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What evidence would it take for more scientists to recognize that perhaps life didn't evolve through some evolutionary process, but was intentionally created? I

What evidence would it take for more scientists to recognize that perhaps life didn't evolve through some evolutionary process, but was intentionally created? It seems like few ever consider that their starting presupposition may be wrong.

bediger4000 2y ago
If we decided that life had been deliberately created, we could get some insight into the god or gods who did it. What kind of a diety creates parasites, for example. What kind of pantheon creates a universe with Goedel's Incompleteness built in, or the difficulty of the Busy Beaver game? Those are fun questions.
- latentsea 2y ago
  The real question, according to HN, is why did god create Kubernetes and have every developer glom onto it when only a handful of companies in the universe truly need it? Edit: the follow up question is "why isn't the universe just a shell script?"
scrapcode 2y ago
I certainly am trending that way as I grow older. As I've recently started to re-dive into Christian theology, the fine-tuning argument seems more and more interesting, and it's pretty difficult to find "good" secular arguments against it.
- roncesvalles 2y ago
  Aside from the mountain of actual evidence, just to build a philosophical intuition against fine-tuning - you need to appreciate the enormous scale of trial and error at play. - The Earth seems like the perfect planet but looking out into the sky there are trillions of planets that aren't perfect at all. - Most likely the universe also appears "perfect" for the same reason - there must be a graveyard of universes where the parameters just didn't work out for life. - Evolution is much the same - many mutations occur all the time, most are fixed by cellular machinery, most that aren't are deleterious, but once in a while a helpful mutation emerges. Take a moment to understand the timescale involved. Don't just handwave away 3.8 billion years as some number - feel it, starting at 1 year and stepping up each order of magnitude. You will realize that a million years is essentially "forever ago", and we had 3800 of those to get here. Consider how many species exist that aren't civilizational sentient intelligence.
  - _1tem 2y ago
    You’re misunderstanding the point about fine-tuning entirely. It doesn’t matter how many billions of years it took, if some of the parameters of fundamental physics were slightly different, even trillions of years would’ve resulted in nothing.
  - beltsazar 2y ago
    Fine tuning for the earth might be able to be explained away most easily, like you said. Fine tuning for the universe, though... Firstly, we have zero evidence for multiverse. Some scientists even argue that the idea is untestable and unfalsifiable. When you said: > there must be a graveyard of universes where the parameters just didn't work out for life You just committed inverse gambler's fallacy. It's like: > You wake up with amnesia, with no clue as to how you got where you are. In front of you is a monkey bashing away on a typewriter, writing perfect English. This clearly requires explanation. You might think: “Maybe I’m dreaming … maybe this is a trained monkey … maybe it’s a robot.” What you would not think is “There must be lots of other monkeys around here, mostly writing nonsense.” You wouldn’t think this because what needs explaining is why this monkey—the only one you’ve actually observed—is writing English, and postulating other monkeys doesn’t explain what this monkey is doing. — https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-improbable-existence-is-no-evidence-for-a-multiverse/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-improbable-ex...
    - roncesvalles 2y ago
      Sure, but I think that's a form of arguing about semantics. Let's say I argue that our universe is fine-tuned because the constants of the universe were decided by dice roll and that there are a trillion other universes with no chance of life. What about the "substrate" within which these trillion universes formed? Wasn't it fine-tuned enough to give rise to at least one universe (ours) with life, just as our universe was fine-tuned enough to give rise to our planet? Now I could argue that actually there are a trillion such "universe substrates" and ours is the one that's fine-tuned. However, it's clear that eventually, everything must converge to a single base layer of existence that just so happens to be "fine-tuned" enough for everything above it to produce at least one instance of life. But this is trivial.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  I don't know, I think the arthropic principle is still going really strong: It's like this because if it wasn't we would be asking different questions or not around to ask at all. It's hard to consider something "so improbable that it must have been God" when we look out at a universe so incomprehensibly bigger that the real question becomes why we haven't evidence of it happening more.
