@Ferguson1951: A synonym for cynicism.

So you say in your ignorance and prejudice.

It's possible to live a good, humane life full of beauty, hope, love, idealism, decency, charity, and adventure without believing in fairy tales. In fact, I'd say the first step to living such a life is to escape from the clammy tentacles of religion and start taking full responsibility for yourself and your actions.

Is there any evil in history that hasn't been justified by religion? How many millions have lived and died in wretched serfdom because they were deceived by empty promises of justice and bliss in the afterlife?

@ferguson: Many things in the world go by chance.

Oh rubbish. Things happen by cause and effect. When people are ignorant of the causes they attribute the events to chance, and events that create opportunities are described as "luck". Decisions to take opportunities or let them go by can be governed by logic or emotion. But your view of life typifies the human tendency to see patterns in everything, even where they don't exist.

Let's take a look at this latest dumping of soiled nappy contents, shall we?

Atheists are adamant about the origin of life (3,5 billion years ago) by chance

Bollocks. If you're going to critique scientific postulates, at least learn what those postulate actually fucking ARE, instead of peddling the usual tiresome canards and misrepresentations thereof we've seen all too often from your smug, self-satisfied and ignorant ilk.

Scientists do NOT postulate that live arose by "chance", instead, they postulate that life was the product of testable natural processes, in this case, chemical reactions. Which they have good reason to postulate as the foundation for life as we know it, because life is manifestly chemistry writ large. Millions of chemical reactions are taking place in your body right now, and if some of those reactions stop, then you DIE. Indeed, scientists have documented in exquisite detail thousands of different chemical reaction pathways that are in operation inside living organisms ranging from amoebae to humans, and if you had ever bothered to pay attention in properly constituted science classes, you would have learned about this.

Furthermore, whenever particular reactions have been postulated to be implicated in the origin of life, scientists researching in the relevant field have performed laboratory experiments to determine if those chemical reactions work, and in every case thus far investigated, they HAVE worked. And in this vein, I now present ...

The Emergence Of Life On Earth

In the earliest period of the history of the planet, it was a body devoid of life, and conditions on the planet were far from conducive to the appearance of life, particularly during the episode termed "The Late Heavy Bombardment" [1] by scientists, which saw intense bolide impact activity taking place on the planet's surface. Once this episode, and subsequent episodes postulated to have taken place, were complete, the Earth cooled, a solid crust formed, and liquid water in quantity began to appear. Thus, the stage was set for the processes that were to result in the emergence of life.

It was Darwin himself who first speculated about the origins of life, with his short remarks about a "warm little pond" [2], but, in the middle of the 19th century, this would remain speculation, as the means to determine the mechanisms that might apply had not yet been developed. However, it made eminent sense to scientists following Darwin, to hypothesise that any natural mechanisms responsible for the origin of life would be based upon organic chemistry, since life itself is manifestly based thereupon - millions of organic reactions are taking place within your body as you read this, and indeed, the cessation of some of those reactions constitutes the end of life for any organisms affected. Alexander Oparin, the Soviet biochemist, was the first to publish hypotheses about the chemical basis of the origin of life [3], and based his own hypotheses on the notion that a reducing atmosphere existed on the primordial Earth, facilitating the production of various organic compounds that would then react further, producing a cascade of escalating complexity that would ultimately result in self-replicating entities. Back in 1924, his hypotheses remained beyond the remit of scientists to test, but that would soon change.

The first indications that Oparin had alighted upon workable ideas came in 1953, with the celebrated Miller-Urey Experiment [4], in which electrical discharges in a reducing atmosphere composed of simple molecules produced measurable quantities of amino acids. Miller himself only cited the presence of five amino acids, as he was reliant at the time upon paper chromatography as his primary analytical tool, which was only sensitive enough to detect those five amino acids cited. However, Miller had been more successful than he originally claimed: after his death, preserved samples of his original reaction mixtures were subject to state-of-the-art analysis, using gas chromatograph mass spectrometry, a technique millions of times more sensitive, and regarded as the 'gold standard' in modern organic analysis. That subsequent analysis yielded not five, but twenty-two amino acids [5].

Early criticism of Miller's work in the scientific community focused upon the requirement for a reducing atmosphere in accordance with the Oparin model. However, subsequent workers determined by repeat experimentation, that a range of atmospheric constitutions would be suitable for a Miller-Urey type synthesis on a prebiotic Earth [6], several of those constitutions being only mildly reducing, expanding the range of conditions for which the Oparin model would be viable. More recently, work has suggested that the prebiotic Earth could have developed an atmosphere containing considerably more hydrogen than originally thought [7], making the Oparin reducing atmosphere once again more plausible. Indeed, the range of conditions under which amino acids could be synthesised has since been expanded to include interstellar ice clouds, courtesy of more recent research [8 - 14], and the Murchison meteorite was found to contain no less than ninety amino acids, nineteen of which are found on Earth, which were obviously synthesised whilst that meteorite was still in space. Other data from meteorites adds to this body of evidence [10, 15, 16].

