@Leadfoot,
Leadfoot wrote:Although the Wiki excerpt states it as fact, RNA world hypothesis is just that, and currently not seen as the most likely route to abiogenesis.
I don't think RNA itself was the first replicator either. I was merely using it as an example of a simple replicator, I assume much simpler replicators came before it and that it is the result of chemical evolution from even simpler forms.
Leadfoot wrote:Your appeal to see chemical evolution as the route to life is the best argument so far but random molecular bonds forming your hypothetical replicating molecule in the early days of earth still seems far beyond the ability of chance. That too is a streatch too far for me. If we can't achieve it in the lab (with the assistance of considerable intelligence) it's pretty hard to see it happening by chance.
First I would like to make clear that I am not the originator of the idea of chemical evolution. That just seems like the most likely scenario to me. I'm sure others have thought of it way before I did.
To address your challenges as the the likelihood/probability of replicative molecules organizing on their own when we haven't been able to produce them in a lab, I would offer a few things to make sure you are adding to your evaluation. The first thing to note is that we don't know what molecule to build yet. We "might" be able to build one if we knew what it was already, but we don't. The other thing to consider is that the primitive earth provided conditions which we cannot reproduce. For example, the first replicative molecules might require large doses of solar radiation (something much more common 4By ago), and they may only form randomly in 1sq meter of water every 1000 years. Given the size of the earth's surface with billions of square meters and millions of years to cook, these events would be quite common, each one potentially able to start a cascade of successful replicative molecules. But in a laboratory with at best, a few square meters of liquid to test with and not even a hundred years to work in yet, it would not be at all surprising if we could not produce these types of molecules.
Leadfoot wrote:But I do appreciate the dilemma that science finds itself in. Science does not have the option to accept any other answer than "If it happened, it had to have a natural cause", no matter how unlikely it may seem. But as a human being, I am not bound by that limitation. I can consider the possibility of intelligent design. Of course just as science often gets it wrong, I could be too.
It's good that we can agree that Science is limited to naturalistic explanations, and I of course, prefer that methodology for answering questions (if that's what your goal is), but putting that aside for the moment, and accepting that you prefer to work from the "unbounded human" perspective, what I don't understand is when you know to stop asking questions and just say to yourself, an Intelligent Designer must have done it. Do you just give up trying to figure things out once you have decided that the answer is ID? I mean, people have been doing that since the beginning of time, right? And now as science continues to answer questions right down the line with more and more detail, the ID just gets pushed further and further into the cracks. So my question to you is, what good does it do you? It doesn't really answer any questions does it. All it does is provide you a convenient place to stop trying to find answers, presumably to things you would like to find answers for. So why do it.
And as far as the improbability of options goes, I would point out that science is proposing the natural occurrence of "simple molecules" and you object to that because your say molecules aren't that simple, but then you offer an Intelligent Designer as a "simpler" solution. Yet any such Intelligent Designer would be infinitely more complex than any molecule no matter how you slice it. So your argument for "simpler" solutions seems illogical given the options you are proposing.