  - philsnow 2y ago
    I know it was just a typo but "arthropic principle" sounds like something from A Deepness in the Sky
    - Terr_ 2y ago
      That would dovetail with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation
  - beltsazar 2y ago
    The anthropic principle is ridiculous. Suppose that, against all odds, you survive the worst plane crash in history. Then you ask NTSB what caused the crash and why you survived. They answer: "Nonsense! You wouldn’t have asked the questions if you hadn't survived." Questions stand alone, regardless of whether someone or something exists to ask them.
  - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    As it's often used, the anthropic principle is fatally flawed. It often starts with an argument between a creationist (could also be an advocate of intelligent design, but I'll just call them the creationist) and an evolutionist. The creationist says, look, the origin of life by purely naturalistic means is ridiculously improbable (and therefore it's reasonable to consider the possibility that God did it). They trot out some generally-accepted scientific principle, do a back-of-the-envelope calculation, and come up with a number that is, in fact, ridiculously improbable. The evolutionist responds with the anthropic principle - if no life had arisen in this universe, we would not be here arguing about how life arose. This is clearly logically correct. It is also completely irrelevant. The creationist didn't argue that life couldn't have arisen in this universe. They argued that it could not have arisen by purely naturalistic means. They're arguing about how, not about whether. The creationist might answer: "Yes, I agree that if life had not arisen in this universe, either by creation or by naturalistic processes, then we would not be here having this conversation. But the question is, which way did life begin?" The anthropic principle doesn't address that issue whatsoever. It doesn't address that issue unless you add an assumption - that life had to begin by purely naturalistic means, that is, that the probability of creation is precisely zero. Then the anthropic principle is relevant, but then there's a new issue, that of begging the question. I suspect that this assumption is present on the side of everyone on the evolution side that pulls out the anthropic principle in an argument with a creationist, but I have never heard it explicitly stated. I'm not even sure the evolutionist realizes they're making an assumption - it's so ingrained in their world view that they can't think that the alternative might be possible. I grant you that the universe is huge and the evidence available is small. But that can turn into an "evolution of the gaps" argument quite easily, so I'm not sure you want to seriously use it.
IAmGraydon 2y ago
I know I really shouldn’t take this bait, but…no one has proof either way. That said, we have a massive amount of scientific evidence that shows it could have naturally evolved and zero evidence that something created us. Finding something that we don’t understand doesn’t mean we have evidence of creation. Ancient civilizations believed that rain came from the gods because they were unaware of how weather combines with the phases of matter and creates atmospheric condensation. That being the state of things at the moment, I lean towards the evidence. Also, this is a scientific oriented discussion forum, so you must expect that many people here are going to disagree with you. Could you be correct? Sure, but we just don’t have reason to believe that at this point.
- _1tem 2y ago
  > we have a massive amount of scientific evidence that shows it could have naturally evolved Define “naturally”. However you define it, that is precisely what some people call “divinely”.
  - IAmGraydon 2y ago
    By naturally I mean without the influence of an external higher intelligence/god/divine being.
- luqtas 2y ago
