Atheists trying to justify themselves often find themselves asked to replace religion. “If there’s no God, what’s your system of morality?” “How did the Universe begin?” “How do you explain the existence of eyes?” “How do you find meaning in life?” And the poor atheist, after one question too many, is forced to say “I don’t know.” After all, he’s not a philosopher, cosmologist, psychologist, and evolutionary biologist rolled into one. And even they don’t have all the answers.
But the atheist, if he retains his composure, can say, “I don’t know, but so what? There’s still something that doesn’t make sense about what you learned in Sunday school. There’s still something wrong with your religion. The fact that I don’t know everything won’t make the problem go away.”
What I want to emphasize here, even though it may be elementary, is that it can be valuable and accurate to say something’s wrong even when you don’t have a full solution or a replacement.
Consider political radicals. Marxists, libertarians, anarchists, greens, John Birchers. Radicals are diverse in their political theories, but they have one critical commonality: they think something’s wrong with the status quo. And that means, in practice, that different kinds of radicals sometimes sound similar, because they’re the ones who criticize the current practices of the current government and society. And it’s in criticizing that radicals make the strongest arguments, I think. They’re sketchy and vague in designing their utopias, but they have moral and evidentiary force when they say that something’s wrong with the criminal justice system, something’s wrong with the economy, something’s wrong with the legislative process.
Moderates, who are invested in the status quo, tend to simply not notice problems, and to dismiss radicals for not having well-thought-out solutions. But it’s better to know that a problem exists than to not know – regardless of whether you have a solution at the moment.
Most people, confronted with a problem they can’t solve, say “We just have to live with it,” and very rapidly gloss into “It’s not really a problem.” Aging is often painful and debilitating and ends in death. Almost everyone has decided it’s not really a problem – simply because it has no known solution. But we also used to think that senile dementia and toothlessness were “just part of getting old.” I would venture that the tendency, over time, to find life’s cruelties less tolerable and to want to cure more of them, is the most positive feature of civilization. To do that, we need people who strenuously object to what everyone else approaches with resignation.
Theodore Roosevelt wrote, “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.”
But it is the critic who counts. Just because I can’t solve P=NP doesn’t mean I can’t say the latest attempt at a proof is flawed. Just because I don’t have a comprehensive system of ethics doesn’t mean there’s not something wrong with the Bible’s. Just because I don’t have a plan for a perfect government doesn’t mean there isn’t something wrong with the present one. Just because I can’t make people live longer and healthier lives doesn’t mean that aging isn’t a problem. Just because nobody knows how to end poverty doesn’t mean poverty is okay. We are further from finding solutions if we dismiss the very existence of the problems.
This is why I’m basically sympathetic to speculations about existential risk, and also to various kinds of research associated with aging and mortality. It’s calling attention to unsolved problems. There’s a human bias against acknowledging the existence of problems for which we don’t have solutions; we need incentives in the other direction, encouraging people to identify hard problems. In mathematics, we value a good conjecture or open problem, even if the proof doesn’t come along for decades. This would be a good norm to adopt more broadly – value the critic, value the one who observes a flaw, notices a hard problem, or protests an outrage, even if he doesn’t come with a solution. Fight the urge to accept a bad solution just because it ties up the loose ends.
And that claim by you is based on ... what exactly? Experiments you have performed? Books you have read explaining the theory to your satisfaction with no obvious hand waving? Books like the ones we all have read describing Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection? Or maybe you have encountered a section in a library filled with technical material beyond your comprehension, but which you are pretty sure you could comprehend with enough effort? For me, something in this category would be stereo amplifiers - I've seen the books so I know there is nothing supernatural involved, though I can't explain it myself.
From what you write below, I'm guessing your background puts you at roughly this level regarding abiogenesis. Except, the difference is that there is no library section filled with technical material explaining how life originated from non-life. So, I think you are going on faith.
No there aren't. There is not a single plausible theory in existence right now claiming that life originates from amino acids arising from a Miller-Urey type of process. There are no chemically sound models for creating life from Miller-Urey building blocks.
There are some models which have life starting with RNA, and some which have life starting with lipids, or iron-sulfide minerals or even (pace Tim) starting with clay. But you didn't mention those more recent and plausible theories. Instead you went on faith.
No. Not at all. I don't have a clue as to what it would even mean to look for, let alone investigate a non-naturalistic hypothesis.
What I am saying is this: Suppose I have before me a theist who claims that a Deity must have been the cause of the Big Bang. "Something from nothing" and all that. Suppose further that my own version of atheism is so completely non-evangelical and my knowledge of cosmology so weak that I say to him, "Could be! I don't believe that a Deity was involved, but I don't have any evidence to rule it out."
So that is the supposition. Next, suppose he says "Furthermore, I think the Deity must have been involved in the origin of life, back 3+ billion years ago. From what I know of chemistry and biochemistry, that could not have been spontaneous." I would tell him that I too know quite a bit about chemistry and biochemistry, and that there are many, many clues indicating that life based on RNA probably existed before modern life based on DNA and amino acids and proteins. There is strong evidence that life in its current form came from something more primitive.
Now, suppose he says "Yes, I understand all that evidence. But you still have no theory to explain how life based on RNA might have started. All you have is handwaving. My belief, since I already believe in a Creator-Deity for the Big Bang, is that a Creator-Deity was also involved in the origin of the RNA World." If he said that, then I would answer, "Ok, you can believe that, but since I don't already believe in a Creator Deity, I would prefer to believe that the first living organism on earth arose by some unknown natural process. In fact, I have some ideas as to how it might have happened."
Yes, I said "prefer to believe" this time. I don't have a good explanation for life's origin, though I have spent a good deal of my spare time over the past 30 years looking for one.
Thanks for catching me in this error. I was very vaguely familiar with those theories, but not enough to realize that they require source materials not available from Miller-Urey building blocks.