Life From Dirt?

[Brian2]

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.

Maybe there are many first causes. Why not.
I wonder if that takes away the label of "first cause".
And infinite regress of causes is not a first cause and time cannot have regressed infinitely or we would not be here yet,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, or to put it another way, an infinite number of regressions would mean that we are not at the infiniteth number yet.

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.

True, but that is accepting the first cause idea and trying to define the cause, whether it is alive and conscious or dead like a rock.
A first cause with no motivation or plan is what science proposes. An accident from a pre existing something that can exist outside time, which is not infinite into the past. Maybe the laws of physics might fit that definition, but that is sort of getting into the realm of the non material, the spiritual.

 

[Heyo]

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),

Sure.

and we don't need to prove they exist in order to believe they exist

You have a right to believe what you want - even when it's wrong.

or to see evidence they exist, even if it is evidence that cannot be studied by science.

You have a right to your own opinion but you don't have a right to your own facts.
When you state a belief, I won't argue that uninvited but if you claim a fact - like the existence of a "life force" - I'll call you out on it.
J. K. Rowling doesn't claim Harry Potter to be real. David Icke does claim lizard people are real.
Treat the Bible like a Harry Potter book and you're fine. Treat it like The Biggest Secret and you set yourself up for inquiry and ridicule.

 

[Polymath257]

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.

But to believe they exist without good evidence is not to be reasonable. And to see evidence that science cannot study is self-delusion or simply misunderstanding the nature of evidence.

 

[Polymath257]

Maybe there are many first causes. Why not.
I wonder if that takes away the label of "first cause".
And infinite regress of causes is not a first cause and time cannot have regressed infinitely or we would not be here yet,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, or to put it another way, an infinite number of regressions would mean that we are not at the infiniteth number yet.

And that is a (common) misunderstanding of an infinite regress. The time difference between any two points is finite and yet the collection of previous points is infinite.

True, but that is accepting the first cause idea and trying to define the cause, whether it is alive and conscious or dead like a rock.

To even have a first cause negates the idea that everything requires a cause. I find it more reasonable to acknowledge that there are events that are uncaused.

A first cause with no motivation or plan is what science proposes. An accident from a pre existing something that can exist outside time, which is not infinite into the past. Maybe the laws of physics might fit that definition, but that is sort of getting into the realm of the non material, the spiritual.

I don't see a need to postulate a 'spiritual'.

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

Which shows the issues with assuming there is a first cause.

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.

I disagree. That first cause would have to come into existence without a cause, right? So *something* either comes into existence without a cause or exists for an infinite amount of time (which produces the problem of an infinite regress below).

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.

To have a 'creator of the universe' that is also 'conscious' requires the assumption of a LOT more than that there was simply something uncaused.

The scientific view point assumes the existence only of those things that it can test.

Of course. That is sort of how you know something exists.

Assuming that and then defining life accordingly is not a proof that the definition is true.

Well, of course. You also need to test to see if the definition is workable in practice.

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.

Except that nothing beyond the chemical has ever been found in spite of people making that hypothesis many times. From the 'spirits' of ancient guesswork, to the 'organic' chemicals of life as opposed to the 'inorganic' chemicals of non-life, to the 'elan vitale' of the 19th century, etc, the assumption that *something* extra is required for life has always been popular. But it has never been demonstrated. And, in fact, ALL those properties that were supposed to be so special for life have turned out to be simple ordinary chemistry applied to carbon compounds.

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

And, if there is good evidence of such things (like, say, dark matter), that can be reasonable. But in the absence of such evidence, it isn't.

 

[Brian2]

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?

A first cause, by definition, did not begin unless it popped into being without a cause,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, like the universe is supposed to have done.

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"

There are sound arguments which conclude "Therefore belief in God is more sensible than not believing in God".

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

That is true, but I said "first life on earth".

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

If by "agnostic" you mean "unknowable", that is not a sound position.
If you mean "unknown" that is better, but we can also have agnostic theism.
Unknown but believed until disproven.

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.

