Evolution is not working with genes already present, it's adding new DNA, new information. From scratch.
From what's already there. Small changes. Take asexual reproduction: that's adding whole new DNA, not different (muttaion takes care of that), but it is creating new DNA. We know that occurs. Look at the end result, you see the big change you're focused on: but the small changes leading up to that are simple and understood.
But I don't have a problem with small changes, so long as it's clear that I don't believe they can lead to a transformation of one kind to another kind. There is no good evidence of this and there should be. If it were true.
There's no reason to think life from nothing is impossible?
That doesn't even try to show it's impossible. The best you can say it's unlikely, but the Earth is not all that exists. There's all of time and all of space for the conditions to be met, and there are many things that could develop. The flaw with that article is that it supposes fully functional cells and DNA sprouted out of nowhere, which no one thinks happened. [/quote]
Many attempts have been made to calculate the probability of the formation of life from chemicals, but all of them involve making simplifying assumptions that make the origin of life even possible (i.e. probability > 0).
Mathematician Sir Fred Hoyle stated in various ways the extreme improbability of life forming, or even getting a single functional biopolymer such as a protein. Hoyle said, “Now imagine 1050 blind persons [ed: standing shoulder to shoulder, they would more than fill our entire planetary system] each with a scrambled Rubik cube and try to conceive of the chance of them all simultaneously arriving at the solved form. You then have the chance of arriving by random shuffling of just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends. The notion that not only the biopolymers but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial soup here on earth is evidently nonsense of a high order. Life must plainly be a cosmic phenomenon.”
Indeed, we can calculate the probability of getting just one small protein of 150 amino acids in length, assuming that only the correct amino acids are present, and assuming that they will join together in the right manner (polymerize). The number of possible arrangements of 150 amino acids, given 20 different ones, is (20)150. Or the probability of getting it right with one try is about 1 in 10195. Lest someone protest that not every amino acid has to be in the exact order, this is only a small protein, and only one of several hundred proteins needed, many of which are much larger, and the DNA sequence has to arise as well, seriously compounding the problem. Indeed there are proteins that will not function at all with even a small alteration to their sequence.
At that time Hoyle argued that life must therefore have come from outer space. Later he realized that even given the universe as a laboratory, life would not form anywhere by the unguided (non-intelligent) processes of physics and chemistry:
“The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40,000 naughts after it … It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence.”
Does a figure of 1 in 1040,000 make the origin of life somewhere in the universe impossible without purposeful intelligence? Can we say that?
The total number of events (or ‘elementary logical operations’) that could have occurred in the universe since the supposed big bang (13.7 billion years) has been calculated at no more than 10120 by MIT researcher Seth Lloyd.40 This sets an upper limit on the number of experiments that are theoretically possible. This limit means that an event with a probability of 1 in 1040,000 would never happen. Not even our one small protein of 150 amino acids would form.
However, biophysicist Harold Morowitz41 came up with a much lower probability of 1 in 1010,000,000,000. This was the chance of a minimalist bacterium being assembled from a broth of all the basic building blocks (e.g. theoretically obtained by heating a brew of living bacteria to kill them and break them down to their basic constituents).
As an atheist, Morowitz argued that therefore life was not a result of chance and posited that there must be some property of available energy that drives the formation of entities that can use it (aka ‘life’). This sounds much like the idea of Gaia, which attributes pantheistic mystical properties to the universe.
More recently the atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel proposed something similar to account for the origin of life and mind.
Anything but believe in a supernatural Creator, it would appear.
The different probabilities calculated arise from the difficulty of calculating such probabilities and the differing assumptions that are made. If we make calculations using assumptions that are most favorable to abiogenesis and the result is still ridiculously improbable, then it is a more powerful argument than using more realistic assumptions that result in an even more improbable result for the materialist (because the materialist can try to argue against some of the assumptions with the latter approach).
However, all calculations of the probability of the chemical origin of life make unrealistic assumptions in favor of it happening, otherwise the probability would be zero. For example, Morowitz’s broth of all the ingredients of a living cell cannot exist because the chemical components will react with each other in ways that will render them unavailable for forming the complex polymers of a living cell, as explained above.
The origin of life is about as good as it gets in terms of scientific ‘proof’ for the existence of God.
