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

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rossum said:
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Aloysium:
Satan lacks any creativity and whatever good he could do was destroyed when he corrupted mankind.
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But Satan did God’s will when he destroyed Job’s family and workers. God Himself gave them over to Satan to do whatever he wanted. Thus Satan’s actions then were in accordance with God’s expressed will. How can actions in accordance with God’s will not be good?
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I don’t intend to derail the thread, but It is worth our time to contemplate the story of Job. Here’s my take on it:

In the Land of Uz, the parable states, there lived a righteous man called Job, blessed by God. As a representative of everyman, the question here addressed has to do with the extent that we truly know and love God. Satan, that voice of selfishness, proposes that Job is good, does the will of God, to love, because he has been so favoured. Whereas in the Garden, Satan seduced us by appealing to our pride, in this case, we are lured to his side by suffering, which it should be remembered, we deserve as a result of our primal choice to usurp the will of God. Do we surrender to the will of God, trusting in Him fully, or do we turn away and curse God? To test Job, God allows Satan to torment, but not kill him. This of course was the fate of Jesus Christ, through whom we are all saved. Sin is a transgression against Love, the will of God. Divine law, think Dharma, is such that every act that is not loving, will end in destruction. It cannot be otherwise in a universe grounded in, brought into existence by Love, where we here and now, find ourselves in enemy territory, where although vanquished, Satan is temporarily allowed free reign. This until we, as one humanity, in and through Christ, find our home in joyous communion with God.
 
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I would find it very hard to believe an “un-guided and randomized” mechanism will produce new species and evolution.

It just does not make sense.
 
John10 said:
I would find it very hard to believe an “un-guided and randomized” mechanism will produce new species and evolution.

It just does not make sense.
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It is not completely ‘unguided’. Natural selection provides an element of guidance by removing changes that work less well and promoting changes that work better than average.

You have billions of generations of ancestors going back to that first primitive proto-cell 4.5 billion years ago. Every single one of those ancestors succeeded in reproducing. Not one failure among then. You are the result of billions of generations of unbroken success.
 
edwest211 said:
I reject the science only explanation. It is incomplete. As I wrote, only the Catholic Church can combine science and theology. You reject Catholic theology.
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So, you reject Einstein’s scientific work because he was not Catholic. Little wonder your view does not have much traction in science.
 
rossum said:
Every single one of those ancestors succeeded in reproducing. Not one failure among then. You are the result of billions of generations of unbroken success.
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I still have my doubts, without someone to supervise I would find it hard to believe in so many consecutive successes.

Secondly, there is the problem of irreducibility complexity. I do not think I would survive for long with a “half” functioning eye, waiting thousands of years for it to finally work.
 
John10 said:
Secondly, there is the problem of irreducibility complexity. I do not think I would survive for long with a “half” functioning eye, waiting thousands of years for it to finally work
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The evolution of the eye has been discussed and investigated from Darwin onwards. Here is some info:

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en.m.wikipedia.org

The fact is that even a patch of light-sensitive cells gives a survival advantage and plenty of scope for evolution to work on.
 
PickyPicky said:
patch of light-sensitive cells gives a survival advantage and plenty of scope for evolution to work on
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I do not believe we go from a patch of light-sensitive cells to a human eye without some intelligence guiding the process, a super one by the way.
 
John10 said:
I do not believe we go from a patch of light-sensitive cells to a human eye without some intelligence guiding the process, a super one by the way
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Believing that is your perfect right, although you don’t say what that belief is based on. If it’s just “such a development would be unbelievably amazing”, then I would reply that “unbelievably amazing” is what I had thought Christians believed God’s creation to be.
 
John10 said:
Common sense
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Unfortunately common sense is not an infallible guide to scientific truth. It’s common sense that time moves at the same speed for us all, but it ain’t true. It’s common sense that continents don’t float about the globe, but they do. It’s common sense that people at the bottom of the earth would fall off, but they don’t. It’s common sense that there could never have been hundreds of metres of ice on top of Britain, but there were. It’s common sense that injecting a disease organism into a human cannot prevent that human acquiring that disease, but it does. If everything on earth could be explained by common sense there would be no need for science at all.
 
Not everything can be explained by pure common sense, but some thing are. As I said before, the only thing that makes sense is that a super powerful intelligence is directing nature and its processes.
 
I understand it to be a mainstream Christian belief that God created and sustains the natural processes by which the human eye evolved.
 
John10 said:
I still have my doubts, without someone to supervise I would find it hard to believe in so many consecutive successes.
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They had to have succeeded; if they hadn’t you wouldn’t be here: “If your parents didn’t have any children then the chances are you won’t either.”
Secondly, there is the problem of irreducibility complexity. I do not think I would survive for long with a “half” functioning eye, waiting thousands of years for it to finally work.
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Irreducible Complexity is a red herring. Nautilus have an eve very similar to ours, but without a lens. Their eyes work well enough for them. Our eyes have adapted to having a lens, so they would not work well without it. Further back, there are light sensitive protists – just a single cell – which can sense light without all the added apparatus of a camera eye. One recipe for making an IC system is to add a helpful extra piece, and then make that extra piece essential. That is probably how lenses became part of our eyes, but not for a Nautilus.

Even Professor Behe agrees that IC systems can evolve; see Behe and Snoke (2004) as well as his sworn testimony at the Kitzmiller trial.
 
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Techno2000 said:
How times do you suppose Natural selection had to remove the less well to get to the 10 million different plant and animal species we have today?
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How many acorns does a mature Oak tree produce over its lifetime? On average only one of those acorns survives to produce a new mature Oak tree.
 
rossum said:
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Techno2000:
How times do you suppose Natural selection had to remove the less well to get to the 10 million different plant and animal species we have today?
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How many acorns does a mature Oak tree produce over its lifetime? On average only one of those acorns survives to produce a new mature Oak tree.
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I’m talking about all the transitional forms that died out.
 
John10 said:
As I said before, the only thing that makes sense is that a super powerful intelligence is directing nature and its processes.
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And the chances of a super-power intelligence happening is even less than the chance of an eye evolving by random mutation and natural selection. See Nilsson and Pelger (1994). A vertebrate eye takes about 400,000 generations to evolve from a flat set of photoreceptors, like the Lancelet eye.

Your personal opinion needs a lot more support to stand against the scientific evidence.
 
rossum said:
They had to have succeeded
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That does not disprove my point, which is being successful by chance many times is very unlikely, unless a super intelligent being is over seeing the whole process.
rossum said:
That is probably how lenses became part of our eyes, but not for a Nautilus.
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Even if that process was true (which again I doubt, given the low chance of surviving with a under developed eye) intelligence is clearly needed to make those improvements.
 
rossum said:
Your personal opinion needs a lot more support to stand against the scientific evidence.
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This is not just my opinion, but rather common sense backup by science. Information can only come from intelligence (a mind).
 
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