Me too. I wonder what the gravity is on Kepler 62f. Hey, life's out there. And of course, hasn't been predicted by any religious text in the history of the world. But science will lead the way.
Abiogeneis, modified for the local conditions. But that's putting the cart before the horse a wee bit.
abiogenesis is as fanciful as the Flying Spaghetti Monster. virtually every theory presupposes some kind of complex molecule for which there is no specific accounting. and the other matter is that there are more than a dozen theories, most of which contradict each other. if there were only two or three competing theories, one might say that the field had been narrowed down to the point that we could make a reasonable assumption that one of them was probable, but the fact that there are so many makes it less likely that any is correct.
I'm not going to argue the merits of the scientific method with you. Seriously, do better - there's plenty of unknown you can work with still.
I really love this part because of the conundrum it creates for you. The thing is, we're aware of many, many complex molecules. We've studied them millions of times over. We know the mechanisms by which atoms combine to form molecules, molecules combine to form larger molecules, and so forth. So presupposing (while we don't have direct evidence of) the existence of a complex molecule--even though its complexity is infinitesimal compared to our own--is a problem for you. But you're perfectly willing to presuppose the existence of an infinitely complex being, without batting an eyelash? Do you see the problem with positing something more complex than we are to explain our existence, and the power inherent in positing something less complex, and experimenting from there? Molecules doing what we already know they do--growing more complex--vs. a being whose complexity you could never possibly account for . . . yet somehow the molecules are the fanciful ones? I don't think so.
the process by which molecules become more and more complex is a mystery. the fact that elements have chemical affinities and bond in predictable ways, based on electron configurations, etc., is something that cannot be fully explained. why two gasses would bond to form a liquid than cannot be compressed is beyond understanding. life is a mystery as well. there is no agreed-upon explanation for its existence and there will never be one. we can only theorize, speculate, guess, muse, wonder. God is a mystery. and it makes far more sense, intuitively, to believe that there is/was a Creator than to believe there wasn't one. abiogenesis is a thinly veiled attempt to obviate a Creator. ask Steven Hawking.
Ah yes. "Making sense." It is easy to conflate "making sense" with "thinking rationally," though they are quite far apart, really. Our brains are evolved to deal with common sense, because common sense helped us to survive, pre-civilization, and pre-science . . . but rational thought takes a lot more effort, and a lot more discipline. There have always been "just so" stories to make sense of our world. For the Najavo, we sprung from corn. Naturally, since corn gave them their livelihood. The earth gives us life in the same sense, as the place where we plant things--so it is no big surprise that the Ancient Hebrews, among many, many other cultures, believed we were formed out of dust. These ideas made intuitive sense, you see. But these days, just as we've realized that lightning is not the god Zeus throwing shit about in anger, and that the waves do not emanate from Poseidon, we've also explained, more completely than any other scientific theory, how all this biological diversity has come to be around us. We now understand how ludicrously difficult we make it for ourselves, guided as we are by the principles of Occam's Razor, to posit something more complex than we are to explain our own, relatively limited complexity. It results in nothing but an infinite regression. It is good to live in such an enlightened age. I love this one too. Of all objects, the planets are those which appear to us under the least varied aspect. We see how we may determine their forms, their distances, their bulk, and their motions, but we can never known anything of their chemical or mineralogical structure; and, much less, that of organized beings living on their surface ... -Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy Comte thought we'd never be able to determine what other stars or planets were made of. After all, we could never reach out and touch them, right? Thankfully, we as a species are far more clever than that--and we have successfully used spectroscopy to determine the compositions not only of planets in our solar system, and the sun, but of dozens of exoplanets and thousands of stars. We owe our entire civilization to brilliant people who think precisely the opposite of what you do (that there are things for which there are no explanations, that consensus can never be reached, that speculations and guesses are all that can ever be). For these people, there have always been answers out there, and they have worked tirelessly to discover them. We should be eternally grateful.
if i'm not mistaken, the scientific method regularly involves experiments to test hypotheses. in the case of abiogenesis, testing the various hypotheses is fraught with a complication, as in the case of Urey-Miller. they asked the right question, developed a working hypothesis, made a prediction and conducted an experiment that would have been worthwhile if their testing model had not been entirely wrong. now, i can understand completely how some enthusiastic persons might clamor to declare that their experimentation brought meaningful results: Eureka! we can develop the precursors to Life in a test tube ( or beaker ). but alas, since the model was wrong, the results, as promising as they might seem, prove absolutely nothing. they aren't even suggestive of anything useful. one last thing: the amount of tinkering that goes into the "experimentation/testing" piece of the puzzle makes for very sketchy results. the experimenters are "helping" develop results a bit more than a natural process would.
