The Big Big Thread of Religious Discussion

[Tydeus]

Well, see, this is difficult, because basically we have a contest over facts at the moment. An "it is true" vs. "no its not" kind of thing.

I guess my two cents regarding abiogenesis --

It's a big goddamn universe. Really, really fucking big.

Earth, at the time at which primitive life was supposed to have arisen, had oceans, but the atmosphere was not yet as thick as it is today. So, we had more radiation/cosmic rays coming down to the surface, and penetrating into the water. Every single body of water on earth with adequate depth would have achieved a sort of "sweet spot" with regard to radiation levels. Just enough to stir the primordial soup, but not too much to immediately destroy any new creation. So, all over earth, there will billions and billions of reactions occuring every day, for millions upon millions of years. Sure abiogenesis may be really fucking improbable, but if you roll the dice enough times...

And then there's the whole "huge fucking universe" thing. Earth is this structure that's quite good at "rolling the dice" many times, very quickly. And, then there's billions of earth-like planets in this galaxy alone (estimated). And there's a shitload of galaxies just in our own cluster, and there are billions of clusters....

So, basically, no matter what the odds are, unless it's actually impossible, it would've happened.

Originally Posted by Swordchucks

So according to scientists, they're able to make an amino acid (picture one), so therefore spontaneous generation of a cell (picture three) is possible. Yeah, no leap in logic there. It's like saying that the materials that make bricks can form naturally, so therefore given enough time a house could spontaneously generate.

Well, first of all, I've got some responses to make to other things said in your post, but, yeah. A house could spontaneously generate. Hell, the Roman Forum could spontaneously generate. Really, really unlikely, but hey, it's a big goddamn universe.

And of course it's going to seem all very unlikely to us -- why here? and all that business. But, of course, it happened here, because we're here. We're not going to be existing on some world that didn't roll the dice and get lucky! We'll exist on the world that has all the ridiculous-seeming improbabilities all compiled, because that's only where we could exist. It's not a hugely satisfying argument, but it makes a lot of sense. Why is the universe tuned that way it is? Because we live here. And we aren't going to live in a universe in which basic constants would prevent the formation of atoms.

But, I think there are a few other flaws in what you posted.

Originally Posted by Swordchucks

This is a protein. Its made of thousands of amino acids, all in the proper order, and with the proper charge to give it an active site, a water soluble region, and a lipid soluble region. One wrong amino acid can cause a bad mutation (this is hemoglobin, so a wrong amino acid causes sickle cell anemia).

More primitive life forms often have less complicated proteins. Viruses, for example (well, they're not really alive, but you know, work with me), often feature somewhat less-complicated proteins. Neuraminidase (sp?) is damn complicated, but not as complicated as hemoglobin And, after all, something that doesn't even metabolize doesn't really require hemoglobin, now does it?

Further, regarding "One wrong amino acid can cause a bad mutation." Again, we're talking about in a highly evolved creature. Again, to return to neuraminidase and hemagglutinin -- influenza undergoes all sorts of mutations every year, and every year, their hemagglutinin and neuraminidase structures are slightly different. Sometimes, the difference can be by dozens of amino acids. And yet, this can lead to new hosts, pandemic outbreaks, and all the like. One minor mutation is not so harmful to such a primitive proto life form.

Imagine even earlier, when "life" didn't metabolize, or necessarily even have DNA/RNA as we know it today, or come in cellular form. It's not like amino acids organized into a cell, or something. First into primitive, simple proteins, which in turned organized together into something more complex, and so on and so forth.

Believe me -- I do understand the impulse to irreduceable complexity. I'm not even a microbiologist, but just learning about something so essential, like the Krebs cycle or photosynthesis, sometimes makes you want to go "someone had to come up with this shit." But, you just have to think about all the supposed steps, right from the damn beginning, and it doesn't seem so implausible after all.

