Why Naturalism CANNOT Explain the Origin of Life

Can a living cell be built by mere chance or the bare necessities of natural law acting on dead matter? How did the genetic code originate? Can naturalistic processes explain the origin of the protein production process in the cell? In this interview, I’m joined by Rob Stadler (Ph.D. Medical Engineering MIT) who has written about the question of the origin of life in his book “Stairway to Life.” He sheds light on several biochemical phenomena which elude naturalistic explanations and raises the question of whether the methodological naturalism prevalent in the sciences is still justified. The truth is that various aspects of the cell machinery resemble the kind of systems human engineers come up with. Accordingly, the question of whether biochemical structures have been engineered or designed is raised naturally.

0:00 Intro
1:39 What got you into science?
2:18 Why study the origin of life?
5:54 Widespread misconceptions
7:25 Plausibility of naturalistic processes?
10:00 Stadler’s case in summary
11:30 Homochirality of building blocks
15:05 Consistent linkage of building blocks
18:11 Biopolymer reproduction
22:15 Self-defeating experiments?
24:54 Repairing biopolymers
28:56 Cell membranes
33:49 Harnessing energy
38:32 Why do naturalistic hopes persist?
40:51 Methodological naturalism
44:19 Objections to Rob’s case?
47:35 God or naturalism of the gaps?
51:43 The Urey-Miller experiment
52:58 Changing philosophy of science?
56:46 Polarization
57:59 Harold Urey’s article of faith

--- YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE ---

[MyContext]

The reason that methodological naturalism is a core aspect of science is due to the need to SHOW whatever claim such that the claim can be checked. Stories which cannot be checked is what the category "supernatural" represents at this time.

[petermuneme]

Added stairway to life to my booklist. This was such a fascinating discussion and really eye opening, I love what diving into apologetics and theology has allowed me to discover. This channel is a real blessing

[midlander]

59 minutes spent proving that Allah created life. Congratulations guys!

[wishlist]

So the alternatives are an unknown natural process that encourages homochirality (I see some research is ongoing) or a supernatural process that selects for it. I'll keep an open mind about either possibility. I do lean heavily towards naturalism for filling such gaps however. After all, those hasty God of the gaps solutions have never once panned out in the past!

[hammerjb]

Very informative and the book Stairway to Life provides much more detailed scientific information. To say life just happened by chance or abiogenesis is easy reveals a lack of understanding.

[danielfullerton]

This channel is great resource for people who want to learn to how to manipulate your brain to believe whatever you want to believe

[danbarnes]

Brilliant! Well done guys, good to see more people other than James Tour and Discovery Institute to addressing this.

[DiedraGoodwin]

I've been interested in evolutionary biology all my life and I think could give a decent account unprepared of how life is organized overall, by descent of course. But I haven't been interested until recently in the origin question. It just seemed too intractable. I think that biologists have been somewhat flummoxed by the problem. But we have to remember that we have only just begun to study biochemistry. When I was born nucleic acids had not been discovered. When I was in high school, biology had barely a hint of how energy works in cells. But I think that the time may now be here to tackle the big question.

A few years ago I came across the Alkaline Subsea Vent Theory for the origin of life and I finally became interested. If you don't want to believe that life arose naturally on Earth then you want to avoid reading about the Alkaline Vent Theory.

[georgethomas]

It will be good to take formal action to correct errors in the "origin of life" teaching contents in science textbooks in as many countries as possible

[FrainBart_main]

12:17 _"[...] you're gonna get 50 % left-handed and 50 % right-handed, equal distribution, that's natural. So you would think if life came from natural processes, what would you expect in the molecules of life? You would expect 50 % left 50 % right."_ Well, not if there is any selection pressure for having homochirality. If there is, then dr. Stadler's coin toss analogy is as wrong as Fred Hoyle's junkyard tornado analogy.

