Abiogenesis is basically stating that life arrived from non life..
Sort of. Though "life" isn't exactly an on/off switch, there is a bit of a grey area in-between. For example, there are self-replicating proteins called
prions. They can reproduce themselves, which is a characteristic of life, so are they alive? And then there are other things like viruses, which have more characteristics of life than prions. Are they alive?
Basically, it's likely that in the beginning some
very simple things with the characteristic of self-replication appeared, just because there was a planet-sized chemistry set going on there, and they self-replicated imperfectly. Those differences due to poor replication were likely almost always bad or neutral, but the tiny percentage of differences that were good made those good changes more likely to spread. Other good changes occasionally happened and all of these good changes accumulated repeatedly over countless replications and tons of time, gradually moving it closer and closer to something we'd call "alive", until something with all of the characteristics of life eventually appeared.
So it's less like a zero suddenly becoming a one-hundred percent, than a zero gradually working up to a one-hundred percent, simply because incremental improvements over generations were favored.
I find that interesting because from my own observation.. life requires life to survive.
Some life, but not all life. Blue-green algae only needs water, sunlight, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and a few other trace elements, all of which are readily available in the environment.
That said, you can't really look at life today and assume that that's what life looked like in the beginning when it first formed. The Earth was very different back then. Even today there are forms of life that, instead of feeding off other organisms, can live off of the heat and chemicals from geothermal vents, places which are a bit closer to how the Earth looked when life started.
Observations are great, but make sure you look at a wide enough variety of examples, especially the ones that are closest to what is being discussed. Looking at animals when we're discussing the simplest of organisms won't reveal anywhere near as much as looking at something much more similar, and, in fact, may actually lead you astray due to their differences.
Animals eat other living things.. does abiogensis apply to life like the life in a human and insect.. or like the life.. in a plant? or both?
I don't know what you mean here, but plants and animals are a relatively recent invention, appearing billions of years after abiogenesis took place, and they don't really resemble early life at all. Abiogenesis is the natural process by which simple organic compounds eventually became life long ago, after that evolution took over.
" I don't know" ... and "We're a product of Intelligent design" are two very different answers. 1 makes no attempts at answering the questions .. while the other uses logic to come to the most logical conclusion our mind can process.
Saying "I don't know" doesn't mean that an attempt wasn't made at answering the question, it simply means that, despite any attempts that may or may not have occurred, you don't know the answer. One should never be afraid to admit that you don't know the answer to something when that's actually the case.
As for "intelligent design", this is
not the most logical conclusion. If it were, then it would be supported by objective evidence and be an accepted part of science. As it is, there is almost no research supporting it, and there are numerous things which refute "intelligent design", such as the many examples of terrible "design". For example, the
recurrent laryngeal nerve in mammals, which goes from the brain, down around the heart, and then back up to the top of the throat. This happens even in giraffes, where that trip loops over about 15 feet just for the nerve to go a few inches from its starting point. Unlike ID, evolution can explain this how this terrible "design" occurred, since in our ancient fish-like ancestors this was a direct route, which is what evolution would have predicted.
You see, the ability to make testable and accurate predictions is what makes evolution a logical scientific explanation for the evidence. ID, on the other hand, makes no testable predictions, it doesn't account for terrible "design", and it gives no actual explanations for what we find. Instead it merely pawns one "mystery" off on an even bigger mystery, thus ultimately explaining nothing at all.
ID utterly fails to explain the gradual appearance of species iterating upon themselves in the fossil record leading up to what we see around us today. It simply assumes that it couldn't happen naturally, and then takes that "I give up" non-explanation, and attempts to use it as "evidence" for a creator. Then, every single time, people present them a natural explanation that they didn't think of, and they move on. Leading to the same ever-shrinking "God of the gaps" type argument that produced creationism/ID in the first place.
ID/creationism is an utter failure at being even remotely scientific or evidence based. It's just religion cosplaying in a lab coat.
Everything we see is the result of a form of creation.. from the mountains.. to your house.. your body.. everything is the result of "creation" whether intentionally or accidentally or through the effect of another action.. everything appears to be the result of something.
But saying that everything is the result of creation is merely assuming exactly what you're attempting to prove here. This is just begging the question. Where is your
evidence that it's created?
Furthermore,
not everything is the result of something. If you take a look at quantum physics, things happen all the time without causes. Sure, one can statistically predict the rate at which an isotope will decay, but one cannot say which particular atom will decay or exactly when it will occur. That's because there isn't any specific cause for any particular atom to decay, it's simply statistical chance. There is no "A triggers B to happen" causation here.
So, again, you're confusing your macro-world observations here on the thin surface of the Earth, which is just a tiny fraction of how things work, for how everything always works everywhere. Observations are great, but don't confuse your tiny slice of every-day reality for how everything else works at all levels of observation all the time.
So I think it's very logical to assume that our universe is the result of something as well. What this something is.. is what we consider "God". Your perspective is that everything is the result of nothing or itself.. which isn't logical based on everything we know and understand.
Even if you just think that, by your logic, the universe has a cause, that's all the further it gets you. There is no reason to assume that the cause has to be intelligent or a being or anything else beyond "a cause".
Based on what you've presented in those two posts, even if we ignore the unsupported and apparently incorrect assumption that all things have to have a cause, jumping to conclusions beyond "there was a cause" are not supported, thus are not logical.
Thinking that something sprang forth from nothing.. is the illogical stance.. and this is based on every day life.
But every day life is
nothing like the non-existence of time and space, so to compare the two is, again, illogical. You keep arguing from your personal experience, but there could be nothing in your personal experience that resembles the non-existence of everything. It's like being a deep-sea fish and arguing that water must exist everywhere, because that's all that you experience. Sometimes you have to look a bit further.
Even here in the universe we know now, particles pop into and out of existence in a vacuum (which is still a very different form of "nothing"), with no particular cause,
all the time. Look into
virtual particles some time. So is it really so illogical to think that something could come from "nothing" when that kind of happens already?
Maybe, maybe not. There are lots of other possibilities. I'm no physicist. However, the fact that I don't know how the universe began doesn't mean that I get to jump to the conclusion that a thinking being created it. You can't jump from "I don't know the cause" to "therefore I know the cause".
So, like I said earlier, when you don't know the cause, it's far more logical to simply say "I don't know" and not believe any claim until sufficient evidence supporting a particular cause is provided.
