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All good things take time to grow and develop. The initial life forms had to evolve into hominids with brains capable of receiving and producing Spirits.
^^^^Right. If we assume the Big Bang was created by God then it took billions upon billions of years for the earth to cool and the elements settle into the right conditions so that in this giant "soup" covering the earth with all the elements necessary for life to develop, a molecule composed of a 147 specific atoms had to assemble itself to make the building blocks of a coherent structure (remember, there were thousands of elements swimming around with these 147 atoms which were incompatible with life), much like taking a hundred different jigg-saw puzzles, mixing the pieces together and then trying to get the right pieces together to form a coherent picture.
Now how do we get from the above image to a highly organized human being possessing dozens of systems like endocrine, digestive, circulatory, immune, nervous, etc. all working in complete harmony? Not without some higher power guiding the assembly. This is the flaw in scientists' theory of evolution: they cannot get from the molecule above to males and females able to reproduce and populate. There isn't a number large enough to calculate the odds of the primordial soup assembling enough dead molecules into a plant and animal kingdom totally compatible with each other and then somehow making it all come to life and following a pretty spectacular system of self-replicating to keep the species going.
My belief: God allowed all this to unfold naturally over billions of years until we are where we are today. Evolution is perfectly compatible with deism, as long as at the very beginning when the first molecule came together we acknowledge through reasonable deduction that the odds of it happening randomly were just too high to be practical, hence some higher power was guiding the whole process, or at least kickstarted it and then allowed it to evolve on its own under natural laws.
^^^^Right. If we assume the Big Bang was created by God then it took billions upon billions of years for the earth to cool and the elements settle into the right conditions so that in this giant "soup" covering the earth with all the elements necessary for life to develop, a molecule composed of a 147 specific atoms had to assemble itself to make the building blocks of a coherent structure (remember, there were thousands of elements swimming around with these 147 atoms which were incompatible with life), much like taking a hundred different jigg-saw puzzles, mixing the pieces together and then trying to get the right pieces together to form a coherent picture.
Now how do we get from the above image to a highly organized human being possessing dozens of systems like endocrine, digestive, circulatory, immune, nervous, etc. all working in complete harmony? Not without some higher power guiding the assembly. This is the flaw in scientists' theory of evolution: they cannot get from the molecule above to males and females able to reproduce and populate. There isn't a number large enough to calculate the odds of the primordial soup assembling enough dead molecules into a plant and animal kingdom totally compatible with each other and then somehow making it all come to life and following a pretty spectacular system of self-replicating to keep the species going.
My belief: God allowed all this to unfold naturally over billions of years until we are where we are today. Evolution is perfectly compatible with deism, as long as at the very beginning when the first molecule came together we acknowledge through reasonable deduction that the odds of it happening randomly were just too high to be practical, hence some higher power was guiding the whole process, or at least kickstarted it and then allowed it to evolve on its own under natural laws.
But it's much more practical to believe that an omnipotent being spoke the first organism into being?
^^^^Right. If we assume the Big Bang was created by God then it took billions upon billions of years for the earth to cool and the elements settle into the right conditions so that in this giant "soup" covering the earth with all the elements necessary for life to develop, a molecule composed of a 147 specific atoms had to assemble itself to make the building blocks of a coherent structure (remember, there were thousands of elements swimming around with these 147 atoms which were incompatible with life), much like taking a hundred different jigg-saw puzzles, mixing the pieces together and then trying to get the right pieces together to form a coherent picture.
Now how do we get from the above image to a highly organized human being possessing dozens of systems like endocrine, digestive, circulatory, immune, nervous, etc. all working in complete harmony? Not without some higher power guiding the assembly. This is the flaw in scientists' theory of evolution: they cannot get from the molecule above to males and females able to reproduce and populate. There isn't a number large enough to calculate the odds of the primordial soup assembling enough dead molecules into a plant and animal kingdom totally compatible with each other and then somehow making it all come to life and following a pretty spectacular system of self-replicating to keep the species going.
My belief: God allowed all this to unfold naturally over billions of years until we are where we are today. Evolution is perfectly compatible with deism, as long as at the very beginning when the first molecule came together we acknowledge through reasonable deduction that the odds of it happening randomly were just too high to be practical, hence some higher power was guiding the whole process, or at least kickstarted it and then allowed it to evolve on its own under natural laws.
That looks like the classic "God of the gaps" argument.
Sure, there's lots of stuff we don't understand. Who knows, we may never understand some things. That doesn't mean those things are controlled/accomplished by invisible beings.
That looks like the classic "God of the gaps" argument.
Sure, there's lots of stuff we don't understand. Who knows, we may never understand some things. That doesn't mean those things are controlled/accomplished by invisible beings.
