I love the RNA world hypothesis, I love the idea that DNA is an iteration on RNA optimised for stable data storage, that proteins are and iteration on RNA optimised to be better enzymes and structures and that mediating between the two we still have to transcribe data to the legacy RNA data format, and use the legacy RNA enzyme ribosomes to translate this through to amino acid sequences.
The idea the RNA metabolisms might have evolved in small cavities in hydrothermal vents also makes it easy to imagine communities of cooperating molecules in an enclosed area needing to defend themselves from free-loading virus molecules, setting up the ongoing conflict between cells and viruses right from the beginning, and also a dynamic in which viruses are both destructive and an important source of novelty
Imagine the seas a thick soup of iron complexes and RNA folded into quadrillions of nightmare shapes, a vanishing few of them busy replicating whatever they bumped into. One day, two of them bumped into one another. In the blink of a geologic eye, the seas were brimming with a descendant of whichever of them was faster.
Somewhere, a membrane happened. I don't think anywhere in nature today do we find a membrane created entirely from scratch. Everywhere we find a membrane, it grew from and split off of an existing membrane. It may be that we should think of ourselves as fancy membranes, and DNA, RNA, and protein are just clever ways to make more membrane.
What is it about free lipids and proteins spontaneously joining together in chaotic aquatic environments to form highly resilient microscopically sub-dividable shells that you find so trollishly unrelated to the concept of membranes forming in early earth conditions?
This would have been at a period before any real sophisticated attackers exist, and before life had built up any specific requirements of an "internal" environment too.
It seems intuitive that this would be how it started, goopy little bubbles filled with goo, just barely keeping out the other goo that would disrupt it.
When you find a living organism relying on sea foam to construct an organelle, you may file for your Nobel Prize.
Literally all the organisms we know about make all the membranes they use by adding to an existing membrane, not fetching them from out of their environment. And really, why should they?
Finally: a soap bubble film has air on both sides, and water solution between, and is thus the opposite of any membrane in a cell, which has water on both sides and glyceride in between.
my hazy memory is that it is/was assumed that the cell wall arose pretty naturally from an asymmetric protein that was hydrophilic on one end and hydrophobic on the other.
The hydrothermal vent as a spongey matrix of cell membrane precursors is one theory for this. The thing I like about this idea is that the idea of a boundary exists before membranes, and fit with the idea of the boundary being ‘found’
I dislike the RNA world hypothesis, since actual RNA nucleotides will be vanishingly rare in the soup, vs. other random similar organic molecules. Cells have these monomers because of synthetic chains with enzymes that precisely catalyze the various steps to get to them.
Related to this; Check out the book The Revolutionary Phenotype.
"The Revolutionary Phenotype is a science book that brings us four billion years into the past, when the first living molecules showed up on Planet Earth. Unlike what was previously thought, we learn that DNA-based life did not emerge from random events in a primordial soup. Indeed, the first molecules of DNA were fabricated by a previous life form. By describing the fascinating events referred to as Phenotypic Revolutions, this book provides a dire warning to humanity: if humans continue to play with their own genes, we will be the next life form to fall to our own creation. "I am VERY impressed with this book—very important topic very well treated." - Robert Trivers"
I'm skeptical of genetic theories constructed solely by a white supremacist [1]. A stopped clock is still right twice a day, but there's kind of a pattern of men who say "white people are superior and Jews are bad" also proposing other unfounded ideas in the name of "science".
Also he tried to get Jeffrey Epstein to fund this book. Neat.
Could there be an unknown class X of biomolecules that was involved in the origin of life but was later outcompeted by the DNA + RNA + protein combo that dominates today? This class X could have been less efficient at replication but kinetically easier to form from the primordial broth.
The environment at the time life evolved was very, very different from today.
In particular, free oxygen was practically non-existent. Metals, particularly iron, and metal complexes were dissolved in the water at high concentration. Processes that spawned the first life had to be compatible with all of that, and may well have depended on many details of it, most of which we can barely imagine. The ancestors of everything alive today survived the arrival of free oxygen a billion or two years later, with the loss of most dissolved metals, leaving no trace of the overwhelming majority that failed to adapt to that.
