Bill Angel

Your argument seems to be a case of what's termed "reductio ad absurdum" See http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

One problem such a creature would have would be in controlling its immune system. When someone is afflicted with an autoimmune disorder its immune system attacks its own cells. Any components of this organism's body that were synthesized from foreign or from modified DNA would most likely be attacked by its own immune system.

That's an interesting observation. For my own part I have become baffled at how ubiquitous has become the usage of the term motherf**ker and motherf**king in spoken English. It seems that for certain individuals that I have encountered, one out of every four words that come out of their mouths are variants of that term. It's only one out of four, because they have to leave room in their speech for the insertion of other swear words, like "shit".

It sounds as if you are asserting an old argument sometimes characterized as the "God of the Gaps" To quote from one explaination of this argument:

The present political conundrum does suggest a fictional scenario from the time of World War II. What if Nazi Germany had embarked on a programme of killing its political enemies with poison gas BEFORE the USA had declared war on Nazi Germany and Japan, and the USA learned about it. Would the USA have attempted to carry out military activities meant to curtail such gassing by the Nazi forces, or would isolationist sentiment in the USA have stymied any attempts by the Roosevelt Administration to do so?

You are invoking what is usually termed the Argument from DesignSee http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleological_argument#Creation_Science_and_intelligent_design If you possess an open mind, you might wish to read the book "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins. Short answer - the presence of beauty and "design" in nature does not provide evidence for the existence of a Diety.

I believe that we got repaid for the costs of Operation Desert Storm.See Donald Trump says Kuwait never paid U.S. back for ousting Saddam Hussein To quote from that article:

One thing you could do is to carry a cellphone with you and take pictures of yourself as you travel about during the day. The backgrounds in the images will help to identify where you were when you took the pictures, as will the GPS info that is encoded in the image data. (EXIF data)

If military action against Syria needs to involve support from an international organization, I should think that it could be supplied by NATO. Turkey is a member of NATO, and it is providing sanctuary for over 400,000 refugees from the conflict in Syria. Any further use of poison gas by the Syrian regime would only cause more people to flee that country to take up residence in the refugee camps, including those in Turkey.

Fred Hoyle had a problem accepting the idea that the universe started with a big bang. See http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle He also was a proponent of intelligent design underlying the creation of life. To quote from that same wiki article: So I would venture to assert that Fred Hoyle's opinions on this subject may be of historical interest, but of little scientific interest.

Richard Dawkins offers an opinion about consiousness in animals. Excerpts from an article in the New York Times about Richard Dawkins titled "A Knack for Bashing Orthodoxy": "...it would be no great surprise if the interior lives of animals turned out to be rather complex. Do dogs, for example, experience consciousness? Are they aware of themselves as autonomous animals in their surroundings?" Consciousness has to be there, hasnt it? Professor Richard Dawkins replies. Its an evolved, emergent quality of brains. Its very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too. See http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/science/20dawkins.html

A miracle is supposed to be an event that can only be explained via the direct intercession of a god. If such an event can shown to be facilitated by quantum tunneling, then such an event would no longer need be characterized as a miracle. For example the explosion of an atomic bomb would appear quite miraculous to someone ignorant of nuclear physics and quantum mechanics. But once those fields of physics can be shown to supply an explanation for how an atomic bomb works, then the need to attribute such an explosion to a miracle vanishes.

Here is another category of atheist, supplied by Richard Dawkins in his book "The God Delusion":

You might also check out your local public library. I've borrowed in ePub format several excellent books on cosmology and string theory from this source, books that are not available for free on the internet. It's all perfectly legit, as the copy of the books that you download have DRM (digital rights management) incorporated into them.

Here are a quote from Carl Jung that might help the discussion along:

I believe that you are asserting a misperception about how questions in astrophysics, astronomy, and cosmology are investigated. There is a book that I'm currently reading titled "The 4 Percent Universe" Subtitled: "Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality" by Richard Panek, Published in 2011 The author expends considerable effort explaining how the EXPERIMENTAL side of astrophysics research is conducted, particularly in the investigation of supernovas, and how critically important such work is not only to astronomers but to theoretical cosmologists as well.

A good book that I am currently reading: "The 4 Percent Universe" Subtitled: "Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality" by Richard Panek Published in 2011

I can envision an artistic use of 3d printing that would appeal to people. It would be great if you could take a set of photographs of a person from a variety of perspectives and have a 3d printer convert the photographs into a sculpture. I expect that a lot of parents would like to be able to keep a small bust of their son or daughter present on their desks at work.

I believe that theoretical work has been done that addresses some of the issues that you mentioned. See Every Black Hole Contains Another Universe? To quote from this article: You mentioned the so-called "axis of evil" present in the CMB. Might our universe be rotating about this "axis of evil"? To quote further from this same article:

There are some predictions open to experimental verification that are made by String Cosmology. In the following recent short talk from June 2013 (see video) , the speaker discusses the physics of an ideal gas made up of strings, as opposed to an ideal gas made up of particles. Unlike particles,he asserts that there is a maximum temperature for strings. He discusses the difference between String Gas Cosmology and Inflationary Cosmology. String Gas Cosmology makes different predictions about the nature of gravitational waves than does the Inflationary Model in Cosmology. Based on the material covered in his brief lecture, I located a more precise description of what he was discussing in the following paper: See: String Gas Cosmology and Structure Formation

See New cosmic background radiation map challenges some foundations of cosmology What brought this report (above) to my attention was another article from a few years back (2007): see Physicists find way to see extra dimensions So the question that occured to me is whether these new results from the Plank satellite will shed any light on the validity of String Theory. I suppose that one could argue that any pattern found in the cosmic backround radiation eminating from near the time of the big bang could be shown to be consistent with at least one six-dimensional geometric model derived from String Theory, and perhaps more than one. Hence any purported validation of String Theory from this new data would likely be considered inconclusive.

I also found Lawrence Krauss' book an excellent read. I am currently reading "The Hidden Reality" by Brian Greene , subtitled "Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos". If the thrust of your question is what is out "there", where "there" refers to beyond the current extent of our universe, one answer according to Dr Greene could be an infinite number of other universes. It also is suggested by Dr Greene that one of these other universes could collide with our own, resulting in their mutual annihilation in a event dubbed the "Big Squash". But this might not happen for another trillion years.

I don't think that social insects should be included in the list. Social insects such as bees and ants exhibit a collective intelligence as an emergent property of the entire nest.

You might wish to check out the career of Georges Lemaître http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre#Biography While he was both a successful scientist and devoted Roman Catholic, he was against mixing science with religion.

There is an intresting video that I think illustrates this issue. It is a short discussion about string theory and the Big Bang. The group include two Nobel prize winners. Near the end of th video Dr Laughlin makes some interesting remarks concerning those situations where "very bright people can delude themselves". I think that the deluded bright people that he is referring to are the believers in string theory.