Re: More fusillades in the ID wars

And yet.....

Don Winterstein wrote:

> Keith Miller wrote:
>
> "...If God is the Creator of the very stuff of creation, and the
> author of all of its laws and regularities, what is the implication if
> the creation is incapable of bringing forth that which God desires...."
>
> No necessary implication. The creation is obviously capable, but (I
> assert for the sake of argument) not without outside help.

But it is an assertion, nonetheless (just for counter-argument's sake).

> No Christian creed claims for the world what Howard Van Till ascribes
> to it.

But those too are in the end assertions, neither deriving from nor
defining through a demonstrable chain of evidence the truth they assay
to reflect - confidence yes, but certainty no.

> There's no reason for Christians as Christians to think that God might
> not have provided the outside help.

Nor to exclude the opposite.

> Their thinking need not fit criteria for elegance, etc.
>
> "From a different perspective, I recently attended the Gordon
> Conference on the Origin of Life in Ventura, CA. It was a very
> interesting event. While the issues and problems are numerous, one of
> the clear impressions is that the transition to living systems is far
> from impossible...."

A thoughtfully prudent observation.

>
> The jury of course is still out. However, until it shows signs of
> coming closer to a decision, I side with Francis Crick in believing
> that we're dealing here with the impossible.

Or is it just highly improbable?

>
> Gerald Schroeder in The Science of God speaks of "...an exotic
> property of molecular self-organization rapidly [joining] the
> necessary chemicals into self-replicating molecules and then a
> yet-to-be discovered series of catalysts [developing] these fecund
> molecules into life itself." Just like that. If it's anything like
> that, once we figure out under what conditions chemicals lead to
> living cells, we should be able to create such living cells routinely
> in the lab, because long periods of time apparently weren't part of
> the recipe--and in fact probably couldn't have been, if you think
> about it.
>
> Unless I see some fairly clear supporting evidence, I choose
> not to believe such scenarios. The world was not a carefully
> controlled lab when life arose.

But relatively unrecognized, I think, is that there is not a single
laboratory setting or retort. Instead, the universe is ENORMOUS (why
might that be in a planned Creation, anyway?), and one result is that
there are gazillions of laboratories with a semi gazillion reaction
vessels each, and operating over millions of years!. Moreover, the
reaction batches are planet, ocean, lake, and pond sizes, allowing for
many subtle shadings of material mixes, temperature, concentration,
gradients, time, etc. etc. That in my view has in turn a HUGE effect on
improving any sort of odds you might choose to consider. It's the most
massively parallel processing institution one might even begin to
conceive of.

> Yet, with the best high-tech controls available, and after all we've
> learned about biochemistry, we today can't approach the solution even
> piecemeal.

If we marshalled every laboratory and researcher in the world for such a
task, for a duration of one hundred lifetimes, or 10,000, we would not
have so much as a drop in the bucket compared to the resources and
potentialities available for the purpose in the universe as created.

That's in part why I think there's reason to consider Howard Van Till's
perspective as viable (so to speak!).

IMHO - JimA
Received on Fri Feb 4 02:58:45 2005