Creation vs. Evolution

[GranTurismo guy]

Quick question, if somebody created us, who created the person who created us?

No one. The theory is called the prime mover, that God creates without having been created.

 

[Touring Mars]

No one. The theory is called the prime mover, that God creates without having been created.

And yet the idea that the Big Bang didn't require anything to exist before it is apparently ridiculous.

 

[Joey D]

Quick question, if somebody created us, who created the person who created us?

Growing up in a family of faithful believers of The Bible, I have never really understood how they actually believe it. Personally, I would have to evolution is for the facts and Jesus is there to make you happy (if you believe).

The most commonly given answer I've heard is that the creator is a supernatural and thus doesn't conform to our ideas of reality.

You could probably ask the same thing when it comes to the creation of the universe without the need for a supernatural being. Where did all the matter come from and what force made it expand outwards rapidly?

Both answers confuse me since I can't comprehend something without a beginning.

 

[GranTurismo guy]

And yet the idea that the Big Bang didn't require anything to exist before it is apparently ridiculous.

Exactly. Silly, right?

 

[Carbonox]

No one. The theory is called the prime mover, that God creates without having been created.

Theory? More like ludicrous claim.

 

[Com Fox]

And yet the idea that the Big Bang didn't require anything to exist before it is apparently ridiculous.

I'm pretty sure something happened to cause the Big Bang but we can't find what caused it (for obvious reasons).

 

[Touring Mars]

Both answers confuse me since I can't comprehend something without a beginning.

It is rather funny how close the current scientific explanation for the origin of the Universe is to the Creationist one - existing scientific theories deal with entities and scenarios (i.e. singularities, black holes) where "the laws of physics break down". If one substitutes 'the laws of physics' with the phrase 'nature' (not unreasonable), one could reasonably say that the origin of the Universe is currently 'beyond nature' or, to put it in one convenient word, supernatural.

That said, the Big Bang theory does do a pretty good job at explaining the Universe to within a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang. I favour the surprisingly recent hypothesis that universes emerge from black holes... if the universe started from a singularity, and black holes are singularities, it doesn't take a genius to make the connection... oh, wait, it does:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/s...r-universe-says-stephen-hawking-10471397.html

And there are black holes everywhere.

I'm pretty sure something happened to cause the Big Bang but we can't find what caused it (for obvious reasons).

Indeed... there is an obvious problem in asking 'what caused the beginning of time?', since the very word 'cause' carries with it the implication of the existence of time. So the beginning of time cannot have a 'cause' - at least not in the way that the word 'cause' is normally used.

 

[Famine]

It is rather funny how close the current scientific explanation for the origin of the Universe is to the Creationist one - existing scientific theories deal with entities and scenarios (i.e. singularities, black holes) where "the laws of physics break down". If one substitutes 'the laws of physics' with the phrase 'nature' (not unreasonable), one could reasonably say that the origin of the Universe is currently 'beyond nature' or, to put it in one convenient word, supernatural.

That said, the Big Bang theory does do a pretty good job at explaining the Universe to within a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang. I favour the surprisingly recent hypothesis that universes emerge from black holes... if the universe started from a singularity, and black holes are singularities, it doesn't take a genius to make the connection... oh, wait, it does:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/s...r-universe-says-stephen-hawking-10471397.html

And there are black holes everywhere.

Indeed. The reason we can't 'see' back that far is that the conditions fundamentally break our models. There is no continuum of space and time and everywhere (and everywhen) is the same place.

But we also have things exactly like that in the universe too - black holes. The singularity at the centre of a black hole is so dense (infinitely so - all the mass occupies no space) that it breaks space-time down and it's really not a massive reach to suggest that the conditions beyond the event horizon are analogous to the "pre-" Big Bang conditions of the universe.


I'm not entirely convinced by the Independent's interpretation of what Hawking said - I seriously doubt you could get close enough to a black hole to pass through it and remain intact as a being, given the ludicrous tidal forces and time dilation - but sure, if you could crack at one at the speed of light, why not?