Has anyone used the scientific method or any other test to test whether God exists or more realistically whether God has any influence over any phenomenon at all? The best I have seen is that God is the God of "Oh this shit (orgins of life or universe) is too tough to figure out so lets attribute it to God. For anything else we look for actual evidence.
And this statement encapsulates why no one can take any of your arguments seriously, as it shows your inability to think and/or argue logically. It does NOT make more sense, intuitively, to answer a mystery we believe we can resolve on our own, with another mystery we probably cannot resolve.
every perceivable phenomenon has an origin and to assume that such origins "just happen", without any agency is not logical. it's counterintuitive. you're so wedded to absolute naturalism that anything that is apart from that process is unthinkable to you.
Honestly - I have no idea what your point is here - nobody is claiming that this is done deal and we have all the answers. Hell, the history of science is positively littered with bad ideas, wrong assumptions and sketchy results being extrapolated beyond the scope of the experiment. Realistically, models are found to be lacking, improved, and then experiments are derived to prove the hypothesis. Lather, rinse, repeat.
So god is not perceivable then, right? Because if he were then by your own statement, believing that he 'just happened' without any agency would be illogical and no more valid than the abiogenesis argument you claim makes no sense.
It is entirely possible that we will never figure out how life originated on Earth. I wonder if Stilton realizes that this by itself wouldn't make him even partially correct.
if there were much, if any, real science involved in the muddle that is abiogenesis, that would be great, but there isn't. some scientists envision an "RNA world". is there any specific evidence that such a "world" existed. is there any evidence that RNA emerged as a self-replicating entity out of the pre-biotic miasma of early Earth? i can understand the hypothesis up to a point, but it's all based on a fairly consequential "IF". and that "if" isn't any less of an "if" than "if there is a God, then..." your statement regarding experiments is critically telling. there won't be any experiments to determine how life started on Earth. why? because we cannot have a completely definitive answer to the question: "What was the environment like where Life was spawned?" it will always be guesswork. good guesses, better guesses, but all guesses.
I think you're totally missing the point I made. I'll happily admit that abiogenesis could end up being the 21st century version of alchemy - so what? The point is it's a current hypothesis being tested, and unless you can point me to experimental results to support a better hypothesis - nothing you've put forth offers a better answer to your original question I responded to, or comes close to refuting it. The fact is we don't know if life exists on any of these planets. Yet.
Live coverage of space capsule landing about to start http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html
This Week in the World of Prime Numbers, UNH's Yitang "Tom" Zhang, One Old Dude by Mathematician Standards, Proves the "Bounded Gaps" Conjecture Last week, Yitang “Tom” Zhang, a popular math professor at the University of New Hampshire, stunned the world of pure mathematics when he announced that he had proven the “bounded gaps” conjecture about the distribution of prime numbers—a crucial milestone on the way to the even more elusive twin primes conjecture, and a major achievement in itself. The stereotype, outmoded though it is, is that new mathematical discoveries emerge from the minds of dewy young geniuses. But Zhang is over 50. What’s more, he hasn’t published a paper since 2001. Some of the world’s most prominent number theorists have been hammering on the bounded gaps problem for decades now, so the sudden resolution of the problem by a seemingly inactive mathematician far from the action at Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford came as a tremendous surprise. But the fact that the conjecture is true was no surprise at all. Mathematicians have a reputation of being no-bullshit hard cases who don’t believe a thing until it’s locked down and proved. That’s not quite true. All of us believed the bounded gaps conjecture before Zhang’s big reveal, and we all believe the twin primes conjecture even though it remains unproven. Why?
wanting answers to find is part of the human experience. pretending that certain answers are available to be found is delusional. some questions cannot be answered, simply because the answer is outside the realm of verification. you can posit a reasonable theory but that's the end of it. you can't test the theory because you don't know the conditions that were present when the phenomenon occurred to a sufficient certainty to replicate them. and that's fine. just don't say "someday we will be able to determine XYZ". not possible.