StJacques said in 253:
"The real argument for a transcendent reality interacting with nature is in the creation of the universe."
That was in response to BB's statement in 252:
"The consistent failure of science to demonstrate abiogenesis – the theory that holds that inorganic matter can “boot-strap itself” into living matter – suggests the possibility that Plato was right about the need of a transcendent input for the creation of life."
I think StJacques has the better point. That is, he is taking the mystery (or in his phrase: the "argument for a transcendent reality") back to the ultimate origin, where the philosopher's Prime Mover has always lurked. Any subsequent "mystery" is subordinate to it, and thus far less significant, and constitutes a question that science may one day resolve. Scientifically explained phenomena are destined to take their places in the Retirement Home for Obsolete Miracles, that dismal residence where such fading idols as disease, lightning, the day-night cycle, and other natural aspects of the world now reside in their dotage, reminiscing about the glory days when they were regarded as evidence of gods.
You may take that last as a frivolous, or even irreligious remark, but that's not my intent. I've often pointed out that I think it's a terrible error to pin one's religious convictions on any one scientific issue, because when the issue is resolved, the results are psychologically catastrophic. Unnecessarily so. Want to see this unfolding in the real world? Visit one of the evolution threads and dispassionately observe the conduct of those whose erroneous worldview is needlessly collapsing around them. It's not a pretty sight.
It's unseemly for transcendence to operate like a poorly-led, untrained militia. "We'll fight it out here, but if it doesn't go right then we'll drop back a bit, and if necessary we'll retreat again to that line of trees over there, but if they get that far then we'll gather what we can salvage and redeploy over yonder ..." That's no way to run things. Take the highest ground there is and you're in the best possible position.
I am very happy to hear it, StJacques – especially about the innovation in capitalization! As already indicated, I await developments on this front with great interest. But I have to tell you: I’m not holding my breath until such time as the expected confirming “breakthrough” occurs.
Frankly, I strongly suspect that the so-called theory (or is it hypothesis?) of abiogenesis is a myth (and you can’t “prove” a myth). The myth relies on statements like this:
“The very fact that life sprang up on earth constitutes conclusive proof of a primary reducing environment since the latter is a necessary prerequisite for chemical evolution and spontaneous origin of life.” [Manfred Schidlowsky, quoted in Robert Shapiro, Origins: A Skeptic’s Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth, 1986]
This is a great example of circular reasoning: It turns out its conclusion is already actually implicit in its premise.
But for the sake of argument, let’s assume I’m wrong about this, and abiogenesis – the spontaneous emergence of life from inorganic matter by sheer random processes – is a viable theory. Still, it would have a very steep hill to climb, and would have to overcome or explain away the following objections (a partial list):
(1) Both the above quote and your own remarks point to a main difficulty. You wrote, “[Science] will have to get a much better handle on discerning what the constraints of the atmosphere of the early earth were before they are able to move to the next step.”
As Dean Overman points out [in The Case Against Accident and Self-Organization 1997), “A methane rich reducing atmosphere [i.e., an atmosphere that has no oxygen] is essential to the Oparin-Haldane hypothesis and the Miller and Uray experiment. Miller based his experiment on the cosmic abundance of hydrogen and the ingredients in the solar nebulae which he believed produced the earth’s early atmosphere. The current geological consensus, however, maintains the view that the interior earth, rather than the solar nebulae, produced the primitive atmosphere and that methane and ammonia were not present. Today geologists understand that chemical reactions from sunlight would have destroyed methane and ammonia within a few thousand years. The sun’s ultraviolet radiation would have converted the methane to hydrocarbons with higher molecular weight and formed an oil slick up to a depth of ten meters. Ammonia is destroyed by ultraviolet radiation, dissociating into nitrogen gas and hydrogen. This presents a stumbling block for anyone building his or her theory of the origin of life on the Oparin-Haldane foundation. As Miller himself admitted, ‘If it is assumed that amino acids more complex than glycine were required for the origin of life, then these results indicate a need for CH4 (methane) in the atmosphere.’”
