Creation: Abiogenesis Part II
You are currently browsing comments. If you would like to return to the full story, you can read the full entry here: “Creation: Abiogenesis Part II”.
9 Comments
Leave a Reply
-
The Boston 3-Day
I will be walking the Boston 3-Day the last weekend in July in honor of Gregg's mom, Ryta Gail, who died from breast cancer when he was a little boy.
Find me on Facebook
Safe Site
We are committed to keeping the content on this site
family friendly and child safe.
-
Gregg & Hallee
Find Me on My Author Blog
* 
I feel deeply embarrassed by this. Please attempt to educate yourself from sources other than Kent Hovind.
Can an Evangelical Christian Accept Evolution?
Also;
http://www.blog.beyondthefirmament.com/video-presentations/science-and-christian-education/
http://www.blog.beyondthefirmament.com/video-presentations/christianity-biology/
I am afraid I don’t believe you.
.
First: If you are a believer, then you already know better than to feel ashamed based on biblical instruction (Mark 8:38; Luke 9:26; Romans 1:16; Romans 10:11; Philippians 1:20; II Timothy 1:8; I Peter 3:16).
.
Second: If you are not a believer, then you have no real basis for feeling any “embarrassment” on my behalf either deep or otherwise, which means your words would be merely an attempt to lay a foundation of a spiritual or intellectual superiority allowing you to look down your nose and tsk tsk me. And since that would be a grossly judgemental act on your part since you do not REALLY know me, and again something a believer would want to avoid, I’m afraid I don’t believe that either.
.
Third: I do not cite Kent Hovind. In this post, I cited Spallanzani, Pasteur, Azimov, Virchow, and many other citations in other posts — none of them Hovind. Googling Kent Hovind’s name nearly caused my computer to melt from the absolutely vitriolic and occasionally pornographic outpouring of hatred Hovind seems to have inspired among Darwinists.
.
As an aside, I actually find the hatred to be a real testimony considering the social dynamics of truth. Maybe I’ll post on that topic on some future Sunday. According to my worldview, Hovind looks like he’s said some things that might have gotten him cruxified a few thousand years ago.
.
But, since I did not cite Hovind in this post — or in any other post — I can safely assume that your equivocation of me to him is no more than a rather ham-handed attempt at character assassination.
.
Thank you for the links to the other sites which are clearly relevant to the discussion. However, my advice would be to get over your deep embarrassment, drop the attempts at insult and belittling, and just speak your mind without the rhetoric and without letting others speak for you. There is risk involved in doing so. It takes courage. Your very own genuine thoughts will be under real scrutiny and they may be subject to debate, possibly even hotly contested. I encourage you to take the risk and speak for yourself from the heart as I, and others, may be interested in what you have to say.
“Abiogenesis…is really just a fairy tale” <– Perhaps you mean "fairy tale" in the sense of "a far-fetched sequence of events" and that the spontaneous formation of life from non-living molecules is, at best, a relatively rare phenomenon in the universe. However, the scientific study of the origin of life is not a fairy tale by any conceivable definition.
Your so called "common sense" examples of abiogenesis in peanut butter and pureed frog are anything but sensible. Anyone with an honest interest in abiogenesis would read some of the scientific literature on the topic and discuss published ideas about the types of environmental conditions that might support abiogenesis. Anyone writing a rather long commentary on the topic should know enough about abiogenesis to be aware that peanut butter and pureed frog are absurd suggestions that do nothing to advance an honest discussion of the topic, yet the commentary on peanut butter and pureed frog was initiated by calling for "common sense". No "common sense" discussion of a scientific field ignores the actual content of that scientific discipline in favor of fanciful and irrelevant distractions.
"The belief in abiogenesis is a religious belief that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with anything scientific or real." <– I think you are trying to discuss the fact that exploration of abiogenesis is a current scientific endeavor. Belief in the possibility of abiogenesis is really the adoption of a working hypothesis. Motivation for study of abiogenesis comes from observation of reality: our planet formed about 4.5 billion years ago from non-living materials and then, later, chemical and fossil evidence for life appears in the geological record. Scientific investigation of abiogenesis is a sensible and natural response to these facts.
"an impossibility" <– You call abiogenesis an "impossibility", but I do not see any real evidence to support this claim. I encourage you to publish your evidence for the impossibility of abiogenesis in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. If your "proof" stands up to peer review, you will surely win a Nobel prize and you will save many scientists from exerting further effort on the study of abiogenesis. Of course, if you actually have no objective evidence to support your claim then I will be tempted to conclude that your belief in the impossibility of abiogenesis is "a religious belief that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with anything scientific".
"In order for life to occur via the Darwinian myth…strings containing extremely specific information" <– Darwin never had any deep thoughts about the chemical origins of life, but neither he nor anyone else has ever made the kinds of claims about abiogenesis that are made in this blog post. If life did originate from random chemical reactions then the first genetic molecules were randomly assembled and not a source of "extremely specific information". Some randomly assembled early polymers might have happened, by chance, to facilitate the production of more polymers with similar structure. That type of chemical evolution is not difficult to imagine and forms the basis for ongoing research into the origins of molecular replication.
"the formation of amino acids, protein, DNA, enzymes, and all the rest needed to form the first living creature, had to occur within an extremely short amount of time. It would all have had to occur within far less than a single generation, possibly less than a few minutes" <– <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world_hypothesis"<One idea that is worth exploring is that the earliest form of life had no amino acids or proteins.
“It would be much more evolutionarily advantageous for all forms of life to reproduce asexually.” <– This is an interesting claim. Again, I encourage you to publish your supporting evidence. If you are correct then you have your second Nobel prize in the bag!
