Ringer

How would you know the leaves really did burn unless it could be shown they would burn again?

I am still curious, do you understand why we have been saying your arguments are fallacious? If not we would be more than happy to clarify.

I see it as the same reason people do magic. They know it's not real and the audience knows it's not real, but it's still fun to do and watch.

Carl Jung was just as quacky as his teacher Freud.

(emphasis mine) Really? You're still saying chance alone? Do you understand why that is a logical fallacy? Maybe, but what evidence does that hypothesis have and what predictions does it make better than the model in place?

Human's are animals so research isn't at all void just because it's not done specifically on humans. A quick look on google scholar will give you plenty to read on the subject: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=sexual+orientation&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C18&as_sdtp=

I wasn't accusing you of duplicity, I was asking if you were admitting to making an incorrect statement or if you stood by that statement. I really don't care what his opinions on things were, especially if you just quote words and not data. Words are worthless, words without data are worth even less.

So you made a statement that is wrong, and explain it away as a generalization? 1.) Yes it can and it has. We have a very good understanding of how the nervous system and the senses that are in it. 2.) If it didn't the things that nothing is watching would be different than those that are being watched. Blatantly untrue. Yes it is useless, just like the majority of doing armchair science on the brain and consciousness. It answers nothing.

Both what we know and what we don't are very long lists, could you perhaps be more specific in what you are looking for? Also, DNA doesn't, for the most part, work much differently in other organisms when compared to humans.

I don't have the requisite knowledge in information theory to feel comfortable making an argument about it, doing so would only bring about misunderstandings. If you could give some sources to the idea that it is both unsolvable and impossible I would be most grateful.

Logical fallacies: 1.) Proof by assertation 2.) Argument from authority 3.) Quote mining (technically quoting out of context) 4.) Argument from incredulity etc. [edit] If you want to know what I mean by quote mining, look up the rest of that quote by Crick and it gives a whole different picture[/edit]

This is blatantly untrue. While exams may be graded on knowledge of the accepted views most, if not almost all, professors will accept challenges to accepted ideas when writing a paper, research reports, presentations, etc. They only time I have seen a student's assignment given poor marks when they took a contrary stance was not because of the stance, but because of the poor writing and evidence used. Obviously this mostly comes when you have a decent understanding of the basics, not freshmen/sophomore level courses, because if you don't know the basics of what you're arguing against you're just soap-boxing. I would hope few scientific departments truly try to shut down a students attempts to understand and further scientific ideas, because that's what makes science progress. If we didn't question the established ideas there would be no jobs for future scientists. Hell, many times I've seen professors get agitated because no one would try to figure out how things worked and why on their own and just relied on him/her to give us information. One prof would throw in some obvious B.S. in a lecture, stop, and usually do something like extra essay questions on the exam if no one could figure out what the B.S. part was. What does this have to do with scientific establishment. 'Officially' science doesn't take a stance on a 'universal source' because it's not scientific to do so. Some scientists personally take a stand on it, as do many non-scientists, but the truth is for science it doesn't matter. A source doesn't explain anything better than the current model and adds more complexity and assumptions that are unnecessary. Therefore the model is not used because it's useless as a scientific model.

Your statement doesn't stand for multiple reasons. You haven't made a good argument for life not being able to come into existence without god, other than an argument from incredulity which is a logical fallacy and not a real argument. It also doesn't stand because the 'chance alone' part of your statement is not what is actually believed, hence the straw man fallacy. Yet another is that you will not actually take on anyone's points other than repeating what you have previously said while ignoring people's actual arguments, which is another fallacy called proof by assertion.

It's meaningless to ask a question regarding this moment in time or anything like that. It would be like having a billion sided die and rolling it. The die comes up with 21,566, I could go on all day about how unlikely that roll was, but it doesn't matter because it happened. To talk about how unlikely a thing is after the fact to explain how impossible it is means nothing because the event happened. Maybe it's a near impossibility before it happened, but it did happen, so now the chances that it happened are 1. It may be that life has come into existence before us, maybe we were the first, maybe we are the only life. It's pointless speculation from there until we can get data. Just because something is amazing doesn't mean it didn't happen.

How things are and how things were are not equivalent. Chemical bonds are not random mixtures nor do they lack specificity either. If those sugars maintained a stable structure, such as an aromatic structure, with decently reactive side chains and a decent Km it could function as a basic replication machine due to the side chains attracting or having an aversion to certain kinds of other molecule. Although it seems incredible, I don't find it any less believable that something like this could happen just because I find it amazing.

It seems you are arguing that natural systems don't have a way to self organize through known natural means. This just isn't true, stars are natural machinery that constantly make more organized atoms from less organized atoms. There is no reason to assume more complex reactions cannot occur through natural means just because we don't know what they are.

ID is not a strawman, it is not falsifiable and therefore not scientific. When people accuse you of using a strawman it is referring to your repeated attempts at saying that evolution, or abiogenesis, happens due to only random factors.

What politics? If your ethical guidelines are so easily swayed as to think you can take a misinterpretation of scientific findings and make them into all defining ethical guidelines then you are seriously mistaken about the purpose of science and of philosophy. By the logic of 'if someone doesn't have a god to tell them what is good they will be evil,' then atheists who do not commit crimes must be better than their religious counter-parts. Not that I believe this is true, but it's the logical conclusion of that train of thought.

So you don't know where the evidence is well enough to give us sources? I'll do some of the work for you: http://www.mod.uk/De...moteViewing.htm http://web.archive.o...6_monroe1.shtml http://skepdic.com/remotevw.html http://en.wikipedia..../Remote_viewing As I said before, there were some positive results, mostly due to poor methods, but remote viewing is not a reality so far as we can tell. Science doesn't accept payroll, anecdotes, or popular vote as evidence. The reason science has little to do with this area is because the area is a dead end. There have been experiments in the field and they don't lead to anything. [edit] I also want to add that if a scientist found strong reproducible evidence of remote viewing, or any other kind of psychic ability, they would be extremely famous and pretty much set for life. As such extensive research was done in the 70s and 80s and no good evidence was found any psychic ability exists, including remote viewing. To assume scientists haven't tried to test the validity of these claims or that they would try to hide the results is simply not true. Something like this would be pretty difficult to hide unless the people who have the ability actively try to trick the scientists, which isn't too hard to do, into believing they didn't have the ability. [/edit]

I don't think most here care about being epistemology responsible, they care about being scientific. Since god, or gods, have nothing to do with science they can't be compared to natural selection using science. It's like me making the statement that since computers work god doesn't exist. Also, there are more ways for things to evolve that random mutation and natural selection, but that's a different discussion.

A paper on using evolution to make semiconductors: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/26/E1705

These genes have waited ~200,000 of years just to pair with yours. How about we go back to my place and increase my room's Entropy.

There haven't been any experiments done that have been able to be replicated. No matter what you are studying you are going to get positive results by chance alone if you do enough experiments. Psychics, read: frauds, trick people all the time into believing they have powers. Not because they do, but because it's easy to be vague, to trick people, etc. if you want to. Not to mention the governments of the world have a pretty crap record at telling real science from pseudoscience or wishful thinking.

If you want to go with #'s on scientists who disagree with evolution, though some on that list are misrepresented, I would like to introduce you to Project Steve: http://ncse.com/taking-action/project-steve/

What about a Ray? http://www.icoachmath.com/math_dictionary/Ray.html