I mean, this is all really just a re-hash of early evolutionary debate and the eyeball. How could something so complex have occured randomly? asked the skeptics, as I'm sure you already know, Sword (so let me say now that most of this post is to assert my understanding, and I'm sure I'll be corrected many times, acheiving my meta-purpose of debate, and also I'm posting for the benefit of others. I don't mean to insult your intelligence, expert that you are, and a valuable memeber to have in such a debate).

And so a progression was thought up, starting with mere patches of photoreceptive cells, capable only of determining light or dark, and without much gradation -- much like the "eyes" found on flukes. And so it evolved from there. Millions upon millions of base pairs may have needed to change, but we're talking about millions upon millions of organisms, each rolling its genetic dice millions upon millions of times, all repeated over the course of millions of millions of years.

Early "life" would have been less alive than viruses, and simpler, and more open to the benefits of mutation thereby.

To return to the beginning:

Originally Posted by Sword

This is a cell. The is what the first life would have looked like. I used a bacteria cell, because animal cells are far more complicated but didn't come first. Even so, this thing is made of hundreds of thousands of proteins, lipids, nucleic acids, and carbohydrates. Each one has a particular function.

This is basically what I've been taking issue with (how characteristic of me to put it at the end of a book-length post). You're asserting that scientists assert that something as compex as a complete, modern prokaryotic cell spontaneously generated, when what I've always read and heard (and thought) is not that minerals could spontaneously form into bricks, and so then a house, but that bricks could form spontaneously, and bricks could form into walls and chimneys and foundations, and these could then form a house.

It's not like we went from soup --> modern life. We went from soup --> sorta, kinda reproductive soup. Ish. --> slightly more reproductive soup still, --> etc.

Anyway, that's always been my understanding.

[Fifthfiend]

Well, see, this is difficult, because basically we have a contest over facts at the moment. An "it is true" vs. "no its not" kind of thing.

Yet another in an occasional series of "Why no sane human being would ever want to be responsible for moderating this discussion."

Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, North Korea, and China

Uh, the Nazis were Christian.

Also doesn't North Korea worship its wacky-ass dictator or some crazy shit like that?

[notasfatasmike]

Originally Posted by fifthfiend

Uh, the Nazis were Christian.

Without reinvolving myself in the actual religious debate, um, no, they weren't. Hitler did use a lot of Christian rhetoric in his speechs, but many private statements culled from his unpublished writing and from statements made by his associates indicate that he was simply using Christianity to further his own goals. This is where the confusion on this issue commonly comes from - if you just take his speeches at face value, he does seem to be using Christianity as one of his talking points, but if you study the behind the scenes story, you'll see that even if Hitler did believe in the Christian god and in Jesus, his beliefs on them were so wacked out (surprise surprise) as to be unrecognizable.

As for the other Nazi leaders, most of them had their roots either in secular thought or in obscure non-Christian religions. To say that the Nazis were Christians is just factually inaccurate. It's a commonly used anti-religious talking point that, ironically, I'm sick of hearing as someone who cares about an accurate teaching of German history, not as a Christian. (Not that I'm claiming that you're using as an anti-religious talking point, Fifth; I'm just mentioning the context I usually see it in.)

The Nazis were just shitty human beings on their own merits, regardless of their religion or other beliefs or whatever. But I suppose that's neither here nor there for this thread, so I'll stop talking now.

[Sithdarth]

Originally Posted by Tydeus

This is basically what I've been taking issue with (how characteristic of me to put it at the end of a book-length post). You're asserting that scientists assert that something as compex as a complete, modern prokaryotic cell spontaneously generated, when what I've always read and heard (and thought) is not that minerals could spontaneously form into bricks, and so then a house, but that bricks could form spontaneously, and bricks could form into walls and chimneys and foundations, and these could then form a house.

Hell a virus can't even really be called a cell in any normal sense of the word. If you want to go even further there exist Prions. These things are pretty much just molecules that self-replicate. Oh and this research kind of shows how life could have gone from molecules that replicate to groups of molecules that replicate.

