How anyone can look at this and claim it's the product of random and gradual changes is beyond me.
Not only is it very possible, but it's very probable. I'd be the first to claim otherwise but the more you learn the more likely it is. Complexity does not require intelligence, much like the invisible hand of the market doesn't require an intelligence on high directing it. Four simple rules:
Buying what you need, at the best price you can find
Sell what people pay the most, that you can most easily produce
Are all that's necessary for the intricate complexities of our supply chains, manufacturing, employment distributions to form all on their own. Nature is no different when it comes to life. Alterations, additions and complexities that improve the capacity to reproduce perpetuate while those that do not diminish. You can absolutely start with just nucleic acid sequences whose structures self replicate, and over billions of years end up with complementary systems working together for a unified purpose best serving each component - a cell, a multi cell organism, a thinking organism that can recognize inherent instinct and override it.
Now what started it all, none can say. And if a god chose to create whole cloth what we see in such a way to obscure his hand, so be that. But there is no service in denying the actual power of natural selection.
It's actually extremely improbable, bordering on impossible, for such complicated systems to arise from random chance. These systems are irreducibly complex, meaning that a number of different components all work together to accomplish the task of the system, and if one component were removed, the system would no longer function. Gradual evolution can not create them because they need to be complete to actually function and would be useless until completed. Let me give an example:
Blood clotting is a highly choreographed system in our bodies. The system is made up of multiple steps and different molecular components. Without the whole system in place, it doesn't work. How can clotting develop over time, step by step, when in the meantime the body has no effective way to stop itself from bleeding to death whenever it's cut?
The system is also highly regulated. If a clot is made in the wrong place, you'll die. If the clot isn't made in the correct timeframe, you'll die. If the clot isn't confined to the injury site, your entire blood system could solidify. This system is so complex that it must be inserted all at once into an organism. Random selection simply cannot explain systems like this.
Also, the fossil record doesn't support gradual macro-evolution at all. There are none of the numerous transitional species that Darwin predicted would be found. The Cambrian explosion invalidates the idea entirely.
Micro-evolution has certainly been proven valid, but no evidence supports the idea of Darwinian evolution. The evidence that's been found in the last 50 or so years points strongly towards intelligent design. Secular scientists refuse to admit this because they demand that everything needs to have a naturalistic explanation and refuse to let God into their clubhouse.
We are not two cards leaning against one another where one card can not exist without the other. Gradual addition is possible for everything we have seen, and your clotting example is such an example; As long as every step is a net positive, it doesn't matter if there are downsides to be ironed out.
Clotting at all is a HUGE advantage over getting punctured and dying. Sure, there are downsides if you're missing the complex regulatory and safety features modern clotting has, but circulatory systems have existed almost as long as true multicellular organisms have - bleeding out has been a selective pressure that whole time.
So first you clot, and that's a game changer. Sure if it clots in the wrong place or if you can't clear it you'll meat the double edge of that sword but hey - being punctured is no longer a guaranteed death sentence. That's a NET POSITIVE.
Then you evolve all the other features we come to have.
'Darwinian' evolution absolutely has the evidence to support it. All the way from the biochemical at the level of nucleic acid formation into self replication, to cooperative association to form proto-cells, to gradual organ development as with eyes, systems development like the circulatory system to include clotting, to the organism level where we gain and lose traits adapting to an environment and it's pressures in species altering fashions. It's all there.
It's all from god, and you have missed it because you somehow think god's grand plan is incompatible with god... all because you hated the messenger.
I can't argue against a position you haven't articulated.
You say the Cambrian explosion completely invalidates Darwin, but... what?? how?? I can't even imagine why you would think such a thing in the first place.
Get your head out of the books and experience the real world.
Accidents as magnificent as creation to not occur in a vacuum. Every aspect of life follows rules, many of them shared. All the hallmarks of intelligent design are there.
When we’re smart enough, we’ll find God’s autograph on his creation.
When we’re smart enough, we’ll find God’s autograph on his creation.
And it's called natural selection.
When his children can not conceive it, he says that he created light, and then the firmament to separate the waters, and when they are ready they recognize it as the suns igniting and processing hydrogen and helium into the larger elements necessary for life, before exploding and recoalescing into planets of water, separated by the cosmos inbetween, or from our perspective, what's up there, the firmament.
Some asshole said evolution proved god didn't exist, and because you knew god existed, that must mean evolution is wrong. But you've missed the point entirely. The premise that evolution refutes god was as absurd an argument as heliocentrism was an argument against god. The atheist was wrong not because he believed evolution, but because he was grasping at anything to prove his point but you somehow allowed evolution to belong to him rather to you.
Once you realize that, you can better admire god's work.
I have no problem believing in natural selection and evolution, and I have no problem accepting that a higher power may have been involved in the process. But accepting a higher power's hand in creating the universe does not automatically lead to a belief in the same God that wiped out the entire human race (except Noah and family) or advocated the murder of innocent women and children in the slaughter of the Canaanites, to mention just one example.
Stories that get in the way of belief are not reason not to believe - reason to question and to think and to wonder what the pieces must be in order for it all to fit together sure.
Agreed. Just because its not how we imagine it, doesn't mean there is any less validity in God, or our creator. Often times many things are not as we imagine them to be in reality.
