Balance of Truth as expressed in Biblical Scripture and Science

[DennisF]

Why do you assume that evolving organisms are "developing towards greater complexity?"

I don't assume it; that is the widely accepted view in the life sciences, that for instance, mammals are of greater complexity than bacteria. If you challenge the assumption (that nobody is making) that the evolution of complexity is monotonic, then I would agree that there is no necessary reason to believe that, but in the aggregate, or on average over a long stretch of evolving, greater complexity is the result. The word evolution even contains that meaning. (Otherwise devolution would be a more accurate word.)

 

[DennisF]

Okay Gene, let's go through it.
First, you are right that not every contributor to science, especially since the Enlightenment (which was not science) began to infect the minds of some in the scientific community. In the context I wrote, I was objecting to those who reject anything from those who speak contrary to their worldview with the rebuttal that it is not science, whereas accept uncritically anti-creation non-science coming from scientists such as Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins.

You seem to be missing the point. ID is in itself not addressing the god-antigod issue but is addressing a limitation or weakness or fault in the neo-Darwinian evolution (NDE) theory about how life could develop incrementally. Gould might have been one of the first to recognize that incremental development not only does not work, the fossil record of the Cambrian explosion contradicts it. Yet Gould had no solution to the problem posed by ID about NDE. Can you stick to that? If you can, then you are addressing what the ID movement (by whatever name) is addressing.

Did Einstein do actual research? He did no "actual research" as experimental science, yet he is hailed as a great physicist. As for publishing, the prominent IDers have already addressed this and most of them have book-length publications. The issue they raise is controversial because those controlling the channels of mainstream scientific publication themselves have a bias on this issue and consider, as you do, that there is nothing of value that ID can contribute to the discussion. That is not a scientific but a worldview decision, a demonstration of confirmation bias that did not exist among scientists before the mid-19th century.

Gatekeepers of scientific publications are not merely scientists; they are humans who hold worldviews and this biases their gatekeeping. It is equivalent to the medieval Schoolmen rejecting the heliocentric theory because it clashed with their worldview. You show your own bias by using derogatory language like "Meyer and his ilk". The gatekeepers share your attitude.

All you are saying is that evolutionary biology is an active field of study. Great; I am glad that it is because the flaws in NDE need to be addressed, yet few of the mainstream participants are addressing the quite valid questions that the IDers have raised.

And it is not only those who might be identified under the ID label. Have you looked at what the Santa Fe Institute has been doing? They too are raising the same kind of questions that the IDers have been raising, from a computational-complexity standpoint. That is what Meyer, Gelenter, and Berlinski also were discussing.

Instead of telling us how unscientific these people are, why don't you instead address the scientific problems they have raised? Or are you of the mind-set that anything coming from someone with an ID label is ipso facto not scientific? That is a philosophy of science judgement and not a scientific judgement.

You are sounding like it!

Do Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins and Michael Shermer "suggest a way of thinking"?

More specifically, the Genesis account is the target because it is the context for creation issues in the West. (Few people in this debate know anything about what Hinduism or the ancient Sumerians or Chinese, or the Mayas said about creation.) The Genesis account, despite what has been read into it, does not give the scope of the creation in that it does not tell us the scope of the shamayim ("heavens"). Genesis 1:1 can equally be read as referring to the skies (shamayim) and the land (eretz). By shamayim it does not necessarily (or probably) mean the modern cosmological model of what we call the universe. So to be more focused, for both myself and the IDers - all of them that I know except one or two who do not believe the genesis account - any reference to "creationism" means to the Genesis (or biblical) account of creation.

This is like arguing that because there are competing theories in scientific fields, that "science" ought to get its story straight first! And you also appear to not recognize the antithetic relationship between the biblical worldview and Mystery Babylon, the source of the extant pagan religions of your two examples. That is a significant failure to distinguish!

ID did not even exist as an identifiable movement back when Judge Overton gave his benchmark ruling against young-earth creationism (YEC) being taught in state-school biology.

What can partially confuse the understanding of the ID movement is the political component of Establishment science. Is there any political diminution of pure science? Where does most of the money come from nowadays to support scientific research? From government? Do you really believe government is objective in funding research grants, with "no strings attached"?

IDers are aware of this because the scientific issues they raise are ignored by mainstream Science. (By Science I mean politically-infested activity that is called science, whether it is or not.) I do not hear ID-bashers addressing this because to do so would not support their position!

