Creation: Question Evolution Campaign — 1 of 15

I’m having trouble writing out a response to this. Maybe it’s because it’s been discussed here before.
Okay, I am just thinking out loud here; it may not be very organized.
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I agree with the people who said we don’t know how it happened. Not only is it not known, there is not even a good guess at this point. There are possibilities being investigated, but each of those if they worked out would still be only parts of the puzzle. And even if a whole solid chain of events were ever worked out, I doubt that it could ever be shown that that was how it actually happened. It seems very unlikely that evidence could exist of such small molecular events after all this time.
But I don’t agree that we know it is impossible.
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The comment about the number of proteins that must be present is not an argument that proves it was impossible. A minimal cell now needs a certain array of proteins. No one assumes that the cell spontaneously assembled in one moment of time with all the functions it has now. In order for reproducing ‘living’ cells to have developed from “dirt and rocks” (dissolved minerals, gases, inorganic molecules, plus whatever organic molecules were formed under the conditions of that time, or were carried in on meteorites) there would have had to have been simpler molecular stages. Was this possible under those conditions? I would have to say that we don’t know whether it was possible. But also we don’t know that it was impossible.
In your post you included this phrase “…or a theoretical creature of such incredible simplicity is hypothesized…”. I didn’t follow the rest of the sentence, but I think you were saying that it would be impossible for there to be a creature (or cell or proto-cell) of such simplicity. But I think you don’t know that.
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Bacterial cells are able to make the organic molecules that are used as their building blocks. At one time it seemed impossible that cells could have developed naturally from chemicals because the process which made the organic building blocks required those same building blocks to produce them. This is why the Miller and Urey experiment was important. It’s not that it ‘proved’ that living cells had come from inorganic matter. It didn’t show that all the building blocks needed for cells now were produced. It did not show by itself that abiogenesis was possible – what it did was break that particular barrier that seemed to say it was impossible. If those organic molecules could be produced under the tested conditions, even if those weren’t exactly the right molecules or the right conditions it still said that organic building blocks could be produced without previously existing cells.
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There was also another apparent barrier that seemed to make abiogenesis impossible: the fact that proteins are used to assemble DNA but DNA is required to make proteins. This barrier was broken by the realization that RNA could act as enzymes and as code carriers both. Some sequences of RNA can catalyze RNA copying. Does this ‘prove’ that RNA was the original source of the genetic code? No, there are still gaps. But it counters the argument that abiogenesis was impossible because of the DNA versus protein issue.
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These are two examples of cases where people said abiogenesis was impossible and then some new information came along which took away that supposed impossibility. They were not enough to prove that it happened or show how it happened, but IMO they showed that you are on shaky ground to claim that it is impossible. Really you don’t have enough information to know.
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As you have pointed out, cells are very complicated, but all the details work by chemistry and they work using chemicals that exist on this earth. We may not know all the details of how things cells work at this point, but we know a huge amount. And all the reactions work by chemical and physical properties. The mysteries of the past (going back to the 1800s when the vitalists thought that living cells required a life force to function) have been explained by biochemistry. To me it seems reasonable to keep looking to chemical interactions to understand where the chemical reactions in current living cells came from. That’s really the only place we can look. (BTW Davies, who is quoted in your post thought it might be worth looking on Mars because he thought conditions might be more promising there fro abiogenesis.)
Could a hypothetical all-powerful supernatural force have created cells from nothing? Well, by definition, yes. But also by definition, how can we possibly investigate that? It’s not possible. We have no evidence of any supernatural forces. But we can investigate the properties of RNA and related nucleotides to see what they CAN do, and the properties of lipid membranes to see what they can do, and other possible biochemical links in the chain.
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And meanwhile, for biological evolution of the different species from bacterial cells, from simple eukaryotic cells, from other species, we cAN look at those, and it doesn’t matter for figuring those out whether the original bacteria; cells came from abiogenesis or were supernaturally created. But I think you prefer focusing on the very difficult and inaccessible question of the origin of life because you want to divert attention away from the much more accessible question of biological evolution. Biological evolution argues against Genesis kinds even if the original cells were created.

