A couple of centuries ago, it was the common wisdom that heavier-than-air flight was impossible. Many things are regarded as impossible until they are actually demonstrated.
Science does not magically gain all of its knowledge in one shot, and that there are questions it cannot answer today does not in any way prove that those questions will not be answered tomorrow. The odds you cite are based on assumptions; there is no particular reason to be confident that any of those assumptions are correct.
You've basically proven only that you know a path by which you cannot get from point A to point B; you have not shown that there is no viable path.
If you are commenting on the part of the article I think you are commenting on, I wasn't discussing a 'path', but an event. Barring a miracle it is impossible for X number of specific things to happen in Y time, given the X and Y we are talking about.
Now, your heavier-than-air issue is the opposite. There you are talking about scientific consensus. We both agree that it is useless when it comes to predicting future events. So to say that now, it will be impossible for us to invent faster-than-light flight would require knowledge that we don't possess. Granted.
But the past study that is evolution is on the opposite side of the issue. There we are dealing with the past, and we know what the result is. It is as if we were already looking around at Boeing 747s. And we do have a pretty good idea of the minimum pre-conditions for life, way, way more than we used to. And each time we find out more it makes life *More* not less impossible.
But, hey, if you wish to propose a possible genesis for the first life (pun intended) that could have come about via random chance into a not only functioning but successfully reproducing state, I'm your man... hit me with it.
But if all scientists wish to say is, "We have confidence that we will one day be able to demonstrate a design of life that is simple enough to have come about by random circumstances in the necessary time frame, with all of the needed parts"... then I would just say, cool, and point out that the definition of 'confidence' is 'with faith'... and I find my faith infinitely easier to believe in then that.
You're making a lot of assumptions about what a minimal proto-life would have to be. The fact is, we don't know every possibility, and therefore cannot be confident in estimates. For example, would it need to have RNA? I recall reading of a much simpler way for a reproduction mechanism to work, using collections of amino acids. It would not necessarily have to be an organism or even life: just something that can grow and reproduce. Even clearly non-organic crystals can do that.
The bottom line is, estimating probability depends heavily on the untestable assumptions you make. We simply do not have the evidence to know what it would have to be, and therefore have no honest way to declare its likelihood.
You are making a faith argument, not a scientific one at all.
I think you need to go back to my post. What I said was that the first life would need to have:
1) A system for reproducing that life. I don't care what kind of system, but it would have to have a system. And to be the first life for our purposes it would have to reproduce *this* life. You cannot get natural selection of each life is randomly different, there has to be pass down.
2) It would have to have an energy system, one that takes in energy from its environment and uses it for its needs, at a minimum for the energy system and reproduction system. Successfully long enough for successful reproduction, and then on and on through the generations.
3) I don't see how you can do with out something resembling some kind of cell wall, to keep the (at least two systems) together.
And I don't deny that I have faith, but I don't have enough faith to believe that you could get the component parts for those systems together, in the right place, at the right time, and have them fall into place to make the first life. I don't have nearly enough faith for that.
Yes, I agree that it has to have a mechanism to reproduce, even if it isn't actually "life." And that mechanism needs to be powered by something, but it could well be the outside environment. As I note, crystals can form without being alive.
When you speak of requiring a cell wall, you are making assumptions about the form of this proto-life that are not warranted.
Again, the post is literally talking about 'the first life'. So if it isn't 'life', then it isn't covered in the post.
Now to say 'powered by the outside environment' is a misnomer. While a bike is 'powered by the child riding it', it nonetheless needs to have a system, however simple, that transforms the child's actions into the purposes of the bike. It can't 'just happen'.
And if you wish to propose a first life that doesn't have a cell wall, well and good, I will listen to your design. Because pretty much all of the biological actors that we know about now need protection from the outside environment.
Even if it isn't life, it could provide a bootstrap to life; that is, it could be something which manages to duplicate itself in some way, and yet be susceptible to a change which could turn it in to life.
Consider a virus, for example. Is it alive? Most biologists would say no - and yet it manages to reproduce itself by taking control of something else. Now I am not suggesting a virus as the first life, just noting that there can be a precursor to life which can reproduce and which could mutate, potentially into life.
This is what I mean about coming up with a path that cannot work and insisting therefore that no path can work.
>>It would not necessarily have to be an organism or even life:
Just to be clear, the first life would have to be life. It's in the definition. If things happened before the first self-reproducing life, well and good. But this post concerns the issue of the first life.
And you don't know what environment that first life would have had. That's the point of proto-life; it could act as a booster and completely change your assumptions. Assuming that new life only happened once, we'd have no residue of that first event to check.
Well, no, it wouldn't change anything I have written. I will grant some sort of self-reproducing molecule that was all over the place that, for some reason, didn't end up being the first life I am talking about. But then, assuming we could even get to it, it would be but one part of the miracle that produced the first life.
Indeed I would be fascinated to know which parts of this you would even think could be made easier, as I was deliberately very, very conservative in my estimates. My 1-3 would actually need to be 1-1000 I'm pretty sure.
