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Yes, there is no evidence of life not associated with the Earth. Now will you be answering mine (the how do you know this question)?
@ Nyarlathotep
Thank you for answering my question. What you said is what I have been saying all along, just not as good as you said it. Can we chock this up to one we agree on?
The "how do I know question"? You are going to have to help me out. That life occurred only once? Yes, I stated that wrong. I was not trying to say we know life only occurred once, but that we only know of life occurring once.
I wouldn't make a habit of misattributing quotes on this website, it won't end well.
Are you now acknowledging that you made an error?
@ Nyarlathotep
Yes, I confess and repent.
Now will you answer my questions?
I thought I already had. Can you list the ones I've missed?
"I qualified that statement you are quoting many times by stating "as far as we know".
So you accept we don't know then, and that life could've occurred innumerable times "as far as we know", is that what you're saying? Only this was not easily inferred from your claims earlier.
@Sheldon
Was is everyone dodging my question?
I am trying to talk about what we do know. Why do you want to turn it into what we don't know? Are you making a god of the gaps argument?
"I am trying to talk about what we do know. Why do you want to turn it into what we don't know? "
We don't know whether life has occurred more than once in this universe. Why is this so hard a concept for you to grasp? It is you is implying a god of the gaps polemic, by inferring something from not knowing one way or the other. Do you really think we don't have any evidence for X is a knowledge claim? Is this why theists keep trying to imply atheism is a claim or assertion?
I'm sorry you can't see the basic error you made Jo, but the statement life has only occurred once in this universe as far as we know is no different from the statement life might have occurred throughout the universe as far as we know. They are both appeals to ignorance fallacies.
I don't know if life has occurred more than once in this universe, as Nyarl said, so I cannot rule it out as you are trying to, in order to lend some gravitas to the absurd idea the universe was "created" with only us in mind.
@ Sheldon
One is speculation - life might have occurred. One is fact - we only know of life occurring one time.
Why is no evidence of god not a fallacy, but no evidence of life elsewhere is a fallacy?
Again, no one has claimed life has occurred more than once in the universe, only that you cannot know it has not.
Atheism is not the claim a deity does not exist, it is the lack or absence of belief in any deity or deity.
Lastly, we know that the existence of life is an objective possibility. We have no objective evidence that supernatural deities are possible. It is also an objective fact that humans create fictional deities.
@ Sheldon
You said "We have no objective evidence that supernatural deities are possible."
Your statement makes me wonder if the test you are using, really can determine if the thing exists. Since you have never seen one, or any evidence for one, how can you be sure that it is not the test that is flawed. If you knew of some God of any kind, any where, you could use that as a standard to evaluate the existence of others. But you don't have that. So how can you be sure the tools, tests and criteria you use to test for God, actually are capable of testing for God. Maybe you are just getting false negatives? I don't know of any God meter.
Testing for God is very different than testing for life elsewhere in the universe. We have all kinds of examples of life all around us. We know what life looks like. We know what we are looking for in the rest of the universe. It could be very different than life on earth, but we have lots to go on. We know where to look, how to look, what we might find. And we have done an awful lot of looking. We know ways that alien life could communicate with us and we have been looking for those communications. And what have we found?
The distinction I am making is important and significant. Evidence for alien life is something in the natural world that we know we could test for with natural means. Testing for God is another matter. We have a good idea and lots of examples of what alien life could be like. But testing for God, what examples do we have, or what standards and tests would be efficacious? So which is more likely, that there is alien life somewhere, or that God exists? We can objectively test for aliens, but the other is much of an unknown.
You said "Again, no one has claimed life has occurred more than once in the universe, only that you cannot know it has not."
Would you say the same about God? That you cannot know he has not existed?
You said "It is also an objective fact that humans create fictional deities."
That is true but I noticed that you did not apply that same evaluation to aliens.
You could have said that humans create fictional aliens. There are lots of stories about abductions, encounters, and pyramids built by aliens. All shown to be delusions, lies, and no evidence of aliens has ever been validated. But that is not used as evidence against alien life. The opposite line of reasoning is used for God.
You give aliens the benefit of the doubt, but God is held in derision.
@ Jo
You asked for the difference between life existing in the universe and a deity, and I gave it.
So just why you're posting a repetitive and overly verbose rant about not being able to test for any deity only you can know? As that is precisely my point.
I suspect your grasp of language is at issue again. I didn't say a deity wasn't possible, I said WE DON'T KNOW if a deity is even possible. We do however know life is possible.
That's the difference, and you asked what the difference was.
QED...
@ Jo
You asked for the difference between life existing in the universe and a deity, and I gave it.
So just why you're posting a repetitive and overly verbose rant about not being able to test for any deity only you can know? As that is precisely my point.
