What aspect of life on the Earth requires supernatural powers?

_{December 1, 2008

Intelligent Design}

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Some people who support ID doggedly hold that life on the planet earth requires a supernatural agency to make it happen. Others who don’t support ID also doggedly hold that ID requires a supernatural agency.

I’ve asked, many times, what is it about the construction of organic life on this planet that requires supernatural intelligence to make it happen? What laws of physics or chemistry must be violated to produce any aspect of any living organism thus far examined?

I admit that the origination and diversification of organic life on the earth seems best explained by participation at some point or points by an intelligent agency but I don’t see where a supernatural intelligent agency able to bend or break the laws of physics and chemistry is required.

I concede that the creation of the entire universe out of nothing seems to require an agency with capabilities that go beyond the laws of physics and chemistry as we understand them today but my question isn’t about the creation of a whole universe. My question is just about the creation of organic life on this planet.

Comments

Kliska, FWIW, I think you win the cigar.mike1962_{December 2, 2008
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rockyr has stolen my thunder to some extent. My thought is that when man is able to take basic elements and from them construct a living breathing organism then I can accept that there is no need for the supernatural. I suppose the ultimate would be to be able to take a frog, drop it into a blender, take out the component parts afterward, reconstruct the frog as a living entity after it croaked in the blender. Until then I'll take it that the supernatural comes into play where the spark of life is necessary to get the machinery of life going.George Tasker_{December 2, 2008
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rockyr: I find your post @69 definitive and persuasive.StephenB_{December 2, 2008
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Interesting but difficult discussion. The crucial part of the problem lies in the imprecise usage of key words, such as what is life, creation, causes, intelligence etc. For example, if you consult any decent dictionary you will discover that the term "organic life" can be shortened to just "life", (real life as we know it), unless you are prepared to argue for fantasies like cyborgs, but that would be a different discussion. Also, please note the importance of terms like "change" and "death" in any such meaningful definition of life. And, if the discussion is indeed "only" about human manipulation of the environment, and humans possibly "creating" "life", let's focus on that specifically. (For example, even within the context of something like this http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/archives/08-09/qq-2008-11-22.html) All these are good questions. And Dave's further clarification, whether life requires a "god-like" entity to pull it off, doesn't make the original question any easier to answer, because now we would have to deal with what is god or God, that is, with theology as well. Chapman55 & tragicmishap have a good point when they say that intelligence itself may be a supernatural intervention. So we would have to ask also — What is intelligence? (A Christian theological answer is expressed in the notion that God is a Creator, while Christ, His son, is a Logos.) There is also confusion about the basic terms which are often incorrectly used interchangeably like create/make/generate/evolve/design/redesign etc. The term "laws" or scientific laws and their breaking also needs to be explained & understood. StephenB also made a good point about the confusion with respect to the words natural and supernatural, specifically about natural/supernatural phenomena, as well as natural/supernatural intelligence. (AI or Artificial Intelligence is a nonsense.) BarryA raised a good question when he asked Dave to clarify whether he means or is interested in the efficient cause. BarryA presented the four famous Aristotelian causes, but, seen from a more distant and holistic perspective, the whole work of Aristotle was aimed at asking the same or similar question DaveScot is asking. That is why Aristotle went to such pain and length to address the various aspects of the terms "nature" and "life" within nature. And what does the word "construction" mean in the original question? — does any intelligent process need an intelligent agent or can an automatical un-intelligent evolution-like process construct such new life? The latter has been explicitly denied by the Catholic Church, and I am quoting just to show that behind any creation in nature is God as the prime cause or the Prime Mover (as in Aristotle): "295 We believe that God created the world according to his wisdom. It is not the product of any necessity whatever, nor of blind fate or chance. We believe that it proceeds from God's free will; he wanted to make his creatures share in his being, wisdom and goodness: "For you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created."Therefore the Psalmist exclaims: "O