The validity of the Miller-Urey Theory

Yes. I am to show that organic molecules can come from non-organic molecules. The Miller-Urey experiment produced exactly this. The first stepping stone between the inorganic and the organic is not a stretch, in fact it took about a week. Further there's about two billion years after this before complex life started to come about. Jumping to the conclusion that nothing could happen because you can't think of a way to do it is wrong. Clearly complex lifeforms exist so it seems pretty obvious that it does work. As for the Miller-Urey experiments they provided a first step and showed quite definitively that you can make steps in that direction. The same things are created in the correct atmospheres. It's a lie to say they aren't. Chang et al. 1983; Miller 1987; Schlesinger and Miller 1983; Stribling and Miller 1987: showed the wide range of atmospheres produce amino acids. Schlesinger and Miller 1983 had the closest to the correct composition and categorically did produce amino acids. Though, we aren't saying that this is exactly how it happened, we don't really know. A lot of the science is up in the air, but one thing which is not is the Miller-Urey experiments. Perhaps early life originated in deep sea vents and the Miler-Urey experiments are a moot point. They would be a valid and moot point, in that organic molecules form under a wide variety of conditions. The correct atmospheres and the ones used in the early Miller-Urey experiments both produced cyanide and formaldehyde. These are rather pivotal building blocks for amino acids and larger organic compounds. Embalming fluid doesn't contain cyanide. Cyanide does not bias chirality. The correct atmospheres produced the same result. Resorting to outright lies is a little bit, oh, I don't know... dishonest. You suggest that the validity of the Miller-Urey experiments rests on the possibility of life forming from it. But that wasn't the goal of Miller-Urey, they wanted to see what would happen. Their result speaks for itself. Early Earth atmosphere would easily have produced complex organic molecules. That's why they are valid that is what they did. As for the possibility of life forming on par with anything, this argument is far from the topic at hand, I recommend reading "The Argument from Biogenesis: Probabilities against a Natural Origin of Life," Biology & Philosophy 19.5 (November, 2004), pp. 739-64 by Richard Carrier. In Addendum B, Carrier adds a special note underlying all the mistakes for calculations that odds life could start: http://www.infidels.org... There is still the same, single, fundamental problem with all these statistical calculations, one that I mention in my review of Foster: no one knows what the first life was. People like Morowitz can try to calculate what is, at a minimum, possible, and laboratory experiments, like that which discovered the powers of tetrahymena (see Addenda C), can approach a guess, but these guesses still do not count as knowledge, and it is not sound to claim that simply because we don't know what it was, therefore we can't assume there was such a simple life form. And even if we accept such an argument, to go from there to "god" is essentially a god-of-the-gaps argument. When we did not know how the bumble-bee flew, was that an adequate ground for positing god as the answer, or was it instead cause for further scientific investigation aimed at finding out the natural explanation? All of science is the result of choosing the latter approach. Once there was a time when nothing was explained. Since then, everything which has been explained has been found to have a natural, not a divine, explanation. Although this does not prove that all future explanations will be of like kind, it shows that it is not at all unreasonable to expect this--and it is not a very reliable bet to expect the opposite. Theories which make the origin of life plausible are hypotheses like any others, awaiting future research--in fact, generating that research. On the other hand, in the words of Frank Salisbury, "Special creation or a directed evolution would solve the problem of the complexity of the gene, but such an idea has little scientific value in the sense of suggesting experiments." And the experiments suggested by Salisbury and his colleagues led, in fact, to a simplification of the very problem that vexed Salisbury in 1969. Science, once again, gets somewhere. Creationism gets us nowhere. Coppedge suspected in his day "many evolutionists have avoided such investigations [into the odds against life forming] because they intuitively recognize that it will threaten evolutionary doctrine" (p. 234). Yet scientists hardly avoided the matter at all. Quite to the contrary, while creationists engaged in no actual research for twenty-five years and contributed nothing to our understanding of biology, scientists chewed away at the very problems Salisbury and Coppedge discussed, and solved a great many of them (see Stuart Kauffman, The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution, 1993). That none of them thought to make arbitrary and groundless guesses for the purpose of calculating a useless statistic is a testament to their wisdom, just as it is a testament to the ignorance of those, like Coppedge, who actually do this. We only need consider which has added to our knowledge to see who is making better use of their time. -- We accept the validity of Miller-Urey not because it provides all the answers to all the questions. We aren't sure what it takes but the research is getting done. Miller-Urey was part of that research and filled in that first step. Somehow in a period of a 1,200,000,000 years life seems to have arisen from non-life and accordingly we exist here. The Miller-Urey Theory is valid. -------------- P.S. Flailing your arms meaninglessly and argue that we can't logically exist is a waste of time. Saying that because we don't have all the answers, there are no answers is one of the most negative and useless positions people can have. I don't think you doubt the validity of Miller-Urey, I think you feel duty-bound to cast unneeded doubts on scientific answers to the question of "how we got here". I think that you do this to preserve the answer of "God did it" from the march of science. If reality disagrees with the views you hold, dear man, don't attempt to change reality.