Life is really tricky in that we really don't have a definition of it. Viruses are missing a couple of the key "indicators" for life and yet are generally considered alive. Prions replicate by themselves and debate has yet to settle their status. Generally it seems the more we know about biology the fuzzier the boundary between living and not living gets.

[I_Like_Swordchucks]

Originally Posted by Tydeus

So, basically, no matter what the odds are, unless it's actually impossible, it would've happened.

Indeed. If it is actually possible, it would have happened. I think to go from amino acid to full grown human being would take a hell of a lot longer than the 4 billion years they say we had without outside influence, but thats just me.

The point I'm trying to make, however, is that we don't even know that it IS possible. Being able to spontaneously produce an amino acid is a far cry from evidencing it can actually go any further. Therefore the whole concept of abiogenesis is based on a premise that has no evidence or experiment to back it up whatsoever.

When looking at it like that, believing in abiogenesis requires as much faith as believing in God. It might not be wrong. But science doesn't deal with faith. It deals with fact and observation, none of which is observed. In fact all evidence we have suggests what we commonly refer to as the Law of Biogenesis, that life can ONLY come from life. I'm sure you can see where I get the point that the only reason abiogenesis is taught is because many dearly-loved scientific theories collapse without it.

Also, you're right, hemoglobin is not a prokaryotic protein. I wasn't trying to imply that it was, I was merely mentioning that the particular picture I was using was that of hemoglobin. Pictures of prokaryotic proteins wouldn't look extremely different, however, and they would still need functional domains.

I don't know where you learned that the first life was less complicated than modern bacteria, however. It's theorized that the first organisms were a type of archaebacteria (blue green algae), and they're pretty damn complex. Viruses are less complex, but still require a nucleic acid and a protein, but they aren't self replicating. Evolutionary theory states that viruses came after bacteria, not before, because viruses require bacteria in order to reproduce as well as that the proteins expressed by their genes are quite complex compared to that of simple bacteria.

You brought up another point too, which is quite true, but damages the current concept of evolution more than what it helps. You said that mutations are more common and less damaging in lower forms of organisms. That is true. Yet if you consider the ladder of evolution, it took a billion years to go from a simple bacteria to a really complex one. It took another billion years to become a eukaryote. Another half a billion years after that to become a multicellular eukaryote. But then if you look at the last 100 million years, the change in creatures have become more complicated, larger in scale, and at a faster rate all the while being less likely to occur. The fast mutation rate of bacteria is true, though even with that extremely fast mutation rate we haven't seen true speciation with it. But how did we somehow manage to get 60 million beneficial mutations in the past 4 million years? Thats 15 positive mutations per year, all in the same ancestry!!! In a creature as complicated as a primate, and without the availability of the argument of billions of primates, the odds are inescapably low. Granted, its possible, but not in the time frame without outside influences.

It should also be noted that there haven't been any recorded instances of a progressive mutation (one that improves a species). We've seen sideways mutations, and regressive ones, but never a progressive mutation. Again, science requires something that has never actually be tested or observed to be true. I'm not denying the existence of evolution, or the fossil record. But I will say the current concept of evolution and the fossil record do a lot more to support intelligent design in my mind than it does to discredit it.

And to believe that it was all purely random and natural selection takes a whole of a lot of faith, because there's sure no empirical evidence to back it up.

Originally Posted by Sithdarth

Hell a virus can't even really be called a cell in any normal sense of the word. If you want to go even further there exist Prions. These things are pretty much just molecules that self-replicate. Oh and this research kind of shows how life could have gone from molecules that replicate to groups of molecules that replicate.

Again, prions are not 'self-replicating'. They need to hijack the system of a living cell in order to replicate, hence why they are infectious. They cannot do so on their own. Most scientists think that both prions and viruses and viroids all evolved after life did, not before, so they aren't a stepping stone.

And seriously? The guy makes a genome using enzymes and bases essentially CREATED for him by OTHER ORGANISMS, and you think that supports spontaneous generation? The polymerase used came from a bacteria, the nucleotides used came from a yeast, the lipids used would have come from another organism. This isn't a spontaneous generation, its a chimera. And he can't even get it to work right. There is no evidence here.

