Replies

there appears to have been a wide array of molecules of many sorts available in the early soup from which life arose.

sigh....and what (or who) made the soup? Again, my point is...make a manmade molecule or a computer progam that shows how to make a molecule. From....? Perhaps this is why cosmology has struggled sooner and is struggling harder than biology, against an inference of design. Evolutionary biologists are mixing and stirring the primordial soup and hoping to say "A-ha!"...while many cosmologists seem uncomfortable in discussing, scientifically, where the soup came from and why the ingredients have (by chance) proven to have been able to produce such stunning recipes (dna codes).

So just belittle the request for science to build a molecule as being "unnecessary" to prove the point that the simplest building blocks of life as we observe it...are beyond the "design" (that word again) of any known science. Or are molecules ...... too irreducibly complex to create, especially from scientific facts about conditions that pre-date the "soup"?

Oh, and returning to the infinitely large empty playroom we will allow our hypothetical super-intelligent children to exist in while they figure out how to create themselves some building blocks (matter) so they can prove it didn't take an Architect to build the Golden Gate Bridge (or a Chef to make soup)...... that playroom should be without light or the dimension of time. The kids will also have to figure out whether they need light or time and how to create them and in what sequence, along with matter.

sigh....and what (or who) made the soup?

That's not a question for an evolutionary biologist, is it? We're discussing (among other things) whether molecules which were undeniably present in large numbers on the early Earth are capable of having ultimately combined on their own in a way that led to self-replicative structures that over billions of years developed into the vast variety of organisms that we currently observe. Evolutionists maintain that that's what happened, and they're engaged in the huge task of trying to understand as completely as possible how that happened. Intelligent Design proponents maintain (as far as I can tell) that a deity somehow whipped up all of the vast variety of life in a jiffy and made it seem as if it really took billions of years. Mostly, they spend their time trying to think up ways to discredit the work of evolutionary biologists and at the same time avoid tricky questions about the 'young Earth' and stuff like that.

And as for this:

Or are molecules ...... too irreducibly complex to create, especially from scientific facts about conditions that pre-date the "soup"?

Organic chemists regularly construct complex molecules by a variety of processes, for example, polymerization. And in a few years, our nanotechnologists are going to be much better at putting together all sorts of materials, one atom at a time. And, lest you try to push the question back further, transmutation of one atom into another is rather straightforward to accomplish in particle accelerators and the like. And, yes, particles can be produced out of pure energy. But do we produce the energy itself, you ask? That's not the question we're discussing, I say! (smile)