Hi Marty,
Found God as a Programmer interesting.
But His first program, The Cell, was amazing.
I canât see what could come before it, what a protocell program would look like.
Also, the single cell bacteria, alive today, seems timeless,
since biochemically it is essentially the same of any one of our cells.
(Of course our cells are bigger, more organized, and have lots and lots more non-coding DNA, for regulating the coding DNA needed for protein synthesis.)
In the billion plus years to bring in us humans, we both marvel at how the program to multicellular life developed. However, we differ perhaps, in the relationship between God and His program.
I see Him and His program as connected, perhaps as One, while you may envision Him leaving His desk and letting the program run.
Abiding in the mysteries,
Doug
âOmnis cellula e cellulaâ All cells originate from cells. This is not necessarily circular reasoning nor a âchicken or egg firstâ conundrum. Itâs more like Berbidge et. al. rejecting creationism in cosmology in favor of their âsteady stateâ view: The cosmos has been around forever and will always exist.
Consider the apocryphal, âAs it was in the beginning, is now and will always be -world with out endâ.
A Bohm recommends, those uncomfortable with dialectics can go with miracles.
In the Gospel of Thomas, saying #18 -
The disciples said to Jesus, âTell us how our end will be.â
Jesus said, âHave you discovered, then, the beginning, that you look for the end? For where the beginning is, there will the end be. Blessed is he who will take his place at the beginning, he will know the end and will not experience death.â
âUltimately, God is in no âhurry.â Itâs only billions of years from our perspective, inside time, looking back.â
This type of understanding is key to seeing the problem with many arguments (both pro and con), e.g. design claims, claims that evolution is too unpleasant in one way or another for God to use, etc. Such claims are making assumptions about what Godâs goal is, often without thinking about them and very rarely explicitly examining them.
A long time to create us is only problematic if the goal is to make us as fast as possible. Gradual creation, using natural law-type methods, is a great way to make a vast diversity of things. Likewise, nature often is far from generating an engineerâs ideal in biological structures. But âgood enough to workâ is the criterion for evolutionary success. And nature has a wide range of different considerations, not solely âmaximize this one thing!â. Even in engineering, maximizing one feature often leaves problems elsewhere. For example, the pandaâs thumb has been cited as an example of poor design. It certainly isnât as useful as our thumbs. But itâs good enough for the panda to be able to get enough bamboo. Thatâs all it needs to do. It is impossible to accurately determine if something is good design or not unless we know what its purpose is.
This is not helpful. He could have said: âIf you say 2+2=11 in base 10 I know that you are wrong.â It is presumed in his comment, and such is not really necessary to state. Too much nitpicking here. The point of language is to communicate ideas and I think we all understood what he meant. It would be better to just address his intended point than to obfuscate the issue and add needless talk of different bases in mathematics.
God, and more specifically, a carpenter from Nazareth, is the reason we have those labs, science and Western civilization. No one is saying not to look but if the evidence actually shows it is highly unlikely cells evolved via purely non-living materials then we would have to accept that. Intelligent design proponents donât simply say âGenesis says goddidit [mature Adam] herp derp therefore, we shouldnât look for natural explanations to life.â The gap arguments are pretty old and tiresome, and truth be told, you have your own science of the gaps here as will be shown below.
So no natural pathway can ever be scientifically validated. Correct. So any model you come up with for the evolution of the cell is not capable of being falsified or verified. Not science. You can only come up with merely possible natural pathways. The analogy I would say is this:
Imagine a man goes to work from his home.
walkling
hitchhiking
cycling
taking the bus
driving a car
driving a rental
carpooling
insert 50 more possibilities
If I had no evidence for any of these options I couldnât pick one and call it science even though they are all potential options. But here is another way of looking at it. This also means if you come up with a possible natural pathway for the cell, I have no scientific reason for even believing it to be a true account of what happened. Unless you can show actual evidence the cell did evolve this way, you are just a pattern seeking primate connecting his own dots subjectively. You would need a âfossilâ of sorts or in the analogy, traffic cam footage showing increments of the mans journey to conclude how he got to work.