Of course you are. The medieval Schoolmen made the same kind of assertions about Galileo's contention.

It has taken 40 years or more (or maybe more like 140 years) for evolutionary biologists to realize this, and to also realize that incremental NDE is a failed theory - at least the developmental hypothesis of it. I am glad to see the flurry of activity needed to address it. What ID brings to it is in raising the larger questions about evolutionary mechanisms that are quite relevant to the current state of evolutionary biology (EB) if for no other reason than that most EBists do not know much of anything about control theory and how it applies to structural organic development. It is beginning to diffuse in but so far, only slightly. All the ruckus about "AI" will probably hasten it.

The history beginning with Miller of the major efforts to address this question are generally recognized among EBists to have failed. That is, nobody has a scientific explanation for how life arose. (Do you? Publish it and win the Nobel Prize!) One might appear in the future, but it is not in the present state of knowledge.

You are making the ID case, that both mutation and selection are not random. IDers would agree. So would I.

Agreed, starting historically with Gould.

Okay, wise guy. The video link I gave above has three people (plus host) discussing the mathematical challenges to NDE (Gelernter and Berlinski from the MIT AI Lab in the past) as was also discussed in an MIT symposium led by Murray Eden in the 20th century. It is known that there are serious mathematical problems with NDE (whether you think MIT is a sufficiently scientific institution or not). Maybe they can be solved. They will not be by being ignored.

One of the prominent IDers, Bill Dembski, has multiple doctorates, one in math, and his doctoral thesis was about probability theory as it applies to these same kinds of NDE problems. He has written a book, Intelligent Design, where he analyzes the problem about irreducible complexity in graduate-school detail from a probabliistic standpoint. Have you read anything Demski has written? You might start there before drawing any hasty conclusions.

Of course one can expect new ideas, but this is an expression of hope, not fact. If and when a credible theory arises, it will probably have implications that a 19th century Enlightenment worldview will find objectionable, and that is the worldview that has infiltrated science in the last two centuries and is why there is an ongoing, never-ending "creation-evolution" controversy.

Again, you fail to understand ID. Have you ever talked to any of the leading ID proponents such as Steve Meyer, Bill Dembski, Mike Behe, Paul Nelson, ...? I have talked with all of them, sometimes into the early morning hours of a conference. You should recognize that when you write "that does not mean in any way the door to a Intelligent Designer is opened up" that this is not a scientific statement and cannot be supported by scientific methods. What if humanity were the result of a bioengineering project? Could that be detected scientifically? It is history, not science, that would give that answer. The scope of ID thinking is wider than your thinking and considers how we might detect such possibilities with our present scientific or mathematical methods. You might not want to consider such questions as falling within the limitations of the methods of science, yet if you've learned any philosophy of science, you would know that they overlap. There is no rigidly defined demarcation of science.

You should run for Congress.

I erred in one of the responses to you (or more, but I don't know it yet). You wrote:

Gene2memE said:
I'm asserting that the issues raised by Meyer, Gelernter and Berlinski are not actually issues. And certainly not issues with 'current neo-Darwinian theory' I'm asserting that none of the answers to problems in biology have been resolved by the statment a creator intelligent designer did it.

I responded:

Of course you are. The medieval Schoolmen made the same kind of assertions about Galileo's contention.​

Very unclear response by me. I was thinking about your first sentence, that the trio did not raise any actual issues. They did, but the mainstream EB world is not ready or willing to address them. You can see this from conferences or debates where IDers and the opponents go at it; there is a failure to achieve what lawyers would call "a meeting of the minds". What that means is more basic than that they disagree but that a lack of understanding between them is occurring, like ships passing in the night. It might be called an orientation mismatch.

As for your second sentence, I agree, and so do all the ID leaders I know, that to say "God did it" or some such response is not a scientific explanation. At most, it might be a historic prelude to more detailed history, but it does not give us insight into the hows and whys of biological development. So, I don't think you have any issue with anyone there.

This controversy might be a rerun of a similar episode in 20th-century science, in physics. Those physicists rooted in 19th-century scientific concepts could simply not believe that quantum physics and-or relativity theory seemed like science. As one of the contributors to modern physics said, it will take a new generation of physicists to learn the new physics before it is more widely accepted. The contribution by ID might be to point to some research paths that lead to beneficial results in the study of life's development. I say something like this in my article on "Design in Nature and the Nature of Design".

