Yes, I stand corrected. Your words do accept that the Earth, and the Universe are millions and billions of years old.
I had misinterpreted what you were skeptical about… if I now grasp your position better, you simply don’t believe ANY amount of time can yield life as we know it.
So, if you are not a YEC, what exactly do you dispute about the BioLogos position - - if BioLogos accepts the possiblity that God intervened here and there in the evolutionary process?
As for the standardized part of your answer - - it is your frequent (and inaccurate) reference to monkeys and typewriters…
The ability of humans to generate something in the lab is orthogonal to the ability of ‘natural’ processes to generate a similar thing. That is setting up a logical fallacy.
For example: We don’t understand the detailed processes by which most cancers arise. We don’t even understand enough to cure most cancers. That information tells us nothing about whether cancer arises through unguided, unaided, natural processes or the likelihood of finding ways to cure cancer in the future.
Another example: We cannot create a single cell from simple starting materials in the lab. Yet bacteria can reproduce from the same simple starting materials. Would one conclude it is improbable that bacteria are unable reproduce themselves without constant unseen intervention and control by a designer? (e.g. Vitalism)
If you want to discuss the likelihood of abiogenesis, I’d suggest doing this while not promulgating logical fallacies.
Instead, try this: We currently have nothing beyond speculative, incomplete hypotheses about how life might have arisen. We likely won’t have the technological ability to model such systems in sufficient detail for at least a few decades. The origin of life remains a complete mystery. We only can say that life has been present on Earth since roughly 500 million years after the planet’s formation.
You said:
“We cannot create a single cell from simple starting materials in the lab. Yet bacteria can reproduce from the same simple starting materials. Would one conclude it is improbable that bacteria are unable reproduce themselves without constant unseen intervention and control by a designer?”
My response:
Isn’t that an inappropriate analogy? A cell has the necessary functional machinery and therefore can reproduce itself without any intervention from an external agent. That is very different from creating “a single cell from the same simple starting materials” in the absence of such functional machinery. So of course one would not have any reason to “conclude it is improbable that bacteria are unable reproduce themselves without constant unseen intervention and control by a designer.”
In how many posts have I referred to monkeys and typewriters in this thread, George? Please provide the dates of all the posts in which I did. And by the way, what is your definition of frequent?
Since we’re talking about definitions, there’s a sentence at the top of the page that says, “This is a place for gracious dialogue about science and faith.” What do you think “gracious dialogue” means? And what types of things does it exclude?
I have to wonder if some of my memories of monkeys and typewriters have been deleted over the coming months…
But let me be gracious and say the search tool reveals hardly any discussion of monkeys and typewriters … and perhaps even less of monkeys and Shakespeare.
So, @RalphDaveWestfall, I stand corrected. And I pay you a sincere apology.
Dang primates … nothing good ever comes of them. And don’t get me started about the woman who lost her face over a birthday cake…
“I stand corrected. And I pay you a sincere apology.”
Hi George:
I learned something very important when I was teaching at a university. I attended a class being taught by another faculty member who was also a Christian. When he made a mistake, he acknowledged it and apologized to the students instead of just going on as if he hadn’t erred.
I thought that would be a good way for me to operate too, and made it a point to put it into practice in my teaching. It showed more respect for the students. It made me a more humble person and encouraged better communication between me and the students.
I recommend this approach to people posting in Internet discussions, especially for those who are religious believers. I was very pleased to see you moving a long way in that direction in your response above.
The things I’ve read about a naturalistic origin of life seem similar to what one would do to create life in a laboratory. The steps are similar—proteins need to be generated, and then they need to be assembled with other materials into a functional structure.
Orthogonal is primarily a mathematical term, used in geometry, statistics, linear algebra, etc. I suppose you could use it as a metaphor for totally independent. But your implied assertion that a naturalistic origin of life is completely different from humans creating life in a lab appears to be a dogmatic claim. Do you have any data or argumentation to support that?
I’m coming late to this discussion, and basically just chiming in from the peanut gallery with a pedantic (but hopefully at least marginally helpful) comment: that is, that “orthogonal” comes up in a lot of scientific contexts. I’m not trained in biology in any way but it comes up in my field of study a good bit. Google gives me this definition (see #2) as its first result when I search for just the word “orthogonal”:
Anyway, carry on. Happy commenting, and I hope people are gracious and welcoming to you (all silly pedantic comments like mine notwithstanding).
