Abiogenesis and Arguments From Ignorance

It would help if ID proponents stopped overstating the case. Rightly or wrongly, that provokes overstatements the other way. Instead just state the fact that just about everyone agrees to: we just don’t know how large parts of the OOL played out.

This neither is a point for abiogenesis or for ID, and trying to claim it as evidence for ID just undermines the credibility of iD.

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OK. So I take it that you don’t agree that Tour has made a convincing case from current research that from what we do know to date it can be reasonably concluded that it would be highly improbable that life came from nonlife.

As I know Tour, that is not even his case. He is not always clear about it, but he himself says he does not know, and that he is not ID because he does not think science can tell us.

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Hmm. I guess I’ll have to listen to his talk again. Cause I was certainly under the impression that he was making the case that from current research there is no way that he could see how life could have come from nonlife. To me that translates into no known natural explanation. But I guess I’ll have to watch again to see if I’m mistaken. Unless I’m misunderstanding what you meant in your last post?

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That is probably correct. Science often feels like dead end when our imagination fails. Others are not done imagining yet. Even if we never find the answer, it might just be outside our view.

We all agree that the known natural explanations are not complete. That is what open problems look like. This one is really hard too, so it will take a long time to crack, if we could ever possibly crack it.

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Tour claims that we know from chemistry that life should not exist. Which you will remember I responded to back here: Rumraket: Response to Dr. Tour on Abiogenesis (notice all those IDcreationists having got the same impression as Jim did here above)

“LIFE SHOULD NOT EXIST. This much we know from chemistry.
(…)
Beyond our planet, all the others that have been probed are lifeless, a result in accord with our chemical expectations. The laws of physics and chemistry’s Periodic Table are universal, suggesting that life based upon amino acids, nucleotides, saccharides and lipids is an anomaly. Life should not exist anywhere in our universe. Life should not even exist on the surface of the earth.17
- James Tour

He may also be saying his usual designed-to-be-sorta-deflating nonsense about not being ID because he doesn’t think science can tell us.

Look, I’m tired of giving this guy the benefit of the doubt, or pretending to be more stupid than I actually am. If you take a step back it’s all obvious. Tour is a Christian apologist using his chemistry credentials to claim that life could not possibly originate without some sort of intervention.

Anyone who thinks something else is going on is deluding themselves. Why do all these IDcreationists and theists keep coming here thinking Tour has shown that the origin of life is basically impossible? It’s no god damn mystery why, they got the forking message. It’s obvious, plain as day. That is what Tour is saying. Well if life can’t originate, then… wink wink ^^

It’s all part of an apologetic designed to appeal to a theistic audience. What is Tour’s message? What does he believe? Simply look at what the people who watch his presentations or read his articles come away believing. Put aside what Tour says of himself to try to distance himself from IDcreationism, and simply look at what the religious people who come here take away from his writings and presentations. How many of these have we had now in the last six months? Ten? They all got the same impression. An impression you’re now insisting Tour didn’t intend.

BULLSHIRT. He’s not being unclear at all. He’s PERFECTLY obvious and articulate. There’s nothing to be confused about.

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Heh, reading that previous thread I now recall that I’ve seen so many creationsts be awestruck by Tour and his credentials I’d somehow managed to convince myself the man had won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. It’s ridiculous.

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It’s worth noting that we’ve only probed two other planets, and we can’t be certain either of them is lifeless. Sampling 3 out of an estimated 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 is not statistically significant. Tour is really overstating the case here.

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“…we certainly do not know enough to tell us it was not a fluke natural event”
Is this a misprint, a metaphysical assumption, or just a malaprop?
I would make the case, along with Tour, that we can and do know better, and that it’s a peculiar form of postmodern denialism to say otherwise.

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Then make that case please.

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We are like a modern “cargo cult,” both in denying what “nature alone” can accomplish, and also not being honest about what requires more than fluke occurrences.
Study the case of the Melanesian cargo cults to understand the metaphorical allusion better.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult

No, that is apparently Tour’s claim, but it is not correct. None of the putative facts Tour invokes to support this claim entail that conclusion, and the extent to which they could be taken to imply it are extremely weak at best.

