Asking of the Designer what we would of any other designer (The atheist delusion)

by dhw, Saturday, July 30, 2011, 09:40 (4866 days ago) @ David Turell

David referred us to an article whose findings he summarized as "abiogenesis is rare in the universe". I argued that it didn't need to be common, as even rare examples would be welcome news to atheists.-DAVID: It seems you are turning the rarity of life back on itself. With a 100 billion galaxies and 100 billion stars in each, and with the knowledge that many stars have solar systems, the numbers of planets must be humongous. Therefore chance for life is enormous if the jump from inorganic to organic is common. The paper says it should not be common, but rare. If it is only on Earth then God is real. That is the import of the paper.-Here is the paper:
Life arose on Earth sometime in the first few hundred million years after the young planet had cooled to the point that it could support water-based organisms on its surface. The early emergence of life on Earth has been taken as evidence that the probability of abiogenesis is high, if starting from young-Earth-like conditions. We revisit this argument quantitatively in a Bayesian statistical framework. By constructing a simple model of the probability of abiogenesis, we calculate a Bayesian estimate of its posterior probability, given the data that life emerged fairly early in Earth's history and that, billions of years later, sentient creatures noted this fact and considered its implications. We find that, given only this very limited empirical information, the choice of Bayesian prior for the abiogenesis probability parameter has a dominant influence on the computed posterior probability. Thus, although life began on this planet fairly soon after the Earth became habitable, this fact is consistent with an arbitrarily low intrinsic probability of abiogenesis for plausible uninformative priors, and therefore with life being arbitrarily rare in the Universe. -I may have misunderstood it, and I must confess I find it extremely hard to follow. Is he arguing that the process of abiogenesis itself (the spontaneous ... i.e. uncreated ... emergence of life from non-life) is improbable, or that given the information we have, there are likely to be far fewer instances of abiogenesis in the universe than some people have expected? You appeared to argue the latter ("abiogenesis is rare in the universe"), and my point is that you only need ONE instance of abiogenesis to give theism a nasty shock.-It's important that we all agree on what abiogenesis actually means. A Wikipedia article confirms my definition: "the study of how biological life arose from inorganic matter through natural processes." I have found an ID site that puts the argument against abiogenesis:- www.gotquestions.org/abiogenesis-definition-theory.html-This again confirms my definition, and I'm sure you will agree with every word, which is why I was surprised in the first place when you wrote abiogenesis was rare. All a big misunderstanding?

Tags:
ABIOGENESIS