Today began gloriously with the crescent moon shining with earthlight, the sunrise and the beach ...
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It is a wonderful thing to wake up in the morning and see Orion, Taurus and Gemini shining bright in the dark sky. The clouds are beautiful, too, as they interact with the sun. The birds are always beautiful. A beach without birds is a total waste of time.
Yesterday I happened to watch a video of Richard Dawkins discussing the origin of life:
http://video.google.co.uk/...
I am very impressed, though not in a positive sort of way, by how many questions atheism cannot answer. The Universe is a mystery which has remained a mystery in spite of four hundred years of science and humankind's boastful pride in claiming to comprehend everything or at least something.
Simply stated, the problem:
Abiogenesis is impossible under any & all circumstances.
How did life originate from non-life? Science doesn't know. Science cannot answer. No scientific experiments have succeeded in accomplishing the task. In the natural world, outside the controlled environment of the science lab, there are no means whatsoever for Nature to accomplish what scientists have failed to accomplish within the lab.
This subject caught my attention because there was an especially miserable attempt at formulating an explation for life's origin in Astronomy Magazine:
http://www.astronomy.com/...
There were three different avenues for life's origin discussed in the article, two of which were dead-ends of such obviousness that the article acknowledged their failure and the final one of which was so fanciful as to receive proper classification as science fiction - fantasy.
Further evidence of science's failure to solve this most fundamental problem comes from Cosmos magazine ...
"The other way we could solve the problem is if we could come up with a convincing understanding of how life originated — perhaps even duplicating the process in the laboratory."
However, to date, scientists have yet to artificially create an organism from the basic building blocks of life. One individual working on the problem is Jack Szostak, professor of genetics and director of the Szostak Lab at the Harvard Medical School.
He believes one reason scientists may have been unsuccessful in replicating biogenesis in the lab is they're trying to synthesise the wrong type of organism. Most lab experiments to date have centred around DNA-based life, although Szostak thinks early life may have been based around the more fundamental RNA (ribonucleic acid).
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/...
You should really read that entire article because it is fascinating and also quite literally wrong about a great many things.
So we are left with a mystery unsolved by science and perplexing to atheists and of such terrible magnitude that scientists have contemplated imagining an infinite number of randomly generated universes in order to explain the existence of life on the Earth.
What do you call an infinite number of universes as a desperate explanation for the existence of life?
An infinite regress.
Needless to say, it is impossible for science to verify these other Universes, just as it is impossible for science to verify the existence of a god.
Atheism fails.
Which the religious might take as words of comfort and/or validation. Too bad that religion has failed, too.
So we are left with a profound mystery unsolved by science, religion and philosophy.
The human intellect failed. Nature preserves her secrets.
This question will remain unanswered forever.
David Mathews
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