Friday, March 31, 2006

sweet mystery of life

Some side notes on the origin of life.

Regarding Divine Intervention: First off, the scientifically apt among you best not get too smug about the role of a potentially divine agent in the development of life. Better minds than yours have contemplated the possibility of God (or something like God) when confronted by some of the trickier questions that the question leads to. But I would reiterate: it seems pretty clear that, God or no, we live in a phenomenological physical universe that is running according to certain reliable dynamics that seem relatively unconnected to the intellectual and spiritual dynamics that we associate with meaning, will, and purpose. If one assumes that God exists, they must also assume that God has chosen to arrange physical reality according to these principles. Consequently, I'm far from persuaded that the acceptance of the existence of a Deity in any way eliminates the question of an observable and scientifically comprehensible physical mechanism for the formation of life.

Regarding Spontaneous Generation: There's a big temptation, in a secularized scientific worldview, to talk about the formation of life in terms of an incredibly improbable event. The idea is that because conditions were just exactly right, this crazy coincidence occurred and boom, there's your life. This kind of thinking fails to recognize a couple of core truths about the scientific idealization of reality. The first is, there's no such thing as a coincidence in science. The whole principle of science is that every cause follows its attendent effect, according to set and predictable laws of exchange and interaction. (Okay, science is a bit more complicated than that. I've read my share of the philosophy of science, believe you me). If life arose from sheerly physical interactions, as a result of molecular bonding and energy exchanges and all the rest, it did so because the arrangements of living systems are, so to speak, built in to the laws of thermodynamics. Life may be rare (another currently unprovable point of severe contention) but that does not make it any less fundamental to the nature of the universe. In pure science, nothing exists that is not fundamental to the nature of the universe.

Regarding Life from Space: This is in some ways a pretty theory and I certainly think it's a valid and worthwhile theory, but that doesn't change the fact that even though it gets presented as one, it is not a theory on the origin of life. It's a theory of the origin of life on Earth, which is a very different issue. It leaves us still very much strapped as concerns how life arose from the (one presumes) chaotic maelstrom of the young and tempestuous physical universe. Personally, I'm convinced that mushrooms came from another planet. But that's not science either, that's just an opinion.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

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