26 Aug '12 07:19>2 edits
Originally posted by sonhouse
Regardless of what we think of the mythology of creationism, we cannot rule it out.
Also there are other hypotheses about the origins of life we cannot rule out either, like martian meteoroids with bacteria surviving the journey from a hit on Mars to its landing on earth and seeding life here (of course that just puts back the question of origins a bit f ...[text shortened]... uled out at this point in time so abiogenesis is only one of several hypotheses floating around.
Regardless of what we think of the mythology of creationism, we cannot rule it out.
actually I would say we can definitely “rule it out” and by that I mean we can immediately dismiss it as so extremely improbable as to be totally absurd ( and, in addition, quite frankly, it is an EXTREMELY STUPID hypothesis ) .
But I think what you must mean by “rule it out” here is to deductively disprove it with pure deductive logic in which case, yes, we cannot “rule it out” in that very strict sense just as we cannot “rule it out” that there is a tooth-fairy or a Santa or a great many other great absurdities but, and this is the problem here, that is not what most of us mean by “rule it out” most of the time in everyday English but rather we tend to mean we should regard it as so extremely improbable as to be absurd and should therefore, in strictly practical terms as opposed to purely academic terms, not even consider it as a 'valid' possibility.