Life From Dirt?

[Brian2]

Don't the religious take it as an article of faith that everything must have a beginning and a cause? At least that's what they assert as a major premise in their arguments against evolution.
God as uncaused cause is a special pleading.

I would think that a first cause would be a special case in that regard.

 

[Brian2]

How can faith be a reasoned position? This is an oxymoron.
'Not self-assembling without a designer' is not based on reasoning.
A designer has not shown us he exists, nor is there any credible evidence that he's spoken to us or let us know what's happening or why. This is an assertion of faith, not reason or evidence.

If I see that all life that we see can be demonstrated to have come from other life then scientifically the first life on earth came from other life.
The assumption is to say that the first life on earth did not come from no pre existing life.
This life includes consciousness and so either life is in the material universe and this includes consciousness or a conscious, pre existing living being created us.
"Pre existing" because if not pre existing then life and consciousness came from nothing, and that goes against the science we know.
So I chose that a conscious, pre-existing being created us and if life is in the material universe then this being put it there.
That the universe is this pre existing living being, and the philosophy that goes with it does not seem to be an idea that takes this being seriously or that is possible given that time had to have a beginning.
I think that the Bible is God's revelation to us.

 

[Heyo]

Is it a reasoned position that God/s do not exist or is that an assumption?

That would also be an assumption. Neither of both are in evidence or proven. In fact both would be nonsensical statements as long as "god" is undefined. Can you tell me whether dofjkfh exists or doesn't exist?

 

[Valjean]

If I see that all life that we see can be demonstrated to have come from other life then scientifically the first life on earth came from other life.
The assumption is to say that the first life on earth did not come from no pre existing life.
This life includes consciousness and so either life is in the material universe and this includes consciousness or a conscious, pre existing living being created us.

And what created the conscious, pre-existing being....?

Yes, this is the argument I often hear from creationists. It seems superficially reasonable, but what is the proposed alternative -- magic poofing, by an invisible entity, invented just for the job? That seems even less likely.

The scientific viewpoint is that there is no, clear, life vs non-life division. Life developed, through ordinary chemistry we can replicate in a jar on the kitchen table, as a spectrum of increasingly lifelike characteristics. At what point we declare a microbe "alive" is arbitrary, just as the point where Latin became Spanish is arbitrary.

We know Earth was originally lifeless. Now there is life, so abiogenesis occurred. The only question is one of mechanism vs magic. One is explainable and observable, the other unexplainable and never observed. Which seems more likely?

"Pre existing" because if not pre existing then life and consciousness came from nothing, and that goes against the science we know.
So I chose that a conscious, pre-existing being created us and if life is in the material universe then this being put it there.
That the universe is this pre existing living being, and the philosophy that goes with it does not seem to be an idea that takes this being seriously or that is possible given that time had to have a beginning.
I think that the Bible is God's revelation to us.

True, consciousness is not understood. We do not know what it is. It appears to be an emergent property of.... something. At this point, till we accumulate more knowledge about it, we can only speculate.

Not understood/explained ≠ God.

 

[Valjean]

That would also be an assumption. Neither of both are in evidence or proven. In fact both would be nonsensical statements as long as "god" is undefined. Can you tell me whether dofjkfh exists or doesn't exist?

An assumption derived reasonably, inasmuch as belief in something without need or evidence is not reasonable.

 

[Polymath257]

Is it a reasoned position that God/s do not exist or is that an assumption?

It's the reasoned position that there has been no good definition of the term 'God' and no good argument so far of the existence.

It is also a reasoned position do not believe until there is good reason to believe.

 

[Polymath257]

I would think that a first cause would be a special case in that regard.

But to show there is a first cause requires special pleading. And that is the difficulty.

Also, why just one uncaused cause? Why not many? Why not an infinite regress of causes? Too many alternatives that are much more likely.

And, once you demonstrate a first cause (unlikely), how do you show it has consciousness? How do you show it has motivation and a plan? Most causes don't.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

It's the reasoned position that there has been no good definition of the term 'God' and no good argument so far of the existence.

It is also a reasoned position do not believe until there is good reason to believe.

And add that it is unknown, if you want to be complete.

 

[Jainarayan]

" For this inflation to have taken place, the Universe at the time of the Big Bang must have been filled with an unstable form of energy whose nature is not yet known. "

Thanks. Now I can sleep.

