No problemo. Is it no problemo to create the thousands of enzymes in your body, each of which is a protein that can have up to a couple thousand amino acids that have to be just right in order to conform by electromagnetics to an exact shape to perfectly fit particular molecules like a jigsaw puzzle to catalyze a particular critical reaction in just the right places in your body? Is it no problemo to create the complexity of the human brain? How about the development of your entire body, including all these reactions, and your brain, and all your organs, all from a single cell? Science keeps saying they can explain everything. Science can't explain ****. We don't even understand how most of the body works, and even less about how it develops, let alone how have a mechanism for how it evolved. It sure looks like something behaving in an orchestrated intelligent way. To simply dismiss that out of hand as an hypothesis you'd have to have your head up your ass. You want to follow the ways of science, what does Occam's razor say is the simplest explanation? You can believe that it all came about by random changes that happened one molecule at a time if you like, but that's faith my friend.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochemistry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemistry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics

Occam's razor: a god is too complex a concept for being feasible.

Yes, I know what all those things are. I don't need wikipedia. I started as a biochemistry major and studied molecular biology, genetics, cell biology, evolution, and chemistry for 2 years before switching to physics and math.

I want to make one thing clear, that i intend to spend most of my weekend studying Quantum Mechanics related topics, some QFT, QED and some classic papers in these areas rather than debating in "fighting" mode.


I didnt offer these examples as reasons to not be religious, only as things they didnt know that together with a great deal more help paint a picture that explains better and better things/effects/properties of our world, often in counter-intuitive fashion, in terms of constantly improving laws rather than some arbitrary intervention and creationism stories. I offered them as examples of effects or ideas they wouldnt necessarily anticipate in their exact form or even similar forms for most, as examples of radical out of the box thinking that further liberates the brain through example from established norms (or every day life enforced intuition) and enables more drastic conclusions such as that all these religious stories are fairy tales of primitive ignorant people that didnt know any better or that they have a more rational explanation that doesnt completely render imbecile/inept/idiotic the ancient people. I offered them as examples that are enhancing doubt for the widely culturally established and liberating the mind to think radically when justified by evidence and sometimes enabling intuition to anticipate the evidence and be vindicated by unorthodox creative thinking.

I wonder why the symbolism at that level was missed especially given the last sentence (of that post)! I never said that knowing these things makes you non religious, atheist or religious etc, although i would argue that it probably makes you less religious over time or at least radically less religious the way most people understand religion. I hate it when i am treated in such seemingly simplistic ways. It shows a profound disrespect for the way i think. I dont really care for that at a personal level unless it comes from people that i have otherwise profound evidence they love and care deeply for my progress as thinker (enough to consider the chance its not simplistic), but it shows the other side is conveniently missing the point by assuming the worse possible for me each time, which is completely unscientific in fact and highly polemic in nature, therefore probably close to religious fanaticism (without of course being that, only in style).

Furthermore the notion of God these modern scientists (last century say) suggested is far removed from that of the vast majority of religious people, so much in fact that one could in principle imagine they are essentially speaking of nature or its laws rather than some super human like form of all knowing God that intervenes, judges, awards afterlife in paradise or hell, dislikes nonbelievers, validates intolerance and violence etc all the usual fairy tales.

Lets instead allow for example one of those mentioned (in the list above), Feynman in his own words to tell us what he thought. And expect that had he lived even more his thoughts could have improved even further as it typically happens with intellect and as he would have wanted it. I tend to trust more those of the great ones that lived in more recent times because they had their thoughts benefited by results of more modern science than even those other thinkers in early 20th century. A lot changed later.



and in particular here (but both the first doesnt include 100% of the second it seems even if it would appear that way i briefly noticed)





Best seeing the entire thing anyway;



At a personal level i wouldnt characterize myself as religious (although i was raised Christian and respect my own culture and the way it has interpreted/incorporated religion). I wont call myself atheist or religious although i recognize some cultural value in religion (before science is available) when considered in its more refined form of values that often are universal. And i will refuse to put myself under agnostics as well.