[graymatter]

THE WHOLE VIDEO IS BASED ON WATCHMAKER FALLACY

Timestamp:

Why study origin of life: 
What he means is abiogenesis how the first life occurred, that is the question we are yet to figure out. Just because we don't know how that doesn't mean god, What the scientists say is that almost 95-98%% of life is made up of elements which are most abundantly available in the Universe (Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen, Carbon) so life might not be that rare (We have yet to find out we haven't looked that far). When it comes abiogenesis life did not start as Pinocchio, it was no where near as complex as we see it today it mostly started off as strand of RNA or DNA or single-celled organism and eventually became multi-cellular. Again we do not know for sure how abiogenesis occurred but life almost for sure was not multi-cellular when it first emerged. Of course life in itself is complex what I meant in complexity is difference in single celled organism to multi cellular organism like Humans.

Widespread conceptions: 
The actuality of the experiment is made to see if we can create organic substance from inorganic substance, and they did create "Amino Acids" which are present in protein and proteins are building blocks of life that itself is a significant achievement (1953 Miller and Urey experiment), again just because WE have an issue recreating that doesn't mean nature had issues with it. People for many years couldn't even figure out how Egyptians built pyramids 4500 years ago and that was our own human culture let alone figure how nature did something 3.7 billion years ago.


Plausibility of naturalistic process: 
There is a difference between how we die and stars dying, they die at temperatures millions of degrees Celsius and pressure million times that of Earth and sometimes they explode with the such an intensity and energy that they out-shine an entire galaxy. Things are different at such extreme temperature and pressure. To even compare how a living thing as large as even whale dying to a star dying is just stupid.

Homochirality of building blocks:
A mixture of exact 50/50 enantiomers ( pairs of compounds with exactly the same connectivity but opposite three-dimensional shapes) is called racemic mixture, on the other hand a chiral substance is enantioenriched or heterochiral when its enantiomeric ratio is greater than 50:50 but less than 100:0, So it doesn't always have to be 50-50 other ratio exist too. Mistakes in DNA are not at all rare, hence we see mutations, Genetic Disorders etc so it is not always consistent. For all of that to happen, life had around 3.7 billion years to evolve and make corrections, many which did not did die out. Again he talks about science couldn't create DNA, the fact that we could even recreate some part of it is itself a huge thing, again just because we can't that doesn't mean nature couldn't.

Biopolymer reproduction: 
I do not know what he means by replicating doesn't happen, Cellular organism like and Bacteria have been doing that for pretty much forever and he goes on saying two cars like wow, cars don't regrow they are not living things. And replicating is not cutting in half and sticking to another organism.

Self-defeating experiments:
For the 99th time just because we couldn't do it that doesn't mean nature had issues.

In the first few things itself there are so many mistakes most of them relate to watchmaker fallacy.

Repairing Biopolymers:
Damage does happen every single day millions of new cells are produced and some of them have a chance to develop into cancerous cells, so they either repair themselves or die off or some cases do develop into cancer and sometimes immune systems does work to fight cancer in the case it doesn't they develop into cancer. Almost all livings have some sort of repair mechanism to ensure survival.

Cell membranes:
Phospholipids are the basic components of all present-day biological membranes, including the plasma membranes of both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells. The key characteristic of the phospholipids that form membranes is that they are amphipathic molecules, meaning that one portion of the molecule is soluble in water and another portion is not. Phospholipids have long, water-insoluble (hydrophobic) hydrocarbon chains joined to water-soluble (hydrophilic) head groups that contain phosphate. When placed in water, phospholipids spontaneously aggregate into a bilayer with their phosphate-containing head groups on the outside in contact with water and their hydrocarbon tails in the interior in contact with each other. Such a phospholipid bilayer forms a stable barrier between two aqueous compartments—for example, separating the interior of the cell from its external environment. And eventually over 3.7 billion years these membranes developed into the complexity we see today.

Energy Harness:

Why do naturalistic hopes persist:
Many things which once were thought to God we now have an explanation and most of the time even an definitive answer, the growth in science contributed to great things like modern machines, medicine, internet, telephones, airplanes, telescopes and the list forever goes on so they aren't desperately clinging on to things. Don't know on what assumptions they thought atheists aren't happy or don't have intellectual fulfillment.

