Nanotechnology and Abiogenesis: Investigating the Origin of Life from a Tiny Perspective

[jstump (Jim Stump)]

Let me try one more time (this will be my last attempt) to extract from you an account of what you’re demanding from me. How much supernatural causation (of the efficient variety) do you invoke to explain the way things are in the world? Presumably this isn’t happening constantly, or the regular interventions of God become indistinguishable from laws. But then you have the same problem of needing to say what else God is doing lest he be relegated to a deistic observers gallery. Right? What am I missing about your position that is any different in this respect than mine? If you have God occasionally intervening in the chain of causes, then you have stretches of time that God is not doing that, right? And spread over an infinity of time, there is no difference between that and what you accuse me of. And in a finite amount of time, there will only be a (small) difference in degree rather than a difference in kind. So we both need an account of God’s creatio continua. I’ve yet to hear anything from you on this.

I (I’m not speaking for BioLogos here, just as an individual philosopher who espouses evolutionary creation) think the problem is more linguistic than usually admitted. The scientific and the personal (or what Sellars called the “manifest”) are two different discourses that have developed. Each have their own ontology in a sense, and they cannot be reduced to each other. One appeals to particles and forces and efficient causes; the other to intentions and will and reasons. We will not get one seamless account that integrates the concepts derived from each. So, I’m going to keep saying “God intentionally created humans” and “evolution is the best scientific description we have of the process by which human beings developed.” Each discourse has its own history, methodology, and logic (in the Hegelean sense). God as an agent does things, and we can talk about them theologically. And we have scientific explanations for some things.

That is only a paragraph summary of what needs a monograph to unpack. But please stop saying no TE/EC people treat this problem seriously.

[martin (Martin Mayberry)]

Of course God a has a big role and he needs to have one! Evolution could NOT do it!It is considered by atheist a “mindless un-directed process”.!

[jstump (Jim Stump)]

@Eddie

My objection is to an overall pattern of science/theology argument (put forward by your BioLogos colleagues and other TE/EC folks in other venues) which I find to be weak, unconvincing, and evasive.

So I think we’d make some further headway on our disagreements if when you’re objecting to “BioLogos” you’d confine that to the people who are actually part of BioLogos now (unless you’re addressing history). These include the staff members, our Board of Directors, and members of the Advisory Council. These people don’t agree on every point, but they are the only people who have publicly identified with BioLogos and with whom BioLogos has publicly identified. I don’t mean this in the silly “distance ourselves from our founder” way that these guys tried to spin it, just that we are an organization that develops (and adapts?!) over time.

I don’t think you’ll find anyone on those lists who disagrees with my claim that God intentionally created humans. And I don’t think you’ll find any “BioLogos leaders constantly exhibit horror” about the possibility of supernatural causation in origins. Our blog is intentionally a place for conversation among people who are interested in these topics. I’d guess that the majority of our blog authors largely agree with our positions, but their blog posts aren’t somehow determining BioLogos doctrine. And certainly the “commentators” are speaking for themselves, not the organization.

Fair enough?

I’m still curious about your view of divine action, but I promised to stop asking. I’m sure it will come up again. By the way, Bob Russell is one of the contributors to our forthcoming series on divine action.

[jstump (Jim Stump)]

Thanks Eddie. I appreciate it.

@Eddie

I’m glad to see that Russell is going to be brought in. I would bet that Ted Davis has something to do with that.

Sorry to keep messing with your image of the organization, but you owe us some money! (there’s a “give” button in the upper right of most screens). Ted didn’t have anything to do with the divine action series. He’s working hard on other things.

@Eddie

Both ID and EC proponents seem to agree that God normally works his will through secondary causes (in rainfall, in the changes of season, in the movement of planets, in reproduction and growth, etc.).

Which is why I keep insisting that EC is no more prone to deism than ID.

@Eddie

He is not “intervening” when he exerts special divine action to make something happen, as if he is some kind of interloper. He is simply choosing to carry out his will by direct rather than indirect means. So the language of “intervention” carries with it an unwarranted air of disreputability for God’s special action.

