Abiogenesis (Origins)

by dhw, Friday, August 05, 2011, 20:52 (4645 days ago) @ broken_cynic

Wednesday 3 August at 18.21:
Dhw: Atheism therefore expressly rejects the existence of a designer and hence the theory of design.
KENT: Agreed.-Thursday 4 August at 23.29:
dhw: "If you categorically reject deliberate design..."
KENT: I do not. -I hope you will understand my confusion. Are you an atheist or not?-Dhw (on the theory of abiogenesis) Then may I ask why, if you accept it, you don't 'believe' it?-KENT: I do not 'accept it' full stop. I accept that it is the only alternative on the table which A) fits the available evidence and B) doesn't hinge on a giant cruft of an unsupported idea with its roots in mythology. (Or in other words, doesn't involve orders of magnitude more unnecessary complexity.) -If you accept that abiogenesis is the ONLY alternative that fits the evidence, and you reject the only other alternative, do please explain to me WHY you do not accept it or believe it. But please do not spend time attacking the alternative of design ... you have made that side of your argument abundantly clear.-Dhw: I don't believe in magic either. Nor do I know of anyone on this forum who does, including our theists.
KENT: Interesting statement. How do you distinguish the things theists believe from magic?
 
You have quoted my answer below. As for the theists on this forum, I will leave it to them to explain their own views if they wish to.-Dhw: IF there is some sort of super-intelligence out there, I could only conceive of it as a form of energy different from what we know, but consciously and scientifically constructing life in the same way as we construct computers.
KENT: So a sufficiently powerful or advanced alien would satisfy your notion of deity?-If by 'alien' you mean a physical creature from another planet, no, because we would then have the same problem of accounting for its origin. I'm talking of some unknown form of energy: expressions like "life force", "élan vital" come to mind, perhaps associated vaguely with electromagnetism, but there's no point in pushing me on this. I have no clear concept, which is scarcely surprising. And I'm fully aware that we will always come back to the unanswerable question of origin.-Dhw: IF this were so, I could then conceive of human consciousness as a similar form of energy, channelled through the material brain, and I could link this energy to the many mystic and/or psychic experiences that remain unexplained. This scenario does not involve the supernatural, but would be an extension of the natural.-KENT: And therefore an extension of science. [...] What is this scenario supposed to suggest? It seems to me as if you are conflating 'natural' and 'scientific' with 'what we know/understand today.'-I am merely suggesting that there MAY be things in the natural world which we do NOT know/understand today. I don't know that science is or ever will be equipped to find out all the forms of energy and materials that make up our universe. String theory proposes 11 dimensions, the multiverse theory proposes who knows how many universes? It may simply be that the answers to the big questions are unknown to us because there are forms or dimensions that are unknown to us. These may include a form of conscious energy that some folk call "God".-Dhw: I have set out the case (for both sides) in my post of August 1 at 13.42.
KENT: The original Abiogenesis post? I certainly don't see a balanced treatment of two sides in that post, nor do I see specifics regarding what you think 'chance has to provide' which you find equal in (un)likelihood with gods?-Then in my totally subjective view, you have "not grasped what is involved". Like yourself, I am not versed in biochemistry, and so I would prefer to leave the "specifics" to David, who is. However, you do not need to be a biochemist to realize that, if you believe in evolution as I do, every stage leading from bacteria (or whatever is now regarded as our first ancestor ... theories keep changing) to the walking, seeing, hearing, thinking beings we are today involves adaptations and innovations that are still beyond our understanding, let alone our capability of consciously producing.-Dhw: [...] if by applying Ockham's razor we are left with too many unanswered questions (there are too many for me, but not for you), we are forced to consider the possibility ... no more ... that the razor may have cut out the very heart of the matter.
KENT: Applying the razor (well put by the way) doesn't leave us with any additional questions compared to what we had before using it. In fact it eliminates the bulk of them and leaves the core few, big, but relatively simple questions. Those questions are still there when you add the idea of a designer back on, only now you have all kinds of new questions about the designer to answer too. Yet somehow those questions get a free pass?-I have already agreed with all of this, except the description of the big questions as "relatively simple". The questions concerning the designer do not get a free pass. You are arguing as if I had advocated belief in a designer. Please reread the conclusion of my initial post on abiogenesis.