Spirituality Abiogenesis and the virgin birth

[Blobbenstein]

One theory I have is that matter is, in some way, alive, and that that self organising life formed the first replicating organic life.

Which lead me to wonder if the same happened with the virgin Mary's gamete egg thingy. Maybe if God can only see this world at the microscopic/atomic level, then he could see her egg......the life at the atomic level, self organised(in the light of God's gaze) until the egg was fertilized.

when the zygote grew to be a man, always in God's view, maybe that is all God could see, Jesus, and the rest of the world at the atomic level..

Any questions?

 

[FortyTwo]

If God were real and the virgin birth occurred, then I don't think there's really any need to scientifically justify what happened, because in that case it just did.

 

[Blobbenstein]

If God were real and the virgin birth occurred, then I don't think there's really any need to scientifically justify what happened, because in that case it just did.

but you could say the same about all physical phenomena.

 

[Blobbenstein]

anyway it isn't really a scientific justification....I was just comparing abiogenesis to the virgin birth.

 

[Clueless Git]

Any questions?

Yes!

What have you been smoking?

The monks at our local buddhist temple have decided that, contrary to any claim ever made by the buddha or elsewhere on behalf of the buddha, that the buddha was the product of a virgin birth also.

It pisses me off.

2,500 years ago in the case of the buddha, 2,014 3/4 for Jesus, this type of bollox may have served the purpose of getting people to listen.

In the modern day and age talking such bollox only serves to warn people that whatever else you might have to say is going to be bollox also.

 

[Clueless Git]

I was just comparing abiogenesis to the virgin birth.

Which is akin to comparing the formation of stalactites and stalacmites to the construction of the Empire State Building.

 

[Blobbenstein]

Which is akin to comparing the formation of stalactites and stalacmites to the construction of the Empire State Building.

all I am suggesting is that abiogenesis has a supernatural cause....and the virgin birth.

 

[Blobbenstein]

Have you heard of Rupert Sheldrake, CG?

And his morphic fields?

 

[Clueless Git]

all I am suggesting is that abiogenesis has a supernatural cause....and the virgin birth.

I'm going to suggest that the cause behind both was a mischievous time travelling alien named Tim.

 

[Clueless Git]

Anyways, how to settle a religious argument ...

Have a good old fashioned punch up.

Whoever wins, no matter whether they believe in God or Tim, clearly has Tim on their side.

 

[FortyTwo]

Have you heard of Rupert Sheldrake, CG?

And his morphic fields?

Maybe don't invest too much in parapsychologists.

Have you ever heard of David Icke and his theories about the Moon?

 

[Blobbenstein]

I know Sheldrakes morphic fields stuff is a bit woolly, but that is inevitable. It is hard to study the supernaural. There is a continuum from the supernatural to the empirical(?), and there is only a narrow area between them that science can investigate. Like the stuff about knowing when you are looked at, or thinking of someone and then they ring you. A narrow band, and hard to get repeatability.
I don't think it is very healthy to only include things that are repeatable in one's frame of reference of reality. It's not logical. Why should things be repeatable.? Who wrote that law?

 

[GingerFoxx]

Pretty sure by definition scientific laws need to be repeatable to be proven and not just theories.

 

[Blobbenstein]

scientific laws yes, not personal world views though.

But there could be laws of nature which lead to some phenomena which aren't repeatable, couldn't there.

 

[FortyTwo]

"Supernatural" still doesn't make any sense to me.

If something happens, there is an explanation for it, whether or not we are equipped to understand it, and anything that happens in the Universe is "natural."

"Natural" itself is kind-of a ridiculous word, really, because it has so many potential meanings.

And the morphic fields thing makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Looking it up has just confirmed Rupert Sheldrake as a total pseudoscientist to me.

 

[Blobbenstein]

it's probably hard to not be a bit pseudo-science when dealing with this stuff..And that is why the word 'super natural' has relevance, as it is a different part of nature, which can't be examined easily by science. How does one study supernatural fields? Can you see them?

He is, or at least was a proper scientist. If you look him up on wiki.

Some of the experiments do show statistical evidence for telepathy; although it is only statistic deviations.

