How can people believe that there isn’t some kind of Creator (God). I mean, sure you can believe in evolution as much as you want to, but sure, organisms gradually evolved over billions of years to eventually become the organisms there are today. But how were those organisms created to evolve into more complex ones?
Well some will say “well it has to do with the big bang theory” etc, etc. Well that’s fine, but where were the materials and things needed to make the big bang happen created?
You see its proven scientific fact that life can not evolve from non-life (anyone could prove this by throwing a bunch of non-living things in a sealed jar…).
So this leaves me to believe that in fact there is an intelligent “designer” of some type. I’m not trying to get into the Bibles story of how everything was created, just thoughts about a Creator.
Evolution is not about the origin of life; that’s abiogenesis. Evolution is solely concerned with what happens to organisms once they exist. It makes not a whit of difference whether the first life arose spontaneously from chemical compounds in the primordial ocean or was created by some external being. Evolution is similarly unrelated to the beginning of the universe.
That is not actually proven fact. Sealing non-life into any container will not prove this either. All that does is show that under those circumstances, which do not resemble Earth a billion ears ago in the slightest, given an insignificant amount of time, life as we know it did not arise.
Believing in a Creator is all well and good, but there is no scientific evidence for either side; otherwise, there would be no need for faith.
Who created the creator? Postulating the existance of a creator **adds **complexity to the problem of how life or the universe began, it does not reduce the complexity of the problem. So, it’s a false belief that a creator somehow answers the difficult problem of the origin of the universe. It just pushes the exact same question back an infinite number of levels (who created the creator of the creator…).
The problem you are wrestling with is that of causality. In the macro world of our everyday expereince you cannot have an effect without a cause. But in the micro world of QM, we know that paritcles can appear and disappear out of (apparently) nothing. And in one of the more modern cosmological models, time iteslf is tied up in the fabric of the universe-- ie, you cannot meaningfully speak of “a time before the beginning of the universe”. Without the existence of the universe, there is no time at all, just as there is no matter.
These are tough concepts to grasp and are not intuitive obvious at all. But if you’rte willing to stop with the idea of creator who comes into being spontaneously, why are you unwilling to stop with the idea of universe that comes into being by the same process?
How can you believe there is ? And if you do, how can you respect it, after doing such a shoddy job ?
First, evolution is a fact, not something you “believe” in. You might as well talk about “believing” in gravity. The only scientific disagreement is about how evolution occurs, not whether it occurs. Second, the beginning of life is abiogenesis, not evolution; a seperate subject.
Third, as far as how it happened; the general idea is that some self replicating but not quite alive structure/molecules evolved a method that would let them preserve their information/structure, probably via RNA. Once that happened, further evolution was inevitable. They existed just because the way matter is made; under they right conditions, you get replicators.
Nowhere; IIRC the latest theories hold that our universe’s positive and negative mass-energy cancels out, and the universe ultimately sums up to nothing. Besides, claiming a Creator made the matter doesn’t solve a thing; where did it come from ?
An experiment that has been done, with some rather organic substances being produced. It is not a proven scientific fact.
Thats pretty simple, no one created the creator. Everything in the world we know needs and has a creator thats why it is such a hard concept to grasp. You thinking the creator needs a creator means that time applys to him, that he needs a beginning.
Thats pretty simple, no one created the universe. Everything in the world we know needs and has a creator thats why it is such a hard concept to grasp. You thinking the universe needs a creator means that time applys to it, that it needs a beginning.
Why doesn’t he? Is the creator bound by the laws of physics as we know them, with thermodynamics and entropy and all that? If not, and the laws are considered irrelevant, what does the creator hypothesis add to our understanding of the universe? By that I mean, some hypotheses lack evidence but are useful predictors of future events, i.e. even without any understanding of gravitons and relativity, Isaac Newton could observe that gravity does have an effect and that it is constant and with the right math, he could draw up new and more accurate astronomical charts.
What comparable use does the creator hypothesis serve? Is the use any different that a hypothesis that says the universe poofed into existence last Thursday, with our memories going back further all fake?