[Fifthfiend]

Hitler did use a lot of Christian rhetoric in his speechs, but many private statements culled from his unpublished writing and from statements made by his associates indicate that he was simply using Christianity to further his own goals. This is where the confusion on this issue commonly comes from - if you just take his speeches at face value, he does seem to be using Christianity as one of his talking points, but if you study the behind the scenes story, you'll see that even if Hitler did believe in the Christian god and in Jesus, his beliefs on them were so wacked out (surprise surprise) as to be unrecognizable.

As for the other Nazi leaders, most of them had their roots either in secular thought or in obscure non-Christian religions. To say that the Nazis were Christians is just factually inaccurate.

That the Nazis were crazy, hypocritical Christians hardly disproves that they were Christians. I mean I'm not sitting here arguing Soviet Russia wasn't atheistic just cause they had a really crazy-ass version of atheism going.

And it's not like a a lot of say, Catholicism, doesn't have its roots either in secular thought or in obscure non-Christian religions.

[I_Like_Swordchucks]

Originally Posted by fifthfiend

That the Nazis were crazy, hypocritical Christians hardly disproves that they were Christians. I mean I'm not sitting here arguing Soviet Russia wasn't atheistic just cause they had a really crazy-ass version of atheism going.

And it's not like a a lot of say, Catholicism, doesn't have its roots either in secular thought or in obscure on-Christian religions.

And you do realize they also believed in the occult and mysticism and threw all the Christians in concentration camps as well, right? I'm pretty sure I read somewhere before that Hitler stated that there was no God... could be wrong.

Besides, using certain Christian statements in order to get votes does not make them Christian. They did not claim to be Christian, they did not listen to the Vatican or any other religious authority, they burned bibles, and followed NONE of the Christian ethic. I'm pretty sure that means they weren't Christians.

[Azisien]

Sword, I have to say, for a molecular biologist going for his PhD, you're really looking at evolution, something you should be at least moderately versed in, from a highly random and linear perspective.

I haven't checked up on abiogenesis stuff lately, I think they've gone beyond amino acids by now, into proteins, fragments of DNA, RNA, etc. I'd have to hunt that down, I think it involved the energy impacts of meteorites driving the reactions.

As Sword said though, of course even bunches of proteins and RNA and DNA isn't "proof" of abiogenesis, but it does show these reactions can happen, that something doesn't have to come from nothing, so to speak.

I think a matter of scale is getting in the way here. It always does, and it does for me, I definitely don't claim to be above it. We're all, what, under 30 years old? We can all trace our family trees, what, MAYBE 1000 years back if you're lucky?

Lacking total recall, I can't really even remember my entire life of only 20 years. How the hell am I supposed to imagine 400 million years? The absolute age of the Earth is still somewhat flexible, that's because the older something is, the more uncertainty accumulates. But given current evidence, life DID arise in its primitive forms (bacteria or bacteria-like) "quickly." I put it in quotations because I say quickly GEOLOGICALLY.

Anyway, I could continue summarizing entire university courses, but really this is stuff everyone needs to learn without reading an Internet forum. Learn it properly.

[I_Like_Swordchucks]

Originally Posted by Azisien

Sword, I have to say, for a molecular biologist going for his PhD, you're really looking at evolution, something you should be at least moderately versed in, from a highly random and linear perspective.

Yep. I also did an minor in philosophy in my undergraduate degree. And did two courses, Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Biology, that did large sections on evolution.

And abiogenesis is not evolution. Don't confuse the two concepts. Evolution DEFINITELY exists. The world is dynamic, and life must definitely evolve and adapt. Natural selection occurs. The organism that is fittest to reproduce passes on its genes.

I actually have quite a good understanding of evolution. However, there are many gaps... MANY gaps... that are simply explained by theories such as abiogenesis which have no scientific or empirical basis. Therefore, belief in those theories ARE faith, not empirical or logical or scientific.

