david f – what it comes down to in the end, it seems to me, is which miracle we are prepared to believe in. I don’t believe that it is irrational when I look at the world around me to accept that there could be a being greater than us, God, who has deliberately created all this.

On the other hand the atheist believes that everything came from nothing (at least according to people like Richard Dawkins Stephen Hawkings) and that lifeless atoms spontaneously gave rise to life, consciousness, intelligence, and speech and all this for no reason or purpose.

I find the atheist miracle much harder to believe in.

JP

If you are against abortion. How does that explain you?

Where you spat, like a fur ball, out of God's spittoon?

Dear JP,

Religionists play with words and make it seem as though other people are talking their language. There is no atheist miracle. Matter can self-replicate. Once that happens slight changes in the process can accumulate and develop into many forms. It is in your mind that there has to be a purpose and goal to all this.

If you suppose a God then the question arises how did that God come into being. What or who created God? Did such a wondrous being arise spontaneously or was he created?

It used to be thought that the chemistry of living matter was somehow different from the chemistry of non-living matter. That is why we have the two branches of chemistry - organic and non-organic. As chemists become more skilled they are able to synthesise any organic matter in the lab through regular chemical means.

You want to believe in miracles and the existence of a God for which there is no evidence. Humans have been creating gods for a long time. That is primitive thinking. Because you don't want to abandon that primitive thinking you use tricks of language to make it seem as though scientists use the same kind of primitive thinking that you do. They don't. We do know that amino acids form under certain conditions from inorganic material. Amino acids can get together to form proteins - a basic material of life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Miller tells how Stanley Miller has formed amino acids in the lab by simply mixing various inorganic substance found in nature and subjecting them to electric charges such as happens in nature by lightning. Since we do not know the exact conditions of the early history of our planet we cannot be sure how life originated, but we already have answers to part of the puzzle.

Neither Dawkins nor I believe in miracles nor do we see a reason why there has to be an ultimate purpose. You believe in miracles, but that is no reason to think that other people do.

david f - I read carefully the link you sent to the Miller experiment. I would ask that you in turn do the same with this link, also about that experiment: http://creation.com/why-the-miller-urey-research-argues-against-abiogenesis

As you can see there, that experiment does not show how life spontaneously came into existence. Scientists have no idea how that could have happened. It needs as much faith to believe that life spontaneously arose as it does to believe that God created life.

>>It needs as much faith to believe that life spontaneously arose as it does to believe that God created life.<<

This sound like

“It needs as much faith to believe that planets are “spontaneously” kept in their orbits as it does to believe that God created the planets and their orbits.”

The difference is that in this case - in distinction to the first one - science (Newton) found a scientific explanation (explaining to a theist “how God did it”, and self-explanatory for an atheist) for the movement of planets.

Neither is an argument for or against the existence of God who is believed to be.beyond the reach of scientific explanations hence cannot be reduced to the discarded “god of the gaps”.

“self-sufficient”, sounds here better than “self-explanatory”.