Yes. We can use different chemistry in the lab compared to what is available in natural settings. We can also store and add intermediates in very specific, directed steps.
The fact is, we don’t know the steps by which life arose in nature. We don’t know the nature of the first replicating units or how various components became integrated over time. In the lab we can bypass any such steps and create final assemblies in ways that nature never used. For example, scientists are not going to assemble living cells by recreating the chemical processes present on the early Earth. Instead, we’d synthesize DNA, amino acids and other components via different reactions. Or, we’d extract components from living organisms and reassemble them into new, living organisms. Thus the steps we’d use in the lab would likely have little in common with how life likely arose in nature.
Here’s an analogy that may help: Nitrogen fixation, the conversion of molecular nitrogen, N2, to biologically accessible compounds like ammonia, NH3. Nitrogen fixation, which produces plant fertilizer, is a critical necessity in commercial agriculture. Bacteria can fix N2 at ambient temperatures using a series of enzymatic reactions. We don’t. That’s neither a practical or commercially viable mechanism. Instead, we run a reaction (google: Haber-Bosch Process), at high temperatures, high pressure and using synthetic metal catalysts under controlled conditions to create ammonia.
The point is: There are often many routes one may take to achieve the same final result. How we would reproduce a living cell in a lab is going to be quite different from how it happened in nature.
The difficulty is far greater then perhaps we may realise. Any argument for life created in an early earth needs to begin with starting materials, and the model of an earth slowly cooling into a planet would necessitate a model in which the elemental composition undergoes equilibrated reactions - such a model would inevitably produce the most stable compounds, such as H2O, CO2, N2, metal oxides and chlorides.
If we try to propose a natural chemistry with these starting chemistry, we can only conclude no life that we may imagine can occur, or form. Even the most basic materials (e.g. amino acids formed by radical chemistry initiated by lightening) cannot provide the required starting compounds to form subsequent bio-relevant molecules. It is for this reason schemes are discussed that require manipulation of specific precursors in the laboratory, and outlandish assumptions that somehow these schemes may show how life commenced.
There are reviews and blogs that may be accessed to show how this matter is debated.
Yep. The natural pathways for the formation of life are unknown. You can be sure humans in the lab would use very different tricks and pathways. Thus my suggestion to RalphDavidWestfall that the notion of whether humans could recreate life in the lab has little bearing on the question of how life arose in nature.
I suspect the best chance of understanding pre- or early-biotic pathways would be to find life on other planets. Hopefully any comparisons would yield interesting clues. Or better, find potential intermediate stages on other planets. The only thing we are certain is that life on earth appeared soon after the planet became capable of sustaining life. If there are records of the process remaining, we haven’t recognized them.
I can’t be sure of something if it has a lot of unknowns. Can you?
To the contrary, human beings have been trying to replicate natural processes that might lead in the direction of precursors of life for a long time–Miller-Urey as an early example. Also see The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life by Nick Lane, which mentions a program of research intended to simulate conditions around sea floor vents.
The fact that humans can’t create life in a lab, even using tools and processes not available in nature, strongly suggests that the problem is very difficult. That implies it is unlikely it could have happened without some kind of outside intervention.
But not impossible. As in it’s not impossible that I could buy just one ticket to each upcoming Powerball lottery for 12 months and win every single one, over 100 in a row.
I started with the definition you posted above, and then checked the Wikipedia article on the word orthogonal. From it I got linear algebra as another example.
[quote=“RalphDaveWestfall, post:32, topic:5604”]
To the contrary, human beings have been trying to replicate natural processes that might lead in the direction of precursors of life for a long time–Miller-Urey as an early example.[/quote]
Or, one could more accurately (and far more charitably) describe these efforts as testing the predictions of different hypotheses, no?
But you left out the other things Lane mentions and doesn’t mention, like proteins as an early component. Yet you claimed above:
Where do you find such a requirement in reading Lane’s book? And have you forgotten about the RNA World hypothesis?
