Yeah, even though I'm getting sucked in, this is why I said I don't generally discuss evolution any more. It never actually reaches the point at which the theory is even critiqued, it's just laymen like me trying to explain the theory.

As far as I know, the Theory of Evolution doesn't explicitly insist that God wasn't involved in creation. In fact, the mainstream religions have no trouble accepting the theory of evolution. So there is no good reason for extremists to reject the theory with specious arguments.

If you are concerned about proof that organic matter can be made from inorganic matter just look in the Bible. Genesis 2:7 "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground…." Dust is inorganic, right?

Mayr, 1982 (in context):

+1

Theistic Evolution is a widely-held position among Christians.


Curiously, you didn't even quote the verse in its entirety. If you had, it would have undermined your point, so I understand why you didn't quote the whole verse.

7 And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. - Genesis 2:7

Adam apparently didn't have life until the Living God breathed life into him.

Do you think this is describing an actual event that happened? Im fairly certain you do, so...

Is dust considered life or non-life?
After God blew air into Adam's dust-nostrils, did Adam became life?
So, life did come from non-life?

If you witnessed this event and you had some video and medical equipment with you, what do you think you would have seen? Did dust turn into multiple proteins, haemoglobin, grey matter, bone, marrow, enamel, nerves and synapses, derma, kidneys, liver, lungs, optic fluid, etc, all from dust?

What would it have looked like?

The additional context makes it more likely to be metaphorical if anything. Presumably God doesn't actually breathe like we do.

No, that was precisely the point. Another poster argued that “living organisms cannot arise from inorganic matter”. Not “Without divine intervention, living organisms cannot arise from inorganic matter.” Even biblical literalists agree that abiogenesis occurred; they just disagree with the scientific hypotheses on the details of how it occurred.

And as an aside, since I am a chemist, I am going to pick a nit here. Please don’t argue that scientists believe that living organisms arose from inorganic matter. Nobody in their right mind believes that. All the hypotheses on abiogenesis would purport that life arose from organic chemicals, never inorganic ones. That’s one point of disagreement with the biblical literalists on abiogenesis— literalists certainly do believe life arose from inorganic matter.

Again, the origin of life is a separate topic from evolution, so this has nothing to do with the validity of evolution, but it’s certainly an interesting topic in its own right. I do think some of the incredulity about abiogenesis is a result of confusion about what such an occurrence actually would entail. You hear “living organism” q a no your mind immediately turns to humans, cattle, dogs, pigs, etc. If you think that something like a dog sprinting forth fully formed from the organic soup would be a wildly improbable event, I fully agree with you. Maybe, though, you think more of amoebas, paramecium, and the like. Even those are still WAY more complex than what a first organism would need to be.

What is life? We need a good definition in order to recognize a living organism. For example, are viruses alive? By most definitions, living organisms must be able to reproduce independently and carry out metabolism. Viruses are not living by that standard. They do seem to be “life-like” though. They do reproduce. They are composed of the same materials as living organisms. Perhaps viruses represent an intermediate state between “life” and “non life”. It’s much easier to imagine a virus incorporating an enzyme that allows it to copy its own DNA than it is to imagine a fully formed multicellular animal spring forth from the ooze, isn’t it?

I’m not seriously suggesting that’s what happened. My expertise is not in that field. I am suggesting that the first life was rather simple and likely incorporated features that do occur spontaneously. Certain hydrophobic chemicals are observed to form membrane-like structures spontaneously, for example. The first true cell membrane might have incorporated such a structure. Amino acids spontaneously polymerize; first simple proteins, etc.

Yes.

I'm not a Dustologist, so I'll go with "non-life" for the sake of this discussion.

Adam became a living being after God's breath gave him life.

Negative. God is a living being, and it was He that gave Adam life.


I have absolutely no idea what it looked like.

I don't personally know of any biblical literalists who believe in any form of abiogenesis.

