Bill's questions:
"You consider yourself "wise," yet believe in spontaneous generation. If you do not beleive in spontaneous generation please provide me witht eh best explanation you have for the origin of life. Can you? Will you?"
Here, we see Bill Morgan returning to what seems to be a favorite misconception, his confusion of abiogenesis with spontaneous generation. By the time he had asked this "unanswerable" question, he should have known better, because I had answered it in my critique of his Weird Science tract, which I had given him nearly two years prior. Had he read my critique, which I doubt very much, then he should have known better.
The first message is in response to an exposition I had written on the role of creation science in fundamentalist apologetics.
In the following text, I am "DWise1" and Bill Morgan is "BillyJack6." Liber8r was a third-party witness to our correspondence.
######################################################### Subj: Re: Creation Science as Apologetics Date: 98-04-19 11:41:18 EDT From: DWise1 To: liber8r@mcs.com CC: DWise1, BillyJack6 Subj: Re: Creation Science as Apologetics Date: 98-04-14 22:50:16 EDT From: unknownsender@unknown.domain To: DWise1@aol.com (DWise1), BillyJack6@aol.com CC: DWise1@aol.com What a letter! It was very well done. >Question: Why is it that Billy doesn't respond with anything other than one line replies? Might it be that he doesn't have a reasonable explanation?< Well, I really cannot say whether he has a reasonable explanation or not. You see, I have yet to see him offer one. ######################################################### Subj: Re: Creation Science as Apologetics Date: 98-04-20 21:31:43 EDT From: BillyJack6 To: DWise1, liber8r@mcs.com Here is a reasonable reply! You consider yourself "wise," yet believe in spontaneous generation. If you do not beleive in spontaneous generation please provide me witht eh best explanation you have for the origin of life. Can you? Will you? Billy Jack ######################################################### Subj: Spontaneous Generation?? Date: 98-04-26 12:58:36 EDT From: DWise1 To: BillyJack6 CC: DWise1, liber8r@mcs.com ###################################### Subj: Re: Creation Science as Apologetics Date: 98-04-20 21:31:43 EDT From: BillyJack6 To: DWise1, liber8r@mcs.com Here is a reasonable reply! You consider yourself "wise," yet believe in spontaneous generation. If you do not beleive in spontaneous generation please provide me witht eh best explanation you have for the origin of life. Can you? Will you? Billy Jack ##################################### >Here is a reasonable reply!< That statement is questionable on two major points: 1. It is not a reply, but rather a non sequitur. You are neither answering nor responding to anything here. It does not follow from the previous discussion, which did include questions for which a resply was expected AND IS STILL EXPECTED. Instead, you are introducing an entirely new topic, effectively avoiding the current topic. For that matter, there is a large and growing number of questions posed to you for which replies were expected and have been requested, repeatedly. You have proven yourself most industrious in avoiding replying to any of them. 2. It is not reasonable. Yet again, you have jumped to unwarranted conclusions based on false premises. You have again demonstrated your misunderstanding of the subject. Bill, you have developed quite a reputation for not replying and for posting very few replies like: ################################ Subj: Re: Where'd ya go? Date: 97-10-10 01:07:56 EDT From: BillyJack6 To: DWise1 Its not! BillyJack6 Re: Where'd ya go? ################################ I have repeatedly asked you what you meant by that, but you have never replied. That is the kind of behavior I was refering to. Right now, I am awaiting your reply to the hypothetical situation I had posed for you and for which I had explicitly requested a reply. We are still waiting. Here is that problem again: ### BEGIN ### Glenn R. Morton, his friend Steve Robertson, and those ICR-trained geology students are prime examples of this high-risk group. When they went to work as geologists, they could not avoid working with those troublesome data that they had been taught did not exist and could not exist. It was right there in front of them, day after day. The harmonization fell to pieces at their feet. They were left with that other lesson that they had been taught over and over again: if that troublesome data were true, then Scripture has no meaning (Liber8r: in case you do not know it, to a fundamentalist that can be paramount to saying that there is no God; in short, their entire theology has lost its basis and starts to unravel). Since they still believed that the troublesome data and their faith were mutually exclusive and they could plainly see that the troublesome data was true, that led them to the logical conclusion that