Every argument ever between Christians and atheists

[Star_Cards]

shapingle animals adapt/evolve all the time to changes in their environments. It's a very slow process, but it's happening and not mythical at all. When you think about the changes that have happened over millions of years I don't think it's that unbelievable.

[shapingle]

yeah i know, but in evolution, isn't it like animals adapt into different animals and then eventually into humans after millions of years?

[shapingle]

and you can call me brett, i dont like my username.. i made it up and its stupid. haha

[Star_Cards]

lol. okay brett.

I'm not an expert by any means, but it's not about all animals evolving into humans. It's about similarities in certain species that link them to the same ancestor and for some reason certain ones evolved in different directions than others.

[gatorboymike]

yeah i know, but in evolution, isn't it like animals adapt into different animals and then eventually into humans after millions of years?

Wrong. Other animals aren't on some path that eventually leads to human. We are not the end goal of evolution. Evolution only rewards what is good at reproducing itself. What's good at reproducing itself is not the same everywhere, every time. All the animals we see today are the way they are because each of their characteristics contributed toward their ability to survive long enough to reproduce in the past and/or today. That's all it is. It's not directed toward some end goal, other than being able to reproduce. The morphological changes you see physically manifested in populations are accompanied by changes at the DNA level. If these changes contribute toward the reproductive ability of the new population, they will continue to manifest and propagate in future generations. The more disparate the DNA of two populations becomes, the less ability they have to interbreed. Once the two populations' DNA has become so different that they cannot produce sexually viable offspring anymore, we say they have become two different species. This is called a speciation event, a branching of the evolutionary tree, or as some creationists call it, "macro-evolution."

So no, we're not waiting around for all the other animals in the world to evolve into humans. That's impossible, because they are on different branches of the tree. However, that's not to say that we couldn't see, millions of years from now, some other sentient species arise as a descendant from a presently-existing species. If, over the course of those millions of years, each of the individual steps from present form to future, sentient form was beneficial to the reproductive ability of the population, taking into account all the necessary factors, that is conceivable. But they certainly wouldn't be humans. In fact, some biologists believe that if the dinosaurs had not become extinct, they might have continued to evolve into sentient, bipedal, humanoid creatures. Obviously there's no way to know if that really would have happened, it's just a thought.

[shapingle]

Wrong. Other animals aren't on some path that eventually leads to human. We are not the end goal of evolution. Evolution only rewards what is good at reproducing itself. What's good at reproducing itself is not the same everywhere, every time. All the animals we see today are the way they are because each of their characteristics contributed toward their ability to survive long enough to reproduce in the past and/or today. That's all it is. It's not directed toward some end goal, other than being able to reproduce. The morphological changes you see physically manifested in populations are accompanied by changes at the DNA level. If these changes contribute toward the reproductive ability of the new population, they will continue to manifest and propagate in future generations. The more disparate the DNA of two populations becomes, the less ability they have to interbreed. Once the two populations' DNA has become so different that they cannot produce sexually viable offspring anymore, we say they have become two different species. This is called a speciation event, a branching of the evolutionary tree, or as some creationists call it, "macro-evolution."

So no, we're not waiting around for all the other animals in the world to evolve into humans. That's impossible, because they are on different branches of the tree. However, that's not to say that we couldn't see, millions of years from now, some other sentient species arise as a descendant from a presently-existing species. If, over the course of those millions of years, each of the individual steps from present form to future, sentient form was beneficial to the reproductive ability of the population, taking into account all the necessary factors, that is conceivable. But they certainly wouldn't be humans. In fact, some biologists believe that if the dinosaurs had not become extinct, they might have continued to evolve into sentient, bipedal, humanoid creatures. Obviously there's no way to know if that really would have happened, it's just a thought.

so millions of years from now we might become some sort of special race? like x men or something as an example?

its believable somewhat, and scientists critisize creation of being no more than a fairy tail. i just don't think i could believe we as humans happened by chance of animals reproducing over a span of who knows how long. what do you believe we finally evolved from? like what animal ?

[gatorboymike]

so millions of years from now we might become some sort of special race? like x men or something as an example?

Like your kindergarten teacher said, everyone is special, lol. If we still exist millions of years from now, we might have become something radically different than what we are today. That is, our descendants might be radically different from us. There's no way to know that for sure; all we can do is hypothesize. But not like X-Men. Evolution will never grant you supernatural powers. X-Men tries to use evolution as a premise for its plot, but their idea of it is flawed and exaggerated to make a more interesting story. The "evolution" they talk about has nothing to do with evolution in the real world.

its believable somewhat, and scientists critisize creation of being no more than a fairy tail. i just don't think i could believe we as humans happened by chance of animals reproducing over a span of who knows how long. what do you believe we finally evolved from? like what animal ?

