Reasons To Question Evolution?

to people who question evolution, i want know your reasons why.

 

I guess there Faith has a big part in accepting nature/the natural order of things
There are some who have strong conviction, and believe after profound consideration feel that there is a simple answer to what has been a matter of debate throughout generations by scholars, philosophers and religious leaders
Like this posting:-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58znSrQBI0k

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIEoO5KdPvg

 

I'm not sure if "questioning" is the right word to use here. I've found a lot of people dont even bother to learn about evolution. You have to first understand the concept to even question it. Many religious people I know just tune out any conversation or lesson on evolution. My high school.biology teacher refused to teach it because she was a Christian, and because at the time I was also a Christian I didn't give a shit. I didn't learn about it until college.

 

How did a single cell turn into a complex cell? How did feelings, thoughts and reason develop?

 

It seems to me we have two options:

1) Believe what people believed 2,000 years ago, when they barely figured out that you shouldn't have feces in your food, and the discovery that sacrificing your firstborn child probably doesn't affect weather patterns was revolutionary

2) Approach the problem carefully by performing experiments, gathering data from every field of inquiry, creating models and testing them, and discarding whatever doesn't work to explain the problem, no matter how good it makes us feel

Why are you even on a computer? A computer is a product of science, not the bible. I would appreciate it if you didn't profane our lord and saviour with your use of this devil's box.

 

Through relationship, viruses introducing nuclear material and things like that.

 

Not very satisfying

 

You don't appreciate the results?

 

This was in regards to your answer to my questions

 

I always wondered how we came to be as well. Seems like mutations would have to be fairly extreme to get where we are now, from a cell-like organism. If it's just blind chance, blind mutations, how lucky we are, to have something as well constructed as fingers and eyes and a brain, and DMT inside it, and stuff. I don't doubt evolution, at all, it's just...

I asked something along these lines in a Biology class (after class) and the teacher looked at me like I was crazy (maybe I wasn't explaining myself very well?) and as I was walking out, an older hispanic lady told me, "it's okay, I don't believe in evolution either." lol, I was too tongue tied and weary to explain myself further.

But I think biology teachers should be well versed in all the intricate details, in case a Biology major, such as myself, is just curious as to how it all works and asks pointed questions. Not just look at them like they're suggesting the world was created by a bearded man in white robes who lives in the sky. Know what I mean?

 

And I asked you another question, I saw your response.

 

http://arch10.igmors.u-psud.fr/LabHome/JFilee/article_jf_5.pdf

Abstract

"Viruses are often considered as fragments of cellular RNA or DNA that escaped a long time ago from cellular chromosomes and that evolved later on by capturing additional genes from the genomes of their hosts. However, this view has now been challenged by the discovery of surprising homology between viruses with very distantly related hosts, and by phylogenetic analyses suggesting that genes might also have flown from viruses to cells. We present here phylogenetic analyses of four proteins involved in DNA replication and synthesis of DNA precursors (DNA polymerases delta, ribonucleotide reductases, thymidylate synthases and replicative helicases) and we discuss the reciprocal roles of cells and viruses during the evolutionary history of these enzymes. These analyses revealed numerous lateral gene transfer events between cells and viruses, in both directions. We suggest that lateral gene transfers from viruses to cells and nonorthologous gene replacements of cellular genes by viral ones are an important source of “genetic novelties” in the evolution of cellular lineages. Thus, viruses have definitively to be considered as major players in the evolution of cellular genomes."

 

Your biology teacher should have been ready to answer this common misconception about evolution. I'm also very surprised you don't understand this much about evolution being a Biology major. Evolution is not blind, nor is it just chance. The actual mutations are random, but those which are beneficial for an organism will be preserved within the gene pool by that organism successfully reproducing and passing those genes on. You are forgetting an entire major part of evolution: Natural Selection. The mutations are not "fairly extreme", they're actually extremely subtle and unnoticeable, until you fast forward the clock through many thousands of generations. As far as the development of complex biological systems like the human eye, perhaps this will help you understand:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrKZBh8BL_U

 

Does it seem like the mutations would have to be extreme?

Life on Earth is an estimated 3.5 billion years old.

That's 3,500,000,000 Years! Think of all the the mutations and evolution of ideas, if you will, humans have experienced in the last 100 or so years: Television, computers, movie theaters, Video Games, Stereos, Robotics, DNA, Neurotransmitters, Mass produced Cars, Space Programs, General Relativity, etc.


I don't know how you understand "blind chance" but evolution is not thought of to be completely randomly blind in the sense it's just a crap shoot when organisms develop. That is to say, evolution tends to work in gradual steps to improve (from an organism's perspective) upon a species through natural selection. In actuality, there are supposedly far more extinct species than currently living species, so even the idea of evolution inherently working towards a beneficial means may be a bit skewed through our lively rose-colored glasses.

