It is called, 'shifting the burden of proof', another logical fallacy. Threads like this bring out the fallacies in droves. IMO, it is because of widespread indoctrination, & the death of critical thinking. 'Reasoning' is a lost art. We live in an era of anti-science, & elitist decrees, no longer the 'age of reason'.
That said, you suggested a higher power or supernatural explanation for existence. Please provide evidence of something supernatural before suggesting it as an explanation. There is no evidence for anything supernatural so it is not logically viable to suggest it as an explanation. You might just as well suggest that Santa Claus, or Glenda the Good Witch did it.
I have repeated this many times. Both supernatural, and natural rely on UNKNOWN processes, so both are matters of opinion or belief. You do not need to demonstrate the HOW of a naturalistic explanation, in order for it to be a valid opinion or belief. Neither do you have to demonstrate aliens or a higher power for that opinion. Dawkins believes in alien seeding.. an 'intelligent design' type of belief. Since all 'theories' about origins have no empirical evidence, they are all in the same boat. So if it is 'logically viable' to posit one, it is logically viable to posit the others.
This is handwaiving away the evidence, and stating "nuh uh" as your argument. You provided no peer reviewed paper or evidence of any kind to rebut what you were given.
Yes, attempts at 'shifting the burden of proof' from those making a claim to those clearly not doing so and simply requesting supportive evidence is textbook fallacy. Why do you suppose that is?
Okay, thanks. Having now revealed yourself as a shameless BSer I know better than to waste any more time on you.
It was either Crick or Watson of double helix fame that gave consideration to something similar in regards to life on earth. Are you aware of this, and if not, perhaps you are not as informed as you think?
It seems you're unaware that Dawkins has never claimed to simply "believe in alien seeding." Shameless dishonesty on parade.
? It seems to me to be a valid opinion/belief/explanation as any other. Why act so offended? It is a type of ID, is all..
Why parse that 'aside' when that was not the point of the post? His was a passing comment, not a central point. Mine was a passing comment, meant to illustrate the wide variety of beliefs/opinions. It seems you are trying to present some kind of unified, consensus of opinion/belief among 'scientists', by acting offended if someone does not toe the line with some 'status quo' of current belief. Do you not realize that there are a lot of different views, even among well known scientists, for origins?
This is actually a positive statement, by the way: "I submit that we still have NO EVIDENCE to support any claim that life can't begin spontaneously." Being a double negative, it can be "logically" rewritten: "I submit that we still (ONLY) have EVIDENCE to support any claim that life can begin spontaneously." EVIDENCE supporting claims that life doesn't (necessarily) begin spontaneously could be as simple as stuff like official documentation or repeated observances of immaculate conception, people springing from donkey jawbones, or storks dropping babies down chimneys, for example. They still claim and we still naturally wait. Not for "proof." For any credible evidence whatsoever.
IF you first make the naturalistic assumptions, THEN you can extrapolate those conclusions. But you have NO WAY of empirically proving the assumptions of time, cooling, heat, etc, that is presented. Merely saying, 'if you dig deep enough, you don't find fossils anymore!' does not provide a valid conclusion for your dating assumptions, nor is it the only conclusion you could posit for that observation. Your 'evidently' is based on previous assumptions, that have not been established as valid scientific evidence. That is merely an opinion, or an extrapolation,, & you cannot make definitive conclusions based on assumptions. All you can conclude is that at some time, when the conditions were able to support it, life began. You have no evidence of either natural or supernatural means. So just because you say life became 'naturally' possible, does not compel a naturalistic explanation, since we still have no evidence that spontaneous abiogenesis is possible. I use 'spontaneous' to differentiate between a unique condition or act. Some have hypothesized in a 'life ray' or such, hitting the planet at the right time, sparking life. Others have posited alien seeding. But for a purely 'natural' explanation, it has to be unguided by any unique force, random & spontaneous, not ordered by any intelligence.
