What evidence would it take for more scientists to recognize that perhaps life didn't evolve through some evolutionary process, but was intentionally created? It seems like few ever consider that their starting presupposition may be wrong.
That being the state of things at the moment, I lean towards the evidence. Also, this is a scientific oriented discussion forum, so you must expect that many people here are going to disagree with you. Could you be correct? Sure, but we just don’t have reason to believe that at this point.
Define “naturally”. However you define it, that is precisely what some people call “divinely”.
the amount of text (considering this is a hardware/software community) i read here defending psychoanalys/acupuncture & the likes as well some opinions on ecology/nutrition makes me pretty agnostic of scientific orientation from users... we are (most of the times) just a bunch of laypersons often only reading titles & conclusions of most papers we read
Unless you're thinking of panspermia, in which case most any hard evidence would do. But that doesn't really sound like your thing.
- a former creationist
By contrast, the epistemological picture for creationism is a trash fire. It requires an ever increasing amount of special pleading to explain all the other evidence. And you don't get to complain that "abiogenesis is entirely unproven", about an event that necessarily happened long before recorded history under entirely different conditions, unless your own theory can stand up to a higher standard of evidence. Which it can't. Speaking, again, as someone who grew up under creationism and had to lever myself out of it piece by piece of evidence.
(Oh, and if you think "nobody has a clue" how abiogenesis worked, you're out of date. Try reading about the work of Nick Lane and Jeremy England, IIRC.)
If anybody has a clue how abiogenesis works, then they should prove it by doing it. Manufacture some bacteria out of sand. Claiming “it takes a trillion years of primordial soup” is an another wild unsubstantiated claim that anyone can make. That’s the same thing as saying: ”wait a few centuries and God will show you.”
By the way, evidence for natural evolution does not contradict creationism, because God could’ve created some things through a process of natural evolution — it’s a false dichotomy to assume that evidence for evolution is evidence against creationism; it’s not. Whether or not natural evolution happened is tangential to the claim of creationism.
The epistemological picture for creation is quite sound. Fermi’s paradox is clear evidence we’re special. Logically, we can define God as existence itself, and the existence of “anything” is proof of Him. It simply can’t be any other way. The fact that we have intentionality is also proof that intentionality “exists” and that in turn is proof that Existence is intentional.
> If anybody has a clue how abiogenesis works, then they should prove it by doing it. Manufacture some bacteria out of sand.
Naturally the only way to demonstrate "having a clue" is to jump straight to accomplishing your favorite chemically implausible but snappily-phrased challenge, that requires full understanding of life itself as well as advanced experimental manufacturing facilities. This is definitely how science works, and there's no way you would turn around and claim that because it was an orchestrated experiment under controlled conditions, it doesn't actually prove anything about the early earth. Anyway, give them time, they're working on it.
> Claiming “it takes a trillion years of primordial soup” is an another wild unsubstantiated claim that anyone can make. That’s the same thing as saying: ”wait a few centuries and God will show you.”
Good thing no one is actually claiming that then, huh? You should really catch up on the science. You sound like you stopped reading ICR tracts in the 90s.
Moving on, I notice you're already jumping into the classic "the creator could have created things in a way consistent with evolution" brand of special pleading. This is 3/4 of the way to admitting that the evidence clearly favors evolution.
Your last paragraph is too divorced from actual logic and evidence to be worth dissecting. Suffice to say, you fallacy is non sequitur.
I never denied the process of evolution. I made that very clear from the start. The Creator may have indeed created us through a process of evolution. This point is irrelevant to me. My claims were:
1. that abiogenesis is understood or reproducible, and that claim still stands. If you believe it is, that still requires a leap of faith. Anyway we'll just have to wait and see - I wait to meet my creator after death in some form, and you wait for science to resolve the origin of life mechanism. However even if it were resolved, I still say:
2. That even if the Creator created us through a process of evolution (entirely possible), that was intentional, not a series of random mutations. Fermi's paradox is evidence of this, and there is more evidence, like this very article we are commenting on (mystery of life's handedness).
Scientism is the faith that requires you to simply believe that humans are somehow special in their ability to create intentionally, while everything else is random Nature. How does a product of random Nature (you) make any meaningful claim at all? If you’re just a random mutation then everything you say is just random mutations and I don’t see any reason to refute it.
If we use the standard of evidence required in any court of law to establish "intent", evidence such as Fermi's paradox is more than enough to establish that life was "intentionally" created. Again, the points about "how" this creation happened are irrelevant, perhaps by a process of evolution, but certainly not randomly.
The Fermi paradox is barely relevant. How much truth do you really think you can extract from an absence of evidence? Really? Because if lack of evidence of communicating technological civilizations (active in the particular tiny timeslice in which we're paying attention) implies lack of existence of any complex life outside of earth (and yes, you seem to need Earth's complex life to be unique for your argument to work), you've got some real thinking to do about the evidence for God or any other creator, especially after you've admitted their actions are, at best, tricky to distinguish from random chance.