 

[BCP1928]

I don't assume it; that is the widely accepted view in the life sciences, that for instance, mammals are of greater complexity than bacteria. If you challenge the assumption (that nobody is making) that the evolution of complexity is monotonic, then I would agree that there is no necessary reason to believe that, but in the aggregate, or on average over a long stretch of evolving, greater complexity is the result. The word evolution even contains that meaning. (Otherwise devolution would be a more accurate word.)

Increasing complexity is an outcome of evolution, but the question is, is it a necessary or a contingent outcome?

 

[DennisF]

Increasing complexity is an outcome of evolution, but the question is, is it a necessary or a contingent outcome?

A good question, which was a major issue in both science and theology a few centuries ago, and which continues to the present. Put a different way, is the existing state of the world the only possible state that could have occurred - a deterministic outcome - or could it have turned out differently. In the 19th century, the philosophical fashion was to think like Simon Pierre de Laplace, that given the laws of science and initial conditions, the outcome necessarily must occur; causality is a kind of logical necessity. Some theologians thought that God was that way too, but if God is constrained in behavior by something more basic than he is, is he really God? Others, like 17th-century Isaac Newton and chemist Robert Boyle and the other Voluntarists of the time believed that God was free to create a different kind of universe if he had wanted to.

This is an issue where separating science and theology is difficult because the issues affect both. Eugene M. Klaaren did his PhD thesis on this and it was published by Eerdmans under the title, Religious Origins of Modern Science. It covers the issue well from a history-of-science perspective.

From a science viewpoint, the late 20th century and onward has opened the possibilities as mathematical chaos theory has entered the discussion. It is a category of behaviors that can be exhibited by certain kinds of nonlinear equations representing physical systems. Chaotic behavior is deterministic - the equations have no random variables in them like quantum mechanics - yet qualitatively different outcomes can occur with the most minute differences in initial conditions - out to the arithmetic resolution of much computation nowadays - like as much as 10 digits. This gives Laplace's machine model of the universe a different look and when applied to evolutionary biology ...

What do you think?

 

[Astrid]

Increasing complexity is an outcome of evolution, but the question is, is it a necessary or a contingent outcome?

It’s one outcome

 

[BCP1928]

It’s one outcome

It was the phrase "evolving towards complexity" which caught my eye. IDists often point to complexity in biological systems as evidence of "design." But if complexity is a contingent outcome rather than a necessary outcome then it carries no teleological implications of that kind. It is interesting that the distinction reflects Traditional Christian thinking on the subject of causality, which is why creationists are almost always Protestants.

 

[Astrid]

It was the phrase "evolving towards complexity" which caught my eye. IDists often point to complexity in biological systems as evidence of "design." But if complexity is a contingent outcome rather than a necessary outcome then it carries no teleological implications of that kind. It is interesting that the distinction reflects Traditional Christian thinking on the subject of causality, which is why creationists are almost always Protestants.

And so often, engineers.

 

[DennisF]

It was the phrase "evolving towards complexity" which caught my eye. IDists often point to complexity in biological systems as evidence of "design." But if complexity is a contingent outcome rather than a necessary outcome then it carries no teleological implications of that kind. It is interesting that the distinction reflects Traditional Christian thinking on the subject of causality, which is why creationists are almost always Protestants.

Complexity as a contingent outcome can carry teleological implications. One need only ask whose free will is being exercised to produce this contingency? The word contingent means dependent on or conditioned by something else such as the free will of some agent. In its broadest sense, it means not necessary. So design could be a possible interpretation of rising complexity in biological systems. Or it might be attributed to "purpose". But again, who's purpose? Who's telos? The core of the issue is whether there is intelligence behind the increase in biological complexity.

There are multiple loose ends in this kind of discussion. Is John Cage art - paint thrown at canvas - purposive or even designed? Design might be random and the creator chaotic (in the random sense), but the underlying issue remains whether this kind of "design" can lead to increasing complexity. This is the driving issue of the creation-evolution controversy, a controversy that might be misnamed as such.

 

[DennisF]

Why do you assume that evolving organisms are "developing towards greater complexity?"

If we are referring to the neo-darwinian theory of biological evolution, life goes from single-celled to mammals to us. I would say that is "development towards increasing complexity".

 

[DennisF]

Yes, that's the point made in the podcast (I assumed it was a video, if I had known it was only a podcast I would have listened to it sooner on my phone.) But anyway, there is nothing new there; people have been making that argument against the theory of evolution all they way back to the days of imagining generations of creatures dragging around useless, half-formed limbs waiting for just the right mutation to come along by chance to finish the job.

