Life defined. Though, I really don’t know how you win, or what you mean by it… but I don’t think I care either. Oh, well.

Just joking. Although the thermodynamic approach for defining life (Margulis and Schröddinger, innit?) is quite good, Dissipative Systems (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissipative_systems (tornados, flames…) tend to act in a similar way and, still, there is viruses, which are alive or not depending on your perspective.

Anyway, it could be possible to generate artificial life (I’m thinking right now that sooner or later extremely complex in silico organisms will appear satisfying most of the traditional thermodynamic requirements) and, therefore, the miracle would not be a miracle at all.

Silly how a Discworld picture can lead to all this… Who’s up for a football/soccer game against German philosophers?

Life defined. Though, I really don’t know how you win, or what you mean by it… but I don’t think I care either. Oh, well.

“in fact, God seems a cheap solution for everything”
God seems to the typical scapegoat for the idiots too stupid or unwilling to understand anything. How does Gravity work?
GOD!
What makes a tsunami?
GOD!
and so forth.

I read that 1/3 of the worlds physicists believe in a creator (and this has been the case for decades) . Where am I going with this? Here:
www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=regressive

If humans continue on the earth, the idiots must die (or be “aborted”), or they will kill us all.

As for the Mental Masturbation stuff in Physics: it’s my experience that physicists define the word ‘weird’.

Here is also an interesting thought. If a cell could be made (by whatever means) in a lab, would this be a living cell, or a dead one? I honestly have very little to base a conclusion on. Comments (and references, if possible)on this would be very welcome. Even if it is, for the moment, ‘mental masturbation’.

OK, here is an easy one, EvilDon: define ‘Life’.

See, I win. LOL

Your falsifiability point is full of reason and depth.

Now a question to mull over. If one has two conflicting hypotheses, and neither can be readily disproved, and the only hint to the correct understanding is math, which way does one turn to research?

Anyway, Illuminatus, I used the term ‘mental masturbation’ to talk about something entirely different from what you’re talking about. I was just saying that falsifiability should be our #1 way of defining science. If Miller et al can prove that evolution is possible, yippee. But that doesn’t prove that evolution happened in the past in a way that Miller can replicate. What is sufficient evidence of evolution to me is that I can think of conditions that would disprove evolutions (“There are living things that are not observably the product of evolution”). When I take particular examples (animals, plants, fossils), I find in every instance that they cannot disprove evolution: They are all adapted to their environments, and have conditions found in other species, etc.

It might sound obvious, but I think that falsifiability is the only way to make science useful. I can say that God exists, and I can think of proofs that God exists, but I cannot think of any statement which could observably disprove that God exists (except sarcasm). That is, I want to create some kind of statement whose condition would negate the existence of God, and prove or disprove that statement. Likewise, I can prove that a lot of things exist which I do not believe do. I could say that the universe is made up of invisible grapes which are impossible to observe in any way. I can’t disprove that. I believe there are moral principles one should follow, but observation gives me results that there is no clear model of interpreting, as I can animal physiology.

So natural sciences, I think, should be about what we can fail to disprove in obvious ways, like evolution. For questions like God, some other method of addressing those has to be devised. If we restricted science to things that can be falsified, then creationists would have no ammo. But then scientists would have to stop fucking around with theories like “The universe is made up of strings bending around membranes which move between ten dimensions, because a hypothetical model of movement which has not been observed ever and cannot be proved because the dimensions are unobservable could potentially exist according to numbers and thus exists” to be a legit theory just because it can’t be disproved.

And you missed my point with the ‘creating life’ bit. Scientists engineer the (what may or may not have been “natural”) circumstances of the formation of the first cell. If it is a simple matter of physics that life begins with the right circumstances, then does that not suggest that it could have been done in the past? See how that proves nothing?

Here is also an interesting thought. If a cell could be made (by whatever means) in a lab, would this be a living cell, or a dead one? I honestly have very little to base a conclusion on. Comments (and references, if possible)on this would be very welcome. Even if it is, for the moment, ‘mental masturbation’.

Really and truly, I do not see how proving (scientifically) the beginnings of life is possible. That is my point.

Besides, the basic experiment and later reformulations by other scientists (like Joan Oró) proved that nucleic acids could form in that enviroment. The point, therefore, is that natural physical and chemical conditions can lead to the rise of life parting from inert matter. Besides, biological membranes appear naturaly in case of high concentrations of lipids and fatty acids just out of pure physics, again, hardly a case of divine intervention.

Anyways, your arguments just fail because reconstruction according to physical, chemical and material evidence is not mental masturbation but part of the hypothetical-deductive method that works on science (and in police work, law and courts, for that matter).