Where's the bookie giving these odds, I wanna make a bet!

Athiesm is based on the concept that absense of evidence is evidence of absense.

No quite; Atheism is more based on the concept of Occam's Razor. If things have simpler explanations (or simpler explanations can be imagined/are pending/are more likely) why assume the existence of a "god" to explain the various phenomena?

Furthermore, there are degrees of atheism. Almost no atheist is 100% unshakably certain that God doesn't exist, they just regard the likelihood that god exists as being so small as to be completely negligible (as Infundibulum says, generally invoking the principle of Occam's Razor)

Another very instructive concept for theists to consider in trying to grasp agnosticism and atheism (which in practice amount to much the same thing) is Betram Russel's teapot, also sometimes known as the "celestial teapot":

Fair enough, as well as there being different degrees.

Though I have a question...what simpler explanation is there for existence?

It seems to me that "a creator" would be the simplest explanation. I am unfamiliar with any scientific explanation as to the Big Bang. So on one side we have a creator, on the other side we have nothing whatsoever.

A good thought experiment, and perfectly logical. The problem I have with that particular idea in relation to the discussion we are having is that a teapot floating in space explains nothing, gives no hypothesis, no matter how unlikely or absurd, for observable reality.

Evolution provides enough explanations for existence. From the formation of the first bacteria to their gradual evolution to higher animals, plants and fungi. Evolution explains how things could have happened. And philosophically it is a simple theory (even though the details can be complex). On the other hand, evoking a supernatural being that created "existence" sounds to far-fetched and unnecessary.

Now, the downside of Occam's Razor is that it is somewhat based on the very subjective opinion of what each person considers "simple" or "simpler". Which of course means that for some people invoking the supernatural being(s) to explain phenomena to constitute a "simpler" explanation. But not for me.

People do like that medieval theologian William of Ockham on here! This is what my philosophy comic-book says about him:


"Unfortunately" because he was wrong. Too reductive. Whereas Einstein said that "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler".
The right answer is the right one, not the simpler one.

Right.

As simple as possible: The laws of nature are built with inherent mechanisms that allow for the development of progressively more complex lifeforms within a limited system.

Simpler: God did it.

And what hypothesis does God give? And which god? There are many many theological systems, both mono-theistic and polytheistic, and all seem to bear an equal paucity of evidence or testable hypotheses (paucity may in fact be too generous a word... dearth is perhaps more appropriate)

Evangelical atheism is a religion par excellence in my opinion. Behaviors such as violence and willful ignorance that often result from religion/spirituality should be soundly condemned but inner metaphysical ideas are not disprovable and therefore they are outside the realm of real critical analysis.

There is some misinformation in this thread. Some knowledge was hard won. People spent their whole lives grinding some truth out of nature so I gotta stand up for it a little. Truth is beautiful! Let's be very careful to not get mired in the confusion of the ancients but instead lets stand on the shoulders of the generations that came before and make more truth.

This defines my own personal spirituality. Carl Sagan said it well. We are starstuff looking back at itself in awe and wonder. The noblest thing we can do is seek truth so the universe can have a better understanding of itself. We are the consciousness of the universe.

So in the interest of improving the universe:



What gaps? You might be surprised at the progress paleontology has made in the last 5-10 years. Many hypothesized transition forms have been found. There were, at one time, gaps in the periodic table of the elements. Finding these elements and discovering they had some of the predicted properties convinced everyone that periodicity is real. Likewise, the missing links are being found! We have the transition from fish to tetrapod now. We have more homonid transitional forms then you can shake a stick at. What gaps still trouble you?



It didn't. The universe is maybe 11-12 billion years old. The earth is 4.5 billion years old. Life on earth is maybe 2.5-3.5 billion years old. These are established verifiable facts.



It is not. The laws of thermodynamics just give humans a nice set of mathematical tools to model certain aspects of life. There are plenty of other things that can be modeled with this math that are not alive and this math is insufficient to explain life entirely.




Man you might consider tuning up your BS'o'meter. This experiment would not produce anything anyone would define as life. This article was bunk.




Nobody can ever know the answer to this. At first you might think that kinda sucks but I think it is a very liberating idea.
We can instead ask: "By what mechanisms non-living molecules form the earliest life form?" Nobody knows the answer to this either but it is something that can potentially be answered.

