How exactly do you see the origin of life? Do you think it just popped into existence, came from natural causes, or something else?

That seems like a very good point and applies to the naive notion that animals all belong to a particular kind which can never give birth to another kind. It is only from the point of view of creatures like us that kinds seem to be so stable. The small changes that accrue over periods vastly longer than we live are essentially invisible to us. Of course with selective breeding it is possible to create pretty drastic changes we can observe in a lifetime. I have a friend who does that with plants all the time. But there is also the example of the Russian project to breed domesticated -not just tame- foxes.

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I don’t know how life started on Earth, and I doubt we will ever know. Unfortunately, molecular reactions at that scale don’t fossilize. At best, we can look for viable natural pathways which is something we can’t do for supernatural pathways.

What little evidence we do have leans towards abiogenesis. If abiogenesis is true then we would expect to see the simple single celled organisms appear first in the fossil record. As of now, there are billions of years in Earth’s early history where all we see is evidence for single celled organisms.

Scientists are doing great work in the lab looking for viable ways life could emerge through abiotic processes, but I think the next real big step is looking for life on other planets/moons. If we find life in those distant places and that life is fundamentally different than life here on Earth (e.g. different genetic systems, different metabolic pathways) then it lends credence to abiogenesis.

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If chance rules, God cannot. If chance exists in its frailest possible form, God is finished. If God is not sovereign, he is not God. If he is not God, he simply is not. If chance is, God is not. If God is, chance is not. The two cannot coexist by reason of the impossibility of the contrary. Things don’t pop into existence by chance.

Nonsense! You might as well say that if chance rules then natural law cannot. But this is demonstrably incorrect. Chance only exists only within a framework of rules. It is only random when you look at the smallest details, because patterns emerge in the big picture. With your declarations here you limit God to your own capacities. Just because you cannot work within a background of chance does not mean that God cannot.

No, this only means He is simply not the god invented by those obsessed with power. He is the God who chose love and freedom rather than power and control. To be sure those using religion as a tool for their own advantage need a God as obsessed with power as they are in order to use Him for the manipulation and control of other people. But these children of hell (Matthew 23:15), these Pharisees do not define God and their efforts to shut the kingdom of heaven against men will surely fail. God is certainly sovereign over the machinations of such sinful men.

The universe is God’s creation not yours. Choosing love and freedom over power and control, God most certainly can make chance and freedom part of His design, and science has conclusively demonstrated that He has done precisely that!

God and natural law including quantum physics and chaotic dynamics coexists because that is what serves HIS purpose in creation even if it will not serve the religious racketeers so well.

If God wants them to pop into existence by chance then they will. And scientists have discovered that they do.

Though… none of this is in any way intended to support the idea that living organisms popped into existence only by chance. Life is a self-organizing phenomena and so living organisms came into existence by a combination of many causes both by their own will/choices and also by the influences of the environment, which includes a shepherd.

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Chance has no power to do anything. Chance is cosmically, totally, consummately impotent. Again, I must justify my dogmatism on this point. I say that chance has no power to do anything because it simply is not anything. It has no power because it has no being.

Chance is not an entity and it is not a thing that has power to affect other things. It is no thing. To be more precise, it is nothing. Nothing cannot do something. Nothing is not. It has no “isness.” Nothing can pop into existence. I was technically incorrect even to say that chance is nothing. Better to say that chance is not.

When we say things happen “by chance,” the term by can be heard as a dative of means. Suddenly chance is given instrumental power. It is the means by which things come to pass. This “means” now assumes a certain power to effect change. Something that in reality is nothing now has the ability or power to do something.

Pierre Delbet’s work La science et la réalité: “Chance appears today as a law, the most general of all laws. It has become for me a soft pillow-like the one which in Montaigne’s words only ignorance and disinterest can provide, but this is a scientific pillow.”

The attributing of instrumental power to chance, is the most serious error made in modern science and cosmology. It is serious because it is a patently false assumption that, if left unchallenged and uncorrected, will lead science into nonsense.

Self-creation or popping is a logical and rational impossibility. For something to create itself it must be able to transcend Hamlet’s dilemma, “To be, or not to be.” Hamlet’s question assumed sound science. He understood that something (himself) could not both be and not be at the same time and in the same relationship.

