Did God Invent Us, Or Did We Invent Him

[Azselendor]

SJ, your example of evolution being non random is an example of forced evolution where if artificially eliminating a large majority of the population, you improve the gene pool. However, there is a flaw in this. Bananas, believe it or not, will more than likely be extinct in all of our life times because humans have pretty much bred all genetic diveristy out of the modern banana. As a result, it can easily be wiped out if a banana-born disease manages to get free.

GBrutt, As for michael behe, his ideas about 'intelligent design' are with the rest, as the overwhelming majority in the scientific community reject it as baseless creationist pseudoscience trying to pass itself as hard science. His Book, Darwin's Black Box, reads like it's based on personal incredulity instead of an actual explanation for his examples. Indeed, a couple of them been used to actually disprove his ideas by his critics. lol

As for the designing of software, keep in mind that software evolution, while done by man, actually evolves not because of the efforts of the programmer, but that of the industry, the community, users, testers, need, and improvements. These are natural influences that influence the direction the programmer (IE force of program evolution) to improve and make new versions of a program, which may spin off into seperate programs that may or may not survive and then further evolve at the hands of yet more programmers and influences around it.

Take Any program, remove the users' and customers' needs. What do you have? A program without enough influenece for dramatic change that will, pretty much, not advance more than what it is. Why? Because the programmer, being the force of program evolution, does not have anyone buy and using his program, thus he is unable to continue to develop it.

Moving on, You are right, life didn't start from nothing. I more than likely started about 8 billion years ago when a red giant went supernova and left enough stellar material behind to create our star system 3.5 to 4 billion years later. Those materials, by random chance and good energy managed to come together and create the right conditions on earth for life and create the building blocks for life which took form in earth's primitive oceans billions of years ago. Computer driven recreations of protoearth enviroments will never yeild the correct responses, mainly because they are best-guess simulations.

Ask yourself what DNA is and then ask yourself what it is made of. Sugars, Amino Acids, etc. What are they made of? basic elements and all of these things exist, already in nature and can form on their own. Often, creationist argue that life had to start at one point. How can we be sure of that? For all we know, CNN might report evidence that many kinds of microbacterial life formed on earth, at different places, all around the same period. Simply, no one knows and no one will know until a proto-earth enviroment can be found.

Now you are assuming that someone is behind everything, someone pulling all the strings, not so. Does lightening have direction? No. It lands on chance and probilities. Then factors increase that chance or decrease it. And remember, Lightening can strike twice.

Now as for you twisting my words, don't. My statement was never about god or religion and the word 'miracle' is used for the purpose of stating the extreme possibility of life, not the fact someone did it. The way you twisted it around would be me saying you endorse free thinking because you uttered "Athiests" The fact is that creationism mythology
is not science and cannot ever compete with it.

Now if "god" did make us in his image, then I think his Xerox needed a serious toner replacement. He got a lot of stuff wrong. The human knees are not load bearing structures. Try standing at attention all day with your knees locked. Humans have some 3000 genetic diseases and faults bred into us alone!

The fact is the complexity of evolution is not complex at all. It only appears complex because it has aeons upon aeons of history behind it that we are yet to uncover.

The bible says the world was created one way, but every religion has different ways. Who's to say who is right and wrong. Hell, the egyptians claimed the unvierse sprung up from godly intercourse and endured because they kept up at it! Can you disprove the egyptian creationism? Greek? Hindu? Zulu? Native Americans? and so on.

You seem to think athiests and free thinkers have an issue with god, in reality most of us don't. As we don't believe in a god-figure or divine-lifeform, we cannot have an issue with it. We won't go to hell, because we don't believe in it thus we cannot go. We don't believe in satan or the devil, so clearly they can't influence us.

So really, how can a free thinker be endebted for all eternity to someone they don't believe even exists? At the risk of insulting all the religious folk and bring down their wrath on me with my next example, but "How many of us owe the toothfairy money for our babyteeth?"

Athiesm has been around since 300bce, if not earlier. I don't think we are going anywhere.

A man called Löffler who was burned in Bern in 1375 for confessing adherence to athiesm is reported to have taunted his executioners that they would not have enough wood to burn "Chance, which rules the world".