Lazarus1 writes:
But you must concede that your claim to strong atheism (that you know there is no God) is not logical,that means there MIGHT be a God, because you don't know all the evidence. Therefore, you must logically be an agnostic.
Somewhat off topic.
If you've had any logic class, then you would know that "proving" something always falls on the ones that claim the positive. For one thing, it is impossible to "prove" that God doesn't exist. However, it is possible to prove that God (or anything) exists simply by finding it. Therefore, the burden of "proving" its existence falls on you.
With that said, show me God and I'll admit its existence. Otherwise, it remains imaginary just like the Easter bunny and Santa.
Back to topic.
We do not know
yet how the first cell came to be. There are several hypotheses that people have, but none of them have been accepted by mainstream science yet. I'll outline the most popular one, which is the four stage hypothesis.
Stage 1 Abiotic synthesis of organic monomers.
We know for a fact that organic molecules form natrually rather easily under certain condition. This was demonstrated by the Miller experiment in the early 50's. He basically created an enclosed apparatus and he put inside water, hydrogen gas, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and a whole bunch of other non-organic molecules that thought to have existed in early earth environment. He then zapped the apparatus with electricity for about 3-4 days. He then took the apparatus apart and found amino acids, monomers of proteins, ATP, and a whole bunch of other organic molecules.
Repeats of the orginal experiment by other scientists have produced all 20 amino acids necessary for life, lipids, sugars, nucleotides of monomers of DNA and RNA, and ATP.
If you want, you can try to do this experiment at home. It's quite simple.
Stage 2 Abiotic Synthesis of polymers
The miller experiment have shown that organic monomers can form quite easily naturally without any divine intervention. This stage explains how these monomers could come together and form polymers such as proteins and nucleic acids without help from biological components today like enzymes.
Scientists have been able to create such polymerization without any divine intervention by dripping solutions of organic monomers onto hot sand, rock, and clay. The heat vaporizes the water in teh solutions and the monomres naturally establish bonds that form polymers such as chains of amino acids that make up proteins.
Again, you can watch this process happening in your own home. If you have a fish tank and a heater in the fish tank, you should notice that there are some solid stuff forming slowly on the heater glass. Same process.
The hypothesis goes that water may have splashed the monomers onto hot rocks of early earth and natural processes pretty much took care of the rest.
stage 3 Self replicating molecules
The hypothesis suggests that the first replicating organic material were short strands of RNA. Laboratory experiments have shown that nucleotide monomers can naturally assemble into RNA molecules without divine intervention. This process happens without the presence of cells or enzymes. As you can imagine, the result is a pool of RNA strands. Now, what scientists have also observed is that some of these RNA strands actually self replicate without any help from anything whatsoever. Again, no divine intervention necessary.
Stage 4 Assembly of pre-cells
Again, laboratory experiments have shown that lipids can fold and establish a self-contained environment in the center from the environment.
For those of you that doesn't know what a cell structure look like, here is a brief explantion. A prokaryotic cell contains a cell wall that isolate the inside from the outside environment.
A pre-cell is pretty much very similar to this structural design. Lipids could have curved in itself and isolate a small pocket of envirnment in the center. When scientists put the pre-cells (which assembled without any help from anybody, not even God) into different solutions of salt concentrations, they found that pre-cells store energy in a form of voltage in their membrane (the cell wall equivalent). When introduced certain enzymes to the pre-cells, the precells displayed a very primitive metabolism. They absorbed substratesfrom their surroundings and release the products of the reactions.
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All the experiments I mentioned above were performed without any prayer or divine intervention. Organic molecules naturally assembled on their own and eventually assembled themselves into pre-cells.
Hope that helps!
The Laminator
™ Version 4.2