 

[Griffith500]

Whilst it's been noted implicitly already, I thought I'd put it more concretely with the help of Carl Sagan:

If God created the universe, we must then ask the next logical question: what created God? We might say God came from nothing, or that God always existed. If we say that God came from nothing, why not skip a step and say the universe came from nothing? If we say that God always existed, why not skip a step and say the universe always existed?

So, after Hawking, it might be that our universe is part of some giant nested tree of universes. Cool. Could provide a "mechanic" for parallel-universes / multi-verses, maybe even in a weird universal "recursion loop" sense (What ultimately happens to black holes? Where did the "first" universe come from - is there even one?!). But I guess that's off-topic.

 

[TenEightyOne]

So, after Hawking, it might be that our universe is part of some giant nested tree of universes. Cool. Could provide a "mechanic" for parallel-universes / multi-verses, maybe even in a weird universal "recursion loop" sense (What ultimately happens to black holes? Where did the "first" universe come from - is there even one?!). But I guess that's off-topic.

Haha, that's an easy one

What happened was... oh, wait...

*mindexplodes.gif*

 

[Cowboy]

Quick question, if somebody created us, who created the person who created us?

But who created the person who created the person that created the person who created us?

 

[kolio]

But who created the person who created the person that created the person who created us?

Exactly! 👍

 

[wfooshee]

But who created the person who created the person that created the person who created us?

I've got my family tree back to the late 17th century, so I know all that stuff about myself......

As far as "firsts" go, I had a recent discussion with a severely Baptist friend of mine when he asked, "for the sake of argument," what if Evolution were actually the true explanation? Wouldn't there still be an Adam and Eve? Wouldn't there have to be a first pair of the species? And if so, how do their descendants populate the Earth without inbreeding themselves out of existence? (He actually saw no irony at all in the last question! It's OK for Adam and Eve to have incestuous descendants, but not a hypothetical Evolutionary first pair.....)

He simply couldn't wrap his head around not needing a first pair. The boundary between Homo sapiens and whatever was before is fuzzy on the order of who-knows-how-many generations. There wasn't suddenly a modern human son and a modern human daughter out of a pre-human family. It's the same misunderstanding of Evolution that permeates most Creationists: A lizard does not beget a frog, which does not beget a mouse, which does not beget a ferret, which does not beget, etc. etc. etc. The concept of waiting THOUSANDS of years for traits to diverge to the point of being a separate species was simply incomprehensible, and therefore patently false.

Up until that discussion I'd never really seen the argument as simply an inability to understand. I'd always seen it as an ignorant insistence on the faith that had been taught since childhood.

 

[Touring Mars]

I will never forget having a similar discussion. It took a slightly awkward turn after I mentioned the fact that all life is biologically related... this earned me the pointed question, "Are you calling me a rat?" I said of course not, but that the entire human species and rat species once descended from a common ancestor that existed around 50-100 million years ago (or something in that ballpark), which earned me a reply along the lines of "I didn't come from no rat" Considering almost no-one knows their own family tree beyond single figure generations, people are surprisingly touchy when you infer that their ancestors of a few million generations ago were small and furry.

But who created the person who created the person that created the person who created us?

And who put the ram in the ram-a-lam-a-ding-dong?

 

[wfooshee]

Yeah, why is it a personal affront to be descended from something else???? With some of these folks' human ancestors, I completely fail to see the offensiveness they derive from the idea.

 

[GBO Possum]

Yeah, why is it a personal affront to be descended from something else???? With some of these folks' human ancestors, I completely fail to see the offensiveness they derive from the idea.

Some people see humans as being special, and totally distinguished from animals in a manner which makes the normal processes of evolution impossible for humanity. No doubt it's related to the claimed existence of a soul, which, it is claimed, humans have and animals do not.

For the rest of us who realize that we are related to zillions of other life forms on the planet, we tend to say "wow, that's really cool!", and relish the sense of kinship.