BTW, I am not exactly making assumptions about what the first life must have been. First of all:
life, living matter and, as such, matter that shows certain attributes that include responsiveness, growth, metabolism, energy transformation, and reproduction. Although a noun, as with other defined entities, the word life might be better cast as a verb to reflect its essential status as a process. Life comprises individuals, living beings, assignable to groups (taxa). Each individual is composed of one or more minimal living units, called cells, and is capable of transformation of carbon-based and other compounds (metabolism), growth, and participation in reproductive acts.
Vonn, I mean this with respect. Russell is correct. You assume a lot and get caught up in semantics and straw man arguments a lot, in my opinion. I don’t doubt your sincerity, but I think you are ignorant of some of your blind spots. No doubt I am as well, and if you see it, point it out. That being said, it is entirely possible for life to form without a ‘first life’ as you say. It is entirely possible for our universe to pop into existence from nothing as well. Lawrence Krauss wrote a book on exactly this. I admit there are a lot of less open minded people than Russel and understand while you may feel you need to argue against them, again i do this somewhat unconsciously as well but I try not too.
There are just too many oddities like the larnygeal nerve, the fact that human consciousness only has appeared in the last 100 000 years or so (in a universe that is 13/14 billion years old) that stare in the face of an intelligent design. You or I could engineer a more efficient design for both of these issues and doesn’t this give you pause? I know you are a young earth creationist but i think you aren’t being entirely honest with yourself. Respond as you like, but I would appreciate if you addressed these two issues with brevity. And I also would like to ask, what would it take yo convince you are wrong? Im not saying you are wrong, I am asking what would it take for you to lose your faith? Is this a possibility for you?
>>You or I could engineer a more efficient design for both of these issues and doesn’t this give you pause?
There are a rather incredible number of things where modern scientists say, 'we could do better than this' and then, a few years later, they've found out that, no, they couldn't. That the design they criticised had some features they hadn't considered.
And, I would add, they are free to try. I will be very interested in the result... assuming they use some animal... of producing an animal, from scratch, that is more efficiently designed. I won't be holding my breath, however.
So if you look up and understand the laryngeal nerve, you will see it is inefficient. I would propose that it doesn’t wind around our pelvis to relay a signal from the brain to the larynx. There
As I said, "there are a rather incredible number of things where modern scientists say, 'we could do better than this' and then, a few years later, they've found out that, no, they couldn't. That the design they criticised had some features they hadn't considered."
You were requested not to just wave your hands and say 'don't do this', but to produce a working organism that has a more efficient design. Note: Working organism.
There have been thousands of times when even brilliant people have said 'well, that's a dumb design' and then, when they went to do it themselves, said, "Oh, well, I see now why they did it that way". Not that every design is brilliant, and not that people don't continually make better designs.
But people have not created even one life from scratch, let along one with a better nervous system.
And I would point you back to my post 'ground rules' and note that you are doing theology here. You are basically saying, "If God were to actually have created life, He would have done a job that is more efficient'. That is a theological, not a scientific, statement.
And I just showed you a non-comprehensive list multiple potential paths to life. That you don't like those does not negate any of them. Bottom line is, what we don't know suggests that the limitations you see are not necessarily the actual limitations.
Until the end of the 19th century, all scientists were absolutely certain that it was impossible for the earth to be more than 10,000 years old, because the only possible means for the sun to be shining was gravitational collapse, and 10,000 years ago, the sun would have had to be large enough to encompass the earth's orbit. Then Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity, and a whole new avenue of possibilities was opened, with the recognition of hydrogen fusion, several decades later.
We don't know everything, and it is absolutely possible that future discoveries will show life to be quite probable, given the right conditions. It is intellectually dishonest to declare it impossible, just because we don't yet know how it could come about.
Again, the issue isn't paths. it is minimum requirements. And the issue isn't 'I don't like them'; they don't deal with the issues that I bring up in this post.
We absolutely don't know everything. But our lack of knowledge does not make something possible. You seem to think that I am proposing a materialistic theory better than that of evolution. I am not. I am saying that that theory doesn't work.
At the very least I am saying that, since they don't have the slightest idea of any way it could have worked (and, again, none of what you posted actually gave any kind of proposal for a first, working and reproducing, life) they should sit down and shut up and stop trying to insist that evolution is a 'fact'.
If the issue were only minimum requirements, you would have to say that you have disproved life itself. Of course, that's nonsense: current life is possible because there exist paths for new lives to be created that meet the known minimum requirements. So paths are what really matters: is there a path for a primitive life form to be created?
And there is no evidence that the path must be all-at-once. There is no reason, in principle, that some primitive basic life-precursor could not have come to be from relatively simple molecules. Like a virus, it could have reproduced thanks to its environment, and ultimately mutated into something more advanced. A large number of steps could ultimately have led to the first primitive life form.
>>If the issue were only minimum requirements, you would have to say that you have disproved life itself.
Hmmm. I'm wondering if you have forgotten the debate we are having. You know, Special Creation vs. Evolution? Just to clarify, in Special Creation, there is no 'first life' from whom all life evolved. There is a creator God, Who spoke, and all life came immediately into existence, fully formed and functioning. That life, then, reproduced basically the way all life does now, and down through the ages until we get NFL stars and Barbie movies.
