Re: Revealing thought experiment

On 9/02/2025 2:38 am, RonO wrote:

On 2/7/2025 4:02 PM, MarkE wrote:

Does the following quotation demonstrate that the naturalistic origin of life involves amplifying a vanishingly small probability (i.e. the probability of spontaneous generation in a jar, with small probabilistic resources of space and time available), to a larger probability (i.e. the universe over its entire history)?
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That is, does it demonstrate that the naturalistic origin of life is spontaneous generation, only with more time and space than Redi and Pasteur allowed?
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"At this point, I introduced Louis Pasteur’s pasteurization experiment, which convinced the world that even microorganisms could not be generated spontaneously.

 At the time spontaneous generation was considered to also be special creation.  It was considered to be God's continued creation.  Pasteur demonstrated that this was not happening.  It had a religious connection.  There was some belief that it might be happening using organic material (plant and animal dead material) and Pasteur demonstrated that this was not the case.  Contamination with existing lifeforms was found to be the basis for the misconception.

Actually, fair point. Doing a bit of digging, some proponents of spontaneous generation regarded it as evidence of a "life force" in non-living matter (e.g. Aristotle, and John Needham 1745).

 None of this changes the fact that the origin of life on this planet is not Biblical.  It really doesn't matter if life arose by natural mechanisms or not the Bible is still wrong about how it occurred.  You likely do need to have a discussion with Denton as to why he has his Deistic notions.  My guess is that he is only deistic in terms of his god's activity with the creation and evolution of this universe, but he likely believes in an interactive god with the human result of biological evolution on this planet because he still claims to probably be Christian.  He seems to be agnostic only to other people's religious beliefs.
 Ron Okimoto

Structuralism as a modern incarnation by Denton and others?
"Form is in this view not shaped by natural selection, but by "self-organizing properties of particular categories of matter" and by "cosmic fine-tuning of the laws of nature".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralism_(biology)

 

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And all students agreed on that conclusion. The following text is a record of my conversation with my students afterward.
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Tan. Are you confident that the experiments by Redi and Pasteur have proved that spontaneous generation is impossible?
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Students. Yes.
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Tan. Sure?
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Students. Yes.
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Tan. Does it matter what sizes the jars/bottles were?
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Students. No.
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Tan. Does it matter how long they waited?
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Students. No.
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Tan. Sure?
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Students. Yes.
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Tan. What if the bottles are very big? I mean very big, really big. Still positive?
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Students. Yes.
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Tan. How about this big? (A picture of the globe was shown.) Still positive?
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Students. Uh… (Some hesitated.)
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Tan. How about this big? (A picture of the visible universe of the Hubble deep field was shown.) Still positive?
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Students. (Silence.)
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How about you?"
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Tan, Change; Stadler, Rob. The Stairway To Life: An Origin-Of-Life Reality Check (pp. 179-180). Evorevo Books. Kindle Edition.
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