This idea that if you look hard enough and pour enough money into a search you can find anything bugs me. Facts can’t be bought.
This is an excellent point that I want to highlight. Churches have more money than god. Who better to fund this research than the people vested in your eternal soul?
The whole discussion is getting somewhat circular and repetitious.
Of significance is the fact that I summarized the conventional mainstream doctrine on the subject in three hypotheses; my choice of words may not have been the greatest, but you get the drift.
Since these three hypotheses are the foundation doctrine for most of conventional biological science, it is incumbent on the believers to demonstrate their veracity. Either you can show me, or you can’t.
Accordingly, as Richard Feynman has famously said: “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong”
Since it is clearly obvious, as demonstrated by each successive paper published which drills deeper into the chemistry of living systems, that this doctrine is ludicrous and has no foundation in science, then I have no expectation that any such demonstrations will be forthcoming.
But, I am open minded. Show me that life and consciousness arise from conventional chemical reactions, and I will become a believer and go back to Miller time.
In the meantime, I suggest that the cheerleaders become more circumspect in their criticisms of the woo whackos; the conventional science doctrine and woo have a lot in common.
The evidence you want is literally between your ears. You’re a walking chemical reaction. You have consciousness.
If you want to assert some magic energy field is responsible for your consciousness, please try. But there is no evidence for it that has yet been shown.
You’re the one with the horseshit here. Let’s not lose sight of that.
So, in other words, not only do you not understand the issues, but “you got nuthin”.
I get it.
I have everything. If you, a creature composed largely of chemical reactions, possess consciousness, that is excellent evidence that it is provided by what we can see.
You are just blindly and ignorantly demanding that it must be the work of a supernatural energy field. But you aren’t providing evidence for such field.
Just because you want it to be true, that doesn’t change where the burden of evidence lay.
Consider, you are saying something analogous to, that gravity is the result of Leprechauns holding us to the Earth. You ignore that we have a fairly good understanding of gravity, and that no one has ever provided evidence for the Leprechauns.
Actually, I withdraw this suggestion. Churches would be scared shitless about what they’d find. I could just see the Catholics funding a channel from the afterlife to here - and finding out that the afterlife looks a lot like Valhalla.
As Cardinal Spellman said to Pope John XXIII when Christ showed up at the back of St. Pats in the Lenny Bruce bit “what are we paying protection for, anyway.”
But the evidence is sure to turn up if we throw a few billion dollars in research funds at the problem.
Not fully understand something as complex a consciousness does not mean that a particular hypothesis is falsified. Kepler could not explain why the planets moved in elliptical orbits - it took Newton - but he was still correct.
What you can expect to see are experiments that could falsify the hypothesis. Of this there are many, including conks on the head, operations, and stimulation and measurement of many parts of the brain. They all support a purely physical cause for consciousness. Please provide me with information on a repeatable experiment which supports a nonphysical cause, and some experiments which could have falsified this hypothesis but didn’t. Houdini never did speak to his wife, after death, you know.
Yeah… similar thought occured to me as well after I posted mine: “Oh, and sorry all you Christians… the Jews were right.” (Can’t recall which comic did that bit.)
It certainly has. Maybe because you keep pressing the God of the Gaps argument and nobody is buying it.
Science has has done so in the lab - sperm meet egg. Life!
Genetic engineering is off to a promissing start as well, but there are ethical issues to overcome first.
You want primordial life from branch chain amino acids? I think that’s been done as well. But as the universe has shown, it takes a little more time for consciousness to develop.
Agreed. Show us your evidence for God in the Gaps.
You are drawing this conclusion on your own. I don’t know of any studies that draw this, arms up in the air - we give up, conclusion.
Okay, scientists are hard at work. But that gives you just about enough time to come up with some actual evidence for intelligent design. And not the hare brained speculation you’ve been doing so far. Some hard evidence. You know, the kind of evidence you’ve been asking of science thus far. Get busy.
Rowan Atkinson, I think.
Ah, yes. 