 

[Jainarayan]

Yes, that is one of the popular misconceptions. In E=m(B#)² [arf arf] , "m" does not stand for "matter" but for "rest mass", or just "mass". Mass is not a thing either. Like energy, it is a property of something. You can't have a jug of mass. You can have a jug of something that has mass - as one of its properties.

Matter is the term we give to entities that have a rest mass. When people loosely talk of matter being created from "energy" they don't mean that. They mean matter can be created from radiation and vice versa, for instance in pair production or its opposite, the annihilation of particles and antiparticles. Radiation is not energy: it has energy, among its many properties (others being frequency, wavelength, speed, amplitude, momentum, spin, polarisation.....)

The entity, the physical system, that is converted to another entity, matter, here is radiation: radiation<->matter. The energy is conserved in this process. Radiation energy (E=hν) becomes rest mass energy (E=mc²).

People often use nuclear fission ans an example of proof of E=mc², and so it is. The total mass of the split up nuclei after fission is less than that of the nucleus before it splits. The difference is in the energy of the radiation (γ-rays) plus the kinetic energy of the particles and daughter nuclei that are emitted in the fission process. So energy is again conserved: some of the rest mass energy has gone into radiation energy and kinetic energy.

This is all really fascinating, now, and much more complex than what How The Universe Works, for example, tries to explain us.

 

[exchemist]

This is all really fascinating, now, and much more complex than what How The Universe Works, for example, tries to explain us.

Well I'm probably giving more details than are strictly necessary. But the key point I think is that energy is conserved, so it can't be right to say it is turned into something else. Energy changes form, that's all, in this case from radiation energy to rest mass energy.

Also useful I think to keep in mind the distinction between entities and attributes, terminology I have shamelessly stolen from data modelling. Energy and momentum are attributes of entities, as are electric charge, mass etc. Energy and momentum are specially useful because these calculated quantities obey conservation laws. So when you look at a physical process, the total has to be the same at the end as it was at the beginning, which can be very helpful in analysing what happens.

 

[Jainarayan]

Well I'm probably giving more details than are strictly necessary. But the key point I think is that energy is conserved, so it can't be right to say it is turned into something else. Energy changes form, that's all, in this case from radiation energy to rest mass energy.

Also useful I think to keep in mind the distinction between entities and attributes, terminology I have shamelessly stolen from data modelling. Energy and momentum are attributes of entities, as are electric charge, mass etc. Energy and momentum are specially useful because these calculated quantities obey conservation laws. So when you look at a physical process, the total has to be the same at the end as it was at the beginning, which can be very helpful in analysing what happens.

No, that all sounds good and makes sense. I think there's another common misconception about energy turning into something else. I always heard about conservation of energy and changing form but like many others I always thought they were the same thing, just using different terminology. I'm also guilty of the "changing into something else" misconception, especially when I use the example matter being formed from super- and hyper-nova explosions. It makes it sound like the energy gels or congeals into gold or platinum, for example. I admit I don't know the mechanism, but I'm sure now that I've been wrong in my understanding. It's much the same as the misconception that the "energy of the Big Bang" ( I use quotes because now I think that is wrong, if I understand correctly) somehow became, congealed, gelled, coalesced, etc. into matter, i.e. subatomic particles then those into atoms of hydrogen, then helium and so on. No doubt the whole thing has been dumbed-down for us.

Maybe as a theist layperson I should just stick with what the Rig Veda says. At least it doesn't say "God did it".

There was neither non-existence nor existence then;
Neither the realm of space, nor the sky which is beyond;
What stirred? Where? ...

Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it?
Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation?
The Gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe.
Who then knows whence it has arisen?

Whether God's will created it, or whether He was mute;
Perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not;

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Why does a God have to have begin?

Extrapolate the implications of your comment. By the same thinking, why does a godless reality have to begin? And if it doesn't, gods are not needed and don't exist unless they evolved into existence from pre-god substance, which we can call naturalistic theogenesis, but why call such things gods?

I start with the reasoned position that God exists, a faith, no proof.

Any position is either soundly reasoned or not, and all of the latter is believed by faith if believed. If you are doing any kind of "reasoning," you're using your own custom rules for reasoning, not the standard set of laws and fallacies. There is no sound argument that concludes, "Therefore, God"

If I see that all life that we see can be demonstrated to have come from other life then scientifically the first life on earth came from other life.