My claims unfalsifiable, as are claims that "it assembled itself" "unconscious matter became conscious" "the universe poofed into existence all by itself".
You may say that you don't claim those things, that you just say you don't know.
That sounds like an unfalsifiable claim with the evidence pointing to you being someone who believes positively that God/s do not exist. But I'm prepared to believe that you have decided to sit on the fence until pushed either way and declare a belief either way.

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.

You completely missed the point. But that is OK and it is fine for you to believe that everything popped into existence from nothing if you want to claim beliefs now.
So are you saying that belief in "magic is real with no Gods and because science says so but not real if there is a God involved" ?

"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.

It sounds like the basic building blocks of nature lead inexorably to life................... under the right conditions.

 

[Brian2]

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.

You sound like you are saying that science can tell us that "spirit" and "God" is not real. But the reality is that this is stepping beyond what science can do.
It is not that science shows that all life is a collection of chemical reaction. That is the naturalistic methodology at work saying that all science can do is look at and study the physical, and it has turned, for some, into the idea that science has shown that spirit does not exist.

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.

All I have to do is notice that life goes from one or two bodies to others through the life in sperm and egg or however the reproduction happened.

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.

I don't hypothesise in a scientific way. If I were a scientist I would be going beyond what the scientific evidence supports,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, but if I were a scientist and said that the science of matter shows that the spirit does not exist, I would be going beyond what science is capable of.

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.

Yes the material universe came first and then life after that.

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.

Of course, it is a choice of faith and not of scientific evidence. It steps beyond what science does or can tell 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).

When you get to the beginning of time or before that, then language gets in the way, but that does not take away the possibility of a pre existing being (pardon the language) who created and gave/gives life.

 

[YoursTrue]

Sure.

You have a right to believe what you want - even when it's wrong.

And so do you.

 

[YoursTrue]

And that is a (common) misunderstanding of an infinite regress. The time difference between any two points is finite and yet the collection of previous points is infinite.

To even have a first cause negates the idea that everything requires a cause. I find it more reasonable to acknowledge that there are events that are uncaused.

I don't see a need to postulate a 'spiritual'.

Which shows the issues with assuming there is a first cause.

I disagree. That first cause would have to come into existence without a cause, right? So *something* either comes into existence without a cause or exists for an infinite amount of time (which produces the problem of an infinite regress below).

To have a 'creator of the universe' that is also 'conscious' requires the assumption of a LOT more than that there was simply something uncaused.

Of course. That is sort of how you know something exists.

Well, of course. You also need to test to see if the definition is workable in practice.

Except that nothing beyond the chemical has ever been found in spite of people making that hypothesis many times. From the 'spirits' of ancient guesswork, to the 'organic' chemicals of life as opposed to the 'inorganic' chemicals of non-life, to the 'elan vitale' of the 19th century, etc, the assumption that *something* extra is required for life has always been popular. But it has never been demonstrated. And, in fact, ALL those properties that were supposed to be so special for life have turned out to be simple ordinary chemistry applied to carbon compounds.

And, if there is good evidence of such things (like, say, dark matter), that can be reasonable. But in the absence of such evidence, it isn't.

Look, the atomic bomb was invented incorporating ideas fostered by scientific endeavors and experiments. It does not demonstrate that God exists or does not exist. God did not invent the A-bomb. He permitted men to invent it, though. That's if a person believes in God. Not saying you do or should, that's up to you. But science obviously doesn't prove whether or not God exists.
Did scientists use their previous thoughts, theories and experiments to invent the A-bomb? Surely they did.

 

[Brian2]

But to believe they exist without good evidence is not to be reasonable. And to see evidence that science cannot study is self-delusion or simply misunderstanding the nature of evidence.

So no theists are reasonable and they are all self delusional or misunderstand the nature of evidence, and faith is what you do when you believe something without any evidence. OK.

 

[RestlessSoul]

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.

You think the millions of people who believe in God have no good reason for doing so?

 

[Hockeycowboy]

If one finds abiogenesis too implausible, & that a beginning
for such things is necessary, then the God alternative raises
the question of whence came it / them / those.

