I think Rum uncovered an error is his argument strategy that I haven’t seen you and Mike Behe make and that is putting yourself in a position to have to prove a negative.
If Tour had simply said the natural origin of life is an exceedingly difficult problem he would be on solid ground.
Yep. I would agree with that. The problem is, you are correct to point out, that Tour seems to be saying that we have now accumulated so much knowledge that we can prove a negative, or close enough. I point out that we are nowhere near this, and that the few chemical factoids that Tour uses to build his arguments, simply does not suffice to entail, or strongly imply that conclusion.
freescience.today is one more propaganda website run by the Discovery Institute. The bullshit they publish on how IDers are so oppressed has as much validity as Philip Morris Tobacco whining cigarettes are harmless and don’t increase health risks.
Ev Biol Argument from past experience: Science has been very successful, so it is currently our best tool for attempting to answer the question. Those who believe in ID/Creationism are free to do their own research using their preferred method.
Can we please take a step back to discussion of fallacies, and deconstruction of statements to reveal what fallacies are being demonstrated? That would be much more useful that arguing over who knows what…
Mung is seeking to imply that it should be easy to just evolve the pathway for ribose synthesis, given how widespread it is in current biology. Not because Mung actually believes it is easy. He is in some sense attempting a reductio ad absurdum argument, or an inductive “proof by contradiction”.
If I were to really try parse out what I think Mung is insinuating it would be more along these lines:
If ribose biosynthesis evolved, then it should be easy because ribose is all over the place. Given that scientists haven’t evolved the pathway for ribose biosynthesis, this should serve to convince us that ribose biosynthesis evolving isn’t easy, and therefore it probably didn’t evolve.
That’s what I take Mung to be insinuating. It’s in Mung’s typical style of argumentation to do these things.
So I undermine what seems to be the premise in Mung’s argument, namely the widespread nature of ribose in biology as an indication of the “ease” of it’s evolution. I ask whether ribose’s ubiquity is a result of evolution, rather than an indication for how easy it is to evolve?
We are on solid ground with two different, and currently paradoxical, kinds of observations, from which very different conclusions seem reasonable, if not entirely indicated.
The more we study the cell and its role in life, the more we are confonted with astounding complexity, and the more we come to understand what have to account for, in the first place, within a developmental matrix, and
the more we study what natural processes can do, and the more we gain control over the variables which present themselves inconveniently in nature, by doing lab experiments whose strictures may or may not apply to anything in the actual history of nature, no matter how seemingly unlikely they seem to be, the more we seem to inch closer to an understanding how life got to those levels of current complexity.
Our knowledge is very far from complete, and there’s plenty of room for folks with different metaphysical orientations, without being confused about who is doing honest science.
Science has not, by any means, demonstrated the lack of any need for God in investigating and elucidating abiogenesis, nor within natural history itself, in a universe which admittedly exhibits signs of fine-tuning, nor has science refuted teleological purpose in nature, nor have scientists who are commited to theism (or Christianity) demonstrated clearly a definitive proof of God from nature alone.
There is room for academic freedom here, and the strengths and weaknesses of both paradoxical views can be fairly evaluated. Even to the degree where either side seems justified in claiming an irrational metaphysical precommitment to those who don’t see the creative potential they do in the various explanations offered.
Only better science, and/or better theology, can take us “further up and higher in.”
My two cents.
All I was arguing was that @Mungsaid it was a product of evolution, and that is what you said too, and lightheartedly noting the irony. I was not arguing about the insinuation.
Your “Do you get it now?” is merely an attempt at an insult. I could ask the same of you.