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Do you think the seeming improbability of the origin of life is evidence for theism?
I don’t mean with respect to so-called cosmic "fine tuning." I refer to the fact that even with our potentially finely tuned cosmos it’s still incredibly unlikely that life would emerge. I took an earth science course in college, and our prof said that Abiogenesis is still the main theory: namely, non living matter gave rise to living matter through a combination of exquisitely improbable events. A bunch of chemicals mixed with other chemicals and were struck by lightning or something, creating the first self-replicating molecule. If you protest “but that’s about as likely as a fighter jet being assembled out of chance collisions,” he says “given the law of large numbers, given enough opportunities a fantastically unlikely event will eventually happen. And the observable universe is just so so vast.
I just realized this might imply that, actually, there probably is a fighter jet somewhere in the universe that arose from chance collisions of matter, or at least that this result wasn't any less likely than life arising from nonliving matter. If you say no to the fighter jet thing, but yes to a self-replicating molecular machine finding a stable enough environment in which to proliferate for millions of years, then presumably you would need to explain the asymmetry in your expectations.
Maybe the chance fighter jet is just… even more unlikely than that? Based on what? The fact that there are many more optimally arranged parts involved in a fighter jet? Maybe, but if that’s actually true, why have we been able to create fighter jets, but not engineer a self-replicating molecular organism from inorganic matter?
About cosmic "fine tuning":
If you buy any of the typical objections to cosmological fine tuning, there is a concern about whether your view "proves too much" by failing to admit of scenarios that would intuitively serve as compelling evidence for Christianity. For instance, in a universe in which the words "made-by-Jesus-Christ" were written into every square inch of matter as a direct result of the way the initial parameters of the universe were ordered, you would have to conclude that we had absolutely zero evidence in favor of Christianity.
Typical Objection to Fine-Tuning #1: "But we don't know how to weight the prior probabilities of alternative universes. At best, we can only assume that the life-permitting parameters are unlikely given all of the non-life-permitting alternatives."
This is equally true of the made-by-Jesus world, but do you really want to say that that world would offer no evidence in favor of Christianity? Isn't that just an unreasonably high degree of skepticism?
Typical Objection to Fine-Tuning #2: "According to the anthropic principle, we wouldn't be in a position to ask about how we appeared in a life-permitting universe if it hadn't been life-permitting to begin with, so fine-tuning requires no explanation/is explained by the fact that it had to happen from our POV."
It's not always clear what is being proposed by the objector making the anthropic principle argument, but on one interpretation the objection is saying something like "any phenomenon which presupposes an explainer requires no explanation/is automatically explained by the fact that it allows for an explainer to exist and wonder about it."
So, for instance, we needn't explain the complexity of life via evolution because had it not occurred, we wouldn't be in a position to wonder about it. Or a falling man who prays for a parachute and is saved when one spontaneously materializes out of thin air needn't explain this miracle because, had it not occurred, he wouldn't be alive to consider candidate explanations.
But notice that the anthropic principle objection can also be posed to the "made-by-Jesus" world, and even still, the "made-by-Jesus" world would be compelling evidence in favor of Christianity.
Typical Objection to Fine-Tuning #3: God could have any number of purposes. Why assume that he wants life to evolve?
This equally applies to the "Made-by-Jesus" world. I can imagine any number of deities who don't want to create a made-by-Jesus world. So in the "made-by-Jesus" world would we have absolutely zero indication that Christianity is true?
Typical Objection to Fine-Tuning #4: Maybe the fine-tuning is just necessary and had to be that way. Since God is supposed to be a necessary being, is it any better to suppose that an explanation that proposes a necessary God + a contingent universe is better than simply a necessary universe all on its own?
This equally applies to the "Made-by-Jesus" world. Maybe the initial parameters of the universe just had to be set up so that the words "made-by-Jesus-Christ" were written into every square inch of matter everywhere. So is the "made-by-Jesus" world not strong evidence for Christianity?
Typical Objection to Fine-Tuning #5: If the multi-verse hypothesis is true, then a finely tuned universe is due to chance. Given enough opportunities, a life permitting arrangement of the parameters will eventually come about, no matter how unlikely one is.
This equally applies to the "Made-by-Jesus" world. So is the "made-by-Jesus" world not strong evidence for Christianity?
Typical Objection to Fine-Tuning #6: There's no telling whether the other parameters of the universe would be life-permitting.
The typical response to this objection is to point out that the features of the universe on which the parameters depend are extremely broad, so that changes would result in a world where, say, all we would have is a distribution of matter in a pattern of random TV static, or each particle being separated from the other by so much space that complex structures could never form, or a giant undifferentiated lump of matter, etc.
