How did it start?

If you have an opportunity to talk to a number of articulate, thoughtful people you may be surprised in where the dividing lines in modes of thought actually are.As I have stated elsewhere here, I (an atheist) have more in common in worldview and thinking with a Christian minister friend than she does with the fundamentalist Christians.Atheists come in all stripes just as Christians do. They are frequently able to sustain an aura of awe at the magnificence of the universe around them that is just as strong as any more "spiritual" person. Don't be too quick to think that you know how someone thinks just because they have a label on their forhead.

I wasn't intending to suggest that you did. If anything I may have been projecting since when I see the label "creationist" I jump to sometimes unwarrented conclusions.

I will be gone. The emergent property of mind will no longer be supported when the brain no longer functions.Believe me I wish it was otherwise but wishes done't make it so.

In any detail that's correct.So?[This message has been edited by NosyNed, 04-30-2004]

I,personally, happen to agree that, with the right, carefull definition of god, the only purely logical conclusion is agnosticism.However, I, personally, go beyound that based on the history we have of conjecturing all sorts of gods and other magical things doing all sorts of things. Over and over this has proved to be a deeply flawed way of looking at and explaining the world around us. Given that history I make the "leap of faith" that it makes some sense to go a step beyond agnosticism and adopt atheism.

Sorry but we have, indeed, wandered off topic. If you want to propose a new topic on this I'll put a little into it.

I think it is a bit strong to say no merit. However, I agree that it is a very weak argument.Perhaps a better view of it would be to note that at every level life is just chemistry. The deep question is to find the simplist form of chemistry that can have some kind of imprefect "reproductive" capacity.A number of differnt experimental results have been referenced here at EvC on this question. I'll see if I can find them.To summarize what I think might be the argument:
1) There is no barrier to chemistry crossing the threashold to life. In fact, it is very hard to define where the threashold is or was.2) We have bits and pieces of steps that could cross the threashold but haven't gotten the whole thing linked up as yet.3) We may never (short of visiting planets in the condition of the early Earth) have a very sure idea of exactly what pathway was taken here. My feeling is that we will be in this state not because we have a hard time finding a way for life to arise but because we will find too many ways and not know which one actually occured. The other obvious reason we will not be sure is because all traces are almost certainly gone by now.That's about all you're going to get right now. I'll just see if I can find some of the references to the details.

It is simple but it is only the barest of starting points.Once we agree that there is no real barrier between chemistry and life (that is we aren't arguing vitalism) we are still left with how do we go from clearly non-living to something that is arguably living.What Robin is asking about is what evidence do we have to lead us to understand how this happened. I hope that s/he isn't saying that it can't happen (that would be disengenous given what her recent posts have been saying).ABEWell maybe there is a bit of a problem when I read "empirical evidence for life coming from non-life". (emphasis mine). That suggests that there is some doubt that it can happen at all. Which is at odds with some other points Robin has made.This message has been edited by NosyNed, 12-15-2004 02:07 PM

Yea, well, you ignored my ABE. I'm not sure that Robin is willing to be completely clear on just what is being asked for and not.Besides I'm feeling generally very cranky and not at all Xmasy. So I'm trying to make things difficult for both sides.

I'd have to say that this is a reasonable position.For myself, not knowing, isn't a good enough reason to contemplate jumping away from suspecting a natural sequence of events. For others it might be. Those who make that jump are going against the tide of history is all.

I like that question. Here are some random thoughts on it:1) If it was it would be very, very hard to detect. It isn't like we have a complete list of all living things that are there so we can tell a "newbie" from the others.Heck just recently bacteriophages were discovered to be much much more prevalent than understood. It seems the outnumber all other living things by a very, very wide margin.2) The earth today is basically enormously different from what it was 4 Gyrs ago. It may be that the conditions that allow/encourage the formation of life are just too different from today.3) As a subset of 2, any new life would have to compete with life that has 3 some billion years of evolution behind it. It might have a tough time surviving in competition with that. For one thing the precursors to life might look a lot like food to todays critters.ABE
so the answer to the question is: "I doubt that abiogenesis is going on today."As cool as that would be, I would be astonished.This message has been edited by NosyNed, 12-15-2004 03:03 PM

You seem to think that there is a contradiction because you are mixing the occurance of life arising with the "how" of it.Crash says he doesn't know "how".If life arose "ex nihilo", from mind or from eternal life those mechanisms (whatever they mean, especially the first two) seem to have used non-living matter that was already around. So I don't see that you aren't being contradictory and have taken us back to the point that Crash was attempting to make awile ago.What does, btw, ex nihilo and "from mind" mean?Why would we use "eternal life" as an explanation when we have no hint that such a thing exists?

S/he will. Within the next generation. The researcher who will give you that is alive today. It's a matter of time.This message has been edited by NosyNed, 12-15-2004 04:55 PM