This is well put.
I would claim that I have been polite throughout, but your position above is impeccable.
Here’s to the next creationist!
I can hardly wait.
I find that very difficult to believe.
There are many, MANY people who believe in a Creator, and yet who are either non-Christians or non-creationists. Roman Catholics, for example, do not subscribe to creationism, yet many of them do believe that the odds are overwhelmingly against life arising from randomness. Hindus also believe in life-creating dieties, and I’m sure that many Moslems would also argue that life is too well-ordered to have arisen from chaos.
Actually, it only shows how one of these steps might have arisen. It’s still a far cry from proving that life itself could have risen, and it doesn’t show that there are “many plausible ways” for it to do so. As other posters have already emphasized, it’s all pretty speculative right now.
I think it’s overstating the case to say that “a majority of the path” has been mapped out. We’ve got some ideas of how it might have happened, but there are still many questions that are a long way from being answered – how DNA came about, for example. Or how ribosomes, cell membranes and mitochondria were formed. Or how rRNA, tRNA and mRNA all came about, each component being critical for cellular replication.
I’m not arguing against abiogenesis, mind you. I just think that it’s naive to say that most of the critical steps involved have already been determined. We’re not even close.
Y’all should read a transcript of a chat with Dr. Terry Mortenson, researcher for http://www.answersingenesis.org . It’s hysterically funny, IMHO. A few choice quotes from the Doc:
So was anti-Semitism; what’s your point?
SNORT!
Okey-dokey.
But I can SEE a doctor or an auto mechanic or even touch them and speak to them and listen to them say, “Stop touching me!” I can’t do that with God.
As long as it isn’t taught as a fact, right?
It sounds like he’s afraid that the discovery of extra-terrestrial life would undermine all of Christianity.
There’s more, but I don’t want to take the chance of violating copyright.
I’m increasingly of the opinion that Dr. Mortenson is a danger to himself and to Christianity.
I haven’t read all of this thread, because I find them tiresome, and besides, I could probably replicate the whole thing on my own based on the hundreds of other threads I’ve read on this subject.
I just popped in to give my usual plug for a book called “At Home in the Universe” by Stuart Kuffman. It does a brilliant job of explaining how life could have arisen from non-living material, and how, instead of being an unbelieveably unlikely process, it could be seen as likely - even inevitable. If you’re truly interested in understanding this subject (as opposed to blindly insisting that you’re right), you must read this book.
Um, my main point was that life coming from non-living matter is (a)biogenesis, not evolution. Hence the ‘slightly confused student’ example.
Christians who believe the Bible is literally true state that:
- God created all life
- humans didn’t evolve, since they were ‘ready-made’ in the first week of life
- the Universe is about 5,000 years old, so there is no time for other evolutionary processes to have happened.
Since such creationists have no evidence to support their claims (‘God faked the evidence to test our faith’), they rely on attacking scientists, with claims such as the above.
I’m interested in your statement that no Roman Catholics are creationists - can you tell me more?
I don’t think it matters that Hinduism has Creators, unless they have a history timeline of the Universe. If God exists, he could have set things in motion so that evolution would have resulted in us. The only clash with a religion and evolution is if there is a tight time scale (as above).
As for ‘life is too well-ordered to have arisen from chaos’, I would like a clear example of what this means.
It sounds suspiciously like ‘since everything that lives underwater* can breathe underwater, this proves God made things that way’.
*just for accuracy, I mean ‘lives permanently’. I’ve seen whales surfacing!
Oh glee, can’t you see that if life was the result of random chaos, we’d see loads of organisms that aren’t at all suited to where they live :rolleyes:
Mangetout,
now who’s being facetious?!
Of course my next few questions would be:
- why, if this is a God made world, do natural disasters kill so many people?
- why did the dinosaurs have to die? (didn’t they matter to God?)
- why is there so much evil? (yes, I know God wants us to have free will. Except in heaven, presumably.)
sorry, couldn’t help myself
I belive this is a reference to the fact that the pope recently announced that catholic dogma accepted evolution as fact.
(Or something like that–I don’t really follow the religious world very closely)
That’s not quite what I said. What I actually said is “Roman Catholics do not believe in creationism”; after all, the Roman Catholic Church teaches that the Genesis account is non-literal, and promotes theistic evolution. In other words, it’s a general statement, rather than a mathematically precise one.
It’s like saying that Jehovah’s Witnesses oppose blood transfusions. There may be exceptions to that statement (and indeed, there are), but it is generally correct.
At any rate, the point remains. Someone can believe that the odds are overwhelming against abiogenesis WITHOUT being a “Christian creationist.”
Ok, I accept that as a general statement. (When dealing with a fundamentalist topic, I sometimes assume everything is meant literally).
That’s not what I said!
I repeat: the only two types of people who ask ‘How did life evolve from non-living matter?’ are Christian creationists and slightly confused students.
My point is that creationists (by which I don’t mean people who believe in a creator, but people who dismiss evolution because of how and when they think life began) usually don’t understand the difference between evolution and abiogenesis.
JThunder wrote:
Um, we’re not just talking about the Urey-Miller experiment here, we’re also talking about the two follow-on experiments of Stanley Fox (which produced proteinoids and lifelike proteinoid microspheres, respectively), and the experiments of other folks which produced coacervates.
Not to mention the experiments with self-catalyzing RNA molecules.
Actually, I saw some (non-creationist) sources describing biogenesis as ‘chemical evolution’, but maybe that was just an attempt to make it accessible to the layman.
I know. God.
What do these people think - that if god used evolution as a tool to shape the world, that genesis would read:
Billions of years ago, I sculpted amino acids into tiny little micro-organisms that you couldn’t see, and over the years, eventually they became man?
I mean, are YOU going to suggest that you tell this to primitive cultures 2000 years ago? The logic of strict creationists baffles me.
Well, 2000 years ago this may have been possible… Democritus believed that everything was built of tiny, invisible blocks called “atoms” back around 400BC if memory serves me
However the genesis story originated long before that, unfortunately since ages and all that are extra fishy in early bible stories its pretty tough to tell when… I’m going to (completely ignorantly and haphazardly) guess 6000 years…either way its before any sort of atom theory so your statement stands
Once again though, I’d have to question that. If other people believe that the odds are against life emerging from randomness (without a Creator, that is), then why wouldn’t they ask the very same question?
Heck, when I was a Catholic, I certainly asked that question. Why wouldn’t others?