The replies have become somewhat muddled. 
Having established that God cannot exclude God. There is no reason why God (or the belief in God) should exclude the possibility of a scientific understanding of abiogenesis.
Of course, I did not say that vitalism is confined to living things, so I want to emphasize that. I focused on the relevance of vitalism to living things because that was the topic I was addressing.
Good; we have both now clarified our intentions. Doesn’t seem muddled to me… but, I’ve been wrong before.
Agreed, generally, but to quote Jay Richards, “not even God can create a non God-governed process.” : )
Who died and made Jay Richards God? '-)
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I hope all is well in this thread that I have unable to participate in. I just had one comment. @Guy_Coe, didn’t most people during Jesus’s time believe in spontaneous generation? Why would we think that abiogenesis is the Judeao-Christian assertion?
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Okay… before this turns into a giant game of “telephone,” here’s what I said:
“To deny that abiogenesis occurred absent God’s purposeful and intentional activity IS THE Judaeo-Christian assertion. That’s the one vital “ingredient” you can’t leave out. I do not deny evolution’s action, only its sufficiency. The evidence clearly shows that, as well as the text of the Bible.
Some Christians use the phrase “God-guided evolution” to account for that aspect; others, like me, speak of the combined activity of God “creating” AND evolution merely operating afterwards, since while I see some adaptive changes within the ken of evolutionary processes, I do not see true innovation arising from them.”
Life did not arise spontaneously; it was created by God. This is what the Bible clearly states. Do you want verses? Maybe take a look at the section from Paul I cited above, from Acts 17, e.g. And, of course, Genesis chapter one.
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But that doesn’t make sense, because abiogenesis and evolution aren’t the same thing.
It also doesn’t make sense because you repeatedly talk about the evidence but never AFAIK cite any evidence.
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Plainly false. We don’t have much evidence of how the flagellum DID evolve (as much of that evidence has, as John T_aquaticus says, been erased by time), but we do have lots of evidence that a flagellum COULD evolve. These two types of evidence (evidence of HOW it did, and evidence that it COULD) are not the same thing.
The evidence that the flagellum COULD evolve is simply the observation that the flagellum is made of proteins, and proteins can evolve for example by gene duplications, just to pick one mechanism. Furthermore there is evidence that exaptation and cooption of disparate genetic elements (such as different protein coding genes involved in totally separate organismal functions) can be coopted in a way that brings them into functional association, or direct contact and binding.
As these are chiefly the kinds of mechanisms by which the flagellum would have evolved, we have all the evidence that is needed to show that it could. There is no in principle barrier to the flagellum’s gradual evolution by a combination of gene duplications and exaptations.
Again look at the analogy to plate tectonics. We have very little evidence of how SPECIFICALLY the Mt Everest came to take the particular, size and shape it has with all it’s trillions of microscopic peculiarities, but we have knowledge of the kinds of mechanisms that would in general be capable of producing a mountain like the Mt Everest. So we can explain the Mt Everest in broad strokes by appealing to some general mechanisms like erosion, pressure, continental drift and so on.
In the same way, we can explain the flagellum in broad strokes by appealing to some general mechanisms gene duplications, exaptation, natural selection, genetic drift and so on.
This is how science in general explain events in the deep past. There’s nothing unusual or different from how it is done in geology, or astronomy, or physics, in how evolutionary biology explains extant structures or entities as particular instantiations of mechanisms observed in the present also having operated in the historical past to create the things we see.
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Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. You can’t go from “no evidence of flagellum evolving” to “flagellum didn’t evolve”.
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Absence of evidence can be evidence of absence if you have reason to expect there to be evidence. In that situation, if you have reason to expect the evidence to exist, then not finding that evidence is now itself evidence against the hypothesis.
For example, the hypothesis “an asteroid impacted here a few hundred years ago” naturally implies we should find an impact crater where the hypothesis claims. Looking for that impact crater and not finding it is then evidence against the hypothesis. So that is a situation in which absence of evidence IS evidence of absence.
But evolution does not entail that ancestral states should be preserved indefinitely into the future (after all extinction, and genetic deletions, not to mention the eventual accumulation of substitutoins are observed facts), so the absense of data that is good enough to infer ancestral states cannot constitute evidence that such ancestral states didn’t or couldn’t exist. So the absence of evidence for HOW the flagellum evolved cannot constitute evidence that it DIDN’T or COULDN’T evolve when in fact evolution predicts that over sufficiently long periods of time, such evidence will eventually erode away.
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It still amazes me that people think this way.
I happen to have a lot of experience in the field of infectious diseases, and one of the earliest pioneers in the field was Robert Koch. He came up with these famous postulates:
There have been a few adjustments to these postulates over the years, but the general scientific approach still applies today. Most would agree that germs cause disease.
However, you will notice that none of those postulates require us to determine the origin of germs. We don’t have to come up with experiments and evidence for how the first life arose from non-living matter in order to determine that germs cause disease. And yet, you are claiming that we should have to figure out abiogenesis in order to also accept the Germ Theory of Disease. This is ludicrous.
We don’t have to know ultimate origins in order to determine proximal causes. This is true throughout the sciences. We don’t have to know the origin of the Earth in order to determine how carbonate rocks form. We don’t have to know the origin of the universe in order to figure out how a white dwarf can produce a type Ia supernovae by stripping material from a companion star.
I would strongly suggest that you sit down and think about what you are claiming. It isn’t logical and it isn’t reasonable.
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You seem to think that I am rejecting evolution. I am not. Only the notion that it is sufficient by itself to account for the complexity we see in cellular assembly and function, and in aggregated metazoan body plan instructions, and other things which go beyond these issues.
Then why do you keep bringing up abiogenesis? The evolution of the metazoan body plan would have occurred well after the appearance of the first organisms. How life arose is irrelevant to how metazoans evolved just as much as the Big Bang is irrelevant to how clouds form on Earth.
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How life arose is entirely relevant to the question of the sufficiency or adequacy of a purely naturalistic conception of evolution as the basis for an entire worldview.
How? A purely naturalistic evolutionary pathway can start with an organism that was specially created. Also, evolution is a scientific theory, not a worldview.
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If that is your view, why the pushback against the notion of “singularities” in a previous thread? Do you belive in the “miraculous?” How would one do so without believing in some kind of “god?”
We are talking about the evolution of the metazoan body plan, not singularities. The fact that evolution can not explain how life arose hundreds of millions of years before the evolution of metazoans is not relevant to how metazoans evolved.
The evolution of the metazoan body plan would have started with unicellular eukaryotes that were themselves the product of hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Abiogenesis has no part in this explanation. If you think evolution is an insufficient explanation then you need to explain how the mechanisms of mutation, selection, neutral drift, speciation, and other evolutionary mechanisms could not produce each step in the history of these eukaryotes. You will also need to map out the exact history of adaptations that appeared in these early eukaryotes and explain how evolution could not have produced them.
If your argument is based on incredulity, then that’s fine. However, I think you should understand that such arguments are not that convincing, especially to scientists.
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You do not get to control what we’re talking about, and I must say that you are a rather selective listener. You asked, I answered.
What worldview do you, vis-a-vis the questions which swirl around an adequate explanation for the existence of the complexity which would be inherent in even the simplest theoretical forms of cellular life, for example. Are you “granting” the “special creation” of something?
You don’t appear to be asking a coherent question here, can you rephrase it?
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