So your an Athiest

[AAA]

God of Mr. Hanky
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Whether or not that uncited claim is true is not above debate, but the possibilities they imply for life under a broader range of conditions remain strong.

That you call them "extremophiles" is rather interesting, considering how life, when it first began 4 billion years ago, did so under similar conditions - the atmosphere and ocean was choked with volcanic activity and no oxygen. It was hardly extreme to these life forms, which made do with what it had available. That's what life does.

Yeah, but I don't think life could form under those conditions. It obviously can live there now, but we don't know if abiogenesis could occur there. They would need to have very rigid peptidoglycan walls to prevent the degradation of any nucleotide chains that somehow formed. These complicated cell walls require enzymes to form. They would also need metabolism that allowed them to convert the toxic chemicals around them into substances that they could use, and have a way to incorporate them into themselves. That's just the tip of the iceberg.

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I just want to point out that the beliefs of scientists are completely irrelevant to the work that they do. Sir Isaac Newton was a practicing alchemist as well as a mathematician and physicist, but it's his work in the latter fields in which he made the greatest contribution. Scientists like everyone else have to show their work, or it doesn't mean a damn.

Agreed

AAA - you should understand that abiogenesis under any conditions can only produce the most simple, self-replicating strands of molecules which are far from the relative complexities of genetic material in its simplest modern form (RNA). It would therefore get through very few replication cycles with the available material which it feeds on before becoming itself consumed by a life form which is billions of years up the tree for its survival traits. So if you're holding your breath waiting to see this happen anywhere in the present natural world, don't - it can only happen where no pre-existing life which would munch it up before it gets the chance to evolve!

Stimbo - Going that far back, what people declared of themselves publicly didn't mean much - very few were secure or balsey enough to incite the ire of intolerant church officials who could and did end people's lives for challenging their ideas. Therefore, as you probably know (but AAA doesn't), many of the early scientists who were declared Christians were secretly atheist.
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Yeah but just to be able to reproduce yourself, you have to have  a sequence with the chemical capabilities to acquire materials from the environment and incorporate them into itself. It also has to be stable enough to not be destroyed. Even "simple" molecules are not so simple when you consider what they have to be able to do.

And Isaac Newton (probably the smartest man who ever lived) was actually not even remotely atheistic. He wrote more on Christian theology than he did science. He wrote on the prophecies of Daniel, and he actually calculated the battle of Armageddon to occur somewhere around 2060. You can't say the scientists were secretly atheists when they identified as Christians. Maybe you wish they were atheists, but that doesn't make it so.

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Well actually those are parameters that are believed to be necessary for life to evolve on a specific planet. So without them you don't get life. You seem to be under the impression that life will inevitably arise no matter what the conditions. I disagree.

I would also disagree with that assertion, especially since it's not what I actually said.


What I'm basically saying is that life (and whatever conditions make it possible) were/are inevitable considering the size, age, and composition of the Universe.


Furthermore, those are the conditions right now (and some of them have been that way for most of Earth's history), but it's believed that the conditions necessary for abiogenesis of microscopic lifeforms are drastically different than those we witness today in terms of atmosphere, soil content, and water content. It's entirely possible that there are many planets out there whose conditions never really improved beyond those stages, and so the only life on those planets is tiny and still swimming in soup or whatever. There are, right now, on this planet, a wide range of conditions that allow or disallow life to exist in various forms and stages, so why wouldn't there also be a reasonably wide range of life-supporting conditions found in the Universe?

Similar to that, the universe permits conditions for life that are unlikely. For example, the universe is expanding at a certain rate, but gravity is also pulling things back at a certain intensity. These two are counteracted in such a fine balance. Changing one even the slightest bit inhibits the formation of planets. There doesn't seem to be any reason that these two are balanced this way, but they are. It looks like some intelligence set these values the way they are.

I'm no physicist, but I don't think gravity is pulling against the expansion of the Universe. In fact, I'm pretty sure that both Universal expansion and gravitational fields are functions of space-time itself. Space-time is actually what's expanding when most physicists talk about Universal expansion, and the warping of space-time is what creates gravitational fields and "pushes" objects in space toward each other.

 Maybe a flood killed them?

Ok, how hard did you study biology again? Please tell me I'm not gonna have to go into all the various and sundry reasons why the Biblical Great Flood is scientifically impossible. I've done it so many times. Please.

Hah, the flood thing was mostly a joke. I probably shouldn't have said it cause now you won't take me seriously.