Re: More fusillades in the ID wars

Don Winterstein wrote:

> 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.

But it sounds like you are still talking about only the resources of the
Earth. My point is that there are far more places that "experiments"
were conducted than just here, multiplying probabilities (assuming
discussions of probabilities are really meaningful in any way)..

And, BTW, spontaneous generation of living cells is a pretty big leap.
What about an early clusters of "substance(s)" that simply reacts to a
chemical or electrical property with a physical change. Perhaps a
particular response is a flexing of the shape that moves it slightly
away from an "intruder" that could otherwise be destructive. It's a
start. But, it's a long way from there to a cell. That doesn't mean,
though, that it still wasn't a first step in the right direction.

>
> Of course, all this talk about how life started is largely just
> generating breeze. We don't know the answer.

True

> If humans succeed in generating living cells in the lab, we'll know a
> lot more.

That's still a huge step. There might be smaller baby (?) steps that
would be equally meaningful to your argument.

> 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.

True, but it's also prudent in my view not to be too dismissive of the
possibility. I'm still waiting for an explanation for the hugeness of
the universe in a Creator's plan when a much smaller resource complement
would suffice in a very specific, targeted creative activity. - JimA

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Received on Mon Feb 7 23:43:29 2005