Did God Invent Us, Or Did We Invent Him

[Suicide Junkie]

Evolution is most definitely nonrandom.

Lots of random and semirandom changes are introduced via mutation and gene swapping.
The individuals with positive changes get copied because they survive to breed.
The individuals with detrimental changes get killed off.

If you take a random distribution of new individuals similar to your current population and then kill off the lowest 90%, the average goes up.

We are the top 0.0000...001% of our class, because we passed the survival exam and its brutal, bell curved marking scheme.

[gbrutt]

Too many posts to reply to them all at once. I will try to deal with some of the material. First of all, the author of Darwin's Black Box is Michael Behe. He is a Professor of Biochemistry at Lehigh University. Before you "debunk" his book, try reading it. He is far from ignorant. Instar, your example of coding is a good one. No matter what you say about complexity, there is a mind behind it, writing, entering, debugging the code. It did not arise of its own will. Your second paragraph also contains speculation, not facts. It takes far more faith for you to adhere to this than for a man to believe that God exists. The chemical reproduction also shows that under controlled conditions, man can manipulate materials to make responses. This is hardly creation.
Phoenix D, could you please explain your statement, "Evolution is not random." It isn't clear, unless you provide an example. Spontaneous generation, that is, starting with nothing, or non-life, and coming up with order, and life, does not work. You still need to start with something. Those who have tried to "recreate" a proto-earth, are using controlled conditions to simulate random patterns. That is hardly scientific, and it never has produced life, even when all of the materials were present and properly manipulated. You still need to begin with something being there or you will never get anything. Instar admits as much when he says, "given certain certain environmental factors, the precursors of life can be generated." Someone is doing the generating, for without manipulating these precursors, the experiment fails. Unfortunately, precursors of life and life are not the same. Klvino, makes an interesting comment when he says that, "the single greatest miracle in all of this universe and the next is that of random chance and the process of evolution." It is impossible to wholly rid ourselves of theological terms like miracle, even when we are trying in vain to be atheists. That's the way that we were made. Man is made in the image and likeness of God. It's the only thing which lends meaning and purpose to this life. If you really believe in microevolution, that all that exists arose from non-life and fell by random chance into the intricate order which we find on planet earth, that you and I are nothing more than a glorified ape, what ultimately, is the purpose of life as we know it? Even your debating this issue is meaningless, for you are nothing more than a random arrangement of molecules destined to rot in the grave. The Bible tells us that, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." All that is is created by Him and owes its very being to Him. That's the real reason most men find the subject troubling to them. They don't like the fact that there is something greater than themselves and to which they are endebted for all that they have.
"The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God."
Psalm 14:1

[Azselendor]

SJ, your example of evolution being non random is an example of forced evolution where if artificially eliminating a large majority of the population, you improve the gene pool. However, there is a flaw in this. Bananas, believe it or not, will more than likely be extinct in all of our life times because humans have pretty much bred all genetic diveristy out of the modern banana. As a result, it can easily be wiped out if a banana-born disease manages to get free.

GBrutt, As for michael behe, his ideas about 'intelligent design' are with the rest, as the overwhelming majority in the scientific community reject it as baseless creationist pseudoscience trying to pass itself as hard science. His Book, Darwin's Black Box, reads like it's based on personal incredulity instead of an actual explanation for his examples. Indeed, a couple of them been used to actually disprove his ideas by his critics. lol

As for the designing of software, keep in mind that software evolution, while done by man, actually evolves not because of the efforts of the programmer, but that of the industry, the community, users, testers, need, and improvements. These are natural influences that influence the direction the programmer (IE force of program evolution) to improve and make new versions of a program, which may spin off into seperate programs that may or may not survive and then further evolve at the hands of yet more programmers and influences around it.

Take Any program, remove the users' and customers' needs. What do you have? A program without enough influenece for dramatic change that will, pretty much, not advance more than what it is. Why? Because the programmer, being the force of program evolution, does not have anyone buy and using his program, thus he is unable to continue to develop it.

Moving on, You are right, life didn't start from nothing. I more than likely started about 8 billion years ago when a red giant went supernova and left enough stellar material behind to create our star system 3.5 to 4 billion years later. Those materials, by random chance and good energy managed to come together and create the right conditions on earth for life and create the building blocks for life which took form in earth's primitive oceans billions of years ago. Computer driven recreations of protoearth enviroments will never yeild the correct responses, mainly because they are best-guess simulations.

Ask yourself what DNA is and then ask yourself what it is made of. Sugars, Amino Acids, etc. What are they made of? basic elements and all of these things exist, already in nature and can form on their own. Often, creationist argue that life had to start at one point. How can we be sure of that? For all we know, CNN might report evidence that many kinds of microbacterial life formed on earth, at different places, all around the same period. Simply, no one knows and no one will know until a proto-earth enviroment can be found.

Now you are assuming that someone is behind everything, someone pulling all the strings, not so. Does lightening have direction? No. It lands on chance and probilities. Then factors increase that chance or decrease it. And remember, Lightening can strike twice.

