Is Abiogenesis a fact?

To agree with you by restating your comments - if it could be observed and tested, or even just observed, it never was supernatural.

I don't know what the "supernatural" is, because nobody will ever tell me, no matter how often I ask.But by definition, anything whose effects can be detected or observed in the natural world is natural.

You don't see anything maybe just a little bit untrustworthy about an argument of the form "there's all this stuff that we couldn't possibly know how to design, so naturally it must all have been designed by someone"?Like, nothing about that doesn't give you pause?

Well, plants come from seeds, but plants are much, much larger than could possibly be contained by a seed. Where does all that extra stuff come from?From the soil, of course, and you can grow a plant on nothing living whatsoever - just some minerals and chemicals that can be produced completely synthetically. So, clearly, the plant is employing nonliving matter as part of its living structure.Life from nonlife? Life does that all the time. And we know from a hundred other experiments (beginning with the synthesis of urea in the 1800's) that the fundamental chemistry of life is no different than the chemistry of minerals and the like. Babies come from mothers, yes, but I weigh much, much more than my mother. Clearly I'm composed of quite a bit of stuff that didn't come from her. Pasteur disproved spontaneous generation of maggots and bacteria, not abiogenesis or the RNA World model. Do you really think that we haven't learned anything more about biology since Pasteur's work in the 1800's? Or is it your contention that Pasteur is to be taken as the last word on all matters biological?

Right, exactly. "Food" is when living things turn non-living matter into living matter.It happens right in front of our eyes, and you think it's unreasonable? That doesn't make any sense to me. Why? I weighed 8 lbs when I was born. Now I weigh 140 lbs. That 132 lbs of matter had to come from somewhere, right? It came from my food, of course - I took nonliving matter and incorporated it into my body. It became living matter during that process. Or is it your contention that only 8lbs of me is alive? But part of you did come from rocks. You ingested those materials as food and incorporated them into your being. You turned nonliving matter into living matter. Why is that hard to understand? Why do you find that a confusing or debatable statement?I mean, if you contain those materials, where did they come from if not from the world around you?

How did the iron get into the dogs, then?

C'mon, you must know better than that. Why does a balance diet include not just carbohydrates (chemical fuel), but protein and minerals?Because that's what your body uses to build itself. Look, it's a simple issue of conservation of mass. You weigh hundreds of pounds more than you did when you were born. Where did all that mass come from if not your food? Thin air? Where does the material for those cells come from? Your food, of course. That's why you need a certain set of amino acids, etc. Cars don't grow or reproduce; the analogy is false. All I'm trying to tell you is that living things take nonliving matter and use it within themselves - they turn nonlife into life.This is 5th grade biology, Pilate. Think back. You weigh so much more than you did when you were born. How is that possible, except that you've been constructing your body from the food you've been eating? Every living thing does exactly the same thing. I'm not saying that you "came from rocks", and you won't find that statement in any of my posts. But you've turned the material found in rocks into your own living body, and in doing so, done exactly what you say is impossible.

No intelligent being was alive on Earth at the time life began. Moreover, we've never seen an intelligent being create life at all.Rather, the only processes we've ever observed produce life from lifelessness are the mindless chemical processes at work in every living being. Thus, clearly, mindless processes can cause nonliving matter to become living. That's fine. Research into how completely natural processes produced life on the early Earth is ongoing, and as yet, there's nothing to support a definite conclusion. I think at this point, anybody's free to believe what they would like to believe. I don't find chemistry very interesting so it's not a very interesting question to me. The inputs would be the materials and chemicals that existed on that early Earth. The process would be the same laws of physics and chemistry that are operating to this day. The output would be the early chemical precursors of life.Your simple equation doesn't pose a barrier to non-divine abiogenesis that I can see. Crystal. I hope my response is the same.

You know, you're the second guy to say this in a week, and I have to ask - who is telling you this?There's no grapple necessary. There's about ten different cheap and easy techniques to synthesize arbitrary proteins in the lab. (And yes, they can start with amino acids that are synthetic in origin, although there's absolutely no difference between synthesized amino acids and amino acids harvested from living things.) The definitive textbooks on laboratory peptide synthesis were written in the 80's. These are not new techniques.Whoever is informing you on the state of the art in laboratory bioscience clearly hasn't stepped foot in a lab in more than 30 years. Where did you get the impression that scientists didn't know how to produce real proteins? The hurdle is more like predicting the weather - there's a lot of variables to compute, and as the problem grows in complexity, you need more computing cycles to predict the final quartenary structure. Protein fold modeling is a computer problem, nothing more. No, I guess not. There's no evidence that there is one, though.

You take the deist view, then? Fine with me; it's not really fundamentally different than most forms of atheism. But that's not how it works in reality. In reality, physical laws don't need to be observed in order to happen. Trees don't wait to fall down in the woods until someone is there to see. The laws of physics happen regardless of whether or not someone is in the room. Indeed. I hope you stick around.