I believe in the aspects of evolution that have been shown to be true. You will not see me arguing the earth is 6000 years old. However, for the aspects that haven't been proven, belief in God fills in those gaps just as well as the beliefs that atheistic scientists have. Believe it or not, every molecular biologist in my department believes in God in some form or another.

After taking the personal experience into account, I'm more likely to believe God exists because I've felt it. Therefore, those gaps in evolutionary theory are tidily fixed by incorporating the concepts of God and Creation with Evolution. They work much better together, and explain the gaps in each other, than they do alone.

And as for my view of pure evolution being random, what do you suppose the atheist concept of evolution is? Directed evolution?

Originally Posted by Azisien

I haven't checked up on abiogenesis stuff lately, I think they've gone beyond amino acids by now, into proteins, fragments of DNA, RNA, etc. I'd have to hunt that down, I think it involved the energy impacts of meteorites driving the reactions.

Pretty sure they haven't. Ribose, the sugar that makes up the backbone of DNA and RNA, has been shown time and time again to be only formed by enzymes. And those papers that say they've formed protein fragments... they're talking about amino acids. And I find it amusing that they decided energy impacts of meteorites driving the reactions. They're using a premise with no proof to try and prove a premise with no proof. It can't hold up.

[Tydeus]

Originally Posted by I_Like_Swordchucks

When looking at it like that, believing in abiogenesis requires as much faith as believing in God. It might not be wrong. But science doesn't deal with faith. It deals with fact and observation, none of which is observed. In fact all evidence we have suggests what we commonly refer to as the Law of Biogenesis, that life can ONLY come from life. I'm sure you can see where I get the point that the only reason abiogenesis is taught is because many dearly-loved scientific theories collapse without it.

Well, I think it takes slightly less faith. Basically, it's like believing in "imaginary time" or a multiverse, or a universe that imploded and then turned into ours, or whatever else. We may never know, and currently have no damn idea if any of these are anywhere approaching correct, but they do fit within our understanding of the universe today. God can be a rather contrary thing. Outside of time, infinite being, etc. etc. Not that it's impossible (I guess, according to the people who sure seemed to know a whole hell of a lot more about physics on this forum than I do), but that it would require a lot of re-working of our basic understanding of the universe.

This is not to say that we should try to preserve our understanding as it is, necessarily, but that we ought to just continue with our current understanding until contrary evidence shows up in great enough quantities. While believing that God created the universe or that we live in a universe within a multiverse may be equally unproven, God's existence would require a massive re-thinking of many, many scientific principles. So, while believing in a godless Creation requires faith, in a way, at least it requires the smallest leap of faith possible. It meshes with what we have recorded and experimented and proven.

Also, you're right, hemoglobin is not a prokaryotic protein. I wasn't trying to imply that it was, I was merely mentioning that the particular picture I was using was that of hemoglobin. Pictures of prokaryotic proteins wouldn't look extremely different, however, and they would still need functional domains.

Granted, but I was talking about things even simpler than that. I didn't think you were implying hemoglobin is prokaryotic -- merely that it was a poor choice of protein when speaking of the pre-cellular primordial soup at the time of abiogenesis.

I don't know where you learned that the first life was less complicated than modern bacteria, however. It's theorized that the first organisms were a type of archaebacteria (blue green algae), and they're pretty damn complex.

Well, yes, the first true life forms were archaebacteria, or so I've been taught. But, I was just saying that life-like entities, similar perhaps to viruses (or as Sithdarth mentioned, prions) would have preceeded archaebacteria, as a bridge from amino acid to archaebacteria.

Viruses are less complex, but still require a nucleic acid and a protein, but they aren't self replicating. Evolutionary theory states that viruses came after bacteria, not before, because viruses require bacteria in order to reproduce as well as that the proteins expressed by their genes are quite complex compared to that of simple bacteria.

Well, see, now I've learned something!

