Are you aware of any type of investigation he put forth to come to his conclusion other than, it’s never been done before?
No, I’m pointing out that you aren’t bothering with examining any evidence.
To start off with, obviously there is no direct empirical evidence, as the supernatural, by definition is inaccessible to direct empirical investigation. For indirect empirical evidence that can be used to infer the existence of a supernatural cause let me list some off the top of my head:
The existence of time, space, matter and energy itself.
Life.
DNA.
Complexity of the cell.
Complexity of nature.
Constants and quantities of nature.
That the physical world is intelligible.
That the features of design are present in all biological structures.
Human beings.
Human physiology.
The human brain.
The earth.
The solar system.
The immensity of the universe.
Light.
Energy.
I think that should suffice for now. So basically, the argument is that based on these empirical evidences it can be inferred that a supernatural explanation would be a competing plausible explanation for the origin of these phenomena. That would be an abductive argument based on indirect empirical evidence. Now please correct me if I’m wrong, but that seems to me to be a valid argument based on reason and empirical evidence.
I’m not so sure. With things we have experience with we can base our judgments on those experiences. We don’t have any experience with OoL to base our conclusions on. All we have is related scientific knowledge to base our conclusions on. Anything more than that is pretty much speculation.
I’m not sure I follow you. If I’m going by what I understand are problems that arise do to “scientific evidence,” how am I not examining any evidence?
How would this apply to God creating life?
Why do those infer a supernatural cause as opposed to a natural cause we don’t fully understand yet?
Your personal incredulity does not constitute empirical evidence, indirect or otherwise.
I’m curious as to how you or anyone can conclude that they can define exactly what supernatural entities could be acting and by what mechanisms such supernatural entities can act with cells or anything in the physical world.
I’m saying that we have no conceivable way to test any hypothesis regarding the specific interactions of specific supernatural entities. For most things, we’ve collectively come to a greater understanding of the natural world and medicine by assuming that such beings don’t tinker with atoms or cells.
You’re not looking at the evidence. You’re basing your position on hearsay.
As I understand it, there can be multiple competing explanations. What happens is they are all examined to see which is the simplest and has the best explanitory scope, and power. I could be wrong, but you don’t seem to understand how abductive reasoning works.
POOF! MAGIC! is so vague it has no explanatory scope or power. It explains nothing since there is literally nothing which it couldn’t incorporate. You claimed to have scientific evidence which you obviously don’t.
There’s a difference between defined in any way, and defined exactly. It’s a little hard to know how to answer if you change the original question. I think it’s not too difficult using logic to come up with some defining properties of what a supernatural cause would need to possess. To know exactly would be a different proposition.
OK. I have no problem with that. But I’ve never intentionally implied that that was not the case. But I’ve lost the original train of thought from which these comments originated so you’ll have to forgive me and either get me back on track, or maybe this is a good place to stop?
Not in this case. Tour made some pretty good points about how chemistry works that would be quite monumental obstructions for known natural causes to account for OoL. If anyone has refuted them I’m not aware of it.
I’ve watched the whole Tour presentation once, but could you maybe specifically enumerate the “pretty good points”. I’m not a biochemist, but I would like to look at these in more depth.
P.S. I’m not doing this with the intention of refuting them. I don’t care either way, I just want to understand the issues more.
Sorry, but I won’t be engaging you any further until you explain to me in a civil and understandable fashion why my position is invalid. Thanks.
It’s not invalid per se for you to believe in magic. It’s just not supported by even a tiny bit of scientific evidence either direct or indirect.
Here’s a rough breakdown of the main points.
14:15 - 21:27 synthesis problem
27:00 Enzymes or complex DNA synthesizers not existing to hook up nucleotides
19:50 mass transfer problem-killer
28:24 Homogeneity not a protocell – the assembly problem
29:43 - 33:56 Complex cellular membrane
33:58 – 36:43 Interactomes
Proto-turkeys? 36:44 –
Origin of Information 37:26 - Nucleic Acids hooked together
I’m no chemist either, but if what he says is factual, which I’m assuming since this is what he does all the time that it is, there are several problems that would arise in a prebiotic situation that would make for pretty insurmountable circumstances for life to arise. One that stood out to me was the fact that there wouldn’t be any enzymes or DNA synthesizers for amino acids to hook up into proteins. Since both are made of protein it’s kind of hard to see how it would work.
Yes, you’re admitting to it.
What Tour says is not evidence. It’s hearsay.
How convenient for you! Have you looked at any OoL research papers yet?
It’s invalid and pseudoscientific because it is based on hearsay, not evidence.
It makes perfect sense and it’s perfectly clear what you are doing.
You have no scientific evidence of supernatural entities meddling in the physical world, and are stalling and goal-post shifting rather than admit it.