Conditions today, even without competition from existing life, might be wholly unsuitable for biogenesis.
It has three alternatives PNA, TNA and GNA that are somewhat variants of the RNA. (I'm not an expert, but my uninformed opinion is that GNA looks promising.)
Also PHAs that is very different and the iron-sulfur idea that is even more difficult. (I'm not an expert, but my uninformed opinion both look too weird and the transition to DNA is less clear.)
I imagined a closed 4-crbon sugar, and I discarded the idea. Is theose open in the TNA? Is the 3D structure similar to the structure of a closed ribose? (My 3D imagination for sugars is very bad.)
For sure it's possible, but evolution rarely gets completely rid of something (as far as we know). My favorite support for RNA-world (and similar) hypothesis is that RNA molecules are used as enzymes in some processes (ribosome - translation), even though RNA is a pretty bad catalyst. If the evolution could choose, it would most likely use a protein, but the cost of switching to "new tech" is too high.
> A shadow biosphere is a hypothetical microbial biosphere of Earth that would use radically different biochemical and molecular processes from that of currently known life. Although life on Earth is relatively well studied, if a shadow biosphere exists it may still remain unnoticed, because the exploration of the microbial world targets primarily the biochemistry of the macro-organisms.
I agree, but I want to add two bad metaphors. (I'd like to have a good one, but I only have bad ones.)
* Prions are like falling domino pieces. If you have a lot of standing domino pieces, and one of them falls, it may cause other domino pieces to fall. But they don't create more domino pieces, or standing pieces. They just pull down the pieces that are around. Also, they store no information, they just flip a bit from 0 to 1.
* RNA is like a small pile of glued magnets glued on their side. If you put some glued magnets in a box full of magnets and shake them, they will pick other magnets and create a inverse copy. If the side of the magnets is (magically) sticky, the copy may get glued permanently. After some more shaking, you have two piles of glued magnets moving around and collecting more magnets and making copies. They store information, because the initial pile may be NNSNSNS and the new piles will have the same pattern until there is an error in the copy.
Thanks. I agree that they are interesting. (I wrote them :) .) But I can think a few reasons why they are wrong. Anyway, I think they are useful to understand the difference between prions and rna, and why prions are not a good proposal for the origin of life.
Good points, I like the analogies. I would also not classify prions as life originators, but rather thinking if a similar model would have been employed by an intermmediate non-nucleotide based replicator. So basically chemical folders that would gradually evolve the replicator molecular complexity.
I think the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAH_world_hypothesis is somewhat similar to your idea. IIUC they don't self reproduce, they just grow in a random order in a pattern. And the proposal is that it 's good to support the RNA bases for a small time to make it easy to build small chains.
[I remember to have read something like that about clay or crystals, but I can't find it now in the article in Wikipedia. Perhaps the idea was abandoned a long time ago.]
No? The article is talking about RNA World hypothesis vs. RNA-Protein World hypothesis. The RNA world hypothesis has been accepted widely for a long time.
Before membraneless RNA viroids were discovered, some abiogenesis researchers may have thought that DNA is fundamentally required for self-replication, so whatever first occurred must have had it. But this is simply a lack of imagination on what RNA can do.
The origin of life is in fact the ONLY interesting scientific question because without life no other question arises.
Also, the fact that there are individual proteins that must be found in a search space that is on the order of 10^70, while only 10^50 living organisms have ever existed on Earth puts to rest the “random mutation” theory of how life evolved.
There was a time when mathematicians in the academy openly mocked the biologists who bought into the “random mutation plus natural selection” creation myth, but sadly those days are over because raising the obvious questions now puts an academic career at risk.
It is commonly assumed that it is impossible to definitively prove the existence of God, but in fact the existence of life is a definitive proof of the existence of God, given what we now understand about molecular biology.
