Sunday, February 23, 2020

"God in the gaps" - Favorite Atheist Dodges For $10 - What is it you can be sure will come up in your hate mail after you write about this.

"With our proposal for RNA world evolution at acidic pH [5], we have suggested that the primordial ‘soup’ may have been more like vinaigrette, while Hanczyc has drawn a comparison with mayonnaise."

Here is a review comment  by the eminent (or so I gather) biologist Eugene Koonin to a paper he reviewed by Harold Bernhardt entitled The RNA world hypothesis: The worst theory of the early evolution of life (except for all the others)

Referee 1: Eugene Koonin
I basically agree with Bernhardt. The RNA World scenario is bad as a scientific hypothesis: it is hardly falsifiable and is extremely difficult to verify due to a great number of holes in the most important parts. To wit, no one has achieved bona fide self-replication of RNA which is the cornerstone of the RNA World. Nevertheless, there is a lot going for the RNA World (Bernhardt summarizes much of the evidence, and I add more below) whereas the other hypotheses on the origin of life are outright helpless. Moreover, as argued in some detail elsewhere [91], the RNA World appears to be an outright logical inevitability. ‘Something’ had to start efficiently replicating to kick off evolution, and proteins do not have this ability. As Bernhardt rightly points out, it is not certain that RNA was the first replicator but it does seem certain that it was the first ‘good’ replicator. To clarify, this does not imply that the primordial RNA World did not have peptides; on the contrary, it is plausible that peptides played important roles but they were not initially encoded in RNA.

Note that the two, the writer of the article and the eminent reviewer agree "The RNA World scenario is bad as a scientific hypothesis."  And then note that, I think with justification, it is taken as the best that the decades of very well funded research into the question of the origin of life on Earth has produced by way of an implausible scenario to get it done by purely chemical means without help from intelligent design.  The entire paper lists what I would not be surprised are one insurmountable problem after another for this, best that they've come up with so far, and in the process noting that even their fellow researchers are quick to point out those problems which were not and, for the most part, have not been surmounted.  

The comment by Koonin AFTER HE POINTS OUT THAT IT IS HARDLY FALSIFIABLE!  that the theory "is extremely difficult to verify due to a great number of holes in the most important parts" is followed by his critique of the competing theories "the other hypotheses on the origin of life are outright helpless."  

And after that, he says"

the RNA World appears to be an outright logical inevitability. ‘Something’ had to start efficiently replicating to kick off evolution, and proteins do not have this ability.

Clearly in this branch of what is denominated to be science, the concept of logical inevitability starts in that prime directive that I noted last week abiogenesis shares with such things as multi-universe conjecture in cosmology, to do anything that will allow them to pretend they have disposed of a Creator.  Of God.  Even the alleged rules of science and even, as can be seen, of having verification of claims presented as science in nature, are to be pushed aside, and, now, we see that even what is admitted is a bad and, I would say, entirely unsupported theory full of holes is declared to be a "logical inevitability" which makes me wonder which other such theories have been, as well, declared to be "logically inevitable" while so full of holes. 

I will note that in the case of Koomin, he, himself, has written a paper which admits what I accused such people of doing, making up an infinity of universes, or a virtual one - take your pick, there are multi-multiverse schemes aplenty to choose from - for the purpose of getting by the absurdly remote probability of any life of the kind we know arising spontaneously by the action of the atheist god Random-Chance. 

Here is the entire abstract of his paper, The cosmological model of eternal inflation and the transition from chance to biological evolution in the history of life

Recent developments in cosmology radically change the conception of the universe as well as the very notions of "probable" and "possible". The model of eternal inflation implies that all macroscopic histories permitted by laws of physics are repeated an infinite number of times in the infinite multiverse. In contrast to the traditional cosmological models of a single, finite universe, this worldview provides for the origin of an infinite number of complex systems by chance, even as the probability of complexity emerging in any given region of the multiverse is extremely low. This change in perspective has profound implications for the history of any phenomenon, and life on earth cannot be an exception.

