This article by Michael Marshall on the The Secret of How Life on Earth Began is probably the best summary on the topic I have read to date. I compiled a quick glossary below.
It’s not just about the “smoker” vs “souper” debate (sometimes referred to as the Metabolism First vs RNA World Brouhaha). This article also examines other disparate competing hypotheses regarding the origin of life and even suggests that a unifying grand hypothesis may be possible.
A great read!
oparin haldane charles darwin atp tree of life chemiosmosis rna world franklin hershey chase peter mitchell cyanide nick lane alkaline vents hydrothermal vents clay meteorites geothermal pond volcanic pond ultraviolet compartmentalisation first lipid world genetics first montmorillonite citrate magnesium copper lipid precursors hodge podge world metal ion core deborah kelley lost city william martin luca last universal common ancestor origin of life reactor pier luigi luisi glycol nucleic acid günter wächtershäuser jack corliss michael russell pyrite david bartel philipp holliger gerald joyce peter nielsen polyamide nucleic acid pna albert eschenmoser threose nucleic acid tna eric meggers miller urey watson crick orgel john sutherland thomas cech walter gilbert thomas steitz jack szostak ribozyme rna enzymes ring of life vitalism trofim lysenko alexander oparin j. b. s. haldane armen mulkidjanian jillian f. banfield friedrich wöhler benjamin moore biotic energy warm little pond
The Bayesian brain hypothesis is absurd.
I’m inclined to think so, too, but I want to have an informed opinion before rendering judgment. I’m reading Hohwy’s book now.
It also needs to be decided whether the evidence is relevant, and that’s best done without ulterior motives, with philosophical dispassion.
Some building blocks are essential or irreducible, some accidental or irrelevant. Compare wheels versus radio in a car. You need to find out the criteria of relevance.
Except that we have an OP as if some progress had been made. Referring to a news website even.
I rest my case.
Yes it is. When will you be able to do this?
That’s already been done. Amino acids are part of cellular life as we know it. That makes them relevant.
And it has. But no, the purpose of the OP is not to claim that progress has been made. What is good about the article linked is it’s balanced overview of several competing hypotheses. It isn’t claimed that the article brings any new evidence, just that it is a well written article about the state of the field.
… without dealing with the explanation why. Okay, you rest your case then.
I think it does a good bit more than that.
Firstly, it gives a nice history of abiogenesis research, from Oparin and Haldane to the present. Secondly, it concludes with a suggestion about the most likely of existing candidates, along with reasons for that assessment. There has been real progress here, in terms of developing new hypotheses and testing them based on their likelihoods and prior probabilities.
It’s a further question whether one thinks that Marshall’s optimism about our ever finally coming up with The Answer is fully warranted, which in turn depends on whether one shares his assessment of Szostak and Sutherland.
Careful, Rumraket will probably put you on ignore if you point out the ridiculousness of a position that calls the definition of life “cellular life.”
The skeptics new strategy here seems to be to cram their fists into their ears as tightly as possible. Now that this site is not an echo chamber with only one dissenting voice, they are all scurrying away from opposing viewpoints as fast as possible.
KN,
The idea that life and cognition are somehow exceptions to the Second Law is a common creationist/IDer misconception. Don’t fall into that trap!
The words “life” and “intelligence” don’t appear in statements of the Second Law, and they don’t need to.
(bolding added)
Plus, intelligence can’t circumvent the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Glen Davidson
Yes, supposing that intelligence is material. But that’s an untenable supposition.
ETA: Materialists often say something like, “Intelligence/thinking/reason is what brain does.” Consider for parallel, “Transport is what a car does.” Now, does car do any transport on its own?
Glen,
Ten years later, we’re still laughing at DaveScot’s blunder:
physicist:
DaveScot:
Why do think it untenable? If you introduce some imaginary effect or process, you have to account for how the imaginary effect or process interacts with reality. Best of luck!