I suspect your grasp of language is at issue again. I didn't say a deity wasn't possible, I said WE DON'T KNOW if a deity is even possible. We do however know life is possible.
That's the difference, and you asked what the difference was.
QED...
@Jo
"I don't know of any God meter."
How about prayer, miracles, predictions, near-death experiences? All of those are supposedly connected to a god.
We can run a statistical analysis on the effects of prayer, since it is touted that your god answers prayers. On wait, that has been done and the odds are actually worse than a coin flip.
"You could have said that humans create fictional aliens. There are lots of stories about abductions, encounters, and pyramids built by aliens. All shown to be delusions, lies, and no evidence of aliens has ever been validated."
Alien life? Please back that down a notch and rephrase that one. Mankind and scientists are searching for signs of life. We are not searching for Klingons. There is a difference, and a vast one.
But I actually agree with you on us not finding any signs of alien life, because it is ridiculous. The time required for any postulated intelligent life to travel to this solar system is insane. As I pointed out in a previous post, the interstellar distances are incredibly huge, and the time for communications is also huge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy7NzjCmUf0
@ David Killens
How can you test for God answering prayers? Seems very subjective and it implies that God working in the world would be measurable
Here is the best explanation I have heard. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2802370/
For a multitude of reasons, research on the healing effects of prayer is riddled with assumptions, challenges and contradictions that make the subject a scientific and religious minefield. We believe that the research has led nowhere, and that future research, if any, will forever be constrained by the scientific limitations that we outline.
Precisely correct, and the reason of course is that we know organic life is possible. Whereas the fictional deities humans create are entirely unevidenced.
Well there you go, you agree with me, though why you're telling an atheist that the concept of your fictional deity can't be tested is unclear?
Once again you seem to be defeating your own argument that belief in a deity is somehow justified, because atheists won't rule out the possibility of life existing elsewhere in the universe. Which of course we know is possible, unlike your deity, as no one can demonstrate any evidence that the existence of deities is even possible. We do however know for an objective fact that humans create fictional deities.
@ Sheldon
The main point I was trying to make is how atheist use very different language to describe two things that are very similar - the belief in alien life and the belief in God. You keep saying that humans make up fictional deities, but humans making up fictional alien life is just as true. You don't have lack of faith in alien life because humans make up fictional alien life. But you use humans making fictional deities as a reason for your lack of faith in God.
You are also making the assumption that life occurred on this planet through chance, yet that has not been evidenced. Then you extrapolate that assumption to the rest of the universe.
I think you also said that children are born atheists. Sorry, if it wasn't you, but it is hard to keep track.
That is against one of the doctrine of atheism (sorry. couldn't resist). A person has to know about the claim of God before they can become an athiest, and children do not know about anything when they are born. It is more rational to conclude that theism is the innate or default and not atheism. Do you know of any culture or country where there was never any belief in the supernatural? If you are going to say children are born that way, than theism is much more likely than atheism.
Pointing out there is no evidence for an assertion is not a fallacy, unless you try to make an assertion based on that lack of evidence.
For example, when you posited your appeal to ignorance fallacy that:
You, believe a deity exists yet can demonstrate no objective evidence it is even possible. Whereas given the objective evidence that the universe is almost 14 billion years old, and has about 200 billion galaxies we know of, with each galaxy containing upwards of a hundred billion solar systems, and that planets can form in any of those solar systems in an orbit around those stars that enables liquid water to form on their surface, the probability that life could exist elsewhere can be measured, the possibility is beyond any rational dispute.
As you have admitted there is no objective evidence for any deity, and you have stated you know of no way to test for its existence. Thus you cannot say a deity is even possible.
NB No one is claiming life exists elsewhere in the universe, even though it is an objective possibility.
YOU believe a deity exists even though you can't objectively determine it is even possible.
I cannot state the flaw in your comparison any plainer than that.
@Jo
"There is only one place in the entire universe over 14 billion years, that life has ever occurred."
The correct statement should have been ....
"There is only one place in the entire universe over 14 billion years, that WE CURRENTLY KNOW life has ever occurred."
@ David Killens
Yes, thanks, that is the correct statement I should have made.
@Jo
"Claims that life might have occurred at other times and other places is just speculation with no evidence."
All we can state with certainty is that life began. We can not state that life began here, or that the mechanisms that produce life do not exists beyond our planet.
Yes, the scientific community is hard at work searching for extraterrestrial life. But even our Milky Way is 100,000 light years in diameter. We use such tools as SETI which listens and watches. But the technology for listening has been around since approximately 1900. That means our sphere of searching has reached out only 120 light years. We have examined a VERY small fraction of this known universe, just 120 light years.
