On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 7:54 PM, Mary Jo Sminkey <[email protected]> wrote: > >>I mean no offence by this, but I'm curious. How does evolving from a >>primordial ooze seem improbable yet a God creating it all, even including a >>plan for evolution, seem somehow more probable? > I do think most people, whether they are religious or not, really don't quite > comprehend how amazing and unlikely our existence really is. Evolution of > complex species is FAR from the only highly improbable factor that plays a > part in our being here. That just is the one that people most commonly see > the inherent problems in fully explaining. >
Err..I don't think you understand science. Certainly not evolution. What in the world has led you to believe that evolution of complex species is a one in a trillion event? Somebody has been lying to you or you've been misreading. Amazing, yes. Unlikely? Not at all. I suppose you could say that it is unlikely in the sense of "wow, what if the gravitational constant was 50% greater than it is. Things would be so different!". If you take the fundamental laws of physics and chemistry as a given, however, life isn't that unlikely at all. The combination of amino acids is pure chemistry. There isn't anything magical, mystical or even wowie there. You keep shaking up amino acids in a suitable medium and chains form that are the basic blocks of RNA. Keep running samples in a massively parallel system with differential survival for a very long time and see what the odds are of something *other* than complex life. Evolution is an algorithm. Quite a simple one in fact. And it operates on the most incredibly basic units. The key that humans don't intuitively grasp is that it runs in a massively parallel system and for an incredibly long time. How parallel the system is and how long it runs is where human experience just doesn't match up. We have nothing to compare it to. So we invent something that does make sense, a "being" that is like us who organizes because that is closer to a scale we can comprehend. What are the odds that a superhuman being created life and made it the way it is? Unknown. There is nothing to compare it to, no cases we can infer from, no methodology we could measure. What are the odds that life evolved from a chemical soup? Quite good. We can see what happens in similar circumstances, we can watch the more advanced stages, we can pinpoint the things that need to happen in order for the process to continue and come to the current stage. There is no comparing odds. Perhaps there is a super-human creator, I don't know. If there is, there is no way of figuring out any sort of odds. Evolution, on the other hand, has elements we can measure and quantify. I choose to believe in evolution for those reasons. That may be wrong of course, many scientific theories are. Hell, most are at one point or another. But I will take a theory that is comprehensible to human reason and testable over one that is not any day. Cheers, Judah ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Want to reach the ColdFusion community with something they want? Let them know on the House of Fusion mailing lists Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/message.cfm/messageid:306613 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=11502.10531.5