I think the big three science questions are: how did the current universe come to be, how (and how many times) did life form, and how did the neural correlates of consciousness arise? The first of those two is interesting even if there isn't any life around to appreciate it.
I think your statements about the protein search space and the number of living organisms are kind of specious. The whole point of evolution is that it can search large spaces effectively- certainly the entire 10**70 (or whatever the size of "protein sequence" or "protein structure" space really is), hasn't been sampled, in the same way that proteins don't explicitly fold by enumerating through every single possible physical conformation.
Nothing about molecular biology proves or supports the argument of the existence of a supreme being.
Consciousness clearly preceded life because it is apparent that life is the result of intelligent design. You just have to snap out of your naturalistic, materialistic framework. For a lot of people a naturalistic starting point leads them to a naturalistic conclusion, which obviously begs the question and is merely a different kind of faith — one that can no longer withstand empirical inquiry.
you're starting from a strong conclusion that has no scientific support. I can't snap out of a naturalistic, materialistic framework, because that's the only one consistent with all the observed evidence. There is no reason to continue arguing for your position, as it is not going to convince anybody.
In fact I myself have been convinced by argument. You state that a naturalistic, materialistic framework is the only one consistent with all the observed evidence, but of course it is not consistent with the observed evidence regarding the existence/origin of life, which is what we’re discussing (and which is the only interesting question). I have referenced a book in my original post that spells the whole argument out.
2019 is when it clicked for me -- I was 45 -- that was when I discovered the work of James Tour -- he comes off as a Jesus freak, so I don't like to recommend him, but his scientific credentials are world class and his argument regarding the origin of life is air tight. Prior to discovering James Tour I had basically bought the naturalistic story, mostly on the basis of arguments from authorities like Sam Harris, Lawrence Kraus, etc. I will admit that I was raised in a Christian household, although my parents are both scientists -- a biochemist and a hematologist. It was interesting to me to observe the upswell of awe I experienced in my own life when I became intellectually convinced that there really is a God who really did create life. Now it seems so obvious to me that I get annoyed by people who view things the way I did just a few years ago -- just blindly accepting a naive story, IMHO!
1. evolution doesn't even try to explain origin of life, it's completely independent matter.
2. your math seems sketchy but even assuming it's fine - there's no requirement for life to search for these proteins on Earth. Even if it had 10^-20 chance of happening on any given planet - there's more planets than 10^20. It's not surprising that SOMEONE wins the lottery, it's only surprising if a predetermined person wins it.
Their are trillions of microorganisms on and in the human body (10^13), and their are a several billion humans (10^10), so there are more than 10^23 living organisms just taking into account humans and their bacterial biomes.
That doesn't include the several billion other fauna, or the unquantifable number of microorganisms living on/in them or in the water and soil. For example, a liter of water contains a million phytoplankton, half a million zooplankton, and over a billion bacteria. The ocean contains about 10^40 liters, which comes out to over 10^50 living organisms just in terms of bacteria, not including higher-order life forms (or non-living self-organizing organic constructs like viruses).
If anything, you are grossly understating the amount of living organisms currently alive.
That's observable universe. There's no requirement for life to arise in observable universe. If it arose in any other part - that part would then be "observable".
You're clearly ignoring the second paragraph, so I guess the problem with your math is simply that your ignoring everything that disagrees with your worldview.
Also, physicians don't know how many elementary particles there are in the entire universe, since we don't actually know what the bulk of the entire universe is made of yet, so your 10^90 is clearly just made up.
"Titin is a multi-functional protein that behaves as a nonlinear spring in human muscles with its many domains unfolding and refolding in the presence of forces and giving muscles their elasticity. Titin is about 100 times longer than the average protein with its 33,423 amino acid polypeptide chain" (http://book.bionumbers.org/how-big-is-the-average-protein/)
How many different ways are there to create a protein containing 33,423 amino acids? I will leave this calculation as an exercise for the reader, but as a starting point, suppose there are only 10 amino acids available -- that would yield 10^33,423 possible arrangements.
