The probability that life could occur without the aid of God

PS: If a model of the moon starts out from the assumption that it is made of green cheese, there is no point in "tuning parameters" to see what the effect of 98% cheese or 93% cheese might be.

Originally posted by sonship
[b]< Is there enough time, given this first primitive life thing about 4 billion years ago to have been the progenitor of the millions of species of living things (plants and animals) on the planet ? >

It is not necessary to assume that there was only one first primitive life form, from which every present life form evolved.
----------------- ...[text shortened]... t way. Some of you guys are overly protective as if loss of sacred religious dogma is at stake.[/b]

You are not arguing. When you say 'what is the probability' of this or that you are really saying 'you are all full of shyte' and I KNOW the way it really is.

Further, if scientists manage to show how life can start on Earth without a god involved, you would simply move the goalposts, not actually being interested in proof. You would find some other path in your vain attempt to prove a god is needed to make all this life you see on Earth today.

Further, if such an experiment was put on in a contained environment and new life forms came about you would just go 'see, that proves intelligent design'.

Originally posted by sonhouse
You are not arguing. When you say 'what is the probability' of this or that you are really saying 'you are all full of shyte' and I KNOW the way it really is.

Further, if scientists manage to show how life can start on Earth without a god involved, you would simply move the goalposts, not actually being interested in proof. You would find some other pat ...[text shortened]... vironment and new life forms came about you would just go 'see, that proves intelligent design'.

So how exactly would you have 'intelligent' scientists prove that no intelligence mechanism was involved in abiogenesis? By scientists trying to create life in the lab, what are they trying to prove?

Originally posted by Fetchmyjunk
So how exactly would you have 'intelligent' scientists prove that no intelligence mechanism was involved in abiogenesis? By scientists trying to create life in the lab, what are they trying to prove?

Well, by creating life in the lab one could, for instance, learn something about the conditions required for life to emerge. This might tell us something about how life emerged on Earth, and whether or how frequently one might expect it to occur in the Universe.

Originally posted by KazetNagorra
Well, by creating life in the lab one could, for instance, learn something about the conditions required for life to emerge. This might tell us something about how life emerged on Earth, and whether or how frequently one might expect it to occur in the Universe.

Which for sure did not involve a deity.

Originally posted by Fetchmyjunk
So how exactly would you have 'intelligent' scientists prove that no intelligence mechanism was involved in abiogenesis? By scientists trying to create life in the lab, what are they trying to prove?

It really depends on how you go about it.

If I wanted to 'create life' in the lab I could carefully reverse engineer current life and then
carefully work out how to design and build all the components and fit them together.
Which is the 'intelligent design' route and what I would do if I were trying to create a
specific life form for a specific task. [say I wanted to create a bacteria for making a drug].

However, I could also just recreate the kind of conditions [based on the evidence] we would
expect on the early Earth [or other conditions one might find in the universe] and see if the
building blocks of life can and do form in such an environment without my purposefully 'designing'
them.

It is that latter kind of experiment [which has been done in various forms] which provides evidence
for the ability for life to form naturally without divine or intelligent intervention in conditions you
might expect to find in the early universe/on the early Earth and/or other planets/moons/comets/etc.

Now those experiments don't show the entire process from the simple base elements to fully
functioning self replicating life forms because that process takes both a large period of time
[from our perspective] and large volumes of reactants. Nature had the entire Earth and millions+
years to work with, and you can't expect to replicate the entire thing overnight in a test tube.

However, what we can see are all the component steps [or possible component steps] taking
place on their own under conditions expected to have existed [based on the available evidence]
on or in the early Earth... We can see self assembling membranes that could form an early
cell wall, we can see the creation of complex amino acids, the building blocks of proteins and
RNA/DNA, etc etc... The problem for answering "How DID life form?" is less that we don't have a
plausible [if incomplete] mechanism... It's that we have dozens of plausible pathways by which
it might have happened.

Originally posted by googlefudge
It really depends on how you go about it.

