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Post by Jack on Oct 15, 2008 12:38:12 GMT
James,
You wrote today, What evidence do you have for this suspicion? What is the definitely of "likely" here?
I recently finished a book on computational genomics that asserts that all life descends from the same origin. If the emergence of life is not unlikely at all, it would be astounding that all our genetics would be related. Why shouldn't life have started in several places at once on the earth? Even if it subsequently mingled, one would presume that we could see the differences in DNA between different origins, the same way that scientists use mitochondrial DNA to trace our ancestry, or the same way that scientists can assert that the bacteria living inside us are not a part of our being, even though their cells outnumber ours.
If the definition of "likely" is that life is extremely rare, but not so rare that it won't arise at least once in the life of the universe, then I see where you're coming from, although I disagree with you on the necessity of a miracle for life, because the existence of a universe predisposed for life likewise seems miraculous. Some scientist, trying to "prove" naturalism, showed that sure, a compute generating random strings could not generate intelligent words, but a computer that could generate random words, then select & discard letters that did not fit a pattern, could generate intelligent words that would remain stable. The problem, of course, is the existence of the intelligent word for which the computer program is striving--why this word and not another!
Perhaps the existence of this "intelligent" word could suggest that life did pop up in several places, and perhaps continues to pop up spontaneously now, but usually fails to evolve towards the intelligent word that guarantees stability--but to my knowledge absolutely no one argues this.
If on the other hand the definition of "likely" is that life should pop up spontaneously with regularity, then I don't see how the evidence bears that out, either our own genetic evidence or the silence of the universe. Even the traces of "bacteria burrowing" found in that Mars rock that struck earth however long ago was considered dubious.
Which one do you mean? can you clarify further?
I also don't see why it's bad theology to suggest divine intervention was necessary for life to appear--not at least for Christians who believe that God intervenes regularly (prayer to the Saints) and sometimes spectacularly (Nativity, Resurrection).
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Post by Al Moritz on Oct 15, 2008 15:01:49 GMT
James, You wrote today, What evidence do you have for this suspicion? I am not the addressee of your post, but I will try to answer anyway. James can add his own comments. James had said in his article: "The main problem is that the simplest forms of life today are still, on an objective level, fantastically complex." This is true, but I am not sure that he implies from this that life arose in complex form at once. It didn't have to, as I point out in my article: talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/originoflife.htmlIf life started in a very simple form, as I argue on solid scientific grounds, then the emergence of life will have been, as James said, not unlikely at all. Interesting point. The answer is probably: out-competition. If one life-form was reproducing at a just somewhat higher rate than others (and early life forms will eventually have reproduced quickly, even though not as quickly as today's bacteria with their 20-minute reproduction cycle) it will have simply swamped any other. And at a quick reproduction rate, extending its reach all over the globe in a short period of time would have been a non-issue. Sure, the Big Bang with its unique initial conditions and laws of nature is the foundational miracle of creation. It is impossible now on this earth for new life to pop up spontaneously from non-living matter. Why? Simple as it is, it would be "eaten" by modern bacteria right away. Of course, other non-bacterial life today has developed defense mechanisms against bacteria -- but then, it is not just as complex as bacteria, but even more so. Furthermore, life as we know it, or in a similar form, could only have arisen in a reducing or, at best, neutral atmosphere, but it cannot arise anew in the oxidizing atmosphere of today's earth -- an atmosphere that has become so due to the presence of living organisms over billions of years. Because it diminishes God's power to assume that He intervenes when He has to, rather than when He wants to. Miracles and intervention in human life are God's free will, overriding of the laws of nature because they are insufficient to achieve His creative goals reeks of impotence. As I said in the article that I link to above: "The issue of chirality, among others, has been touted by creationists as a "huge problem" for the concept of an origin of life by natural causes. Allegedly, only a miraculous intervention by God could have solved the problem. Yet the above findings are a typical example for why the "God-of-the-gaps" concept does not work: science rapidly closes the gaps that previously might have been thought to be reserved for miraculous intervention. "This is exactly what should be expected if either the material world is all there is, or if the world was created by a God who, as primary cause, chose to create through secondary causes – precisely those natural causes that science studies. In fact, creationists should seriously ask themselves if their concept of God is not a belittling one: the Intelligent Designer as "tinkerer" who is forced to break his own created laws of nature once in a while because they are insufficient to achieve certain stages in the development of the material world. From a theistic philosophical perspective, the actual findings of science suggest a much grander idea of God: the Designer who laid out an elegant and self-sufficient set of laws of nature that accomplish the unfolding of his creation by inducing self-organization of the material world. This idea is easily compatible with the concept of God of many mainstream religions, including most Christian ones."
