David Deamer’s book “Assembling Life”

[MarkE]

Bill Rogers has been pestering me to read this for some time. I’ve resisted mainly because I don’t believe that the OoL issues we’ve been disputing will be helped by another speculated location/model, in this case supplied by Deamer. However, from the free Kindle sample of AL:

“Conjecture: Life originated in hydrothermal vents and later adapted to freshwater on volcanic and continental land masses. In the absence of alternatives this idea has been accepted as a reasonable proposal.” And Deamer’s alternative conjecture: “Life originated in freshwater hydrothermal fields associated with volcanic land masses then later adapted to the salty seawater of the early ocean.”

One of the more interesting reviews [1] of Deamer’s book opens with, “It is worth reading, it is an advance in the field.”

[1] Bains, William. Getting Beyond the Toy Domain. Meditations on David Deamer’s “Assembling Life”. Life 2020, https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/10/2/18

Bains again:

“Deamer’s view might be summarised as “container-enabled chemistry first”. Long chain fatty acids can be made abiotically, and spontaneously assemble into multilayer structures on drying from freshwater hydrothermal fields, structures that break up again into vesicles on wetting. Why fresh water hydrothermal systems? Because in seawater divalent cations, especially calcium, prevent fatty acids from forming bilayers, as well as efficiently precipitating phosphate and organophosphate compounds (although the role of phosphate in OOL is itself contentious.”

Bains is sympathetic to Deamer’s approach, however in support of my claim that we don’t need another conjecture, says this:

“But. Here is the fundamental problem. There is only one actual fact known about the origin of life (OOL). It happened. We do not know where, when, or how. Suggestions on location range over clouds, in ice, black smokers, alkaline hydrothermal vents, freshwater volcanic or sedimentary hydrothermal systems, land ponds, coastal ponds, the Moon and Mars…Choose your key properties for life, your preferred path, find a location that matches those, and you have a new scenario for life, and one that can match your preferred mechanism better than any other. But it is not an objective choice.”

Regardless, Bains trumps a generally positive rap with this summary:

“In my view, almost all the OOL chemistry that I see is Toy Domain chemistry. It is making single types of biochemicals in a controlled laboratory setting using pure chemicals that might, just might, have been present in trace amounts in a complex mixture of thousands of other chemicals at OOL, under conditions that might have existed and might have persisted long enough, and then stopping the reaction at exactly the right time to maximize the yield of what you want. It neglects that many of the postulated starting materials are themselves unstable. It neglects that they will react with other chemicals present. It neglects that the intermediates will all react with each other, and with the products.”

That's from an informed and supportive commentator who believes there must be a naturalistic explanation for the origin of life. Where have we heard precisely the same criticism of the state of OoL recently? Yes, from James Tour.

Perfect.

[MarkE]

William Bains (short selection):

Research Scientist
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Apr 2009 - Oct 2014 · 5 yrs 7 mos
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Researcher in Prof Sara Seager's group at MIT, working out how we might detect alien biochemistries on other worlds. Computational chemistry and biochemistry work with a world-class physicist.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-bains/?originalSubdomain=uk

Photochemistry in terrestrial exoplanet atmospheres. II. H2S and SO2 photochemistry in anoxic atmospheres
R Hu, S Seager, W Bains - The Astrophysical Journal, 2013 - iopscience.iop.org

Phosphine on Venus cannot be explained by conventional processes
W Bains, JJ Petkowski, S Seager, S Ranjan… - Astrobiology, 2021 - liebertpub.com

Many chemistries could be used to build living systems
W Bains - Astrobiology, 2004 - liebertpub.com

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=William%20Bains

[broger...@gmail.com]

Hey, if you aren't interested, don't read it.

[Burkhard]

On Sunday, September 17, 2023 at 9:00:40 AM UTC+1, MarkE wrote:
> Bill Rogers has been pestering me to read this for some time. I’ve resisted mainly because I don’t believe that the OoL issues we’ve been disputing will be helped by another speculated location/model, in this case supplied by Deamer. However, from the free Kindle sample of AL:

With other words, you want a theory of OoL without a theory. Baring time travel, every reconstruction of a singular past event will inevitably involve speculation and model building, though specific speculations/hypothesis/models can then be tested and sometimes falsified, which allows us to say that certain things did not happen. But the positive claim cannot be anything but "speculation", which a minute's thought should tell you.

[MarkE]

On Sunday, September 17, 2023 at 10:20:39 PM UTC+10, Burkhard wrote:
> On Sunday, September 17, 2023 at 9:00:40 AM UTC+1, MarkE wrote:
> > Bill Rogers has been pestering me to read this for some time. I’ve resisted mainly because I don’t believe that the OoL issues we’ve been disputing will be helped by another speculated location/model, in this case supplied by Deamer. However, from the free Kindle sample of AL:
> With other words, you want a theory of OoL without a theory. Baring time travel, every reconstruction of a singular past event will inevitably involve speculation and model building, though specific speculations/hypothesis/models can then be tested and sometimes falsified, which allows us to say that certain things did not happen. But the positive claim cannot be anything but "speculation", which a minute's thought should tell you.

Not interested in nit-picking and semantics. Tour calls out the highly exaggerated claims of OoL, and Bains does the same with his "toy domain" assessment. Both offer serious critiques from outside and within the camp. If you want to address matters of substance, be my guest.

[MarkE]

Bains has given me sufficient reason not to.

But I do want to thank you for leading me to this goldmine. In reading _about_ Deamer I've discovered within the OoL camp a truth-teller - speaking the same truth as James Tour. The irony is exquisite. And the case is substantial. Counter-arguments of substance are welcome.

[MarkE]

On Sunday, September 17, 2023 at 6:00:40 PM UTC+10, MarkE wrote:

More choice cuts from Bains' article:

"Again, the term ‘Protocell’ is used to mean any liposome-like membrane encapsulating other molecules. In my opinion, a vesicle encapsulating random organic molecules is almost as far from life as the bulk “prebiotic soup” from which it was made. To draw “Protocells → Progenote” in a diagram [11] skips over everything about how that transition happens, i.e., how life originates!"
- This confirms a recent thread where I challenge Deamer's endorsement of Dyson's "garbage bag model".

"Because, I suggest, OOL is at least 50 years too early. OOL in 2020 is like AI in 1950. It was missing several critical pieces. We are playing with Toy Domains."
- Maybe OoL does need another 50+ years to develop. Why pretend the current state of the field is anything but?

"Most researchers, even some working on such chemical schemes, understand that lab chemistry is only a tiny part of the whole problem. But that is not the primary issue. It is a tiny part solved in an unrealistic way. Only by a tiny, outside chance can lab reactions of specific reagents, even to give “messy” products, be part of a larger solution. The research does tell us something about chemistry. But it is not something that has much relevance to OOL, because if you carry out lab organic chemistry on anything approaching a plausible pre-biotic aqueous organic soup you never get life. You get tar. Even if you do it in vesicles."
- James Tour couldn't have said it better.

"And indeed there has been a major advance in the use of the term “major advance” in the OOL literature; 75% of all papers using the phrase “major advance” in the context of origin of life listed in Google Scholar were published after 2011. But what many such advances are is a new scenario—new location, new suggested set of pure reagents to react, a new chain of specific reactions that have be demonstrated, one at a time, in the lab. They are all new Toy Domains."
- The term “major advance” called out for the misleading hype that it is. Again, pure Tour.

"I think we need to go beyond this, and here Deamer is oddly muted. We need new ideas, and not just yet another contrived scenario how this or that reaction could happen on this or that mineral, not even a refocusing on the chemistry of life on self-organization rather than individual chemical reactions. We need fundamentally new ways of looking at life and its origin, and we do not have them, not even close."
- We're shooting fish in a barrel now.

"What new ideas? I do not know!"
- Thank you!

"There is also a lot of excitement about “systems chemistry” and “autocatalytic” systems, catalysed mainly by Stuart Kauffman. Kaufmann postulates that a sufficiently diverse collection of reactive and catalytic molecules would undergo a phase transition and become self-propagating, autocatalytic, i.e., life-like. But what does “diverse” mean? Atmospheric photochemical networks have nearly as many components and more reactions than central metabolism. Does this mean the atmosphere is alive? Specificity and accuracy need to be included; what biochemicals do not do is at least as important we what they do. But this depends on the chemistry involved. Just saying that A catalyses the reaction of B with C does not say what A does to D thru Z, or what D thru Z do to A. Even within the biochemical networks of established life, random chemistry occurs and degrades the components of metabolism (e.g., the reaction of amines with sugars, amino acid side-chains with each other etc.). Any sufficiently complex set of reactive and catalytic molecules is, in fact, Benner’s tar. We need something more."
- Autocatalytic systems? Tar.

"And we hear every now and again about “New Physics”, a term growing like bindweed from the intellectual rootstock to Schroedinger’s execrable book."
- A refence to Jeremy England?

"This is a simplistic model, and as such is justifiably relegated to an appendix. However it illustrates that the issue in OOL research is not just ‘can we make it’ but also ‘can we stop making everything else’." https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/10/2/18/s1
- the tar problem again

[broger...@gmail.com]

Well, I told you when I recommended the book that it was a review of (then) current research in OoL, not a solution to the problem. It is an honest review of the science and points out the limitations. It will absolutely disappoint you if you are looking for the breakthrough that solves the whole problem.

[Mark Isaak]

On 9/17/23 6:13 AM, MarkE wrote:
> On Sunday, September 17, 2023 at 6:00:40 PM UTC+10, MarkE wrote:
>> Bill Rogers has been pestering me to read this for some time. I’ve resisted mainly because I don’t believe that the OoL issues we’ve been disputing will be helped by another speculated location/model, in this case supplied by Deamer. However, from the free Kindle sample of AL:
>>
>> “Conjecture: Life originated in hydrothermal vents and later adapted to freshwater on volcanic and continental land masses. In the absence of alternatives this idea has been accepted as a reasonable proposal.” And Deamer’s alternative conjecture: “Life originated in freshwater hydrothermal fields associated with volcanic land masses then later adapted to the salty seawater of the early ocean.”
>>
>> One of the more interesting reviews [1] of Deamer’s book opens with, “It is worth reading, it is an advance in the field.”
>>
>> [1] Bains, William. Getting Beyond the Toy Domain. Meditations on David Deamer’s “Assembling Life”. Life 2020, https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/10/2/18
>>
>> Bains again:
>>
>> “Deamer’s view might be summarised as “container-enabled chemistry first”. Long chain fatty acids can be made abiotically, and spontaneously assemble into multilayer structures on drying from freshwater hydrothermal fields, structures that break up again into vesicles on wetting. Why fresh water hydrothermal systems? Because in seawater divalent cations, especially calcium, prevent fatty acids from forming bilayers, as well as efficiently precipitating phosphate and organophosphate compounds (although the role of phosphate in OOL is itself contentious.”
>>
>> Bains is sympathetic to Deamer’s approach, however in support of my claim that we don’t need another conjecture, says this:
>>
>> “But. Here is the fundamental problem. There is only one actual fact known about the origin of life (OOL). It happened. We do not know where, when, or how. Suggestions on location range over clouds, in ice, black smokers, alkaline hydrothermal vents, freshwater volcanic or sedimentary hydrothermal systems, land ponds, coastal ponds, the Moon and Mars…Choose your key properties for life, your preferred path, find a location that matches those, and you have a new scenario for life, and one that can match your preferred mechanism better than any other. But it is not an objective choice.”
>>
>> Regardless, Bains trumps a generally positive rap with this summary:
>>
>> “In my view, almost all the OOL chemistry that I see is Toy Domain chemistry. It is making single types of biochemicals in a controlled laboratory setting using pure chemicals that might, just might, have been present in trace amounts in a complex mixture of thousands of other chemicals at OOL, under conditions that might have existed and might have persisted long enough, and then stopping the reaction at exactly the right time to maximize the yield of what you want. It neglects that many of the postulated starting materials are themselves unstable. It neglects that they will react with other chemicals present. It neglects that the intermediates will all react with each other, and with the products.”
>>
>> That's from an informed and supportive commentator who believes there must be a naturalistic explanation for the origin of life. Where have we heard precisely the same criticism of the state of OoL recently? Yes, from James Tour.
>>
>> Perfect.
>
> More choice cuts from Bains' article:

> [...]