The formation of amino acids itself, whilst an important step in any naturalistic origin of life, would need to be accompanied by some means of linking those amino acids into peptide molecules [17] - the process by which proteins are formed. A significant step forward with respect to this, arose when researchers alighted upon the fact that carbonyl sulphide, a gas that is produced in quantity naturally by volcanoes, acts as a catalyst for the formation of peptides, increasing yields dramatically [18]. This would facilitate peptide formation not only in the vicinity of hydrothermal vents, but in the vicinity of terrestrial volcanoes close to bodies of open water. Indeed, Miller had produced the 22 amino acids found in some of his reaction mixtures by extending the synthesis to include volcanic input, though not carbonyl sulphide - the addition of carbonyl sulphide would, however, facilitate peptide formation rapidly once the amino acids themselves were formed.

One additional problem to be overcome was the 'chirality problem'. Amino acids, with the exception of glycine, are chiral molecules, existing in two forms that are mirror images of each other in space (stereoisomers). Initially, methods for producing one form preferentially over another were something of a puzzle, but chemists working in an entirely different field established that a process called 'chiral catalysis' exists, indeed, this work led to a Nobel Prize for the researchers in question [19]. The demonstrated existence of working chiral catalysts [20] led abiogenesis researchers to seek such catalytic processes in their own field, and, in due course, these were alighted upon [15, 21- 24].

However, amino acids are not the only molecules required for life, important though they are. Some form of self-replicating molecule, providing the basis of an inheritance mechanism, is required. Given the difficulties involved in synthesising DNA as a total synthesis, researchers turned to RNA instead, a molecule that still forms the basis of the genomes of numerous extant taxonomic Families of viruses today. RNA, being easier to synthesise, was considered a natural first choice for the basis of primordial genomes, and thus, attention turned to the synthesis of RNA under prebiotic conditions. This was soon found not only to be possible, but to be readily achievable in the laboratory, and indeed, catalysis plays a role in these experiments. Natural clays formed from a mineral called montmorillonite provide a ready natural catalyst that would have been present in quantity on a prebiotic Earth, and the catalytic chemistry of RNA formation whilst adsorbed to such clays is now a standard part of the scientific literature [22- 42].

Having established that RNA was synthesisable under prebiotic conditions, researchers then turned to the matter of establishing the existence of self-replicating species of RNA molecules. This was duly successful [30, 43, 45 - 47], establishing that such species could have arisen among the extant RNA molecules being synthesised on a prebiotic Earth, and of course, once one self-replicating species exists, the process of evolution can begin, which has also since been demonstrated to apply to replicating RNAs in appropriate laboratory experiments [48].

Once a self-replicating molecule that can form the basis of an inheritance mechanism exists, the next stage scientists postulate to be required is encapsulation within some sort of selectively permeable membrane. The molecules of choice for these membrane are lipids, which have been demonstrated repeatedly in the laboratory to undergo spontaneous self-organisation into various structures, such as bilayer sheets, micelles and liposomes. Indeed, in the case of phospholipids, they can be stimulated to self-organise by the simple process of agitating the solution within which they are suspended - literally, shake the bottle [49 - 53]. Moreover, research has established that these lipids can encapsulate RNA molecules, and selectively admit the passage of base and sugar molecules to facilitate RNA replication [54, 55]. With the advent of this discovery in appropriate laboratory research, protocell formation is but a short step away, and indeed, the latest research is now actively concentrating upon the minimum components required in order for a viable, self-replicating protocell to exist. Prebiotic lipid formation is also a part of the repertoire of the literature in the field, and some papers now extant document the first experiments aimed at producing viable self-replicating protocells [55 - 70].

Whilst scientists naturally accept that 'joining the dots' between these individual steps is entirely proper, particularly on a body the size of a planet over a 100 million year period, the absence of experiments actively coupling these stages is a matter remaining to be addressed, though such experiments will be ambitious in scope indeed if they are to produce complete working protocells at the end of a long production line starting with a Miller-Urey synthesis. A 'grand synthesis' of this sort in the laboratory is not high on the scientific agenda at the moment, which is more concerned with validating the individual hypothesised steps, but once those steps are accepted as valid in the field, doubtless one day a 'grand synthesis' will be attempted, and the success thereof will establish beyond serious doubt that our pale blue dot became our home courtesy of well-defined and testable chemical reactions. Even so, no one conversant with the literature seriously considers any more that magical forces are required to produce life: just as vitalism was refuted by Wöhler's classic experiment, that gave rise to organic chemistry as an empirical science in the first place, so it is likely to be rendered ever more irrelevant in abiogenesis research, as the steps leading to life's blossoming on our planet are traversed and studied in ever greater detail.