Besides my previous point about reading intention into nature, courts of law are not scientific. Among other differences, they operate in a context where intent is much more likely to be actually present. Why would you even bring that up? Except that it's an old creationist talking point, I guess.
It's hard to consider something "so improbable that it must have been God" when we look out at a universe so incomprehensibly bigger that the real question becomes why we haven't evidence of it happening more.
It often starts with an argument between a creationist (could also be an advocate of intelligent design, but I'll just call them the creationist) and an evolutionist. The creationist says, look, the origin of life by purely naturalistic means is ridiculously improbable (and therefore it's reasonable to consider the possibility that God did it). They trot out some generally-accepted scientific principle, do a back-of-the-envelope calculation, and come up with a number that is, in fact, ridiculously improbable.
The evolutionist responds with the anthropic principle - if no life had arisen in this universe, we would not be here arguing about how life arose. This is clearly logically correct. It is also completely irrelevant.
The creationist didn't argue that life couldn't have arisen in this universe. They argued that it could not have arisen by purely naturalistic means. They're arguing about how, not about whether. The creationist might answer: "Yes, I agree that if life had not arisen in this universe, either by creation or by naturalistic processes, then we would not be here having this conversation. But the question is, which way did life begin?" The anthropic principle doesn't address that issue whatsoever.
It doesn't address that issue unless you add an assumption - that life had to begin by purely naturalistic means, that is, that the probability of creation is precisely zero. Then the anthropic principle is relevant, but then there's a new issue, that of begging the question.
I suspect that this assumption is present on the side of everyone on the evolution side that pulls out the anthropic principle in an argument with a creationist, but I have never heard it explicitly stated. I'm not even sure the evolutionist realizes they're making an assumption - it's so ingrained in their world view that they can't think that the alternative might be possible.
I grant you that the universe is huge and the evidence available is small. But that can turn into an "evolution of the gaps" argument quite easily, so I'm not sure you want to seriously use it.
"Nonsense! You wouldn’t have asked the questions if you hadn't survived."
Questions stand alone, regardless of whether someone or something exists to ask them.
In all the zillions of galaxies that exist, the ones where intelligent life developed are more likely to be observed by intelligent life. Therefore, intelligent life can't make any arguments based on probability that intelligent life developed, because our observation of the phenomenon is not independent.
And maybe some people have used it to avoid explanation, but it also doesn't really conflict with any effort to explain either.
Saying that we wouldn't be here to ask the question is not an answer to anything because we are here and we need to understand how and why.
1. "What the mechanisms or rules that explain or seem to govern this observable phenomenon?"
2. "The rules behind our own existence seem unique or low-probability, can I use our N=1 sample to safely assume we are inherently special and/or the existence of a god?"
- The Earth seems like the perfect planet but looking out into the sky there are trillions of planets that aren't perfect at all.
- Most likely the universe also appears "perfect" for the same reason - there must be a graveyard of universes where the parameters just didn't work out for life.
- Evolution is much the same - many mutations occur all the time, most are fixed by cellular machinery, most that aren't are deleterious, but once in a while a helpful mutation emerges. Take a moment to understand the timescale involved. Don't just handwave away 3.8 billion years as some number - feel it, starting at 1 year and stepping up each order of magnitude. You will realize that a million years is essentially "forever ago", and we had 3800 of those to get here. Consider how many species exist that aren't civilizational sentient intelligence.
Firstly, we have zero evidence for multiverse. Some scientists even argue that the idea is untestable and unfalsifiable.
When you said:
> there must be a graveyard of universes where the parameters just didn't work out for life
You just committed inverse gambler's fallacy. It's like:
> You wake up with amnesia, with no clue as to how you got where you are. In front of you is a monkey bashing away on a typewriter, writing perfect English. This clearly requires explanation. You might think: “Maybe I’m dreaming … maybe this is a trained monkey … maybe it’s a robot.” What you would not think is “There must be lots of other monkeys around here, mostly writing nonsense.” You wouldn’t think this because what needs explaining is why this monkey—the only one you’ve actually observed—is writing English, and postulating other monkeys doesn’t explain what this monkey is doing.
— https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-improbable-ex...
Let's say I argue that our universe is fine-tuned because the constants of the universe were decided by dice roll and that there are a trillion other universes with no chance of life.
What about the "substrate" within which these trillion universes formed? Wasn't it fine-tuned enough to give rise to at least one universe (ours) with life, just as our universe was fine-tuned enough to give rise to our planet?
Now I could argue that actually there are a trillion such "universe substrates" and ours is the one that's fine-tuned. However, it's clear that eventually, everything must converge to a single base layer of existence that just so happens to be "fine-tuned" enough for everything above it to produce at least one instance of life. But this is trivial.
Those are fun questions.
Edit: the follow up question is "why isn't the universe just a shell script?"