[WhompingWindows]

"the tiniest creatures God in his wisdom put upon this earth"

The writing is nice but flawed. Since War of the Worlds, we have advanced tremendously and no longer need intelligent design or creation myths to explain microorganisms.

Reproducible, testable science demonstrates that in the primordial oceans, self-replicating molecules which were slightly better at self-replicating produced globules of matter capable of inheritance. Small mutations over millions of years led to the tiniest organisms, not "creatures", and most microorganisms don't even interact with higher life forms. It's only after epochs of time that complex mammals arose, breathing air, and these mammalian hosts then did provide the harbor for pathogens we know today.

[corobo]

The writing is nice because it's nicely written. It's fiction, Wells was a fiction author.

Give the dude a break on the athiest rant, he's been dead half a century.

[shadowofneptune]

HG Wells would have been well aware of this, being an athiest of a kind we'd consider close to New Athiesm nowadays.

[Vrondi]

Yeah, you'd almost think he was writing in the voice of a fictional character or something bizarre like that.

[junon]

Or that God was maybe a writing device instead of literally referring to God.

[hutzlibu]

"Reproducible, testable science demonstrates that in the primordial oceans, self-replicating molecules which were slightly better at self-replicating produced globules of matter capable of inheritance."

Hang on. Are you implying that science created artifical life from just elements? Because that would be news to me.

[michaelmrose]

We don't understand how abiogenesis happened exactly but we do know that electricity from lightning is liable to be able to produce amino acids from simpler chemicals and we have theories as to how the early earth would have been amenable to such formation in a way the current earth is not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment

Given the history of shamanistic figures explaining the natural world in terms of magical spirits and having magical definitions replaced with natural ones thousands of years one can perhaps be forgiven for concluding that the original of life was just another domino waiting to fall.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis

[mensetmanusman]

This is interesting, but it also says nothing about fine-tuning, which is likely outside the realms of the scientific method.

[michaelmrose]

Why is it outside of the scientific method? Speculate based on the other things we know about the universe, devise way of test theory, rinse repeat.

[mensetmanusman]

By definition, you can propose theories that are untestable. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/

[michaelmrose]

You would need to prove all theories that describe the beginning of life on earth will be untestable.

[gher-shyu3i]

Science does not and will not be able to explain the origin of life. The statement still holds. It's very arrogant of us to assume otherwise.

[tremon]

That depends on whether your question to the origin of life begins with "How" or "Why".

[elif]

Of course science informs us about the origin of life.

Science is a matter of theorization and subsequent development of confidence through testing theorization.

It is arrogant and manipulative to view science as black and white and then call everything white due to a lack of 100.000% confidence.

[gher-shyu3i]

It's simply a matter of science being limited to observations in the natural world. We will not be able to go back to before t=0 when the universe was created. Such knowledge is beyond the real of space and time, and we do not have access to it.

[techrat]

Is the theory of gravity still something to be considered only a theory?

[hanche]

A theory, yes. Those who say “only a theory” tend to confuse theory with hypothesis, which is much looser. A theory is a coherent set of principles serving to explain a range of phenomena. Emphasis on coherent, meaning not only internally consistent, but also consistent with related knowledge. The road from hypothesis to theory can be long and tortuous.

[techrat]

My question was meant to be rhetorical in response to the OP.

We have many things labelled to be a theory that are complete enough to be acceptable answers while still being considered relatively incoherent or insufficient to science.

[michaelmrose]

Presumably so especially since both Newton's and Enstein's understanding of gravity is obviously incomplete.

[behringer]

Why wouldn't it. If it has an answer science can find it.

[nanis]

> science can find it.

There is no thing called "science" that finds answers. There are scientists who can form hypotheses about the universe they can see and perceive and check whether they are consistent with what they can see and perceive.

We are mostly ants on a balloon:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-the-fact-tha...

We do not know where the balloon came from.

[Retric]

> There is no thing called "science" that finds answers.

That’s equivalent to suggesting people can’t do chess. Semantically it may be accurate, but it’s intentionally obtuse.

Language doesn’t actually work that way.

Anyway, science isn’t experiments and building hypothesis etc. That’s part of the process, but really quite small pieces of a greater whole. It’s the long processes of generations refining and testing earlier ideas that finds truth.

[nanis]

I am not sure I understand the statement about chess.

It is important to understand that scientists are individuals with individual incentives. While some have an inherent drive towards getting closer to truths via the application of the scientific method, others may find other things more important.

Abstracting "the science" from scientists is a convenient way of training other people in the acceptance of the proposition that there are inherently qualified arbiters of truth.

[Retric]

Chess is an abstract set of rules not the thought process behind making a move or the physical action of moving a piece. As such nobody actually does chess.

