Was at least the first life form created?

[rjh4 is back]

Ehhh, you are very close to the mark, but I would make a tiny distinction. When you say you believe something, it still can be construed as a truth claim that needs to meet the burden of proof.

Now there you lost me. I can agree that the statements “I believe in God” and “I do not believe in gods” are both truth claims but I think they are self-verifying and, therefore, do not require any more proof than the statement itself. If I made the statement to you: “I believe in God.” what proof could I offer that that is what I believe? Would it be reasonable for you to respond by saying, “No that is not what you believe” or “You have not proven that that is what you believe”? I do not think so. At best, if you wanted to push this, you could ask “Why do you believe in God?” and I could provide my reasons. Given my reasons you could reasonably counter by saying “Those reasons would not lead me to conclude there are gods.” However, I do not think a reasonable response would be “You have not proven your case” because in my proposed conversation, there was nothing I needed to prove to begin with. I would not have provided my reasoning to show “that God is" but merely to explain why I believe in God. To make either of the statements “I believe in God” and “I do not believe in gods” merely give some information about the sayer, much like if someone tells you what their name is. I do not think it is anything more nor do I think either of the statements should be construed to be anything more, especially considering how wording gets dissected so much here (which I think is a good thing and doesn’t happen as much as it should even here).

What do you think? Did I convince you?

Atheists don't think "this" just "happened".

I know. In context, I was explaining what I was thinking, never intending to imply anything about atheists.

Relative to your comments regarding science, I must say that they seem to be riddled with the fallacy of reification. While I realize that the site provided does make a distinction between reification and speaking of abstractions metaphorically, I do not think you are doing the latter in some instances. Let me give you an example. You say:

Science has a good idea, and abiogenesis is becoming more and more promising, and the Urey-Miller experiment, while not a slam dunk, shows it's possible.

I think I count three instances of reification here. 1) “Science has a good idea”. Science is an abstraction of what scientists do. Science itself does not have any ideas at all. Scientists carry out experiments and/or make observations and then draw conclusions about those experiments/observations. Assuming that the scientist is careful (which I think is a good assumption generally as I do not think many scientists are interested in falsifying their data), we can then agree on the observations made. The conclusions are another story. 2) “abiogenesis is becoming more and more promising”. I am not sure about this one. It could fall into metaphoric use so I will not elaborate on this. 3) “the Urey-Miller experiment…shows it’s possible”. No. Urey-Miller themselves demonstrated that when such and such is done, amino acids, etc. are produced. That is it. If you want to conclude from that or use that as reasoning why you think abiogenesis is possible, then feel free. I cannot argue with that. But I think it is unreasonable to conflate the experiment/observations with any particular conclusion like you do in your statement. What you are essentially saying is that there is only one reasonable conclusion that one can reach from the facts of the experiment without having to explain why this is the only reasonable conclusion or even a reasonable conclusion at all.

since when people leave it at "God did it" they stop looking towards science and learning about all it's discoveries.

I think this is a totally unsupported assertion. Many earlier scientists believed in God and the Bible and yet made many wonderful contributions to our body of scientific knowledge. Did they stop looking and learning just because they believed in God and the Bible? No. I actually love science. When I read about all the things that scientists discover it really blows my mind and the more I learn the more I realize how little we really know. My believe in God and the Bible in no way stunts my growth in this area even though I might draw different conclusions than the scientists would. I really think this goes back to what I said about presuppositions.

Also, even if Science proved tomorrow a God had to have created the first living organism, it does nothing to prove that the god is a personal god (Deist vs theist god) and so without the ability to prove it's a personal god, we cannot make the leap from the creator God to being the Christian god. So maybe it may make you feel better to imagine God created life because you can't imagine another way, but that does not make it true.

I agree. What I think doesn’t necessarily make it true and neither does the conclusion of a scientist necessarily make the conclusion true.

I think with better science it is possible to prove abiogenesis true (If it in fact is).

I think this is too inaccurate and broad sweeping to be reasonable. It think it would be reasonable to say: “I think with better science it is possible to demonstrate or prove abiogenesis can happen and from this I would conclude that that is how life can into existence in our universe.” Again, I think it makes it more clear to separate the facts of science (the actual observations made) from the conclusions drawn therefrom.

We've already done that with evolution. It is an incontrovertible fact that evolution is true, no God needed.

I might be able to agree with this depending on what you mean by “evolution”. If you are referring to the observation that organisms change and that “natural selection” occurs, I would wholeheartedly agree with you. Those are observations that are easily verified. If you are referring to common descent (the concept that all life descended from a common anscestor), I would wholeheartedly disagree with you. You may draw the conclusion from the observable facts that you think common descent is how the life we observe got here, but it is far from an incontrovertible fact. The type of evolution we do observe, as noted above, simply does not necessarily lead to the conclusion of common descent. Just because many people would agree with the conclusion does not make it a fact, as you have pointed out in other threads.

Scientists creating life in a laboratory would not prove creation in any way.

I think I said that I would take this as evidence for creation. I think throwing around the word “prove” in the way you do confuses things. You talk about “proving” things like science can lead to absolute truth. I do not think it can. We can make models that predict how the world behaves but they are just models. They do not tell us anything about absolute truth. Proof is the evidence sufficient to establish a thing as true, or to produce belief in its truth. (from dictionary.com) But it is clear that it is not talking about absolute truth. We could clearly both look at the same evidence (the observed facts) and it could prove one thing to you and another to me and neither would necessarily be right or wrong. I think we are back to the presuppositions with which we look at the observed facts.

Yeah, I would agree with the quote. I was raised Catholic and luckily the Catholics don't refuse to teach evolution. I came to the conclusion a long time ago that science was the best method for explaining what is true about the world. In essence, science brings the good. It provides the most reliable evidence and proof of what is true about this world. Is that the only reason I disbelieve? No. I also saw how religion crumbles under scrutiny, especially the Bible. Science plays a large, but not the only, part in my atheism.

My whole problem (maybe not my whole problem ) with the quote is the statement “God is a theoretical entity that is postulated by theists to explain various phenomena”. Isn’t this really begging the question? The question is whether or not God exists and one starts with a statement like above that assumes that God is merely “a theoretical entity”. Doesn’t that make the whole line of reasoning fallacious?