The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics already provides an explanation for God’s eternal existence….

“In a closed system, energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It only changes form.”
The universe, encompassing everything, is by definition “a closed system.”
This means that, within this closed system, energy has always existed.
So prior to the BB, energy existed. In the form of the spirit (invisible) entity of God.

 

[Heyo]

You think the millions of people who believe in God have no good reason for doing so?

Yes.

They have an explanation (mostly indoctrination) and some have a reason (makes me feel good). The question is if you consider that a good reason.

 

[RestlessSoul]

Yes.

They have an explanation (mostly indoctrination) and some have a reason (makes me feel good). The question is if you consider that a good reason.

So you are the arbiter of good reason, for all of humanity?

And atheists wonder why they have a reputation for insufferable arrogance. Whereas to the person of faith, this is the pride that cuts man off from God.

 

[ImmortalFlame]

So you are the arbiter of good reason, for all of humanity?

And atheists wonder why they have a reputation for insufferable arrogance. To the person of faith, this is the pride that cuts man off from God.

To be fair, if an atheist DID think that there were good reasons to be a theist, they would be one. Taking up ANY position on anything necessarily requires a degree of assuming that contrary positions are flawed in some way. Also, we're talking about theism: where people regularly state, often from a pulpit to dozens, hundreds or thousands of followers, that they understand and can arbitrate a fundamental, unknowable, supernatural agency behind all of existence that encompasses all that ever is or could be, and often claim to be able to distil this understanding into a fundamental set of rules that everyone should live by.

Arrogance is kind of endemic in this debate. It's just that the arrogance of the religious is more widely accepted.

 

[RestlessSoul]

To be fair, if an atheist DID think that there were good reasons to be a theist, they would be one. Taking up ANY position on anything necessarily requires a degree of assuming that contrary positions are flawed in some way. Also, we're talking about theism: where people regularly state, often from a pulpit to dozens, hundreds or thousands of followers, that they understand and can arbitrate a fundamental, unknowable, supernatural agency behind all of existence that encompasses all that ever is or could be, and often claim to be able to distil this understanding into a fundamental set of rules that everyone should live by.

Arrogance is kind of endemic in this debate. It's just that the arrogance of the religious is more widely accepted.

Yeah, I’m not keen on being lectured to from pulpits, whatever doctrine the lecturer promotes. I assume that most people feel that way, and try to avoid doing it myself if I can. I probably don’t always succeed.

My experience of this forum is that it’s a subset of the atheist contributors who are by far the worst offenders in this regard, but that may very well just be my own perceptions.

And what is a good reason for one person to believe as they do, may not seem so to another.

 

[ImmortalFlame]

Yeah, I’m not keen on being lectured to from pulpits, whatever doctrine the lecturer promotes.

I'm speaking broadly, of course. There's lots of theists who recognise the arrogance of such systems and take steps to minimise it within themselves.

 

[Brian2]

And that is a (common) misunderstanding of an infinite regress. The time difference between any two points is finite and yet the collection of previous points is infinite.

It's hard to know exactly what you are talking about but I have had a discussion with @Audie that might be the same one.
Could you elaborate?

To even have a first cause negates the idea that everything requires a cause. I find it more reasonable to acknowledge that there are events that are uncaused.

I hear that there are causeless events which don't seem to be completely causeless, because they are caused by the environment they happen in, the quantum environment. So for that environment, which seems to have been the environment of the initial universe, I would say that this is what God created first, a chaotic environment, and the applied laws of Physics to it so that the universe ended up as God had planned.

I don't see a need to postulate a 'spiritual'.

To say that the laws of Physics existed seems to be proposing the existence of something that is not phyisical at all, and so is spiritual.

Which shows the issues with assuming there is a first cause.

There are issues with a first cause and issues if you say there was no first cause.
To think that the first cause might need a cause is just a nonsense statement/question imo.

disagree. That first cause would have to come into existence without a cause, right? So *something* either comes into existence without a cause or exists for an infinite amount of time (which produces the problem of an infinite regress below).

