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Posted: Wed Jan 12, 2005 9:28 pm
by Mastermind
"Mastermind, I don't believe you when you say a rock holds no functions...take away all the rocks (including a lot of the dirt since dirt is, for the most part, ground rocks) and the earth could not harbor human life. In that sense, the rocks keep us alive and anything that keeps us alive is, in essence, a part of us. That's a relativistic philosophy, but I must admit that I love rocks (and hence, geology.) Of course, the same is true of the water, the sun, and the weather, but this part of my post is dedicated solely to the rocks.
By function I meant the rock actually does something. Rocks don't go around hunting for food, trying to find shelter, convert energy into usable energy. Their only function is to sit there. They don't HAVE to perform any complicated functions like gas conversion. They don't do anything. You're never going to see a rock get up and go to work, bring you your coffee and then finish the day with a nice game of poker while you're both complaining about how much life sucks.
More confusion I've caused. I didn't mean any ordinary rock, I was pretty much referring to all the different rock types. I'm not saying you could pick up a piece of quartzite and smoosh it together with a chunk of halite and a living creature will spontaneously arise from the...whatever you would have. I'm just saying that all the elements that make up humans can be found in a natural, non-living form (such as rocks, clay, water, etc.) We are as much a part of the cycles of nature as anything.
That doesn't change the fact that certain combinations are so unlikely to occur that to assume they do so by chance seems like a joke. I'm not going to see nature form a giant sword and have the wind make it float around and take over the world. From what I see, it is chemically impossible to have life randomly created. For example, if a lifeform required 3 different elements, but those elements could not survive in their needed form outside the organism, they will never come together since the environment of the other two elements might not be healthy for them(For example, one particle might thrive in water while the other would be dissolved by it). Again, a rock doesn't require precise engineering to survive. Life does.

Posted: Thu Jan 13, 2005 12:08 pm
by Anonymous
skoobieschnax
This is a metaphor for the chemical world. Remember biochemistry? Templates, more commonly referred to as "catalysts," speed up chemical reactions. It wouldn't take much time at all to create billions of 'lazy' words floating around. It would almost appear that there was a boom of life, if the word "lazy" were an amoeba.
This is the same "METHINKSITSAWEASEL" idea of Richard Dawkins. The problem is the aimlessness of the mechanism. In short, why would the process stop once it reached "LAZY"? There is no chemical reason for the LAZY to be the end result because the mechanism is NOT looking for an end result - it is just performing the process dictated by the reactions. It seems to me that just as soon as the LAZY appears it could become LAZYQ and then AZYQ (if the L came off due to some reaction). There seems no way stop at something beneficial - it just keeps reacting. You can't say "now we have LAZY so we're done". So if we can't keep LAZY as is then how can it reproduce itself?
I believe (here comes that relativistic viewpoint again. sigh.) that we will never know with absolute certainty where the stuff came from that made all the stuff--that's the scientific way of putting it.
I find it hard to imagine how scientists believe they can know what happened in the first fraction of a second of an event they aren't sure happened. I for one do not believe in a Big Bang or an expanding universe. Researchers are discovering that the universe is not expanding at all and the RedShift which Hubble thought meant velocity only means distance. The logical conclusion: No Expansion then NO BIG BANG.

Posted: Thu Jan 13, 2005 7:58 pm
by August
I for one do not believe in a Big Bang or an expanding universe. Researchers are discovering that the universe is not expanding at all and the RedShift which Hubble thought meant velocity only means distance. The logical conclusion: No Expansion then NO BIG BANG.
Can you post a reference for that please? Thanks.

Posted: Fri Jan 14, 2005 8:54 am
by Anonymous
August wrote:
I for one do not believe in a Big Bang or an expanding universe. Researchers are discovering that the universe is not expanding at all and the RedShift which Hubble thought meant velocity only means distance. The logical conclusion: No Expansion then NO BIG BANG.
Can you post a reference for that please? Thanks.
Here's two, I'll edit this post to add others.

http://www.setterfield.org/staticu.html
http://www.khouse.org/articles/technica ... 201-4.html
http://www.halos.com/reports/perspectiv ... g-bang.htm
http://www.orionfdn.org/papers/arxiv-9.htm

Posted: Fri Jan 14, 2005 6:59 pm
by August
Hi E, thanks for the references. Please note that I'm not saying this is right or wrong, I'm simply presenting some of the refutations for discussions sake. We have a duty to be critical to ourselves.

The c-decay and redshift anomolies suggested by Setterfield appears to be mostly refuted. The observable results are different than to what he found. In the simplest terms, if c-decay has been taking place, then everything we see happen in distant galaxies would appear to happen in slow motion. The data he used is also questionable, and flaws were exposed in it.

http://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-179.htm
http://chem.tufts.edu/science/FrankSteiger/light.htm
http://homepage.mac.com/cygnusx1/cdecay ... etterfield'

The work of Gentry, and polonium halos have also been questioned in some detail. His methodology, using radioactive decay selectively raised some questions about the validity of his experiments.

http://www.heathfrye.com/PoloniumHaloesRefuted.html
http://www.grisda.org/origins/15032.htm

I'm sorry, I did not understand the explanation in the khouse.org link, I will have to study that in more detail. It appears to also rely on c-decay, which has been refuted by observable evidence.

I must admit that all of these were well written, and appear to have been honestly researched. The problem is that many of the pro and con arguments are so steeped in either religious or atheist dogma that it's hard to find the real facts.

I still personally believe that the most compelling evidence still points to a big bang and expanding universe.