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Origins of life

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Thanks for moving this Madsen, I love discussing these kinds of topics but it's nice to discuss it AND keep my brewlog clean! :) I also appreciate you, AToE, The Alchemist and others looking at my brewlog! It gives me nice warm fuzzies to know that I can ask a totally newb question and get such polite responses!


As for the topic of the new thread: I would clarify that I don't believe we actually are a petri dish experiment, but it is the closest analogy of how God works IMO. My view of God is drastically different because of how logical I am. I was agnostic leaning towards atheism for a very long time until I had a deeply religious experience. No it wasn't my near death experience, that actually didn't convince me. It was an experience that had someone told me about it during my atheist years, I would have thought them insane. People still think I'm a bit crazy when I tell them, but I think the fact I can ask if I'm insane generally makes me not insane.

After my experience, I could no longer deny God, but I couldn't shake the feeling that somehow, things didn't line up with the concept of what God is. There were problems with the guidelines for going to heaven/hell which didn't makes sense compared to a kind/loving God. There were problems with the idea of an all knowing all powerful God together, The kind/loving God didn't make sense with things that happened in the world, especially lined up with the all knowing/all powerful parts.

As I thought things through I realized, that if things aren't adding up, you need to check your premises for the equation. Thus I came up with a number of conclusions.

God is real
Religion is a creation of man
The nature of God is not what most people think (All powerful/All knowing)
Religions are mostly harmless

I'm pretty accepting of religions, heck despite my weird views I'm married to a Catholic (Practicing but not strict). My family includes atheists, agnostics, wiccans, neo-pagans and even a Mormon father. I guess that adds up to why I consider myself Unitarian Universalist. I love having my beliefs challenged, it helps me to refine my understanding of the divine.
 
Loadnabox said:
After my experience, I could no longer deny God, but I couldn't shake the feeling that somehow, things didn't line up with the concept of what God is. There were problems with the guidelines for going to heaven/hell which didn't makes sense compared to a kind/loving God. There were problems with the idea of an all knowing all powerful God together, The kind/loving God didn't make sense with things that happened in the world, especially lined up with the all knowing/all powerful parts.

As I thought things through I realized, that if things aren't adding up, you need to check your premises for the equation. Thus I came up with a number of conclusions.

God is real
Religion is a creation of man
The nature of God is not what most people think (All powerful/All knowing)
Religions are mostly harmless

I'm pretty accepting of religions, heck despite my weird views I'm married to a Catholic (Practicing but not strict). My family includes atheists, agnostics, wiccans, neo-pagans and even a Mormon father. I guess that adds up to why I consider myself Unitarian Universalist. I love having my beliefs challenged, it helps me to refine my understanding of the divine.
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That right there is an awesome attitude. :notworthy:

My aunt (the nun) is like that, but a number of others (especially born-again types) I know are not. And there's no point in challenging people who cling so tightly and so blindly, they obviously NEED that belief so badly that it's not fair to make them think about it.

And I always love finding out about people who've had actual experiences. Cool.

But let me throw a little gas on the fire... I disagree that religions are mostly harmless, a lot of damage has been done on small and large scale in the name of religion... They're only mostly harmless until someone at the top gets ideas, I believe religions were invented to control people... have you ever noticed that most of the wars ever fought have a religious base, at least on the outside? The Crusades, witch-burnings, the Holocaust, 9/11... Hardly harmless. But they're not a reflection on god/God/whatever, because as you said, religion is a creation of man...
 
Chevette Girl said:
That right there is an awesome attitude. :notworthy:

My aunt (the nun) is like that, but a number of others (especially born-again types) I know are not. And there's no point in challenging people who cling so tightly and so blindly, they obviously NEED that belief so badly that it's not fair to make them think about it.

And I always love finding out about people who've had actual experiences. Cool.

But let me throw a little gas on the fire... I disagree that religions are mostly harmless, a lot of damage has been done on small and large scale in the name of religion... They're only mostly harmless until someone at the top gets ideas, I believe religions were invented to control people... have you ever noticed that most of the wars ever fought have a religious base, at least on the outside? The Crusades, witch-burnings, the Holocaust, 9/11... Hardly harmless. But they're not a reflection on god/God/whatever, because as you said, religion is a creation of man...
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That's why I said mostly harmless. Most religions were made to control people. The catholic church is certainly no exception. Confessions to a man were the early days version of domestic spying and to me make no sense especially in the light of an all knowing God. He knows what you did, he knows if you're sorry, why do you need to tell a man your misdeeds? (Funny, I'm away from my fermenters for a niece's first communion :-D )

I cut the church some slack on the crusades. The land up until the sixth century belong to Christians and Jews. Islam was converting the land at the blade of a sword (Dhimmi status and Jizya were no joke). Generally killing all the men in a city wasn't unusual, and sometimes even the women over a certain age. It wasn't pretty, nor was the response of the Crusades which can be seen as a defensive war. Islam had crept all the way from the middle east into Spain and was killing anyone who wouldn't convert. It's fair to say it could be justifiable at that point to go into an aggressive war to push back the borders of the invaders, who just happened to be religious groups as opposed to political ones.