We’re getting closer when you say this. Language causes all kinds of problems in this area (and in philosophy of action in general). More to come…

[bren]

Hi Eddie,

Your schematization seems fairly solid, and I think you are right that where ECs and IDs differ (your variety of ID that is, and I am convinced that this is not a majority view for those who identify themselves with the position) is in their tendency to admit special divine action as a likely causal factor at key stages in natural history. Such a difference in outlook, being reduced to a simple matter of intellectual inclination when considering likely hypotheses for the formation of life on this planet, strikes me as a fairly trivial issue on which to build such a strong disagreement.

If this is really the crux of the issue, then this strikes me as hardly worth discussing, especially when both sides seem to concede that the question is open, regardless of what they personally happen to find more convincing. I have long guessed that the reason this might disturb you is that you strongly suspect the motives (and perhaps the naturalistic bias) of those who don’t think that special divine action is a likely solution for abiogenesis. If this is the case, I think you may be jumping to conclusions, and in spite of your frequent characterization of your dialogues with ECs, in any discussions I’ve seen you having with the biologos staff, their replies always struck me as being anything but shady, evasive and disingenuous. Maybe this characterizes some of your earlier discussions that I did not read, but I’m sort of hesitant to accept this (though I’m open to any link you want to provide).

It is clear that the ECs under discussion have no trouble with the idea that God can intervene (your well-considered concern for what this term might be thought to imply is noted), so it is a good guess that something else is driving the disagreement. It could be that social pressures stemming from an ambient naturalist worldview are hard at work behind the scenes. But on the other hand, it could be a whole range of other influences.

It could be that abiogenesis left us with nearly no evidence at all (for obvious reasons), so we have good reason to suspect that scientists addressing the question have essentially been flailing about in the dark with very few helpful pointers, like detectives at an 80 year-old cold-case crime scene. It may be the consideration that scientist have only been at it for half a century in a limited number of labs with highly limited ideas of what to look for, while the formation of early replicators would have arisen in an abiotic world-wide lab filled with an immense range of conditions and deriving from an unparalleled high-throughput experiment with infinitesimally graded variables and an enormous range of substrates over millions of years, making it a bit absurd for us to throw up our hands and admit failure (yes I realize you aren’t suggesting we do this). It may be due to the consideration that in every one of the untold number of times when some feature of the natural world did not seem susceptible to a natural explanation, further scientific investigation has proven that this intuition was wrong, with this pattern playing out this way so often that to bet against this outcome has become a bad idea. It may be because science has progressively uncovered such a self-consistent vision of the natural world through space and time, that any interruption in continuity (a causal gap) starts to look like an unlikely bet unless it has some purpose other than connecting the dots in an otherwise continuous space-time matrix (this is how special divine action leading to the creation of life tends to look, like it or not). Is it not reasonable to consider that a combination of these factors might result in what you end up viewing as an unreasonable bias?

I admit that I see no problem in principle with your view, but special divine action leading to the creation of life would strike me as an odd and surprising outcome given the elegant self-consistency that scientific investigation has otherwise uncovered. It is difficult to avoid automatically associating it with the idea of angelic adjustments of planetary motions, whether or not it is the same thing. It is easy to interpret it in this way, whether you call it an intervention or a special divine action, and whether or not you normalize it against the backdrop of the Hebrew perspective.

I also understand where the admittedly denigrating term “tinkering” comes from, since from this point of view, it becomes odd and inexplicable, when the rest of the picture seems to have unfolded from a singularity with such astonishing uniformity, that some unique feature was not made available in this unfolding. It simply becomes a kneejerk reaction to picture it as the boss showing up to handle some glaring lacuna in the company SOPs, even if this isn’t the necessary interpretation. The bottom line is that the conclusion that abiogenesis likely has a natural explanation is probably usually an induction from what we know about the natural world and the history of science rather than a deduction from what we think should be the case based on some bias toward naturalism.

This is really quite separate from questions of general divine action, which is something that both ECs and IDs need to consider without either position really offering much of an advantage.

