Theoretical origin of life; new earliest? (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, October 07, 2017, 10:22 (2604 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: You had said that Darwin’s theory “dismisses God out of hand”. It doesn’t. Even the hypothesis of random mutations, which you and I reject, does not dismiss God out of hand, as Darwin himself makes very clear. Your firm belief that your God designed absolutely everything, and left nothing to chance (I wonder if this now includes every environmental change), is of course your prerogative, but it does not mean that whoever disagrees with your interpretation of God “dismisses God out of hand”.

DAVID: Gradual change by chance mutations is still evolution by chance.

But it does not explain how life and the mechanisms for chance mutations came into existence, and that was not Darwin’s focus: “How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated.” (Difficulties on Theory)

DAVID: That is why atheism sticks to a Darwin style evolutionary process. Pure Darwinism supports atheism, no matter how Darwin himself felt as he reacted to criticism.

What do you mean by “pure Darwinism”? Of course atheists twist the theory to support their atheism. Now find me one single passage in The Origin of Species or anywhere else in which Darwin – the prime exponent of “pure Darwinism” – dismisses God out of hand. (Elsewhere he does attack religious dogma, but then so do you and lots of other theists and agnostics.)