a must watch truly amazing

Nowhere have I said that God did it.

I disagreed with your opinion that God could not have possibly done it.

Apologies if I implied such. I was talking about the original video. And, no, he didn't say "God did it", either, but strongly implied that saying the biological motor was a result of God's direct intervention (as opposed to a Deist interpretation -- God set up the Laws of Nature, and everything follows from that) was just as "valid" as viewing the motor as a result on natural processes that do not depend on a God at all. The two views are not equal.

But I never said or implied such a thing. What I said was that, even if God did "do it", there's no way that we could know that, so there's no point in going there.

I disagree with your opinion that there is no point in going there because for those who believe God created the universe and everything in it either directly or indirectly by defining the laws of physics, nature, biology etc etc then anything humans cannot explain can be explored as being at least an indirect creation by God.

Just because your modus operandi is getting under other people's skin, doesn't mean that it is mine too. And just because it is a competition for you, doesn't mean it is a competition for me...

If it wasn't an attempt to get under danhasleftforum's skin then you are resorting to telling lies because it is not his middle name.

Please stay on topic.

Your modus operandi is getting under people's skin. It is a competition for you...

If you need to be taken seriously then practise what you preach and don't tell lies about people's names as you did at the start of this exchange.

This devices was used as one of the mainstays of Creationist Theory, "Irreducible Complexity" a flawed argument, as well as being quite wrong:

The motor is too complex to have evolved because it requires many parts that have to function together to create the motor and so there is no possible evolutionary path for the motor as the motor can only exist once all the parts have already evolved.

The flaw is the assumption that point "a" on the evolutionary path was "let's evolve a motor" and the journey to point "b" was a refinement of that motor. But evolution also involves processes of less than optimal variation, redundancy and re-purposing. Also the motor does work with parts removed and there is an evolutionary path with similar devices with different functionalities, it's not the whole story.

But it doesn't get us anywhere anymore than if you said:

I disagree with your opinion that there is no point in going there because for those who believe Aliens engineered all biology on Earth then any biology humans cannot explain can be explored as being at least an indirect creation by aliens.

Even if one said, "The physics of this biological motor are amazing!" doesn't get us anywhere unless we explain how the motor is made possible by physics as we understand it. Saying "God did it", "Aliens did it", or even "Physics" -- they're all meaningless statements that take us no where. If you're simply impressed by it, then all you need say is "Amazing!" and that will do it. But when you ascribe the amazingness to a God, aliens, or natural processes, then you need to spell out how the cause created the effect for it to have any meaning.

I mean, most people nowadays would think you're an idiot for saying the Earth is flat. But ask them how they know the Earth isn't flat, and they can't explain it. So even though it's true that the Earth isn't flat, those parroting the truth are no more enlightened than those perpetuating misinformation.

A big difference between science and religion is that with science, when answering "But why?", you eventually reach "I don't know". With religion, you reach "God did it", and it means the exact same thing, but phrased in a way as to avoid admitting you don't know. And that's why "God did it" is a useless thing to say. Even if you believe that God did it, you should be able to answer how you know it was God that did it, just as if you believe it is the result of physical processes, you should be able to answer how you know it was the result of physical processes. Or, at the very least, why you believe that "God did it" or "Physics". But even in light conversation, those trite answers are like saying "Harris" or "Trump" in response to "Who do you think will win the election?" -- they're very loaded responses.

You sure about that? With science don't you start with "I don't know," and doesn't religion start with, "you'd better God damn believe that I'm right, ain't nothing gonna convince me otherwise..." ??

As I said in my previous post, for those that believe God created the universe and everything in it either directly or indirectly by defining the laws of physics, nature, biology etc etc etc then anything that humans cannot explain can be explored regarding God's involvement either directly or indirectly through the above laws he defined.

Your above comment tells me that you are not ruling out that God could have been involved either directly or indirectly as described above.

Science doesn't start with "I don't know". Science starts with observations or an idea of how things might work. If the former, then science looks for an explanation that explains the observations. If the latter, science looks for observations (or performs experiments) to test the idea. The "I don't know" comes from the eventual "Why does it work this way as opposed to some other way?" in the causal chain.

Religion begins with "This is how things are" and, well, that's pretty much it. There's no putting it to the test (else all religions would fail). For example, a religion might say if you do good things, you will be rewarded. That does not work -- sometimes you're rewarded, sometimes you're punished, and sometimes neither. But people are good with confirmation bias, so every time you are rewarded for a good deed, it "confirms" your religion; every time it doesn't work out, it's forgotten or dismissed (e.g., you did something bad that you were not aware of that cancelled your good deed).

