Kupek wrote:Huh. That's a well reasoned post, Sine. I agree with pretty much all of it.
What were you expecting? I've been arguing on the Internet for 13+ years. I know when and when not to rave like an idiot, and I'd done enough of that with these specific type of topics several years ago (and not going anywhere with it).
Mully wrote:Seraphina wrote:I don't necessarily believe that a one in a gazillion chance we evolved from microbes
Me neither, it's too much of an odd that it
just happened.
We mistake the temporal context of the facts when we read them in a book, or hear them in a conversation, to be in some short span of time because we are not interested in the gaps in-between, nor do we talk about them. However, the time scale is expansive. We are talking about BILLIONS of years. They estimate close to 2,100,000,000 years ago when the first complex cell-like organisms were formed. If humans lived in that era, they would have 70,000,000 generations between now and then. There would be 745,209 Egyptian empires (like the ENTIRE 3000 year history of Egypt) during that time. In the timeline of a solar system forming, billions of years is how they measure it.
Heck, it was an estimated 3,800,000,000 years ago when microscopic life was first formed. It took 1,700,000,000 years just to go from microscopic cells (ie: bacteria) to the more complex cells you find in animal and plant life. When producing a number of those cells during that time that gave their lives to EVER SO S-L-O-W-L-Y evolve into the complex animal cells, that number would fill up a couple of pages on this post, probably close to a googol. It's the kind of number that no human could completely wrap their head around.
So, please do not mistake the BILLIONS of years it took to go from bacteria to human as being just like a somebody buying a single lottery ticket and winning. When you think about it, the odds are actually damn good that at least SOMETHING complex is going to come out of that ooze several billion years ago. In fact, we had millions of different species come out of it: plants, animals, insects, fish, etc., etc.
Mully wrote:If you talk about evolution as Sine does, you have to talk about the Big Bang, which in their theories go Hand-in-hand. Here's what I don't believe, these questions don't have to be answered, and it's not saying anyone is stupid for believing this by the way they are questioned, it's just stream of consciousness: What happened before the Big Bang? Primordial ooze? What cause the spark that cause an explosion? The Big Bang theory relies on the idea that everything is moving away from some point with the universe continually expanding from some point (the middle of the explosion) in the universe...where did "space" come from? What's beyond the current reach of the universe, something is if we are expanding? Is nothing there?
These are the gaps in our knowledge where the science ends and the philosophy and religion begin. Our scope of science is ever expanding in both space and time as our knowledge of the universe increases. Sometimes, it is met with resistance with the religious who insist that it was written or foretold that a certain piece of knowledge is right, and the new evidence of science is wrong. Eventually, the ever mounting evidence wins out, and the boundaries between science and religion expands.
At one point, we thought that the gods lived in the sky just above our heads. Then we thought they lived on the other planets. Then we believed that we were the center of the universe. But all of that was proven wrong.
One could say that science is always gaining new ground and religion is losing its "territory" overall, but there will
always be a boundary, and religion will fill that boundary for some people. Even if we explore the universe, there is always other dimensions or other boundaries or the afterlife, or entire new and foreign concepts that we couldn't dream of.
However, these are the kind of dualities that can still co-exist for even scientists. Einstein was still religious, despite having a strong grasp of the concepts around how the universe worked. He came up with the (now paraphrased here) quote "God does not play dice with the universe" and "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Newton were all religious scientists.