Questions on biology

[Lief Erikson]

Forgive me for not having a very good subject heading. I couldn't think of the proper one.

In a couple days I'll be meeting with a creationist speaker who will be visiting the Christian youth group I'm helping to lead. If some of the nonbelievers here could offer me some good questions to ask him on the subject of the origin of life, I'd greatly appreciate hearing them to pass them on.

I could post his answers here, if you please, so that you can attack them and leave me just as uncertain about the truth of how life came to be as ever .

Thanks a lot, all.

[Sminty_Smeagol]

evolution q's included?

[Insidious Rex]

yeah how about page 36 (bout half way down) of the REAL debate thread for RELIGION. That would be a good start if he could explain all those things listed.

[Lief Erikson]

It doesn't make much difference to my faith whether evolution occurred or not. One can believe in Intelligent Design and still believe in evolution. However, if one of you disagrees with that statement too, go ahead and tackle it.

What I'm primarily interested in is knowing what kinds of arguments exist in favor of naturalistic explanations for the origin of life. I've been led to believe that scientists are largely stumped as to how life originated, because the various theories currently in existence, upon close inspection, have been shown to be flawed.

Also I have read that the incredible complexity of the cell and the language of the DNA molecule defy scientific explanation.

[BeardofPants]

What does he think of the notion of only partially quoting sources? The so-called creation 'spin'? (creationist 'lies'/misinformation, etc.) Or misinterpreting/misusing certain methodologies? For instance, using carbon dating to date LIVE samples, when the method measures the ratio of breakdown of carbon and nitrogen AFTER an organisms death.

[Insidious Rex]

Originally posted by Lief Erikson
It doesn't make much difference to my faith whether evolution occurred or not. One can believe in Intelligent Design and still believe in evolution.

so then do you think that god created the first single celled creatures and then evolution took it from there?

Originally posted by Lief Erikson


Also I have read that the incredible complexity of the cell and the language of the DNA molecule defy scientific explanation.

how so?

[Lief Erikson]

Originally posted by BeardofPants
What does he think of the notion of only partially quoting sources? The so-called creation 'spin'? (creationist 'lies'/misinformation, etc.)

Doubtless he'd disapprove. He also would say, quite correctly, that you can't generalize that to all Creationist research. Further, he might point out that some nonbelievers have faked their results in order to support the origin of life having been naturalistic.

Originally posted by BeardofPants
Or misinterpreting/misusing certain methodologies? For instance, using carbon dating to date LIVE samples, when the method measures the ratio of breakdown of carbon and nitrogen AFTER an organisms death.

Again, mentioning any of this would be of no service. It seems probable to me that Christians have used false information upon occasion. There are also examples of nonchristians doing the same thing.

I have no desire to go there.

[Rían]

Good answers to BOP's questions, Lief. Let's try to just keep things scientific when in a scientific discussion.

[Rían]

I thought of something, Lief, if you have time.

I'm seriously disturbed with the dating methods that evolutionists use, because of the "pre-dating" that occurs. IOW, as (IIRC) BOP mentioned, acc'd to standard procedure, certain dating methods are only good for certain range-of-age items. This, however, means that one needs to make a guess as to the age of the item in order to send it to the "right" dating method. This is, as I said before, seriously disturbing to me in a scientific sense, and to me, indicates a non-scientific pre-commitment to evolution as being right.

Here's an example - some creationist scientists got a legal sample using standard procedure from the lava dome of Mt. St. Helens, and sent it off to a standard lab. The date that was returned for the sample was from 250,000 to 1 MILLION years old! And this sample was 16 years old. Some of the evolutionists here objected, saying that you have to know approximately how old the sample is in order to send it to the right lab for the right procedure. This should set off major alarm bells, but somehow it doesn't. In my mind, to be scientific, it should be a totally blind procedure. However, as mentioned, a rock sample can be preliminarily "dated" by the type of fossil that is in it! Now this is TOTALLY circular reasoning, IMO.

I'd really like to know more about the underlying assumptions that are in existence in the various standard dating procedures, and the reasons that are given why a raw sample can't just be sent to a lab without a preliminary date guess. Now if it's a question of half-lives, etc., then the return should either be a valid date or a "sample invalid for this type of procedure". Samples should NOT be pre-vetted for dating types, IMO - why are they, then?