Yes, but atheist scientists unwittingly box themselves into a God of the gaps theory because they can offer no alternative explanation that passes the rigors of the scientific model. Without a hypothesis that doesn't sound ridiculous or as impossible as their belief in the impossibility of a higher power guiding at least some of it, then they are in as big a conundrum as the one they claim the creationists are in. I don't believe in the Christian version of creation for an instant; I don't buy the liberal Christian version that God set an Adam and Eve-like figures fully assembled onto the earth millions of years ago and left them to fate. I think the most logical explanation, seeing as we will never be able to prove it one way or the other, is that the biogenesis started with a molecule and followed a blueprint laid out by a superhuman intelligence of assembling one molecule at a time and evolving over billions of years until we got the first rough human-like species and then they kept evolving from there. I find it curious that major human evolution completely stopped at some point millions of years ago or we'd have evolved six fingers by now, seeing as six fingers are better than five.
Question: why has the human structure, except for minor modifications in things like our immune system and such, completely halted? Why aren't we evolving an eye behind our head since we really need one driving in Los Angeles. Another way of asking it: have human stopped evolving on a macro level? If so, why? If not, where's the evidence we're still evolving, since the laws of evolution say a species continues to evolve until it goes extinct?
Yes, but atheist scientists unwittingly box themselves into a God of the gaps theory because they can offer no alternative explanation that passes the rigors of the scientific model. Without a hypothesis that doesn't sound ridiculous or as impossible as their belief in the impossibility of a higher power guiding at least some of it, then they are in as big a conundrum as the one they claim the creationists are in.
I don't understand why you think scientists are boxed into a God of the gaps theory. Scientists in almost all fields are working on solving all kinds of mysteries. Some mysteries are harder to crack than others. Some mysteries may never be solved. "Solving" a mystery by saying "God did it" is a cop-out because it doesn't actually increase our knowledge. It's far more scientific to admit our ignorance on some topic (and keep trying the scientific method) than to make up an untestable explanation (like "God did it"). Yes, it is possible that a god, an alien, or Chuck Norris controls or accomplishes the things we don't understand, but historically this has not been the case: we have found better explanations.
Quote:
Originally Posted by thrillobyte
I don't believe in the Christian version of creation for an instant; I don't buy the liberal Christian version that God set an Adam and Eve-like figures fully assembled onto the earth millions of years ago and left them to fate. I think the most logical explanation, seeing as we will never be able to prove it one way or the other, is that the biogenesis started with a molecule and followed a blueprint laid out by a superhuman intelligence of assembling one molecule at a time and evolving over billions of years until we got the first rough human-like species and then they kept evolving from there. I find it curious that major human evolution completely stopped at some point millions of years ago or we'd have evolved six fingers by now, seeing as six fingers are better than five.
I'm not sure I understand what you are getting at here. I know that some humans are in fact born with six fingers, but apparently the survival benefit of having six fingers is not large enough to cause those folks to out-survive the rest of us. In certain environments, perhaps the six finger benefit would be a large enough?
Quote:
Originally Posted by thrillobyte
Question: why has the human structure, except for minor modifications in things like our immune system and such, completely halted? Why aren't we evolving an eye behind our head since we really need one driving in Los Angeles. Another way of asking it: have human stopped evolving on a macro level? If so, why? If not, where's the evidence we're still evolving, since the laws of evolution say a species continues to evolve until it goes extinct?
I'm not a Real Evolutionary Biologist, but I'll take a stab at it anyway, since I'm a fool like that:
I have never heard that human evolution has halted. Major structures that work well in our current environment are unlikely to change much. In places where food is readily available, it is possible that the human stomach could actually get smaller over time since the extra capacity is not needed and can even contribute to obesity. Think of all the people getting gastric bypass surgery in order to artificially adapt to a food rich environment.
As far as having an eye in the back of our head for driving: we don't need one since we have rear-view mirrors and backup cameras. We decided that Natural Selection against non-rear-eyed people on the freeway would be quite undesirable, so we invented rear-view mirrors in order to avoid such carnage. It would not be wise to wait for a rear-eye mutation to arise in the human genome in order to make driving safe without mirrors. We changed our environment instead of waiting for evolution to adapt to a non-mirror environment, which could take a long time. If a rear-eye mutation ever did arise in a non-mirror driving environment, you can bet that the mutation would spread by natural selection over the millennia since those folks would be less likely to die while driving.
Like mordant says, evolution produces life forms optimized for mere survival, not for enjoyment, quality of life, or convenience.
Assuming that mankind is the whole reason for having the earth in the first place (as religious people believe).
Time is a human concept works only on humans. In science, time is rather a delusion.
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