The Sermon Part 2 (Agnosticism)

by dhw, Saturday, August 02, 2008, 08:54 (5740 days ago) @ David Turell

David agrees with George's definition of abiogenesis ("first appearance of life in a lifeless universe"). - This is an unfortunate digression from the two issues I was trying to discuss: 1) the need for theists and atheists to make up their own, non-evidence-based concepts, and 2) what is the point of faith in a God without attributes (panentheism). However, since we need to sort out definitions in view of George's belief that abiogenesis is evidence-based, let me try again. - If you take abiogenesis to mean simply the origin of life ... whether created or not ... then of course, as George says, it happened. We're here to prove it. The dispute is over whether living organisms can arise spontaneously from non-living substances (a theory crucial to atheism), which is why two of my dictionaries call abiogenesis a hypothesis and a third defines it as 'the supposed spontaneous generation of living organisms'. Maybe one should use the old term 'spontaneous generation', or 'autogenesis', in order to avoid further misunderstandings. But whatever terms we use, the fact remains - as I pointed out previously - that despite decades of research by many eminent scientists, this hypothesis is still unproven. - Not only is the hypothesis unproven, but according to David, "the odds against spontaneous formation of living organisms wherever it happens are impossibly enormous" (July 23 at 02.44 under Knowledge, belief & agnosticism).