No, you have not refuted it. Saying they are still called e coli is a superficial argument. This is where you just ignore any debate. I asked how you define major genetic change and to reference your claims to back it up because you say it must add new chromosomes to become a new species. I have not seen this requirement anywhere in the literature. Most likely because there are chromosomal changes that do not cause speciation (e.g., trisomy 21, 18, or 13). Yet, you claim this without support and ignore these basic counter factuals. That in the scientific community is called an opinion and is not considered an refutation of a claim. I can link some of the publications describing the genetic changes, but there are over a dozen: http://datadryad.org/resource/doi:10.5061/dryad.2875k.2 https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7268/full/nature08480.html http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/691209 My guess is you are just going tocall this techno babble, but when discussing science you precisely define your terms. You have not done this. Additionally, your claims are not substantiated by any material other than your own opinion. I have linked and continued to link multiple articles that support my claim. This is how you debate science, not by claiming what you feel. If your opinions have evidence, post it. If not, it is just an opinion and does not refute these articles. As for posting the old thread, the thread is gone it is over a year old. Post it if you have access to it
What repeatable lab evidence do you have knowledge of, which backs up your post I quoted? When I read it, I did not disagree, up until I came to your last assertion, which is clearly in the same pile of bullcrap you accuse USfan of indulging in. There is no repeatable lab evidence that out of randomness and disorder, by mere chance, an extraordinarily event is believed to have happened, giving rise to the first self replicating molecule that somehow contained the potentiality of then evolving, which too is a chance, beyond the first chance which gave us something very complex, with the potentiality of reading its environment and responding to it within the limitations of that first self replicating molecule. Some in mathematics have said the odds of such a thing happening is so high as to be improbable unless you had an infinite amount of time, here on earth. But then we think that given an infinity of time, it is possible that chimps could type out the works of Shakespeare, perfectly. Yet, this idea is impossible to obtain evidence to support it. I put it in with the philosophical materialistic assumption that matter is fundamental when indeed it very well may not be. We discovered in the early 20th century that the atom is not analogous to a solar system, and that Newtonian physics could not be used here, to make predictions in regards to the quantum level of reality. And as more tombstones of the materialistic scientists pile up, we may see a paradigm shift in evolutionary biology, which will put an end to the promissory notes written by evolutionary biologists ever since Darwin with the introduction of information instead of blind materialism. In fact, I think it is a fairly good bet to place in regards to the change in paradigm. We, including many scientists are still wedded to the philosophical materialism which biologists are married to even as the more insightful physicist, thousands of them are being pushed towards a reality, a universe based upon information which has given us a virtual reality universe. If this universe is a virtual reality, dependent upon information from outside, of course evolutionary biology will see a major change in paradigm, as well as the other softer sciences. Not being encumbered by materialism as biology is, as physics was set free from a single vision of a materialistic Newtonian universe, has allowed quantum physics to give us a technology that would be indistinquishable from magic if viewed by human beings in the past. As well as giving us a view of reality which has still not permeated our society, due to the beliefs in materialism, and still seeing reality through the lens of this paradigm, when we know, some of us, that our views of reality should already have seen this change in paradigm. We should be thinking about reality much differently than we are, due to QM, a highly successful field, and yet that is very slow to happen. What the reality is at that smallest level matters, and very well may be indicative of what our macro reality is, which is now seen as materialistic, but probably isn't.
Posting links, with no commentary, is not 'evidence!' It is a bluff.. a pretense of presenting something when there has been nothing presented. Make you points, in your own words, then support it with links or quotes, if you wish. but i cannot & will not debate links.
If you will not debate scientific articles then you will not debate science. Science is argued using peer reviewed evidence.
You know, I have found that some of these people who call BS, are many times totally ignorant of their own ignorance. This was certainly the case on another thread when I mentioned there is a mountain of evidence that consciousness intent can affect a random number generator, outside of the skull. I was accused of being a purveyor of WOO, and a BS artist, when the fact was, those accusers were just ignorant of their own ignorance. I think this is as common on one side as the other. Princeton Engineering has the evidence of what I speak, and since then, even more evidence has been accumulated by other people in science, but the entrenched materialists refuse to accept the evidence. LOL I can understand why, for such evidence negates materialism and careers have been built on materialism LOL Yes, scientists are full of human nature and it is more powerful at times than what the scientific mind is supposed to be. When human beings are ignorant of their own ignorance you then get the ego driven arrogance. I remember from University listening to a man of hard science, and there was an absence of this certainty which breeds arrogance. If one of the students came up with what the materialists would call WOO, this Prof would not just dismiss the possibility with arrogant certainty. And of course this is the attitude that scientists with integrity have and display. The scientists with humility accurately reflect science ,while the arrogantly certain do not. We have the latter here in significant numbers. A scientist with integrity has an open mind, which is essential in serious science.
Then present your scientific premise. Posting a link is not an argument, & you make no statements to examine.
You asked for genetic changes in the e coli. I provided the links for those changes. Refute the genetic changes are not speciation. It was claimed in the original article and those additional articles. There bacteria evolved the ability to grow aerobically on citrate. This species cannot do this. To do this, thousands of genetic changes occurred. These genetic changes resulted in morphological changes to transmembrane proteins that enabled them to grow aerobically on citrate. These changes were the result of the abundance of citrate as a food source in their environment. Please refute that these genetic changes were not speciation and cite your references like I did.
I did a search for 'e coli' & the older threads showed up. this one is from earlier this year. Since it is close, you cannot quote it in the usual way, so i had to copy & paste it.. it was long, so i just included my reply.. which was not addressed to you, but another poster. I spent quite a bit of time, studying & sifting through the side points, to get the meat of the study, & like i said, i do understand a lot of the 'techno babble', as i like to call it. but to be fair, in a truly scientific journal, it is not really 'techno babble', but the common vernacular. But when it is used to bluff or dazzle, toward laymen, i use the term, 'techno babble'.
I found it.. the reply to you, in the older thread. It is too lengthy to cut & paste, but i definitely replied to you, on this very study, in great detail. It is post # 742 & 743 in the now closed thread, http://www.politicalforum.com/index.php?threads/the-central-flaw-of-evolution.442211/ But i have addressed this same study, several times, in 'debates' over the ToE. I am amazed that it keeps coming up, as if it was some kind of ground breaking study.
