Posted on 04/25/2014 8:30:14 AM PDT by fishtank
He's making a philosophical point about the chemical processes of abiogenesis very possibly being similar to the trial and error of evolution, and it shouldn't be cast aside as a separate study.
But it doesn't change the fact that the study of evolution IS NOT the study of the origin (the actual chemical processes) of life.
Myers is appealing for the ideas to intermingle, as they might be related if abiogenesis ever jumps from the realm of purely theoretical to scientific fact. This is altogether different from the claim that creationists make, that evolution and abiogenesis are the same thing, or are directly related in the world of science. They're not, and that's an inarguable fact.
And my point still stands, that science doesn’t “claim to know the origin of life.” Myers wasn’t claiming to know how abiogenesis works, and wasn’t saying that he knows how life started.
You miss the point Chadwell makes - … the naturalist believes that beneath every natural phenomenon there exists yet another natural phenomenon…. The naturalist's answer for the origin of life, therefore, is some natural phenomenon. (Which one is not particularly relevant.) When you ask them how that natural phenomenon came to be, their response boils down to: "It's natural phenomena all the way down!" Does science claim to ‘know’ the origin is some natural phenomenon?
Darwin showed that material causes are a sufficient explanation not only for physical phenomena, as Descartes and Newton had shown, but also for biological phenomena with all their seeming evidence of design and purpose. By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous. Together with Marx's materialistic theory of history and society and Freud's attribution of human behavior to influences over which we have little control, Darwin's theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of mechanism and materialism…
-Douglas Futuyma's Evolutionary Biology (1998, 3rd Ed., Sinauer Associates), p. 5
For example, I don't how the core of Neptune first formed, but it's likely that it had something to do with gravity, its accretion disk, and compression, and not leprechauns making it out of supernatural pixie dust.
OK, but there are ramifications in assuming naturalism – and again, that is the point…
In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.
– Richard Dawkins River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life
The alternative is to assume supernaturalism, which would not make sense since there's no evidence for anything supernatural.
Can natural processes create natural processes?
I don’t know.
So you think there is an ultimate ‘natural process’ at the heart of infinite negative entropy? Or do you just not believe in the big bang process?
Plate tectonics cause earthquakes, solar flares cause weather changes, temperature causes sleet, snow, and water vapor, and so on.
When someone discovers a supernatural process, we'll be sure and revisit the issue.
Maybe. The primordial atom may have been infinite in the sense that something that exists outside of space and time can't really have a "beginning" or be "created".
No, you cannot identify a state of nothing in our present Universe. You can fudge and make axiomatic that anything below Planck lengtha nd Planck time is not real, but that is not the same as defining a state of nothing. In fact, Haisch, Rueda, and Puthoff have derived F = ma using quantum parton configurations, thus showing that inertia is due to real ‘things’ smaller than quarks acting upon quarks.
The cool thing is that nothing isn't nothing any more. Science is changing our understanding of nothing to the point that what we considered nothing prior actually has a lot of something. In quantum fluctuation we can see particles popping in and out of existence in fields of "nothing" all the time.
"A point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God."Natural – matter, energy, laws of physics, space, time.
-Steven Hawking
Natural causes cannot ultimately cause natural processes (circulus in probando).
Why would something that is not bound space, time, matter, energy, or the natural laws of physics be supernatural? If it can be measured, observed, or verified. If it indeed exists, then the laws of physics that will have to change to accommodate it.
If you're trying to appeal to something that cannot be measured, verified, proved, observed, or in any way else make itself open to evidentiary inquiry, then that's called snake oil.
Hawking is an atheist by the way.
I know he’s an atheist and that the point – he knows that natural causes cannot ultimately cause natural processes.
He doesn't know any such thing, nor does he claim to.
Your assertion is incorrect. It may be the way popular science defines quantum fluctuations, but it has now been proven incoreect with the work of Bernard Haisch and his associate Rueda. Look for their 2005 paper in Physics.
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