I prefer the idea that i am a free thinker, a scientist that has been liberated through math, physics and modern science in general from superficial folk stories, fairy tales and religious dogma, embracing instead rational thinking and demanding a more concrete redevelopment of my own ethics. I have done that without the assistance of various authors or philosophers other than those read at a young age as student during which i was partially religious.

I arrived at my ideas about the world a bit later after teens in a completely rational way through my exposure to science and analytical thinking. If i tend to agree with certain authors that is a coincidence, i have kept myself on purpose clean from organized systematic forms of "philosophy" as you may already know from my persistent avoidance of such technical threads.

After of course having formed my own ideas during and after my 20s i enabled myself to rejoin the reading public on topics outside science such as philosophy as well selected world literature generally improves the mind and provides wider perspective, provided that science has first equipped it with a more healthy form of skepticism and confidence in proof and whatever evidence where available, to be effectively immune to preaching or mystical approaches in general or any kind of arbitrary theories that do not care enough to convince the reader with legitimate means. It is true however that math and physics still dominates most of my reading and all my ideas about the universe etc are my own developed through physics and personal thinking. I do not read sci fi literature either.

I welcome Bruce, Plaaynde and anyone else that actively participates in SMP forum to share as well their personal viewpoints regarding religion or (life path) connection to it. Are you religious?



PS: regarding origin of life etc, this is exactly why i think that life is rare in the universe even if you give >10^22 systems several billion years each of experimentation and why ultimately i assign so few advanced civilizations in the observable universe or even dare to entertain the idea we are one of the very first or even exactly first. The position of the first ones would always look paradoxical to them due to how unlikely it seems. But i dont think life starts with 10^-100 or anything like Dirac said. Instead i think that life starts in various far from life forms of elaborate chemistry that each have tiny chance to occur spontaneously but once they form they make possible further complexity that over time makes very plausible a further rare development (the vast important of time and the effectively trillions of available experimentation sites per planet) until finally the originally unthinkable is within reach. Still probably of the order of 10^-9 per planet or satellite (say 10^-20 per site among the billion/trillions a planet can have when considered quasi microscopically ie at cm^2 level range) in friendly star systems per billion years or something like that.

Thanks for the video, masque To Bruce: this is approximately how I view things. The god theory just is making you not being able to have questions about anything, like I want to. If god is the correct answer down the line, so be it. But there are no indications for that so far. I believed once, but it appears to be one of those mistakes we all make during our lifetime.

To me it looks clear that Feynman is an atheist, just knows it's PC not to utter it directly. I have not uttered it myself yet. But I may take the full consequences of my thinking one day, maybe if I live long enough for the previous generation to pass. If I'm the first to go, maybe a cross on the tombstone would look nice anyway?

The only point to be made here is that not all scientists are atheists and not all atheists and agnostics think that being intolerant of religion is the correct stance to take.

That Einstein really liked pasta is probably more important.

We are also getting closer to figuring out what all these religious feelings are in terms of the brain. Some small strides have been made on the strange beliefs part of religiosity, and other strides have been made working on the feelings of belonging that religious folk call spirituality. I wonder what Dirac would think of that.

We have already practically eliminated Einstein's view about aliens on Mars and other planets in our solar system. What I like is that we are beginning to get results about exoplanets. But the data so far is disappointing, we have not got any positive hit yet. We can only be more and more disappointed with time, if we don't get that hit which would change everything forever. My gut feeling is we will not find extraterrestrial life during my lifetime, I'm hoping to be wrong.

How does adding in "some guy we will conveniently name 'creator god' did it on purpose" make it any simpler? It appears that such a thing would just be pushing the question back a bit. My initial reaction is not uncommon: This creator god guy sounds pretty amazing. Clearly more amazing than we are. Who made him?