According to biology, what we classify as "human" means the genus Homo. There have been about a dozen different species of Homo, including Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, Homo ergaster, Homo georgicus, Homo antecessor, Homo cepranensis, Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo rhodesiensis, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo floresiensis and Homo sapiens. All of those are extinct except the last one, Homo sapiens, which includes all present-day humans, and originated in its present 200-250 thousand years ago. There is some debate over which species were our direct ancestors and which were our different cousins, but there is pretty firm agreement that Homo erectus was our direct ancestor and Homo habilis before that. Our last common ancestor with today's chimpanzees was Australopithecus afarensis, and that speciation event happened 3.2 million years ago. The dividing line between late apes (Australopithecines) and early humans (Homo) is usually placed at around 2.3-2.4 million years ago.

Keep in mind that evolution isn't pure chance. Some of its constituent processes like mutation, genetic drift and gene flow are random, but the most important constituent process, natural selection, is NOT random. Natural selection is what decides which life forms survive and which ones die out after they are produced. Whether or not that seems plausible to you is not important. Your understanding or lack thereof does not dictate reality. Scientists don't accept creationism because it invokes magic and supernaturalism. Science is the study of the natural world. In the past, humans attributed many things to magic and supernaturalism that we now know to be natural phenomena. It was science that figured those things out.

[shapingle]

isn't it hard to say that we came from animals though? If you think about it. what you are saying.. is that we are ancestors of apes/monkeys/ whatever you want to call them. of the billions of people in the world.. we all came from monkeys? its hard to believe. and speculating that the world is millions of years old.. how could you possibly know that the world is that old? you see all the freak accidents that we have now with earthquakes and sunami's etc.

how do you believe we got our first cell? since that is where life form started in evolution. In the movie expelled.. scientists had a lot of different views as to where it came from.. some were absurd and made me laugh, but some were believable, but very unlikely.. and it seemed that their reasoning behind the first cell was that in the million of years the earth has been around, the first cell has miracuously created itself by chance.

[gatorboymike]

isn't it hard to say that we came from animals though? If you think about it. what you are saying.. is that we are ancestors of apes/monkeys/ whatever you want to call them. of the billions of people in the world.. we all came from monkeys? its hard to believe. and speculating that the world is millions of years old.. how could you possibly know that the world is that old? you see all the freak accidents that we have now with earthquakes and sunami's etc.

There are multiple independent methods of dating that all agree on the age of the earth. We are not the ancestors of apes and monkeys, they are our ancestors. And that's only hard to believe if you don't have a good understanding of evolution...or if you're intentionally trying not to understand it, which I suspect you are. Is that really harder to believe than that a supernatural being said "abracadabra" and turned dirt into a fully formed human? If you're going to go with that idea, there's a lot you would have to explain and you probably can't explain any of it.

how do you believe we got our first cell? since that is where life form started in evolution. In the movie expelled.. scientists had a lot of different views as to where it came from.. some were absurd and made me laugh, but some were believable, but very unlikely.. and it seemed that their reasoning behind the first cell was that in the million of years the earth has been around, the first cell has miracuously created itself by chance.

The first life on earth, according to the theory of abiogenesis (which is separate from the theory of evolution), arose from non-living material. To date, experiments have confirmed that at least some of the building blocks of DNA can be produced under naturally occurring conditions. They're working on the rest of it. Honestly, the theory of abiogensis is not as well-supported as the theory of evolution, which is why biologists are continuing to research it. And some things to keep in mind are that after the formation of the earth (4.5 billion years ago), it took another 2.3 billion years for the conditions to be right for life to arise. And if you're going to try the "life can't come from non-life" argument, you should realize that you and I and all living things ARE made from non-living material. We're all made of atoms and molecules, which are not alive.

[shapingle]

There are multiple independent methods of dating that all agree on the age of the earth. We are not the ancestors of apes and monkeys, they are our ancestors. And that's only hard to believe if you don't have a good understanding of evolution...or if you're intentionally trying not to understand it, which I suspect you are. Is that really harder to believe than that a supernatural being said "abracadabra" and turned dirt into a fully formed human? If you're going to go with that idea, there's a lot you would have to explain and you probably can't explain any of it.



The first life on earth, according to the theory of abiogenesis (which is separate from the theory of evolution), arose from non-living material. To date, experiments have confirmed that at least some of the building blocks of DNA can be produced under naturally occurring conditions. They're working on the rest of it. Honestly, the theory of abiogensis is not as well-supported as the theory of evolution, which is why biologists are continuing to research it. And some things to keep in mind are that after the formation of the earth (4.5 billion years ago), it took another 2.3 billion years for the conditions to be right for life to arise. And if you're going to try the "life can't come from non-life" argument, you should realize that you and I and all living things ARE made from non-living material. We're all made of atoms and molecules, which are not alive.

i understand evolution, not to the extent you do, though. its not that i dont want to believe it, but there just has to be something more than science that created the world out there. there is billions and billions of miles of space out there, thats incredible if you've ever seen pictures. Its hard to believe that it made its own self.

im not going to question evolutions theory of 'life came from non-living material', because thats where God created life from.. if you believe in creation, but it is pretty unlikely, if you believe in creation, then you believe in God, and the Bible says God to do anything, so its easier to believe than believing that the natural process of the earth formed life throughout billions of years.