Some good news. Brian Miller from DI is going to join us tonight on this thread. I also @herman joins in, as the “thermodynamic argument against the origin of life” is closely related to The Semiotic Argument Against Naturalism.
There is quite a bit of technical information here, and also some substantial disagreement. It will take a few days before I will be willing to weigh in strongly, as I want to do the background reading first. It is well known that I am not an ID proponent, for example, and have a tumultuous relationship with the DI.
With that in mind, before we get into our disagreements, I wanted to request we spend sometime delineating what our common ground actually is before jumping into a technical details. That will give people time to catch up with what actually is being debated here. The fact of the matter is that we do appear to agree in on a lot.
Common Ground
With that in mind, let me kick that off. I think we do have common ground in agreeing on before we start.
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No credible mechanism has been put forward for the origin of life yet. Appealing to evolution misses the point, because we need to have a replicable unit first before any sort of natural selection based process can kick in.
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Anyone who argues that the Origin of Life is a solved problem is uninformed or agenda driven. We, fundamentally, have not established how the first life arose in science. There are interesting theories, but nothing connects all the critical dots from non-life to life in a satisfactory way. Of course there is sensationalized press, and a mythology regarding the Urey-Miller experiments (and other cases), but anyone reading the science would have to agree we are facing an unsolved problem.
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This may ultimately be unsolvable for a whole host of reasons. Perhaps there is no natural mechanism available, or perhaps we just do not have enough information and observation time to understand the mechanisms there. Either way, we would not be able to solve this problem.
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A natural mechanism for the origin of life does not somehow constitute a proof against God or against creation in any meaningful sense. For example, the recent novel Origins is not just science fiction, it is also religious fiction, when it claims that demonstrating a process for the origin of life would end religion.
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This has very little to do with evolutionary science in biology. Evolution is about how biological systems evolve from other biological systems.
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Outside science (not wearing our scientific hats), it is entirely reasonable (even if disputed) to draw an inference to design. This is especially true if we are Christians, already affirm God exists and created us all. No one should act as if science has unsettled that theological claim.
I think most secular scientists would agree with this too. None of this is particularly controversial. In fact, much of this can be considered the consensus view.
The Disagreement?
I suspect the disagreement (from starting to read this) is going to be about:
- the validity of specific arguments and specific claims and specific analogies/metaphors
- whether this inference to design allowed inside scientific discourse or not
- whether a confrontational or non-confrontational relationship with science is best
- whether we can distinguish “impossible by any process” (known and unknown) from “possible by unknown process.”
I’ll disclose I already see a truckload of #1, think the inference to design here is outside of science #2 (even though it can be warranted), prefer non-confrontation #3, and and think that #4 is not possible.
Still, before we enter the labyrinth, where do you all think we should focus discussion? I doubt we can do all of it without getting lost in the maze. What do you think would be most helpful? Of course, please be sure to articulate what you think our common ground is, and delineate what might be our disagreement. Once we scope this a bit, and some of us catch up on reading, it will be interesting to see how this unfolds.