LORD, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all"..." http://www.vatican.va/archive/catechism/p1s2c1p4.htm (This is a matter of belief and doctrine for Catholics, Christians, Jews, Muslims and any intelligent rational theists.) Now, subject to the clarification of all of the above difficulties, and of my understanding of the posed question, I will attempt a simple answer — The scientists, i.e. human intelligence, will not be able to make or create any meaningful and positive life, by meaningful & positive I mean something good, contributing positively to nature or creation, unless they are guided by some supernatural intelligence or intelligences. (Let's not forget the role of angels in all this.) It is possible that despite the infinitesimal odds and difficulties, as they have been admitted by scientists, (see or listen to the above reference), some life-like things (chimeras, monsters, and the like), may eventually crawl out of the test tube, and if science "creates" such things, it will pose further questions about the real meaning of life.rockyr_{December 2, 2008
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----allanius: "At the same time, the implication that nothing more than natural intellect is needed to create life is unproven. No fair eliding material and efficient causes. We may know the basic constituents of life, but that doesn’t mean we know how to." That seems reasonable to me. As I indicated above, it seems possible that human intellect could reproduce much of it, but even if we could replicate 80% of it, the other 20% might well take us completely out of range. The more I think about it, the more I conclude that humans can't even redesign the project, let alone create it. I think I am with you on this one. By the way, when you speak of the "divide" between intellect and matter, are you referring to radical Cartesian dualism? Or, are you referring to moderate dualism of Aristotle, Aquinas, Adler, Maritain etc......or do you have something else entirely in mind. I won't press the issue because it is too much off topic to pursue, but I would like to know what you mean.StephenB_{December 2, 2008
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Any mechanistic theory of the will to live can be no more than an automated stimulus-response program of “if x then y”. The fact remains that there is absolutely no mechanistic theory of desire, of consciousness or freewill. The best the materialists can do is to deny that these things exist. If they say that they are an illusion—it’s an illusion to what consciousness? Is it that the consciousness that doesn’t exist dreams that it does exist? Now then as for the biblical soul (néphesh)---the commentators see two levels, one which inheres in all life as the center of desire and will (Deut 12:15; Ezekiel 18:4, 20), and the breath (n?shamá) of God that imparts human language (Gen 2:7; Job 32:8). Strangely enough the tribes that I work with perceive the same tripartite nature of man as Scripture (1Thess 5:23; Heb 4:12) with the exception that they additionally associate colors: body (wáwnakwshash) is associated with the color yellow, life (waq’íshwit) with human language and the color blue, and heart (t?mná) with free will and the color red. Who says that such insight cannot inspire our hypotheses? I would suggest that we are only now beginning to grasp the distinction between body (hardware) and spirit (software), and some even see that these are incomplete. Your desktop with its sophisticated programming is not enough—there’s also got to be that soul at the keyboard and mouse.Rude_{December 2, 2008
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#64, please note that the verse you quoted indicates that neither the body nor the "soul" is immortal. They can be destroyed, and will be in hell. Regardless, soul in that context means your whole being, "character, personality, intellect, spirituality," etc. This is in contrast with "body," which is just the physical, material make-up of a man. Soul here doesn't mean some ghostly component of being. In fact, it never does mean that in the Bible. Here's some handy information for you to peruse. I will certainly watch the video at length when I get a moment tonight. However, as you point to Sheldrake, I'll point to Uri Geller's early works where he claimed to have psychic powers. Apparently he has recently retracted that claim. BTW, I am a Bible-believing Christian and a skeptic. I am a skeptic because I hate seeing good people deluded by fraudsters- the proverbial wolves in sheep's clothing- of whom Satan is the greatest. ;)cklester_{December 2, 2008
