Exactly!
Abiogenesis - Is it Faith?
by cantleave 25 Replies latest jw friends
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Anony Mous
Abiogenesis happened, somewhere, somehow. You can't claim God existed forever and created everything if you don't want to accept that energy existed forever and grouped together to form life. They are the same thing, one thing is believed (but not proven) to be intelligent, the other thing is just chance. The reason scientist don't answer the god-community that asks where did the energy come from is because it's a really stupid question and does not actually help the scientific process, it only dilutes the search for what actually happened in our timeline and gives creationists soundbytes and information they don't understand and subsequently find fault with.
The thing is God is really hard to prove experimentally (he doesn't show himself unless you believe that he does things that cause him to not show himself) while scientific abiogenesis has some merit out of our understanding of life and experiments done (put stuff in a test-tube, shake it and you have the building blocks of a life form, shake it some more and you get primordial lifeforms).
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bohm
abiogenesis is a the most likely explanation given the observations.
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hamsterbait
We can see events in the distant universe, as they unfolded BILLIONS of years ago.
There is no evidence that in those far off days an imaginary friend was manipulating things. We still dont see it today.
HB
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sizemik
Abiogenesis or God? The question itself places both "hypotheses" in the same general category in the sense of your OP . . . "light the blue touch paper and stand well clear" (I know you meant something else) . . . but only as a question at the outset.
Before anyone jumps down my throat . . .
From a scientific point of view it is simply looking for a mechanism or process which, admittedly, is inherently difficult because it has already occurred, and cannot yet be observed in the full sense. The difficulty lies in unearthing a process or phenomenon which is hard to recreate or test without any of the parameters first being established . . . significant progress has been, and is being made in this area however. Such is the nature of science (discovery).
The difficulty for the theological hypothesis ie; "God did it" is infinitely more difficult than that . . . it has nothing by way of quantifiable scientific parameters to even offer to begin with and therefore can be nothing but guesswork, which can neither be proved or disproved . . . and therefore will forever be consigned to the parameters of faith . . . not science. Even operating within these parameters, God is remote and disinterested as evolutionary knowledge compounds . . . "light the blue touch paper and stand well clear" . . . becomes his only conceivable role.
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tec
(Evolution is proven despite it being called a theory. Electricity and Gravity are theories also. The specific ways which life evolved are the only real debate on that.)
Forgive me for going off topic for one quick second, but gravity is a law, yes? Electricity also? In science, aren't there hypothesis, then theories, and then laws? So evolution isn't quite as 'proven' as something like gravity?
Thanks,
Tammy
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darthfader
TEC:
- A scientific law is a concept related to a scientific theory. Very well-established "theories" that rely on a simple principle are often called scientific "laws". For example, it is common to encounter reference to "the law of gravity", "the law of natural selection", or the "laws of evolution."
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Nickolas
Hey guys. Ever notice how often the same people get involved with a certain genre of thread?
Anyone like me who subscribes to the Theory of Evolution and who has read up-to-date material on it is more and more convinced, but I don't think it has been proven in the accepted sense of the word. But we're talking about abiogeneis, and that's an entirely different subject. Abiogenesis has not been duplicated in the laboratory, which would help constitute a solid proof for evolution, even if it is a different subject. Abiogenesis may never be duplicated in the laboratory. Life as we can observe it is only possible because the planet earth is part of a solar system that supports life. The process required to generate self-replicating protein molecules required the specific conditions set up by the solar system as it stabilised, conditions that have long disappeared. Whether or not those conditions can be ascertained and then duplicated in the laboratory is quite rightly described as a longshot. If the odds of abiogenesis happening are very, very long indeed, like one in a billion or one in ten billion there would still be between 5 and 50 planets in the Milky Way galaxy on which it will have happened, including here. And finding the recipe would be a great challenge.
Is it faith? No. It's credible based on the anthropic principle and credible evidence from Hubble. Show me something more credible than abiogenesis and I will drop it into the trash and move on.
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sizemik
Good point darthfader . . .
A lot of confusion is generated by semantic nuances of the terms employed when discussing Evolution.
Science rarely refers to "The Theory of Evolution" simply because an all-encompassing fully accepted singular theory simply does not exist. Reference is more commonly made to "The Evolutionary Model" on account of the fact that it encompasses such a wide variety of areas of study and scientific fields. Within each field there are "theories" "laws" and "facts" which all contribute to the understanding of the Evolutionary model. Abiogenesis is just one of these.
Evolution v Creation is really a gross over-simplification of the subject when attempting to "prove" one and descredit the other. It is fair to say that scientific evidence to date . . . heavily favours the Evolutionary Model because of the facts and laws relating to it, which are now universally accepted.
It's not about dodging the fundamental question . . . more about acknowledging the complexity of the issues involved
Hope this makes sense.
Edit; Nick . . . you made a better job than me of narrowing the discussion to be on topic.
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unshackled
but I don't think it has been proven in the accepted sense of the word.
Nickolas...wondering if you wouldn't mind elaborating on that. Granted I'm early in studying evolution but from what I've read so far, Dawkins and Coyne, the theory of evolution is as rock solid, and accepted, of any scientific theory. Perhaps you meant something different...