From: george murphy (gmurphy@raex.com)
Date: Wed Jul 30 2003 - 15:58:12 EDT
Richard McGough wrote:
> >Richard McGough wrote:
> >>
> >> Re post: http://www.calvin.edu/archive/asa/200307/0609.html
> >>
> >> George wrote:
> >>
> >> >
> >> > The "phenomenon that Science can't explain" is the emergence of terrestrial life
> >> >between ~ 3 & 4 billion years ago.
> >> >
> >>
> >> I'm sorry to belabour the point, but my argument has nothing to do with the universally recognized fact that life had a beginning on earth.
> >>
> >> My point is that there is no evidence for abiogenesis, which I take to be defined as "the emergence of life from non-living matter through natural processes."
> >
> > & by the same token there is no evidence for the emergence of life via miracle -
> >i.e., by the immediate action of God. The argument cuts both ways. I completely agree
> >that we do not yet have a satisfactory scientific explanation of abiogenesis. You are
> >trying to get me to agree to more than that - to say that therefore life didn't happen
> >through natural processes and was miraculous. That simply doesn't follow.
> >
> >George L. Murphy
> >gmurphy@raex.com
> >http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
> >
> >
>
> Hi George, good to have you back. I was wondering what you would have to say on this issue.
>
> Yes, the argument cuts both ways. That's what I love about logic - its very predictable :)
>
> I agree completely that the lack of evidence of the phenomenon of abiogenesis is not in and of itself evidence *for* a miraculous origin of life. That's why I never asserted any such thing. That was never my point.
>
> I wasn't trying to get you to agree to anything more than the fact that abiogenesis is not a scientific observation. Though I believe life began through a divine form-confering act, I never asserted that anywhere in the course of this thread. If you review all my posts, I'm sure you will agree.
>
> I think it is worth noting how difficult it seems for people to separate assertions about scientific *observations* from assertions about scientific *explanations*. My primary point concerning abiogenesis has never been that science can not explain how it happened. My point has consistently been the assertion that we don't even know if abiogenesis (through natural processes) ever even occurred. The tenacity of this confusion is evident by the fact that you, Howard, Jim, Glen, and others have all reframed my argument in terms of the explanatory powers of science. My point has never been about what science can *explain*. My point is about what science has *observed*, either directly or indirectly. Of course, this argument is discussed at length in the Aphenomenon of Abiogenesis thread which split off this thread.
>
> Finally, it is important to remember the reason for this - it all began when Glen asserted that Denyse was being "highly inconsistent" by admitting the natural "evolution" of elements while denying the natural "evolution" of life. Do you agree that it is incorrect to use "evolution" in these two very different senses in a single sentence? It seems like an amphiboly to me.
Yes, we have "observed" neither the origin of life through natural processes nor its miraculous origin. We can claim to have observed, rather indirectly, that it did come into being on earth.
But that seems to be rather loose usage of the word "observe." The classic detection of the Lamb shift, e.g., were not "observations" of electron self-energy and vacuum polarization in an obvious sense. They were rather observations of a particular rf transition in hydrogen and somewhat more indirectly of a shift in hydrogen energy levels, things that can be explained with high precision by QED. So, from this and other experiments, we can plausibly say that we've observed the _effects_ of vacuum polarization &c.
With the topic at issue, the question is whether the emergence of life on earth ~3.5 x 10^9 yrs ago can plausibly be understood as the _effect_ of natural processes. Now I admit that we don't know what those natural processes may have been - whether it was simply a complex combination of processes we now know, or whether some radically new breakthrough akin to the development of QM might be required. But explaining the Lamb shift required new ideas too - e.g., renormalization.
I would briefly assess the 2 basically different approaches to the origin of life as follows:
Natural processes
Pro: Science has an excellent track record of explaining puzzling phenomena.
There are many detailed relationships & analogies between living & non-living systems.
Various theological approaches, including chiasmic cosmology, suggest that God works
in the world through natural processes.
Con: We don't have any kind of detailed understanding of how this might have happened.
Immediate divine action:
Pro: Miracle provides a simple and unambiguous explanation of the origin of life.
Con: Miracle can provide a simple and unambiguous explanation of _anything_ but this
approach has no predictive power.
There is no good theological reason to think that life originated miraculously: The Bible
never says this and the imagery of Genesis 1 points in the other direction.
> I understand you were gone during most of this conversation. Perhaps you missed some of the points I reiterated above.
>
> So how was the ASA meeting? Solve any fundamental questions? Hehehe :-)
I thought it was very good. I missed most of the special session on divine action (caught only Terry's paper) because I was involved with the cosmology discussions. I'm glad that ID did not seem to be a defining issue for folks there. Certainly there are varying views on that in the ASA
but I hope we can continue to avoid being sharply divided along party lines.
Shalom,
George
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