Abiogenesis: what happens to creationism if and when it hits paydirt?

Great Debates
21

I should add that OECs will likely not be much affected. While not as impervious to reason as are many YECs, OECs still maintain faith that God directly intervened at some point. For some, this point may well be the first “spark” which created life.

This is not to say that some folks of any particular current belief might not be swayed should solid evidence demonstrating abiogenesis come to light As movements, though, I think YECs and OECs are unlikely to be affected (though for different reasons), while ID will likely decline.

22

I should note, as a point of fighting potential ignorance, that the analogy to building a self-replicating robot from the spare parts of a robot is an extremely misleading one.

The basic elements of organic chemistry are not at all like spare parts simply jostled about and happening to end up in the right places. Molecules interact with each other: they retard or accelerate each other’s actions, they bond and unbond constantly, they react very differently in even slightly different environments and concentrations, and so on. In short, the basic elements at play in abiogenesis are not like static puzzle pieces that happen to fall into the right place (though certainly some of that is going on). They are constantly moving and interacting elements of function, each with different characters when alone or combined and so on. It would be just as wrong to give them “intention” or “desire” (pathetic fallacy indeed), and yet the way they work and how they pair up and break apart is dynamic enough that most non-psychological analogies and metaphors seem to be inappropriate as well.

Interestingly enough, as a total hijack, amoeba are actually a lot MORE complicated, as well as higher up in the tree of life, than we had all at first believed.

23

IMO, what will happen to creationism if abiogenesis is observed is the same thing that will happen if it isn’t: namely, the same thing that happened to heliocentrism. The evolution of species will gradually become more and more basic to scientific practice and theory, and the claim that it contradicts religious truth will gradually become more and more awkward and inconvenient. In a few more generations, that claim will have receded into the fringe, and in a couple of centuries, it will be a rare and ludicrous oddity.

Remember, folks, Copernicus published the hypothesis of a heliocentric solar system in De Revolutionibus in 1543, but adherence to geocentrism still persisted in many belief systems well into the eighteenth century—over 200 years later. Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, less than 150 years ago.* Gotta have patience.

  • Yes, Darwin wasn’t the first to suggest evolutionary origins, as Copernicus wasn’t the first to suggest heliocentrism, but in both cases their books mark some kind of watershed for the theory involved.
24

Count me in with the people who say it won’t make much difference. Some more reasonable people might be swayed, but the group of fanatics who make the most noise are immune to evidence anyway. They don’t understand science, and they don’t care for it either. More science they don’t understand or care for won’t affect them.

25

Well to highlight the fact that you said in one of your opening paragraphs that few here are interested in the subject, I must admit I did not read your entire post, because I find the topic too boring to read a post of that length on it.

I’ll say this, though, I don’t really think it will have much practical effect on religion, because creationism as it were isn’t really a key part of most Christian faiths as far as I’m concerned.

My grandfather was raised a Methodist. But he was also a chemist and a man of science. He never even presumed to “reject” evolution. Anymore than he would presume to reject anything he knew to be a fact about chemistry. He felt God created everything, but that it certainly doesn’t mean it all had to happen 8,000 years ago within the span of 7 days, or that his belief was incompatible with the scientific facts.

In fact not to get in to it here too deeply but Genesis in its more original form (Greek/Hebrew) leaves much more “wiggle” room, and it isn’t written so literally as some modern translations of Genesis.

I was raised a Catholic, I went to a Catholic High School.

Would you like to guess what I learned in biology class (well, one of the things I learned)?

That’s right, the theory of evolution. The text we used in fact was written by IIRC a very atheist biology professor out of one IIRC the University of Illinois (we’re stretch here because my memory isn’t perfect.) But creationism just wasn’t mentioned. The way my Catholic HS (and from what I understand many such schools) were set up there wasn’t talk of god or Catholicism in biology class. Any more than there was talk of God in math class.

There would perhaps be prayer in said class if said class fell at a certain time of day, but I was taught biology just as anyone who takes a biology class in a college would have it taught to them.

