One step closer to proving abiogenesis? Scientists create "Near-Living Crystal"

[Confused Ape]

It's an interesting philosophical exercise to try to pin down exactly what properties one means when one uses the shorthand of 'life'.

It's really down to what humans define as 'life'.

Are Viruses Alive?

There is no precise definition of what separates the living from the non-living. One definition might be the point at which an entity becomes self-aware. In this sense, someone who has had severe head trauma may be classified as brain dead. In this case, the body and brain are still functioning on a base level and there is definitely metabolic activity in all of the cells that make up the larger organism, but it is presumed that there is no self-awareness so the person is classified as brain dead. On the other end of the spectrum, a different criterion for defining life would be the ability to move a genetic blueprint into future generations, thereby regenerating your likeness. In the second, more simplistic definition, viruses are definitely alive. They are undeniably the most efficient entities on this planet at propagating their genetic information.

[Zone]

I don't think it would be that big a deal for theists they would only say God created the laws of physics with the intent that these crystals would form. And then after 4 billion years Jesus came saved everyone.

[Ryantology]

At some point, it will be true that the only defense of the Bible will be to call it a collection of metaphors. And, the closer we get to that, the less convinced people will be by it.

[Zone]

They will just say that the Bible doesn't explain what we don't know but instead provides the very foundation of what we do know. You have your fine tuning and argument from design there. You're not going to convince anyone that God doesn't exist because "we have all this science and shit", if God survived evolution he can survive this.

[Ryantology]

God has survived evolution, but by no means did he escape harm.

There may be few current believers who can be swayed, but replenishing their numbers is only going to get more difficult. The more you water down the message, the less willing people will be to defend it to the death. The more reasons people have to question scripture, the weaker its grip becomes. Until a few hundred years ago, nobody knew enough to launch a successful assault on biblical assertions.

[Zone]

They will still use the tornado through a junkyard argument only applied to the universe as a whole rather than individual living cells. Besides if you look at Genesis God isn't described as creating life directly himself with the exception of humans who he made out of clay, he commands the Earth to bring forth life from within itself so that still works.

[Ryantology]

Yeah, I know they'll use the same old arguments. I'm saying, they sound less and less convincing.

If this experiment progresses to the point where the results are generally accepted as life coming from non-living substance, even if you can point to the Bible and say "it doesn't contradict this", sure, but that's beside the point. God's not doing it now, we are, and it would be a tough argument to sell that God is intervening, invisibly, to produce a scientific result which is going to weaken faith in him for many people.

[Zone]

God is said to have made us from the clay a non-living substance of the Earth which God breathes his divine breath into in the Bible. So it's not the non-living material life was originally made from but the divine presence within. So that shouldn't be too much of a problem for them. And these days what God is said to do is use his divine power to maintain the universe in existence and humans having this God spirit can commune with this supreme power through prayer, even if nothing actually happens in the literal physical sense. God can only really interact directly with the universe when he is manifest in a physical body as was the case with the miracles of Jesus. So Christians have upped their game to the extent that it's pretty much impervious to any form of scientific discovery. I suppose artificially intelligent machines like HAL from 2001 if we could make such a thing could phase them, seeing as that be consciousness produced by purely mechanistic physical means.

[Ryantology]

The problem lies in the fact that abiogenesis has been one of the more hated scientific theories. To turn around and pretend that there was never any contradiction will cause problems. Some Christians work evolution into their faith, I was one of them. A great many steadfastly refuse to do that.

Christianity will never be eliminated by scientific discovery, this I understand. But, it will continue to be marginalized. And, the bigger the divide between the strict and loose Biblical interpretation camps, the more of the loose ones will decide that there's not much point to the whole thing.

The biggest issue this raises for Christianity is not changing the minds of current believers, but planting nonsense in the minds of new believers. It is going to keep getting harder and harder to do that when kids learn about how the world really works at school and God is nowhere mentioned.

[Zone]

Well if God created the universe with the intention of creating life then he would have designed all the physical processes that lead to life there wasn't any need to magic life straight into existence. I'm not sure if even Genesis shows God doing producing anything directly. He says "let there be this that and the other" and "be fruitful and multiply" and so on, it seems fairly hands off until he gets to humanity. So if a Christian is being clever they can claim that abiogeneisis supports the Biblical account of creation. When it says God made us from the clay of the Earth it could be crystals in the inorganic sediment around hydrothermal vents and the universe was set up to do this from the start.