Hello, Mirabile_Auditu, and welcome. Let me add to the Moose's point, if I may.
quote:
Contemporary Darwinism has quite enough difficulties, thank you, just trying to explain the descent (or if you wish, ascent) of man without adding to the impossible burden the greater impossibility of abiogenesis. For this reason, Darwin's apologists are extremely eager to dissociate themselves from abiogenesis. They claim, very nervously, no doubt, that "evolution does not include abiogenesis."
Abiogenesis is a very interesting subject, and is worth discussing for its own sake. However it is true that abiogenesis is separate subject than the (biological) theory of evolution.
As an analogy, let us take my family history. We know that a certain branch of my family started in Ohio and ended in Oregon by way of Kansas. We have a pretty good idea that this occurred, and rough estimates of the dates, because we can locate birth and death certificates and marriage liscences.
However, we do not know how my European ancestors first came to North America, or when. We have only some vague ideas, but nothing definite. But it doesn't matter in regards to the subject of the long journey that took my ancestors from Ohio to Kansas, and the on to Oregon. My family might have come to this country after the Civil War, they may have arrived during the British colonial period, or they may have miraculously appeared at some point. We do have definite evidence, though, that at some point they were in Ohio and then moved to Kansas and then to Oregon.
In the same way, we have very good detailed evidence of the history of life on earth, and that all current species have evolved from a very few (perhaps only a single) ancestral species. We do not need to know how life originally arose (although that is, indeed, an interesting question). Life may have arisen from entirely naturalistic means on the surface of the earth; it may have come from interstellar space; it may have been miraculously created
ex nihilo by a deity three and a half billion years ago. But it doesn't matter
how it came about (as much as we'd like to know), because whatever the origin of life is, the evidence that evolution has occurred over the past several billion years is pretty much indisputable and unambiguous.
"Intellectually, scientifically, even artistically, fundamentalism -- biblical literalism -- is a road to nowhere, because it insists on fidelity to revealed truths that are not true." -- Katha Pollitt
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