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TruthMuse

Elroch

That is a dreadful argument. The reason the Oxford English Dictionary looks like it was created by humans is that it was. That does not have any bearing on the origin of say, tardigrades.

But the scientific method can look at all the different organisms and show with no reasonable doubt how they have a common origin through evolution.

This reasoning does not tell us the answer to the separate question of how the most recent common ancestor of all life came from. We can be very clear that it too evolved before its time from earlier life, of which only one variant survived. It would be way too much of a co-incidence to be both the first life and the most recent common ancestor.

But beyond that, we have to reason that there has to be some first life, according to a definition which at such an extreme may prove somewhat ambiguous (unlike for the modern distinction between life and non-life, which is largely very easy).

What came before that is very speculative, but it is very reasonable to believe that what preceded life as we know it and choose to define it was something which had some of the properties of life as we know it, but not all of them. The essential properties are those that permit the process of the evolution of functional information (rather than the evolution of cellular life). This falls into the topic of chemical evolution, a very difficult and challenging topic because of the astronomical variation possible.

And the naturalistic hypothesis is that an example of chemical evolution arose in a natural environment that previously only had chemistry and physics without what we would describe as chemical evolution.

Parts of this picture have support. Even the last stage, where scientists have found an impressive range of the simple chemicals that could act as the precursors of chemical evolution do arise in non-biological contexts.

TruthMuse
Elroch wrote:

That is a dreadful argument. The reason the Oxford English Dictionary looks like it was created by humans is that it was. That does not have any bearing on the origin of say, tardigrades.

But the scientific method can look at all the different organisms and show with no reasonable doubt how they have a common origin through evolution.

This reasoning does not tell us the answer to the separate question of how the most recent common ancestor of all life came from. We can be very clear that it too evolved before its time from earlier life, of which only one variant survived. It would be way too much of a co-incidence to be both the first life and the most recent common ancestor.

But beyond that, we have to reason that there has to be some first life, according to a definition which at such an extreme may prove somewhat ambiguous (unlike for the modern distinction between life and non-life, which is largely very easy).

What came before that is very speculative, but it is very reasonable to believe that what preceded life as we know it and choose to define it was something which had some of the properties of life as we know it, but not all of them. The essential properties are those that permit the process of the evolution of functional information (rather than the evolution of cellular life). This falls into the topic of chemical evolution, a very difficult and challenging topic because of the astronomical variation possible.

And the naturalistic hypothesis is that an example of chemical evolution arose in a natural environment that previously only had chemistry and physics without what we would describe as chemical evolution.

Parts of this picture have support. Even the last stage, where scientists have found an impressive range of the simple chemicals that could act as the precursors of chemical evolution do arise in non-biological contexts.

I believe there is every reason to doubt some non-intelligent cause started life, then used very precise processes guided by instructions to create and maintain forms and features of life.

An undirected process with random chemical reactions will not produce highly specialized processes with error checking, stop start mechanisms, it would have nothing to shoot towards. Even if a life friendly reaction occurred there would be nothing to protect that result from all of the continuing reactions still going on.