.
What I think you simply assume is âthere must be some natural pathwayâ (which is science of the gaps). We may all think like this on a lot of issues but it is a philosophical judgment, not a scientific one. But admitting there can never be actual evidence for any one of them because â. . . cells donât leave the types of fossils we can use to answer those questionsâ is very curious in light of your other comment about realities vs possibilities.
Whatever model someone might choose for how the cell came to be would be unscientific because it cannot be verified or falsified per you. Now it is true that âthe man was teleported to work by Godâ is logically possible, but not an explanation most would initially look for. This option would continue the analogy and stand for: âGod creating cells.â Sure this is a gap and not how we normally think. If I see ketchup in my fridge. I assume my wife put it there, not that I was gifted the divine and penultimate French fry condiment from heaven. But miracles are departures from the normal and this is where we need to steel man otherâs arguments. For most people throughout history, outside modern nihilists and relativists, who only pretend morality and truth are important, life has always been considered special and different from inanimate objects. If ever there was a potential for an actual gap where God went beyond the normal course of natural law that He sustains and upholds at every instant, the creation of life itself is a very strong candidate. For those of us who take humans to be created in the image of God, and view life as sacred, this is a very reasonable posture to take. Itâs just as reasonable as thinking John took the bus to work. I have no problem thinking the cell or life might be a âpotential gapâ that actually required God to go beyond his natural score. So I am not going for force biological explanations onto the cell because I come in with the predetermined belief âthere absolutely must be one.â This is an open question in my mind. We can look but should be open to the possibility that as scientists, we might be disappointed with what we find while simultaneously being elated as theologians. But the modern naturalists goes in ahead of time knowing the answer that there must be a natural pathway just as the modern fundamentalist apologists goes into analyzing potential biblical problems knowing beforehand they canât be real and their must be some harmonization. I donât think this way.
For me it is a demonstrable metaphysical fact that God exists and upholds every process at all times. So I have no skin in this game. âNaturalâ means how God upholds reality at all times and âmiracleâ is God going beyond what is normal. For me God is not going to get âsqueezed outâ whether the cell is shown to extremely unlikely to have formed via natural means or if scientists come up with plausible pathways because He is inevitable. I am okay with that latter sort of thinking in regards to life, but your comments certainly came off as very strange to me after you just told an individual talking about a creator God:
That may be true but you are nonetheless enamored by âpossibilitiesâ as your comments above demonstrate.
If I had no evidence for any of these options I couldnât pick one and call it science even though they are all potential options."
True. But if we do have some data, we may be able to narrow it down. [This gets into the issue of Bayesian statistics and to what extent they can be realistically applied.] For example, there is no bus service here. I covered 5.6 miles in about 11 minutes. These facts narrow down the options in figuring out how I got to work.
In general, it is extremely difficult to prove anything scientifically. Many things can be falsified, though, and we can determine what is likely.
In the case of the origin of life, we have extensive biochemical and fossil data that tell us about how life has changed over time. Extrapolating the patterns of DNA change backwards gets us to appreciably simpler cells, though still complex in many ways. Conversely, from study of potential prebiotic chemistry, we can find ways to build a wide range of modestly complex precursor molecules and some simple systems. Thus, itâs not unscientific to say that it seems plausible that these two could connect up. But we cannot say that we have proved exactly how life did originate; we are merely coming up with plausible models and eliminating less plausible ones. We should be trying to find the correct answer while recognizing that we canât know everything. On the one hand, itâs not just an arbitrary choice - we can determine that some models are better than others. But we never know if thereâs a better idea we didnât think of, and there are almost always details that can be improved.
