Absence of Evidence (The limitations of science)

by John Clinch , London, Friday, February 29, 2008, 17:03 (5898 days ago) @ dhw

I wasn't quoting you: I was paraphrasing, I thought fairly. - Your argument turns on abiogenesis being tantamount to an actual miraculous event or series of events ... i.e. something that science CANNOT IN PRINCIPLE explain. I say this because much of your home page is devoted to stressing what you regard as the limitations of science and drawing your conclusion from these limitations. It would seem to follow that the basis of your agnosticism falls away if science could explain abiogenesis. Fair? - You referred to what would be the miraculous creativity of pure chance. Specifically, as to the naturalistic explanation of life's origins, I found this: - "But how does life get started?" Again [Dawkins] admits that this "may have been a highly improbable occurrence". "The origin of life was the chemical event, or series of events, whereby the vital condition for natural selection first came about. The major ingredient was heredity, either DNA or (more probably) something that copies like DNA but less accurately, perhaps the related molecule RNA." This is an extraordinary simplification. The origin of life must at the very least have had two major ingredients, and they must have sparked into life at precisely the same moment: heredity was one, but what Darwin called the "breath" was the other. DNA is not much use in a lifeless body. By only calling on DNA/RNA, at a stroke Dawkins has halved the degree of the already high improbability. But be reassured: "I shall not be surprised if, within the next few years, chemists report that they have successfully midwifed a new origin of life in the laboratory" (p. 137). That's OK then. Dawkins thinks that the combined knowledge of the finest brains, working on the findings of generations of earlier fine brains, will soon be able consciously to put together the ingredients and breathe the spark of life into them ... which will prove that life came about through unconscious chance." - You do not develop the point, but the implication is clear enough: you don't believe Dawkins' claim. It is unclear whether you disagree with the view that life will be artificially created SOON or are saying that life will NEVER be artificially created. But, basically, you dispute that science can do it. Fair? - And in your posting, responding to me, you said: - "However, if scientists do eventually discover how life came about, and if the explanation turns out to be as simple and natural as you and George think, and chance does seem to be the best bet, then it may indeed influence my beliefs" - Set against this, I cannot see how my statement, referring to your - "apparent presupposition that scientists would never uncover evidence about how life could rise from simpler physical forms. His is a hugely strong claim..." - can, in fairness, be objected to. If you want to resile from your stated position, we need to know, but any reasonable reading of what you wrote tends to the view that you are, at the very least, extremely sceptical that science will ever fully explain life. I'm paraphrasing again, of course, but your argument is based on an assumption that it won't happen. Fair? - The declared basis for your agnosticism is the argument that you are faced with two very implausible options: the rock of the miracle of "creative chance" and the hard place of a miraculous intervention by God. That is to say, we are faced with two miraculous alternatives. It follows that, if there is ever good evidence of natural processes, there is no miracle. Fair? - I am amazed about your low expectations of science in this regard: its record over the last 300 years has been STAGGERING in what it can now explain and we may just, if we manage our planet properly, have a million or even a billion years of science ahead of us. Just pause and imagine that. Why do you need to speculatively posit the possibility of a miraculous intervention when there may be so much time left to understand what is, after all, just another aspect of Nature? The reality is that there are very good grounds to suppose that science WILL be able to fully explain how life originated. My interventions in this debate have been to try to understand why, in the face of that, you persist with saying we only have two miraculous alternatives. - Remember, not one single miracle has ever been verified. ALL phenomena of Nature observed thus far have been due to entirely natural processes and we have no good reason to suppose that any will not be. Applying Ockham's razor, there is no need to postulate the possibility of a designer to explain the origin of life on this planet. Ergo, although there may be a good reason for being an agnostic (and I believe that there are), yours isn't one of them.