Yazata:
Certainly too many to allow contemporary science to plausibly pretend that it knows how life originated. It doesn't. 'Abiogenesis' simply means something like 'life from non-life'. It isn't an explanation, it's just a name for a whole collection of current research problems. That's the essence of my argument with Paddoboy, I guess.
Mine too.
No competent professional scientist who is studying abiogenesis would claim that there is a "scientific theory of abiogenesis" or say something like "it is the only scientific answer we have". To assume current science has The Answer to abiogenesis is a hopeful fantasy, nothing more. What it has, as I keep telling paddoboy, is some hypotheses and some likely fragments of a future theory.
Of course, positing a single giant supernatural miracle responsible for all of it is no more plausible. Less plausible, in my opinion.
Miracles are unfalsifiable. You can "explain"
anything by appealing to a miracle, which makes miracles a non-explanation. If a miracle happened, why did it happen? Who made it happen? How did they do it? What natural mechanisms and what supernatural mechanisms are involved? Obviously, there are no answers to any of these questions, just loads of baseless speculation - apart from speculations about natural mechanisms, that is, which only bring us back to science.
"God did it" is a trite non-starter as an explanation of anything. By its nature, it's always a faith-based claim without support.
It's certainly no more intellectually respectable.
One problem is that there is a long history of treating God claims as respectable. Previous generations of scientists were steeped in the same superstitions as current religionists, and their religious indoctrination often crept into those parts of their speculative writings and speeches that went beyond what they could justify with their science. Today, we're still living with a legacy of treating faith-based hypotheses about scientific matters as respectable, even if such hypotheses are now largely absent from the peer-reviewed scientific literature.
It doesn't bring us any closer to understanding and just multiplies the mysteries. That's the essence of my argument with the creationists.
Creationism was originally - and still is for the hard-core American Creationists - based on the assumption of the inerrantcy of the bible. These days, we can show that the biblical creation stories are not just flawed due to their idle speculation, but actually factually incompatible with scientific findings.
The thing is, it isn't an either-or matter. It's not like one must falsely pretend to have a scientific answer to the origin-of-life question, or else everyone will immediately slide backwards into the horrible pit of supernatural creationism.
That's correct. While fanboy science boosting is not really on a par with literal Creationism's outright and knowing dishonesty, it is still intellectually unsustainable and overreaching in a not-dissimilar way. Whichever way you look at it, pretending to have all the answers is intellectually dishonest. I don't know why anybody who claims to respect the scientific endeavour would want to get into bed with the Creationists to tell lies about the origin of life, even if they are lies of a different kind. It is far preferable to take the moral high road.
One would think that self-proclaimed 'skeptics' would be open to admitting that they don't know things, but often-times they aren't.
In my experience, many self-proclaimed skeptics are woefully uninformed about what skepticism actually entails. Case in point is anybody who says something like "I used to be a complete skeptic, but after doing a lot of reading I'm now totally convinced that the stories people tell about UFOs/ghosts/God/etc. prove that there's more to [those things] than science knows."
paddoboy:
Actually, I'll agree with that, but add the important proviso, it is the only scientific answer we have.
There's no getting through to you, obviously. As Yazata says, you just blatantly contradicted yourself. You can't have it both ways. Either you believe there is a scientific "theory of abiogenesis" that is "The Answer", or you accept that what science really has is a collection of problems related to the origins of life that are the subject of ongoing research.
The fact that you won't commit to one position or the other in writing smacks of a knowing dishonesty on your part. I don't think you're really as stupid as you make out sometimes. I think that, by now, you know that you're on the wrong side of this particular argument, but you're not man enough to admit it. Your ego, as usual, keeps getting in the way.
I no longer expect you to be reasonable. I'm expecting this post will be followed by more of the same from you: ignoring everything that you are being told, combined with pointless repetition of your baseless claim. If you're true to form, you'll also trot out some irrelevant cut-and-pastes from other websites to try to prop up your position, while ignoring the main point of the objection that Yazata and myself have put to you over and over again.
I am not sure if anyone has claimed that we know the methodology of Abiogenisis.
You have. What do you think it means when you claim that some unspecified scientific "theory of abiogenesis" is "the only answer we have"? Are we to read your words as saying something other than what they clearly imply?
Have you listened to Tour? and in his own words how even if evidence of a Abiogenesis methodology were to surface, how it still wouldn't change his literal interpretation of the bible.
That's why the man is a fanatical bible basher. Even the Catholic church do not now literally take the bible as fact.
None of that excuses your false claim.