It’s untenable to assume that imaginary is something necessarily opposing to reality. Imagination exists, right? What exists belongs to reality.
But in this case we were talking about intelligence which cannot be said to be an imaginary thing in the first place. Good luck to you imagining how the world works without using/implying intelligence.
Transport is the moving of an object from one position to another. Yes, cars can transport on their own. But never mind man-made vehicles.
Rivers can also transport things. And ocean currents. And the wind also transports lots of stuff around. They transport heat, sediments, gases, moisture, debris and so on.
Rivers are some times used deliberately as transportation devices. They do it “on their own”.
And some people say that catching mice is what a cat does. Now, does a cat catch mice on its own?
As relevant.
But to be relevant would be to discuss these matters meaningfully. And you just don’t.
Glen Davidson
I appreciate the warning, but I don’t think I was in any danger of falling into it.
True, but I’m not sure how that’s relevant to the point I was trying to make. The applications of laws to specific conditions never appear in the statement of the laws themselves.
The only point I was trying to make is that there’s some interesting research on the free-energy principle as important both for life and for cognition. I find this quite fascinating. Maybe that’s not of interest to others here, which is fine by me.
Do you even remember the point being made? Evidently not.
The river may carry things on its own, but does it do so intelligently (i.e. does it carry wherever it wishes)? Is the river alive?
Now, the cat is certainly alive as compared to the car, and that’s how we can figure out the nature of intelligence. The cat can catch mice on its own, but if the car is to transport things, it needs a driver, a living being. So intelligence is the property of living beings exclusively.
And intelligence is immaterial, because if it were material, then either all material things would be intelligent or you would be able to extract the material element responsible for intelligence. Since neither is the case, intelligence is immaterial.
Will you ever make a proper point?
The real issue is how to infer causes. It’s ridiculous to invent something other than water and gravity (keeping it basic) to explain how the river “carries things,” and likewise it’s ridiculous to suppose that something other than the considerable data processing capabilities of the brain (neural nets, etc.) are responsible for human intelligence. Unless you actually have proper evidence for something else.
So what is that supposed to mean (the following quote is so much nonsense)?
Above, one of the worst “arguments” ever.
Computation is immaterial, because if it were material, then either all material things would compute, or you would be able to extract the material element responsible for computation.
You evince no knowledge of what makes one “material” thing different from another one.
Since you have no capacity for discussing what intelligence is, and so have completely wrong presuppositions about it, your fallacies lead you to a fallacious “conclusion.”
Glen Davidson
Correct.
Are you saying you inferred a cause here?
Yes, river carries things as long as it flows. Yes, the brain has processing power as long as it’s alive. So, the causality is not in river apart from its flow. The causality is not in the brain apart from its being alive. A dead brain has all the same cell structure, but processes nothing.
We know what makes a river flow. Do you know what makes the brain alive? As long as you don’t, you have not even begun to infer causalities in relation to it.
I’ll ignore the rest of your comment for your own good.
Did I say that I did?
The point is that you have no evidence for your “immaterial causes” any more than you have knowledge of the causes involved in neural circuitry. I’m not trying to pander to your lack of knowledge.
The cell has the capacity to engage in functional glycolysis only as long as it’s alive? So what?
Yes, living things generally can’t do dead what they could alive. Like maintaining organization.
Not even close. Once past the threshold of death, the cell’s organization seriously declines. Anoxia can seriously damage still-living cells, as well as killing a number of other cells, so that a still-living brain may process things very much worse than it did prior to the anoxic incident.
I know some of what does. Do you know why this matters with respect to brain operation?
As long as you don’t understand the importance of nerve conduction and synapses that require living cells but whose informational processes are not dependent upon most of the processes involved in living brain cells, you haven’t a clue of what is important in this matter. You’re blundering on with your essentialist nonsense.
Oh, you can’t deal with it? Poor you.
Go learn something,.