You are right; the probability that evolution would result in 'the present complexity of life' is vanishing small, but the only probability important to evolution is the probability that the next generation of a species contains at least some individuals sufficiently well adapted to the environment in which they find themselves that they live long enough to reproduce. Thus, the reality is that the probability that evolution would result in 'the present complexity of life' or some other complexity of life altogether may actually be quite favorable--without the necessity of outside direction.

This hand-waving. Give an example using probability theory with some chosen representative numbers.

 

[Yttrium]

If we are referring to the neo-darwinian theory of biological evolution, life goes from single-celled to mammals to us. I would say that is "development towards increasing complexity".

Some of it increases in complexity. There's still an awful lot of single-celled organisms out there, you know. Developing into multi-cellular life-forms isn't inevitable, it's a chance event that can stick around. There are still a great many simple, multi-cellular organisms around. The bigger life forms are actually a small minority of life in general, they're just easier for us to see.

 

[Aaron112]

Increasing complexity is an outcome of evolution, but the question is, is it a necessary or a contingent outcome?

Neither actually. Remember God's Word - God made all things simple ; man came up with many devices /distractions (from truth; away from simple truth).

 

[Yttrium]

This hand-waving. Give an example using probability theory with some chosen representative numbers.

I'll give you a number. The probability of the diversity of life today is 1.

If I roll a 10-sided die a thousand times and record the result each time, I'll end up with a list of numbers. What is the probability of coming up with that exact list? It's really unlikely. Astronomically unlikely. So unlikely that it's practically impossible. I couldn't have rolled up that list of numbers. But I did. The probability of coming up with some result is 1.

If you have mutations and selections churning out varieties of organisms, you'll end up with some diverse variety of organisms after a great length of time. The probability is 1.

 

[Hans Blaster]

Complexity as a contingent outcome can carry teleological implications. One need only ask whose free will is being exercised to produce this contingency? The word contingent means dependent on or conditioned by something else such as the free will of some agent. In its broadest sense, it means not necessary. So design could be a possible interpretation of rising complexity in biological systems. Or it might be attributed to "purpose". But again, who's purpose? Who's telos? The core of the issue is whether there is intelligence behind the increase in biological complexity.

Contingency in the evolutionary has nothing to do with teleology, free will, or even choices. It is about how the range of possible futures is dependent on the path that has already been taken.

Contingency (evolutionary biology) - Wikipedia

I like watching volcanoes and the seventh in a series of eruptions in just over a year along a single line of craters about 10 km long just ended. Why are they happening there? Well, it's because there is a fracture there that weakens the structure of the rock. And why is there a fracture there? Because the continents are pulling apart and it had to fracture somewhere. Why that specific place? Probably because it was far enough from the last major crack and stress built up and the rock failed there instead of somewhere else. This sequence of events lead to this month's eruption in Iceland happening in the particular place it did.

Any descendant species of Homo erectus was going to be a modified H. erectus and have characteristics like H. erectus, upright, bipedal, large-brained ape that used tools. We have five fingers with nails instead of claws because that is the form primate limbs have taken for 10s of millions of years.

 

[DennisF]

Some of it increases in complexity. There's still an awful lot of single-celled organisms out there, you know. Developing into multi-cellular life-forms isn't inevitable, it's a chance event that can stick around. There are still a great many simple, multi-cellular organisms around. The bigger life forms are actually a small minority of life in general, they're just easier for us to see.

"A chance event" is a mathematical way of saying "no prior knowledge" of what will happen. It is a statement of confessed ignorance but it has little or nothing to do with what is under discussion - namely, that in the larger picture, evolutionary biology attempts to explain (and I am not arguing here about whether it is successful or not) how life has evolved from the simple to the complex. That this happens at all is what the ruckus is about.

I find the fossil record to be fairly convincing that this ascent of life is indeed the case, but how this has happened is not adequately explained because the fossil record also shows the Cambrian-era explosion of a wide diversity of lifeforms appearing almost immediately on a geologic or evolutionary biologic time-scale. Evolutionary theory has consequently gone from an emphasis on random to directed processes (Gould exemplifies this), but it has yet to be determined who or what is doing the directing. The "who" is answered by the biblical Genesis account as exo-scientific - that is, higher beings that appear in the very first verse of the Bible - the elohim (plural in Hebrew) - who are genetic engineers. In this case, the explanation for some critical aspects of life's emergence are not within the limits of scientific discovery; it is a matter of exo-social history, not physical or biological science and hence the need for it to be revealed to us by the head of the project, named only at the end of the creation account.

