Teapot Agnosticism (General)

by George Jelliss , Crewe, Sunday, February 03, 2008, 16:52 (6136 days ago) @ dhw

dhw writes: <i>I begin with the question &quot;How did we get here?&quot; By this I mean the origin of life itself ... Darwin&apos;s few forms or one, Dawkins&apos; &quot;first hereditary molecule&quot; ... and not evolution, which I do believe in. I then ask: &quot;Could it have been by chance?&quot; I ponder the fact that it has taken the most brilliant conscious minds to unravel the code of an organism that came to life, reproduced itself, and held within itself the potential for infinite variations ... even now we can&apos;t replicate it ... and I find that I am unable to believe that unconscious chance could create such a mechanism. My next step is to look for an alternative explanation, and it can only be some kind of design.</i> - So we are back again at the problem of abiogenesis. See my first post under the heading &quot;origin of life&quot;, where I gave links to various sites discussing the latest scientific hypotheses. It seems to me that significant progress has already been made in finding sequences of events that could lead to the origin of life. There is much more to be done, but there is nothing in principle that makes it impossible, except your incredulity. - The reason I find the origin of life likely to have occurred through some sequence of chemical processes is that it is a matter of a relatively few elements being combined in a relatively few ways, like a combinatorial problem in mathematics, and there is sufficient time for such a process to have emerged, step by step. The individual steps are not improbable, but to suppose it all happened at once is of course impossibly improbable (you multiply together the improbabilities of the component steps). - The postulation of a &quot;designer&quot; to guide these processes is just so over-the-top in improbabilities as not to be worth considering.