On 2026/04/05 7:07 PM, MarkE wrote:Thank you, that confirms where you're coming from.On 4/04/2026 4:05 pm, MarkE wrote:On 3/04/2026 12:56 am, ShyDavid wrote:On 2026/04/01 4:22 PM, MarkE wrote:>
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*SNIP!*
>:)>
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But for the record, the white flag will be naturalism-of-the-gaps conceding defeat. Here's an example of this retreat - Nick Lane on origin of life in hydrothermal vents:
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"So this vision and this is from Nick Lane, but also as we mentioned, there are many other investigators that have contributed to this. We have Bill Martin and Michael Russell, Joseph Moran, and so forth. A lot of people, but we're giving this. We're talking mostly with Nick Lane here because he's more of the public figure, I guess the guy you see on YouTube and the author of these books.
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"But the vision for it is basically three steps as he lays it out that first you want to produce the organics and all you have is hydrogen and CO2 and it's chemically very difficult to combine hydrogen and CO2 to end up with organic products.
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"Some life forms do it, but it's not easy and they're working hard to see if you can produce a variety of different organic molecules through these fence alkaline conditions and with some catalysts, some metal catalysts to get the job done.
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And then the second step within those micropores in the vent, he envisions that you have lipids being produced, and the lipids form a lipid bilayer and you start to have something that you could call a protocell.
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"And then in the third step, the genetic code starts to form, you start to have RNA and DNA and protein.
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"And the further down you go here the more sort of hand-wavy the whole thing becomes. And I pull out this quote from his book.
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"'You know, at once you get to this point, the standard mechanisms of evolution eventually produce sophisticated proteins in early cells, including ribosomes and the ATP synthase we just talked about.'
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"So this is utter nonsense. I would love Nick Lane to come on here and take a few questions on this."
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https://youtu.be/abkFiI-lyV0?si=_Vb6bzM97AXGiyaY&t=121
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I'm sorry, but it really is utter nonsense. It's beyond hand-waving and just-so storying. OoL is naturalism's dirty little secret.
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The request for Nick Lane et al to confront this challenge illustrates my point: informed scientific challenges are being levelled, and the OoL community (for example) is in retreat, denial, avoidance.
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It will only get worse as the minimum complexity of a sustainable self-replicating entity with sufficient copying fidelity etc etc is recognised to be impossibly great.
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(Note: the commentators are not picking on Nick Lane per se, and acknowledge his book The Vital Question to be "very well-written".)
I have never heard about "naturalism-of-the-gaps," so Google told me:
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"Naturalism-of-the-gaps" is the philosophical assumption that unguided natural processes will eventually explain all phenomena, even when current evidence is lacking, say researchers in this PDF from ResearchGate. It assumes a natural answer exists, treating unexplained phenomena as mere temporary knowledge gaps to be filled by future science, rather than evidence of non-natural causes.
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That is the default: the null hypothesis. There are a nearly infinite things humanity has no knowledge of, and/or no existing model to understand the phenomena. I am very much content to say "I do not know" when I do not know, and so do most scientists.
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There is no such thing as "Naturalism-of-the-gaps:" we have "'I- don't- know'-of-the-gaps."
I-don't-know-of-the-gaps appears to be a durable get-out-of-jail-free card. And indeed, if we assume that science and all other categories of knowledge cannot _prove_ divine action, then it is technically unassailable.
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The assumption within that position is that the set of unknown explanations is large and contains roughly equiprobable elements. E.g., God is one of a million explanations, each with probability of around one in a million.
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Of course, we are unable to assign probabilities here - the numbers provided are for illustration only. However, if, say, over a long period of sustained scientific research, the consensus rejects all propsosed naturalistic hypotheses (e.g. for OoL), then I suggest a more reasonable assumption would be the probability of God is much more than one in a million. You might choose a placeholder amount of 50%, 10% or 1%.
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My point is, if you are perfectly comfortable with I-don't-know, that seems to imply an assumption of a negligible probability of God, which may in turn reveal an a priori commitment to naturalism. Which would be a metaphysical stance, not a rational, scientific one.
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Moreover, if God, then major personal implications potentially come into play (insert your preferred variation of Pascal's Wager here).David, I'm interested to hear your response to this...I cannot understand why you would want my opinion on this, as Creationists appear to be learning impaired. However:
There are nearly an infinite number of things that do not exist and events that do not happen. Ergo, the null hypothesis applies to all of that which does not exist and does not happen. I am content to say "I don't know," and accept the null position: neither "for" something, or "against" something. It is not a choice of "0" or "1:" it is the non- choice of "NULL." This is the most honest, most virtuous "position:" the refusal to hold an opinion on that which there is no evidence for something existing or happening.
The conclusion "The gods did it" is unethical and immoral; it is using the gods as some kind of vanity tools; it is claiming one knows that which is unknowable; it is a position of faith and/or the assertion that evidence exists that shows the gods exist, yet no one has ever stepped up to produce that evidence.
The probability, as discussed above, that the gods exist is NULL. The list of gods that there is evidence for is a NULL set. To assert any probability to the gods existing is to assert that one is dishonest.
Given what theists tend to claim the gods are like and what they do, if gods do exist I suppose they would be livid with rage: theists tend to assert that the gods are like the very worse of human beings.
This is year 2026, as defined by Gregory XIII. Human knowledge has expanded exponential since around 3,500 BCE (math was taught in some places then; reading and writing was taught in some regions of Earth by then). Foundation Physicists know where the elementary particles that make up more complex elementary particles that make up atoms that make up all that exists in the universe. That which they do not know, they say "We do not know."
I would love to see theists being just as honest and virtuous as scientists.
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