I believe our best scientific related arguments against metaphysical naturalism/materialism/atheism is the Origin of Life, which I can speak extensively about. But at present I only have one post, but it's a start. See "
Paradoxes of the Origin of Life." Best
1/ The "weak case for abiogenesis" and was evolution guided anyway?
A few thoughts.
I cannot help but feel you are too defensive with this, when there is little or nothing to defend.
RNA world maybe the best on offer. It is also woefully inadequate.
Attempts to rationalize problems against it give it credence to lack of evidence. It does not deserve!
Just going back to a few basics of where we are at.
Self catalysing reactions are the only game in town for abiogenesis.
But even the ones that have got going, are the product of intelligent design of Phds.
They are not randomly occuring. Im happy to be corrected, but we cannot see them in nature of the form claimed as origin for life (as far as I am aware!!) Those that do get going stop.
Stepping back.
Liquid water on earth, FORCES a fairly stable environment.
Geology allows both highly alkaline and acidic environments, and many combinations of minerals.
Volcanic activity and polar climates allow all from freezing to boiling.
There are new volcanic vents and pools all the time of every age back to prehistoric..
There are plenty of places at optimal temperatures for life whatever you decide optimal temperature/ salinity/acidity etc is.
Yet in NONE of them are the so called "building blocks of life" forming ( more of that later).
In none of them are the newest simplest living structures forming from no life.
The pools are all dead , until life comes from somehwere else.
A hundred years of analytical science has not even a found a candidate new organsim from anywhere or a kit of parts that could make one occuring naturally!.
Those who say "ah but the world has changed" , Have no evidence to say that, but again it is the only game in town for them to say it..
There are still all the range of environments from cold to hot, acid to alkali, gas levels and so on..
So. From that we can assume life even if it formed this way is extremely unlikely in chemistry or we would see it forming again now and we dont
Now. Just from basic reaction kinetics. If a reaction is unlikely, so massive band gap, then you expect a lot of raw materials to get just a few reacted .
If a reaction is likely. We expect a lot of reacted product, far less building blocks.
But we have neither. Neither places with new life, nor with lots of "building blocks"
And the more complicated we make it the more unlikely it is. Life really does have an irreducible complexity issue
RNA is hideously complicated, and all the structures needed for life
energy etc, to be the first in the chain. That is the elephant in the room.
But there is another red herring.
It is common to speak of building blocks. What are the building blocks?
With a steel building , it is steel. A wood building needs wood. An igloo needs ice.
So unless someone can say what the first cells were made off, the idea that "building blocks are abundant"
is yet another triumph of wishful thinking over evidence
Reality is of course, if other than RNA was the first genome (and it had to be something simpler )
just because of irreducible complexity of a first living thing...then there must have been transitions in genome type over the history of lfe..
There is no evidence of how when or whether that happened. You would expect life to have a mixture of the types old and new.
The reality is at cell level.
We know how cells reproduce ans so can use it for our own attermpts to steer evolution.
Most of the things we see in our gardens, domestic and farm animals, all agriculture are the product of man steering evolution.!
But the minimum cell we know is hideously complex.
A massive factory of hundreds or thousands of proteins.
And Before that we have nothing at all. Neither of abiogenesis (first cell) or how the modern cell developed or what the intermediates if any were... We do know that none of the pools and vents we know of have failed to get anywhere close to new life!
Attempts to backwards engineer reduce the complexity as ventner did, barely reduced the gene count before the life became unstable!
No evidence of intermediate development stages or how the first came about.
There is literally nothing to hang your hat on. So giving reasons "why not" is premature until there is a case for "why"
There is no evidence of when , where, what, no structure and no process for it. So no hypothesis or experiment possible.
All there is is interesting "plausibility ideas"
Abiogenesis plus evolution are the only game in town for atheists.
And they have no evidence at cell level how or whether any of it happened!
It is so much shadow boxing.
Can you imagine what atheists would say if we said.
There was a miracle. We cannot tell you when, where, what happened or how?
They would laugh at us and rightly so! But that is their case for abiogenesis and cell development from there.
Ill expand on 2/ and 3/ in subsequent posts - which I think are more fruitful ground.
"/ If consciosness is separable from the brain, no amount of chemistry can explain life.
And there is evidence 3/ of actual created life in our time. Compatible with Christianity, not Darwin!
