Skip to main content
Philosophy

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

20
  • 7
    I suspect this question will lean too far into what the actual evidence is, which would be a question of science, not philosophy. The philosophy question might be whether some hypothetical scientific theory or hypothesis, supported by some abstract set of evidence, would meet the criteria for these frameworks. But I don't really know how one would ask that abstractly. Otherwise one might ask more broadly how one would go about evaluating claims under those frameworks, but the answer might just be "with evidence" and "via reliability", respectively.
    – NotThatGuy
    Commented May 26 at 19:29
  • 4
    Science split off from philosophy and might technically fall under it, but modern-day philosophy operates outside and around science. A philosopher wouldn't be the best person to ask about microbiology or whatever (unless they also happen to be a biologist).
    – NotThatGuy
    Commented May 26 at 20:33
  • 5
    Abiogenesis is justified evidentially, just not to the same degree as more established theories, like evolution by natural selection. Biologists synthesized requisite organic molecules in conditions similar to primordial oceans, and there are plausible models (RNA world) of how those could combine into proto-organisms. Stronger evidence would be experimental production of such proto-organisms in a lab, but that is currently beyond reach for practical reasons. As the evidence is obtained by scientific methods, presumed reliable, abiogenesis is also justified under reliabilism.
    – Conifold
    Commented May 27 at 4:40
  • 6
    You'd better define what "abiogenesis" means. From my own knowledge and a couple of dictionary definitions I just looked up, it means whatever process turned nonlife into life. There is ample evidence that life hasn't existed forever (there were not even any atoms 13.8 billion years ago), so abiogenesis happened. Wikipedia (which you linked) unusually says abiogenesis has to be "natural", in which case this seems the same as the other question you linked, and of course it gets into the problem of what counts as "natural".
    – benrg
    Commented May 27 at 17:38
  • 3
    And what's a natural process? A thing that happened in nature? A thing that happened without a human-like agent? A thing that happened in a way well-modeled by already well-supported physical principles? A thing that happened mechanistically, without the involvement of an agent who supervenes upon the mechanism but does not fundamentally alter and is not itself determined by the mechanism? The answer to this question could easily change from "yes" to "no" to "category error, we're just comparing ontological commitments" depending on the definition.
    – g s
    Commented May 27 at 20:36