Defending the Truth

Your idea of a source is a post by a "Process Engineer" from an online forum called "Rapture Ready"? I take it your 'conversation' with a few 'in the know people' is located here?

Likewise, if this is the same "Preacherman" that I and everyone on this board is familiar with, then let us just say this post is now dubious tenfold. Preacherman was banned from this forum.

Now you've merely substituted your own anecdotal evidence for someone else's. Likewise, as many of the arguments presented by "Preacherman" are merely a regurgitation of your earlier platitudes, I think my earlier rebuttals to which have still not been responded still apply. Preacherman seems to be presenting the same level (perhaps more) of ignorance of science. Not only has he confused biology with chemistry (evolution and abiogenesis), but he is ignorant on the current level of understanding in the scientific community. As for your claim to a "Cornell teacher" I have no way to validate. It seems as if, by these standards of "insider", perhaps I qualify more simply because I have contact with biology and chemistry professors in the Ohio State University (a research university).

Did I read a retort to suggest that the "Miller Experiment" produces life in a lab? What a joke. Perhaps a few "facts" concerning the espoused proof of reproducing life, and then someone "parroting" the "opinion" of others to even suggest that this experiment produced life is somewhat amusing, in its attempt to suggest that people are so gullible. Just because someone has an "opinion" does not make that "opinion" a fact. Just as many are "confused" between a "fact" and a "theory of speculation".

The Origin of Life and the Death of Materialism: Meyer, Stephen C.

Wow, I had no Idea someone else actually used that, besides me. I dont know anything about raptureready. I got it at a place call sportswrath.com He isnt only a process engineer, he also spent 20+ years as a mathmatition at Cornell University.
I have no Idea who that is. Must be a regular at sportswrath too. Though I dont know anyone by that name there. Although attacking the source isnt helping your argument at all. The guys name is BinB at sportswrath, and is definity among the smartest I've seen on any MB.
Well I dont know anything about preacherman, But Ive watched Bin rip to shreads many arguments for evolution. Why is it ok for you to get info from outside sources, but not me??

I'd ask him to come here, but I dont think he would touch this place with a 10 foot pole.

That you did Ralph. Well not really, it was more stated that the Miller experiment produced a building block for life to form. So they naturaly just assume the other billion things that needed to take place are just a given. Try to get anymore info on it, and you will be acused of hyperpoling.

Sorry Ralph, but I had to steal this from your site



Problems with the Oparin/Miller Hypothesis

Despite its status as textbook orthodoxy, the Oparin chemical evolutionary theory has in recent years encountered severe, even fatal, criticisms on many fronts. First, geochemists have failed to find evidence of the nitrogen-rich "prebiotic soup" required by Oparin's model. Second, the remains of single-celled organisms in the very oldest rocks testify that, however life emerged, it did so relatively quickly, i.e. fossil evidence suggests that chemical evolution had little time to work before life emerged on the early earth. Third, new geological and geochemical evidence suggests that prebiotic atmospheric conditions were hostile, not friendly, to the production of amino acids and other essential building blocks of life. Fourth, the revolution in the field of molecular biology has revealed so great a complexity and specificity of design in even the "simplest" cells and cellular components as to defy materialistic explanation. Even scientists known for a staunch commitment to materialistic philosophy now concede that materialistic science in no way suffices to explain the origin of life. As Francis Crick has written: "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, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going."
To understand the crisis in chemical evolutionary theory, it will be necessary to explain in more detail the latter two difficulties, namely, the problem of hostile pre-biotic conditions and the problem posed by the complexity of the cell and its components.
When Stanley Miller conducted his experiment simulating the production of amino acids on the early earth, he presupposed that the earth's atmosphere was composed of a mixture of what chemists call reducing gases such as methane (CH4), ammonia (NH3) and hydrogen (H2). He also assumed that the earth's atmosphere contained virtually no free oxygen. Miller derived his assumptions about these conditions from Oparin's 1936 book. In the years following Miller's experiment, however, new geochemical evidence made it clear that the assumptions that Oparin and Miller had made about the early atmosphere could not be justified. Instead, evidence strongly suggested that neutral gases such as carbon dioxide, nitrogen and water vapor, not methane, ammonia and hydrogen, predominated in the early atmosphere. Moreover, a number of geochemical studies showed that significant amounts of free oxygen were also present even before the advent of plant life, probably as the result of volcanic outgassing and the photodissociation of water vapor.
This new information about the probable composition of the early atmosphere has forced a serious re-evaluation of the significance and relevance of Miller-type simulation experiments. As had been well know even before Miller's experiment, amino acids will form readily in an appropriate mixture of reducing gases. In a chemically neutral atmosphere, however, reactions among atmospheric gases will not take place readily and those reactions that do take place will produce extremely low yields of biological building blocks. Further, even a small amount of atmospheric oxygen will quench the production of biologically significant building blocks and cause any biomolecules otherwise present to degrade rapidly.
An analogy may help to illustrate. Making amino acids in a reducing atmosphere is like getting vinegar and baking soda to react. Because the reaction releases stored chemical energy as heat (i.e. it is "exothermic"), it occurs easily. Trying to make biological building blocks in a neutral atmosphere, however, is more like trying to get oil and water (or any two inert chemicals) to react.
Stanley Miller's experiment, and others like his, are only relevant to the origin of life if the reducing conditions he assumed actually existed on the early earth. Since independent geochemical evidence now strongly suggests that chemically hostile conditions prevailed, Miller's experiment cannot be said to "simulate" anything. Miller's work was heralded as a positive test of Oparin's chemical evolutionary scenario precisely because he had selected parameters for his experiment in accord with a then-current understanding of early atmospheric conditions. What made Miller's experiment significant was not the production of amino acids per se, but the production of amino acids from presumably plausible prebiotic conditions. As Miller himself stated, "In this apparatus an attempt was made to duplicate a primitive atmosphere of the earth, and not to obtain the optimum conditions for the formation of amino acids." Now, however, the situation has changed. The only reason to continue assuming the existence of a chemically reducing prebiotic atmosphere is that chemical evolutionary theory seems to require it. As Science magazine's Richard Kerr put it, "No geological or geochemical evidence collected in the last 30 years favors a strongly reducing primitive atmosphere. . .Only the success of the laboratory experiments recommends it."
While laboratory simulation experiments have failed to demonstrate the plausibility of chemical evolution, they may have inadvertently demonstrated the necessity of intelligent agency playing an active role in the design of living systems. Ironically, even successful simulation experiments require the intervention of the experimenters to prevent what are known as "interfering cross reactions" and other chemically destructive processes.
Assume for the moment that the reducing gases used by Stanley Miller do actually simulate the conditions on the early earth. Would his experimental results, then, support chemical evolution? Not necessarily. Miller-type simulation experiments have invariably produced non-biological substances in addition to biological building blocks such as amino acids and nucleic acid bases. Without human intervention, these other substances will react readily with biologically relevant building blocks to form a biologically irrelevant compound, a chemically insoluble sludge. To prevent this from happening and to move the simulation of chemical evolution along a biologically promising trajectory, experimenters have often removed those chemicals that degrade or transform amino acids into non-biologically relevant compounds. They must also artificially manipulate the initial conditions in their experiments. Rather than using both short and long-wavelength ultraviolet light which would be present in any realistic atmosphere, they use only short-wavelength UV. Why? The presence of the long-wavelength UV light quickly degrades amino acids. Thus, investigators have routinely manipulated chemical conditions both before and after performing "simulation" experiments in order to protect their experiments from destructive naturally occurring processes. These manipulations constitute what chemist Michael Polanyi called a "profoundly informative intervention."
They seem to simulate, if they simulate anything, the need for an intelligent agent to overcome the randomizing influences of natural chemical processes, processes that lead inexorably, under realistic conditions, to biochemical dead-ends.

