Evolution vs Creation and So Forth

I cannot answer that question. Maybe God just used a common template and worked his way up?
I will state this however, look at the alleged evolution of the whale's nostrils.


Shouldn't we have thousands of examples of the nostrils moving up the head as opposed to big jumps between one form and another?

 

That’s not how evolution works. You don’t need living examples of every stage in the development of a feature. Existing species will display a variety of snapshots of how a feature may have evolved.

As others have said to you on the thread, science is not about incontrovertible proof. It’s about the level of evidence for a theory. And the evidence for evolution is overwhelming.

 

I agree that the evidence can be interpreted to to look like evolution is occurring, however, there are just too many larger questions for me to accept the conclusion. I have seen absolutely nothing that has convinced me that a living cell can spontaneously arise. I haven't even seen a brief description of how such a thing could have occurred.

At this point the closest thing to an explanation I would accept is that the Bible is literally wrong about Creation but that there is a God that created the living cell and then evolution has been happening for billions of years. I still don't think that is true though. That's the big thing I want to know, where did that first cell come from if it did in fact happen that way?

 

I've posted a link for you earlier.

The educational system is failing your country.

 

I'm highly educated. I write software for one of the world's largest building materials manufacturers. It is my education that leads me to believe that a living cell arising out of nature by itself without an intelligent designer is mathematically impossible. The reason I don't work a career in my educational background is because I started working as an engineer for the Veteran's Administration hospitals and while I was there I saw how basically corrupt the system was and how bad they screw veterans and it made me sick so I quit. I was working there when there was a national scandal that caused many patients to get exposed to HIV from dirty endoscopes (butthole cameras) and it was from shitty standardized procedures. I saw first hand why it was happening. I then taught myself C, C#, Assembly, HTML, CSS, and Javascript and started working as a software developer and have been doing that for nearly a decade. Your assertion that my education system is failing me just because I don't buy into evolution is hilarious. I have always been a high IQ person. I went to a Math and Science Magnet high school, something you have to test into. You think that just because I don't believe in evolution as it is taught that I am somehow lacking in education when I bet that I actually know more about the theory of evolution than most people that believe it.

Wait, I take that back. I am a dumbass. I knew all about the cochlea, and tinnitus, and I still foolishly gave myself hearing damage from playing my guitar way too loudly. You're right. I'm an idiot.

 

I've never made such a claim.

 

fair enough, I'm making it.

 

Richard Dawkins demonstrates the evolution of...

How do you explain the animals that are unique to Australia? Did Noah take a group of animals to Australia?

 

The FIRST cell didn't have to be as complex as the cells we observe after millions of years of evolution.

Religion requires faith, and the results in science aren't based on faith. So they Are mutually exclusive.

Not true:
https://listverse.com/2011/11/19/8-examples-of-evolution-in-action/

Are you aware of contemporary machine learning/artificial intelligence techniques where computers evolve profoundly complex computer programs? Look into it.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/lifes-first-molecule-was-protein-not-rna-new-model-suggests-20171102/

 

He must have made a pit stop. The Orangutans were getting winy.

 

Poppycock. It would have at least had to had DNA, RNA transcription, a way to synthesize proteins, and replicate. There is nothing not complex about that.

Science that gives us chemistry, electronics, physics, etc are all things that can be observed and replicated in labs. What people call science regarding the ancient past involving evolution and the origin of life is all conjecture and is unobservable, therefore it is just that, conjecture, it has nothing to do with science. It is based on faith.

None of those examples demonstrate one specie turning into another that cannot interbreed with it's original population. Africans and Europeans have adapted to their ancestral environments, are you saying that Africans and Europeans are two different species?

Show me an AI machine that built and programmed itself that can also produce physical copies of itself.
This is a terrible example because computers are designed by intelligent beings, just like the living cell was also designed by an intelligence.

And I'll get back to you about the proteins.... That's the achilles heel of this entire debate.

 

Ice bridges? I don't know? Where did Uluru come from? A glacier?

 

Kierkegaard, (spelling) Christian Danish philosopher... considered by some the first existentialist philosopher. Died in 1855.
He did not try to reconcile science with religion i.e. Grand design.

Simply if you have faith then God exists. And faith is enough, you need nothing more, nor should you attempt futile circuits arguments that are un winnable.

If you believe, your relationship and sanctity of that commune is between you and your god.
If one doesn’t believe as you do, frankly, who gives a toss.
You either have faith or you don’t.

I am not a Christian, that was not how I was raised, but this guy was really cool and seems pertinent to this civilized discourse.

Check this guy out, he’s super famous, like Chopin , Hendricks, Stravinsky, Tolstoy.
Standard in any philosophical teaching pertaining to faith and science.

