Dear Oliver,

Stanley Miller demonstrated by experiment that presumed conditions on earth could produce the organic building blocks of life.

Kauffman contends that matter has certain inherent self-organising properties so the possibility of 32 amino acid chains uniting to form life is much higher than the possibility of them coming together solely by chance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Miller

Stanley Lloyd Miller (March 7, 1930 - May 20, 2007) was an American chemist and biologist who is known for his studies into the origin of life, particularly the Miller-Urey experiment which demonstrated that organic compounds can be created by fairly simple physical processes from inorganic substances. The experiment used conditions then thought to provide an approximate representation of those present on the primordial Earth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Kauffman

Stuart Alan Kauffman (28 September 1939) is an American theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher concerning the origin of life on Earth. He is best known for arguing that the complexity of biological systems and organisms might result as much from self-organization and far-from-equilibrium dynamics as from Darwinian natural selection, as well as for applying models of Boolean networks to simplified genetic circuits.

I am now reading his book, "Investigations." If his contentions are accurate the existence of life is almost a certainty with certain preconditions which earth seemed to have.

Oliver,
You call yourself a skeptic. If you were really a skeptic, you would not entertain ‘convenient transient constructs’. Rather, you would be skeptical about them.

Bugsy,
Singular events may or may not be miracles. All I am suggesting is that all historical events leave behind evidence which can then be investigated.

It is said that he who defines the terms controls the discussion. That is why I objected to your assertion that miracles are untouchable by science. So let’s look again at some of these terms:

A mystery is something beyond our current ability to explain.

A miracle is something a bit different. It’s not necessarily inexplicable. For example, a coin entering a fish’s mouth is not inexplicable. Yet Jesus indicating who will be the next man to pull a fish out of the sea with a coin in its mouth is a marvel pointing to divine wisdom or predestination.

By one definition, a miracle is an event offering access to the divine. Jesus healing the man born blind is not the most powerful of all Biblical miracles, but is perhaps one of the most significant in that it promotes an overwhelming crisis between Jesus and others leading to Christ’s passion narrative.

Therefore, a scientist can investigate any event. Only after the investigation, dependent on the findings, is the event declared mundane, mysterious, marvelous, or miraculous. That’s a call of judgement.

As you say, there are some pretty big mysteries out there. Such is our ongoing experience of this world. We need not go out of our way to artificially create any.

In over half a century since the Miller-Urey experiments, through earnestness, our knowledge has grown immensely. To again quote Berlinski, “It would be the height of folly to doubt that our understanding of life’s origins has been immeasurably improved. But whether it has been immeasurably improved in a way that vigorously confirms the daring idea that living systems are chemical in their origin and so physical in their nature – that is another question entirely.”

Dear Dan,

I recognise that sometimes folk don't get things right the first time around and that a false model might still have value as a template for something more substantive. The Ancient Greeks had a false model of the atom, yet, despite its erroneous nature, the the Greek atom framework was informative. We know of the predictive power of QM, however, interpretations of phenomena are still fuzzy and underdeveloped.

Even for a model that works, Einstein acknowledged that the best fate for a theory was for the old theory be subordinated within a greater/better theory.

If an event is declared ‘miraculous’ it is because of its inexplicability Dan. Well, other than ‘Hand of God’ type explanations that is. They require the invocation of a divine supernatural element. However there are several different definitions of ‘miracle’ and the most mundane of them take it to mean ‘an unlikely or wondrous event’, which is not what we are talking about here. Oh, and they tend to be positive events, nobody thinks that freak accidents are miraculous, just unlikely. The Vatican doesn’t declare ‘miracles’ because they are just wonderful unlikely events. I would suggest that you be careful not to slip in and out of the multiple definitions here.
While mysteries on the other hand are a different kettle of fish and do not necessarily require a supernatural explanation, even if they are currently beyond our ability to explain them. Quite often mysteries have an explanation, or even multiple possible explanations, but we just don’t know the truth of them. For example, what happened to Amelia Earhart is a mystery, but not a miracle.

It could be argued that there are no miracles, only mysteries. Miracles require the divine, and vice versa.

If you are trying to argue that science has anything to say about the water into wine trick, I disagree. What evidence, other than supposed 'eyewitnesses' written into a narrative many years after the apparent event (which science could not deal with anyway), could science possibly work with?

I would suggest that Berlinski did not ponder too hard on the confirmation bias, and neither to you Dan.

Oliver,
So where and how are you demonstrating your skepticism?

Bugsy,
No, practically speaking, after 2000 years science can no longer investigate the water and wine. The jars will have dried up by now. What I am trying to demonstrate is the inconsistency with which definitions are being applied.

We work at describing the properties of matter and energy. What’s normative is described by law. One attempt to define a miracle was that which is inexplicable; that which defies normal description. We put water changing to wine into that category. Meanwhile we note with absolute regularity that life only descends from other life. Exhaustive efforts cannot explain the arrival of organic life from non-living chemicals. Hopes are stretched by an ideological necessity, that any ‘hand of God’ explanation must be firmly excluded (lest the arm and torso might also enter to give us a wake up slap in the face.)

"What I am trying to demonstrate is the inconsistency with which definitions are being applied."

No, you're not Dan. You're using parts of the definition to make it appear as if I'm being inconsistent, but I have not changed my meaning of the word 'miracle' in the sense I used it one iota.

'Miracle' as I used it (i.e.e in the religious sense) requires the divine and a divine explanation, it is not merely a mystery. Miracles are outside the realm of science, because if they were explicable by science they would no longer be miracles.

Exhaustive efforts cannot YET explain the arrival of life Dan. Big difference. But 'science' can conceive of a non-divine explanation, even if it is not fully informed yet. And I wouldn't really call our efforts 'exhaustive', that would imply that we have looked at all possible information.