[Lief Erikson]

Originally posted by Insidious Rex
so then do you think that god created the first single celled creatures and then evolution took it from there?

I don't know. I personally think that evolution research is still at a very primitive stage. A lot more will doubtless be discovered about evolution.

Originally posted by Insidious Rex
how so?

Originally written in "The Case for Faith"
"The making of DNA and RNA would be an even greater problem than creating protein," he replied. "These are much more complex, and there are a host of practical problems. For instance, the synthesis of key building blocks for DNA and RNA has never been successfully done except under highly implausibl conditions without any resemblance to those of the early earth. Klaus Dose of the Institute for Biochemistry in Mainz, Germany, admitted that the difficulties with synthesizing DNA and RNA 'are at present beyond our imagination.'

"Frankly, the origin of such a sophisticated system that is both rich in information and capable of reproducing itself has absolutely stymied origin-of-life scientists. As the Nobel Prize-winner Sir Francis Crick said, "The origin of life appears to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to be satisfied to get it going.'"

As for the cell part. Correct amino acids must be isolated and linked together in the correct sequence to produce protein molecules. While this might not be difficult to accomplish if you managed it with your own mind, when simple chemical evolution is used, things become much more difficult.

Amino acids also react more readily with other molecules than they do with one another. So the extraneous molecules must be gotten rid of.

Originally written in "The Case for Faith"
"Then there's another complication: there are an equal number of amino acids that are right- and left-handed, and only the left-handed ones work in living matter. Now you've got to get only these select ones to link together in the right sequence. And you also need the correct kind of chemical bonds-namely, peptide bonds-in the correct places in order for the protein to be able to fold in a specific three dimensional way. Otherwise, it wouldn't function.

"It's sort of like a printer taking letters out of a basket and setting type the way they used to do it by hand. If you guide it with your intelligence, it's no problem. But if you just choose letters at random and put them together haphazardly-including upside down and backwards-then what are the chances you'd get words, sentences, and paragraphs that make sense? It's extremely unlikely.

"In the same way, perhaps one hundred amino acids have to be put together in just the right manner to make a protein molecule. And, remember, that's just the first step. Creating one protein molecule doesn't mean you've created life. Now you have to bring together a collection of protein molecules-maybe two hundred of them-with just the right functions to get a typical living cell."

Note that this is explaining what the minimum complexity living cell would have been like.

[Lief Erikson]

Okay, RÃ*an, I've got your question written into a Microsoft Word document.

[jerseydevil]

Originally posted by Lief Erikson
Okay, RÃ*an, I've got your question written into a Microsoft Word document.

It seems as if you only want to take questions that attack evolution - since you knocked down the questions by BoP and IR. So I have a feeling this is going to be another go around of evolution versus the belief of creationism.

[Lief Erikson]

Insidious Rex hasn't yet suggested to me any questions to pass on. I did examine his arguments on Page 36 of the Religion debate thread, and they looked quite interesting.

As from my own beliefs I have no real difficulty with what Insidious Rex wrote, there seems no reason to bring those things up. My subject question was about the origin of life, not about the details of evolution. If the details of evolution come in as challenging Christianity, then I would immediately gobble them up.

I might bring up Insidious Rex's comments from page 36 if I feel that the creationist speaker is too vehement in clobbering evolution. I want to try to point out there that the question is purely scientific, and the Bible really doesn't say whether or not evolution happened.

What the Bible says

It says that man was created from dust, which is organic material. It doesn't say whether that material was in the shape of a previous form of life, or anything else. God didn't just go POP, and there was man. He made him out of a natural substance. Whether he made him utilizing a natural process or not, it doesn't say.

There is another scripture that says the land created the animals, which seems to me a way of phrasing it that implies evolution.

About the scriptural seven days. In Revelation, we see God using the number seven repeatedly in his visions to John. It is a number of great symbolic value, for perfection. It might even in some literal sense be true, merely in a way that we don't yet understand. Take for example the instance of how science has discovered that the earth is not moving. If that can happen, then perhaps the seven can in some way also be literal.

Yet whether it is literal or not, it is strong in symbolism. Also according to another scripture, a day is like a thousand years to God, and a thousand years is like a day.

