This is a frequent meme from the creationist toolbox, but it's flawed. Creationists believe that the first life came from nonlife, although they might not realize it. They believe that God exists uncreated, and is the source of life on Earth. Does he consider a disembodied mind like God alive? I wouldn't use that word for pure mind, but I don't mind if others do. Either way, he believes that the first life, whether that was God or the life He created on Earth, didn't come from life.
Life without a body has been life always. Life with a body came from life without a body.
[QUOTE="It Aint Necessarily So, post: 7847298, member: 61691"It is science, and it is not dishonest. Consider the evolution of man from ancient primates. We'd like to know what the last common ancestor of man and chimp looked like, but even if found, how will we know that there wasn't a later common ancestor. What would be dishonest would be to claim that we know what we don't know.
We'd like to know which of the hominid fossils we find are our ancestors and which are cousins whose lineages have gone extinct, but we man not find them all, and we may have trouble deciding which are ancestral to modern man. This is all honest science unless there is fraud as with the Piltdown man, which is corrected by the honest remnant.[/QUOTE]
I can understand what you were talking about and that things need to be fairly vague when talking about the past. It is however dishonest to say that science knows how something evolved when it is guess. It may have happened just as guessed but it is guess and cannot be tested. Best if science does not make claims that is knows when it does not.
To raise it to the level of knowledge is unjustified belief, faith, and in this case, unlike with a faith in God, we know it is dishonest.
[QUOTE="It Aint Necessarily So, post: 7847298, member: 61691"This doesn't sound like intelligence anymore. Intelligence requires thinking. We might as well say that Jupiter "knows" to pull on its moons without thinking.[/QUOTE]
Jupiter does not even know anything and certainly does not think. It just is what it is and does what it does as a reaction. God just is and probably just does what He does as a reaction without the need to think.
Actually conceptualizing is probably just instantaneous thinking anyway. We think over time, God is not us. His thoughts are higher than ours.
[QUOTE="It Aint Necessarily So, post: 7847298, member: 61691"Again, the internal contradiction there renders the statement incoherent, like the phrase married bachelor is incoherent. It's two parts don't cohere. They contradict one another. How does one step into time? That's an action. One must already be in time to conceive of stepping into time and then doing it. You keep going back to that idea that one can exist and act outside of time without every addressing the argument for why that concept is incoherent. It's no good to keep asserting the impossible. You'd need to explain why you think I am wrong. It's not enough just to assert or imply it.[/QUOTE]
If God exists outside of time and in time also then God experiences things from inside and outside of time.
I just spoke of conceptualizing, that is as deep as I can go on the whole thing of time and what is possible outside of time. If we have not experienced it, it is hard to know what is possible or impossible to do there.
[QUOTE="It Aint Necessarily So, post: 7847298, member: 61691"Once again, why call that a god? Unconscious software would work just as well. Intelligence implies consciousness.[/QUOTE]
God knowing implies consciousness.
[QUOTE="It Aint Necessarily So, post: 7847298, member: 61691"Empiricists and experienced critical thinkers have no difficulty saying they don't know. But they had to learn to do that. The natural human inclination is to guess. Isn't that what creation stories are - people who didn't know but wanted to take a guess anyway and call it history?[/QUOTE]
I suppose most creation stories are guesses,,,,,,,,,,,,,, maybe to tell the kids, and so it gets passed on when the kids grow up and were not told that dad was just making stuff up around the fire.
The Bible of course is different
The Bible has evidence of being true.