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@kellyjay saidThe universe exists without divine action, either in creation or maintenance.
And????
So what!?
@ghost-of-a-duke saidYou are stating your beliefs as if they are facts, while you proclaim evidence supports your views are you not?
The universe exists without divine action, either in creation or maintenance.
@ghost-of-a-duke saidFactual or theoretically, because confident leaves room for correction and errors.
On the contrary sir. I am quietly confident most of my knowledge is based on "fact-supported theories".
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@kellyjay saidAs already stated, 'a scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment. Such fact-supported theories are not "guesses" but reliable accounts of the real world.'
You are stating your beliefs as if they are facts, while you proclaim evidence supports your views are you not?
@KellyJay
No one's playing chess with me at the moment, so here are some fairly random thoughts to be going on with. Regarding intelligent design, it's quite clear that for a few billion years there were nothing but single - celled things floating about, so what was god up to during this time, life must have been fairly boring. And then...Things started to happen. I read once that it is estimated (by those far cleverer than I) that about 99% of all species which have existed on planet earth are now extinct. (In fact I think the quoted figure was 99.9999%, but let's not split hairs, and let's allow some margin of error). That which we see is but a tiny representation of what's been going on, since it got going evolution has been rampant, and most species didn't make it through (bad design...?) And then, lo, it came to pass that god made humankind in his/her/it's own image, a nasty, weak little ape which devotes a good deal of it's time, effort and intellect finding good ways to blow other apes of its' own kind to damnation, and is busy about the business of destroying the only environment in which it can live. I mean, dumb, or what? Which must beg the question, why would you bother to create such an animal? We are now witnessing another mass extinction, as said nasty ape goes about wiping out the other species around which aren't useful to it with gay abandon, so that's not very nice, either.
Science can't (yet) explain everything, and even scientists don't claim that science can explain everything. The 'big bang' idea is a good one, but nobody can really say how or why it happened, so let's go back to the good old 'god made everything' idea, which has various manifestations in different religions. The problem facing humanity is that it can't conceive of 'time' having no beginning and no end, any more than it can imagine an infinite universe, I mean try it, it does your head in. Nor can it get it's collective head around the thought that we just die, and that which we are made of becomes something else, it's a really depressing thought for self - aware creatures such as ourselves, (I mean no one wants to die, right?) so we make up all kinds of stuff about going to heaven or hell, because it makes us feel better. Especially the heaven part, but still we try blow each other up, or get richer than the next ape, or dislike or distrust people who don't for example have the same (evolved) skin pigmentation as us, or have been told to believe in a different god, so where do you think we're going, then, heaven or hell....Just give me minute...
@ghost-of-a-duke saidDo you consider Lucy valid well-substantiated evidence?
As already stated, 'a scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment. Such fact-supported theories are not "guesses" but reliable accounts of the real world.'
@indonesia-phil saidMy first suggestion to you would be use paragraphs. If you want to play me challenge me.
@KellyJay
No one's playing chess with me at the moment, so here are some fairly random thoughts to be going on with. Regarding intelligent design, it's quite clear that for a few billion years there were nothing but single - celled things floating about, so what was god up to during this time, life must have been fairly boring. And then...Things started to happen. I r ...[text shortened]... n a different god, so where do you think we're going, then, heaven or hell....Just give me minute...
@ghost-of-a-duke saidReally?
The universe exists without divine action, either in creation or maintenance.
Tell us, what is Dark Matter then?
You know about Dark Matter, right?
It's what makes up the majority of the universe, the stuff we have no idea what it is.
Like gravity, it's those forces that have no particles, nothing to seemingly measure, but evidence of its existence is all around us.
@ghost-of-a-duke saidBased upon what evidence?
Not a chance. I believe life is pretty commonplace.
@ghost-of-a-duke saidChristianity has evidence, but no proof.
Christianity is not a fact-supported theory. (Hence the need for faith).
If you want a proof of something, take a math class.
The vast majority of what we believe has no proof, but often there is evidence for what we believe.
@ghost-of-a-duke saidSchroeder has a theory about how humans came to be as well.
