That’s normal. Creationists try to argue against common descent, fail miserably, and switch to arguing against abiogenesis. They fail miserably at that too, but it’s less obvious.
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Thanks, but I’m a 30-yer veteran of ev/cr, not of the armed forces.
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The same could be said then of eukaryotic evolution which may not be of the same magnitude as the origin of life, but I can’t say in good conscience “it happened naturally” as in “it happened according to normative chemical and physical mechanisms.”
But, while we’re on the topic of normative. We teach in standard physics and engineering and chemistry the behavior of monoatomic gases in a box. Though it is statistically possible that all the gas atoms could briefly and spontaneously congregate to the left half of the box, we don’t teach it as a practical reality. That is standard statistical mechanics for typical monoatomic gases.
Events that take far longer and require much more resources to get an observation of a statistically improbable event aren’t treated as textbook science.
“So, we don’t know from theology or from science the answer.” The same then might be said of eukaryotic evolution.
So does that mean you’re open to the possibility of a miracle of God as the origin of life. If I’m reading your correctly, you believe Jesus rising from the dead was a miracle of God, the creation of matter ex-nihilo in the feeding of the 5000, and the healing of the blind man. It seems by way of extension, if “we don’t know” is a possible answer, it’s not wrong to suspect or even believe a miracle was in play. If one can believe that Jesus rose from the dead by and act of God, I don’t think it’s outrageous to believe that God is the Creator of Life through a miraculous act in light of the considerations laid out – miracle as in instantaneous assembly and transformation like Jesus turning water into wine.
NO ONE today believes abiogenesis occurred by ordinary chemical mechanisms
Well, I appreciate you saying that!
PS
I will extend greetings from you to your friend John Sanford when I see him in a week or so.
But wouldn’t it depend significantly on how many times the coins were “randomized” by shaking? If it was just once, I’d be shocked to get all 500 heads. But if you told me you had shaken it 100,000 times and stopped when you got all heads I would say “sure, maybe”. Some (in fact most, when you think about it) chemical reactions are incredibly unlikely to happen, yet they do happen. The reason is that we work with very large numbers of molecules at a time and they have a very large number of collisions even over short time scales. So even very unlikely reactions (including ones that “violate” laws), can occur.
When I think about the enormous timescales involved with the history of the Earth, it seems reasonable that even the most unlikely of chemical “chance” happenings may have occurred a time or two. On these time scales “it doesn’t seem likely” is virtually meaningless, it seems to me.
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Please do! Ask him what he thinks of the GAE. I asked him for an endorsement.
I will respond to the rest later.
What do you mean by “Life” here? If you refer to a first cell from which all other life-forms descend, that’s a wholly different question from creation of thousands or millions of “kinds”. Which are you arguing for? There’s certainly much evidence against the latter, and a dearth of conceivable evidence for or against the former.
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I have yet to see evidence that life would require the specific repair mechanisms that it has, or any repair mechanism.
You would need to show how this is analogous to biological systems.
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The “500 coins all heads by chance” is one of the dumber Creationist arguments simply because it does not model actual evolutionary processes even a little. There is no feedback affecting the outcome as there is in biological life. No one in science says or thinks extant proteins had to self assemble all at once by chance. Rather they are the result of a long term iterative process involving selection feedback.
If a Creationist wanted a good coin analogy start with 500 coins randomly lying on a metal table next to a train track. Every time the train goes by all 500 coins are given a force to “flip”. Now add a bit of natural selection to the coins: the “tails” side is slightly magnetic so a coin lying heads up / tails down will end lying heads up 75% of the time. Now let the train come by and “flip” the coins - as more “flips” are done the probability of ending up with all head will approach 1.0 = certainty.
The sad truth is Creationists using the dumb “500 coins” argument aren’t interested in getting the analogy right. Their point is to gull ignorant layman, not actually demonstrate evolution is too improbable to happen.
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You are making the assumption that there is only one combination of coins that will work. This isn’t the case for biology. There are many combinations of amino acids and nucleotides that can increase fitness, not just one. To use a poker analogy, you are trying to claim that you need a Royal Flush to win a hand, but for most games you only need a pair.
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Not only that but natural selection makes the game more like draw poker where you can keep and accumulate good cards while discarding weaker ones. With enough discards and redraws you can get a royal straight flush virtually every time. Sal is claiming the royal straight flush must be dealt all at once with just 5 cards.
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Naturally occurring oxidative DNA damages arise at least 10,000 times per cell per day in humans and 50,000 times or more per cell per day in rats, as documented below. Oxidative DNA damage can produce more than 20 types of altered bases as well as single strand breaks.
The evidence is very strong that mutation would be critically high without repair due to the environment. This is what we saw when the repair mechanism broke in the Lenski experiment.
You don’t understand the assumptions he is making. Why don’t you ask him first?
He is not T. This is a discussion of homochirality.
Bill he flat out said 500 fair coins 100% heads. That’s only one combination. Can you count to one?
I suggest you back off and read the comments until you understand the homochiral problem OOL faces.
The real issue is not 2^-500 but more like 2^-120000 just for starters assuming 400 300 AA proteins for minimum life.
T doesn’t understand the argument. Thats all I am going to say at this point. Sal is not assuming he is observing the chirality of AA’s in living organisms vs the AA’s in nature.
LOL! Says the guy who didn’t bother even reading the quote he was bellyaching about. 
I have to say your knee-jerk defenses of anything even remotely connected to your Creationist beliefs can be damn funny sometimes. 
It would be no less likely than any other combination that came up on a single toss of all 500 at once. So why should “design” only apply if they all come up heads? Think carefully about this. It is a very crucial and pervasive error made by ID Creationists all the time.
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It would be no less likely than any other permutation. There’s a big difference between permutation and combination. There are 500! / (250!)(250!) => (~10150) combinations for tossing exactly 250 heads with 500 coins, for example.
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