Why you should think that the Natural-Evolution of species is true

[Herculees]

The Catholic Church allows one to believe in evolution as long as
you still see God in the creation of the species!

 

[Rubee]

By describing and likening it to computer code, you’re implicitly saying that its something a physical being could have made. Perhaps not one of human intelligence (I have no idea, since we’re still learning about how it all works), but one of an alien and superior intelligence.

But if a physical being couldn’t do it, then if, as you say, we’re just artifacts, then even the lowliest angel could do it.

I’m likening it to a computer code because that’s exactly what evolutionists are describing. Something that is like a computer code. This argument is like “it makes me feel iffy, so don’t do it”. I just don’t see any substance to it.

You can’t deny that evolutionists are describing a mechanism that operates very much like a predictable, super intelligent program for changes occurring in life forms that produce all the life forms that have existed. That’s a tech! I’m sorry if it makes your stomach queezy.

Also, you are tying yourself in this unnecessary knot because you are projecting too much onto the actual subject. All we’re talking about here is changes introduced into already existing life forms through a predictable mechanism that no creature made.

Claiming any creature could make it is frankly absurd. Let’s see them do it, then. Fashion life from stars and dead molecules and put into a simple code all the life forms that have ever existed on this planet, then I’ll take that objection seriously.

And if they could do it, well then that’d be a fact we’d have to explain, not pretend not to see. But they can’t. Making dead things alive is something only God can do, however you describe the process.

The idea that calling it a tech (the truth of what’s described!) is claiming all these things I’m explicitly contradicting is unjustified. Stop projecting.

 

[Rubee]

I’m not denying that. @leonhardprintz eonhardprintz is making lots out of the fact that I don’t use his preferred metaphors, descriptions, and analogies. But unless he’s saying it’s impossible for God to design a mechanism like evolutionists describe, I don’t get any of the objections.

I’m not sure I buy evolution, personally, which is why all my statements start with the qualifier “IF evolution is true.” Like the church, I’m not interested in committing myself one way or the other. But I am denying the claims of true ‘randomness’. That’s pure magic being claimed as far as I’m concerned. Just coz you don’t see the strings or hand doesn’t mean the puppeteer isn’t behind the puppet.

Also, even if an angel could hypothetically fashion DNA, that would only imply the potential was already there to begin with, created by God. Otherwise the angel couldn’t do squat.

Unless someone is claiming angels or a creature gives being to anyone, all of these objections seem groundless to me, depending on projections more than anything. If God in fact used a mechanism as described in evolution, then he used something like an advance program. That’s not something I think can be denied with any honesty. You can deny that that is what God did, but you can’t deny that the process entails something very much like an intelligently designed program.

Even if it relies on the cosmos acting a certain way to effect certain changes, it’s still something designed.

I also don’t understand how intelligent design is somehow more insulting to the dignity our nature than randomness. It’s like saying it’s better to be a chair that was put together by accident of wind and an explosion than to be a chair that was put together following a deliberately designed program for it to exist as a chair. That’s…well…topsy turvy. I’d definitely rather be the deliberately designed chair.

 

[Eric_Hyom]

By describing and likening it to computer code, you’re implicitly saying that its something a physical being could have made. Perhaps not one of human intelligence (I have no idea, since we’re still learning about how it all works), but one of an alien and superior intelligence.

I think we are looking at the theory of an infinite regress of aliens here.

 

[rossum]

One wonders what sort of mutation would form part of a heart in a creature whose DNA has no instructions for anything like a heart.

Insects have an open circulatory system, they don’t have blood vessels, they have liquid (haemolymph) sloshing around in their body cavity. They do have a heart, which is open at both ends to help slosh the liquid around. The heart looks very like a piece of gut, open at both ends. Rather than moving food along the gut, its muscles pump liquid in one end and out of the other.

There is more than one way to solve the problem of a circulatory system, and the early solutions were very crude compared to later systems.