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Playing the middle against both ends, are we? Very clever. Unfortunately, you’re not really in the middle. The notion that intellect is supernatural is a strawman—you won’t find it in the Bible. Nor can it be concluded from our advances in life sciences that an advanced intellect could create life by purely natural means. Nowhere does the Bible indicate that intellect is supernatural or the essence of being. That’s a Greek notion. It led to a divide between intellect and matter and the demise of philosophy in the end; so if that’s where you’re going—well, welcome to the modern age. At the same time, the implication that nothing more than natural intellect is needed to create life is unproven. No fair eliding material and efficient causes. We may know the basic constituents of life, but that doesn’t mean we know how to make them stand together in a living whole. The issues of fine tuning and regression are also germane. If an advanced intellect managed to create life in a universe fine-tuned for life, then that intellect was coddled; if it used existing materials, then it had a head start. As for the nature of intellect itself, it seems the brain is fashioned in such a way as to make it possible for consciousness and identity to come into being. Human intellect may be unspiritual—divided by the knowledge of good and evil—but it is capable of intuiting the unity of spirit; capable, that is, of a spiritual relation. All of which leads to an important statement made recently about other ways of obtaining knowledge from intellect and its methods—but that’s for another day.allanius_{December 2, 2008
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Yes, cklester, the OT intermixes "soul" and "living beings/creatures/etc.", which is why I referred you to the NIV for that search. Maimonides pointed out long ago that the Hebrew word which the KJV translators wrote as "soul" had several different meanings. That doesn't explain the words of Jesus in Matthew 10:28. Your understanding of the word "soul" makes no sense in that context whatsoever. As far as Sheldrake is concerned, try watching the video instead of scoring points by linking James Randi.angryoldfatman_{December 2, 2008
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Dave Scott says, “What I want to know is what aspect of organic life that we know about requires a god-like entity to pull it off.” I think Dave’s right about the material mechanism of the cell (which is what we know about)—there’s no reason to believe that in the course of time human technology will not advance to the level where we can build a cell. Whether it would live or not depends on whether vitalism is valid. Is there something, something elemental, that imparts the will to live (which Darwinism assumes), which cannot be explained by the mere mechanism of the cell? If it turns out that the DNA is no more than a recipe for proteins, and that in the course of our studies we find nothing in the material mechanism of the cell that manages the hierarchy of its life, then I’d say the vitalists are right. And if so then we could build a cell but if the gods were not willing there would be no will to live. Now—perhaps the thing to ask here, avoiding loaded concepts such as “supernatural” as well as theology and the ultimate nature of creation (ex nihilo versus “moving things around”), is whether we think mind (the source of design) is---as I asked above---elemental or merely supervenient on mechanism. Thus does design (mechanism) come from mechanism? Is it, as in the old story, “turtles all the way down”? Perhaps we will differ in this. So rather than endlessly argue theology and Bible and material versus ethereal substance, it might be good to clarify: are some of us emergentists and others vitalists (and elementarians/fundamentalists?!) when it comes to the source of design? It should be easy to figure this out (I’m of the latter) and then we can go from there.Rude_{December 2, 2008
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Good thread! I'm curious, though, what definition of "natural" and "supernatural" are in play here? Is "supernatural" used as "that which we currently can't explain with our current science" or "that which cannot be understood by any science, now or in the future"?GlowStick_{December 2, 2008
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Hey Guys - my comment "I’d like to take a stab at this, if I may: I think that some ID advocates don’t think that life evolved to its current complexity through Darwinian processes because of Dembski’s Specified Complexity, which in this case asserts that there’s not enough probabilistic resources in the universe (stuff x time) for this to happen. Well, if our life is so improbable as to be impossible, what chance does a progenitor species have, that must have come about with less resources (time) available? If natural explanations (all the stuff and time in the universe) are ruled out, are we left with the supernatural?" Is still waiting moderation. Hoping I'm not caught is a spam filter or something!IDskeptic_{December 2, 2008
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#58, "soul" is used interchangeably with "being" or "living being" throughout the Bible. Notice the first instance of the word "soul" in the KJV doesn't mean a "third part" but rather "the whole," which is what it means throughout the entire Word. "Man became a living soul." He doesn't have a soul, he IS one. Also, in Revelation, it says: And the second angel poured out his vial upon the sea; and it became as the blood of a dead man: and every living soul died in the sea, meaning, as the New American Standard puts it, "and every living thing in the sea died." Fishes. Turtles. These are "souls" according to the Bible because "soul" means "living creature." You can do more research, but the word "soul" in the Bible does not support an ethereal ghost component of the human being. Regarding telepathy, when James Randy is convinced, I'll be convinced. ;) (In other words, I ain't convinced yet.)cklester_{December 2, 2008