>
> "Because, I suggest, OOL is at least 50 years too early. OOL in 2020 is like AI in 1950. It was missing several critical pieces. We are playing with Toy Domains."
> - Maybe OoL does need another 50+ years to develop. Why pretend the current state of the field is anything but?

That question is easy to answer. People have to defend the field of
abiogensis from Tour, you, and people like you who insist that it is
worthless in every way. Nobody claims that abiogenesis has satisfying
answers. But it should be obvious, even to you, that nobody will ever
find the answers if nobody ever looks for them.

It occurs to me that you do not *want* answers about abiogenesis, do you?

--
Mark Isaak
"Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between 'That
doesn't make sense' and 'I don't understand.'" - Mary Doria Russell

[Gary Hurd]

On Sunday, September 17, 2023 at 1:00:40 AM UTC-7, MarkE wrote:
> Bill Rogers has been pestering me to read this for some time. I’ve resisted mainly because I don’t believe that the OoL issues we’ve been disputing will be helped by another speculated location/model, in this case supplied by Deamer. However, from the free Kindle sample of AL:
>
> “Conjecture: Life originated in hydrothermal vents and later adapted to freshwater on volcanic and continental land masses. In the absence of alternatives this idea has been accepted as a reasonable proposal.” And Deamer’s alternative conjecture: “Life originated in freshwater hydrothermal fields associated with volcanic land masses then later adapted to the salty seawater of the early ocean.”
>
> One of the more interesting reviews [1] of Deamer’s book opens with, “It is worth reading, it is an advance in the field.”
>
> [1] Bains, William. Getting Beyond the Toy Domain. Meditations on David Deamer’s “Assembling Life”. Life 2020, https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/10/2/18
>

My reading recommendations on the origin of life for people without college chemistry, are;

Hazen, RM 2005 "Gen-e-sis" Washington DC: Joseph Henry Press

Deamer, David W. 2011 “First Life: Discovering the Connections between Stars, Cells, and How Life Began” University of California Press.

They are a bit dated, but are readable for people without much background study.

If you have had a good background, First year college; Introduction to Chemistry, Second year; Organic Chemistry and at least one biochem or genetics course see;

Deamer, David W. 2019 "Assembling Life: How can life begin on Earth and other habitable planets?" Oxford University Press.

Hazen, RM 2019 "Symphony in C: Carbon and the Evolution of (Almost) Everything" Norton and Co.

Note: Bob Hazen thinks his 2019 book can be read by non-scientists. I doubt it.

Nick Lane 2015 "The Vital Question" W. W. Norton & Company

Nick Lane spent some pages on the differences between Archaea and Bacteria cell boundary chemistry, and mitochondria chemistry. That could hint at a single RNA/DNA life that diverged very early, and then hybridized. Very interesting idea!

Nick Lane
2022 "Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death" W. W. Norton & Company

In this book Professor Lane is focused on the chemistry of the Krebs Cycle (and its’ reverse) for the existence of life, and its’ origin. I did need to read a few sections more than once.

[broger...@gmail.com]

There seem to be two major complaints.

The first complaint is that OoL scientists keep claiming that much more progress has been made than actually has been. I don't really know what to make of that claim. That sort of triumphalism is more common in popular science summaries than in actual research papers. Indeed one can quotemine papers from the same set of OoL scientists to suggest that either they think the problem is essentially insoluble or that they think it has essentially been solved. But when I read the actual research papers, they all seem pretty circumspect to me, very willing to admit the large amount of stuff that is unknown and the limitations of the results. Some scientists can certainly toot their own horn more than I'd like - first everybody wanted to have created a "paradigm shift" in whatever field they worked in, then everything had "novel" in the title, so much so that the standing joke was to read the title replacing the word "novel" with "yet another." But that's more a criticism of style than substance and, mostly, more applicable to science journalism than to the actual technical papers.

The second complaint is that the research is too focused on "toy domains," very simplified sets of reagents and conditions that ignore all sorts of other compounds that would presumably be present in the natural environment and which might significantly change the results. Well, that seems to me a very reasonable way to start. You have an extremely complex problem - a long set of steps that took place over millions of years in unknown environment and that involved complex mixtures of reagents. It seems quite rational to think about key steps and look for early-earth-like conditions under which they can be made to occur. Of course there are side products, yields are low, components not present in the experimental design might have played an important role; but you have to start somewhere. The people who do those experiments acknowledge the artificiality of the set-ups.

Still, this is progress. Look at a couple of "catch-22's". (1) The "water problem." Life works in an aqueous environment. But in an aqueous environment, condensation of amino acid monomers into peptides or nucleotides into oligonucleotides is energetically unfavorable and is not expected to happen spontaneously. In living things an energetically favorable reaction has to be coupled to the condensation reaction for it to occur. But you can't have all the mechanisms required for that coupling in a living cell without nucleic acids and proteins. Catch-22. Except that since the "water problem" was proposed a variety of abiotic conditions have been found that favor polymerization over hydrolysis - wet-dry cycles, adsorbtion to clays, microparticles, lipids, bubbles. None of these is obviously what happened 4 billion years ago, but the simple lab experiments show that the water problem is not a fatal catch-22. That's progress. And everybody working on this admits that there still remains an enormous amount to explain - what conditions, for example would select for 5'-3' rather than 5'-2' linkages in oligoribonucleotides, how are soluble oligopeptides enriched relative to insoluble "goop."?
(2) Another catch-22 - the DNA-RNA-protein catch-22. You need enzymes to replicate or transcribe DNA and you need enzymes to translate RNA into protein, you can't make RNA without the enzymes, but you can't make the enzymes without RNA. Sounds pretty fatal, too. Until, in "toy domains" people started finding that RNA alone can have enzymatic activity, indeed a variety of enzymatic activities that can be selected for in vitro. That certainly is not remotely proof of the RNA world in all its detail, but it shows the catch-22 was not fatal.

Of course nature, in the form of a volcanic pool or a tide pool or a hydrothermal vent is more complicated than a test tube, but the approach of understanding complicated phenomena by breaking them down into simple steps and making sure you understand the simple steps well before you add in complications seems to work pretty well. Still, if Bains has some experimental suggestions for a "fundamentally new approach to studying life and its origins," lots of people would be interested.

[MarkE]

That's a well-expressed and insightful summing up.

The first complaint of overstated progress, I would agree, would likely be partly attributable to individual horn-tooters and popular science reporters. The second complaint of "toy domains" could be partly justified by the need to start with the study of simplified reaction conditions and processes and build from there.

And as you say, various problems that have been declared catch-22s have since been tackled enough to argue for a downgrade from condition "fatal".

I wonder if there are broadly speaking these possibilities:

1. Claimed progress and actual progress in OoL research is about where you'd expect it to be, given the nature and difficulty of the problem, the age of the field, and the resourcing invested.
- "Nothing to see here"

2. Progress is lagging, claimed and actual, but as would be expected with a maturing discipline coming to grips with the scope of the challenge and not yet ready to concede the need to dial down the narrative.
- "No cover-up here"

3. The field is stalling, but the response is significant downplaying and denial of this, due to lack of awareness, unwillingness to admit, or other motivation.
- "There's a false narrative or cover-up here"

4. The accumulation of evidence, in the form of experimentally disproven hypotheses, has reached a level such that a significant proportion of those seeking naturalistic explanations are calling into doubt the capacity of known laws to provide answers, and are appealing unknown laws, non-supernatural teleological explanations, a multiverse to overcome all odds, etc.
- "Science has no satisfactory explanation for the origin of life (with the qualifier 'thus far' indefinitely applied, technically at least)"

If I could hazard a guess, you would be somewhere between 1 and 2, and closer to 1?

I'd place myself at 3 (with an acknowledged bias to expect 4 in time), along with James Tour and William Bains.

[MarkE]

I've appreciated listening to OoL presentations by Nick Lane and also Jack Szostak. I've particularly enjoyed reading "The Origin of Life Circus: A How To Make Life Extravaganza" by Suzan Mazur.

[broger...@gmail.com]

As expected, I'm firmly at 1. I don't think there's a cover up because (1) I don't think there's anything to cover up and (2) if you read the actual papers, they are all pretty open about the difficulties - so much so that it's possible to quote mine them and make it look like they think the problems are essentially insoluble.

[Öö Tiib]

I am thinking like 1. Events 4 bya do not matter to vast majority of
those who have money. Environment back then is not actual,
processes in it back then are not actual, waiting even millions of
years for anything feels most ridiculous business idea, nothing
to talk of billions. Evidence of so long ago is close to zero as is set
of ideas how to acquire more of it.

Interesting is that nanotechnologist James Tour has seemingly
decided to lament about OOL. Rare cares to put any bucks into OOL.
Meanwhile US government alone invests $2 billions annually into his
actual expertise area.

Note that the design theory is however in state of 0.
0. The accumulation of evidence and explanations of those evidences is
none and research done is also none.

Indeed ... why to create life 4 bya and then to leave it to wildly vegetate
for 3 billions of years? I agree with Ron Okimoto that no creationist
wants to explain that as whatever explanation is not what neither they
nor the choir to what they preach want to hear.

[Kerr-Mudd, John]

I'm sure she an entertaining author, but not above some embellishment:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Altenberg_16_controversy#Susan_Mazur

--
Bah, and indeed Humbug.

[Mark Isaak]

On 9/18/23 4:13 AM, MarkE wrote:
> [...]

