The Problem with Christians

[Esquilax]

I'd rather not get into the formation of the universe itself, because it will quickly become the infinite regress in which we can get nowhere. However, if we are going to oversimplify each other's position on the formation of the universe, then you believe it created itself. 

My position is that nobody knows. There's an appreciable difference between an oversimplification and a flat out inaccuracy, even if I were to agree that what I said was simplified, instead of merely denuded of language meant to obfuscate the fundamentally magical claim you're making.

And the empirical evidence for abiogenesis is incredibly lacking. I don't think I ever said there was none, although I can't think of any. We were talking about the speculative nature with which they describe the origin of photosynthetic systems. It was not based on empiricism. And I don't think you can just assert that it is the best current hypothesis. There is another hypothesis capable of explaining the features of life, and that is intelligent design. Just because it raises more questions than answers does not mean it isn't correct (I'm not saying you're rejecting it for this reason, but I have a feeling it would have been part of the next response). When people first began to realize that electrons, protons, and neutrons were not the most fundamental particles, it raised a lot of questions, but they did not reject it on that premise. 

While I agree that intelligent design has (arguably superficial) explanatory power, this in itself isn't a testament to the truth of the claim either. What matters is the data and how it supports the claim, and in this case, as I said before, abiogenesis has some positive evidence in support of it, and intelligent design has no positive evidence supporting it. The fact that you can poke holes in the former does not, and has never, lent credence to the latter claim, which is important to note.

Both sides look at the empirical evidence. Both sides go from their to speculate about its origins. I happen to think they should be held on equal scientific grounds. I also think that the discussion should be encouraged in science. However, I think we need a word separate from science, because then it gets hard to discern speculation with empiricism.

First of all, this insistence on marking the speculation involved in science belies a lack of understanding that all of science is probabilistic and meant to change based on expanded or additional evidence. At heart, all science is speculation based on, and subordinate to, empirical evidence. Any speculation made without the empiricism isn't even science.

Lastly though, and I went into this in one of my responses to RoadRunner, but ID and abiogenesis aren't on remotely equal grounds empirically. Both sides do examine the same set of data, but what they do with it is entirely different, and that difference is what makes ID non-scientific, yet obsessed with cloaking itself in the terminology of science to leach some credibility from it. When one looks at the arguments for abiogenesis, you find positive evidence- if we perform X, Y, or Z experiment, for example, we get A, B, or C component of life, indicating that these things can arise from natural means. In fact, just recently it was discovered how a certain vital sugar compound can be made in conditions identical to space, granting greater odds to some form of panspermia event helping the process. Meanwhile, if you look at the arguments for ID, what you find is uniformly negative evidence, otherwise known as our good friend, the argument from ignorance: oh, I've got organic trait X, here, and I can't think of a way that it could have evolved, and in fact, if I try to reduce it according to what I know, it stops functioning! It must be irreducibly complex, and thus evolution without a designer can't account for it! Ha! I'm Michael Behe!

Do you see the difference? The former uses the observations to draw links for a given conclusion, whereas ID concerns itself with using the same observations to find arguments against the former. One is science, the other is just attempting to shit on the conclusion it doesn't like, in an attempt to discredit it. But even if such arguments were to discredit the abiogenesis conclusion, they would not do even one thing toward demonstrating ID, which is the thing real science, rather than theater science playing in a lab coat, actually does. When Einstein intended to establish the accuracy of general relativity, to use a popular example, he didn't just run around poking holes in every competing idea until only his was left. He made testable predictions and presented evidence for his idea.

When you want to determine what a pre-chosen random number between one and ten is, going "it's not two, and it's not seven, therefore, it's five!" will not render a rational or scientific conclusion.