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| quote: | Originally posted by Chris Larkin
Also, how did life first begin? We haven't managed to synthesise organic life even in laboratories yet, but when we do, the way we do it will need to have been doable naturally when in the conditions before life on earth. Otherwise, we may start having to reconsider God as getting the life started, even if he's not doing much now. |
We haven't been able to generate life in under laboratory conditions that replicate the atmosphere of early Earth, but we have been able to create organic monomers (amnimo acids etc.) that are, quite literally, the building blocks necessary for the emergence of life:
| quote: | | Monomers combine chemically with each other to form long complex chains of molecules (polymers) that are used to build living cells. Oparin hypothesized that on the early earth, in the absense of oxygen, abiological physical processes would produce simple carbon-containing compounds. This hypothesis was tested in 1953 by a very famous experiment performed by Stanley Miller in the laboratory of Harold Urey, an expert on the early composition of the earth's atmosphere. Using a combination of gasses thought to represent the early atmosphere, in a glass refluxing system, they created a minerature ocean-atmosphere system energized with an electrical spark. The reaction of the gasses in the sparking chamber produced a number of simple amino acids when the water “ocean” was later analyzed. |
http://www2.bc.edu/~strother/GE_146/lectures/2.html
The chemical synthesis of these monomers (over the course of millions of years) would have given rise to polymers which are very complex molecules that could, given time, synthesise to give rise to single-celled organisims.
However, the criticism that we cannot, at the moment anyway, create life in a laboratory under the conditions that existed in early Earth is probably unfair. The most important factor in the development from monomers (which we can create) to polymers, to life itself is the factor of time. The emergence of monomers to the emergence of polymers may have taken hundreds of millions of years. The transition of polymers into complex, living single-celled organisms may have taken hundreds of millions of years more. The evolution of single-celled organisms into multicellular life did, based on the fossil evidence, take hundreds of millions of years. Put simply, the immense amount of time required to replicate abiogenesis cannot be produced under laboratory conditions, so I'm not sure why the "synthesis of organic life in laboratories", as you put it, would be necessary to demonstrate the possibility or likelihood of life emerging without interference from a deity.
In any case, as I've always maintained, the emergence of something as chemically quantifiable as life from chemicals that were and are common on Earth is much easier to justify logically than the emergence of something as complex and powerful as God from nothing. God just isn't an adequate explanation for the emergence of life on Earth - it's an inherently more complex, convoluted theory than that of scientific abiogenesis. If theists try to tell me that the emergence of life from nothing (which isn't actualy true - as I said, all the chemical elements were already there) is less believable than the emergence of an omniscient, omnipotent being from nothing, who then, using magic that cannot be explained or in any way quantified scientifically, created life on a back-water planet for his own amusement, then I can only laugh. God is an unnecessary plurality that poses more questions than it solves.
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http://eschatonnow.blogspot.com/
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