> I wonder if there are broadly speaking these possibilities:
>
> 1. Claimed progress and actual progress in OoL research is about where you'd expect it to be, given the nature and difficulty of the problem, the age of the field, and the resourcing invested.
> - "Nothing to see here"
>
> 2. Progress is lagging, claimed and actual, but as would be expected with a maturing discipline coming to grips with the scope of the challenge and not yet ready to concede the need to dial down the narrative.
> - "No cover-up here"
>
> 3. The field is stalling, but the response is significant downplaying and denial of this, due to lack of awareness, unwillingness to admit, or other motivation.
> - "There's a false narrative or cover-up here"
>
> 4. The accumulation of evidence, in the form of experimentally disproven hypotheses, has reached a level such that a significant proportion of those seeking naturalistic explanations are calling into doubt the capacity of known laws to provide answers, and are appealing unknown laws, non-supernatural teleological explanations, a multiverse to overcome all odds, etc.
> - "Science has no satisfactory explanation for the origin of life (with the qualifier 'thus far' indefinitely applied, technically at least)"
>
> If I could hazard a guess, you would be somewhere between 1 and 2, and closer to 1?
>
> I'd place myself at 3 (with an acknowledged bias to expect 4 in time), along with James Tour and William Bains.

I know little specifically about current research going on in
abiogenesis, but I think we can rule out 3 and 4.

I can think of three things which might cause a field to stall.
A: Loss of interest. Rarely if ever applicable to any but narrow,
esoteric fields, and clearly not applicable here.
B. Reassignment of personnel or funding resources. Personnel
reassignments on a large scale happen due to world war, and I have not
noticed one of those lately. Abiogenesis research is not so expensive to
rely on one, or even very few, sources of funding, so that would not be
a reason.
C. Dominance of the field by a single misguided paradigm. This may have
been common in the past (I'm thinking of reluctance of doctors to start
washing their hands, for example), but the last such instance I can
think of was Freudian psychoanalaysis. Abiogenesis most certainly does
not suffer this problem.

As for your possibility #4, note that it has never before happened in
all of history, and in fact the pattern goes strongly the other way.
Natural explanations are found for things that used to be considered
supernatural. This trend is not merely in science, but also in theology,
as religious leaders come to see natural explanations as compatible with
their religion.

[Lawyer Daggett]

I'm struggling with the enumerated list. It mixes and matches from disjoint
concepts without a logical flow.

A. There is a question involving the state of scientific knowledge associated
with Origins of Life on Earth by natural means. This of course has myriad
aspects to it. They range from the state of knowledge of organic chemistry,
thermodynamics, information theory, and chemical catalysis. And these
separate disciplines become entwined in applied science. Then there's
an overlayer of modeling which mixes adopting the best of various
current understandings and the practicality of experimental testing.

B. Dependent upon an appreciation of aspects of A. above, there are
two more aspects invoked in the proposed scale of 1 through 4. One
is a judgement of the rate of "progress" in the various disciplines,
modeling, and experimentation. Two is an assessment of expectations
for what progress should be being made.

C. The 1-4 "scale also introduces some ill-defined perceptions about
how the whole field is perceived. Perceived by what metric? By whom?
Some branch of popular press or science journalism? By peer reviewed
publications? By organizations with agendas? It's the sort of thing that
just begs for confirmation bias in how one selects and weighs sources.

D. And then there's a conspiracy over-layer folded in about "cover-ups".

Part A has the greatest prospect of objectivity. Part B has a fairly objective
historical aspect, except there's a great deal of confusion over the
significance of underlying models for OoL and how to interpret them.
That makes it hard to be clear about progress.

Parts C and D are huge cans of worms. Folding them in, in this unfettered
way makes me think "run away, run away!"

[broger...@gmail.com]

I had a couple of other thoughts

>
> 1. Claimed progress and actual progress in OoL research is about where you'd expect it to be, given the nature and difficulty of the problem, the age of the field, and the resourcing invested.
> - "Nothing to see here"
>
> 2. Progress is lagging, claimed and actual, but as would be expected with a maturing discipline coming to grips with the scope of the challenge and not yet ready to concede the need to dial down the narrative.
> - "No cover-up here"

I think you are hearing a very different "narrative" than I am. I certainly am not hearing the narrative - "hey, we've got this all figured out, there's just a few details to wrap up," which seems to me to be what you perceive to be the narrative. When I read the actual papers, it just seems like ordinary workaday science, people making modest progress on a difficult problem, not different in tone from papers in any other field of science. It may be that if I were to spend a lot of time reading blogs about ID versus evolution in which OoL is at issue that I'd find some people talking as though OoL were already solved or nearly so, but I don't read that sort of stuff very often and I don't find that tone in the actual research papers. Most people working in the field are not motivated by a desire to refute ID, but by a desire to figure out what happened or what might have happened. ID is a going concern for IDers and people who spend a lot of time debating them, but not so much for most working scientists.

>
> 3. The field is stalling, but the response is significant downplaying and denial of this, due to lack of awareness, unwillingness to admit, or other motivation.
> - "There's a false narrative or cover-up here"
>
> 4. The accumulation of evidence, in the form of experimentally disproven hypotheses, has reached a level such that a significant proportion of those seeking naturalistic explanations are calling into doubt the capacity of known laws to provide answers, and are appealing unknown laws, non-supernatural teleological explanations, a multiverse to overcome all odds, etc.
> - "Science has no satisfactory explanation for the origin of life (with the qualifier 'thus far' indefinitely applied, technically at least)"

You here seem to talk as though experimentally disproven hypotheses were a bad thing and represent a failure in the field. That's not the way I would look at it. Every time a hypothesis is falsified, that result puts additional constraints on models for OoL. That's a good thing, not a bad thing. If you could show, for example, that conditions at hydrothermal vents were incompatible with polymerization of RNA, in principle you'd have reduced the number of possible scenarios that need to be worked through. Weeding out hypothesis that don't pan out, particularly in a question as complicated as OoL, is just the way science works. And not everything gets falsified. The finding of enzymatic activity in protein-free RNA systems is an important failure to falsify the RNA world hypothesis, because if it had proven impossible to demonstrate enzymatic activity in RNAs, the RNA world would have taken a probably fatal hit.

[MarkE]

Options 1 and 2, which I've categorised as unremarkable, naturally include experimentally disproven hypotheses; that's how science works. Therefore, I'm confused as to why you would suggest that I "seem to talk as though experimentally disproven hypotheses were a bad thing and represent a failure in the field."

You omitted my essential qualification of experimentally disproven hypotheses, i.e. "has reached a level such that". That "level" is of course subjective and open to debate.

[MarkE]

Don't run away.

Life originated either by known or unknown natural means, or by supernatural agency. The name of this forum sets an agenda of discussing this and related questions. What then might be the terms of engagement?

Is there a place for meaningful dialogue between those who take various and opposing views on this based on different interpretations of scientific evidence, and possibly other evidence or reasoning? If so, in broad terms how might this discussion proceed?

[talk.origins]

Yes, I did omit that. As I said, you flatter scientists in thinking that if they cannot hit open the correct hypothesis after X amount of time, then no correct hypothesis exists. I have no such confidence in human ingenuity - some problems may have solutions which, for any number of reasons, we just cannot find.

[jillery]

On Mon, 18 Sep 2023 16:16:16 -0700 (PDT), MarkE <me22...@gmail.com>
wrote:

>On Tuesday, September 19, 2023 at 4:05:41?AM UTC+10, Lawyer Daggett wrote:

Do you understand that material evidence, on which material science is
based, can provide evidence only for material causes?


--
To know less than we don't know is the nature of most knowledge

[MarkE]

Do you believe then that talk.origins is only for discussion of naturalistic explanations of origins? Or how would you express suitable terms of engagement here?

[Mark Isaak]

To start with, we need a definition of "supernatural." In particular,
how is "supernatural" recognizably different from "unknown"? How can a
hundred different people take your answer to that question, apply it to
questions regarding abiogenesis (or anything else) and get the same answer?

[MarkE]

So then, do you believe that talk.origins is only for discussion of naturalistic explanations of origins? Or how would you express suitable terms of engagement here?

[talk.origins]

> So then, do you believe that talk.origins is only for discussion of naturalistic explanations of origins? Or how would you express suitable terms of engagement here?
>

Opposite ... talk.origins is for discussion of whatever explanations of origins.
But how to? Read yourself. Even question how to differentiate between "unknown"
and "supernatural" will be responded by something like that. Asking anything in
that direction is perceived as aggression, attack or insult. What is the reason?
Can it be non-existence of supernatural explanations?

[Martin Harran]

On Mon, 18 Sep 2023 22:11:45 -0700 (PDT), MarkE <me22...@gmail.com>
wrote:


<snip for focus>

>
>So then, do you believe that talk.origins is only for discussion of naturalistic explanations of origins? Or how would you express suitable terms of engagement here?

As a committed Christian, I'm totally open to discussing
non-naturalistic explanations of origins. Why don't you open the
discussion by suggesting some non-naturalistic explanations?

Do note that to make a discussion worthwhile, it needs to be based on
positive arguments for such explanations rather than attacking things
you see missing in naturalistic explanations.

[Kerr-Mudd, John]

On Tue, 19 Sep 2023 01:02:21 -0700 (PDT)
"talk.origins" <oot...@hot.ee> wrote:

> On Tuesday, 19 September 2023 at 08:15:41 UTC+3, MarkE wrote:

[]
How about some snipping in this NG?

> > So then, do you believe that talk.origins is only for discussion of naturalistic explanations of origins? Or how would you express suitable terms of engagement here?
> >
> Opposite ... talk.origins is for discussion of whatever explanations of origins.
> But how to? Read yourself. Even question how to differentiate between "unknown"
> and "supernatural" will be responded by something like that. Asking anything in
> that direction is perceived as aggression, attack or insult. What is the reason?
> Can it be non-existence of supernatural explanations?
>

Pshurely there isn't any other than "some ineffable power beyond our
comprehension did it and then ran away". Or maybe it is still mysteriously
intervening but we can't ever understand it's motives, the best we can do
is come up with some complicated rituals to try to placate it.

[jillery]

On Mon, 18 Sep 2023 19:36:39 -0700 (PDT), MarkE <me22...@gmail.com>
wrote:

My question above is a sincere effort to get you to be clear what you
mean by "scientific evidence" and explanations for them. Scientific
discussions are limited to naturalistic aka measurable aka material
causes and effects. This doesn't say there are no supernatural aka
non-material causes and effects. This does say things which have no
material aspects provide no scientific basis to discuss, by
definition.

So one can claim to discuss supernatural aka immaterial aka
unmeasurable causes and effects, or claim to discuss naturalistic aka
material aka measurable causes and effects, or claim to discuss both
and by so doing fail to "engage" discussing either. Pick your poison.

[MarkE]

After 500 years on sustained research into origin of life, all available naturalistic avenues and hypotheses have been demonstrated to be inadequate, and this is the consensus a large majority scientists in the field. Would you say:

1. We may never work this out
2. Keep looking
3. Let's consider the God-hypothesis
4. Other (please elaborate)

You may choose more than one option.

