The origin of life

[Zzyzx]

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The origin of life

Some members seem to think that they know how life originated.

State your claim and present verifiable evidence

Definition of verifiable: capable of being proven as true or real
https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/verifiable

[Jagella]

The origin of life

Some members seem to think that they know how life originated.

State your claim and present verifiable evidence

Definition of verifiable: capable of being proven as true or real
https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/verifiable

Obviously, nobody really knows how life originated on earth or anywhere else. Such a gap in knowledge doesn't stop apologists from telling us they know how life originated, though, and their god fits very comfortably into that gap. They will tell us that their god created life. After all, it says so right there in Genesis 1.

Unfortunately for the defenders of the Christian faith, citing the Bible does not suffice to let many people confidently know how life originated. Not everybody believes what the Bible says, and such skeptics may dismiss the creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2 as mythology.

No longer able to lawfully imprison, torture, and execute heretics who might openly doubt Genesis, Christian apologists have turned to arguing that "God must'a done it." They put a lot of effort and time into trying to convince people that modern science is wrong or at least inadequate to yet answer how life came about. They tell us that life is way too complicated to have come about "by chance." Having presumably ruled out this way naturalistic explanations for how life started, the only alternative is the supernatural, or God--their god and not any other.

I tend to disagree with these apologists. Life is very natural, and I see nothing magical about it. If life is completely natural and free of miracles at present, then it seems very presumptuous to me to insist that life got started as a miracle. I think it's best to go with what we know rather than what we don't know, and since we know of no gods magically creating living things, then let's look for naturalistic explanations for life's origin.

Besides, if we created God, then he could not have created us.

[SallyF]

The origin of life.

It's one of those BIG questions we still don't quite have the full set of answers to.

Which is why it's REALLY handy to be able to adopt a very serious expression, and declare that "Jesus did it" and ask for a great big AMEN from the like-minded congregation who will willingly give up a great big AMEN for any such declaration without actually thinking about the details too deeply. (I have been accused by persons of faith of thinking too much … which is one of the reasons I'm a New Atheist.)

Wikipedia is often a good place to start one's search for, well, pretty much anything really. There we find:

Abiogenesis, or informally the origin of life,[3][4][5][a] is the natural process by which life has arisen from non-living matter, such as simple organic compounds.[6][4][7][8] While the details of this process are still unknown, the prevailing scientific hypothesis is that the transition from non-living to living entities was not a single event, but an evolutionary process of increasing complexity that involved molecular self-replication, self-assembly, autocatalysis, and the emergence of cell membranes.[9][10][11] Although the occurrence of abiogenesis is uncontroversial among scientists, its possible mechanisms are poorly understood. This article presents several principles and hypotheses for how abiogenesis could have occurred.

And we have NUMEROUS sources and 349 citations to give us the honest "we don't quite know the answers" answer.

I also smiled when I read there:

"Origin of life" redirects here. For non-scientific views on the origins of life, see Creation myth.

Amongst the numerous creation myths, we find the Hebrew ones.

And where better to find the details of Hebrew/Bible creation truth than Answers in Genesis:

To creationists, the incredible workings of the genetic code are not a mystery to be explained but instead a marvel to be understood as one of God’s most incredible designs. How such a coding system (even in a simpler form) could have arisen through random interaction is yet another leap of faith by evolutionists. https://answersingenesis.org/origin-of-life/

There are NUMEROUS citations/articles by folks with very impressive CVs who, despite their scientific backgrounds, still seem to be sort of saying "Jesus did it" based on ONE source and BELIEF - not verifiable evidence - in that ONE source.[/u]

[Willum]

It's really pretty simple isn't it?

For intuitive purposes, let's start in the middle with plant life.
Let's make is small, like blue-green algae.

Like God, like one of God's greatest claims, it takes unliving clay and produces life in its own image.

Now what that algae is doing is a miracle of cellular life.
Assuming it evolved, lets move backwards in tie and allow it to become more and more simple.
Its parents may have reproduced more slowly, with greater variation, competing with others.
Its 'grandparents' may have only developed the ability to procreate.
Its 'great grand parents' may have only converted lipids into unpredictable structures.
Its 'g2 grand parents' may have just had the ability to agglomerate.
Its 'g3 grand parents' may have just have been chemicals.

Well you get the idea.

Given that, it seems perfectly reasonable that life arose under Earth conditions, rather than assuming there is a magical wizard in the sky who made life magically...