  yeah but what if the creators of life orchestrate the condensation? /s the amount of text (considering this is a hardware/software community) i read here defending psychoanalys/acupuncture & the likes as well some opinions on ecology/nutrition makes me pretty agnostic of scientific orientation from users... we are (most of the times) just a bunch of laypersons often only reading titles & conclusions of most papers we read
  - IAmGraydon 2y ago
    Up until the last few years, opinions not supported by science would be quickly down voted to nonexistence on Hacker News. The discourse remained high level enough to dissuade people who don't know what they're talking about from participating. Something has unfortunately changed recently. I have my thoughts on what is causing this, but one thing is for sure - Dang's job has gotten exponentially more difficult in recent years if he wants HN to remain a bastion of elevated discussion on the internet.
photonthug 2y ago
For better or worse the standard of evidence for almost everything is more like “smoking gun” than “I found a bullet”. In some cases this is bad, in others it is good. Just consider all the criminal matters where the crime is only a crime if you can additionally demonstrate intent, which is strange right, since it doesn’t change outcomes / injuries at all. Since sufficiently ancient guns won’t even be smoking anymore this will be problematic for creationists even if they are correct, so I think we’d need a new kind of burning bush.
andrewflnr 2y ago
Enough evidence to overcome the enormous pile of evidence that life evolved over billions of years. Often literal piles, in the case of geology, but there's a lot of different kinds of interlocking evidence that suggest a pretty clear picture, even if a few puzzle pieces are still missing. Unless you're thinking of panspermia, in which case most any hard evidence would do. But that doesn't really sound like your thing. - a former creationist
- _1tem 2y ago
  It’s not just that a few puzzle pieces are missing. Abiogenesis is entirely unproven and nobody has a clue how it works and nobody can demonstrate experimentally any of the hypothetical mechanisms.
  - andrewflnr 2y ago
    No, that actually is still "a few puzzle" pieces compared to the entirety of the geologic record, relatively clear progressions of life forms over time that broadly line up with physical and genetic taxonomy. There are some gaps, yeah, but enough to clearly imply that the overall picture is correct. By contrast, the epistemological picture for creationism is a trash fire. It requires an ever increasing amount of special pleading to explain all the other evidence. And you don't get to complain that "abiogenesis is entirely unproven", about an event that necessarily happened long before recorded history under entirely different conditions, unless your own theory can stand up to a higher standard of evidence. Which it can't. Speaking, again, as someone who grew up under creationism and had to lever myself out of it piece by piece of evidence. (Oh, and if you think "nobody has a clue" how abiogenesis worked, you're out of date. Try reading about the work of Nick Lane and Jeremy England, IIRC.)
    - _1tem 2y ago
      You don’t get to claim that an “event happened long before recorded history under entirely different conditions”, because anyone can make that claim. That’s not science, not evidence. I can claim the same thing for intentional creation, for example. If anybody has a clue how abiogenesis works, then they should prove it by doing it. Manufacture some bacteria out of sand. Claiming “it takes a trillion years of primordial soup” is an another wild unsubstantiated claim that anyone can make. That’s the same thing as saying: ”wait a few centuries and God will show you.” By the way, evidence for natural evolution does not contradict creationism, because God could’ve created some things through a process of natural evolution — it’s a false dichotomy to assume that evidence for evolution is evidence against creationism; it’s not. Whether or not natural evolution happened is tangential to the claim of creationism. The epistemological picture for creation is quite sound. Fermi’s paradox is clear evidence we’re special. Logically, we can define God as existence itself, and the existence of “anything” is proof of Him. It simply can’t be any other way. The fact that we have intentionality is also proof that intentionality “exists” and that in turn is proof that Existence is intentional.

