No scientific theory can have anything scientific to say about the origin of life and, in any case, it is not equipped to comment on whether or not that origin was the result of The Creator. For science to have anything real to say about an original organism(s) it would have to actually have resolvable fossilized remains of that organism and only that organism. And even those remains would certainly not answer the question of how it was created.
If the theory of an original organism from which all life today is descended is true, and it is the theory I believe, then one thing is certain about it, it, unlike every single subsequent descendant of it, didn't come from a living organism but somehow, by unknowable processes, came together, began to live, presumably to metabolize, sustain and build whatever structure it had and, most incredibly of all, successfully reproduce itself in a way it hadn't ever done before*.
At each stage, this organism would have had to perform what were almost certainly the most complex chemical reactions to have ever happened on the planet, perhaps in the solar system or galaxy, and done it successfully and to have survived that, repairing any damage it may have sustained in the process. And, it being alive, it would have had to have successfully done what were very complex physiological processes that would be entirely unprecedented and done those successfully the first time. There would be none of the theoretical practice sessions of natural selection to get it right, the failures being merely unsuccessful models, the first organism was sui generis (in the most radical sense in which that term can be used) and its success could not be the product of trial and error. Error would have killed it and it would have left no descendants.
Personally, I doubt that could have happened without an intelligent agency controlling it, intelligence that, if it were contained within the organism would only magnify the already incredible improbability of every single stage of that original organisms life happening, successfully, so as to produce the line and then the interacting chains and webs and billions of threads of life that arose and diverged from it. Of course, anything that can be said about that isn't a scientific conclusion, for or against, since it is based on absolutely no evidence but entirely on imagination and assumptions. Just as anything that can be said about any organism for which no direct evidence is available, here or elsewhere in the universe, you know, the kind of living beings that atheists like Carl Sagan like to make up out of wishful thinking and unwarranted assumptions of analogy to organisms they know on Earth.
But that is all speculation. The "science" of abiogenesis, which was invented by Oparin explicitly to support his atheism, will certainly never have that fossilized remnant of that original organism and almost as certainly never even get within many hundreds of millions of years near that event, so even the earliest resolvable fossils about which anything can be said with any confidence won't answer those questions. Among the reasons for that is that every subsequent organism will have had the drastically different origin of biological reproduction. The original organism would be radically different from every, single one of its descendants.
Atheists hate it when you point that out because they, as much as creationists, need to pretend they know how life began on Earth, not for scientific purposes, because without evidence science can't be done, but so they can deny that an intelligent agent was involved in it and claim that declaration is science.
Well, it isn't science and it never can be because even if they had the knowledge of that mechanism, they would have gained that knowledge through their own intelligence.
And that would be merely a description of what happened, it wouldn't have made what happened in the unknown conditions under which it happened, happen. If, as so many atheists like to pretend, what Urey and Miller did, produce amino acids or more complex molecules in a laboratory, under conditions which were certainly NOT like any that existed on the early Earth, was relevant to the origin of life, they would have unwittingly lent support to the necessity of intelligent design being part of the process.
If they could come up with the plan and design of their experiment and do it in a modern laboratory, their intelligence is an essential component in that process. IT WOULD NEVER HAVE HAPPENED WITHOUT THEIR INTELLIGENCE MAKING THE CRUCIAL CONTRIBUTION. They would not have proved that it could have happened in the conditions under which the first organism arose in the absence of intelligent agency, they would have merely shown that those things could be done with it. If abiogenists and their atheist fan boys want to pretend that what they've produced has the reliability of science, telling us something about the original organism, they have unwittingly provided those who believe in intelligent design the ability to point out, correctly and irrefutably, that intelligence was required to do what they did. But, then, atheists quite often do things unwittingly in claiming science is their property.
