As I read it, Genesis 1 is consistent with both natural abiogenesis and with panspermia. And Genesis 2 is consistent with natural abiogenesis.
Back when I was a Christian – around age 11-23 – I held a similar view on the origin of life to the one that I now hold. I did not much care for the magic poofing possibility, as that seemed an ugly way of doing it.
What is it with the ID people. They spend lots of time making a case that the world is fine tuned for life. And then then spend lots of time attempting to make the case that it isn’t fine tuned enough for natural abiogenesis. Do they not see the apparent inconsistency?
Minds don’t create concrete things, they create ideas. It is humans, mind and body together, who create actual complex things.
So in addition to a mind capable of creating complex ideas at a time before life existed you also need a body that is capable of implementing these ideas. Where did that body come from?
The trouble with this top-down approach to explaining life is that you are inevitably going to hit the barrier of an infinite regress. You need a complex entity to explain the existence of complex entities.
On the other hand, the bottom-up approach of incremental steps of increasing complexity both in organisation and in implementation does not suffer from that problem. All it needs is a way to overcome the odds. Trial and error is a plausible mechanism for that, although I am well aware that we don’t (yet) understand the actual pathways.
This is your assertion, but mainstream science has much explored these topics. There is a well established path for the development of vision and flight, both for phenotype and genotype, and it mischaracterizes the level of detail which has emerged to broadly dismiss it as speculative.
Exactly right. Atheism entails having faith in the actual existence of these pathways. For me the odds are too long for this to be realistic. An eternal intelligent Agent seems a much more parsimonious explanation.
Once agreement that and intelligent Agent should be considered then science needs to parse out what was directly caused by the IA( Intelligent Agent) and was was caused by forces the IA created.
Notice that this expresses an aesthetic and/or metaphysical preference, rather than any argument against the possibility of “poofing.” (Not that I am defending “poofing”; I’m merely pointing out the character of your objection.)
You’re not making distinctions among ID proponents. Meyer would agree that fine-tuning alone can’t explain the origin of life, but Denton would not. ID as such takes no position on the question. To be sure, the majority of ID proponents side with Meyer rather than Denton, but the point is that there is a range of views.
Hi Neil
The issue is where the starting points are. Where does creation end and natural change start. It appears to me the starting points are living animal populations. Without the fine tuning of our universe and solar system the living and reproducing populations are not sustainable.
That would be true for the ‘hard’ form of atheism. Many people who call themselves atheists aren’t that extreme.
It is more that if we want to make any progress in answering the question we have litte choice but to employ scientific research. If we were lo leave it to theologians we wouldn’t get anywhere in a hurry - they have had thousands of years yet still disagree about pretty much everything (I include scholars of non-Judeo-Christian religions here). Worse, there doesn’t seem to be a working methodology to settle the issue because testing God is verboten. So either we throw up our hands and say ‘we will never know’, or we throw the science at it. What would you do?
Fine tuning is not restricted to just providence. It includes the nucleosynthesis and properties of carbon which would have played a necessary role in allowing any instance of abiogenesis.
That’s because, if you think about it, design is actually an implementation of evolution. When you try to imagine designing something by reason, what is it that really occurs in your head? Suppose you are to build a load-bearing structure of some sort. What thoughts do you have? Well you sort of imagine how different structures behave when subject to the imagined forces they have to withstand. You think about where to put one thing in relation to another thing so as to support and strengthen each other, because you have a sort of intuitive simulation running about how that structure would behave under those conditions. In your head, you are “testing” the structure in the environment given your intuitive understanding of the laws of physics.
You are literally designing by implementing evolution in your head. Your knowledge of the behavior of physics and building materials comes from previous learning and copying. It was learned by trial and error, and/or was copied from someone else. That was inheritance. And now you implement the inherited information in a simulated environment in your head to see if you can intuit the performance of the structure. You’re evolving the design in your head. The “knowing” how something behaves under physics is really just memory. Inheritance. The faithful copying and passing on of previous successful experiences.
Then at some point your simulated design has to come into contact with the real world, and then another round of iterative trial and error has to occur, to see where the physics of the real world deviate from your simulated reality.
The false contrast between intelligent design and evolution is one of life’s great ironies.
Oh and when it comes to “minds” being able to solve things like “search problems” or overcome other such “probabilistic barriers”, it’s still only through trial and error. An evolution-like process of learning. A mind can’t just “know” where to find a workable solution in a large space of nonfunctional structures, otherwise “minds” could be used to solve things like directly guessing correctly long complex passwords. But no amount of intelligence is going to make you able to just know what a password to something is. You have to either have inherited information about what is likely to be among good candidate passwords before(obtained knowledge from prior research and studies of often used passwords), or do blind, brute-force sampling among trillions and trillions of password before you happen to guess the correct one by chance.
This whole “mind” bs Bill is on about is a total fantasy that has no connection to reality, or our knowledge of how “minds” actually work. Minds aren’t supernatural, they’re just another material and physical process contingent on history and local circumstances. Notice how all the things you can do you had to learn first (the copying of information gained from previous generations of trial and error), and we have entire institutions called schools with people employed to copy and paste information into your brain. You have to learn either by memorization(inheritance, reproduction of information, essentially “common descent”), or by trial and error.
The whole intelligent design thing is a fable, and a false dichotomy. Evolution is, at bottom, the only intelligent designer that exists.
Parsimonous? There is nothing in our shared experience that suggests such a thing is possible, let alone exists. It is impossible to distinguish this from a private fantasy.
I do not however think the holds up at the molecular level beginning with DNA sequences that create unique plants and animals from bacteria to humans. These sequences exist in nature but their origin is not well understood and requires faith to believe their origin was a product of nature.