[talk.origins]

"All available hypotheses" just means "all the ones anyone has thought of yet," right?

I'm sure you can guess that my choices would be 1 and 2, with maybe a little more inclination to 1, still leaving open the possibility that someone may come up with an idea that nobody thought of yet. But I won't be here after 500 years, so I'm not sure it matters.

Before you can get to 3, you'd have to make "the God hypothesis" an actual, testable hypothesis. Otherwise it's just a label you put on our ignorance.

[Mark Isaak]

> So then, do you believe that talk.origins is only for discussion of naturalistic explanations of origins? Or how would you express suitable terms of engagement here?

How can we discuss non-naturalistic explanations if nobody knows even
what a non-naturalistic explanation is?

Such questions diverge from science into the realms of philosophy and
theology, but those realms are entirely suitable for talk.origins, too.
Are you comfortable discussing epistemology and its application to theology?

[Bob Casanova]

On Tue, 19 Sep 2023 05:43:56 -0700 (PDT), the following
appeared in talk.origins, posted by "talk.origins"
<broger...@gmail.com>:

>On Tuesday, September 19, 2023 at 8:30:42?AM UTC-4, MarkE wrote:
>
<snip>

>
>> After 500 years on sustained research into origin of life, all available naturalistic avenues and hypotheses have been demonstrated to be inadequate, and this is the consensus a large majority scientists in the field. Would you say:
>>
>> 1. We may never work this out
>> 2. Keep looking
>> 3. Let's consider the God-hypothesis
>> 4. Other (please elaborate)
>>
>> You may choose more than one option.
>
>"All available hypotheses" just means "all the ones anyone has thought of yet," right?
>
>I'm sure you can guess that my choices would be 1 and 2, with maybe a little more inclination to 1, still leaving open the possibility that someone may come up with an idea that nobody thought of yet. But I won't be here after 500 years, so I'm not sure it matters.
>
>Before you can get to 3, you'd have to make "the God hypothesis" an actual, testable hypothesis. Otherwise it's just a label you put on our ignorance.
>

Two points:
1) There has been no more than 150 years of actual research
into OoL; less than 100 years of even semi-serious sustained
research.
2) In the absence of comprehensive data, I reject the
assertion that anything even close to consensus of "a large
majority [of] scientists in the field"exists. It's simply a
claim like "4 out of 5 doctors recommend Lucky Strike"; an
assertion without evidence. Of course, Mark can refute that
with a reference to the objective data, but I won't hold my
breath waiting.
>
--

Bob C.

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science,
the one that heralds new discoveries, is not
'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'"

- Isaac Asimov

[talk.origins]

Somewhere between 1 and 2, where 3, provided someone really developed a "hypothesis" could be part of 2, as another naturalistic explanation.

[talk.origins]

On Tuesday, September 19, 2023 at 12:10:42 PM UTC-4, Bob Casanova wrote:
> On Tue, 19 Sep 2023 05:43:56 -0700 (PDT), the following
> appeared in talk.origins, posted by "talk.origins"
> <broger...@gmail.com>:
>
> >On Tuesday, September 19, 2023 at 8:30:42?AM UTC-4, MarkE wrote:
> >
> <snip>
> >
> >> After 500 years on sustained research into origin of life, all available naturalistic avenues and hypotheses have been demonstrated to be inadequate, and this is the consensus a large majority scientists in the field. Would you say:
> >>
> >> 1. We may never work this out
> >> 2. Keep looking
> >> 3. Let's consider the God-hypothesis
> >> 4. Other (please elaborate)
> >>
> >> You may choose more than one option.
> >
> >"All available hypotheses" just means "all the ones anyone has thought of yet," right?
> >
> >I'm sure you can guess that my choices would be 1 and 2, with maybe a little more inclination to 1, still leaving open the possibility that someone may come up with an idea that nobody thought of yet. But I won't be here after 500 years, so I'm not sure it matters.
> >
> >Before you can get to 3, you'd have to make "the God hypothesis" an actual, testable hypothesis. Otherwise it's just a label you put on our ignorance.
> >
> Two points:
> 1) There has been no more than 150 years of actual research
> into OoL; less than 100 years of even semi-serious sustained
> research.

I think it was meant as a hypothetical even though he left out the IF at the beginning.

> 2) In the absence of comprehensive data, I reject the
> assertion that anything even close to consensus of "a large
> majority [of] scientists in the field"exists. It's simply a
> claim like "4 out of 5 doctors recommend Lucky Strike"; an
> assertion without evidence. Of course, Mark can refute that
> with a reference to the objective data, but I won't hold my
> breath waiting.
> >

Likewise, part of the hypothetical, I think.

[Bob Casanova]

On Tue, 19 Sep 2023 09:27:58 -0700 (PDT), the following

appeared in talk.origins, posted by "talk.origins"
<broger...@gmail.com>:

>On Tuesday, September 19, 2023 at 12:10:42?PM UTC-4, Bob Casanova wrote:
>> On Tue, 19 Sep 2023 05:43:56 -0700 (PDT), the following
>> appeared in talk.origins, posted by "talk.origins"
>> <broger...@gmail.com>:
>>
>> >On Tuesday, September 19, 2023 at 8:30:42?AM UTC-4, MarkE wrote:
>> >
>> <snip>
>> >
>> >> After 500 years on sustained research into origin of life, all available naturalistic avenues and hypotheses have been demonstrated to be inadequate, and this is the consensus a large majority scientists in the field. Would you say:
>> >>
>> >> 1. We may never work this out
>> >> 2. Keep looking
>> >> 3. Let's consider the God-hypothesis
>> >> 4. Other (please elaborate)
>> >>
>> >> You may choose more than one option.
>> >
>> >"All available hypotheses" just means "all the ones anyone has thought of yet," right?
>> >
>> >I'm sure you can guess that my choices would be 1 and 2, with maybe a little more inclination to 1, still leaving open the possibility that someone may come up with an idea that nobody thought of yet. But I won't be here after 500 years, so I'm not sure it matters.
>> >
>> >Before you can get to 3, you'd have to make "the God hypothesis" an actual, testable hypothesis. Otherwise it's just a label you put on our ignorance.
>> >
>> Two points:
>> 1) There has been no more than 150 years of actual research
>> into OoL; less than 100 years of even semi-serious sustained
>> research.
>
>I think it was meant as a hypothetical even though he left out the IF at the beginning.
>

I don't. But either is possible; I simply think, based on
his prior history of hyperbole and unsupported assertions
stated as fact, plus quote mining, that it was intentional.

>
>> 2) In the absence of comprehensive data, I reject the
>> assertion that anything even close to consensus of "a large
>> majority [of] scientists in the field"exists. It's simply a
>> claim like "4 out of 5 doctors recommend Lucky Strike"; an
>> assertion without evidence. Of course, Mark can refute that
>> with a reference to the objective data, but I won't hold my
>> breath waiting.
>> >
>Likewise, part of the hypothetical, I think.
>

If so, it indicates a tendency to play fast and loose with
claims and quotes, something which seems to be
characteristic of a certain type of zealot.
>
--

[MarkE]

Bob, my use of "500 years" and "consensus a large majority scientists" can only be hypothetical. Therefore, your interpretation as literal indicates either careless reading, limited comprehension or willful misconstruing?

[Lawyer Daggett]

No.
I testify that I read your original and did a double, then triple, the quadruple
take. What the heck is he saying?

Ultimately, I generously decided that you meant to insert an "If" before
what you wrote. But it wasn't easy to assert that owing to other aspects
of posts you have made.

Firstly, it's so extremely clumsy to have written what you did, intending
the preliminary conditional, but not including it. Do I presume that you
are that inept? It's not unknown but it's seriously bad.

I might add it's as bad or even worse than your earlier quote mining
that distorted a published paper to support your "catch-22" assertion
about the origins of protein translation, which you were extremely
clumsy in defending. Asserting that a paper supports you, with a
quote mine, when the paper clearly refutes that assertion is an
extremely disreputable basis upon which to pontificate.

Furthermore, your writing respective to the 500 years bit was absolutely
bad.

I puzzled over it. Literally, it was suggesting that there had been 500 years
of OoL research that had failed, and that there was a consensus among
informed scientists that such efforts had failed.

Are readers supposed to ignore the fairly direct implication of your literal
wording? Of course, your literal wording is absurd but what allowances are
we supposed to make presuming that your writing skills are inept? Yes,
this is harsh but you were the original author and you own the impact.

Being somewhat generous, I did presume that you intended your whole
supposition about 500 years of OoL research to be a conditional that
ought to have begun with an "If". But of course that supposition was
so clumsy that it was hard to take seriously.

Why 500 years? A consensus among which scientists? What progress
is presumed? What projections of progress exist and upon what are
they predicated? Ultimately, it's a profoundly, obviously, stupid question.

Yet it's understood that the dialog involved in pointing out that the
conditional predicate that you might have intended (if you had
basic expository skills) is so poorly formulated as to be mostly
meaningless.

Were you unaware of these inadequacies or just playing games?
How to respond to the myriad answers?
.

[Bob Casanova]

On Wed, 20 Sep 2023 16:15:59 -0700 (PDT), the following
appeared in talk.origins, posted by MarkE
<me22...@gmail.com>:

So the "facts" you post should not be taken literally, but
only as unsupported conjecture? Good to know; thanks.

[MarkE]

Okay, I'll concede that an 'if' would have significantly helped make the hypothetical explicit and clear. Bob, you're off the hook, my bad.

So then, Bob, LD, and others:

If, after 500 years on sustained research into origin of life, all available* naturalistic avenues and hypotheses have been demonstrated to be inadequate, and this is the consensus a large majority scientists in the field, would you say:

1. We may never work this out
2. Keep looking

3. Let's consider the God-hypothesis**

4. Other (please elaborate)

You may choose more than one option.

* all the ones anyone has thought of yet
** terms, definitions, options etc are a separate matter

[Öö Tiib]

On Thursday, 21 September 2023 at 09:10:43 UTC+3, MarkE wrote:
> On Thursday, September 21, 2023 at 1:30:43 PM UTC+10, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
> > On Wednesday, September 20, 2023 at 7:20:43 PM UTC-4, MarkE wrote:
>
> Okay, I'll concede that an 'if' would have significantly helped make the hypothetical explicit and clear. Bob, you're off the hook, my bad.
>
> So then, Bob, LD, and others:
>
> If, after 500 years on sustained research into origin of life, all available* naturalistic avenues and hypotheses have been demonstrated to be inadequate, and this is the consensus a large majority scientists in the field, would you say:
>
> 1. We may never work this out
> 2. Keep looking
> 3. Let's consider the God-hypothesis**
> 4. Other (please elaborate)
>
> You may choose more than one option.
> * all the ones anyone has thought of yet
> ** terms, definitions, options etc are a separate matter
>

Why to wait for 500 years and to expect extremely unlikely event that
large majority of scientists agree that all available hypotheses are inadequate?

