re: #136 Naso Tang

The topic was evolution, not origins of life. This is a classic fall-back of those who are only opposed to something, without any alternatives beyond mysticism.

Evolution does explain life from a simple starting point, but it does not even attempt to prove that start, even while it can speculate on the possible options based on what is known.

Panspermia is certainly a possibility, for Earth, but proves nothing about the origin before so even if it, panspermia, occurred it is irrelevant to the question of ultimate origin.

As to what I “believe”; I know that the universe is large beyond our imagination. I know that there is life in places on this earth that we would have thought impossible just years ago. I know that much of such life has no relevance to us humans, except perhaps as a seed for the next stage after us, and I see no reason to think that is not common elsewhere, nor that it is not a common, relatively, result of laws of chemistry and physics.

I do know with certainty however that there was no intelligence (other than perhaps a perverse one) in the design of life, human in particular, since we would be able to design much better bodies and lives for ourselves if we could (when we can), than the crippling system failures that some supposed intelligent designer came up with (take your pick, gods or aliens).

The theory of evolution has certainly attempted to explain the origin of life, no matter how many times people here would like to try and deny the historical veracity of that. Evolution implies naturalism, but evolutionists have only recently discovered that life is too complicated to support a naturalistic origin. Its not good enough to say proof is forthcoming, as soon as the chaos theorists are done with their work. You really want to claim a naturalistic origin for life, but you have no scientific basis to do so. You want to claim that one species of a creature can spontaneously evolve into another species, but no one has ever observed this. If you are waiting for more evidence to turn up, fine, but that only clarifies that evolution has no true theoretical bases for the two toughest questions.