But anyway, why couldn't the same objection be made to the "made-by-Jesus" world? For all we know, most arrangements of the parameters of the universe result in a "made-by-Jesus world." We haven't observed those universes, so who is really to say otherwise?
Typical Objection to Fine-Tuning #7: The fine-tuning argument is just an appeal to our ignorance, or a "god-of-the-gaps"-style inference.
Is this also true of saying that the truth of Christianity is a good explanation for the made-by-Jesus universe?
TL;DR: If you buy any of the typical objections to cosmological fine tuning, there is a concern about whether your view "proves too much" by failing to admit scenarios that would intuitively serve as compelling evidence for Christianity. For instance, in a universe in which the words "made-by-Jesus-Christ" were written into every square inch of matter as a direct result of the way the initial parameters of the universe were ordered, you would have to conclude that we had absolutely zero evidence in favor of Christianity.
I have connections to people doing research into the origins of life, and frankly the probabilisty-based arguments against natural biogenesis are very weak.
Cosmological fine-tuning isn't an argument against natural (or at least materialistic) origin because it runs into the anthropic paradox. If the universe were fine-tuned to create life, the same arguments must hold to show that it was fine-tuned to create humanity, and to create you. After all, just as a universe supporting life like us is improbable, so is your specific combination of genes and experience fantastically improbable. Any number of chance encounters (even a half-second delay in your father's ejaculation) could have resulted in a different sperm meeting that egg, and you simply not existing. Nonetheless, we also know that no fine-tuning of sperm selection was involved in the process, and God was not necessary: we can choose sperm in the lab and force a baby to happen. We can even tune the genetics of nonhuman individuals for appearance, health, and personality, and it is only ethics that keeps us from doing that to humans.
If you look at a specific origin of life it looks fantastically improbable, but there are a lot of demonstrations that the "minimal replicating natural system" is probably a lot smaller than a protein, let alone a full cell. All that would be required is a set of amino-acids that are stable at the temperature and pressure of oceanic vents, and which catalyze the creation of themselves. (The technical term for this is an autocatalytic set.) It has been shown that proteins are unnecessary: RNA can catalyze its own replication (http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1371-4), and peptides (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1371-4) and amino acids (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acscentsci.9b00520) can arise from chemical environments with very simple precursors (HCN and H2O are all you need for amino acids to arise). The search for a minimal amino acid set with the ability for self-replication is ongoing, but if any such set occured even once in the billion-year history of oceanic vents, then it would have become the primary chemical makeup of its environment. Such a set would not even need to be very efficient at first; in an environment without RNAase it only needs to self-catalyze faster than its thermal breakdown, and evolution does the rest. FOOM.
There is also circumstantial evidence to suggest this happened. The synthesis of amino acids and sugars is more favorable at 85C in the environment of certain porous and hydrogen-rich rocks, and this environment is preferred by certain extant microorganisms (https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2021JG006436). Most recently, I heard about a manuscript showing that of the 402 proteins which have been highly conserved in bacterial metabolism, 380 of them are highly stable at the pressure, temperature, and pH of these mineral-emitting thermal vents. (Unfortunately, I can't find it. Edit: Maybe ThenElection finds it below.)
Your first bullet point only functions as an explanation of fine tuning if we assume in advance that the (or “a”) multiverse hypothesis is true. It’s unlikely that I would result from my parent’s act of conception, but billions of acts of conception were happening before I was conceived. But we don’t have an analogous knowledge of there being billions and billions of universes with different parameters and physical laws, exhausting enough of the possibilities to eventually create life.
Should I explain why I find the multiverse hypothesis less plausible than theism as an explanation of fine tuning, or do you already agree with me that it is?
Your second bullet point calls for some subject matter expertise that I obviously don’t have. You mention that RNA can be self-catalyzing. I suppose this raises the question of “just how hard would it be to create RNA by chance circumstances.” How complex is RNA in terms of number of parts and mechanisms?
To your third bullet point, I’m not as surprised that organisms which were already created in such environments can now live in them as I am by the suggestion that they were created in the first place. I agree that this is evidence in favor of their possibly being created in them, though, of course, because if it was impossible for an organism to live in such an environment, it would be impossible for them to be created in them. But anyway, I’m not sure this is a strong item of evidence in favor of abiogenesis and don’t weight it very heavily.