their religion was wrong (ironically, that realization probably actually saved their faith, but more on that thought at a later date). Morton ended up on the verge of becoming an atheist. BECAUSE of creation science. Robertson didn't quite go that far and I don't know about the others, except that none of them had suffered a crisis of GEOLOGY. Bill, you're an ME. Now, I know from experience that fundamentalists tend to have a hard time with Gedankenexperimenten and hypothetical situations, but please bear with me. Try to imagine what it would be like to have been taught that, say, there was no such thing as the Moment of Inertia and, furthermore, if it did exist then Scripture would have no meaning. You go through school having been taught this and you believe it. But then you go out to work as an ME. What do you have to deal with several times over in virtually each and every piece of machinery? Moments of Inertia! They're all over the place! Given the premises of this Gedankenexperiment, what effect would this have on you and on your faith? What conclusions would you reach? Think about it! It's very important! Especially that last question. Because that question is not rhetorical. Because there is a right answer to it. An answer that provides the key to solving the entire problem. An answer that will lead a harmonization that can withstand any number of "troublesome data" and keep faith intact. An answer that is in full accord with your Calvinistic world-view. You've seen the answer many times before, but you have denied that answer because of your paradigm paralysis. That reference to Calvinism is a hint. Use it. We'll talk about that answer later. ### END ### Oh, and what is your reply regarding an on-line debate? Now, since I do reply to questions, and quite reasonably, I might add: >You consider yourself "wise," yet believe in spontaneous generation.< It is demonstrably false to say that I "believe in spontaneous generation" or to claim the same of evolutionary biologists. The idea of spontaneous generation dates from before this century. It was the idea that that entire living organisms could arise fully formed, complete with complex organs and systems, from previously living matter. That idea was shown to be false through the experiments of Louis Pasteur. Hardly anybody believes in spontaneous generation anymore. Tell me, Bill. Who among us here, entre nous trois, comes the closest to believing in the abrupt appearance of fully formed, complex living organisms who lack any progenitors (ie, parents)? In all honesty, who among us three comes the closest to believing in spontaneous generation? I'll give you a hint: it is neither me nor liber8r. >If you do not beleive in spontaneous generation please provide me witht eh best explanation you have for the origin of life. Abiogenesis. Duh? Abiogenesis is very different from spontaneous generation. Abiogenesis is the study of the origin of living systems from non-living matter through prebiotic synthesis; it is a slow, stepwise set of natural processes. Spontaneous generation is the assembly of fully formed complex organisms out of inanimate material in short periods of time; it is an abrupt, all-at-once process. Abiogenesis and spontaneous generation are not comparable. All that you are trying to accomplish by equating abiogenesis with the long-discredited idea of spontaneous generation is to discredit evolution through association, even though evolution does not depend on abiogenesis (which you already know, or should know). It is just another creationist strawman for you to put on yet another public show of defeating utterly, while you stay well away from your avowed enemy, evolution. It was just yet another cheap, dishonest creationist trick. Bill, we've been through all this before. Don't you remember? You made the exact same false claim in your "Weird Science", to which I replied in my critique: ### BEGIN EXERPT ###################################### "Stu : What about life starting from non-life. It's called spontaneous generation." "Life starting from non-life" is called Abiogenesis, as opposed to the general observation of life coming from life, or Biogenesis. It seems that no creationist presentation ever goes by without throwing this challenge out. The obvious intent is to tie evolution with abiogenesis and to make it appear to the audience that evolution depends upon abiogenesis, so that any failure to explain abiogenesis can be declared a failure of evolution. As it turns out, Darwinian evolution does not deal with the origin of life from non-life, but rather with descent with modification from a common ancestor, which presupposes life and so conforms to Biogenesis. Abiogenesis extends the ideas of evolution and so depends on evolution, whereas evolution does not depend on abiogenesis. Think about it. Darwinian evolution is "descent with modification from a common ancestor," i.e. that all species are the