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Post by humphreyclarke on Oct 15, 2008 16:15:31 GMT
I think problems do arise when certain areas of science (and history for that matter) are used for points scoring between atheists and theists. Something that looks like a quick win in an argument actually transpires to be foolish and unecessary if you look at the bigger picture. Actually when one looks at the Christian tradition you find great oneness and willingness to challenge existing dogma in the search for truth. You never hear that Copernicus and Galileo were devout Catholics, that Newton wrote more on Theology than science and that evolution was incorporated into Christian belief without too many difficulties, e.g R. A Fischer, Asa Gray, Dobzhansky. This will continue to be the case if the present day conflict between science and fundamentalist religion continues to spiral out of control. There are two approaches with the study of the origin of life (which admittedly is in turmoil right now), one can do what the creationists do and sneer on the sidelines or one can get stuck in like catholic evolutionary scientist Martin Nowak ( www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=can-math-solve-origin-of-life ) and begin solving the mystery. That seems to me to be the best option and most in keeping with our knowledge of the universe thus far, that it appears to have been 'set up' to be bio-phillic. It would be odd if the creator had set up every stage in the process of generating life (the formation of galaxies, several stages of star formation, the production of the elements) and then left the last step to miraculous intervention.
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Post by Jack on Oct 15, 2008 18:18:16 GMT
I am not the addressee of your post, but I will try to answer anyway. I (mostly) liked your reply, thanks :-) Again I find myself asking, what's the definition of likely? Could someone clarify this before saying whether the emergence of life is "likely"? Scientists have been unable to produce life in the laboratory, and they aren't even applying random processes: they know a lot of the necessary materials, and the necessary conditions. So something about life strikes me as not likely at all. I also find myself wondering, what's the definition of life? I'd like that defined, too. I'm not being facetious: an atheist friend has a PhD from Yale and works in protein purification making mucho more $$$ than I (a mathematician). When I asked whether viruses were alive, she answered no, because "life" consists of the ability to replicate the genetic information inside oneself, and viruses, are helpless until they find a living thing whose materials they can use to replicate. I can see her point of view, but then it doesn't make sense that life could emerge in a "simple" form. So what is meant by "simple"? At some point there is an irreducible form required for life, and to me it looks incredibly complex. What is that form? (I am trying to avoid the phrase "irreducible complexity" because I don't want to be confused with an ID advocate. I really want the answers to my questions.) I don't quite see what you're saying. Are you saying that the first life would have consumed all the resources before a second life could emerge? In that case, life should have exhausted itself after consuming the resources. Obviously you don't mean that, or do you? If so, why? If life is simple, and can arise spontaneously quite easily, then surely it should have appeared in many different places in a relatively short time, given that the conditions necessary for life were present throughout the world when it arose. I know that exponential functions achieve a high rate of change incredibly quickly, but I find it hard to believe that it would have been the near-instantaneous rate of growth that you imply. The worst that I can imagine would not be a swamping out, but rather a mingling, whose traces should be around today. If so, then a few fundamental assumptions of computational genomics are wrong. Maybe it's not so wrong that you can't accomplish what these scientists want to do--like Newtonian physics is not so wrong that you can't do ordinary, day-to-day work with it--and we just don't know how to look for the evidence of the mingling? Well, there are lots of things that bacteria can't "eat", and even though today's bacteria might easily eat the simplest forms of life that gave rise to, well, bacteria, I don't see why it follows that they might eat a different form of life that arose from, say, silicon instead of carbon. (Is it still accepted that that could happen?) Even if the new life was of the same sort that bacteria could eat, if its rate of reproduction is as fast as you suggest above, I'm not convinced that these simple life forms wouldn't survive, the same way that many simple life forms survive in the face of constant predation. I've read that many scientists believe that life can arise spontaneously from the heat vents at the bottom of the ocean. Do you disagree with that? Isn't that a different sort of necessity? The only necessity of divine intervention is that God must intervene because He chooses to. So, God must intervene for material life to arise, because God desires material life to arise. That isn't bad theology at all: God is not compelled to intervene because God is not compelled to create life, nor more than God was compelled to provide the spring at Lourdes.
