Have you read a book called The Stairway to Life: An Origin-of-Life Reality Check by Tan & Stadler? You can find it on Amazon. It's pretty short and will get you thinking rigorously about the problem.
Also searchable by its other title "God of the Gaps Volume 6,000 - Forget the Other 5999, This Time We're Really Sure, Can You Stop Doing Research Now Please"
And I'm not opposed to doing research, of course (hard to believe I have to clarify this)
In fact I want people to research the question of the origin of life as rigorously and exhaustively as possible because it is just going to make it that much more obvious that life was designed by God.
I have absolutely no fear that this "gap" is going to do anything but widen.
No. But I feel like it is unlikely I'll find much value in it. Part 1 being on the Venter work does NOT inspire confidence at all. Not to dismiss them - they're great I've worked with them on a couple projects - but it frankly doesn't have anything to do with abiogenesis. The other fact that lots of creationists like it doesn't bode well either.
Like, of COURSE the Venter cell looks too complicated to originate from raw chemicals! The lineage it evolved from was far more complex, and Mycoplasma underwent minimization. Minimal life also does not equal simple life, or life that was most probable to arise from chemicals. Just a stupid premise, really.
It’s hard to see how it would be evidence based if the evidence’s premise is fundamentally flawed - just in such a niche way that people not in my field wouldn’t be able to see it. They’re kinda preying on the fact that people like you can’t see it, and that’s sad.
The false premise is that the religious explanation is the default or incumbent explanation, which must then be bettered or countered by "challenger" explanations such as science. It tries to frame the argument with religion as the "defending champion" for challengers to somehow unseat ("atheists need to explain how...").
In reality, of course, religious explanation has no such presumptive default or incumbent status. Religious explanations are just one of many potential explanations for how the world works and compete on equal terms with any other. And when the religious explanation really just boils down to some variant of "god did it", it becomes very obvious how inadequate that is compared to even the worst scientific attempts.
Related: religious apologists constantly try to pretend that criticisms or problems identified with scientific explanations somehow count as points in favor of their religious alternative. This is also a false idea. It is not a debate, where pointing out flaws in your opponent's argument helps yours "win". It is a search for truth, and finding fault with another theory does nothing at all to enhance your own.
Breaking the site guidelines like this will get your account banned on HN, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are, or how badly someone else is behaving.