Suppose we find out that all ways of abiogenesis we can imagine of carbon
based life were certainly blocked by something on all 197 millions of square
miles of earth. Then the problem can be with our imagination and there
still are endless possibilities of panspermia, accidental contamination and
intelligent design by anyone.

All events leave some evidence. When we find nothing then we don't know.
Trying to gain knowledge from ignorance keeps being as wrong after 500
years as it is now.

Also you can have that God hypothesis right now. God is supposed to
be capable of communicating whenever He feels like. Can keep trying
to ask nicely today, no need to wait 500 years. But without evidence there
are no science to do or to teach to kids.

[broger...@gmail.com]

As I said, I'd go for "we may never work this out." BUT, your hypothetical, hypothetical as it now clearly is, is a bit ill-defined. What happened during those 500 years? If there was absolutely no progress, it wouldn't take 500 years for people to look for more tractable questions to spend their time on - they'd have already decided that they were never going to work this out, or that in order to work it out there'd have to be some accumulation of knowledge in other, related fields that's not available yet.

On the other hand, if there'd been continuous progress, but no definitive solution, then I suspect lots of people would say "Let's keep at it."

Ot maybe it's somewhere in between, lots of results that seem like a little bit of progress, but still no clear direction for where the answer might lie - then it would depend on individual's interest and personality as to whether they'd give up and go work on something else, or keep trying.

As for the "God hypothesis," it's not a defined or testable hypothesis. As you say, it's in a different category from scientific hypotheses, and that means that if you like it, there's no reason to wait 500 years to accept it (I don't say to propose it, because that would imply that it was a proposition you could test, like the scientific hypotheses). Indeed, there are certainly forms of the "God hypothesis" that are entirely compatible with the existence of a fully worked out, experimentally supported naturalistic explanation for OoL. So you're option 3 doesn't really belong in a list that makes it look like it is in direct competition with 1 and 2.

[Martin Harran]

On Wed, 20 Sep 2023 23:09:47 -0700 (PDT), MarkE <me22...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[...]

>
>So then, Bob, LD, and others:
>
>If, after 500 years on sustained research into origin of life, all available* naturalistic avenues and hypotheses have been demonstrated to be inadequate, and this is the consensus a large majority scientists in the field, would you say:
>
>1. We may never work this out
>2. Keep looking
>3. Let's consider the God-hypothesis**

Back in July 2022, I posted a detailed review of Stephen Meyer's book
"'Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That
Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe'".

If you want to read the whole review, you can find it here:

1a3tdhte2stpr46o3...@4ax.com
Or
https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/z8Yq7lvkAfU/m/um8mt8MDAgAJ


It is a bit long so I'll quote one part of it that I think is relevant
here:

=============================

As mentioned earlier, Meyer at least gets away from the undefined,
'choose what you want' type of designer and comes out in favour of
God. This, however, creates an even bigger problem for me. On page
269, he defines theism, saying that it "affirms a personal,
intelligent, transcendent God." [3]

I have no issue with that definition as it is exactly the sort of God
that I believe in. Where I have a problem with Meyer's ideas is with
the word 'personal' which to me, in terms of theism, implies a God
with whom I can have an interactive relationship. Nowhere in his book
does Meyer explain the jump from a God fiddling about with the factors
in the anthropic principle or tweaking DNA to a God with whom we can
individually and collectively interact or a God that we can join with
in the afterlife."

===========================

Would you care to comment on that issue?

>4. Other (please elaborate)
>
>You may choose more than one option.
>
>* all the ones anyone has thought of yet
>** terms, definitions, options etc are a separate matter
>

[...]

[MarkE]

I read this after responding to your post in another thread, so have look there also: https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/JKnUO3rwKo4/m/NlPP2oIPCAAJ

I will have a read of your review of Meyer's book too (I have read the book).

You comment that "Nowhere in his book does Meyer explain the jump from a God fiddling about with the factors in the anthropic principle or tweaking DNA to a God with whom we can individually and collectively interact or a God that we can join with in the afterlife." I don't think Meyer is being evasive or missing an opportunity, but rather it sits outside of science, in the province of special revelation.

"Special Revelation is a contrast to General Revelation, which refers to the knowledge of God and spiritual matters which reputedly can be discovered through natural means, such as observation of nature, philosophy and reasoning, conscience or providence."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_revelation#:~:text=Special%20Revelation%20is%20a%20contrast,and%20reasoning%2C%20conscience%20or%20providence.

[MarkE]

In the context of this hypothetical, doesn't the of logic Pascal's Wager* make consideration of option 3 rational (prudent, even)?

* In broad terms, and not restricting choices to a dichotomy

[Lawyer Daggett]

On Thursday, September 21, 2023 at 2:10:43 AM UTC-4, MarkE wrote:

.

> Okay, I'll concede that an 'if' would have significantly helped make the hypothetical explicit and clear. Bob, you're off the hook, my bad.
>
> So then, Bob, LD, and others:
>
> If, after 500 years on sustained research into origin of life,
> all available* naturalistic avenues and hypotheses have
> been demonstrated to be inadequate, and this is the consensus
> a large majority scientists in the field, would you say:
> 1. We may never work this out
> 2. Keep looking
> 3. Let's consider the God-hypothesis**
> 4. Other (please elaborate)
>
> You may choose more than one option.
> * all the ones anyone has thought of yet
> ** terms, definitions, options etc are a separate matter

After 500 years, I say we convince the assigned graduate
student to accept an "honorary" Masters degree and get
on with his life.

More seriously, the question is ill posed. The choice of
500 years, or 50, or 5000 is so arbitrary. Yet, if we exhaust
our ideas, and new ideas stop arising from other areas
of study, well I find that hard to imagine unless we suddenly
evolve to be less imaginative.

I do think it's possible that in the future science could rule
out most of our current general schemes for a spontaneous
origin of life as highly implausible. Today, we're more
in the "unknown" phase.

As a metabolism first fan, I'd guess the place to look with
the most promise is geochemistry. We do see that thermal
vents can provide synthetic engines. That means sources
of raw materials that are sufficiently reactive. I don't
think we know enough to put bounds on how diverse
and multiplexed sets of geothermal chemical systems
can get.

I'd guess OoL would require some aspects of slow cooking
to happen in isolated and protected environments
(subterranean) and then mixing of a few flavors of these
into an environment with a good source of redox and
thermocycling. Thus, black smokers provide a clue but not
a solution.

Of course too many misunderstand how science moves.
Consider the Miller-Urey experiment. It wasn't designed
to produce life. Yet some will retort that it was a failed
attempt to create life. Or some will retort that it didn't
make DNA or protein, or other misconceptions. In that
vein, anyone who expects or challenges science to
build new life in the lab from primordial chemicals has
delusional expectations having nothing to do with the odds
of such having occurred spontaneously on Earth.
.

[broger...@gmail.com]

I don't see how Pascal's wager applies here. To me, the existence (or not) of God is a completely separate issue from whether we figure out how life got started. A fully supported detailed model of the OoL would not be evidence against God, and 5 century long failure to figure out OoL (or any other scientific problem) would not be not evidence for God.

And, separately, I think Pascal's wager is really poor theology and psychology. If I do not believe in God, I cannot force myself to do so, even if Pascal convinces me that, game theoretically, it would be in my best interests to do so. Look at it in reverse - if I believed in God, but it were against my self interest to do so, would I be able to make my belief go away? Would it seem like a good thing to do if I could? And I mean really cease to believe, not merely cease to express my belief. Pascal's Wager is poetry for those who already believe, not a serious proposal.

[jillery]

On Wed, 20 Sep 2023 23:09:47 -0700 (PDT), MarkE <me22...@gmail.com>
wrote:

>If, after 500 years on sustained research into origin of life, all available* naturalistic avenues and hypotheses have been demonstrated to be inadequate, and this is the consensus a large majority scientists in the field, would you say:
>
>1. We may never work this out
>2. Keep looking
>3. Let's consider the God-hypothesis**
>4. Other (please elaborate)
>
>You may choose more than one option.
>
>* all the ones anyone has thought of yet
>** terms, definitions, options etc are a separate matter

1. This possibility exist for all questions. OoL isn't distinguished
by it.

2. Why not keep looking? That's a necessary requirement for learning.

3. Why consider the God-hypothesis at all? How does Goddidit explain
anything?

[Mark Isaak]

On 9/20/23 11:09 PM, MarkE wrote:
>
> If, after 500 years on sustained research into origin of life, all available* naturalistic avenues and hypotheses have been demonstrated to be inadequate, and this is the consensus a large majority scientists in the field, would you say:
>
> 1. We may never work this out
> 2. Keep looking
> 3. Let's consider the God-hypothesis**
> 4. Other (please elaborate)

I asked once before, and I ask again: What is the difference between a
supernatural explanation ("God-hypothesis" included) and "explanation
unknown"?

I won't say you own me an answer, but you very much owe yourself one.

[Kerr-Mudd, John]

On Thu, 21 Sep 2023 05:14:44 -0700 (PDT)
"broger...@gmail.com" <broger...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thursday, September 21, 2023 at 8:05:44 AM UTC-4, MarkE wrote:
> > On Thursday, September 21, 2023 at 8:40:43 PM UTC+10, broger...@gmail.com wrote:

[A lot of snippage]

['option' 3 - God created life (presumably 4 billion years back, not
7 days ago)]

> > In the context of this hypothetical, doesn't the of logic Pascal's Wager* make consideration of option 3 rational (prudent, even)?
>
> I don't see how Pascal's wager applies here. To me, the existence (or not) of God is a completely separate issue from whether we figure out how life got started. A fully supported detailed model of the OoL would not be evidence against God, and 5 century long failure to figure out OoL (or any other scientific problem) would not be not evidence for God.
>
> And, separately, I think Pascal's wager is really poor theology and psychology. If I do not believe in God, I cannot force myself to do so, even if Pascal convinces me that, game theoretically, it would be in my best interests to do so. Look at it in reverse - if I believed in God, but it were against my self interest to do so, would I be able to make my belief go away? Would it seem like a good thing to do if I could? And I mean really cease to believe, not merely cease to express my belief. Pascal's Wager is poetry for those who already believe, not a serious proposal.

Superbly put.

[Ron Dean]

As I pointed out earlier, I was forced into early retirement because of a
heart attack, & kidney failure, but I was offered my job back as a
contractor
w/no benefits, but w/a bit more income. So, I'm employed now. You've
been a good supporter through these trying times. It meant a lot to me!
Thank you;
Ron Dean

[Burkhard]

No, I don't think so. For several reasons - one being that of course theologians/priests/adherents
of the various religions have failed for much longer than just your 500 years to reach a consensus,
each considering the other's hypothesis as inadequate. Now, you might be able to make a special
pleading that the God hypothesis should not be evaluated using the same criteria that led you/the
scientists in 2523 to abandon naturalistic explanations, but you can't do this if you want to make a
Pascal type argument - backing the wrong deity could be much worse than not backing any deity
at all, some of them are very much attuned to Exodus 20:5

[broger...@gmail.com]

As Homer Simpson said, "But Marge, Marge, what if we are worshiping the wrong God? Then every time we go to church he just gets madder and madder."