Correct, inasmuch as I am not ruling out that "Aliens did it", "Santa Claus did it", or "The Easter Bunny did it". I don't believe any of them, but I can't prove that it wasn't due to any of them. At some point, everything comes down to faith, but not all faiths are equal. Even science is based on the faith that the universe can be explained rationally, but that proposition cannot be proved. I think it was Randy the Great who said, "If you push a hundred reindeer off the top of a building and they fall to their deaths, you have not proven that reindeer can't fly -- you've simply proven that those particular one hundred reindeer did not fly that particular time."

Then you are in effect saying it is possible that God was either directly or indirectly involved just as much as aliens, santa or the Easter bunny.

That's a good starting point because you included God in your list. If you choose to believe none of them could have been involved that is ok, I have no issue with that.

Now people can choose for themselves which one, if any of those, was involved and to what extent.

As you correctly say, it's largely a matter of faith and mine is based partly on personal experiences throughout my life.

You have some weird ideas. You can rule out purely fictional characters like the Easter Bunny from science. Science is measured by results and progress, and there is a fundamental difference between faith and objective fact. And I think that any rational scientist would say that they were 99.999% certain about reindeer through long observation and the lack of any credible evidence that just one of the larger population has ever flown or even shows any of the features/limbs that usually make flight possible. It's not a scientific saying, it's more a confirmation bias one.

And you've been led up a blind alley by Dan again.

Yes.

I believe none of them are real (although I do believe there are aliens), but I can't prove it either way.

Sure.

Sure. What I'm talking about is the utility of a statement or belief. "God did it" has no utility. "Because physics" has no utility. However, "God did it" and "Because physics" do convey the belief system of the person making the statement, to some extent. It's just that neither statement is useful other than to tell people what your belief system is.

We are in agreement

Here we disagree because I believe God exists.

We are in agreement

It gets worse. 😆

Well, here's the thing. All Gods from all religions [that I'm aware of] are also fictional characters. And they're not ruled out by science. They're ruled out by logical contradictions. However, the universe need not be rational -- that's merely my belief system. So, in an irrational universe, any and all could be true.

Science is useful in that you can use it to make predictions. One can say that religion is useful in that it gives [at least some] people comfort. Also, "objective fact" changes. A flat earth used to be "objective fact". The Earth being at the center of the universe also used to be "objective fact". With science, the facts change as new observations are made and new models are created to explain the observations.

On the other hand, religion doesn't change. But what portions of any given religion people choose to believe/ignore are a function of society and personal prejudices. For example, for a Christian, was the world created in 7 days or is that just a metaphor? Well, it depends on which Christian you ask. Is it OK to divorce? Well, Jesus said no, but Christians say yes. Etc., etc., etc.. And I don't mean to pick on Christianity, here -- the same is true for all religions (again, that I'm aware of).

Perhaps. But the main point here is that I'm not discussing whether or not God exists. I'm saying that the conclusion of the video, that to say that the biological motor is an amazing product of nature and explainable by natural laws and that "God did it" are not equally valid. The former is far more useful than the latter. Even if someone from the "God did it" crowd said that God created the laws of nature, that doesn't add any value -- it just tells people that they believe God created everything and has nothing of utility to say about the biological motor.

Now, if there were a religious text that went into detail about how God created a biological motor, then that would be a different story. And who knows? Maybe someone wrote a book like that, and all someone has to do is cite that book as their bible and say, "Yeah, God did it -- it's spelled out in this bible". 😉

Whether or not you believe God exists has no bearing on wonder of the biological motor. If you say, for example, that God is amazing in that God created laws of nature that allowed such a thing to exist, that's fine, but it has no direct bearing on the biological motor itself. That would be like someone saying that Simone Biles is amazing because of her parents, or her grand parents, or all the way back to Adam and Eve, or because of God. Doing so is a terrible disservice to all the hard work she put in to become such an accomplished gymnast. Sure, her parents played a role, as did her grandparents, all the way back -- but each step back you take, you get further from saying anything meaningful about how great of a gymnast she is.

If you give God the credit for the biological motor, then you give God the credit for every single thing and event in the entire universe and for all time. But "believers" are not keen to step up and praise God for the creation of the nuclear bomb. Physics, on the other hand, is not selective based on human values -- everything that can be explained with physics, good, bad, or neither, is attributed to the laws of nature. And, no, "we" cannot explain how the laws of nature arose (at least, not yet, but probably never), but neither can the religious explain where God came from or why God does what God does. As to the former, saying "God is the First Cause", well, save yourself a step and say, "The Laws of Nature are the First Cause". But neither statement gets you anywhere.