Are we made in God's image?

Discussion in 'Religion' started by James R, Apr 23, 2020.

  1. Vociferous Valued Senior Member

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    2,046
    You do know you can search for all posts from one member in a thread, right? And that my very first post in this thread answered the OP? Too lazy, huh?

    No trying involved in discrediting your tenuous grasp of the science you ignorantly tout.

    LOL! You just keep posting science you clearly don't understand.
    "Geobiology is, in part, about looking for life or life's graffito - and finding it - in unusual places: deep in ancient rock, in super-heated waters of undersea volcanic vents, and beneath the ice of Greenland."
    Yep, finding existing life or evidence of life. Nothing about life from the inanimate.
    "But geobiology can also be about fashioning crude "proto-cells" from chemical goop resembling primeval ooze, work done recently in the Harvard/Massachusetts General Hospital laboratory of geneticist Jack W. Szostak to study how lifelike entities might have arisen in the extreme environment 3.5 billion years ago. The emergent field rests on the idea that the dividing line between life and nonlife is blurrier than science has long believed. And that the minerals and chemicals of the earth are constantly interacting with living things in unexpected ways."
    Protocells are not alive and we have not been able to make living cells from them. Interactions with "living things" does not make the distinction between life and the inanimate any "blurrier". You need to learn to distinguish between actual science and speculation.
    "That means the origins of life can only be understood as shaped by the larger environment, and - by the same token - the nonliving environment can be understood only in the context of the fast-multiplying organisms that shaped it right back."
    And? This non sequitur doesn't make any point you may imagine it does and really only further illustrates your ignorance of the science. Interactions between living organisms and the environment are trivial and do not evidence life from the inanimate.
    "Evolution is not something that happened solely to organisms," said Robert Hazen, a research scientist with Washington's Carnegie Institution. "There has been co-evolution of the geosphere and the biosphere."
    Again, and? Another non sequitur that does nothing to address your central claims about abiogenesis.
    "Said geobiologist Lisa M. Pratt of Indiana University: "Turns out, establishing where geochemistry ends and life begins isn't always so easy. We know surprisingly little about the origin, evolution, and limits for life on earth. But we're on the cusp of dramatic new understandings.""
    LOL! She's literally saying we don't know how, or even if, chemistry leads to life, because we "know surprisingly little about the origin...of life on earth". Her optimistic speculation just feeds your blind faith. Her own admission contradicts her optimism.
    "Twitches of life are showing up where life shouldn't exist. In southern Africa, for example, scientists burrowed 2 miles beneath the earth's surface, discovering bacteria that feed on radioactive rocks."
    Incredulity about extremophiles also doesn't tell us anything about life from the inanimate.
    "In the minds of some geobiologists, including Pratt, the existence of these "extremophile" microbes hints that life is such sturdy stuff that it might seed itself on any planet possessing a bit of water."
    That literally says that life could come from elsewhere, not that it comes from the inanimate.

    No, you've repeatedly proven that what you believe you know is due to blind faith, not comprehension.
    We would know if we created life in a lab. Biochemistry is just the chemistry utilized by living organisms. There is no "transition" of the chemical. It's just sometimes utilized by living organisms. And since there is no "transition", there is no mechanism. It's just living organisms using what's available in the environment.

    Your nonsense like "'fully' alive" is unscientific twaddle.

    Again, pure speculation without any actual, scientific evidence. Hell, you just listed a whole host of attributes of living organisms virus do not have.

    "But crucially, quasi-life forms are able to replicate themselves by pirating the machinery of living cells. Since they cannot survive independently, they are technically non-life structures."
    "The virus replicates itself by invading taking over the translation mechanism in living cells."
    You keep emphasizing bits that contradict your own claims. If virus can only subsist on living cells, it logically follows that living cells had to be around first, and viruses cannot, then, be a stepping stone from the inanimate to life.

    posit - assume as a fact; put forward as a basis of argument.​
    IOW, speculation. Too bad you don't understand the science you blindly tout enough to separate speculation from fact.



    Are you starting to understand how easy it is to refute your claims, by using your own citations? Not hard when I obviously understand the science way better than you do.
     
    Last edited: Jun 28, 2020
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  3. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    No, it doesn't.
    Viruses have had three billion years to adjust to the expansion of life built from cells. But there was a time before cells, when the first structures of what are now living beings assembled and reproduced. And there is no reason to doubt that halfway living strings of chemicals such as RNA and various structures of clay and complex assemblies of hydrocarbons or silicates or whatever and so forth were common - as we see in the neighborhood of undersea vents. There was plenty of energy to drive assembly, and nothing around that could eat or otherwise destroy the resulting structures.
    You say there is no transition, and then you say there is - you notice that chemicals found in the environment are incorporated into living beings, which are thereby proven to consist of self-assembling inanimate chemicals - abiogenesis, right in front of you.
     
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  5. Vociferous Valued Senior Member

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    Ah, another functionally scientific illiterate.