 

[Aloysium]

If everything came from one organism, and the process of diversification is through random mutations in the genes, then it necessarily means the original DNA contained in its code all the potential life forms that can be traced to it and all their features.

I say it’s super in the sense that it already has all life forms ever and all their features in that code in some way at the very beginning.

So in a sense, they were already created “in the beginning” and have only been waiting for the right time, place, and environment to come out and express or actualize the potentiality of their being.

There’s no evidence of such organisms. Algae as a possible example of a kind of creature that pre-existed redwood fir trees do not today contain the DNA that would express itself at some later date as the myriad of plant forms that have and will exist.

So, it’s definitely not like what we find in a human embryo, for sure. The epigenetic factors that govern when and where cells specialize and fashion the various tissues and organ systems of the body, are coded for in the initial cell. In terms of procreation, there do appear to be similar processes that result in the unrandom mutation of DNA in gametes. But change seems to be restricted to the kind of organism it is. The beak, the colours, the dietary requirements, the size of the feathers might change, but a song-bird remains a song-bird, even if some progeny stop singing.

I see it not so much in the code, but in the existence of DNA as a means of transmitting information, and before that the tetrhedral electrostatic shape of the carbon atom, that make this all possible. In that sense, with the creation of the building blocks, there came into being the potential for all that followed; but each kind of being had to be created as a first seed. Although the code that is included in the formation of our body temporally preceded our presence in the world, humanity, started with Adam; before that there is God.

 

[Rubee]

So DNA wasn’t prior? Interesting. 2 questions:

1. What tells those non-DNA creatures to build themselves into themselves? Is there a DNA equivalent for them?
2. What’s the evolutionist explanation for the appearance of DNA then, from one set of creatures to others? Please don’t tell me random mutations

 

[Metis1]

Some geneticists believe that it is likely that DNA evolved from RNA, the latter of which is a simpler form, and then there’s the issue of amino acids, which is the building block for protein being merged in.

To me, the biggest question is not whether life could have emerged from non-life, as even if it did how could it reproduce? Some believe that maybe it’s due to what are called “replicating molecules”, but even that doesn’t seem to answer the question-- at least for me.

Personally, I am of the belief that God was behind it all but that he most likely didn’t organize every little detail of this evolution of life forms. An excellent book, imo, that covers this is “The Image of the Unseen God: Catholicity, Science, and Our Living Understanding of God” by Fr. Hosinski C.S.C.

 

[Aloysium]

So DNA wasn’t prior? Interesting. 2 questions:

1. What tells those non-DNA creatures to build themselves into themselves? Is there a DNA equivalent for them?
2. What’s the evolutionist explanation for the appearance of DNA then, from one set of creatures to others? Please don’t tell me random mutations

I’m not sure I have understood the question, since i don’t know what you mean by non-DNA creatures. A non-DNA creature might be the carbon atom, it having been created by God, existing presumably as itself and as a component in larger systems.

I see it not so much in the code, but in the existence of DNA as a means of transmitting information, and before that the tetrhedral electrostatic shape of the carbon atom, that make this all possible.

I would say that God brought the first organic life into existence as whole entities - cells having specific characteristics to establish a primordial environment utilizing the basic resources of earth, air, water and sunlight to thereby create the organic molecules that would serve as the nutritional basis of life that followed. This is pretty much what science says if we throw out the magic of random chemical activity. He then in successive steps created plants and animals of different kinds, and then we ourselves. The DNA information found in the organisms that followed, would not be in the original creature, but part of the physical make-up of the totality of their being, as He brought them into existence. Hoping that makes sense.

What’s the evolutionist explanation for the appearance of DNA then, from one set of creatures to others? Please don’t tell me random mutations

Random chemical activity would be their explanation. I think it’s too far-fetched and don’t believe it either.

 

[Rubee]

Random chemical activity would be their explanation. I think it’s too far-fetched and don’t believe it either.

