God plays hide-and-seek like this:
I wish! Actually, this is what Jeremiah said prior to filling his prescription:
If you seek me with all your heart and soul, I will make myself available to you,’ says the Lord.
As Pascal pointed out, this is not like saying “seek water in the ocean,” or “seek the sun in broad daylight.” Because of God’s hiddenness, we must diligently seek him with all the heart and soul in order to find him.
Oh – and thank you so much for that [nearly after-thought, and as it was, shared-again] link. It mystifies me as to how I would have missed this piece of yours from several years ago. Maybe that was before my time there. In any case, I had never heard of these critical re-evaluations of the situation between the approaches of Newton, Leibniz, and Laplace; or certainly managed to forget this if I had. Very enlightening indeed!
Science has not shown us anything like that. The only way to make that first claim into something resembling the truth is to point out the obvious and continuously-reiterated fact that the OOL occurred so far in the past and under such distinct conditions (from today) that we will probably never be able to find evidence of its occurrence or even detailed descriptions of the conditions in which it happened. This is very far from “we cannot understand.” Asserting that we “cannot understand” the OOL is exactly the same as asserting that we cannot understand the formation of the solar system or of our galaxy or of our universe.
Of course not. It’s part of the work that needs to be done to see what kind of things evolution can accomplish.
Thanks for reading it, Merv. I forget the stuff myself sometimes, but this one, apart from myth-busting, led me to muse on the phenomena of near-chaotic systems such as the solar system turns out to be and which appear to be quite common in nature, eg weather systems.
Such systems would be particularly amenable to Newton’s “minor adjustment” - neither predictably lawlike nor grossly unstable. Ideal for a theistic, governing Deity!
I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say … or I just didn’t invest enough time into my wording (or both).
Your statement, reproduced again below, is pretty much wrong:
“. . . . we wouldn’t waste our money on experiments that wouldn’t work because they were based on evolutionary principles.”
There is no way of knowing which step or what part of Evolution is miraculous and not testable via scientific method.
You do understand how difficult it would be to demonstrate that something can’t be accomplished without an intelligent designer?
A) If God just creates the mutation that is needed, how would an I.D. scientist demonstrate that such a mutation couldn’t happen on its own?
B) If God introduced a very unusual combination of weather and competitors in order to accomplish a specific result in Evolutionary processes, how would an I.D. scientist demonstrate the net combination is miraculous?
Frankly, it’s virtually impossible unless God really really wanted to give the I.D. folks something to discover!
Rather, I would rephrase your statement:
Yes, what I said was wrong, but not, perhaps, for the reason you suggest. I said nothing about miracles. I should have added this:
At the present time we have no way of knowing when we have reached the end of failed evolutionary explanations.
For some things, I know how difficult it is to demonstrate that some things can be accomplished without a designer.
I am thinking about origin of life.
Evolutionary theory guided Neil Shubin to the rock layers of the correct age where the first critters who walked on land would be found. And lo and behold–Tiktaalik roseae! It’s an example of how evolutionary theory lets scientists make predictions. ID would be unhelpful in this regard…
Try as I may, it seems I cannot avoid interactions with a bombastic person on this site. I paste this portion of a paper from an ardent proponent of OOL and invite anyone interested in the veracity of the proposed chemistry to read for him/her self. As I have stated on a number of occasions, if this chemistry were put to a reputable journal simply as chemistry, it would be rejected - but place an OOL heading with a misleading title, and that magical pool where everything somehow comes together (and throw in a few asteroids), well guess what …, it gets published. Here is the start and end of the paper in question, which is fairly recent and repeats most of the familiar assumptions:
Researchers may have solved origin-of-life conundrum
By Robert F. Service Mar. 16, 2015 ,
The origin of life on Earth is a set of paradoxes. In order for life to have gotten started, there must have been a genetic molecule—something like DNA or RNA—capable of passing along blueprints for making proteins, the workhorse molecules of life. But modern cells can’t copy DNA and RNA without the help of proteins themselves. To make matters more vexing, none of these molecules can do their jobs without fatty lipids, which provide the membranes that cells need to hold their contents inside. And in yet another chicken-and-egg complication, protein-based enzymes (encoded by genetic molecules) are needed to synthesize lipids………
…… That said, Sutherland cautions that the reactions that would have made each of the sets of building blocks are different enough from one another—requiring different metal catalysts, for example—that they likely would not have all occurred in the same location. Rather, he says, slight variations in chemistry and energy could have favored the creation of one set of building blocks over another, such as amino acids or lipids, in different places. “Rainwater would then wash these compounds into a common pool,” says Dave Deamer, an origin-of-life researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who wasn’t affiliated with the research.
Could life have kindled in that common pool? That detail is almost certainly forever lost to history. But the idea and the “plausible chemistry” behind it is worth careful thought, Deamer says. Szostak agrees. “This general scenario raises many questions,” he says, “and I am sure that it will be debated for some time to come.”
The excerpts were from a news article, which everyone can read here.[quote=“GJDS, post:302, topic:36790”]
As I have stated on a number of occasions, if this chemistry were put to a reputable journal simply as chemistry, it would be rejected - but place an OOL heading with a misleading title, and that magical pool where everything somehow comes together (and throw in a few asteroids), well guess what …, it gets published.