Cegstar let me give you a little advice, from one Christian to what I am assuming is another…
Don’t try to go toe to toe with the folks on this board and think you are going to win this argument based on facts. The facts as we know them do NOT provide evidence of the existance of God, nor of his creation of the universe.
All of that being said, if you pay attention to what these guys are saying, you can learn a lot. And expanding your views on God or creation does not have to explode your belief in these things.
I am telling you this because you are giving talking point arguments we have all heard from more or less fundamentalist Christians. The people who espouse your views often hold to traditional Christian views that require them to deny or reject demonstrable scientific facts. That tact will not work well here.
Glad you’re still up, John Mace. I know I have a few responses to my last post, but would you mind replying to it too? I’m curious as to what you have to say. I may not be able to reply back until tomorrow though. Thanks.
A bunch of people are standing on the beach on a clear night, marvelling at how the universe came to be.
Cegstar walks up and explains: “Clearly God created it!”
Confused, the people ask how God came to be.
Cegstar replies: “Thats pretty simple, no one created the creator. Everything in the world we know needs and has a creator thats why it is such a hard concept to grasp. You thinking the creator needs a creator means that time applys to him, that he needs a beginning.”
A bunch of people are standing on the beach on a clear night, marvelling at how God came to be.
That’s an interesting point. When a supercollider spits out some particles that can best be explained by the existence of a creator, I’m sure it’ll make all the headlines.
We do not, in fact, know that everything in the world has a creator (in the sense of an omnipotent, sentient being), much less needs one.
What one has “proven” (and really, not even that) is that spontaneous generation does not occur. And that we’ve known for quite some time; piles of rags do not spawn rats, and spoiled meat does not produce maggots. Spontaneous generation is a very different thing from abiogenesis.
But really, all this talk about ultimate origins does little to explain the here and now. Whether the universe popped into being on the whim of a supreme, omnipotent entity or whether it popped into being as a result of “the Big Bang”, it still popped into being. And once it did, the laws of physics took care of the rest.
What you have to ask is why does everything need a creator? Remember “It just does” isn’t an answer. If you’re just assuming it does remember that the universe is under no obligation to conform to your logic or common sense. Also remember that the universe and the planet earth have gone through phases where they were vastly different than they are today. Even today our common sense perceptions are based on a very small subset of reality.
I don’t know what to say to that other than what has already been said. If you can accept that “no one created to creator” then you can accept “no on created the universe.” Since we know the universe exists, why postulate an added complexity of a creator?
No, you’re just trying to prove you assertion by defining it to be true. We do not know that everything needs a creator.
If you can accept that the creator had no beginning and that time does no apply to him, then you should be able to accept the same about the universe.
Maybe you just need to assume that: God = The Universe.
Do you think that a simple, self-replicating molecule, cannot occur from the more or less random collisions of simpler molecules - given enough time, and we’ve got plenty of time. Given that, don’t you think that a molecule that replicated faster wouldn’t tend to dominate molecules that replicated more slowly? If you agree to that, couldn’t one of these increases in complexity become an RNA molecule? And then a DNA molecule? I don’t know where you think life begins, but viruses are not much more than this. It’s all evolution from there. Once you get anything which can reproduce, and for which the process of reproduction produces errors, and for which a selective advantage can happen, you have evolution, even if the reproduction is only self-replication and not life at all.
As a minor addition, don’t forget the constant infusion of energy the system receives from the sun, making sure everything is kept in flux. I get the impression thermodynamics isn’t a high priority to many creationists.
Everything else in your life requires scientific exploration. Why do you exempt The Beginning of Everything from that scrutiny? The fact that you (or we) don’t know how it all began doesn’t mean a default ‘god creature’ is the correct answer.
Repeat after me: “We don’t know yet, but we’re trying to find out.”
This is one of the most interesting (to me, anyway) features of mainstream creationism - there’s a never-quite-explicitly-spoken, yet at the same time terribly urgent impetus to please, just stop trying to ‘find out’ and instead accept this or that potted explanation.
Other than an underlying frantic realisation that when we do find out, the answer probably won’t be what we would have liked, I can’t think of an explanation (but I’m trying to find out).
