Re: Is a fact something that has been proven?


Steven J. wrote:
ave1 wrote:
Steven J. wrote:

-- [snip]

There are certainly equations there. They cannot demonstrate that
amino acids can't get together to form complex proteins since, as the
article goes on to note, pretty obviously proteins are formed.

. . . well, via a route which involves genetic instructions to put them
together.

The article *DOES* demonstrate that amino acids can't get together to
form complex proteins-- without genetic instructions-- at least in an
aqueous environment.

That "at least" is a very important note. One cannot create a living
cell by waiting for atoms to spontaneously assemble themselves in an
aqueous solution. There seem to be several other possible environments
where assembling the components of living cells is very difficult, but
not demonstrably impossible.

I've heard one possible place where there might be concentrating effect
would be at the rim of volcanos (above the water's surface), but the
problem here is one of heat. Heat promotes breakdown of the chemical
constituents of proteins. There's also UV radiation exposure issues
above the water's surface. Another possible place that might be
posited is an edge of a pond (where there wouldn't be an excess of heat
and maybe less exposure to UV if the pond is not exactly out in the
open), but the problem here is that amino acids were only found in
extremely small amounts in the Stanley Miller experiments (and there
were only a few of them present in any significant amounts-- some of
the very important ones just didn't show up). Why would we expect any
significant concentration of important amino acids to be present at the
water's edge when the prebiotic pond itself would have such tiny
concentrations of the significant components in the first place (if any
at all)? Also, this prebiotic pond wouldn't have a way of preventing
the tar-like materials (which Miller had to separate from the emerging
amino acids in his experiment) from mixing with the newly formed amino
acids and ruining the whole potential for pure amino acids getting
together and forming polypeptides.

"Let us sum up. The experiment performed by Miller yielded tar as its
most abundant product...There are about fifty small organic compounds
that are called 'building blocks'... Only two of these fifty
occurred among the preferential Miller-Urey products." --Robert Shapiro
(1986) (Marshill.org website)

And then there's the whole problem of racemic isomers. . .

Here, in a nutshell, is the problem with
trying to prove creation/design by ruling out all other possibilities:
you can only rule out the possibilities you've actually investigated,
and you can't be sure you've investigated them all.

How many years do we have to consider the various environments? We've
had over 150 years since Darwin stated what he did about "a warm little
pond" in his letter. What exactly is it that needs to yet be
considered about environments?

The
article demonstrates that we don't know of conditions, other than those
existing in living cells, that can permit these to happen, so that
abiogenesis is an unsolved problem.

That's like saying that maggots might still come from meat, even though
the very hunk of meat Francesco Redi isolated in a jar still sits in a
museum all these hundreds of years later without a hint of any new
spontaneously generated life coming from it. . .

I might grant you that it's like saying that maggots might
spontaneously generate from some unknown conditions, albeit not
directly from meat, since that possibility -- but not all others -- has
been eliminated by investigation. Actually, for a sufficiently long
and tortuous route to maggotdom, I suppose that *is* what I'm arguing,
although, again, abiogenesis as currently conceived does not look much
like traditional notions of spontaneous generation.

It is, nonetheless, boiling down to spontaneous generation.

""If we do not accept the hypothesis of spontaneous generation, then at
this one point in the history of evolution we must have recourse to the
miracle of a supernatural creation." --Ernst Haeckel (1876) (brought to
my attention through the Marshill (MH) website).

"One has to only contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that
the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet we
are here-as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation." --George
Wald (1954) (MH)

Yeah, that spontaneous generation is an "unsolved problem"--- if you're
a believer.

Sarfati's preferred solution, of
course, is to make a series of assumptions: that a supernatural Creator
exists,

This is not based on assumption, but through written accounts of
trustworthy people to whom God personally revealed Himself (or His
workmanship at least) in the past.

Eyewitnesses, in human experience, can lie (even about being
eyewitnesses), or be mistaken, or be misinterpreted, or have their
accounts distorted in the retelling, embellished by legendary or
propagandistic additions or deletions.