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Post by Jack on Oct 15, 2008 18:22:09 GMT
It would be odd if the creator had set up every stage in the process of generating life (the formation of galaxies, several stages of star formation, the production of the elements) and then left the last step to miraculous intervention. I like this argument. The first step would required miraculous intervention, but it would be odd to suggest that later steps required it. But this applies just as well to other divine interventions: why would God have "set up" a universe where He "had" to intervene through Christ? If the one is bad theology, isn't the second?
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Post by Al Moritz on Oct 15, 2008 19:38:37 GMT
Jack, thanks for your comments. Before we discuss any further, I suggest you read my article that I linked to. It should make things clearer overall and answer some of your questions.
Al
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Post by Jack on Oct 15, 2008 20:52:43 GMT
Well, I read it, but I can't say I understood most of it, let alone how most of it answered my questions. I'm afraid that an abundance of sentences like Protein synthesis requires the aminoacylation of RNA… don't exactly help. Here's what I did bring away from it: - Scientists don't know all the details of how life started, but they have a lot of ideas. All the ideas face difficulties, but many of them have plausible explanations. I learned that not only is there DNA and RNA, but PNA and other things besides. All that said, all of this is highly speculative (your words).
- So, for example, many scientists argue that life can start near deep-sea hypothermal vents. There are problems with this theory (I didn't understand what the problems were, but I understand from what you write that there are problems). There are explanations for some problems; others continue investigation.
- The same with other possibilities: maybe life started in little puddles that had long wet-dry cycles.
- Intelligent designers advocate a God-of-the-gaps argument, but it's not clear to me that the intelligent design that I've heard of is any different from what you advocate when you say that a much grander idea of God: the Designer who laid out an elegant and self-sufficient set of laws of nature that accomplish the unfolding of his creation by inducing self-organization of the material world. It's still an intelligent design, and I'm quite sure most of the IDers I've read advocate this.
Quite honestly, I'm more confused than before. I still have no definition of "likely", and I see that even the definition of "life" is somewhat controversial. I honestly have the impression that you gave me the answer to a different question, one that I didn't ask.
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Post by unkleE on Oct 15, 2008 23:40:42 GMT
I am a scientific layman, and relatively ignorant at that, but with a smattering of theological knowledge. I therefore tend to take the scientists at their word and believe what science has discovered, but with a certain healthy scepticism because scientific knowledge changes over time.
But I too have some problems with James' theological reasons to disbelieve in special creation of life, and less antipathy to "God of the gaps".
1. I can't really see that it matters theologically whether God set it all up at the beginning and let it run, or interferes all the way through. After all, if God is outside time, how do we decide when he does something? (Though I note Richard Swinburne thinks God is within time.) And further, I agree with you Jack that similar "tidiness" arguments don't seem to work in other areas - you mention the prevalence of sin in God's world and God's remedy in Jesus, but one could equally well ask why is the revelation in the Bible so apparently fallible and changing; and why does God's church, Jesus' body and bride, need such regular and drastic reformation? I think the matter should be judged scientifically.
2. I think "God of the gaps" has a bad name. Science works by people refining and/or rejecting hypotheses as more data is obtained, and we live our life by learning from experience. So I don't see why, if we accept that our knowledge comes from revelation, evidence, reasoning, experience and intuition, that our understanding of God shouldn't change and develop. We survived the demolition of the old Paley watchmaker design argument for life on earth, but in its place we have the fine-tuning of the universe design argument. And if someday (I doubt it) someone can demonstrate that the multiverse is true, the the argument will shift again, but it will still be there.
So I don't think we should put too many eggs in any potentially God-of-the-gaps argument, but we must respond to whatever knowledge we have, and remain flexible.
