so the logic implication is this implies we don't/didn't need a divine creator to create man right? Like the molecules were capable of it all by themselves?
We have several hypothesis about the origin of life, and none of them require a divine creator. It turns out non-equilibrium systems dissipating energy will create complexity, as complexity is more efficient at dissipating energy. There is a natural selection pressure for building complexity!
It's like when you watch a show like Ghost Hunters. I mean I'd be the first one to express delight if they ever come up with something that was genuinely novel and interesting after all the years they've been on TV. But even if they did, it wouldn't prove the existence of the afterlife, it would be something else. And it would need to be investigated by people who aren't invested in any particular outcome.
So it ends up being a paradox. If you want to prove the truth of a religious assertion, you have to approach it from a neutral place and look for all the possible falsifications. And since religious people never want to do that, we find ourselves back at the place we started, saying that religion is a manifestation of human culture, which is different from a thing that defines a method for explaining novel phenomena.
That is, there is some property of the material of the universe that makes complex life possible. It's a bit like saying "I know how to build a computer" because you can buy parts online and put them together. There is a sense in which what you are saying is true - but without TSMC you are not going to be able to build a computer.
> Detractors argue that this perspective is problematic as it seems to rely on gaps in human understanding and ignorance to make its case for the existence of God. As scientific knowledge continues to advance, these gaps tend to shrink, potentially weakening the argument for God's existence. Critics contend that such an approach can undermine religious beliefs by suggesting that God only operates in the unexplained areas of our understanding, leaving little room for divine involvement in a comprehensive and coherent worldview.
Please assemble your god or accept my eternal hydrogen.
So we are faced with 2 choices:
- we keep on playing this game forever. Effectively, we have explained nothing, but provisionally everything works due to theoretical models. We have tech, we have understanding and ability to interact with scales that are enough for human life and progress, everything is merry but we have _truly_ explained nothing. We don't know if the next "level down" will completely wrap around our understanding. And the next "level down" might as well be God, we won't know.
- we consciously pick an informed primitive. The "one free miracle" philosophers (and scientists) blabber about. Now, _if_ we can build a consistent model out of that assumption, _then_ we might have a chance to actually explain something. And there God is not really needed. Nature is obviously what nature is, why can't we accept that something simply is without being created? The very question betrays an entrapment in a space-time mentality where "there must be a before where nothing was, hence divine intervention" but we already know, form physics, that that is not the case.
Picture a spotlight shining down on an infinite field.
The surface which is lit up by the spotlight represents our collective knowledge about reality, and the further up you move the spotlight, the more of the field you will light up, and thus know about.
Except, how much is it left to know about outside of circle that the spotlight lights up?
With that said, I think it's pointless to speak about God in the realm of science, because there is no way of scientifically proving that he's real or not. In the realm of science, we have to abide by the rules thus set, and how we define what is knowable. The rules are quite good, and they have served us well thus far, so there is no need to question it's validity or usefulness outside of strictly philosophical limits. And under those rules, God is not knowable. Thus you may believe in God, the Universe or only in the things you can scientifically prove; it matters not, because you still exist and perceive. Hopefully!
Who cares about the origin of life, this scientist just proved that God is real and finally speaks back when addressed.
God replies: "No, I bought those hydrogen atoms from ASML."
The argument wouldn't exist if you weren't already proving something to God. The presence of the God character in this story has no foundation other than the presence of the God character in this story.
> it's merely a framing device for something like "God created everything natural".
That is the very position that the God character in this story takes. In order to support this position, the God character points out that he exists in the story.
The story itself does nothing to prove for or against the existence of God, but it clearly intends to leave the reader believing in the existence of God.
A naïve person would then argue that hydrogen must have been created by their God, that the existence of the universe must be the doing of their God and that proves that their God must exist. A scientist would interject, as that's a whole load of assumptions which are untestable and the simpler theory, that the universe just exists as an assumption in itself, is a much better one. A less religious person, however, would argue that God is that abstract fact of pre-existence, a pre-existence that all the scientific investigation in the world could never get rid of.
All philosophy of science starts with the set of assumptions known as materialism: the world exists objectively, and its phenomena can be measured and explained. We can't possibly ever escape the assumption that the world exists with any scientific theory and therefore must accept some kind of pre-existence.
The argument does not actually support the existence of a conscious, material God any more than just saying that you believe in him. It simply argues that science can never explain the existence of the universe, just its development. Intelligent design is pretty much excluded.
God is not a priori. God only exists after being declared to exist.
To contrast, the ground under my feet existed before I started writing about it just now. It existed before I looked at it. It existed to other people. It existed to the objects that were dropped on it. It continues to exist under experimentation.
There is nothing wrong with the argument - alone - that science cannot prove the origins of life. We already know that it hasn't proven any yet.
But bringing a God character into that argument is just as absurd as claiming that science has found the answer.
> The argument does not actually support the existence of a conscious, material God any more than just saying that you believe in him.
Bullshit. To say that you believe something exists, but it doesn't really exist to other people, is to blatantly and directly contradict yourself.
The argument doesn't say that a specific God exists. It says that there will always be some pre-existence, and in saying that the argument is valid. That is the point.
The story did. I explained why I would not (God is superfluous).
Beyond that, any notion of "pre-existence" is as circular as a notion of "beginning".
To present God as a part of this story only serves to present the unkown as "settled", which I find absurd.
We never did. Of all the Gods of all religions that have had a creation story, not a single one of them is available right now, and for some reason, all chose to speak through a chosen elite.
Religions are children stories used for political power.
The post you responded to didn't say "did" but "could". Science hasn't disproved "someone created stuff" only "humans came first" and "the Earth is a few thousand years old".
Science has said that "someone didn't have to create stuff" which is an important distinction here.
And with what evidence does science support the claim that things went from not existing to existing with no outside intervention?
The theory of evolution is pretty well documented and similarly human remains only go back so far.
Science doesn't say it did. Science said it could.
Science assumes it did because it is the most "likely" answer. In the absence of contrarian evidence you assume the only possible answer.
Religion is not in and of itself contrarian evidence.
Also I will note that an alternative is an asteroid dropped the building blocks onto Earth, it isn't the primary because our understanding of the maths involved says organic molecules surviving in outer space for billions of years (the average time expected to go from interesting place to earth via asteroid) is less likely than it randomly occuring in the early very active earth.
What "evidence" is this? Are you referring to the radioactive dating data that must first assume that radioactive decomposition happens at a fixed rate across all time (unverified and unverifiable), and that we even know what the "original" isotope breakdowns of various elements were (unknown and unknowable)? Or is there some geological evidence I am not aware of that does not require first assuming the desired conclusion.
> Science doesn't say it did. Science said it could.
Ok fine, with what evidence does science support the claim that things could go from not existing to existing with no outside intervention?
> it is the most "likely" answer
Only if you explicitly exclude the idea that a higher intelligence created the universe with life more or less as we know it (explaining the great holes in your "fossil records"/etc.). If you refrain from artificially excluding that explanation, you will see that no answer is any more likely than precisely it.