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In @60, I obviously do not mean to suggest that humans can also move parts around so as to design souls, minds, and wills.StephenB_{December 2, 2008
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I think that Dave does seem to have a point here: We recognize that a superhuman (Divine?) mind must [A] Begin time, [B] Create the raw materials from nothing, [C] Arrange them in the right order, [D] Fashion the laws that govern them, and [E] maintain the power flow that keeps them operating. To truly create one must do all of these things. The only thing human intelligence can do is [C] meaning it can only redesign the raw materials. But Dave has already acknowledged the point, in so many words, that human intelligence cannot, strictly speaking, create; it can only redesign. What I understand Dave to be saying is that there is nothing in principle to prevent a human being from "redesigning" all the component parts in such a way as to reproduce life, or as Barry A, puts it, act as an “efficient cause.” Given those qualifications, I can’t think of any serious objection to Dave’s assertion.StephenB_{December 2, 2008
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I agree: The supernatural, as opposed to the natural, may not be that useful a distinction. Better, I would think, is what the particle physicists call “elementarity”, or what Daniel Denett dubbed “skyhooks” (as opposed to “cranes”). It’s what you start with in your explanations—and you gotta start with something—nobody explains ex nihilo. Jacques Monod, as y’all know, clarified things in his book Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology (Knopf, 1970). He outlawed Design. Blind chance and the constraints of physics are all that’s permitted in explaining “the appearance of design” in living things. We’re rebels, however, and who is this frère Jacques to order us around? We know design when we see it because we are designers. Can he explain away this ability? Yes, he and his ilk promise, and so they issue their promisory notes called “emergence” and “supervenience”—conscienceness and free will emerge from mechanism, they supervene on organic chemistry. So what do we say—we who support ID? Well, when we say it, I think we say, NONSENSE! As I think I might have pontificated here before—this is no theory of conscienceness or free will. There never was such a theory and nobody has any idea how there ever could be such a theory. All they say is that when mechanism gets to a certain level of complexity—computational or stimulus response complexity—then hocus pocus! conscienceness supervenes! This is Francis Crick’s “astonishing hypothesis”, and astonishing it is. It’s a hopeless hope that makes us mere clouds—aggregates of atoms meeting fortuitously and fleetingly before dissipating in the vapor of time. Therefore I say that ID stands for design detection and the hypothesis that the source of design is elemental, fundamental, a sky-hook a la Dennett. It need not be supernatural any more than supervenient because it’s a fundamental part of reality. We’re here. We design. And we do it all within the laws of nature and the higher laws of mathematics and logic.Rude_{December 2, 2008
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cklester wrote:
The “mind” and the “soul” are unnecessary and certainly cannot be supported from neither science nor the Bible
What? (NIV used here to avoid OT translation confusion.)
There are no non-bodily powers. At least, not yet.
Dr. Rupert Sheldrake has done some interesting work that casts doubt on the definitive tone of your statement. FWIW, I tried deism myself a couple of decades ago, but found it lacking.angryoldfatman_{December 2, 2008
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tragicmishap asks why I distinguish between "non-material" and "supernatural." Because “supernatural” obviously carries theological baggage that “non-material” does not. In one sense, as you say, the words may be synonyms, but most people when they hear the word “supernatural” immediately leap to the conclusion that one is talking about God. I take it that you are using the word in a metaphysical, not theological, sense. Nevertheless, I suspect many of readers don’t grasp that distinction.Barry Arrington_{December 2, 2008
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wonderer asks: "If humanity someday assembles life from scratch, would that be proof of materialism or intelligent design?" Neither. It would demonstrate that the efficient cause of life need not be supernatural, which is the point of Dave's post.Barry Arrington_{December 2, 2008
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Neither.ribczynski_{December 2, 2008
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If humanity someday assembles life from scratch, would that be proof of materialism or intelligent design?the wonderer_{December 2, 2008
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Mapou wrote:
Materialism comes to an embarassingly screeching halt when faced with the hard problem of consciousness.