It was just a basic HS bio class so evolution wasn’t covered in depth, but it was given a section consisting of 1-2 chapters. And we studied and were tested on it (and if we had written in “God created everything, the end” as an answer we’d have failed the test.)

I should probably rephrase what I said in opening. Christians believe God created all life, but we don’t believe it in the “evolution is impossible” manner that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson argue. Sure, some Christians do believe that way, but in my personal life I’ve not met any out of certain very specific Protestant Denominations that argued that way.

So even if something is proven to give more support to the theory of evolution it won’t change most Christians minds or anything. Most of us already believe in evolution from my experience.

26

I’ve seen creationists say exactly what I have quoted - I am not clever enough to make it up. While we have not had a biological revolution, we have had a cosmological one - we can now see stars and planets forming, with no evidence of god. That seems analogous to abiogenesis, with the kicker of no human intervention.

As for history, I’ll go even further - Christians were abandoning YEC even before Darwin, based on geological evidence. Darwin depended on evidence of an old earth. The shock was the elimination of the necessity of god in the creation of man. Then there were many religious leaders who assumed that science would support the Bible. Those you mention resolved this by reinterpreting the Bible to match science - the OECs, for instance. The other faction just rejected science. Creationists today reject it, I can’t imagine any finding from those atheist scientists (even the ones who go to church every Sunday) that would make them change their minds. They hate and distrust any science that does not support their beliefs. That’s something different from ignorance or stupidity.

27

Count me in the “won’t make a damn bit of difference” crowd. Look: We’ve already pretty much got a good working theory of the evolution of the entire universe from fractions of a second after the Big Bang up to the present. “Well, what came before the Big Bang?”, asks the theist. Despite the fact that question may be meaningless, you can’t give an explanation that covers every possibility, so there’s always room for God to wriggle in.

If you create life in the lab, it “proves” nothing, except that you can create life in the lab; you can’t say with 100% certainty that your experiment mimicked perfectly the primodial stew. Forget that your experiment shows that abiogenesis is at least possible in principle; in creationistic arguments, as we should all know by now, experimentally-established principles are irrelevant. If the “skeptic of science” will not accept that another hypothesis or theory is at least demonstrably plausible, then there’s nothing more to say on the subject. Since the ID theorists have already discounted a priori the possibility that nature can “climb mount improbable” and give rise to life with only raw materials, random chance, and lots of time, there’s little reason to expect their minds would be changed by experimental evidence any more than they have in the past. They’re not even deterred by devastating experimental refutation. They simply retreat to another position, “moving the goalpoast” as theists (or theists in disguise) are wont to do. First the thrombotic cascade has irreducible complexity; then when parts are found to be unessential, it retains an “irreducible core”; and when further evidence of duplication and shuffling, plus divergent evolution of structural motifs to yield novel proteins with novel functions is demonstrated, it’s finally just a bad example. Other “examples” rise up where the last one failed, in an infinite regression.

No, I doubt even a time machine would be sufficient. There is no “pay dirt” in the mind of the creationist, because they discounted your hypothesis before you posed it. There’s nothing to demonstrate, because nothing but the indubitable evidence of God’s intelligence is demonstrable. I think we reached a point long ago where it was clear “debate” on the matter was pointless, and now all that remains is to make certain the pseudoscientists and/or theists don’t pollute the scientific discourse by demanding their views be given equal time in the classroom.

28

[semi-hijack]

Well, that’s the damndest thing, isn’t it? I agree, anybody truly fossilized in a the standard Creationist model aren’t likely to be budged, regardless. And I share Mr. Hyde’s observation, most Christians accept evolution like they accept microwave ovens.

But from whence, then, all these polls that show how vast is the number of Americans who don’t? Is there a mechanism at work there that creates false returns in the polling, or are there so many evolution-rejectionists but somehow we just never manage to know any?

[/semi hijack]

29

Also to expand my ideas further it really depends on your definition of creationist.

Almost nothing is black and white, one line explanation. A creationist can broadly be defined as someone who believes a divine being created existence.

How far do we take that? Some say that God created everything “magically” that humans, dogs, whales, birds, lizards et cetera were literally “created using divine magic” and set down on the earth.

