EvC Forum: Rational Skeptics VS Theists & Christians

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There is a group on facebook that I have followed for awhile and some of the questions and topics being proposed are thought provoking. I thought I would start a topic and share one here.

Rational Skeptics vs Theists writes:

Angelo: I think i have good reasons to be skeptic, that materialism tops theism in regards of explanatory power of our origins. Try....

Richard: Which materials composed the original "singularity"? Where did they come from? What bound them together and what caused them to create the "Big Bang"? Where and how did life begin? The DNA strand is built by several machines working in concert. The instructions to build those machines is in the DNA. Which came first? No assertions...just proven scientific facts.

Thugpreacha(aka Phat): so it looks as if materialism has solid measurable evidence which theism cant have....is that your argument?

Angelo: True. And the measurements do not favour materialism. 1. The more statistically improbable something is, the less it makes sense to believe that it just happened by blind chance.
2. Statistically, it is practically impossible, that the primordial genome, proteome, and metabolome of the first living cell arose by chance.
3. Furthermore, we see in biochemistry purposeful design.
4. Therefore, an intelligent Designer is by far the best explanation of origins.
It is an interesting question, to elucidate what would be a theoretical minimal Cell, since based on that information, we can figure out what it would take for first life to begin on early earth. That gives us a probability, if someone proposes natural, unguided mechanisms, based on chemical reactions, and atmospheric - and geological circumstances. The fact that we don't know the composition of the atmosphere back then doesn't do harm and is not necessary for our inquiry.
According to a peer-reviewed scientific paper published in Science magazine in 2016: Design and synthesis of a minimal bacterial genome, in their best approximation to a minimal cell, it has a 531000-base pairs genome that encodes 473 gene products, being substantially smaller than M. genitalium (580 kbp), which has the smallest genome of any naturally occurring cell that has been grown in pure culture, having a genome that contains the core set of genes that are required for cellular life. That means, all its genes are essential and irreducible. It encodes for 438 proteins
Regardless of whether the actual minimum is 100,000 or 500,000 nucleotides, this is all beyond a nucleic acid technology struggling with falling apart at 200 nucleotides. The current understanding of information can give many explanations of the difficulties of creating it. It cannot explain where it comes from.

Protein-length distributions for the three domains of life
The average protein length of these 110 clusters of orthologous genes COGs is 359 amino acids for the prokaryotes and 459 for eukaryotes.

Proteins are the result of the instructions stored in DNA, which specifies the complex sequence necessary to produce functional 3D folds of proteins. Both, improbability and specification are required in order to justify an inference of design.

1. According to the latest estimation of a minimal protein set for the first living organism, the requirement would be about 438 proteins, this would be the absolute minimum to keep the basic functions of a cell alive.

2. According to the Protein-length distributions for the three domains of life, there is an average between prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells of about 400 amino acids per protein.

3. Each of the 400 positions in the amino acid polypeptide chains could be occupied by any one of the 20 amino acids used in cells, so if we suppose that proteins emerged randomly on prebiotic earth, then the total possible arrangements or odds to get one which would fold into a functional 3D protein would be 1 to 20^400 or 1 to 10^520. A truly enormous, super astronomical number.

4. Since we need 438 proteins total to make a first living cell, we would have to repeat the shuffle 438 times, to get all proteins required for life. The probability would be therefore 438/10^520. We arrive at a probability of about 1 in 10^350.000 ( A proteome set with 239 proteins yields odds of approximately 1/10^119.614 )

Comments welcome and encouraged.

Lets go with Miss. Topics In Creation and Evolution, shall we?

Edited by Phat, : spelling

Edited by Phat, : No reason given.

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