For the first actual life, assuming evolution, there was an instant when that life was not, and the next instant it was. However the building blocks were arrived at, at one instant there came into existence a life capable of reproduction of itself, which, if evolution is to be believed, produced offspring which produced offspring which randomly mutated and naturally selected until, finally, President Trump. So, again, I am not discussing the path, altho you can do so at your leisure. I am discussing what would have been necessary for the first functioning, reproducing life.
(There is, of course, a problem with the previous forms. Viruses, as I assume you know, depend on functioning life to reproduce. The minimal functioning reproducing life has to have, at the very least, a way of capturing and using energy, and a way of successfully reproducing.)
I've not forgotten, but there are certainly no greater requirements on the first live organism that on subsequent ones. The rest of them are able to come into being through use of their parents, and there is no reason in principle that the first live organism could not have similarly come into being through the use of non-life precursors.
Essentially, you are looking at a man on top of a high smooth wall, noting that he cannot have climbed up or flown, and arguing that he must have been lifted there via Divine means, completely ignoring the possibility of a ladder or a pile of sand that has since been removed.
>>and there is no reason in principle that the first live organism could not have similarly come into being through the use of non-life precursors.
Except for being completely different, these are indeed similar. In the one case, you have a reproductive system designed by an omniscient designer, acting as designed to produce offspring of the same type.
In the other case, you have literally none of those things. None of them. You have no life, no reproductive system, no designer, no design...
Now you slip in a bit of a caveat by saying 'through the use'. No one, least of all me, is saying that an omniscient God could not use whatever He wished. He used a donkey once, as I recall.
However, even if he used eye of newt and the tail of a rat to produce the first life, or a bunch of dust to produce the first man and a rib to produce the first woman, the point would be that He had all the component parts He needed to produce them. He had them in any case since He is omniscient.
And if you wish to argue for what is commonly called Theistic Evolution, then you are welcome to do so. There can be no evidence for or against it, obviously, as at any point (as you said in your article) God can choose how the dice fall. The most impossible set of circumstances can be assured of coming to pass if He is in charge.
I will disagree with Theistic Evolution on theology grounds since the evidence can say nothing.
>>Essentially, you are looking at a man on top of a high smooth wall, noting that he cannot have climbed up or flown, and arguing that he must have been lifted there via Divine means, completely ignoring the possibility of a ladder.
I am noting that he could not have climbed up or flown. I'll allow the ladder. A ladder, one will note, is designed :)
It's funny you keep bringing up 'a couple of centuries ago' comments. Because a few centuries ago, you had the entire scientific community absolutely sure of such things as illness being the result of an imbalance of humours, and, thus the efficacy of bleeding. (which, ironically, there is one disease for which bleeding is a treatment, and my brother has it.)
Scientists frequently get things wrong. But their ignorance is rarely a sign that they have gotten something right. Nor is their concensus.
Yes, exactly. And the point here is that science is ultimately self-correcting, as (old scientists who block the way die and) new observations are made, allowing old ideas to be disproven. So you cannot look at what is currently known and declare that everything must conform to it.
I have laid out exactly why it couldn't have happened, and backed it up. Indeed it is blindingly obvious.
And, actually, I don't think any of your examples are correct. Most of the issues that you list there involved theories that weren't even in existence until they started working. And heavier than air flight was always known to be possible. I assume that what you mean is engine-powered heavier-than-air flight involving man. And people always thought that was possible, there were just a bunch of high fallutin scientists that didn't.
But in any case, if anyone had come along in, say, 1100 AD and said that Germ theory was an established fact around which all of science should revolve, they would have been considered insane, since the tools needed to work on germ theory hadn't yet been invented. And I would be interested in the logic that someone would have used to say it was impossible. And I would have been willing to put forward my own logic, and my own explanations, as to how it would work.
None of this is the case here. Materialist evolutionists have no even semi-plausible idea of what the first life was like... what its component parts would have been and would have needed to be. They are not willing to sit down with their detractors and say, "Here is what I propose as a theory for the first life... here are the necessary parts... here are sub parts that could have gone together to make them." Not 'what was that life like', but 'what could it have been like'.
If you were to ask me to describe the evolution of the bicycle I couldn't do it (outside of Google). But I could imagine that evolution. I could imagine someone in 220 BC accidentally going down a hill while on a log, frantically running backwards, and have them say, "Hey, if I were to do that on purpose!" Or some charioteer whose chariot had rotted out kicking the ground like on a skateboard and saying, "Hey, I wonder..."
But when the simple question is asked, "What do you propose for the component parts of this first life', the question goes unanswered. I believe because it can't be. Because if someone were to say, "Here is the minimum set", then either someone else would say, "How would that work without X", or everyone would look at say, "How could that all possibly have come together???"
No, you have asserted that it could not happen, based on unproven assumptions.
And science does not need to prove exactly how something could happen in order to say that it could happen. The burden of proof is on those who claim to know 100% of how the world works, to assert that something cannot - and that is humanly impossible.
I just wanted to thank you for doing a lot of the heavy lifting in here. Also providing wicked new arguments for me for future use. Im waning in my ability to keep at this thread. We have hit the impasse Mr. Raven forewarned me about. Couto’s.