Then some, like me, feel that God worked in both ways that can be some day explained by man, and in ways that cannot. One “tool” god used to shape life on Earth is evolution.

If you “prove” abiogenesis all you will be “showing” me is how God started the evolution process, nothing more, nothing less.

God has shown a proclivity for building simpler things into more complex things. I don’t want to get too presumptuous here but that to me shows some form of human logic in God’s actions. I don’t want to ever try and apply logic to God, for aside from it being blasphemous it is also incorrect to do so. But I do think that since we are crafted in his image our logic that we’ve developed may not be so different than whatever thought processes might go on with the divine.

So in that context evolution makes a good deal of sense to me.

Now as for society in general, no effects will be immediate or dramatic.

  1. The dogmatists who believe contrary to evolution now will dismiss it (let’s also not forget that as you said even if we prove a form of abiogenesis indeed we have no proof that is actually the specific method it occured 3.5 billion years ago on earth, it’s just one possible method) because dogmatists dismiss anything that interferes with their position.

  2. No major religion is going to collapse or be undone, nor will belief be reshaped. Christian belief for example has almost nothing to do with Genesis or God creating the world. That’s a historical record of sorts as to what God did in the beginning. To expand upon that or to explain that in a way that includes abiogenesis really doesn’t touch on most of the issues that are taught and preached on in Christian churches (as most of these things come from the teachings of Christ himself in the New Testament.)

Changes will occur, but after the people who were already set in their ways have died, so we’re talking 50-100 years and more.

30

I think it is two fold (and I actually do know some evolution rejectionists, just one that I can think of right now.)

Firstly, we’re going off anectdotal evidence when we talk about “just the people we know.”

Secondly I think a lot of people probably reject evolution when they aren’t even particularly religious. These are people that don’t attend Church regularly but genuinely believe in God and Jesus and et cetera. And to them evolution has never been explained fully (or like most Americans they just don’t remember anything from HS except having sex and getting drunk.) So they hear evolution they think, “That’s saying man came from apes, or monkeys” or whatever primate term you wish to use.

So I think a lot of people are simply misinformed. I think the number of “Falwell Creationists” who have read the scientific literature but still maintain life began 8,000 years ago is pretty small.

And a small nitpick is the phrase, “We came from apes.” It pisses me off because it’s such an inaccuracy. Firstly, we obviously share a common ancestor with the gorilla, the chimpanzee, the orangutan, et cetera. Depending on which primate we are talking about, the common ancestor in question may be closer in evolutionary terms or farther away.

But my understanding has always been that we share a common ancestor not that humans developed “out of” modern day chimpanzees, gorillas et cetera. In fact most modern day primates from what I’ve read weren’t to the point where they are really the same as they are today when humans themselves started breaking off from the common ancestry.

31

Well, abiogenesis isn’t the same thing as the theory of evolution, really.

And I should note that your story basically concerns what happened after DARWIN: basically in Catholicism, the church quickly accepted evolution as an acceptable idea that did not conflict with doctrine as long as some key features were retained. I tried very deliberately in my OP not to speak about all Christians precisely because creationism is largely an American Protestant phenomenon.

32

Martin Hyde has provided an equisite example of what I was talking about. Maybe there was a primordial soup, but can you say the hand of God did not stir it thirteen times counterclockwise and set the process of abiogenesis in motion? Or, if life is but an emergent phenomenon, arising through natural selection from the primordial soup in the same stochastic manner that cells evolve, does not God then simply manifest through emergent phenomena? Never mind that external agents are unnecessary for this particular emergent phenomenon. There must be, if you are willing to argue back enough, a first cause (even if that’s not necessarily true). The default position “God did it”, can squeeze into any crack, any hole, any possible gap where something remains unexplained, or at least accomodates a number of possiblities. That idea that there might be no God at work in these processes (not even an atheistic assertion, just a conjecture) is simply not considered. The matter was settled before the conversation began.

33

But again, it seems to me that a lot of the responses are based on the premise that everyone, to a man, is just so dogmatic and insensibly to evidence that their beliefs cannot be changed by major new revisions of the picture of the natural world.

