I didn't follow this discussion from the beginning and don't know what you initially suggested. But you appear to have adopted two assumptions that make your conclusions very reasonable.
First, you assume the universe began at some point in the past, and that it is meaningful to imagine a time before the universe began, when there was nothing, and a time immediately after, when there was something. Having assumed this is what happened, you call it a mystery.
Second, you assume there is a similarly absolute division between living and non-living processes, and that at some point in the past, that division was crossed. Having made that assumption, you call it a mystery.
The conclusions are perfectly reasonable based on the assumptions, but the mystery is already built into these assumptions. If the universe and life have no causal precedents, then by definition they are mysteries -- a mystery being that which has no causal precedent.
You could extend this thesis along a line Russel once proposed -- imagine the whole world was created out of nothing five minutes ago, complete with memories and an apparent history. There's no way to disprove this scenario.
I'm not against seeing life as exceeding our understanding and deserving of awe, but locating the mystery in some singular act of creation in the past surely misses the point.
Let's imagine there is a God that created the universe and then created life; the rest of the time normal causal processes run their course. That's an incredibly lazy god! He does one instant of good work and then lazes around for ten billion years until he finally gets around to creating life in a second instant. Once that's accomplished, he drifts off to sleep again. The real mystery is what he's been up to since! Remedial ed? I think this is a really poor conception of the divine.
You might enjoy Franciso Ayala's argument about Incompetent Design, summarized at markarkleiman.com -- he argues Intelligent Design is blasphemous, as it attributes immoral and incompetent acts to God. |