Meanwhile, some of the events of the seven days are strongly attested to in science. For example, the formation of the atmosphere is currently accepted by science as having happened in exactly the same way that the Bible portrayed it as having happened. The way the events were described doesn't seem very likely for someone to have just been lucky, with.

* * *

I was getting off on a big tangent. I'm sorry if my remarks seemed insulting, to BeardofPants.

[Lizra]

I wouldn't bother asking him anything! He's got his "story" and he's sticking with it!

[brownjenkins]

science is based upon experimentations and theories... carbon dating, for instance is based upon what we theorize about radioactive decay... scientists test samples and then compare them with other methods of dating (i.e. ice layers in the poles)

i've heard plenty of attempts by creationists to debunk scientific theories... which is a good thing btw, theories are meant to be challenged... my question:

is there anything in the creationist realm like the above example, where you can perform more than one experiment in order to verify specific findings?

[GrayMouser]

Frankly, the origin of such a sophisticated system that is both rich in information and capable of reproducing itself has absolutely stymied origin-of-life scientists. As the Nobel Prize-winner Sir Francis Crick said, "The origin of life appears to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to be satisfied to get it going.'"

BHWA! BHWA! BHWA! Quote-Mine Alert! Quote-Mine Alert!

"An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that, in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle." (Francis Crick, Life Itself, Its Origin and Nature, 1981, p. 88)

Again there is an unmarked deletion, this time at the end, following right after "miracle,":

" . . . so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going. But this should not be taken to imply that there are good reasons to believe that it could not have started on the earth by a perfectly reasonable sequence of fairly ordinary chemical reactions. The plain fact is that the time available was too long, the many microenvironments on the earth's surface too diverse, the various chemical possibilities too numerous and our own knowledge and imagination too feeble to allow us to be able to unravel exactly how it might or might not have happened such a long time ago, especially as we have no experimental evidence from that era to check our ideas against."

Crick's book is about his proposition that life on Earth may have been the result of "directed panspermia." It should be noted that, in the book, he assumes that the aliens who he posits might be "seeding" the universe are, themselves, the product of evolution. In this quote, Crick is simply pointing out how, in the absence of evidence, the appearance of life on Earth might seem like a miracle. But he specifically admits that abiogenesis may have occurred on Earth as a result of ordinary chemical processes that require no resort to outside intelligence. Leaving out that part of it, by cutting off what immediately follows, is deeply dishonest.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quot...e/part1-4.html

Any time you see a Creationist quoting an isolated sentence or two of a prominent modern biologist - especially without giving a reference- it should set off red flags.

Always check to see the quote in context.

[GrayMouser]

And for the Mt.St. Helens sample:

Because radiometric dating utterly refutes their biblical interpretations, young-Earth creationists (YECs) are desperate to undermine the reality of these methods. As part of their efforts, YEC Dr. Steve Austin and his associates at the Institute for Creation 'Research' (ICR) collected a dacite sample from Mt. St. Helens, Washington State, USA, which probably erupted in 1986 AD. Austin et al. then ineffectively separated the sample into several mineral and glass 'fractions', submitted the dacite and its 'fractions' for potassium 40-argon 40 (K-Ar) dating, and subsequently used the bogus results to inappropriately attack the K-Ar method. Austin's conclusions on this project are summarized at the ICR website.

The 'research' efforts of Austin and his colleagues and their 'expertise' in radiometric dating have been widely criticized, including by Joe Meert (also here), Karen Bartelt and company and myself at 'No Answers in Genesis' and in my web debate with Dr. David Plaisted at Tim Thompson's 'Radiometric Dating Source List' (also here).

Austin rarely responds to his critics. However, non-geologist YECs, such as MD Keith Swenson at 'Is the Lava Dome at Mt. St. Helens Really a Million Years Old?' and at the 'Answers in Genesis' website, have attempted to defend Austin's work. Although Swenson accompanied Austin on a trip to Mt. St. Helens, there is no indication from his writings that Swenson is familiar with igneous petrology, geochronology or even geology in general.

