Ok Origins of life ....CHECK!
Next.....
SH*T!!!!!!!!!
What came first????
Yup.... Chicken or egg LOL
That was fun..............
Simple answer, please! Scientifically explain the origin of life coming from nothing!
by Silent_Scream 170 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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SixofNine
Well there is this: http://tellapallet.com/TreeOfLife.pdf
If you think that the upper left corner of that chart points to some sort of god, well more power to ya.... it's a "simple" answer; that's for sure! :)
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Billy the Ex-Bethelite
I haven't read all the comments, but I'll state the evidence I have for what I believe.
A living thing coming from non-living matter has NEVER been observed nor reproduced.
I would disagree. To a great extent, life coming from something non-living happens all the time. All evidence would appear that seeds and frozen embryos are non-living. Before anybody freaks out and starts screaming "they're alive but dormant!" you have to realize that they aren't breathing, eating, drinking, thinking, or aging. There is no evident that they are living. However, even some of the wheat that was entombing with the Egyptian pharoahs was able to sprout when planted. But some of the seed, like the mummies, stayed non-living.
It's only recently in mankind's history that we've begun to understand the marvels, complexities, fragilities, and resilience of life. Before that, it was a complete puzzle for the ancients. They thought that maggots, worms, and other creepy-crawlies spontaneously generated because they couldn't see how small or where they started. Even doctors were resistent to the idea of germs too small to see, yet now it's common knowledge. Once they started figuring out germs and diseases, they thought they could end them all. They've succeeded in eliminating the threats of some, yet other, new diseases appear.
Where do new diseases come from? Typically, they're just changes, adaptations, or evolution of old diseases. All life has similar building blocks. DNA is amazingly similar between humans, monkeys, rats, plants, viruses, etc. There didn't need to be thousands of miracles of abiogenesis, only a very few, hardy originators. When they started, it wouldn't have looked like much for a very long time. But as conditions became favorable for different life forms, diversity expanded.
As far as the actual origin of life, exactly how or where it started, there is no written record (of course). Should we expect to be able to exactly duplicate and prove it right now? No. Since we don't know the details of the environment where and how it began, it would be illogical to expect to immediately duplicate something that may have required hundreds or thousands of years to get to a form we would recognize today. Personally I wouldn't be interested in trying. The last thing we need is for scientists to be spending years and billions of dollars trying to create something that already exists. For that matter, we don't know exactly how the Egyptians built the pyramids. Does that mean that the pyramids weren't built? Does it mean that invisible giants must have built them for the Egyptians? Should we start experimentally building pyramids with thousands of workers using ancient tools to recreate how the pyramids might have been built? Nope. We go with what the general evidence points to and find the eternal mystery absolutely fascinating.
As far as requiring a scientific explanation, the best you can get is that life is here, it must have started somehow, somewhere. Did it start here, were there aliens involved? Why are there stars and planets? Why isn't everything made of gold? Dunno. We can sit around debating it all day while sipping coffee and arging about French grammar, but without conclusive evidence (like an actual time capsule with text, photo, and video of how the first microbes began), I go with what I perceive.
Personally, I think I would be critical of scientific efforts to recreate the beginning of life on earth. It would probably turn into the next Lyme disease, Herpes, or flesh-eating virus. Instead, I get excited about things like stem cell research and trying to learn more of the mysteries of how to improve life as it is...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXO_ApjKPaI
You're probably disappointed with my explanation, but I'm okay with the fact that there's lots of things I don't have a rock solid, evidence in hand explanation for. Why are there so many languages and why were ancient people scattered all over the world rather than staying fairly close with a common language? Why were some civilizations amazingly advanced, yet disappeared? Why do coffee and chocolate taste so delicious? Why is French grammar so complicated?
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NewChapter
Wow, that skin gun is quite interesting. I guess I understand you view on this Billy---that it is not really important. And of course, there is always the chance that any life that is created could be malignant. But cracking this mystery could also lead to knowledge we never even conceived of. If scientists had this knowledge, who knows how they could apply it?
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dgp
I used to stay a believer on the grounds Silent Scream is posting here. The funny or interesting thing is that I got to think that way after attending a (compulsory) lecture on Marxism, where we were told that some old fart had tried to prove that life would originate spontaneously from a dirt shirt, sweat and I forget what else, and of course that was not true.
