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Replying to Paul of Tarsus in post #215]
It seems reasonable to me that if NASA is looking for life on Mars, then they'd look for any kind of life there--past or present, intelligent or atheistic.
Except that we know that no intelligent life exists on Mars now, or likely ever did given the complete absence of any structures or any other evidence that intelligent beings such as atheists may have left (to counter your obvious slur against atheists in the above quote). So it would not be at all reasonable to spend time and money developing instrumentation and getting it to Mars to look for
intelligent life (athiests or theists).
The basic idea is that
microbial life may have once existed there because liquid water once existed there, and they are looking for evidence of that as on past missions. Since the global average surface pressure on Mars today is almost exactly equal to the triple point of water (6.1 mbar ... less than 1/100 of Earth's surface pressure), and the atmospheric composition is about 95% CO2, liquid water is very scarce and can only exist above its triple point pressure. The possibility of intelligent life existing on Mars now is essentially zero, and there is no point wasting money (tax dollars given that is how NASA is funded) looking for it.
Frankly, I find this hard to believe.
Irrelevant, but I can prove it easily enough (PM me).
So you know that the universe is not designed. That settles the whole matter, then! You may wish to publish a paper on that for peer review.
I never made any such claim. Just another example of misunderstanding the point (or intentionally misrepresenting it).
Elsewhere I've mentioned DNA as a possible design not made by humans. It has organized structure and purpose far beyond human invention yet is not designed or created by people. If DNA is not designed, then how did it come about?
It evolved of course. How else? What happened during the roughly 3
billion years that single-celled organisms ruled the domain of life on this planet, all the while reproducing, processing mutations and genetic drift, etc. We don't yet know how the first life forms formed, or exactly what their genetic makeup was, and it could have been an "RNA World" prior to DNA. These are unsolved scientific problems. But as with all unsolved scientific problems, the default answer is not "a god did it."
Great! In that case you concede my point that we can know design without previously knowing the designer.
Not at all what I said or implied.
So studying religion and meeting people of religions not yours convinced you that God doesn't exist. That kind of evidence doesn't make doubters out of everybody, obviously. God might exist, and there might be many religions. All you're demonstrating is that at least some religions are wrong about God.
No, it showed the huge inconsistencies across religions in terms of their definitions of gods, number of gods, the characteristics and histories and powers of these gods, etc. It is impossible for all religions and god concepts to be correct, obviously. If only one of them is correct (and ask any devout practitioner of any religion and they will claim only their religion or god is "true") then which one it is? The only answer that is consistent in every way with every claim about all the different religions and gods is that none of them are really "true", and that gods don't actually, really, truly exist. That is the one scenario that has no inconsistencies with observation, and eliminates the discrepencies across religions and god concepts (at least it seems that way to me, hence I am an atheist).
Until very recently physicists lacked tangible evidence for the Higgs boson, but they didn't lack belief that it existed. This example demonstrates that sensible, informed people can and do believe in things for which we have no physical evidence. The fact that the Higgs Boson is called "the God particle" is telling, is it not?
Oh ... where to start with this one. Peter Higgs wrote a paper in 1964 predicting the boson that now bears his name. Here it is if you want to read it:
https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.110 ... ett.13.508
It is very short and sweet. The reason that scientists "didn't lack belief that it existed" was because of this paper (and a few others, one in that same journal issue on p. 321). Higgs had a good case for it. What didn't exist in 1964 was a collider large enough to produce the energies needed to see it. So what happened? The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was built to get more energies for the colliding particles, partly to look specifically for the Higgs boson because it was a key "missing" particle in the Standard Model of Physics. It was eventually found of course, and calling it the "God" particle is purely a press name. That comes from a physicist calling it the "God*mn" particle and the press took license. So it isn't at all telling that it is called the "God" particle, and the belief that it may exist was not without reason (ie. Higgs paper .. and he eventually won a Nobel Prize of course).
What evidence do you have that the bacterial flagellum evolved? It appears that you are assuming that it evolved.
Bacteria and/or archaea that did not have flagella, their progeny that do have flagella.