Re: More fusillades in the ID wars

Jim Armstrong wrote:

"...But it is an assertion.... But those too are in the end assertions,.... Nor to exclude the opposite."

So true. My goal here is to distinguish between what science requires and what some scientists would like. Many scientists as we all know overreach: they are allowed methodological naturalism but they then assume ontological naturalism. People of God who work with science and/or scientists need to be clear where the lines must be drawn, and where it is possible to depart from conventional scientific thought without rejecting valid fruits of science. What scientists actually know and can legitimately appropriate is often far less that what many scientists will claim. I draw the line as tightly as I can in order to give God more freedom to break the laws (whether he wants it or not).

JA: "But relatively unrecognized, I think, is that there is not a single laboratory setting or retort....
..If we marshaled 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."

This sounds impressive, but on closer inspection all of those "resources and potentialities" on primordial Earth must have looked the same to first order and differed largely only in temperature and chemical composition to second order, and I remain unconvinced that any of them had the right stuff to enable spontaneous generation of living cells. After all, the right stuff is pretty exotic and tends to be unstable outside living cells in many environments. Surely our knowledge of biochemistry and our ability to control environments must give humans a considerable advantage over dumb nature.

Of course, all this talk about how life started is largely just generating breeze. We don't know the answer. If humans succeed in generating living cells in the lab, we'll know a lot more. But, once again, I'm just trying to draw the line tightly. At this point there's no reason intelligent and educated people should feel compelled to believe life arose spontaneously, even though most scientists probably believe so.

Don

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Jim Armstrong<mailto:jarmstro@qwest.net>
  Cc: asa<mailto:asa@calvin.edu>
  Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2005 11:58 PM
  Subject: 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 Sat Feb 5 03:18:20 2005