Words can have a variety of different meanings and shades of meaning. “Mythical” can carry the meaning of something that is untrue in our usual physical world because it relies on supernatural events. So mythical can be used to accuse an idea of being untrue, and this, I think, is the way you have used it in your comment.
But ‘myth’ also has the meaning of a sacred story, a story of how things in the world came to be by the actions of supernatural individuals and forces such as gods. (We talk about Greek myths for example, and we consider them as untrue in our time and culture even though they were believed in their own time.) In this meaning, the word ‘myth’, as I understand it, does not necessarily mean that the myth is true or untrue, but just that it is a certain kind of story. To my understanding, much of Genesis, for example the story of Noah, can be characterized as a myth by its nature as a sacred story. It involves a Deity and supernatural events.The fact that you think it is literally true does not, again to my understanding, affect its characterization as a myth using that definition, even though you would disagree with the use of the other definition – something that is untrue .
Similarly, ‘magical’ can have different meanings. One meaning, to me anyway, is something that occurs by supernatural causes. Because supernatural causes have not been observed to act in our physical world, when you use the word magical you are using it above in the sense of impossible. But again there are events in the Bible which I think can be fairly described as magical, and that’s okay because in the Bible they occur by supernatural means. So I think you could legitimately consider the changing of Moses’ staff into a snake as an example of a magical occurrence.
So when you accuse the ideas of the origin of life of being mythical/magical you are saying that they are not possible by normal physical chemical means and you are saying that they are unbelievable for that reason.
I want to point out that there is a legitimate way in which stories from the Bible can be called mythical and magical (as opposed to the pejorative meanings). But science can never be accurately described as a literal myth or a literal magic using the those meanings (again, as opposed to the pejorative meanings of being unbelievable or untrue).
I understand that you are using the words to mean impossible, unbelievable and untrue, and that you do think that, so it is not incorrect for you to use those words for your own opinion. But when you (or others) use these words against science, it reminds me of the kid phrase, “I know you are, but what am I?” Whether the observations of science or the conclusions drawn correct or not in any particular case, the aims of scientific research are the opposite of myths and magic, and the opposite of supernatural stories.
I’m not sure if this makes an actual point; it doesn’t really make any kind of argument. It is my reaction to your use of those words.

“….The only way it isn’t impossible is if I allow myself to assume that BILLIONS of years ago there was a magical/mythical environment …”
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But IMO it is not a “Magical/mythical” environment. Ideas of what the earth would have been like a billion years ago are not based on imagination and story-telling. They are based on evidence we have today about chemistry and physics, about rocks and their behavior, about radioactive decay.
Do we know with 100% accuracy, do we have “proof”? No, because we can’t travel back in time. Can we rule out supernatural inputs from undetected, undetectable hypothetical forces (whose only sources are through stories told by humans)? Again, by definition, no. Science can only move forward by investigating the physical world that is available to us, but scientists can make logical assumptions about what might have happened in the past and then check them further against additional information. This is not mythical story telling.

(I see that I already said this in my first comment.)

…”I don’t think so because in each case they have their own set of problems. Urey-Miller produced toxins and poisons in an environment that was nothing at all like what is thought to have ever been the environment of the planet, for instance. How is that disproving anything at all? If anything, it supports the assertion that it IS impossible.”
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I think I should not have used the Urey example because I don’t know enough about that field.
I think you’re correct that at this time the consensus is that conditions on earth would have been different from the main Urey-Miller experiment. They did do another experiment that was supposed to relate to volcanic activity; that experiment used CO2 gas (which the original one didn’t) and hydrogen sulfide, something like that, for a volcanic gas. That experiment gave them an even better yield than the original one. I think this experiment used conditions that are closer to the current consensus about early earth conditions, but I don’t understand enough to make an argument.
About your comment about the toxins: I think when you have a simple model like their apparatus it naturally does not reproduce all the variables in the actual earth. So things like the accumulation of toxic compounds in one place in the model apparatus to me does not necessarily represent how those compounds would be associated on the actual earth. But to be honest that is a completely uninformed guess.
(If the conditions of Miller and Urey did not correctly represent the conditions of early earth then their results could not show that the origin of life was impossible under some different set of conditions.)