Most of this is fairly old history as well. Religions in their modern incarnations are still mostly harmless, perhaps more so than their classic incarnations. The biggest threat from them comes in the form of intolerance fomenting hate. Mormon re-education camps are an easily identifiable point (used to try and beat gay teens into a straight lifestyle). Islamic Sharia law isn't butterflies and sunshine either. At the same time I don't mind my daughter being baptized Catholic, a little water on her head won't hurt anything, and most of the morality espoused by the church will go a long way to helping her to be a better person.
 
Loadnabox said:
At the same time I don't mind my daughter being baptized Catholic, a little water on her head won't hurt anything, and most of the morality espoused by the church will go a long way to helping her to be a better person.
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That her in your av? Who's the other little person?
 
Waiting for Jenn to weigh in on this one...go on, Jenn, we know you have a heartfelt opinion on this, and gotmead's nothin' if it's not a place to express heartfelt opinion...
 
Wow, that's a lot of posts for a 24 hour period. I'm kinda jumping in the middle of it, so sorry if I'm being repetitive, but I can't not get in on this.

Firstly, I find it a little tragic that topics such as religion are seen as so "hands off" for discussion. Why is it so difficult for people to discuss something they firmly believe in without getting irate or "offended"? So long as arguments are formed respectfully and non-maliciously, I don't see where offense can be taken; the people who do get offended are often the ones who say the most offensive things, in my experience.

Next order of business: the development of life from organic compounds. I think one reason it's so hard to imagine this is the scales of time required for such development to occur. It's not as simple as a micelle forms, some passing amino acids are taken up, and self-replication begins. It's a very, very, very (effectively ad infinitum simply from the perspective of our very limited and finite human time-scales) gradual process. The organic compounds that are the basis of life did NOT develop spontaneously, they developed over however-long based on a large input of energy (energy required for order) and a VERY chance but conducive circumstance of chemical conditions. Over vast amounts of time, the compounds that arouse from the chemical reactions occurring acted as catalysts for further reactions of a similar nature. This is a slow ramping up process, but it results in areas (pools) with high concentrations of organic compounds. This is not just conjecture, these experiments have been done.

In such highly concentrated conditions, it's not hard to imagine micelles that do uptake amino acids and other compounds. These proto-cells (I am using this term due to convenience and a lack of knowledge of more proper terminology) probably did not hold together for long, but ones that held together for slightly longer would have some influence on what reactions were being catalyzed, as the interior of these proto-cells would be more chemically stable. This primitive, chemical form of natural selection would select for organic compounds that worked most effectively together and were most stable in conjunction.

After some (excessively long, by our human standards) amount of time, you would have some very primitive forms of replication. Nucleotide strands (ie RNA) would facilitate the synthesis of amino acid strands (ie proteins) that facilitated the synthesis of nucleic acid strands, etc, etc. Proteins work by simple physical chemistry; given arrangements of amino acids produce structures that are useful for certain biochemical reactions. If you have a 20 base long nucleotide strand (not too hard to imagine), then you have the potential to have a 10 amino acid long protein (it's hypothesized that amino acids were initially coded by only two nucleotides, not three; I guess the third nucleic acid in most codons nowadays is repetitive). If the structure of this protein happens to facilitate RNA building, then it's easy to see how selection for the most "cooperative" RNA sequences and proteins would occur. Ramp this whole process up for several billion years, and you get self-replicating cells that classic biological natural selection can work on. Give it another couple billion years, and we get us, discussing our origins across an external, non-biological network, and that's a whole other can of worms, haha!

The Boeing 747 is a product of this total "evolution". To say a Boeing 747 does not spontaneously assemble (so why should a cell) is to make a false dichotomy. It took a long time of aeronautical trial-and-error to develop and build the first Boeing 747, the same is true for the first cell. Nobody is suggesting a cell just came together one day from a bunch of chemicals; it took a LOT of "development".

