The Question Thread

I always like predictions of science that take a long time to be confirmed. Evolution provides that with the best part of a century delay for the central prediction of similarity in the inherited information (whose nature was completely unknown for a long time after Darwin) characteristic of common ancestry.

(Like the hundred years it took to confirm gravitational waves existed, and the 50 years to confirm the existence of the Higgs boson).

@Pyrite

If I accept Evolution, does that mean I need to stop believing in the Bible?

I think you just need to interpret it more reasonably. It's amazing how much effort some people put into finding implausible ways to ignore contradictions and yet take obvious allegory as literal truth.

I’d say you do what you want. But there are many devout religious people who accept the theory of evolution.

I'll read more here, just joined. 

Is the general consensus of "non-believers" that God creating man from mud is a metaphor based on evolution and our (humans) lack of knowledge  at the time? This is my belief. 

Evolution is the main theory that underpins the science of Biology. Senior Biologists are often heard to say that without evolution, nothing in Biology makes sense.

So the theory of evolution is very much at the heart of our scientific understanding.

By contrast, people of faith are quick to remind us that the Bible is not a science textbook. Very well, there's no reason to think it is. So why confuse the two things?

Right. I do believe there is much historical data in the Bible however. Some stories are just that, stories, and are good in the sense of wisdom or other, but some data is accurate. 

Perhaps there is in the sense of actual events & historical characters but the world of fiction writing is also filled with examples of invented characters & events set in authentic historical settings.

So what does this demonstrate? That much of what is written in the Bible is simply another form of invented story telling. Human beings are very good at inventing such things.

Locations, some natural structures, that sort of thing. 

"natural structures"? What point are you making? Do you think having references to actual events & people lends some kind of authority to the Bible?

Look at the novels of Charles Dickens - they're peppered with such references. But Oliver Twist & Nicholas Nickleby didn't actually exist.

Just as I stated, the only point. Authority? Neutral, only information, for better or worse. 

I know this is believed, but leaving a high-level view of what supposedly occurs, it gets problematic in my bias opinion. Can you describe the process in how it would build a stop-start mechanism that would only work when the need arises, using the process as you see it?

If there are no goals in nature, then everything done is done without respect for life-improving, dying, or continuing. To suggest only the good go forward and the bad do not, is a judgment call not made in a blind process with no goals in mind. All mutations would be equal in merit to be passed on to the next generation without prejudice.

But ignoring all of that, how does a mindless, directionless process, without goals, take on any creative tasks as building a stop-start mechanism. Why or how would the instructions in life's program change to make such a thing possible?

Mutation is mindless and directionless, for the most part yes. ( Tbwp can demonstrate otherwise, somewhat.)

Natural selection however, is mindless but not directionless.

So therefore, if one were to explain Evolution, one would need explain a mindless but "directed" process.

Or "direction-ful"?

Your distinction is one without a difference. Water flows downhill, and it will not on its own rise above its source. The water streaming is a direction; it is not selecting anything, but reacting to the conditions and forces at play, nothing creative is in that.

Nothing about a process like this is in the real world is used to construct a functionally sophisticated specific feature. The start and stop of something for a system to operate correctly if a necessary feature. This is not like wind moving the branches on a tree, or weather fronts causing storms, it is creatively forming something into existence that was never here before.

However, we know that life did come into existence so what theory regarding this process should we adopt that doesn't increase the complexity of the problems we face?

What do you mean increase the complexity problems we face? What issue are you talking about?

Avoid reaching for explanations of how systems in nature work, such as evolution & abiogenesis, that multipy, rather than reduce, the number & complexity of the questions we have before us.

What has that got to do with reality and truth? Sometimes things are complex and that is the way it is, it doesn't mean it is no longer true. Why would you believe simple is better? 

Remember that I was addressing these comments in particular. Let me pick up on this sentence..

"it is creatively forming something into existence that was never here before" - not exactly, all processes in nature act on what material is available. The emergence of the first life involved the organisation of already existing molecules into more complex structures, it didn't bring the material from which it was made into existence.

And we see organisation in all manner of natural systems. Gravity alone has the ability to form an entire solar system out of a disc of gas & dust but we don't sit around debating whether or not this is possible by purely natural means.

It may well be that greater compexity alone explains many of the features we see in living forms in a way that isn't yet properly understood. Perhaps the emergence of life is inevitable given certain starting conditions. These are questions we can't yet answer.

What you just said is that science or just your beliefs?