Subject:
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Re: Atheism (was: Santorum Fails In His Effort To Pervert The Constitution)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Thu, 19 Aug 2004 02:10:50 GMT
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Viewed:
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2743 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, David Laswell wrote:
> It would be more significant if he'd taken the various amino acids, introduced
> them into a sterile environment, and seen what he could get them to do.
> Injection molding machines can spit out the bricks necessary to build an
> Imperial Star Destroyer until the sun blows up, but they still won't be able to
> assemble the model. The question is whether the cosmos is capable of randomly
> spitting out an ISD assembler machine, or if some sentient being would still be
> required to come along and get the show started. And once the first microscopic
> beasties were floating around in the ooze, what possible reason would there be
> for them to have reproductive capabilities built in? And why, in the eons since
> the dawn of life, have we never seen any evidence to suggest that life continues
> to spring fully-formed from the ether?
Your analogy is a rather poor one, because you imply that either sentient
capabilities are required to assemble a complex form directly from simple parts
or a (complex) assembler would have to be randomly generated. First, most
abiogenesis theories involve the initial self replication of single molecules or
small groups of them - rather than more complex "microscopic beasties". In your
Lego analogy this might be more like the replication of small groups of bricks
stuck together rather than complete ISDs. Furthermore the evolution to a more
complicated ISD "replicator" is not a purely random process anyway. Random
mutation provides the variations that natural selection acts upon. And natural
selection is most certainly not a random process.
J. Spencer Rezkalla
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