Another complication is considering whether the uncertainty matters for the question we are asking. Can I be certain whether a particular fossil is the direct ancestor of a living species, rather than some sort of cousin twice removed? Certainly it is not possible to be certain that the exact specimen I have is an ancestor, and confidently identifying the ancestral population is possible only in specialized situations. But that does not justify claiming that the fossil and modern forms are not related; it just means that we donât know the exact relationship. The fossil still tells us something about the ancestral condition and likely evolutionary pathways. The individual âLucyâ skeleton has a rather limited chance of being directly ancestral to modern humans. It is not certain if any individual of Australopithecus afarensis is directly ancestral to modern humans; maybe other, undiscovered populations with species-level differences were the actual ancestors. But Lucy does show that there were bipedal apes around in the Pliocene, intermediate in a number of skeletal features between modern humans and chimps. Our understanding of human evolution indicates that such organisms should have been around in that rough time frame, and indeed they were.
3 Likes
T_aquaticus
(The Friendly Neighborhood Atheist)
90
As I stated earlier, I donât think it is possible to determine exactly how life arose on Earth in a scientific sense. There is no evidence that I am aware of that could be used to test those speculations. The best we can do is look for pathways that can give rise to complex biomolecules like RNA and proteins, and those pathways can easily be tested and would be falsifiable.
What you could do is use science to determine which would be sufficient. I also notice that you didnât include any supernatural explanations.
I thought we were talking about abiogenesis, not evolution.
What I observe is that looking for natural explanations has been extremely fruitful, so it seems to be the best option for trying to understand how life can originate.
What is the alternative? What could we do with supernatural explanations? How would supernatural explanations help us understand nature better? What kind of track record to supernatuarl explanations have?
The point is that he claims there is only one way to look at things and that there is a distinct right and wrong. If you try and understand, you (he) might realise that there are legitimate rationalles for different understanding (truths) and that just because he canât see it, doesnât mean it isnât valid
You missed the point of the analogy. They are all sufficient already. That is built in. But unless you have actual evidence for that pathway itâs not a scientific belief. I also purposefully excluded supernatural because the statement before introducing the analogy had ânatural pathways.â I added the logically possible supernatural explanation in later and dealt with that with a ketchup analogy.
We are. The cell evolving from more primitive cells and all of it from non-living, particulate matter.
Of course it has been fruitful in some regards. Fruitful at making wonderful weapons that kill people. Fruitful at making medicines that heal people. Fruitful at predicting reality. But is this the extent of your actual belief or is phrasing it that way just pretty packaging? Iâd wager the majority of secularists go further than this and assume there is a natural explanation for how life developed that we just havenât found it yet. They are optimistic we eventually will but I doubt many of them actually think there might not actually be one.
There is nothing in that quote not found in my response. We can look but I donât need to assume beforehand that itâs necessary we will find anything not does introducing a potential natural pathway mean anyone has to believe it anymore than anyone has to believe in a potential harmonization to a biblical error. Unless you have actual scientific evidence that specific pathway occurred (of which you already said none can be had) then believing in it is not a scientific thought. The science behind the hypothesized pathways could be falsified but the validity of the pathway itself never can. That should be a sobering thought.
While I agree with Venema but I basically added that for people who find life to be sacred and made in Godâs image, it is quite plausible for us to think there may be a gap needing filling here. Itâs a category error and lazy thinking to put all âgod of the gapsâ arguments in the same boat. Itâs quite plausible to me that god may have gone beyond the natural order of things and, so to speak, breathed a breath of life into creation.
Iâm sure that if it were shown the cell could not have reached its current complexity naturally, that would help us better understand ourselves and the world around us. The alternative in my mind is simply to keep doing science but to get away from scientism, add a sprinkle of intellectual humility to our world views. As I said, life is sacred and holy to me. Maybe you disagree and see everything as flesh bags but that gives me pause to consider there may not actually be a completely natural explanation that explains every aspect of life and its development on this planet.
This doesnât work. In the analogy these are the narrowed down pathways and itâs already been claimed that we cannot have evidence showing any specific pathway occurred in time. So there simply is no data for the trip. No dashboard footage, no traffic cams, etc. The data you are referring to would be analogous to John owning a car, owning a bike, being on a bus service, etc. None of these narrow the options. But if we admit we cannot actually trace the evolution of any specific pathway scientifically, then that model of the cellâs development is not a scientific belief.
Itâs not implausible to say the two could connect up but if you cannot have evidence the actual pathway occurred it is not scientific. Maybe a-scientific as opposed to un is a better word choice. This is as factual as 2+2= 4. And what prompted this whole technical splicing on my part is T telling someone else he prefers actualities to possibilities. There is tension here. Without scientific evidence for various steps of the cells development via some pathway, belief in any specific pathway is beyond the reach of science proper. Even if you had plausible pathways, I still think itâs possible God may have played a more special role. Itâs life we are talking about. All gaps are not equal.
2 Likes
T_aquaticus
(The Friendly Neighborhood Atheist)
93
Thatâs what research in the field of abiogenesis is all about, determining what pathways are possible. We may never know what pathway was taken, just as we may never know what form of transportation a specific person took on a specific day.
Those are two separate processes, however.
I donât see why that matters. Iâm sure secularists think that a newly discovered human disease has a natural explanation, but I donât see this as a reason for not doing the research and looking for a natural explanation.
Personally, I tend to see supernatural explanations as giving up. Thatâs just me being honest about my biases. I think part of intellectual humility isnât in being bias free, but in being honest about what your biases are and how they may affect your conclusions. With that said, I donât see how we can differentiate between there being no natural explanation and not having found the natural explanation.
Iâd say not. Would vitalists have looked for a chemical synthesis route for urea? Did chemists in the 1800âs display vanity and dogma in pursuing the synthesis? I expect that we will never find the answers for everything but there are things which we may think are worth investigating or tractable to research.
For the past 20 or so years Iâve worked on early phase projects in cancer drug discovery. I donât expect any project I work to lead to testing in humans or even become a treatment or a cure (projects in this field have a high failure rate), but one may. We always learn something new while trying, too, so the effort is never a total loss. A lot of advances come from those who pick the areas they think might yield success, even if itâs just a step in a particular direction, and are persistent as hell. Failure is an option, and scientists are very familiar with failure. We expect failure and learn from them. But sometimes problems eventually yield. This actually applies to life and accomplishments in general.
I would say it is a matter of perspective and usefulness. Finding cures and medical advances of that nature have n obvious value. Discovering how life began or germinates? As I have said before, I see little benefit and a great deal of danger in it.
âBenefitâ certainly factors in funding, and origin of life research funding is paltry compared to cancer research. I think thatâs appropriate but âbasic researchâ without an immediate benefit also needs funding because thatâs where a lot of discoveries that can become beneficial are spawned*. What is interesting and common to a lot of research is that even if the intended goal of a project is not reached, we still learn information that can apply elsewhere. All the failed drug discovery projects Iâve participated in generated a lot of useful information about how cells operate and add evidence to demonstrate or refute hypotheses about the a cellâs or an organismâs biological processes.
What does original of life research potentially give us outside of determining how life may have originated? Advances in chemistry, discovering the parameters necessary for self-replication (systems modelling and engineering), and learning whether similar conditions exist on other planets. Thatâs just off the top of my head.
*Aside: Many cancer treatment projects fail â actually this applies to many medical treatments â because weâre often pushing the discovery work before there is additional âbasic researchâ that could reduce the failure rate. There is always a tension in balancing the urgency of need versus waiting for more discoveries to improve the likelihood of success.
4 Likes
T_aquaticus
(The Friendly Neighborhood Atheist)
99
An example adjacent to my field, basic research into gram positive phage resistance and repetitive DNA doesnât have any obvious benefit like cancer research does. However, that basic research led to the discovery of CRISPR-Cas9 which holds the promise of many, many benefits, some of which are already being realized.
I even remember sitting through talks on interspersed repeats in bacterial genomes some years ago, and I thought it was pretty esoteric and probably wouldnât come to much. Got that one wrong.