Now as for you twisting my words, don't. My statement was never about god or religion and the word 'miracle' is used for the purpose of stating the extreme possibility of life, not the fact someone did it. The way you twisted it around would be me saying you endorse free thinking because you uttered "Athiests" The fact is that creationism mythology
is not science and cannot ever compete with it.

Now if "god" did make us in his image, then I think his Xerox needed a serious toner replacement. He got a lot of stuff wrong. The human knees are not load bearing structures. Try standing at attention all day with your knees locked. Humans have some 3000 genetic diseases and faults bred into us alone!

The fact is the complexity of evolution is not complex at all. It only appears complex because it has aeons upon aeons of history behind it that we are yet to uncover.

The bible says the world was created one way, but every religion has different ways. Who's to say who is right and wrong. Hell, the egyptians claimed the unvierse sprung up from godly intercourse and endured because they kept up at it! Can you disprove the egyptian creationism? Greek? Hindu? Zulu? Native Americans? and so on.

You seem to think athiests and free thinkers have an issue with god, in reality most of us don't. As we don't believe in a god-figure or divine-lifeform, we cannot have an issue with it. We won't go to hell, because we don't believe in it thus we cannot go. We don't believe in satan or the devil, so clearly they can't influence us.

So really, how can a free thinker be endebted for all eternity to someone they don't believe even exists? At the risk of insulting all the religious folk and bring down their wrath on me with my next example, but "How many of us owe the toothfairy money for our babyteeth?"

Athiesm has been around since 300bce, if not earlier. I don't think we are going anywhere.

A man called L�ffler who was burned in Bern in 1375 for confessing adherence to athiesm is reported to have taunted his executioners that they would not have enough wood to burn "Chance, which rules the world".

[Instar]

I'm afraid you missed the point of the software example. The process of evolutionary software does NOT involve any human input, besides the design of the algortithm, that is, setting the code up to evolve. The software itself creates several versions of a program, each with some randomly chosen changes, and then runs simulations to see which version of the program works best, and then combines the best ones to be members of the next generation.
To reiterate, there is absolutely NO human intervention beyond actually setting it up to evolve. Evolutionary software mimics the natural process, and even can create many novel and interesting solutions to problems.

[Phoenix-D]

Evolution is not random, Klvino [ORB]. It is mainly driven by natural selection; the organisms that aren't good at dealing with their current envioroment don't do as well as the organisms that are. Either they just breed more, they live longer, whatever.

Yes, you've got mutations and genetic drift in their too. And those are important, since they can seperate two otherwise identical populations into sub-species or species, given enough time. But natural selection does most of the 'work'.

GBrutt, see the above and also note that abiogenesis and evolution are two different topics. Evolution theory doesn't care how life got here- it just covers what happens when it did.

Abiogensis does rely on random processes to an extent, though, but you don't have to maniuplate anything. Give conditions much like the early earth and early components of life will form spontantiously. Given that its estimated it took several billion years to go from that to single-celled organisms to multi-celled organisms, its not surprising we haven't gotten any farther yet.

That's why research is still continung in that area. It gets really murky because the early life left very few traces; bacteria simply don't fossilize well, and just to make things complicated bacteria "species" are very flexible, given that many bacteria can eat DNA and sometimes instead of eating it use it in their own chromosome.

[Instar]

gbrutt, the Bible also says that God killed a guy for, well, spilling his seed on the ground. God also says in Malachi 2:3 that hes going to wipe poo on people's faces.
Skeptic's Annotated Bible has a ton of such inconsistencies (and yes, there is a Skeptic's Annotated Koran too).

[Azselendor]

You forgot the one for the Mormons too, Instar! lol

Pheonix-D, Natural Selection is one of several evolutionary processes Darwin proposed. Had the Indian Subcontinent not smashed into Asia, then our ancestors would have never had a practical reason to climb down from their trees. Off course, it did happen and the monsoon didn't go to africa any more thus changing the climate where our ancestors lived dramatically.

[gbrutt]

Response to Klvino (and the many others)

Behe didn�t really plumb the depths of intelligent design as much as expand on the idea of irreducible complexity. He is not, by his own admission, a Christian. He is a scientist who is trying to make sense of the Creation/evolution debate for himself while at the same time is perplexed at the lack of response from the scientific community. The examples of I/C he lists the development of the eye, exploding beetles, blood clotting, all point to intricate systems which have no way of developing on their own. You say that there are some examples of scientists who disproved this, I would be interested in hearing more about them. Behe never says evolution is impossible, rather, he is a rare scientist who cannot answer the questions which face him in the evolutionary model and is honest about it. Read the book again.

