[b]I think this is going to get heavily critisized but all one can do is suggest!
If Darwins theory is right, we developed from small single celled organisms, Amoeba’s (i think thats how you spell it) and they had no conscious mind; then we evolved from these amoeba’s in boggy swamps and thinks and ‘primevil soup’ and etc etc, oh look chimp! and now human! but hang on… how can that work?
If we stuck a bunch of elements together in a swamp and left it, would life evolve? i dont think so, scientists have said this; they cannot create life. so what did? nature? swamps and marshes with elements and the right conditions, life just sprung out of nowhere? Surely ‘something cannot come from nothing’, so what actually ‘created’ life?
I do not believe in God, but i think Darwin over looks this. Also if we evolved from chimps and monkeys, why are there still monkeys now? everytime a species has evolved its wiped out its predecessor for good.
Humans didn’t evolve from chimps or monkeys, humans and chimps both evolved from some pre-historic simian, or what has been called “the missing link.” And amoebas didn’t just pop up in a bog. The first bits of “life” were strands of self replicating protein strands.
You also forget that the atmospheric content was quite a bit different back then than it is today. And there is a lot that nature can do that science can’t, to site one example of this and proclaim that it is proof that widely accepted scientific fact is false is foolish.
No one, except creationists, has said that when life first appeared on earth that something came out of nothing, all the elements of life were there (the protein strands and all) they just needed to arrange themselves right.
Some guy is trying to create a single cell organism in a lab with nothing more than protein and RNA strands…which he ALSO created himself. He’s trying to create his own little bit of evolution in a peitry dish.
I accept Darwinism as the easiest answer to a complex question, but I’ll never forget that it, much like Creationism, is just a theory.
I think you are wrong that just because i wish to explore an idea which is not scientific fact, but still theory as is the creationist view, that i am foolish and my idea completely wrong. I am not a religious believer at all, and i do not believe in God, in any direct way, i certainly do not worship him/her/it in any way at all.
What i was tryign to understand was that, surely, just because certain elements get together and have certain ‘climate conditions’ it does not mean that life will suddenly begin to exist. What i am saying is without some sort of intervention, without something to cause it, why would life begin? There is surely no reason, someone spoke of 'nature ’ earlier on being able to do what science cannot, what do you mean by nature? without life, there is nothing to percieve the known universe and therefroe nothing to prove it exists at all.
What i cannot understand is, (even though i do not believe in God) is why if nature does not have some mind or consciousness, would life begin? I apologise for my ignorance of the protein strands creating amoeba life form, i am only an A-level student and biology was never my greatest subject, i study Physics but again only at an A-level standard. I gave what i thought was a very simplistic view of Darwin’s origin of species from what i had read. i still do not believe or perhaps can understand why it would ‘just become’ and ‘exist’.
If this guy succeeds in making his lifeform, will that disprove or help to prove creationist or darwinian theory? im sorry i over slept and am sleepy and cant think about it…
if I remember correctly, Darwin has never theorised about how life begun, rather, he only developed a theory (more about theory on theory later on) about how life evolves. there is a crucial difference between how something starts and how something changes.
there is evidence that the first protein molecules come from space, from meteorites etc when the atmosphere is much thinner than it is now.
the right sort of molecules can then come together by chance, which is not impossible, given that the environment is suitable, that the tme given was sufficently long.
you may find that life is amazing and therefore say that someone or something must have designed it. however, if life doesn’t exist you wouldn’t be here to observe it. the only possible way to observe “how amazing life is” is when life is in existence. you shouldn’t therefore find life THAT amazing really. I mean i don’t.
the monkeys and chimpansees are still here because evolution is an ongoing process. the human species is just one of the branches of the evolutionary chain. its existence does not threaten the survivability of monkeys. in fact, I believe that every kind of animal has something that it is best at i.e. something that they have evolved more than any other animal. the monkeys must have evolved into a different direction when humans and monkeys split. the way I picture it is that there were some difficulties facing the animals, and there are different ways to solve the problems. evolving into humans (developing the brain) is one way, and developing something else is another (as I believe the monkeys have done).
using consciousness as an argument for how special how humans are is not valid in my opinion. humans happen to be best at their brains that’s all, there are loads of things that humans can’t compete with other animals. I’m sure that the other animals like spiders are laughing at us when they are walking on the ceiling (if they know how to laugh at us that is). if you were a spider, I’m sure that you wouldn’t be so cocky to think that “I’m special because I can walk on the ceiling”
Yan
I don’t think evolution is just A theory. Both sides use theory in completely different senses. evolution is a theory meaning it is a heuristic device used to refer quickly to a large field of facts and data. Creationism is a theory in the sense that Literary Schools of interpretation have their theories, ie a text laid atop a text w/ little grounding in the fact and data. Creationism is aesthetic gibberish, not logos
2.Why assume life didn’t come from outer space and is in fact the condition of the universe?
