Abiogenesis is the Scientific God

It certainly does, scientists have no idea how life came to be.

 

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That is why science separates abiogenesis and evolution. Once a process of coding and replication starts, evolution and natural selection explains the origin of cellular structures. In fact, designed things such as those designed by humans, have very different characteristics than things that evolved.

Science has a very good track record of discovering the naturalistic causes of phenomenon. Just one look at the past sucesses of science should show that it is a better way of explaining things than relying on an ancient holy book. Science has discovered much of the workings of the atom, it has harnessed the power of electricity, it has eliminated some diseases. It has disproved religious ideas like the sun revolving around the Earth, the genetic causes of some diseases (rather than demons). Religion has a very poor record in this area. ID is just an example of desperation on the part of those who see their cherished beliefs slipping away.

 

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Many Christians got those breakthroughs going, so what's your point?

 

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This post said nothing to discredit ID at all, not even to the slightest, most remote extent. ID really has nothing to do with religion, it just has religious implications. Just like evolution may have nothing to do with atheism, but it has atheistic implications.

Basically your evidence is that science has disproven a lot of things believed to be true in the past by religion, so "nature-did-it". All you do is really avoid the question by seperating evolution and abiogenesis. Evolution relies on abiogenesis and it has a lot to with life...Doesn't it seem a bit strange to you all that embedded within each of your cells is genetic information or data that contains all of your physical characteristics?

 

'Nother great post VitalOne, they say it's all naturalistic, but what they "know" (Darwinism) is severed from life origins, because the implications for life origins are plainly religious, so "beyond our perview" is their response, admitting that it's beyond natural as far as they know, but of course, they would never admit this.

 

My physical characteristics are not embedded in the code of DNA, that is a common misunderstanding. DNA is not a blueprint for the body. My body formed from the interaction between DNA and it's environment. That is why it is impossible to reconstruct an ancient animal from DNA.

ID has everything to do with a certian brand of fundamentalist Christianity. To say otherwise is intellectual dishonesty.

 

To say that abiogenesis is the only way is intellectually dishonest, to say the least.

 

Vitalone,

The absence of an explanation isn’t support for anything else or indicates it is not true.

That goes back to my question – what example/evidence can you give of ANYTHING that was designed by an intelligent cause to justify that claim?

Good examples of evolutionary processes. The pyramids and Stonehenge did not arise without a long evolutionary process before them, e.g. the abilities that had to be developed to cut large blocks, the abilities to move large items, the organizational requirements that had to be developed, the long development of tools, the endless attempts at building smaller things first. If you examine anything that man has created, and he is our ONLY example of intelligence, then you will find “NOTHING” that he has made that has not arisen from an evolutionary process.

In this sense man’s intelligence is not the cause but just a component of an evolutionary process.

Except you are ignoring the massively different time components. Man has only been around a few million years and it is only recently, i.e. a few thousand years that we could claim he has created anything complex, e.g. computers. But the basic building blocks of life has had billions of years.

Neither is chance quite a relevant issue here. All of the basic blocks of biology combine through natural attractive and repellant forces. Some things fit together and while others cannot. Everything complex you see is the result of something simpler in exactly the same way that man’s creations are always the result of building on something simpler.

Current observed complexity isn’t evidence of intelligent creation but simply evidence of changes from something simpler. We have no reason to believe that life did not arise from simply much longer processes of change and adaptation.

Or can you provide an example of something complex having been created without any preceding simpler building block?

 

Yeah, the sad part is that the design theory really has nothing to do with religion at all, it just has religious implications. You can interpret this intelligent cause as innumerable things besides God, like aliens, a mind, an impersonalistic God, etc....but just because it just happens to have some theistic implications they say that its religious.

Take for instance Antony Flew, the world-famous atheist most known for the coining the "no true scotsman" fallacy. He became a Deist just because of intelligent design...is he also a religious fundementalist like the anti-IDers claim? No he was an atheist all his life, and is famous for debating against the existence of God, famous for writing books similar to Dawkins "The God Delusion", yet he became a Deist just because there is no undirected naturalistic cause for DNA structure, he also knows that the only logical conclusion is that their is an intelligent cause. He does not interpret this intelligent cause as a Judeo-Christian God but rather an impersonal Aristotlian God...

 

Well there's your first mistake right there -- assuming that reality divides things into these two categories "life" and "non-life." This is the fallacy of the excluded middle, otherwise known as a false dichotomy. There is no authoritative scientific definition of what "life" even is, so how can you decide if something fits into that category? "Life" is a rough, fuzzy-edged concept that we find useful for carving up reality so we can understand it, but that's all it is. Life is just a highly complex arrangement of matter, and there were undoubtedly steps in between what you call "non-life" and "life" that would be hard to classify as either.

"Anywhere close" is a relative statement. I'll give you that it's certainly "incorrect" to say we've come really close (so far), but it's not "preposterous." There is more evidence and theoretical framework on the subject than there was a few decades ago, and our understanding continues to grow. We're talking about a process that may have involved thousands of steps, perhaps even tens or hundreds of thousands, before it ever got to anything you'd label as "life." Why do you think this should be able to be replicated in a lab in a finite amount of time spanning a few decades (especially if the necessary techniques and equipment may not even be sophisticated enough yet)? Someone else made this same point in another thread, which I'd guess you read and automatically rejected because it doesn't fit in with your preconceived notions.

Even though we may never know the exact sequence of steps involved, we are developing some good ideas about what kinds of pathways are possible or likely. There is a promising hypothesis that DNA evolved from a previous RNA system, which itself evolved from an even simpler nucleic acid system. That's working backwards. From the other end, as for how it initially got started, it is revealing that some types of non-living materials (I think there's a certain type of clay in particular) that form crystalline structures that act as a template to form more such structure -- i.e. the process is self-perpetuating (read: self-reproducing). It's not too hard to see the connections here. It will take time to develop a fully satisfactory theory on this, but we have a good start. Which is much better than the "God did it" crowd has.

That is exactly what we see. EVERY species is transitional (except the ones at the very tips of the tree of life's branches, and they will be transitional one day if they don't go extinct first). But this is one of the creationists' favorite exercises in moving the goalpost. If I give you species A and Z and you ask for something transitional, I give you species M. Then you say M is its own species, created as it is. So I give you species F that is transitional between A and M. Again, you say this is not good enough. And it goes on and on and on..... forever.

 

Cris, how 'bout humans? Try that one.

 

I didn't say it's the only way, but compared to ID, it's much more reasonable.

 

Iceage,

Again, the absence of an explanation gives zero evidence of a fantasy being true.

 

Especially so. Humans have evolved extremely rapidly.

 

Hey Liege, then why have spiders, and clams, and alligators, and many more, not changed for "hundreds of millions of years?"

 

Iceage,

What about humans?

 

Iceage,

Why should they change?

 

Do you think humans evolved from a tree shrew, or a chimp, or a great ape, or a small ape, or what have you?

 

They have changed. They only have relatively stable forms due to the stability of their environments.

 

Nothing has changed except extinctions.