Abiogenesis (Origins)

by broken_cynic , Wednesday, August 03, 2011, 18:21 (4859 days ago) @ dhw

I have noted earlier in this conversation that my take is that atheist refers to a position regarding belief whereas agnostic refers to a position regarding knowledge. By straight dictionary definition however, agnosticism is a belief position: one that believes that the answers to questions regarding the existence of god(s) (and perhaps many other questions as well) are ultimately unknowable. It is already apparent that you do not find your experience of agnosticism to be constrained by the dictionary, so please accept that I as an atheist may also not fit precisely in either the dictionary or your own notion of what an atheist is, believes and thinks.-> dhw: "Atheism therefore expressly rejects the existence of a designer and hence the theory of design..."-Agreed.-> "...which leaves abiogenesis as the only alternative."-Pretty much. As Balance correctly pointed out, even if it didn't happen here on Earth, the buck has got to stop somewhere/time.-> "Let us take this point by point. The process that led from life to non-life is "unclear". Agreed. There is no evidence to suggest outside intervention. Agreed. There is also no evidence to suggest that chance is capable of creating the astonishingly complex mechanisms I have described elsewhere. "We go with the simplest explanation." But if the simplest explanation (applying Ockham's razor) entails believing in something which has no scientific evidence to support it, why not withhold belief until there IS evidence? "When more data becomes available, the explanation will be adjusted as necessary." Yes indeed.-You talk about "believing in something which has no scientific evidence to support it," but I don't 'believe in' anything in this scenario. I don't hold to any particular theory of abiogenesis as I am not nearly well enough educated on the subject to stake a claim. I don't dogmatically 'believe in' the idea in general. I merely observe and accept that (as you have illustrated) in the absence of the supernatural, abiogenesis in some form is likely to be the source of life in this universe. I also accept that life on this planet kicked off so long ago and at such a small scale that hard evidence for exactly how that occurred is unlikely to be forthcoming anytime soon. So the only point where belief comes into this at all is way before these considerations even come up in the broader analysis when I note that all of the deities on the table are 1) utterly ridiculous, 2) irrelevant to our existence or 3) both, and that furthermore, beyond the lack of supporting evidence the concept of the supernatural is fundamentally incoherent.-What 'astonishingly complex mechanisms' do you suggest that chance must supply? All that is necessary to begin with is imperfect self-replication. If we assume, for the sake of argument, the classic protein in a warm chemical soup then there may well have been an effectively infinite number of proteins over billions of years before that one oddball with a lucky difference. There may even have been billions that turned that particular trick, but only one that thrived. There's a good chance we will never know the details.-> ""A designer is unnecessary": that is an assumption, since you have no idea how life began. Until there is evidence to the contrary, I myself cannot believe that chance is capable of creating the mechanisms of life and evolution. You evidently can, as you have closed the door on the alternative. Like you, I can't believe in a supernatural creator either. And so I leave both doors open."-'A designer is unnecessary' is not an assumption at all. Adding the idea of a designer to the body of knowledge we currently have doesn't add anything to our understanding, therefore it is not necessary. I'm not suggesting that I know the details of how it happened and there wasn't a designer involved, I'm simply saying that that by the law of parsimony a creator is extraneous complexity and is therefore dismissed. The idea of a creator adds complexity vastly above and beyond that required for chance to do the job, as instead of just trying to figure out where a very simple self-replicating organic mechanism came from you now need to explain the origins of something that operates outside of our entire realm of experience. As you have apparently asked before on this board: who created the creator? A creator is not even an alternative hypothesis, it's just a way of passing the buck so far along that one no longer need bother even attempting to see where it stops.-I'm not asking you to 'believe in' chance, only to grant that given our current state of knowledge it is the explanation which requires the least assumptions. Beating huge odds is something we know happens in the real world. Magic isn't.