Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 29
I found this mini-course by chemist Dr James Tour which explains problems with origin of life research. One of the greatest unsolved mysteries of science is how life originated on Earth. How do you get a working cell from a soup of chemicals? This problem is a lot deeper than most people assume, including scientists. Scientists grossly underestimate what cells are and how they work. I find it fascinating to contemplate this issue.
Dr James Tour is a brilliant chemist who unravels some of the BS and hype that has been plaguing origin of life research. He has dozens of videos on his channel that go into great detail, below I link just a few of them:
A Course On Abiogenesis - EP 7 - Peptides
A Course On Abiogenesis - EP 8 - Nucleotides
A Course On Abiogenesis - EP 9 - Lipids
Now, it's important to underscore that even though the above work casts serious doubt on origins of life research, you should not take this to mean that life did not originate through a natural process. I'm not suggesting that life happen through some magical means via a bearded man in the clouds. All that's being said is that scientists have no idea how exactly life got started and they take the issue of creating life from basic chemical building blocks for granted. The point of these videos is not to deny science or natural origins of life, nor to smuggle in Jesus, but to better appreciate how amazing and unique life is. My goal here is to help you recognize and appreciate the sheer genius of life.
Note: Dr James Tour is a born-again Christian, but he is also one of the world's top chemists, with over 100 patents. His science is solid and straight. He does not pollute it with talk of religion.
Mearsheimer has some of the best analysis of geopolitics and foreign policy I've ever heard. What's most remarkable about him is how objective and unbiased he is.
This explanation isn't technically rigorous, but what it lacks in rigor is makes up for in profundity:
In other words: INFINITY!
If you look at molecular biology and you don't see God, you're more blind than a bat.
The intelligence and engineering that runs through every living cell in your body is absolutely mind-boggling and insane, and humans have only just begun to scratch its surface.
Look at this! Just look!
It's not a question of, Did God design this? No! THIS IS GOD! You're looking at GOD! GOD isn't a bearded man in the sky, GOD is what you see above.
It's insane that any of this works!
None of this is happening through "random mutation" or lucky coincidence.
Just 1 cell in your body is more intelligent and more masterfully engineered than any human machine. Scientists take this completely for granted. No human on this planet is intelligent enough to design even a single cell. No biologist has ever made a cell from basic chemical parts in the lab. Not even close. They don't even have a theory for how it can be done. It is easier to build a rocket ship that flies to Mars than it is to build a single cell from scratch!
Your body contains about 100 trillion cells. And if they stopped coordinating perfectly with each other, you'd be dead within minutes. Compare this to humans, who can barely keep a society of 100 million people together. A single human body is more complex and more intelligently coordinated than all of human civilization by multiple orders of magnitude.
God is a living miracle! You are the miracle! When will you finally realize this?
This discussion is educational if you study it for errors in thinking by both sides.
Theists are correct in assuming that there must be a vast intelligence or mind behind the design of life and the Universe. However they screw up when they assume this mind to be something like a man in the clouds. It is a mistake to try to pinpoint God's mind as something before the Big Bang or the like. The entire Universe just is the mind of God! Period. End of story. The intelligence of God is distributed throughout the entire field of consciousness within which everything occurs. It is not that God sat down and designed the DNA of life 3 billion years ago. It's that God's intelligence is flowing through the whole cosmos at all times. You don't try to pinpoint the intelligence in any single cause or event, you recognize it as the flow of the whole cosmic symphony.
The other big mistake made by theists, and Christians especially, is trying to use the Big Bang as evidence of God because it seems to confirm the Creation story from the Bible — Boom! and the world was born. But this is a mistake. Creation is Eternal. It's an Eternal Dream that has existed forever. God is forever in the process of Creation. Creation is not a singular event that happened billions of years ago. You can find infinite chains of causation going back forever, far older than the Big Bang. No single Creation event is necessary, nor is it proof of anything. It's absurd for theists to avoid infinite regress arguments. This is the single greatest clue of God's existence. God is infinite regress in all directions! If you're a Christian or theist you should gladly embrace all the infinite regresses found throughout the Universe and use them to bash atheists and scientists over the head.
The best way to defeat an atheist/materialist/scientist is to bludgeon him to death with Infinity. You can destroy all of physics, mathematics, and logic with Infinity. It's just that nobody has the balls to do it. Infinity to a physicist is like garlic to a vampire. Because, of course, Infinity is God. Just the fact that you can count up forever is proof of God, you just don't realize it yet. That bit of proof will only make sense in retrospect, after Awakening.
No amount of reasoning, logic, or evidence can prove God. The only proof is the moment of your Awakening. All the evidence only makes sense in retrospect. People who try to prove God without first Awakening are wasting time and making fools of themselves. And people who try to debunk God are making even bigger fools of themselves. You can't debunk your own existence. Nor can you prove it to anyone but yourself.
Towards the end of the video Michael Shermer asks, "So how does a mind create something out of nothing?" To which the answer is: An infinite mind, by virtue of having nothing outside it, has no rules bounding what it can or cannot do. This makes it literally Omnipotent. And thus it is able to do the impossible: create itself out of nothing at zero cost. And THAT is why we call it God and not anything else. God is the only object that can account for its own existence. Which is why God is the only thing that can exist. Nothing else can exist because nothing else can create itself from nothing. And anything that can create itself from nothing must be God. And so the final theory of everything just is: Infinite Mind. Once you got that, you're Awake. And say to yourself, "OH MY GOD! OF COURSE!" And then you laugh at every scientific, academic, philosophic, skeptic, materialist, theism, atheism buffoon on the planet.
This is an amazing discussion in which Roger Penrose, one of the world's top scientists, is given the precise explanation of the ultimate nature of reality — that Everything is Mind — but he's too dense to understand it. It's a good case study in why scientists keep missing God.
Infinite Mind just goes over his head.
You can see how deeply Penrose is locked into the materialist paradigm here. It doesn't even occur to him that physical reality could just be the hallucination of a sufficiently powerful Mind. Which of course resolves every metaphysical problem there is.
American right-wingers elect such dumb politicians it's unbelievable. Americans should be embarrassed, but they are too guilty.
It's not as if Trump's stupidity is anything new. Bush was just as stupid and all the right-wingers now act as though that never happened and they didn't fully support it. All the "anti-establishment" MAGA types of today were full-throated Bush supporters 20 years ago around 9/11. Nothing has really changed.
It's quite simple: When you elect stupid people over and over again, your country becomes broken. The American founding fathers were genius philosophers and intellectuals. That's why America was great. But today....
You know what would be truly conservative and traditional? Electing some genius intellectuals to run the government. But I won't hold my breath.