If I wanted to 'create life' in the lab I could carefully reverse engineer current life and then
carefully work out how to design and build all the components and fit them together.
Which is the 'intelligent design' route and what I would do if I were trying to create a
specific life form for a specific t ...[text shortened]... ] mechanism... It's that we have dozens of plausible pathways by which
it might have happened.

The problem for answering "How DID life form?" is less that we don't have a
plausible [if incomplete] mechanism... It's that we have dozens of plausible pathways by which it might have happened.

Brilliantly put and utterly refuting the claim that this could not have happened, or that it is impossible for it to have happened, or that if it happened a miracle - something outside of science and unknown to science - would be required.

Originally posted by finnegan

The problem for answering "How DID life form?" is less that we don't have a
plausible [if incomplete] mechanism... It's that we have dozens of plausible pathways by which it might have happened.

Brilliantly put and utterly refuting the claim that this could not have happened, or that it is impossible for it to have happened, or that if it happened a miracle - something outside of science and unknown to science - would be required.

If life was ever created without reverse engineering but from fundamental physics and chemistry up, the religious set would never accept it as real. They would just rationalize it all away.

I would love to see that experiment actually produce life. I bet it won't look like our DNA either, I bet there are many ways DNA like mechanisms can work to do exactly what our DNA does. I think RNA and DNA just won out over a bunch of other early experiments, maybe being more efficient energy wise or some such but that is here on Earth. Other planets could have far different but benign enough conditions for their own kind of life, but maybe triangular DNA kind of shapes or quad shapes, could be anything. That would be the most exciting thing to come out of successful life experiments.

Originally posted by sonhouse
I would love to see that experiment actually produce life. I bet it won't look like our DNA either, I bet there are many ways DNA like mechanisms can work to do exactly what our DNA does. I think RNA and DNA just won out over a bunch of other early experiments, maybe being more efficient energy wise or some such but that is here on Earth. Other planets cou ...[text shortened]... d be anything. That would be the most exciting thing to come out of successful life experiments.

It is highly unlikely that we would be able to observe life being formed in that way in the lab. Its just too small an environment.
More likely would be the discovery of either alien life on another planet, or other life forms that exist on earth that we simply didn't know about (we really have not looked very hard at the single celled life form size).

Another very interesting aspect will be life forms designed by humans from the ground up. Could we use intelligence to do a better job, and how much better would it be? We could for example remove all the junk DNA in a human genome and make cell replication more efficient.

Originally posted by Fetchmyjunk
So how exactly would you have 'intelligent' scientists prove that no intelligence mechanism was involved in abiogenesis? By scientists trying to create life in the lab, what are they trying to prove?

On what basis do you think scientists need to "prove that no intelligence mechanism was involved in abiogenesis" ? I do not agree that there is any such obligation whatever.

Those who wish to explain evolution can turn to a range of possible explanations. One candidate was Paley's "Intelligent Design" theory. He thought this was the best way to explain what we observe.

Notice however that he did not, and never set out to prove this was true, for example by describing in detail how ID was put into practice. Instead, what he did set out to "prove" for example by inventing his famous "Blind Watchmaker" analogy was the life could not have evolved in the way it has done without an intelligent designer.

You may think it was a further step towards proof to point to Genesis and use this as "proof" but you would be wrong. This would imply that we have a satisfactory proof of God's existence and no theologian makes that claim. The rational proofs we have produced in history have all been found defective and religious belief cannot depend on such rational arguments. Psychologically and sociologically we know for a fact that religious belief does not come from or rely on reasoned argument.

Darwin did not have to prove that there was no "Intelligent Designer." What he did have to prove was that it is FALSE to claim there must be one. He demonstrated with a mountain of empirical evidence brilliantly marshalled that we can indeed account for evolution fully without apealing to any ID whatever. Indeed, he showed in addition that, given the way Nature is manifested, then any Intelligent Designer would be a strangely incompetent engineer and would have to be supremely malicious, bearing no similiarity to the God he had learned about as a Christian.

What he proved false was not the existence of an Intelligent Designer but the claim that there must be one.

