Endymion

But the contrary is not true: that which is beyond imagination is not necessarily non-existent. Check your premises. That God, or a Prime Mover is beyond imagination does not, per se, indicate that he cannot, or does not, exist.

An infinite regress occurs with any kind of explanation whatsoever — spiritual or material — so long as the causal chain is constrained to "inside" the universe. Obviously, then, for the chain of causes-&-effects to begin, it had to do so from some place that is "outside" the universe, i.e., not part of the universe. That way, whether you posit a creator intelligence or a "big kahuna electron", you needn't explain that as an effect of any prior cause. Whatever it was, it was both a Cause and an Effect of its own existence. That was actually intuitively understood by Aristotle and those who elaborated his geocentric system of the universe: God, or simply the Prime Mover, was outside the universe, past a wall of "fire" separating him from the rest of the concentric spheres comprising the actual universe. The Prime Mover gave a slight "push" to the outer sphere, setting it in circular motion, which in turn, caused the next inner sphere to rotate, etc. The view here is that God, the Prime Mover, is outside the periphery of the universe, and not actually part of it. To answer in advance a possible objection: The reason that sort of explanation cannot be used for the material universe that we inhabit (i.e., Existence was its own cause and its own Effect), is because of our knowledge of things like the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which all matter and energy obey. Things run down over time, and things like 4-symbol chemical codes — codes always being the product of intelligence, and an intelligence that can anticipate future uses for it (such anticipations being strictly verboten under Darwinist assumptions) — do not get built up over time by chance collisions and physical law. Face it. If your Western Digital 1-terabyte hard-drive — with a functioning operating system installed! — could not have been the product of a tornado throwing scrap-metal together in a junkyard, then neither could a DNA molecule (and, by extension, certainly not a complete living cell) have been the product of random processes.

Lots of evidence. But if a priori you claim that anything explainable by means of purposive intelligent action is also just as easily explain (in principle) by means of physical matter, energy, and some combination of chance and deterministic law, then you are claiming that no argument for the existence of a Creator is even possible. You've simply closed yourself off to it. For the record, The biochemical evidence is overwhelming. The recently published results in the prestigious British journal Nature of the ENCODE project (which studied the functionality of the genome) shows that about 90% of DNA is functional, i.e., is transcribed onto RNA, and therefore has some kind of function within the cell. The researchers claimed that they expect 100% of DNA to be functional. It appears that only a small part of DNA actually codes for amino acids in the process of protein synthesis. The rest of the DNA strand does other stuff, apparently controlling much of the "formatting" (to use a term from desktop publishing) of the coding part. The significance of all this (aside from the fact that scientifically it's interesting in its own right) is that the notion of "junk DNA" — i.e., long, non-coding, NON-FUNCTIONAL, stretches of DNA apparently being preserved "errors" [the DNA equivalent of fossils] of random variation and natural selection over millions of years of genomic evolution — is out the window. None of it is junk. All of it is functional. It's quite funny to read many of the Darwinists backpeddle on this issue now: "Oh, we NEVER used the phrase 'junk DNA' in the first place! That was just the popular press exaggerating things!" Etc. Anyway, the ENCODE results have hammered the final nail in the coffin of junk DNA, an important element of the Darwinian scenario on evolution. Additionally, a company called "Agilent" has successfully used DNA as an actual storage medium for jpeg images and text (they encoded all of Shakespeare's sonnets and some images on a few grains of DNA). The DNA was flown to their sister office in the U.S., which successfully decoded the data and read it off with near 100% fidelity. Sorry, but the ability to use DNA for human data storage proves that the original molecule was already a kind of storage device, making use of a 4-symbol code (i.e., the nucleotide bases making up the rungs of the DNA helix) instead of a 2-symbol code like binary, which is what our man-made computers "understand." Hard-drives don't appear in nature by means of random processes and deterministic forces; they are the results of intention and purpose. Same with DNA, which is nothing but a very small hard-drive -- literally. By the way, the compression of DNA storage is fantastic, even given the rough state of today's technology: according to its inventors, 1 gram of DNA (about 1/3rd of a teaspoon) can easily store 1 petabyte of data. 1 petabyte is 1,000 terabytes. So envision 1,000 1-terabyte hard-drives stacked up in your office, completely filled with data. Then compare that to a teaspoon 1/3rd full of powdery specks of DNA. If the 1,000 hard-drives stacked up in your office couldn't appear by means of a Darwinian process, why would anyone choose to believe the teaspoon full of microscopic biochemical hard-drives were? And again: the only difference between DNA used to store information about JPEG images and text, and DNA actively functioning in your cells is the choice of data: the latter store data on amino acid selection, protein synthesis, and other cellular processes. Au contraire. Reason is a subcategory of faith. That's why Dante, in the "Purgatory", required the character of Virgil (the "shade" of the great Roman poet, who symbolically represented reason, and had acted as the benevolent guide for Dante while he was making his travels and discoveries in the "Inferno") to remain behind, unable to enter heaven with Dante as he made his final voyage in the "Paradiso". Since Virgil was a pre-Christian pagan, he could not have had the requisite faith to enter heaven with Dante and act as a guide. You should read Dante sometime.

I'm Serapis Bey and I approve this message. >>>Come on Weird Rand, I know you can do better than that. Maybe it was his genes that made him do it. Maybe it was the material particles comprising his consciousness (particles that simply obey deterministic physical laws) that made him do it. Maybe his otherwise vibrant imagination failed him, and he reached for an easy win. Quien sabe? I am Endymion* and I approve of Serapis Bey. *A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its lovliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. — "Endymion" by the great romantic poet, John Keats

If this is your understanding of the natural leader, then I simply don't see how one can avoid separating 'natural leaders' from bullies.And, like you, I hate bullies. (PS: I can't believe it, I actually agree with We Erred Rand here... well, with WER's basic point, not with WER's uncivil rhetoric) We share 98 percent of our genetic structure with Chimpanzee who are not cute and comical like Tarzan's Cheetah, but are in fact killer apes. Chimps are nasty brutes and we have an embarassing resemblence to them. 1) There's no known causal link between the genome and the body-plan, or shape, of an organism. 2) There's no known causal link between the genome and behavior — at least, not human behavior. Correlations perhaps. But correlation is not causation. 3) The 99% genomic similarity between chimps and humans was at first downgraded to 95% similarity, and now there are calls to throw out the chimp genome mapping altogether as simply being a scientific embarrassment. First of all, the chimp map was purposely turned upside down (with the long arm of the map on top and the short arm on bottom, which is the opposite way in which these maps are normally oriented), and many of the blank, unmapped regions were simply deleted altogether. This was done for the express ideological (not scientific) purpose of making the chimp gene map line up with the human gene map. And that was done for the propagandistic purpose of declaring, "Look! Darwinian evolution must be true! Observe how close the human genome is to the chimp genome! That proves common descent!" Sure. If you fudge the data.