WLC on why theory of biological evolution is better evidence for theism than atheism
Sept 21, 2018 15:40:38 GMT
Post by rizdek on Sept 21, 2018 15:40:38 GMT
Seems to me the existence of a god who can create matter and energy, time and space out of nothing would be a miracle. How in the world can such a being simply "exist" and do all it does with no "time" in which to do all those things? It's like explaining something that is difficult to explain with something that is astronomically more difficult to explain. Positing a supernatural world at all, much less a supernatural being only adds to the conundrum of how things got to be the way they are and solves nothing. The theist still doesn't know how a supernatural being in a supernatural world does what it does...just like naturalists can't explain all that they believe the natural world is, or has been, capable of.
My understanding of experiments done at the Scripts Institute suggests that long chained molecules that can reproduce and evolve have been synthesized from smaller molecules, in the lab. phys.org/news/2009-01-scientists-examples-rna-replicates-indefinitely.html
I find those experiments fascinating when thinking about the possible origins of life. It suggest to me that self-organization into long-chained self-replicating molecules might not have taken millions of years, but might've happened in a matter of years [or even shorter] given the right environment. Of course the time for a population of those long-chained thusly self-organized molecules to advance to the simplest cell-like organisms given the hit or miss aspects of natural settings stable enough to allow that to happen, might have required millions of years for the right combination of conditions to allow evolution to proceed. But AFAIK, that part of the process...from conjectured long-chained molecules TO the simplest one-celled organisms took over a billion years.
The one thing these experiments debunk is that abiogenesis would have had to depend on a purely random assemblage of billions of atoms into DNA molecules out-of-the-blue, so to speak. It suggests DNA evolved from other, simpler, molecules which themselves evolved from simpler molecules, etc. just like many believe mammals evolved from other previously existing, perhaps simpler, life forms.
One of my favorites is the phospholipid bilayer. It is the beginning of the protective environment necessary for RNA replication to avoid the ravages of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, to play a sort of "Maxwell's Demon" role (stretching terms a bit) in the advancement of the system of molecules. Experiments with the early stages of RNA replication typically avoid using a phospholipid bilayer.
Perhaps among the reasons are that although the conditions to develop a phospholipid bilayer are easily set up in a lab, and the conditions to get a set of amino acids are easily set up in a lab, trying to do both at once proves to be most difficult. How do you get not just amino acids but the beginnings of chains of RNA to form inside the phospholipid bilayer? Then you have another problem. Although you've reduced the agencies of disassembly, you've also reduced the agencies of forward assembly. If the chains were sitting there doing nothing before, they're even more determined to do nothing now. The great philosophical question then becomes which came first, the long "smart" RNA chain or the phospholipid bilayer?