 

[TenEightyOne]

Yeah, why is it a personal affront to be descended from something else???? With some of these folks' human ancestors, I completely fail to see the offensiveness they derive from the idea.

People have a real 'thing' about humans they see as somehow "animal", I guess the biological link is simply too much for them.

 

[ryzno]

I'll just leave this here.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/10/africa/homo-naledi-human-relative-species/index.html

 

[TheCracker]

God just placed the bones there to test our faith.

 

[TenEightyOne]

I'll just leave this here.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/10/africa/homo-naledi-human-relative-species/index.html

A friend and I once discovered a race of people very close to humans, their language was almost similar and they'd evolved crude ways of performing tasks that would be familiar to humans. Then we remembered that we were in Grimsby so we didn't bother phoning it in.

In seriousness; I haven't heard the Creationist rebuttal of these findings yet... does anyone have a link? Maybe they're just ignoring it...

 

[Griffith500]

A friend and I once discovered a race of people very close to humans, their language was almost similar and they'd evolved crude ways of performing tasks that would be familiar to humans. Then we remembered that we were in Grimsby so we didn't bother phoning it in.

In seriousness; I haven't heard the Creationist rebuttal of these findings yet... does anyone have a link? Maybe they're just ignoring it...

Haha, I know a few Codheads myself...

I would be interested to see a theist's response as well, although not necessarily a rebuttal (a means to an end), but certainly any kind of exploratory comment.

 

[Joey D]

In seriousness; I haven't heard the Creationist rebuttal of these findings yet... does anyone have a link? Maybe they're just ignoring it...

I think most creationist only view homo sapiens as humans, so they won't view these as anything other than just a "monkey" or something equally ridiculous.

Although I have been seeing blog posts saying that because h. naledi buried their dead, then they must be human, but I haven't really seen anything past that.

 

[Dotini]

Although I have been seeing blog posts saying that because h. naledi buried their dead, then they must be human, but I haven't really seen anything past that.

Me neither, but I agree that beings who bury their dead might well do so for a variety of reasons, one of which might be some ritualistic belief in an afterlife. On BBC radio I heard these 3 million year old hominids are the earliest known species of the human genus.

 

[Sureboss]

The amount of bones found is utterly incredible, though given the site, it was hardly surprising they have remained untouched.

 

[TenEightyOne]

Me neither, but I agree that beings who bury their dead might well do so for a variety of reasons, one of which might be some ritualistic belief in an afterlife. On BBC radio I heard these 3 million year old hominids are the earliest known species of the human genus.

Dolphins, chimps and elephants have all been observed to have ritualistic death behaviours including covering corpses. Perhaps dolphins think god made them in her image too? Maybe Douglas Adams was right!?

 

[BobK]

Maybe Douglas Adams was right!?

This. 42 times, this.

 

[Joey D]

And since we were discussing this, here's the first bit I've seen where h. naledi is being denied.

https://answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2015/09/10/supposed-human-ancestor-found/

I'll leave this excerpt here:

We know from God’s Word that “nature” did not experiment “with how to evolve humans.” God told us He created two humans as well as all the kinds of land animals—and that includes apes—on the same day. That means that there could be no evolution involved. Whatever species these bones represent—and we will be publishing a more complete report on the discovery and the claims being made about it soon—we know that they cannot be any sort of intermediate between apes and humans. The only way to find an ape-man—or a “bridge” between apes and humans—is to misinterpret fossils of either an ape or a human as something in between. But all humans—even varieties of humans that we no longer have with us—were all descended from the first two people God made. So are we. And all apes, even extinct varieties, are all descendants of the kinds of apes God made in the beginning.

 

[wfooshee]

And the flat Earth, supported on the backs of elephants riding a turtle, is the center of the Universe.

 

[TenEightyOne]

https://answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2015/09/10/supposed-human-ancestor-found/

Wow... just wow

 

[CodeRedR51]

"God told us, blah, blah...."

That's where I stop reading.