Even in James Randi's book An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural, one of his entries admits a statistically deviation in a telepathy experiment.

 

[Blobbenstein]

Life and career
After obtaining his PhD, Sheldrake became a fellow of Clare College,[36] working in biochemistry and cell biology with funding from the Royal Society Rosenheim Research Fellowship.[37] He investigated auxin, a phytohormone which plays a role in plant vascular cell differentiation,[38] and published a number of papers related to the topic.[39][40] A 2012 profile in The Guardian described the Sheldrake of that era as "one of the brightest Darwinians of his generation".[3] His development with Philip Rubery of the chemiosmotic model of polar auxin transport has been described as "astonishingly visionary".[41] Their work in the 1970s was confirmed in the 21st century.[41]

Rupert Sheldrake - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


I sent an email to him recently about my idea that maybe some aspects of his morphic field ideas could be falsified if you could grown an organism in a computer simulation. If you could grown a virtual zygote into a fully grown organism, then that would show that morphic(or some kind of field) fields don't play a big part in organic growth...If you get a huge clump of proteins etc then that would either indicate that some kind of field is at work in the real world, or there is something wrong with the software....Either way, it makes some kind of field hypothesis falsifiable.

It would take a huge amount of computing power so I suppose the orgamism would have to small at first....not sure when this computer experiment wil be possible.

 

[FortyTwo]

One studies supernatural fields by not just assuming they exist because you want them to, and instead waiting for reasonable observation tactics to actually understand them without pretending they're definitely there and are just "not understandable" without any actual evidence.

Maybe there are special morphic fields or something like that. Who knows? Science doesn't just suddenly tell us everything about the Universe, and assuming it does is just as bad as claiming it's totally useless. It's important to recognize that we don't know everything yet, and probably never will.

But we haven't observed anything like that and it hasn't become relevant. It's just something that this one person is proposing based on a hypothesis that doesn't have any sound basis other than "wouldn't it be cool if..." or "this is how it is because I said these words."

Another important thing to recognize is that scientists are humans, and so are fallible. A scientist is just as likely as anyone else to chase some totally ridiculous thread in life, or to lose touch with reality, or to promote themselves to an absurd degree. I can acknowledge that Mr. Sheldrake is probably a brilliant biochemist - he got his PhD after all - and still understand that his morphic field stuff is bizarre and unfounded.

Essentially the difference between science and pseudoscience is that the latter sounds enticing and sometimes professional, but doesn't back up the grandiose things that it claims. Real science is always backed up.

 

[Blobbenstein]

I don't get why people are against assuming things. Some guy, on another forum, argued against the idea of assuming that aliens exist, and that we should wait for evidence that they exist.
If we assume they exist then we can maybe come up with some way to detect them, or contact them.
Same with the morphic fields. We can try to think of ways that they might work, and how we can detect them.
Sheldrake thinks that they might be majorly important in the development of eggs into full grown organism. He thinks they may contain the instructions for most of the growth. He thinks organisms are too complex for them to be made by the genes alone, which he thinks are just there to facilitate more basic chemical changes.

I think it could be right, or maybe fractal like reiteration could be enough to form very complex structures.

Computer simulations should show whether a cell needs some mysterious assistance, when computers get powerful enough, don't you agree?

 

[FortyTwo]

Except from what we know about DNA, we know that it can code everything we need just fine. There's no need for morphic fields.

If he can prove there are morphic fields, then more power to him! He should get out there and actually do that science and find that proof. If they're real, he'll find them, or at least something pointing to their existence. But as it is, we don't need them to explain how we work. There is no "mysterious assistance," we work just fine with the biology we already know. Sure there's more we have to learn about the human body and especially the brain, but you really do not need morphic fields.

Comparing something totally unfounded like that to something significantly more plausible - extraterrestrial life - doesn't make any sense.

On a different note... maybe there's some mysterious force called the House Force that helps my house stand up. I don't think a house like mine could actually stand up against gravity. I'm not basing that on anything, because it's probably undetectable.

That's ridiculous, of course, but at the moment it's in exactly the same group of theories as morphic resonance - something proposed by someone who has no real evidence for it, but wants to promote it anyway.