Evolution: Is There Any Good Reason To Reject The Abiogenesis Hypothesis?

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o_mlly said:
Absent an organizing principle, matter may aggregate but matter cannot integrate.
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I don’t think anything is possible without God, so i see no reason to invoke him to explain some physical event. This is to say i see no reason to think that God didn’t will from all eternity that life would arise under certain physical conditions.

Science is only possible because God created a natural process.

So why should i see the beginning of life as a divine intervention as opposed to any event that came before it?
 
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There is no magisterial teaching on the biochemical origin origin of the beginning of life
 
IWantGod said:
So why should i see the beginning of life as a divine intervention as opposed to any event that came before it?
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As a matter of faith, you may believe whatever you want. Not so with science or philosophy.

Science: The null hypothesis.
When we have no evidence to resolve the proposition, we may suspend judgment. From a cognitive sense, when no personal preference toward opposing claims exists, one may be either skeptical about both claims or ambivalent about both claims. If there is a dispute, the burden of proof falls onto the challenger of the status quo from the perspective of any given social narrative. If there is no agreeable and adequate proof of evidence to support a claim, the claim is considered an argument from ignorance.
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Philosophy: The Principle of Evidence. There is none.
 
o_mlly said:
Philosophy: The Principle of Evidence. There is none.
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There may be no evidence for abiogenesis (nobody claimed there was in the first place), but you still haven’t justified your position.
 
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IWantGod said:
There may be no evidence for abiogenesis ( nobody claimed there was in the first place ), but you still haven’t justified your position.
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@Rossum did some 400 + posts ago. Are you not reading the posts on your own thread?
rossum said:
Unevidenced personal belief is not science.
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Is there any good reason to reject that crocodiles come from rotting logs at the bottom of bodies of water?

Unless something new is posted to this thread for consideration, I’m out. I have to go pet my imaginary unicorn.
 
IWantGod said:
why should i see the beginning of life as a divine intervention as opposed to any event that came before it?
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Huh?

This very moment exists through an act of Divine intervention since otherwise there would be nothing. God brings us here, into existence, as He does all moments along the trajectory of all things as they are determined by what they are in themselves and how they relate to what is other to their existence. In terms of the material universe, this goes for the subatomic as it does to molecular structures, living forms and we ourselves. Each kind of being has its own properties and had a beginning, when they were created in time. This has been revealed, but is also realized through reason when we look into ourselves, and the complexities of each individual level that constitutes our nature, from our being atoms, cells, and a multicellular, psychological creature endowed with a spiritual soul grounded in eternity and capable of knowing and acting as a causal agent. This cannot come about as a generational transformation, but requires a new creation with each step.
 
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buffalo said:
As in intelligent design?
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It depends what you mean by that. If you mean a divine intervention in nature where complex beings are constructed outside the normal activity of natural processes, then i must say i am not a proponent of that position. But if one were to say it is God’s will that life arises out of the activity of natural processes given the right conditions, then yes i support intelligent design because i don’t believe there is a natural event that doesn’t owe it’s power and activity to God.

Thus abiogenesis is not a problem for me.
 
God was directly involved in creation. There is no natural - non-God - process by definition.
 
If intelligence is required for the origin of life, then you need a non-living intelligence to start life off. If the intelligence is living, then it cannot originate life, obviously.

What non-living intelligence do you propose for the origin of life?
 
rossum said:
If intelligence is required for the origin of life, then you need a non-living intelligence to start life off. If the intelligence is living, then it cannot originate life, obviously.

What non-living intelligence do you propose for the origin of life?
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God who is reality itself.

[34] The world, and man, attest that they contain within themselves neither their first principle nor their final end, but rather that they participate in Being itself, which alone is without origin or end. Thus, in different ways, man can come to know that there exists a reality which is the first cause and final end of all things, a reality “that everyone calls God”.10
 
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buffalo said:
God who is reality itself.

[34] The world, and man, attest that they contain within themselves neither their first principle nor their final end, but rather that they participate in Being itself, which alone is without origin or end. Thus, in different ways, man can come to know that there exists a reality which is the first cause and final end of all things, a reality “that everyone calls God”.10
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So, since God is a “living God” then He cannot be the intelligence which started life, because He is already alive.

Your earlier statement about intelligence being required to start life is obviously wrong.

You need to think things through more carefully here.
 
rossum said:
So, since God is a “living God” then He cannot be the intelligence which started life, because He is already alive.

Your earlier statement about intelligence being required to start life is obviously wrong.

You need to think things through more carefully here.
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You used to understand Catholicism pretty well. What happened?
 
I still do. Catholicism worships a living God. A God who is powerful and knowledgeable enough not to have to fiddle with His universe after He has set it running.

God set the initial conditions. God set the rules. God has always known that the rules He set at the beginning would result in the evolution of material life and of intelligent material life.

The ID version of God did not get things exactly right at first and needs to intervene on occasions to get things back on track. An inferior God to the Catholic version.

The Catholic God is more powerful and more intelligent than the ID God.

You still have a problem with your claim that an intelligence started life. That makes your intelligence non-living. Have you seen “The Terminator”? Are you thinking of something like Skynet?
 
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edwest211 said:
God designed everything.
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But Intelligent Design appears to think that God’s design was a little off, and so needs to be tweaked to make it come out right. The ID God has to act in time to put things back on course; that God didn’t get it right first time, so has to go back to correct earlier errors.
 
rossum said:
The ID version of God did not get things exactly right at first and needs to intervene on occasions to get things back on track. An inferior God to the Catholic version.
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The IDvolution position is He did get things right but allows man to have an influence in the outcome. He can also intervene as a result of petitions by the faithful.
 

The Thomistic Critique of Theistic Evolution​

Under the mental cloud generated by geology and paleontology, for example, we all casually use the clause when man became man . Yet this expression makes no sense whatever, and such is the heart of the Thomist critique of evolution as presented by Fr. Chaberek. Contra theistic evolutionists, not even God could take a hominid body and infuse into it a human soul, for such would violate not only canons of logic but the integrity and nature of speciation in traditional metaphysics and Christian revelation. The very thought would issue in the production of mental chimeras, the impossible (though not unimaginable) conjunctions of two natures, two essences, two vacuous “entities” in one “palpability.”

www.newoxfordreview.org

The Thomistic Critique of Theistic Evolution | New Oxford Review

www.newoxfordreview.org www.newoxfordreview.org
 
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