[/quote]
The actual scientific paper is:
Common origins of RNA, protein and lipid precursors in a cyanosulfidic protometabolism
The authors are chemists from the University of Manchester. The journal is Nature Chemistry, which I believe is among the 5 most highly cited journals of chemistry in the world. The paper, mocked by GJDS, has been cited 120 times in 2 1/2 years.
Oh dear, was that bombastic?
Yes it is true. I has been true for me and many others, especially students.
And, thank you for your empathy. It is one of the main reasons I decided to brave the internet and start engaging this issue.
Like others, I am curious how you determined that natural processes can’t produce this information.
I suspect that you would agree with the criticism that a scientific theory should not depend almost solely on a universal negative. “Evolution can’t do it, therefore Design” is not going to be palatable to scientists not because it invokes a designer but because it lacks positive evidence for design. At conferences, presenters don’t list all of the failures of Intelligent Design and then end their talk with “Therefore, it had to evolve”. And yet, that is how ID appears to work.
On top of that, there are many examples of scientists looking at possible evolutionary pathways at the molecular level, and they work (e.g. estrogen response elements evolving into steroid response elements). I don’t see why this trend wouldn’t continue.
As you have noted before, this is not evidence for just 2 people since a constant and larger population could form the same trees just as a constant and larger population will continually produce new MRCA’s for mitDNA and y chromosomes as lineages die out and others are amplified either by positive selection or pedigree collapse. This is what leads to the question of why propose just 2 people to begin with if there is no positive evidence pointing in that direction? Pushing the “first couple” back far enough so that the impact of the bottleneck will be indistinguishable from a constant and larger population doesn’t seem like a good way to find positive evidence for that first couple.
It is this type of view that tends to raise the hackles of many scientists. If the ID paradigm for the origin of life is “stop doing science”, then that doesn’t seem like a very viable route for research. Scientists, for some crazy reason, like doing science and like hard questions.
Also, arguments against abiogenesis remind me of this famous quote:
“Heavier than air flying craft are impossible.”–Lord Kelvin, 1895
If other people had taken the same advice we may not have airplanes, light bulbs, or have found planets orbiting distant stars. Flying in space? Impossible.[quote=“agauger, post:281, topic:36790”]
We perform experiments just like everybody else. We set out to ask a question by designing a protocol, we test our protocol, then we look for results. Did I mention miracle? No.
[/quote]
Then what experiments are ID proponents doing to produce positive evidence for their hypotheses as it relates to the origin of life?
What reasons do you have for claiming this?[quote=“GJDS, post:302, topic:36790”]
The origin of life on Earth is a set of paradoxes. In order for life to have gotten started, there must have been a genetic molecule—something like DNA or RNA—capable of passing along blueprints for making proteins, the workhorse molecules of life. But modern cells can’t copy DNA and RNA without the help of proteins themselves.
[/quote]
Those are modern cells. What scientists are asking is if RNA could serve as both the genetic molecule and as a pool of enzymes in the first life. In fact, RNA makes up the functional core of ribosomes, the molecules that construct proteins. The proteins in ribosomes are there to stabilize the enzymatically active RNA. Scientists have found that randomly assembled RNA molecules can have RNA ligase activity which means that random RNA molecules can stitch together other RNA molecules to form longer chains.
Did life start with RNA, or was it started by God? I don’t know, but the only path I see for answering that question right now is in the research that is currently being done. I don’t see anyone who believes life was started by an intelligent designer proposing new experiments.
Then what experiments are ID proponents doing to produce positive evidence for their hypotheses as it relates to the origin of life?
I seem to have hit a nerve. I don’t have time to answer all of this right now. Maybe we should rename the thread though. How about “T_aquaticus’s latest salvo against Ann Gauger’s arguments for ID”?
My nerves are fine, don’t worry. 
Also, I am raising concerns and criticisms of ID in general and not you specifically, some of which I thought you might agree with. I am sure that you would prefer positive evidence for ID rather than negative evidence against abiogenesis/evolution, and have seemed to hint at that position in other posts. I am trying to leave our other conversations where they lie with varying amounts of success.
“What I mean by ‘bad design’ is the notion that if organisms were built from scratch by a designer – one who used the biological building blocks of nerves, muscles, bone, and so on – they would not have such imperfections. Perfect design would truly be the sign of a skilled and intelligent designer. Imperfect design is the mark of evolution; in fact, it’s precisely what we expect from evolution.”
Jerry Coyne, Why Evolution Is True (Viking, 2009, p. 81).
I am on my way to Portugal, so will not be able to participate further in this discussion (sorry about that). For anyone who wishes to pursue this question in greater depth, however, I recommend this paper by philosopher of science Steve Dilley:
I am sure that Jerry Coyne also lists a lot more evidence than that, such as nested hierarchies. We could completely ignore what Coyne said about perfect v. imperfect designs and still have mountains of positive evidence that support the theory of evolution.[quote=“paulnelson58, post:313, topic:36790”]
I am on my way to Portugal, so will not be able to participate further in this discussion (sorry about that). For anyone who wishes to pursue this question in greater depth, however, I recommend this paper by philosopher of science Steve Dilley:
[/quote]
I tend to share Steven Weinberg’s curmudgeonly view of philosophy, but I will read the article when I have time.
Can you show me how a constant and large population will reproduce the HLA-DRB1 trees?
As for pushing the first couple back so far, I have explained elsewhere why I favor that. It has nothing to do with finding positive evidence of that first couple. For that we plan to use the model we are implementing. Our goal is to identify how populations behave under different starting assumptions, among them being an initial population of 2.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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