Biblical skepticism of the Origin of Life

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By the way, on the sentence highlighted in yellow. This was published in September:


Science progresses. Sooner or later someone acquires the money and equipment to perform the experiment that is capable of correctly reproducing one of these natural environments hypothesized to have been relevant at the origin of life, and then the gap gets a little bit smaller.

The sentence highlighted in purple is just plain wrong. There actually is some evidence that life arose from non-life, which can still be traced in the history of amino acid use in proteins:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature03306

This argument generally takes this form: If the first life arose from inanimate matter, the further we can trace back in time on the tree of life, we should be getting closer to the time when life first arose from inanimate matter. The first organisms would have acquired materials for production of their organic components from those available in the prebiotic environment before they had evolved the capability biosynthesize their own, and thus the composition of their proteomes should largely reflect the availability of their basic constituents. This is what we find.

Life could have been first created like extant life, with the ability to biosynthesize all their own components (such as amino acids), and hence there’s zero reason to expect early life to exhibit an overabundance of the prebiotic distribution of amino acids.
So the results linked above really are some evidence that life arose from non-life.

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Why do you even care that she thinks this? She believes someone who can think without a brain, picked up dust and blew on it and then it became a living human being, that research into the origin of life is occult, and that “Frankenstein is a cautionary tale”. And she believes this simply because it says so in some book. No evidence, no experiments, no way to test or confirm any of it. Book says so, she’s in 100%. Some guy who is a chemist also believes the magic-story, so that’s it, the matter is settled.

Do you really believe someone who is even weakly inclined to agree with such nonsense will feel the slightest pull in the other direction from something as mundane as reason and evidence?

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Why do you even care that she thinks this?

To be honest I don’t really care, but I want her to think deeply about the things she says. She seems to think that problems faced by OoL research are isolated and that other areas of science proceed with little or no vexing puzzles. That’s why I keep restating the protein folding dilemma. By her logic protein folding research would be pathetic and embarrassing, since there isn’t any well-supported paradigm for determining the shape of a protein from its primary sequence, even though researchers have been on it for over 50 years.

And she believes this simply because it says so in some book.

I am a Christian like her, but I gave up on seeing the Bible as being necessarily correct on facts about nature. I see the Bible as one among many ancient books. It got some things right, but is incorrect on other issues.

Do you really believe someone who is even weakly inclined to agree with such nonsense will feel the slightest pull in the other direction from something as mundane as reason and evidence?

That’s highly unlikely for some of them, but for others its somewhat vice versa.

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You’re doing what everything creationist does. Not reading after the abstract or introduction

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I encourage you to keep looking, I don’t see any reason why not…Eventually you will find that God is not irrelevant, probably when you are close to death, that is usually when people cry out to Him.

Say what you want about Dr. Tour. He is an accomplished synthetic chemist and Messianic Jew (and very nice guy). However, his statements about OoL research are purely philosophical…he says that if you create life in a lab, it has not been created in a natural setting, and is therefore not an adequate representation of how life began. He is not the only one that believes this, and this is not his sole position on OoL. There is no mystery here, it is a simple argument…by creating the conditions for life to begin, you have tampered with the natural beginning. Yes, that basically states that it is impossible to create a natural beginning, and there is no argument against.

You cannot claim to be Christian and make this statement. They are in conflict. You are either not Christian, or the bible is infallible. Jesus (the Christ root of Christian) is the Word (which is the bible). If you don’t believe in one, you don’t believe in the other.

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No she’s reading looking for something to disagree with, rather than try to comprehend what is being said and why anyone would say it. To the extend she is even allowing herself to wonder why anyone would write what that book says, she has some band-aid rationalization that “it’s because they’re trying to disprove God”.

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This statement is clearly and obviously false. From a logical standpoint It is entirely possible that God exists, that Jesus really was God, really got himself crucified and resurrected himself, and that the Bible does not correctly describe actual historical events.

There is no necessary relationship between the two. People could have corrupted or even wholesale invented many Biblical stories and that God allowed people to use their free will to do this (and maybe the people who did this went on to be judged for it). And yet some of them could be true, or retain some small smidgeon of truth, like (for example) the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And thus at least that part of “canonical” Christian doctrine is true.

There are innumerable other logical possibilities regarding the relationship between Christianity, God, Jesus, the resurrection, and historical fact and truth. You are presenting an obviously false dichotomy. Either the Bible is 100% true and infallible, or Christianity is false, are simply not the only two options.

I am surprised I have to sit here and explain this as an atheist.

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I encourage you to keep looking, I don’t see any reason why not…Eventually you will find that God is not irrelevant,

We can explains hurricanes, epilepsy, lightning, disease outbreaks without appealing to supernatural causes. That’s what I meant by God being irrelevant to scientific discussions. As a Christian, God is relevant to you, but he is irrelevant to a good number of people on earth and scientific explanations too.