Secondary reactions are along the lines of: That tailbone thingy we have is definitely a design flaw indicating a less than fully developed intellect in this creator god guy.

Tertiary reactions are along the lines of: Wind was god breathing before we figured out the whole weather thing. That sort of thing keeps happening with the parts of the world. Not definitive, but there does seem to be a consistent pattern.

At least we agree on something BTM2.

1. According to the talk, he said in the future even our neighboring galaxies will be moving away from us at faster than the speed of light. Presently, in empty space particles that come in and out of existence. I assume when space is expanding greater than the speed of light, these particles will become real particles.

2. I also assume these new particles as viewed from the space outside every galaxy will be viewed as a big bang. The pinpoint will actually be a galaxy. In the talk he mentions that the universe could have been curved flat or round. However, he knew it would be flat since that meant all the net energy in the universe would be zero and thus start from nothing. I come to the theory the same way, if a galaxy was the seed to a new universe, the universe would never end and since there are 300 billion galaxies, after only 2 generations the amount of galaxies would be 300,000,000,000*300,000,000,000*300,000,000,000 = a lot of galaxies. Add in 100 generations and you are talking a number of sand in a ball with the center of our sun and Sirius as diameter.

3. It fits pretty well as we needed to have a young starts explode to give us oxygen, gold, silver, copper, ...

4. Because they are closer in light-years. The galaxies we 10 light years away are NOW like ours and the stars we we have long since burned out and the galaxies might even be moving away from us faster than the speed of light by now.

5. You are correct. But like how the guy knew our universe was flat, it would make a lot of sense if galaxies (our gravitationally tied local group) are seeds to big bangs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO-GqraV8Ho minute 20.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs_Y_-X2GCw

A young star exploding is not thought to bring us gold among other heavier rare elements. At least two stars, specifically two neutron stars colliding similar to type 1a supernovae, are thought to be the source of all the gold we know.

Your information on this specific point is old, the nice thing about theories are they can be updated to be more accurate and give us a better understanding of reality.

Asking if the Big Bang is an illusion at this point of time really belongs in the conspiracy thread or belongs with material like "did we really go to the moon" or supply side economics

Steelhouse, you're just stringing words together here without understanding, just like you do in economics.

When you say "space is expanding greater than the speed of light", what do you mean? The people you're listening to mean that *galaxies* are moving apart at a rate faster than the speed of light...in other words, a point in space at the center of one galaxy compared to a point in space at the center of another galaxy.

When you then talk about subatomic particles coming in and out of existence, I assume (to make any meaning out of that) you mean the creation of virtual pairs. The distance between virtual pairs for their total existence is tiny (barring being close to a black hole...)

Now the problem is, when people talk about space expanding, the speed at which one point is receding is proportional to the distance between the two points. One of your distances is an astronomical scale, the other subatomic.

No, you don't have a new theory that works. You have a crackpot theory. I'm reminded of something Richard Feynman said in a lecture at Cornell. He said he routinely got such crackpot theories, and expressed incredulity that the people writing them didn't think the experts, who were paid to think of such things, hadn't thought of those things--and further, unlike the crackpots, actually followed the thoughts to their logical conclusions and discarded each one for being unphysical.

[Start of derail]



But we are learning more and more about **** everyday Bruce! I could cite thousands of examples but I will just give the links below to start you on your path to knowing about ****. And why it is important.



Challenges in Diagnostic Accuracy Studies in Primary Care: The Fecal Calprotectin Example.