And to your most recent comment above Von, germ theory was true before any one had a theory of it and we can be certain it’s true because we are able to replicate experiments. Even if we couldn’t be certain it would remain true. Same can be said for evolution. We have provided you with about a dozen different tests to test evolution and you don’t bother engaging because your mind is made up. Why do cephalopods breathe air? Wouldn’t it make more sense for them to have gills? Why are whales closely related to cows? Why do we have vestigial organs? Why would you create a world that is 6000 years old appear as if it is 4.5 billion years old. And on and on and on. Im getting tired of this if you won’t answer my questions or at least try, rather than obfuscating. Again, with respect. I just don’t see this getting anywhere
This is rather dramatic begging the quesiton. You assume that evolution is true, and then say so it is true.
Evolution is just as false as the humor theory that preceded germ theory. It was false before it was thought up, and it is just as false now.
Now the rest of your post is mostly all theology. You are basically comparing your wisdom as to how things should have been created, and saying 'that's not the way it is, so God didn't create the world'. I would think it would be better to say, "I don't know anything about how or why God created the world, so it doesn't make sense for me to put tests on it.'
All of your 'tests' for evolution are not tests comparing it to Special Creation. And you aren't answering the actual subject of this post about the first life.
>>Why are whales closely related to cows? Why do we have vestigial organs? Why would you create a world that is 6000 years old appear as if it is 4.5 billion years old
See 'Methodological Naturalism'. How old would a doctor have said Adam was one day after he was created?
Im open to the idea of a god. Even a Christian one, though extremely unlikely in my opinion, but denying evolution that remains sound after centuries of testing, is illogical when the same logic proves gravity or relativity or the technology used to speak to you on Substack .
Actually, the logic used in evolution is the exact opposite of that used to create the technology used on Substack, as Russ pointed out. No one has any problem laying out, in rather incredible levels of detail, how the tech used to power Substack works. I'm sure you could find volumes on the internet, going back to punch cards.
The opposite is true for this issue of the First Life. All we have is some frantic, hopeful, handwaving about clay and lightning bolts.
I'll answer that in a sec, but reading over several of your comments I wrote this:
So, Don Pato, sorry you are frustrated. But, in my defense, I predicted you would be.
I would point you back to my post ‘Ground Rules’, and mention that pretty much every issue that I mentioned there is coming around to haunt you here:
1) Methodological Naturalism: All of modern science is built on the foundation of ‘ruling out supernatural causes before we begin our investigation’… thus it can have literally nothing to say about the creation/evolution debate. Nothing. And yet time and again believers in evolution keep saying, “But science has…”. Science has done no such thing, because it can’t.
2) Theology: I warned you that you would slip into doing theology, and you have. When you bring up the laryngeal nerve, for example, you are making a logical argument with a missing premise:
a) This design is inefficient
b) God wouldn’t make inefficient designs
ergo
c) God didn’t design this.
But notice that (b) is theology. It involves a whole raft of conclusions about who God is. And that is theology. You can’t just slip it in, you would have to move over into the theological realm and either say, “This is what I believe about God” or “This is what you believe about God”. In the first case, who cares? You are arguing against me, not yourself. And in the second case… you’re wrong.
3) Evidence for must be evidence against: You seem to forget that there can’t be ‘evidence for evolution’ in a vacuum. It must be evidence for evolution that is against Special Creation.
I would also point out that as long as you are only doing comments, which get lost in long, involved threads, you never get to present your positive case. You never get to write a logically connected article, “Here’s why you should believe in evolution not special creation”. That makes for a rather disjointed and thus frustrating conversation.
I don't think the heliocentric model has anything at all to do with the issue of evolution or the first life.
But completely off-topic, no, I don't know of any particular impossibilities or even improbabilities in the heliocentric model. There is a little bit of a linguistic issue, or perhaps philosophical, regarding the meaning of the word 'centric'. From a philosophical standpoint, and a linguistic one, it is rational for a human being to say the sun 'rises' and 'sets', since that reflects their viewpoint and life. That is not in contrast or contradiction to the materialistic viewpoint that the earth sort of rotates around the sun (and sort of doesn't, as they are both rotating around the centre of the galaxy, and the gravity of the various planets distorts the orbit a bit, etc etc.
From a theological standpoint the sun was created to 'rule the day' (light-wise), which is obviously an observer-centric viewpoint but, again, says nothing as to how it does that.
I am not frustrating because you have shook me on any proof in your favour. Actually the opposite. But i too am busy and don’t want to violate our rules so i will just need more time to reply over the next bit. Talk to you soon
Yes yes. Catch up with you later. Im on night shift and woke up in the middle of my night and saw your response’s and had to reply. I need rest. Talk to you soon
A couple of centuries ago, it was the common wisdom that heavier-than-air flight was impossible. Many things are regarded as impossible until they are actually demonstrated.
Science does not magically gain all of its knowledge in one shot, and that there are questions it cannot answer today does not in any way prove that those questions will not be answered tomorrow. The odds you cite are based on assumptions; there is no particular reason to be confident that any of those assumptions are correct.
You've basically proven only that you know a path by which you cannot get from point A to point B; you have not shown that there is no viable path.
