Eavesdropping on a religious debate and Jones my just heard the creationist say 'I can't believe in evolution because it's too fantastical'. -she's also being really rude and argumentative (using Ray Comfort style techniques).
So here's my stance on religion. Note that I'm an agnostic that's grown up in a catholic school and family all my life.
I think religion is outdated. It's a way of keeping people in check and making sure they'll follow guidelines you want them to. The Bible contradicts itself and modern christianity, there's a ton of unexplained stuff that I'll probably get to later, and there's no physical evidence of a worldwide flood, a deity's existence, etc. There's a bunch of unnecessary restrictions that don't do any good being restricted, if they don't do harm. A glaring example of this is that you aren't supposed to marry another person who is nonreligious (2 Corinthians 6:14). Now pardon my french, but if two people love each other who the fuck are the church to say that they can't get married? Then there's the obvious fact that God's killed tons of people, then suddenly became extremely forgiving when he decided to get himself nailed to a cross, yet hell still is apparently a thing. Good going. Also, did anyone else note that Jesus was a bit on the narcissistic side?
Also, every religion out there is teaching their kids that they have the right religion, and that the other ones are all wrong. Yeah....anyone else see the problem?
A friend told me he had found the "best religion ever" and described to me what a Unitarian was. Frankly, I don't care what the religion entails; I still see no physical evidence of God. I know I may sound contradictory when I say this, but I may become theist once again, however I don't think I'll ever be religious again.
How do I explain a sunset if ‘their’ is no god? Well, first, I learn the difference between ‘there’ and ‘their’. I make typos here, but I also post about ten pages of material each week at least (sometimes more). This young lady only had eleven words to edit and she couldn’t get it right. That said, I don’t know anything about sunsets, but I might ask this person a question of my own. How do you explain apartheid, child molester (some of whom are in god’s church), slavery, sexism, genocide, the Holocaust (and please, not responses with the phrase ‘Christ Killer’ to this one), Hurricane Sandy, Andrew and Katrina, war, starvation, capitalism and Justin Bieber if the IS a god? What makes you beliebe?
So God created the universe to show "how big and powerful" he is? So God is so self conscious, has such poor self esteem and needed something to boost his ego he not only created the universe filled with planets and stars, so vast that it seems infinite, but also made humans to worship him and him only?....and you love this God why?....
You did not present the science against evolution at all though. The intelligent design theory is BACKED BY SCIENCE, not just certain religions. The complexities of the cell could not have arisen over time. Darwin himself said that a discovery (such as machines in the cell) would disprove him. I am not bashing your faith in proteins to spontaneously become life. I am simply presenting beliefs that were incorrectly presented. "The Bible said so" is NOT the reason I believe in intelligent design.
It happened. Finally. I knew it would. Thank you, anon, for your question.
The answer to this ask is extremely long so I have hidden it below the cut once more, to avoid the cluttering of your dashes. I apologise profusely to those of you who are mobile bloggers, and therefore do not have the luxury of the Read More button.
I was expecting this. This is a common argument. Before I disassemble it, let me first address the ludicrous assertion that intelligent design by theory is backed by science:
To say that something is abjectly impossible is to deny the scientific process. It is therefore NOT science that you are asserting; it is NOT a scientific statement to say that it is impossible for the complexities of the cell to have arisen through evolution by natural selection.
Furthermore, it is inherently impossible to prove a statement of impossibility. This is the religion argument all over again, but this time it doesn’t work out for you.
'God exists, because you cannot prove that He does not'
No man can prove this. It cannot be proven. Nothing short of killing a person can prove to them that there is no deity (or otherwise).
The same applies here. You are thinking backward and missing the point of science if you are only interested in the assertion that this idea is impossible, simply because it has not yet been possible to objectively prove. It is tantamount to giving up on the scientific process altogether to say that it could not have happened. Denying the possibility is like burying your head in the ground.
The greatest thing about science is acknowledging our knowledge gaps. Saying ‘oh wow, we still do not know how this could have happened. We should try our best to find out’ is the key to science.
Your argument is ‘oh, well, I don’t see how this could possibly have happened. It mist be divine intervention. I give up.’
Do you see where I am coming from? You are failing to understand the inquisitiveness, and the refusal to leave these questions unexplored, that is at the heart of science.
Anyway, now that I have addressed that, let me get on to the next assertion, vis-à-vis Darwin:
Darwin was wrong about a great many things. He started his life as a religious man, married his cousin who was also very religious, and originally wasn’t going to publish The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, until AR Wallace sent him a letter that went along the lines of:
'Dear Charlie,
I’ve had this brilliant idea. I bet no-one has ever had it before.
[Here’s what it is.]
Hope you haven’t had this idea before me,
Alfie Russel Wallyface’
at which point Darwin had a look over his immense manuscript and was like ‘ah buggery, I should probably publish this before Wally gets to it’
Charlie never imagined where his little evolution idea would be two hundred years on. He was just one person - just the starting pistol for a whole field. He was bound to get something wrong.
So remember at the time there were two huge knowledge gaps:
Firstly, remember that DNA had not yet been discovered. It turns out that Darwin owned a copy of Mendel’s book on inheritance (which later transformed the theory of evolution), but because it was written in German, he was unable to read it. If he had, perhaps he would have been able to address some of the issues he encountered.
Second, we must remember that nobody had done microscopic investigations of individual cells by this point. Yes, it was ludicrous to Darwin to think that little machines might drive the cells, but it was an overstatement in the extreme if he said that such structures would invalidate his idea. Because it turns out they offer some of the best support for it!
