Arrylium wrote:Well, sorry I'm not from the US and have no idea what their school system is like - I'm probably even further from it because I was homeschooled for 5 years.
Heh, nothing to be sorry about, I just asked because I recognised some expressions and some ways of reasoning.
Alright, so in the non-scientific sense would you say faith is not necessarily a bad thing?
Our everyday lives would be impossible, or at least intolerable, if we demanded the same degree of evidence as sciences does to take something as correct or incorrect. Relationships with other people, decisions making regarding the most trivial things...in our lives, we need some faith in people and things around us. Imagine if we would question every statement other people made, and demand objective evidence that must be replicated before we believe in them! If my best friend says she's not well and she needs to talk to me, I just go and see her, I don't question the reliability and validity of her statement, I act upon it as a "truth".
Ok, I think I'm getting it. The example about the ovarian cancer was another example of what I'm talking about - just the idea that although a piece of evidence may be quantifiable, measurable etc., it can be seen by different people to support or falsify different hypotheses. Would that be fair enough as a statement from a scientific viewpoint?
Not sure what you mean here, but in science, there is little room for different people to have different views on a piece of evidence as support or falsification for a certain hypothesis, since the hypothesis must state from the beginning what would consist falsification and what would consist support. However, outside of science, it can vary a lot what a certain piece of evidence is seen as.
I read them, I'm not sure exactly how well I understood them.
Could primoridal soup be thought of as life in any sense?
The articles are a bit technical, that's the problem with what is called "primary literature", ie the original reports written by the scientists who conducted the experiements.
However, the so called "primoridal soup" is a term that denotes the state of earth when it was newly formed. No life existed then. Here is a schematic description of this state:
http://clab.cecil.cc.md.us/faculty/biology1/prisoup.htm
The oldest prokaryote (simple cells that are bacteria or algae) are from 3.5-3.2 billions years ago, so as far as we know now, it seems that the development from non-life to the simplest life form we define as life, took over 1 billion years. Then, it took a further 2 billion years before the eukaryotes developed, ie cells that have a nucleus and organelles, cells like the ones we and most other living things on earth have in our bodies.
I don't want to sound picky or something but I want to be clear - is this equivalent to saying that science has proven that life can come from non-life, or is having steps produced seperately in a lab different to having an entire process occur in nature?
It sounds like you have got it right, science has demonstrated that life can come from non-life. The important thing is that life
can develop from non life in the steps produced separately in labs - that does not mean we know for sure
it really happened that way 3-3.5 billion years ago. Much evidence points in this direction, but it means that it is possible that life can develop without a god - however, we don't know if it really did or not.
Sorry, I certainly didn't mean to be putting up strawmen, I was just wondering because I view that as an argument for the existence of God, and against the scientific principle that there is no need for a God.
What exactly is a 'singularity?'
I don't think the "something cannot come from nothing" it's a very useful argument or the existance of a god, for two reasons:
1. neither astrophysics nor biology claims that the universe developed from nothing, or that life developed from nothing
2. it raises the question "where did god come from?"
A singularity is a single point in a state of infinite density where time and room does not exist since the gravity is infinite. It is thought that singularities exist inside of black holes.
A singularity is a place where the classical concepts of space and time break down as do all the known laws of physics because they are all formulated on a classical space-time background. Hawking, S.W. Breakdown of Predictability in Gravitational Collapse,' Physical Review D, 14 (1976), 2460.
Hmmmm.... well I wouldn't exactly say I use that theory a lot, but I have doubts on the ability of science to prove, quantify, and explain absolutely everything about the universe, even given thousands of years, so I don't know if all the 'gaps' will be closed eventually.
Maybe science will never fill in all the gaps, but the number of gaps are constantly decrasing, and it would be strange indeed if god was sort of shrinking, that his power would be less and less, he had done less and less, and the arguments became fewer and fewer. Personally, I think a sound faith in god must rest on believing god has created the universe, earth and life, and that science is simply discovering how he did this, ie the mechanisms behind it, just as if the artist have painted a fantastic painting, and the art-expert analyses how it was done, what canvas was used, what colours, how they were mixed, what painting-techniques were used, etc.
Ok, that's quite interesting (no sarcasm intended whatsoever). How does that work (or am I going way off topic here?) - I would have thought of love as something that no-one can explain.
Love is an immense topic of it's own, but a starting point could be this thread:
http://gamebanshee.com/forums/showthrea ... light=love
Absolutely - I was just checking that 'a great probability' was not equivalent to 'truth.'
Good - no they are not equivalent.
I had a look at the link and that's what I was thinking of when I mentioned spontaneous generation - I remembered reading in it in a book about Louis Pasteur - I certainly don't think it's possible and I was fairly sure it wasn't accepted as science any more. I was thinking of it, though, because you mentioned the steps between life and non-life being reproducible, and I was wondering whether that meant life could come from non-life, and if so whether that was spontaneous generation all over again.
Ok, now we both know that spontaneous generation is something completely else and that the very concept of spontaneous generation is not used anymore.
I don't see science in conflict with religion myself, but I do occasionally see science trying to step into areas that it just doesn't belong. I don't see any reason why the two should be fundamentally in opposition.
What areas do think science are stepping into, where it does not belong? Individual scientists can sometimes draw their conclusions too far, but in general, I don't really see where science enters the realm of religion, so I'd be interested in hearing what you are referring too. Like you, I don't see any reason why the two should be conflicting since one does not exclude the other.
(Sorry if this post is not very clear, I'm in a hurry since I'm at work)
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