Origin of Life: miracle? (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, October 14, 2013, 16:09 (3846 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Rabbi Averick:-http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/atheism-of-the-gap/-"What Koonin has done is simply add a new twist to one of the profoundly flawed arguments routinely offered by atheists: The Argument from Infinite Possibilities-Let me begin my explanation of this flawed argument by quoting one of the great intellectuals of the 20th century, Bertrand Russell. Russell made the following oft-quoted statement:-"Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of skeptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that since my assertion cannot be disproved [no one can doubt its truth], I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense.' "-What agnostics/atheists and theists consistently fail to acknowledge is that the agnostic/atheist Russell's teapot analogy applies to all of them.-QUOTE: "Atheistic scientists are acutely aware of the difficulties involved in proposing that some type of unguided process would be able to bridge the gaping chasm between non-life and life. However, they seem totally oblivious to the fact that ... in keeping with the thrust of Russell's argument ... it is their burden to prove it true rather than being the burden of the theist to disprove the possibility."-Absolutely right. And precisely the same applies to the claim that there is an eternal, universal God, though we cannot perceive or know him. It is the theist's burden to prove it. Of course neither proposition can be proved, which is why our rabbi blithely shifts the goalposts, as follows:-QUOTE: "When the atheist says "it's possible that it happened" or "it's not impossible that it happened" he is appealing to the notion of Infinite Possibilities. As we know from the courtroom, we don't live in a world where we are required to consider infinite possibilities; we live in a world where we are only required to consider reasonable possibilities. The only reasonable possibility is that life was the result of Intelligent Creation/Design."-Hold on. We've now switched from "burden to prove" to "reasonable possibility". So if the atheist says he can see no reasonable possibility of some invisible, unknowable, eternal, infinite being capable both of creating whole universes and of cobbling together the tiniest living micro-organisms, why is his version of what is reasonable any less valid than that of the theist who sees no reasonable possibility other than there being a designer? What gives Rabbi Averick or anyone else the right to claim they know what is or isn't reasonable?-The subjectively viewed reasonableness or otherwise of the two hypotheses stems at least partly from their negation of the other viewpoint: chance is unreasonable, therefore God is reasonable. God is unreasonable, therefore chance is reasonable. As an agnostic, I find both hypotheses equally difficult to believe, but since no explanation seems to me to provide adequate solutions to the unsolved mysteries, I would not be so arrogant as to call them unreasonable.