Re: "Scientific" position on philosophical questions

Biochmborg@aol.com
Tue, 13 Jul 1999 17:46:57 EDT

In a message dated 7/13/99 11:59:50 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
ssclark@facstaff.wisc.edu writes:

> It seems to me that the product that is created is more
> interesting/important than the process of fabrication. It is very
> plausible that a boring, impoverished, even "blunt" process of fabrication
> could yield an outstanding product that , intuitively,does not seem
> commensurate with the perceived blunt process by which it was made.
>

Thermal copolymerization of amino acids is a perfect example of this. It is
very much a "blunt" process that nonetheless yields living protocells, even
though it seems counter-intuitive that heating a dry mixture of amino acids
can cause them to polymerize, or that the polymerization would be be
selective enough to produce nonrandom polyamino acids with catalytic activity
that would spontaneously associate to form living cellular structures. Yet
this indisputable fact has been demonstrated and expanded upon for the last
four decades.

>

[snip]

>
> The impoverishment you see belies a strange human myopia through which we
> presume to know how God would create. Your view here seems to be that an
> omniscient, omnipotent, glorious God must create in what we somehow define
> to befit our belief of a God sitting on a jeweled throne in the sky. But
> the truth is that if God created life using evolutionary tools, it does not
> change the glory of the creation or the majesty of God one iota.

Well said. I agree exactly.

Kevin L. O'Brien