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2296/14/179

Fecal Biotherapy for the Induction of Remission in Active Ulcerative Colitis

http://clinicaltrials.gov/show/NCT01545908

Concentrations of Pathogens and Indicators in Animal Feces in the Sydney Watershed

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1265995/

DIFFERENTIATION STUDIES OF FECAL STREPTOCOCCI FROM FARM ANIMALS

http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/...m#.UwopfxaYYqQ


Studies to distinguish between human and animal faecal
pollution using F-RNA coliphages and faecal sterols

A Sundram1*, N Jumanlal1 and MM Ehlers2
1Umgeni Water, PO Box 9, Pietermaritzburg 3200, South Africa
2Department of Medical Virology, University of Pretoria/NHLS, Pretoria 0001, South Africa.

Abstract

Human enteric viral infections are considered to be predominantly associated with human wastes, as opposed to animal wastes, and a distinction between these has benefits for water quality control and risk assessment. A variety of techniques have been described to distinguish between human and animal faecal pollution of water. F-RNA (male-specific) coliphages have been classified into four sero-groups and evidence has been presented that two of these sero-groups are specific for human excreta and the other two for animal excreta. Certain chemical compounds such as the faecal sterols cholesterol and coprostanol yielded valuable results in attempts to distinguish between faecal pollution of human and animal origin.

In this study the application of F-RNA coliphages and faecal sterols to distinction between human and animal excreta has been investigated. Faecal sterols were extracted from water and analysed by gas chromatography using published methods that were adapted for the detection and quantification of cholesterol and coprostanol. Wastewater containing predominantly animal excreta was collected from cattle, pig and chicken feedlots. Wastewater containing predominantly human excreta was collected from hospitals.
Results revealed that F-RNA coliphages isolated from wastewater from four different hospitals consisted almost exclu¬sively of genotypes 2 and 3. Only F-RNA coliphage genotypes 1 and 4 were detected in all three wastewater samples from cattle feedlots, while F-RNA coliphage genotypes 1, 3 and 4 were detected in all three chicken feedlot wastewater samples. Five wastewater samples from pig feedlots contained typically F-RNA coliphage genotypes 3 and 4.

Cholesterol and coprostanol were detected in ranges of 28 to 1 013 μg/ℓ and 19 to 1 441 μg/ℓ in wastewater, respectively. Coprostanol concentrations were more than double the cholesterol concentration in wastewaters from hospitals and pig feed¬lots in the five samples analysed. The opposite applied to wastewater from cattle and chicken feedlots, where cholesterol con¬centrations in all seven samples were higher than coprostanol concentrations. Analysis of wastewater from a poultry feedlot yielded a high cholesterol:coprostanol ratio and the presence of predominantly F-RNA coliphage genotype 4, confirming the specificity of these determinants for animal wastes.

The results of this study confirmed earlier reports on the specificity of F-RNA coliphage genotypes 1 and 4 for animal wastes, and genotypes 2 and 3 for human excreta, in a part of the world where investigations using these methods are limited. The same applies to the higher ratio of coprostanol: cholesterol in human excreta, and the higher ratio of cholesterol: copros¬tanol in animal excreta. The observations suggested that further optimisation of applying these indicators in combination may lead to the development of procedures for the meaningful distinction between faecal pollution of human and animal origin in quantitative terms.

***********************************************


And one of my favorites:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal.../393680a0.html

From above link:

A king-sized theropod coprolite

Karen Chin1, Timothy T. Tokaryk2, Gregory M. Erickson3,4 & Lewis C. Calk1
1.United States Geological Survey, 345 Middlefield Road, MS 975, Menlo Park, California 94025, USA
2.Eastend Fossil Research Station, Royal Saskatchewan Museum, Box 460, Eastend, Saskatchewan S0N 0T0, Canada
3.Department of Integrative Biology & Museums of Vertebrate Zoology and Paleontology, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
4.Present address: Biomechanical Engineering Division, Mechanical Engineering Department

