Anthony Edgar wrote:
What about reports of miracles, visions and demonic possession? These are events that have been observed.
These are anecdotes, not observations. These reports cannot be verified or repeated, and interestingly these things never seem to happen when qualified skeptics are watching. They're just big fish stories and nothing more.
Anthony Edgar wrote:
Scientists don't call it magic, but in effect, that is what they believe in. Abiogenesis is one example of pseudo-scientific magic, but there are many others, such as dead matter producing at ordered universe. Evolution is magic. The Sun, for example, is a nuclear fusion reactor, which, according to science, formed as a result of chance. Magic.
Now you're just being silly and obstinate.
First off, whether the universe is orderly or not is up for debate. Planets, stars, and even galaxies run into each other all the time. There are big asteroids that have come frighteningly close to hitting the earth in recent years. On earth, there are a lot of disorderly events, such as our notoriously difficult-to-predict weather.
However, there is a sense in which the universe is orderly, and that is in the basic physics of the world. Everything comes down to the four forces - gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. We may not know everything about these forces yet, but we do know how they work and how to predict interactions between atoms based on those forces. Even at larger scales, things can be fairly predictable. For example, the laws of chemistry, Newton's Laws of Motion (at non-relativistic scales), and Einstein's Special and General Relativity all hold true with so much regularity that we've been able to produce gobs of useful technology based off of them.
I've already explained that abiogenesis is just chemistry in action. The fact that organisms change over time is obvious to anyone who's ever looked at family portraits. The basic mechanism for how this happens (random mutation and natural selection) is remarkably simple and requires no magic whatsoever. The sun formed as a result of gravity pulling a cloud of gas together. As the gas particles got closer together, the temperature rose until it was hot enough to begin nuclear fusion. No magic required, just the laws of physics.
Is it only by chance that a rock falls to the ground when you drop it? Is it magic that hydrocarbons react with oxygen to produce heat, carbon dioxide, and water? The same principles govern these everyday occurrences as govern the processes you label as magic. Scientists don't believe in magic. They leave that to the superstitious.
Anthony Edgar wrote:
This is code for "more untestable theories".
Untestable? Really? So... all the tests being done with protocells and RNA don't count? Scientists are just sitting in armchairs dreaming up stories explaining how life emerged without ever going into the lab and seeing if there's any evidence to back those stories up? Give me a break. Abiogenesis is an active and fruitful field of research.
Anthony Edgar wrote:
Yeah, photosynthesis is so simple! (just like the first "simple" cell that began all life)
Photosynthesis doesn't have to be simple to prove my point. It is nonliving matter turning into living matter. If you think that's impossible, I challenge you to explain why photosynthesis can't happen, perform an experiment to prove it can't happen, and win a Nobel Prize.
Anthony Edgar wrote:
It makes more sense to compare abiogenesis to spontaneous generation - believing "rotting meat turned into flies" and "mud turning into frogs" is really no different to believing that dead matter turned into living matter (abiogenesis).
So abiogenesis is really spontaneous generation under a different name - ie, nineteenth century superstition and magic masquerading as science.
Ah, now this is something I actually expected you to compare abiogenesis to! It's still completely wrong, but at least the two can be properly compared with each other. The difference between abiogenesis and spontaneous generation is that spontaneous generation was the belief that fully-formed extant species emerged whole cloth from nonliving material, while abiogenesis is the belief that organic chemistry gradually became more and more complex until the first self-replicating organisms formed, at which point the theory of evolution takes over to explain how that organism's descendants diversified over millions of years to become all the living things we see today. The time scales are different. The mechanisms are different. One has evidence to support it, and the other does not. These are not the same thing.
As usual, I really wish that I could post links.