Astrophile
Active Member
Quite right. Would you like another example? Australopithecines (such as 'Lucy') were apes. Humans are descended from australopithecines. Therefore humans are apes. We have not evolved into animals that are not apes. QED.OK, I understand. You have no verifiable evidence that fruit flies evolved to something other than fruit flies. Thank you very much. Oh, and finches, despite their changing beak sizes or color or feather variations are observed to stay finches. Not enough time perhaps to notice finches evolving to something other than i the finch "family"?
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Immediately, from the collapse of the dense core of an interstellar molecular cloud to produce an O or early B-type star with a mass of more than 8 solar masses. Ultimately, from the H+He mixture produced by the expansion of the universe from an initial ultra-high-temperature ultra-high-density state.
So far as the evidence goes, your first sentence may be correct, provided that you are saying that God supplied the energy for the Big Bang, not that he created the galaxies and the stars (including the Sun) in their present condition. Of course, this is a faith position, with no evidence to support it.
Your second sentence is certainly false; there is abundant evidence of how animals and plants have evolved since the Cambrian period.
Science cannot prove that there is no God; it deals with natural phenomena, not with the supernatural. However, my experience has been different from yours. It took four years of careful study of the Bible to convince me that Christianity is false. Obviously I could not spend the same time on the other religions of the world (Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, the religions of ancient Greece and Rome, etc.), but once I had concluded that Christianity was false I reasoned that I was likely to come to the same conclusion about other religions. I did try to read the Bhagavad Gita, but it meant nothing to me. I suppose that an educated Hindu who tried to read the Bible would find it equally meaningless.
However, your belief in your God and my conviction that there are no gods is a matter of your word against mine; there is no way of showing whether either of us is right. If all you claim is that your God exists, I have no quarrel with you. It is when you start claiming, on the basis of your religious faith, that the results of scientific research are false that we are likely to quarrel.
No. The first human (Homo habilis?) was born as a baby and was nourished and cared for by its parents and by other members of its community. That was how it survived to adulthood.
I can't explain how the universe began; if I, or anybody else, could explain it, it would be in complex mathematical formulae and you would not be able to understand it. You could try reading The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow and A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence Krauss.
However, you are making the false inference that if scientists don't know everything, they don't know anything. Although scientists don't know how the universe or life began, other findings of science do not depend on their knowing about these beginnings. There is compelling evidence that the universe began about 13.8 billion years ago; that hydrogen, helium and lithium were formed during the first few minutes of the expansion of the universe, and that the first galaxies and stars were formed within a few hundred million years after the 'Big Bang'. None of these conclusions depend on our knowing the source of the energy required to form the universe.
The same is true of the evidence that the Sun was formed about 4567 million years ago by the collapse of the dense core of an interstellar molecular cloud, that the Earth is about 30 million years younger than the Sun and was formed in a protoplanetary disc surrounding the Sun, and that the Moon was formed by a collision between the Earth and a smaller planet about 50-70 million years after the formation of the Earth, not four days after.
I know nothing about abiogenesis. However, I think that it is something of a red herring. If life is as scarce in the universe as it appears to be, it seems very unlikely that the universe was designed as a home for life. In any case, there is compelling evidence that simple forms of terrestrial life existed at least 3500 million years and that they have evolved into more complex life-forms since then. None of this depends on our knowing how the first life originated from systems of organic compounds.
