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Originally Posted by twistedmosaic
From a strictly agnostic point of view, I still can't fully grok counterpoints to irreducible complexity, and also a lack of reproducable abiogenesis. But this is probably my own fault for not educating myself about these areas rather than a lack in the field.
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Abiogenesis has more to do with astrobiology than evolutionary theory. We have direct observable evidence that life spontaneously came into existence on our planet; the question of how is interesting and not well understood yet, but evolutionary theory deals more with what comes after. Evolution is strictly an answer to how complex life can develop from simpler organisms through the principle of natural selection. Interestingly, this creates one of those little nooks in our understanding that allow theology and modern science to co-exist peacefully. We know that life originated, and we know (more or less) what happened after that. As to what happened before, what you want to believe is your lookout. If you want to believe that God nudged a couple of amino acids in the right direction, more power to you.
Equally interesting is what happens when we combine abiogenesis with the anthropic principle. We can, essentially, state that life originated on Earth because, even though the odds of life spontaneously arising on any one particular planet are exceedingly low, life arising when taken from a Universal perspective is pretty much inevitable. It had to happen somewhere and our little rock just happened to be the one that got it right. Admittedly, this is a somewhat weak argument from a scientific standpoint due to the difficulty of obtaining proof, but it does explain why attempts to replicate spontaneous abiogenesis in the lab have so far failed. Every time we combine the right molecules in the right condition, we roll the dice. We've already won the lottery once and doing so again is going to take many more attempts than we've had time to make (assuming, of course, that we
are combining the right molecules in the right environment; primoridal conditions being what they were, it's very difficult to know this with any real certainty). This would also seem to lend credence to the rare Earth hypothesis, although now we're getting on quite a tangent and I think I'll leave it there.
As to irreducible complexity, that is from my understanding an argument from ignorance. The prime example I've seen is the human eye, but the argument fails to grasp that an eye wasn't always necessarily such; simple photoreceptors may have simply been a small cluster of light-sensitive cells (in turn possibly adapted from heat-sensitive cells). Once we have a starting point, however primitive, natural selection takes over and gives rise to organs and devices that seem inexplicably complex. It may help to point out that evolution can be a device that removes unnecessary components as well as adding necessary ones, which can lead to an end result that seems to be impossible to reach from a simple starting point (due to intermediate steps that arose and subsequently became redundant and atrophied).