That said, your observations about the worldview that is codified by the Hebrew language are well expressed and I think very helpful, as are your caveats about the terminology being used for these debates.

[bren]

Hi Eddie,

Thanks for a balanced response. I think we find ourselves in agreement on most of the points that you touch on. I am glad that you are carefully distinguishing between ECs on some of these issues, since I have often felt that some of your somewhat sweeping characterizations did not reflect the views of many of us. I tend to agree that the bend-over-backward efforts to explain miracles in rationalistic terms comes off as silly, unconvincing and biased. And it’s also pretty 19th century (David Strauss viewed this rationalistic tendency as one of his main targets when writing his Life of Jesus), and therefore; bad;-). I remember a friend (who otherwise didn’t have a rationalistic bone in his body) trying to convince me many years ago that the red sea crossing could be wholly explained by winds and tides, and whatever my leanings at the time, I just couldn’t see the point of such an explanation when discussing the activity of an omnipotent God.

So yes, I do get where you are coming from on these issues, which is why I don’t tend to disagree with you here. As usual, my disagreement is with respect to your global assessment of the sciences and of what we can confidently include in a reliable (if approximate) body of knowledge. Since this impression for each of us is largely a culmination of all of the intangibles of our reading, discussions and work experience, I don’t think it’s useful to go into why each of us ends up with a different impression of where the sciences are at and what we can reliably expect from our future investigations. I recognize that the scientific method in all of its forms has very clear limits, but if in addition to this, I was under the impression that there were all sorts of aspects of the natural world that had no scientific explanation in principle, not because of human or technological limitations, but because we would find that they were at base supernatural, then I suppose I’d take your view.

The fundamental problem with this is (a) this does not match my impression of scientific progress, and as I said, it isn’t that science has routinely explained routine observations, it is that science has routinely explained things that were considered by many to be beyond any possible or accessible scientific explanation (rather like this very question), and (b) I can’t imagine reaching a place, in theory, were we can feel confident that we have exhausted all possible natural explanations for something like the origin of life, and I think it is absolutely incredible that anyone can reach the conclusion that we have more or less shown it to be all but impossible through our limited investigations. This second point is critical, because it means that special creation at this juncture in natural history can never really be established, because we will simply never have any idea how many of the realistic and possible hypotheses we have actually falsified in the limited time we have had to work on the limited number of ideas we’ve cooked up. If we knew that there were only 100 possibilities for how life formed and we felt that we have done enough work (another unlikely conclusion) to fully discard 85 of the most likely, then we could almost slap a probability on our assurance that God skipped the middle-man at this stage, but this is just not a realistic scenario. As I pointed out, the massive experiment that may have led to the formation of life is absolutely impossible for us to replicate on any scale or to any tiny degree, and we have hardly a clue or a scrap of evidence directing us to a starting point. I not only think that it is wildly premature to start discussing supernatural options, but I think that based on this thought experiment, we will never be in a position where we can reasonable decide to label any continuing investigation a “forlorn hope” unless it is because we have exhausted our own limited resources as investigators. Further, the origin of life seems to be receiving special treatment here; there are all sorts of scientific mysteries that have continued to baffle us for similar lengths of time, yet there isn’t a whisper of; “well then, maybe we need to start seriously considering Gods direct action here”. A tough question is a tough question, not an invitation to de facto wave the white flag even if the investigation continues in practice. That doesn’t mean that the naturalist explanation is true, it means that we have not yet reached the point, and probably never will, where we have any special reason to think that this scientific question has a less natural explanation than any other scientific question that is still the subject of ongoing investigation. So this combination of points leads me to suspect that the ID community is pushing to consider it a failed attempt, not because it is the least bit reasonable to think that we have covered every possibility and ruled out the scientific route, but because there is a driving predisposition to be able to point to a scientific failure and impel the recognition of God’s direct action. You probably have a more nuanced view on what is driving this ID push, but there it is.

