An Ideology That Lives By Cartoonish Simplification Must Surely Be Damaged When That Simplicity Is Debunked - Hate Mail

ALL ANY OF US who believe that there is most likely a "first organism" from which all subsequent organisms evolved has is an imagination of it.  There is no physical evidence of what organisms even many presumed generations of life on Earth were like, not for what is assumed would be many millions of generations after when that original organism would have had to flourish.  There is no evidence that such a first organism is how life came to first exist on Earth, there is no evidence of what it is like.  The only thing we can possibly know for certain is if that imagined organism came about from non-living matter is that it would have to be unique in the entire line of life because every subsequent organism would have had to have come about out of living organisms.  

Before going on, to lay out the groundwork of this post I do hold as a tentative belief that there likely was one "first organism" though the more I read about the discoveries of current biology I admit that belief is merely on the basis of seeming (as opposed to knowable) probability considering the extreme problems of it happening even once based on what is believed, today, to imagine up that original organism, its physiology and its life and, most improbable seeming of all, its successful reproduction of itself.  If some materialist-atheist wants to argue about that, I'll be forced to bring up the problem of the containing membrane in which molecules from outside of that organism would have had to be contained to reach a concentration so as to ignite metabolic activity and, most problematic, reproduction.  If they propose something like a virus, I think, considering what those are and how they are reproduced, that viruses probably evolved after organisms they could parasitize had already evolved.  So I doubt they preceded cellular life.  Same thing with prions, as one online atheist proposed as a means of getting over the insurmountable mountain of problems for life just having happened by random chance.  Neither viruses nor prions are sufficiently "simple" nor known to be able to exist on their own no matter how "simple" they are imagined to be if you ignore their complexity.   Viruses are not as simple as they need to be to fit into that claim.

Back to the argument.  One of the assumptions of what that "first organism" we imagine is like is that it was "simple," that its physical body was simple, though we have no actual information as to what that "simplicity" would have been like.  We can't imagine life, metabolism, change, reproduction (change would have to have happened for both of those) physical anatomy, etc. apart from the life which can be seen and studied now, certainly many, many, many billions of years, of presumable evolutionary change and development and divergent pathways and presumably enormous difference from that first organism or its first descendants (keeping in mind what my dear old biology teacher said about the impossibility of differentiating among cells that divide as to which one was the "original" of the resulting cells).  

Every one of the proposals for how molecules would have just happened to have assembled themselves into that first organism by chance imagines something that is far, far from "simple" because those have no alternative but to be based in what we know about life now.  The various proposals for how DNA or RNA is supposed to have assembled out of random chance events in the conditions on the early Earth, more than three billion years ago, out of the random chance scenario that is a prerequisite for that entire game of abiogenesis, are, themselves, extremely improbable.  I would guess that is one of the reasons why one of the most famous proponents of coming up with a materialistic, atheistic, scientistic explanation of that, Francis Crick (Crick and Orgel 1973), resorted to some kind of extra-terrestrial seeding of the early Earth, probably as some extremely long-term experiment by intelligent beings from elsewhere in the galaxy or universe, as a way of skirting the problem of that sciency imaginary scenario.  Which, in his philosophical incompetence, merely would relocate the problems of where that intelligent life started out its existence under similar difficulties to those which an Earth based scheme of random-chance assembly of that non-Earth life would have had to happen.  Not to mention wondering who was supposed to live for enough billions of years or at least hundreds of millions of years to have made such an experiment worth expending wealth and energy on.  Of all the proposals of how it "just happened" that is probably the stupidest of them all.  But I think anyone who got suckered into believing that the Miller-Urey experiment explained it all, as I heard in my youth (AND IT MOST CERTAINLY DIDN'T) and which I still hear from the sci-rangers on-line, has such a naive view of the problems involved that they need to be ridiculed out of the discussion if we're ever going to get anywhere in it.  