Who needs Wallace Stevens, that sounds like a good reason to stay home on Sunday morning.

[MarkE]

My hypothetical presents you with evidence of the possibility that life, including your life, was created by a transcendent intelligent agent. The weighting you give to this evidence is personal and subjective, and it is only evidence of a possibility.

Nevertheless, isn't it reasonable to seek to investigate this further? Notwithstanding the possibility that there is no such agent, or that the agent is unknowable, or that the various religions claiming knowledge of the agent are difficult to assess or all wrong, etc.

As per the wager, potentially your eternal future is on the line -- not worth a bit of a look around?

Note too that I am not suggesting that such an investigation in and of itself could or should lead to insincere belief as afterlife insurance.

[MarkE]

My reply to Burkhard attempts to address this.

[MarkE]

On Friday, September 22, 2023 at 2:45:43 AM UTC+10, Mark Isaak wrote:
> On 9/20/23 11:09 PM, MarkE wrote:
> >
> > If, after 500 years on sustained research into origin of life, all available* naturalistic avenues and hypotheses have been demonstrated to be inadequate, and this is the consensus a large majority scientists in the field, would you say:
> >
> > 1. We may never work this out
> > 2. Keep looking
> > 3. Let's consider the God-hypothesis**
> > 4. Other (please elaborate)
> I asked once before, and I ask again: What is the difference between a
> supernatural explanation ("God-hypothesis" included) and "explanation
> unknown"?
>
> I won't say you own me an answer, but you very much owe yourself one.

A supernatural explanation potentially has major personal ramifications.

[Burkhard]

Depends how you understand "transcendental". I'd say that any "investigation", if successful, will
inevitably will reduce what looked transcendental at the beginning to something mundane and natural.
Just as Newtonian gravity and its "action at a distance" looked to many of his contemporaries as
mystical and bad metaphysics, while for us it's a pretty mundane thing.

Why this change? because it turned out that it allowed to quantify, and through that control, the world.
And that's what science always does One of the founding father's or modern science, the
devout Anglican Francis Bacon, saw this very clearly - The approach of the scientists to their domain is
one of domination and control: a good experimental design forces nature to
give clear, binary answers. In Bacon's word, "to tweak the lion's tail".

So if you read investigation as scientific investigation, you are proposing to tweak God's tail", which
I'd consider a bad idea. If you want to maintain the integrity of the "transcendental" on the other hand,
I don't know what "investigation" could even mean.

>Notwithstanding the possibility that there is no such agent, or that the agent is unknowable, or that the various religions claiming knowledge of the >agent are difficult to assess or all wrong, etc.

Or all true, or some true and some false. And how do you adjudicate this, if you always only have your personal and subjective probabilities to fall back to?

>
> As per the wager, potentially your eternal future is on the line -- not worth a bit of a look around?

As above, your future cold also be on the line if the deity in question does not like you
looking around - or dislikes people who only look around due to such a facetious
argument as Pascal's wager.

And nothing normative follows from the mere existence of a designer. All and any
normative consequences for behaviour would have to come from additional
sources anyway

>
> Note too that I am not suggesting that such an investigation in and of itself could or should lead to insincere belief as afterlife insurance.

I'd say that's however pretty inevitably a consequence of this approach.

[Burkhard]

On Friday, September 22, 2023 at 6:45:44 AM UTC+2, MarkE wrote:
> On Friday, September 22, 2023 at 2:45:43 AM UTC+10, Mark Isaak wrote:
> > On 9/20/23 11:09 PM, MarkE wrote:
> > >
> > > If, after 500 years on sustained research into origin of life, all available* naturalistic avenues and hypotheses have been demonstrated to be inadequate, and this is the consensus a large majority scientists in the field, would you say:
> > >
> > > 1. We may never work this out
> > > 2. Keep looking
> > > 3. Let's consider the God-hypothesis**
> > > 4. Other (please elaborate)
> > I asked once before, and I ask again: What is the difference between a
> > supernatural explanation ("God-hypothesis" included) and "explanation
> > unknown"?
> >
> > I won't say you own me an answer, but you very much owe yourself one.
> A supernatural explanation potentially has major personal ramifications.
> --

can't see why. Here two models with supernatural explanation:
- a supernatural designer created life, then died
- a supernatural designer created life, then moved on to other things/universes
- a supernatural designer created life, but only as a cruel joke
- a supernatural designer created life as a form of biological weapon to be used
against other deities
- a supernatural designer created life, but hoped it would stay on a very primitive level
and would have hated the idea of that life developing the ability to
reason about its origin

lots of other possibilities as well. The mere existence of a supernatural designer
is consistent with lots and lots of theories that have no personal remifications
whatsoever

[broger...@gmail.com]

I'm not sure what Pascal's wager has to do with OoL. If Pascal's Wager is a reasonable way to think, then its reasonableness does not depend on whether or not there is a solid scientific explanation for the OoL.

Burkhard has already responded to you about Pascal's Wager itself. I agree with him, for the reasons I already gave. I cannot change what I believe simply because it might be in my self interest to do so. In a human situation I might be able to hide a set of beliefs or pretend to have them if doing so was in my self interest, but I could not actually change them. Since the sorts of God you are interested in in Pascal's Wager would not be fooled by feigned belief, I don't really see the point. And as for considering the possibility that God exists, I don't need to be coerced into doing that by game theory, it's something I have thought about seriously and often. I guarantee you that at no point in my many back and forths between various forms of Christianity and atheism did I ever think - "there's obviously a naturalistic explanation for OoL so Christianity is false", or, "there's just no naturalistic explanation of OoL, so I guess I accept Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior". The one has absolutely nothing to do with the other.

[MarkE]

"Note too that I am not suggesting that such an investigation in and of itself could or should lead to insincere belief as afterlife insurance."

> > > >

[MarkE]

Yep, which is why I used the qualifier "potentially".

Nevertheless, as per the wager, potentially your eternal future is on the line -- not worth a bit of a look around?

[broger...@gmail.com]

Of course it cannot lead to belief - I cannot change what I believe because it's in my self interest according to Pascal or because you give me a nudge and wink and tell me that "my eternal future is on the line."

But that's the point of Pascal's Wager, right, afterlife insurance? Sometimes I don't get what you actually find attractive about Christianity. You want to argue for it based on the incompleteness of OoL research or in something as mercenary as Pascal's Wager. None of that is going to inspire anyone. Seriously. People get inspired by Jesus' message or his personality or direct experiences of community with believers, and that inspiration does not depend on betting that OoL research will stall out or on game theory or on veiled hints about the afterlife.

[Lawyer Daggett]

How does Pascal's Wager even work? Specifically, how does one choose
to __believe__? I don't think I could. I know that I tried when I was young
and it didn't work. Pretending to believe when I didn't felt dirty. It would be
like pretending to love someone that I felt nothing for. And pretending so
for some potential reward? that would make me a whore.

I have no problem with people who believe. More power to them. But once
anyone says why they believe, or don't believe in X, and try to sell me one
those reasons, it seems fair to address those reasons. If they say they
believe in some particular god because they want to get into heaven,
I smile and make a note to be careful around them. I don't have big problems
with (theistic) believers in general, I have friends and family who are such
believers. But I don't think any of them have whored out their belief, to the
extent that is even possible to do, in hopes of some possible reward.

[Ernest Major]

I think of the "pop" version of Pascal's Wager as Satan's Wager; once
one considers the implications it's corrosive of belief. I know also
realise that, to the extent that it adopts Sola Fides as an axiom, it is
also corrosive of morals, so Satan gets you coming and going.

[For the avoidance of doubt, Satan here is a metaphor.]

--
alias Ernest Major

[broger...@gmail.com]

To put the most
positive spin on
Mark's point, I
think he is not
arguing that you
can make yourself
believe in response
to Pascal's Wager,
only that it might
prompt you to
investigate whe-
ther you might
be open to belief.
It's still a poor
approach - sort of
a threat - think
about this because
if you don't you
might have a bad
afterlife. Not very
inspiring if you ask
me.

[Ernest Major]

That position (which I understand is closer to what Pascal argued) has
an implicit and flawed assumption that people haven't already investigated.

--
alias Ernest Major

[Lawyer Daggett]

Do I detect a bit of mockery?
Nice!

[broger...@gmail.com]

M
o
c
k
e
r
y
?
?

[Lawyer Daggett]

lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol

[MarkE]

Thanks, that's all I'm suggesting. And it's just one reason to prompt you to investigate whether you might be open to belief; collect the set:
- possible eternal consequences, good or bad, for yourself and others
- possible positive benefits or pitfalls avoided here and now for yourself and others
- a search for truth and meaning
- curiosity

Not worth a bit of a look around? Anyone?

[broger...@gmail.com]

On Friday, September 22, 2023 at 9:40:46 AM UTC-4, MarkE wrote:
> On Friday, September 22, 2023 at 10:30:45 PM UTC+10, broger...@gmail.com wrote:

<big snip>

What makes you think people have not already looked around? And why do you think that "That's a nice potential afterlife you got there, wouldn't want anything to happen to it," is a particularly good way to get people who haven't thought about it to do so?

[Lawyer Daggett]

123456789A123456789B123456789C123456789D123456789E123456789F
The curious thing is that you presume that people are unfamiliar with the varied
claims and promises of various religions. Why? Why do you presume that?

[MarkE]

I'm not suggesting people have not already looked around. Rather, I'm suggesting doing so seems like a reasonable response. Obviously if you have already looked, this suggestion is no longer applicable.

So...not worth a bit of a look around (if you haven't already)? Anyone?

[broger...@gmail.com]

Do you seriously think anyone posting to TO has not already "looked around"?

[MarkE]

Similar to my reply to Bill, I'm only suggesting that consideration of the claims and promises of various religions would be a reasonable response. If one has already made such a consideration, good.

What is fascinating here is the absolute unwillingness to concede this, even allowing any amount of clarification, qualification or correction.

[Lawyer Daggett]

Are you trying to impersonate a Jehovah's Witness knocking on my door?
Or are you wearing a cheap white shirt and tie and offering up a copy of the
Book of Mormon? Repeating Bill's point, what makes you think we haven't
looked into it before? The arrogance!

Have you investigated Catholicism, Baptist theology, Lutheranism, Methodism,
Islam, Sufism, Buddhism, Sikhism? I expect that a large number, perhaps even
a majority, of regulars on talk.origins have investigated most, if not all of these.
I have. So far, what you are offering up is very weak sauce.

If you have a mission to evangelize for your faith because of your profound
belief, I have some advice for you. Work harder to improve your background
knowledge, and your communication skills. You are doing your cause a
grand disservice.

[Lawyer Daggett]

.

> Similar to my reply to Bill, I'm only suggesting that consideration of the claims and
> promises of various religions would be a reasonable response. If one has already
> made such a consideration, good.
>
> What is fascinating here is the absolute unwillingness to concede this, even allowing
> any amount of clarification, qualification or correction.