Methodological naturalism:
Definition of Science: the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.
We tend to follow science as opposed to religious teaching is because religious teaching are vastly vague and un-reliable and there many mistakes which we wouldn't agree upon in today's world. Religion and the origin of religion has been spoken on many different platforms by many people.

This is a class in Stanford explaining origin

Objection to rob's case: 
Not sure what this is, but judging from what he himself said the scientists weren't simplifying life itself rather a single cellular organism. Again we don't know how abiogenesis happened and when we take about evidence there is literally NONE when it comes to god. No evidence of god Jupiter, Thor, Zeus, Horus, Enki, Vishnu, Allah, Jesus, Mosses and the 2 billion other which were said to exist.

Gaps: 
Science has pretty much explained most questions which were once assumed as god there are only few which it couldn't so we know science doesn't need to exist in between gaps rather it's religion desperately clinging onto the gaps where science can't yet tread. As I mentioned earlier, Scientists are actively trying to find out how nature did certain things many billions of years ago, they just don't say nature did it and sit back and chill while people who believe in religion did that for many years, They don't know how something happened and the answer was GOD and after that many did not even bother to question and many times people were killed for questioning religion or religious teachings. In the same video they mentioned many experiments which were made in order to understand origins of life, that itself means science is trying to come to an understanding.

Urey-Miller Experiment:
You can read about it there are so many articles and videos on this, everything I posted can also be found with 15-30 mins of research.

Changing philosophy of science: Science never pushed away possibilities many scientists still say there might be god but we haven't seen evidence as of yet hence we don't believe in him. It was religion pushing away idea of science for almost a millennia. Many scientists or people who came up with reasonable explanation which were against religion were out right killed, you can literally pull up the list of all the people executed by the church. Whereas no scientists has killed a theologist for the sake of his finding/teaching to stay relevant.

Polarization: Again its usually religious people who are not even open to scientific explanations and get immediately defensive not the other way around.

Harold-Urey particle of faith: 
You Roasted this man and his experiment for the entirety of the video but when suited put his quote up to support applause to that. Again we do not know how life started on this planet one day we'll figure it out.

[carel-bartviljoen]

The mention of the perpetual motion machine is not really an argument- we have life on earth, but we don't have perpetual motion, therefore only the former deserves an explanation?

[DerMelodist]

This is going to be a great talk, but I’ll have to postpone listening to it until later.

[bsatyam]

54:25 I take objection to the fact that any unnatural explanation is "a very real possibility". No, it is not, we have never observed any unnatural or supernatural event thus there is no reason to believe so. To entertain any possibility of sudden, unexplainable deviations from natural laws of physics is to lose all predictive power. You don't take inductive reasoning too seriously it seems.

[adamheywood]

No, life didn't arise by chance, it's a deterministic process of cause and effect

[bsatyam]

38:34 Dude, ever hear of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics? The 2nd law is only an emergent law at the large scale and on average, it does not preclude the formation of self replicating molecules. Progression towards lower entropy in pockets among on average increasing entropy everywhere else is entirely possible and we see that all around us. If quantum fluctuations can lead to large scale structure formation in the universe, given a playground of trillions of planets in the entire universe it would not surprise me that an unlikely event happened once (that we know of). Abiogenesis might be EXTREMELY unlikely, but there's a reason why planets where it does not happen do not host discussions like these. The anthropic principle is lost on people like you it seems.

[Qualier]

Saying atheists can't be intellectual as naturalists is funny when claimed by a YEC.

[MyMy-tvfd]

everything looks designed because it is

[piage]

hey Lukas, I was wondering which amazing medical and biological discoveries have come up from YEC/Creationist "science"? Is there anything that doctors are using today to cure something we couldn't before? I'm asking, cause if creationism is true and evolution is actually false, those genius creationist scientists should have come up with a lot new discoveries by now....

[avivastudios]

How could anyone think that life was an accident? Hopefully after this video they'd change their minds.