For something to create itself, it must have the ability to be and not be at the same time and in the same relationship. For something to create itself it must be before it is. This is impossible. It is impossible for solids, liquids, and gasses. It is impossible for atoms and subatomic particles. It is impossible for light and heat. It is impossible for God. Nothing anywhere, anytime, can create itself.

There is no popping into existence.

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Sure it does. In the same sense as anything but God has power, it certainly does. Just as a hammer has the power to drive in nail or pull it out because it was designed for precisely that purpose. In the same way we were created with the power to do things also. Can we ultimately do such things without God who created us and the circumstances where these powers work and have meaning? No. So in that sense only you can say that chance also has no power to do anything. It is impotent in the same way that you are impotent.

But with that rather inane caveat, chance is a powerful tool. It can solve complex problem in an evolutionary algorithm, design machines, and beat us at our most difficult strategy games. It can create worlds by procedural generation.

No. Nor is intelligence an entity. Nor is life an entity. Nor is power an entity. These are all simply abstract concepts. So?

Now that is just wrong. It is no more nothing than intelligence, life, and power. An abstraction is not nothing. It may have no existence apart from particulars, I would agree with that, but it is not nothing.

Is chance helping you to utter this nonsense? Is it some random firing of a defective neuron which is assembling this collection of words in meaningless order?

The demonstrable evidence of science is that Einstein’s denial of a role for probability in the laws of nature was incorrect. In this way scientists were FORCED to accept against what they wanted to believe, that some events governed only by probability and no hidden variables are an inescapable reality.

Are you telling us about something God cannot do? He cannot make a world in which there are things which pop into existence? …a world like this one, where virtual particle pop into existence for a brief amount of time according to the time-energy uncertainty principle? Hmmm… The God I believe in can do that.

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Then He does it on every world of the infinity from eternity. Why does abiogenesis require divine intervention when there is no other rational trace or need of it? It means that if the phosphine is not just Venusian atmospheric chemistry, He created life there as well. Why? Rather than as soon as it rains on a world sized lab, life emerges.

What’s chance got to do with it? What’s chance got to do with whatever principle has eternally grounded, instantiated existence? Something does that. Either ineffable nature meaninglessly abhors an absence, a null even of vacuum, alone or it is an aspect of ineffable purposeful transcendence.

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I don’t think anyone is saying that chance is a physical thing. Chance is a word we humans use to describe how a physical system operates. If we model the lottery we use probabilities. If we model quantum mechanics we use probabilities. The same applies to gas laws, thermodynamics, and a whole host of other systems.

Of course the story of that creation might get told differently on other worlds. Perhaps Christianity’s is simply the way the story gets told here. There isn’t much specificity in that story. Something has pushed the winding down of the expansion of this singularity toward the creation of matter, energy, life, multi-cellular life and consciousness including our peculiar self-aware sort. I don’t believe science has yet come up with a comprehensive theory to explain this movement toward increased complexity and freedom. Do you think the Christian story is wrong in its particulars once you make allowance for the original intended audience and translation?

Fair enough. But the question was: Did life pop into existence which relates to chance

Believing in the unseen act of creation does not mean we have no visible evidence at all this took place. If that were so, Paul could not tell us in Romans 1:20 that the created order gives us knowledge of the Creator and His attributes and consequently, His work of creation. Nevertheless, since none of us were present when God made the world and since this act of initial creation cannot be replicated in a laboratory, the belief that God created the universe is an act of faith and not chance and not popping.

The belief that God made the universe does not mean believing that He took preexistent matter not created by Him and shaped it into the heavens and the earth. It means believing that"what is seen was not made out of things that are visible" Hebrews 11:3. This is creation out of nothing - also God spoke other things into being into existence by the word of his power, the same word that sustains all creation.

Nothing can create itself it must be before it is. This is impossible for God. Nothing anywhere anytime, can create itself. A being can be self-existent without violating logic but it cannot be self-created.

There is no causal power of chance, no popping, no-self creation. So the use of chance used in scientific and philosophical discussion is sloppy because ‘chance’ appears today as a law, the most general of all laws when relating to evolution.

