Re: Ool - out at first base?

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. As I've said here many times before, there is the error of prematurely invoking divine action. When that is done, it is shown to be error by subsequent scientific advances. That's an appeal to the god-of-the-gaps.
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?
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."
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."
Of course, different people will make different choices in this scenario for many different reasons.
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.