Yeah, ive read about theories of us coming from outer space, and to be honest i cant comment because i havent a clue as do any of us. i wasnt there to witness it. Evidence is only secondary information; for instance it was said before that it is basically proven, no i dont think it is at all, it is a theory because we cannot as of yet know for certain, there is some evidence to support the ‘theory’ but that is what it is, and for the mean time that is what we will be taught.
It wasnt long ago that people were taught that the world was made in seven days (by not long ago i mean a good while actuallY) or that the world was flat, this was science fact, not even a theory, they believed they had all the evidence they needed.
Just because we live in what we think is a learned age and we think we are seemingly on the verge of solving all the answers doesnt mean we know anymore and are certainly in a parrelel position to those hundreds of years ago, as what we ‘know’ today, will be different tomorrow.
I currently feel like im in one of my lessons at college and been given a lost cause to argue, i dont feel that strongly one way or the other, but at least ive learnt something - protein things before amoebas…
just one more thing… if we werent there, isnt entirely possible a giant god like donkey could have created everything? and then left behind clues that the universe was made the way we think it is now made? I guess in a very loose way like Descartes Third wave of doubt, the decieving God, we know we exist, but where and how are very different things.
And Yan dont be bitter just because you loose at chess lol!
Actualy they’ve been trying that experiment for over 30 years now with no success according to a show I saw on PBS.
Dr. Stanical wrote:
So the universe was around forever? If you accept the big bang then you accept the universe had a begining. A universe with a begining needs material since this is a materialistic universe. Where did the material come from?
“The world was flat” has been used by many people to try to prove that the validity of a theory is doubtful. what you are confused about is the difference between speculation and theory. a theory, as whitelotus pointed out, can be used to explain things and is testifiable. speculations are some kind of believes that people spread around. the world was flat thesis was not a theory, it was merely a speculation, not supposted by any testified observations or evidence.
in the same way, creationism is a speculation, it is what some people believe to be true without testified observations. on the other hand, evolunary theory is a theory because it can be supported by observations such as the variety of fossils found, and that the evolutionary thesis can be used to explain things.
Yan
Man if you do not beleive in God you might as well screw darwin and everything else you think about…dang I mean everyone has a right to his or her own opinion but ‘I do not believe in God’. That is kind of rough. Most of the western philosophy rests on God as a supreme omnipitent being. If you do not believe in that how can u believe in anything else
Ugh, nononono. Very different uses of “theory”. A theory in science is an explanatory framework, in this case explaining what may be the mechanism behind the fact of evolution.
This dude was able to create self-replicating RNA strands, which, in turn, began forming complex protein structures. In other words, this man is actually having success.
it’s been shown a long time ago that from some basic elements, like CO2, H2O, NH3… amino acids (one of the major bases of life) can and will be formed in an environment with a lot of electric discharges, obviously these were the circomstances back then…
But dont you see it is just a word game here. Silent Voice’s point was that there need “some sort of intervention”. And what is done here is call that intervention “circumstances” or “lot of electric discharges” or “law of of evolution” or “chance”. And you may want to go up the chain and ask how did the elemental bits of the amino acid get to happen. And you may say it happened in the Sun when it is formed, etc. But what caused it to happen in the Sun, and so on until we reach the Big Bang, and again we are left with the question why the Big Bang? And chance intervening again? or yet something else?
Of course all this thinking is irrelevant if you dont ask why. But then humans do, and that to me itself needs to be questioned why.
We look at the aftermath and try to figure out why it happened just as it did. It’s a cold crime scene. It happened over millions and tens of billions of years. The accident happened. It could have happened quite differently. It may have happend differently. Perhaps we are on the 20th itteration of it, perhaps it happened many times before and this is just the latest version. A long time ago in a galaxy far far away… We think that we know things that we cannot know. But we try to assign meaning to it. We look at the sum of everything and try to assign meaning to it. There seems to be something a bit irrational about that.
