Materialistically we don't know how it started?

If there isn't a reason for evolution to begin in a purely materialistic manner without outside intervention, why do people think it did?  If hope only suggests it did, how is that different from saying, "God did it?"

What happened = Life

Reality has to be involved in what happened; therefore, whatever we believe took place in what happened needs to be possible, and if we suggest something that isn't, it should be rejected out of hand.

T_M, it would help if you were clearer - do you mean how life first emerged or how evolution began? They're very different things.

I think you probably mean the first, yes?

Evolution doesn’t begin until life does so it’s the same thing. Like a chess game we can talk about the opening, middle, or end game all three are part of the same game. Granted we can talk about evolution without discussing the beginning of the process, that doesn’t mean that they are not part of the same topic overall.

If you think that it suggests you don't understand the main issues involved. Evolution may be the consequence of life first emerging but otherwise they're very different points of discussion.

Not being able to explain how something came to exist by natural processes should not lead us to believe that no explanation is possible. Only when a contradiction can be shown can we be certain that such an explanation is impossible.

Personally, I don't find it particularly fruitful to speculate how life might have come into existence if it couldn't have been by natural means.

This a common cop-out, but the truth is every process has a beginning, and one without even a theory about its beginning does not have a reason for being, accept people want it to be true.

Acknowledging the boundaries of current knowledge and that some things may be unknowable, is not in any way a "common cop-out". It's sensible to resist unwarranted speculation about how life on earth first came into existence, until such time as it's possible to say that no materialistic explanation is achievable.

We're far from that point. It's also important to present any hypothesis within the context of what is known.

I don't think we are far from that point at all! We know what we see, we know what is here, and we know that not everything can be explained by purely materialistic explanations. We cannot for example explain the digital structures of the dots on our screens that produce meaning by turning bits into letters, which form words, the complex thoughts by simply reducing everything down to a material explanation. If our median were paper and ink the same thing would be true there as well, meaning transcends the material world, if messages were sent by smoke signals with the material it would be just material nothing more, meaning we find transcending the material itself. Our experience with information tells us that there are different levels of information some are just values, height, width, and weight speaking to descriptions, and for others, we can see information instructions a very high level of information that directs. Life is full of this type of information, and that type only shows up with intent, nothing else in all of our experience produces instructional information.

Knowing that is the case there is no cause for a mindless process that is operating at that level of information guiding highly complex tasks, that have ever been suggested to be reasonable, which means it is unreasonable to think it is true.

At the risk of repeating myself: "It's also important to present any hypothesis within the context of what is known"

After the Big Bang it took many hundreds of millions of years for the heavier elements (Carbon, Iron etc.), essential for life, to be created by exploding stars.

After a period of some 10,000,000,000 years, our solar system finally formed and hundreds of millions of years after that life finally emerged on Earth (and possibly the Universe?).

Even then life existed as little more than single-celled 'sludge' for another 3,000,000,000 years before the first multicellular life emerged.

Any alternative to a materialistic hypothesis for life must take these things into account!

What is known is that intentional informational instructions habitually come by intention, a mind is behind it, and no other explanation is reasonable.

"no other explanation is reasonable" - if that was the case many highly intelligent researchers into OOL would not waste their time (and careers) on something that was so hopeless, according to you.

Not to mention the witholding of valuable funding for such projects - clearly, they do not agree with you!

If you are looking for something and there are no reasons to think it’s real, but intend to continue to look for it when is time to call it? Not many are still looking for a perpetual motion machine and those who are if they express a hopeful pathway has been found are they taken seriously? If evidence is not forthcoming but a worldview calls for it doesn’t that reflect poorly on the worldview?

The fact is that many highly intelligent people in such fields of research simply disagree with you.

You can spend your whole career and life looking for something that is not there, and if evidence is not what motivates to do your research, because there is none, then there will be no reason to stop looking, you have to have a path to look at and acknowledge it is a dead end first, there isn’t any. A major milestone would be something remotely possible to consider.

There is no reason at all for a mindless process that deals with information to come forward out of an ocean of chaos and bring with it law-like precision in integrated systems in life performing highly specified tasks. There is no mindless reason for the proteins in life to behave in language-like manners so they can be read, or act like programmed computer languages, so there are forms and functions in life. Mindlessness doesn't have reasons!

What can I say? Most Biologists appear to disagree with you.

If you had a professional qualification in this field I might be persuaded to delve into this more deeply but I sense that your understanding of what biological systems are capable of is no greater than mine.

What I am talking about I do know about, which are how it takes information manipulation to do things like level checking which is what we have when our bodies have stats that requires numbers staying within specific parameters. Blood pressure, temperature, glucose, metabolism and so on, on top of start stopping mechanisms like blood clotting.

If a level moves outside normal operating numbers, reactions have to occur to move the numbers in the correct order. If nothing is done detrimental things occur, if reactions over react detrimental things occur.

It doesn’t matter if what we are talking about are digital or biological systems, these types of things have the same properties.

An important question, do you believe the universe is information-rich, and as such it can be understood through study?

I believe it's ordered and many natural systems can be understood by systematic study.

Do you think 🤔 because of the way the world is ordered, that we can study it, there is something to that, more than mere happenstance?

Just because some outcome is puzzling, strange/bizarre, utterly unexpected perhaps, does not mean it isn't the result of entirely natural processes.

We are not yet in any position to say what can possibly result from such processes and what cannot. That may have to be enough.