Abiogenesis is the Scientific God

Discussion in 'Science & Society' started by IceAgeCivilizations, May 14, 2007.

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  1. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

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    I don't know what you're referring to as a "complete lack" of evidence. Obviously, there is quite a bit of scientific evidence about how living molecules come together.

    Well, yes. There's no alternative, is there?

    Not any that you have suggested, anyway.

    What other theory? You've presented none.
     
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  3. D H Some other guy Valued Senior Member

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    Leopold, you are on the verge of making this thread look a whole lot better to me (i.e., you are about to join my ignore list).

    There is no such thing as absolute proof in science. Period. Proof in science is probabilistic, very similar to proof in law ("beyond a reasonable doubt").

    Probabilistic proof doesn't cut it in mathematics. Many a mathematical conjecture has died because some upstart found one counterexample. For example, the discovery that 2,682,440[sup]4[/sup]+15,365,639[sup]4[/sup]+18,796,760[sup]4[/sup]=20,615,673[sup]4[/sup] disproves Euler's conjecture.

    How do you know that we evolved? The evidence is indirect and depends on other sciences. (How do we know that carbon dating works?) The evidence is also overwhelming, which is why we can say evolution is a fact. By mathematical standards, it is not a fact. By legal standards, it most certainly is.

    Even by the less-than-perfect standards of scientific proof, abiogenesis is still deemed to be a hypothesis or conjecture in the eyes of scientists. You are asking for something (proof of abiogenesis) that does not yet exist. Just because the evidence does not yet exist does not mean it never will.
     
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  5. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    Sounds a lot like the argument for God.

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  7. leopold Valued Senior Member

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    D. H. aka dung hole,
    put me on ignore man.
     
  8. D H Some other guy Valued Senior Member

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    In what way? I never said the evidence will appear. My argument is simply that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

    Arguing that the evidence for abiogenesis doesn't exist and hence God created life is the God of the gaps argument. That argument has failed time and time again. I am not going to bet on that argument working this time around.
     
  9. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    I don't disagree with what you said, I was merely stating that your belief is an act of faith too.
     
  10. leopold Valued Senior Member

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    you mean you ain't gonna threaten me with the ignore button?

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    what i mean by a "complete lack" is that science has not demonstrated how we got here with successful experiments in the lab.
    agreed.
    molecules "coming together" is a far cry from "life in the lab"
    yes, there are alternatives, some more obtuse than others.
    creationism for one.
    some form of supernatural force for another.

    i really don't understand why everyone is getting all stupid about this.
    all i've stated is that science has not been able to create life in the lab and these assholes are taking it personal, some have even put me on ignore and a few more has threatened to.

    the only thing i can say is put me on ignore.
    it sure as hell will not change any of the facts i've presented.
     
  11. leopold Valued Senior Member

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    why am i being put on ignore?
    for presenting evidence like the following:
    Miller began his research in 1950 as a graduate student at the University of Chicago under Nobel laureate Harold Urey and started his experiments in 1952. After publishing the results in the journal Science in 1953, he gained widespread attention.

    Scientists appeared on the cusp of achieving genesis in the laboratory but, over the next half century, creating life from scratch eluded researchers.
    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18825863/
    of course MSNBC is a religious wacko website.

    then people like ophiolite and spuriousmonkey say "well we can explain how life arose".
    and i say that science cannot prove those explanations.

    why the above makes you people all stupid is crazy.
    ignoring it will not make it go away.
     
  12. 2inquisitive The Devil is in the details Registered Senior Member

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    leupold99,
    No, where did the 'creator' come from? You simply took abiogenesis one step farther back and made it more complicated. How does this creator travel the universe, in a spacecraft, or is it just a 'spirit' that has powers to manipulate matter?
    Is that supernatural force alive? How did it become alive? Or was that supernatural force something like lightning striking near the 'goo' millions of times and finally giving some particular mixture of the 'goo' life?
    You have stated much more than that, but regardless.
    You do realize the first 'life' was probably a single cell that divided into two cells, then at least one those two cells divided again, etc. Scientists think it was millions of years before the right combination of ingredients came together in the right enviroment and the first cell divided. The experiments have a few millions of years to run before they are confirmed or refuted.
     
