bohm

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Posts by bohm

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  69

  Science still doesn't have the answers on how life first appeared

  by EndofMysteries in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  since so many athiests in this thread, and since i'm going to college, i was curious if what i would learn in biology would change my thoughts and show that life clearly and easily spontaneously happened.

  just looking up the origins of dna or rna there is nothing conclusive.

  for example, scientists today are able to manipulate life.

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  bohm

  prologos: Why should it be easier to figure out what could/did happen on the early earth 4 billion years ago than to find the Higgs boson?

  
  
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  69

  Science still doesn't have the answers on how life first appeared

  by EndofMysteries in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  since so many athiests in this thread, and since i'm going to college, i was curious if what i would learn in biology would change my thoughts and show that life clearly and easily spontaneously happened.

  just looking up the origins of dna or rna there is nothing conclusive.

  for example, scientists today are able to manipulate life.

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  bohm

  prologos: There are quite significant differences between the work at CERN and abiogenesis, primarily that at CERN they have a fixed theory to work with (the standard model of particle physics) which operate with a small(ish) number of entities according to fixed laws. With abiogenesis, you got all of biochemistry, most which has not yet been discovered (no standard model), you don't know what simple life could be (compare to look for the higgs boson) and you don't have a fixed environment since we don't know the geological and chemical makeup of early earth very well (compare to the controlled environment in a collider). 

  You could make the same argument for any old crime: hey, if they can find the amplitude of the Higgs field, why can't they figure out who killed ms. Jones?
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  69

  Science still doesn't have the answers on how life first appeared

  by EndofMysteries in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  since so many athiests in this thread, and since i'm going to college, i was curious if what i would learn in biology would change my thoughts and show that life clearly and easily spontaneously happened.

  just looking up the origins of dna or rna there is nothing conclusive.

  for example, scientists today are able to manipulate life.

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  bohm

  My point is that if scientifically ALL possibilities must be looked at.

  Viviane: Not even close. Not how science works. Before you jump into biology, take a class on basic scientific education first. Your grasp of science is woefully lacking.

  In order to look at all possibilities, you must consider an infinite number of combinations, for instance, that a rhino made of pigs is responsible for creation, or that drywall spackle is, or that life sprang from nothing with no cause, or that life came from a collision of an ice cream truck and a comet while having lunch in the core of a neutron star.

  In practice, the possibilities are often grouped, as are the examples EOM gave. For instance you have a group of theistic explanations, a group of explanations involving life originating on earth, a group of explanations with life originating elsewhere in the universe, etc. Now, it is possible to conjure up an (for all purposes) infinite way of counting these explanations in a number of trivial ways, for instance you can think of life originating an infinite number of places on earth or the infinite possible values of the gravitational constant, however this is clearly not the practical problem of science as these different ways are in practice very often neatly grouped. 

  In the history of science the to-many-explanations-to-consider problem has very rarely surfaced. For instance before Einstein there was not 100 different physical ideas of coordinate invariance in inertial systems but one, Galilean invariance. With Einstein (well, Lorentz, depending on how you look at things) there was two, Galilean invariance and Lorentz invariance and it was quickly apparent which was the better. Or take the shape of the earth. I can think of a grand total of three ideas in the history of science, cylindrical, flat and round.

  In science today I would think that looking at all possibilities is exactly the sort of advice I think one should give to people. To negate the statement one end up with the suggestion that one should not look at some possibilities; however if we are really to take this suggestion seriously, we cannot decide to look or not to look at a possibility by investigating it's properties, because that would exactly require us to look at it in the first place. The advice would then seem to boil down to randomly selecting some ideas over other to look at; i think that exactly characterizes the opposite of being scientific.

  
  

  
  

  
  
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  69

  Science still doesn't have the answers on how life first appeared

  by EndofMysteries in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  since so many athiests in this thread, and since i'm going to college, i was curious if what i would learn in biology would change my thoughts and show that life clearly and easily spontaneously happened.

  just looking up the origins of dna or rna there is nothing conclusive.

  for example, scientists today are able to manipulate life.

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  bohm

  My point is that if scientifically ALL possibilities must be looked at.

  EOM: I agree we should allow ourselves to look at all possibilities, including God.

  I think the problem is there are three great unknowns in this equation. First, we don't have a very firm idea what early life could be. So we have a rough idea that the early life (according to abiogenesis) should be the simplest system of molecules that was able to store information (that is, really just a complicated molecule that could be build in different ways), copy itself and it had to have something going on chemically (a metabolism). The issue is for all of these things the current ideas for how life originated involves that existing non-living system might have taken care of some of these functions making the delineation between life and environment very fuzzy. For instance according to many ideas, volcanoes (of different sorts!) took care of the metabolism. Now we don't know at all what is possible in an earth-sized chemical environment, and that is our first problem: each decade bring new ideas for how early life might have looked and interacted with the surroundings so we clearly need to do a lot more exploring.

  The second unknown is we don't know terrible much about the early earth. So we know it had biochemistry, and we know it had amino acids and lipids, but the problem is small biological chemicals with a life-span (even in good conditions!) of about a hundred years won't leave much of a trace if you leave them on a rock for 4 billion years; in fact, the rock is likely to have either been eroded away in the mean time or buried very deep. This is very important because the acidity of the environment, the concentration of biological substances and which biological substances was available are very important. 

  The third unknown is what the earliest life on earth actually looked like. The earliest traces we have of life is identified, as far as i know, only by looking at concentration of an isotope of carbon at what is believed to be remains of life. The issue is that looking at this isotope wont tell us anything about the biochemical makeup of this life, and we should not believe it was the earliest. 