But then the explanation we find in the Bible is not credible. One thing that always troubled me was just how the writer of Genesis got to know how God had created the world. Was he told by God himself? Or was he having an epyleptic seizure? Or was it an old wive's tale that got modified over time to scare unruly children? I don't know that, either. Why would the writer of such a relevant piece of information forget to give us his name? Something like "Me, Whatever in Hebrew, son of my father, who was the son of his father, who was in turn the son of my grandpa... this morning was told by God that He created the world in this way and another"?
And the story in the Bible is about the creation of this planet (which is not even identified as a celestial body that revolves around the Sun), not about the Universe. There is nothing in the Bible to tell us how come Saturn has rings, for example.
I find this explanation impossible to believe. I don't know how or if scientists will ever get to know how life started, or whether they will do it in my lifetime, but I do know that I do not find evidence to support the idea that God created the Universe.
The fact that we don't have evidence in favor of one theory does not prove another, which, by the way, is one of many.
No one has proved to me that rain doesn't come when a God named Tláloc breaks some vases with a stick. Should I believe that?
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sizemik
But I never claimed that life came from nothing---so why would I have to prove that? I claimed I don't know how life originated, and that I can prove. It is you who keep insisting that I claim life came from nothing---therefore it is a strawman argument. When I make the claim that life came from nothing, you can ask me to prove it. . . . NC
ok. . . . SS
(sound of penny dropping?)
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nicolaou
WOW. So not one person has provided an answer. NOT ONE! No evidence, the very thing you demand from us.
Look at it this way Silent Scream. Science DOES have evidence, overwhelming amounts of it in fact, for the progression of life from simple, self-replicating cells to the super abundant diversity we witness today. However there is, we would all agree, a hole in the scientific explanation for the origin of life. Yes, we are lacking evidence here.
As we wind the clock back over 3.5 BILLION years we observe via fossil, D.N.A and other evidence the natural progession of complex modern life into simpler and simpler forms until we reach the point where we have nothing but Eoarchean microbes. Yep, the evidence for how they came about is lacking but both Abiogenesis and the Anthropic Principle offer sound bases for future research. Science is looking for answers all the time, that's what it does.
A cell. A single, self-replicating molecule. That's what needs explaining.
Now, I wouldn't have included this final comment if it weren't for your use of the word 'us' in the quote above. But what is it that YOU need to explain? Not the simplest, tiniest scrap of life. No. You face a much bigger problem than that . . .
Nic'
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Billy the Ex-Bethelite
dgp: "But then the explanation we find in the Bible is not credible."
We weren't supposed to bring up the G word, but I just wanted to clarify that the Bible has two different explanations. The first account is Gen. 1:1 - 2:3 and says how "God" created everything in "days". Gen 2:4 begins a different creation account where "Jehovah God" creates everything with different details in a different order. And neither of the accounts are credible... or explain cells.
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Twitch
But I never claimed that life came from nothing---so why would I have to prove that? I claimed I don't know how life originated, and that I can prove. It is you who keep insisting that I claim life came from nothing---therefore it is a strawman argument. When I make the claim that life came from nothing, you can ask me to prove it.
Bravo
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OnTheWayOut
Defining evidence as having a preconceived notion and then gathering data and interpreting it to support that notion while discarding other notions that do not fit the given data, then there is plenty of evidence for abiogenesis.
Granted, with the odds being incredible, chance could arrange naturally occurring amino acids into proteins which could somehow be organized into the building blocks for the first primitive cell.
While the notion that this happened by chance and something set it to motion in being self-replicating, is difficult to swallow, there is nothing about it that could be better explained by a supernatural cause. Even if a supernatural cause existed, the supernatural cause would be subject to the same questions- what is it's origin?I know you asked for simple explanations, something we could put on a bumper sticker like "God Didn't Do It!" but that just isn't the way this will play out. Here's a website that adds to the "notion" based on evidence: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2000/ast20jun_1/
This video works with the evidence as described above and works it out nicely, but it takes some scientific knowledge to understand it and it won't fit on your bumper sticker: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6QYDdgP9eg
Niel deGrasse Tyson tells us things more simply, but it takes awhile to show how the evidence fits the notions that abiogenesis proscribes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axlVxk7UsqY&feature=related
But these are theories that fit the available evidence. It is possible (and some people are more confident) that life arrived on earth and that conditions to start life from lifelessness existed elsewhere. I think that theory is not as popular among scientists because earth just seemed to have everything needed and life thrives on earth so well.