^ Edit:I typed this prior to seeing Writer's response, I apologize if some of that is redundant.

By no means am I a biology expert, however one concept which applicable to biology, as well as many realms of understanding is emergence.

I'll make an analogy for you which will hopefully illustrate the concept of emergence and perhaps we can draw a parallel from simple cells to more complex lifeforms... It will require a stretch in imagination though.

Let us anthropomorphize and entertain the idea of a city as an organism. The people, buildings, streets, highways, etc. All represent like cells, structures or constituent parts of the city organism.
Before it developed into the city, it had to have clusters of people coming together, gradually structures emerge to make the system work more efficiently. The systems of the city organism emerge to develop so efficiently that now it has precise pathways (streets,highways) which direct the people (cells) to communicate and keep the city working efficiently. The city is regulated by a circadian rhythm of sorts, that is the city conserves it's energy (lights and traffic) by dwindling usage at late parts of the evening and early morning (Pretend it's a weekday for the sake of the analogy ). The city organism responds to outside stimuli (weather, air travel, ships, etc.) which in turn influences it's constituent parts to modulate behavior.

The complexity of the city organism has emerged from "simpler" set of conditions and organisms, which do not necessarily exhibit the same behavior but may have a reciprocal influence.

 

The universe is nearly 14 Billion years old. The genesis of life from non-living matter does seem incredibly unlikely, but most people fail to truly grasp how large of a number a billion is. How long would it take you to count to a billion? The size of the universe is incredibly huge also.

That life can arise from random processes seems unlikely but by definition, a set or truly random numbers of infinite size will definitely contain every possible number, as well as every possible subset. This means that it would contain sets of sequential numbers from negative infinity to positive infinity as well.

The larger the set, the more likely that rare occurrences will occur. For example, if one were to consider the number 42 to be rare, and unlikely to occur when the set of possible random values is very large, a list of any size of the number of 42 can be produced by generating random numbers and it is inevitable that the list will become filled after some arbitrary length of time. I was curious and decided to see how rare the number 42 was and to see how unlikely it would be to find at least 10 numbers equal to 42 in a large set of random numbers.

I didn't time it but it took a couple of minutes. The generated random numbers were in the range of 0 - 2,147,483,647, so assuming that the numbers are truly random (they aren't, but close enough to it) meaning any possible value is equally likely to occur next the probability of 42 being produced is 1 in 2,147,483,647, quite a small probability. As you can see below, in a set of 20 billion random numbers, the number 42 was found to occur 12 times which suggest that the numbers were fairly close to random as that is not far off from the results that you would predict based on the statistical probability (9.83 occurences out of 20 billion). That might not seem very cool, well of course you say ... if you pick enough numbers at random, eventually you will pick the one your looking for, ...especially after 20 billion tries!

it would be a lot cooler to find something like large sets of sequential numbers, generated one after the other in order ... or the digits of Pi to 100 decimal places in order. That would eventually occur too, in fact it's inevitable and absoutely WILL happen if the set is large enough, but how long would it take .... i'm not willing to wait that long to find out but i'd be willing to bet that 14 billion years is enough

Min: 0, Max: 2147483647, matches: 12, numbers generated: 20000000000

42
42
42
42
42
42
42
42
42
42
42
42


edit: the number 42 itself isn't particularly remarkable, it is rare, about equally rare as any other number i think many of the things we find remarkable and unlikely are just unlikely ... we find them remarkable but they are no more objectively remarkable than any other rare occurrence. Things like certain atoms decaying into other atoms are pretty rare too (and in fact truly random), given enough time some amount of mass will completely decay into another element. There's a lot of atoms out there tho, so overall it occurs quite often.

 

Evolution is a fact - it is the Original 'Beginning' of such however, which is the Question - and although one can speculate, whilst there is a good deal of conjecture - proof and belief is that witch lies within the Heart, Mind and Soul of the individual

 

Heehee, I love pirsig he has some great ideas, and everybody should read his masterpiece!



Just to give an idea of how big the number billion is, if you were to count every second since the moment of your birth, you'd only hit your first billion at around age 40. I firmly believe that mathematical illiteracy is a primary source of confusion for people on scientific matters; they simply do not even have a rudimentary comprehension of the vast time and distance scales we are talking about, nor the sheer quantity of cellular life that has existed on earth and been exposed to random mutations through cosmic rays and imperfect replication.

 

The OP says: to people who question evolution That aside:

I know you're kidding/being sarcastic here, especially the last sentence. But i'm wondering if there's any purpose in projecting this aversity against science on christians in general.
Also, are you sure those are the only 2 options?