Im on your side man (same view). Stop looking for an argument. As i said in my original post that things which are thought to be a coincidence (like the earths position) isnt just by accident. Everything has a reason and i personally believe theres a higher power. These discussions get heated because religion and belief is brought in.
I'm not necessarily looking for an argument, but the earth's position isn't coincidence, it's physics. I don't see any need to evoke a higher power for something like that. I don't think we are on the same side at all, but that's life.
I got ya, but the positioning determines life and death that the fact if it was a little closer we would burn and a little further we would freeze makes me wonder about things. It is what it is, very complex and a mystery.
Alfred North Whitehead has some interesting things to say about this question in his book, The Function of Reason: Short version: life evolved because life is more fun. Of course, this would seem to require that either 1) the universe is being urged or lured along this path by something (God, perhaps?), or 2) there is some very very primitive interior dimension to all matter that leads even inorganic matter to form more complex structures, or 3) it was all just random until life came along, and then the urge that Whitehead talks about took over. I tend towards (2), because I tend to think that consciousness couldn't exist at a high level if it didn't first exist at the most elementary level, albeit in a primitive and/or latent sort of form. But that's just me.
I don't think it's that complex, really and less of a mystery each day. The positioning is much, much bigger than you probably think. Every star, including our sun, has what is known as a habitable zone. It is affected both by the size of the star and its intensity. Our Sun's orbit could decrease by about 4,500,000 miles or increase by 34,000,000 mises and still be in the habitable zone. Considering it's (on average) 93,000,000 miles to the sun, that's a pretty wide range to exist in. Also take into consideration that the earth's orbit is elliptical and the distance to the sun ranges from 91,445,000 miles to 94,555,000 miles and we already have a few million miles we deal with on a yearly basis. So I guess it depends on your definition of "little bit" when it comes to freezing or burning.
Not to mention that the orbit of a planet can change during the life cycle of a solar system. Mars at one time had water, though life is unsure.
The origin of life is what completely stymies those who do not believe in a higher being (i.e. atheists). They cannot explain it.
It stymies everybody... I'm an atheist and "I don't know" the origins of life. And theists "don't know" the origins of "god" other than to say that it always existed. But then again, perhaps life always existed. Certainly not in the current form, but in some form. In the end... we just don't know. We just can't explain it. Not you. Not me. But I'm much more comfortable with a humble, honest approach of "I don't know" than to act like I have the answer by submitting that an unverified hypothesis is true regardless of the absolute lack of evidence to substantiate the claim of "God did it".
Yeah, there's no research into that at all, either. It's a lot easier to just stuff god into the gaps and move on with your life, fingers in ears, going lalalala. Or maybe, just maybe, you could look into it like John Sutherland (RNA World hypothesis), Miller and Urey (sparks, reducing atmosphere, etc.), Alexander Graham Cairns-Smith (clay as a scaffold), or the others looking into metabolism-first models, panspermia (amino acids and nucleotides like guanine and adenine have been found on meteorites), and other models. Stymied? Hardly. Actively researching and exploring several viable hypotheses? Yes.
Sorta agree with bigtexxx. @mclawson - little as far as comparing those spaces to the size of the galaxy is what ill base it off
That's a bit of a cop-out, isn't it? Of course the vastness of space is large compared to the large numbers of habitable areas. However, even in our single, small galaxy, with it's 200-400 Billion stars (out of the ~100 billion galaxies in the known universe so far) that vastness allows for a huge area that would be considered habitable. Only someone being intentionally obtuse would consider that area "little".
Spontaneous generation from a chemically self-replicating carbon molecule. Out of all the trillions and trillions of chemical reactions throughout the entire history of the universe, it only takes one...... and away you go.
that is actually what the creationists use to argue against evolution. The 2nd law of thermodynamics states order ---> disorder but you can compare things so linearly.
But the 2nd law of thermodynamics only applies to a closed system - one where there isn't an input of energy. I guess it's easy to ignore the sun?
Yes it is. It's called the level of entropy. Scientists believe that the level of entropy ALWAYS increases with time. That is, things always become less and less orderly. Everything you see, eventually will disintegrate. The singular point before the big band was the ultimate ordered "universe". Then came the big bang. The early solar system was violently disorderly. The present solar system is extremely orderly. A few billion years later, the sun will be gone. All stars will eventually burn out, the universe as we know it will be gone. By then, the universe reaches its highest level of entropy. But, life is the only matter that defies the time law of entropy. The seemingly random rocks and waters all of a sudden arranged themselves in the right order to come alive. Sure there is no law of physics to prevent this from happening. But, the likelihood that it did happen is millions times smaller than a pyramid being formed naturally on Mars. Also, such an order reversal would have taken an enormous amount of time, during which the incompleted process would be very unstable and easy to be destroyed by the force of nature. It is almost as if there was a driving force that pushed the process to completion - to the establishment of the first living cell. Creation or not, it'll take a huge leap of faith to believe either one...
Humans can only comprehend and understand time linearly. The fact that there is no conceivable beginning or end doesn't mean there are higher beings afoot. It just means we don't have the intellectual capacity to understand it.