If time is associated with the universe and there was no time up till then, then God existed in timelessness.

To have a 'creator of the universe' that is also 'conscious' requires the assumption of a LOT more than that there was simply something uncaused.

Each answer causes more questions.
God is changeless, God knows and does not need to reason things through over time. God is a repository for the laws of physics and the one who can cause the universe and apply the laws.

Of course. That is sort of how you know something exists.

Life and love etc exist and science can only study their effects in a body and brain and actions, the assumption being that those things do not really exist in their own right.

Well, of course. You also need to test to see if the definition is workable in practice.

Workable and being true are not the same thing.

Except that nothing beyond the chemical has ever been found in spite of people making that hypothesis many times. From the 'spirits' of ancient guesswork, to the 'organic' chemicals of life as opposed to the 'inorganic' chemicals of non-life, to the 'elan vitale' of the 19th century, etc, the assumption that *something* extra is required for life has always been popular. But it has never been demonstrated. And, in fact, ALL those properties that were supposed to be so special for life have turned out to be simple ordinary chemistry applied to carbon compounds.

There is a difference between assuming that consciousness is an emergent property of matter and showing that. If a spirit is connected to a material computer brain, how is the distinction to be made?

And, if there is good evidence of such things (like, say, dark matter), that can be reasonable. But in the absence of such evidence, it isn't.

Dark matter is something that is material and has observable physical effects on matter.
If I believe in God and my life is changed because of that, that is effects that cannot studied by science.

 

[Polymath257]

You sound like you are saying that science can tell us that "spirit" and "God" is not real. But the reality is that this is stepping beyond what science can do.

And thereby goes beyond the realm of reason. Either there *is* evidence and science can deal with it, or there is no evidence and it isn't reasonable to believe.

It is not that science shows that all life is a collection of chemical reaction. That is the naturalistic methodology at work saying that all science can do is look at and study the physical, and it has turned, for some, into the idea that science has shown that spirit does not exist.

Wrong. In fact, there have been *scientific* hypotheses that something beyond just chemistry is required for life (the elan vitale). But they have been discounted because chemistry *has* been shown to be enough to explain all phenomena we have actually observed.

Science doesn't require everything to be 'physical'. It just requires everything to be testable.

And nobody has ever found a way to test for 'spirits' in a way that gives consistent results.

All I have to do is notice that life goes from one or two bodies to others through the life in sperm and egg or however the reproduction happened.

Um, I think you need to learn a bit more about this process. Life *continues* through different cells. Those cells divide to reproduce. That is one of the things that *defines* life. But that division is a physical/chemical process and we know most of the chemical steps in that process.

There is NO evidence of life being anything other than a chemical process.

I don't hypothesise in a scientific way. If I were a scientist I would be going beyond what the scientific evidence supports,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, but if I were a scientist and said that the science of matter shows that the spirit does not exist, I would be going beyond what science is capable of.

Nope. Either there is objective evidence or there is not. If there is, then science can deal with it. If there is not, then it is a personal opinion and not a fact.

Yes the material universe came first and then life after that.

Good. So no pre-existing life.

Of course, it is a choice of faith and not of scientific evidence. It steps beyond what science does or can tell us.

And that is going beyond reason.

When you get to the beginning of time or before that, then language gets in the way, but that does not take away the possibility of a pre existing being (pardon the language) who created and gave/gives life.

If the prefix 'pre-' applies, then time is there. So there can be no 'pre-' for the beginning of time.

That seems clear to me.

 

[Polymath257]

So no theists are reasonable and they are all self delusional or misunderstand the nature of evidence, and faith is what you do when you believe something without any evidence. OK.

Well, I think it *was* reasonable in the past because of our limited knowledge about a lot of things. But as we learn more and more, it becomes less and less reasonable.

It was reasonable for Aristotle to make conjectures about physics, and his reasons for believing what he did were often good ones. He just turned out to be wrong. Anyone today that believes in Aristotle's physics is being unreasonable.

