Author:
Pahu
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Date Posted: 07:56:11 12/02/08 Tue
THE ORIGIN OF FIRST LIFE 4
What could explain the sudden appearance of life and also provide for the informational organization of living matter? If we apply the principle of uniformity (analogy) to the question, the only cause that we know routinely does this kind of work in the present is intelligence. The reasonable assumption is that it also required intelligence to do it in the past. Uniform experience proves this to us and, as Hume said, "As a uniform experience amounts to a proof, there is here a direct and full proof from the nature of the fact" that the information inherent in living things required an intelligent cause. Since it is not possible that we are speaking of human intelligence, or even living beings in the natural sense, it had to be a supernatural intelligence. This does create a disjunction in the course of nature, which irritates most scientists; however, once it is admitted that there is a radical disjunction from nothing to something at the beginning of the universe, there can be little objection to the idea of another intervention when the evidence clearly points to it.
Other theories have been advanced to explain the origins of first life on earth. One is that new natural laws need to be discovered, but scientists can only point out the need and cannot explain how the organizing work can be done. Others suggest that life may have come to earth from somewhere else in the universe, either on a meteorite or on an ancient spaceship, but both of these solutions just push the question back one step: Where did that life come from? Still others borrow from pantheism and hold that some mind within the universe can account for the origin of life. Thermal vents in the sea floor and clay deposits are being studied as possible breeding grounds for life's beginnings, but none of these views really accounts for a way to harness the energy to make specified complexity possible. The most probable cause is a supernatural intelligence.
[From When Skeptics Ask by Geisler & Brooks]
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