Does it matter

You've made up your mind that life cannot possibly have come into existence other than by some 'mind' by which you mean divine intervention.

I actually keep an open mind and am guided by those much better informed than myself, namely Biologists and OOL researchers. So I adopt the 'let's wait and see' approach, not the more dogmatic(?) we have to form an opinion immediately! position.

That life on earth remained in a single-celled state for about 3000,000,000 years matters to most people, despite you dismissing this problem for 'divine origin' as being unimportant.

It strongly points to a natural process, not one driven by some hypothesised creating mind.

I made up my mind that nothing can create itself out of nothing, therefore there must be a cause that didn't need to be caused.

You elevate the opinions of others over reasoning, looking for truth yourself. Truth should never take a back seat to other people's opinions in our minds.

Even if this were to be the case, it would by itself tell us nothing more than some 'mind' created rudimentary, single-celled life. It tells us no more.

Not in the least - I respect the much better informed opinions of people who spend decades studying the subject. You are the one making dogmatic assertions and claiming that your opinion is fact but it's not at this time.

The entire life-friendly planet in a specific area in the universe so it could support life, and you think only a rudimentary cell we can give credit to a mind?

Do you think ruling things out is not as dogmatic as ruling them in?

If you read my comments carefully you'll see that I'm not "ruling things out" at all. Haven't I said more than once that I keep an open mind?

You are the one making emphatic assertions, not me! I'm merely saying that we should work within the bounds of what is believed to be the case to a very high degree of confidence and not run too far beyond that with unjustifiable (at this time) speculation.

There's absolutely no pressing need to answer the question of how life originated. I can't think of a serious problem in the world today that will be solved by its answer - can you?

I don't think you have an open mind, otherwise, you would look carefully at what is in front of you in evidential norms in what we see in nature and make determinations on just the evidence and not on wishful thinking. So you have closed your mind in the hopes something someday will somehow justify your worldview's foundational beliefs.

Did you read my post about the discovery of radioactivity? Did you understand the point I was making?

If you did you must see that at any given point in time our knowledge is incomplete and we have no way of knowing what vital discovery is around the corner. While the question of the origin of life may be immensely problematic, we cannot at this time rule out a natural explanation.

That's where we actually stand and any other approach involves unwarranted speculation.

Yes, without a doubt you can always say we have incomplete data, but that shouldn't stop you from looking at the data we do have very carefully and looking for the most reasonable conclusion, instead of looking at the data and saying we don't know it all so I'll ignore what is in front of me now. No matter how much we learn that will always be true, there is what we know and what we don't know, and no matter how much we take in that is always going to be the case.

You really do have an obsession with this, don't you?

I'd describe the 'mind' explanation as deeply unsatisfactory due to all the other questions and problems it throws up, not least the immense spans of time involved in progressing from a rudimentary form of single-celled life to anything more complex.

3000,000,000 years is not insignificant!

You have never seen 3,000,000,000 years go by yet you with incomplete knowledge are calling that factual? You have limited knowledge and great assumptions you don't seem to have an issue with accepting. What we do see in the here and now looking at cause and effect brings the scope down to just those things we have before us, we can make determinations without fear of making gross errors that cannot be falsified, to what we know causes processes to act in specific ways and not.

We can discuss the methods used by scientists to establish the age of rocks, sediments, our planet, the Solar System and the Universe if you wish. Their work is thorough and generally accepted to be reliable in its results.

Of course if you're going to insist that the Earth is no more than thousands of years old, then we might as well wrap this thread up now!

Dating the universe doesn’t mean anything helpful to the evolutionary theory, you may trust any method that you like to acquire any age you deem appropriate. That still leaves us with a lack of viable options outside of a mind being able to put information into life.

As long as we're clear that this postulated 'mind', might have been responsible only for putting in place a single, very rudimentary lifeform and nothing more than that?

From then on the mindless process of evolution shaped that lifeform into the myriad types we see on Earth today and throughout its history.

Even as I'm typing this I'm struck by the sheer improbabilty of it! Why in the name of sanity would any 'mind' go about the process of populating a planet that way? It makes no sense to me.

No, we are not clear on a mind only putting forward very rudimentary lifeforms and nothing more than that. As I pointed out God's timing to do work means He can do things that are required to be done simultaneously, and that instantly, so we can see how proteins that are required to make proteins could occur at once without billions of years of preparation. What you do NOT have even with billions of years of opportunity is a remote possibility of seeing how the outer part of a cell could get formed in its necessary features while having a city-like amount of working pieces integrated for just a single cell. When you look at all of the cells in each lifeform designed to accomplish very precise tasks working in unison to keep life alive you have nothing to say about how the instructions required for that either to be written into the code.

"As I pointed out God's timing to do work ...."

You have a name for this 'mind' already? But where did that come from?

There's no reason I can think of to connect the 'god' of human religion and culture with this 'mind' you've postulated. In fact much of what's written about 'god' seems to contradict what we can with confidence say about the nature and development of life.

But it's good that you've dropped any pretence about your agenda here, namely to try to give support to the 'god' proposition.

If in time it does become accepted that some undefined/undefinable 'mind' was responsible for kick-starting life, that will tell us nothing about that 'mind' beyond that it chose to create a rudimentary formof life on our planet.

The Prime Reality, the cause that started it all was causeless so everything else would have come from Him, being God. As far as agendas goes I don’t mind speaking directly about God, He is beyond the scope of science and scientific research in that we can see evidence for Him that only He explains but not prove He is real.

You propose billions of years on the grounds of testing you trust, then turn around and propose a mindless indifference goalless process can do what you say. I don’t believe in a mindless process could ever do that type of work, there is nothing in nature that we can point to that would make us accept it is possible.

But unless you're an evolution denier, I think it follows that after that initial rudimentary lifeform was (supposedly) placed on Earth, everything that followed was determined by the blind, mindless process of evolution.

As I have to keep repeating, if life was kick-started by some unspecified 'mind', it completely baffles me as to why that mind would go about things as they did.

It's like me building a boat and pushing it out to sea in the hope that currents would carry it safely to some distant shore. There's nothing about the emergence of either the Universe or life that resembles a mindful process afaic.