nerds

Im not sayin im bigger then jesus but i am more popular

and 4 months later at Elmster we can hang him up and eat chocolate

GOD told me I

I'm going to release a line of "Satan Loves You" boards.

and for all the atheists, a line of "No one loves you" boards.

Do you remember cum with me to the sea i luv

followed by: my god would lick your god in a fight

..and, if so, what are your favourite positions?

I have difficulty imagining non-time. There is an argument that says time began with the big bang. I don't pretend to understand it but I think the argument stems from the notion that space/time is one entity and space has a geometry that is circular.

If there is such a thing as non-time then there is no such thing as time before the big bang. So there is no "before the big bang". Likewise, when you say "What created God?" you imply that there must have been something before God. I don't think that is necessarily so.

Common sense is deceptive. Before Galileo proved the case it was commonly believed that heavy things fell faster than light things. Common sense, informed by the experience of seeing feathers and ashes drifting slowly through the air while rocks and cannon balls plummeted past them, led to this belief. By dint of some rigorous experimentation Galileo proved that it wasn't their weight difference that accounted for their speed difference. Likewise common sense might lead you to believe that frogs croaking brings the rain, a belief held by some Amazonian Indians.

To say that the complexity of life and the cosmos is designed is an unsupportable tenet of faith unless your definition of design includes the arbitrary and accidental processes of evolution, and it doesn't seem to. It was William of Occam who pointed out that for a good theory one shouldn't draw on any more complication than the minimum necessary to make the theory work. Evolutionary theory requires nothing more than the known laws of nature. It is illogical to attribute the complexity of the natural world to a "Designer". It is fallacious to argue that natural complexity is evidence of design.

wind

Sorry Nebs that should be WERE employed by Ford and Toyota not ARE employed.

So is a divine entity responsible for the looming financial crisis ?
A modern capitalistic take on the 'black plague'... in some religious circles referred to as the work of GOD ?
Natural selection on a modern cash driven scale perhaps ?

Wind and waves on the way today.... amen !

In that case the notion that a designer was at work would be a valid hypothesis simply because the known laws of nature don't allow for autonomous evolution in inanimate things. I'm talking evolution = increased complexity and order and doesn't include geology for example. If cars reproduced themselves in a process akin to sex, namely blindly f*****g away and letting nature take it course, then one would be inclined to attribute their evolution to natural causes and one would look for those causes.

And you're not a bad lookin man yourself Nebbs. Nice talking to you.

I recall seeing an answer to that one in Time magazine years ago. They put it down to poor semantics. They said the void is infinite and "space" refers to meaningful space. That is space containing matter. When the cosmologist says "space is expanding" he means that matter is spreading further apart, that the products of the big bang, ie the universe, is taking up more of the void.

I'm inclined to agree with you though when you imply that "space" is space but I can sympathise with the point that the void beyond the cosmos is meaningless except in the sense that it gives the cosmos room to move. Simply because the void beyond the cosmos is beyond the cosmos it can not interact with the cosmos in any way so it's as good as a myth.

Then again there may be some tricky physics/philosophy in the description of the cosmos and space/time that denies the existence of the void beyond the universe. idk.

While I am not an authority I would dispute the notion that the laws of nature do not allow evolution. Amino acids I understand are continually created by energetic processes throughout the cosmos. Space is full of the stuff. Lightening produces it. It has been like that for a very, very, very, long time. I think its highly improbable that the necessary amino acids have not been protected by special circumstances from time to time. Accidental assemblages of amino acids in long chains is easier to imagine than a God sitting down and putting them together. In fact that sort of thinking strikes me as a cop out. Remember, very complex things can be produced by simple generative systems, the weather for example. RNA and DNA are complicated but not THAT complicated. It only takes 1 accidental success, 1 molecule of RNA to survive and reproduce itself in a favourable environment. Life proliferates like cancer. It's unstoppable. I'd be surprised if it isn't abundant throughout the cosmos but that is just a guess.

Speciation is not hard to imagine. The variety you refer to big and little people and hunchbacked people, and people with prominent eyebrow ridges alludes to the variety we see every day. In fact variety is so much the norm that identical twins are anomalous. So we have an isolated population propagating through a process that generates variation (sex). All the while this population absorbs the difference it generates. It's ludicrous to expect a neighbouring isolated population to generate the same thread of difference. Its drawing a long bow to expect them NOT to speciate eventually.

The fossil record is replete with evidence of organisms (say trilobites) that exist for hundreds of thousands even millions of years with very little change. Then there is a hiccup in the record. The species disappears and is replaced with something very similar but of a different species. These changes appear to take place over a relatively short period and hence seem improbable. However if you invoke the scenario above, of two populations say that develop in isolation but with one superabundant and the other small, then imagine a catastrophe that clobbers the more numerous population, It doesn't seem improbable at all to see the minority population expand to fill the available niche. But the fossil record is patchy. It only records a very small part of the story and a lot must be inferred from disparate evidence. DNA is also a record. Even though we cant recover ancient DNA, the genes in existing DNA, genes we share with ALL other organisms makes an indisputable case for commonality. I suppose you could invoke the fairytale that God made all the different creatures out of a small parcel of genes but that's ridiculous.

As for perpetual improvement, evolutionary theory does not demand this. The theory just explains divergence and diversity. There is no reason that simple organisms can not continue to thrive in the company of more complex organisms. They just have to fit their environment.

While on the face of it life appears to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics and defy entropy, it really doesn't. Life is a product of energy. Life can't initiate, or continue to exist without access to an external movement of energy. While the overall system may well be entropic, life is like an anomaly but it is dependant on energy flow and when that is not available it can not maintain its order. Incidentally, it appears to violate the airplane rule also (which, paraphrased, says that simple is best) but if you think about it the rule is not really challenged by the complexity of life because life is self replicating, self repairing and self varying. Its a marvellous thing.

As for fossilised boots and hats, are you implying that the age of the fossil record is challenged by that? I would say that all sorts of facts must be re-examined from time to time in the light of new processes and new knowledge. Its part of the scientific process.

I am not aware of anything about the big bang that predicts the direction of rotation of heavenly bodies. So I don't see any disparity.

There is a simple test for the likely validity of an argument in this arena. Its the "God of the gaps" test. You find a hole in the scientific argument that defies explanation. Do you invoke a supernatural being to explain it?

Graphics plays an important part it may make or mar the looks ! I agree with you and I prefer simple light colored graphics !

far canal!