That's the thing Kelly. Life appeared on a planet of molten rock (when conditions became hospitable) and over billions of years slowly evolved into an array of species, including our own. All evidence discredits the idea that life appeared on Earth in just a few days, and that 'we' appeared as fully formed humans. This being the case, there was no 'Adam and Eve,' and ...[text shortened]... here was no 'fall' or 'curse' to explain earthquakes and account for the imperfect world we inhabit.
"What was the origin of mankind? There may be a dearth of fossil evidence describing the path of early life, but a range of fossils exist showing that creatures almost identical in shape to humans have existed at least for past million years and perhaps longer. We might be tempted to neglect the fragments of the early fossil record. After all, they themselves are not actually dated. Their ages are estimated from the age of the deposits at the location of the find. But there exist hundreds, even thousands, of fossils from the past 15,000 years. These are accurately dated by the carbon 14 concentration in the fossil itself. At the edge of the Arctic, the remains of whole villages of Eskimo like dwellers have been found. These existed 9,000 years ago. Among the finds, in addition to the skeletons, are relics of clothing and housing and the utensils of the socially organized daily life. Equally well documented pre-Adam settlements extend from France to the Ukraine. In these finds, in addition to the tools of daily life, there are finely fashioned sculptures of a multitude of animals, and more extraordinarily, drawings that reveal the perception and hand eye coordination required to show 3 dimensional perspective in a 2 dimensional representation. Our similarity to the ancestral hominids extends to cranial capacity as well. It has not increased since the appearance of the Neanderthals, 100,000 years ago. In fact, there are Neanderthal fossils with cranial capacities reaching 1,400 cc. That is some 100 cc larger than today's humans and 300 cc larger than the brain of the Anatole France, the acclaimed writer and winner of the Nobel Prize!
3 million years ago in the region of Hadar, Ethiopia, and in Laetoli, Tanzania, animals that walked upright with a smooth and erect bipedal stride first appeared. This means that for 3 million years a type of animal moved about with hands free for grasping and using objects. Yet during almost this entire period the manufacture of tools evolved only slightly, being confined to making of stone cores and flint blades. Then quite suddenly, about 40,000 years ago, or to put this timing into perspective, at the start of the final 1% of the time that bipeds excess of anything seen during the previous 99% of their tenure. Stone spearheads, harpoons, bone needles, and statuettes appeared. This sudden abundant of material wealth plus a social structure that appears to have included care for the infirm (based on the remains of the healed breaks in limbs, and diseased jaws which must have been toothless), indicates a new ability to organize the life of a community. The instrument of this organization, 40,000 years ago, was probably some form of speech.
@whodey
cont.
"The shapes of the interiors of fossil skulls indicate that even the 3 layered structure of our brains has existed for at least hundreds of thousands of years and it possibly extends back a million years. What appears to be the oldest part of our brain is a mass of nerves at the top of the spinal cord. In this region, referred to as the stem, or brain stem, automatic body functions such as breathing and heartbeat are controlled. Overlaying the brain stem is the reptilian part of our brain, where the instincts for territorial control and for fight or flight are seated. These very instincts still strongly control the actions and reactions of today's reptiles. They are also part of our intellectual baggage. Above the reptilian brain lies the limbic system. With the appearance of this portion of the brain, mammals depart from all their ancestors. From there originate emotions, especially those related to the love and care for offspring. The most recent part of the brain to evolve is the cerebral cortex. This overlies the limbic system. It is from here that analytical thought and the ability for mathematics and language and forethought stem.
The very fact that the brain is layered with such successive advance in intellectual development literally placed on top of its predecessor, indicates a pattern in development of brain morphology that is similar to the development of other body functions. Recall that at the cellular level the processing of foods consists of the more recently developed oxic respiration cycle being appended to the older anoxic fermentation cycle. The fact that the development of a fertilized human egg proceeds through gill-bearing and tail-bearing stages shows that the ability to produce those organs is still within our genetic material. Our final structure is molded in part from a composite of these earlier forms. The flippers of the porpoise have retained the bone structure of the forearm and hand that forbearers of this mammal had. The gene site for this structure has been retained within the porpoise's genetic material just as humans retain the gene site for gills and tails.
