: : : I hope you guys don't mind me starting a new thread on the same topic. Previously, I stated that the probability of a functional protein forming by chance was one in 10 to the 65th power, though in reality, life could not originate from a single protein. The point I was trying to make was, that, most people don't have a clear understanding of the immense hurdles that would have to be overcome for "nature" to produce life from inert matter. You're probably familiar with the monkey and the typewiter analogy, where if a monkey presses the keys long enough, he will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. This is not a good analogy. The reason being, a letter produced on a piece of paper is a stable end-product, in biochemistry, the letter would have a strong inclination to jump off the paper and back on to the key due to the law of chemical equilibrium. For example, if a DNA molecule would happen to form by random, it would quickly (micro-seconds) dissociate. In nature, these bio-molecules are components of "information systems", that is, they contain the genetic information to build a living organism. At the cellular-level, DNA functions along with messenger RNA, many enzymes, along with the ribosome etc, in an integrated system. The information needed to construct the ribosome, RNA etc, is contained in the DNA. This system is "irreducibly complex". All known irreducibly complex systems are the result of intellegent design. Why should these be different?

: : Why does probability even matter, in a system which chaos literally rules? There were billions and billions of years for life to find a way for it's own existance, because there is no reason to think that life originated on earth. That is to say the very start of life such as micro-organisms.

: bzrd here: The difference between life and inert matter is that life contains information. Chaos contains no information (at least none that anyone can interpret) thus, chaos is the antithesesis of information. For example, the information in the chloroplast, is what enables plants to convert the energy of the sun into glucose. The information encoded in the DNA molecule is what enables an organism to reproduce. To propose a naturalistic mechanism for the origin of life one must propose a mechanism for the origin of information from inert matter. As I have previously stated, there is not a known mutation that has been observed to add information to the biosphere. If this is true, then, we are de-evolving (there is a body of evidence for this). Also, I must repectfully disagree with you're position regarding life not originating on earth, I maintain that until it is known how we came to be here, proposing that life exists elsewhere, is unabashed speculation.

***To say that there is no information in a piece of gold is to say that there are no laws to the universe, and if there were no laws, there could be no life, and if it is accepted that there are laws one must accept that there is information, for there can be no laws to operate without information. Furthermore, the very atomic structure of all things proves that there is information by its very existance. So the stucture of gold is something that cannot be lost. Gold can be changed in all manner of ways, in each state of being, it is still gold, even when you pull its basic building blocks totally apart, they continue to have the possibility to reform into gold, or into anything else for that matter. This also leads me to conclude that the amount of information in the universe is eternally stable, wheather it is expresesed or not, the ininite amount of possibilities within the confines of all the information/matterial cannot be added/subracted from, for information is no more than the possibilities themselves. Thus I must conclude that reality is the expession of some of the possibilities to a perciving device. One more abstract idea is that all things "percieve". For gravity is an expression of one particals perception of another. Its time t go t sleep, and contemplate how dreams fit into all of this...