However, his statements about OoL research are purely philosophical…he says that if you create life in a lab, it has not been created in a natural setting, and is therefore not an adequate representation of how life began.

Yes its true that experimental conditions do not fully reflect natural conditions, but they can approach it very closely. For example, antibiotic resistance evolves in bacterial populations outside the laboratory, but we can also replay the same process in the laboratory with near fidelity.

Tumor formation occurs naturally, but we can induce its formation in the lab because we know the processes that lead to it. As I have said before, OoL research aims to identify any such mechanisms or processes that led to the generation of the first life forms, and considering that life originated once, its going to be an exceedingly difficult task.

There is no mystery here, it is a simple argument…by creating the conditions for life to begin, you have tampered with the natural beginning. Yes, that basically states that it is impossible to create a natural beginning, and there is no argument against.

I suggest you take some time to review the nature of scientific experiments and correct your flawed view of it.

You cannot claim to be Christian and make this statement. They are in conflict.

Do some insects have four legs? Does the earth have four corners? Is the moon luminescent? The Bible says yes to all and it is wrong.

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I’m surprised you try too, you obviously don’t understand the bible. I was not speaking about God or the existence of God, I was speaking about the Word of Truth, the Christ that is why someone calls themselves Christian. I understand it clearly and fully.

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That’s not the obstacle here. The obstacle is that I’m simply not joining you in making the totally unwarranted assumption that the Bible is the infallible word of God.

The Bible could claim this about itself, but then I’d have to already assume that the Bible was telling the truth when it says this.

The Bible’s claims can’t be proof for the truth of themselves, that’s textbook circular reasoning. So I can’t join you in making this assumption. We have to respect the basic rules of logical inference, one of which is to avoid blatantly fallacious thinking.

Either you agree with me on this or conversation has become completely meaningless. I will not deign to waste my time producing logical arguments to convince people who don’t care about logic.

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If I see a supernatural deity magically poofing life into being then I will accept it. I could be wrong.

How about you? Would you accept a report of scientists creating life with no evidence of dark forces or the supernatural?

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We are arguing the same point…which is…(1) If you claim to be Christian, then (2) the bible must be infallible.

You are not claiming to be Christian, and therefore don’t believe the bible to be infallible. I’m ok with that.

But, someone who says, “I believe in Christ, but I don’t believe in the Word of God.” is (according to the bible) contradicting themselves because Jesus is the Word.

The bible is clearly not scientifically accurate, that doesn’t mean that it is just “wrong”. It is spiritually accurate and uses imagery and metaphor to explain unseen things. It was also written in a time that science was undeveloped. I like that the Levitical laws addressing animal sacrifice have a lot to do with current food safety standards…

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I’m sorry but it simply does not follow that the Bible must be infallible for someone to be a Christian.
(2) does not follow from (1).

This assumes that the Bible is the Word. That’s just an assumption. Just because the Bible might say this doesn’t make it true. You can assume it is, but that doesn’t make it so.

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Is that entirely true? An infallible Bible isn’t found anywhere in the Nicene Creed.

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I am assuming nothing, read the bible in its entirety as I have and you will understand. Sorry guys, I’m not going to engage any further in an atheist bashing…study the bible if you want to argue your points.

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I am not able to see where in that article it is stated that protocells "need to have everything ‘all at once.’” It’s not even clear what you mean by “everything”. Are you sure you understood the article? Perhaps you could quote the exact passage you are referring to.

TBH, that looks like an excellent article, to my admittedly non-expert eyes. Of course, if @thoughtful is just skimming it to look for excuses to deny science she won’t get as much out of it as she could.

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The bible is clearly not scientifically accurate, that doesn’t mean that it is just “wrong”

If it is not scientifically accurate, then it is wrong. Its that simple. Geocentrism, blending inheritance are scientifically inaccurate concepts or are wrong when scrutinized through the lens of science. Note that I am not arguing the entire bible is wrong, I am arguing its scientifically inaccurate in some places.

It is spiritually accurate and uses imagery and metaphor to explain unseen things. It was also written in a time that science was undeveloped.

This is not in doubt, but we know the ancient had some wrong ideas and thanks to scientific research we know that now. I am totally up for using imagery and metaphorical language in teaching, but you should use facts to do this and not factual errors.

I like that the Levitical laws addressing animal sacrifice have a lot to do with current food safety standards…

Oh I see, so tell me what was unclean about pork?

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If I wrote in a book that everything I wrote was infallible would all my writings suddenly become infallible? If someone states that it is logical for the Bible to be infallible we will point to the obvious flaws in that logic. At the same time, I don’t think any of us have an issue with people believing in an infallible Bible through faith. I think we could also ask how biblical infallibility has been viewed through the history of Christianity.

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I haven’t seen such a report. But I just gave you a report that said sorcery and dark magic were used successfully. If you are keeping score, I guess that makes me ahead when comes to evidence.

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Like I said, you won’t even contemplate the idea that you could be wrong.

You gave me a story.