A simple case for intelligent design

[leroy]

You can't even define your terms properly, how do you expect people to test them? Try avoiding circular reasoning in your definitions Did you forget how your "specified information" failed? Even a snowflake could be considered "specified" with one of your attempts at definitions and we know those form without the influence of any deity.

Well prove you assertions, if a snow flake has the attribute of specified complexity, then ID would be falsified, ¿what would falsify natural abiogenesis?


These article explains with detail the concept of specified complexity, (Explaining Specified Complexity | Metanexus) if you can show that the concept is circular, the argument would be invalid.

 

[leroy]

No, I would not. The evidence is suggestive, but we do not know the complete mechanism. Nobody disputes that.

But we also know that many of the objections that have been made have turned out not to be valid. It was once thought that amino acids couldn't form without life. We know they can. it was once claimed that there could not be spontaneous organization. We know it is possible now. It was once objected that the protein-nucleic acid relationship was irreducibly complex. We now know that RNA can catalyze many biologically relevant reactions, meaning proteins are not strictly required.

Are there issues that have not been resolved? Yes, definitely. But it is remarkable that many proposed obstacles have not turned out to be so.

Ok so if there is no conclusive evidence for “natural abiogenesis” then it is reasonable to be skeptic about it………….agree?

From the point of view of naturalism, Gaps are getting bigger as scientific knowledge progresses, for example you mention RNA, the RNA world hypothesis is becoming less and less plausible as scientific knowledge advances.

All the evidence that we have indicates that abiogeneis cant happen naturally, it really seems as if natural laws are consipiring to make abiogenesis look stupid, for example you need proteins made out of 100% left handed (LH) amonacids, (low entropy) but all the evidence that we have shows that nature tends to produce a mixture of 50% LH and 50% RH, this is one of docens of similar problems, where abiogenesis requires “X” and nature tends to produce “Y”.

What evidence would prove that natural abiogenesis is wrong? Naturalists can’t answer this question because there world view is unfalsifiable.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Well prove you assertions, if a snow flake has the attribute of specified complexity, then ID would be falsified, ¿what would falsify natural abiogenesis?


These article explains with detail the concept of specified complexity, (Explaining Specified Complexity | Metanexus) if you can show that the concept is circular, the argument would be invalid.

You can't even properly define "design". Abiogenesis is as has been pointed out still in the hypothetical stage. There are several hypotheses that explain various steps in abiogenesis. Some of those were testable and have been tested. Perhaps the most famous is the first once that said that amino acids could be formed naturally. If that was shown to be false then the concept would have died an early death. The Miller-Urey experiment tested that concept and it was found to be valid. An ongoing refutation would be if the creationist idea of Spontaneous Generation was confirmed. It is rather amazing that creationists think the fact that spontaneous generation was refuted as a concept somehow refutes abiogenesis. when spontaneous generation is more of a creationist concept than an evolutionary one.

And I am not wasting time with an article that you can't even bother to quote from. I can't take a concept that cannot even pass the relatively low bar of peer review seriously.

 

[leroy]

You can't even properly define "design". Abiogenesis is as has been pointed out still in the hypothetical stage. There are several hypotheses that explain various steps in abiogenesis. Some of those were testable and have been tested. Perhaps the most famous is the first once that said that amino acids could be formed naturally. If that was shown to be false then the concept would have died an early death. The Miller-Urey experiment tested that concept and it was found to be valid. An ongoing refutation would be if the creationist idea of Spontaneous Generation was confirmed. It is rather amazing that creationists think the fact that spontaneous generation was refuted as a concept somehow refutes abiogenesis. when spontaneous generation is more of a creationist concept than an evolutionary one.

And I am not wasting time with an article that you can't even bother to quote from. I can't take a concept that cannot even pass the relatively low bar of peer review seriously.

The article is intended to explain the concept of specified complexity. Your unwillingness to at least try to understand ID sows that you are not different from extreme fanatic creationists. You are not different from those YEC who deny evolution, when they don’t even understand it.

The ID claim is not that aminoacids can’t form naturally, the claim is that amnoacids wont organize themselves in the specific pattern required to produce self replicating proteins. You are making the positive statement you are the one who claims that aminocids do organice naturally in such pattern, how can your statement be falsified?

 

[Subduction Zone]

The article is intended to explain the concept of specified complexity. Your unwillingness to at least try to understand ID sows that you are not different from extreme fanatic creationists. You are not different from those YEC who deny evolution, when they don’t even understand it.