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Post by Jack on Oct 16, 2008 12:38:38 GMT
I am a scientific layman, and relatively ignorant at that, but with a smattering of theological knowledge. I therefore tend to take the scientists at their word and believe what science has discovered, but with a certain healthy scepticism because scientific knowledge changes over time. I'd like to think I have more or less the same point of view, but (a) as a mathematician, I guess I'm somewhat less "lay" than you, and (b) I don't know if "scepticism" is the right word for me. I understand that scientific knowledge changes over time, as I hinted above, but I also don't have much sympathy for Young Earthers who, for example, argue strenuously against carbon dating, but have no trouble using tools that are based on the exact same science & data, like microwave ovens. This is another things that bothers me about calling divine intervention in the creation of life "bad theology". Even if one concedes that life could arise by natural methods, it is conceivable that it could arise by many natural methods, in many places, at many times. There could be a total ambiguity as to whether life first arose in the puddles that I think Al is advocating (I apologize to Al if that's not what his article argues) or whether it arose first in deep-sea vents, or whether it arrived on a meteorite blown off the face of Mars. If all of those are possible, and only one of them happened, why did one happen and not the other(s)? It isn't bad theology to say that, at the outset of creation, God ordained life to arise in a certain way, at a certain time, and that to us this appears to be divine intervention at a certain time even when it arises by natural methods, in the same way that I see Bernadette's vision and the spring at Lourdes as divine intervention even if someone could explain it by natural methods. IIRC St. Thomas Aquinas argues for the impassibility of God in more or less these terms: we see God acting in time, but rather God acts outside of time. If we talk about divine intervention we are talking about our point of view, not God's. I agree with this, and from Al's article I gather that he does, too. I think this is also the Catholic Church's point of view, inasmuch as the Church teaches that over the first few centuries She had to define clearly Christ's relationship both with God and humanity, examining various ideas such as monothelitism, monophysitism, Arianism, Nestorianism, and so forth.
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Post by humphreyclarke on Oct 16, 2008 14:08:17 GMT
Perhaps a better term for it, rather than 'bad theology', is 'highly risky theology'. At first glance this looks like the ideal place for a design argument as the search for the origin of life thus far has been a scientific failure. However, unlike something like the appearance of Christ or the Lourdes miracles, the origin of life is a process you can trace back all the way to the singularity. At each point the cosmos has evolved through a series of finely balanced natural processes. It seems more prudent to conclude that life therefore evolved through a finely balanced, algorithmic natural process. When this is discovered it will probably have the same effect as dark energy/ the cosmological constant, solving one mystery whilst considerably strengthening the fine-tuning argument. If the standard theist position is to throw up our hands and say 'its a miracle!' and it turns out to be the result of a highly improbable but natural process, then we will all look like a bunch of wallys. Imagine the gloating on RichardDawkins.net!.
I think also, that just because something is labelled as ‘a natural process’ doesn’t make it any less miraculous. I mean there is something a bit ridiculous about saying, ‘there is no way this guy could have turned water into wine’ when we are sitting at the bottom of a gravity well on a small rocky planet orbiting a giant nuclear fireball, our ancestors were fish and bacteria, our bodies are made of stardust, and the universe jumped from a size smaller than an atom to a vastly complex, fine-tuned, mathematical system with over 100 billion galaxies. It is a very long way from the dreary infinite void of the Epicureans.
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Post by James Hannam on Oct 17, 2008 9:16:11 GMT
Jack, Others have said most of what I would have wanted to. I should mention I agree with that the conditions in the early earth are very different from now so may well have been suitable for life to arise, although today's are not. Also, bad theology, as Humphrey said, is probably the wrong term. Certainly, it is bad apologetics. I'll try to post later on the inflationary big bang model and how this dealt with closed a gap in which some had inserted God. Perhaps of relevant interest to all, by the way: news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7675193.stmBest wishes James
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Post by Jack on Oct 17, 2008 12:28:03 GMT
James,
Thanks, that story was fascinating---life from a volcano!---and I agree completely with the term "bad apologetics".
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Post by jim_s on Oct 18, 2008 16:13:30 GMT
There's another thread on this in the science section: jameshannam.proboards83.com/index.cgi?board=science&action=display&thread=94I wrote something over there about the charge that it seems sloppy of God to have to step in to create life supernaturally, so I cut and pasted it below: As to the claim that God tinkering in the universe seems to point to shoddy workmanship on his part: this was an old Deist claim in the 19th century, and has, as far as I can tell, been abandoned as an argument. For one thing, there's no particular reason for thinking that an engine which runs without further input by its inventor is an appropriate metaphor for an ordered universe created by a loving God who wants to interact with it. For another, it seems to assume that any "tinkering" on God's part would be contrary to the system of the universe. But as C. S. Lewis wrote in Miracles, the reason some people find miracles intolerable is because, "they start by taking Nature to be the whole of reality. And they are sure that all reality must be interrelated and consistent. I agree with them. But I think they have mistaken a partial system within reality, namely Nature, for the whole. ... To find out how is interlocked with the previous history of Nature you must replace both Nature and the miracle in a larger context. Everything is connected with everything else: but not all things are connected by the short and straight roads we expected."
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