Glen Davidson
Very slight disagreement here: cognitive scientists are still developing and revising and testing theories about what brains do and how brain activity is best understood in relation to person-level activities such as perceiving, thinking, wanting, and acting. I worry that the use of “ridiculous” here suggests that we have a fully worked out theory of how mental phenomena are causally implemented in brains (or, as I would prefer, brain-body-environment causal loops), and we just don’t.
However, I would say that skepticism about neuroscience (as with skepticism about abiogenesis) is often just “epistemophobia”. People don’t want to know that there are things we actually do know, when that knowledge conflicts with convictions that are either constitutive of identity or imbued with ethical, aesthetic, or spiritual evaluation.
First off, it was about “intelligence,” and a fair amount is known about that, much more than some other brain activities you listed. Secondly, are we really at a loss to understand the basics (and apparent bases) just because we don’t know everything?
No, that doesn’t follow.
There is the known, and then there are evidenceless unknowns. Are we supposed to think that because particular evolutionary processes aren’t completely known (and often rather less than that) that it’s incorrect to claim that it’s ridiculous to conclude that “immaterial causes” must be responsible for some of them?
That’s not ridiculous? As a personal belief I wouldn’t really label it ridiculous, but as a claim made to others (and with a poor knowledge of neuroscience) that is supposed to be persuasive, it indeed is ridiculous.
Glen Davidson
keiths:
KN:
It sure looks like you were:
That’s not just a “suggestion.” Of course life and cognition are not deviations from the Second Law. Of course intelligent agents can’t circumvent it. It’s a law of nature, after all.
Erik,
What hideous logic.
Erik,
I suspect not to someone who is ideologically committed to the position that it is. For my part (disbelieve me if you will) my interest in science is unconnected with atheism. I’m merely curious about how things work. I’d like to know how life came about, in a nuts-and-bolts way. I don’t see anything helpful in theistic gibberings on the matter.
It is curious how the ‘ideological’ quest can dismiss certain lines of investigation as untenable. I, for example, disagree with all ‘peptides-first’ scenarios, on chemical grounds, my namesake Miller notwithstanding.
Erik,
I keep seeing my name bandied about, but not attached to a position I actually recognise. What have I arbitrarily decided? I don’t think that abiogenesis has been solved. But I do think there are good reasons to suppose that Life on a planet could be a one-off thing – as regards reaching a concentration that we could detect – without it being exceptional in itself. There is a huge difference between a sterile earth and one teeming with evolved organisms, for a tentative, clumsy replicator, if such can exist. I know, that’s Natural Selection Bah Humbug Darwin Bastard Puppies gibber … but perhaps a less loaded term might be ‘ecology’.
Not at all though you must appreciate that the definitions need to be clear. Simply, “Imagination” is my blanket term for whatever is not in any way, detectable, observable or inferable, however indirectly.
Human imagination – the act of imagining – certainly exists as a biological process that happens in brains.
Yes.
I think it is eminently possible to describe the universe and everything in it without needing to resort to “intelligence”. The concept of intelligence is not at all clearly defined or at all useful.
Kantian Naturalist,
Only kinda. I don’t think chemistry that is not in service of a replicator is worthy of the term ‘metabolism’ myself, granted that is a semantic nicety.
It is observed that certain central metabolic pathways can proceed non-enzymatically. One could call that metabolism I guess. But what is lacking is anything that benefits from that process, and beyond that, any mechanism for doing it better. Energy falls down the thermodynamic well – and then … ?
RNA World is not just about replicators, but energy. The basic building blocks of RNA include the main energy currencies of the cell, ATP and GTP. That’s not likely to be incidental. ATP’s adenosine forms a very precise angle, with atoms along the planar edge that map very precisely upon complementary atoms in a pyrimidine orientated precisely 180 degrees the other way. Many different molecules could serve the energetic role – they don’t need to be that shape; that shape is only required for RNA polymerisation (although of course the shape is also fixed by enzyme binding sites in modern life).
