Discovery!

While we are on the subject I am trying to gather together material for a museum I am getting together to show the great works of the creator, you will donate the VERY best of your collection to me, eg fournierae, alexandrae, only A1+ please, none of your common crappy stuff, the consequences of failing to comply with my request are unthinkable.

We can create "life". Nucleic acids are everywhere, exposing them to UV light turns one into another and a little bit of heat and electricity and they start to self-associate. There we have the first strand of genetic material. We can do it in a test tube. I think there is even a NOVA episode about this very subject for those who don't like to read. I'm a molecular biologist, I am very qualified to discuss the heck out of this if you want.

Young earth is not quantifiable, not without falsifying data. Old earth is very quantifiable and it has been quantified over and over and over and over with very very small margins of error (think % not actual years, 100 years might be long to an organism that is usually expiring around 80, but not to a planet that is millions- then it is only a fraction of a percentage).

I have no problem with religion either, friends and family naturally span the gamut, but I do take issue with disseminating "beliefs" as "facts" just like Simon. It is socially irresponsible. I too hope that this mode of thinking remains a strictly American thing. I would hope that the rest of the world laughing out loud would help us to... evolve, so to speak, our own thought processes to integrate facts with our various beliefs a little more realistically.

Young Earth (millions rather than billions) is quantifiable. There are methods which indicate youngish (I can't say young). There should be discussions to think about why one method shows old and one not. This way, calibration or elimination can occur. To make the statement anything that disagrees with you is a lie is kinda- well I don't want sound insulting but I was kinda bothered by the blanket statement. Define life please - Dna is not life.

Not meant to be insulting, and also never said it was a lie. I said the studies were "fatally flawed" which means they overlooked something very significant when interpreting their results which caused them to draw hasty and unsupported conclusions. It's not that the idea disagrees with me, it disagrees with tons of data gathered over many and many years using a myriad of techniques. It is with this other library of information that you can show the holes in the other hypotheses, that is why it is not convincing. If two tests that aren't very well designed tell you one thing but one hundred different tests tell you another then you know the first two tests were leaving an important variable out that caused them to be insufficient measures of whatever you are looking at. Or at the very minimum you don't walk around telling everyone about the truth you found with those first two tests. They don't stand up to scrutiny.

Not from scratch in a lab yet, but we have examples of the rest of the steps in nature already- in viruses. That's just a brief matter of time. It doesn't imply anything about the status of God mind you, just that with what is here on earth we can recreate the origin of life. How all that stuff got here is not my department at all. But I know lots about life from the cellular level down, that is my terrain.

I sincerely hope advances in medicine can help whatever ails you. A bit off topic, but have you seen the "regenerative" organs we can make now? They take an organ from a donor that is deceased too long for a transplant or has some other issue, such as incompatibility with the potential recipient. Then they basically wash the genetic material and organelles away with detergent, leaving behind only the cytoskeleton. Finally the membranous structure is flooded with healthy cells from the recipient and cultured until the structure is refilled with newly differentiated cells that function just like the original organ, only matching the donor exactly. A little spark and you have a beating heart. They're doing this at Wake Forest I believe. There's hope for every disease I strongly believe, you could very well be in the tropics soon. The question of money, insurance, etc. etc. has to be resolved of course, but that's a whole other thread... this one was interesting enough, right?

really well said Geoff, a well thought out statement, I too have my own set of beleifs as do most people, I think what put most peoples backs up about the creationist past posts was not just what was said but the manner it was said, I have found in my time on this site that people are tolerant of other peoples beleifs and quite rightly so, but when educated people are told I'm right and you are wrong the end and when those beleifs are so far removed from reality to be plausible then mockery and arguments start.