Texas Songwriter: "Your statement seems to be a series of faith statements."
What are you talking about?
Did you never go to school?
Did they never show you a dictionary?
Which dictionary in the whole wide wonderful world told you that my word "guess" means "faith"?? "Guess" means guess -- go ahead, look it up!
Texas Songwriter: "How does a chemical, or multiple organic chemicals organize into a cell.
I mentioned before that about a dozen different hypotheses have been proposed (including panspermia) for how that might have first happened.
None are confirmed, so nobody knows for sure.
However, a lot of work has been done, and I've read where scientists are today far beyond the old 1952 Miller-Urey experiment:
Texas Songwriter: "Your reference to extraterrestrial life infers ID, but seems to leave that notion hanging out there like a matzo ball."
Pal, I merely reported the fact that various ideas on panspermia are among the hypotheses proposed for origin of life on earth.
So far, the only actual evidence of it is some more complex organic molecules found on comets.
That would suggest that nearly all the real creative work was done here on earth...
Texas Songwriter: "The complexity of the simplest cell is so complex that man has never yet been able to develop such a primordial cell.....and that is with intelligence applied, yet you seem to want to rely on blind luck, happenstance, and hope."
We can be certain that the full complexity of today's simplest cells did not evolve overnight, or on a time-scale equivalent to the lifetimes of today's scientists!
Rather, it must have happened in many, many small steps over not just millions but billions of years.
Doubtless, we would not even consider the first "cells" to be fully alive, since they wouldn't have reproduced using DNA or even RNA.
quoting BJK: "...those first 'cells' were in a reduced atmosphere so that there was no oxygen available to drive those enzyme systems..."
Doubtless those first cells were anaerobic, of which there are still many descendants surviving today.
They prove that life can survive on just about any energy source available.
As for complex enzyme systems -- you can be certain they were not there in the beginning, but must have evolved slowly, slowly over millions & billions of years.
Remember, when the "Cambrian Explosion" started, the earth was already nearly four billion years old.
Texas Songwriter: "Your schematic of the invagination of a select portion of ectoderm which invaginated, becomes sequesters and then takes on a completely different functional form ( light sensitivity, sight) with just the good luck to develop a lens."
"Good luck" or God's good planning, the process is still the same -- descent with modifications and natural selection result in increasing complexity and sometimes diversity.
The point of the schematic is to show that our sophisticated eyeballs were preceded by many others less highly engineered.
Texas Songwriter: "Ontology recapitulates phylogeny".....the old lie of Ernst Haeckel and fraudulent drawings of embryos."
In fact, there's more truth in it than you care to admit.
Haeckel's drawings were wrong, but the basic idea, not so far off -- many creatures have similar early stages of fetus development.
Texas Songwriter: "We know these are fraudulent, yet public school books still lie to young students to inculcate this nonsense."
Here is our current understanding:
- "The Haeckelian form of recapitulation theory is considered defunct.[23]
However, embryos do undergo a period where their morphology is strongly shaped by their phylogenetic position, rather than selective pressures"