And I have to say: while I can appreciate the sentiment in that it is borne out of frustration arguing with single individuals directly, I find it unconvincing and even a little odd that so many people could be enamoured of the idea that there would be almost no fallout from the discovery that life can form spontaneously without the NEED for any intelligence. I mean, people, that’s a pretty HUGE development in terms of the intelectual history of all human civilization. I mean, Time magazine will, without a doubt, devote at least one cover to it (in between their annual "so, how many heavenly angels visited America this year). Past revisions of the natural picture, for all the claimed dogmatism of people, most certainly DID radically alter people’s picture of the world: INCLUDING that of many many believers and theologians who changed to accomodate it.

Heck, one of my old professors wrote an excellent book called “The Character of God” in which he describes how Protestant Christianity rethought itself and its theology simply because of the influence of the Romantic movement in Europe! And yet, we are to think that a major development in abiogenesis will simply have no impact on the creationist USA? Not even over generations?

34

The red is where you jumped from physics to ontological theology.

35

No the red indicates where one might try to be mindful of the fact that both space and time were possibly created at the Big Bang, and hence statements about “before” simply may not have meaning. The analogy is “what’s north of the North Pole?” The answer is: If the North Pole is where we think it may be, that’s a meaningless question. Our current tested theories are essentially silent on the subject. That does not mean it’s an unanswerable question (for instance, theories of quantum gravity suggest a pre-Big Bang epoch), just that we don’t even know if its a question one can ask. Nothing about ontological theology is said either way. I leave rhetorical bandying of words of that sort to the philosophers, who often have nothing better to do.

36

Sure, it’s a huge intellectual development, but it’s not really a new one. The idea that life originated as a chemical soup has been around for some time; most scientists, I would venture to say, regard it as both possible and probable. Finding actual evidence that it not only can occur, but does occur would be incredibly significant. But in terms of defeating creationism, it would be but one more factoid in an already large pile of evidence. Faith not only has the power to move mountains, but to ignore them, as well.

As I mentioned earlier, I am surprised that the creationist movement still even exists today. And yet, we hear all the time about this sticker being placed on that biology textbook, or this school board trying to include some disclaimer or other regarding evolution, or Intelligent Design gaining a foothold in the classroom. I think that speaks much about the relative intellectual imperviousness of new scientific data to the movement in general.

37

Sure, but there’s been nothing recent to serve as a way to push back the slight rebounding that the extreme literalists engineered after the first major blow that came with evolution. Sure, the IDEA of abiogensis isn’t new… but then neither was evolution. It was developing the specific theory and then proving it to be true: and a powerful explanatory device: that gave it the ability to move societies. Right now, abiogenesis is missing any actual mechanism, any elan vital (sp?). There’s nothing yet to put it in the papers and herald as a major new development.

38

Another analogy is “Does god exist?” The answer is: If God is “that which is what it is,” then that’s a meaningless question.

We can define the north pole such that it’s meaningless to ask what’s north of it; we can define time such that it’s meaningless to ask what came before it; and we can define God such that it’s meaningless to ask “Did God do this?”

Conjectures such as:

often aren’t considered because they’re meaningless for what many believe God to be.

39

Another analogy is “Does god exist?” The answer is: If God is “that which is what it is,” then that’s a meaningless question.

We can define the north pole such that it’s meaningless to ask what’s north of it; we can define time such that it’s meaningless to ask what came before it; and we can define God such that it’s meaningless to ask “Did God do this?”

Conjectures such as:

often aren’t considered because they’re meaningless given what many believe God to be.

40

[QUOTE=Darwin’s Finch]
The idea that life originated as a chemical soup has been around for some time; most scientists, I would venture to say, regard it as both possible and probable. Finding actual evidence that it not only can occur, but does occur would be incredibly significant. But in terms of defeating creationism, it would be but one more factoid in an already large pile of evidence.

[QUOTE]

But how did the soup get there? Where did the ingredients for it originate from? And with what degree of certainty can a scientist (or the combined weight of all the world’s scientists) hold any answer they come up with?

Pithy and possibly true. But faith typifies all members of the species.