||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ||||||||||||||||||| First post for the year -- welcome back to all! |||||||||||||||||||||||||| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Jack L I've included two of your posts in this thread with comments. Paul D oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo /* You are forgiven your messy attachments! |[:-) Just an open mind. Not relative to anything. Characterised principally by being able to acknowledge a point made by your adversary as correct instead of objecting to every point made on principle (or simply ignoring it) and especially those points which are quintesentially obvious. */ From Jack Lewis Sun Dec 23 22:34:14 2007 Sorry about the messy way I sent the attachments. I'll be more careful next time. I'm glad you thought the articles had some debating merit. However an open mind with respect to what? Do you mean with respect to the two articles or to other things? Finally may I wish you a thoughtful Christmas and a preposterous New Year:-) Jack L Paul Deema wrote: Jack L I've extracted the text from that unreadable file you sent me and have 'textised' the other one as well -- about 92% reduction in file size! Some typos have been fixed and hyperlinks removed. I find the content of both files quite interesting and stuff for a fertile debate -- if only you had an open mind. Paul D oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo /* I'll try one more analogy -- please try to grasp what it is I'm saying. You've seen those wonderfully imaginative demonstrations involving -- in some cases I believe -- more than a million dominoes, each arranged so as to fall when struck by the previous falling domino (or something struck by a falling domino). It is a fascinatingly compulsive spectacle. Abiogenesis is like the first domino being pushed sufficiently that its centre of gravity falls outside its base of support. Once this happens, all that follows is preordained. And what I mean by "...try to understand..." is that I'm aware that you can posit all manner of events which could derail the process. This matters not. If your positted event does not occur, then they will all fall. The aether on the other hand is like the water in a canal. When a barge is deposited in it, it displaces just the the amount of water which equals its own weight. The barge can then be towed to the next loch. Without it, the barge would rest in the mud and to a first approximation -- you couldn't move it. Thus it must always be there for the canal to funcion. Again, I'm sure you can raise all manner of objections. I say again -- it matters not. Thus I say yet again -- abiogenesis and the aether cannot be compared, as they are different each from the other in a fundamental manner. */ /* Concerning fossils found in waterborn sediments and the idea that the smaller were buried first and the larger later. Why then do we not find rabbit skeletons buried with the trilobytes and elephants buried with the hadrosaurs? Now to the matter of the "...scientific absurdities..." and scientists being in denial. As gently as I can manage Jack -- you are not my first point of reference when it comes to deciding what is scientific and what is not and I suspect that this is true for a great many of my peers and my betters. Not to put too fine a point on it, I think you overestimate your ability to determine what is 'scientific' and what is not, especially in light of the fact that most everytime a new idea is floated past you, your usual response is to ask someone else what position you should take on the matter. */ From Jack Lewis Sun Dec 23 10:13:08 2007 Dear Paul and Regner, Unfortunately Paul you picked a bad example as an analogy for evolution. 1 The building needed drawings from an architect. 2 The bricks did not make themselves. 3 The building could not build itself. It is impossible for you to try and describe evolution, the 'goo to you' type of evolution by comparing it with man made artefacts. If you want to use a building as a true analogy then you must consider that the bricks came about by some process that doesn't require intelligence. How many millions of years do you suppose must elapse before bricks, complete with manufacturer's name, spontaneously materialise? Of course the idea is daft and nobody would make such a suggestion, without the bricks you couldn't build a house. Therefore those who would continue to maintain that bricks must have come about by some random natural spontaneous event simply because they exist, is not a very smart conclusion. You may claim that you don't yet know the answer how bricks came about, but a cursory inspection shows they couldn't have happened by chance random processes. So why is it so difficult to apply the same reasoning to life which is massively more complex that a clay brick? Regarding evolution and the unimportance of abiogenesis, the fossil record does not show gradual change but thousands of set kinds - many of which are now extinct. Since the fossils are found in water-born sediment, it makes sense that the smallest organisms get buried first followed by the larger creatures. That is the most obvious and simplest interpretation of the evidence. The only reason for denying this interpretation is its close similarity with the events described in the Bible therefore by default there has to be another explanation. It is this explanation that is full of scientific absurdities which the scientists are unable to see because they are in denial. Abiogenesis is their most fundamental and greatest problem. Regner's suggestion that the first organisms could have come from some other part of the cosmos merely shifts the problem to somewhere else and again, it is not a very scientific suggestion. You can look at all the skyscrapers in New York and marvel at them but any suggestion that their building blocks could have happened by chance is a non starter - no bricks, no building, it really is that simple. Jack L oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo Make the switch to the world's best email. Get the new Yahoo!7 Mail now. www.yahoo7.com.au/worldsbestemail