Doesn’t answer my question at all.
Well, nobody can. However RNA avoids needing to ask which came first; catalyst or template.
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Now we are on the same page. However, I think we can but its nearly impossible to do so in the absence of any historical data or realtime experiments to generate some level of plausibility for any other type of polymer.
On point.
How did a discussion of “Why Atheists Need Faith” turn into a long and detailed debate over the validity of the RNA world hypothesis?
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This seems a fruitless discussion to me because there’s no universally agreed upon definition of life, and even if there was it would still be an arbitrary decision of where to put the line between life and non-life.
In any case, if RNA came before cells you might even go the other way around and insist that also isn’t life until it’s inside a cell and powered by some sort of metabolism.
The questions about life’s origins can be subdivided into multiple questions that get us closer to a complete answer:
When did bilayer lipid membranes arise?
When did genetic polymers arise, and what was the first one(RNA, PNA, DNA, something else)?
When did coded protein biosynthesis arise, and was there uncoded synthesis before this?
When did metabolism arise?
When did truly Darwinian evolution begin?
No matter how you chronologically order each of these in some series of events culminating in something like a prokaryotic cell, until you’ve reached that point someone could argue it still doesn’t count as life.
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I think that where threads are concerned, some moderators are, just as with phylogeny, “lumpers” while others are “splitters.” Or, to turn instead to physics, it may not be the moderator but the subject: some subjects are unstable, and all you need to do is fire one neutron at the nucleus and the whole thing comes apart.
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That’s an odd place to say ‘if’.
You might indeed, and that life would still be RNA-based, which was my only point.
I agree with your assessment that panspermia does kick the can down the road so to speak.
Is it true that the universe itself can’t be a brute fact because it is composite? If it had a beginning and therefore an end and it is ruled by of cause-and-effect. Even if a black hole in another dimension or universe created this universe through a white hole or a big bang the question still remains, where did all of other universe(s) or Dimension(s) come from? Causality still exists.
Is it true that laws of physics cannot be a brute fact due for the reason that the laws of physics break down at the event horizon of a black hole?
I think you’re right in your assessment about the difference between naturalists materialists and atheists vs theists and the way they see what is primary and independent vs secondary and dependent. I like your analogy of the top down approach or from the bottom up.
For most theists it would be essence before existence, mind(consciousness) before the physical brain, soul before flesh or energy before matter, and of course one before all other numbers.
Well I think discussions evolve 
I don’t think anyone of us currently discussing this has really disputed the existence of the RNA world however. What is being discussed is how far back it goes compared to other attributes of life as we know it, such as metabolism and cellularity. These are still, largely, open questions.
I don’t think so. While we have very good evidence there was an RNA world, we have no good evidence of the geochemical or biological context in which that RNA world arose. We don’t have any evidence that suggests whether it happened in the context of a fatty acid/lipid bilayer membrane vesicle, or even before this.
Vesicles certainly may predate RNA. Possibly even protocells, by some definitions. But I struggle to think what structure(s) you are imagining that could reasonably be described as ‘cells’ that wouldn’t be either be alive or at least the product of life. And I believe you agree that RNA certainly predates life, so…
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I think discussions are created, and evolve only to a limited extent.
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Here’s the question that has not been raised:
Why is it that theists have some need to believe that atheism requires faith?
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Agreed, this does seem to be a very real (but strange) obsession with many Christians.
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That is a weird one. Of course, some of them just aren’t thinking very carefully and have assumed that most atheists are making some sort of claim about the existence of gods, rather than finding the arguments for the existence of the gods inadequate.
But for those who have had the time and the available neurons to think that through but pull this “faith” thing all the time, what’s up? At the most basic level it’s obviously just the use of false equivalence, adopted as a rhetorical strategy when they find themselves unable to credibly defend their views and feel they can make up for lost ground by saying, well, y’know, EVERYBODY’s views are based on unprovable postulates. You say your dog exists and has four legs? Unprovable! Nobody can know that we do not live in The Matrix and that your dog is not just a formula in the vast computer that runs our simulated world! Aha! See?
The silly thing is, of course, that these amateur philosophers haven’t realized that once you come up with a universal solvent, you can’t bottle it, because the bottle itself will dissolve. All you can do is watch it dissolve all of reality. So, yes, it’s true that nobody can prove my dog exists (least of all me, as I haven’t got a dog), but while this poses an interesting philosophical puzzle it really does nothing to help the other fellow, who is now left simply admitting that nobody can prove that his god exists.
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Well here I think we have to decide on what we mean by a cell, and this is where quibbling about definitions gets us. I suppose we could call a protocell a sort of cell, while not thinking it is alive, but is a step on the pathway to life. Again, all depends on what exactly we mean by a cell, and by life. I don’t want to press that question further as we appear to agree on my main point about the unknowns in the relative chronologies of RNA and some sort of (proto)cellularity.
Ah, the possibilities.
Naturwissenschaften volume 60 , pages 425–427 (1973)
Synthesis of Oligonucleotides by Proteinoid Microspheres Acting on ATP
John R. Jungck and Sidney W. Fox
Departments of Biology and Chemistry and Institute for Molecular and Cellular Evolution, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida, U. S. A.
Interaction of a solution of ATP with a suspension of microparticles of basic and acidic thermal proteinoids produces the dinucleotide and trinucleotide of adenine. The basic proteinoid in solution alone promotes the production of dinucleotide. The results with the particles provide a model for the origin of cellular Synthesis of polynucleotide. In association with other concepts the results strengthen the concept of cells prior to contemporary nucleic acid and protein.
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Yes. I can only speak for myself and the YEC community I was raised in, but I can see a lot of the same hallmarks in people involved with the big creationist organizations.
I used this approach far more for my own benefit than for that of my interlocutor’s. It was always uncomfortable for me that there was so much evidence and research backing up the evolutionist position, and I felt my creationist counters were often comparatively weak. So telling myself that atheists (I conflated atheism with evolution) had no better standing than I helped me feel better about the positions I held.
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Yes, I think this is exactly right.