I will look into Nagel’s book, and I know that there are a few others that deal more with the limits of science (like Barrow’s Impossibility) than with the fundamental incompleteness of the scientific picture. I am open to a mind-change here, but even if convinced that the holistic picture we’ve created is badly flawed, I’m not sure that this invalidates a probability inference that the origin of life is likely to be as susceptible to a natural explanation as so many of the apparently improbable steps in the evolution of life.

As usual, I think we will agree on most of the well-defined surface questions, while disagreeing on some of the less tangible considerations, but my main point it is that it is possibly wholly reasonable and hardly obviously biased for someone who views these questions in light of the above considerations to reach the conclusion that the natural explanation is probably the good one. I therefore think that you are mistaken in viewing this as an unjustified prejudice instead of a well reasoned impression of what we can likely expect, and I think that this mistake is largely related to your personal assessment of the state of scientific knowledge (which, as you must concede, is quite different from the assessment of many of the ECs you debate with). If we switched overall impressions of the sciences, there is some reason to think we’d switch expectations as well.

[bren]

Thanks Eddie,

You view any confidence that abiogenesis is likely to have a natural explanation as a probably subconscious naturalistic bias ingrained by scientific training. I think that such psychological conjectures put you on extremely shaky ground, especially when those who actually hold the position explicitly state that their reasons lie elsewhere, lay out their reasons for coming to this conclusion and state that they are convinced by these instead of by some feeling of how it “must” be. On my own account, I’m not addressing the question against some sweeping background of an inflexible worldview, I’m addressing it with a number of points in mind that convince me that natural explanation just happens to be the right horse to bet on.

I’m not unsympathetic to the influence of bias, even when a position is reasoned through, but since any thoughts on this topic for me immediately gravitate to the specific points I have been trying to bring across instead of to any deductions from my scientific training or my worldview, I tend to view your description of the EC mindset on this topic as simply inaccurate as a generalization, even where I’ll admit that it may characterize some thinkers. You could suggest that the considerations I’ve listed are just a smokescreen I have set for myself to hide my true reasons for coming to this conclusion, but I’m sorry to say that I can’t take such psychological second guessing seriously and it is intrinsically a weak argument unless it is supported by something greater than a hunch. As I’ve said, some ECs are probably motivated in this way (or by all sorts of other bizarre considerations), and their statements will give the game away, but you have vastly overextended this to ECs who have given no such hints and who are ready to give reasons why they vouch for the a non-interventionist account.

I don’t think I should relist the reasons why I take a different view, since I think they were clear enough. You have offered a number of reasons that contribute to your own background tendency. Some of them are philosophical and I was not unaware of them, but since I am addressing a question about probabilities relating to a natural phenomenon, these philosophical considerations strike me as being intrinsically unlikely to be directly helpful and very likely to be misleading when working out the probabilities of any given hypothesis. Philosophical considerations do not contribute to the probability calculus that leads us to our personal conclusions on probability questions, it can only serve to expand or restrict the range of options.

Since we both agree on what not to rule out, the philosophical considerations you bring are not useful for differentiating our positions (though they are good for distinguishing from the strict materialist position), while we clearly disagree on the psychological considerations as I mentioned above (on this point I can at the very least state that you are incorrect in one case and probably incorrect for many other ECs).

What’s left? This is where it get’s interesting. You make statements like “But so far that is not what the best science tells us. So far, the best science tells us that life has specific arrangements which by their very nature do not proceed from natural laws alone and which are very unlikely to have arisen by chance” and your reference to James Tour lay the groundwork of your position. James Tour is an expert in his field, but he is also someone who seems to take the argument from personal incredulity far more seriously than the question warrants. Both the statement and the reference make it clear that probably your main exposure to this question is mediated through the discovery institute and those who are associated or sympathetic with it. Nothing intrinsically wrong with this, but it is difficult to deny that they are strongly motivated to view the scientific effort to assess the question as a failure and their entire raison d’etre is related to their efforts to identify God’s handiwork by scientific means. James Tour seems to be connected with this drive to see the scientific account in general as incomplete and he is simply not representative of the perspective of the vast majority of scientists on questions like evolution. It doesn’t mean he’s wrong, it means that with the exception of more specific questions relating to nanotechnology, he is a very poor envoy for delivering any message about what the best science tells us on subjects like evolution and abiogenesis.