 

[DennisF]

I'll give you a number. The probability of the diversity of life today is 1.

If I roll a 10-sided die a thousand times and record the result each time, I'll end up with a list of numbers. What is the probability of coming up with that exact list? It's really unlikely. Astronomically unlikely. So unlikely that it's practically impossible. I couldn't have rolled up that list of numbers. But I did. The probability of coming up with some result is 1.

If you have mutations and selections churning out varieties of organisms, you'll end up with some diverse variety of organisms after a great length of time. The probability is 1.

Nobody is arguing that life is not certain to be diverse when we can observe that it is. The real question is how the present complexity of life could have been the result of random processes. Look at the Murray Eden symposium held at MIT a few decades ago. These were mathematicians applying probability theory to the development of life as a random process and they concluded that the probability was so small that it could not have happened in a finite universe such as ours. Then later Bill Dembski picked up on this topic (in his PhD thesis in math) to confirm this in more elaborate mathematical detail. Those are the probability arguments, with numbers, that you should engage and if you disagree, refute with equal rigor.

 

[DennisF]

Contingency in the evolutionary has nothing to do with teleology, free will, or even choices. It is about how the range of possible futures is dependent on the path that has already been taken.

Contingency (evolutionary biology) - Wikipedia

I like watching volcanoes and the seventh in a series of eruptions in just over a year along a single line of craters about 10 km long just ended. Why are they happening there? Well, it's because there is a fracture there that weakens the structure of the rock. And why is there a fracture there? Because the continents are pulling apart and it had to fracture somewhere. Why that specific place? Probably because it was far enough from the last major crack and stress built up and the rock failed there instead of somewhere else. This sequence of events lead to this month's eruption in Iceland happening in the particular place it did.

Any descendant species of Homo erectus was going to be a modified H. erectus and have characteristics like H. erectus, upright, bipedal, large-brained ape that used tools. We have five fingers with nails instead of claws because that is the form primate limbs have taken for 10s of millions of years.

Go read the necessity-contingency debate in the history of science - back in the 17th century - and you will know what contingency means in both a scientific and philosophical context. Start with the PhD thesis I cited of Eugene M. Klaaren which was published by Eerdmans as a book titled The Religious Origins of Modern Science. This was at an earlier time when scientists, unlike nowadays, were more characteristically big-picture people. Klaaren takes chemist Robert Boyle, a Voluntarist, as an example in the argument against the Aristotelian Schoolmen, the rationalists of the medieval Universities. The word contingent comes out of that historic context.

 

[Hans Blaster]

"A chance event" is a mathematical way of saying "no prior knowledge" of what will happen. It is a statement of confessed ignorance but it has little or nothing to do with what is under discussion - namely, that in the larger picture, evolutionary biology attempts to explain (and I am not arguing here about whether it is successful or not) how life has evolved from the simple to the complex. That this happens at all is what the ruckus is about.

I find the fossil record to be fairly convincing that this ascent of life is indeed the case, but how this has happened is not adequately explained because the fossil record also shows the Cambrian-era explosion of a wide diversity of lifeforms appearing almost immediately on a geologic or evolutionary biologic time-scale.

The Cambrian "explosion" occurs over 35-50 million years which is at least 10 million generations. Taking human history back that brings us at least as far back as the common ancestor of all primates

Evolutionary theory has consequently gone from an emphasis on random to directed processes (Gould exemplifies this), but it has yet to be determined who or what is doing the directing.

"Directed processes"? I don't think so. Gould wasn't about direction, but intermittent stasis. The basic pattern of "punctuated equilibrium" is that species can exist with little outward change for a while, but when a strong stressor comes, the built up variation is rapidly deployed and changes are relatively fast.

The "who" is answered by the biblical Genesis account as exo-scientific - that is, higher beings that appear in the very first verse of the Bible - the elohim (plural in Hebrew) - who are genetic engineers.

That is an interesting interpretation of "elohim". Most people think it means either "gods" (the plural usage for a group of gods) or "God", the singular god of Israel. Nothing in the rest of that chapter or the next implies any sort of engineering or progression of changes. Groups are made, from nothing apparently, without any concern about how they fit into a cladistic tree of life. (This is not surprising given that the editors of that book had no idea about the broad relationships between groups of species nor the sequence of emergence.)