* Update: Rereading this to see how many mistakes I made I should have added that the original organism, since it would have lived for a time, may very well have had to REGULATE its chemistry, which would be essential for its continuing and to coordinate every aspect of its life. If, as some of the many competing creation myths of abiogenists insist, RNA (or even more unlikely, DNA) was part of that, presumably some containing membrane to allow sufficient accumulation of chemical components for its action would have been part of it, too. How that original organism would have known how to do that, with no instructions inherited from a parent organism and how it would have known how to repair its containing membrane when it reproduced are questions I'd need answered before I bought any of those theories.
When it's living organisms that are the subject, all of those and almost certainly many other, yet unknown, issues vital to their life and reproduction would have to be addressed and positively resolved. I will say, flat out, that science will never do that and come to a conclusion that even all other Creator hating, materialist scientists specializing in that form of ideological speculation will accept. There is no reason for anyone to accept any of it in the absence of that total agreement or even with it. Someone will whine that what I've said here isn't science. No, it isn't as I said in the beginning of this piece. And when science can't refute an idea, everyone is free to accept or reject it or pretend to not take a position on it on whatever other basis they will.
Update 2: Someone has objected to my including metabolism in what the original organism would have to have done. Well, if it reproduced it had to have had enough physical material to reproduce itself and that would mean it would have had to have taken in more material than it originally contained to do that. And they would have had to turn those materials into a biologically active form, within their own body structure. You see how complicated it is when you're talking about living organisms as they would really have to be for them to do what you believe they would have to have done? You can't just imagine that stuff up, it happened the way it did and only in the way it did and you can only know that by observation.
Update 3: Ennui for Dummies
@Ennui for Dummies @Kevin Boyle "turtles all the way down" Do you idiots even consider whether or not your atheist cliches are appropriate to what was said?
What I said is that without evidence of the original organism that provided the information of how it came into being, sustained its life and reproduced, science could say nothing scientific about it. It can't even say if it happened once, in an incredible string of seeming improbabilities, or, vastly multiplying those impossibilities, more than once. I have actually had atheist true believers in Urey and Miller, while bringing up the range of things that would have had to happen, just as a result of random actions, claim that it must have happened more than once.
If you want to claim that Urey and Miller did something relevant to the solution of that enormous problem, it is you and other atheists, the two scientists included, who have given intelligent design proponents the ability to point out that WITHOUT THEIR INTELLIGENT DESIGN THEIR EXPERIMENT NEVER WOULD HAVE HAPPENED.[There is no way to demonstrate through an experiment that it ever would have happened without intelligent input. Doing the experiment creates the impossibility of demonstrating that, which is one of the reasons that you can't deal with the presence of The Creator using science.]
That's one of the thing with you materialist-atheist dolts, you figure that if you don't like a logical point that it is illegitimate when the only valid judgement of a logical point is that it is logical. In that you are at least [as bad as], and in many cases worse than some of the more reasonable of fundamentalists who understand at least that much about how logic works.
To answer your question, God is uncreated not a thing in the universe that is created, that is sufficient to answer that.
Many people like to feel smug. They like to think "we" know the answers because knowing the answers provides a justification for the smugness they like to feel. But as a matter of fact we don't know all the answers, including to some of the most basic questions. For example, we don't know how, why, when or where the first living things came into existence, and we don't know enough to do more than speculate on whether they were created, fabricated or arose spontaneously. Enquiring minds would like to know, but only the incurably dogmatic would insist that we do know how life began.
ReplyDeleteAnthony's claim that "without evidence of the original organism that provided the information of how it came into being, sustained its life and reproduced, science could say nothing scientific about it" is both correct and refreshing.
Thanks for the post - another thoughtful read. It brought to mind that I keep hearing the word "Darwinian" used - maybe in a new way. Yesterday, someone on NPR said that the piano today is the result of many years of "Darwinian improvement." Do people really think there isn't intelligence behind a modern piano - not to mention the first piano!?
ReplyDeleteBut without God, can anything really be done "on purpose?"