I will prove god's existence if....

@Didymos Thomas,

Didymos Thomas wrote:

Yeah, I have become rather predictable.

From what I gather, most scholars see Buddhism as a Hindu reform movement. In much the same way as (early) Christianity can be seen as a Jewish reform movement.

As for avatar's view of God in relation to the possibility that all conceptions of God are aimed at the same thing, yeah, he probably would disagree. But who cares? Through the whole thread avatar has avoided his own subject and done so with a large chip on his shoulder.

Why not? I think we should.

Well I do apologise if I have offended you in some manner, but that is besides the point. Are all religous beliefs aimed at the same thing? Perhaps. In that they all seek to understand the universe through the existance of a divine being/beings that is true. On the other hand I would hold that my view of God is the best one, and the truest. Even if all religions are reaching towards the same thing, then that thing is still a specific thing, not all of them can be right about everything though all may approach the truth. I believe my vision of God to be the true one, but I could of course be wrong.

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@avatar6v7,

Why o why dont you capitulate....no one is actualy denying your rights to believe but by reason alone you cant prove gods existance to us by any stretch of the imagination..i have tried to show you we can speculate and ponder on god or gods but by its nature it can not be proved..your claim is made out of haste by other threads and even if this thread continued you must at sometime recognise we are not impressed..

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@xris,

xris wrote:

Why o why dont you capitulate....no one is actualy denying your rights to believe but by reason alone you cant prove gods existance to us by any stretch of the imagination..i have tried to show you we can speculate and ponder on god or gods but by its nature it can not be proved..your claim is made out of haste by other threads and even if this thread continued you must at sometime recognise we are not impressed..

I don't give a flying **** as to whether you are impressed or not. My proof is a proof that denys the value of proof itself in this matter. Surely you can recognise this? I have proven that faith does not need to be justified by empircal evidence, as the valueation of empircal evidence is itself a belief. My point is that a proof can be provided- a proof or if you prefer a disproof of everything, but that it leaves us where we started.

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@avatar6v7,

avatar6v7 wrote:

I don't give a flying **** as to whether you are impressed or not. My proof is a proof that denys the value of proof itself in this matter. Surely you can recognise this? I have proven that faith does not need to be justified by empircal evidence, as the valueation of empircal evidence is itself a belief. My point is that a proof can be provided- a proof or if you prefer a disproof of everything, but that it leaves us where we started.

oo dont get teasy..you have proved nothing to me..nothing at all..you decide what is relevant for me believe? is that it?you made a claim that you could prove gods existance to me the reader...is that right? well dont side step the claim or waffle about emperical evidence as not being relevant..well it has to be or your just huffing and puffing...

1 Reply

@avatar6v7,

avatar6v7 wrote:

I have proven that faith does not need to be justified by empircal evidence, as the valueation of empircal evidence is itself a belief.

You haven't proven this, and you still have not answered my question. STILL. I can PROVE beyond any reasonable doubt the existence of my toenails. And no one except the stodgiest holder of the Buddhist doctrines of nothingness would dispute it. The proof is empirical. But you cannot prove the existence of the creator of the universe in nearly as acceptable a way. Why not? If God is so fundamental to the universe, then why on earth is his existence so controversial whereas the existence of mundane things is not??

1 Reply

@xris,

xris wrote:

oo dont get teasy..you have proved nothing to me..nothing at all..you decide what is relevant for me believe? is that it?you made a claim that you could prove gods existance to me the reader...is that right? well dont side step the claim or waffle about emperical evidence as not being relevant..well it has to be or your just huffing and puffing...

You are being ridiculous. My point is that you chose to follow your beliefs because you like them. Why does this offend you? Do you deny god? Fine but you do it because you dislike the idea or because it does not fit in or cannot be established with your system of beliefs.

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@Aedes,

Aedes wrote:

You haven't proven this, and you still have not answered my question. STILL. I can PROVE beyond any reasonable doubt the existence of my toenails. And no one except the stodgiest holder of the Buddhist doctrines of nothingness would dispute it. The proof is empirical. But you cannot prove the existence of the creator of the universe in nearly as acceptable a way. Why not? If God is so fundamental to the universe, then why on earth is his existence so controversial whereas the existence of mundane things is not??

Your toenails might not exist and cannot be proven. God is controversial because he is fundamental to the universe, and it wasn't controversial till relativly recently. As to the existance of mundane things, that is mostly undenied, but the existance of mundane things does not lead us immediatly to the conclusion that one system of understanding them is the best one. Now calm down.

