in stating I am biased by my beliefs. I most certainly am. We all are, I'm no better than anyone else.

However, I base this debate on statistical odds, not my understanding of a concept. You can test and retest the calculations to see, no matter how long you try, you can never get 2000 coins to land on heads in a row. Even if you could, you'd need 238 of those 2^2000 proteins lined up in perfect order, making the possibility of life occuring by accident at over 1 in 10^28000. There is such a thing as statistically impossible.

The principle of biogenesis states "bi·o·gen·e·sis ( P ) Pronunciation Key (b-jn-ss) also bi·og·e·ny (b-j-n)
n.
The principle that living organisms develop only from other living organisms and not from nonliving matter. "

Source: The American Heritage® Stedman's Medical Dictionary
Copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company.



We have yet to verify living organisms develop from nonliving matter. If we ever are able to reproduce it, it will be because we applied intelligent design.

I think you mean "Kevin Klein's principle of biogenesis".

Mr. Klein, you ain't making any converts here; please, please, tell me that you are doing this for your own amusement, as I cannot bear to think that you are putting this much effort into it otherwise.

Wrong. I'm converted. I think all of you should listen to Kevin. He's the smartest, wisest fellow I've ever seen post on these forums (and a fine piece of ass to boot). Nothing beats statistics. If it's impossible, it's impossible. Why can't you see that? Maybe if you guys had more love in your heart then you could appreciate the tenderness that God put into creating us through his divine plan. But no, all you can see is your own fallacies and then you make arguments based on faulty logic (or are so ridiculous that he'd rather just ignore them- and rightfully so, as if anyone could honestly compare the light of Jesus to drug addicts). You guys are so wrong, and Kevin has proved this, but you don't want to listen. I think you should all take a look at yourselves and see the wonder and beauty of God's creation in your soul and make room for Jesus in your heart.