Stanley Jaki calls chance "the softest philosophical pillow in scientific history, just like popping
“Ex nihilo nihil fit” - out of nothing, nothing come.

I think what this is really about is that chance is not a satisfactory explanation for Paul_Allen. And I certainly have no problem with that whatsoever. What works as a satisfactory explanation for people seems to be rather subjective. But we can certainly tell him that within the procedural methodology of science, chance certainly does work as an explanation for some things, because it provides the means to calculate and predict the results of our measurements in those cases.

Oh dear… someone is deciding to limit God to the logic and premises they have decided to put their faith in. I would rather put my faith in God.

though…

This is not completely unconditional. I do have ethical standards. I will not worship the devil even if he declares himself god over the world. And this is far far far more than just a name… but a matter of character, ethics, and the methods they use. Holding a gun to people’s head or running a protection racket is not a behavior I will accept in any god that I would worship.

No more so than water pops into existence when you put a spark to hydrogen and oxygen. At a molecular level, oxygen and hydrogen run into each other in the presence of excess energy and this is what produces the water molecules. If abiogenesis did happen, it happened through those same chance encounters of different molecules.

Just to be clear . . . I have no problem with people believing things through faith, even if I don’t share that belief.

The type of chance I am talking about is not axiomic. It is a practical and methodological description. Could there be some sort of deity behind the workings of nature that we can’t detect? It can’t be ruled out so I will never say that such a deity does not exist. It could be that God acted through abiogenesis.

At a practical level, we use models based on probabilities (i.e. chance) and they work, so I use them. That’s the same way science approaches the question as well.

Such a statement fails to understand what chance is and how it works in our models. Matter and energy has to interact and produce results. How we model those interactions and results is through probabilities. That’s what chance is.

I think we are trying to answer different questions, which I definitely don’t have a problem with. Asking how air pressure can equalize within a container is not the same as asking if life has intrinsic purpose and meaning.

There are infinite creation myths. But one rationalist account. I don’t believe you’ll ever believe that nature does nature. And I don’t know what freedom is in nature, apart from the freedom of movement to complexity. The Christian story is rationally wrong - human - in its missing the point.

This is a reoccurring theme on this site, and I guess I repeat myself - semantics can obscure our discussions. I cannot see ‘chance’ in chemical reactions, although we may use models with probabilities. As chemical systems increase in complexity, and we superimpose environments that cannot be set with exact values, we realize the limitations of science. It is in this context that it is unreasonable to believe life came about an irrational ‘popping out’.

While Christians believe God created all, including life, we state this as a faith based statement. I thing the opposite side, that an atheist would claim things come about by chance, is an expression of their belief (or something like that), because no matter how we argue, every idea put forward as an explanation on the origin of life falls far short of a scientific proposal.

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The ground of being is not chance. It is an ineffable principle. The first law of nature. All else emerges from that, including quantum mechanics, nucleosynthesis, abiogenesis and mind. The question is, is that first law actually natural? We have no evidence that it isn’t apart from the Jesus story.

Actually I really do think nature is entirely natural and that “creator” is one of the roles attributed to that which gives rise to God belief which is mistaken. I just think the arc of our origins is a genuinely surprising and wonderful thing all the same. While I think it is mistaken I do think attributing creation to God does no harm so long as that doesn’t distort science as it does in YEC and ID. My reason is that a felt connection to what gives rise to God belief is what matters; so if people have that by way of a traditional approach that carries some baggage which rubs our modern sensibilities the wrong way, then I don’t really care. Even if intellectually such belief isn’t required, is it at least permitted? Reason unalloyed with intuition is not to be trusted. My intellectual conclusions must not only evade contradicting my senses but also keep my humanity intact.

My apologies MarkD. I’m surprised and wondered too. To an embarrassing degree, even when completely alone with me Stendhal’s and my first encounter with a Himalayan maple: it brought tears to my eyes, it was just so beautiful. We’re certainly wired by evolution for the sacred; ‘a felt connection to what gives rise to God belief’? It’s not just permitted, it’s human mandatory. My intuition is that reason cannot ever be denied in open matters of religion.

‘*’ It distorts science to a very high degree on this site even without YEC and ID: At least one pillar here believes that God created life with enough white space round that for others to interpolate ‘directly’, despite the harm that does to rationality.