ISIS

Islamic State militants beheaded a renowned antiquities scholar in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra and hung his mutilated body on a column in a main square of the historic site because he apparently refused to reveal where valuable artefacts had been moved for safekeeping.

DDHvi wrote:I cannot accept a theory of life formation that violates the law of probability, producing by chance the chirality of DNA and proteins.

DDHvi wrote:I cannot accept geological theories that ignore the lack of erosion over the purported millions of years. It doesn't take long to produce large ravines, and very few geological layers have even small ravines.

DDHvi wrote:I cannot accept radioactive dating that produces ages in the millions of years from lava seen to flow in historical times.

Tenshinai wrote:For the same reason that other "trillion to one" events still happen.

DDHvi wrote:[
Trillion to one isn't even in the ballpark. The formula for common chirality by accident is one in 2^(n-1) for each n unit thread of chemical. Life would need to beat the odds on the supporting structures, the cell walls, the exact correct DNA to provide the information for all that, the proteins that work with the DNA in the process of duplication, all at the same time. DNA is fragile, cells have mechanisms to check it and correct damage, within certain limits.

DDHvi wrote:Trillion to one isn't even in the ballpark. The formula for common chirality by accident is one in 2^(n-1) for each n unit thread of chemical.

DDHvi wrote:Life would need to beat the odds on the supporting structures, the cell walls, the exact correct DNA to provide the information for all that, the proteins that work with the DNA in the process of duplication, all at the same time. DNA is fragile, cells have mechanisms to check it and correct damage, within certain limits.

DDHvi wrote:Note that radioactive dating can only produce a maximum possible date, just as mytochrondrial DNA can only produce a minimum possible. Which might or might not be the actual one.

DDHvi wrote:Given the accepted size of the Plank unit, assuming variations occur one per each unit of time, with a universe of 20 billion years, and the estimated size of the known universe, the odds are still very bad.

DDHvi wrote:Real science is based on experiment and observation

DDHvi wrote:and keeps on finding the unexpected, such as the non-mineralized dinosaur fossils with traces of organic material still in the bones.

DDHvi wrote:Back to Weber:

in spite of the many things impossible by our current knowledge, the Honorverse is still my favorite series.

Tenshinai wrote:

DDHvi wrote:I cannot accept geological theories that ignore the lack of erosion over the purported millions of years. It doesn't take long to produce large ravines, and very few geological layers have even small ravines.

Geology does not ignore "lack of erosion" or anything such. That´s faerytales from people who doesn´t know WTF they´re talking about.

What lack of erosion by the way? There is no such thing. If you actually bother to look, there´s plenty where there SHOULD BE.

DDHvi wrote:Steeper slopes produce ravine/gully erosion. Less steep slopes produce meander erosion/depositing. Reaching the ocean produces delta formation depositing. What size of water flow would produce sheet erosion/depositing formations extending for hundreds of miles? This is of special importance in the several places where the Grand Canyon has neighboring layers which by accepted dating methods are hundreds of millions of years apart. How can such long time spans not produce large gully, meander, or delta events?

Astro-physicists estimate that there are no more than 10^80 infinitesimal "particles" in the universe, and that the age of the universe in its present form is no greater than 10^18 seconds (30 billion years). Assuming each particle can participate in a thousand billion (10^12) different events every second (this is impossibly high, of course), then the greatest number of events that could ever happen (or trials that could ever be made) in all the universe throughout its entire history is only 10^80 x 10^18 x 10^12, or 10^110 (most authorities would make this figure much lower, about 10^50). Any event with a probability of less than one chance in 10^110, therefore, cannot occur. Its probability becomes zero, at least in our known universe.

DDHvi wrote:Multiply each of these by a factor of 1000, and the odds only go up to 10^119

Even the simplest replicating protein molecule that could be imagined has been shown by Golay1 to have a probability of one in 10^450. Salisbury2 calculates the probability of a typical DNA chain to be one in 10^600

1 Marcel Golay, "Reflections of a Communications Engineer," Analytical Chemistry, V. 33, June 1961, p. 23.
2 Frank B. Salisbury, "Doubts about the Modern Synthetic Theory of Evolution," American Biology Teacher, September 1971, p. 336.
3 Hubert P. Yockey, "A Calculation of the Probability of Spontaneous Bio-genesis by Information Theory," Journal of Theoretical Biology, V. 67, 1977, p. 398.
4 Peter T. Mora, "The Folly of Probability," in The Origins of Prebiological Systems (Sydney Fox, Editor, New York, Academic Press, 1965), p. 45.
5 David M. Raup, "Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology," Bulletin of the Field Museum of Natural History, V. 50, January 1979, pp. 25-26.
6 Ibid., p. 23.

Open warfare is Phase Six of a detailed, 32-page ISIS strategy recently discovered in Pakistan called “A Brief History of the Islamic State Caliphate (ISC): The Caliphate According to the Prophet.”.

Speaking of “those parts in the world,” The State Department estimated that, worldwide, 33,000 people were killed in terrorist attacks just in 2014.

But it’s not, at least not to government officials. According to an article by Nina Shea at National Review, “Christians are to be excluded from an impending official United States government declaration of ISIS genocide.” Shea cites a Yahoo News report which states that the ISIS attacks against the Yazidis will be designated as acts of genocide, but not attacks against Christians.

After Friday, the West is scrambling to find a response to Islamist terror. But part of the problem, as I told you Tuesday on BreakPoint, is that the increasingly secularized West simply does not and cannot understand the motivation and appeal of groups like ISIS.

People for whom religion is, at best, something optional, cannot understand people for whom religion is the center of their existence. People who have rejected the Christian eschaton—the end of the current age and the restoration of all things—cannot understand people whose goals are to usher in their own version of the eschaton.

That’s at least partly because the West seems to believe it has already achieved a kind of eschaton in which the reign of human ingenuity and prosperity and technology has supplanted the reign of God. The mark of the secular West is that it actually believes humans are ultimately in control of all things. We believe the world is the way it is because we make it that way. We talk about “directing our own evolution.” It’s a conceit as old as the human race: “you will be like God.”

But of course we aren’t. So when events don’t turn out the way we think they should, our illusion is shattered and our response is panic and flailing.

“ISIS’ anti-Western attacks are getting deadlier,” the report revealed. “A total of 270 people have died in ISIS-linked terror plots against the West, and more than 550 have been wounded. The average number of fatalities in each attack has gone up significantly since 2014. In the second half of that year, an average of one person died in each successful attack, but in the first half of 2015, the average death toll rose to 11. By the end of 2015, anti-Western ISIS attacks averaged a death toll of 30 people per incident.”