But even an average protein would have more different possible arrangements than there are atoms on Earth.
Given that there are only 10^16 seconds in a billion years, we can safely assume that mutating a protein ten times every second for a billion years will search less than a quadrillionth of the search space.
1. again you're (mis)quoting universe size without understanding. The actual quote is "There are between 10^78 to 10^82 atoms in the OBSERVABLE universe". As in - "universe that is close enough to us that light from it can arrive to us before it expands away FTL". There is no reason to believe universe ends exactly as far from us as we can see. It would be a coincidence much more astounding than the fact that titin exists (it would mean Earth is exactly in the middle of the WHOLE universe and it's exactly the size for us to see everything). It would also mean gravity theory is wrong because with nothing outside of the observable universe - universe should be expanding slower because mean gravity would bring everything towards Earth. Basically it's not the case.
2. genetic code doesn't change only by 1-base pair at a time. There are duplications, inclusions, etc. I'm pretty sure you can find many duplicated fragments in the code for titin.
3. you have choosen your target (titin) without specifying the class that it belongs to. Maybe it only matters that it's long and the endings are kinda this shape? Let's say there's 10^25_000 different viable titin alternatives. No matter which we end up with - it works, and you wouldn't know if you were in these universes instead. It significantly changes the likelihood but you treat the titin as the only possibility.
It's like being amazed that John Smith won the lottery - sure, it's unlikely that this exact person won. But it's pretty likely that SOMEONE wins the lottery. And you can only be amazed if you chose that person before the draw. In case of titin you select the winner after the draw and marvel at the unlikelihood.
These comparisons are usually motivated ideologically and based on misunderstanding of both probability and universe.
1. You really seem hung up on the word "observable". Obviously we can't literally see atoms in distant galaxies -- but we can still deduce that there are atoms there. We use calculations regarding the expansion rate of the universe, the strength of gravity, etc, to "observe" using scientific reasoning. But in any case, what is the point of your argument here -- suppose I am off by a factor of a quadrillion and there are really 10^99 atoms in the universe -- how does that change anything?
2. Proteins are not genetic code.
3. Let's say there are 4 viable titin alternatives.
Also, what is this about "you wouldn't know if you were in these universes"? Do you think there are other universes? The multiverse hypothesis is a transparent attempt to avoid the conclusion that God exists -- but it has no basis in any science or empiricism of any sort -- it's just an absolutely made up speculative fantasy. The fact that people have to resort to it just drives home how impoverished the materialist framework is -- it only works if there is an infinite number of universes for which there is no evidence. At least having in God is having faith in something for which there is evidence.
Apparently I have the solid statistical reasoning here and you are the one motivated by a "materialism of the gaps" ideology.
If you don't know how many tickets the lottery sells you cannot estimate the probability of winning it. Your assumption that universe ends exactly as far away form us as we can see is absurd, so I pointed it out.
> Proteins are not genetic code.
Proteins are generated from the genetic code, and it's the genetic code that evolves and gets inherited over generations not proteins. Proteins are just an expression of this inherited and mutated code. So it makes more sense to focus on the code and not on the result. And the relationship isn't 1:1. See also "Kolmogorov complexity".
For 1 example - Pi is infinite and non-periodic. But the algorithm to generate Pi to an arbitrary digit is quite simple and short.
> Let's say there are 4 viable titin alternatives.
There's more than that in every single human being. And it changes through life.
> The titin gene (TTN), with its 364 exons, encodes the largest human protein. It gives rise to a dizzying array of alternatively spliced isoforms differentially expressed in various skeletal muscles, heart, and in development.
We focus on the ones that lead to sickness, but there are also many that don't.
> Do you think there are other universes?
No. I'm talking about the hypothetical situation in which titin evolved differently. In that case you would think that this version of titin was the only version possible and you would calculate the probability basing on that instead. Yet it's obviously wrong.
