Obviously I do not regard God "zapping" anything physical (matter, energy or geometry, information) - to give rise to life from non-life - a case of abiogenesis, i.e. life from non-life. God is alive by any rational definition of life.
We also have an utter failure to communicate on cause. cornelis is doing a great job of explicating the point with the distinction between heterogeneity and homogeneity.
All I would add is the Aristotlean concept of cause:
2. Material cause is the stuff from which it comes to be and persists - such as the lumber and nails for a home.
3. Essential cause is the source of the thing - such as the carpenters building the home.
4. Final cause is that for the sake of which it is - such as to shelter a family.
Heterogeneity considers both the material and essential cause.
Finally, concerning Yockey - in his own words as posted in the Chowder Society:
"Your book gets discussed here every now and then. I am hoping that people will take this opportunity to pose their questions to the author himself, rather than get second-hand interpretations. I will list below what I feel are some of your more controversial views that should be of interest to this group. Please feel free to modify these if I mis-represent your views in any way ;-)"
You asked three questions:
a) the primeval soup probably never existed
b) even if it did, the various self-organizational schemes proposed to "explain" the origin of life still don't
work c) life must be accepted as an axiom
You get an A!
Response to a) The correct way to pose that statement is: There is no evidence that a primeval soup ever existed. If one looks for geological evidence that a primeval soup existed one comes up empty. See discussion in Information in Bits and Bytes in BioEssays v17 85-88 1995.
There is a more thorough discussion in Information Theory and Molecular Biology. Dialectical materialists are atheists. Their belief in a primeval soup without evidence puts them in bed with theologians. In science the "Absence of evidence IS evidence of absence." One does not believe unless and until one has overwhelming evidence. You will note of course that this is a twist from the usual declaration of faith by SETI disciples. Forgive me if I think this incongruous situation is very funny.
Response to b) All dialectical materialist origin of life scenarios require in extremis a primeval soup. There is no path from this mythical soup to the generation of a genome and a genetic code. John von Neumann showed that fact in his Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata U of Ill. Press 1966. One must begin with a genetic message of a rather large information content. Manfred Eigen and his disciples argue that all it takes is one self-catalytic molecule to generate a genome. This self-catalytic molecule must have a very small information content. By that token, there must be very few of them [Section 2.4.1] As they self-reproduce and evolve the descendants get lost in the enormous number of possible sequences in which the specific messages of biological are buried. From the Shannon-McMillan theorem I have shown that a small protein, cytochrome c is only 2 x 10^-44 of the possible sequences. It takes religious faith to believe that would happen. Of course the minimum information content of the simplest organism is much larger than the information content of cytochrome c.
c) Niels Bohr in his Light and Life [Nature 1933 v131 p421-423; 457-459] lecture is the author of the suggestion that life must be taken as an axiom inasmuch as we take the quantum of action in quantum theory as an axiom. There are many other examples in relativity and quantum mechanics. Prominent among these is the wave-particle dualism. How can an electron, clearly a matter particle, be at once a wave and a particle?
Pose this proposition to your enemies (not your friends): Given any two theories, an experiment will decide between them and prove one true and one false. This is the philosophy of Sir Karl Popper. When a physicist does an experiment to prove that an electron is a particle, it behaves as a particle. When another physicist does an experiment to show an electron is a wave, it behaves as a wave. In some diffraction experiments ray tracing shows the electron or neutron was in two places at once. Thus these experiments prove the wave-particle dualism. Einstein was extremely annoyed by this and suggested experiments to explain what he regarded as a dilemma. He exclaimed: Der lieber Gott wuerfelt nicht mit der Welt! Bohr's reply was: "Einstein, stop telling God what to do!"
Faced with what physicstis and chemists have had to accept from relativity and quantum mechanics, taking the origin of life as an axiom seems rather tame.
In the book I discussed other mathematically deeper questions, for example undecidability. Until the work of Goedel and Turing it was assummed that a mathematical proposition was either true of false. They proved that some questions are undecidable. For example, given any computer program it is undecidable whether it will ever stop. One can check it empirically. But suppose it doesn't stop in one year, no one can be sure it wouldn't stop in another five minutes. So it is with the origin of life.
The dialectical materialist lumpen-intelligentsia are extremely annoyed that God didn't take their advice when He made the universe.
Incidentially my suggestion that biologists follow particle physicsts in doing enormously expensive experiments was intended as a joke.
This is enough for now. Refer to what I have posted on other newsgroups. Best regards , Hubert
Yockey really does have a razor-like sense of humor. :^)
Thank you so much Alamo-Girl for posting Yockey's remarks to the Chowder Society, and for the great link!
And thank you for a wonderful essay/post!
Yockey must have had an epiphany between 1996 and 2000, because he has clearly come down on the side of life's origin being natural.
I find that most people who doubt evolution and naturalism do not understand feedback. they cannot understand a system that is controlled by consequences rather than by antecedents.
While participating in a conservative forum I see various manifestations of this. Many people do not understand capitalism and the marketplace. They do not understand that the flow of goods and services, and even the invention and production of new products is managed by the invisible hand of results. If it were otherwise -- if correct market behavior could be anticipated by logical analysis -- then we should all be socialists, and we should all bow to five year plans.
Science is also a marketplace. The progress and management of science is controlled by results, not by the steady application of rational propositions.
And life is also a marketplace. This is the one truly great insight of Darwin's. And he borrowed it from Adam Smith. The reason you can't figure out the source of life's information is that the coding is done by the marketplace, the result of countless feints and maneuvers, and their consequences.
Your statement that God is alive by any rational definition of life leads to an interesting problem, since you also appear to believe that life only comes from life. Clearly not all life comes from life. The obvious solution to this conundrum -- God is outside time and without a beginning -- is just a loophole manufactured to escape from logic. It is no more compelling than the assumption that physical existence is outside of time, or that God and physical reality are coextensive.