The ID claim is not that aminoacids can’t form naturally, the claim is that amnoacids wont organize themselves in the specific pattern required to produce self replicating proteins. You are making the positive statement you are the one who claims that aminocids do organice naturally in such pattern, how can your statement be falsified?

You have to at least quote the applicable parts of the article. You can't even find anything that is peer reviewed that supports your claims. That should tell you that you are not dealing with science. Since you have no faith in your own article why should I even bother?

Now I see that you are moving the goal posts. You asked for how abiogenesis could be refuted and I gave you more than one example. If you can't be honest enough to admit that I did do that for you why should I bother to continue to try to help you?


So far you have failed to properly support any of your claims and all that you can come up with are excuses for not accepting the scientific work that has been done.

 

[leroy]

You have to at least quote the applicable parts of the article. You can't even find anything that is peer reviewed that supports your claims. That should tell you that you are not dealing with science. Since you have no faith in your own article why should I even bother?

Now I see that you are moving the goal posts. You asked for how abiogenesis could be refuted and I gave you more than one example. If you can't be honest enough to admit that I did do that for you why should I bother to continue to try to help you?


So far you have failed to properly support any of your claims and all that you can come up with are excuses for not accepting the scientific work that has been done.

I have provided short definition for specifiec complexity multiple times, and you failed to understand the concept, I linked an article that explains the concept in more detail, and you don’t what to reed it…..honestly you are not willing to at least try to understand the concept of specified complexity.

I don’t need a peer reviewed source to define what I mean by specified complexity. All I need is a source that explains the concept.

I am not changing the goal post, since the very first page, I have been saying that for the sake of this thread I am granting that all aminoacids can formed naturally.

By your logic, YECs claim that the earth was created 6,000 years ago. Prove that The Earth doesn’t exist. And the statement would be falsified.

 

[Subduction Zone]

I have provided short definition for specifiec complexity multiple times, and you failed to understand the concept, I linked an article that explains the concept in more detail, and you don’t what to reed it…..honestly you are not willing to at least try to understand the concept of specified complexity.

I don’t need a peer reviewed source to define what I mean by specified complexity. All I need is a source that explains the concept.

I am not changing the goal post, since the very first page, I have been saying that for the sake of this thread I am granting that all aminoacids can formed naturally.

By your logic, YECs claim that the earth was created 6,000 years ago. Prove that The Earth doesn’t exist. And the statement would be falsified.

All of your definitions in the past have been shown to be circular. You won't quote your source because in all likelihood you know that it is circular as well.

And yes, if you want to make a scientific argument a peer reviewed source is extremely useful. You are trying to make a scientific claim. You need science based sources.

 

[gnostic]

Ok so if there is no conclusive evidence for “natural abiogenesis” then it is reasonable to be skeptic about it………….agree?

Of course, you can be skeptical about abiogenesis.

Abiogenesis is still a ongoing hypothesis, because there are several different versions of abiogenesis, which still required more evidences and more data.

Some of abiogenesis have already tested, because amino acid being one of the building blocks to proteins, they, of course,

(A) can occur naturally and/or can be found in nature (eg discovered in Murchison meteorite, 1969),

and (B) experiments can be done in the lab, trying to replicate certain conditions where amino acids can form from some ingredients that would and could develop amino acids (eg the Miller-Urey 1952; other types of experiments followed in the decades that followed).​

Abiogenesis may not be Scientific Theory now, but it is clear that there have some progress being made.

From the point of view of naturalism, Gaps are getting bigger as scientific knowledge progresses, for example you mention RNA, the RNA world hypothesis is becoming less and less plausible as scientific knowledge advances.

All the evidence that we have indicates that abiogeneis cant happen naturally, it really seems as if natural laws are consipiring to make abiogenesis look stupid, for example you need proteins made out of 100% left handed (LH) amonacids, (low entropy) but all the evidence that we have shows that nature tends to produce a mixture of 50% LH and 50% RH, this is one of docens of similar problems, where abiogenesis requires “X” and nature tends to produce “Y”.

What evidence would prove that natural abiogenesis is wrong? Naturalists can’t answer this question because there world view is unfalsifiable.

Wow.

You still don’t understand the concept of falsification.

The fact that have already performed a number of different experiments, since the first one in 1952, it already showed that the abiogenesis is falsifiable.

To recap, the definition of falsifiability is that any statement where you find (discover) testable evidences for abiogenesis or where you can perform controlled experiments in lab environment, would count the abiogenesis being falsifiable.

The question to abiogenesis “being falsifiable” or “not being falsifiable”, is no longer in question. Abiogenesis is falsifiable. What it isn’t, it isn’t scientific theory.