1 Reply

@avatar6v7,

avatar6v7 wrote:

You are being ridiculous. My point is that you chose to follow your beliefs because you like them. Why does this offend you? Do you deny god? Fine but you do it because you dislike the idea or because it does not fit in or cannot be established with your system of beliefs.

i choose to follow my beliefs because i like them...wot does that mean? I choose not to believe? i think you will find god chooses not to show himself to me...I was hoping you might shed some light on his non appearance in real terms...he was very good biblicaly but as of late his personel appearances seem to be in very short supply...Your just like so many other false prophets full of promises but very little substance..

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@avatar6v7,

avatar6v7 wrote:

I have proven that faith does not need to be justified by empircal evidence, as the valueation of empircal evidence is itself a belief.

(my bold)

So to expand, you said :
"I have proven that faith (a belief that is not based on proof) does not need to be justified by empircal[sic] evidence, as the valueation[sic] of empircal[sic] evidence is itself a belief (which is also based on faith?)."

Huh ? So you proved that faith is what any dictionary says it is ? That "faith" means a belief held without any proof ? Good job !

Now you have to prove why a belief based on physical evidence is also based on faith.

Then you should convince lawmakers that physical-based evidence has the same value, like you said, as faith-based evidence. "Your Honor, we believe the defendant is guilty, because we have great faith that he is." Good luck !

avatar6v7 wrote:

My point is that a proof can be provided- a proof or if you prefer a disproof of everything, but that it leaves us where we started."

A disproof of everything. Gotcha. :a-ok:

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@avatar6v7,

avatar6v7 wrote:

Your toenails might not exist and cannot be proven.

Right, to someone who distrusts the sense organs that were informing his brain before he was born, let alone before he developed the rudiments of language or logic. But to everyone else, who can all come and take a look, that is how we come to understand what exists and what doesn't.

Quote:

God is controversial because he is fundamental to the universe, and it wasn't controversial till relativly recently.

Really... amazing how Spinoza in the early 17th century made some of the most profound cases for the lack of his existence, and certainly the limitation of scripture as a source of any knowledge. Amazing all the medieval God proofs that were central to philosophy at the time -- if it wasn't controversial, then why did Duns Scotus and Abelard and Anselm and everyone feel the need to create a proof??

And there are other things fundamental to the universe that are not controversial. Time is not controversial. Matter is not controversial. Energy is not controversial. Forces of nature are not controversial. Sure, there are different scientific understandings of them and controversies within those fields, but no one denies the existence of matter.

Quote:

As to the existance of mundane things, that is mostly undenied, but the existance of mundane things does not lead us immediatly to the conclusion that one system of understanding them is the best one.

Yeah, but it's amazing how a good number of smart people cannot be convinced by any form of demonstration that god's existence can be proved. Leads one to think that it's what's in your heart and not in your head that proves the existence of god. As Augustine asserted, belief is the product of God gracing you with it -- sort of deterministic theism, and an act of faith itself, but certainly NOT a claim that you can arrive at God just by thinking hard enough.

Quote:

Now calm down.

Don't be patronizing. I am calm. I've been forced to put things in bold and caps so that you stop ignoring them.

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@avatar6v7,

avatar6v7 wrote:

A good response. You are right to say that we can still make judgements about different systems based on what they are and do. My point on this is that the idea of attacking a belief in God because it is unproven is a fallacy. I would agree that scince can be judged based on its succeses to be a good system. However the nature of its successes tells us its limitations. Scince has never produced any model for political systems or society, and its inventions have cause great misery and death, though the benefits have arguably outwayed the risks. Obviously scince has grounding as a system of morality, or indeed of establishing anything non-empirical. That is not a critiscm of scince but a recognition of its limitations. To say that we should not look beyond the physical because scince is successful in it's own field is not logical. As to a belief in God, it has not acheived as much as scince in a physical sense, because it is not a system based on an attempt to understand things at that level. The fact that faith and belief are its foundations shows it to be an excellent system for applying universally. As all beliefs are founded on just that, any belief system that does not recognise its own justification is not suitable to be universally applied.

I think I understand, and I feel that attacking a belief in God because it is unproven on rational or scientific grounds is an error, just as I feel attempting to prove the existence of God on such grounds is an error. I don't think it is an issue which can be addressed by science, or entirely by reason, either. I sympathize, however, with those who feel that if it cannot be addressed in that fashion, there is no good reason to believe in God's existence. And, as a believer, I am frustrated by the fact that I am unable to answer them in a way I would find entirely satisfactory. Nevertheless, I continue to believe.