On to your field of expertise, software. There I must bow to your knowledge and experience, it is quite beyond my reckoning, except for the gadgets and games that I immensely enjoy. Still, in your anecdote, each step involves a human mind adding to or manipulating data in order to achieve a desired result. No software yet has ever sprung up whole from nothing. There is always a programmer, and engineer, a tech, who put each piece in place. It all requires a mind, your mind, to make it move and work. The program may evolve, but that is only after a great many steps were taken to insure that the conditions were favorable to this result.

The reason that I say that life must come from life is that every scientist knows that it is so. The Laws of Biogenesis prove that life comes from life. All living organisms come from living organisms. We cannot create matter and energy in a lab, no matter who controls the experiment. So how is it then, according to your beliefs, that life came to be? The Steady State Theory was abandoned years ago as untenable, so it must have come about in some fashion.

Also, I never twisted your words. I quoted them and then commented on that quote. I said that no one can escape theological language as it is the way that we are. To use the word miracle is to give assent to the concept of something, whether you admit it or not. If you don't like it, choose another word. On another point, �The fact is that creationism mythology is not science and cannot ever compete with it.� Klvino, look at your own post. It is littered with phrases like, "more than likely," "by random chance," "no one knows," "the extreme possibility." This is fact that you flout, the mighty truth which is to topple Christianity? If you read the same halting words, but from another's post, would you call it science, or in the words of the Apostle Paul, �science falsely so-called.�?

I have a question for you. In the words of Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History. �Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing�that is true?� What evidence can you provide to prove your your hypothesis? In your evolutionist point of view, how did all that is get here? How do you explain irreducible complexity in relation to forms of life? Can you tell me how is it possible that they could have come about? What about the utter lack of intermediate forms, which should be superabundant, given the amount of time and fossils which have been uncovered? Or the fact that even given the greatest possible amount of time, the radical changes from one type to another are impossible?

As to the God made a booboo when he made man idea, you err because you assume that man is now as he always is. A man named Descartes also said something similar, but from the perspective of the philosophical. �If there is a god, he is a devil.� In trying to understand how God could make man, who is inherently beautiful and creative, yet also ugly, or evil; Descartes reasoned that if there is a God, he is a devil. This presumes that God made man as he now is. If this is the case, Descartes is right. There is another factor that changes all of the speculations. Something happened to sever the relationship that God had with man. Christians know this as the fall. As a result, man is both beautiful, capable of creating wondrous works to stir the imagination; and is able to commit unspeakable horrors. It also means that we must turn to God to be rescued from our present state. If you have further interest on the subject, Francis Scaeffer�s books are highly recommended to expand on this further. He is a far better spokesman than I could ever be. Try his trilogy, The God is There, He is There and He is Not Silent, and Escape from Reason.

Lastly, (for now), and this is to Instar. You mention two passages of Scripture. The first one details Onan, found in Genesis 38:4-10. The second is Malachi 2:3. Just what your post is supposed to mean, I'm not certain. Was there a context to this, or is the reader left to guess at the underlying motivation? Perhaps you should go back and try it again. Better yet, lay aside your Skeptic's Annotated Bible, pick up the Bible, and read it. I recommend the same to all of you. Job 38 is a nice place to start. Goodnight for now.

[Instar]

The point of those two scriptures was to show how ridiculous portions of the Bible are.
And yes, I've read the Bible. I spent a lot of time in Bible study classes. I read the story of Job too. He went though a heck of a lot of torture for some celestial game. That is a very kind God... and don't say he gets it all back either, because his first set of kids are DEAD.
You're missing the point. I've tried to explain how life is thought to have first arose, in the primordial earth of billions of years ago. Experiments in conditions similar to what the earth was like then show that some parts could have been formed from natural processes.
Admittedly, the software analogy doesn't work because you don't know software or programming enough. Essentially what evolutionary software is is a simulation of evolution. And we're not debating evolution, so the example isn't needed.

meh

[Suicide Junkie]

Klvino [ORB] said:
SJ, your example of evolution being non random is an example of forced evolution where if artificially eliminating a large majority of the population, you improve the gene pool. However, there is a flaw in this. Bananas, believe it or not, will more than likely be extinct in all of our life times because humans have pretty much bred all genetic diveristy out of the modern banana. As a result, it can easily be wiped out if a banana-born disease manages to get free.

I'm sorry. Are you trying to point out that humans are destroying ecodiversity?
We already know that humans are breaking the so-called "natural" patterns with medicine and pollution and clearcutting.
Hell, we've halted the ice age cycle and put people on the moon.

ANYWAYS.
With your typical group of critter, the worst mutations die before birth. The pretty bad ones will die after birth when they can't do basic things nessesary for survival.
Lots of the rest get eaten by predators because they were a little bit slower, a little bit more stupid, or has "lower stats" that contribute to their failure.

In non-social critters, they still have to compete against each other for food. Only the best get to eat consistently, and the rest starve.
In social critters, they still have to compete against each other to attract mates.

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There is a pretty high attrition rate, especially during developmental stages, I'm afraid to say.

Out of all the eggs and embryos, there is an average of just one per parent that survive to breed again in a stable population. That's pretty bad odds.