In light of this additive nature of development, the sobering realization is that our brain is not qualitatively different from many lower animals'. While the cerebral cortex is largest in humans, and as such provides us with the ability to formulate language and conceptual reasoning, its structure is the same as it is in rodents, monkeys, and all mammals. For all, it is composed of vertical columns of interconnected nerve cells, each 0.2 to 0.3 millimeters in diameter. Each column forms a modular unit.
The add on nature of this modular design has enabled the expansion in mental capacity without a need to change the basic internal structure of the brain and nervous system. The social breakthrough of language, spoken and written, was accomplished by humans and their nearly, but not quite, human ancestors through the quantitative increase in these modular units, numbering billions in humans, and not by a qualitative change in the functioning of the brain.
The record is all but irrefutable. Either we believe that the Creator placed fossils in the Earth to test our faith in a literal understanding of the Biblical account of the Creation (and I do not subscribe to such a concept), or we must acknowledge that a form of animal life that was very much like human life predated Adam and Eve.
This latter option is not in contradiction with the established tradition on which I am relying. Well within this scope of Biblical tradition is the fact of a directed evolution of man, one that arises from the pristine matter of the universe.
cont.
@whodey
cont.
"Biblically, Divine punctuation in the flow of life is seen in the original creation of the universe, in the creation of the ability for animal life to arise from this matter, and in the tenfold repetition of "and God said" recoded in the first chapter of Genesis. The fact that the making of man is the most intimately described event of that chapter in Genesis implies that mankind is the targeted goal of those punctuations.
When on the 6th day, in the Creator's space-time reference frame, God decided to make mankind, the Bible first states that God will make man in God's image and likeness. (Gen 1:26) In the following verse it is written, "God created mankind in his image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them". The verbs make and create are both used, and so, from these two verses, it appears that both making and creating were involved in the appearance of the first of mankind. Later (Gen 2:7), it is explicitly stated that mankind is formed from a previously existing substance, in fact, the same substance used to form the fowl and land animals (Gen 2:19). However, a special ingredient not mentioned before is summoned at this juncture. God breathes a neshamah, a "soul life" into this creature and man becomes a living being.
Nahmanides (who predates modern science) in his Commentary on Genesis and Maimonides in his Guide for the Perplexed both state with no equivocation: Every material thing that was eventually to exist was derived from what was created in the first instant of creation. That was the only material creation. From that ethereal mass of pure energy and exquisitely thin substance, stones and galaxies and humans were to be formed. We are products of the Big Bang. We are, in fact, made of star dust. The material aspects of man are totally rooted in the universe.
The specialty of mankind is not the physical attributes we have...............mankind and his predecessors, although physically related, are not connected by a spiritual line of evolution. Homo sapiens roamed the Earth form some 300,000 years, in our space-time reference frame, prior to the appearance of mankind. The Neanderthals appear to have started burying their dead 100,000 years ago, and their fossil remains as well as those of the more recent Cro-Magnon became increasingly similar in shape to human beings as the time before the present decreases. But neither the Neanderthal nor the Cro-Magnon evolved into human beings.
At a crucial junction some 5,700 years ago a quantum change occurred. This change is the reason for the Biblically stated partnership between God and the Earth in creating mankind. Indeed, so intimate is mankind's connection with the Earth that the name chosen for the first of the species is Adam, which means "soil" in Hebrew.
All animals received a life giving spirit, a nefesh in Hebrew. The animal that was about to become Adam was no exception. However, into the physical form that contained the nefesh of Adam, the Creator placed an additional spirit, or soul, the neshamah. It is this that has set mankind apart from the other animals. "And the Lord formed man from the dust of the ground and blew in his nostrils a soul of life (neshamah), and man became a living being (nefesh)." (Genesis 2:7)
In The Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides makes a remarkable comment. In the time of Adam, he writes, there coexisted animals that appeared as humans in the shape and also in intelligence but lacked the "image" that makes man uniquely different from other animals, being as the "image" of God."
@kellyjay saidYou schooling someone on writing style!
My first suggestion to you would be use paragraphs. If you want to play me challenge me.
LOL
I'll be watching you.