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Paper in white the floor of the room, and rule it off in one-foot squares. Down on one's hands and knees, write in the first square a set of equations conceived as able to govern the physics of the universe. Think more overnight. Next day put a better set of equations into square two. Invite one's most respected colleagues to contribute to other squares. At the end of these labors, one has worked oneself out into the doorway. Stand up, look back on all those equations, some perhaps more hopeful than others, raise one's finger commandingly, and give the order "Fly!" Not one of those equations will put on wings, take off, or fly. Yet the universe "flies". - John A. Wheeler

Like my grandpa could have but probably didn't say, if a man can't make his own point he probably doesn't have one!

But from what I gather, you're implying something along the lines of "Cells are obviously here and since the only way they could have come to exist is if they sprang to life from randomly mixed inorganic soup, and so therefore that is how it happened..?" I Taut' so, I Taut' so...!

-Jesse

Like my grandpa could have but probably didn't say, if a man can't make his own point he probably doesn't have one!

"Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra."

Actually, I thought the quote was somewhat conciliatory, as it concedes that the universe holds ineffable mysteries still impenetrable to science. However, I will hold fast to the idea that there is no scientific argument for the impossibility of the spontaneous origin of life, and furthermore, that the history of scientific discovery has done nothing but offer encouragement to the idea, as the conditions of life as we see it fit so extremely well with such an origin.

On the other side of the coin, I am always bemused by the idea of a Designer God, or as a recent poster put it, God the Great Engineer. Here we are asked to impute specifically human endeavors to God, as if man were not made in the image of God, but God is rather a man carried to some kind of fever pitch. It strikes me as almost comical. And, it is entirely unbiblical! In Genesis, God speaks and commands. There is no mention of designing, and no one ever seems to venture any sort of guess about what sort of activity might be implied by the term. As a result, the doctrines of Creationism and Intelligent Design seem to amount to nothing more than a demand for pious silence on the subject.