NASA Kills God

[Bonam]

NASA Completes 52-Year Mission To Find, Kill God

"I am ecstatic to tell you all today that we have beheld the awesome visage of the supreme architect of the cosmos, and we have murdered Him," jubilant administrator Charles Bolden said after being drenched with champagne by other celebrating NASA employees. "There have been innumerable setbacks, missteps, and hardships over the past 50 years, but we always stayed true to our ultimate goal and we never gave up."

"We finally got the son of a bitch!" Bolden continued. "He's dead! God is dead!"

[WIP]

NASA Completes 52-Year Mission To Find, Kill God

I don't mean to be a killjoy, but the believers here need to be informed that this is a satirical piece in a satire publication - The Onion.

[bush_cheney2004]

Yep...says so right in the link. The Onion...America's Finest News Source.

[Sir Bandelot]

Insults as entertainment.

Some people would threaten to kill you for that.

[bush_cheney2004]

Insults as entertainment.

Some people would threaten to kill you for that.

Others would be stars...like Don Rickles.

[scouterjim]

NASA Completes 52-Year Mission To Find, Kill God

HMM, wasn't God declared dead in the 1960's? Is NASA just finding this out?

[Jack Weber]

It's funny!!

[pfezziwig]

Nothing like being preached to by scientists who believe the universe began with a big bang, prior to which they magically believe the universe did not exist, and afterwards life magically formed in some primordial ooze, all of which they have no evidence to support, who's really the religious zealot?

[segnosaur]

Nothing like being preached to by scientists who believe the universe began with a big bang, prior to which they magically believe the universe did not exist, and afterwards life magically formed in some primordial ooze, all of which they have no evidence to support, who's really the religious zealot?

Ummmm... yeah.

You DO realize that the original post was referring to a joke article?

And you DO realize that they DO have substantial evidence pointing to the 'big bang', evolution, etc.?

[ToadBrother]

Nothing like being preached to by scientists who believe the universe began with a big bang, prior to which they magically believe the universe did not exist, and afterwards life magically formed in some primordial ooze, all of which they have no evidence to support, who's really the religious zealot?

Translation: I know almost nothing about science, but my religious convictions are such that I'll mock scientific theories anyways.

[DogOnPorch]

Translation: I know almost nothing about science, but my religious convictions are such that I'll mock scientific theories anyways.

Yup. Let 'em explain away this...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charnia

...not a plant. Long since gone.

[ToadBrother]

Yup. Let 'em explain away this...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charnia

...not a plant. Long since gone.

This is my favorite evidence of evolution...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_retrovirus

Now why would God infect both chimps and humans with precisely the same retroviruses and have chunks of the viral genomes stuck in exactly the same places within the host genome?

[DogOnPorch]

This is my favorite evidence of evolution...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_retrovirus

Now why would God infect both chimps and humans with precisely the same retroviruses and have chunks of the viral genomes stuck in exactly the same places within the host genome?

As Richard Dawkins said...and others, I'm sure...

...they stick their fingers in their ears and go: La, la, la, la ,la...

[pfezziwig]

Translation: I know almost nothing about science, but my religious convictions are such that I'll mock scientific theories anyways.

If life began in primordial ooze spontaneously why can't 'believers' use modern science to duplicate this result in a lab? That would be the normal scientific method of proving a 'scientific theory', this theory has as much proof as the exisitence of God.

[GostHacked]

The Onion. That is all you need to know. Satire.

[DogOnPorch]

If life began in primordial ooze spontaneously why can't 'believers' use modern science to duplicate this result in a lab? That would be the normal scientific method of proving a 'scientific theory', this theory has as much proof as the exisitence of God.

So what is Charnia?

[The_Squid]

If life began in primordial ooze spontaneously why can't 'believers' use modern science to duplicate this result in a lab? That would be the normal scientific method of proving a 'scientific theory', this theory has as much proof as the exisitence of God.

