(January 12, 2019 at 12:23 pm)Editz Wrote: Perhaps I can make something of amends by posting on topic. Theists sometimes trot out the line "but the beginning of life on earth (they usually don't know the word abiogenesis) has only happened ONCE - how do you explain that, stupid atheist!?"
The fact of the matter is, as Darwin himself wrote:
Quote:Darwin discussed the suggestion that the original spark of life may have begun in a "warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, &c., present, that a compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes." He went on to explain that "at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed."
Speaking for myself, it doesn't seem to be the issue. More along the lines of you can't prove it happened once. "Can" or "can't" is also irrelevant if it didn't. At best, a "can" today would make it something worth considering, but not concluding.
Just to bridge the gap a bit, when we look at God as the Creator then we know inorganic can be formed into organic, based on the Bible's explanation that God formed man from the earth, at which point he became a living soul, and he said it was good.
The alternative, which I think would be fair is say, is that someone a simple one-celled organism was cooked up in a "primordial soup", then through mitosis and meiosis + mutations gained in complexity over time. Of course for that to happen, you need RNA, so it would have to be assumed that somehow this soup was cooking RNA And of course all this by randomness to get it going.
For me, what would be your version, and feel free to correct me if it's not, is really a shot in the dark. Even if you could get to that point of saying "abiogenesis" happened, the increase in information is still a problem. If you say mutations caused an increase in information, it would also need to be functional, but the results of mutations are almost always the opposite. An example would be cancer. Of course we know that's not good, so we must eliminate the cancer cells to eliminate the detrimental effects on the body. If not they can become malignant and create more, which can eventually kill someone. Or a mutation could add a new element that weakens the organism. Say a fly gets an extra wing. Yep, we got something new, but it will also likely kill the fly because now it can't fly properly. If the dysfunction doesn't kill it, then it would likely get picked off more easily by a predator. Not only did "positive" mutations have to occur, but in the reproductive system so that it could be passed down to offspring. On and on and on...
So yeah, I don't readily assume abiogenesis but if someone feels they can prove it conclusively even once, I'm still happy to hear then out.