    What part of viruses not replicating outside of living cells do you not understand? Never mind, probably all of it.
    "Halfway living" is more unscientific twaddle. And the "or whatever and so forth" is downright laughably ignorant.
    Again, living extremophiles are not evidence of life from the inanimate.

    Chemicals incorporated into living beings do not magically become different chemicals. And since a chemical transition is just a chemical reaction, there is nothing inherently special about it occurring in an organism or not. And it's complete idiocy to claim that living organisms simply using chemicals is evidence of abiogenesis, when that, again, relies on a preexisting living organism. Basic rational thought alone should tell you that much.
     
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  7. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    The part you don't understand is that things change in three billion years.
    Yes, they are.
    So are the other kinds of living beings, all of which comprise assemblies of inanimate chemicals - abiogenesis, right in front of you.
    Exactly. They assemble into living beings without themselves changing in the slightest.
    Living beings consist of assemblies of inanimate chemicals - abiogenesis, right in front of you.
    Any living organism it relies on is also an assembly of inanimate chemicals.
    The entire setup is made of inanimate chemicals. Abiogenesis, right in front of you.
     
  8. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    20,069
    Man was made before viruses? DNA came before RNA?

    And that first post of yours in this thread is supposed to be a clear and logical explanation why we are made in god's image. "Agency"? That's it?????
    Of course, "Agency" explains the universe and everything within it? Why didn't I think of that? Let me guess. Oh, I did, and I found it wanting as a logical explanation of why we are made in God's image.
    Image
    After all that bluster, answer me one question, is a virus a living thing or not? If not, what then is it?

    ARE VIRUSES ALIVE?
    Issue: What is life?
    10 May 2016 ARTICLE

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    No, viruses are not alive

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    https://microbiologysociety.org/pub...e/article/are-viruses-alive-what-is-life.html

    I would suggest to follow the debate by two "knowledgeable" scientists.

    Can you provide me with an image of "Agency"?




     
    Last edited: Jun 29, 2020
  9. Vociferous Valued Senior Member

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    2,046
    That's one hell of a non sequitur. Never said anything of the sort. Please, learn to read.
    Again, no one said anything about agency explaining "the universe and everything within it". For the love of God, learn to read.
    Good, at least you understand that much. If viruses were alive, we could kill them, like we do bacteria.
    Why are viruses hard to kill? Virologists explain why these tiny parasites are so tough to treat
    "The fact that they are not alive means they don't have to play by the same rules that living things play by," a virologist said.​
    Following Jewish tradition, scholars such as Saadia Gaon and Philo argued that being made in the Image of God does not mean that God possesses human-like features, but rather that the statement is figurative language for God bestowing special honor unto humankind, which He did not confer unto the rest of Creation. Likewise, Maimonides argues that it is consciousness and the ability to speak which is the "image of God;" both faculties which differentiate mankind from animals, and allow man to grasp concepts and ideas that are not merely instinctual.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_of_God

    image
    : a mental conception held in common by members of a group and symbolic of a basic attitude and orientation
    : idea, concept
    https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/image


    Again, you should note how easy it is to refute your claims. Should make you think.
     
  10. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    20,069
    Please learn to add 2 + 2 = 4
    Made in God's image is an "equation", in case you do not understand abstract mathematics.
     
  11. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    20,069
    Are you claiming viruses are exempt from Darwinian evolution by "natural selection"?
     
  12. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    20,069
    LOL....no, I make no claim as to the "image of Man or God"......., you do......, and without evidence at that.
    Yet you have the gall to denegrade my objective approach to the truth.
    There it is, hubris instead of humility..., vanity!

    As you admitted, it's all "belief", a commonly held "mental concept". And it is much easier to debunk your "belief", that it is to debunk my objective "image" of God as being equal to Universal Potential, in all respects except for "divine motivation" as proposed by theism. Potential is measured by its inherently quantifiable values.

    God is a "flight of fancy" to satisfy our Ego, remember that Human image of God? (see 10 commandments)
     
    Last edited: Jun 29, 2020
  13. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    20,069
    What about the bacterial inhabitants that make up 90% of the human biome, that keep us alive?

    I would rather honor them and consider them our " little buddies" that actually and demonstrably keep us alive, instead of our some "obscure Big Sky Daddy" who doesn't give a damn whether we live or die.
    Would you allow a virus to kill God, if you could prevent it? Who's image are we projecting?
     
    Last edited: Jun 29, 2020
  14. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    All life is built from the inanimate.
    So all discoveries that bear on how life is or could be built is "about life from the inanimate".
    Yes, you did.
    That RNA likely preceded DNA in the early stages of the emergence of living beings from nonliving entities (no matter how "living" is defined) is a major finding in the research into that emergence.
    You use a truly lousy definition from a famous source of horseshit definitions (it not only fails to mention the illiteracy - or at least controversiality, among experts and authorities, in all non-jargon contexts) of customary transitive use as a verb, it lists that dubious usage first among the verb meanings)
    and then you cherrypick it for the worst and least applicable of its entries.
    That is especially odd considering that your source there includes an explicitly relevant definition, one directly applicable here:
    Note that the King James Bible, from an age in which even committees could produce meaningful and accurate English prose, does not translate the original reference as one to "his own image" in any simplistic sense, but rather something with considerably deeper and more sophisticated implications:
    You mean "otherwise", or "in contrast".
    Regardless: Either or both of those conflict with your linked Webster "definition", in particular with the specific features of the "definition" you chose to be the significant ones here.

