Organic Molecules Found 400 Light Years From Earth

[rjh4 is back]

Close proximity of individual atoms that by themselves are not a living thing, but because they bond like magnets exchanging electrons, that makes it very easy to go from non life to life.

Most of your post was just more stawman assumptions about my position. I won't respond any more to them.

I will respond to your statement above with these questions: If you are correct and it is so easy to go from life to non-life, why do you suppose scientists now take the position that spontaneous generation has been refuted? If it is so easy, why don't we see it happening all the time such that spontaneous generation would be widely accepted?

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Your avatar lists you as Christian, you are still being intellectually dishonest if you are trying to claim that you are not trying to put your God of the bible in as the start of evolution.

Wrong again, Brian. I already told you I was a common descent denier. So why would I put God as the start of something I do not ascribe to?

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I was trying to show you how the logic didn't seem to flow for me and maybe I was focusing on the wrong part of your position. Of course I was just making something up as the hypothesis. But my point was that some, if not all, proposed hypotheses on this subject, may be wrong. (I was just picking a ridiculous one that all would agree was wrong.) How can a claim that there is no natural mechanism be unsupported based on hypotheses that are wrong or even potentially wrong?

The same way a claim that you didn't have any way to drive to Columbia, SC this morning is refuted, even if my proposed method of you doing so might not be the right one. I claimed there was no way you could do it. To refute me, all you have to do is show that there was a way you could do it. Maybe I should only have claimed that you weren't in Columbia this morning; then if you wanted to bother to refute me, you would have to show you actually were in town this morning instead of just pointing out ways that you could have gotten here.

That's why I shouldn't go around telling people what can't be, unless I'm sure there's no way it could be. Even if you never arrived in Columbia, SC at all, I'm wrong if you could have driven here.

Let me explain it this way:

You say: "When you claim there is no natural mechanism...All it takes to refute that claim is a possible natural mechanism". Given any of those "possible" natural mechanisms, would it not be fair of me to then say: "Prove that the natural mechanism can produce life from non-life, and until you do my claim stands"?

As I said above, if somebody actually produced life from non-life in the lab, I would agree that my claim would then be unsupported.

If anyone ever succeeds in producing life from non-life in a lab, your claim was always unsupported, wasn't it? It just wasn't disproven yet. There's a difference. I'm not saying that your claim is disproven, I'm saying it's unsupported. There's a Nobel Prize waiting for you if you can prove that life could not have begun by a natural process. Claiming that there is no such process is a position you can't support.

You could certainly have said that we don't know for sure what natural mechanism is responsible for the origin of life, and that we can't reasonably claim to have 100% certainty that the mechanism for the origin of life was, in fact, natural. But you claimed that there is no natural mechanism, and you are not able to meet the burden of proof for that. All I have to do to show that your claim is unreasonable is a possible way that there could have been a natural origin for life (and there are several) and the rational thing for you to do would be to revise your claim to a position of less certainty.

Since that seems to actually be your position (that a natural mechanism for the origin of life is unproven), that should be your claim.

Now to me, it's probabilistic: a natural origin seems much more likely given the information that we have than a miraculous origin, even if there is some sort of God that started the universe. God poofing the first cell into existence billions of years ago seems not to be what any religion actually claims as their deity's MO for starting life, but if that's how you want to roll, it's less unlikely than most other supernatural abiogenesis claims in that it at least doesn't contradict the evidence we have that the earliest detectable signs of life were of microorganisms.

Were I a Christian who accepted evolution, I would think God making man from dust would be a nice metaphor for humans evolving from microorganisms.

Ok...I do see where you are coming from regarding unsupported vs. unproven.

I didn't think I actually made that claim but I looked back and I did say:

"Perhaps no atheists wanted to push back as doing so might highlight the lack of any known naturalistic mechanism for forming life from non-life????"

This does have the claim embedded into it.

Good catch, Mr. Agenda. I should have been more careful.

I hereby withdraw my claim regarding the lack of any known naturalistic mechanism for forming life from non-life.

Brian, that doesn't let you off the hook from explaining how life comes from non-life when you say it is so easy.