Or that you and scientists have very different ideas about the origins of life. As in yours are cellular, whereas those in the field are not.
Or that it took a very, very long time.
Or that conditions today are very different then they were.
I don’t see how that follows.
[quote]But not impossible. As in it’s not impossible that I could buy just one ticket to each upcoming Powerball lottery for 12 months and win every single one, over 100 in a row.
[/quote]That’s a very poor analogy, as you’re grossly distorting the time component. If you bought Powerball tickets every day for billions of years, you’re likely to win.
Unfortunately I have to demur on answering your question, because my username is already a bit too revealing for my comfort level; if some of the folks I know were to find me on here, it could get a bit tricky for me. For purposes of the “orthogonal” discussion I’ll just say I work in a field that is a little more “soft science” than “hard science,” though the line is a bit blurry at times. Not all researchers in my field use “orthogonal,” but enough do that I’m familiar with it and have been known to use it myself on occasion.
Have a blessed Sunday. Glad you enjoyed my pedantry.
Benjamin Kirk
“That’s a very poor analogy, as you’re grossly distorting the time component. If you bought Powerball tickets every day for billions of years, you’re likely to win.”
To say that I’m grossly distorting the time component, you must have some kind of evidence for how long it would take for life to originate by accident. Could you show it to us, Ben?
But I wasn’t talking about winning one time. I said winning twice a week, over 100 times in a row buying just one ticket per lottery. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the chances of that are 1 in 292,201,338 (Wikipedia) to the power of 104, or 1 in 2.69742157126 times 10 to the power of 880* (calculated at HyperCalc JavaScript, by Robert P. Munafo and Kenny TM~ Chan at MROB ).
Although Powerball lotteries are only held twice a week, let’s assume they are every day. If I bought 365 times three billion years of tickets (one each in 1.095 trillion lotteries), the chance of winning 100 times in a row would be around 1 in 2.46339869522 times 10 to the power of 868*. So I wouldn’t be at all “likely to win.”
Nobody knows what the odds are of life occurring by chance, because no one knows whether or how it could have happened. But considering all the obstacles that have been identified, the probabilities are very likely to be incredibly low. Given that, I feel that some kind of intelligent agency might be a viable alternative to a completely naturalistic scenario.
I used a simplified calculation above. See 20 Heads In a Row - What Are the Odds? | Dr Dobb's for a more accurate approach. However either way the numbers would be so huge that that winning 100 times in a row in billions of years is incredibly unlikely.
It goes without saying … that if you are a Christian who adheres to Evolution of one kind or another - - it should not be surprising to anybody that You … or maybe one of Your Friends… or Your Relatives … believes that inanimate matter produced Life - - by means of God’s providential work on that matter.
Other Christians might be more inclined to think that this is not a particularly difficult operation … and that even without God, it would be possible … but over much longer time periods, and with generally less satisfactory results.
BioLogos does not require or even invite Christians to think life was created without God, or that all the Earth’s life forms appeared without God.
BioLogos is for Believers of many types and stripes.
I don’t know (and neither does anyone else) whether life on this planet could have originated by natural causes. However the improbabilities are such that non-natural (unnatural?) explanations could be credible. One possibility, but not the only one, is some form of intelligent action, divine or otherwise.
BTW if you haven’t seen it, check out Origins of Life: Biblical and Evolutionary Models Face Off by Rana and Ross, Amazon.com A person does not have to agree with the authors’ motivations, conclusions or other positions to get a lot of useful information from their book.
It looks like this thread is petering out. Unfortunately although there has been some worthwhile dialog, no one has really responded to my original inquiry, quoted below:
Has anyone has ever succeeded, using all the accumulated knowledge, tools and techniques of the biological sciences in either:
A-creating life in the laboratory, which successfully reproduced itself for multiple generations in a favorable environment?
OR
B-disassembling and reassembling a living cell which then reproduced itself as above?
I understand that I shouldn’t draw any unwarranted conclusions from responses in just one discussion thread on a specialized web site. Perhaps I should try this somewhere else. Any suggestions?
Actually several people did and the very simple and obvious answer to both A and B is “no,” as jpm and Dennis said pretty unequivocally. Humans have never created life or raised life from the dead. Were you actually expecting someone to say yes?