The first life could not have come from other life, or it wouldn't be first. Likewise with the first consciousness.

Is it a reasoned position that God/s do not exist or is that an assumption?

Either position would be an unsound conclusion. You can call either belief an assumption. The only sound position possible is agnostic atheism.

So I have more answers and more sensible answers than "it assembled itself" "unconscious matter became conscious" "the universe poofed into existence all by itself" and that comes down to "magic is real with no Gods and because science says so but not real if there is a God involved"

What you have are not what I would call answers, which need to be demonstrably correct claims. What you have are unfalsifiable claims, which have no explanatory or predictive power.

So it is not a big deal to say that God created everything from nothing.

It's an example of an unfalsifiable claim, meaning that there can be no evidence for (or against) it. It is also a violation of Occam's principle of parsimony, since no god is known to exist or to be needed to create anything.

How something knows to assemble itself to a functioning thing is a hard thing.

"Knowing" implies consciousness to me. Non-life is assembled into life by unconscious mechanisms passively obeying the four forces acting on assorted arrangements of quarks and leptons.

 

[Jimmy]

"...Beginning to?" Haven't you been convinced of it all along?
"Through abiogenisis?" Just to clarify, abiogenesis is not a particular mechanism, it's just what we call the emergence of life from non-living matter.
"God theory?" There is no God theory. "Gdddidit" is not a theory, it's not even a mechanism. It's an assertion of agency and magic, based on no objective evidence whatsoever.

Goddidit is abiogenesis by magic, as opposed to chemistry.

Not nit picky, it's the very heart of the dispute. Dismiss his point and you're dodging the issue again.
So don't be so simplistic. Confront the issue. Use objective facts, reason and logic.

Beginning to? This thread is written as If I believed that time actually existed. Haha

 

[Polymath257]

If I see that all life that we see can be demonstrated to have come from other life then scientifically the first life on earth came from other life.

All life is a collection of chemical reactions, so it is reasonable to think that chemistry can produce life. There is no additional 'life force' above chemistry. That is what the science shows.

The assumption is to say that the first life on earth did not come from no pre existing life.

But did that pre-existing life produce life on Earth through the physical process of reproduction? If you want to claim that all life comes from life because of the evidence, then you need to take the next step and note that all life comes from previous life by the processes of physical reproduction. Life doesn't produce new life by snapping its fingers.

This life includes consciousness and so either life is in the material universe and this includes consciousness or a conscious, pre existing living being created us.

Yes, all consciousness we know of is associated with complex processes in matter. So far, it is associated with the neural networks in brains. To hypothesize some other form of consciousness is to go way beyond what the evidence supports.

"Pre existing" because if not pre existing then life and consciousness came from nothing, and that goes against the science we know.

Nobody says that life came from nothing. The chemical processes of life came from other chemical processes. The matter for life existed before the Earth formed. And that is supported by the science we know.

So I chose that a conscious, pre-existing being created us and if life is in the material universe then this being put it there.

You chose, but that was a choice that goes well beyond the evidence and beyond the confines of 'reasonable'. it is a matter of faith, not of reason.

That the universe is this pre existing living being, and the philosophy that goes with it does not seem to be an idea that takes this being seriously or that is possible given that time had to have a beginning.
I think that the Bible is God's revelation to us.

Many different things are 'logically possible' that reason would not take seriously.Time having a beginning actually precludes a pre-existing entity (the prefix 'pre' implies an earlier time).

 

[exchemist]

No, that all sounds good and makes sense. I think there's another common misconception about energy turning into something else. I always heard about conservation of energy and changing form but like many others I always thought they were the same thing, just using different terminology. I'm also guilty of the "changing into something else" misconception, especially when I use the example matter being formed from super- and hyper-nova explosions. It makes it sound like the energy gels or congeals into gold or platinum, for example. I admit I don't know the mechanism, but I'm sure now that I've been wrong in my understanding. It's much the same as the misconception that the "energy of the Big Bang" ( I use quotes because now I think that is wrong, if I understand correctly) somehow became, congealed, gelled, coalesced, etc. into matter, i.e. subatomic particles then those into atoms of hydrogen, then helium and so on. No doubt the whole thing has been dumbed-down for us.

Maybe as a theist layperson I should just stick with what the Rig Veda says. At least it doesn't say "God did it".

