From: richard@biblewheel.com
Date: Fri Jul 25 2003 - 14:06:58 EDT
Hi Brian. In post http://www.calvin.edu/archive/asa/200307/0559.html you
asked:
>Richard, do you believe that science and human reasoning
>are all powerful?, i.e. do you believe that science is able to
>understand any natural phenomena given enough time and
>money?
No. That's why I never suggested any such a thing. My argument has nothing
to do with our ability to "understand a natural phenomena" per se. It has to
do with what we mean by *phenomena* in the first place, which I define as
events we can directly observe or infer from direct observation. Is this an
adequate definition for science? If not, I would be very interested in an
improvement.
Please understand that I am not a biologist, nor an expert in abiogenesis
(which is the proper term for life arising from inanimate matter). But I do
understand the basic rules of science from extensive training in graduate
level Quantum Physics with a fair amount of digression into the philosophy
of science (generated by the problem of the interpretation of QM which was
essential to the disertation I was working on). Thus I learned that many
things we talk about in theoretical physics like atomic and subatomic
particles are intellectual constructs that we create to understand,
classify, and predict *observations*. They themselves are not directly
observed, but they are so effective in our understanding of phenomena that
we generally forget they are constructs and treat them as actual objects,
when in fact a future theory may do away with them altogether. Thus,
scientific constructs are always subject to change, whereas accurate
observations are not.
The key to it all is what is actually observed - and this seems to be what
is lacking in the question of abiogenesis. You seem to be doing exactly what
Howard Van Till, George Murphy, and (most elaborately) Jim Armstrong have
done, which is to reframe my assertion that we lack evidence for the *event*
of abiogenesis as a natural phenomenon into the assertion that we lack the
ability to explain a known physical phenomenon.
The reason for this confusion seems to be that methodological materialists
are so enmeshed in their philosophic presuppostions as to be unable (or
unwilling) to recognise that their assertion that we *know* abiogenesis
happened at least once in the past is false. I myself even fell for this
when I agreed with George when he said:
1) The best evidence indicates that there was no life on earth ~ 4 x 10^9
years
ago and that there was life ~3 x 10^9 yrs ago. Therefore (barring panspermia
which
doesn't settle any fundamental questions) biogenesis took place. The
question is how.
(cf. post http://www.calvin.edu/archive/asa/200307/0541.html)
The error becomes quite obvious when we carefully define the question.
The proper question is not if Life started (Biogenesis), since that is
obvious to all. The real question is about Abiogensis, which is defined as
the rise of Life from inaminate matter through natural processes.
Abiogenesis has never been observered in nature or the lab, and we have no
scientific theory that predicts it.
There are no scientific observations supporting abiogenesis.
This has nothing to do with our inability to explain known phenomena, which
is what the "God of the gaps" is really all about.
My point is that abiogensis is not known to be a phenomenon in the first
place. There is no evidence it ever happened.
In service of Christ our Biogenesis,
Richard Amiel McGough
Discover the sevenfold symmetric perfection of the Holy Bible at
http://www.BibleWheel.com
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