bediger4000 2y ago

If we decided that life had been deliberately created, we could get some insight into the god or gods who did it. What kind of a diety creates parasites, for example. What kind of pantheon creates a universe with Goedel's Incompleteness built in, or the difficulty of the Busy Beaver game? Those are fun questions.

latentsea 2y ago
The real question, according to HN, is why did god create Kubernetes and have every developer glom onto it when only a handful of companies in the universe truly need it? Edit: the follow up question is "why isn't the universe just a shell script?"

scrapcode 2y ago

I certainly am trending that way as I grow older. As I've recently started to re-dive into Christian theology, the fine-tuning argument seems more and more interesting, and it's pretty difficult to find "good" secular arguments against it.

roncesvalles 2y ago
Aside from the mountain of actual evidence, just to build a philosophical intuition against fine-tuning - you need to appreciate the enormous scale of trial and error at play. - The Earth seems like the perfect planet but looking out into the sky there are trillions of planets that aren't perfect at all. - Most likely the universe also appears "perfect" for the same reason - there must be a graveyard of universes where the parameters just didn't work out for life. - Evolution is much the same - many mutations occur all the time, most are fixed by cellular machinery, most that aren't are deleterious, but once in a while a helpful mutation emerges. Take a moment to understand the timescale involved. Don't just handwave away 3.8 billion years as some number - feel it, starting at 1 year and stepping up each order of magnitude. You will realize that a million years is essentially "forever ago", and we had 3800 of those to get here. Consider how many species exist that aren't civilizational sentient intelligence.
- _1tem 2y ago
  You’re misunderstanding the point about fine-tuning entirely. It doesn’t matter how many billions of years it took, if some of the parameters of fundamental physics were slightly different, even trillions of years would’ve resulted in nothing.
- beltsazar 2y ago
  Fine tuning for the earth might be able to be explained away most easily, like you said. Fine tuning for the universe, though... Firstly, we have zero evidence for multiverse. Some scientists even argue that the idea is untestable and unfalsifiable. When you said: > there must be a graveyard of universes where the parameters just didn't work out for life You just committed inverse gambler's fallacy. It's like: > You wake up with amnesia, with no clue as to how you got where you are. In front of you is a monkey bashing away on a typewriter, writing perfect English. This clearly requires explanation. You might think: “Maybe I’m dreaming … maybe this is a trained monkey … maybe it’s a robot.” What you would not think is “There must be lots of other monkeys around here, mostly writing nonsense.” You wouldn’t think this because what needs explaining is why this monkey—the only one you’ve actually observed—is writing English, and postulating other monkeys doesn’t explain what this monkey is doing. — https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-improbable-existence-is-no-evidence-for-a-multiverse/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-improbable-ex...
  - roncesvalles 2y ago
    Sure, but I think that's a form of arguing about semantics. Let's say I argue that our universe is fine-tuned because the constants of the universe were decided by dice roll and that there are a trillion other universes with no chance of life. What about the "substrate" within which these trillion universes formed? Wasn't it fine-tuned enough to give rise to at least one universe (ours) with life, just as our universe was fine-tuned enough to give rise to our planet? Now I could argue that actually there are a trillion such "universe substrates" and ours is the one that's fine-tuned. However, it's clear that eventually, everything must converge to a single base layer of existence that just so happens to be "fine-tuned" enough for everything above it to produce at least one instance of life. But this is trivial.
Terr_ 2y ago
I don't know, I think the arthropic principle is still going really strong: It's like this because if it wasn't we would be asking different questions or not around to ask at all. It's hard to consider something "so improbable that it must have been God" when we look out at a universe so incomprehensibly bigger that the real question becomes why we haven't evidence of it happening more.
- philsnow 2y ago
  I know it was just a typo but "arthropic principle" sounds like something from A Deepness in the Sky
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    That would dovetail with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation
- beltsazar 2y ago
  The anthropic principle is ridiculous. Suppose that, against all odds, you survive the worst plane crash in history. Then you ask NTSB what caused the crash and why you survived. They answer: "Nonsense! You wouldn’t have asked the questions if you hadn't survived." Questions stand alone, regardless of whether someone or something exists to ask them.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  As it's often used, the anthropic principle is fatally flawed. It often starts with an argument between a creationist (could also be an advocate of intelligent design, but I'll just call them the creationist) and an evolutionist. The creationist says, look, the origin of life by purely naturalistic means is ridiculously improbable (and therefore it's reasonable to consider the possibility that God did it). They trot out some generally-accepted scientific principle, do a back-of-the-envelope calculation, and come up with a number that is, in fact, ridiculously improbable. The evolutionist responds with the anthropic principle - if no life had arisen in this universe, we would not be here arguing about how life arose. This is clearly logically correct. It is also completely irrelevant. The creationist didn't argue that life couldn't have arisen in this universe. They argued that it could not have arisen by purely naturalistic means. They're arguing about how, not about whether. The creationist might answer: "Yes, I agree that if life had not arisen in this universe, either by creation or by naturalistic processes, then we would not be here having this conversation. But the question is, which way did life begin?" The anthropic principle doesn't address that issue whatsoever. It doesn't address that issue unless you add an assumption - that life had to begin by purely naturalistic means, that is, that the probability of creation is precisely zero. Then the anthropic principle is relevant, but then there's a new issue, that of begging the question. I suspect that this assumption is present on the side of everyone on the evolution side that pulls out the anthropic principle in an argument with a creationist, but I have never heard it explicitly stated. I'm not even sure the evolutionist realizes they're making an assumption - it's so ingrained in their world view that they can't think that the alternative might be possible. I grant you that the universe is huge and the evidence available is small. But that can turn into an "evolution of the gaps" argument quite easily, so I'm not sure you want to seriously use it.

IAmGraydon 2y ago

I know I really shouldn’t take this bait, but…no one has proof either way. That said, we have a massive amount of scientific evidence that shows it could have naturally evolved and zero evidence that something created us. Finding something that we don’t understand doesn’t mean we have evidence of creation. Ancient civilizations believed that rain came from the gods because they were unaware of how weather combines with the phases of matter and creates atmospheric condensation. That being the state of things at the moment, I lean towards the evidence. Also, this is a scientific oriented discussion forum, so you must expect that many people here are going to disagree with you. Could you be correct? Sure, but we just don’t have reason to believe that at this point.

