exchemist

The prediction that there should be uncaused events. I think that's fairly clear from the context of the discussion.

Yes, but I think what the questioner is getting at is what happens to the charcoal that is produced, for instance in forest fires. The suggestion is that this, being elemental carbon, is biochemically fairly inert and thus should remain in the soil indefinitely. It seems a fair enough question. Though the amount of carbon that can get locked up in this way is pretty minor, I should think. I don't know of any soil processes that would convert charcoal to more reactive carbon compounds, anyway.

I am not aware of any axioms in any theory of science. Axioms belong in logic and mathematics, surely? And I do not see the relevance of all this about laws and material quantities to the untestable hypothesis of a First Cause.

Good. So we are doing metaphysics here, rather than science. It then comes down to individual preference whether one feels the need to try to force an explanation for which there is no evidence, or whether one is content to say that where the evidence stops, that's where I stop demanding answers. There is nothing remotely "inescapable" about a God hypothesis, unless you demand that every question must be answered, whether we have any supporting evidence or not - in other words, that any answer, even made up one, is preferable to no answer.

That limerick was composed by a Catholic priest and scholar, Mgr. Ronald Knox, in relation to Bishop Berkeley's ideas.

Woof woof. Have a nice day.

I think this clarifies things greatly. What you are doing is trying to find an answer to a question that science cannot answer, due to the lack of any relevant observations to test any hypothesis. So, by proposing God as a First Cause, what you are doing is jumping out of science into metaphysics. You can do that if you like. Many people, including many respected scientists, do so, on aesthetic or cultural grounds or out of personal conviction due to religious experience. But what you can't do is expect people with a science training to agree that it is a scientific idea. "Explaining" something by means of an untestable hypothesis is not an explanation at all, scientifically speaking.

If you could, for once, make a single coherent point, I might be able to respond to it. As it is, I feel I am trying to have a conversation with a barking dog. All you do veer around all over the place, not even completing your sentences half the time, and repeating this demonstrably false assertion that nothing in nature is observed to "......become" twice (I assume you mean "happen" or "occur"). Several people, including me, have pointed out to you, quite politely, that this is obviously wrong, yet you continue to repeat it as if nobody had replied at all. My patience is now exhausted. There is no point trying to have a conversation with someone who doesn't listen and can't string two thoughts together.

Yes, for me the spark was kindled at about the age of seven by Lincoln Barnett's book version of "The World We Live In", which had wonderful panoramas of the creatures of each geological period - plus a completely wrong (pre-plate tectonics) account of mountain-building.

Er, well, I do have a degree in chemistry, in the course of which I learned a fair amount about chemical thermodynamics. So yeah I think I do have some understanding of the entropy of chemical systems, actually. I do not assume anything "appeared from thin air". A lot of work has been done on the likely origins of the various building blocks of life. (I've read a bit of it, but it's a fast-moving field and I don't pretend to have kept up with it all.) But you are flailing around so wildly now that it is impossible to discern what point you are really trying to make. The fact is that chemical reactions are repeatable. So your original argument that nothing in nature repeats itself is patently false. If you want to argue that life can't have arisen anywhere else, you will need a far better argument than hogwash like that.

The Earth formed ~4.5bn years ago. The earliest signs of life we have date from about 3.5bn years ago. So it took less than a billion years, apparently. I don't understand what point about entropy you are trying to make. The entropy of a given chemical reaction is a fixed thing. It is the same now as it was 3.5bn years ago.

I really do not understand why you keep repeating this falsehood: "lesser complex reactions are not observed to produce the same thing twice " They do produce the same thing, repeatedly. If they didn't, there would be no science of chemistry. Where do you get this silly nonsense from?

"Biology" is just what biochemistry produces. There can be different "biologies", based on different biochemistries. For instance, there might be a different system for inheritance that didn't use a molecule like our DNA. It might involve different base pairs, or not use base pairs as a coding mechanism at all. Its metabolic biochemistry might not use ATP as a carrier of energy for reactions inside the cell. It could differ from our biology in countless ways. But, so long as it produced biochemical systems that replicated and passed on their characteristics to the next generation, you would get evolution....and then more complex life forms would come into being. As for chemical intent to become life, no, I do not suggest that. But life did arise here on Earth and there is no reason to think the conditions on the early Earth are unique in all the universe. A similar process, if not an identical one, can certainly have taken place elsewhere.

Yes this criticism has a point. It seems to me that the deepest mystery of all about the universe is where the order in it (what we call the "laws of nature", though actually the laws are just our models of the order, as we perceive it) comes from. As far as science can go , it "just is". We have to accept it as a given. Rather interestingly, it seems that, to Einstein and Spinoza, this order effectively is what we commonly call "God".

But, as I have said to you several times over now, it would not be the same thing twice. That life would most likely look different from ours, here. It would involve organisms that metabolise and reproduce, but there the similarities might end. Your question about numbers of singular events is pointless. You will just get some telephone number or other, to set against other telephone numbers representing the number of potential worlds on which life could arise, and the time available for them to do so. That is a fruitless line of reasoning for something like this. It looks to me a lot like the notorious "Argument from Personal Incredulity".

Yes I rather agree with you about that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Universe_from_Nothing

So now you are asserting something quite different from the OP: you are saying that abiogenesis is too improbable to occur twice. But you have no basis for saying that. The universe is a big place and has been going for a long time. There is plenty of room, and plenty of time, for all sorts of low probability events to have come up, somewhere.

No. The process (by which life arises, or by which gold veins form in the rock) will be essentially the same, but the outcome will differ somewhat from occasion to occasion.

None of this is relevant to the discussion on this thread.

Yes this is true to an extent. But, to take the radioactive decay example, we can predict that a radioactive nucleus will decay, due to a cause - its instability - that we are aware of. We even know what prompts the decay of an individual nucleus (vacuum fluctuations). But we can never predict when an individual nucleus will decay, because these vacuum fluctuations are random. There is no cause for an individual fluctuation. They just happen.

You're "still waiting", for all of five whole minutes? I'm touched that you hang on my every word, but I'm afraid I do have to attend to some other things besides your posts. I won't keep you in suspense longer than I have to. Stay calm. Yes. Which question do want me to answer, then? I'm not doing both, because I have no intention of getting Gish Galloped.

He's talking about something else here, namely faster than light/backwards in time influences.

In QM, the probability of events is predicted, but the actual occurrence of the individual events themselves cannot be. That's not too hard to grasp, surely? In QM there are fundamental limits to how much can be known about systems.

It is what the theory predicts and observation is in line with that prediction. So we have evidence that it is uncaused. We don't have proof of course, because we are doing science and science does not deal in proof.

Well it is what quantum mechanics seems to tell us about the nature of the world. So it is the state-of-the-art model, at least. So, anyway, I'm glad to have got this clear: you are essentially putting forward the good old First Cause cosmological argument for God. The objections to that will be the usual ones.