Word! Screw Ockam's razor. It has mislead more scientists then it has aided. Life in particlular is not as simple as it could be. Many systems in living organisms are like freaking Rube Goldberg machines. An intelligent designer could have made them way more efficient.

Well said, I like Carl Sagan, and I agree wholeheartedly that the noblest thing we can do is seek truth. My flaw with this perception is that it is too narrow, the entire universe is conscious, we are only a exceptionally small part of it.

Please define consciousness in scientific terms...


The gaps of the missing links that have not been found...I'll have to do some research to find specific examples, but there are great bursts in evolution that cannot as yet be explained. Evolution is not always a slow and methodocial process, at times great leaps are made in astonishingly short peroids of time, in a seemingly cyclical nature.
http://www.lbl.gov/Scien...fossil-biodiversity.html

I agree many things are being found, evolution is the best explanaion we have scientifically for the process of life, after it arose, although there is some dubious evidence. It does not, and I believe will never be able to explain everything we observe.



Partially incorrect. According to current estimates, the universe is 13.7 billion years old. My original statement is incorrect by current scientific understanding in that I stated that life arose from the moment of creation, which is not possible. Unless you broadly expand your definition of life.



I was responding to a post made by someone else who linked an article that stated without verifying evidence that life is written into the laws of thermodynamics. I agree with your statement that this math is insufficient to explain the origins of life. Unless it is written in the laws of nature which were formed at the beginning of it all.





So we will never understand the origins of life? There will never be a way to describe it scientifically? Maybe, maybe not. As I said earlier, the chances of DNA forming from non-living molecules is according to Hoyle "negligible".

Here is the relevant part of that quote by Hoyle:



The odds of that are 10 to the 130+ power

There has to be a simpler answer. I'll take the odds of a creator any day over those odds.

Perhaps life is an inherent property of the universe, it is written into its code, a self organizing principal from the energy that pervades all of existence? An unprovable hypothesis at the moment, but interesting to ponder, and more likely than any other explanaion offered so far, in my opinion...

Evolution cannot explain the formation of the first bacteria. It can explain how higher animals, plants and fungi formed from that bacteria, but not how that bacteria came about from non organic molecules. It certainly explains how things could have happened very compellingly and with good evidence, but only after life emerged.

That is most certainly a flaw in Occam's Razor. The odds of some higher organizing principal to existence is far more likely in my opinion, than the odds of random molecules just happening to run into eachother in the right way and the right time in the right place by accident.

Could it possibly be both? Why is it always an all or nothing propositon?

Too many of you are avoiding the entire argument I have been making this entire thread. DO NOT anthropomorphize "god". DO NOT think in the narrow terms of a personal god. Both ideas I have refuted multiple times as they are absurd and a hopelessly limited understanding of what is.

Think along the lines of Tao or Brahman, All That Is, Energy, Vibration. Creation is in all the laws of nature, it is the universe experiencing itself. It is consciousness, in all its forms.

Agree lets throw out the personal god hes dead as dead can be. But the things you mention are just as dead. Consciousness iiiiiiiiiiissss.......

Ill get back to this later. Gotta get to work.

How are the things I mentioned just as dead? Please explain.

Consciousness iiisssss...What? Define please as I am still looking for a scientific explanation of consciousness...

I myself am off to bed, have a good day/night all!

Namaste

Quote:
burnt
What is ypur opinion on the parallels between quantum physics and certain mysticisms ie the void generates all things from nothing just as particiles arise in a vacuume seemimgly from no where. We need a experement to determin whats realy happening but I fear it wont be in my life time I hope I am wrong.


Well ok. Our entire universe is made up of 'stuff' space is not empty. But where did space come from? I don't know no one does. But why think that some intelligence force created it? How could there be an intelligent force without something making it? Thats why god is so improbable.

I think you are wrong there are lots of experiments going on so I think we are going to see a lot in this regard except I don't think its going to be good news for the spiritual or religious folk for the reasons I am currently suggesting.

But yea I often don't like when people link mystics with quantum physics. Theres a lot of popular writing about this these days and half of it is complete garbage. I ask my physicists friends this and they explain it as such. I prefer to look at just quantum physics and what it tells us because it was discovered by a process in which we can not deny its real.