Yet many scientists today are of the opinion that the earth’s primitive atmosphere was not so strongly reducing and probably contained significant amounts of oxygen. Overman notes, “The presence of even a small amount of oxygen, assiduously avoided in the laboratories of the [Miller-Urey] experiments, would prevent the formation of amino acids and nucleotides, because atoms and molecules would bond with the oxygen atoms rather than hydrogen atoms. Even if amino acids could be formed, oxygen would cause them to decompose quickly and terminate any further random processes which could eventually produce life. If the early earth’s atmosphere had oxidizing conditions, abiogenesis would have been impossible.”
Later he adds another important consideration, “Even if oxygen was not present in the early earth’s atmosphere, the absence of oxygen would present obstacles to the formation of life. Oxygen is required for the ozone layer which protects the surface of the earth from deadly ultraviolet radiation. Without oxygen this radiation would break down organic compounds as soon as they formed.” This is Michael Denton’s “Catch 22” of abiogenesis: “If we have oxygen we have no organic compounds, but if we don’t we have none either.”
Still, let’s try to answer the question whether the early-earth atmosphere was strongly reducing (methane-rich, no oxygen), or one in which oxygen was present. I guess all we’ve basically got to go on is the geological record. But this would seem to lend little support to the doctrine of abiogenesis. Here’s the problem:
“If there ever was a primitive soup, then we would expect to find at least somewhere on this planet either massive sediments containing enormous amounts of the various nitrogenous organic compounds, amino acids, purines, pyrimidines, and the like, or alternatively in much-metamorphosed sediments we should find vast amounts of nitrogenous cokes (graphite-like nitrogen-containing minerals). In fact, no such materials have been found anywhere on earth.” [J. Brooks and G. Shaw, Origin and Development of Living Systems, 1973]
Michael Denton gets the next-to-the-last word on “objection (1)” as follows, and then we must move on:
“The existence of a prebiotic soup is crucial to the whole scheme [of abiogenesis]. Without an abiotic accumulation of the building blocks of the cell no life could ever evolve. If the traditional story [i.e., myth] is true, therefore, there must have existed for many millions of years a rich mixture of organic compounds in the ancient oceans and some of this material would very likely have been trapped in the sedimentary rocks lain down in the seas of those remote times. Yet rocks of great antiquity have been examined over the past two decades and in none of them has any trace of abiotically produced organic compounds been found. Most notable of these rocks are the ‘dawn rocks’ of Western Greenland, the earliest dated rocks on Earth, considered to be approaching 3,900 million years old. So ancient are these rocks that they must have been lain down not long after the formation of the oceans themselves…. Sediments from many other parts of the world dated variously between 3,900 million years old and 3,500 million years old also show no sign of any abiotically formed organic compounds…. Considering the way the prebiotic soup is referred to in so many discussions of the origins of life as an already established reality, it comes as something of a shock to realize that there is absolutely no positive evidence for its existence.” [Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, 1985]
And Hubert Yockey gets the last word:
“Although the Oparin-Haldane paradigm is now just a relic of the cosmology of the time when it was invented, it certainly deserved extensive research and much has been learned in investigating it. The same can be said for many other failed paradigms. Nevertheless, like the luminiferous ether, one has to conclude that there is no evidence that a ‘hot dilute soup’ ever existed. In spite of this fact adherents of this paradigm think it ought to have existed for philosophical or ideological reasons…. I have emphasized that in science one must follow the results of experiments and mathematics and not one’s faith, religion, philosophy, or ideology. The primeval soup is unobservable because, by the paradigm, it was destroyed by the organisms from which it presumably emerged. It is most unsatisfactory in science to explain what is observable by what cannot be observed. Since creative skepticism and not faith is the cardinal virtue in science one would expect that proponents of the primeval soup paradigm would be actively searching for direct geological evidence of such a condition of the early ocean. The power of ideology to interpose a fact-proof screen is so great that this has not been done (perhaps for fear that its failure might be exposed).” [Information Theory and Molecular Biology]
(2) Abiogenesis must explain how inorganic matter, by purely random or accidental processes, can give rise to a fully living system, which George Gaylord Simpson, distinguished professor of paleontology at Harvard, defines as follows:
