The second, "the justice revealed in history" seems like a total crock. We have a long history of evil triumphing and good losing. The moral history of the universe is one long story that shows a universe that is morally indifferent to us and to everything in it.

I'm not sure about the nuances of words in ancient languages, but sometimes Adam is said to have been made of clay, and the idea that clay was important in the origin of life does have some support.

Dude - I quote
"What "deeper meaning" are you looking for? I mean, here we are, a Big
Bang out of nothingness, which somehow put a planet on a exact orbit
around a burning sphere of gas, said planet full of chemicals that
somehow lined up into strands of proteins, said proteins somehow got hit
by lightning and became replicating DNA, etc. etc. etc. all the way to
two guys who have nothing more in common than cursing at a couch in a
doorway forming a friendship over a system of electrons flying around
the world, bouncing off satellites. You really do not see ANY miracles
in that scenario?
I dunno Mike, but the idea that it all happened by accident seems pretty fanciful to me..."

All you have done is confirm that the very first of the events - ie "somehow put a planet on a exact orbit
around a burning sphere of gas..," doesn't happen every day.... You in fact admit it happens every 450 million light years or so (or whatever your calculation which is full of assumptions you regard as ridiculous eventually came up with).

I have to say I have enjoyed this discussion, but I think it has run it's course. I am sure you will disagree with me, but I hope you do not think I am rude if I do not respond. So, here it is - you can have the last word - if you like.

I get your point - there are a lot of rocks out there hurtling around stars in a manner that is pretty close to Earth.

So you don't think that burning stinking gases combining to form a planet with water and air is so vastly improbable as to constitute a miracle anymore ?

But there are literally millions of other variables that have to line up just so in order for the planet to support life.

A million variables need to line up "just so" for anything to happen; the whole "million" thing is a red herring. It relies on the idea that a combination of many unlikely events is even more unlikely than each event individually, i.e. the property that the probability of many events together is the product of the probability of each event, which is true only if the events are independent.

I could just as easily say that a rock I'm holding four feet above the ground, with still, empty air between it and said ground, under standard conditions of temperature and pressure etc, contains trillions of trillions of atoms, with more trillions of trillions of atoms of air between it and the ground; for the rock to fall that would require the trillions of trillions of atoms in the rock to move in the exact same direction and the atoms in the air between it and the ground to move in that direction, or away from the rock, at exactly the right moments for the rock to move through the air... Thus, if I let go of the rock it is inconceivably improbable that it would fall.

That doesn't say anything about the probability of life arising btw; I'm just pointing out your rhetorical use of "millions" isn't a valid argument on its own. As I said before, I want to know for sure how you're using "likelihood" before I discuss the odds of life arising with out.

Your argument is basically coming down to "Hey, we both have little rectangular pieces of paper with numbers written on them... we must both have the winning lottery ticket!"

Nope. Again, I haven't been talking about life at all, I've been talking about planetary formation. And as far as planetary formation goes I've been saying "the odds of winning the lottery with those tickets is millions to one, so given hundreds of millions of people have played the lottery thousands of times since it was invented, we'd expect there have been thousands of lottery winners; so the odds of there being at least one winner is pretty much 100%".

You know, you really do not help your case when you say things like "Of course that estimate is ridiculously conservative and assumes completely wrong things about solar system formation..." or "...another massive overestimation...".

I get your point - there are a lot of rocks out there hurtling around stars in a manner that is pretty close to Earth.

But there are literally millions of other variables that have to line up just so in order for the planet to support life.

Your argument is basically coming down to "Hey, we both have little rectangular pieces of paper with numbers written on them... we must both have the winning lottery ticket!"

You do see that don't you?

You're the one who brought the 450 light years; you even brought it up as evidence for the improbability of a habitable planet forming. I merely pointed out that number doesn't support that argument, if anything it undermines it. It's like a tree in a forest saying "trees are so mind-bogglingly improbable! Why, the closest thing to me that even looks like a tree is a whole two meters away!"

My own calculation might be based, say, on the frequency of planets forming in a star system (on the order of one per star IIRC), and the odds of that planet occurring in the habitable zone, based on the width of the habitable zone vs the width of the system.

Those numbers depend on a star's size and temperature (which is related to its size), so let's consider only Sun-like stars for convenience. Say 50,000 AU for the size of the Solar system (distance of the Oort cloud), 0.01 AU for the width of the zone (most conservative estimate I could find), knock off an order of magnitude to account for excentricity (another massive overestimation; most planets' orbits have low excentricity) that's one planet in 50 million expected to be in the Goldilocks Zone. Sun-like stars are apparently 3 to 8% of all stars in the Milky Way; let's round it down to 1%. Out of 100 billion stars in our galaxy, that's 20 planets in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star in our galaxy alone; the observable Universe, again, contains billions upon billions of galaxies.