And much more to the point, your above sentence is very problematic. You start by saying that the best science tells us that life has specific arrangements; though I would clarify this by correcting it to “life has a range of specific arrangements that are mapped to niche specific fitness landscapes”, since this probably is a more realistic description and it avoids the sense that only a discrete and very limited set of molecular arrangements are viable overall. That aside, you go on to say what the best science tells us; “…which by their very nature to not proceed from natural laws alone and which are very unlikely to have arisen by chance”. I strongly take issue with this; I can’t imagine where or when the best science has concluded that the very nature of these molecular arrangements requires something beyond natural laws or where the probabilities have been worked out in a way that is generally accepted by scientists. It seems to me that either finding would be viewed as a breakthrough scientific discovery. You say “the best science”, but since I don’t think it’s possible that I would have overlooked these conclusions if they were generally recognized conclusions, I’m guessing that what you mean is “ID science”. The very terminology being used is well outside the limits of scientific investigation (how on earth would one go about determining whether some arrangement in nature required the involvement of something beyond nature to come into being)?

Some of your follow up sentences bring me to a similar conclusion; “So what is the evidence, at present, that life could be formed out of the unguided movement of atoms and molecules? Close to zero.” This almost automatically reminds me of the absurd tornado in a junkyard argument. Not a single scientist is investigating the possibility that unguided atomic and molecular movements on their own produced complex arrangements that led to life. Obviously a “ratchet” approach (well described by Dawkins for evolution) is the best one, which is why scientists like Cairns-Smith have considered clay crystal minerals as a first step, whatever the merit of his approach. They are looking for how patterns and chains can spontaneously form and they are looking for what conditions will make each step toward self-replicators locally favorable, rendering the overall string of events likely or even inevitable. Obviously probabilities calculated on all of the atoms just happening to bump into each other in the right way are silly and are not taken seriously by anyone. You have essentially guessed at an overall probability (“close to zero”) without any of the knowledge about the specific conditions and interactions that are wholly necessary for determining the probability of each step that leads to this overall outcome, and this knowledge is logically prior to even beginning to think in terms of probabilities.

Your analysis of theological and philosophical questions are generally excellent, but these few statements on scientific/probability questions have very serious problems associated with them and are very poor fodder for any assessment.

Even your discussion of thermal vents is problematic, because it fails to account for the fact that any nascent early steps in the formation of life are rendered nearly impossible by the fact that this is no longer an abiotic world; any formation of some organic soup in today’s world is almost immediately food for scavengers in the food chain, and even controlled lab experiments are always in danger of being upset by contamination from the highly evolved life-forms already present.

In short, I do not think your scientific account stems from sources that can be relied upon to be unbiased, and I think the statements you have offered about scientific considerations have very clear problems and can’t be used to arrive at any conclusions. Nor do I think that they directly respond to the stated reasons that I view the natural account as more likely. Much of what you say is clear and advances the discussion, but I think that our biggest disagreement continues to be on scientific questions, and I think that my original and overall point was simply that your view that some naturalistic bias is all that is driving the EC position is very far from the mark. I’m open to new philosophical considerations but so far I can’t see them resolving these issues.

I enjoy our discussions and particularly your depth and clarity, so thanks for giving your thoughts on this!

[benkirk (Benjamin Kirk)]

@Eddie

So far, the best science tells us that life has specific arrangements which by their very nature do not proceed from natural laws alone and which are very unlikely to have arisen by chance. (For more argument on this, see the aforementioned James Tour lecture.)

Hello Eddie,

I think it’s much more accurate to say that the lecture tells us merely that James Tour thinks this, not that the best science tells us anything of the sort. If you disagree, let’s discuss the actual science (without name-dropping) that you think tells us this.

[quote=“Eddie, post:26, topic:4758”]
Thus, the Christian always has, as a real possibility, the hypothesis of a non-natural origin of life. [/quote]
And the real Christian scientist tests her hypotheses. Pseudoscientists do not.

