Evidence for creation discussed

I do believe God created everything, from the material to the immaterial and I believe science for all it can tell us cannot answer those types of questions using the facts on the ground so to speak. How consciousness started, being able to appreciate beautiful things, love those are not material things, a chemical reaction isn't going to give you love in a bottle. They transcend the material world, knowledge transcends the material world, how is the study of biological information inside living things coming along?

We are talking about what followed the emergence of the first lifeform, yes?

Are you suggesting modern evolutionary theory does not exclude divine intervention?

The theory itself describes an entirely natural process of mutations being acted upon by natural selection. Introduce 'an invisible creative agent' and it blows the theory of evolution apart.

But I'm pretty certain you understand this so it leaves me wondering, not for the first time, quite what it is you're trying to do here?

Belief in something and justifying such belief are two very different things.

But if you saw my reading list you'd know to ask me again in about five years?  😉

stephen please don't misunderstand me, I think you are one of the fairest people I disagree with here, you do take the time to listen to opposing views (in links), not all of them but some which I think say loads about you. You have nothing but respect for me, *even though I think you wrong* I know I'm not infallible and can not see things clearly, I don't see for example when looking for truth on any topic desire blinders that would hide possibilities from me seeing it, as I think many do, we should never put truth in a box, and refuse to look outside of it, and I can do that just as easily as anyone else.

We can only justify ourselves if what we present as the truth has no contradictions in it, that is answers the questions, and can we see it fits with the things we know as true everywhere else. This is why I'm not saying evolution cannot be real, but if it is, it is a process that has to do with information changing over time, successfully, and while changing and improving life into much more functionally complex life, haphazard changes will never do that, they always move toward equilibrium.

And yet professional scientists who have studied the various processes of life and who understand cell chemistry much better than any of us are entirely satisfied that the modern theory of evolution explains how the myriad lifeforms alive today came to exist.

There're two ways of satisfying ourselves that a scientific theory is sound: Spend years studying that subject, preferably working towards a doctorate in it, or trust in the collective conclusions of the many professional scientists who have done just that.

I've heard more than one Biologist say that without evolution Biology makes no sense.

Theres no practical question that the theory of evolution is sound.

If you accept that life started from dead dirt what else can you say?

There were several miracles of nature completely mysteries that no one has evidence for but it is on blind faith believed.

The first life started from non-life, with no evidence only the possibility someone may come up with a rational theory someday barring that, only blind faith.

Others come in one just as unlikely as the others, the list is so long, to boil it down to a few words, everything required for life all showed up at the exact right time, place, in the proper amounts, connecting only in the right way so life could be started, all while this miracle of nature managed also to write into the code of life, informational instructions, with read-write abilities and error checking and nothing was directing it all to happen, it just did, we are so lucky.

The probabilities are not even taking into account that the universe itself has presented the right conditions in a harsh universe where it is impossible to occur anywhere in our field of vision.

You know we don't have to turn our brains off just because someone with a degree speaks.

"If you accept that life started from dead dirt what else can you say?"

I can say that all the elements required to enable the emergence of life had to be formed in stars, which then exploded, and that process took many hundreds of millions of years to take place.

Then billions of years passed before our star formed on an arm of the Milky Way and yet more millions of years before conditions were suitable on our planet for life to come into existence.

Beyond questioning the immense spans of time involved, I can't ever remember you addressing the issue of the entirely naturalistic processes from which life finally emerged?

Why is that?

You can say anything the point being whatever starting point you choose will have all of the same questions. I don’t care how much time you think is available to you, can what you accept actually happen? Elements found in stars sounds romantic but were all the proper ones required leave the stars make their way to earth and some string of events cause what we see in life? The information is primarily the forms and systems are derivative the information drives the processes, unless you have some means of reversing that where first comes life then the code that drives the processes.

I don't know how to be any clearer. I'm not trying to "do" anything here. Let's try this again:

Science excludes supernatural causation a priori. Science can neither prove nor disprove supernatural involvement. Even if there is a natural explanation throughout earth history,  divine involvement (or 'oversight') can't be ruled out by science (nor can it be proven). As a scientist (regardless of whether you have religious beliefs or don't or believe there is divine intervention, guidance, oversight what have you or don't believe that) all scientists adopt a framework of methodogical naturalism when doing research that excludes the supernatural a priori (even if they're religious).

Science if it puts on blinders to exclude any possibly by definition will be blind to them, this doesn’t exclude them from the list of possibilities. It only suggests that science cannot point directly at them by default. Thus if science is blind and unable to reach a solution one of the reasons very well could be it is outside of science’s ability to discover, that is not saying it cannot be realistic only that science is out of its depth.

My position is unchanged - I take my cue from the professional scentists who research this subject. I'm utterly unqualified to form an opinion on whether life could have emerged by purely naturalistic processes but when I hear those researchers as a body announce that the search for an answer is hopeless, then I'll change my position.

But my point about the enormous spans of time that it actually took for the requisite elements to be created and the conditions on this planet to be just right, was that it resembles an entirely naturalistic process, not one that a conscious creator would use.

I believe that greatly reinforces the argument for a naturalistic cause of life, despite the problems such a search faces.

But didn't this flow from the question I remember asking about how, absent of any divine intervention, the complexity we see in many living forms today ~ not to mention the exquisite complexity of consciousness ~ came about if not by the process of evolution?

It's not credible I think that the faculty of  consciousness was somehow wrapped up in that first single cell. It must more probably have arisen as a result of evolutionary processes.

For the record, "Science excludes supernatural causation a priori" means only that scientific methodology is equipped to deal with the physical alone, it doesn't exclude anything in an ideological way! I'm not sure some members (TruthMuse?) fully understand that.

You don't have "the body" of professional scientists, you have some because not all agree with what you are proposing and none of them including you can even point to a reason why you think abiogenesis occurred, outside of the fact you by default rule out design. You cannot say that large amounts of time did it if you cannot show the mechanism that did the work. 

Exactly how do you know what a conscious creator would use? Would one who could design all the laws of nature, nature, and maintain them be limited to only being able to do that type of work in a large amount of time? For that matter, there are several things we have no answer for with the chicken and egg issue, which came first, if time isn't an issue there wouldn't even need to be a long amount of time, an instant would be no different than a day. One who transcends time, matter, energy, and space means that one created them doesn't need them to create, they are not part of the creating process, they are things that were created.

The passage of time involved matters, not to mention the way in which all necessary components came to be in place(*) because they point very strongly to the rest of the process being naturalistic, not a matter of design.

* The elements essential for life itself and all the parts of the system such as a planet capable of hosting life and in a location where life is not threatened by Cosmic events (supernovae etc.).

You have no mechanism that can do the things you suggest were done over time, long or short time isn't important there is either a means to do it or not. In addition, you have not even put forward a means for matter, space, time, and energy to appear to do the things you think could have built life over time.

That's not a problem for me to solve, it's a problem for all those specialists involved in OOL research.

I am not qualified to make a judgment as to the cause of life.

So you have an unidentified unspecified group of people who you can’t pick out of a list of names that must choose before you consider it yourself? How does that work exactly?

And as I said in previous posts, evolution doesn’t solve the fundamental problem of how to derive consciousness and thoughts--which are real but nonphysical--from material physicality.

Failing to answer such questions thus far doesn't mean they cannot be answered in time.

I've made my position as clear as I can and I feel we're going round and round in the same circle now.