AUSTIN FAILED TO PROPERLY USE THE K-Ar METHOD

Considering that the half-life of potassium-40 (40K) is fairly long (1,250 million years, McDougall and Harrison, 1999, p. 9), the K-Ar method cannot be used to date samples that are much younger than 6,000 years old (Dalrymple, 1991, p. 93). A few thousand years are not enough time for 40Ar to accumulate in a sample at high enough concentrations to be detected and quantified. Furthermore, many geochronology laboratories do not have the expensive state-of-the-art equipment to accurately measure argon in samples that are only a few million years old. Specifically, the laboratory personnel that performed the K-Ar dating for Austin et al. (Geochron Laboratories of Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA) clearly state at their website that their equipment cannot accurately date rocks that are younger than about 2 million years old ('We cannot analyze samples expected to be younger than 2 M.Y.'; also see discussions by Bartelt et al.). With less advanced equipment, 'memory effects' can be a problem with very young samples (Dalrymple, 1969, p. 48). That is, very tiny amounts of argon contaminants from previous analyses may remain within the equipment, which precludes accurate dates for very young samples. For older samples, which contain more 40Ar, the contamination is diluted and has insignificant effects. Considering the statements at the Geochron website and the lowest age limitations of the K-Ar method, why did Austin submit a recently erupted dacite to this laboratory and expect a reliable answer??? Contrary to Swenson's uninformed claim that ' Dr Austin carefully designed the research to counter all possible objections', Austin clearly demonstrated his inexperience in geochronology when he wasted a lot of money using the K-Ar method on the wrong type of samples.

There's lots more, in great detail.

http://home.austarnet.com.au/stear/m..._dacite_kh.htm

As for me, I have no questions for this Creationist about the Origin of Life, anymore than I would ask an astrologer for opinions on the 'missing matter' puzzle or a faith healer about the origins of SARS.

[brownjenkins]

another question:

does he believe creationism is how we came about, or does he just see it as one of the many possible theories?

[Insidious Rex]

Originally posted by Lief Erikson
It says that man was created from dust, which is organic material. It doesn't say whether that material was in the shape of a previous form of life, or anything else. God didn't just go POP, and there was man. He made him out of a natural substance. Whether he made him utilizing a natural process or not, it doesn't say.

There is another scripture that says the land created the animals, which seems to me a way of phrasing it that implies evolution.

Ive always appreciated how you thought on this subject. More christians should think along these lines in my opinion. Certainly evolution could be a tool used be a creator. Seems like quite a simple supposition to me. And a grand design to use if you ask me and if it is one. And the language in the bible certainly seems symbolic enough to allow an evolutionary force to be part of the equation.

Insidious Rex hasn't yet suggested to me any questions to pass on. I did examine his arguments on Page 36 of the Religion debate thread, and they looked quite interesting.

As from my own beliefs I have no real difficulty with what Insidious Rex wrote, there seems no reason to bring those things up. My subject question was about the origin of life, not about the details of evolution. If the details of evolution come in as challenging Christianity, then I would immediately gobble them up.

I might bring up Insidious Rex's comments from page 36 if I feel that the creationist speaker is too vehement in clobbering evolution. I want to try to point out there that the question is purely scientific, and the Bible really doesn't say whether or not evolution happened.

well use em if you like. print it out and keep em in your back pocket just in case. I have tons and tons more if you need em.

[Lief Erikson]

Originally posted by brownjenkins
science is based upon experimentations and theories... carbon dating, for instance is based upon what we theorize about radioactive decay... scientists test samples and then compare them with other methods of dating (i.e. ice layers in the poles)

i've heard plenty of attempts by creationists to debunk scientific theories... which is a good thing btw, theories are meant to be challenged... my question:

is there anything in the creationist realm like the above example, where you can perform more than one experiment in order to verify specific findings?

That's a very good question, and I'll be sure to ask it.

I can tell you a part of the answer to your question now, though. The belief that the continents were all in one whole was predicted by a man who immediately came under fire for being biased in favor of Christianity. It was believed to come too close to Christianity, where it describes all the water having initially been in one place, and another passage where it says "It was at this time that the land divided."

Also the Biblical Second Day account of the formation of the atmosphere is very, very similar to what is currently at least theorized by modern science. I read this in a source that was not a Christian one. Unfortunately, right now I don't have time to write down the quote.

There probably is more. I just can't think of it all right now. But thanks for the question!