Of course that estimate is ridiculously conservative and assumes completely wrong things about solar system formation (for example planets aren't uniformly distributed between the star and the outer edge of its gravitational influence; because the whole system is caused by the collapse of the proto-stellar disk of gas and dust, planets will be closer to the star where the gas is thicker. The very closest ones being rocky planets if they're close enough for the solar wind to blow the hydrogen and helium away, gas giants a bit further where the solar wind is weak enough to be counteracted by gravity, and smaller and smaller bodies as we get further from the center of the disk after that).

More realistic estimates based on Kepler data apparently point to there being billions of Earth-like planets in the habitable zone of Sun-like stars in the Milky Way alone.

"Likelihood", like "logic", is a word that means something. That thing isn't "an intuitive feeling I pulled out of my ass". Ha hah hah - there are so many variables and assumptions that you need to conflate (ahhhhhh - got to use it one last time!) that ANYTHING said by either side of the issue is tantamount to "an intuitive feeling I pulled out of my ass"! Let's go back to your assumption that a planet in the "Goldilocks Zone" exists every 450 million light years, because there is arguably one 450 million light years from earth. An N of 1 potential planet in 450 million years that may be in a particular orbit around a particular star is the basis for YOU calculation of "likelihood"? Now I REALLY want to invoke Ye Olde Statistician!

Ha ha ha - take a chill pill friend! You sound like you have been wrestling with a couch stuck in a doorway.

Do you want me to put a mathematical proof together on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? You don't seem like a silly person, and I don't want to insult you, but sorry, all I hear is a silly question, and a semantic argument over "likelihood".

"Likelihood", like "logic", is a word that means something. That thing isn't "an intuitive feeling I pulled out of my ass", but it's looking increasingly like that's exactly what you mean by it. Semantic arguments are perfectly appropriate when someone bases their argument on an egregious misuse of a word.

I am also missing your point over friendship existing in a world devoid of spiritualism. I think it probably comes down to a semantic difference over "friendship". though. That is, for me, a friendship has a spiritual component that transcends a mathematical formula of mutual benefit.

Yeah, if you define "friendship" as being spiritual then obviously it won't exist in a non-spiritual context. However this does not explain all the other nonsense you've said about how things would be in an atheistic world (like everyone interacts with others as if it were a zero-sum game, etc).

Somebody noted somewhere that "Facts" and "Truth" are two separate things. Was it you, or was it a guy you were arguing with?

I don't remember seeing that argument anywhere recently, so it looks like "neither". But quibbling over whether "facts" and "truth" are different or not does look like a not-very-pointful semantic argument to me.

It's the likelihood of those specific things I'm talking about here.
You're asserting likelihoods left and right; surely you have a general
method of estimating them, and if that method leads you to absurd
statements on the likelihood of planetary formation then what they tell
you about life is the least of your problems.

Do you want me to put a mathematical proof together on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? You don't seem like a silly person, and I don't want to insult you, but sorry, all I hear is a silly question, and a semantic argument over "likelihood".

I am also missing your point over friendship existing in a world devoid of spiritualism. I think it probably comes down to a semantic difference over "friendship". though. That is, for me, a friendship has a spiritual component that transcends a mathematical formula of mutual benefit.

I am getting very confused about who I am talking to and what I am talking about on these damn blogs though. Somebody noted somewhere that "Facts" and "Truth" are two separate things. Was it you, or was it a guy you were arguing with? I assume it was a guy you were arguing with sice it was a pretty good argument, and I think you are a "facts" kind of guy. Anyway, in the absence of having the same understanding of the difference between "facts" and "truth" I doubt we are going to persuade each other of our cases.

Let me remind you that you used "somehow" not only on life forming, but on Earth forming. In the same context you've also asserted the massive improbability of gases combining to form a planet with air and water.

It's the likelihood of those specific things I'm talking about here. You're asserting likelihoods left and right; surely you have a general method of estimating them, and if that method leads you to absurd statements on the likelihood of planetary formation then what they tell you about life is the least of your problems.

Not to mention, you yourself have said you wouldn't be surprised to find intelligent life elsewhere, which means you do think its likelihood is higher than once-in-a-Universe! ... Or you would if you were using "likelihood" in its standard manner, which you don't seem to, so again: how are you calculating your probabilities?

As to a reason that friendship can not exist, it is because in a world
without spiritual life, all actions are an attempt at a zero-sum game.

And yet another rephrasing of the same point. Game theory is pure maths and logic. It doesn't include a "spiritual life" variable. And it can consider positive-sum and negative-sum games as easily as zero-sum games. There is no logical necessity for all games to be zero-sum, spirituality or no spirituality.