Search for extraterrestrial life ... 120 light years.
Size of our local galaxy ... 100,000 light years
Size of observable universe ... +90 billion light years
@ David Killens
Can we say that there is no evidence that life occurred anywhere in the entire universe in almost 14 billion years, except here?
It is a simple and straight forward question. How come no one will answer it directly and unequivocally?
@Jo
"Can we say that there is no evidence that life occurred anywhere in the entire universe in almost 14 billion years, except here? "
WE DO NOT KNOW
I pointed out the vast distances involved, and the times involved. It is like turning off all the power in the pentagon, you have just one small penlight and have searched just one room. One can not prove or disprove anything outside of that one room.
But science is attempting to find out, and based on experiments, it has been proven that under certain conditions, life can form. But we do not know if it occurred anywhere else. WE have not searched a large enough area to arrive at any probability that life is improbable, neither have we discovered life.
Jo, I suspect you are attempting to connect proof of god with proof of life elsewhere. But we have definite proof of life, while us atheists are still waiting on the answer. Additionally, research is slowly peeling back the question on life elsewhere. The scientific community actually have something to go on.
The sad truth is that the only thing theists have going for them is faith. Just faith.
@ David Killens
Haven't we searched about the same amount of the universe for God? It has been going on for longer, but mostly confined to this planet. If we have not searched enough of the universe to make any evaluation of alien life, couldn't you say the same for God? At least for aliens we know some of the ways they could communicate and some of the forms they could take place.
Can you help me understand this:
If an Amoeba was found on Mars, or a radio signal from a distant solar system was received. Wouldn't hat be used as evidence against God. That life has occurred other places implies we were not created.
But when no life is found anywhere, that is not evidence that implies a creator. Seems fair to me to use the same line of reasoning both ways.
@Jo
"If we have not searched enough of the universe to make any evaluation of alien life, couldn't you say the same for God?"
I am going to deal with humanity's search for life off this planet, not some search for Klingons. It may be possible that there is no intelligent life within this galaxy, maybe the entire observable universe. So get your facts and terms right, and try to understand the difference between life and intelligent life.
No, we could not say the same for god because according to all theists, god is right here, doing it's crazy bat-ass shit on this planet. The search for any god is not interstellar, the search for god is on this planet.
"If an Amoeba was found on Mars, or a radio signal from a distant solar system was received. Wouldn't hat be used as evidence against God. That life has occurred other places implies we were not created."
If an amoeba was found on Mars, the only thing we can state with certainty is that there are amoebas on Mars. And the same applies to radio signals. If we got a radio signal tomorrow that positively proves it came from another star or galaxy, that means only that there is something out there. Neither deals with the god question.
How you personally deal with these (imagined) facts is for you to ponder. Besides, there are so many contradictions in the bible, proof of life outside of this planet is just one more drop in a huge reservoir that proves the bible is full of shit.
https://www.atheists.org/activism/resources/biblical-contradictions/
@ David Killens
I looked at the website you gave for biblical contradictions. I could answer them individually but here are some general answers that cover most of them.
Some are one sentence taken out of context. Further reading would have answered the supposed contradiction.
Most of them are taking a verse from before the law, during the law, or after the law, and not understanding the difference.
Some are misunderstanding the meaning of the verse and assuming a nefarious meaning.
Frankly, they were really simple and the supposed contradictions are easily explained. Do you have any better ones? I have looked at many other "contradictions" from various sources and never found any that are really consequential.
delete
You don't know that life has only occurred once in the universe, you also don;t seem to understand that pointing out this fact is not the same as claiming life HAS occurred more than once. It's a basic error in language and epistemology you keep making.
"Claims that life might have occurred at other times and other places is just speculation with no evidence."
No one has claimed this, QED. The only one making an unevidenced claim is you. As Nyarl just pointed out we know that life has occurred AT LEAST once, we don't know it has occurred ONLY ONCE as you keep claiming.
"It seems like everyone is dodging the evidence presented."
You've presented no evidence, it is clear you don't understand what constitutes evidence to be honest.
"There has been attempts for about 50 years to find life in our solar system and elsewhere in the universe, with no success."
Christ almighty that's funny, please tell me you meant this to be ironic? Religion have had thousands of years and produced nothing to evidence their claims. Space exploration hasn't left our own solar system yet. I think just squeezed out a little piss laughing, fair play.
@ Sheldon
I am NOT claiming that life only occurred once. I am asking questions, presenting evidence and trying to draw rational conclusion from the evidence.
Please unequivocally and directly answer my question:
Is there any evidence that life has occurred anywhere in our universe in almost 14 billion years, except here? Does all life on this planet have a common ancestor?
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