Life from Non Life? Creator or Natural Causes.?

Here's my belief on the nature of life. The belief in God is a moot point. Why does it matter if God exists? People spend so much time getting distracted by which answer is real, when we should be doing one thing. That's trying to make the world a better place. People get distracted and over-think if God is real or not. This leads to huge negatives. We spend all our time trying to get into heaven, when we should just spend our lives trying to leave the world better than we found it. This leads to pointless discrimination, and even violence. Many wars have existed because of people trying to "fight" for their God being the right one. Why does it matter though? A catholic, A protestant, A muslim, a Jew, a Hindu, and an Atheist can all be just as good people. And I see this in my life every day. Some of the greatest people I know come from every religious background.

For this reason, I choose to believe in what science suggests. There is no suggestion that God doesn't exist in science, but there is nothing that we've found in nature that can't be explained by science. So on your question of where life came from, I must ask another question. What is life? Life is an arbitrary boundary that humans have created in order to classify things. So many things ride a fine line between organism and object, that it's hard to even say that something is alive, and something is not. After all, what is a human? All a human is, is a series of chemical reactions that have arranged themselves in such a way that it can perceive itself and the world around it.

As for what "made us?" We humans are a product of random chemical reactions. These reactions over 3.5 billion years. Why do I believe this? An overwhelming amount of evidence suggests it to be true. Even Catholic cardinals are coming our and saying that they believe evolution is true. Why? Because they've observed in labs! I know that many people and this point believe in micro evolution, but not macro. Can someone tell me the difference though? They say, yes, a species can evolve, but never will it switch types (species). What is a species though? It's far more complicated than people think, and it is once again an arbitrary boundary. Plus, all "evidence" for other theories is circumstantial at best, or down-right ridiculous at the worst. Sorry, but "I don't get it" isn't evidence.

What we do know of natural causes, chemistry, and physics leads us to believe that life comes only from life.

Abiogenesis is warmed up primordial soup of spontaneous generation.

[edit] Here's a good article.

Top Five Problems with Current Origin-of-Life Theories

Casey Luskin December 12, 2012

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/12/top_five_prob...

Problem 1: No Viable Mechanism to Generate a Primordial Soup.

Problem 2: Forming Polymers Requires Dehydration Synthesis

Problem 3: RNA World Hypothesis Lacks Confirming Evidence

Problem 4: Unguided Chemical Processes Cannot Explain the Origin of the Genetic Code.

Problem 5: No Workable Model for the Origin of Life

The "God did it!" scenario has no causal explanation for the existence of intelligence in the first place. It just assumes - without evidence, and against common sense, logic, objective experience, and science - that super-human intelligence just magically existed before any life did.

Evolution gives a causal explanation for the existence of intelligence, in the evolutionary origin of complex brains.

It's not that the origin of life required preexisting intelligence, but that the origin of intelligence required preexisting life.

If someone claims that the origin of life must be explained in complete detail, then where does that take us?

If the proposed designer of life is living, then that person has to present a comprehensive explanation for the designer's origin. To not do so would be intellectually dishonest and hypocritical.

On the other hand, it the proposed designer is not living, then that person also has life coming from non-life, but with no evidence supporting their position and with reliance upon "Poof! Magic!"... unlike abiogenesis which does have experimental support for many of its required steps. So how would their position be better? (It wouldn’t be)

Questions that anyone who proposes intelligent design must answer about the designer.

1. Who is the designer?

2. What valid, objective evidence do you have that the designer exists?

3. What plausible, testable explanation do you have showing that your designer even could exist?

4. How do you know there is only one designer, and not a team of designers?

5. What mechanism does the designer use to create his designs? How does he turn his designs into actual physical reality?

6. Who designed the designer? Or, if you like, what plausible explanation do you have for why life as we know it needs a designer, but your designer doesn’t need a designer?

Yes, we have proven lots and there is no reason to believe that any physical test done in the physical realm will not turn out a natural physical answer thats a no brainer and I wouldn't expect anything less. I am talking about the spirit realm for instance (and only one instance) is imagination? Everything other then the elements comes from the imagination yet the imagination is not something you can see, feel or tough until it is created in the physical world. Is energy conscious? Is the imagination real? Does the brain create mind or receive it?

Gordon,

Research "abiogenesis". That is the branch of science that is looking at what the beginning of life on earth might have looked like. Certainly, the first life was some self-replicating molecule. No biologist expects the first life to be a cell. You may hear that biologists have "disproved" spontaneous generation. Research the findings of Redi (flies come from flies) and Pasteur (bacteria come from bacteria). These two scientists found that under ***present*** conditions, organisms come from organisms (life comes from life). Some Creationists have misstated and over-generalized those experiments to say that biologists have said life from non-living material is impossible. What we do know is that organic compounds, once thought to be only produced by living things (organic = carbon based) CAN arise from inanimate processes. Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, have been found even in meteorites.