_1tem 2y ago
> we have a massive amount of scientific evidence that shows it could have naturally evolved Define “naturally”. However you define it, that is precisely what some people call “divinely”.
- IAmGraydon 2y ago
  By naturally I mean without the influence of an external higher intelligence/god/divine being.
luqtas 2y ago
yeah but what if the creators of life orchestrate the condensation? /s the amount of text (considering this is a hardware/software community) i read here defending psychoanalys/acupuncture & the likes as well some opinions on ecology/nutrition makes me pretty agnostic of scientific orientation from users... we are (most of the times) just a bunch of laypersons often only reading titles & conclusions of most papers we read
- IAmGraydon 2y ago
  Up until the last few years, opinions not supported by science would be quickly down voted to nonexistence on Hacker News. The discourse remained high level enough to dissuade people who don't know what they're talking about from participating. Something has unfortunately changed recently. I have my thoughts on what is causing this, but one thing is for sure - Dang's job has gotten exponentially more difficult in recent years if he wants HN to remain a bastion of elevated discussion on the internet.

photonthug 2y ago

For better or worse the standard of evidence for almost everything is more like “smoking gun” than “I found a bullet”. In some cases this is bad, in others it is good. Just consider all the criminal matters where the crime is only a crime if you can additionally demonstrate intent, which is strange right, since it doesn’t change outcomes / injuries at all. Since sufficiently ancient guns won’t even be smoking anymore this will be problematic for creationists even if they are correct, so I think we’d need a new kind of burning bush.

andrewflnr 2y ago

Enough evidence to overcome the enormous pile of evidence that life evolved over billions of years. Often literal piles, in the case of geology, but there's a lot of different kinds of interlocking evidence that suggest a pretty clear picture, even if a few puzzle pieces are still missing. Unless you're thinking of panspermia, in which case most any hard evidence would do. But that doesn't really sound like your thing. - a former creationist

_1tem 2y ago
It’s not just that a few puzzle pieces are missing. Abiogenesis is entirely unproven and nobody has a clue how it works and nobody can demonstrate experimentally any of the hypothetical mechanisms.
- andrewflnr 2y ago
  No, that actually is still "a few puzzle" pieces compared to the entirety of the geologic record, relatively clear progressions of life forms over time that broadly line up with physical and genetic taxonomy. There are some gaps, yeah, but enough to clearly imply that the overall picture is correct. By contrast, the epistemological picture for creationism is a trash fire. It requires an ever increasing amount of special pleading to explain all the other evidence. And you don't get to complain that "abiogenesis is entirely unproven", about an event that necessarily happened long before recorded history under entirely different conditions, unless your own theory can stand up to a higher standard of evidence. Which it can't. Speaking, again, as someone who grew up under creationism and had to lever myself out of it piece by piece of evidence. (Oh, and if you think "nobody has a clue" how abiogenesis worked, you're out of date. Try reading about the work of Nick Lane and Jeremy England, IIRC.)
  - _1tem 2y ago
    You don’t get to claim that an “event happened long before recorded history under entirely different conditions”, because anyone can make that claim. That’s not science, not evidence. I can claim the same thing for intentional creation, for example. If anybody has a clue how abiogenesis works, then they should prove it by doing it. Manufacture some bacteria out of sand. Claiming “it takes a trillion years of primordial soup” is an another wild unsubstantiated claim that anyone can make. That’s the same thing as saying: ”wait a few centuries and God will show you.” By the way, evidence for natural evolution does not contradict creationism, because God could’ve created some things through a process of natural evolution — it’s a false dichotomy to assume that evidence for evolution is evidence against creationism; it’s not. Whether or not natural evolution happened is tangential to the claim of creationism. The epistemological picture for creation is quite sound. Fermi’s paradox is clear evidence we’re special. Logically, we can define God as existence itself, and the existence of “anything” is proof of Him. It simply can’t be any other way. The fact that we have intentionality is also proof that intentionality “exists” and that in turn is proof that Existence is intentional.