I don’t understand this sentence:
“ of the 402 proteins which have been highly conserved in bacterial metabolism, 380 of them are highly stable at the pressure, temperature, and pH of these mineral-emitting thermal vents.”
What are proteins “which are highly conserved in bacterial metabolism?” And why is this significant?
I would love to chat with your friend, please consider giving me a point of contact. (If it matters, I’m not a Christian, I’m a weak, almost-reserving-judgement-but-not-quite deist with a sense that there is something to the cosmic fine tuning argument for life.)
No it doesn't depend on a multiverse at all. (Does all statistical reasoning require multiverses to exist?) It only requires a belief that the universe we see is one example of the set of all possible (imaginable) universes.
You don't seem to be understanding the implications of the anthropic principle. For every human that is conceived, there are billions of sperm which are thrown out, and there are even more (billions upon billions upon billions(*A)) of potential genetic combinations which could happen but don't. Had the sperm which became you not fertilized the egg which became you, you would just not exist to have this conversation. Full stop. The probability that you in particular would exist is just too small. The number of possible humans is of similar magnitude to the number of atoms in the universe.
(A) The human genome has 3,054,815,472 base pairs, and two random humans might differ by up to 0.6% of their genome, so we can say that two random humans are separated by about 18M base pairs, whereas the rate of mutation in human DNA is ~2.5×10^(−8) per base per generation, so each human will have about 76 new mutations. To simplify a bit (assuming mutations are evenly distributed, which they are not, but you will see that it doesn't matter), this means the possible range of single mutations that are still considered human is bounded between 4^76 = 5.7 x 10^45 (all mutations between humans occur on the same 76 nucleobases) and 18M choose 764 (any of 76 mutations could occur anywhere in the genome). Either way, the number of possible humans is really big, so if you were not born when you were born, you would never have been, at least not in our light cone.
This was addressed by ResoluteRaven below. The answer appears to be "not very hard", and that was also the gist of the paper I linked above about combining HCN and H2O to make amino acids.
This is poor logic, because it can be continued ad infinitem to explain anything inconvenient for your position, and makes your position unfalsifiable. (You might say it proves too much. If your position is unfalsifiable, then it is not testable. To put it another way, suppose that 50 years from now scientists were to demonstrate abiogenesis in the lab. You could still argue that they merely discovered the method by which God created life. How convenient, considering it would also the method by which life could have arisen without a God at all.
In the modern day, I've heard creationists arguing on behalf of the position that the earth is only 6,000 years old. When confronted with the fact that fossils can be dated to millions of years ago, they fall back to the argument that if fossils appear to have been buried for millions of years, they must have been placed in the rock formation by an intelligent designer to appear that way, so as to trick modern-day humans. This argument can of course be extended to argue that everything before any arbitrary moment in the past has been retconned, and God just created a world to look convincingly old. If your Designer is all-powerful, I guess that might make sense to you, but it is equally valid to suppose that the Designer didn't do much more than set some parameters on the Big Bang and press a button to see what would happen.
I hate to be trite, but another commenter below has explained this already. I may suggest that if this topic matters to you (or is truly critical to maintaining your faith), then you try reading the first few chapters of a textbook on molecular biology for the relevant background. You don't have to read very far. I got to chapter 3.
I'm really sorry, but my friend has spent an inordinate amount of their career arguing against intelligent design. Probably about as much time as they have spent doing biological research. Given that the return to humanity is much higher if they spend their time doing research, I really don't want to provide them access to more ideas from intelligent design.
It does require it, I think.
One draw from a haystack vs 100000000000000 draws will have different chances of hitting the needle.
If only one universe exists, and most possible universes are very non-conducive to life, it should be surprising to us that we exist, since that seems so unlikely. At that point, we should be looking for explanations that might make it more likely, like multiverses or theism, or it being necessary that the universe be that way, or actually, most universes are conducive to life after all. But we can't just say that in worlds where we woke up it would look like worlds where we might be able to wake up, because the really surprising thing here isn't that but why the hell did we wake up at all, if we are indeed in the only universe, which should by every expectation be very hostile to life. (note, I'm assuming those two things, not asserting them here)
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RNA is composed of one sugar molecule (ribose) and 4 nucleotides in various arrangements. These have all been found in meteorites, indicating that they are likely abundant throughout the universe. I would expect them to come together spontaneously, possibly even within those meteorites themselves shortly after they formed while they still contain pockets of liquid water.
