Science can only deal with definable, observable, measurable objects and phenomena in the physical universe.
Science cannot be done if the entity scientists purport to study can't be defined, observed or measured, either because it can't be by the nature of what they purport to study or that the presumed observable objects or phenomena are not and, to within the realm of absolute certainty, never will be available to study with sufficient resolution to come to reliable conclusions about them.
If, as we both appear to believe, life on Earth began in a single instance of the assembly of a theoretical first living organism that is the origin of all subsequent life which we know about, then to study that origin of life you would need to have the resolvable remains of exactly that first organism to study and it is within the realm of absolute absurdity to think that science could find such remains in detail of required resolution to even identify it as that first organism.
To believe you can conjure it up out of lab experiments and suppositions without the actual fossil of that organism is so absurd that anyone in the biological sciences, who has actually studied living organisms or even resolvable fossils would know that you have to do that to actually do science about those organisms. Anyone in science, or outside of it, who claims you can make up just-so stories and imaginary organisms instead of having the actual specimen to study should disqualify anyone from being taken seriously on the topic.
AND I WILL POINT OUT THAT EVEN IF YOU HAD THAT ACTUAL ORGANISM, YOU LIKELY WOULD NOT BE ABLE TO DETERMINE HOW IT HAD COME INTO BEING FROM NON-LIVING MATTER IN A WAY THAT HAS NEVER, ONCE, BEEN OBSERVED. You would need to actually see how it happened to know how it happened exactly and solely in that one organism and I'm entirely confident in saying that that will never happen.*
To believe that Miller and Urey's experiment did any such thing is so stupid that anyone who brings their famous experiment up should be considered even more obviously disqualifed. No one, including Miller and Urey could possibly assert that what they did a. is a representation of conditions on the early Earth, b. the product of anything but the intelligent design of two scientists. Even if their experiment had done far, far, . . . entirely more than it did, show a rather odd way to generate amino acid sequences, and had produced an actual organism (something it came no where near doing) it could not disprove intelligent design but it would confirm that an organism COULD BE THE RESULT OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN. I know that's not where you thought this would end up, but that is where it does end up. The entire science of the alleged study of the origin of life on Earth (it's called "abiogenesis" since I doubt you know that) is basically wrong-headed. Nothing that any of the atheists doing it for the purpose of disproving intelligent design could possibly do that BECAUSE EVERYTHING THEY DO IS A PRODUCT OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN, EVERY MOLECULE THEY PRODUCE IS A PRODUCT OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN. The only thing they can do is confirm that it is possible that life began as a result of intelligent design BECAUSE EVERY SINGLE SCIENCE EXPERIMENT AND ITS RESULTS IS THE PRODUCT OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN.
That so many sciencey guys and actual scientists fail to recognize that simple fact about what they're engaged in is more a product of the failure of the Freshman year in college, if not the science curriculum in high schools. I've come to believe that everyone who wants to get a bachelor's degree in any topic should be required to take a rigorous course in rhetoric, including the construction and criticism of logical arguments because the inability to do that seems to be rampant among people trained in just about every topic in universities in the English speaking world, perhaps elsewhere.
Abiogenesis, like Carl Sagan's equally if not even more absurd "exobiology", which purport to do science about life forms that have not, likely will never and those which certainly can never be known to exist and are certainly NOT HERE FOR THEM TO STUDY AS THEY PUBLISH THEIR "SCIENCE" NOW, are intellectually more dubious than alchemy or astrology which at least have things they can look at and measure. That Carl Sagan has been considered in atheist sciency circles as some kind of logic ninja leads me to think that science is seriously screwed up in way too many cases. The popular conception of science certainly is. It's more than just someone who wasn't a biologist playing one on TV or to curry favor with Lenin and Stalin (in the case of Alexander Oparin), it's a violation of the most basic conditions for science to happen. Both of those "sciences" should be sent to the boneyard of discontinued science. Though they won't be.
Intelligent design and its disconfirmation is not anything that science can deal with. In order to scientifically validate that the first organism was a result of intelligent design you would have to also have the evidence of that organism which I hold you will never have. Being persuaded or not accepting that intelligent design was responsible for its spontaneous generation and being sparked into life isn't a matter of science, it's a matter of belief. I have gone from being a rather conventional Darwinist on that matter to, when thinking about the enormous unlikelyhood of random events just happening to have assembled a living, metabolizing, and, most of all, reproducing organism is entirely more likely to have been the result of intelligent design than a random event that just happened to have happened.