> "materialism of the gaps"
It's you who assumes that God must have made it because you don't understand how it could have happened. Depsite your false assumptions about the probability:
1. titin can only works if it's exactly as is (despite the fact there are many working variants present in every single homo sapiens, not to mention inter-species variants)
2. titin could have only evolved in the part of universe that we can see (despite the fact it's obvious there's more universe than that - see gravity distribution)
3. evolution works on proteins directly by changing them 1 particle at a time (despite the fact evolution works on genetic code and not 1 pair at a time)
These assumptions are all false as I've shown above, hence your estimation is useless. It has nothing to do with alternative universes or "gaps".
I’m going to have to move this discussion to a substack newsletter. There are good responses to all your objections, but a hacker news thread isn’t the place. I don’t think you appreciate the difficulty of unlocking the precise proteins that are needed for life, and pointing to a “code” that generates them just makes the situation more miraculous, not less. I’ll drop a comment here when I get a substack newsletter going on this subject. I will welcome your comments and input, since it is clear you are passionate, willing to do research, and eager to find objections to theism.
You took an example of the number of microorganisms in a liter of pond water, then multiplied it by all the liters of water in the ocean — but you won’t find the same number of microorganisms in a liter of salt water a mile deep beneath the arctic. So I think your math is a little sketchy. In any case, I’ll have to go back and find my source and look into how he did the calculation.
I used to think this, but the work of Jeremy England (IIRC) has convinced me that the emergence of life is thermodynamically favored. FWIW I'm not down voting.
The origin of life (organic material arising from inorganic material) is actually not that interesting of a question - abiogenesis explains it just fine.
Fairy tales from illiterates are absolutely not a better theory absent extraordinary evidence to support the hearsay-upon-hearsay-upon-edited-hearsay-upon-hearsay (ad nauseam) claims.
Please, all, don’t let this type of unscientific non-thinking go unchecked.
Abiogenesis is the question of how life formed, and is the only field where aliens (albeit in the form of proteins on comets) are a legitimate scientific advocation. Don’t take away the mysticism of how life arose by pretending we’ve answered the question and can easily explain it, or pretending a scientific explanation is somehow at odds with conceptualism.
Abiogenesis has nothing to do with aliens: it’s the conclusion of “[t]he classic 1952 Miller–Urey experiment [that] demonstrated that most amino acids, the chemical constituents of proteins, can be synthesized from inorganic compounds under conditions intended to replicate those of the early Earth.”
It’s terrifying that basic science can be dismissed so easily.
I see your Wikipedia link and raise you a Nature article..
Summary about how the test equipment of Miller-Urey wasn’t accounted for in the experiment.
“It finds that the precise composition of the apparatus housing the experiment is crucial to amino acid formation.”
I think you’re misreading the article… the one and only conclusion for the article is that “Miller recreated in his experiments the atmosphere and waters of the primtive Earth. The role of the rocks was hidden in the walls of the reactors.” The article is only saying that other, inorganic, roots of life may have been a part of the origins of life. The ultimate conclusion of abiogenesis are still the same.
I said abiogenesis was the only field where aliens were taken seriously, in a not so serious manor. Your Miller experiment is also widely cited as proof that abiogenesis is extremely complex and would take an order of magnitude longer (under perfect conditions) to achieve RNA than we have any reason to believe actually occurred. You are strawmanning by pretending anyone else is suggesting something other than science. You are also simultaneously completely wrong about how confident we are life evolved entirely on Earth.
Going from millers early experiments to the LUCA is a larger gap in complexity than going from LUCA to modern man. It is that level of jump we believe to have occurred in just 1-200 million years. We do not currently have a proper explanation for this but there several candidates.
So yes, aliens as in proteins coming from comets, are very much a consideration and you should familiarize with the last few decades of research into the field before trying to be condescending.
The parent is saying that aliens (proteins from comets) may have brought life to Earth, but that is not an explanation for how life began in the first place, anywhere in the universe. Saying "aliens" merely kicks the first-cause can down the road.
It kicks the can down the road, but it also means that the "first cause" can be even less likely (on any one planet) and still have happened.