If you are commenting on the part of the article I think you are commenting on, I wasn't discussing a 'path', but an event. Barring a miracle it is impossible for X number of specific things to happen in Y time, given the X and Y we are talking about.
Now, your heavier-than-air issue is the opposite. There you are talking about scientific consensus. We both agree that it is useless when it comes to predicting future events. So to say that now, it will be impossible for us to invent faster-than-light flight would require knowledge that we don't possess. Granted.
But the past study that is evolution is on the opposite side of the issue. There we are dealing with the past, and we know what the result is. It is as if we were already looking around at Boeing 747s. And we do have a pretty good idea of the minimum pre-conditions for life, way, way more than we used to. And each time we find out more it makes life *More* not less impossible.
But, hey, if you wish to propose a possible genesis for the first life (pun intended) that could have come about via random chance into a not only functioning but successfully reproducing state, I'm your man... hit me with it.
But if all scientists wish to say is, "We have confidence that we will one day be able to demonstrate a design of life that is simple enough to have come about by random circumstances in the necessary time frame, with all of the needed parts"... then I would just say, cool, and point out that the definition of 'confidence' is 'with faith'... and I find my faith infinitely easier to believe in then that.
You're making a lot of assumptions about what a minimal proto-life would have to be. The fact is, we don't know every possibility, and therefore cannot be confident in estimates. For example, would it need to have RNA? I recall reading of a much simpler way for a reproduction mechanism to work, using collections of amino acids. It would not necessarily have to be an organism or even life: just something that can grow and reproduce. Even clearly non-organic crystals can do that.
The bottom line is, estimating probability depends heavily on the untestable assumptions you make. We simply do not have the evidence to know what it would have to be, and therefore have no honest way to declare its likelihood.
You are making a faith argument, not a scientific one at all.
I think you need to go back to my post. What I said was that the first life would need to have:
1) A system for reproducing that life. I don't care what kind of system, but it would have to have a system. And to be the first life for our purposes it would have to reproduce *this* life. You cannot get natural selection of each life is randomly different, there has to be pass down.
2) It would have to have an energy system, one that takes in energy from its environment and uses it for its needs, at a minimum for the energy system and reproduction system. Successfully long enough for successful reproduction, and then on and on through the generations.
3) I don't see how you can do with out something resembling some kind of cell wall, to keep the (at least two systems) together.
And I don't deny that I have faith, but I don't have enough faith to believe that you could get the component parts for those systems together, in the right place, at the right time, and have them fall into place to make the first life. I don't have nearly enough faith for that.
Yes, I agree that it has to have a mechanism to reproduce, even if it isn't actually "life." And that mechanism needs to be powered by something, but it could well be the outside environment. As I note, crystals can form without being alive.
When you speak of requiring a cell wall, you are making assumptions about the form of this proto-life that are not warranted.
Again, the post is literally talking about 'the first life'. So if it isn't 'life', then it isn't covered in the post.
Now to say 'powered by the outside environment' is a misnomer. While a bike is 'powered by the child riding it', it nonetheless needs to have a system, however simple, that transforms the child's actions into the purposes of the bike. It can't 'just happen'.
And if you wish to propose a first life that doesn't have a cell wall, well and good, I will listen to your design. Because pretty much all of the biological actors that we know about now need protection from the outside environment.
Even if it isn't life, it could provide a bootstrap to life; that is, it could be something which manages to duplicate itself in some way, and yet be susceptible to a change which could turn it in to life.
Consider a virus, for example. Is it alive? Most biologists would say no - and yet it manages to reproduce itself by taking control of something else. Now I am not suggesting a virus as the first life, just noting that there can be a precursor to life which can reproduce and which could mutate, potentially into life.
This is what I mean about coming up with a path that cannot work and insisting therefore that no path can work.
Here, for example, are a few different hypothesis: https://www.livescience.com/13363-7-theories-origin-life.html
>>It would not necessarily have to be an organism or even life:
Just to be clear, the first life would have to be life. It's in the definition. If things happened before the first self-reproducing life, well and good. But this post concerns the issue of the first life.
And you don't know what environment that first life would have had. That's the point of proto-life; it could act as a booster and completely change your assumptions. Assuming that new life only happened once, we'd have no residue of that first event to check.
Well, no, it wouldn't change anything I have written. I will grant some sort of self-reproducing molecule that was all over the place that, for some reason, didn't end up being the first life I am talking about. But then, assuming we could even get to it, it would be but one part of the miracle that produced the first life.
Indeed I would be fascinated to know which parts of this you would even think could be made easier, as I was deliberately very, very conservative in my estimates. My 1-3 would actually need to be 1-1000 I'm pretty sure.
BTW, I am not exactly making assumptions about what the first life must have been. First of all:
life, living matter and, as such, matter that shows certain attributes that include responsiveness, growth, metabolism, energy transformation, and reproduction. Although a noun, as with other defined entities, the word life might be better cast as a verb to reflect its essential status as a process. Life comprises individuals, living beings, assignable to groups (taxa). Each individual is composed of one or more minimal living units, called cells, and is capable of transformation of carbon-based and other compounds (metabolism), growth, and participation in reproductive acts.