“A fully living system must be capable of energy conversion in such a way as to accumulate negentropy, that is, it must produce a less probable, less random organization of matter and must cause the increase of available energy in the local system rather than the decrease demanded in closed systems by the second law of thermodynamics. It must also be capable of storing and replicating information, and the replicated information must eventually enter into the development of a new individual system like that from which it came. The living system must further be enclosed in such a way as to prevent dispersal of the interacting molecular structures and to permit negentropy accumulation. At the same time selective transfer of materials and energy in both directions between organism and environment must be possible. Systems evolving toward life must become cellular individuals bounded by membranes.” [“The Nonprevalence of Humanoids,” Science 143, 1964]
Some issues arise here: (a) How does matter, which is wholly subject to the second law, get the idea to “go against the law?” That is, how can stuff wholly subject to entropy generate other stuff that is able to counter that law, which that other stuff must do in order to be alive [e.g., as seen in Simpson’s requirement of negentropy production and accumulation]? (b) What is the impulse directing random matter to give rise to something that must be much less random than it is in order to be alive? In other words, by what principle does randomness – accident -- produce less-randomness? It seems an accident of an accident is still an accident, ad infinitum. (c) The information contained in the genetic code is not material. All forms of information are not made of matter. How did matter create this “non-matter” so essential to the life, self-maintenance, and reproductive capabilities of even the simplest organism? Consider these lines from Michael Denton:
“Molecular biology has shown that even the simplest of all living systems on earth today, bacterial cells, are exceedingly complex objects. Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10^-12 gms, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world…. The recently revealed world of molecular machinery, of coding systems, of informational molecules, of catalytic devices and feedback control, is in its design and complexity quite unique to living systems and without parallel in the non-living world.” [Ibid.]
How does “dumb matter” – ubiquitous and uniform – accidentally give rise to even such a comparatively “simple” life form as a bacterium, a creature able to transact the most sophisticated information processing upon which not only its life, but also the global governance of its extraordinarily complex system, its sensitive responsiveness, its mobility, its ability to “communicate” with its constituent subsystems and to its external environment, etc., depends? Matter itself does NONE of these things as far as we know. So, how does its “progeny” acquire these skills?
Other questions present themselves; but these three very basic ones will suffice for now. I’m interested in how you propose to answer them.
(3) You refer to James Ferris’ experiment involving the catalyzation of RNA aqueous solutions in mineral clays, seeming to regard it as a harbinger of the next great breakthrough that will validate abiogenesis. But I have a question: Since RNA in natural systems is a sort of “slave” to DNA; and since it is a human experimenter who has, in effect, taken on DNA’s role with respect to an “artificially derived” RNA under laboratory or controlled conditions; and since the entire enterprise may spring from a (perhaps) faulty initial premise (see above) – in what way can we expect this to reliably tell us anything about what’s actually going on in (untampered with) natural systems? Especially when we still have so much to learn about DNA itself – which does not even enter the purview of this experiment?
* * * * *
Must close, have run on too long. But I must add just one more thing, unrelated to the above discussion. And that is the idea that people (I gather you’re suggesting I’m one of them) come to science to validate their faith in God. From my perspective, nothing could be further from the truth; on the contrary, the truth of the matter goes the other way around. My faith in God is not in the least dependent on scientific discoveries. I believed in God long before I “believed” in science; you might say I came to science because I believe in God. I study it because I realize that the “book of nature,” of the living universe, is also a “book” sacred to God; and that being so, that I might profitably study it and find in it the glory of the Lord, as I do in the pages of the Holy Scriptures. So far, this has proven to have been a well-rewarded endeavor – and if I might add, a spiritually rewarding one especially.
Oh, one last thing that might be useful to you, StJacques, PH, and many of my other friends out there in FreeperLand: It might be profitable if you could begin to draw distinctions between such words as: religion, theology, Spirit, metaphysics, transcendence, while seeing that they all point in a direction needful for man individually, and for the human race. I think some of you guys just toss them all into a single category, the category of irrelevancy. You just flush them all away, it seems to me, without understanding what it means to do that. But FWIW, your own essential humanity goes down the dumper with them, if you do that. JMHO. But then again, nobody listens to an ersatz-Cassandra….
Thanks so much for writing, StJacques, PatrickHenry, All – this has been a marvelous discussion so far. I look forward to your replies, as ever.