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

[Metis1]

… which is how, like multitudes of graduates, you ended up so brainwashed. So of them manage to grow out the indoctriantion they received at the hands of the education system, but most don’t.

You really don’t have much of a clue on this, plus the ToE is simply not “atheism” as it neither posits nor denies Divine creation.

So, it’s no wonder you take the positions that you do since you attribute a bogus motivation by scientists that simply isn’t even close to being true.

And, to make matters worse, you basically place culpability on the Church over this since the Church allows for a Catholic to believe in the ToE as long as it is understood that God was and is behind it all. Why that is so difficult for you to understand is beyond me. Is the Pope and the bishops evil for saying that it is acceptable?

 

[PetraG]

Then change is an illusion? That would make Darwinism an illusion too.

An amazing claim. The present is not like the past.

No, no, I didn’t mean that the past and future aren’t different in that no matter or energy are in different places.
No, I mean different in the sense that these may, in some sense, already exist.

That wouldn’t preclude a non-chaotic connection between one moment and the next.

This is in keeping with the opinion of some philosophers that all of space and time are known to God as an immediate experience, rather than the past being “stored in memory” and the future being known as a prospect that has no existence in reality yet. We, in contrast, can only know the moment we refer to as “Now.” Everything else is outside our direct experience but is only known by the evidence that past events left in now or that the current moment implies about the future based on our limited knowledge of cause and effect.

I think the order in the universe is beyond the comprehension of human beings in any but very abstract terms. We shouldn’t limit what happens in reality to what we allow our imaginations to accept.

You have to be able to accept that free will and omniscience concerning the future are not mutually-exclusive possibilities. If that requires divine intervention of some kind or physical laws of which we are not aware, so be it. I don’t see, however, how evolution can be excluded as a creative choice. If we believe both that the weather follows physical laws and that God determines where there will be rain and where there will be drought, how is evolution something that can be excluded from the realm of Providence? That doesn’t make sense to me.

Perhaps we will find that our human choices were not disconnected and made with one divorced from another, as we thought in our limited experience of time (not to mention our limited self-awareness), but rather made as a whole on an eternal plane, as we imagine the angels made the decision to ally themselves with Heaven or with Hell.

 

[edwest]

An even more amazing claim. With all due respect, this amounts to speculation or an interesting thought but it is beyond further clarification.

 

[PetraG]

An even more amazing claim. With all due respect, this amounts to speculation or an interesting thought but it is beyond further clarification.

Well, yes, it is speculation. I don’t find it at all disrepectful to say so. My point is merely that even physicists have to contend not just with evidence of “randomness” and evidence of a determined future, but with the possibility that these are mutually necessary.

After all, what fiction is nearly so amazing as what we know to be true?

 

[Rubee]

IIRC there was some Hindu organisation doing research into Hindu creationism – the Big Bang theory gave much too young a universe for them, they wanted a 300 million year old universe (or older) with a human presence from the beginning.

You must remember wrongly, because the BBT has a 13.5 billion year age for the universe (plus/minus a few hundred million). If they want 300 million, they’re asking for a much younger universe.

 

[Rubee]

That everything is present to God (not us!) in an eternal ‘now’ is most certainly not ‘speculation.’ It’s Catholic faith! God is timeless, so it can be no other way. All things, places, and moments are before him all at once. God has no ‘yesterday, today, and tomorrow’; time itself is a creation of his.

What I don’t understand is what this has to do with evolution or your claim that true randomness (beyond free will) is possible in a reality created by God.

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05551b.htm

 

[rossum]

You must remember wrongly, because the BBT has a 13.5 billion year age for the universe (plus/minus a few hundred million). If they want 300 million, they’re asking for a much younger universe.

Thank you for the correction. They were after a 300 billion year old universe. See “Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race” by Michael Cremo for details.

Apologies for my mistake.

 

[Aloysium]

We can understand what is outside the day to day workings of the world, the biggest of things and the smallest, mathematically. We discover the relationships that exist between atoms and the subatomic and that of galaxies, their gravitational effects and the light they transmit over billions of light years and at the speed of light. When we try to figure out what it means beyond that, we construct analogies utilizing what we experience day to day, and that’s where it starts sounding bizarre.

The issue they are getting at in the clip is that of simulteneity, and the suggestion is that in the universal picture, encompassing what is happening here and now, where my writing this occurs in the past relative to your reading this, simulteneity occurs in one moment encompassing all time and space. Outside of that one Moment, time is fractured.

I’m going to suggest that this occurs as a reflection of the human spirit, which dwells in its finite but boundless now (Everything we do and experience happens in its moment; wherever we go, it is “here”), which is constructed as a past-present-future. Intellectually, we place ourselves in any position and time, and that creates the fracturing of space-time, because it is centred around our being an experiential-causal agent. This isn’t to say that those relationships into which we insert ourselves are happening because of our consciousness, but rather that they are happening all in one Now.

The issue of determinism and free will deserves a separate post.

 

[Aloysium]

If we believe both that the weather follows physical laws and that God determines where there will be rain and where there will be drought, how is evolution something that can be excluded from the realm of Providence?

It seems to me that one of the meanings of Genesis, where it describes God’s forming mankind from the dust of the ground, is that we were directly created, and no randomness entered into the final picture of what our bodies would be like. We were meant to have two eyes with colour vision in the spectral range.

There may be some “randomness” with respect the the role we as individual persons are cast in this world and the blessings we receive, but I would see this more as an expression of creativity, with the will of God prominent in terms of what He wishes to express through each of us.