We have consistent accounts, though, in the four Gospels of Jesus's
ministry (which were written soon after the events themselves by the
people who witnessed them-- and not some medieval monk. There are also
extrabiblical accounts (from the century after the crucifixion and
resurrection) that Jesus had a huge impact on Israel's society 2000
years ago.

That the written accounts are,
in fact, by eyewitnesses or participants in the events they describe
is, as it happens, one of the points in contention. Other witnesses,
or alleged witnesses, or retellers of the alleged observations of
witnesses, have told other, incompatible tales.

In the end we all have some degree of faith about any written account
of history. Can we really know that Genghis Khan really did what was
claimed in the written accounts of that time? Did Washington really
cross the Delaware? Depends on the level of faith you have to believe
these things are well-substantiated.

You don't even have to go as far back as Adam or Moses or Jesus to get
accounts of trustworthy people seeing God directly intervene in nature
or communicate directly with us. In fact you don't even have to go
back as far as one hundred years. Have you ever read this account?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_%22Miracle_of_the_Sun%22

Allegedly 70,000 people saw the sun take on an unusual appearance and
dance about in the sky. Note that this is not actually based on 70,000
individual, separately taken eyewitness accounts, but on a few accounts
which are assumed to apply to all those present.

There were more than a few accounts recorded.

Note, more
significantly, that at least 100 times that many people (including
every astronomer in the Eastern hemisphere) did not observe any such
odd behavior on the part of the sun.

The phenomenon seemed to be held to the confines of the city and
immediate outskirts.

What we have here is a
psychological phenomenon involving the crowd, not the sun.

Sooo, they just all imagined the same phenomenon simultaneously because
they hallucinated?

That doesn't seem to me to be a very convincing explanation. . .

Granted,
people are part of nature, also, and an alteration to their perceptions
might be a nature miracle -- but it also might be explicable in terms
of phenomena, from random eye movements mistaken for movements in the
thing observed, to mass hysteria -- that are not usually regarded as
miraculous.

But there are even accounts of people who were not religious having the
same description of the phenomenon there. Mass hysteria just doesn't
add up.

Maybe you want to posit that there was a chemical in the air that
caused the hallucination?

with the ability to endow matter with whatever properties He
chooses, but that this Creator chose not to endow the universe with the
properties necessary for life to form spontaneously under any
naturally-occurring conditions, and that an argument from ignorance
(current ignorance of what natural conditions are sufficient for
abiogenesis) is sufficient to establish the first two points.

If this is an argument from ignorance, then it could be said that
Francesco Redi was taking a stand on something that was an argument
from ignorance (that spontaneous generation doesn't occur). But, of
course, we know that Redi's arguments were not categorized as such. . .

Redi was ruling out a particular scenario (complex multicellular
organisms forming directly without intermediates from the rotting flesh
of quite different multicellular organisms). I will concede that this
possibility has been rather authoritatively ruled out.

.. . . because there's a dismal lack of observational evidence. There's
also a dismal lack of observational evidence that even a protein
(structural protein) could get itself put together in ANY environment
via blind processes.

Note that "information," by itself, does not arrange atoms into
molecules or monomers into polymers. Some physical mechanism for
getting that "information" into matter needs to exist, and Sarfati is
as clueless about how that might that as any of the popular press
reporters he excoriates. His preferred approach (and that of the
"creationist lite" ID proponents) is to simply invoke a vacuous
"intelligence" and ignore the problem of how that intelligence actually
produces and instantiates design in matter.

Intelligence certainly has been shown to be a legitimately known source
of high information in the past. . .

Intelligence, unaccompanied by mechanism, has done no such thing (but
then, intelligence unaccompanied by mechanism is pretty much unknown;
we have no idea of how such an intelligence might do anything).

We can see an analogy in our own intelligence implementation. We
think, we conceive, we plan, we build, we put the finishing touches on
what's been built. The intelligence is behind every one of these steps.

-- [snip of material quoted from article]

This demonstrates a very real problem for those who think "life finds a
way" in the area of abiogenesis. It only finds a way when genetic
instructions are applied.

The information given in the article does not demonstrate that.