By “fairy tale” I mean fictitious story set in a fantastical world and often involving magical events to drive the plot.
.
Peanut butter and frog goo are examples of extreme hyperbole and anyone without an ax to grind would recognize that without feeling the need to march an army of strawmen into the arena of the debate.
.
You say, “Belief in the possibility of abiogenesis is really the adoption of a working hypothesis. Motivation for study of abiogenesis comes from observation of reality: our planet formed about 4.5 billion years ago from non-living materials and then, later, chemical and fossil evidence for life appears in the geological record. Scientific investigation of abiogenesis is a sensible and natural response to these facts.”
.
Respectfully, these aren’t facts. They are beliefs. There is strong evidence that the earth is much younger than 4.5 billion ears old. The so called “geologic column” does not actually exist anywhere on earth — except in text books and the imagination of ardent Darwinists. Were you to say something like, “Scientific investigation of abiogenesis is a natural response to these Darwinist beliefs” I would have no room to argue.
.
You say you do not see any real evidence to support my claim that abiogenesis is an impossibility and ask me to offer “proof” that it is impossible. This is a perfect example of an argument from ignorance in both form and function.
.
If you were to state that, say, men could once upon a time in a fantastical world long ago jump 1,000 feet into the air and land miles away without harm even though there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that this can take place except that, you know, men can still jump a few feet in the air today. Then I declared that such a claim is, in a word, impossible — it would not be up to me to publish peer-reviewed texts to support the impossibility. The burden of proof is firmly on you to provide actual evidence that supports your silly idea.
.
May I gently suggest that it is up to Darwinists to prove the impossible? It is not up to me, or any other skeptic, to disprove the impossible. Such a position defies simple logic.
.
You say “Darwin never … made the kinds of claims about abiogenesis that are made in this blog post.” And you are mistaken.
.
While it IS true that Charles Darwin never wrote a single word about origins in his racist diatribe partially entitled “on origins,” he did hint and muse in a letter that was later edited and placed in print by his son, Francis Darwin: The life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887 ed.), Francis Darwin, p. 202.
.
.
And this is essentially the foundation of all such Darwinist religious beliefs in abiogenesis, that life can magically spontaneously generate from non-living things via purely “natural” and random, undirected processes.
.
You dispute that extremely specific information would have to be present for life to exist but this point is really beyond argument. Randomly assembled polymers or crystals or bubbles contain repetative and patterned data, but they do not — and never can and never do — contain specific non-repeating information that exists and is quite necessary in all living things.
.
You say that the hypothesis that the earliest form of life had no amino acids or proteins is worth exploring. I say it is yet another Darwinian pipe dream, posited and put forth mainly because the evidence against abiogenesis — and the contradicting evidence that refutes it — consistent with it involving protiens and amino acids has reached critical mass with even early proponents abandoning the idea entirely. Miller?
.
You say, “It would be much more evolutionarily advantageous for all forms of life to reproduce asexually.” <– This is an interesting claim. Again, I encourage you to publish your supporting evidence.
.
I don't need to. I have reliable witnesses. Half the human race, in fact. Ask any woman who has ever carried a child what possible evolutionary advantage she is granted by bouts of morning sickness, backpain, sleeplessness, weakness, fatigue, and risk to her very own life during delivery — followed by months or years of dependancy by her child. Much more evolutionarily advantageous to spawn atop a few eggs and let survival of the fittest sort it out later, or to split into an exact copy of oneself. Simple logic.
.
You say, "If you are correct then you have your second Nobel prize in the bag!"
.
I appreciate the nominations and, yes, I'm sure I would. But the Nobel isn’t really the dynamite prize it once was.
It seems sensible to me, and not at all a pipe dream, to look for a way for abiogenesis to have occurred, and to investigate RNA when it seems that the combo of DNA and protein as a starting point was not working. That is the way science works.
.
In the 1800s scientists had the idea that organic molecules could only be made by living organisms, that it was impossible for chemists to make them. Should the chemists have given up trying on the basis that it was thought to be impossible? Should chemistry and biology have come to a grinidng halt in the early 1800s? What actually happened was that a scientist did figure how how to maunfacture urea, an organic molecule, which made it clear that organic molecules did not require living organisms for their synthesis.
.
If scientists start out with an idea and it turns out not to be correct, are they supposed to give up and say it’s impossible? Maybe the question has to wait until there is new technology. The door doesn’t have to be closed.
The investigation into RNA for abiogenesisis not an irrational leap from the previous investigations with protein and DNA. RNA is very involved with both DNA and protein, and RNA has the ability to act both as an information carrier and catalyst.
Read the article. The premise now is that neither RNA nor DNA were involved. In other words, no information created highly specific and ordered information without anything to record it upon.
.
Pipe dream.
(When I read your response I didn’t know what article you meant, or if you meant this essay, which particular section or sentence you meant. And I didn’t know which premise, or whose premise you meant. I thought you might be referring to the idea that instead of RNA the original nucleotide might have been one with a different type of molecule for a backbone, maybe a different sugar. But I didn’t see anything about that in your post.)
Gregg,
I haven’t read the whole thing, but good for you for standing up for REAL science. And it makes me laugh a little because my husband has done the exact same thing. :)
Simply brilliant !! Evolution is a complete waste of public money and is not scientific at all. Abiogenesis is a myth. Why are there attempts being made to block “Intelligent Design”; the only alternative to any kind of hypothetical evolution scenario, cosmic or biological ? It is another attempt by some, in the scientific community to stifle Intelligent Design — and refute the existence of a Creator.