The idea that life came about by luck is completely absurd, even more so than thinking that a computer chip was created by chance erosion of a silicone wafer in exactly the right pattern.
As I see it life was clearly designed by God.
The idea that life came about by luck is completely absurd, even more so than thinking that a computer chip was created by chance erosion of a silicone wafer in exactly the right pattern.
As I see it life was clearly designed by God.
It’s a big universe and there are a lot of years, so chemical evolution seems like a decent tool for God to use. Much like General Relativity is a more efficient way to rule the world than assigning angels to push the planets thru the sky. And a passing familiarity with birth defects will prove to most hard hearted people that each specific fact of biology is not designed by a loving creator. Unless you believe this messy but gloriously complex universe to be the best of all possible worlds, right up till you lie to your friend, it is difficult to believe whole heartedly in a loving creator.
I'm not a biblical scholar, but I think the "loving creator" thing was invented by people and not necessarily in the Bible. I'm pretty sure Old Testament God is pretty vengeful.
Theistic Evolution is wide-enough belief, especially with Protestants.
It is definitely in the Bible. Cynically, God seems to swing wildly between mercy and vengeance, but it's clear he would feel justified in a lot more vengeance than he takes but doesn't because he loves people. Less cynically, he's planning for Jesus and salvation the whole time, and sorta trying to keep the evil from getting out of hand with the occasional smiting. You can make the logic work if you want to.
This is edging into religious debate, which the guidelines ask people to keep off HN
And where did that god come from? Primordial soup full of magic and stardust? The idea of life starting by chance is completely absurd to you but somehow a god that just came out of nowhere is perfectly reasonable.
I don’t think what you are pointing at is a real issue.
Something exists. Therefore, on of the following 3 must hold: “one or more things exists or have existed which were not a consequence of another thing existing”, “an infinite regress of things existing as a consequence of other things”, “a cycles of consequences”.
The purported absurdity of life arising by chance is not about life existing, but about it arising by chance as a consequence of other non-living things.
The idea that god coming from nothing is absurd, well, that absurdity seemingly has to apply somewhere, as all 3 cases of the trichotomy above seem around as absurd? Eventually something has to be without explanation, whether it be a thing or a chain or cycle of things.
Or, were you not aware that most people who believe that God exists believe that God is the first cause?
Apparently you weren’t aware of that, because you said something about magic and stardust??
> As I see it life was clearly designed by God
Yes, wide-bosomed Gaia, foundation of us all, this research is about the manner in which She did it, if it was one birth or two.
Could you go into why you consider the existence of an invisible (all powerful? Depends which god you mean, you didn't say) being that happens to concern itself with life on Sol's third planet, to be less absurd than what you describe?
Or is that the joke and I'm missing it?
We know that intricate machines are designed by smart people; they don't just happen by luck. The idea that living things, which are far more intricately organized at every level than any machine we have made, could have arisen by some unknown series of chance steps is a fairy tale. It has never been observed, and even in the most controlled of environments it cannot be replicated. To me it's far more reasonable to conclude that life was designed by a super intelligent Creator. Just as a piano implies a piano maker (even if we haven't seen them), life implies an original Life-giver.
> The idea that living things, which are far more intricately organized at every level than any machine we have made, could have arisen by some unknown series of chance steps is a fairy tale.
Really? Because when you look at something like the human retina, the organization is embarrassing.
Especially since there are older, extant examples with better organization.
I wish I were so vain as to think I'm so special, surely I could never have happened by chance.
> As I see it life was clearly designed by God.
Which one? There are so many to choose from...
And what created that God? I know it's turtles all the way down but still want to know.
The dogma in many religions is that nothing created God or at least, there's no way to know. He exists outside our time and space. So from our perspective, God has always existed. If you believe that free will is true, then he can see all outcomes of the universe at once. If you don't believe in true free will, he sees the single timeline at once, from the big bang to the heat death of the universe.
Personally, I don't believe in any religions. They were all developed before we had a much clearer idea of how our world works and there's just too much folklore mixed in with actual, yet primitive, philosophical discussions to abide by any of it. But like with the simulation theory, we have no way to know what exists outside our time and space so you shouldn't worry. If there is some bored extra dimensional teenager simulating our universe on their GPU, it ultimately doesn't matter because we'll never know.
I believe that according to Catholic and Orthodox thought, God is Being itself. If you're familiar with Plato and Aristotle, God is the Form of Being. If not, I guess you could say God is Being as a noun, or God is where the idea of Being comes from. God exists because he is existence itself. (He is also Life and Love, in the same way)
Interesting comment. FWIW the idea of God as Being accords with Spinoza's philosophy, which in turn accords with Greek philosophy and ultimately accords with biblical philosophy. These are roots among the many roots of our modern world.
What we learn from these philosophies is that God is necessarily the author of life and love, but as well hatred and destruction. Worth noting that the latter are most (but not exclusively) expressed in human conduct. Among all animals humans have the most developed ability to decide how to act. That ability is not absolute, often enough logic or reasoning is bypassed and emotion rules.
Naturally cognition is not unbounded, we are limited by constraints of our construction. It means aspects of the universe are unknowable, we can't know what we're missing.
But knowing what we can know is an obligation of our privileged existence. As knowledge expands it exposes the utter complexity of all things emerging from common fundamental processes.
Seeing what is seen, a human may for a moment get a glimpse of the hand that binds everything together. That's a gift if there ever was one.
Do you reject evolution or do you believe God only created bacteria etc?
Which god?
the Sun
> The idea that life came about by luck is completely absurd
Argument by ridicule is a fallacy.
> even more so than thinking that a computer chip was created by chance erosion of a silicone wafer in exactly the right pattern.
But, as I'm sure you have been told many times, that's an absurd strawman, and suggests that you didn't read TFA or anything else that discusses how life may have arisen, including any of the other comments here. Life didn't spring up fully formed, it developed in stages.
> As I see it
I can't think of anything less compelling.
> life was clearly designed by God.
That is semantically incoherent, as well as being a violation of HN guidelines ("Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.")