Abiogenesis (Origins)

by dhw, Friday, August 05, 2011, 21:12 (4641 days ago) @ broken_cynic

KENT: Scientific study is an action conducted by cognitive beings. That action can't 'claim' anything, only the beings can do that. -That is precisely the point I was trying to make. It is scientists, not science, that make claims, and there is no absolutely no scientific argument to support the theory that life originated by chance. That is a purely subjective belief.-Dhw: There is no default position.
KENT: Yes there is... the null hypothesis. ;)-I was referring to your statement that "They default to the chance explanation..." If scientists are trying to prove that life arose by chance (abiogenesis), then you are right. If scientists are trying to find out how life originated, then I don't see how they can "default" to the chance explanation. If the chance explanation is the null hypothesis, it can't be proved anyway. But I find all this very confusing ... as I do the fact that you don't 'believe' the chance theory, although you 'accept' that chance is the only explanation that fits the evidence and you reject the one alternative of design (or you do on a Wednesday and don't on a Thursday). My apologies if the confusion is caused by my own obtuseness.-Dhw: If scientists ever do crack the codes and explain to us how the various chemicals combined to create the mechanisms for life and evolution, no doubt the atheist will say chance did it, and the theist will say God did it. -KENT: I suspect that if you unpack their statements, the theist means 'the specific god I pray to did it' while the atheist means 'look dude, material processes all the way down, give it (your extraneous unnecessarily complex explanation) a rest.' Do you find those statements equally silly?-Yes, I find them equally silly. If the theist were to say: "I believe these codes are so complex that only some conscious intelligence could have produced them", and if the atheist said: "The theory of conscious intelligence raises too many new and extraneous questions for me, and so I believe the theory of chance to be more likely", I would acknowledge the utter reasonableness (and they would acknowledge the subjectivity) of their arguments, and we would all go and have dinner together.-KENT: "I can't explain X" (the argument from ignorance) is not evidence for Y. Period. If we can't agree on that, it will be awfully difficult to proceed.-Then do by all means let us agree on it. You wrote: "Show me the first piece of evidence that there is anything but the material world...and I will re-consider." Agreed. Now show me the first piece of evidence that chance can produce a mechanism that will turn bacteria into human beings, and I will reconsider. There are certain "big" questions to which we do not have the answers. Without convincing evidence (absolute knowledge is impossible) I'm not prepared to make a judgement. Apparently you are. -Dhw: Of course scientists can investigate, and they can assume/hope that they will eventually find a material explanation. But they haven't done so. KENT: They haven't found an explanation for what? 'Unexplained psychic phenomenon' is a completely empty phrase. Every single 'psychic phenomenon' that has ever been explained has been a trick. Every. Single. One.-I'm surprised at your knowledge of every deity on the table, and I am flabbergasted at your apparently all-embracing knowledge of psychic phenomena. Or do you perhaps mean that every psychic phenomenon you know about has been a trick, and those you don't know about don't count?-KENT (re the middle ground concept of agnosticism): It's not the concept as I usually use it, but there's no use getting wrapped up in minutia if we want to make any progress.-It was you who called the middle ground concept of agnosticism a "common misconception", and I'm sorry if you now regard my response and your own self-contradiction as "minutiae". I'm happy to drop the subject.
 
Dhw: I was brought up in a Liberal Jewish household, turned atheist in my teens, then read The Origin of Species and became an agnostic.
KENT: It is funny that you went that direction on reading a book that scared the hell out of the church and convinced many that the idea of a creator/god was finally unnecessary.
 
Perhaps I'm a funny person! The problem for the church was that the theory went against so many of its dogmatic teachings. Darwin himself saw "no good reason why the views given in [his] book should shock the religious feelings of any one", even talked of life "having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or one", and quoted the Rev. Charles Kingsley's comment that it was "just as noble a conception of the Deity" to say he created a few original forms instead of making each one in "a fresh act of creation" ... a view accepted by many of the religious people I know. (All quotes from my undated edition of The Origin). Darwin himself stated categorically on more than one occasion that he was an agnostic and had never been an atheist. The theory itself makes no case for or against God.