You are welcome as they are not mine, but the product of actual scientific research by a gentleman by the name of Dr. Stephen Meyer a proponent of "intelligent design". With the theories presented founded in empirical science perhaps more than Mr. Darwin's short sited theory, that has become another "in vogue" platform for the pseudo intellectuals, and their pompous attitude of self professed superior intelligence. Just "Smoke and Mirrors" when push comes to shove. As exampled by the supposed "empirical science" backed claim of a program witnessed on PBS. A very expensive production about dinosaurs presented by the BBC called "walking with dinosaurs" which aired a 29 minute program about the fossil remains of one dino call "Big Al". My youngest son and I watched it together. I recorded all the facts that were presented. The first fact given was that this creature existed some 160 million years ago, just stated as a matter of fact and supported by nothing but a claim of such. While viewing the program I recorded how many times the phrases, Maybe, could have, must have, speculated, conjecture, suggests, etc were used. The grand total in only a 29 min. span was over 45 times the speculations were referenced as factual information and presented as such. EMPIRICAL? Hardly the fact, so to speak.

It is of no wonder that our children are so confused when they are "force feed" information such as this and then told that it is "factual". I even had a high school science teacher explain to me how the "theory of evolution" had been proven by use of C-14 dating. And, he was shocked when I asked him how it was proven by a procedure that can only be calibrated to its half life of a little over 5000 years. Of course I then was hit with the ever popular radiometric parent/sister element decay theory of methodology, and I asked him if that was the same theory that suggested 200 year old rocks were several million years old, or how a piece of wood found in a 100 million year old rock could be C-14 dated to be only 800 years old? Unreliability of Radiometric Dating and Old Age of the Earth

You're joking?

Absolutely no JOKE, when theory is presented as factual information and empirical, to the exclusion of other scientific theory, this is not called "education" but "indoctrination" when someone is "instructed" to take what is presented based only on the "speculation that it is true, and not told of other ideologies that are just as "empirical" or more so on some levels. After all we are not speaking of "the scientific law of evolution" only the "scientifically speculated" theory of evolution. (R)

“Evolution is often considered as something unexpected. Wouldn’t it be more natural, some antievolutionists ask, if everything would always stay the same? Perhaps this was a valid question before we understood genetics, but it is no longer. In fact, the way organisms are structured, evolution is inevitable. Each organism, even the simplest bacterium, has a genome, consisting of thousands to many millions of base pairs. Observation has established that each base pair is subject to occasional mutation. Different populations have different mutations, and if they are isolated from each other, these populations inevitably become more different from each other from generation to generation. Even this simplest of all possible scenarios represents evolution. If one adds further biological processes, such as recombination and selection, the rate of evolution accelerates exponentially. Therefore, the mere fact of the existence of genetic programs makes the assumption of a stationary world impossible. Evolution is thus a plain fact, not a conjecture or assumption.

It is very questionable whether the term “evolutionary theory” should be used any longer. That evolution has occurred and takes place all the time is a fact so overwhelmingly established that is has become irrational to call it a theory. To be sure, there are particular evolutionary theories such as those of common descent, origin of life, gradualism, speciation, and natural selection, but scientific arguments about conflicting theories concerning these topics do not in any way affect the basic conclusion that evolution as such is a fact. It has taken place ever since the origin of life.”


“What Evolution Is”
Ernst Mayr

Evolution isn't just speculated, it's been proven. We don't just think the Earth is over 6,000 years old, we know.