  
  

  The problem is these three unknowns makes it impossible to conclude one way or another. It could be in a hundred years geology will have advanced to a degree that we know what the early earth was like chemically, and using huge simulations we have probed what is chemically feasible in this environment. if it turns out there seem to be a very firm limit to how advanced the chemistry could have become by then, then this would be evidence against abiogenesis and for God, but right now we simply don't know that much about the early earth or what is chemically feasible. 

  It is a bit like looking at the pyramids and thinking: Man could not have build these! It must have been the aliens.

  There is in principle no problem with this conclusion, however it requires 3 elements: First, it requires knowledge of the society in ancient Egypt, i.e. what technology and resources they had available. Then it requires knowledge of what is feasible with this technology in terms of heaping stones on top of each other, and thirdly it requires archaeological knowledge, that is, you dig through the sand around the pyramids and look for evidence of (or against) quarries, worker barracks, etc. Without knowledge of these things the conclusion aliens must have done it is not warranted. 

  I would recommend the wikipedia article on abiogenesis to get an idea of the complexity of the chemistry involved and how primitive early living systems are thought to have been. I might also recommend "life ascending" by nick lane, however I thought it was a very hard book to read.

  
  
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  73

  What will the JW religion be like in 2015?

  by JimmyPage in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  over 100 years into the reign of christ and six more years of damage from the internet.

  .

  what do you envision?.

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  bohm

  Mary, time for the 2020 predictions!
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  49

  Elders in Spain Steal Millions from Congregation

  by cappytan in

  1. watchtower
  2. scandals

  these men are appointed by holy spirit,.

  here is the source: http://www.economiadigital.es/es/notices/2015/01/la-fiscalia-imputa-una-estafa-de-mas-de-170-millones-de-euros-a-una-congregacion-de-testigos-de-jeho-65161.php.

  basically, if you don't know spanish, it boils down to this: (my personal editorial of what i've read).

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  bohm

  If this is true someone added a lot of zeros to the numbers..
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  24

  Evidence regarding Daniel 11 & Antiochus IV

  by Bobcat in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  i was doing research on daniel 8 and 11. what i was wondering was if there was any evidence that the jews saw daniel 8 and 11 fulfilled in antiochus iv.. the explained fulfillments (re: antiochus; non-wt explanations) make a lot of sense, but what specifically i was wondering was if the jews (after the time of antiochus iv) saw the daniel prophecies as being fulfilled in him?

  or if there are any threads that discuss this, a link would be appreciated.. thank you in advance.. take care.

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  bohm

  I miss Leolaia. sigh.
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  16

  JW.org and recruitment

  by Illuminated in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  do you believe the marketing of jay w org will convert more people or help inactive ones remain indoctrinated?

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  bohm

  There is a very easy sanity check as for how much the jw.org / tv.jw.org actually help in terms of contacting people: Simply ask yourself when you went to lds.org, or scientology.com, or somewhere else and was so impressed by the site that you read several articles and thought about the information. this is how outsiders view jw.org.

  I am very sure the top brass view this as mostly an internal campaign and in terms of tv.jw.org this has IMHO pretty much been confirmed by the way the GB members say things on JW TV that makes little sense to outsiders (e.g. Anthony Morris in the last show said: "as many of you know I am a father"; this is not someone talking to an audience mainly composed of non-jws). 
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  29

  Meaningful Study

  by Awake at last in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  i never thought i would be commenting, let alone starting a new topic in the category of bible research and study.

  anyone reading my comments on this site would have realised that i am the most unspiritual person to have ever stepped foot inside a kh.

  yet for the first time in my life, on saturday night, i did some meaningful bible study/research, on my own without a wtbts publication in sight, except the nwt bible.

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  bohm

  A fun thing to do when reading a WT is to see how many "study" questions can be answered by reading the paragraph. For instance:

  Q: Circuit overseers have noted what situation in many congregations?

  A: Circuit overseers around the world have noted that in many congregations, more needs to be done to train brothers—

  Q: (a) How do the Scriptures show the importance of training, and why should all of us be interested in this? (See footnote)

  A: As a shepherd, you no doubt realize that personal training is important. You know that more brothers are needed to keep existing congregations spiritually strong and to allow new congregations to be formed. (Read Isaiah 60:22.) You also know that God’s Word urges you to “teach others.” (Read 2 Timothy 2:2.) + 

  Q: (b) Why may some elders find it hard to train others?A: After you have taken care of family needs, job requirements, congregation responsibilities, and other urgent matters, there just seems to be no time left to train others in the congregation
  Q:  What might be one reason why training at times is postponed?A: some think: ‘Training is important, but it is not as urgent as other congregation matters that simply cannot wait. If I have to postpone training for a while, the congregation will continue to function.’
  
  and so on :-). 
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  27

  Did Polonius kill his wife? A problem with apolegetics

  by bohm in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  a basic problem with christian apologetics when applied to the bible is that it relies on the tacit assumption you can draw reliable conclusions on the material.

  the most common form of apologetics start out by certain claims (the tomb was found empty, the disciples had post-crusifiction experiences of jesus that transformed their lives, etc.

  this is hearsay since the person who made the statement cannot be sworn in.

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  bohm

  Honesty: Any discussion regarding the reality of Jesus and His resurrection necessitates a degree of faith

  I think you have just accepted my original point without being aware of it.