You can play chess, as in follow the rules, or be a scientist, as in contribute to the progress of science, but nobody is the physical embodiment of chess or science.

Edit: To be as clear as possible, the President isn’t Democracy, but Democracy still exists in that you can meaningfully destroy it.

[behringer]

science is our method of finding answers. When we say science can find it, we mean scientists using the scientific method.

[gher-shyu3i]

Science is a method of finding answers, it's not the only one.

[gher-shyu3i]

Because it's beyond the realm of space and time. We can't go back before t=0 when the universe was created.

[behringer]

Until we know the nature of the universe, that may not be correct.

[__s]

It may not be correct, but it may be correct

Your statement "If it has an answer" only holds if you say that any truth science can't prove doesn't exist

But this isn't true. See Halting problem etc. There are things for which the answer can exist & yet be undeterminable

This is fine. I prefer to look at it this way: science is searching out a subset of knowable truths. The origin of the universe is interesting only insofar as we can dredge up relevant information, but coming up with an origin story or not isn't what proves the validity of science

Science isn't about getting all the answers, it's about getting the answers right & at it's best admitting when we got the answers wrong

When someone asks "If God doesn't exist what created the universe?" I say "I don't know, I don't care"

[michaelmrose]

Life is believed to have emerged at ~t=9 billion why couldn't we formulate a theory of how it emerged?

[mensetmanusman]

Life connects back to time zero because everything prior was an important boundary condition, e.g. heavy metals made through exploding stars supporting elemental composition of life, etc.

[michaelmrose]

You don't have to understand everything to understand anything. Scientific theories are always abstractions that reduce the complex interconnected universe to a workable surface area we are trying to explore in order to produce a model that can be used to make predictions about the larger world that in turn can be tested, refined, or shit canned as appropriate.

You can say we can't possibly understand how the heart works because we do not understand the entire evolutionary tree leading up to the human race and how the circulatory system evolved over billions of years and ergo heart transplants are impossible. This is trivially false and its false for the same reason parent posters assertion is false. Everything is how it is because of initial conditions ergo everything connects back to time zero but we can still use the abstract understanding we do have to make models and predictions.

[benlivengood]

> Life connects back to time zero because everything prior was an important boundary condition, e.g. heavy metals made through exploding stars supporting elemental composition of life, etc.

The initial conditions were so uniform that it doesn't take the same level of detail to understand what happened, and we can look all the way back to the CMBR. A particle-by-particle reconstruction of interactions since the big bang won't make much of a difference in our understanding of what happened on Earth. Virtually all of the interactions arrived in our solar system in a very noisy fashion during star formation and it was up to the resulting sun to pump negentropy into the rocks and other matter.

[marshmallow_12]

He means to say that science does not have the tools to reproduce the beginning of the Universe. If it's not reproducible it's not Science. Confident assertions non-withstanding, the Human mind is a slave to nature, in that can never hope to uncover it's deepest secrets and thus, it's true.....nature?

[michaelmrose]

By that definition science is entirely unreal because we can't reproduce an apple pie from scratch without first creating the universe. We explore geology including theories about the formation of the earth without making new planets.

What is supposed to be reproducible is the act of collecting and processing data to ensure that your conclusion isn't based on error, falsehood, or happenstance. What he is promoting is a basic misunderstanding of both science and logic.

People with preconceived anti science attitudes do this all the time. They face you down at high noon in their fancy duds, six guns ready at their hips sure of themselves and ready to kill and draw pearl handled.... water pistols.

They went looking for the correct answer to satisfy their religion not a commitment to truth and found cheaply manufactured baubles they are sure are deadly weapons because the very skills that would enable them to see it clearly would prevent them from looking for such easy answers in the first place.

[marshmallow_12]

let me rephrase; science has limited itself to understanding the laws of Nature. It can never tell us how the world -and thus life- came to be. I admit your argument was a good one. But not the anti religious points. Essentially atheists has declared Nature as the true god. In the rules he has imposed, he has left us with no choice. Science has hardly managed to do away with god, it has merely managed to exchange him as it were.

I will also argue that atheism is a religion. There is nothing more exciting than being able to throw off the rules of one god by replacing him with another who asks for nothing.

[michaelmrose]

Only theists conceive of God as an essential element and thereby perceive a god shaped hole in atheists world view? What religion does your cat practice for example?

Nature is like gravity it is a label we attach to things in order to communicate about some aspect of our mental models of the universe we share or imagine we share sufficiently to communicate theories about the underlying thing those models point to. It isn't in most cases not imagined to be a sentience modeled after ourselves but rather an abstraction around some aspects of everything in the overarching model.

Religion, Philosophy, Science are all systems of models of the world but they belong in different category based on characteristics in the same way that a trout, a dog, and an duck are all animals but they aren't all fish just because they all swim.

