Re: Ool - out at first base?

On Sat, 14 Dec 2024 22:01:41 +1100, MarkE <me22over7@gmail.com> wrote:

On 14/12/2024 7:31 pm, Martin Harran wrote:

On Sat, 14 Dec 2024 16:41:25 +1100, MarkE <me22over7@gmail.com> wrote:
 

On 14/12/2024 3:06 am, erik simpson wrote:
"MaekE is stuck with his idea that only a zero probability of OOL is
necessary to prove the existence of god.  He doesn't understand that god
can explain anything, including a high probability of OOL.  He has a
real blind spot there, to be charitable."
>
Say, for argument's sake, we determined that the origin of life could
not be explained by natural causes.
>
Then by definition, we must conclude supernatural causes, and haggle
over the definition of supernatural.

 
No, all you can conclude is that we can't figure it out. A few
thousand years ago, people couldn't figure out how the sun moved
across the sky so they concluded it must be a god driving a fiery
chariot. How did that go?
 
The thing that you and other IDers either don't see or choose to
ignore is that the absence of an explanation doesn't prove anything,
you have to have some linkage between the unexplained problem and your
proposed answer. I asked you before how you get from your protocell to
a God we can interact with. As far as I remember, your answer was that
it wasn't up to you to figure that out. Well, I have news for you, if
you want to gain any credibility for your arguments, then you do have
to figure it out.
 

>
There's nuance here.

Again you make no attempt to address my actual question.

As I've said here many times before, there is the
error of prematurely invoking divine action.

That is exactly what ID does and you seem pretty much on the same
track.

When that is done, it is
shown to be error by subsequent scientific advances. That's an appeal to
the god-of-the-gaps.

And God-of-the-gaps is exactly what you are offering here, no matter
how you try to dress it up, until you offer some sort of tahyway from
the protocell to God..

>
However, consider this scenario. Let's say there were 500 years of
active OoL research from this time on. What if (say) little further
progress has been made. In fact, the greatly enlarged body of
understanding and experimental results in this area have revealed that
(say) the barriers to the naturalistic formation of a viable protocell
are far, far deeper than than is regarded today.
>
What then?

Nothing different - how long we don't know something has no impact on
the answer. The fact that it took thousands of years to figure out
that the sun is just another star didn't change the fact that that was
exactly what it was.

>
Well, a person living 500 years from now still has a personal choice to
make:
>
Option 1. They may choose to say, "We just don't know, but keep looking;
I still have no need of that God hypothesis."

Why would they refer to the 'God hypothesis' at all? I use quotes
because it's not even a hypothesis until you outline a pathway that is
at least possible if not plausible.

>
Option 2. Or they may choose a provisional position like this: "On the
basis of the accumulated scientific evidence, I'll take a closer look at
the God hypothesis, though continue looking for a natural explanation."

People who would go for that option would likely already be
considering the 'God hypothesis'

>
Of course, different people will make different choices in this scenario
for many different reasons.

The reason is almost inevitably whether or not the person nis a
religious believer.

Can God and science be reconciled? Yes they can, no doubt about it in
my mind but not by turning the God that people generally worship into
some kind of designer fiddling about with protocells. Christians
believe that man is made in God's image; what have protocells to so
with that image?

>
My contention is that option 1 is actually a *more* reasonable and valid
application of science.
>
Moreover, I contend that we are much closer to this point than 500 years
away.
>