Originally posted by Andrew Hamilton
[b]…the assumption that life has arisen from non living matter, is probably the biggest and most fundamental.…
Given the fact that it is not logically credible that life could have got started in any other way, it is no big assumption. -in fact, it is reasonable to consider it to be a fact that the first life came from non-life. It is true tha ...[text shortened]... erses atheism but rather it is just basic science and which most Christians wouldn't refute.[/b]
haha, so you are saying that because there is nothing else, or in your own words life could not have stated in any other way, is nothing short of an admission of preconception and assumption, thank you for your honesty! that it is feasible, reasonable and scientific to conclude that life came from non life even though this is mathematically highly improbable and unable to be demonstrated in the laboratory, and your eventual admission that this is in fact the case is all that i endeavored to ascertain, it is a matter of faith, period, and the sooner that you and others except this, the more reasonable and scientific you will become.
As to whether the primitive atmosphere was reducing or otherwise is also NOT A SCIENTIFIC FACT, consider the words of stanley miller himself if you will, in a classic paper published two years after his experiment, Miller wrote: “These ideas are of course speculation, for we do not know that the earth had a reducing atmosphere when it was formed NO DIRECT EVIDENCE HAS YET BEEN FOUND, - Journal of the American Chemical Society, May 12, 1955.
Was evidence ever found? Some 25 years later, science writer Robert C. Cowen reported: “Scientists are having to rethink some of their assumptions - little evidence has emerged to support the notion of a hydrogen-rich, highly reducing atmosphere, but some evidence speaks against it. - technology review, April 1981.
and since then? In 1991, John Horgan wrote in Scientific American: 'over the past decade or so, doubts have grown about Urey and Miller’s assumptions regarding the atmosphere. laboratory experiments and computerized reconstructions of the atmosphere....suggest that ultraviolet radiation from the sun, which today is blocked by atmospheric ozone, would have destroyed hydrogen-based molecules in the atmosphere....such an atmosphere (carbon dioxide and nitrogen) would not have been conducive to the synthesis of amino acids and other precursors of life,'
why, then, do many still hold that earth’s early atmosphere was reducing, containing little oxygen?
In Molecular Evolution and the Origin of Life, Sidney W. Fox and Klaus Dose answer: the atmosphere must have lacked oxygen because, for one thing, 'laboratory experiments show that chemical evolution...would be largely inhibited by oxygen' and because compounds such as amino acids 'are not stable over geological times in the presence of oxygen,'
Any reasonable and scientifically minded person would ask themselves is this not circular reasoning? the early atmosphere was a reducing one, it is said, because spontaneous generation of life could otherwise not have taken place. but there actually is no assurance that it was reducing, as has been evidently stated from the admissions of eminent scientists quoted above, none more so than miller himself
so what are we to conclude other than STOP PRESENTING SCIENTIFIC DATA AND ASSUMPTIONS AS IF THEY ARE UNDENIABLE FACTS, THEY ARE NOTHING OF THE SORT and quit berating others by insisting that they are unreasonable and unscientific when they question the validity of the data, you are entitled to your faith, and others are entitled to theirs.