[quote]And this is where Meyer’s discussion of “the best explanation” comes in. In the historical sciences, we often have to settle for “the best explanation” – we cannot obtain the sort of confirmation that lab-based sciences can obtain.
[/quote]Your distinction is not nearly as bright as you wish it to be. There’s still plenty of hypothesis testing to be done in the allegedly historical sciences. Your problem is that Meyer has never tested a hypothesis nor advanced a single hypothesis that makes empirical predictions, despite a great deal of sciency-sounding rhetoric.

@Eddie

Some will say that we should suspend judgment, and not decide which hypothesis is best, until all the facts are in.

Scientists all say that we should test the hypotheses, and the good ones do that.

Some will grossly misrepresent the scientific method as mere debate over data produced by some lower group of scientists, while in the real world the recognition goes primarily to those whose labs produce the paradigm-changing data.

[benkirk (Benjamin Kirk)]

@bren

I think that such psychological conjectures put you [Eddie] on extremely shaky ground, especially when those who actually hold the position explicitly state that their reasons lie elsewhere, lay out their reasons for coming to this conclusion and state that they are convinced by these instead of by some feeling of how it “must” be.

Hello bren,

I agree completely, but should add that those who actually hold the position are actively trying to disprove their hypotheses.

@bren

Even your discussion of thermal vents is problematic, because it fails to account for the fact that any nascent early steps in the formation of life are rendered nearly impossible by the fact that this is no longer an abiotic world; any formation of some organic soup in today’s world is almost immediately food for scavengers in the food chain, and even controlled lab experiments are always in danger of being upset by contamination from the highly evolved life-forms already present.

Exactly. This also holds for RNA, as AFAIK every living thing secretes ribonuclease, which is miraculously stable. This makes perfect sense as a way for life to outcompete and obliterate most of the preceding RNA World, with only stable RNAs like rRNA and tRNA able to survive.

[benkirk (Benjamin Kirk)]

@Eddie

I referenced his talk because it is on an issue that interests me (origin of life) and because he is certainly qualified to speak about what “real science” is and does (rumor has it that he was on the very short list for the Nobel in Chemistry a couple of years back), and because he knows a heck of a lot about molecules and molecular machines (he builds them!) and the conditions necessary for creating such things, and because his talk was just darned good.

Hello Eddie,

You wrote that Tour’s opinion is what science tells us. That’s not accurate.

@Eddie

First, there are some things about DNA base sequences and their code-relationship to amino acids which are not governed by natural laws. You will see the explanation in Stephen Meyer’s first book, and for all the crowing against Meyer from TE/ECs and atheists, not one of them has shown that he is wrong on that point.[/quote]
According to you. Has anyone shown that he is right on that point? Has Meyer tried to test his hypothesis?

[quote]There is an essential arbitrariness about some features of life which rules out law as an explanation for those features, and leaves only chance or design.

No, there is no such ruling out. That’s a mere hypothesis and you are simply asserting it.

Speaking of arbitrariness, maybe you could explain the central feature of the ribosome: that the enzymatic core is a ribozyme. Meyer clearly can’t.

@Eddie

The onus is not on me to disprove it; the onus is on you to provide detailed and plausible pathways and mechanisms.

If you’re being at all scientific, the opposite is true: the onus is clearly on you to test your own hypothesis.

[Christy (Christy Hemphill)]

@Eddie

“Sorry to keep messing with your image of the organization, but you owe us some money!”

Funny, when I go into a Christian church, they ask me to give only what I can, and no one ever checks to see how much (if any) money I put in the collection plate. One gives what one can. I have no money to spare for BioLogos, so I give time and knowledge instead. I’m told that at least some of the readers here find my contributions helpful. (P.S. I don’t give any money to Discovery, either.)

For crying out loud, Eddie, it was a response to your “I would bet that Ted Davis has something to do with that.” In other words, you lose that bet, you’re wrong. No one is trying to shake you down,