Good as I said I was hoping I was wrong. heh Thanks for the reply

No worries man just thought i would let you know, I took absolutely no offense


Much Peace

I meant I don't think the universe is alive. When I said personal god was dead I meant that more in metaphorical sense.



I'll have to say that SWIM doesn't like occam's razor. Quantum mechanics is just one example of something that was unlikely but is certainly true.

Anyway concerning life's origin. Bacteria were most likely not the first organisms. The first organism was probably just a very small strand of RNA or peptide. We knows its possible for strands of nucleotides (things that make up RNA and DNA) and peptides (amino acids that make up proteins) to form under conditions like those on early earth and in space. However the odds that one would be capable of self replication are smaller and the odds that it would survive long enough to get more complex are also smaller. But its not impossible and we can probably observe this happen in a test tube given enough time and a variety of conditions. We have already observe formation of nucleotides and amino acids. They have also been found on meteors and some other tests in space I think say they can form in space.

In a universe as big as ours the odds certainly make it possible for life to form indeed it wouldn't be here (unless god did it) if it couldn't form.

Concerning the first membranes. Membranes spontaneously form in water when there is compounds that have a lipid chain and a polar group. Molecules like this could perhaps also form spontaneously although SWIM hasn't read any reports or studies about that. There might be some SWIM just doesn't know. The first membrane 'coats' could have been peptides as well which can form spontaneously.



There are some "missing" links but they are always blown way out of proportion. And for the most part a clear trend is obvious. Concerning speed of evolution this also varies so yes I agree but this depends on selection pressure and other normal evolutionary forces. There are also some other newer mechanisms concerning DNA and proteins that also are playing a role in evolution but its not necessary to get into right now.



This author is over simplifying it. There just isn't enough data yet to make such assumptions and calculate such odds. But experiments can be performed to test some of these ideas it just might take a long time or not maybe its not that unlikely. If we find life on some moon of jupiter or mars I think it would be really good evidence that life can arise in various conditions. There could be many factors we aren't even thinking of that could have catalyzed many kinds of chemical reactions needed to link up nucleotides and amino acids. Think of all the radiation blasting the earth at that time. Just one example of one possibility. There is a lot more then just that test that Miller and Urey performed.



Anyway Saiden yes I think we have been beating around the bush a bit but I think some necessary points had to be made first about evolution, the cosmos, and that we all don't like mainstream religion (for the most part). Now lets tackle the deep waters.


For a clear no nonsense definition of consciousness I like to turn to neuroscience text (Principles of Neuroscience 4th edition: Kandal, Schwartz, and Jessel). To paraphrase:

Mind is the whole of the brains operations. Consciousness is a state of awareness. Consciousness is subjective. Consciousness is unitary. Our perceptions appear as a whole. Consciousness displays intentionality meaning connecting memories and ideas and representing a range of our own experiences.

Some people claim mind is dualistic meaning mind is separate from the physical functions of the body. This is an old idea. Not necessarily a true one and in fact most evidence points to the idea that consciousness arises from the physical properties of the brain and nervous system.

We currently lack an overall completely accepted theory of how the firing of neurons leads to conscious perception. How can something that's irreducibly subjective such as consciousness ever be studied objectively?

Just because consciousness is subjective does not mean that the mind and consciousness cannot be studied from an objective and at the same time reductionist approach. The more we learn about the basics of the mind and how it can give rise to consciousness the more we will be able to explain how exactly the firing of specific neurons appears to give rise to consciousness. Its not impossible despite claims of various philosophers and we are learning ALOT. We are working our way up to bigger theories of conscious experience. Selective attention is one example of a testable component of consciousness.

So to summarize it does not yet appear that consciousness and how the neural mechanisms of the brain lead to conscious experience is outside the realm of science.





This to me is the closet I can come to any kind of spiritualism. Sagan had a knack for putting it poetically.


Are there any objections to how consciousness has been defined? If not we should move on.

A few issues to cover remain formation of the universe (which there is no real answer to), things like shamanic insight synchronocity, other odd ball spiritual beliefs like reincarnation, faith healing whatever. Don't know where to start but it all falls under the umbrella of the laws of nature for me.

^^Your history of the universe is very very flawed.