My favorite thing about the “even humans can’t make life” argument is that when you point out that we have actually made the kind of rudimentary precursors to life in laboratories, they just say “see? It needs an intelligent mind to make it!”
Oh? I’ve seen several similar claims in media that always, on closer look, ended up as some combination of already organic/live parts with synthetic parts. Did we ever managed to make somehing “alive” strictly from something synthetic/dead?
I am talking about the Miller-Urey experiment. They didn’t create life, but in the words of Forrest Valkai, we have steps 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, and 100 for abiogenesis. Creationists right now like to say “haha, you don’t have step 3!” But when we do reach step 3, they’ll still be able to point to 6, 7, 8, 9, and so on. And when we do reach all those steps, creationists will pivot, and say “haha! You admit that life was intelligently designed!” As if the laboratory conditions that scientists use aren’t simulating the mineral and nutrient rich conditions of the pre-life oceans, and as if there weren’t billions of cubic meters of water for it to randomly happen in over hundreds of millions of years
I’m not familiar with experiment and I certainly don’t subscribe to any creationist logic. But until science can create life from death (a proof that we understand it well enough) we can’t really claim much about it or eliminate intelligent desing, however unprobable it seemed. And as far as I know, currently there isn’t even consensus on definition of life.
My favorite thing about the “even humans can’t make life” argument is that when you point out that we have actually made the kind of rudimentary precursors to life in laboratories, they just say “see? It needs an intelligent mind to make it!”
And my least favourite thing about it is it assumes that somehow science is finished and therefore capable of everything possible.
Oh? I’ve seen several similar claims in media that always, on closer look, ended up as some combination of already organic/live parts with synthetic parts. Did we ever managed to make somehing “alive” strictly from something synthetic/dead?
I am talking about the Miller-Urey experiment. They didn’t create life, but in the words of Forrest Valkai, we have steps 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, and 100 for abiogenesis. Creationists right now like to say “haha, you don’t have step 3!” But when we do reach step 3, they’ll still be able to point to 6, 7, 8, 9, and so on. And when we do reach all those steps, creationists will pivot, and say “haha! You admit that life was intelligently designed!” As if the laboratory conditions that scientists use aren’t simulating the mineral and nutrient rich conditions of the pre-life oceans, and as if there weren’t billions of cubic meters of water for it to randomly happen in over hundreds of millions of years
I’m not familiar with experiment and I certainly don’t subscribe to any creationist logic. But until science can create life from death (a proof that we understand it well enough) we can’t really claim much about it or eliminate intelligent desing, however unprobable it seemed. And as far as I know, currently there isn’t even consensus on definition of life.