RE: What beliefs would we consider reasonable for a self proclaimed Christian to hold?
March 23, 2018 at 3:06 pm
(This post was last modified: March 23, 2018 at 3:06 pm by polymath257.)
(March 23, 2018 at 1:11 am)He lives Wrote: I agree with your points and your argument. However by agreeing I would like to point out that everyone should also be skeptical about abiogenesis as there is no solid evidence to it's extraordinary claims that life began from some hypothetical primordial soup that was thought to exist on the pre life earth. This sounds too much like the fictional story of Frankenstein. At least in the story of Frankenstein body parts were used to bring him to life. You may say that life on earth is evidence of abiogenesis. However life on earth can also be used as evidence of intelligent design. In fact I am very much a skeptic of abiogenesis. The chances of the biogenesis Hypothesis ever happening are 1 in 10 to the 40,000th power. It would be more likely to find a brand new F-16 on the dark side of the moon. I therefore would like to know why anyone would trust in the abiogenesis hypothesis?I don't see it as being of any more value to anyone than ID since neither one have been proven.I want to point out that this type of figure is often quoted, but it has no solid foundation. The problem is that is assumes that a cell has to pop into existence as a complete unit in a single step with no precursors at all. NOBODY makes such a claim!
Furthermore, the usual 'computation' that leads to such absurd numbers makes some assumptions about probabilistic independence (even at the level of proteins) that are known to be incorrect. Among others: that only a single string of amino acids would perform the job of a given protein, that there is no precursor to that protein, that the amino acids are integrated in sequence and each is probabilistically independent from the rest, etc.
Every single one of these assumptions is known to be wrong. In almost every case, there is *far* more flexibility in protein composition than the calculation claims. And, again, the formation of a protein of 200 amino acids is NOT thought to happen in a single step, but via the merging of smaller, but useful (maybe for different reactions!) proteins.
And, of course, this completely neglects the RNA world that is strongly suspected as a precursor to the current protein based biology.
Sorry, but your F-16 claim is irrelevant to the reality of the chemistry of life.
