I have faith that this misunderstanding of atheists will continue in the aforementioned “amateur philosopher” community for a very long time.
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Despite substantial differences on some other points of faith, you and I are in total agreement upon this statement of faith.
It’s sad, in a way, that half the time when people ask about atheism or agnosticism it dissolves into a discussion about definitions, but that discussion is often necessary simply because people often do not understand what others are saying. So very, very often the atheist is careful to say that he does not so much deny a god as affirm that he’s yet to see something that drives him to accept one, and very, very often, this is misunderstood. The mental habit of reservation of judgment can be hard for people to develop, and for those who haven’t developed it, hard to understand.
May I ask: what is it that shook you loose on this? Do you think it was the drip-drip-drip of evidence playing on your reason, or what? I know that for myself, extreme relativist notions (“everybody is just repeating what his worldview tells him, and all facts are only points of view”) never seemed tremendously convincing, as one had to admit that if the real world exists at all, SOME expressions about it must, if not true, be at least somewhat truer than others. And once one admits that, the answer “your views are just based on faith, too” no longer seems satisfactory. You’ve got to do the next step, which is to ask which postulates about the world, even if they are only postulates, seem to lie at the base of reliable insights. So I could imagine someone in your position just being pushed by the evidence for evolution, but I could also imagine it being more of a philosophical shift.
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I think a “brute fact” is simply describing something that we do not understand the origin of. It is by definition just the starting point of scientific discovery.
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→ Of course that fact cannot be believed without supporting evidence. It cannot be accepted without extrapolation. And then further extrapolation is where the beauty of science emerges.
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Yes, it was a slow shift with lots of factors involved, but primarily having my social group expanded beyond my YEC community mixed with less time spent in that community, and then exposure to the evidence.
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I don’t quite understand why research in protenoids was abandoned. Whatever I can find about those reasons seem fundamentally misguided non-sequiturs.
My opinion is that the field moved on, especially since (outside of the very obscure reference I give above) there was no connection with the RNA World, or to other aspects of origin-of-life research mentioned on this board (and many, many other places). But I believe there is still much to be mined from these old reports.
Another curious observation from the 80’s:
Suppose that the activity reported by Jungck and Fox had a similar capability as T7 RNA polymerase. The possibilities are fascinating (to say the least).
A brute fact bashes you with logic and steals your misconceptions. 
That’s what Caesar said.
(“Et tu, Brute?”)
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