Anyway, what I was trying to say, I guess, was that primitive entities may have existed that weren't technically alive, but may have preceeded and promoted the creation of life. Take prions (although I'm no longer saying that they existed prior to cellular life, but just as an example of a "could have") -- they don't self-replicate, but they do attach to other, normally-folded proteins, and change them into the prion form. If you've got a crapload of primitive proteins floating about, and this one kind of protein has a tendency to turn others into copies of itself, that's a way of introducing order via energy input into the system.

And really, that's what it all comes down to -- introducing order into the system by aid of energy input. The energy was there; it's just a matter of how it got translated into order. (Or if, I guess)

You brought up another point too, which is quite true, but damages the current concept of evolution more than what it helps. You said that mutations are more common and less damaging in lower forms of organisms. That is true. Yet if you consider the ladder of evolution, it took a billion years to go from a simple bacteria to a really complex one. It took another billion years to become a eukaryote. Another half a billion years after that to become a multicellular eukaryote. But then if you look at the last 100 million years, the change in creatures have become more complicated, larger in scale, and at a faster rate all the while being less likely to occur. The fast mutation rate of bacteria is true, though even with that extremely fast mutation rate we haven't seen true speciation with it. But how did we somehow manage to get 60 million beneficial mutations in the past 4 million years?

Well, they need not all be beneficial -- merely not harmful. Obviously some have to be beneficial, but not all. It's all about the net outcome, right?

And, really, think about going from prokaryote to eukaryote -- that's really a much bigger step than going from "really hairy, kinda smart, kinda bipedal mammal" to "less hairy, really smart, totally bipedal mammal." I mean, prokaryote to eukaryote is a big change, and so is single-celled to multicellular. Comparatively, that'd be like going from soup-in-a-bag ape ancestors to organ-filled (delicious organs!) human beings. I mean, the whole no-organelles to organelles transition is pretty huge. And so is the idea of multicellular organisms, in which cells depend on each other for survival and differentiate. It's like technology, kind of. Took us 100,000 years to get farming, but once we got the possibilty for differentiation of societal roles, specialization increased exponentially.

In the one-to-two billion years since multicellular organisms appeared, there's yet to be another jump in evolution of that same scale. So, really, it still fits the model. Especially since we don't even see any signs that a jump of that nature may happen anytime soon. It's just been refinements of the same basic idea. Prokaryote -- > eukaryote was a paradigm shift, and so was single cell --> multi cell. Austrolepithecus (sp?) Afarensis --> Homo Sapien is just a refinement of very similar ideas.

Thats 15 positive mutations per year, all in the same ancestry!!! In a creature as complicated as a primate, and without the availability of the argument of billions of primates, the odds are inescapably low. Granted, its possible, but not in the time frame without outside influences.

Again, not all the mutations would have to be positive, right? Just a net total?

It should also be noted that there haven't been any recorded instances of a progressive mutation (one that improves a species). We've seen sideways mutations, and regressive ones, but never a progressive mutation.

Really? What about drug resistance? What about Moths on birch trees (You know that classic, right?)? What about the few lucky people who seem to be basically immune to HIV?

We just seem to have settled into something of a nice niche -- there's yet to be really devastating, mass-extinction-scale environmental pressures on most of the aforementioned species to actually make such traits into the kind of traits that dictate the future of the species.

Again, science requires something that has never actually be tested or observed to be true. I'm not denying the existence of evolution, or the fossil record. But I will say the current concept of evolution and the fossil record do a lot more to support intelligent design in my mind than it does to discredit it.

But, again, the idea of God overturns a lot of science, not just evolution. So, while both ideas may have problems, at least one does not conflict with what we are confident of.

And to believe that it was all purely random and natural selection takes a whole of a lot of faith, because there's sure no empirical evidence to back it up.

None? Isn't that an exaggeration?

Again, prions are not 'self-replicating'. They need to hijack the system of a living cell in order to replicate, hence why they are infectious. They cannot do so on their own. Most scientists think that both prions and viruses and viroids all evolved after life did, not before, so they aren't a stepping stone.

addressed above.