The energy for polymerisation is present within the ATP molecule. That is not the case for amino acids for example, which have further complications due to multiple carboxyl and amino groups, and a complete lack of repeat specification in the absence of a translation system. Replication is not necessary in the first instance – complementary pairing provides for stabilisation. But if you do get replication, that would light a spark. Create copies with an exponent greater than 1, and you can gain significant increase, with variation providing opportunities to tune and improve.
Any system that starts with something other than RNA has a major problem of transition. It does things one way and then evolves a completely different system to do them another, while maintaining some kind of continuity of underlying process. That does not seem very plausible. (The apparently parallel difficulty of going from ribozymes to protein enzymes is much less fundamental, because the genetic material does not change).
So, although I’m not going to pretend (Erik take careful note) that this is the answer, I think RNA world ideas have considerable merit.
I’m a theist.
ETA: vj torley is a theist.
Yes, in fact my interest in science made me an atheist, not the other way around. I was raised a christian, I was a christian into my early twenties, but I also had a great interested in science along the way. I don’t have any need to be an atheist, I’m not an atheist because I want to be one or because it is in any way attractive to me. Who the hell wants there to not be an afterlife, or no justice for supreme crooks like Kim Jong Un? I was raised a christian, I was a christian into my mid twenties, but eventually it slowly got eroded away by evidence.
I think it is you who forgot. We weren’t discussing intelligence, but what it means to be alive. You are seemingly implying there must be some sort of “life force” in living things. Vitalism.
So you think that all living things are intelligent? Do you believe an E coli bacterium is intelligent? If so, please give an example of something E coli does that is “intelligent” and then tell me how something dead, like my computer, or a lump of rock, is not also intelligent when it reacts to external input and influences.
If you really think they are, then your definition of intelligence is so broad you will not be able to distinguish between “dead” intelligent and “living” intelligent things. Under your definition, my computer is intelligent. So are rocks. They “respond” to outside influences.
Uhh, we CAN extract the material element responsible for intelligence. Using a more meaningful definition of intelligence, most organisms have brains and a central nervous system. Your computer has a CPU. Google’s search engine runs on giant server clusters which also has CPUs.
And also what it means to have purpose. As for you, you are unable to account for any of these concepts. For example, you said that it’s okay to define life as “cellular life” and that that’s not tautological.
And compare these statements of yours:
At first you accuse me of believing that E coli and lumps of rock are intelligent. Nevermind for the way you misrepresent me (it’s understandable because we haven’t even begun specifying the relevant definitions), but immediately next you say that to say that brains and CPUs are intelligent is a meaningful thing to say. So essentially you yourself hold to the belief that E coli and lumps of rock are intelligent.
Take your time to sort yourself out. I have already stated the following: Yes, river carries things as long as it flows. Yes, the brain has processing power as long as it’s alive. The qualifications are important.
Of course at some point you don’t recognize your own views when your views are arbitrary. The case in point was the way you decided that life can happen given right conditions even when scientists cannot re-create the conditions and they even know hardly anything about what the conditions were.
To be non-arbitrary, you need to give the same liberty to any opposing view. But of course you don’t, because you are deciding things arbitrarily.
So, when you imagine that tomorrow is going to be a good day, there’s nothing detectable, observable or inferable about it. Good job at arbitrarily redefining things.
If you didn’t, then you didn’t mean it seriously when you said, “The real issue is how to infer causes.”
Let me know when you have begun dealing with the real issue. You are not even touching the real issue here:
Radio is also part of the car. Does it make it relevant? The point is that it’s not sufficient to be part of something. You clearly have not figured out the criteria to determine relevance.
So you know what makes the brain alive? And for proof, you can reverse the death process by adding precisely the thing needed to make it alive?
We’ll resume the discussion when you do that.