As I said earlier, abiogenesis is an “ongoing hypothesis”, hence not scientific theory. Biochemists and biologists are still testings, still performing experiments, and still gathering evidences, and still trying to work out which of different versions need further investigation and further testings.

The fact that more than one experiment have been performed, already concluded that abiogenesis is falsifiable. What it needs is do some experiments or to find more evidences, evidences and experiments that can potentially settled which road to abiogenesis is conclusive.

Science is a slow.

It took millennia before Newton discovered one of the forces of nature, so Newton is one of the pioneers to theory of gravity and gravitational force, but it isn’t a complete theory. It wasn’t until another couple of centuries have passed, that the theory of gravity, got a serious upgrade, by Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

General Relativity didn’t make Newtonian theory obsolete, but GR does help understand how gravity worked in space, particularly of more distant objects (objects, like more distant galaxies and distant stars), and it show how gravity can affect space and time, spacetime.

And still even with addition of Einstein’s GR, we are still working on new ways to study and investigate gravity, more specifically, how gravity affect quantum particles, hence the quantum gravitation, which is still theoretical.

Gravity is an ongoing scientific theory that have been going on for centuries, and we are still working on the details.

Hence, science is slow progress.

Evolution is also a work in progress type of science, where biology and related fields are still working on the theory, and it has been going on for a century and a half.

Believe or not, but evolution is a more solid scientific theory than the theory of gravity. There are far more evidences that verified and validated evolution than there are for gravity.

And yet evolution is still being investigated, and each newer evidence help biologists to understand more about biology.

That what science progress is about. Slow, progressive and methodical.

I think your problem as a creationist is that you got wrong idea that science must have all the answer from the get go. Newton didn’t have all the answers about gravity. Neither did Darwin with evolution. Nor did Lemaître with the expanding universe model, which is more commonly known as the Big Bang theory.

So you can’t expect biochemists to have all the answers, from the get go.

 

[Polymath257]

Ok so if there is no conclusive evidence for “natural abiogenesis” then it is reasonable to be skeptic about it………….agree?

Sure. it is quite reasonable to be skeptical about the mechanisms.

From the point of view of naturalism, Gaps are getting bigger as scientific knowledge progresses, for example you mention RNA, the RNA world hypothesis is becoming less and less plausible as scientific knowledge advances.

Hmm...everything I have seen points exactly in the opposite direction: making the RNA world hypothesis *more* likely.

All the evidence that we have indicates that abiogeneis cant happen naturally, it really seems as if natural laws are consipiring to make abiogenesis look stupid, for example you need proteins made out of 100% left handed (LH) amonacids, (low entropy) but all the evidence that we have shows that nature tends to produce a mixture of 50% LH and 50% RH, this is one of docens of similar problems, where abiogenesis requires “X” and nature tends to produce “Y”.

Except, of course, for strands that form in the presence of certain types of clay (which are chiral).

What evidence would prove that natural abiogenesis is wrong? Naturalists can’t answer this question because there world view is unfalsifiable.

Well, any number of purported roadblocks to abiogenesis have been proposed and shown to be invalid. This goes back to the production of organic compounds non-biologically, to the formation of amino acids, to the production of polymers, to the formation of double walled vesicles, to the formation of RNA,etc, etc, etc. Any one of these could have falsified the whole, but instead they have shown to not be nearly the obstacles that were suggested.

Well, a first thing required to show that abiogenesis is invalid would be to show *anything* that isn't from a natural source.

 

[Dan From Smithville]

Again, I offer you every species on Earth today--show the adaptations that are currently allowing speciation between families or kinds.

Do you mean the taxonomic category of "family" and what do you mean by kinds?

There are examples of change in populations and speciation. The evolution of a nylon digestion in bacteria would be an example of change at the population level and, considering the state of bacterial taxonomy, this might even qualify as a speciation-level event. The evolutionary radiation of the cichlid species flock found in Lake Victoria in Africa is a more recent speciation event that includes the evolution of entirely new genera. This occurred within the last 15,000 years and is considered and example of one of the fastest radiation/speciation events yet recorded. That is over 500 species of cichlids from a small number of original species for the period.

Then there is the change over time observed in the fossil record and these changes are visible. The examples are numerous and include a number of well known and extant vertebrate lines including horses and whales.

Other examples that come to mind, are evolution and speciation by hybridization in goat's beard (Tragopogon) and by similiar means in the grey tree frog, Hyla chrysoscelis evolving by ploidy into H. versicolor with both species extant and often with overlapping ranges.