The other issue with randomness is that chemicals, no matter how much time we might give them, are like true monkeys at a keyboard. Atoms cannot spontaneously arrange themselves into the necessary shapes required for life any more than a chimp will write a Shakespearean play; such occurrences occur only in the imagination.

The issue of God’s omniscience and involvement with His human children possessing a free will is illustrated in the story of Cain, where God reaches into time to warn Cain of where he is heading. God knows the outcome, but the murder of Abel need not have happened; it was Cain’s choice to give himself over to his passions. The warning serves to transform the incident from being strictly an emotional reaction to that of a sin. God wants us to choose the good, to become loving persons. Given our human nature, the choice we, as one humanity, made in Adam, it necessitated the incarnation of the Word and His sacrifice, to allow us to achieve this end. All this was known from the creation of the world. We are destined to ultimately be in communion with God in and through Jesus Christ, becoming Love itself; Lord have mercy on us all.

 

[ProdglArchitect]

300 Billion with a constant human presence?

I’m not super familiar with Hindu mythology, but I thought they believe that humanity was created by the gods some time after the creation of the universe…

Or did it all come about from the same inciting event?

Either way, I hope they are honest about their findings, because it’s always interesting when a study that sets out to disprove the common understanding instead proves it.

 

[Rubee]

Was a long time ago, but what I recall is that Hindus believe in an eternal cycle of creation and destruction of the universe. So in that sense, there’ve been countless universes with humans before this one. However, I’m not sure what the 300 billion years refers to: our single universe or all the ones that have come before? I suspect it’s the first since the second would imply a beginning to the succession of universes.

 

[Edgar]

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.

I don’t know why you’re using insects as an argument for the evolution of an animal heart - there is no evolutionary connection between them.
Furthermore:
How do random mutations form a heart valve?
How do random mutations form new brain matter that will control a heart?
How do random mutations connect the heart to the brain?
Why would an organism’s brain form new brain matter to control a novel heart system that it doesn’t need, since that organism is already breathing quite well?
How does evolution let the brain know that the heart needs to beat, and at a very precise rate, and then provide the necessary hardware?
Why would natural selection favour a brain-heart system that is only partially formed and hence is useless?

 

[Edgar]

So, you have no explanation for the origin of your proposed ‘intelligence’. I hope you understand that this leaves a huge hole in your explanation, and renders your explanation scientifically unsatisfactory

So, what are your sceintific explanations for your Buddhist believes in karma and reincarnation? (which require intelligence, btw)

Natural selection is definitely not random.

Natural selection is not the master in ToE. You keep forgetting that natural selection has no choice but to dance to the tune of environmental conditions, which definitely are random.

 

[edwest]

Well said. The greater the complexity, the more complex the integration, the greater the odds that the blind watchmaker cannot do the job.

 

[Edgar]

Well said. The greater the complexity, the more complex the integration, the greater the odds that the blind watchmaker cannot do the job.

The more one considers what macroevolution requires, the more absurd the whole theory becomes. The only reason anyone believes this science-insulting fantasy is that a) making an intellectually fool of oneself is much better than believing in a Creator, b) one has been brainwashed by the education system, c) one has seriously overestimated the powers of science to explain the history of life on earth (scientism).

 

[Edgar]

Malaria kills a high proportion of young children, before they reach sexual maturity. Malaria resistance, such as the HbS or HbC mutations, enable more children with those mutations to reach maturity and have children of their own. That puts more copies of those variants into the population of areas where malaria is prevalent. Lactase persistence mutations allow adults to digest milk. That is an extra food source in areas where sheep, cattle, goats etc. are farmed. That extra food source is useful in times of famine, reducing deaths among those with the mutation relative to those without the mutation. Again, because of higher relative survival rates more copies of that variant appear in the population. Currently about one third of the human population has a lactase persistence variant.

These are examples of “evolution” within a species, which demonstates nothing more than evolution within a species. Therefore they don’t provide any evidence that all the life that has existed on earth evolved from a microbe.

 

[Techno2000]

Natural selection is not the master in ToE. You keep forgetting that natural selection has no choice but to dance to the tune of environmental conditions, which definitely are random.

Environmental conditions and evolution in the past were much more thoughtful and forgiving.Expect when a organism couldn’t cut it, but still after that evolution would step in and lend a helping hand.

 

[edwest]

Here, peer pressure is definitely involved. ‘Just accept it and we’ll stop bothering you.’
And scientism. No, science is incomplete and can’t explain everything.
The education system just requires teachers to say, Believe in evolution, and because a teacher said it, it must be true. Multiply that by decades and you’ve got generation after generation who believe something that is incomplete.

But fear not, you’ll just be told how uneducated you are. Forever.

 

[Techno2000]

Well said. The greater the complexity, the more complex the integration, the greater the odds that the blind watchmaker cannot do the job.

And evolution is sexist, why did evolution choose to make the males more prettier and colorful ?

 

[Edgar]

Believe in evolution, and because a teacher said it, it must be true. Multiply that by decades and you’ve got generation after generation who believe something that is incomplete.

Preach a myth for long enough and wide enough and exclusively enough, and the masses will start to believe it. It’s called brainwashing and Darwinism excels at it, like any good cult.

you’ll just be told how uneducated you are.

That’s right. The first accusation an evo’ will throw at a dissenter is “You oppose evolution because you don’t understand how it works. Get educated.” Whereas in fact, most of these dissenters oppose evolution precisely because they DO know how it works.