One can never prove beyond the doubts of a supreme sceptic that there is not a staggeringly deceptive and well concealed designer laying traps for the unwary, but it is certainly the case that such a sceptic is stuck with the "God of the Gaps" argument, an incompetent designer and a malicious one, which is really pathetic. .

Originally posted by googlefudge
It really depends on how you go about it.

If I wanted to 'create life' in the lab I could carefully reverse engineer current life and then
carefully work out how to design and build all the components and fit them together.
Which is the 'intelligent design' route and what I would do if I were trying to create a
specific life form for a specific t ...[text shortened]... ] mechanism... It's that we have dozens of plausible pathways by which
it might have happened.

However, what we can see are all the component steps [or possible component steps] taking place on their own under conditions expected to have existed [based on the available evidence] on or in the early Earth...

What kind of evidence are you talking about?

Originally posted by sonhouse
If life was ever created without reverse engineering but from fundamental physics and chemistry up, the religious set would never accept it as real. They would just rationalize it all away.

I would love to see that experiment actually produce life. I bet it won't look like our DNA either, I bet there are many ways DNA like mechanisms can work to do exa ...[text shortened]... d be anything. That would be the most exciting thing to come out of successful life experiments.

"If life was ever created without reverse engineering but from fundamental physics and chemistry up, the religious set would never accept it as real. They would just rationalize it all away. "

If people put ID into life's creation and they create it by bypassing all of the random
features they think were in the universe at the beginning, would they then rationalize
away it took ID to do it?

http://www.biology-pages.info/A/AbioticSynthesis.html

Lots of good source material here. Demonstrating that life can emerge from the right conditions is not hard. Describing the evolutionary path from the simplest antecedents of life through simple to more complex organisms is harder.

It is not hard for life to emerge through basic chemistry under conditions found early in earth's history and replicated on other planets in the solar system. One factor supporting this belief is the simple evidence that it did not take all that long for the first life forms to appear on earth. A far longer delay accompanied the progression beyond single cell organic life forms. Nobody says complex life is inevitable but it is possible.

The difficulty is that Creationists demand something impossible - to say not what is possible but what happened. That refers to a historical fact - a specific event at a particular moment - and as such it cannot be recovered. However, it is also not required. We do not know when the last dinosaur died or when the first kangaroo bounced but we know the first are dead and the second are bouncing along merrily.

The chemisty of life is known.

Originally posted by finnegan
http://www.biology-pages.info/A/AbioticSynthesis.html

Lots of good source material here. Demonstrating that life can emerge from the right conditions is not hard. Describing the evolutionary path from the simplest antecedents of life through simple to more complex organisms is harder.

It is not hard for life to emerge through basic chemistry under ...[text shortened]... the first are dead and the second are bouncing along merrily.

The chemisty of life is known.

Demonstrating that life can emerge from the right conditions is not hard.

If it is so easy for life to emerge from the right conditions, why has it never been observed or demonstrated?

Originally posted by Fetchmyjunk
[b]Demonstrating that life can emerge from the right conditions is not hard.

If it is so easy for life to emerge from the right conditions, why has it never been observed or demonstrated?[/b]

It has been. I gave you a link to excellent and very succinct scientific evidence which you can read for yourself. It would take a few minutes at most.

We also know that life emerged when the Earth was still relatively young, indicating that there was not too much difficult in acheving this. By examining the geological records we can identify when life first appeared on earth and when it evolved and how it evolved. By examing genetic date we gain further sophisticated detail about the relationships between species.

We can show for example that the conditions under which life first emerged were very different to those prevailing today, and we can show how life has itself produced important transofrmations, such as the release of oxygen into the atmosphere. We can also see how life continues to affect the atmosphere. For example, we know that ice ages followed a regular cyclical pattern - explained by referring to Earth's orbit of the Sun - and that a new ice age has been prevented by the impact of humans, including agriculture. Those climate change deniers who think human induced atmospheric change is something very new are wrong.

We have not had the opportunity to do similar work on other planets yet.

Your utter refusal to enter into rational debate of this evidence is characteristic.