Originally posted by Dartmoor Dave But science doesn't claim to know how it was done, it just claims to have the best theory it's been able to come up with so far, and it certainly doesn't expect us to believe it without evidence.
If only that were true, Dave. The biochemistry of life is increasingly well understood, genetics likewise. But there is a third discipline, a most unforgiving one, which is quite unable to account for life beginning in a dirty puddle, under a heap of stones, next to volcanic springs in the oceans or wherever from very raw ingredients. Chemistry is the problem, and chemistry says “
who are you kidding?” to propositions of the raw ingredients of cellular life being made, persisting and assembling themselves into life, however basic, in prebiotic conditions of any colour. The variety of temperatures, pressures, pH and the presence of co-reagents simultaneously necessary but mutually exclusive is ridiculous.
The chemistry is difficult, really really difficult, even in a laboratory, and no-one has a credible answer to that essential problem. Appeals to billion-year timescales don’t help either because the compounds, unless in living systems, oxidise, hydrolyse and decay. Try any textbook, any academic paper, any popular science book, none give anything more than a vague recipe of wishful thinking or bodyswerve it entirely. But we are still expected to believe it.