Actually, it’s not. Well-reasoned arguments are a good thing – it’s petty bickering, squabbling and snark that are not.
People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.
G.K. Chesterton
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I like how the ESV says, “the universe was created by the word of God.” It literally means God speaks the world into being, and then from Hebrews 1:3, “he upholds the universe by the word of his power.”
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Arguing = bad is a pretty western thing. In many Middle Eastern cultures it is a sign you care about what is being discussed.
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That’s why prices may not be posted in a market. Everyone cares about pricing. ; - )
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I don’t understand 5. It makes God meaninglessly weird.
How could we the third? We don’t have a Hadean Earthlab with abiotic warm alkali olivine vents percolating for millions of years to put them in place. Who’s we the second? We the first do not see the processes that were put in place resulting in life today.
To be clear then, it does not interest or concern you that the best and smartest scientists in the world today still cannot duplicate origins. Thus your ability to discount this fact allows you to remain confident that the origins of life began purely by chance occurrence, enabled by the unique and non-replicable environment of Earth 4.2 Bya.
To say that life began purely by chance tells us nothing about how it began. But the same is true of saying life was created from nothing by a hypothetical power conceived of as being prior to and independent of everything we know of the cosmos. Ultimate causes are odious and result in pointless quibbling. What we do know is life did somehow get started here sometime before now and after this planet came together, cooled off enough and acquired water. The study of life’s progression on this planet is a historical project. Science allows us to follow what clues there are back more and more. Beyond that is speculation whether with or without God. But it seems unfair to say that a godless Genesis bears the added burden of reproducing life in a laboratory while belief in Genesis through God has no burden to bear at all. It isn’t a reasonable stance and no Christian should feel obliged to adopt such a smug position. There is plenty of reason for humility where such questions are concerned - on both sides.
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Why should it concern me? How does the Miller-Urey flask compare with the multi-dimensional gradients of the Hadean? If you’ve got a spare billion dollars you could start a small Hadean startup project. Ice, fire, olivine, lava, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, water, cee oh two, Fe(Ni)S minerals, UV, temperature, pH, pressure, salinity gradients, you know the drill.
If you want to believe in our Earth local incarnation, go ahead, so do I. What does that have to do with the utterly perfect self-explanatory power of nature? Wanting Jesus to be the real deal doesn’t mean you have to fabricate evidence for God otherwise.
Why not? You seem to make these bald assertions without any reasoning or evidence.
Well said, and a fair observation. But fair or not, if one stipulates that the chemical steps, environment and ingredients did not allow for natural origins, one remaining possibility is God. In that instance, there is no longer a burden or requirement, since that is not testable.
More importantly, my point was not to explain “how it began”. Assuming a God origin may be only a default position after discarding natural events, with no attempt to define the steps. In other words: “If it couldn’t have happened naturally, it may have happened another (hand of God)”.
We are nowhere close to knowing if abiogenesis can not occur in our universe.
God is hardly the only possibility. Aliens travelling through multi-dimensional space are another option.
True. My suggestion has nothing to do with evidence for (fabricated or otherwise). It is simply looking for logical explanations if natural ones are statistically unlikely (impossible).
A much used and failed experiment used in support of natural events. We must all remember that there is no scenario for abiotic arrival of self-replication molecules. And no cell has ever been observed to generate a de-novo functional membrane.
And Venter’s creation of “synthia” required assimilating everything necessary beforehand. The origin of LUCA had to have these in place.
Besides, I am not trying to push an opinion. It’s only a reasonable and logical explanation for what so far defies us.
Even as it is granted that the appearance of design does not necessarily mean there is a designer. It seems as if you want to think design by a non-theistic nature is still an option.
The Miller-Urey experiment was a massive success. They set out to show that complex biomolecules could form on an early Earth from basic chemicals like methane. That’s exactly what they observed in their experiments.
There is no evidence that these things can’t happen.
An argument from ignorance is a logical fallacy, not a valid logical argument. A God of the Gaps is an argument from ignorance.
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I am waiting for you to support your claims with evidence. You claim that if something has purpose that it couldn’t come from a process without purpose. Where is the evidence for this claim?
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I think you have in mind the subjective meaning you might attach to a purposeless object.
Check out this rebuttal, by an atheist, to the “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist “ book.
Why? That’s like saying that my father’s existence is odious. We have objective evidence for the existence of the Christian God.
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