For a start the Miller-Urey experiment in no way reproduced the conditions of the early-Earth, and after that their experiment was inseparable from the very same obstacle that Francis Crick's imaginary, unevidenced, ET origin of life on Earth was, THE INTELLIGENT DESIGNS AND INTENTIONS OF THOSE WHO WOULD HAVE CARRIED ON THOSE EXPERIMENTS.  The product of an intentionally carried out experiment cannot possibly be known to represent something that would happen "in nature" without the intelligent design or the manipulation of materials by the scientists who are doing that experiment.  It is the greatest irony of abiogenesis, a "science" born out of materialist-atheist-scientism and continuing in that quest to refute a theory of intelligence in life arising on Earth, that everything they do by way of experiments or of analysis of any observations they make merely reinforces the theory that intelligent design was needed to get the results they did.  There is no way to filter out or remove what the scientists did to get the results they did, though their analysis of that can pretend it does that's mere dishonesty or that ubiquitous philosophical incompetence which is rife among those in the sciences, today.  And Miller And Urey merely came up with a novel way to manufacture some few amino acids, they in now way got much if any closer to figuring out how those assembled by random chance into a first organism.

My ideas on this, today, developed from my response to the ridiculous claims that scientists who had made artificial "DNA" and "got it to replicate itself" had put the final nail in the coffin of the idea that God was necessary to the creation of life.  The first thing I thought was that their "DNA" hadn't assembled itself and it had hardly "replicated itself" because it was the various manipulations of molecules under the specific ambient conditions they did their experiment in (hardly likely to have anything like approximated conditions anywhere on the early Earth) are what got the results.  So the "DNA" hadn't replicated itself, the scientists who did the experiment did that.*  Just as we know that DNA in living organisms doesn't replicate itself, the enormously complex cellular physiology and chemistry of enormously complex molecules (which are hadly likely to have have existed in that first organisms) replicates any DNA in it, in those eukaryotic cells such as comprise our bodies, far more than one DNA molecule has to do that in exquisitely complex coordination within and without the cell with other DNA in the organelles of the cell through other enormously complex operations in the cell.  I doubt that DNA or RNA existed on Earth until those evolved many millions of generations of life after that first event, though that is, as well, an enormous speculative leap based on what I imagine.  I'd say that if any DNA or RNA managed to assemble by random chance events on the early Earth, evaded immediate destruction in what was unlikely to have been favorable conditions and, somehow, assembled, the first organism it would have been no less miraculous than any miracle asserted by any tradition of religion or folklore.  The dependence on random chance and other such speculative aids in any materialist, atheist, scientistic scheme of explaining how life so improbably arose on the early Earth arrives at greater improbabilities if you think even not terribly hard about it,  YOU'D HAVE TO HAVE A STRONG EMOTIONAL ATTACHMENT TO MATERIALISM, ATHEISM AND SCIENTISM TO SUSTAIN THAT NAIVE FAITH IN THAT god OF MODERN ATHEISM, RANDOM CHANCE, TO BE ABLE TO OVERCOME THE INCREDIBLE ODDS AGAINST IT HAVING HAPPENED IN FACT.  And the culture of the college-credentialed materialist-atheist devotee of scientism has as strong an emotional attachment to their ideology as the most fevered fundamentalist or the most mendacious Trumpzi.  They might be less stupid than a Trumpzi has to be but their stubborn refusal to see the problems with their faith and what it forces them to pretend they know things that aren't and couldn't be true is the same.

One of the interesting things that James Shapiro pointed out in that lecture was that with the discovery of a third kind of cell the archaea, apart from the eukaryotic cells and the prokaryotic cells, the line of cells among species of methane producing bacteria, is that there may well have been many, even many thousands of different kinds of cells on the early Earth which didn't survive up into the organisms that left resolvable images of their bodies.  He honestly points out that we can't know that because we don't have the evidence.  Which is another complication of the lore of the alleged science that makes all kinds of claims about that earliest life about which science cannot now be honestly done.  Which does nothing, whatsoever, to keep those employed in that scientific folklore and materialist-atheist scholastic speculation from coming clean and admitting that what they are doing is far more akin to the cartoon of medieval theology they probably mock.  That they do so out of an allegiance to the faith of materialism and atheism doesn't change the character of what they are doing.  I think that the rise of science and modern history has had a very strong impact for the better in much of modern theology which, in supreme irony, has not influenced the culture of science and the sciency nearly as much.  I doubt that any credible modern theologian would be as unaware of the problems with their procedures, I doubt many of the earlier ones would.  Gregory of Nyssa, for example, strikes me as being more honest about what he was doing than many a highly placed scientist today does.  