Forgot the atheists part. Seems we’re damned to spend eternity in hell with the Christians. Fitting, I suppose. :smack:
In reading some of the posts above, I am beginning to think that in addition to attending too many cult meetings, some of the cheerleaders have overdosed on their medication.
So, let me spell it out: in my list of hypothesis, I spelled out what is the current state of the art doctrine in mainstream science; then asked that the cheerleaders to show how it works.
Now the cheerleaders are attacking their own doctrine?
Regarding the spending of billions of dollars on pointless make work schemes for scientists, sorry “research”, have you looked at cancer research lately?
Some eighty billion dollars spent since 1970, and hardly anything to show for it. And the cancer industry is demanding more money for even more pointless studies.
Why doesn’t the Catholic church spend money on woo studies? Why would they waste time and money on what they have known for about two thousand years? They know that there is an afterlife; they know that the dead go to one of two places: “Heaven” or “Hell”.
The entire reason the Catholic church exists is to ensure that people stay on the straight and narrow, and get preferential treatment in “Heaven”.
I thought even a graduates from our education system knew that.
Attacking others because you can’t support your views isn’t particularly persuasive.
You’ve failed utterly. All you have is the demand that your nonsense magical energy field must exist, because we don’t yet have total knowledge of the human brain.
All evidence ever collected in the history of man supports a mechanical seat for consciousness in the brain.
Drivel. You are just flailing because you don’t have a single, solitary piece of evidence for the magical energy field you want to exist.
Cancer research has provided many life-extending treatments and techniques. And cancer is a real problem.
Supernatural research has provided exactly nothing, and has only made those who believe in it look very silly.
You need to educate yourself on cancer research.
They don’t know it. They believe it.
They are as unfounded as you are.
Plenty of people graduate without understanding science or basic logic.
I can’t tell what this rant has to do with past lives, but “hardly anything to show for it” is an incorrect characterization of cancer-related research and the declining cancer death rate in the U.S.:
*"Annual statistics reporting from the American Cancer Society shows the death rate from cancer in the US has fallen 20% from its peak in 1991. “Cancer Statistics, 2013,” published in the American Cancer Society’s journal CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, and its companion piece “Cancer Facts & Figures 2013,” estimates the numbers of new cancer cases and deaths expected in the US this year. The estimates are some of the most widely quoted cancer statistics in the world.
A total of 1,660,290 new cancer cases and 580,350 deaths from cancer are projected to occur in the US in 2013. Between 1990/1991 and 2009, the most recent year for which data is available, overall death rates decreased by 24% in men, 16% in women, and 20% overall. This translates to almost 1.2 million deaths from cancer that were avoided."*
The “cancer industry” is busy trying to put itself out of business through early detection and effective treatment of cancer.
And even if your claims were valid, they would do nothing to justify the woo you believe in.
The Catholics may “know” it (that is believe it) but billions don’t. Don’t you think that they would fund such studies if they thought it would result in all these souls being saved? And the Church actually supports science. I used to work with a nun who was a damn good scientist, and someone I knew in college is an astronomer at the
Vatican. So perhaps the reason they don’t fund woo studies is that they are smart enough to know it would be money wasted.
Before Constantine, there was no Roman or Catholic(Universal ) church. Christianity was very divided, that is why Constantine,being head of the Roman empire called for the Council of Nicea to unite the Church. Then the Bishops of the Roman and Orthocox churches decided what was God’s word and what was inspired by God, and got rid of anything they felt didn’t agree with that. Many Monks worked on the NT and one of the reasons(I believe) there was so many contradictions was because of not all reading and translating the same thing. In 1,000AD the Orthodox and Roman churches split.
Oh, I see what it is that’s got you all worked up. Any science and research that isn’t providing the answers that YOU want is a waste of time and money. And the answers that science does provide you can’t accept anyway because it doesn’t fit neatly into the intelligent design framework you’re clutching onto so desperately. Yes, I can see how that would make someone agry and shrill. Carry on. :rolleyes: