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To: donh
"How is this not experiments that can fail? They sporadically do fail, so that would be a pretty hard argument to make."

Of course. Experiments must have the potential for failure to be falsifiable.

My point is that the general conclusion that my test would merely support life originating by natural processes is too limiting. It supports a specific natural process (and does not necessarily imply that this natural process could not be duplicated by other forms of intelligence), namely that life originated by intelligent assembly. By attempting to find a way the same processes involved could occur without intelligent control, serve to falsify my assertion (that is, if an instance is found).
3,366 posted on 02/13/2006 11:16:41 AM PST by unlearner (You will never come to know that which you do not know until you first know that you do not know it.)
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To: unlearner
My point is that the general conclusion that my test would merely support life originating by natural processes is too limiting.

That wasn't my claim--my claim was that there's no better reason to think your test's failure would say anything more about the need for external intervention, than it would about the need for more time than any laboratory can allot.

It supports a specific natural process (and does not necessarily imply that this natural process could not be duplicated by other forms of intelligence), namely that life originated by intelligent assembly.

There is nothing remotely specific about this claim because you refuse to specify in fine detail what you mean by "life". And, as I just now told you, the failure to produce life in the lab, if it to address intelligent assembly, must in some way weight against all natural reasons why the test might fail, and that is way too tall an order. Your test's failure does not mean whatever you want it to mean, just because you say so over and over...and over.

By attempting to find a way the same processes involved could occur without intelligent control, serve to falsify my assertion (that is, if an instance is found).

Bleep...see above. A test's failure doesn't imply whatever you want it to imply, any more than it implies anything else, just because you can filibuster longer than anyone else. The imaginary failure of this imaginary experiment with unspecified imaginary constraints might also falsify the theory that life isn't real at all--it's just the imaginings of rocks. It might falsify the theory that life is a trick played on the universe by Mr. Mxlpxl, Superman's nemesis from the 9th dimension.

The contention that life takes too long to happen, for it to happen in a lab, is, of course, the most natural and obvious, and least hair-brained, of the many contentions that might be falsified by your test--and has the advantage that there is some actual, and rather unsurprising evidence in favor of it, when stated as a positive scientific thesis.

3,372 posted on 02/14/2006 2:03:36 PM PST by donh
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