| bimmylee said: Ok, anyone who incorrectly assumes that "creationism" automatically means "6000-year-old earth" is not up to speed on the different camps that make up creationism. Not all creationists believe that the Earth is only 6000 years old, so the vast majority of you who are jumping straight onto the "lol creationists r n00bs"-bandwagon need to quickly educate yourselves before making such foolish statements. As expected (in regards to my earlier post), people are saying that "it takes a different kind of faith or lesser faith to not believe in God that to believe" or "while it takes faith to believe in an unprovable God, there is no faith involved in not believing in something that can't be proven." I think you're missing something. Anyone who has had a lengthy discussion with a creationist on the topic of the origin of the known universe will know that creationists love to talk about statistics and probability... and for good reason. (See "fine-tuning argument".) When you look from the perspective of a scientist at the universe, it looks as if it knew we were coming. I won't get into the exact numbers, but our life-sustaining planet is unbelieveably rare. So you can either believe that it was all by chance, or that it was done on purpose. The ultimate question is, which is easier to believe? Consider this analogy: in a poker game, the dealer deals himself twenty straight hands of four aces. As the other players are about to kill him for cheating, the dealer says, "wait, you can't prove I'm cheating; there are a trillion parallel universes and we just happen to be in the one where the chances of dealing twenty straight hands of aces has been realized." Technically, he's right--it is possible that there are trillions of universes and that this is the one universe in which all those aces are dealt. But the other players still kill him, because, after all... which is more plausible: that he is lucky, or that he is cheating? Or this: If someone broke into your house through a living room window one night intending to steal something, and you came and saw them standing in there red-handed, and they said to you, "unbelieveably, while i was walking down the sidewalk outside your house, a car struck something on the road, which then hit me on the head and made me crash through your window", what would you believe? Did this unlikely thing really happen, or did the person purposely break into your house? And which would you do first: call the cops, or give this person medical attention? (haha) |
First, about the 4004BC creation myth, I have seen it cited many many as the date of creation by Christians and people from other abrahamic religions. I specified the source when I made my arguments. I used the Abrahamic creation story because the "exact date" is cited so frequently, but to be honest it works with any young Earth theory date. It's not an exact date that I have the problem with, it's the idea of a young Earth and any time that's given. The problem I have is that all evidence goes against the idea of a young Earth and that young Earth "evidence" is usually speculation and false information, usually started from an unreliable source such as Answers in Genesis.
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For the Universe thing, you miss out one major thing; the odds are unlikely, but we live in a Universe of huge numbers.
Consider this, life may be rare, life may only occur in every other system, every thousandth system, every galaxy; we just don't know. But there are an estimated 100 billion stars in our galaxy, and billions, perhaps even trillions of galaxies. The amount of planets that exist are just uncountable.
We can't work out the figures for the Drake equation, but even if it turned out that life only has a 1 in a Billion chance of forming, that still means there would be a 100 planets with life in our galaxy alone. The odds are astronomical, but they do happen.
An analogy would be people winning the lottery. The lottery has astronomical odds of winning, one in millions upon millions, but people the world over beat these odds week in week out. It doesn't matter when the odds are so large because there is a such a huge number of people taking those odds, far more than the odds actually are, so statistically someone has to beat the odds.
Even if the odds are huge, the Universe is so vast that the odds have to be beaten time and time again.
Also. It's takes life to recognise that life exists. We can only pose this argument because our defying the odds has allowed us to observe life. We only know that we are here, because we are here. (like a lottery winner only being able to enjoy the lottery winnings because they beat the odds to win it. You can't enjoy it if you didn't win the lottery).
You also assume that we are the only type life that can form and that all life has to have our exact conditions. This is not true. Perhaps we are just inhabit one of billions of potential combinations that allow life to form. Why does life have to have our exact combination? You assume that it does, but I don't see this written anywhere in the rulebook. For example, we could assume life needs Carbon as a base element. But on a planet with low amounts of Carbon, life could just as easily use silicon or another element as its base. We know silicon life can form so I don't see as so far fetched. This is just one example of potentially millions (perhaps billions). I know, this is hypothetical, but it is also extremely plausible that life does not have to take our form.
If this is the case, then life would likely be common.
We've also found organic molecules, the building blocks of life, from non-terrestrial sources. So the building blocks of life certainly exist elsewhere in the universe, you just a need a solvent for them to form (usually water, the third most common molecule in the Universe, one of just a wide range of other mediums for that). It's a slow process and we've never "observed" abiogenesis, but we think that life will form, even if it's just simple self replicating molecules that eventually evolve into simple cells. We can't be sure, but our current evidence certainly points to this type of scenario.