Not me but: https://www.britannica.com/science/life
Secondly, I would be interested in hearing how a lesser definition could work to produce what we have today.
Vonn, I mean this with respect. Russell is correct. You assume a lot and get caught up in semantics and straw man arguments a lot, in my opinion. I don’t doubt your sincerity, but I think you are ignorant of some of your blind spots. No doubt I am as well, and if you see it, point it out. That being said, it is entirely possible for life to form without a ‘first life’ as you say. It is entirely possible for our universe to pop into existence from nothing as well. Lawrence Krauss wrote a book on exactly this. I admit there are a lot of less open minded people than Russel and understand while you may feel you need to argue against them, again i do this somewhat unconsciously as well but I try not too.
There are just too many oddities like the larnygeal nerve, the fact that human consciousness only has appeared in the last 100 000 years or so (in a universe that is 13/14 billion years old) that stare in the face of an intelligent design. You or I could engineer a more efficient design for both of these issues and doesn’t this give you pause? I know you are a young earth creationist but i think you aren’t being entirely honest with yourself. Respond as you like, but I would appreciate if you addressed these two issues with brevity. And I also would like to ask, what would it take yo convince you are wrong? Im not saying you are wrong, I am asking what would it take for you to lose your faith? Is this a possibility for you?
>>That being said, it is entirely possible for life to form without a ‘first life’ as you say.
I'm trying to figure out what this sentence means. Are you agreeing or disagreeing with me?
>>You or I could engineer a more efficient design for both of these issues and doesn’t this give you pause?
There are a rather incredible number of things where modern scientists say, 'we could do better than this' and then, a few years later, they've found out that, no, they couldn't. That the design they criticised had some features they hadn't considered.
And, I would add, they are free to try. I will be very interested in the result... assuming they use some animal... of producing an animal, from scratch, that is more efficiently designed. I won't be holding my breath, however.
So if you look up and understand the laryngeal nerve, you will see it is inefficient. I would propose that it doesn’t wind around our pelvis to relay a signal from the brain to the larynx. There
There what?
As I said, "there are a rather incredible number of things where modern scientists say, 'we could do better than this' and then, a few years later, they've found out that, no, they couldn't. That the design they criticised had some features they hadn't considered."
You were requested not to just wave your hands and say 'don't do this', but to produce a working organism that has a more efficient design. Note: Working organism.
There have been thousands of times when even brilliant people have said 'well, that's a dumb design' and then, when they went to do it themselves, said, "Oh, well, I see now why they did it that way". Not that every design is brilliant, and not that people don't continually make better designs.
But people have not created even one life from scratch, let along one with a better nervous system.
And I would point you back to my post 'ground rules' and note that you are doing theology here. You are basically saying, "If God were to actually have created life, He would have done a job that is more efficient'. That is a theological, not a scientific, statement.
And I just showed you a non-comprehensive list multiple potential paths to life. That you don't like those does not negate any of them. Bottom line is, what we don't know suggests that the limitations you see are not necessarily the actual limitations.
Until the end of the 19th century, all scientists were absolutely certain that it was impossible for the earth to be more than 10,000 years old, because the only possible means for the sun to be shining was gravitational collapse, and 10,000 years ago, the sun would have had to be large enough to encompass the earth's orbit. Then Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity, and a whole new avenue of possibilities was opened, with the recognition of hydrogen fusion, several decades later.
We don't know everything, and it is absolutely possible that future discoveries will show life to be quite probable, given the right conditions. It is intellectually dishonest to declare it impossible, just because we don't yet know how it could come about.
Again, the issue isn't paths. it is minimum requirements. And the issue isn't 'I don't like them'; they don't deal with the issues that I bring up in this post.
We absolutely don't know everything. But our lack of knowledge does not make something possible. You seem to think that I am proposing a materialistic theory better than that of evolution. I am not. I am saying that that theory doesn't work.
At the very least I am saying that, since they don't have the slightest idea of any way it could have worked (and, again, none of what you posted actually gave any kind of proposal for a first, working and reproducing, life) they should sit down and shut up and stop trying to insist that evolution is a 'fact'.
If the issue were only minimum requirements, you would have to say that you have disproved life itself. Of course, that's nonsense: current life is possible because there exist paths for new lives to be created that meet the known minimum requirements. So paths are what really matters: is there a path for a primitive life form to be created?
And there is no evidence that the path must be all-at-once. There is no reason, in principle, that some primitive basic life-precursor could not have come to be from relatively simple molecules. Like a virus, it could have reproduced thanks to its environment, and ultimately mutated into something more advanced. A large number of steps could ultimately have led to the first primitive life form.
>>If the issue were only minimum requirements, you would have to say that you have disproved life itself.
Hmmm. I'm wondering if you have forgotten the debate we are having. You know, Special Creation vs. Evolution? Just to clarify, in Special Creation, there is no 'first life' from whom all life evolved. There is a creator God, Who spoke, and all life came immediately into existence, fully formed and functioning. That life, then, reproduced basically the way all life does now, and down through the ages until we get NFL stars and Barbie movies.
