What do you think about evolution?

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It seems it bit like nonsense to me. How can life just appear from nowhere? How can the Earth form without a creator? It is like saying a house can just put itself together without any builders. Creation makes a lot more sense.

Have you looked at the evidence for evolution or studied it using appropriate (i.e. secular), source material? Whether it makes sense to people or not, the evidence for it is undeniable. I was homeschooled in a fundamentalist household and didn’t learn about evolution until I investigated it on my own from a neutral perspective as an adult. At this point, my old beliefs seem a bit silly to me.

Some people believe that God or some entity got the ball rolling with the Big Bang and things expanded and life evolved from there. Others, like me, need solid proof that there’s a deity in order to believe in one. If you’re saying that a builder had to build the house, who created the builder?

Apart from that issue, the universe is not like a house. It’s messy randomness. Stuff crashes into other stuff all the time.

Last edited by TwilightPrincess on 20 May 2024, 3:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I'm not sure what the formation of the earth has to do with evolution.

The theory of evolution via natural selection only seeks to address the question of how did the current diversity of life originate. It's not relevant to the origins of the universe or our solar system.

Personally, I'd say the theory of evolution via natural selection continues to be the only viable proposed explanation for the question it seeks to answer.

As for the origins of the planet and the universe, those are different questions which have unrelated answers proposed for them.

Science doesn't attempt to merge these questions into a creation myth like you're seeking to.

Science also doesn't address questions involving the supernatural, so there's no reason one can't believe some sort of all-powerful creator god is responsible for the scientific origins of the universe and of life as we know it. Science only seeks to understand those topics from a materialist standpoint, the how it happened portion. If you'd like to add your supernatural beliefs to explain why it happened, all the power to you.

Science can't disprove the existence of a creator god, all it can do is provide reasons why certain creation myths can't possibly be true. We know the earth couldn't possibly have formed 6000 or 8000 years ago with all current geological weathering occurring in an instant because far too much heat would still remain from that process.

That's one of many reasons why young earth creationism is impossible, but it isn't proof that no gods exist.

Evolution is the alternative to creation. If the Earth didn't originate through creation, it formed through evolution which makes less sense

One plausible theory of the creation of life is abiogenesis, which suggests that life emerged from non-living matter through a series of chemical reactions. Under certain conditions, such as the ones in existence during the Earth's early stage, it's by no means impossible that organic molecules formed from simpler inorganic molecules, such as amino acids from simpler compounds like methane, ammonia, water, and hydrogen. These organic molecules could have then undergone further chemical reactions to form more complex molecules, eventually leading to the emergence of self-replicating molecules and primitive reproducing cells. The Miller-Urey experiment demonstrated that organic molecules, including amino acids, could be synthesized under conditions mimicking the early Earth's atmosphere. Once you have a molecule that's capable of reproduction, it will be subject to the laws of evolution and survival of the fittest. Molecules aren't considered to be life-forms exactly, but billions of years of selective pressure gave enough time for the gradual evolution of the complex reproducing organisms we know as life.

It's not completely satisfying as a theory because we don't know everything about the exact conditions and reactions that existed so long ago, but it's entirely plausible something of the kind happened. As a rival theory, the idea of an intelligent creator seems less plausible because it begs the question, what created the creator? If you just say he was simply always there, then that's admitting that complex living entities need no explanation of their origins, and so there's no need for life to have a creator in the first place.

The theory of a divine creator probably seemed to be the only plausible explanation to the ancients because they didn't know as much about chemistry as we do. Primitive people usually have theories like that for phenomena they can't otherwise explain.

No one claims that the Earth formed through evolution.



https://news.uchicago.edu/explainer/for ... 0formation.

That quote below is evolution. Not creation. Evolutionists have strange ideas about origins

I don’t think you have a solid grasp of what evolution is which might explain why you don’t believe in it.

It has nothing to do with the origins of the universe or how the Earth was formed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution

It seems your understanding of what evolution refers to is incorrect, meaning your conclusions will also inevitably be incorrect.

The theory of evolution via natural selection makes no mention of the origins of the planet. It's strictly focused on the idea that the current diversity of life as we know it all shares a common ancestor and how that diversity slowly emerged.

Creationists often conflate a number of scientific theories together to make something analogous to their creation myth but science doesn't merge them. Disproving the big bang wouldn't impact our understanding of how the solar system and it's planets formed; disproving or altering both of those wouldn't impact the theory of evolution via natural selection.

The big bang describes the origin of the universe.

The nebular hypothesis describes how stars and their systems form.

Abiogenesis describes how self-replicating molecules can gradually come to be sophisticated enough that we'd consider them life.

The theory of evolution via natural selection describes how life gradually adapts to environmental changes and to fulfil new roles.

Those are four distinct theories with no real overlap. If you insist on mashing them all together you'll reach wrong conclusions about them because you insisted on starting with an incorrect understanding of them.

No, that is not a description of what the theory of evolution via natural selection was describing.

It's actually what the nebular hypothesis proposes.

The nebular hypothesis is not the same as evolution even if they're often conflated together by creationists.

I think it's real.

What do you think of people who sneer at the mere suggestion that humans, monkeys, and apes may have had a common ape-like ancestor, but who seem to feel a sense of pride in believing that the first human was created from a handful of dirt?

Again, this is a common misconception among those who do not understand science -- religious fundamentalists, for example.

I'm a scientific layman, but just from observing the world around me, the idea of life forms gradually changing over a long period of time makes more sense to me than BAM! Everything was there at once.

Though I'm aware there are different forms of creationism. Belief in a creator and evolution aren't mutually exclusive.

Regarding your house analogy, while houses don't evolve like living things because they can't reproduce on their own, there has been a sort-of evolution in how human homes are designed. The great variety of house designs we see today developed over time -- they weren't all designed and built at once.

Also, houses are designed by humans, for humans, with specific pre-existing human wants and needs in mind -- comfort, safety, aesthetics, etc. This is a far cry from a supernatural being deciding to create every form of life on Earth from scratch.

Last edited by vividgroovy on 21 May 2024, 12:43 am, edited 1 time in total.

I believe that a belief in creationism (magic) is the adult version of believing in Santa Claus.

The house analogy seems to me to be a version of Hoyle's Fallacy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junkyard_tornado

Though to see that it's a fallacy, it's necessary to understand how evolution works.

While evolution seems a lot like nonsense to me, a lot of things in the Bible seem like nonsense to me too. Like Noah's ark. Just how did Noah manage to feed all those animals? And how did the carnivorous animals eat after they left the ark?