In other words, if terrestrial life isn't assumed to have arisen on earth de-novo, then the odds of it arising elsewhere and being transplanted by chance rise considerably, as it only has to happen once on any one of many other worlds that are potentially suitable, and if we extend the thought to Earth perhaps not being a 2nd generation cradle to being a 3rd, or even at a further remove, the odds of life arising spontaneously somewhere start to look darnright favorable, and that is still assuming that we should only consider the emergence of terrestrial life-as-we-know-it rather than anything lifelike, with life-as-we-know-it simply being the one that emerged (or rather, spread) first, at least in our particular parochial corner of the universe.
It's easy to dismiss "basic science" when it comes from people who say things logically equivalent to "abiogenesis explains abiogenesis so it's clearly not a big deal". The least you can bring to this discussion is a Wikipedia-level understanding of the terminology. And the "aliens" comment was clearly a reference to panspermia, which last I checked remains an unlikely but still viable explanation for the origin of life on Earth. This was obvious to me, who was raised Creationist, so if you missed it you're either not as educated in "basic science" as you think or are playing dumb to make a point for... people who mostly believe in evolution already? I don't know, dude, just chill.
Panspermia and abiogenesis are different but more likely explanations than any religious explanation for the origins of life. That said, my comment is merely a reply to one thing: reasonably likely science vs gossip from illiterate, worship-prone travelers as the explanation for life. My personal opinion is that the only reasonable answer to the question of ‘where did life come from’ is ‘we have no fucking clue but science is a better explanation than supernatural genies because science provides a plausible explanation for almost everything’
Edit, to add: and, more importantly, we, as a human race, will glean so much more from exploring scientific explanations vs religious explanations that we should hurry up and move on from the latter before it stultifies us yet again like in dark ages and witch-burning era before we regress even farther than we have.
“Science is a better explanation than the supernatural” presumes that science and the supernatural are incompatible —- but this only makes sense if you assume naturalism to begin, which would be to beg the question.
There are all sorts of areas in which scientific reasoning leads to a conclusion of intelligent design — from examining arrow heads to cryptography to forensic science.
When science investigates the supernatural and finds an explanation (one that is compatible with the evidence and is replicable by independent investigators), it ceases to be supernatural and moves into the realm of the natural.
If you hand-wave away skeptical inquiry of a topic, then yes, it can remain within the realm of the supernatural, but that is hardly an endorsement, it simply means you aren't willing to subject the topic to investigation with all the tools at our disposal, or at least are unwilling to eschew tools that have proved unreliable (such as circular logic).
Your argument basically boils down to "The spontaneous emergence of life in a universe consistent with the materialistic and naturalistic worldview is so unlikely that we must attribute it to a cause that cannot be accounted for from within that worldview."
To which I say: "It almost doesn't matter how unlikely the emergence of life is, since if life hadn't emerged we wouldn't be having this argument". This is of course the anthropic principle. Which isn't to say that determining the likelihood isn't important and interesting! Just that it isn't particularly relevant to the question of whether the emergence of life can be explained from within a naturalistic and materialist worldview.
You would have to prove that the emergence of life is not only unlikely, but actually impossible, in order to demonstrate that a non-naturalistic origin is required.
Well, actually, to be thorough, that isn't the only possible avenue of proving your point if view, but other avenues would require more data than we currently have, and would require that data to point in directions that demonstrate the universe having agency and intent of some sort.
You might enjoy the science fiction novel Calculating God, by Robert J. Sawyer, which riffs a bit on this theme:
To give a hypothetical example of the kind of future evidence that could support your argument that nevertheless doesn't spoil the plot of that novel, imagine that buried within the non-coding and non-regulatory genomes of many different life forms on earth there were a message (Bible Code style). The message isn't identical everywhere, mutations do degrade it, but just as often over evolutionary times scales mutations correct the errors. There is no explicable mechanism for these corrections, that demonstrate ongoing interference for no reason than the preservation of the message. Furthermore, the message gets longer in larger genomes, and has expanded in similar ways in species otherwise not particularly related, and to an extent that cannot be attributed to known mechanisms of horizontal gene transfer.