All this said, I am not a biochemist, molecular-, or micro-biologist. I have only a rudimentary understanding of this stuff - in the general idea of the progression, I think I've got some abstract idea of it - so I may not be conveying it very well.

In terms of a creator, I am not full on against the idea, but my immediate question is, what created the creator? It's an infinite regress, and eventually you have to draw a line and say, okay, some kind of ordering event had to occur here. My thought is - for parsimony sake - why not draw that line at our Archaean origins? If there is a creator, fine, but there's no reason - with what we now know - to rely on one for our biological start.
 
mccann51 said:
...In terms of a creator, I am not full on against the idea, but my immediate question is, what created the creator? It's an infinite regress, and eventually you have to draw a line and say, okay, some kind of ordering event had to occur here. My thought is - for parsimony sake - why not draw that line at our Archaean origins? If there is a creator, fine, but there's no reason - with what we now know - to rely on one for our biological start.
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Ah, The Causa Sui Project...
 
Riverat said:
One could always hope that broader minds can be open to other points of view and find value in them. The areas of spirituality tend to explore and teach in the direction of morals (right and wrong) and science in the direction of true or false.
Both of these domains of thought have very real value in everyday life and need not be mutualy exclusive, the arguments seem to arise when one domain intrudes into the other (mostly by means of inappropriate rationale) and defensive mechanisims come into play. After all spirituality probably has little to say about physical reality ( faith not meaning much if it needs proof) and science little to say about the devine as it needs to be able to manipulate and experiment (finite actions and models) I like to think I have a fair grasp of things and while I see nothng that calls for the devine (pridictable if you really think about it) I also see nothing that precludes it.
I am a scientist by nature and can't bring myself to believe in magic......but life....that's about as close to magic as you can get and so a great source for debate.
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While science doesn't delve much into morality (there's science in there though!) and spirituality does, it's important to remember that secular philosophy is also fully capable of deep examination of morality. Morality doesn't come from spirituality or religion, those are just two methods of organizing/refining it, not the only methods though. :)
 
My problem with the airplane parts being toss around analogy is that while it gets the point across, it's really not analogous at all for obvious reasons. Planes require welding, bolts, so forth and so on. On a microscopic level it's a lot easier for things to fall into place with each other - there are strong attractions between things (unlike plane parts, which have no measurable attraction to each other) and only certain parts can fit onto certain parts, and the fact that gravity has little/far less effect on something this size also removes one of the major problems that would arise if trying to assemble a plane in such a manner!

It's tough to come up with a macroscopic analogy that has any relevance because everything on our scale just behaves so differently than down at the molecular level.

As a side note: Obviously Medsen is a smart guy and knows darned well the differences I'm talking about (in many cases probably better than I do!). I just wanted to point this out in case that analogy had anyone confused/reconsidering evolution!

Now I'm off to try and find the explanation I'm looking for that explains why entropy does not in fact make a case for creation, because on the surface logic of it I'll agree it certainly does seem to. I want to tackle that one, because it's one of the more difficult to explain-why-incorrect concepts that people as evidence for creationism. (I don't think any of the "this is too complicated, could never have come together by accident arguements are really very hard to argue people out of, because of the timeframes involved and how though things seems insanely complex, the step by step makes total sense. This entropy thing though is something that I know is incorrect, but cannot for the life of me seem to explain why! So I head to the internets for help...) ;D
 
mccann51 said:
. My thought is - for parsimony sake - why not draw that line at our Archaean origins? If there is a creator, fine, but there's no reason - with what we now know - to rely on one for our biological start.
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And to consider the larger universe in this, one might forego the idea of an "intervention" creating life here at all. Considering the speed that life took hold here (hmm, still, maybe an intervention?) it may be that the building blocks of the cosmos are such that life is inevitable where the basics are present. "God" would not likely be some old white bearded guy on a throne but the same divine (thanks for the correction) spark / life / organizing principle for you. me, that little praying mantis in my window, the tree it's on or whatever passes for life on whatever world wherever.
It's a pretty big universe out there and "life" probably has a pretty significant (if long term) part in it.
 
AToE said:
secular philosophy is also fully capable of deep examination of morality. Morality doesn't come from spirituality or religion, those are just two methods of organizing/refining it, not the only methods though. :)
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Any excellent, under-appreciated point.

