Letters to the Editor
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Published Letters: 351 Editor's Choice: 43
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Profound Ignorance
[Read the article: The believer]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]>If life could form in a lab, it would.
The early Earth wasn't a lab, and life had hundreds of millions of years in which to form. That's a lot of time for random processes and chemistry to do their thing. And that assumes life even formed on Earth – it's possible life formed elsewhere and simply landed here in a comet or meteorite. Life may have only formed once in the entire 10+ billion year history of the Milky Way, spreading via impacts since that time. We won't know more until we either go out into the galaxy and sample other worlds, or stumble across an chunk of extrasolar rock with a passenger onboard.
>even if you could show that a one in a zillion chance of all the
>chemicals and hot and cold cycles could have converged at
>just the right time to create that first proto virus
There's zero evidence – zilch – that life started as a "proto virus", since a virus by definition has to infect other organisms in order to reproduce. Really, your profound ignorance is showing.
> FAITH can move mountains- and does. The athiest finds faith in
>himself, and evangelizes (as in this forum) constantly.
You can keep grinding that axe until the cows come home, but it still won't make a single one of these silly assertions of yours true.
And I'm still waiting for faith to move a pebble, let alone a mountain.
The thing that strikes me about the religious apologists on this thread is just how profoundly ignorant they are, willfully ignorant (or they're just being deceitful). They're getting basic science and mathematics completely, utterly wrong – stuff I mastered in high school (and I'm certainly no genius – I know this, because I have friends who routinely make me feel like an idiot with the stuff they know). How can anybody that ignorant of basic science feel compelled to enter into a discussion that requires at least a passing knowledge of science and mathematics? It would be like me blundering into a thread about soccer – a subject I know next to nothing about – and spewing a bunch of half-baked crap about how Manchester United sucks because Pele doesn't play for them anymore.