Not only is it very possible, but it's very probable. I'd be the first to claim otherwise but the more you learn the more likely it is. Complexity does not require intelligence, much like the invisible hand of the market doesn't require an intelligence on high directing it. Four simple rules:
Buying what you need, at the best price you can find
Sell what people pay the most, that you can most easily produce
Are all that's necessary for the intricate complexities of our supply chains, manufacturing, employment distributions to form all on their own. Nature is no different when it comes to life. Alterations, additions and complexities that improve the capacity to reproduce perpetuate while those that do not diminish. You can absolutely start with just nucleic acid sequences whose structures self replicate, and over billions of years end up with complementary systems working together for a unified purpose best serving each component - a cell, a multi cell organism, a thinking organism that can recognize inherent instinct and override it.
Now what started it all, none can say. And if a god chose to create whole cloth what we see in such a way to obscure his hand, so be that. But there is no service in denying the actual power of natural selection.
It's actually extremely improbable, bordering on impossible, for such complicated systems to arise from random chance. These systems are irreducibly complex, meaning that a number of different components all work together to accomplish the task of the system, and if one component were removed, the system would no longer function. Gradual evolution can not create them because they need to be complete to actually function and would be useless until completed. Let me give an example:
Blood clotting is a highly choreographed system in our bodies. The system is made up of multiple steps and different molecular components. Without the whole system in place, it doesn't work. How can clotting develop over time, step by step, when in the meantime the body has no effective way to stop itself from bleeding to death whenever it's cut?
The system is also highly regulated. If a clot is made in the wrong place, you'll die. If the clot isn't made in the correct timeframe, you'll die. If the clot isn't confined to the injury site, your entire blood system could solidify. This system is so complex that it must be inserted all at once into an organism. Random selection simply cannot explain systems like this.
Also, the fossil record doesn't support gradual macro-evolution at all. There are none of the numerous transitional species that Darwin predicted would be found. The Cambrian explosion invalidates the idea entirely.
Micro-evolution has certainly been proven valid, but no evidence supports the idea of Darwinian evolution. The evidence that's been found in the last 50 or so years points strongly towards intelligent design. Secular scientists refuse to admit this because they demand that everything needs to have a naturalistic explanation and refuse to let God into their clubhouse.
Can you imagine throwing in mRNA into that perfect system. Abomination!!
Ugh, yea, its absolutely disgusting.
We are not irreducibly complex
We are not two cards leaning against one another where one card can not exist without the other. Gradual addition is possible for everything we have seen, and your clotting example is such an example; As long as every step is a net positive, it doesn't matter if there are downsides to be ironed out.
Clotting at all is a HUGE advantage over getting punctured and dying. Sure, there are downsides if you're missing the complex regulatory and safety features modern clotting has, but circulatory systems have existed almost as long as true multicellular organisms have - bleeding out has been a selective pressure that whole time.
So first you clot, and that's a game changer. Sure if it clots in the wrong place or if you can't clear it you'll meat the double edge of that sword but hey - being punctured is no longer a guaranteed death sentence. That's a NET POSITIVE.
Then you evolve all the other features we come to have.
'Darwinian' evolution absolutely has the evidence to support it. All the way from the biochemical at the level of nucleic acid formation into self replication, to cooperative association to form proto-cells, to gradual organ development as with eyes, systems development like the circulatory system to include clotting, to the organism level where we gain and lose traits adapting to an environment and it's pressures in species altering fashions. It's all there.
It's all from god, and you have missed it because you somehow think god's grand plan is incompatible with god... all because you hated the messenger.
Explain the Cambrian explosion using the Darwinian theory of evolution. I know we aren't going to agree, but I want to hear your take on it.
I can't argue against a position you haven't articulated.
You say the Cambrian explosion completely invalidates Darwin, but... what?? how?? I can't even imagine why you would think such a thing in the first place.
Get your head out of the books and experience the real world.
Accidents as magnificent as creation to not occur in a vacuum. Every aspect of life follows rules, many of them shared. All the hallmarks of intelligent design are there.
When we’re smart enough, we’ll find God’s autograph on his creation.
And it's called natural selection.
When his children can not conceive it, he says that he created light, and then the firmament to separate the waters, and when they are ready they recognize it as the suns igniting and processing hydrogen and helium into the larger elements necessary for life, before exploding and recoalescing into planets of water, separated by the cosmos inbetween, or from our perspective, what's up there, the firmament.
Some asshole said evolution proved god didn't exist, and because you knew god existed, that must mean evolution is wrong. But you've missed the point entirely. The premise that evolution refutes god was as absurd an argument as heliocentrism was an argument against god. The atheist was wrong not because he believed evolution, but because he was grasping at anything to prove his point but you somehow allowed evolution to belong to him rather to you.
Once you realize that, you can better admire god's work.
I have no problem believing in natural selection and evolution, and I have no problem accepting that a higher power may have been involved in the process. But accepting a higher power's hand in creating the universe does not automatically lead to a belief in the same God that wiped out the entire human race (except Noah and family) or advocated the murder of innocent women and children in the slaughter of the Canaanites, to mention just one example.
Stories that get in the way of belief are not reason not to believe - reason to question and to think and to wonder what the pieces must be in order for it all to fit together sure.
Agreed. Just because its not how we imagine it, doesn't mean there is any less validity in God, or our creator. Often times many things are not as we imagine them to be in reality.