So does dualism. Dualists can't explain consciousness either -- they just assume it.ribczynski_{December 2, 2008
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#48 - I'd like to know where that "ancient promise" was made. All I see in Genesis is God taking "dust" (component #1 of the human being) and injecting into it the "breath of life" (component #2) and man became a living being. That's it. Two parts. There is no third part, no matter what you want to call it (spirit, soul, etc.). And from those very first creative acts (Adam and Eve), he has let his humankind create the rest; there is no need for intervention from him. (Take note #49): God set it in motion, but we keep it going with our God-given abilities. God is the ultimate engineer and has crafted a biological machine that can contain intelligence, character, and will (which is really just a result of intelligence) in a 3 lb. "computer." The "mind" and the "soul" are unnecessary and certainly cannot be supported from neither science nor the Bible, though this is a topic for another thread (and maybe an entirely other site!). :D There are no non-bodily powers. At least, not yet. ;) Back to the initial question: it requires a supernatural entity to get life started. It can't just happen through undirected physical processes. And if this life that is started is intelligent, then it too can create life in a lab (as opposed to in the womb) if its technology is sufficiently advanced. There is nothing about me (a father raising two teenagers) that is supernatural, yet I participated in the creation of two additional human beings, each of which started out as bundles of instinct and learned, over time, to control themselves. Reproduction is a (fun) feature God built-in to human kind. ;)cklester_{December 1, 2008
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bFast wrote: "It is not unreasonable that a few hundred generations from now kids in high-schools will begin with atoms, and assemble their own living micro-organism." There is a powerful case to be made that humans, unlike other living entities on the planet, are in fact supernatural beings by virtue of the observation that they all claim to be conscious. Materialism comes to an embarassingly screeching halt when faced with the hard problem of consciousness. We are the only species on earth that can aspire to design living cells from scratch. Somewhere it is written: "Ye are Gods."Mapou_{December 1, 2008
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Barry: Dembski has made the case that information is non-material because information content does not depend upon the medium. A string of ones and zeros can be represented exactly the same way by tapping on a telegraph, writing them on a piece of paper or in the memory of a computer. Is this what you mean when you say the mind is non-material? And are you then saying that you do not believe the mind is necessarily supernatural? I'm interested in why you are making the distinction between "non-material" and "supernatural". Intuitively, it seems that if nature is defined as atoms and the space between them, and supernatural is "outside the natural", than the categories of "natural" and "supernatural" cover pretty much everything. "Material" is just "natural", and "non-material" is what if not supernatural? I'm not really disagreeing with you on anything. I'm just curious as to why you think the term "supernatural" is so special that mind must not be included in it even though the mind is non-material. Dave: Would I be right in assuming that you believe mind can be entirely material? Or are you saying as Barry seems to be that mind is non-material but not supernatural?tragicmishap_{December 1, 2008
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Is supernature required to create biological organisms from scratch? The ID position is that intelligence is required and that RM + NS can't do it by itself. Intelligence means a mind and a final cause (teleology) so my answer depends on how you classify the intelligent mind. If you say the intelligent mind is part of nature then, NO, supernature is not required. Human minds probably will someday create life from scratch. But! I see a fly in the ointment. If RM + NS can't produce ANY intelligent minds on it's own then how can one of these minds be considered part of nature that eventually creates organic life from scratch? There's a chicken and egg thing going on.Lurker_{December 1, 2008
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I really don't want to unnecessarily prolong this discussion and I apologize in advance for the length of my post, but I have to agree with Timothy here. I think we all accept that a sufficiently advanced civilization could create microbes, plants and animals on another planet. The falsifiable prediction that I would make is that there is one thing that an advanced civilization could never do, no matter how much it monkeyed around with DNA, and that is: create a NEW race of intelligent beings. As other philosophers have argued more ably than I can do (see this article at http://www.rdg.ac.uk/AcaDepts/ld/Philos/dso/papers/Concepts,%20Dualism%20and%20Human%20Intellect.pdf for a good exposition), acts of the intellect (e.g. understanding) are necessarily non-bodily acts, so any race of intelligent beings would have to possess non-bodily capacities. No civilization, however technologically advanced, is capable of creating an entity with non-bodily capacities. I certainly agree with Dave that the Creator of an intelligent being would NOT have to violate any physical or chemical laws. However, it does not follow from this fact that a sufficiently advanced intelligent life form, somewhere out there in the cosmos, would be capable of creating intelligent life. The reason why I believe that no NATURAL entity (or entities) would be up to the job of creating a new race of intelligent life can be expressed using the Aristotelian terminology introduced by Barry: the efficient cause being posited here is inadequate to the task at hand. "Why?" you might ask. "For the same reason that telekinesis is impossible," I would answer. Despite the fact that we happen to have some non-bodily capacities, humans and all other intelligent life forms in the cosmos are essentially embodied beings. We can only act because we have bodies, and we can only act by influencing other