Abiogenesis has never been observed
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Contents |
Claim
Abiogenesis (life from non-life) has never been observed or recreated.
Source
- Anon, 1985. Life--How Did It Get Here? Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., p. 50.
Responses
- Although this claim is true, it is not clear why Creationists believe it is in any way significant, since it applies to Creationism just as well as it does to evolution. Of course, Creationists would assert that the Creation was observed, by God - but if you ask them how they know that God didn't observe abiogenesis, you will not get a coherent answer.
- Mainstream scientists don't claim that abiogenesis has been observed, so this can hardly be considered a criticism of mainstream science.
- If common descent is true, then we would expect to have not observed the abiogenesis event that caused the ancestor of modern life to appear. After all, if all life on earth descended from one living organism and that organism itself arose from non-life then no living thing of terrestrial origin could possibly have observed it happen. This criticism merely points out that the expected result is true.
- The atmospheric conditions today are not the same as they were 4 (+/- 0.1) billion years ago, at the time abiogenesis is expected to have happened, nor at any time during the existence of modern empirical or anecdotal observation. Thus, the fact that we haven't directly observed abiogenesis while it's happening does in fact support the hypothesis.
- There are credible reports of life's building blocks originating (such as in the Miller-Urey Experiment).
- Abiogenesis requires a sterile environment for complex molecules to be built. In a world saturated with organisms and molecular oxygen ready to consume even the smallest building blocks of life, it should come as no surprise that abiogenesis is not observed in nature now.
- Abiogenesis only needs to have happened once in a period of billions of years on a single planet orbiting one of the universe's 100 billion billion+ stars for there to be life.
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Fallacies contained in this claim
- Red Herring (claim is not relevant to evolution)
- Straw Man (scientists don't claim to have observed abiogenesis or even expect to)
- Moving Goalpost Syndrome (evidence of abiogenesis results in the setting of higher expectations)
- Argument from Ignorance (I can't believe abiogenesis, therefore it did not happen)
External Links
- J. Craig Venter Institute, January 24, 2008. Institute Scientists Create First Synthetic Bacterial Genome
- Gish, Duane Origin of Life: Critique of Early Stage Chemical Evolution Theories. Institute for Creation Research.
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