References:

[1] An apposite paper (among many) covering the Late Heavy Bombardment is:

Origin Of The Cataclysmic Late Heavy Bombardment Period Of The Terrestrial Planets by R. Gomes, H. F. Levison, K. Tsiganis and A. Morbidelli, Nature, 435: 466-469 (26th May 2005)

[2] Cited in The Life And Letters Of Charles Darwin, Including An Autobiographical Chapter, edited by Francis Darwin, 1887

[3] The Origin And Development Of Life by Alexander Oparin, 1924 (English translation: NASA TTF-488)

[4] A Production Of Amino Acids Under Possible Primitive Earth Conditions by Stanley L. Miller, Science, 117: 528-529 (15th May 1953)

[5] The Miller Volcanic Discharge Spark Experiment by Adam P. Johnson, H. James Cleaves, Jason P. Dworkin, Daniel P. Glavin, Antonio Lazcano and Jeffrey L. Bada, Science, 322:404 (17th Ocotber 2008)

[6] Amino Acid Synthesis From Hydrogen Cyanide Under Possible Primitive Earth Conditions by J. Oró and S. S.Kamat, Nature, 190: 442-443 (1961)

[7] A Hydrogen Rich Early Earth Atmosphere by Feng Tian, Owen B. Toon, Alexander A. Pavlov and H. de Sterck, Science, 308: 1014-1017 (13th May 2005)

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[19] Nobel Prize for Chemistry, 2001, was awarded to William S. Knowles, Ryoji Noyori and K. Barry Sharpless, for their work establishing the existence of asymmetric catalysts and chiral catalysis - see the Nobel Lecture by William S. Knowles [url=http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2001/knowles-lect...

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[38] Sequence- And Regio-Selectivity In The Montmorillonite-Catalysed Synthesis Of RNA by Gözen Ertem and James P. Ferris, Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere, 30: 411-422 (2000)

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[45] Ribozymes: Building The RNA World by Gerald F. Joyce, Current Biology, 6(8): 965-967, 1996

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[52] Simulation Of The Spontaneous Aggregation Of Phospholipids Into Bilayers by Siewert J. Marrink, Eric Lindahl, Olle Edholm and Alan E. Mark, Journal of the American Chemical Society, 123: 8638-8639 (2001)

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[60] Formation Of Protocell-Like Structures From Glycine And Formaldehyde In A Modified Sea Medium by Hiroshi Yanagawa and Fujio Egami, Proceedings of the Japan Academy, 53: 42-45 (12th January 1977)

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Since I wrote that original exposition, several thousand more scientific papers documenting relevant experiments have been published, and scientists researching in the field are now actively experimenting with model protocells constructed in the laboratory. You can find examples of the most recent research here, and learn about more successful investigations in the field.

So before you post yet more bullshit that merely demonstrates your ignorance of the subject, I suggest you learn some actual facts about the subject.

Right, moving on from this, let's continue deploying the decontamination ordnance ...

because it is convenient to them

Bollocks. What part of "the above scientific papers, and many others besides, provide evidence for the requisite postulates" do you not understand?

This isn't about "convenience", it's about rigorously tested postulates validated by laboratory experiments. Do learn this elementary concept before posting yet more fatuous drivel.

it fits into their scheme that God does not exist.

Actually, if you bothered paying attention to what we actually state here, instead of your own fabricated misrepresentations thereof, what we actually postulate is that if a god type entity actually exists, it won't be any of the fatuous candidates presented in pre-scientific mythologies, such as the one you clearly adhere to. Oh, speaking of which, if your imaginary magic man actually existed, why did your magic man allow fatuous and absurd errors to be included in the mythology in question? Especially in the light of assertions about the purported "omniscience" of said entity, which if true, would mean that said entity would know in advance that these errors would be discovered by humans in the future?

They cannot prove (produce evidence) that it went like that: they just BELIEVE it.

Bullshit. I just listed 70 scientific papers containing relevant evidence from laboratory experiments above. Your lie is busted.

They come up with junk theories that presumably make that rational, logical, "scientific".

The world's chemists are pointing and laughing at you for describing their working laboratory experiments as "junk theories". Enjoy the sound thereof as it rings in your ears.

