Some more comments from a science professor friend (who has never been a Witness) .
sorry didn't mean to insult you just never heard of Ph.D. in evaluation and research. about god: there is no conclusive evidence against the possibility that the universe is the result of intelligent design. the inherent design flaws make it improbable however imo.
I suppose everyone's entitled to their opinions, but the opinion of someone who hasn't any experience in a field usually doesn't count for much to other people, and I don't know anybody who has designed a universe. To be a bit more serious, this response seems to indicate he's not considering a couple points. I don't know which "inherent design flaws" he's referring to, but it's quite possible that some of them are not inherent but entered the world through sin, at least indirectly, through man's rejection of God even though the original plan/design included more open and active participation by the Designer. Also, as many others, including evolutionist, have pointed out, there are many factors of the basic physical conditions and properties of the universe that have to be extremely close to their observed values for the universe to exist and a stable and interesting form, let alone support living and even intelligent creatures.
about the 400.000bp: as you said yourself there are environmental condition under which the number can be greatly reduced. under certain condition a primitve cell could be quite simple with no need for catabolic or anabolic activities. a nature article described the theoretical limit a while back. one can further assume that a cell didn't form out of nothing but that replicating systems existed already before a membrane etc. was added.
I haven't heard of any "environmental" conditions under which the complexity required for living thing can be reduced that isn't either artificial or the presence of a previous living thing. Nobody has yet demonstrated a genetically engineered creature that is extremely simplified and can live freely in a plausible natural environment. I believe Jon von Neumann (sp?) years ago calculated a theoretical limit to the number of parts a self-replicating machine would need, and as I recall, the absolute minimum was something like 400 parts. Of course, it would be only a couple of decades before they had a machine (computer) with human-level intelligence, and they are still saying that today, several decades later, so I may have been very optimistic about that as well. At any rate, I've never heard of any observation of discrete and diverse parts coming together to form interactive, organized system that converts energy from one form to another apart from a previous living thing. For that matter, I don't know of any other living things besides humans that can produce such phenomena, unless you want to count specially trained apes, and I don't recall hearing any cases of that, even. If one refuses to consider the possibility of an intelligent designer, one almost has to assume that the first life form assembled in piecemeal fashion, with various sub units forming separately and then somehow or other coming together in just the right way. Since nothing like this has ever been observed, however, this is merely an assumption out of desperation.
about the mechanisms: yes such calculations are done my scientists. however, if something appears impossible at first based on such calculations a scientist does not automatically assume that god was involved but that there are natural mechanisms at work that explain the result without the requirement of a miracle.
Scientists almost always study subjects that can be observed repeatedly within the natural world. The origin of life was not observed by any human, has not been replicated by any human, and there is no known natural process that is equivalent. Even the artificial "life forms" that we have succeeded in producing , such as computer viruses, are the work of intelligent designers. As far as that goes, the intelligent design component of the "God Hypothesis" does not require a miracle, simply the application of a known process. Therefore, in the case of the origin of life, the evolutionists are the ones looking for a "natural miracle" (a totally unknown and otherwise undesired "mechanism") and ignoring a process which is known to account for similar phenomena.
for instance no probability calculation about the formation of proteins includes the preference that exists during the formation of peptide bonds between certain aa.
this is a review that talkes about this:
...
More wishful thinking and hand waving, based on a few simple chemicals that form on clays and also happen to exist in living microorganisms. These "oligomers" are so small that the probability calculations mentioned above do not apply to them. There is nothing terribly surprising about getting several heads in a row when you're flipping coins, but if somebody gets 100 in a row, it makes sense to suspect that someone has intelligently altered the conditions of the trial, or somehow you've accidentally used a two-headed coin. The problem is the exponential increase in improbability as the number of factors increase. Therefore, examples involving a few factors are irrelevant. Furthermore, while many creationist arguments along these lines deal with proteins as a starting point because the probability of their formation can be clearly and easily expressed in a quantifiable manner, this is still no more than a starting point. Likewise, theoretical estimates of the minimum number of genes required for a basic life form also come short of considering all the complex characteristics that would have to come together to produce such an organism. What all this amounts to, then, is nothing more than an expression of faith that God does not exist, or if he does, he never got involved with our universe except perhaps to set in motion some unknown process that produced life, even though no known process in nature has been observed to produce the same kind of complexity even to a much lesser degree.
