Did Life Originate By Chance or Intelligent Design? Or is There a Third Option?

by JimmyPage 85 Replies latest jw friends

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  prologos

  ENTIRELY POSSIBLE GOLDWATER: RIGHT! THE QUESTION WAS "--ORIGINATE--" AND STILL IS. A CORPSE HAS ALL THE CHEMICALS (HARD TO SYNTISIZE) FOR LIFE, BUT IS LIFELESS, THE SPARK IS GONE, THAT VIBRANT USE OF ENERGY, THE RIDE ON THE WAVE IS OVER AT DEATH.

  SO THE TWO TOWERING FACTS ARE 1) THE CREATION, ORIGIN OF THE MATERIAL UNIVERSE, ITS FLOW THROUGH TIME : ISAIH 40, AND

  2) THE CREATION, ORIGIN OF LIFE: GENESIS STORY

  3) THE EMERGENCE OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS ABOVE THE ANIMAL MIND: THE A&E SYMBOLISM.

  IT WOULD BE A MASTERSTROKE OF CREATIVITY TO MAKE POSSIBLE A SELF-DEVELOPING LIFE SYSTEM (EVOLUTION) THAT HAS US AS A PINNACLE, ALLOWING AN UNDERSTANDING MIND. IS THE CREATION ACCOUNT AS WRITTEN, TO BE UNDERSTOOD AND EXCUSED AS AN ALLEGORY FOR SIMPLER TIMES? THE 3 FACTS ARE THERE, ANY BETTER EXPLANATIONS? BLESSINGS
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  NewChapter

  I'm not sure I understand your post, but I will say you have us as some kind of 'pinnacle'. We are not a pinnacle. We are still evolving. All evolution does not lead to H. sapien, so this was not the goal. It is simply where we are at the moment, and we are different than our ancient ancestors.

  Other human species also had an understanding mind that surpassed the congition of other animals. They had symbolic thoughts and sought the spiritual. Yet they no longer walk the earth.
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  konceptual99

  When I started reading about evolution it really hit me that I had never really understood anything about the subject despite my thinking that I had been given lots of info via the society's publications. There are two massive misconceptions that are typical of most witnesses. Firstly, as already mentioned, that evolution relates to the emergence of life. Not true. That's the realm of abiogenesis. The second is that there is one "theory" of evolution. Natural selection is the prime, but just one, component of how life progressed.

  The ignorance of witnesses in this area is shocking but not surprising. If the society actually educated people about the subject or gave people an honest representaion of evolutionary science on subjects such as the development of the eye or cooperation and interdependencies between organisms, then they would risk people actually starting to accept science instead of the emotional assertions of the society.

  The one area I still find difficult to discuss with witnesses is faith and belief in science. Once you understand the scientific method and the difference between theory and hypothesis it's easy to see there is no believe and faith, just acceptance. For a witness however they are still conditioned to say that you have to have faith that a scientific position is true, for example so called assumptions about intermediaries or theories about feathers on dinosaurs.

  The acceptance of natural selection does not remove the existence of a creator and designer but it does very much reduce the need.
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  Qcmbr

  There may be many paths to generating life. The difficulty is marking the transition between behaviour at the chemical level to behaviour at the replication and processing level - i.e. what is our definition of life? Chemicals can exhibit some behaviour normally associated with life http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcpcFL2hes8 meaning that we may actually have no start of life, merely an ongoing aggregation of chemicals in multiple places some of which have had enough time and energy to progress to the cellular level.

  Even if we can replicate a process for chemicals to organise and can somehow speed up the process to acount for billions of years and we label that as an abiogenetic process we still cannot say with any certainty that this discovered process is what actually happened.

  Also when we die as a complete organism it is absolutely incorrect to say that the individual lieforms that once collaborated to make us die, the only thing gone is the human brain activity. The bacteria in our guts goes into overdrive and parasites compete with incoming invaders such as fly larvae to utilise the food sources of the body just as surely as when our brains were alive we utilised the resources of the food we ate. We are not alone, we are a nation of combined , independantly viable, lifeforms collaborating temporaily for mutual gain. A corpse is not useless.
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  Satanus

  I wonder, sometimes, if the word awarenss should be substituted for life. Perhaps, that would help the search. How does 'the origin or awareness' sound? I have read articles that the lowest forms of life have some kind of awareness.

  S
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  Satanus

  'Chemicals can exhibit some behaviour normally associated with life meaning that we may actually have no start of life, merely an ongoing aggregation of chemicals in multiple places some of which have had enough time and energy to progress to the cellular level.'

  I just saw this, and find it interesting, in lieu of my first post. It tends to describe it as a continuum. It might work well, if what was tested for was awarness and not for signs of life.

  S
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  Qcmbr

  Some of those chemical globs seemed to be aware (though of course they were merely performing chemical interactions ) - is a cell aware? The more I find out about science the more I'm reminded that we aren't divided into neat boxes and how change is an inbuilt part of the whole. It may even be possible that we will one day undo ourselves and replace our biological self with a mechanical one; the definition of life will have to once again be redefined.
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  Satanus

  ' is a cell aware?'

  If it is, it's first reaction would be to its environment in whatever body it is, plant, animal, bug, bacteria, etc. In other words, all its operational programs would have it focused on the function that it has evolved to do within it's host body. Of course, since cells have also descended from previous ancestral cells. Some of the previous dna codings could still be lying there, dormant.

  What i'm saying is that you couldn't walk up to the cell, introducing yourself, so to speak and expect a response as per your definitions. It's awareness, if it had that would be on other things. You would get ignored.

  S
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  yadda yadda 2

  We just don't know, and we probably will never know for a very very long time, if ever at all. That's the only answer I know for sure.
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  cofty

  I have been reading about abiognesis recently. I am convinced we are very close to answering the question.

  The hypothesis about organic soup is a dead end.

  Once I am finished the Greatest Show thread I would like to get into it in detail.