| kevin the wiiite said: Oh, and another argument I just remembered. Evolution, if true, clearly relies on improbable events occuring repeatedly over and over again, as it's never been documented in action in the few thousand years of recored history. The second law of thermodynamics and laws of statistical probability aren't exclusive to their fields. Scientists just like to suppress them. Everything in the world gravitates towards equilibrium and states of higher probability, a direct counterpoint to evolution, which relies on constant gravitation towards the improbable. Cars break, glaciers melt, deserts grow, crops die, but somehow fish sprout legs and walk. Please if anyone has a good response to this I'm trying to be rational here. I'm not the religious nut a lot of Atheists think I am. Why else would I rely on pascal's wager for my faith? |
Firstly evolution makes sense statistically as it is not a random process but rather a selective one. Also the second law of thermodynamics is for a closed system, the earth is not a closed system as the sun constantly pumps energy into it. The decrease of entropy in the form of ordered life is more than countered by the increase of entropy in the sun.
Also one of the problems with Pascals wager is that it ignores that there have been many Gods worshipped throughout history - it just assumes that you have picked the right God. If you take into account the fact that if you picked the wrong God you're still going to hell, by Pascals wager you're likely going to hell no matter what God you believe in.
Also if you seriously only believe in God because of Pascals wager...
1) Do you need to be a bible literalist?
2) Do you really have faith or are you just pretending out of fear of the possibility of hell?
Edit: "But that's exactly what I'm talking about. I went to a conference on genomics that talked about this. Less than 300 mutations on average occur per generation per 6 billion base pairs. These are almost always harmless, and the probability of them impacting anything is negligible aside from those that kill you. In order to create a new gene to express growth of new limbs or digestion of new materials or lungs or whatever you need you would need thousands of non-fatal mutations on the same gene to occur. The likelihood of that happening in a way that doesn't kill you is so low that you wouldn't even see it once in 6 billion years.
300/6000000000=.00000005 mutations/pair
300/6000000000*299/5999999999*298/5999999998........*1/5999999701= a really really small chance of stringing all those mutations consecutively. "
Oh where to begin? Evolution doesn't just drop a lung in occasionally, the process involves slow changes each one have a positive effect. The eye is a very nice example, take a look at this wee picture.
Each step along that picture is an improvement upon the last.
