Evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, January 13, 2009, 17:57 (5791 days ago) @ David Turell

David and George have been corresponding about the latest lab results "following the theory of an RNA world preceding the DNA world." - George comments: "Is this chance or law? It looks quite mechanical to me." 
David comments: "Of course they used rather complicated organic molecules, and cannot answer the question of how they might have risen from an inorganic world." - If I may follow on from these remarks, it seems to me that our use of language constantly reduces the colossal scale of realities we are asked to believe in. "Chance or law", "mechanical" ... such words bring the matter within our grasp. "Ribonucleic acid", "deoxyribonucleic acid" sound complex, but nicely scientific and unified ... again, a graspable concept. In the same way, "God" enables people to make a conceivable unit out of something absolutely unimaginable. - Can we for a moment dispense with such language and instead imagine a scenario. I am a living, conscious, fairly intelligent being. You have put me in a vast laboratory with all the ingredients necessary to create life and reproduction (the two are inseparable if life is to go on). But you have also given me lots of other ingredients that are irrelevant. So there I am, with all I need. I just have to select which thingummies to put together, and there will be life and reproduction. - I am not, however, a scientist. I am ignorant of science. I don't know which material is which. I don't know which of the thingummies are needed, let alone how to put them together. There is no-one to teach me. And there is a vast variety of thingummies, and an infinite number of possible combinations. Would you be prepared to bet that one day I, dhw, non-scientist and ignoramus, would find the right materials and the right combination to create life and reproduction? - The laboratory, of course, is the Earth. But if I follow the atheist line of thinking, I am not there. There is not even a living, conscious, highly intelligent scientist there. There is nobody there at all. Only the ingredients, and they know nothing. They may be blown around in the wind or swirled around in the water, but no-one is trying to put them together. - Here, then, is my personal situation: I do not believe that, left in my ignorance even for billions of years, I would ever be able to select and combine the ingredients and thereby create life and reproduction (not to mention, in due course, sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell, consciousness). How, then, can I believe that a non-living, non-conscious, non-intelligent mass of materials, which don't even know there is such a thing as life, reproduction etc., could float round the otherwise empty laboratory to find the combination I don't think I could ever find? - That is one reason why I am not an atheist. But please don't argue that this makes me a theist. A non-belief in (a) does not lead to a belief in (b). You need much more than a negative to lead you to a positive.