I'm a chemical engineer. I exploit the 2nd law every day to make people's lives better. What do you do?
How long have we had rocks on this planet? 3-4 billion years? That's your answer. In 3-4 billion years, we have much evidence of simple compounds forming, random arrangements of simple compounds forming, and complex life forms decaying into simple compounds.
Perhaps you've already addressed this, but none of this contradicts the idea that all life on Earth descended from a common ancestor.
Not at all. I don't know enough biology to even comment intelligently on that. And it doesn't really disprove that methane molecules randomly arranged themselves into proteins that randomly arranged themselves into cells. But based on our understanding of chemistry right now, it seems really unlikely. Like beyond "10^millionth" unlikely.
The theory doesn't say that simple molecules "randomly" arranged into proteins (which are quite complex), or that these proteins "randomly" arranged into cells. You're correct -- that would be too unlikely to be believed. Its not like you had a bunch of methane molecules swimming around, and in an instant they happened to form randomly into a protein. It was a very slow, incremental process -- guided by selection of molecule arrangements that were advantageous to the structure as a whole (like natural selection, applied at a much lower level). I'm not a biologist either, but I think this is one of the key points to keep in mind.
I doubt we'll truly know how "it began" in our lifetimes, if ever. Heck, it could've came from asteroids or somewhere outside our planet. Finding another world with life would help, but that'd open up a round of new questions or leave old ones unanswered. Furthermore, life pretty much terraformed the earth along with it's natural geological changes over the course of billions of years. We probably need to observe a lot of "earths" through different phases to be a little more sure. But I don't think there's a question among scientists of how we are related to other life on earth. The ocean covers ~70% of the earth, holds incredible diversity beyond what we've seen on land, and is the origin to almost all life on earth. Yet humanity has only explored around 5% of it. And in general, there's a lot of organisms that act as time machines for a particular niche. Some give us understanding of how single celled organisms can act like a multicelled animals. They work collectively and efficiently for specific tasks (organ-like) as one major unit, even though they're all individual units with their own DNA. It's incredible and surprising given that we look up to the stars for new life and adventure when we've barely scratched what's underneath the water. We might be limited with the tools we have, but that shouldn't limit the mind and it's potential to imagine and dream.
There are very few rocks around that are nearly that old. Most of the surface of the Earth is much younger than that. Even then, that's not the same as a controlled experiment for 3-4 billion years. I'm an astrophysicist, I know the difference between looking at snapshots of different things at different ages to piece together a story and actually being able to do experiments like other physicists can.
Agreed. <object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/zSgiXGELjbc&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xd0d0d0&hl=en_US&feature=player_detailpage&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/zSgiXGELjbc&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xd0d0d0&hl=en_US&feature=player_detailpage&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="640" height="385"></embed></object>
That's the problem. The forces of chemistry work in the opposite direction. Natural selection in chemistry goes to toward the simple, not the complex. It's why the intelligent atheists almost always go to the wild guesses like that it came from outside of our planet (a place with different laws of chemistry, I suppose).
This is the heart of the debate, and what I think should really be the focus (discussions about abiogenesis are fun, don't get me wrong). Anyhow, the term "unlikely" is interesting in your point above, because the implied idea is that something unlikely hints at external (godly) influence. I think that's a dangerous viewpoint in that it actively stifles further curiosity, thus my analogy to a primitive culture finding Orion in the stars. I don't see anything wrong with finding god in nature a la MadMax's post - but the connotation that complexity inherently even hints at god strikes me as anti-intellectual pseudoscience not far removed from dogma (e.g. Copernicus, Galileo). More to the point at hand, I find the concept of god needing "justification" through some sort of physical process counter-intuitive to the idea of faith. If you claim to believe in god but find solace in complexity as pseudo-proof, you don't really believe. Please note that I am not accusing you of such a sentiment, but your ideology is, nonetheless, close. I guess I don't see the point in relating science to god based on our limited understanding of a particular facet of it.
I don't think you can claim this as a rule, but maybe I'm not understanding what you mean by "simple" and "complex" here. If in chemical reactions things always became simpler, then you wouldn't even have the formation of molecules.
I'm sorry, but I disagree. It's not pseudoscience (or science, for that matter) in my mind. It's physical observations that help confirm my faith. And it's not just the idea of the complexity. It's the idea that the complexity goes against everything else we observe about chemistry. Now, just because we understand (fully or partially) the physical forces behind something doesn't weaken God's influence in my mind. Here in Calgary, I can look West and see beautiful mountains and see God in them. I don't get all the plate tectonics and other forces that created them, but geologists have a pretty good idea. I can know a little about those physical processes, understand that someone else has a pretty thorough understanding, and still look at it and see God's beautiful creation. (I think I'm in good company. Even as a deist, Einstein did the same.)
The more accurate descriptions are more stable and less stable. The most stable molecules aren't always single atoms, but they are generally very simple. Methane, carbon dioxide, water, etc. It's why they are so common. Less stable, more complex molecules are created only with input of energy, and the ones that occur without biological forces or very controlled processes with massive energy inputs are virtually always just random combinations of these simple molecules.
Fair enough. We disagree, it's cool. Not much point to discussing this further (unless you want to). I've always liked this. Spinoza, Einstein, Hawking etc...I think they have the right ideas about how to relate a god to natural phenomena.
But this doesn't rule out the possibility, with a massive number of trials over a vast period of time in a sterile environment, that very simple self-replicating molecular structures could have formed by chance and boot-strapped the evolutionary process. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/abioprob.html
Not on the scale of forming a complex life supporting eco-planet. Molecules today are more successfully formed when intelligent humans intervene or complex systems operate correctly pretty much to perfection like plant photo-synthesis.