These are just examples off the top of my head. You could, of course, wave your hand and declare them null, since the daughter species are still fish, or frogs or flowers, but this would be disingenuous as they are examples of evolution per the theory.

Demanding examples of changes at the family level is more or less a straw man argument against evolution based on either a purposeful misunderstanding or a naive understanding of the evolution of life and the family concept in taxonomy.

 

[Dan From Smithville]

Such change is invisible in fossil systems. The analogy is a short book and a long book by two different authors and saying one book evolved to another.

Not a very good analogy, given that books are artificial constructs that do not reproduce. Upon studying the books, their content, style, the materials they were made from, where they were found and their ages, it could be determined with a high probability of certainty that the books were by two different authors. I am uncertain how the length of the books is relevant to determining authorship, unless one author was noted for only producing short works and the other was not.

Fossils are not just scanned superficially and declared similar based on the subjective opinion that they "sure look similar" by the person caring out the observations. Fossils are described based on their source, geological position, dating, geographical location, shape, size and other quantifiable characters and these are compared and contrasted with the same characters found in other fossils. Changes are observed and are not a hidden aspect of the fossil record that cannot really be seen. Your claim is incorrect. When viewed as a whole, series of fossils reveal transitions that often jump out rather vividly.

 

[exchemist]

Ok so if there is no conclusive evidence for “natural abiogenesis” then it is reasonable to be skeptic about it………….agree?

From the point of view of naturalism, Gaps are getting bigger as scientific knowledge progresses, for example you mention RNA, the RNA world hypothesis is becoming less and less plausible as scientific knowledge advances.

All the evidence that we have indicates that abiogeneis cant happen naturally, it really seems as if natural laws are consipiring to make abiogenesis look stupid, for example you need proteins made out of 100% left handed (LH) amonacids, (low entropy) but all the evidence that we have shows that nature tends to produce a mixture of 50% LH and 50% RH, this is one of docens of similar problems, where abiogenesis requires “X” and nature tends to produce “Y”.

What evidence would prove that natural abiogenesis is wrong? Naturalists can’t answer this question because there world view is unfalsifiable.

You are making a category error.

Natural abiogenesis is not a theory. Not being a theory, it makes no predictions and is hence not open to the normal avenues of falsifiability.

Looking for explanations in terms of natural processes is what science does. It is its working method. To do anything else would not be doing science.

 

[Subduction Zone]

You are making a category error.

Natural abiogenesis is not a theory. Not being a theory, it makes no predictions and is hence not open to the normal avenues of falsifiability.

Looking for explanations in terms of natural processes is what science does. It is its working method. To do anything else would not be doing science.

There have been and still are several hypotheses of abiogenesis. Some have been confirmed. That does not mean "proven", they merely have been tested and shown to possibly work. Some hypotheses did not work out and were dropped. The concept is still in the hypothetical stage. So there is no overarching theory as you pointed out. Individual hypotheses can be shown to be wrong but one cannot refute all of aboigenesis by refuting one particular hypothesis.


Just filling out your answer a bit in hopes that @leroy understands it.

 

[exchemist]

There have been and still are several hypotheses of abiogenesis. Some have been confirmed. That does not mean "proven", they merely have been tested and shown to possibly work. Some hypotheses did not work out and were dropped. The concept is still in the hypothetical stage. So there is no overarching theory as you pointed out. Individual hypotheses can be shown to be wrong but one cannot refute all of aboigenesis by refuting one particular hypothesis.


Just filling out your answer a bit in hopes that @leroy understands it.

Indeed. There are testable hypotheses for a number of individual pieces of the jigsaw, sure. But the term "natural abiogenesis" is no more than a label for the usual axiomatic postulate of all science, viz. that the explanations of natural phenomena are to be found in nature, if you look hard enough.

By the way, you may be closer to this than I am: Is it possible yet to map out a series of steps to give any idea of the order in which the various bits and piece may have come together? I had thought we still had little idea whether, say, bi-lipid membranes appeared before peptide synthesis, or whether metabolic reaction systems came before the start of replicating structures.

 

[leroy]

There have been and still are several hypotheses of abiogenesis. Some have been confirmed. That does not mean "proven", they merely have been tested and shown to possibly work. Some hypotheses did not work out and were dropped. The concept is still in the hypothetical stage. So there is no overarching theory as you pointed out. Individual hypotheses can be shown to be wrong but one cannot refute all of aboigenesis by refuting one particular hypothesis.


Just filling out your answer a bit in hopes that @leroy understands it.

Define “possible work” what exactly do you mean by that.