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@avatar6v7,

avatar6v7 wrote:

[...] My point on this is that the idea of attacking a belief in God because it is unproven is a fallacy. [...]

If I claim I have the Tooth Fairy locked up in a jar, and I show you an empty jar you'll call me silly, at least.

If I call you silly for claiming an invisible unprovable entity exists up in the heaven then I am `attacking your faith` -- you feel entitled to be offended and the blame is on me for not acting `politically correct` and `not respecting your faith`. LOL what a crock of ****.

Grow up. If you don't want your beliefs to be 'attacked' then stop having such silly beliefs.

-

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@avatar6v7,

Avatar,

I wanted to extend a bit of an olive branch to you in this thread. It's been 18+ pages of pretty feisty discussion that I think might have been more focused if we began a different way.

After 18 pages you deserve the opportunity to get out what you consider a proof of god and why the rest of us should give it thought. It's not getting anywhere to dwell on the nuances of proof, because in the end we have different understandings and criteria.

So, if you wish, I'd be interested in seeing what exactly was on your mind when this thread began.

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@ciceronianus,

Your proof for God's existence is within your DNA.

All earth DNA is "Right Handed".

Randomly occurring life would generate spirals of both direction.

If life were to have originated on earth, it should exist with random probability of both Left and Right Handed DNA.

Therefore, life did NOT originate on earth.

1 Reply

@Data phil,

Data;35854 wrote:

Randomly occurring life would generate spirals of both direction.

That is completely incorrect. The active sites of enzymes that recognize, synthesize, and metabolize nucleic acids require a substrate with a single chirality, and DNA polymerases and transcriptases can only uncoil it from a certain spiral handedness. DNA could not have evolved to be stereoisomeric. There is no way. The chirality of DNA's monomers is what determines its spiral. In the primordial soup it may well have been that stereoisomeric nucleotide precursors existed -- but they were not the ones incorporated into the biological system that persisted. A single enantiomer is what persisted.

Quote:

If life were to have originated on earth, it should exist with random probability of both Left and Right Handed DNA.

That's just not true. The earliest nucleic acids were not even double stranded, so they were not helical to begin with. Just as some viruses, like HIV and influenza and measles, have single stranded RNA as their genome. Eventually a subset with a specific conformation persisted, and because double stranded DNA is a lot more chemically stable than single stranded RNA, it led to all the downstream evolutionary possibilities.

Quote:

Therefore, life did NOT originate on earth.

Your conclusion is based on assumptions that you cannot justify. How do you know how life must have evolved? Furthermore, there may be a chemical reason why a specific enantiomer is more common. The earth is asymmetric in other ways -- it rotates in one direction, it has polar magnetism, etc. And not having been to other star systems, we really cannot say whether this is unique to earth or not.

1 Reply

@Aedes,

It's not that we would have co-existing DNA within us. It's that there would exist life that is of the Right Handed and that of the Left Handed.

In such a "primordial soup", DNA would evolve to its current state of complexity. However, there was not one or two "primordial soup" pools, but must have been thousands of thousands. In this process, it would dictate that the probability of life evolving Right OR Left handed would be a 50-50 coin toss. For such, it would be unrealistic to conclude that, even with a toss of no memory, that Right was the winner in every pool and won 100%.

Hence the conclusion. There should be organisms alive on earth that are comprised of Left handed DNA. The lack of their existence demonstrates that life could not have originated on earth.

As for evolution as a whole, we have to accept the theory of evolution as the primary "given" when trying to demonstrate a proof that life did originate on earth and is not the product of divine intervention.

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@Data phil,

Data wrote:

It's not that we would have co-existing DNA within us. It's that there would exist life that is of the Right Handed and that of the Left Handed.

That would require life to evolve twice on earth along two completely independent lines. You're saying that's more likely than life evolving just once with a single DNA conformation?

All cellular life on earth (including bacteria) shares a very narrow ancestry. The fundamental repository of reproductive information, namely DNA, must have a reasonably conserved mechanism for this to be possible. And indeed that is true. Everything from archaebacteria up to humans, up to giant sequoias, etc, have DNA-dependant DNA polymerases and RNA polymerases. Many of these enzymes have conserved regions that are conserved across ALL eukaryotic life forms.

