The time window during which the probabilities involved in the assembly of molecules and, let's not forget, atoms, into the first living organism had to play out isn't four billion years, it's only plausibly a billion or fewer years. Even starting with primitive amino acids that would supposedly come here on meteorites to form the Earth would have probably been destroyed in conditions on the early Earth and the probabilities of those surviving and, somehow, assembling in ways not seen in nature, without input by the designs of scientists in laboratories are subject to what are certainly very, very long odds that don't favor it happening within the time frame of the Earth forming and life first arising on it.
The only plausible means of speeding things up is through some imposed design that winnows out the probabilities*. At least I can't think of another one which doesn't involve some unknown process of nature, unaided by some intelligence. If you can come up with one which isn't the product of your intelligent desire to get out of the probability trap you've made for a materialist scenario, I'd love to know what that is.
I have listened to one of the Altenberg 16 talking about this stuff and as soon as he used the term "pre-biological evolution" I came to suspect that even those radicals who admit a good part of the improbability of the neo-Darwinian orthodoxy that holds hegemony over science and popular science don't seem to be able to admit that they've got to invent stuff that is unevidenced and unobserved to avoid the implausibility of it having happened without design, by random combinations within the time period they propose.
It might be time to admit that all of the various scenarios that have been thought up to give a purely materialistic scheme of how life arose are, themselves, the product of intelligent design and like all ideologically motivated designs, they are a product of intentionality. All of them have to leave out parts of the problem which their rivals or critics can bring up at any time in order to dissuade people from believing in them. I doubt that even a great council of atheist abiogenesists could come up with a scheme that would avoid any necessity of stacking improbabilities to favor their grand design in some way, leave our or try to diminish problems to bias the probabilities, or consider all of the possible problems involved in the first organism just happening to come together by chance.
As I've said before, it's not only as improbable as a drop of ink in a bathtub of water reforming itself out of pure chance, it is more like several drops of different colored ink coming together in a tub to make a single, combined drop in exactly the same place and remaining together and reproducing itself.
If I hadn't been forced to consider these things, considering the range of problems involved I would have remained unconvinced of the greater probability that some kind of intention had a role in the creation of life than in the conventional, atheist, assertion that it happened by random chance - the default god of conventional neo-Darwinism. I had to read the conventional neo-Darwinists and think hard about what they were claiming to become convinced that their entire range of ever shifting claims which decayed and eroded as early, complex pre-biological molecules would have in the formation of the Earth and its physical and chemical conditions. I can assure you, Genesis had nothing to do with it as the Catholicism I was raised in didn't hold that Genesis was either a modern historical or scientific account of factual history. I find the conjecture of those who composed Genesis impressive in its insights, in places, especially as interpreted by the most sophisticated of the scholars who have studied the scriptures, Brueggemann, of course, being among the first of those but it's not science and it's not history.
There is a paranoia in the culture and consciousness of atheism that people are always trying to insert supernaturalism into something. Daniel Dennett, one of the stupidest of today's neo-Darwinian fanatics is always making that accusation against real scientists who are both smarter and more level-headed atheists than he is. But there is one thing that is clear, there is no way to insert religion into science covertly. All of the monotheistic religions I know of carry moral prohibitions against lying and all of them NEED ANY ADVOCACY FOR THEM TO BE OVERT AND DECLARED. If I wanted to convert an atheist scientist to Islam or Christianity, I would have to be up front and clear about that. Merely pointing out the improbability of the various atheist ideological insertions into science and the wacky, improbable and ridiculous claims made to do that - many of those accepted as having the status of science by scientists - doesn't do anything to force religion into science. You can't do that covertly as atheism has inserted itself into science, over and over again. Atheism doesn't have any moral commandment against lying and to tell the truth. Maybe that's why people haven't admitted that it is one of the major pollutants of science (especially the softer and pseudo-social-sciences) and the culture of science, right now. How else do you think the abiogenesists have gotten away with what they're claiming?
Oh, and, by the way, Darwinism isn't the same thing as evolution. Darwinism is, first and foremost, the belief that his theory of natural selection is true and it is the engine of evolution. I have come, by similar study of the claims of Darwinists, to think natural selection is an illusion, an imposition of the British economic and social class system onto nature, as Marx observed in his reconsideration of it. As I said yesterday, I've always believed in evolution, I'm an Irish American, I despise the British and all other class systems.
* I think that is what the current, minor fad of atheist-materialist panpsychism among people like Strawson and Nagel is an attempt to do, though I think it is unpersuasive and not only can't sustain materialism but is a total refutation of it. Rupert Sheldrake has pointed out that you could limit the range of non-living things that had consciousness to "self-organized systems" but I don't see how that can get you out of problems similar to those involved in explaining the consciousness of living beings and where their consciousness comes from. I don't think you can get away from consciousness having to be a non-material realm and have consciousness mean anything or match the human experience of consciousness, which is necessary for anything concerning it to be rationally persuasive instead of ideologically adopted. I don't have any prejudice against physical objects but I don't think there is any way to claim that they have consciousness in the same way that organisms exhibit.
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