Then can you provide an example of a single hypothesis that has been proven to “possible work”


My claim is that the statement “life had a natural origin” is unfalsifiable ……….do we agree on this point?

 

[leroy]

You are making a category error.

Natural abiogenesis is not a theory. Not being a theory, it makes no predictions and is hence not open to the normal avenues of falsifiability.

Looking for explanations in terms of natural processes is what science does. It is its working method. To do anything else would not be doing science.

Grate don’t call it “theory”

How can the statement “life had a natural origin” be falsified?

 

[leroy]

All of your definitions in the past have been shown to be circular. You won't quote your source because in all likelihood you know that it is circular as well.

And yes, if you want to make a scientific argument a peer reviewed source is extremely useful. You are trying to make a scientific claim. You need science based sources.

Your strawman understanding of the definitions, might be circular, I already answered to your concerns and explained to you what I meant by “independent of the laws of nature”

Something is complex if it has many parts (many units)

Something is specified if it is organized in an independent pattern, and where the laws of nature allow for many possible configurations but only 1 (or few) configurations would produce such pattern.

You won't quote your source because in all likelihood you know that it is circular as well.

sure I can quote it

Life is both complex and specified. The basic intuition here is straightforward. A single letter of the alphabet is specified without being complex (i.e., it conforms to an independently given pattern but is simple). A long sequence of random letters is complex without being specified (i.e., it requires a complicated instruction-set to characterize but conforms to no independently given pattern). A Shakespearean sonnet is both complex and specified.

Explaining Specified Complexity | Metanexus

Why is the definition circular? support your assertion.

 

[exchemist]

Grate don’t call it “theory”

How can the statement “life had a natural origin” be falsified?

(I presume "grate" is just the Molesworth spelling of "great".)

What you are asking, in effect, is: "How could the scientific method of investigating the natural world be shown to be inadequate for studying the origin of life?". My answer is that I really have no idea.

Consider: what could unambiguous evidence of a miracle look like? I suppose it would have to be a well-corroborated and documented instance, in which many of what we call the "laws of nature" were simultaneously broken, in such a capricious way that the phenomenon could not be ascribed to some hitherto unknown natural principle. Obviously something like a rerun of the Marriage at Cana would qualify, but in the context of the development of life, I can't begin to imagine what such a thing would look like.

 

[Polymath257]

Your strawman understanding of the definitions, might be circular, I already answered to your concerns and explained to you what I meant by “independent of the laws of nature”

Something is complex if it has many parts (many units)

Something is specified if it is organized in an independent pattern, and where the laws of nature allow for many possible configurations but only 1 (or few) configurations would produce such pattern.

sure I can quote it
Explaining Specified Complexity | Metanexus

Why is the definition circular? support your assertion.

What about a situation where initially it looks like there are many different possibilities, but after analysis, the actual process only allows a few of them? Are the results specified or not? By your definition, they would be *if* you use the initial understanding, but not if you use the later understanding.

This is often the case in scientific investigations: it initially looks like something quite strange is going on, but later it is found to be quite ordinary.

For example, it is easy enough to estimate the total number of possible configurations possible for a medium length protein (single chain). It is also possible to calculate how long it would take for a protein to fold if all those configurations were to be tested randomly. But, in actual practice, proteins fold much, much faster than that because the random configurations are not all tested (not even close). Is this specified or not? Once we understand the environment in which folding occurs, the 'specified' nature of the end result vanishes.

 

[exchemist]

Define “possible work” what exactly do you mean by that.

Then can you provide an example of a single hypothesis that has been proven to “possible work”


My claim is that the statement “life had a natural origin” is unfalsifiable ……….do we agree on this point?

Oh some of us were discussing an example of that yesterday. There was a hypothesis that an inorganic precursor of ATP might have been be able to catalyse the formation of peptides (i.e. the process by which proteins are built up), without the need for the strongly acidic or basic conditions that are typically needed in the lab to catalyse this condensation reaction (between an amine group and a carboxylic acid group, eliminating water, to form an amide link). An experiment has been run in which inorganic metatriphosphate actually does allow two amino acids to link in just this way, at pH values not far from neutral. ATP-> ADP conversion, as you may know, is the universal source of energy for driving cellular biochemical reactions (the purpose of metabolism, in effect, is to drive conversion of low energy ADP to high energy ATP, which is then turned back to ADP as it drives the biochemical processes in the cell.)

So this shows the hypothesis works: there could easily have been an inorganic precursor to the ATP-> ADP cycle that could perform one of the critical functions.

The discussion was on this thread, starting with post 287:
Scientific advances in abiogenesis