No, but your descendants might to demonstrate your lack of faith. 
I vote we commence evolving immediately.
OK, now I’m visualizing …
DARTH VADER I find your lack of faith disturbing.
DARTH VADER force-chokes LACK-OF-FAITH GUY
OBI-WAN KENOBI I sensed a great disturbance in the force, as if a man were choking, and his son suddenly grew a tail.
You were not told you ‘could not have an opinion’; you were asked to discuss your opinion in another thread because it wasn’t relevant to the subject under discussion.
Now, if, as it appears, you want to argue that the origin of life requires magic to accomplish, you are welocome to do so, but I think you will quickly run into a problem finding hard evidence to support this view.
Evolution is a limited theory which purports to explain the means through which living things change over time. Evolution cannot explain the origin of life itself because it has nothing to do with the origin of life.
This is sometimes difficult to understand, so I’ll put it in plain terms.
The first living things did not evolve. How they came to exist is something of a mystery - there are several competing theories, some of which are supported by scientific fact, and some which are not. If it pleases you to believe that a supreme being provided a divine spark to create the first living thing, then by all means do so. Although this explanation raises more metaphysical questions than it answers, it is in some sense a possibility.
Now, once living things came to exist, evolution began. The reason we don’t discuss the origin of life in the context of evolution is that they are two unrelated topics. This is a big problem for creationists - or, rather, it’s a way creationists make evolution seem problematic. “Evolution can’t explain the origin of life, so it’s useless!” is what they often say. This is equivalent to saying, “gravity can’t explain where energy comes from, so it’s useless!”
If you’d like a simpler explanation, look at it thus:
I own a computer. I built my computer using parts I bought individually - a case, power suppy, motherboard, processor, hard drive, graphics card, and so on. I can explain how you build a computer using these various components, how to upgrade it, and how to install operating systems and other software on it. Call this RNATB’s Theory of PC Building.
Unfortunately, computer components do not occur naturally. You can’t go out into the woods and pick a hard drive off a tree whenever you need one. Somebody has to design and produce one. I have no idea how this is accomplished. I know it involves electronic circuits, and a magnetic disk that spins around to allow a little reader thing to pull information from it - but even if you gave me all the necessary sub-components, I would not be able to produce a functioning hard drive.
So, does the fact that I cannot build a computer from scratch mean that my knowledge of computer building is useless? Of course it doesn’t - it remains a handy skill. My Theory of PC Building is not worthless just because it doesn’t explain everything; it’s just limited.
The same is true of evolution - it is very useful in explaining what it aims to explain. It is - not surprisingly - useless in explaining things it doesn’t aim to explain. If you want to dismiss it because it can’t explain everything, feel free. However, you should at least be consistent; you’d better stop believing in gravity, combustion, and everything else science tells you.
I hope that helps.
<insert joke about despised profession here>
I know what you’re saying, and I agree that abiogenesis is best dealt with as a separate topic from biological evolution, however, in most of the abiogenesis hypotheses I’ve heard about, there are:
[ul]
[li]Processes of replication[/li]li Inheritance of properties from one replicator to its duplicates[/li][li]Processes of selection acting upon those imperfect replicators[/li][/ul]
That is evolution, it’s just evolution in a context quite distinct from ‘everyday’ biological evolution.
Maybe, maybe not. It depends on what you mean by living. Are viruses alive? If no, then you are incorrect, since they definitely evolve.
Any time you have a self-replicating molecule which might have errors during replication you can get a form of evolution. So, abiogenesis would involve getting the first self-replicating molecules, and the time from this to whatever you call life.
One problem we need to deal with is that the idea of “the first living thing” doesn’t really make sense. The transition from not-alive to alive was a process, not an event. Even today we have entities (viruses) for which there is debate about whether they represent life or not.
Humans like to categorize things into neat little boxes, but much of the natural world is a continuum.
For the purposes of explaining why evolution doesn’t explain the origin of life, you have to start somewhere. My explanation was overly simplistic but broadly accurate, I think.
I think your explanation is simply putting down a marker and defining evolution as only applying to living things. That really doesn’t address the problem.
It’s not my marker. The theory of evolution, by definition, only applies to biological organisms - ie., those possessing genetic material.
The possibility that evolutionary processes may or may not have occurred prior to the existence of biological organisms is irrelevant.
Assuming that at some point we understand the origin of life, we will almost certainly form a new synthesis that comprehensively explains both. That’s how science works. Our current understanding is limited, but that’s a function of our own feeble brains, not what actually happened in the real world.
Well, that depends on what actually happened.
I would say that depends on what you mean, specifically, by “the theory of evolution”. Natural selection has been demonstrated in computer programs (see, for example, here), which are, obviously, not “alive” in any sense. Natural selection can, and does, occur in non-living systems; all that is required is replication, inheritance, and preferential reproduction (by which I mean any sort of duplication, not solely biological reproduction).
Right, but the theory of evolution isn’t an all-encompassing view of natural selection processes. It addresses only living creatures, even if the outcome is the same, no?
Well, that’s why I’m asking what you mean by that phrase. To me, the 'theory of evolution" is shorthand for “the various theoretical mechanisms that result in evolution”. Depending on the context, “the various theoretical phylogenetic pathways that have resulted in current diversity” can also be thrown in.
Have to admit I hadn’t really thought about it that much- but I would certainly not consider the change of nonliving things over time to be biological evolution, regardless of whether evolutionary pressures result in that change.
I suppose you’d better explain to SW why evolution doesn’t explain the origin of life.
Well, depending on who you ask, it does!
The current state of the art of Evolutionary Theory does not explain the origin of life. It is not capable of doing that. Yet. Biologists (and other scientists) are, of course, trying to expand the theory so that id does, and while there are a few working hypothesis out there, there is nothing that rises to the level of “theory” and that can be wrapped into an updated and expanded Modern Synthesis.