Despite the fact the Old Testament is still published as a good two-thirds of the Xtian bible, Xtians love to insist that very much of it “no longer applies” or is “a metaphor.” Especially the bits that are gross and immoral, and the bits that have been refuted by science.
And, they certainly have a point. We know, for example, that the Genesis creation story is nonsense, the Flood never happened, the Israelites were never enslaved to the Egyptians, and thus there was no Passover and no Exodus.
The problem is that the New Testament requires that the Old Testament be true. It needs to be true in order to establish the prophecies that Jesus supposedly fulfils - but doesn’t. (Although, to be fair, Jesus also supposedly fulfils a number of “prophecies” that don’t even exist, or aren’t prophecies at all.) And provide the Original Sin justification for him being a blood-magic scapegoat. If Genesis isn’t true, then Jesus serves no purpose.
Unless he didn’t. Unless Jesus lives in the same fictional universe as the Old Testament metaphors, rather than the real-world universe where none of these thing happened.
No matter how you carve it up, the bible is wrong, metaphorical, self-canceling or unreliable. In some cases, several of these all at once.
When Xtians try to rescue their religion by discarding the Old Testament, they bring the entire house of cards down themselves, faster and more thoroughly than any atheist.
Wow that's a lot of sources, nice! Also I'm sorry but I didn't assume you were lookinh at my blog haha, anyway like I said I'm not a scientist but I did follow you hoping to learn more so maybe you're doing me a favor, and yes I think I can understand the argument that chickens have evolved from dinosaurs or something in between but I was more so asking what evolved first that started it all? Like say .. I've heard some people mention that we started as bacteria
The cells that make up all living things, despite their endless variations, contain three fundamental elements. There are molecules that encode information and can be copied—DNA and its simpler relative, RNA. There are proteins—workhorse molecules that perform important tasks. And encapsulating them all, there’s a membrane made from fatty acids. Go back far enough in time, before animals and plants and even bacteria existed, and you’d find that the precursor of all life—what scientists call a “protocell”—likely had this same trinity of parts: RNA and proteins, in a membrane. As the physicist Freeman Dyson once said, “Life began with little bags of garbage.”
The bags—the membranes—were crucial. Without something to corral the other molecules, they would all just float away, diffusing into the world and achieving nothing. By concentrating them, membranes transformed an inanimate world of disordered chemicals into one teeming with redwoods and redstarts, elephants and E. coli, humans and hagfish. Life, at its core, is about creating compartments. And that’s much easier and much harder than it might seem.
if lungs need a brain and heart to work and a brain need lungs and heart to work and hearts need brains and lungs which evolved first and how did it survive until the rest evolved?
What you’re talking about is called “irreducible complexity.” Necessary organs can develop over time and are only necessary now, to us in our current forms. Organs in their current form may have replaced previous organs, such as gills. If tf the oceans rise - and assuming the species persists - in 100,000 years, we may have developed gills again and no longer possess lungs. An organ that served one function may change to perform another function if its original function is no longer required - e.g. the appendix.
Your body has the leftovers of many body parts that are no longer necessary, some of these remnants are even disappearing over time. They’re called vestigal structures.
If a god can create any form of life it chooses, why would it be limited to creating its crowning achievement, humanity, that has interdependent organs with little to no redundancy? Humans created organ transplants, not to mention artificial organs, to fix this god’s mistake. Why could it give salamanders and spiders the ability to regrow missing limbs, but not us? Why would it create the biological ability to change sex to facilitate reproductive continuity and survival, and give it to frogs instead of us?
For that matter, why would it be limited to creating life on the most temperate planet on the solar system, the one most suited to supporting it in the first place? Shouldn’t a creator god be immune to such limitations, and able to create life on Pluto or Mercury just as easily?
These interdependencies, vulnerabilities, limitations and flaws are a slam-dunk for evolution, and against the idea of a benevolent, powerful, intelligent creator. (Although perhaps not by a malevolent, limited, incompetent creator.)
All of them, and the many other flaws of the human body, are explained by evolution, but not by design or creation.
Also you bring up incest which makes me think of another question, when the first human evolved where did it get it’s mate? Was it a different unrelated fish that happen t evolve at the same time? Thanks again! (:
There was no first human. No creature has ever given birth to another creature of a different species. Speciation does not occur because you’re different from your parents. It’ occurs because you’re different from your great, great, great, great [x thousands of generations later] grand-parents.
i understand why you’re asking it, but with an understanding of evolution, it’s a nonsense question.
“A Universe Not Made for Us” - Carl Sagan reads from “The Demon Haunted World:Science as a Candle in the Dark.”
The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is then determined only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life’s meaning. We long for a parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes; but knowledge is preferable to ignorance — better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fake. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.
Scientists have watched a single-celled organism evolve into a multi-celled one in a laboratory, recreating one of the most important leaps in evolutionary history.
Humans are made up of trillions of different types of cells, but it is unclear how and when life evolved from being a single self-replicating cell to a multi-cellular organism.
Now, in a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, a team of scientists from the University of Montana have identified a way in which that evolution may have taken place.
Scientists have reproduced in the lab how the ingredients for life could have formed deep in the ocean 4 billion years ago. The results of the new study offer clues to how life started on Earth and where else in the cosmos we might find it.
Astrobiologist Laurie Barge and her team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, are working to recognize life on other planets by studying the origins of life here on Earth. Their research focuses on how the building blocks of life form in hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor.
And if you say nobody, that it didn’t need a creator, then you’re agreeing that neither did the universe or DNA. You must either concede that things exist without needing creators, or you must concede that your creator requires a creator.
(Psst... since you’re poised to say that your specific “god” is the exception, let’s jump ahead and understand that this assertion is a fallacy associated with Confirmation Bias called SpecialPleading. So, maybe don’t waste anyone’s time with that.)
Is your creator more complex than DNA or less complex than DNA? Think carefully before you answer.
It’s a very special kind of arrogance that theists think that things are only true if they, personally, can understand them. And yet use a complex series of electronic devices and communications systems - that they don’t understand - to broadcast that ignorance.
It’s also a wild ride of logic whiplash for someone to try and invoke a scientific concept, such as DNA, to try and debunk another scientific concept, such as evolution, when the two are inextricably interlinked, but the theist doesn’t understand either. I mean, really? You think DNA refutes evolution? Do you even science?
Your scientific ignorance is not evidence of a creator. It’s just evidence of your scientific ignorance. And it can be corrected - you don’t have to live this way - but only if you make the choice to abandon ignorance and superstitious buffoonery.
From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.
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