First off, welcome to the fray, pilate_judas.
It appears you have dragged out a number of responses to this question, one that does keep re-appearing on these forums.
But, what gets my goat is to suggest--as some of the posters I believe are trying to suggest--that the ORIGIN of life is a pre-biotic soup w/o a living & intelligent being in the picture.
What I can see is that when it comes right down to the nitty-gritty answer ... is that we don't know.
It could be one it could be another, it could be some answer nobody has yet considered, but in the end ... we don't know.
Modulous actually stumped me on this when he pointed out to an Abrahmic God.
My personal belief, as a Deist, is that the universe was created with a maximum of diversity and intentional chaos in order to achieve the most diverse possible kinds of life and experience, but also that the universe was primed for life to develop.
I have put together a rather extensive essay on the possibilities, the things we do know, the building blocks we can point to as possible paths. It is located at
RAZD - Building Blocks of Life. This is not meant to be definitive but indicitive and subject to modification as new information becomes available (it was written a year ago, and some posts do add new information). Feel free to read and comment there as you wish.
My first message to you,
Message 249, may have seemed a little abrupt in it's final assertion, which I have toned down to
We also see pre-biotic self replicating systems. They come from pre-biotic self replicating systems.
We have cup-cakes as well as cakes.
Simply put, life may have come from pre-biotic self replicating systems.
I feel this position is amply substantiated by my essay on building blocks to be a perfectly reasonable position.
Again, the bottom line is that we don't know.
Now let's take your assertion:
Life from Non-Life is Not Reasonable
And, my disagreement is based on this simple equation: INPUT + PROCESS = OUTPUT.
As I said before, nobody is claiming that there was
not {INPUT + PROCESS = OUTPUT}, but that the input + process are not limited to being life to get output as life -- they could be {pre-biotic replicating systems + energy + substrates that catalyze formation}.
Therefore to keep pushing this 'equation' as proof that life could not come from {pre-biotic replicating systems + energy + substrates that catalyze formation} is not being intellectually honest or logically consistent, but falling back on assertion based on the argument from ignorance and incredulity (as others have pointed out).
Denial of evidence that contradicts your position is not faith.
But let me now turn your main "complaint" around and say:
Life ONLY from Life is Not Reasonable
For then you
never answer the question of where the first life came from.
You may think you know and have a final answer, that some god or other always existed -- but that ends up being a special pleading logical fallacy, excluding discussion of where that god came from, a 'favor' for one side not given to the other.
Ultimately life came from something not-life-as-we-know-it, whether that something was imbued with spirit or not ... we don't know.
I don't know if your read Jar's post,
Message 250, where he said:
There is ample evidence that there was a time when life did not exist on earth.
There is ample evidence that life now exists on earth.
So, anyone who hints or suggests that life did not come from non-life has to provide the model that shows some other source for life.
There was a time when there was only non-life.
Later there was life and non-life.
If life did not come from the non-life, just what DID it come from.
I'm not so sure we can set a time when we absolutely know there was no life -- just not likely life as we know it ... and yet we keep finding life in more and more extreme conditions of heat and pressure ... even living off radiation deep in the earth. We also find pre-biotic compounds in outer space ... the far reaches of outer space, where they could not have come from earth.
What we do know, is that the oldest rocks we can find that are capable of showing signs of life that we can recognize -- rocks 3.5 billion years old -- that those rocks do show signs of life, it was already here.
There is also some disputed evidence that may push it back to 3.7 or 3.9 billion years, but it would still be life already existing at the limits of our ability to detect it.
Before that, we don't know. Life may have existed for some time before then ... we don't know.
It could even be true that life existed during the big inflation of the universe, that remnants of that life was sprayed out into to the universe and what we see around us is but a poor survivor remnant or some weak reconstruction of that first life, or it may be what that first life intended to happen ....
We don't know.
Enjoy.
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