The point of my last post which is complained about so angrily, was that if materialist-atheist devotees of scientism can pretend to find a reason for dismissing a belief in God the Creator out of their entirely unrealistic claims of the simplicity of how life originated and evolved - claims of simplicity that, the more that is reliably discovered by physiology and molecular biology, are false - then it is certainly justified by someone like me to point out that the more that is discovered about how life, now, sustains itself supports the need of conscious intelligence to point that out.  I don't think it's at all unfair of us to say that in order for that to have gotten started, at all, is reasonably concluded to require that intelligent intent was part of it.  Another of the hoary old arguments of atheism was that life in the physical universe would seem to be sparse (though that's another assumption that isn't susceptible to confirmation with science) and so there is no intent behind its existence, therefore, no God.  I know, my dear old Latin teacher tried that one on me, as well.  Such an argument merely makes the existence of life on Earth to be even more improbable, leaving the atheist with the problem of how it could have plausibly happened even once (remember what I said about the cosmologist who, on that basis, doubts that there is life anywhere else in the universe.  I think the more plausible belief INFORMED BY WHAT SCIENCE HAS SHOWN is that God created life and sustains it as well as the planet and universe in which we know one thing with as good reason as anything we believe we know, that we are here.  

If the tantalizingly suggestive observations of the ancient Hebrew traditions point to scientific reasons to believe they had an inkling of what was real about such things as the origin of the universe, we have a right to notice that.  Though it's not a scientific conclusion because science isn't supposed to claim to answer questions it can't, though, as can be seen from looking at the attempts of scientists to put that elusive last nail in the coffin of God with science, that isn't kept out of it.  Atheism is a flourishing and dishonest industry within the literature and teaching of science and, especially, in "the popular understanding of science"  whereas theology isn't and shouldn't be there as the rules now stand.  But neither should atheism.  I certainly reject both attempts to do that, though there is nothing at all wrong with it as long as it is explicitly understood that it isn't science because science can't be allowed to go there and maintain its integrity.  Of the two, atheist ideology has been successfully inserted into even the formal literature of science.  It is rampant in some fields as even someone like Stephen Hawking has noted of his own field and such stuff as abiogenis was invented with that intent.  Of the two atheism, which inevitably will come to a condition of amorality, is the more dangerous.

* God only knows what disastrous consequences scientists assembling artificial "DNA" could bring if even segments of that "DNA" manages to get into the real DNA of living beings as we know real DNA can do.  The ignorance of what biological effect such artificial polymers could bring leads me to think it's probably one of the greater dangers that have arisen from science. And with the plastics industry and its consequences, as James Shaprio also noted, that dangerous experiment is already underway.  It makes you realize absurdly unrealistic the old fashioned view of DNA is in light of the discoveries of how enormously changeable DNA is, now entire regions of it can migrate to other parts of DNA and become biologically active both within one organism and among different organisms.  That knowledge start starting with Barbara McClintok more than a generation ago should have long ago destroyed the old imaginary models of DNA as well as the mid-20th century dogma of neo-Darwinism.  The absurd assertions that DNA was in command and reigning over the physiology and life actions of the organisms it exists within, vulnerable only to the materialist god of random chance.  I will repeat that I think it was a notion of how disconfirming of the ruling ideology of materialist-atheist-scientism in the wake of the neo-Darwinian synthesis the new discoveries were that led to McClintok being discouraged from continuing her work, if not just out of the ruling inertia of professional interest - which was hardly separable from the dominant ideology of the scientists discouraging or opposing her.