• Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
    • Access to private conversations with other members.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

Is Mankind A Fluke?

PruePhillip

Well-Known Member
It
If a tornado went crashing through a junkyard and left behind a Boeing 747, fully fueled and ready to go, would that be a fluke?

View attachment 46308
pexels.com

It CAN actually happen that a tornado creates a 747, in fact quantum
science tell us it has probably happened somewhere IF the universe is
essentially infinite.The chances of a person vanishing off the earth,
walking on the sun and returning to earth CAN happen, but the chances are
one to the power one hundred to the power one hundred a second time.
A googol to a googol.
But that's not how life on earth appeared - it's incremental chemical changes,
ratcheting along one successful step at a time. Chances of it happening on a
planet like earth are 99.99999999%.
 

blü 2

Veteran Member
Premium Member
If a tornado went crashing through a junkyard and left behind a Boeing 747, fully fueled and ready to go, would that be a fluke?
If a self-replicating cell was capable of evolving into more complex assemblies of cells and then into multicellular animals and then into bilaterans, then four-legged creatures with spinal columns, and then into mammals and then into primates, and then into Homo and then into H sap sap, would that be a fluke?

Well, in some senses, yes ─ as the late Stephen Jay Gould discussed in his (somewhat criticized) book Wonderful Life, if you ran the evolutionary tape again from the start, you might end up with a most-intelligent-species, but it VERY likely wouldn't be H sap sap.

But more broadly, no ─ the processes involved are substantially understood and explained.
 

ADigitalArtist

Veteran Member
Staff member
Premium Member
This is a religious forum, seems like a curious choice for someone who is searching for science...???
The vast majority of religions have no problem with evolution. Just a small subset o
It just seems really far fetched that so often mutations occur that just "happen" to be very useful. It's even more bizarre that the same mutations happen over and over independently, when the odds, using common sense, seem to be against it.

It's bizarre that these two unrelated plants would look so similar for absolutely no reason I can think of but both live at similar altitudes.

The odds of similar, mutations, through a successive process of mini-mutations, is in opposition to common sense.

View attachment 46312 View attachment 46313

Convergent evolution - Wikipedia
The odds are incredibly good for traits which fill an ecological niche to be selected and further refined multiple times.
Wings are not one mutation that happened, there were incredibly long periods where non-wing or 'half wing' like structures that couldn't be used for flight existed before wings.
But if a 'half wings' used by theropod dinosaurs for display, insulation and egg brooding gave them access to more food because they could jump longer or glide, then bigger, more complicated, more flight specific wings would be a natural result as more food and better survival = small traits that add up to a specific behavior. So the thousands of non-flying dinosaurs are gone because they couldn't reliably get as good food and survival escapes as flying dinosaurs.

You definitely do not need an outside agent for convergent evolution to happen.
 

Evangelicalhumanist

"Truth" isn't a thing...
Premium Member
Is that what I said? :)
Yes, actually. There are many ways to impart a message. Here was yours: "This is a religious forum, seems like a curious choice for someone who is searching for science...???"

Your meaning was eminently clear to me. Especially as this is in a thread called "Evolution vs Creationism."
 

Salty Booger

Royal Crown Cola (RC)
Yes, actually. There are many ways to impart a message. Here was yours: "This is a religious forum, seems like a curious choice for someone who is searching for science...???"

Your meaning was eminently clear to me.
Well, I suppose my question conveys my curiosity: Why would a person of science hang in a forum for religion if not in search for answers?
 

Evangelicalhumanist

"Truth" isn't a thing...
Premium Member
Well, I suppose my question conveys my curiosity: Why would a person of science hang in a forum for religion if not in search for answers?
I have explained my reasons before. My study is humanity, and tragically, religion is a very large part of that study. Ignoring religion while studying humanity would be like the fellow who says, "I want to know everything about mathematics, but I won't do fractions."

My personal view, by the way, is that if humans really want to make progress (beyond our endless wars and hatreds of one another), we are going to have to grow up and dispense with religion. It really doesn't answer any questions, it leads to too many people arguing (in forums like this one) about beliefs they can't support, when we'd be better of just trying to check our facts.
 

Evangelicalhumanist

"Truth" isn't a thing...
Premium Member
I have explained my reasons before. My study is humanity, and tragically, religion is a very large part of that study. Ignoring religion while studying humanity would be like the fellow who says, "I want to know everything about mathematics, but I won't do fractions."

My personal view, by the way, is that if humans really want to make progress (beyond our endless wars and hatreds of one another), we are going to have to grow up and dispense with religion. It really doesn't answer any questions, it leads to too many people arguing (in forums like this one) about beliefs they can't support, when we'd be better of just trying to check our facts.
Want to hear the expressed a hundred times better than I can? Listen to Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot."
 

Salty Booger

Royal Crown Cola (RC)
My personal view, by the way, is that if humans really want to make progress (beyond our endless wars and hatreds of one another), we are going to have to grow up and dispense with religion. It really doesn't answer any questions, it leads to too many people arguing (in forums like this one) about beliefs they can't support, when we'd be better of just trying to check our facts.

Granted, wars have been fought over religion, but as is often the case in such things, our leaders are largely to blame. As for doing away with spirituality, it is part of human nature.
 

Evangelicalhumanist

"Truth" isn't a thing...
Premium Member
Granted, wars have been fought over religion, but as is often the case in such things, our leaders are largely to blame. As for doing away with spirituality, it is part of human nature.
Learning about reality -- and learning to be real -- can be just as much spiritual experiences as anything religion has to offer. In fact, since religion is all too often nothing but a show-piece on Sunday (so the neighbours know your still "one of us," you know), living knowledgeably within the real world can sometimes be even more spiritual.

The truth has a way of getting hold of you -- if only you let it.
 

Father Heathen

Veteran Member
Okay, a tornado that codes DNA strands over millions of years. Better?
Nope, still completely nonsensical. If you genuinely have an interest in learning and understanding, there is a FAQ stickied here along with a sizable list of resources. Otherwise what do you hope to achieve by debating subject matter that you have little to no knowledge of?
 

Salty Booger

Royal Crown Cola (RC)
Nope, still completely nonsensical. If you genuinely have an interest in learning and understanding, there is a FAQ stickied here along with a sizable list of resources. Otherwise what do you hope to achieve by debating subject matter that you have little to no knowledge of?
This isn't a debate. Also, science is here to serve man, not the other way around. ;)
 

blü 2

Veteran Member
Premium Member
Okay, a tornado that codes DNA strands over millions of years. Better?
On what basis do you call the processes of evolution 'a tornado'?

The starting point of evolution is descent with variation, and the test of the variation is whether it helps the creature to survive long enough to breed, so that its genes appear more frequently in succeeding generations, or hinders that process, so that its genes appear less frequently or not at all, or is neutral.

The better image for evolution might be a trade wind, a form of natural selection that never goes away.
 
Top