In this case, the explanation for some critical aspects of life's emergence are not within the limits of scientific discovery; it is a matter of exo-social history, not physical or biological science and hence the need for it to be revealed to us by the head of the project, named only at the end of the creation account.

Are you speaking of the emergence as the origin of life (abiogenesis) or the development of life (evolution)? If the latter, it is all within the purview of scientific discovery, but even much of abiogenesis is as well.

 

[Hans Blaster]

Go read the necessity-contingency debate in the history of science - back in the 17th century - and you will know what contingency means in both a scientific and philosophical context. Start with the PhD thesis I cited of Eugene M. Klaaren which was published by Eerdmans as a book titled The Religious Origins of Modern Science. This was at an earlier time when scientists, unlike nowadays, were more characteristically big-picture people. Klaaren takes chemist Robert Boyle, a Voluntarist, as an example in the argument against the Aristotelian Schoolmen, the rationalists of the medieval Universities. The word contingent comes out of that historic context.

And I provided you with a direct link about how "contingent" is used in modern evolutionary biology. Other uses (if different, I don't really care what the are) are irrelevant.

Claims about "religious origins" are irrelevant to the usage of contingent in biology, and no one cares about the "Aristotelian Schoolmen" whatever they are.

 

[DennisF]

"Directed processes"? I don't think so. Gould wasn't about direction, but intermittent stasis. The basic pattern of "punctuated equilibrium" is that species can exist with little outward change for a while, but when a strong stressor comes, the built up variation is rapidly deployed and changes are relatively fast.

This says that evolutionary change occurs at varying rates. Yet Gould also recognized that random processes are not an explanation for how these changes occurred. That is the issue.

That is an interesting interpretation of "elohim". Most people think it means either "gods" (the plural usage for a group of gods) or "God", the singular god of Israel.

There is nothing too interesting about this to anyone who is even passingly familiar (like me, not a Hebrew scholar) with the paleo-Hebrew language. Without contrivance, Hebrew scholars do not argue about whether nouns ending in -im are plural or not. It seems to me that some of the understanding of Genesis 1 is badly in need of a group rethink. Conrad Hyers wrote a book, the Meaning of Creation (John Knox Press, 1984) that helps to clear away confusion by those who attempt to read a modern scientific explanation into Genesis 1, but my simple observation beyond that is that the "us" - first-person plural pronoun - in verse 26 "Let us make adam [man] in our image ..." has as its antecedent, the only one possible, of the elohim (also plural) in verse 1. The translators take a called strike on this one, so it appears to me. Some theologians rationalize that "us" refers to the Trinity of Trinitarian doctrine which does not come into view at all in Genesis and is only barely hinted at in the entire Old Testament. To me, that's a contrived explanation for something that they have no explanation for.

Nothing in the rest of that chapter or the next implies any sort of engineering or progression of changes.

No, that's not in the text but is me adding that if we were back there - "we" especially being engineers - would understand it perhaps that way. My implied point is that there was no abracadabra , no waving of a magic wand of God but in line with the character of YHWH as he is portrayed throughout the OT, is hesed; he acts perfectly consistently in his dealing s with Israel and also in how he upholds the physical world. Thus, we can expect that there is some physical explanation, if only we were advanced enough in our science, to explain what happened.

Groups are made, from nothing apparently, without any concern about how they fit into a cladistic tree of life. (This is not surprising given that the editors of that book had no idea about the broad relationships between groups of species nor the sequence of emergence.)

Which book? Genesis? Conrad Hyers, who is not ignorant of biology, addresses these concerns in that each of the days of creation picks off a major cluster of pagan gods of nature and de-deifies them. To try to read Genesis as some young-earth creationsts do, imposing modern science on Genesis 1, misses the whole point of the author, to debunk nature as created and not pagan gods as (the conclusion: Genesis 2:4) created stuff and not a genealogy of cognizant beings.

Are you speaking of the emergence as the origin of life (abiogenesis) or the development of life (evolution)? If the latter, it is all within the purview of scientific discovery, but even much of abiogenesis is as well.

I agree, but as I understand the history of the attempts at explaining the origin of life, it has been a dismal history scientifically. Miller's experiments were a brilliant attempt but in retrospect rather amateurish by today's thinking. Since then some researchers have been fascinated by the properties of clay, but nothing (nothing alive, at least!) has emerged from it.