In other words, life evolved and diversified from a narrow ancestry that has certain particular features. In order for something as fundamental as the chirality of nucleotides and the helical orientation of double stranded DNA to be different, this would require an entirely independent evolution event and downstream diversification.

Data wrote:

In such a "primordial soup", DNA would evolve to its current state of complexity.

DNA didn't even remotely achieve its current state of complexity in the primordial soup. Eukaryotic DNA is far more complex than prokaryotic DNA, and we only diverged from prokaryotes ~ 1 billion years ago.

Data wrote:

However, there was not one or two "primordial soup" pools, but must have been thousands of thousands. In this process, it would dictate that the probability of life evolving Right OR Left handed would be a 50-50 coin toss. For such, it would be unrealistic to conclude that, even with a toss of no memory, that Right was the winner in every pool and won 100%.

But life itself successfully evolved only once! So that coin landed on one side, and here we are.

Data wrote:

As for evolution as a whole, we have to accept the theory of evolution as the primary "given" when trying to demonstrate a proof that life did originate on earth and is not the product of divine intervention.

No one needs the theory. You can go and look at all the mountains of raw data and draw your own conclusions from it. However one interprets all the various forms of evidence for evolution (which span everything from ecology to molecular biology research), there isn't anything in the scientific literature that provides evidence that "divine intervention" was what created the observations.

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@Data phil,

Let's not forget:

Life evolved 4.5 BILLION years ago.

The phyla exploded from one, which incidentally no longer exists, to the many of today, approximately 525 million years ago, and such occurred in completion within a maximum time of only 3-5 million years. We are now to conclude that during the first 4 billion years of evolution, that Left Handed DNA life forms were not produced?

Granted, our current life forms originate from a narrow span origin, which, as stated, is only 525 million years old. But, what happened to the Left Handed lives that were formed?

1 Reply

@Data phil,

Data wrote:

We are now to conclude that during the first 4 billion years of evolution, that Left Handed DNA life forms were not produced?

Yup. There's a lot more to life than DNA. By the time that the genetic material actually was DNA, life had been around for aeons. Other less stable nucleic acids were around in our earliest ancestors. It was a LATER development that led to DNA.

What you don't seem to include in your discussion is that the helical orientation of double stranded DNA is determined by the chirality of its constituent molecules. And on this planet of ours, there is NOT a 50-50 ratio of enantiomers! This is well-established, and it is thought to be related to other, grander physical asymmetries in the earth.

Data wrote:

Granted, our current life forms originate from a narrow span origin, which, as stated, is only 525 million years old. But, what happened to the Left Handed lives that were formed?

It's not "left handed lives" that are the issue. You're skipping a step. Either you propose that life completely 100% independently would arise with left-handed DNA, but happen to have all the other features of life (lipid bilayers, ribosomes, metabolism) AND somehow compete well enough to survive to modernity; OR you have to propose that somewhere along our lineage one branch would switch to left handed DNA. There is no other possibility -- and both are prohibitively unlikely, especially given the a priori chirality of organic molecules on earth.

In other words (and forgive me if I'm using too much jargon, my undergraduate degree was in biochemistry), the earth is NOT a level playing field for chemical handedness, so specific orientations are FAR more likely a priori. The fundamental forces of nature have their own asymmetries and (by analogy) handedness. This is why the physical universe is even possible.

Check out these scientific abstracts:

ScienceDirect - Medical Hypotheses : Effect of Earth’s orbital chirality on elementary particles and unification of chiral asymmetries in life on different levels

http://www.springerlink.com/content/j074520830166371/fulltext.pdf?page=1

Earth?s Orbital Chirality and Its Possible Role in Biomolecular Evolution - arNQ eprints

Oh, by the way, apparently specimens from outer space are asymmetrically enantiomeric as well:

Murchison meteorite - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

1 Reply

@Aedes,

Aedes wrote:

Oh, by the way, apparently specimens from outer space are asymmetrically enantiomeric as well:

Well, you are now focusing on the root of the counter-argument. If you are willing to move forward and accept that during 4 billion years, the same factors which accomplished the successful production of Right Handed life would also be in existence to create the formation of life as Left Handed. And, yes, a level playing field for the production of both forms, as the earth was in form 4.5 billion years ago and during much of its state for the next 3 billion years or so. Not until about 1.3 billion years ago did the earth start taking on its current and more familiar form.

Then, the bigger question to ask is not, "DID life originate on earth?" That's not probable, and can be proven false by more than just the spiral direction of DNA. The question to ask is "Where did it originate from?"

1 Reply

I will prove god's existence if....

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