To a biologist, "highly conserved" means something between "very old" and "nearly unchanged from the earliest times," depending on context. In this case it is closest to the latter. The oldest proteins being stable in hydrothermal vent conditions being evidence that bacteria originated from there is similar to how linguists can determine the homeland of a proto-language by the words for animals and plants that are shared across all its descendants (e.g. if the word for "pine tree" is shared by all of them but not "palm tree" then they probably didn't come from the tropics).
The minimally replicating natural system would need:
Some way of reproducing dynamically in response to mutations. It can’t just be able to reproduce itself perfectly, but otherwise not at all; it needs an information carrier that can vary the assembly instructions in ways that would result in multiple different possible viable offspring. Otherwise, evolution would’ve never happened, because there would only have ever been one organism, or the one organism would have died very early on.
Some machinery for assembly of parts,
a way of reading the instructions,
An outer membrane that holds all of this stuff together,
A way to catalyze it’s own chemical processes
How is RNA sufficient for all of the above?
RNA molecules capable of replicating themselves and other RNA molecules are already known to be possible. The beauty of RNA is that it can both carry information and also catalyze chemical reactions, including the synthesis of other RNA's, and the oldest bit of active chemical machinery within our cells (the ribosomes) use RNA rather than amino acids for their key activity (protein synthesis).
Mutations will occur spontaneously because the replication is inherently imperfect, for RNA more so than for DNA because the molecules are less stable, so it's not something that needs to be accounted for separately. A membrane is not strictly necessary as long as all the components are close enough together. Nearly all of the cellular machinery still works if you take it out of the cell and this is commonly used in the biotechnology industry when we only care about one or two enzymes and not the whole system.
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The trick with the anthropic argument is that it doesn’t rely on multiverses or even infinities. Just that A -> B. Given that we are making observations and philosophy instead of choking on vacuum, we must be in conditions that support such activities. It doesn’t explain why you were born to your specific parents, but it does argue that those parents can’t be virgins.
I think it would require multiverses. Yes, it proves rather trivially that you are in the kind of universe in which life exists, but it doesn't provide reasoning for why we should expect that universe to exist. A multiverse should be capable of providing the second, assuming that the multiverse is the sort of multiverse that can do that, I would think?
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People mean different things by “the anthropic principle” so let me clarify what you have in mind. Sometimes the idea is supposed to challenge the fine tuning argument by pointing to the multiverse and invoking the law of large numbers. That argument works if you have some reason to think the multiverse exists and is more probable and theoretically virtuous than theism.
But I also hear much more naive and confused sounding appeals to the anthropic principle. For example, sometimes people seem to be suggesting that because a phenomenon involves the creation of observers, the phenomenon requires no explanation, which is silly. Imagine if I prayed for a parachute while falling from a plane, one spontaneously manifested out of thin air and deployed to save my life, and I reflected afterwards about why that happened. I conclude, “well, I wouldn’t be here to ask the question in the first place if that didn’t happen, so there must be no explanation needed.”
Or imagine saying the theory of evolution is dispensable because “if it didn’t happen we wouldn’t exist. We wouldn’t be here to wonder about it if not, so what is there to explain?”
I’m not trying to use the Anthropic principle as an argument for any process over another. No, it’s a refutation of the fine-tuning premise in general. Good conditions aren’t evidence for or against an intelligent designer.
That means I have to answer “no” to your question, because we’d have to see the “seeming improbability” no matter how it came about.
Suppose you were sentenced to death by firing squad but a thousand marksmen ten feet away missed their shot. Would you say you don’t have to explain how this happened (by design, presumably—a conspiracy not to kill you), because being in a position to ask it requires already existing?
If this is still supposed to be about the unlikeliness of abiogenesis, then this analogy would only make sense if you believed that the conditions necessary for the arising of life happened only once in the entire history of the universe. Then it really would be a miracle.
But it's more like there are a bajillion people about to be executed, each with their own thousand-strong firing squad and we know that at least one of them survived. With so many tries, one of them could have gotten super lucky. (And of course, we don't really know how many marksmen you need to postulate to match the probability of abiogenesis happening in some small volume of the primordial soup at a particular point).
(If it's about the wonder of the fact that our universe can support life at all, then I'm fine with answering "I dunno" while insisting that there's no justification for jumping from "I dunno" to "therefore, God.")
This is correct.
The level of analogy for which he makes sense would be ways the physical laws of the universe itself is fine-tuned for life. As long as there are no varying-laws multiverses, then there's only one, not a bajillion.
I'll also note that the firing squad example makes this more complicated to me. I was reminded of Joe Carlsmith's SIA vs SSA series on anthropics, which I don't remember well enough to be able to give truly informed opinions.
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