For the first actual life, assuming evolution, there was an instant when that life was not, and the next instant it was. However the building blocks were arrived at, at one instant there came into existence a life capable of reproduction of itself, which, if evolution is to be believed, produced offspring which produced offspring which randomly mutated and naturally selected until, finally, President Trump. So, again, I am not discussing the path, altho you can do so at your leisure. I am discussing what would have been necessary for the first functioning, reproducing life.
(There is, of course, a problem with the previous forms. Viruses, as I assume you know, depend on functioning life to reproduce. The minimal functioning reproducing life has to have, at the very least, a way of capturing and using energy, and a way of successfully reproducing.)
I've not forgotten, but there are certainly no greater requirements on the first live organism that on subsequent ones. The rest of them are able to come into being through use of their parents, and there is no reason in principle that the first live organism could not have similarly come into being through the use of non-life precursors.
Essentially, you are looking at a man on top of a high smooth wall, noting that he cannot have climbed up or flown, and arguing that he must have been lifted there via Divine means, completely ignoring the possibility of a ladder or a pile of sand that has since been removed.
>>and there is no reason in principle that the first live organism could not have similarly come into being through the use of non-life precursors.
Except for being completely different, these are indeed similar. In the one case, you have a reproductive system designed by an omniscient designer, acting as designed to produce offspring of the same type.
In the other case, you have literally none of those things. None of them. You have no life, no reproductive system, no designer, no design...
Now you slip in a bit of a caveat by saying 'through the use'. No one, least of all me, is saying that an omniscient God could not use whatever He wished. He used a donkey once, as I recall.
However, even if he used eye of newt and the tail of a rat to produce the first life, or a bunch of dust to produce the first man and a rib to produce the first woman, the point would be that He had all the component parts He needed to produce them. He had them in any case since He is omniscient.
And if you wish to argue for what is commonly called Theistic Evolution, then you are welcome to do so. There can be no evidence for or against it, obviously, as at any point (as you said in your article) God can choose how the dice fall. The most impossible set of circumstances can be assured of coming to pass if He is in charge.
I will disagree with Theistic Evolution on theology grounds since the evidence can say nothing.
>>Essentially, you are looking at a man on top of a high smooth wall, noting that he cannot have climbed up or flown, and arguing that he must have been lifted there via Divine means, completely ignoring the possibility of a ladder.
I am noting that he could not have climbed up or flown. I'll allow the ladder. A ladder, one will note, is designed :)
(or a pile of sand), but you're killing the metaphor.
It's funny you keep bringing up 'a couple of centuries ago' comments. Because a few centuries ago, you had the entire scientific community absolutely sure of such things as illness being the result of an imbalance of humours, and, thus the efficacy of bleeding. (which, ironically, there is one disease for which bleeding is a treatment, and my brother has it.)
Scientists frequently get things wrong. But their ignorance is rarely a sign that they have gotten something right. Nor is their concensus.
Yes, exactly. And the point here is that science is ultimately self-correcting, as (old scientists who block the way die and) new observations are made, allowing old ideas to be disproven. So you cannot look at what is currently known and declare that everything must conform to it.
Right, and germ theory "couldn't happen" until it turned out to happen.
Nuclear energy "couldn't happen" until it did.
Heavier-than-air flight "couldn't happen" until it did.
Quantum mechanics and uncertainty "couldn't happen" until it did.
You're basically using "repeated assertion" as a form of argumentation. You have no basis for arguing that pre-life precursors couldn't have happened.
I have laid out exactly why it couldn't have happened, and backed it up. Indeed it is blindingly obvious.
And, actually, I don't think any of your examples are correct. Most of the issues that you list there involved theories that weren't even in existence until they started working. And heavier than air flight was always known to be possible. I assume that what you mean is engine-powered heavier-than-air flight involving man. And people always thought that was possible, there were just a bunch of high fallutin scientists that didn't.
But in any case, if anyone had come along in, say, 1100 AD and said that Germ theory was an established fact around which all of science should revolve, they would have been considered insane, since the tools needed to work on germ theory hadn't yet been invented. And I would be interested in the logic that someone would have used to say it was impossible. And I would have been willing to put forward my own logic, and my own explanations, as to how it would work.
None of this is the case here. Materialist evolutionists have no even semi-plausible idea of what the first life was like... what its component parts would have been and would have needed to be. They are not willing to sit down with their detractors and say, "Here is what I propose as a theory for the first life... here are the necessary parts... here are sub parts that could have gone together to make them." Not 'what was that life like', but 'what could it have been like'.
If you were to ask me to describe the evolution of the bicycle I couldn't do it (outside of Google). But I could imagine that evolution. I could imagine someone in 220 BC accidentally going down a hill while on a log, frantically running backwards, and have them say, "Hey, if I were to do that on purpose!" Or some charioteer whose chariot had rotted out kicking the ground like on a skateboard and saying, "Hey, I wonder..."
But when the simple question is asked, "What do you propose for the component parts of this first life', the question goes unanswered. I believe because it can't be. Because if someone were to say, "Here is the minimum set", then either someone else would say, "How would that work without X", or everyone would look at say, "How could that all possibly have come together???"
No, you have asserted that it could not happen, based on unproven assumptions.