No, that’s you just now introducing the concept. We haven’t been discussing that at all until this very sentence I am responding to.
But if you wish to discuss purpose, here’s my view: There is not any thing that “has” purpose. Purpose is an idea in the minds of conscious beings. We assign purpose to things, or event, or ourselves. But they (the things, events or even ourselves) don’t “have” it.
We believe it about something else, or about ourselves. But the thing itself has no property called purpose. Take a screwdriver, it’s created “for the purpose” of losening or tightening screws. But is this really a property of the screwdriver? No, it is found nowhere in the screwdriver. And you can use it as a weapon, or for making holes in ice, or shove it up your ass if you are so inclined. Does it then suddenly change purpose? Well, the screwdriver itself doesn’t change at all, it is just your beliefs about it that does. Your thoughts about the screwdriver, and your use of the screwdriver has changed. But the screwdriver itself is entirely unaffected, it doesn’t have purpose nor has it’s purpose changed. Purpose can not be “imbued” in something, or “infused”, or “built into” anything. It is in our minds and nowhere else.
Even if there’s a God, and God created human beings, the entire universe and everything in it, there would still not be any purpose in any of his creations.
It would still just be an idea in God’s mind about the things God created.
I just did. Purpose is an idea in your head, nothing more. That’s an account.
Oh I see the problem now, you are objecting to the word “life” in the definition of life as “cellular life”. Okay, thank you for pointing that out. Let me correct it then: Life is cells with a DNA or RNA based genetic system with protein translation, encapsulated by a phospholipid bilayer membrane, the totality of which can synthesize it’s own components from simpler precursors, grow, divide and evolve.
Now the word “life” is not part of the definition any more. I actually clarified this definition of cellular life earlier, but I can see why you got confused.
Yes, first I point out a problem with your position, then later I give examples of things I would claim are intelligent. Notice how rocks and E coli isn’t part of the examples I give, of things I would say are intelligent.
I’m not saying that intelligence is merely things that “respond” to outside influences, for the very reason that if we do that, everything becomes intelligent.
Then please offer your definition of intelligence and explain how “life” qualifies as being intelligent, while dead things do not.
No, as just explained.
Yes, first I point out a problem with your position, then later I give examples of things I would claim are intelligent. Notice how rocks and E coli isn’t part of the examples I give, of things I would say are intelligent.
You are misattributing the quote to GlenDavidson, I think you have messed up something with your posts. I was the one saying “That’s already been done. Amino acids are part of cellular life as we know it. That makes them relevant.”
By the way, I clearly have figured out the criteria to determine relevance. It is you who can’t keep up with the discussion.
The relevant question is how life AS WE KNOW IT, came to exist. That is the problem scientists are right now trying to solve. The origin of life is the challenge of identifying how life AS WE KNOW IT, the life we ourselves is part of, came to exist.
Since amino acids are part of life AS WE KNOW IT, it is relevant. It cannot be any more relevant than that. Amino acids are part of the building blocks of life AS WE KNOW IT.
There could possibly be other forms of life not dependent on amino acids, but that is not the kind of life WE are, and as such, is not the question we are trying to solve when we try to solve the origin of life AS WE KNOW IT.
Remember, as I explained in the post where I defined life as “cellular life”, I also clarified that: “That usually means a DNA or RNA based genetic system with protein translation, encapsulated by a phospholipid bilayer membrane, the totality of which can synthesize it’s own components from simpler precursors, grow, divide and evolve.
So the origin of life is the challenge of identifying the mechanism by which such an entity (cellular life) came to exist.”
So amino acids are eminently relevant to the question of explaining how “a DNA or RNA based genetic system with protein translation, encapsulated by a phospholipid bilayer membrane, the totality of which can synthesize it’s own components from simpler precursors, grow, divide and evolve” came to exist.
It’s been discussed as “function” starting from roughly here http://theskepticalzone.fr/competing-origin-of-life-hypotheses-fantastic-summary-by-the-bbc/comment-page-4/#comment-148600
Point taken. Case closed.
