It's all chemistry

[Wertbag]

Christians will say "life cannot come from non-life", yet a sperm is not categorized as alive and neither is the egg, so every case of reproduction is literally two non-alive things joining to create life.  Even life itself is a grey area, with the boundary between what counts and what doesn't being unclear.  Viruses are the most common edge case, where they aren't complete beings and are incapable of surviving outside of a host, but we also have a range of single celled organisms, fungal spores or self-replicating molecules, that have some but not all aspects of what we deem as life.

 

Animals are all chemistry based, from the molecules that make us up, to the systems within us, it is all chemistry.  From respiration, digestion, cardiovascular, nerves, reproduction to our minds, everything is chemistry.  So, if we change the viewpoint, it is possible to remove the incredulity from the Christian statement.  Rather than non-life making life, its chemistry making chemistry.  One statement sounds silly and is easy to hand wave away, but the other sounds perfectly logical.

 

The mental jump from having a non-living organism like a virus or a sperm, that through a chemical process gains the missing part to change its categorization, whether that be the ability to self-replicate, to survive by absorbing energy or gain a form of motion, it's now a small step that sounds plausible rather than jumping from a rock to a bacteria.  A huge portion of the arguments against abiogenesis are purely incredulity, so resetting the framing of the question and highlighting that the difference between life and non-life is fractional, with it all being chemistry before, during and after, makes it all much easier to believe in.

[TABA]

Excellent point.  As with so much in the universe, the spectrum from non-life to life is nowhere near as clear and distinct as is often thought.  Even in human life, the transition from fertilized egg to full-term baby is so gradual that even theists can by no means agree on when it becomes a human being.  Modern pro-lifers insist it’s at conception, but various religions have disagreed widely.  Then of course there’s the debates over when the soul appears in the fetus…

[Wertbag]

It appears most ancient people held to the idea of life beginning at the quickening (when the baby first moves) because before scans there was no other way to tell if it was alive. Miscarriages are still very common and would have been more so in ancient times. 

 

Imagine trying to explain reproduction to an ancient person "there's an egg, but so small its invisible and its met by a tadpole looking thing called a sperm, which is even smaller and also invisible. One random sperm out of a hundred million gets to fertilise the egg". They'd think you were nuts.

[TABA]

12 minutes ago, Wertbag said:

Imagine trying to explain reproduction to an ancient person "there's an egg, but so small its invisible and its met by a tadpole looking thing called a sperm, which is even smaller and also invisible. One random sperm out of a hundred million gets to fertilise the egg". They'd think you were nuts.

I read that in centuries past, it was widely believed that the mother was an empty vessel, an incubator into which the father ejaculated a minute embryo.  Not sure how they thought the baby might come to resemble its mother.  By some kind of osmosis, I guess.   

[TheRedneckProfessor]

5 hours ago, TABA said:

I read that in centuries past, it was widely believed that the mother was an empty vessel, an incubator into which the father ejaculated a minute embryo.  Not sure how they thought the baby might come to resemble its mother.  By some kind of osmosis, I guess.