High profile information theorist Hubert Yockey (UC Berkeley) realized this problem:
“The origin of life by chance in a primeval soup is impossible in probability in the same way that a perpetual motion machine is in probability. The extremely small probabilities calculated in this chapter are not discouraging to true believers … [however] A practical person must conclude that life didn’t happen by chance.”
Note that in his calculations, Yockey generously granted that the raw materials were available in a primeval soup. But in the previous chapter of his book, Yockey showed that a primeval soup could never have existed, so belief in it is an act of ‘faith’. He later concluded, “the primeval soup paradigm is self-deception based on the ideology of its champions.”
there is no reason to think they are turning into something else or were something else.
Only if you presuppose evolution doesn't exist, in which case your line of arguing against evolution is meaningless. Everything that exists has a use, because otherwise it wouldn't exist: that's a simplification of evolution. Claiming that we don't observe transition and therefore that's not evidence for evolution, however, is wholly circular. [/quote]
But you're forgetting that you're coming at it from the angle that evolution does exist, which is also a presupposition. Can you explain to me how it's circular reasoning to say that if we can't observe something in science, it doesn't exist? I'm fairly certain science is observing, pretty much by definition.
I'm not only talking about morality in my axiom, but I'll address that too. The reason why atheism is not a better axiom, in my opinion, is because it fails to explain the way the world works in a consistent manner. You are right to say that if evolution is true, there is no objective morality. Naturalism cannot provide ethics, it is simply not capable of providing meaning.
Because evolution doesn't provide an axiom: it provides our ability to reason and arrive at the axiom, and to have a conscience. [/quote]
Evolution does not have an explanation for reason or conscience, but you must assume that it provides you with the ability to reason if you refuse to believe in God.
The atheist cannot put forward, within his own framework, a justification for why reasoning is trustworthy, or even worthwhile. There's no explanation for why a debate is more important than the two soda bottles fizzing.
Reasoning is trustworthy by axiom too: that's necessarily the case. You can't exactly prove, beyond assuming it, that God gave us reliable faculties of reasoning: any attempt to do so would be based in assuming you can reason. [/quote]
If you believe in God, then you believe him when he says he made us in his image. That means that he gave us the ability to reason because he does. To give us free will, we must also have the ability to reason and to choose to be in relationship with him or to reject him.
I don't know where you got the idea that humans don't have the tendency to believe in God.
Capital-G God. Beyond issues with the study, there is no tendency to believe in the morally mandated God. [/quote]
I thought you meant there was no tendency to believe in a supernatural being. Because that would be the opposite of atheism. But if you believe in a god of any sort, you must believe he or she is there for a reason, whether it's to hold you accountable for your actions (which is usually the case) or because it's the power that began life.
If we evolved to do no harm and that is the evolutionary moral code, it seems that we would be programmed to do a little better. Rather, it seems that we wouldn't be able to help but be morally perfect. Of course it makes sense to care for our young, but it doesn't make sense that we would do so without knowing why we're doing it. It doesn't make sense that we would evolve urges that contradict other evolved urges. And it's also too convenient.
We breathe without knowing why we're doing it, at first: and early humans did for centuries. Why do you have to know a reason, to do something? [/quote]
Because our urges and chemicals should only be for surviving. But to have offspring is too intelligent of a need for an accidental urge to stick around, because it doesn't have to. Other tendencies like breathing are critical to survival (and still absurd to have began on its own) but passing off genes is just a benefit--a bonus.
If we were divinely created, we should do a little better, and our urges should be more in line. Evolution isn't an intelligent process, flaws will seep in: that's how it works. [/quote]
But the difference is that God made us with free will in a world where we can choose good or evil. But evolution seems to have given birth to robots who are programmed from pond scum to do good because we're selfish and want to survive, for some reason. Or rather, for no reason.
If you are a product of chemicals and nothing more, everything in your mind is an illusion. Every idea, including evolution, stems from some kind of urge or chemical. Really nothing can be trusted to be real. Sad, huh?
I still fail to understand what your definition of illusion is. If you think something is an illusion simply because God didn't make it, sure, but that's meaningless.
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What I'm saying is that your feelings and ideas, if based on chemicals and urges only, are completely without logic. There's no point to them. And really no point to anything.
By the way, I thought I figured out how to do your quote then mine, for easier reading, but the preview doesn't show it how it's supposed to be. I'm hoping it's clear enough. Also doing this all on my phone, so it's taking even longer. But maybe that's why the code isn't working? I don't know.