Ok, thank you. I consider this a much crazier claim than evolution, or at least what I thought was the theory of evolution up until this point: that all life forms came from a variation of these codes. The idea that the codes are from blind chemical processes and things bumping into each other is absurd, with all due respect to anyone who holds it as true.

I’d sooner believe in the monkey typing Shakespeare than chemicals randomly producing a mechanism that can produce all the varying life forms with greater and greater sophistication over billions of years. At least the monkey has some intelligence: if we give him immortality, he might actually do it.

Billions of life forms from DNA through mutations that appear random to us? I’ll roll with that. DNA from random chemical stuff? Baloney.

 

[Techno2000]

Aloysium:

Random chemical activity would be their explanation. I think it’s too far-fetched and don’t believe it either.

Ok, thank you. I consider this a much crazier claim than evolution, or at least what I thought was the theory of evolution up until this point: that all life forms came from a variation of these codes. The idea that the codes are from blind chemical processes and things bumping into each other is absurd, with all due respect to anyone who holds it as true.

I’d sooner believe in the monkey typing Shakespeare than chemicals randomly producing a mechanism that can produce all the varying life forms with greater and greater sophistication over billions of years. At least the monkey has some intelligence: if we give him immortality, he might actually do it.

Billions of life forms from DNA through mutations that appear random to us? I’ll roll with that. DNA from random chemical stuff? Baloney.

Back in the old days the future was bright for any plant or animal willing to survive and grow.They knew whatever environmental challenge came their way evolution would have their back. Sadly, today evolution has dropped the ball, things die, and are as dead as a doornail.

 

[buffalo]

Should be noted that neither of those are evolutionary biologists, Rob Sheldon works for a creationist blog called “Evolution News and View” and Gary Webb is a journalist.

Once again, rule #1, always attack the person.

This is important and you ignored it:

Thus the Origin-of-life, evolutionary progress paradox can be solved, but at the cost of requiring the universe to be in a highly information-dense initial state.

and

If the
20th century was about entropy, then the 21st century is about information.

 

[buffalo]

Again if creationists wish to argue that all of the DNA is utterly nescessary and completely indispensible, then I suggest you ally yourself with some competent molecular biologists, and fund some experiments where attempts to create minimalistic DNA’s are done.

That would be an excellent way to test that.

Instructions stored in the DNA library are not always accessed. But they are available when needed I have many books in my library, some I access more, many less. They are there if I need them. My HD is nearly full, yet I use certain codes more than others.

Programmers use certain program codes more than others. Yet they need all of them to complete the intended design.

 

[buffalo]

Microevolution is accepted by everyone.

 

[edwest]

Here are the problems:

1. Life from non-life. Not going to happen. It can only be assumed. That is faith, not science.
2. The first cell is sometimes described as a lipid bubble with contents. Where is the machinery that makes that cell alive? Where did it come from?
3. Cellular reproduction is complex. It requires the necessary machinery to work. How does the cell know when and how to do this?

 

[buffalo]

The hardware can write the software to run itself. LOL

 

[Techno2000]

Here are the problems:

1. Life from non-life. Not going to happen. It can only be assumed. That is faith, not science.
2. The first cell is sometimes described as a lipid bubble with contents. Where is the machinery that makes that cell alive? Where did it come from?
3. Cellular reproduction is complex. It requires the necessary machinery to work. How does the cell know when and how to do this?

To make all this plausible they would say God did it, if you are an atheist you would say that’s abiogenesis and not part of Darwinism.

 

[rossum]

Life from non-life. Not going to happen. It can only be assumed. That is faith, not science.

Creationism assumes the existence of life by faith. Do not project your beliefs onto science. That is an error.

 

[edwest]

People in general should not try to project their science onto Divine Revelation.

 

[rossum]

People in general should not try to project their science onto Divine Revelation.

I was not projecting science, I was referring to the Bible: “My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.” (Psalm 41 or 42)

As I said, Creationism assumes the existence of life.