Oh, so you mentioning the term “function of the car” once means we have been discussing purpose. Cool story bro.
Glad to have been of service. Any time really.
Non sequitur. You certainly are poor at using logic. Among other things.
Like you’d know. Learn some logic, then you might begin to deal with facts.
You haven’t figured out how to attribute quotes properly.
We’ll begin to have a decent discussion when you stop with the fallacies. Like that’ll ever happen. You really have a lot to learn to even begin to deal with facts.
Glen Davidson
Looks like we have another common point here: Logic precedes facts. In other words, intelligence precedes matter. If you mean it seriously, there’s hope.
Non-sequitur. Literally a logical fallacy. LOL.
You and Glen use the word “non sequitur”, but you display no awareness of what the fallacy consists in. You just throw the word around. In a rational discussion, you don’t just throw words around, but show that you understand what they mean.
On the one hand, it should be easy for you to prove it, because it’s an egregious logical fallacy. On the other hand, to do it you would need to restate my statements in a formal way without misrepresenting them and then point out the fallacy. Given the quality of our discussion thus far, it’s impossible that you are able to do it. So you are just throwing a word around.
As you were.
Rumraket said:
That all depends on what god is and what creation is. In my view, creation exists within the mind of god, so yes, if there is a purpose for a thing god creates, that thing would be factually made up of the same “mind-stuff” that carries purpose, and so that created thing would in fact have inherent purpose.
The same principle of “material world within and imbued by mind and consciousness”, as believed in many spiritual doctrines, would provide the screwdriver with inherent purpose from the mind of its human creator, the human mind being a subset of god’s mind.
Your argument against such inherent purpose in a theistic universe erroneously assumes a materialist perspective and your argument is also, apparently, limited by a narrow concept of theistic worldviews.
If I may ask, in what way does “design detection” fit into this world view? If it doesn’t, then which aspects of ID theory do you hold to? What do you take ID to consist in, as a scientific theory?
Erik:
That would take a considerably lengthy post to go into any detail, but I’ll do some broad strokes.
First, the “mind of god” is a label, a label meant to convey a general understanding. As an actual thing, it’s not entirely comprehensible.
Second, there’s a lot of stuff going on in the mind of god. Levels of stuff, categories of stuff, universes full of stuff. Compare it to the dream state of a human, only many orders of magnitude greater in scope and depth.
In our experiential section of the mind of god, there are phenomena that behave and interact according to certain rules; this forms a contextual framework for conscious, continuing-identity, individual experience and the characteristics of those lawful phenomena are categorized as “natural”. Other phenomena in this universe behave outside of the reasonable scope of such natural processes; we can call this category “artificial” or “supernatural”.
IMO, ID as a scientific enterprise attempts to determine a metric that is useful in forming a categorical demarcation between those two types of phenomena and recognize the characteristic imprint of artificial or supernatural activity (although most ID proponents wouldn’t use the term “supernatural”).
Whether or not an ID proponent believes existence to reside within the mind of god, I think ID as science is pretty much what I described it as – the attempt to find and use a metric to make a determination between phenomena best explained as the result of natural or artificial processes/causes, and to employ the corresponding heuristic when conducting further research into that phenomena.
Bye-bye, physics and chemistry!
When I imagine something, such as what you might look like for instance, the process is a real one, involving electrochemical processes in my brain. The idea I come up with is probably nothing like you. If I had sufficient artistic skill I might be able to reproduce an image that would perhaps match your species, sex, number of eyes, ears, nostrils and so on but it would be a work of pure imagination.
As far as tomorrow goes, I hope it will be a better day but that depends on how people vote today. Hoping for the best.
Didn’t Dembski unambiguously claim that he actually had such a metric? He was not attempting to determine such a metric. He alleged he was already operating with it.