Oh, and I need to also bring forward this quote from
http://marshill.org/Evidence%20for%20Creation/Origin_of_life.htm :

"In his book, Origins-A Skeptics Guide to the Creation of Life on
Earth, Robert Shapiro gives a very realistic illustration of how one
might estimate the odds of the spontaneous generation of life. Shapiro
begins by allowing one billion years (5 x 10^14 minutes) for
spontaneous biogenesis. Next he notes that a simple bacterium can make
a copy of itself in twenty minutes, but he assumes that the first life
was much simpler. So he allows each trial assembly to last one minute,
thus providing 5 x 10^14 trial assemblies in 1 billion years to make a
living bacterium. Next he allows the entire ocean to be used as the
reaction chamber. If the entire ocean volume on planet earth were
divided into reaction flasks the size of a bacterium we would have
10^36 separate reaction flasks. He allows each reaction flask to be
filled with all the necessary building blocks of life. Finally, each
reaction chamber is allowed to proceed through one-minute trial
assemblies for one billion years. The result is that there would be
10^51 tries available in 1 billion years. According to Morowitz we need
10^100,000,000,000 trial assemblies!

This does not seem to me a very realistic illustration. The article is
attempting to calculate the odds of atoms spontaneously coming together
to form a simple bacterium. Now, I grant you that current models of
abiogenesis are very sketchy, but none look at all like that. There is
no discussion of precursor systems -- simpler self-catalyzing cycles
that might gradually aquire further components and complexity. Nothing
builds on anything else; the immense number of trial assemblies are
simply an immense number of attempts to produce a living cell in one
fell swoop. This is the principle difference between spontaneous
generation and current ideas about abiogenesis, which are attempts to
break the origin of life down into smaller steps so that you don't have
to deal with all-or-nothing, one-giant-step biopoesis. No, I don't
know what those simpler steps would look like, or under what conditions
they could exist and be stable enough to undergo further evolution --
but then, neither do Shapiro or Morowitz offer any reason to suppose
that one-step synthesis of an entire cell would be necessary.

Even getting the first replicating protein to come about
naturalistically would be an impossibility (and this is shown by the
equilibrium concentration example I brought forward).

An impossibility in an aqueous solution, apparently, which is hardly
the only possibility that can be thought of

The thing is that the Miller experiments are the main source of
evidence people look to for considering abiogenesis as being possible--
AND THAT WAS REQUIRING AN AQUEOUS ENVIRONMENT!

(and there may be
possibilities that exist but have not been thought of, though to be
sure there may also be apparent possibilities thought of that are not
actual possibilities).

So we just not imaginative enough over these past 150 years. I see.

Note, by the way, that your entire argument here depends on requiring
"evolutionists" to provide detailed scenarios and proof of the
possibility of every step of the process, while at the same time simply
assuming that a Designer of the requisite abilities and interests
exists (and, as noted, that He has not designed the universe itself to
be able to "spontaneously generate" life). You haven't actually shown
mathematical or physical modelling of how "design" is . . . <snip>
-- [snip]
-- Steven J.

Are you aware that intelligent designers HAVE produced a replicating
chemical using information? The replicating polio virus was
synthesized from scratch around 2001 in the lab of researchers. This
is akin to the kind of designing that would have taken place to get the
first high information-content organisms designed intelligently long
ago here on Earth.

Actually, I was aware that intelligent designers have produced a polio
virus using various proteins and nucleotides; in effect, they gathered
the components of a "do-it-yourself virus-building kit" and built the
virus.

Yes, and this was a good example of what intelligence is capable of.

One might as well say that one has assembled a new barbecue
grill or office chair "using information" without mentioning that the
need for actual physical components (except that the virus components
screw themselves together).

Steven J.

Well, the barbecue grill doesn't have replication capabilities. The
construction of a replicating virus is definitely a more striking
example for any intelligent design proponent to point to.

Steve
---
Did mind come before matter in the universe or matter come before mind?
Chapters 1 and 2 have your answer:
http://www.bottomlayer.com/bottom/reality/Intro.html

.

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