There’s nothing from current research that says life could not have come from non-life. From the standpoint of statistical mechanics, life in the form of almost any known organism could originate literally on the tip of your nose right now and there’d be no physical or chemical law against it. It would merely be very very unlikely. As you say, it could in fact be how life originated, a statistical “fluke”. Which there is no law against, rational, mathematical, physical, or otherwise. It IS possible to roll a million sixes in a row. There is no number of sixes in a row that is impossible. It will never cross over form merely being more and more unlikely to suddenly being impossible with one more six rolled.

So your “case” amounts to merely re-stating the claim in more words, and combining it with an additional claim that disagreement with the claim amounts to a “cargo cult”? That isn’t a case at all im sorry to say.

You responded to Swamidass saying “we certainly do not know enough to tell us it was not a fluke natural event”, that you would make the case that we do know better and it’s a form of denialism to say otherwise. A case I asked of you to make.

So please make the case that we know “enough to tell us it was a not a fluke natural event”.

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The problem is, there is no kind of argument other than that which can begin to crack open a prior philosophical commitment. Ask yourself honestly --what would you accept as evidence, much less proof?

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I only have philosophical commitments to properly using reason, and basing my beliefs on evidence.

Ask yourself honestly --what would you accept as evidence, much less proof?

Evidence or proof of what, specifically?

Wrong thread. :slight_smile:

So I think you are right @swamidass. It seems Dr. Tour is simply making a case that scientists just don’t know at all how these things work and shouldn’t be making claims that give people the impression that they do. But in doing so I would argue that even though it’s not his intention, he’s making a pretty good case that the evidence strongly suggests that any natural cause for OOL is highly improbable.

And going by the standard practice in reasoning of following the evidence where it leads, based on what Dr. Tour has stated regarding current scientific evidence, until further investigation can provide significant evidence to the contrary, I would argue that it would be perfectly justified to conclude that no presently known natural causes are sufficient to account for OOL, and therefore it’s justified to explore metaphysical explanations and if they can be shown to be plausible explanations, make claims based on how well they explain the evidence. That’s how I understand the reasoning process works.

And I don’t see any justifiable reason why reasoning shouldn’t work just the same inside or out of science. To say that there has to be a natural explanation for everything, which I think is the underlying assumption in methodological naturalism, is just a way for naturalists to a priori exclude metaphysical explanations without any real justification.

That’s not to say other experts cannot disagree with Tour. More often than not, if I’m not mistaken, there is disagreement among experts. And if someone is of the opinion that a convincing case to the contrary has been made based on current evidence, they are justified in coming to a different conclusion, as long as they can show it’s warranted.

But that doesn’t preclude someone who is convinced by what Dr. Tour’s has presented, and not persuaded by the arguments against it, from being justified in making a warranted conclusion based on the evidence in that presentation. And I don’t think that should be viewed as unreasonable by someone just because it’s not the conclusion that they prefer, unless of course it’s pretty obvious and can be demonstrated by standard reasoning that the conclusion is unwarranted.

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Science does not work the way we expect. That should settle it. Just make your case outside of science, and let science be what it is. What is the problem with this?

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Care to elaborate?

Highly improbable is something easily overcome in our universe. I think that is worth remembering. We need to remember the scale of the problem, both at the macroscopic and microscopic scale.

At the large scale, we shouldn’t assume that Earth is the only place where life could emerge. If there are just 100 planets in each galaxy where specific types of chemistry can occur we are still talking about 10 trillion planets across the universe. We should also keep in mind the long time periods and the vast volumes of water where these chemical reactions can take place.

At the microscopic scale, or rather the molecular, we have to keep in mind how numerous the reactions are. 1 milligram of DNA 1,000 base pairs long contains about 975,000,000,000,000 individual molecules. That’s just 1 mg.

When I see vague claims about the improbability of this or that, it usually sets off my bovine excrement detector. Hopefully these handful of facts can help people understand why.

Just because scientists are searching for a natural explanation it does not stop others from finding a non-scientific explanation. The problem is that some people don’t find the non-scientific explanations to be that satisfactory, and they don’t have the best track record through history. We have example after example of supernatural explanations being replaced by natural explanations, but I don’t know of any verified and evidenced supernatural explanations replacing natural explanations.

Each person can decide for themselves what is convincing and what beliefs are justified. The difficult part is convincing others.

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