Fossil faeces (coprolites) provide unique trophic perspectives on ancient ecosystems. Yet, although thousands of coprolites have been discovered, specimens that can be unequivocally attributed to carnivorous dinosaurs are almost unknown. A few fossil faeces have been ascribed to herbivorous dinosaurs but it is more difficult to identify coprolites produced by theropods because other carnivorous taxa coexisted with dinosaurs and most faeces are taxonomically ambiguous. Thus sizeable (up to 20 cm long and 10 cm wide) phosphatic coprolites from Belgium and India that have been attributed to dinosaurs might have been produced by contemporaneous crocodylians7 or fish. But there is no ambiguity about the theropod origin of the Cretaceous coprolite we report here. This specimen is more than twice as large as any previously reported carnivore coprolite, and its great size and temporal and geographic context indicate that it was produced by a tyrannosaur, most likely Tyrannosaurus rex. The specimen contains a high proportion (30–50%) of bone fragments, and is rare tangible evidence of theropod diet and digestive processes.

____________________________

And that ain't no ****.

[End of derail]

LOL

Strange that they such radically different views on god but agreed so much on math.

So they are wired differently if they behave exactly the same as us wrt to less intelligent life?

All the major religions of the world are describing different aspects of the same fundamental concepts. Think of it like the different string theories that were united to form M-theory, or the way 't Hooft believes that string theory and loop quantum gravity are describing different aspects of the same thing.

Everybody will gladly admit that M theory might not exist and 't Hooft is almost certainly wrong.

Did you hear that masque? You will gladly admit that 't Hooft is almost certainly wrong.

We are all wrong in some sense until the time is right for time to die...

Sorry, ambiguous sentence structure. Everybody will gladly admit that M thoery might not exist. Also, 't Hooft is almost certainly wrong.

Say you didn't know how cars are made. One possible explanation is that engineers thought about it, drew up blueprints, then handed those off to machinists, welders, and assembly line workers. Another is that they just poured a bunch of iron, plastic, rubber, and silicon together, let it simmer for awhile, and out popped a car. Not all at once of course. First came lesser vehicles, like tricycles. Those randomly evolved into cars by a small series of changes, like gaining a wheel. Which explanation is simpler?

Actually, having the simplest explanation is a hangup of science. There's no particular reason to believe that the truth is the simplest possible extension of what we already know. The truth can be something so ungodly complicated that our meager brains are unable to even comprehend of it.

One way that an explanation can be more complicated yet still useful is to be a generalization. We know that intelligence exists. It exists in our brains. I would say that all the intricate biochemical machinery in our bodies are intelligent in the same way our brains are intelligent. They operate in an orchestrated way AS IF they were designed to do so by some intelligence. Then I would say that the DNA that allows such an intelligence to unfold and develop starting from a single cell is also intelligent. It's AS IF an intelligence is guiding this process. It's at this point that our knowledge starts to fall off a cliff. We've just started to scratch the surface with stem cells and epigenetics, but we really don't understand how this works. If we don't understand how this works, we really don't understand how it evolved. Evolution definitely occurred and still occurs. You'd have to be a fool to think otherwise. But the process of this evolution is intelligent. It acts AS IF it is guided by an intelligence. You would like to say it's only guided by the environment that structures the randomness into emergent complexity. You could be right. I could just call that God, and we can all agree and go home. But as a logical generalization, I could imagine that intelligence could have been around much longer. Intelligence and consciousness could have been around at the beginning, serving as a blueprint for what was to unfold, serving as a template which allowed all the correct atoms to be drawn to it.

That is incorrect, it is a very large singular sun exploding that brings the gold. Once the fusion hits iron it collapses, and the resulting type 2 supernovae results in gold.

This thread is a theory that all big bangs as we know them start with a galaxy. The illusion is that it starts with a pinpoint. I am not disagreeing with the big bang theory.

The galaxies are basically static. It is the space in between the galaxies that are expanding. I suppose center point to center point. I have not done the calculation but galaxies at 10+ billion light years away from us, might not even be in our universe anymore. Can two galaxies separated by space that is moving apart by faster than the speed of light be considered in separate universes?

I am sure this has already been discovered and thought about.