Further, imagine that we discover life elsewhere in the solar system (for example on Titan, or Europa). These extraterrestrial life forms don't particularly resemble Earth's, differing in to he chiralitt of their protiens an do sugars, using sightly different genetic coding and transcription mechanisms, but buried within their own junk genes there are, astonishingly similar messages encoded differently, preserved and expanded upon in sync with Earth's over eons, without there being any explicable means of sharing that data and no other between classes that are otherwise incompatible in encoding, metabolism, or basic chemistry (Titan's life uses methane and ethane as solvents instead of water).
That would be a pretty convincing argument for their being a "supernatural" entity being responsible for creating life and chivvying it along. Whether that entity is also responsible for the creation of the universe is a separate argument, but perhaps there is further evidence somehow encoded within the fabric of spacetime's various universal constants (eg. Contact buried a message deep within the digits of Pi).
I'm happy to consider God "natural" if you don't like the term "supernatural" -- the point is that we can definitely conclude that God exists. If that makes God "natural", then fine.
Ah, but see, you're basing your conclusion on motivated reasoning and a selective interpretation of the evidence (or lack thereof, in some cases).
In short, concluding that God exists is a bit of an iffy proposition that largely relies on a failure of imagination. I prefer to hew to a slightly higher standard, that of demonstrating that God exists.
The entire question is regarding “abiogenesis” — you can’t appeal to abiogenesis to explain abiogenesis. I know it is difficult for a lot of people to countenance the fact that science has proven the existence of God, but that is where we are.
Except, only you are there. Exactly where you started, sterile and empty-handed.
"God did it" is equally applicable as the answer to every possible question, and is equally useless in every case. Every jot and tittle of progress ever made came from rejecting that answer.
I am arguing that the orgin-of-life is special case -- it is not like trying to explain where thunder comes from -- and I am completely happy to bite the bullet on the god-of-the-gaps question when it comes to the origin of life. We're 70 years past the Miller-Urey experiment and the gap has only grown wider. If I write a book on this subject it will be called "The God of the Gap".
And when abiogenesis is finally worked out, your god vanishes in a puff of unreality? If I were going to pick a god to believe in, I would demand sterner stuff than that.
But I here predict that when abiogenesis is solved, you will pivot immediately to a now-diminished god inventing amino acids with innate capacity for evolving life. From there, to carbon; and then hydrogen, and its propensity to make stars that eventually go supernova (for the first few rows of the periodic table) and collapse to neutron stars (that collide to make the rest). It will be a god of Hydrogen. Or maybe of Quarks, Leptons, and Photons, though that seems a little messy. Maybe the devil gets to do Dark Matter?
Absolutely not -- if abiogenesis is solved then I'll be happy to capitulate. My entire argument is based on the fact that abiogenesis cannot be solved within a materialistic/naturalistic framework. If you do it, then you win.
You’re making a “god of the gaps” critique — but the origin of life is not merely a “gap” — it is the ONLY interesting scientific question in existence (because without life no other question arises) and it is better described as “an infinite chasm” than a “gap”. The more we learn about it the wider the chasm gets and the more compelling the argument for God becomes.
How has the chasm gotten wider? “We” is an interesting euphemism for “you”. I’m content with the randomness.
I also think you are limiting your approach to who you are responding to: athiesm is a belief system about there not being a God, there is a different word for people who just don’t care at all.
In Darwin’s day the cell was not understood and it was assumed to be a simple blob — now we can see inside the cell and can observe astonishing complexity.
The idea the RNA metabolisms might have evolved in small cavities in hydrothermal vents also makes it easy to imagine communities of cooperating molecules in an enclosed area needing to defend themselves from free-loading virus molecules, setting up the ongoing conflict between cells and viruses right from the beginning, and also a dynamic in which viruses are both destructive and an important source of novelty