Abiogenesis (Origins)

by broken_cynic , Wednesday, August 03, 2011, 23:30 (4648 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

Balance_Maintained: "This is all well and fantastic and probably completely understood within the scientific community. However, the scientific community is responsible for how they represent that data to the public. If they 'simply do not know' then they should say 'we simply do not know', or 'this is the only thing we can come up with other than god. We don't know if it is possible. We don't know how it works. We have never observed it, and we can't test it, and we can't do it ourselves.'-> This is not what they DO, though. Instead, they present all of these hypotheses to the PUBLIC as if there is some factual basis for making the claim, just like the arguments for black holes, dark matter, life seeded by meteors, and multi-verses. When someone calls their hand on it, they generally revert back to the same line you just tossed out."-This may get confusing, but I'd like to keep this response where it belongs in the hierarchy of the thread. This is the summary I was referring to as "disingenuous, bordering on outright dishonest" and it was more than I could manage to compose a reply to it on my phone, but I did want to get back to it when I could do it some justice.-The reason scientists do not say the things you propose is because it would be false. You are twisting things badly. You confuse incomplete knowledge for complete ignorance. If you are asked to prove a complex mathematical formula, and you make significant progress, but are unable to finish the task, have you then accomplished/learned nothing? You may well find, when the complete proof is revealed to you, that you made some errors along the way and some changes need to be made to finish the thing by the route you had been on, but simply failing to close the deal does not necessarily invalidate the work done so far. Indeed, if the partial work proves sound and can be built upon to continue to make progress on other, lesser proofs, then it is even useful. -So they present what they do know, and they present their hypotheses about what might possibly one day get them from that knowledge to the answer they seek. Those hypotheses are honestly presented as such, even if they don't always come across that way in the popular media.-Your list of further examples are a widely varying mish-mash. Black holes are a real and relatively well understood phenomena (even if they are nothing like the ones in sci fi.) Dark matter is less well understood, but progress is being made in leaps and bounds in that department of late. Life seeded by meteors and multi-verses on the other hand are pure hypotheses, guesses which (arguably) fit the available data, but have no significant supporting evidence and will be discarded in a moment if an alternative hypothesis gains serious evidentiary support.-You need to bone up on the distinction between data, evidence, hypothesis, law and theory.