Faith and the Origin of Life Faith and the Origin of Life
-Steven Sawyer
Abiogenesis is the idea that life originated from non-living matter in the sense that it arose naturalistically. The naturalistic (and therefore “scientific”) concept is that life ("bio") must have originated ("genesis") without ("a-") any outside help.
Life, ALL BIOLOGICAL LIFE anywhere in the universe, either arose naturally or supernaturally. So, ultimately, there are really only two alternatives.
Does anyone have a true third alternative?
Biological life on earth (if it arose naturally) must have either begun here or was "seeded" from somewhere else. But appeal to seeding merely pushes the question back one step... back to biological life being a result of either naturalistic processes or supernatural ones somewhere else in the universe. If you substitute, for example, a biological alien for God, then the same question is then asked of him... where did he originate?
Similarly, skeptics demand to know where God originated. God, however, is defined (at least by the mono-theistic religions) as being an everlasting spirit and therefore has no beginning and (since He created this universe and time itself) is transcendent to the concept of space-time.
Philosophically, there is nothing inconsistent with something being eternal. What is impossible (from everything we actually know) is for something to spontaneously generate itself from nothing. From nothing, nothing comes. Even the Big Bang proponents believe that some unknowable form of “energy” or “singularity” existed for an indefinite period of “time” before the theorized Big Bang.
Faith in God is ridiculed. FAITH in naturalism is accepted as “scientific”.
Theists believe that the God that exists has revealed himself. Is there faith involved? Absolutely! The question isn’t whether or not faith is involved (we ALL have faith in things we can’t demonstrate to be true empirically) but whether or not that faith is reasonable. The problem then becomes defining what is reasonable… evidence isn’t evidence until it is PERCIEVED as evidence.
Science supposedly revels in evidence… it is demanded at every turn. In most things this is actually very good. But the scientific method certainly does not apply to the origin of life. We are all dealing with too many assumptions for this topic to be anything more than a metaphysical exercise based on sketchy subjective interpretations of the ancient forensic evidences and what we know of chemical reactions. There are no “fossil” remnants of the supposed chemical evolution from non-life to life. There are only guesses.
Scientists don't really have a clue how life arose. They have a bunch of "just so" stories and THAT is ALL! Their experiments are absolute dead ends. Am I suggesting that they give up research? No, of course I’m not suggesting any such thing. They may eventually find that "unknown process" which will spontaneously allow matter to organize itself into the bio-chemical equivalent of a von Neumann machine... good luck to ‘em (they’ll need it).
Just to "sweeten the pot," here's that $1.3 million offer to anyone who can come up with something that actually works:
The Origin-of-Life Prize (NOT from a creationist organization):
http://www.us.net/life/Science does not recognize anything supernatural because that is the way “science” is defined. Its methodology ONLY works for naturalistic processes. If the reality of everything does actually does include the supernatural element, then science can be said to be LIMITED to the naturalistic processes (i.e., science cannot define the ultimate reality). Scientists are often governed by the philosophy of naturalism because their view of reality is limited to what science can define as knowable via the scientific method.
David Hume is supposed to have “disproven” miracles. No, he merely defined them out of existence. This, in a sense, is what “science” does with the supernatural.
However, science can recognize the limitations of naturalistic processes. Just as we all recognize that blocks of stone don’t become buildings from naturalistic processes (there may be caves, but there are no skyscrapers formed naturally) so too should we be able to recognize when basic chemistry just doesn’t provide the impetus to build bio-chemical machinery without intelligence. Does the level of complexity of even the simplest living cell (or proto-cell) imply imputed organization rather than self-organization?
The skeptic, if he is to be honest about his own belief system, MUST be able to demonstrate the possibility of the naturalistic self-formation of life from non-living chemicals or else he is merely exhibiting that very quality he ridicules the theists for - faith!
The "atheism of the gaps" is actually less rational than the "God of the gaps" because the skeptic claims that the natural universe is ALL that exists (there are no supernatural beings) yet the skeptic cannot (as yet) produce ANY real evidence demonstrating that natural processes are even theoretically capable of producing even the most rudimentary form of life. Very few today would argue against the statement that, based on what we KNOW (to date), life is at best a very highly improbable arrangement of matter. The skeptic's "out" is simply that we are here, so no matter how improbable, it must have happened. Any other answer is unscientific. But, reality may not be limited to what science defines… and if the naturalistic processes are found wanting, then the only rational alternative is the “unscientific” one.
Science can only assess the degree of probability of an event. The probability of the organization of basic elements into a functional symbiotic self-replicating, self-repairing bio-chemical MACHINE is beyond the capacity of those elements to perform on its own (based on what we actually know). In order to achieve the properties we see inherent in life, the molecules must somehow overcome increasingly more difficult levels of complexity. Each “higher” stage is therefore less probable than the preceding one. The probability of natural processes (as we currently understand them) to be able to “create” even the most rudimentary living organism appears to be infinitely small (sort of like having all the air molecules suddenly move to one corner of the room). Impossible? No, just very, very unlikely.
Abiogenesis: The First Frontier
http://informationcentre.tripod.com/abiogenesis.html
…Be sure and “click” the “Keep Going” link at the bottom to continue… this article is more than one web page.
The skeptic insists that the known laws and processes are fine, we just haven’t been smart enough to figure out how nature could have put just the right rudimentary elements together on its own – i.e., he invokes a blind faith in an as yet unknown process and claims THIS is scientific. It is ONLY scientific in the sense that ANY other real alternative would be to ultimately invoke a supernatural creator transcendent to this universe and THAT simply does not fit into the paradigm of naturalistic philosophy.
Producing the raw basic compounds of living organisms is not the same as producing life by a long shot. The MATERIALS for biological life came from non-living matter and can be produced relatively easily in a lab. Big deal! The MATERIALS for writing (at least up until recently) were pen, ink, and paper... but the materials are not the work. Life is built upon the raw chemical materials of the earth. Life is, in reductionist terms, an incredible form of bio-chemical machinery. The skeptic would say that these bio-chemical processes are ALL life is. The theist would say, no, life's symbiotic complexity had to be imposed upon the raw materials from the outside... raw ink on paper can make designs... some of them even with some degree of order from inherent properties... but it will never develop any language or a type of Morse code much less create novels or the sheet music of symphonies. The origin of life experiments have produced some of the sweet notes of life’s music but they also produce much disharmony and noise at the same time. And finding a way for a short piece a pre-existing RNA to replicate itself under controlled conditions is sort of like taking a small piece of the “sheet music” of life to a “Xerox” machine and making copies of it. This may be an interesting chemistry experiment, but it is no real advancement towards building the interconnected, interdependent self-replicating, self-repairing, metabolizing machine of life. The symphony is more than either the notes or the sheet music or the individual instruments… it is all these working together in harmony.
Maybe one day when we really figure out how a “simple” cell works, we will be able to duplicate life in a laboratory. Then will we have proven that life originates by itself? No. We will have proven that decades of concentrated work by the most brilliant human minds with the aide of the most advanced technology and millions of dollars of research grants were able to replicate some form of life under tightly controlled laboratory conditions in order to provide evidence that natural processes under chaotic conditions could do the same.