And science does not need to prove exactly how something could happen in order to say that it could happen. The burden of proof is on those who claim to know 100% of how the world works, to assert that something cannot - and that is humanly impossible.
I just wanted to thank you for doing a lot of the heavy lifting in here. Also providing wicked new arguments for me for future use. Im waning in my ability to keep at this thread. We have hit the impasse Mr. Raven forewarned me about. Couto’s.
And to your most recent comment above Von, germ theory was true before any one had a theory of it and we can be certain it’s true because we are able to replicate experiments. Even if we couldn’t be certain it would remain true. Same can be said for evolution. We have provided you with about a dozen different tests to test evolution and you don’t bother engaging because your mind is made up. Why do cephalopods breathe air? Wouldn’t it make more sense for them to have gills? Why are whales closely related to cows? Why do we have vestigial organs? Why would you create a world that is 6000 years old appear as if it is 4.5 billion years old. And on and on and on. Im getting tired of this if you won’t answer my questions or at least try, rather than obfuscating. Again, with respect. I just don’t see this getting anywhere
>>Same can be said for evolution.
This is rather dramatic begging the quesiton. You assume that evolution is true, and then say so it is true.
Evolution is just as false as the humor theory that preceded germ theory. It was false before it was thought up, and it is just as false now.
Now the rest of your post is mostly all theology. You are basically comparing your wisdom as to how things should have been created, and saying 'that's not the way it is, so God didn't create the world'. I would think it would be better to say, "I don't know anything about how or why God created the world, so it doesn't make sense for me to put tests on it.'
All of your 'tests' for evolution are not tests comparing it to Special Creation. And you aren't answering the actual subject of this post about the first life.
>>Why are whales closely related to cows? Why do we have vestigial organs? Why would you create a world that is 6000 years old appear as if it is 4.5 billion years old
See 'Methodological Naturalism'. How old would a doctor have said Adam was one day after he was created?
Im open to the idea of a god. Even a Christian one, though extremely unlikely in my opinion, but denying evolution that remains sound after centuries of testing, is illogical when the same logic proves gravity or relativity or the technology used to speak to you on Substack .
Actually, the logic used in evolution is the exact opposite of that used to create the technology used on Substack, as Russ pointed out. No one has any problem laying out, in rather incredible levels of detail, how the tech used to power Substack works. I'm sure you could find volumes on the internet, going back to punch cards.
The opposite is true for this issue of the First Life. All we have is some frantic, hopeful, handwaving about clay and lightning bolts.
Do you take the heliocentric model to be true or impossible as you say evolution is?
I'll answer that in a sec, but reading over several of your comments I wrote this:
So, Don Pato, sorry you are frustrated. But, in my defense, I predicted you would be.
I would point you back to my post ‘Ground Rules’, and mention that pretty much every issue that I mentioned there is coming around to haunt you here:
1) Methodological Naturalism: All of modern science is built on the foundation of ‘ruling out supernatural causes before we begin our investigation’… thus it can have literally nothing to say about the creation/evolution debate. Nothing. And yet time and again believers in evolution keep saying, “But science has…”. Science has done no such thing, because it can’t.
2) Theology: I warned you that you would slip into doing theology, and you have. When you bring up the laryngeal nerve, for example, you are making a logical argument with a missing premise:
a) This design is inefficient
b) God wouldn’t make inefficient designs
ergo
c) God didn’t design this.
But notice that (b) is theology. It involves a whole raft of conclusions about who God is. And that is theology. You can’t just slip it in, you would have to move over into the theological realm and either say, “This is what I believe about God” or “This is what you believe about God”. In the first case, who cares? You are arguing against me, not yourself. And in the second case… you’re wrong.
3) Evidence for must be evidence against: You seem to forget that there can’t be ‘evidence for evolution’ in a vacuum. It must be evidence for evolution that is against Special Creation.
I would also point out that as long as you are only doing comments, which get lost in long, involved threads, you never get to present your positive case. You never get to write a logically connected article, “Here’s why you should believe in evolution not special creation”. That makes for a rather disjointed and thus frustrating conversation.
I don't think the heliocentric model has anything at all to do with the issue of evolution or the first life.
But completely off-topic, no, I don't know of any particular impossibilities or even improbabilities in the heliocentric model. There is a little bit of a linguistic issue, or perhaps philosophical, regarding the meaning of the word 'centric'. From a philosophical standpoint, and a linguistic one, it is rational for a human being to say the sun 'rises' and 'sets', since that reflects their viewpoint and life. That is not in contrast or contradiction to the materialistic viewpoint that the earth sort of rotates around the sun (and sort of doesn't, as they are both rotating around the centre of the galaxy, and the gravity of the various planets distorts the orbit a bit, etc etc.
From a theological standpoint the sun was created to 'rule the day' (light-wise), which is obviously an observer-centric viewpoint but, again, says nothing as to how it does that.
I am not frustrating because you have shook me on any proof in your favour. Actually the opposite. But i too am busy and don’t want to violate our rules so i will just need more time to reply over the next bit. Talk to you soon
Just to be clear, I didn't say you were frustrated because of any proof.
Yes yes. Catch up with you later. Im on night shift and woke up in the middle of my night and saw your response’s and had to reply. I need rest. Talk to you soon