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Comment by dougmwne | Hacker News Reader

I am a theist. I also find what you are saying pretty unconvincing.

Panspermia theory means there’s basically no bounds on how long ago life may have formed or how many trillions of planets may have hosted primordial soup waiting for the right interactions. Good statical analysis and biochem showing that it couldn’t have formed on earth would be better evidence for panspermia than divine genetics.

The universe and our existence is plenty awe inspiring to me. I don’t need to invent miracles or fit the evidence to the conclusion. I think it’s better to use our intellect and see where the evidence leads us rather than pre-supposing the nature of God.

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Panspermia gets you nowhere and merely allows you to try to save face before what you suppose are your more sophisticated colleagues.

Also, "no bounds on how long ago life may have formed" just displays ignorance of the fact that we do in fact have bounds on the age of the universe.

It is obvious to me that you have ruled miracles out by definition, allowing you to conclude that miracles must not have occurred. Forgive me for rolling my eyes.

There are single proteins that are so complex that the search space for them is so large that it would be equivalent to picking a single specified elementary particle out of all the elementary particles in the Universe. Also, the shape of a protein is like a combination lock -- you have to get it right or it just doesn't work and also gives you no feedback that you can use to make a better guess.

Also, why are you a theist? Do you hear God talking to you or something like that?

Most people are atheists, because the concept of god was created to explain the world when humans did not have enough knowledge and information for scientific analysis, but this is not the case anymore today. Over centuries, this went away due to inventions of printing press, literature, a lot of basic scientific research and so on.

Also if you read the article it gives you multiple theories how initial proteins formed. No god needed there.

You appear to be attempting to make a God-of-the-Gaps argument, but you are unaware that "scientific progress" is widening the gap when it comes to the origin of life question.

For example, in Darwin's day it was assumed that the cell was a simple blob containing life-force, but now we have powerful electron microscopes and it turns out that our initial assumptions about how simple life must be were completely wrong.

And yes, I read the article. I've read many such articles. There are a lot of "theories" out there, but none that pass the smell test, although most of them try to snow the unsophisticated reader with a bunch of acronyms and jargon.

You talk about smell tests and unsophisticated dimwits but then you just arbitrarily assume that God made it because it's complex...

...And then, what? Do we write "God made it" in a book and close the case?

You can believe in God and use common sense at the same time.

LOL

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