Is this really a given? Certainly there must be something in the universe that "started it all" and has no origin of itself. Or, alternatively, everything in the universe has a history stretching back infinitely far, but that's equally incomprehensible and still allows you to perform the same "trick" (in this case: life has always existed).
Not saying that I believe in intelligent design, but in this case it seems to me that it does answer a question without creating any new ones.
If you're happy to entertain a causeless cause to explain life, why make it an intelligent designer, a very complicated object? Why couldn't life itself be the causeless cause? A cell is much simpler than anything capable of inventing the universe. All 'intelligent design' does is move the problem (and amplify it).
I think an intelligent designer feels simpler to a human because "conscious entity" is implemented as a conceptual primitive in our minds, for obvious evolutionary reasons. The idea of a non-corporeal mind spontaneously arising feels more plausible than a single-celled organism spontaneously assembling, because we need many more symbols to represent the latter. But it's a misleading perception.
Because everything we know about this universe needs a cause, nothing in this universe is causeless, so you can't simply say that "something" inside that universe is causeless.
And everything we know about life screams causality, from the need to eat and drink to generate energy, to sex for reproduction. If life can actually be causeless why is it so fragile and dependent on so many things to keep itself from death?
> A cell is much simpler than anything capable of inventing the universe.
A cell is also not capable of creating itself out of nothing.
Your lack of knowledge/understanding about how can something create the universe is not a justification for assuming that it created itself.
You need a causeless cause (otherwise we wouldn't exist), so you either choose it to be the universe itself (which is a wild guess with zero evidence and hence not even scientific as you claim), or it is God (and yes you can't and will never understand how it is the first cause)
I'd rather believe in God and his messages to us that brought actual evidence, than believe in an unconscious universe creating itself with no evidence.
Of course, belief in God is an emotionally charged topic. Many people rely on their belief for many things, and trying to argue against it is seldom productive - I'm hesitant to engage for that reason. You're free to believe what you'd like. But, since you've brought up "evidence"
I don't agree that there is more evidence for God creating the universe than there is for some kind of spontaneous event. For a start, the existence of the universe is extremely verifiable, much more so than God - no matter how much you believe in the "messages". For another, the universe appears to governed by very simple rules of physics (although not quite simple enough for my "several bits" threshold of acausality, just yet). Attempting to explain a fairly simple phenomenon that definitely exists with a very complex phenomenon of uncertain existence doesn't seem to add any explanatory power, and in fact just multiplies entities unnecessarily. All you've done there is take the mystery, put it in a box labeled "God" (along with a bunch of other things), and then said we're not supposed to look inside the box.
Addendum - I don't think the universe needs a "cause", per se - causality is related to the arrow of time, and that is a property internal to the universe. That's not to say that nothing needs explaining, but I think we should focus on "simplicity" rather than "causality".
It's much more honest to say "we don't know yet".
Fortunately, there's an abundance of evidence that complex phenomena can (and do, more often than not) arise from simple rules. Apart from this being the goal of all physics, at which it has been wildly successful, we can find examples all over mathematics. The cellular automaton "Rule 90" is a nice visual example of this: the rules are only a few bits and the initial state is a single cell, but the behavior is a tantalizing mix of ordered structures on the micro scale and chaos on the macro scale - a suggestive metaphor for our own universe.
If you saw a picture of a section of Rule 90 without knowing what it was, and tried to explain it, which explanation feels more satisfying? A mathematical rule + initial conditions that fit into a few bits? Or "someone drew it in an image editor because they thought it looked pretty"? Which has more predictive power?
Why not have the creator exist inside of time, or around it, or beside it? Maybe all existence was just out to tea right then with its creator, because the creator’s very attached to a particular tea flavor only found on earth, but will later be the creator, and will one day be in between two dozen creators? These are valid phrases that do not refer to literal relations, like “I am beside myself”, or “snapped back to reality”—the spatial foundations of these linguistic concepts refer to distance and spatial/time relations but don’t describe anything testable or reliably true. Intelligent design as a concept exploits language to imply absurd things, like that an omniscient omnipresent, omnipowerful, undetectable force is somehow also analogous to a mortal, finite, fallible, conscious human.
FWIW all this applies to holographic universe theories as well. The narrative makes 100% sense, but it doesn’t refer to empirically meaningful concepts.
It doesn't posit anything about other intelligence or life, just that the biological information necessary to kick off a self-replicating cell that undergoes evolution is too complex and too specific to happen randomly on Earth.
Even naturalistic panspermia theories are compatible with intelligent design, because it shifts the frame of abiogenesis to different conditions where cellular formation may actually become probable.
1. http://discovermagazine.com/2008/feb/did-life-evolve-in-ice
In this line of reasoning "Why this set of constants" doesn't matter, because only the universes that could have observers would be observed.
That is to say, we may not be able to easily predict and rationalize the beginning of life based on the initial conditions of the earth, because it is likely that it was an improbable fluke. It feels like a lottery winner trying to explain how they won the lottery.
If we do the chemistry and figure out the mechanism and it looks like it happens all the time, then that tells us one more term in the Drake equation and gives us a reason to go check out the exoplanets.
I think we are going to find that the preconditions for life are quite common. The way solar fusion and supernovas work, what atoms are produced, The distribution of material and of those atoms within an accretion ring... if a planet forms at the right distance, then it will have the mix of chemical precursors.
Honestly I suspect the only thing that makes Earth rare is our freakishly large moon. If we can ever prove that life is viable on a timescale of eons on a planet without such huge tidal forces pumping the biosphere, that will be a revelation.
Now most of the rest of us are still curious to find out how stuff works around here.
> The next major problem Carell wants to tackle is what reactions could have formed the sugar ribose, which needs to link to nucleobases before RNA can form.
Possibly something resembling the Calvin cycle could be the start you talk of. [1]
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00239-018-9840-1
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_teleportation
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21051949
> The results add credence to the ‘RNA world’ hypothesis, says Carell, who is at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany. ...
It's worth noting that what was made were nucleobases - flat very low molecular weight molecules - that when attached to ribose yield nucleotides.
It is nucleotides, not nucleobases, that form RNA.
The "RNA world hypothesis" still needs to explain where the ribose came from, how it was joined with the bases that were supposedly littering the Earth's surface, and how the resulting nucleotides started spontaneously assembling themselves through combination with phosphate into polymers.
That's a very, very tall order in chemistry.