modified descendants of earlier species. This means the Darwinian view is that a species existed which produced offspring that were very similar to, yet slightly different from, the parent generation (a very common every-day occurrence). If the environment changes (through climatic change or migration), then the differences between the original ancestral species and its descendants would increase through differential reproduction (AKA natural selection) until they become two different species. Furthermore, if different groups of the original ancestral species' descendants had moved into different environments and so were subjected to different selective pressures, then they would become different from each other and also become two different species. Notice that in each generation, Darwinian evolution has LIFE (an ancestral species) giving rise to LIFE (a descendant species). This is in complete agreement with Biogenesis. DARWINIAN evolution presupposes life; it describes the origin of species from ancestral species. Darwinian evolution depends on the ability of a population to make near-perfect copies of itself (but not too perfect); this is a property of life. Darwinian evolution does not claim that life started from non-life," it does not depend on that claim, and it does not, in and of itself, even raise that question. Darwinian evolution deals with proximate origins, not ultimate origins. Rather, "life starting from non-life" is a part of Abiogenesis, which does directly raise and try to answer the question of the origin of life from non-living matter. This area of study has adopted some evolutionary ideas, both Darwinian and non-Darwinian, adapted them to new and different kinds of problems, and extended them beyond their original scope. It's an entirely different and very difficult game of which we've barely begun just to learn the rules. Abiogenesis is admittedly a rather weak science, mainly because it has so little direct evidence to work from. Almost all the evidence from the origin of life has been eradicated, most likely through the action of life. Any attempt to repeat the process in nature will be halted either by the wrong conditions (e.g. atmospheric content) or by the action of existing life (e.g. proteinoids immediately being eaten by existing bacteria). Just about all that scientists can do at this point is to take their current understanding of the processes that were probably involved, try to reconstruct how it might have happened, and see how much sense it makes. It can be frustrating work, but it does show some promise. It's like working a jig-saw puzzle without a pattern picture and with most of the pieces missing. But even though most of the key pieces have not been found yet, what we have found is very promising. Sidney Fox's work with thermal proteins show that amino acids will form together quite readily when heated and that the proteinoid microspheres that form when water is added can persist for indefinite periods of time over a wide range of conditions and that some of them exhibit enzyme-like and other activities, albeit weak. Orgel's experiments show enzymes producing RNA. ### For a long time, we have been vitalists, i.e. we have believed that there was something insubstantial and magical about life, something that we could never find nor duplicate. Yet we have found that the stuff and processes of life are very much physical and mechanistic. The stuff of life are molecules and they operate very regularly through biochemistry; there is nothing mystical about it. Abiogenesis depends upon the ideas of Darwinian evolution to the extent that they apply to this problem, but it is doubtful how far they can apply. Darwinian evolution depends very heavily on the property of replication (so that it can bring the power of natural selection to bear), so until that property can be established Darwinian evolution can contribute very little if anything. Scientists even apply a different term, chemical evolution, which relies on deterministic chemical reactions, rather than the principles of Darwinian evolution. It is not evolution that depends on abiogenesis, but rather the materialistic view of the universe, a view which I happen to share. ### END EXERPT ###################################### As I had said, research in abiogenesis doesn't really have much in way of historical evidence to go on. Like much of what's produced in the kitchen, most of the evidence has been eaten (literally). We do not have anything approaching a complete comprehensive model, but we have found several intriguing clues. The natural production of amino acids was demonstrated by the famous Urey-Miller experiment. Even though creationists tried to discredit it, it did still show that amino acids could be produced by natural processes. Then Sidney Fox's experiments with thermal proteins showed that amino acids, when heated, form readily into short protein-like chains (what is the probability of proteins forming? 