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.
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.