They spend their lives and money to look for that one evidence that can prove it beyond reasonable doubt, just because they have to prove that there was nothing supernatural in it.

Guess what? Those laboratory experiments establish this conclusively. Game over for your infantile attachment to a mythology written by piss-stained Bronze Age incels, who were too stupid to count correctly the number of legs that an insect possesses.

They are simply biased.

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

Don't you just love the way in which preference for working empirical test is summarily dismissed as "bias", by supernaturalists who are manifestly biased in favour of an evidence-free, assertion-laden mythological view of the world?

Here's a clue for you. Your mythology asserts all manner of ridiculous notions that were tossed into the bin by diligent scientific enquiry a long time ago. Your mythology is, to be brief, full of shit. Though perhaps not quite as full of shit as the diseased rants you post here.

Here's a little test you can conduct, just to see how full of shit your mythology is. Turn to Genesis 30:37-39. Read it. Then, perform the following tasks, without outside assistance:

[1] Work out what this passage asserts;

[2] If you have successfully conducted [1] above, work out why it's utter drivel. Bonus points if you can work out who first demonstrated experimentally that it was drivel.

Care to take up that challenge, or are you going to follow the precedent set by every other supernaturalist I've dropped this on, and chicken out?

And it's soiled nappy dumping time again ...

If I study all that, I will probably become like you, and that is outside the question

Translation: "I'm not going to change my mind, no matter how much data is presented that conclusively demonstrates that I am wrong".

In short, your position consists of "if reality and my favourite mythology differ, reality is wrong and my favourite mythology is right". Let's see how long it takes you to work out what a spectacle you're presenting here by adopting this position.

Testable natural processes that do not guarantee one bit that things actually went that way.

Ha ha ha ha ha. They're a damn sight more reliable than assertions from a pre-scientific mythology. Let's see, who shall I run with here? The choices on offer are:

[1] Tenured professional scientists, who have not only spent decades learning how to treat observational data in a proper, rigorous manner, but learning how to apply said treatment of data to working laboratory experiments;

[2] Piss-stained Bronze Age incels who were too stupid to count correctly the number of legs that an insect possesses, and the fatuous assertions they scribbled in a diseased mythology, which includes such joys as gleeful celebration of bloody Lebensraum wars and the taking of underage sex slaves afterwards.

Wow, this choice is so hard ...

Oh, and the reliability of testable natural processes forms the basis of your comfortable, famine-free, disease-free life surrounded by expensive electronic toys. None of this was the product of your sad little mythology and its moronic assertions.

In addition, why do you carefully avoid to test "extraordinary" events?

Which "extraordinary" events would these be? Only the scientists cited above, found the answers to questions you didn't even know fucking existed, until I brought the paper citations here. Put up or shut up.

When a rational scientist is asked about miracles he will say that science is not concerned with miracles.

Correction, what any competent scientist will tell you, if you actually bother to ask one, is that any genuine evidence for a miracle will almost certainly result in a re-writing of the laws of physics. Since the laws of physics underwent a wholesale rewrite during the transition from Newton to Einstein and the various pioneers of quantum mechanics, there's a precedent to take into account here. But then you've openly declared your complete and wilful ignorance of even the basics, let alone the fine detail, in past posts of yours.

But when a miracle occurs they go any length to give a natural explanation.

Correction - when a "miracle" is asserted to occur, the provenance of that assertion is subject to proper test, and either [1] the assertion is found to be untestable, and discardable on that basis, [2] is found to be false, and discardable on that basis, or [3] is found to be a misrepresentation of a natural phenomenon. I've already dealt with the Fatima bullshit in an earlier post in this thread, as an example of the sort of analysis that is brought to bear, and you can go back here and re-read that dissection in full, for which you never had anything even remotely resembling an answer.

Here's a clue for you: those of us who paid attention in class, are aware of the existence of observational consequences for a host of asserted phenomena, and if those observational consequences don't show up, those asserted phenomena were precisely that - merely asserted.

To me, you do nothing else but reinforce my dislike for science and the like.

Encountering pedlars of manifest lies such as yourself, is what led me to regard your mythology as poison. Though your mythology isn't unique in this respect. However, I am minded to note how ready adherents of your mythology are, to jettison the Ninth Commandment thereof, if they think doing so will further their apologetics, and as a corollary of noting this, point you to Matthew 7:5.

Oh, by the way, I see you chickened out of that challenge re: Genesis 30:37-39. Quelle fucking surprise. I've never met a supernaturalist yet with the balls to face that one.

Moving on to another contributor ...

You are great advertisement for the theory that the last refuge of religion is the ignorance of their adherents.

You forgot, the ignorance and duplicity of their adherents. :)