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.