That is not to say that there are lots of things we don't know about abiogenesis. But science tries to come up with explanations of the natural world that are testable and falsifiable. And that's what is happening with the field right now. Science does not rely on supernatural explanations. The difference between the approach of science and religion can be summed up with this cartoon: http://wordpress.visitmix.com/wp-content/uploads/i...

The cosmic manifestation is just like a colossal machine both organic and inorganic properties. Behind every machine there is an operator. There is no machine that exists where an operator is not required; you car, your phone, computer, everything. Without the operator the machine is useless and simply will not work. So similarly, behind the cosmic machine is an operator. Label it as you will; Superior Being, God, or whatever. Labels are irrelevant. The fact that the operator is there is important to understand. There is no value in theories. Knowledge must be factual. By direct perception we know that we are existing, yet the body cannot be identified with our self. Through the process of elimination we can conclude that we are not these material bodies; we are not the hands, not the legs, not the head an so on and so forth. These bodies are by-products of material nature, namely earth, fire, water, air and ether. But we can practically perceive that our consciousness is not a material by-product, it is in fact something different, a different energy, a superior energy. Because if in fact we are these bodies derived from some chemical combination then why can't Doctors or Scientists inject those chemicals into a dead body of any type, plant, insect, animal, fish, any life form, and bring the body back to life. It cannot be done.

The essence of life, that consciousness that pervades the body is therefore not comprised of material elements. The mind, the ego, and the intelligence cannot be seen with our eyes yet we know factually they exist. They are of a superior energy, a subtle energy. therefore there exists 2 types of energy, inferior and superior. The body is a product of the inferior energy and the subtle aspects of it are of the superior energy. The logical conclusion is that life does not come from matter, Science is defined by hypothesis, experiment, result, conclusion. So the hypothesis put forward here is that the source of life, or that which animates the body is not a combination of chemicals. The experimental challenge is there; arrange the chemicals to bring life to something that is dead on any level. The undeniable result is failure. It will not come back to life. Unquestionably concluding and proving that life does not come from matter.

There is no value in theories. Knowledge must be factual to possess any genuine value.

One important difference is that we KNOW that natural causes exist and can explain things. We know this because literally every single phenomenon we have ever looked at, from the sun rising and setting, to babies being born, to the creation of solar systems - EVERY SINGLE THING - has natural causes that we can understand.

Whereas, in all of the history of human thought, there have been exactly zero times when the actual explanation for something we don't understand has turned out to be magic.

In other words, we have examined, oh, I don't know, several tens of millions of questions at least over the last few centuries. Each and every time, we have started out with two possibilities: either the question will turn out to have a naturalistic explanation, or else God did it with his magic. Out of those tens of millions of times, 100.000% of the time, the answer has turned out to be "naturalistic explanations". It is true that there are still a few questions to which we haven't yet found the answer, but to claim that both possibilities - natural and supernatural explanations - are still equally likely is ludicrous.

If I spin a roulette wheel fifty million times, and get fifty million blacks, are you really going to claim that, on the next spin, there's really going to be a fair, 50/50 chance of getting red this time? I know which color I'm going to put my money on.

Edit: By the way, just for fun, I just searched PubMed for the number of papers it has indexed that have been published from Jan 1, 1900, up to today. I got just over 24 million hits. That's just for biology and medical fields, and they don't index everything. That ignores chemistry, physics, geology, math, etc, etc. Each and every paper is an answer to at least one question. Most of them answer more than that - perhaps five or so as an average would be my guess. Not a single solitary one of them ends with the conclusion "It's impossible for this to have happened. God must have done it with magic."

So my original guess of "tens of millions" is not too far off, but probably an underestimate. I'd guess that hundreds of millions to billions would be more accurate.

My only comment is simply that a question that I cannot solve is not best answered by "someone I never saw and cannot even say exists must have done it". My failure to understand does not impose the existence of a superior being who is responsible. That s not an answer, it is a cop-out. It explains nothing.

First of all, we know for a fact that life changes via natural processes; it's been observed. Second, no, we do not yet understand how life arose from non-life, but that does not mean God is the answer.

> the jury

Say, you know there are several standards for "proof" for juries?

Beyond a shadow of a doubt

Beyond a reasonable doubt <== here is where we are in Eukaryote-to-you scenario

A preponderance of evidence supports... <== Here is where we are with naturalistic abiogenesis