Um, did you read the title of this thread? The OP dragged God into the subject on the first line, and I don't think he's an atheist. I fully agree that there is today no good theory about the origin of life. Every proposed theory has lots of gaps where "magic happens". A prokaryotic cell is enormously complicated, and isn't going to get thrown together by chance, even if you have an ocean full of experiments going on for billions of years. So all origin of life attempts involve trying to find stable intermediate systems of chemicals that could have a least plausibly have formed naturally and ultimately lead to life as we know it. When it gets to the particulars it's really hard to come up such systems. My conclusion: I am unsurprised that there is still stuff that scientists don't know. That's what makes it an interesting area for further research. But it's a very weak reed to base one's belief in God on.
Um, no, it's not that simple. Suppose that we tried to create a prokaryote by randomly throwing together simple molecules. Suppose you carried out one trillion such experiments in parallel in each cubic centimeter of water, and did one million such parallel experiments every second. Then with an entire ocean and 10 billion years you'd have about 10^60 chances to create your first bacterium. The problem is that the odds of creating a cell in this way are on the order of 10^million-or-so. So no, you're not going to get life this way. The vast majority of protobiologists who are numerate are aware of this combinatorial problem. That is why they have to come up with more complex theories and the good scientists in the field will tell you that we don't have a complete theory yet, just some plausible pieces.
I know what your saying. However it's true there were a vast number of breeder sites over vast periods of time with vast numbers of chemicals involved. It's this huge number of trials and error, and building-upon, that lead to life. My initial and main point remains true, and that is that protobiologists do NOT say that life could not have come from chance. Almost all of them believe it did. The initial premise of that argument is false. I will admit there is a slim possibility that earth was seeded with bacteria from comets. But if it was, that bacteria evolved on another planet through similar processes.
Can you read... the paper presented you the conclusions of nobel prize winners and the giants of the field. They tell you that although it could not have happened by chance.... we are here. According to Crick âthe origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to been satisfied to get it goingâ (1981: 88); the emergence of life was nevertheless a âhappy accidentâ (p. 14). 5 According to Mayr, âa full realization of the near impossibility of an origin of life brings home the point of how improbable this event was.â (1982: 45). Monod famously claimed that although the probability of life arising by chance was âvirtually zero. . .our number came up in the Monte Carlo gameâ (1974: 137). Life, as Monod puts it, is âchance caught on a wingâ (p. 78). That is, although natural selection took over early to produce the diversity of life, its origin was nothing but an incredibly improbable fluke.Does Origins of Life Research Rest on a Mistake? 459 However, the vast majority of experts in the field clearly define their work in opposition to this view. The more common attitude is summed up neatly by J. D. Bernal. [T]he question, could life have originated by a chance occurrence of atoms, clearly leads to a negative answer. This answer, combined with the knowledge that life is actually here, leads to the conclusion that some sequences other than chance occurrences must have led to the appearances of life. (quoted in Fry 2000: 153) Having calculated the staggering improbability of lifeâs emergence by chance, Manfred Eigen (1992) concludes, The genes found today cannot have arisen randomly, as it were by the throw of a dice. There must exist a process of optimization that works toward functional efficiency. Even if there are several routes to optimal efficiency, mere trial and error cannotbe one of them. (p. 11) It is from this conclusion that Eigen motivates his search for a physical principle that does not leave the emergence of life up to blind chance, hence making itreproducible in principle: The physical principle that we are looking for should be in a position to explain the complexity typical of the phenomena of life at the level of molecular structures and syntheses. It should show how such complex molecular arrangements are able to form reproducibly in Nature. (p. 11) According to Christian de Duve (1991), . . .unless one adopts a creationist view,. . .life arose through the succession of an enormous number of small steps, almost each of which, given the condition at the time had a very high probability of happening. . .the alternative amounts to a miracle. . .were [the emergence of life] not an obligatory manifestation of the combinatorial properties of matter, it could not possibly have arisen naturally.
"Right off the bat wrong. First sentence. No need to go further." Spot on. Rational argument matters not one jot to Jem. He needs gaps for a God to sit in, as if life could have originated not by chance from chemical reaction/synthesis which of course everything points toward, but by chance of magic, which of course nothing does. Accordingly he'll pointlessly and rather brainlessly keep posting the same flawed text even though it's been refuted a thousand times, just like a retarded creationist would.
Jem, how about this? God ejaculated into space and his sperm, like comets, spewed into earth and impregnated her.
No you don't. If rew's numbers are correct, you'd be more likely to win a "Pick Three" of atoms from the observable universe than create a cell.
The numbers are just numbers. It's playing with abstracts and extrapolating from unknowns. These kind of philisophico/probabilistic arguments tend to ignore some very mechanistic proofs. We can see genes. We can watch fruit flies and bacteria evolve to fit certain environments. We can feel in our hands the fossils. Theories developed to fit physical reality will always trump those to fit abstract constructs.
Right... just like you "thought" that because life exists on earth, that somehow "proves" it "came from simple terrestrial processes."