There was neither non-existence nor existence then;
Neither the realm of space, nor the sky which is beyond;
What stirred? Where? ...

Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it?
Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation?
The Gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe.
Who then knows whence it has arisen?

Whether God's will created it, or whether He was mute;
Perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not;

You raise an interesting point about the way the Big Bang theory is frequently portrayed. A lot of descriptions of that seem to talk loosely about "energy" at the start, without saying the energy of what. I suspect the problem is that physics eventually breaks down if one extrapolates far enough back, so our notions of subatomic particles, radiation and fields become indistinct. Our ability to calculate energy and extrapolate that probably exceeds our ability to define what that energy was the energy of!

As for supernovae I think that's far more straightforward. The physics - or cosmology - problem is to explain how elements beyond iron in the Periodic Table came to be produced. As iron cobalt and nickel have the most stable nuclei of all the elements, the fusion that goes on in stars would be expected eventually to generate the elements up to them but no further.

So, how to explain how heavier nuclei were produced? There are reasons to think that supernovae create a very high neutron flux. This can lead to nuclei such as iron picking up a lot of extra neutrons through the bombardment they experience, and that some of these neutrons turn into protons, by emitting β-particles (fast-moving electrons) before these highly unstable, neutron-rich nuclei have time to disintegrate again. So that way, heavier elements are produced even though they are less intrinsically stable than iron, as shown by the stability curve above.

By the way, it is the fact uranium is less stable than lighter elements that allows us to exploit its higher energy in nuclear power stations. You break it up, generating daughter nuclei that are more stable (further to the left, towards iron, Fe, on the curve), and the surplus energy is available to raise steam for a turbine.

 

[Polymath257]

You're the one who said negative energy plus positive energy equals zero energy.
I think it was Paul Davies that said that nothing means absolutely nothing, except the laws of physics.
What does current science say happened?

There is no consensus and won't likely be until there is more and better evidence.

 

[Brian2]

That would also be an assumption. Neither of both are in evidence or proven. In fact both would be nonsensical statements as long as "god" is undefined. Can you tell me whether dofjkfh exists or doesn't exist?

I cannot say whether dofjkfh exists or not if dofjkfh is meant to be a being. I can say dofjkfh exists as a word on a computer screen.
When it comes to God/s we don't have to know much about them but can define them in our own particular way (eg the supreme being who was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the Father of Jesus), and we don't need to prove they exist in order to believe they exist or to see evidence they exist, even if it is evidence that cannot be studied by science.

 

[Brian2]

And what created the conscious, pre-existing being....?

If something created the first cause then it was not the first cause.

Yes, this is the argument I often hear from creationists. It seems superficially reasonable, but what is the proposed alternative -- magic poofing, by an invisible entity, invented just for the job? That seems even less likely.

The first cause, causing other things to exist, through a mechanism that we do not know, sounds more reasonable than things just coming into existence from nothing and without a cause. That magical coming into existence usually seems to be associated with the pre existence of something else however which becomes the alternative first cause when God is rejected.

The scientific viewpoint is that there is no, clear, life vs non-life division. Life developed, through ordinary chemistry we can replicate in a jar on the kitchen table, as a spectrum of increasingly lifelike characteristics. At what point we declare a microbe "alive" is arbitrary, just as the point where Latin became Spanish is arbitrary.

We know Earth was originally lifeless. Now there is life, so abiogenesis occurred. The only question is one of mechanism vs magic. One is explainable and observable, the other unexplainable and never observed. Which seems more likely?

The scientific view point assumes the existence only of those things that it can test.
Assuming that and then defining life accordingly is not a proof that the definition is true.
Those who define life in other ways can see a different nature in those things that are alive compared to a pile of chemicals,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, especially when those things are conscious.
We define this as a different nature to just chemicals and so the chemicals need something special beyond the material to give the material life.

True, consciousness is not understood. We do not know what it is. It appears to be an emergent property of.... something. At this point, till we accumulate more knowledge about it, we can only speculate.

Not understood/explained ≠ God.

Nevertheless we can believe in the existence of things that are not understood or explained.

 

[Brian2]

It's the reasoned position that there has been no good definition of the term 'God' and no good argument so far of the existence.

It is also a reasoned position do not believe until there is good reason to believe.

Yes they are subjective reasoned positions.