Please quote a literalist who believes the bolded. Speaking only for myself, I would argue that life did not arise from inorganic matter by itself. That is, I do not believe that there is a natural process by which life arose from inorganic matter.

LAG, we start with dust. Dust does not reproduce itself. It does not have metabolism. By anyone’s definition, dust is not alive. Now, a purported deity shapes some dust into the form of a human; still not alive. That deity breathes into the dust — now it’s alive. The dust went from non-life to living. Hence, abiogenesis, namely non living matter being transformed into a living organism.

Now literalists don’t like to call it that, presumably because they want to reserve the term for abiogenesis that occurs spontaneously. Regardless, though, I don’t see how you can read the Bible literally and not maintain that no living matter became a living organism.

Obviously since I’m an atheist I’m not committed to any particular interpretation of the Genesis story. I’m just curious why you seem to be twisting yourself into logical knots trying to deny the claim that an omnipotent deity transformed non living matter into a living organism, especially since anyone reading Genesis and taking it literallwould not doubt that dust was transformed into Adam.

I, of course, affirm the claim that God transformed non-living matter into a living organism. I deny that it occurred by way of a natural process.

You silly people on both sides are focusing on the wrong things. Since both living and non living things are made up of protons neutrons, electrons, etc, a bunch of them may or may not have jiggled themselves from one category to the other without anybody's help.

Religious people should be asking two other questions. How did those protons and neutrons come into existence? And once they formed, by whatever means into clumps that we call "alive", how did those clumps, in certain select cases, become entities that REALIZE that they exist.

Religious defenders of special creation like lagtight and Alter2Ego often have some kind of vitalist view of biology as a background assumption and it can be helpful in arguing against them to show that this is false or of no use.

Why should only "religious people" be asking those two questions?

Where did I say "only". I meant that they should ask atheists. Atheists should ask them also but tend not to because the "I don't know" answer is problematical for them. In any case would you agree that it is more important to understand what caused humans to differ from turtles than what caused (living) turtles to differ from Brillo pads?

Thanks for the clarification.

I'd say they're about equally important.

Meant to say sponges in the second case. Meanwhile I think that most religions are indeed more interested in who are what caused "consciousness" than how non life turned to life.

Noted.

Speaking as an atheist, I would disagree that the “I don’t know” answer to these questions is particularly problematic. The universe is full of phenomena. We only have satisfactory explanations for some subset of these phenomena. Why is it problematic that as of 2021, we don’t have a full and complete understanding of the universe and everything in it?

Religious answers to these questions are no more satisfactory than scientific ones. They all rely on the premise that an entity for which evidence is lacking actually exists. They never actually explain anything; it’s just God did it. Well, how did he do it? For example, how does breathing on some non living dust transform it into a living human? All we get by way of explanation is essentially “it’s a mystery”. Well, it’s a mystery is not really an explanation; it amounts to the same answer atheists give, “I don’t know”, which is much more problematic for a belief system that purports to have all the answers than it is to atheists who will readily admit that we don’t have all the answers and that having all the answers may not even be possible.

I agree that "I don't know" is almost never a problematic answer, especially when dealing with something complicated.

The existence of a painting is proof that there is a painter.* If I see a painting hanging on a wall in someone's home, I know for certain that there was a painter, but at the same time I can answer "I don't know" to the question of who actually painted the picture.

*If the painting was computer-generated, then the "painter" was the computer programmer.

I assume that most atheists reject explanations like little boys living in the seventh dimension, or anything of that nature, creating the universe or human consciousness, (as opposed to the natural progression of the laws of physics) is as silly as breathing life into dust. But an explanation in that category WOULD become the favorite if regular science can't provide a solution.

It's tautological that a painting had a painter. The problem is when we don't agree it's a painting.

tame_deuces:

Anything that atheists cannot overcome is automatically "uninteresting to the concept of evolution."

Nuff said.

Alter2Ego

________________
"That people may know that you, whose name is JEHOVAH, you alone are the Most High over all the earth." ~ Psalms 83:18

I agree.