Arguments made by scientists asserting intelligent design, such as Michael Behe, are a different matter. I've listened to a few things and read a few things but I have not encountered anything he asserted that doesn't require a lot more information than I know so I don't say anything much about it. That Behe is a scientist isn't for me to determine, he's got the qualifications, the publications history and the job. And I've never heard him say something as stupid as some of the anti-ID side who are held to be scientists have said. P.Z. Myers, for example. I don't think you can prove intelligent design with science but I don't think there is anything illegitimate in making arguments for or against the idea as long as you use the science you cite honestly.
I don't know what the most recent polls on the topic say, I don't hold that polling is scientific, either, but the last time I looked, the conventional anti-intelligent design side were losing ground rather steadily since the latest go-round in this started in about the 1990s. Doesn't look like people are buying it, maybe you guys should try not being such a bunch of dicks about it. I've been through this over and over again, you don't refute what I said and you don't really say anything that isn't stupid, like something an unintelligent 12-year-old would say when they had nothing to say. See, how did that make you feel?
* A couple of months ago I pointed out that when asked the reasonable question of why we have not seen life spontaneously coming about in conditions they alleged were the origin of life the scientist on the CBC's Quirks and Quarks show had not answered the question at all. I don't think any scientist would dare to give a responsible answer to such a question because they would fear being black-balled or vilified or destroyed by those who uphold the atheist hegemony in science and academic culture, in general. The real answer to such a question is we don't know why. We likely never will know why and science can probably never answer that question. It certainly can't answer it in any way that will be universally accepted or anything but controversial. But that would open up all of the above to question and that would violate the rules of that atheist hegemony.
Why did life start in inanimate material once upon an unknown time, and never do it again?
ReplyDeleteToo much trouble? Been there, done that? A mistake still regretted?
In considering the complexities involved in the construction of that first organism, especially the likelihood that it would have had to have had a containing membrane in which molecules had to be concentrated to have motivated its body to have reproduced, how that first and totally unprecidented in the whole history of the Earth perhaps universe act of reproduction happened, leaving more than one living organism, how it had to have happened successfully the very first time or it would have killed one or both of the only organisms on Earth, how that physical mechanism, certainly the most complex molecular-structural on Earth if not in the universe was supposed to have just happened in some just-so way according to the atheist claims -P. Z. Myers actually asserting that its containing structure just came about like debris forming on a shoreline - leaves me thinking that intelligent design is not only a far more credible explanation for it, it also makes entirely more sense than the atheist articulation.
DeleteClaiming "random chance events" "probability" is no more of an answer than "it just did". It's an answer that relies on the ignorance of the improbability of the random chance events by the largely math-deficient population, so many of who seem to believe that buying 2 lottery tickets increases their chance of winning in some significant way. I think those atheist standbys are so absurd - ever so much more so when you include the improbabilities discussed in cosmology which have to be figured in even before you start working out the improbabilities of what atheism claims happened by random chance events in the assembly and successful metabolism and reproduction of life, that I think it takes far more faith in not only the unexplained but also the improbable to believe it could have happened that way than by the intelligent design of the Creator.
And then there is the question of why it doesn't happen over and over again with the minute observation of things like thermal vents where they claimed it happened before. Certainly the presence of the molecules that they claim just happened to come together is ever so much higher in the biosphere than it would have been the entirely non-biological, pre-life early Earth atmosphere and oceans, lakes, rivers, etc.
No, it's like natural selection in my experience, the more you look at the claims made by atheists, the more you look at them and the underlying intellectual framing required for their claims about more complex things - especially when you look with a critical eye at their claims of the creative power of probability and random events, the less intellectually sound it appears to be.
Atheism is a product of ignorance, a self-contradictory botch which depends on people not being able to understand what the claims are due to ignorance. In its modern, scientistic articulation, it depends on some peoples' lack of knowledge of science and math, on them taking what atheists in science and in the pop-articulation of scientistic orthodoxy on the one hand and on scientists with an ideological bias to ignore or pretend these problems with their claims are not real or are of no significance. Then there are the common received and simplistic lies about history, but that's only the icing and filling of the Twinkie.