 

God and Evolution go hand in hand as far as I'm concerned. The fact that some people think it's either/or is weird to me

 

The cosmology of the Bible is not compatible with evolution theory unless you interpret it in a very unorthodox manner. Maybe other religions have a cosmology that is compatible with evolution, but Christians are going to have a hard time reconciling the Bible with evolution.

But that's not really the purpose of this debate. I am saying it was and is impossible for a living cell to have formed by chance. It has never been observed, because it doesn't nor has ever happened.

 

Ah well, I haven't read the Bible and I'm not talking about the christian idea of God

 

So do you believe that an intelligent creative force is responsible for the first living cell?

 

I'm agnostic on the issue, seems like the only sensible position.

Who knows. Maybe we live in a simulation, maybe there are infinite universes in which case our universe is no longer a mystery since every possible outcome exists, maybe some intelligence (the universe itself is my main contender) is shaping how things turn out ie creating it. Maybe our earth was altered by aliens long ago, aliens with enough knowlegde about how to start an evolution of carbon based life.

I'm quite comfortable without knowing

 

If all of the animals that had ever lived were to be preserved as fossils, then the answer to your question would have been "yes." But that's not the case, so that answer to your question is "no."

It is the best and simplest explanation given the evidence that we have. Religious faith doesn't satisfy that criteria.

 

There couldn't have been ice bridges that long, and also 5000 years would not have been enough for rocks to be carved by the glaciers the way they had been.

No. See the example with the eye.

It shouldn't be long before there is one.

 

How is a living cell defying odds of like 1:10^100 to come into existence by chance simpler than just saying God did it?

 

You're saying the first cell didn't have to have DNA?

 

"a single sheet of light sensitive cells"
He makes it seem like that is so simple.

How does a cell mutate and have the chemical receptors and then also the nervous system infrastructure to even detect when the receptors have light shining on them? That's a huge leap in of itself.

 

There are many methods these days that can be used to get computers to EVOLVE code. Here is a book published a quarter of a century ago with a subtitle that speaks for itself:



https://www.amazon.com/Genetic-Programming-Computers-Selection-Feb-1993/dp/B010BF3Z6E

In most of those methods, computers first create random computer programs, and within several hundreds of generations evolve computer programs that are able to solve the user's problem.

 

Man made computers generating random code is not the same as a physical cell that can replicate itself. Doesn't seem like a useful analogy to me.

 

Bill, machine learning is vastly simpler than software writing and modifying it's own source code, which is not happening. All of these primitive AI applications are working within the framework of their source code, which was intelligently designed. AI is not writing it's own source code, and that is leaps and exponential bounds beyond having the code, the machine, and the ability to replicate. What I am trying to show you guys is that that a living cell is so profoundly complicated that it defies any mathematical probability that it could have possibly arisen from the random processes of nature that we can or have ever observed that the evolutionary model regarding the origin of life is not just impossible, but 100% without any shadow of a doubt impossible. Okay maybe .0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of a shadow.

 

They are simulating evolution - survival of the fittest, mutations, etc. Evolution and natural selection happen naturally, without the need for anyone to supervise the process.

I pasted the name of the technique on the cover of the book from my earlier post into Google Scholar, and added "programming itself" to that search query. On the first page of the search results, I got
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c3cf/c72c0eca13a3063162112c819bed52b6c9a9.pdf

The paper describes a machine learning technique that is evolving the best way to evolve. So it is basically software modifying its own code.

There are billions of Earth-like planets in the universe. Over the past 10 billion years, the chance that life would appear on at least one of those planets (given the odds above) is basically 100%. We are that planet.

You said you are a computer programmer. My background is also not biology. I think that one needs such a background to evaluate the likelihood that simple cells could have been created in primordial soup that had existed earlier in the planet's history. People with that background seem to not have any problems with the theory of evolution.

 

not coming from religiosity but i have to ask, what caused the big bang? what was before it? how can anything come from nothing? if we don't know the answers to these questions, how can science's view on life be taken as a fact? it's just a theory, and same as faith, it becomes a belief. yes, science is working hard to provide answers and proof but do you really think it can get there? to go where nothingness is/was, beyond space and time?

 

Not maybe. There are.

 

But you have to assume that it has been that long sing the beginning of the known universe.

Because they don't think about it. Also, I started in electronics and microcontrollers, so I have a healthy understanding of the complexities of the machine itself. Now that I work in an office that specifically writes software, I have noticed that people that came into this from a computer science background focused primarily on writing code, have very little knowledge about the complexities of the machine itself. They don't know about things like CPU machine cycles, logic gates, I/O, data buses, address buses, etc. That being said, everyone I work with except for one person in my office is a Christian. Out of the two top dogs, one of them is a young earth creationist like me.