Religion especially western religion has classically been a pre scientific exploration of different theories about how the world came to be lacking virtually all actual understanding and focused on the idea that something much like man writ large was responsible for the universe and that the man who acted as conduit to the wishes off that man would derive some measure of that beings power mirroring primitive social structures and extending them skyward to the fanciful creations of our own mind. As if an ant had imagined the entire world was a giant burrow made by giant ants who could make their wishes known to lesser ants by way of the arrangements of your dogs droppings in your yard.

Science is merely a system for harnessing the same imagination but directed towards testing our fanciful explanations and building an increasingly powerful set of facts and models that are extremely likely to be somewhat true. We by the nature of our brains are builders of models and we must have them to exist and to progress but we don't need to build a system that glorifies the very flaws to which our minds are most heir to and exploits them. That is to say we haven't replaced God with nature we have simply built mental models of the universe that don't contain a first cause because we don't believe there is a conscious act at the center of it all.

Those of us who have wings know that a wing isn't a different kind of fin and a rocket engine isn't a different sort of wing and naked is not a style of pants.

There is no reason that we can't at the end of a long road have a pretty good idea how how life on earth came to be in the same way as we have a pretty good idea of how to continents came to be as they are. It wont be perfect but it will keep getting better every year as we learn more.

Your god was invented thousands of years ago so someone could claim to speak for him and attain status within his or her tribe without hunting more animals a trick that amazingly still works NOW. Throwing off the yoke of his adherents doesn't free one from the obligation of life, meaning, your family, or your fellow man. It is a harder obligation not an easier one. You incorrectly frame casting out comforting lies and facing down a terrifying truth as an easy way out but nothing could be further from the truth.

If a lie it is and I for myself call it a lie then adhering to it would be an unacceptable act of cowardice. If you truly believe it then to you it is courage to adhere to it but neither of our experiences is a lie and you definitely do not understand mine or any other alike.

[mensetmanusman]

This article by an MIT prof might be interesting: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/03/miracles...

tl;dr At some depth, you ask questions beyond the scientific method itself.

[gher-shyu3i]

Your argument is a straw man.

[michaelmrose]

Instead of throwing out the names of logical fallacies as if they applied to this argument please explain how this is a straw man?

[michaelmrose]

I suggest you defend that position instead of stating it so boldly and asking us to accept your reasoning.

[gher-shyu3i]

I mentioned in another comment just one counter example: we cannot go back to before t=0 when the universe was created. There is knowledge beyond the realm of space and time which we have no access to.

[zuminator]

If the universe "began" at t=0, and life began at, let's call it t=100, then all we need is access to t=99, not all the way back to the beginning. I'm not saying that's actually achievable, I'm just saying your argument is not persuasive.

[gher-shyu3i]

I gave it as an example to close the debate fully, because I'm aware of this line of arguing. The point remains, (1) life will not be possible without the universe, (2) the universe exists, and (3) we do not have access to the knowledge about how the universe was created, nor before it was created.

[michaelmrose]

Lets go to Wile E. Coyote for this one.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e2/f0/16/e2f0165777598a13c246...

Anvils would not be possible without the universe ergo we cannot possible predict solely on our knowledge of Warner Brothers physics and prior plot lines that the anvil trap he is laying will fall on his own head comically flattening him yet somehow leaving him alive and ready to chase the road runner again in the next sketch.

Our models don't capture every aspect of the world but good models capture enough to make increasingly good predictions about the past and future and the more we test them and winnow out the bad we approach but can never achieve perfection. The origin of life isn't inherently any different than the evolution of the continents, the planets, or the tree of life over the eons. No fundamental barrier stands in the way of our understanding. You didn't "close the debate fully". Nobody who didn't start out agreeing with you now does and its because they understand things you do not.

[Shorel]

Neither will religion.

It is very arrogant of any ideology to pretend it can explain things it can't.

[gher-shyu3i]

Depends on which religion. It's a fallacy to group all religions under a single umbrella called "religion", no such thing exists.

[Shorel]

You can create a list of religions that don't try to explain things with superstitions, and then we can discuss them one by one.

[gher-shyu3i]

Superstition: "A belief, practice, or rite irrationally maintained by ignorance of the laws of nature or by faith in magic or chance."

Islam passes with flying colors because it isn't superstitious.

[Bancakes]

I don't see the contradiction honestly. They are creatures and they are here. Maybe you misinterpret what a creature is.

[knolax]

It's a figure of speech...

[KoftaBob]

It's always those that are the least confident in their atheism that feel the need to constantly defend it.

[hanche]

Doesn’t that go for any ‘ism?

[KoftaBob]

Sure, I was just being specific for this case.