100%, a sure thing.), some of which are chemically active. Earlier proteinoids did not last long, but it was found that that was due to their being eaten by micro-organisms; a sterile batch of proteinoid microspheres remained stable for several years, until they were destroyed at the end of the experiment. RNA has been shown to be capable of self-replication. And so on. Of course, we don't have the full story yet, nor do we know how these pieces fit into the puzzle. But we are confident that we are on the right track. FWIW, the first transition from non-life to life could have been a supernatural event. We really don't have any way of knowing at the present. However, keep in mind that even if this were true, that does not automatically mean that it would have been YOUR version of that supernatural event (after all, yours is just one of countless other supernaturalistic creation myths). And, even if non-life to life had been a supernatural event, the resultant descent with modification that changed that first life to life as we know it at present would still be Darwinian evolution, so a supernaturalistic explanation would not support your "creation model." And if you try to raise the idea of panspermia, the results would still be the same. First, panspermia only displaces the question of how life arose to extraterrestrial sites and causes and, second, Darwinian evolution would still have taken that first, transplanted life and produced life as we know it at present. A final thought on this matter, which was provided by Wakefield in his report on Robert Gentry's polonium-halo claim (basically, Gentry claimed to have found polonium halos in the lowest and most ancient granite, when in reality, the rocks that Gentry claimed to have found the halos in were METAMORPHIC rock; at first, Gentry had agreed to cooperate with Wakefield, but he quickly backed out) [paraphrasing from memory]: There those for whom a mystery equals God; such that if scientists cannot explain it, then that must mean that God did it and hence it is proof of the existence of God. So when these people see a mystery, they want it to remain a mystery. But when a scientist sees a mystery, he wants to solve it. The "mystery equals God" approach seeks to preserve ignorance whereas the scientific way seeks to learn more. That is the most basic difference between scientists and creationists. There now, Bill. That was yet another reply from me. Now it is your turn to provide some replies -- actually, it's been your turn for quite some time now. Shall I list a few of the old questions yet again?: 1. Do you think the earth is less than 10,000 years old? Why? 2. Do you agree with John Morris that if the earth is more than 10,000 years old then Scripture has no meaning? 3. What would happen if you found irrefutable proof that the earth is far older than 10,000 years? What effect would that have on you? How would it affect your faith? Should it? Why? 4. [to your "Have you ever heard my lesson?"] Do you have a lesson to present? Then please, go right ahead and present it. Nothing is stopping you, nor has anything ever been stopping you. 5. What was meant by your outburst, "Its not!" (Subj: Re: Where'd ya go?; Date: 97-10-10 01:07:56 EDT)? What's "not"? Please, provide some context. What are you talking about? 6. How, then, can you honestly ever expect to use creation science to convert me or anybody else possessing knowledge of creation science? The only way would be for us to abandon our higher moral and ethical standards of truth and honesty. Why would I ever want to lower my standards so drastically? 7. Which Patterson quotes did your speaker use and how did he use and interpret those quotes for the audience. 8. What is your definition [in your assessment of the moon-dust claims as "a uniformitarian argument and ridiculous."] of "uniformitarian"? Do you have other definitions of this term that you use? (eg, are there differences in how you used the term here and in how science uses the term) Who would use uniformitarian arguments? (obviously, from this example, we know that creationists do) What are the alternatives to uniformitarian arguments? ######################################################### Subj: Re: Spontaneous Generation?? Date: 98-04-27 00:02:18 EDT From: BillyJack6 To: DWise1 Hey! I am helping to organize an Origin of Life Debate at UCI on May 28th 1998. Will you be able to make it? Bill ########################################################Note that Bill's response to my answer was to immediately change the subject. Consider his actions here in light of the fact that origin-of-life ideas are a favorite creationist target.
Share and enjoy!
Return to Top of Page
Return to DWise1's "Bill Morgan's 'Unanswerable' Questions" Page
Return to DWise1's "Bill Morgan" Page
Return to DWise1's "Creation/Evolution" Page
First uploaded on 2000 July 02.
Updated on 2015 October 21.