And the environment today is incredibly different than it was then. What we might trigger today in terms of mimicing the wonder of life, would probably have very little relationship to what occured 50 million years ago. At best it would be a copy of a copy of a copy of…
Even if we could figure it out, somehow, ours is one little tiny spec of the totality of a universe that is no doubt teeming with life. How our little insignifigant tiny spark of life came about on this one little tiny planet in this one little tiny solar system in this one remote arm of one insignifigant galaxy carries very little importance to any species other than our own. We have no way of knowing if these exact conditions ever produced anything remotely similar in any other primordial ooze on any other of the billions upon billions of planets that populate a universe so large that these minds of which we are so proud cannot even grasp its largeness. Again, we are so taken with our own importance that we think it must have a meaning. This just seems to be very human of us.
But WHAT IF the tables were turned? What if we were standing there on the edge of the primordial ooze, and we were faced with the prospect of predicting what the future would be 50 million years later? Would we have predicted homo sapiens? Why would we?
What freaks me out about bio-engineering is this all too arrogant idea that we can control what develops. The massively vast unfolding over tnes of billions of years. This monumental momentum of the natural march of events, we think we can somehow control. It is a testiment to our own ego. And it is an illusion. We control nothing except ourselves.
I do believe in Karma, although I cannot defend that belief on any rational basis other than negative and positive energy leaving an imprint which can be detected. In short, I think that what goes around comes around. The evils of colonization, for example, or the horrors of slavery, I suspect that humanity faces being colonized on a global basis in the distant future, and that slavery will once again arise based upon a different sort of planetary or species predjudice. We certainly deserve it. It would be justice. Our inhumanity to each other has earned us nothing less. And our respect or lack of respect for nature and for natural processes, carries it’s own Karma which will I cannot shake the feeling will come home to roost as well. We play Russian roulette with our own very brief and very fragile existence as a species. We are so impressed with our own progress that we think ourselves the master of massive vast global and universal unfolding of overwhelming forces that defy mastery. It is a form of insanity.
So Darwin or God? I will take God and say that Darwin may have had some insight into God’s method.
If God then why does the form of life even matter? If God, then is our particular life form, our physical bodies, so perfect, so much better than any other possibility? If God, then is this flesh anything other than a sheath, a temporary form, that tends to seduce us into forgetting that we are not this stuff. Couldn’t any form serve as well? Could not we reside in any other sheath just as well? If God, if we are made in the image of God, what are we? Are we this stuff? Or are we something else? Wherein does the image of God reside? In us? Or in these lumps of clay? I have never understood why religions would claim that we were spiritual beings with eternal lives and yet be so enamoured of this physical world and these physical forms as to argue that they could not be otherwise? If God, then these bodies, they could take any form whatsoever and it would change nothing about us? Would it? If God, then are we these bodies? Or if God are we eternal spiritual beings? I think it is very revealing how religious people both deny and claim the material world all at the same time. They preach that we are not of this world and yet they want so desperately to claim that this physical world is so significant that it could not be otherwise.
If God then why does the form of life even matter? If God, then is our particular life form, our physical bodies, so perfect, so much better than any other
possibility? If God, then is this flesh anything other than a sheath, a temporary form, that tends to seduce us into forgetting that we are not this stuff.
Couldn’t any form serve as well? Could not we reside in any other sheath just as well? If God, if we are made in the image of God, what are we? Are we
this stuff? Or are we something else? Wherein does the image of God reside?
one thing you shouldn’t forget is that we are not perfect and we are evolving still because, perhaps, the world is still in the middle of the process of creation by God. God is using the method of evolution to make the world, so that eventually it will become what he sees it to be.
evolution can explain what happens AFTER there is stuff in existence, but it can’t explain where stuff comes from. and that is where exactly people have to reason that some one, some being must have created the stuff. or the being is part of the stuff. and that that being is always there/here.
one reason why I think that there could well be a god is that humans are not necessarily the cleverest and most inteligent beings in the world, if there is/are beings out there that are more intelligent, far more inteeligent, than us, we humans won’t be able to detect it and we won’t be able to comprehend why they do thing their way, what reasons they have for doing something. therefore, I will never rule out the possibility that there is a God, or being that are much more intelligent than us.