Now, let us address then this assertion that organelles and the cells that they are found in substantiate a claim against evolution:
(by the way, the theory of evolution by natural selection has nothing to do with this. A theory of spontaneous life formation is in question here. As I said in the argument that this ask is based on, there is no denying that evolution does happen, whether cells were created by intelligent design or arose spontaneously. Here we are only addressing the question specifically phrased in this ask: ‘the complexities of the cell could not have arisen over time’).
Alright now we have that out of the way, let’s talk about cell membranes for a second. Cell membranes are made of a phospholipid bilayer (two in eukaryotes). This is a layer of two fats, which have their hydrophilic ends oriented outward, and their hydrophobic ends oriented inward. There are two awesome things about these lipids: (1) they are made by DNA, and (2) you can throw a bunch of them together and they will auto-assemble into cell-like structures of spherical phospholipid bilayers. This is because the cell-like structure that they form is the most energetically stable arrangement for those molecules.
This, alone, is enough to substantiate the idea that cells (in their simplest definition: a vesicle contained within phospholipids) can have arisen spontaneously.
But this is not enough. Cells are so much more than just phospholipids and water. They are full of organelles and proteins and stuff.
Inside eukaryotic cells are organelles. The nucleus is sometimes considered one of them, but also there are mitochondria. We are reasonably certain that the mitochondria was once a free-living organism. It may have become an endoparasite or an endosymbiont of eukaryotic cells, probably a bacterium, to which the genome of the mitochondria is related. But we know that at some point, it was swallowed by eukaryotic cells. This was before the divergence of plants and animals. They share this organelle - this machine, which you claim invalidates the idea that complex cells could not have arisen over time. It is shared.
And even better than that, we can trace it! Mitochondria, as I have already said, have their own genome. It is utterly separate from the nuclear genome (though it can trade genes back and forth, especially in plants). And by tracing the mitochondrial genome, we can see that there are shared genes between the plant and animal mitochondria. They have changed a lot, but we know that the common ancestor of the two had a mitochondrial genome in common. The fact that the genome most closely resembles a bacterial genome further lends support to the idea that this, perhaps the most complex of machinery inside the cell, arose by a simple method. A method that we can satisfactorily explain.
And it is not the only thing. Chloroplasts arose in the same way in plants. Chloroplasts, which I am sure you know about, have again their own genome. And this, again, can be traced through the plants, down to their ancestors. In this case, it is almost certainly a single endosymbiosis of a cyanobacterium.
Cyanobacteria themselves consist of little more than a cell membrane, nuclear DNA, and a few very simple organelles. They also have a slime coat and other features not shared by any other group of organisms. But they are extremely simple.
It is not hard to imagine that, once a cell had formed around some DNA, and that DNA had the basic properties of replicating itself, the cells might, through many successive modifications, become increasingly advanced.
The problem of DNA evolution is another issue that has been looked at. It has been shown, for example, that RNA strands will evolve over successive generations, just like living organisms (read this article). It is no great stretch to think that DNA might also have undergone similar action, once it had gotten its start.
How did this start come about? I am not sure, and I’m not sure anyone has figured it out yet. But we do have ideas.
In time, we will gain more and more insight into how this process might have happened. What steps might have occurred to give rise to each and every structure inside the cell. We have only been doing this for a hundred years. Give it another two hundred, and I put it to you that we might have answered this, the greatest question of them all: where did life come from.
In summary:
The assertion of impossibility is one that you must avoid at all costs if you are attempting to argue in science. I have given substantial evidence that the organelles - the complex machinery of cells - have indeed arisen spontaneously. That they arose not through any form of divine intervention, but through coincidence and happenstance, and were successively acted upon by selection. The fact that it is possible to trace the evolution of not only the nuclear, but also the mitochondrial and chloroplast genomes, substantiates still further the claim that evolution is real, it is happening, and that we owe the incredible complexity of our cells, not to some divine creator, but to the incredible, beautiful power that is evolution, acting over billions of years.
I think the issue here is that people do not understand the time scale. We are fleeting organisms. We live for mere moments in the lifetime of the earth. We, as humans, are not even able to fathom how long a million seconds ago was. How can we be expected to understand that the earth is four billion years old? How much has changed in four billion years? It is beyond the possibility of our comprehension. Do you know what percentage of the earth’s existence you will be around for? 0.000000015%, that’s how much.
Over these immense and unfathomable time periods, intracellular interactions have had immeasurable opportunity to develop into incomprehensible complexity. That is what cellular biologists are faced with. Trying to unravel the complexity of organisms which have been evolving for at least 3.5 billion years.
How tragic it is to dismiss this - the life of our beautiful planet, the unbelievable time that it has taken for beautiful organisms such as yourself to form from primordial sludge - as the selfish act of a single deity. Who are you - and indeed, who am I - to dismiss such things as these? We are but a blip in the existence of our planet. We do it an injustice if we do not give it the credit that is due. If we do not try to elucidate the complex things that have happened to give rise to the amazing life that surrounds us, but instead, dismiss it as divine intervention.
Do not be so closed-minded as to state that it is impossible for these things to have evolved in four billion years. Few things are impossible in such a time period.
I hope that this argument is cogent enough to have changed your mind. Because it is vital that you understand how science works. What science is. And why any argument involving the intervention of something supernatural as a dismissal of the possibility of it occurring through natural means cannot be treated as science. I regret not providing any source material - had you asked this question in a month, my answer might have been longer and better sourced, but this will have to do for now.
OH MAN, IF THE SUN DIDN'T EXIST, HOW DID THE 'FIRST DAY' EVER START. I'm looking at you, God. Seems like everything prior to the creation of the heavens/sun would be pre-day (there's probably a better term for this), and then after He made the heavens, that's when the day started. How long is a 'God day'?