The arrogance you display by presuming that others are unfamiliar with the "claims
and promises" of various religions works against you. Protip: saying things that
presume the target of your prose is ignorant tends to piss them off, especially
when it becomes clear that they are better educated than you.

Is this your mission? To offend and alienate others? I'm trying to help you out here
and explain to you that, from the perspective of what you seem to be trying to
accomplish, you are utterly failing. Take and pause and think.

[MarkE]

Try to keep up. My aim here is not evangelism. It's asking for responses to the hypothetical I previously set out:

If, after 500 years on sustained research into origin of life, all available* naturalistic avenues and hypotheses have been demonstrated to be inadequate, and this is the consensus a large majority scientists in the field, would you say:

1. We may never work this out
2. Keep looking
3. Let's consider the God-hypothesis**
4. Other (please elaborate)

You may choose more than one option.

[broger...@gmail.com]

We have been keeping up. When several of us answered 1 or 2, you brought up Pascal's Wager yourself. Your main interest in OoL seems to be about whether it can provide a gap for God to fit into, a gap which, if there is a God, that God certainly does not need. It all seems rather pointless, even more so, if your aim here is not evangelism.

[Lawyer Daggett]

And you've been answered. Your question has myriad problems.
It is ill posed for reasons already provided by me and others.
Your list of answers is poorly constructed, among other reasons, 3 is not
in opposition to 1 or 2. And in respect to recent posts, there's a presumption
behind your inclusion of option 3 that people have not considered a
God-hypothesis.

Your arguments are approaching word salad. These things must seem profound
in your head but out in the wild they have deep flaws that you are refusing to
recognize. It appears that underneath it all, you have some misconceptions
about what people think and why they think them. These are mostly unstated
but here's what's coming through:

1 You seem to think people are unfamiliar with the claims and promises of religions.
2 You seem to think that people want to not believe in gods to evade moral constraints.
3 You seem to think that people believe in naturalism on dogmatic grounds.

There's more but that's enough for now. I suggest you are wrong regards 1, 2 and 3
but are unwilling to reorganize your views accordingly.

[DB Cates]

What do you propose I look for and especially how do I go about "looking"?
--
--
Don Cates ("he's a cunning rascal" PN)

[Mark Isaak]

Looking at what? What's there to look at that separates supernatural
from unknown?

"Seek and you shall find" the Bible says somewhere. What it leaves out
is that someone seeking hard enough will find what he is looking for
even if it doesn't exist. Any god I could worship would value curiosity
but would *not* reward self-deception in response to it. The same sort
of principle applies to Pascal's wager. The moral and theological
problems with it make it unambiguously a step *away* from a decent god.

--
Mark Isaak
"Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between 'That
doesn't make sense' and 'I don't understand.'" - Mary Doria Russell

[Burkhard]

You ask me if it is worth shopping around when it comes to religions? That is..ironic...
My guess is you pretty much stayed with the one that's the dominant belief system where
you grew up? Confusing childhood certainties with reasoned belief formation is all too common
in this space.

Me by contrast, I actually like religions - and as always when one likes something, having a lot
of variety seems like a natural thing to do. So I had back-to-back pilgrimage to Lourdes and Protestant
Kirchentag when I was younger, participate in the rites of a local Labrys group and their rituals (my
favourites, even though one should not have favourites, I know), jump over the fire at Beltane,
offered mead at the geblōt, organised reading groups with our Quakers etc.

And in my professional capacity I co-supervised two PhDs with colleagues in Divinity,
published about Vedic, Christian, Islamic and Jewish theology, and organised
events with the Science and Society committee of the Church of Scotland and the
UK Humanist Association on Neuroscience and the person, with the Dominicans on AI and just war,
with our Buddhist temple on AI and emotions,

It is precisely because I'm "religion positive" that I strongly dislike the theological perversion that
is natural theology, and the reduction of the divine to an incompetent tinkerer deity that is evoked
whenever one is too lazy to do proper science.

[Ernest Major]

On the side of the coin, has he had a look around Islam? Buddhism?
Hinduism? Shinto? Tengrism? the Bahai faith? Sikhism? Zoreasterism?
Jainism? Yezidism? Wicca? Asatru? Mormonism?

--
alias Ernest Major

[MarkE]

Let me propose a truce of sorts. If I need to adjust my position or way of expressing it, okay.

It might be helpful to first return to an earlier and more basic question I raised, i.e. what are the terms of engagement in/for this debate? Specifically, with respect to the relationship between science (perhaps defined as methodological naturalism), and supernaturalism (perhaps defined as intervention by transcendent agency). Happy to refine those definitions, or consider a different question.

One starting point might be Gould's "non-overlapping magisteria" (NOMA) - its Wikipedia article outlines some of the factors and perspectives on the relationship between science and religion (whatever you may think of NOMA itself). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-overlapping_magisteria

Another approach is to consider how people think about this issue generally. For example, those who identify as atheists commonly say (in many conversations I've had), I don't believe in God and I don't need to, as science explains things. That's not to suggest that if science did not explain things, they would or should change their view. Rather, my point is that at a popular, "commonsense" level, there is a (reasonably common?) assumption that either some higher power created, or natural processes alone are a sufficient explanation.

A focal point of this issue is the god-of-the-gaps. At times I think this is a legitimate protest by materialists, i.e. creationists are premature in claiming gaps in today's scientific knowledge. On the hand, when/how might the creationist claim be legitimate?

But back to the original question, how would you frame the terms of engagement for debate involving the relationship between science and the supernatural?

Genuine question - suggestions welcome from anyone reading this.

[MarkE]

I acknowledge your point. I've discussed this issue with my own kids. We all form our beliefs from a complex and imprecise mixture of factors and influences.

I've been surprised at by the explicit mentions of Jesus in the Koran; my reading of the history of Islam reveals major problems. I have also done comparative study of other religions, in particular Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, and Mormonism. But not exhaustively, nor generally to a depth that I would ask of a member of another faith to investigate Christianity.

>
> --
> alias Ernest Major

[Ernest Major]

On 23/09/2023 07:51, MarkE wrote:
> Let me propose a truce of sorts. If I need to adjust my position or way of expressing it, okay.
>
> It might be helpful to first return to an earlier and more basic question I raised, i.e. what are the terms of engagement in/for this debate? Specifically, with respect to the relationship between science (perhaps defined as methodological naturalism), and supernaturalism (perhaps defined as intervention by transcendent agency). Happy to refine those definitions, or consider a different question.
>

> One starting point might be Gould's "non-overlapping magisteria" (NOMA) - its Wikipedia article outlines some of the factors and perspectives on the relationship between science and religion (whatever you may think of NOMA itself).https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-overlapping_magisteria

>
> Another approach is to consider how people think about this issue generally. For example, those who identify as atheists commonly say (in many conversations I've had), I don't believe in God and I don't need to, as science explains things. That's not to suggest that if science did not explain things, they would or should change their view. Rather, my point is that at a popular, "commonsense" level, there is a (reasonably common?) assumption that either some higher power created, or natural processes alone are a sufficient explanation.
>
> A focal point of this issue is the god-of-the-gaps. At times I think this is a legitimate protest by materialists, i.e. creationists are premature in claiming gaps in today's scientific knowledge. On the hand, when/how might the creationist claim be legitimate?
>
> But back to the original question, how would you frame the terms of engagement for debate involving the relationship between science and the supernatural?
>
> Genuine question - suggestions welcome from anyone reading this.

To address one point, non-overlapping magisteria is incompatible with
God of the gaps arguments. Additionally non-overlapping magisteria is
incompatible with creationism.

--
alias Ernest Major

[Ernest Major]

On 23/09/2023 07:51, MarkE wrote:

> Let me propose a truce of sorts. If I need to adjust my position or way of expressing it, okay.
>
> It might be helpful to first return to an earlier and more basic question I raised, i.e. what are the terms of engagement in/for this debate? Specifically, with respect to the relationship between science (perhaps defined as methodological naturalism), and supernaturalism (perhaps defined as intervention by transcendent agency). Happy to refine those definitions, or consider a different question.
>

> One starting point might be Gould's "non-overlapping magisteria" (NOMA) - its Wikipedia article outlines some of the factors and perspectives on the relationship between science and religion (whatever you may think of NOMA itself).https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-overlapping_magisteria

>
> Another approach is to consider how people think about this issue generally. For example, those who identify as atheists commonly say (in many conversations I've had), I don't believe in God and I don't need to, as science explains things. That's not to suggest that if science did not explain things, they would or should change their view. Rather, my point is that at a popular, "commonsense" level, there is a (reasonably common?) assumption that either some higher power created, or natural processes alone are a sufficient explanation.
>
> A focal point of this issue is the god-of-the-gaps. At times I think this is a legitimate protest by materialists, i.e. creationists are premature in claiming gaps in today's scientific knowledge. On the hand, when/how might the creationist claim be legitimate?
>
> But back to the original question, how would you frame the terms of engagement for debate involving the relationship between science and the supernatural?
>
> Genuine question - suggestions welcome from anyone reading this.

The practice of science requires repeatable (at least statistically so)
relations between cause and effect. That means that science could
investigate supernatural entities provided that such entities (exist
and) are constrained in some fashion.

--
alias Ernest Major

[MarkE]

I should mention that I don't agree with Gould's claim of non-overlapping magisteria. But it does provide a reference point.

>
> --
> alias Ernest Major

[broger...@gmail.com]

I do not think there is a relationship between science and the supernatural. Supernatural explanations are not explanations, they are just a name you put on your ignorance of what's going on. It is certainly not the default explanation which gets to be enthroned without passing any empirical tests simply because some given number of non-supernatural explanations have not panned out.

[Martin Harran]

On Thu, 21 Sep 2023 04:37:36 -0700 (PDT), MarkE <me22...@gmail.com>
wrote:

>On Thursday, September 21, 2023 at 9:05:44?PM UTC+10, Martin Harran wrote:
>> On Wed, 20 Sep 2023 23:09:47 -0700 (PDT), MarkE <me22...@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> [...]

