Evolution?

[soliloquy]

I'm guessing I've managed to piss off everyone except sanantone basically, so I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but if not, thanks.

Just waiting for my start time right now and posting with my cell.

I don't think you've made anyone angry. Even if we disagree on what we believe, there is no reason to become angry about it. I think we are all capable of a candid discussion as long as we do so respectfully.

[Leebo]

I agree.

Rereading my last post, it's probably confusing. Please ask for clarification if it is.

One thing I want to toss out there is that even if we had zero evidence in support of the theory of evolution, that would not be evidence for creation. As with most things related to God, creation is a way of saying "we don't know how it happened, so God must have done it." It's not really an explanation at all. There are hundreds of conflicting creation stories throughout history and in various religions.

[Jack1798]

.

Imagine life begins,

Leebo,
I'm having trouble imagining. How did life begin? Please don't use the Miller–Urey experiment as an example because they were evolutionary scientists so they're obviously out to prove that life can just spontaneously jump into being on its own. It's the classic "fox watching the hen house" dilemma. On top of that Miller only got 11 amino acids of the naturally occurring 20 needed to form proteins necessary for an organism to exist. Even if we are going with a modest or "short" protein we would still need 150 amino acids in exactly the right order. doing some quick math for a single protein with 150 amino acids in the chain with 20 possible at each site you would have 20^150 power. converted to a base of 10 that's 10^195 possible combinations all just to get one protein.

All this to say the theory of evolution seems to have a serious problem concerning the origin of life and if something has a problem at square one, then we have problems with the whole theory. If your arrow is crooked just a little bit, it's not going to fly straight. Maybe I'm just not getting something.


Skeptically,
Jack

[Jack1798]

I agree.

Rereading my last post, it's probably confusing. Please ask for clarification if it is.

One thing I want to toss out there is that even if we had zero evidence in support of the theory of evolution, that would not be evidence for creation. As with most things related to God, creation is a way of saying "we don't know how it happened, so God must have done it." It's not really an explanation at all. There are hundreds of conflicting creation stories throughout history and in various religions.

Just as an aside that entire comment was a straw-man argument. We're talking about evolution here. Now who's getting off-topic? :p

[Leebo]

The theory of evolution says absolutely nothing about the origin of life. It literally has nothing to do with it. Completely separate field of study.

Evolution only discusses what happens once life exists, and a lot of religious people believe that God is the one who started it but evolution took over from there as a result of the natural processes God created.

That's not my perspective, but it's not incompatible with evolution.

I'm hoping you didn't ignore the rest of my post because of an unrelated topic. If that's the case, I'm probably taking a break.

Regarding your math... I'm not going to comment on the specifics, but I'll just say most people underestimate the fact that the Earth is really, really, REALLY old, and also really, really, REALLY big. There's enough time and space for unlikely things to happen.

And as for my last comment being a straw man... I'm again not attributing it to anyone, I just wanted to put it on the table because lots of people see it as an either/or situation when that's a false dichotomy.

[Jack1798]

No, I'm not ignoring the rest of your post. Though, I will accept that evolution has nothing to do with the origin of life, it is nonetheless inextricably linked. I think that we can agree that atheism/ evolution is a worldview of sorts and as such you have to deal with origins. To avoid this is to avoid one of the most basic questions in all of life, that being, "how did we get here." To simply say "we just evolved and are here" is, for me at least, simply not adequate. At least religion makes an attempt at answering this question. I will go into the math and other stuff in depth at a later date I just simply don't have the time right now.

as an aside, why does it seem as though only you (Leebo) and I (Jack1798) are participating in this conversation?

[Leebo]

I disagree with you that saying "I don't know" is the wrong thing to do if you don't know. There's nothing wrong with not knowing and working toward knowing. Science is a constant process of improving our understanding without taking the easy way out and just declaring that we know without having to do any more work.

We wouldn't know what we know today if everyone in the past had just attributed everything to God and not been curious at all.

As for why it's mostly just you and me? It's the weekend. I'm a total loser so I'm just chilling at home by myself and taking exams...

[defscarlett]

[ATTACH=CONFIG]1312[/ATTACH]


bam, everything has now been solved.

BTW I love this guy.

[Lindagerr]

Another point of view

"Evolution is the result of a single or multiple simultaneous mutations resulting in selective advantage. Selective advantage is the probability of living long enough to successfully reproduce viable offspring possessing this trait that favors them and their offspring reaching reproductive maturity."

I showed this discussion to my husband and his opinion was no one had properly defined evolution, the above is his definition. He further suggests reading Teilhard deChardin for religious perspective.

[Leebo]

I defined evolution in my first post. Changes in gene frequencies over time.