Abiogenesis and Arguments From Ignorance

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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I’ll try to get to the rest of your comment afterwards, but I’m curious to know which cases of “something highly improbable being easily overcome by the universe” you’re referring to?

The chances of winning the lottery are around 1 in 150 million, and yet people win all of the time.

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I will add to this discussion by noting that, in order to know that the OOL is highly improbable, one must first know the mechanisms that underlie the OOL. If one does not know how life arose, then one simply cannot make any claims as to the improbability of the process or event.

I am pretty sure that Tour hasn’t a clue about anything that has to do with the origins of life, so any insinuations on his part as to the improbability of the event or process are completely out of line.

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Yes, but in a lottery there is a guaranteed winner. That’s nothing like a random unguided process. No one to pull out the winning ticket there.

No, there isn’t. This is why jackpots roll over all of the time. People pick numbers, and then random numbers are drawn. If no one has the right numbers, then no one wins. It is a completely random process.

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Negative

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Oh. Guess that shows how much I gamble. :slight_smile: However, I’m still not clear how this relates to the issue being discussed. I don’t see how human agents winning a lottery because someone drew their number is analogous with a natural process doing something highly improbable.

It seems to me that to be relevant to the claim you made in regards to what I was saying, you would need to show an example in nature where unguided random processes without any agency involved demonstrate “something highly improbable being easily overcome by the universe.” Unless I’ve misunderstood what you meant by that?

The exact surface topology of the Moon at a resolution of one picometer this very instant.

The exact location of every grain of sand on some beach.

Where exactly every drop of rain lands next time it rains in your local area.

And so on ad infinitum.

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Human agents winning the lottery is highly improbable, yet it happens all of the time. That’s how it is analogous.

That’s also rather easy. Each human is born with about 100 substitution mutations, including you. The probability of you having those 100 exact mutations is 6 billion (the number of bases in the human diploid genome) to the 100th power, or about 5 with 947 zeros after it. The chances of you having those exact 100 mutations is extremely improbable, and yet it happened.

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With a natural process just as with a lottery any specific result may have an extremely low probability but the probability of some result is virtually 1.0. Most anti-evolution “it’s too improbable!!” arguments fail for that reason.

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OK. Maybe I’m using the wrong terminology here. You’ll have to forgive me as I’m just a layperson. Maybe what I should be saying instead of improbable is implausible. In light of that how would you respond?

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I would ask for evidence that it is implausible. From what I have read in the field of abiogenesis, we simply don’t know enough to determine if abiogenesis is implausible or not. Tour also doesn’t convince me because he dismisses possibilities with a wave of the hand, only to arrive at a conclusion he already held. We also have to ask how plausible it is that a supernatural deity created life. How do we approach that question?

It seems to me that’s saying the same thing. What is it that makes something implausible? That it is unlikely. What makes something plausible? That it is likely. How else is one to understand or make sense of plausibility?

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Tour is basically saying that because he doesn’t find current proposals likely (which he supports with some very poor arguments most of which assume things he has no way of knowing whether are true), then no other option is likely to exist at all(which isn’t even weakly implied), and therefore… wink wink

I continue to be astonished that people come away from reading his essays or hearing his talks unable to see through these obvious fallacies in his reasoning.

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Not maybe, definitely.

Yet you claim to understand biology better than experts in biology. Why is that?

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