>> >
>> >So then, Bob, LD, and others:
>> >

>> >If, after 500 years on sustained research into origin of life, all available* naturalistic avenues and hypotheses have been demonstrated to be inadequate, and this is the consensus a large majority scientists in the field, would you say:
>> >
>> >1. We may never work this out
>> >2. Keep looking
>> >3. Let's consider the God-hypothesis**

>> Back in July 2022, I posted a detailed review of Stephen Meyer's book
>> "'Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That
>> Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe'".
>>
>> If you want to read the whole review, you can find it here:
>>
>> 1a3tdhte2stpr46o3...@4ax.com
>> Or
>> https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/z8Yq7lvkAfU/m/um8mt8MDAgAJ
>>
>>
>> It is a bit long so I'll quote one part of it that I think is relevant
>> here:
>>
>> =============================
>>
>> As mentioned earlier, Meyer at least gets away from the undefined,
>> 'choose what you want' type of designer and comes out in favour of
>> God. This, however, creates an even bigger problem for me. On page
>> 269, he defines theism, saying that it "affirms a personal,
>> intelligent, transcendent God." [3]
>>
>> I have no issue with that definition as it is exactly the sort of God
>> that I believe in. Where I have a problem with Meyer's ideas is with
>> the word 'personal' which to me, in terms of theism, implies a God
>> with whom I can have an interactive relationship. Nowhere in his book
>> does Meyer explain the jump from a God fiddling about with the factors
>> in the anthropic principle or tweaking DNA to a God with whom we can
>> individually and collectively interact or a God that we can join with
>> in the afterlife."
>>
>> ===========================
>>
>> Would you care to comment on that issue?
>
>I read this after responding to your post in another thread, so have look there also: https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/JKnUO3rwKo4/m/NlPP2oIPCAAJ

I've included ny response to this post in my reply on that thread.

>
>I will have a read of your review of Meyer's book too (I have read the book).
>
>You comment that "Nowhere in his book does Meyer explain the jump from a God fiddling about with the factors in the anthropic principle or tweaking DNA to a God with whom we can individually and collectively interact or a God that we can join with in the afterlife." I don't think Meyer is being evasive or missing an opportunity, but rather it sits outside of science, in the province of special revelation.
>
>"Special Revelation is a contrast to General Revelation, which refers to the knowledge of God and spiritual matters which reputedly can be discovered through natural means, such as observation of nature, philosophy and reasoning, conscience or providence."
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_revelation#:~:text=Special%20Revelation%20is%20a%20contrast,and%20reasoning%2C%20conscience%20or%20providence.

>
>> >4. Other (please elaborate)
>> >
>> >You may choose more than one option.
>> >
>> >* all the ones anyone has thought of yet
>> >** terms, definitions, options etc are a separate matter
>> >

>> [...]

[jillery]

On Fri, 22 Sep 2023 23:51:29 -0700 (PDT), MarkE <me22...@gmail.com>
wrote:

>On Saturday, September 23, 2023 at 12:55:45?AM UTC+10, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
>> On Friday, September 22, 2023 at 10:35:45?AM UTC-4, MarkE wrote:
>> > On Saturday, September 23, 2023 at 12:25:45?AM UTC+10, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
>> > > On Friday, September 22, 2023 at 10:15:45?AM UTC-4, MarkE wrote:
>> > > > On Friday, September 22, 2023 at 11:55:45?PM UTC+10, Lawyer Daggett wrote:

This thread took a wrong turn when it failed to distinguish between
objective facts and subjective values/priorities. Debates about
science can involve both, but often become bogged down in
question-begging and taking past each other. Raising NOMA is a good
first step toward mitigating those problems.

--
To know less than we don't know is the nature of most knowledge

[jillery]

On Thu, 21 Sep 2023 14:07:31 -0400, Ron Dean
<rondean...@gmail.com> wrote:

>As I pointed out earlier, I was forced into early retirement because of a
>heart attack, & kidney failure, but I was offered my job back as a
>contractor
>w/no benefits, but w/a bit more income. So, I'm employed now. You've
>been a good supporter through these trying times. It meant a lot to me!
>Thank you;
>Ron Dean


Thank you for your kind words. I am glad to see you separate your self
from your arguments.

[MarkE]

Actually, supernatural origin of life is not just a fallback "default" option if natural explanations fail. It's a legitimate hypothesis in its own right. Moreover, a large number of scientists believe in some form of higher power [1]. A fraction of these may have a belief in a higher power that would still be compatible with naturalistic explanation, but many would not.

Yes, natural vs supernatural explanations are investigated differently, but science is not the sole source and arbiter of all truth. Better still though if science itself points to the *possible* need for supernatural explanation of life - which the state of OoL research is beginning to do I think.

[1] "According to the poll, just over half of scientists (51%) believe in some form of deity or higher power; specifically, 33% of scientists say they believe in God, while 18% believe in a universal spirit or higher power. By contrast, 95% of Americans believe in some form of deity or higher power..."
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2009/11/05/scientists-and-belief/

[MarkE]

Agreed. It seems difficult to establish provisional, generally accepted guidelines. Anyone aware of previous threads or articles that attempt this?

[broger...@gmail.com]

I'm not sure what you mean by calling the bare idea that the origin of life was supernatural a hypothesis. There's no detail at all, no predictions, no method by which it could be falsified. It is so general that it is compatible with any and all possible evidence, and it is compatible with a simultaneous natural explanation for the origin of life. It is not a hypothesis in the same category as scientific hypotheses. If you were to treat it as a hypothesis in its own right, you'd need to supply enough detail to make it testable and falsifiable.

>
> Yes, natural vs supernatural explanations are investigated differently, but science is not the sole source and arbiter of all truth. Better still though if science itself points to the *possible* need for supernatural explanation of life - which the state of OoL research is beginning to do I think.

Of course science is not the sole arbiter of truth. It certainly does not point to a supernatural explanation of anything, though. Supernatural explanations, as you have said yourself, are in a different category from scientific ones. They cannot compete with them, they do not require detail or evidence, and they are not mutually exclusive with scientific explanations. The lack of a scientific explanation is not evidence for a supernatural one (and indeed, supernatural ones do not require evidence anyway). Lack of a scientific explanation is only evidence of human ignorance.

[Mark Isaak]

On 9/22/23 11:51 PM, MarkE wrote:
> [...]

> It might be helpful to first return to an earlier and more basic question I raised, i.e. what are the terms of engagement in/for this debate? Specifically, with respect to the relationship between science (perhaps defined as methodological naturalism), and supernaturalism (perhaps defined as intervention by transcendent agency). Happy to refine those definitions, or consider a different question.
>
> One starting point might be Gould's "non-overlapping magisteria" (NOMA) - its Wikipedia article outlines some of the factors and perspectives on the relationship between science and religion (whatever you may think of NOMA itself). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-overlapping_magisteria
>
> Another approach is to consider how people think about this issue generally. For example, those who identify as atheists commonly say (in many conversations I've had), I don't believe in God and I don't need to, as science explains things. That's not to suggest that if science did not explain things, they would or should change their view. Rather, my point is that at a popular, "commonsense" level, there is a (reasonably common?) assumption that either some higher power created, or natural processes alone are a sufficient explanation.
>
> A focal point of this issue is the god-of-the-gaps. At times I think this is a legitimate protest by materialists, i.e. creationists are premature in claiming gaps in today's scientific knowledge. On the hand, when/how might the creationist claim be legitimate?
>
> But back to the original question, how would you frame the terms of engagement for debate involving the relationship between science and the supernatural?

You refer to the supernatural a lot, but the term is very poorly
defined. I suggest you replace each and every occurrence of it in your
writings with one of "unknown", "personal unsubstantiated belief", or
"mythic tradition." All mentions of the supernatural (not just by you),
I think you will find, fit in one or more of those categories.

[MarkE]

Yes, it could be as unspecified as "not natural", but I'd suggest a definition along the lines of "transcendent supernatural agency" or an "intelligent designer", which I think is commonly accepted, at least in broad terms. Investigating this is the province of theology etc.

To reiterate: The supernatural origin of life is not just a fallback "default" option if natural explanations fail. It's a legitimate hypothesis in its own right. Moreover, a large number of scientists believe in some form of higher power. A fraction of these may have a belief in a higher power that would still be compatible with naturalistic explanation, but many would not.

[Ernest Major]

On 25/09/2023 03:56, MarkE wrote:
> On Monday, September 25, 2023 at 10:55:47 AM UTC+10, Mark Isaak wrote:
>> On 9/22/23 11:51 PM, MarkE wrote:
>>> [...]
>>> It might be helpful to first return to an earlier and more basic question I raised, i.e. what are the terms of engagement in/for this debate? Specifically, with respect to the relationship between science (perhaps defined as methodological naturalism), and supernaturalism (perhaps defined as intervention by transcendent agency). Happy to refine those definitions, or consider a different question.
>>>
>>> One starting point might be Gould's "non-overlapping magisteria" (NOMA) - its Wikipedia article outlines some of the factors and perspectives on the relationship between science and religion (whatever you may think of NOMA itself). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-overlapping_magisteria
>>>
>>> Another approach is to consider how people think about this issue generally. For example, those who identify as atheists commonly say (in many conversations I've had), I don't believe in God and I don't need to, as science explains things. That's not to suggest that if science did not explain things, they would or should change their view. Rather, my point is that at a popular, "commonsense" level, there is a (reasonably common?) assumption that either some higher power created, or natural processes alone are a sufficient explanation.
>>>
>>> A focal point of this issue is the god-of-the-gaps. At times I think this is a legitimate protest by materialists, i.e. creationists are premature in claiming gaps in today's scientific knowledge. On the hand, when/how might the creationist claim be legitimate?
>>>
>>> But back to the original question, how would you frame the terms of engagement for debate involving the relationship between science and the supernatural?
>> You refer to the supernatural a lot, but the term is very poorly
>> defined. I suggest you replace each and every occurrence of it in your
>> writings with one of "unknown", "personal unsubstantiated belief", or
>> "mythic tradition." All mentions of the supernatural (not just by you),
>> I think you will find, fit in one or more of those categories.
>
> Yes, it could be as unspecified as "not natural", but I'd suggest a definition along the lines of "transcendent supernatural agency" or an "intelligent designer", which I think is commonly accepted, at least in broad terms. Investigating this is the province of theology etc.

You've committed recursion in defining "supernatural" as "transcendent
supernatural agency". You've also either narrowed the scope of
supernaturality greatly, or narrowed the scope of potential interaction
between science and the supernatural greatly.

I wouldn't expect many people to exclude ghosts, leprechauns and souls
from the supernatural, or to include angels, djinn and genii loci among
the transcendent.

For supernatural abiogenesis you can restrict the sets of supernatural
agencies processes somewhat, but not for the more general question of
the relationship between science and the supernatural.

Science is a process to describe (if you're a realist) or model (if
you're an anti-realist) the world. Supernatural explanations are only
useful to scientific explanations if they're more than a placeholder for
ignorance. To convert Intelligent Design from the propaganda arm of a
religiously motivated political movement to a scientific research
program you have to investigate how the Intelligent Design filled
whatever gap you're appealing to. For example you have to attempt to
answer the question as to why your Intelligent Designer intervened to
generate life rather than create a universe in which it spontaneously
occurred (is life an afterthough, or are there two different Intelligent
Designers. or ...?)

>
> To reiterate: The supernatural origin of life is not just a fallback "default" option if natural explanations fail. It's a legitimate hypothesis in its own right. Moreover, a large number of scientists believe in some form of higher power. A fraction of these may have a belief in a higher power that would still be compatible with naturalistic explanation, but many would not.
>
>> --
>> Mark Isaak
>> "Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between 'That
>> doesn't make sense' and 'I don't understand.'" - Mary Doria Russell
>

--
alias Ernest Major