Hi, Homunculus. Welcome to EvC!
I’m going to reply to some of the key motifs I’ve seen in many of your posts here in one post. Forgive me for it's length.
homunculus, post #57, writes:
Creation's alternative counterpart is Evolution.
Evolution, as is usually argued about it's true meaning. Either, that Evolution is the grain behind the principles of the universe being billions of years old, inspiration to the invention of the geologic column, inspiration to the invention of "species", the belief of universal common ancestry and abiogenesis/self generation origination/autopoiesis, as universally identified or, as argued by some, progressive adaptation. (evolutionism, evolutionist)
This is actually terribly wrong, as others have said.
Let me try my best to explain why.
In religion, there is great emphasis on universality. “All truth can be circumscribed into one, great whole” is a quote my Church particularly likes.
In science, we are not particularly interested in explaining
everything with a single theory. Rather, science is interested in practicality. So, we divide up the physical realm into chunks to make it easier to understand. We define our “chunks” by similarity of the underlying mechanisms, and build up a theory to explain those mechanisms.
So, something like the Theory of Evolution (hereafter: ToE) was constructed to describe a specific “chunk” of nature. ToE’s jurisdiction is the process of change over time in biological populations. It does not have jurisdiction over the processes that resulted in the initial emergence of life, just as doesn’t have jurisdiction over the processes that cause planets to move in elliptical orbits.
Let’s take an example. Let’s say God created a bacterium, and placed it on the earth. Then, over time, this bacterium evolved into myriad kinds of life.
In this scenario, God created life, and life evolved. ToE holds true, even though the bacterium did not arise through autopoiesis (your term).
The Theory of Evolution does not require life to have come spontaneously from non-life.
“Evolutionism” is not a grand worldview, but just a small theory that explains a subset of the physical phenomena that this universe contains.
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homunculus, post #39, writes:
I said only that life producing life is all that has been observed.
Life producing life is the basis of ToE: ToE stipulates that, when life produces new life, it does so imperfectly, such that the new life is somewhat different from the parent life; and that, given enough time, these subtle differences can build up into dramatic differences.
Non-life producing life is not required.
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homunculus, post #42, writes:
Here is where I decide to go out on a limb and say that I understand that the idea of god turns your stomachs, but something tells me that until i say, "there is no god, there is only evolution" you people will continue to fling feces at me.
homunculus, post #49, writes:
But because I said we have only seen life produce life, suggesting the possibility of a god, it's like a black man walked in the middle of a kkk convention with a white girl. You people have went bonkers. Does the idea of a supernatural creator really crawl on you that much?
This is simply not true. Your inference of anti-theism from these posts betrays only a measure of paranoia in yourself. By now, you have surely figured out that I am an evolutionist. Yet, I continue to hold on to my belief in God, and my evolutionist colleagues here on EvC have not yet demanded that I relinquish this belief, nor have they ridiculed or belittled me because of it. To the contrary, they have been most respectful to me.
I stand as a living testament to the ridiculousness of your claim. You are receiving negative reviews of your arguments, and extrapolating from that that your opponents despise you, your God and everything about both, and will only be satisfied when your morale is completely crushed and all mention of your God is erased from the face of the universe. I have stood my ground against them, have been hammered by them, have lost and won various arguments, and, to date, even my worst of critics have permitted me the privilege of continuing my worship while studying evolutionary biology.
They are not “out to get you” or “out to destroy your way of life,” but are only hoping to preserve the fruits of hundreds of years of rigorous, honest, scientific labor. To be sure, we are quite miffed that you don’t respect the work of our colleagues and predecessors (and ourselves), and this frustration can often be seen in our posts: but this is like the frustration of an aviation engineer who is being told by a teenager who took Physics 101 that his new jet fighter design will not fly.
However, to my horror, I note that many of my Christian brethren really
are out to destroy their enemies, at any cost whatsoever, with the misinformed excuse that the enemies they are trying to destroy are trying to destroy
them. Don’t become one of those.
Remember that scientists partition their worldview into chunks: an argument against a specific point is only an argument against that point, and nothing more. Despite what you have been taught by your ministers, scientists are very good at knowing their bounds: it is one of the most prominent skills we are trained to use. Please recognize that.
{AbE: I realize that some people here aren't scientists; but, the argument generally holds for most of them, too.}
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homunculus, post #31, writes:
First, I would like to bring to surface that the asset of this thread is that 'organic life coming from non life' or, if it is OK, 'spontaneous generation'
No, this is not okay.
Sometimes, in the course of science, terminology catches up with itself too late to fix a gross misunderstanding by the public.
Spontaneous generation is a specific phenomenon (which has been shown not to occur) which held that reproduction by today’s organisms was possible by means other than sex or cell division. Specifically, baby mice arose from wheat fields, rather than from their mothers’ wombs, and rotten meat morphed into maggots.
This is not the same proposition currently under study under the name “abiogenesis.” Since we now know more about the chemistry of life, we have been able to explore the processes that could initiate the self-sustaining chemical reactions that combine into the phenomenon that we call “life.” This is a gradual process, whereby different molecules become more and more closely associated with one another until their functions become interdependent and can “evolve” as a single unit.
Whereas “spontaneous generation” was a theory of
ontogeny, “abiogenesis” is a theory of
phylogeny. Look those words up if you don’t know what they mean.
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homunculus, post #70, writes:
I'm still choking down the origin of life.
So are we, in a manner of speaking: we don’t have a good, solid theory for the origin of life yet.
You are free to debate the origin of life, but don’t so so under the pretense of disproving evolution, because you can’t get at ToE through abiogenesis.
Edited by Bluejay, : Addition, and my traditional "five dashes"
Edited by Bluejay, : "initial emergence of life" makes more sense than "initial emergence of time."
-Bluejay/Mantis/Thylacosmilus
Darwin loves you.
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