Apologetics: Chemistry

Chemistry

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Trying to explain how everything came about at the chemical level, including life (particularly, abiogenesis is just speculated to have occurred on asteroids) | Chemical Evolution: Origins of the Elements, Molecules, and Living Systems (1991)

Fine tuning is necessary for carbon synthesis. (This article interestingly argues against that by saying that the tuning does not need to be so fine, as long as the lack of carbon's alpha resonance is compensated by the longer lifetime of beryllium. At least the concession is made that carbon has a monopoly on naturally developing life, and that itself is telling. Why did life not appear as lifeforms consisting of other possible combinations of elements? If carbon chauvinism cannot have its day, and other lifeforms are indeed possible, why did we hit the jackpot in that respect and only observe carbon lifeforms?)

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There is a counter-argument to fine-tuning that says: The argument and wonder of fine tuning is only valid when you have multiple universes in the first place to show that this universe is the lucky one out of them all, just as you have multiple planets that don't have life to show convincingly that this planet is the luckiest one out of all of them. This is absurd and is not consistent with the physicists' right intuition that there is a need to discuss multiple universes (and indeed they do go there automatically). The exact reasons for the absurdity of the counter-argument are twofold: (1) From a practical method of doing physics, much of the existence of entities are given by reasonable inferences from data and theories. We could just say that we don't know if there are other planets, and physicists would plainly point to the flying bodies that our sun illuminates in our solar system and say that those can be inferred to be planets, point to the stars in the sky and say that they are like the sun we have, and just assume that there are planets around those suns. In the same vein, the existence of possible universes are not an idle claim, but are being seriously considered with field/string theories and inflation mechanisms to create them. (2) Actual entities and events require counterfactuals to make a theory to begin with and construct predictions which assume that such-and-such will happen under yet-to-be-actualized experimental conditions. A theory about an electron is not very impressive if it only records that electrons start to accelerate away from each other at distance 3 m, 0.1 nm, 2.99 m and 1 million other data points while being scientifically reserved and refusing to say what will happen at a yet-to-be-observed mutual distance by some equation (e.g. Coulomb's law). The person who brings up this counter-argument has not done much science.

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