AToE said:
Now I'm off to try and find the explanation I'm looking for that explains why entropy does not in fact make a case for creation, because on the surface logic of it I'll agree it certainly does seem to. I want to tackle that one, because it's one of the more difficult to explain-why-incorrect concepts that people as evidence for creationism. (I don't think any of the "this is too complicated, could never have come together by accident arguements are really very hard to argue people out of, because of the timeframes involved and how though things seems insanely complex, the step by step makes total sense. This entropy thing though is something that I know is incorrect, but cannot for the life of me seem to explain why! So I head to the internets for help...) ;D
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An input of energy is required to order things and fight the downward-spiral of entropy. Energy was present when life and its chemical antecedents were first making their appearance on Earth. Ultraviolet light and electrical energy from lightning I think are the main culprits here.

Once actual cells developed, they were able to order themselves and their environment by their own volition, utilizing carbon compounds and ATP as energy.
 
I haven't found a single great article or essay yet, but the jist of it seems to be that the second law of thermodynamics only applies to a closed system. A planet, a cell, a creature, these are not closed systems. Energy is constantly being added from the sun (which yes will tend towards entropy eventually). There's more to it than that, but that's one of the main parts of why entropy doesn't disprove the random-chance development of life. Once that life is started, natural selection takes hold, and entropy actually helps evolution along by causing more randomized changes in the DNA, resulting in slow changes to the organism over time. EDIT: And I did meet one guy who said this argument actually applied to the formation of planets and stars as well, but gravity is the obvious foil to that argument.

I really need to get more info organized about this, it's an argument that comes up a lot in these discussions.

Someone, maybe you, said it well earlier - if there is a creator, fine. But so far there's nothing that actually suggests a creator is needed for life to have arisen and then to become as complex as it is now. (If someone wants to suggest a creator is needed for the creation of the universe in the first place, that's a whole nuther discussion, and that is something science has less of a firm grasp on at this point in time!).
 
AToE said:
I haven't found a single great article or essay yet, but the jist of it seems to be that the second law of thermodynamics only applies to a closed system. A planet, a cell, a creature, these are not closed systems. Energy is constantly being added from the sun (which yes will tend towards entropy eventually). There's more to it than that, but that's one of the main parts of why entropy doesn't disprove the random-chance development of life. Once that life is started, natural selection takes hold, and entropy actually helps evolution along by causing more randomized changes in the DNA, resulting in slow changes to the organism over time.
.
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Perfectly expresed!
 
On the topic of morality when it comes to religious vs agnostic vs atheist - I really don't think any one group has more or less capacity for extreme morality (though certain religions may encourage it, and certain ones do just the opposite. Just as some secular groups are extremely moral, some very dangerous).

People often tend to think of Atheists as some kind of robots, people who only think in terms of science. The reality couldn't be further than that - part of the problem is language. I cannot say I am spiritual, because that word implies beliefs in the supernatural, which I don't have. But, spiritual is indeed the cloest word to what kind of person I am, we really need a non-supernatural word for the same thing. Deeply intro and extro-spective, looking constantly for better morality, to be a better person, to love yourself more, and to love the rest of humanity more. To love non-human life too (from an Atheist point of view every single life form on this planet is my family, from the yeast I ferment mead with right on up to my parents!), to love the universe in all it's glory.

Deep morality, deep meaning/purpose, these things come from within, the difference between all us groups of humans is simply how we try to refine those concepts and communicate them to others (I think).
 
AToE, I wouldn't dare say any group is more or less moral. Morality in of itself is relative. Many cultures in the world a woman is still considered property. Not saying this is right, but to them we're weird that they're not property. Just using this as a way of dramatizing why I say morality is relative :-D

As a former atheist/agnostic I am always defending them to my wife. I understand why atheists are so in your face about defending themselves. Most Abrahamic religions are pretty rabid about proselytizing such that if you're on the other end you begin to feel attacked by the constant barrage. I remember listening to Dr Laura on the radio and how insulted I was as she literally blamed the failing economy, war, overcrowding in prisons, teen pregnancy, and high unemployment on atheists and agnostics. A defensive return of barrage is to be expected.

This doesn't excuse the way that some atheists return fire in a rather vitriolic manner. To some it becomes more than just a defensive reflex and almost becomes a matter of trying to convert to atheism as well.

The whole point of mine wasn't so much that churches are more moral, but that they provide much more structure in a group mindset to influence children positively. As the groups that have been preaching these morals (and they are the basis for our western morality) they are also very learned in how to accomplish these goals. Atheists and Agnostics, while there are some some groups, are nearly as organized and don't have the focus on morality that a church group would.

I personally think I could teach morality without the church, but as for how -I- view my daughters' attendance in these groups(eventually), that's the justification for me. It doesn't hurt anything AND they will help provide a moral foundation for her.
 
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