Hypothesis
Origin of life is a chicken and egg problem: for biological evolution that is governed, primarily, by natural selection, to take off, efficient systems for replication and translation are required, but even barebones cores of these systems appear to be products of extensive selection. The currently favored (partial) solution is an RNA world without proteins in which replication is catalyzed by ribozymes and which serves as the cradle for the translation system. However, the RNA world faces its own hard problems as ribozyme-catalyzed RNA replication remains a hypothesis and the selective pressures behind the origin of translation remain mysterious. Eternal inflation offers a viable alternative that is untenable in a finite universe, i.e., that a coupled system of translation and replication emerged by chance, and became the breakthrough stage from which biological evolution, centered around Darwinian selection, took off. A corollary of this hypothesis is that an RNA world, as a diverse population of replicating RNA molecules, might have never existed. In this model, the stage for Darwinian selection is set by anthropic selection of complex systems that rarely but inevitably emerge by chance in the infinite universe (multiverse).

Conclusion
The plausibility of different models for the origin of life on earth directly depends on the adopted cosmological scenario. In an infinite universe (multiverse), emergence of highly complex systems by chance is inevitable. Therefore, under this cosmology, an entity as complex as a coupled translation-replication system should be considered a viable breakthrough stage for the onset of biological evolution.

The two rather give away what the game is, it is to create totally unsupported, unevidenced entities to fill the huge gap in knowledge with the atheist god which they won't name as such but which I think any rational observer without their prime directive motivating their every action would have to admit is their creator god, Random-Chance.  And they repeatedly have put him into the gap of knowledge wherever needed in order to pretend that they have disposed of the Creator of monotheism.   Wise believers in religion don't put God in the gaps, among the first person to warn against it was a Scottish evangelical preacher, Henry Drummond.  

But in science, it's done all the time because, you see, their god is a mathematical one and it serves to push off all unanswerable questions even if it means coming up with theories such as abiogenesis does - to stupidly use intelligent design to deny intelligent design is necessary to do what they do with it - and by cosmologists who, being better at math than others realize that when the improbabilities against chance are up against some rather seriously discrediting time limits, they merely create infinities out of nothing but a desire to pretend they're getting rid of God with science, though they have to destroy scientific method to do so.  And they're allowed to do that because the current ideological governance of science and modern culture are far more scholastically wedded to atheist-materialism than medieval scholasticism was to Christian Catholicism.  I've mentioned before that Paul Feyerabend compared and found medieval methods of logical investigation were at times superior to the atheist-polemical methods used by post-war men of science. 

I will conclude with a passage from an article by one of my favorite critics into the laspses of scientists, John Horgan who said in regard to another of the unevidenced schemes of  such science (Francis Crick put his childlike faith in atheism in it for one) to get past the time limit on their creator god to do it 

Of course, panspermia theories merely push the problem of life's origin into outer space. If life didn’t begin here, how did it begin out there? Creationists are no doubt thrilled that origin-of-life research has reached such an impasse (see for example the screed "Darwinism Refuted," which cites my 1991 article), but they shouldn't be. Their explanations suffer from the same flaw: What created the divine Creator? And at least scientists are making an honest effort to solve life's mystery instead of blaming it all on God.

Which, fond as I am for him, is too glib in the end.  John Horgan, of course, knows he must uphold the atheist-materialist order, even though he knows more than most what's wrong with it, so he makes the obvious blunder of defining God as a created being when, at least, the Abrahamic monotheistic religions have always, from their earliest records, seem to have said that the real God is uncreated.  That is the God who could have gotten the job done within the presently known conditions and time limits in which it could have happened.  I think that, given the amount of unevidenced conjecture that the atheist-materialists have to come up with to support their multiverse resort and their hopeless shredding and mashing of scientific method in abiogenetic pseudo-science it is far less unscientific to admit that we cannot solve such questions with science and it would be better to either shut up in agnostic silence on them - if that's your preference - or to admit that you believe God did it but that how it happened is not something God chooses to reveal to us as of yet.  Maybe never will.  Just as we will never, ever have the resolvable and knowable fossil of the first organism in our line of life. 

My religious belief is based on what Jesus said about human life to humans who didn't have the luxury to waste time on worrying about that.  As we soon won't, either. 

I've obviously read more about this BEFORE I came to my conclusions about it than you have before you did.  Why don't you try that instead of watching cable TV shows about it before you go back to gaming and whining like your fellow incel buddies.  None of you seems to have anything important to say in the matter.  

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