And the point of classical (pre-Paley) design argument is that the distinctions of “natural” and “artificial”, alive and dead, intelligent and what not, they all manifest in degrees within creation, not in categorical terms. To be sure, they are distinctions invariably applied/created by higher beings (higher beings tampering with lower things) and when enforced, the distinctions tend to be sticky (i.e. they form species and kinds), so they seem to be categorical, but are really of degree.
Another way to put it: Since all creation is within God’s mind, there’s nothing within creation categorically devoid of purpose or design. Therefore the categorical metric to detect design is an impossibility. This is why I am not an ID-ist. To me the classical (scholastic) view of design and intelligence makes better sense.
Erik said:
I was under the impression you were asking me about my views on the subject. What does Dembski have to do with my views?
Well, I guess that depends on how you define the degrees and categories in question.
That may be your view, but it isn’t how I see it. You can have one thing and that one thing have different categories of characteristics.
Just as everything in my own mind is not necessarily purposeful or designed, I don’t hold that everything in god’s mind is purposeful or designed. It may be, but that is not necessarily the case.
In any event, even if it were a fact that everything was actually designed, that doesn’t mean that ID cannot be useful as a means of scientifically discerning the difference between two different categories (or sub-categories) of design characteristics – Design-N (appears to be the result of natural law & chance), and Design-A (appears to be the result of artifice).
ID would still be a valid and useful endeavor in either case.
Thank you for that lecture, so let me make your fallacy clear to you. A non-sequitur fallacy is a classical fallacy in which the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises. The key words are “doesn’t follow”.
You wrote “Looks like we have another common point here: Logic precedes facts. In other words, intelligence precedes matter.”
Taking the first sentence to be the premise and the second to be a conclusion, it would look like this:
P1) Logic precedes facts. (A before N)
C1) Therefore intelligence precedes matter. (Therefore B before G).
That conclusion doesn’t follow, you are introducing terms and concepts in your conclusion not found anywhere in your premises. Even if the conclusion is true, it is not true because of anything stated in the premise.
I get that you think these terms are connected in some way (logic and intelligence, facts and matter), but that connection needs to be made explicit. As it stands, being very charitable and calling it an argument, it’s invalid. The conclusion doesn’t follow. So a non-sequitur fallacy.
If it’s not meant as an argument, then it’s just incoherent, since the words in the first sentence are not interchangeable with the words in the second (logic does not equal intelligence, facts do not equal matter). In other words, you literally can’t use the phrase “in other words” when describing the first sentence with the second, because those are not words that mean the same thing.
Thank you for that for the vote of confidence. I see how you are such a charitable person. Must be that good christian upbringing I hear so much about.
That’s an interesting suggestion but I can’t make sense of it. Supposing there’s an immaterial, conceptual realm of some sort, ala platonic ideals or concepts. In what way do things “have” purpose in this realm? It doesn’t seem to make any sense to say that. So there’s a screwdriver in this realm, and it has a purpose as a fundamental property. How? What is it about the screwdriver? Can you really answer that question without just asserting what I’m asking you to explain? It just “has” purpose? What does that mean? How does that work? What effect does this have on the screwdriver, it’s surroundings and it’s uses?
You seem to think the world we live in is such a realm, in which things really do have purposes as intrinsic properties. While things appear to us to be material, you seem to think they aren’t. That they are somehow conceptual, because they are “imagined” by God.
How do you know this and more importantly how do you know what that purpose is? I really can’t make sense of the concept of purpose except as an idea held ABOUT a thing, but never as a property of the thing itself. Whether things are made of atoms, or whether they are entirely imagined and conceptual in the first place.
If God imagines a screwdriver forth, in His mind, how does this make the screwdriver have purpose as a property of itself? It seems to me God has now just imagined TWO things, a screwdriver, and what it is for. But suppose God did not imagine it for anything? It seems to me it would have changed nothing about the screwdriver, only what God imagines it is for.