But yes, if there *is* evidence, then science can deal with it. The ideas can be tested and it can at least be determined which ones are false.

if there is no evidence, on the other hand, then it is not reasonable to believe.

 

[Polymath257]

It's hard to know exactly what you are talking about but I have had a discussion with @Audie that might be the same one.
Could you elaborate?

Certainly. To think that an infinite regress requires an infinite wait is incorrect. Between any two links in the chain of causality, there are only finitely many steps.

You don't have to wait for an infinite amount of time to pass, because at any point an infinite amount of time has already passed.

The mistake is thinking there is a start, AND THEN an infinite number of steps have to transpire. But the point is that there is no start. So, you are here because of the previous step. Causality is a wave that moves through the chain. At any point in the chain there has already been all the necessary precursors for that event.

But, of course, causality in the real world isn't just a chain. Very few events that have a cause only have a single cause. Usually, there are multiple different influences that 'cause' any event. So we actually get a network of causes, not a simple chain. And that network simply continues back for an infinite amount of time.

I hear that there are causeless events which don't seem to be completely causeless, because they are caused by the environment they happen in, the quantum environment.

That is a misunderstanding. Quantum events are uncaused in their specifics. For example, if you have two uranium nuclei, they will be *identical*. And yet, one may decay in a minue and the other not decay for another billion years. There is NO internal or external 'trigger' to the decay.

I have no idea what you mean by the 'quantum environment'. The only reasonable way to interpret that is the universe itself.

So for that environment, which seems to have been the environment of the initial universe, I would say that this is what God created first, a chaotic environment, and the applied laws of Physics to it so that the universe ended up as God had planned.

Which goes way, way beyond the actual evidence.

To say that the laws of Physics existed seems to be proposing the existence of something that is not phyisical at all, and so is spiritual.

Hmmm...that seems to be a misunderstanding of the nature of physical laws. They are descriptions of how things behave. Nothing else. Things in the universe have properties and those properties determine how they interact. The laws of physics describe those interactions.

Physical laws are descriptive laws, not prescriptive laws (like those of the legal system).

There are issues with a first cause and issues if you say there was no first cause.
To think that the first cause might need a cause is just a nonsense statement/question imo.

Well, from what I can see, there are many, many uncaused causes all the time within our universe. Every quantum event is uncaused. That means there are quintillions of them every second in every cubic meter.

If time is associated with the universe and there was no time up till then, then God existed in timelessness.

And now your assumptions multiply further. You now have to postulate such a timeless realm (without evidence) for the being to exist that creates the universe (through the action of which laws?) in a way for which there is no evidence.

One of the biggest mistakes of philosophy was when Plato imagined such a timeless realm.

Each answer causes more questions.
God is changeless, God knows and does not need to reason things through over time. God is a repository for the laws of physics and the one who can cause the universe and apply the laws.

And now even more assumptions with no proof. They seem to keep multiplying.

Life and love etc exist and science can only study their effects in a body and brain and actions, the assumption being that those things do not really exist in their own right.



Workable and being true are not the same thing.

For a definition, the issue isn't between true and false, it is between workable and not. Definitions are neither true nor false. They are simply ways of talking.

There is a difference between assuming that consciousness is an emergent property of matter and showing that. If a spirit is connected to a material computer brain, how is the distinction to be made?

Good question. And if that distinction cannot be made, then the extra assumption of a spiritual should be discarded as unnecessary to understanding.

Dark matter is something that is material and has observable physical effects on matter.
If I believe in God and my life is changed because of that, that is effects that cannot studied by science.

That is psychology. It is relatively easy to manipulate psychology because the brain is so flexible.

My life changed when I stopped looking for a God. Before, it was disturbed and I felt lost because I saw no evidence of this being everyone was talking about. Eventually, I realized that I didn't believe in that being (sort of like how I didn't believe in Santa Claus). When I gave myself permission to not believe, it was an immense relief. And my life has since been quite good.

So, I am glad your belief system works for you. It gives you happiness and comfort. So whether or not it is true seems irrelevant.