bodies. Direct, non-bodily action is not something we are built for. It is a lesson we learn in childhood: wishing for something doesn't make it happen. To make something happen, you have to get your hands dirty and DO something physical. We can act willingly, but we cannot act simply by "willing" or "wishing," as if these were magical ways of making things happen. God can make things happen in the cosmos simply by wishing them to be so; but that is because the cosmos itself is simply an expression of God's will. God "contains" it, so to speak, be virtue of being its Ultimate Cause. To return to the task at hand: creating a new race of beings with non-bodily capacities. The problem here is that there's nothing PHYSICAL that we can do to generate a non-physical capacity. We can't educe it from matter, for an immaterial capacity is not something "locked away" in matter, in the first place. And anything NON-physical that we do by the exercise of our intelligence is powerless to generate anything new in the external world, except through performing some physical act intelligentLY. For essentially embodied beings like us (and other aliens out there in the cosmos), that's the only way we can act. For a good exposition of the philosophical arguments for the view that the human soul can only be created by a supernatural act of God, I would recommend this essay entitled "Good News, Your Soul Han't Quite Died Yet" by Professor Alfred Freddoso: http://www.nd.edu/~afreddos/papers/soul.htm . Freddoso defends the view of the Catholic Church, expressed in its Catechism, that "every spiritual soul is created immediately by God" and "can have its origin only in God." cklester: I take your point that human beings procreate enjoyably all the time, and the regularity with which this process is followed by the arrival of a newborn baby who soon begins to exercise his or her own little mind, might tempt one to think that nature alone can explain the appearance and emergence of our intellectual powers, without any recourse to a Deity. All it proves, of course, is that God is not one to break an ancient promise made to the human race: that the progeny of the first human beings, who were endowed supernaturally with non-bodily intellectual powers, will forever after be endowed with the same non-bodily powers, from the moment of conception. Had God not kept that promise, then we would today be nothing more than a race of advanced primates, capable of tool-making and natural empathy, but incapable of critical reflection, science, philosophy and religion. As the father of a three-year-old child, I have to say that my own gut reaction, on watching his mind unfold, was: "I didn't make that. God did." Making a mind is not something I can do, and I don't believe any other intelligent life form can make one, either.vjtorley_{December 1, 2008
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Hi Dave, You have made this point in a previous thread -- and had just as hard of time with it as now. I believe that the struggle that you are having is caused by the fact that many posters on this site do not have clear boundaries between their religious convictions and their scientific perspective. In general, as far as biology is concerned, I agree with your premise -- that supernaturality does not seem to be required to create living organisms. It is not unreasonable that a few hundred generations from now kids in high-schools will begin with atoms, and assemble their own living micro-organism. I think that there are three areas where the case for "supernaturality" can be seriously made, however. The first is in the topic of cosmic ID. It would appear to me that the intelligence that pulled off the finely tuned universe must have been somehow outside of that universe. As physicists would point out that time as we know it began at the bang, that intelligence must also be outside of time as we know it. These necessities (of being outside of our universe, and of time as we know it) appear to me to be at the core of any definition of "supernatural". Second, It is reasonable that earth's biology is the product of some extraterrestrial kid's biology experiment. However, from my understanding of physics, our earth grew life fairly early within the possibilities of carbon-based life occuring in the universe. (It appears that at least one cycle of a star forming and dying was required just to get some of the core materials, such as carbon, to build with.) Unless there is a life-form out there that is radically different from us, it is highly unlikely that it would have had time to evolve to the level of creating biology, back 4 billion years ago. As such, it is really difficult that we are more than one intelligence away from the intelligence that somehow spawned from nothing (even though our biology obviously didn't), or was designed by a supernatural designer. Third, I think there is some validity in suggesting that there is something "other" about the mind. I am not necessarily convinced that the mind is "other", but a reasonable case has been made. If that case is true, it does beg the possibility that we will eventually be forced to conclude that the mind must have been the product of supernaturality. I, however, am with you on this one -- the case has not been sufficiently made. What the mind is, and how it works remains to be too much of a mystery for us to determine with confidence that it is beyond the reach of otherworldly engineering.bFast_{December 1, 2008
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I concur with Tragic Mishap at #44. Thanks Barry, the definitions clarified a lot.chapman55k_{December 1, 2008
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I’d like to take a stab at this, if I may: I think that some ID advocates don’t think that life evolved to its current complexity through Darwinian processes because of Dembski’s Specified Complexity, which in this case asserts that there’s not enough probabilistic resources in the universe (stuff x time) for this to happen. Well, if our life is so improbable as to be impossible, what chance does a progenitor species have, that must have come about with less recourses (time) available? If natural explanations (all the stuff and time in the universe) are ruled out, are we left with the supernatural?IDskeptic_{December 1, 2008
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