  13. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Because that explains the evidence well, and no other extant explanation does.

    Nothing has been proven, and new evidence tomorrow could throw the entire current theory of evolution out the window as well as the "fact" that we evolved. Scientific "facts" can always be disproven - Karl Popper even took that as the identifying characteristic of a scientific fact.

    That differs from mathematical facts, for example, which cannot be disproved because that impossibility is what established them in the first place. And it differes from spiritual or artistic facts because proof is irrelevant to them.

    But it would have to be pretty spectacular evidence, because the vetting of the fact of evolution, as well as the theory of it, has been very, very thorough so far.

    Natural abiogenesis on earth has footing nowhere near as solid. But it does explain a great deal of evidence, has available a great many mechanistic possibilities for its occurrence (and doubtless more to be discovered: the field is young and unexplored), and is contradicted by nothing so far.
     
  14. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

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    leopold99:

    I don't have anyone on ignore.

    Creationism, in the sense of the literal truth of the Genesis bible story, is well and truly ruled out by evidence. Do you agree?
     
  15. leopold Valued Senior Member

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    you asked for alternative theories, i gave you some.
    i didn't say i agreed with them.
     
  16. leopold Valued Senior Member

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    haven't a clue, and frankly i could care less


    this thread is about how life got on this planet, not happened after it arrived.
    give me a break homey.
    i'll post a link that will completely blow this statement of yours out of the water.
    edit:
    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070522210926.htm
     
    Last edited: May 25, 2007
  17. leopold Valued Senior Member

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    50 years is hardly young, and it's been explored very well in those 50 odd years.
     
  18. 2inquisitive The Devil is in the details Registered Senior Member

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    leupold99,
    Did you read the link?
    So, they stacked the odds. How does this completely blow my statement out of the water???
    So you think a spacecraft or something brought life here, denying that the particular life on this planet originated here?
     
  19. leopold Valued Senior Member

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    yes.

    you stated something to the effect that the experiments haven't had time to complete. the link i gave says your wrong.

    i wish you people would stop putting words in my mouth.
     
  20. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    You have yet to present a single theory. Do you know what a theory is ?
    ? The single least defensible assertion on this thread.

    People have been trying to breed true-black tulips in the lab for hundreds of years - and failed. Yet you think the entire question of abiogenesis has been explored "very well" less than 75 years from the discovery of DNA, less than fifty years from the discovery of plate tectonics, less than 25 years from the discovery of one of the three major branches of life on earth, just a few years after the discovery of RNA catalysis and replication,

    and you consider the failure to duplicate in a lab an unknown event precursor to all of those, three billion years in the past under circumstances difficult to even guess, as a side effect of other investigations, a demonstration of the impossibility of that event?
     
  21. leopold Valued Senior Member

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    this is the last tim e i'll say this:
    i wish you people would not put words in my mouth.

    i stated my stance, i gave evidence to support it.
    if you do not wish to address the points i raised then post somewhere else.
     
  22. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Thanks for this - I did not know it had been proven false. Do you know how many hours of computer time (even better and more general if stated in computer cycles of a 64 bit word machine) did it take to find this?

    BTW, to stay thread related, even though no I longer see leopold's nonsense, directly, his desire for science to reproduce abiogenese in the lab will probably require funding the experimental attempt for many millions of years. (Perhaps that is billions of years as we will not have the entire volume of the oceans available.) I doubt if he will pay for that, or be around to see the proof when it is achieved. Only way that seems likely is via a time machine. If that exists, probably more convencing to him is just to send him back to watch the original, instead of a duplication. - just a thought. I will contribute a dollar to pay for his trip back a few million years.

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    Last edited by a moderator: May 25, 2007
  23. leopold Valued Senior Member

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    yeah, well if you weren't so fucking lame you would've seen the link i posted that makes you look like the dork you are.
     
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