*LOL* and scientists should make a big bang in the lab too!!

It is absolutely true... scientists do not know exactly how life began. But scientists, and people who payed attention in grade 8 science class, do not automatically make the leap of faith that it must be some sort of mythical being since we don't yet know.

NOVA has a cool Q/A about this topic and actually mentions an experiment similar to the life-replicating one that pfezzwiggzffgg says should be so simple for scientists to do in a lab:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/evolution/how-did-life-begin.html

There was a famous experiment done by Stanley Miller when he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the early 1950s. Miller essentially put methane, or natural gas, ammonia, hydrogen gas, and water vapor into a beaker. That wasn't a random mixture; at the time he did the experiment, that was at least one view of what the primordial atmosphere would have looked like.

Then he did a brilliant thing. He simply put an electric charge through that mixture to simulate lightning going through an early atmosphere. After sitting around for a couple of days, all of a sudden there was this brown goo all over the reaction vessel. When he analyzed what was in the vessel, rather than only having methane and ammonia, he actually had amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. In fact, he had them in just about the same proportions you would find if you looked at organic matter in a meteorite. So the chemistry that Miller was discovering in this wonderful experiment was not some improbable chemistry, but a chemistry that is widely distributed throughout our solar system.

[Bonam]

If life began in primordial ooze spontaneously why can't 'believers' use modern science to duplicate this result in a lab? That would be the normal scientific method of proving a 'scientific theory', this theory has as much proof as the exisitence of God.

Science is just now advancing to the point where that is possible. Already, scientists have created artificial life:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/05/scientists-create-first-self-replicating-synthetic-life/

[ToadBrother]

If life began in primordial ooze spontaneously why can't 'believers' use modern science to duplicate this result in a lab? That would be the normal scientific method of proving a 'scientific theory', this theory has as much proof as the exisitence of God.

This unfortunately betrays a pretty deep ignorance of how science works. You cannot hope to demonstrate every theory in the lab, and setting that as a requirement would pretty much render most science impossible. You can't bottle up a black hole or a volcano, but that hardly stops you from creating theories and testing them, not necessarily in a test tube, but against the data you gather. "Experiment" means a good many things in science, not just the grade five school version you seem to advocating.

[WIP]

*LOL* and scientists should make a big bang in the lab too!!

It is absolutely true... scientists do not know exactly how life began. But scientists, and people who payed attention in grade 8 science class, do not automatically make the leap of faith that it must be some sort of mythical being since we don't yet know.

And it needs to be pointed out that creationists conflate evolutionary theory with abiogenesis, which is completely separate, since evolution begins with life already established.

NOVA has a cool Q/A about this topic and actually mentions an experiment similar to the life-replicating one that pfezzwiggzffgg says should be so simple for scientists to do in a lab:

Creationist critics complain that the Miller/Urey Experiments only demonstrate that simple amino acids can be formed in these experiments designed to simulate a possible early earth environment...and not self-replicating molecules. But, just that fact is strike against their claims that increased complexity is impossible and a violation of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Then, they move on to claims that DNA is too complex to create through random organic chemistry. But, this is another example of false probabilities, since we don't know what the graduating steps are in between creating amino acids to DNA. A popular proposal for a mid-stage in life is that RNA, not DNA, was the first self-replicating molecule that simple organic life was based on: RNA World.

It's likely that there are a number of possible ways to turn organic chemistry into life, and that makes finding the exact route next to impossible! One thing we can be confident about, is that the early Earth environment was suitable enough for creating life that it began very early after there was a solid surface. The earliest microfossils of primitive bacteria (stromatolites) found in the Western Australian Desert, are almost 3.5 billion years old; and paleontologists believe the earliest likely are more than 3.8 billion years old.

A big question for creationists to explain, is why a creator would create the first one celled creatures, and then have to wait billions of years before creating multicellular complex life? It doesn't make any sense as some intelligently designed system.