    I'd stick with the Talmud, rather than that bullshit dictionary - but neither will settle the obvious conflict between biological science and whatever you end up with as the meaning of "image" in this context.
     
    Last edited: Jun 30, 2020
  15. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    20,069
    And what gives you the idea that man is the only animal able to entertain abstract ideas or possess an ability which sets it apart from all other living creatures?

    Communicating? Really? Ever heard of "quorum sensing" a form of speech that began some 4 billion years ago with evolution of bacteria, when man was just an "Implicate", emerging from the universal potential....

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    .

    But there are several forms of information sharing (communication) starting soon after the BB. Elements share information and join to form molecules, neat huh? Some of the molecules share information and form bio-molecules, the building blocks of life.

    Some 14 billion years later:
    How about that honey-bee, which lives in perfect symbiosis with flowering plants and have the ability to determine the gender and fertility of their off-spring, by preparing and feeding the larvae "royal jelly", a extra-ordinary "health food" which man is unable to duplicate.

    Now, if that lowly insect which roamed the earth hundreds of millions of years before man, feeds 70% of life on earth, is not made "in the Image of God", then what is? .........Man?............. Are you kidding?

    If anything, for all it's acquired natural abilities, mankind is an invasive species, relying for a great deal on predatory and parasitic behaviors to occupy all four corners of the earth, crowding out other species and generally destroying the earth's entire eco-system.
    Is that in God's Image?.


    You are so enamored of yourself that you have lost the ability to see the truth about man's image as compared to other intelligent organisms, which share this planet with us.

    p.s. "instinct" is function of memory, an evolved survival ability and advantage from storing experiential data. Data storage has been a part of nature's mathematical essence since the first physical patterns began to emerge from the post-BB chaos.
     
  16. Vociferous Valued Senior Member

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    I was wondering if I was witnessing you cracking up. Not so much now.
    Since you seem to be wanting to distract me, let's go see why. Your question was:
    "Man was made before viruses? DNA came before RNA?"
    http://sciforums.com/goto/post?id=3640955#post-3640955
    That's an open question in virology, but here's your virus-first hypothesis:
    Virus-first hypothesis: Viruses evolved from complex molecules of protein and nucleic acid before cells first appeared on earth.[1][2] By this hypothesis, viruses contributed to the rise of cellular life.[7] This is supported by the idea that all viral genomes encode proteins that do not have cellular homologs. The virus-first hypothesis has been dismissed by some scientists because it violates the definition of viruses, in that they require a host cell to replicate.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_evolution#Origins
    So viruses came first, but only if they weren't really viruses, as we know them. Note that all virus origins are hypotheses, and we haven't found conclusive evidence to decide between them.
    Of course not. Don't be dense.
    LOL! I haven't denigrated anything but your demonstrably poor understanding of the science you try to tout. You're free to believe whatever you like, but I'll call bs when you try to misrepresent the actual science.
    And no one said you made any claims about the image of man or God. Again, please learn how to read.
    Again, why are you defining God at all? No one cares how an atheist might define God, and you just said that atheists don't do that: http://sciforums.com/threads/defini...-to-rule-them-all.163061/page-28#post-3641024
    Your subjective take on God doesn't actually do anything to refute mine. That's how subjective beliefs work.
     
  17. Beer w/Straw Transcendental Ignorance! Valued Senior Member

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    No one cares what you say.

    Is AlphaNumeric here? I want to become a TA.
     
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  18. Vociferous Valued Senior Member

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    Ah, another scientific illiterate.

    Ah, more pseudoscience from a true believer in scientism.
     
  19. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Ahhh, obviously more self gazing at one's navel.

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    Come back for more?

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  20. (Q) Encephaloid Martini Valued Senior Member

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    Vociferous makes himself out to be a total fool by accusing others of being scientifically illiterate or passing off science as pseudoscience simply because the science of abiogenesis jeopardizes his faith in a god/creator. He isn't just calling out a few folks here, but is actually calling out the scientific community as illiterate and attempting to pass off the science as pseudoscience. How dumb can he be?
     
  21. Vociferous Valued Senior Member

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    Not "simply because the science of abiogenesis jeopardizes his faith in a god/creator". Because I've actually refuted ignorance of the science being touted. Actual scientists know the difference between fact and hypothesis. Too bad you don't.
     
  22. Beer w/Straw Transcendental Ignorance! Valued Senior Member

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    OK, argue me.

    I'm stupid and I think you are a retard.

    Cling to fantasies much?
     
  23. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    So you do admit that "good" science is true? Yet you persist in touting the ignorance of refuted "faith in a god/creator".

    Unless your god is scientifically definable, theism does not rest on fact but only on hypothesis.
    Do you know the difference between fact and hypothesis?
     

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