4 ms·

I myself am partial to the Latter-day Saint teaching that matter/energy has always existed (and forever will exist) and that the creation of the world involved

by umvi 4y ago

I myself am partial to the Latter-day Saint teaching that matter/energy has always existed (and forever will exist) and that the creation of the world involved "organizing" existing matter in an iterative process. That matches the pattern of creation I've experienced myself where I take something that already exists and iterate on it until it is in a refined state that I desire. I find it hard to believe that the mindboggling complexity of protein machinery was purely accidental/probabilistic. I understand how evolution works, and it makes sense, but... to me at least, it seems more likely that there was a creative iterative process that "guided" matter towards the evolutionary system we have on earth vs lightning striking an ocean full of amino acids and DNA/cells/proteins coincidentally arranging in the right configuration to jump start evolution.

rubicon33 4y ago
Uh, what man? That “guide” was natural selection over millions of years. It’s literally random chance, and if a change is beneficial, it sticks. If we were really “designed” then there are so many failures and inefficiencies that deserve scrutiny. Chief among them, childhood cancers. Fuck a designer that left that bug in the system and shipped it.
- akiselev 4y ago
  > That “guide” was natural selection over millions of years. Small nitpick: millions of years is how long Hominini brains have been evolving with stone tools. Mammalian brains had already been evolving for at least a hundred million years, animals in general for seven hundred million years, and the basic molecular machinery like genetics and proteomics had been evolving for billions of years. The scale at which evolution operates at is truly mind boggling.
- umvi 4y ago
  I understand how natural selection works in the framework of evolution. But how did the evolutionary framework itself emerge? Natural selection can't happen without being contained in a larger self-propagating evolutionary system, correct? And it seems sophisticated enough for me to believe that an intelligent force helped create it. Of course, I could be wrong, but I'd need some pretty compelling proof of abiogenesis, not just isolated examples of self assembling or replicating molecules. > Chief among them, childhood cancers. Fuck a designer that left that bug in the system and shipped it. How is it the designer's fault if (for example) humans decide to build and detonate nuclear weapons, the fallout is blown across oceans and/or continents and precipitates into water supplies which then manifests as childhood cancers 25 years later (unbeknownst to the citizens)? That's not a "bug", that's just a natural consequence of physics and physical interactions of matter. Rinse and repeat with lead and other compounds which unknowingly are contaminating our environment and causing childhood cancers to happen in the aggregate?
oldstrangers 4y ago
How is an infinite universe that's been painstakingly engineered by an infinitely omnipotent being less mindboggling than evolutionary biology?
- dctoedt 4y ago
  Agreed. From the late Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne KBE FRS — a noted Cambridge particle physicist, turned late-call Church of England priest [0]: "Early on, an Anglican clergyman, Charles Kingsley, stated powerfully the right way to think theologically about evolution. He said that God could no doubt have brought into being a ready-made world, but in fact the Creator had done something cleverer than that in making ‘a creation that could make itself’." [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Polkinghorne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Polkinghorne [1] https://www.questioningchristian.org/2006/03/the_continuing_.html https://www.questioningchristian.org/2006/03/the_continuing_... (Emphasis added.)
HybridCurve 4y ago
Conway's game of life is a good example of how complex behavior can evolve from systems with a simple set of rules. Molecular dynamics follow a more complex set of rules at a much more rapid rate. This combined with the fact those interactions have been happening for billions of years in parallel at such a massive scale does not make it surprising that persistent and self replicating patterns emerge. On a large enough scale, even improbable events become likely.
- umvi 4y ago
  > This combined with the fact those interactions have been happening for billions of years in parallel at such a massive scale does not make it surprising that persistent and self replicating patterns emerge. On a large enough scale, even improbable events become likely. I don't think anyone has proven the scales necessary for life to happen by chance. What you have done is worked off the base assumption that abiogenesis happened accidentally and therefore the time and scale needed to do so is the age and scale of the observable universe. Under the infinite monkeys theorem the works of Shakespeare will eventually be produced, but we are not working with infinite time and resources here. We are working with "just" 9 billion years and "just" 100 billion galaxies, which, for abiogenesis seems pretty short especially considering what % of planets have zero chance for life due to their composition and star proximity. How many billions of years of compute time across how many parallel computers do you think it would take Conway's game of life with random RNG seeds to simulate itself (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8)? Regardless of your answer, I still find it more likely Conway's game of life simulating itself points to an intelligent force of some sort having iteratively created it.

by umvi 4y ago

rubicon33 4y ago

Uh, what man? That “guide” was natural selection over millions of years. It’s literally random chance, and if a change is beneficial, it sticks. If we were really “designed” then there are so many failures and inefficiencies that deserve scrutiny. Chief among them, childhood cancers. Fuck a designer that left that bug in the system and shipped it.

akiselev 4y ago
> That “guide” was natural selection over millions of years. Small nitpick: millions of years is how long Hominini brains have been evolving with stone tools. Mammalian brains had already been evolving for at least a hundred million years, animals in general for seven hundred million years, and the basic molecular machinery like genetics and proteomics had been evolving for billions of years. The scale at which evolution operates at is truly mind boggling.
umvi 4y ago
I understand how natural selection works in the framework of evolution. But how did the evolutionary framework itself emerge? Natural selection can't happen without being contained in a larger self-propagating evolutionary system, correct? And it seems sophisticated enough for me to believe that an intelligent force helped create it. Of course, I could be wrong, but I'd need some pretty compelling proof of abiogenesis, not just isolated examples of self assembling or replicating molecules. > Chief among them, childhood cancers. Fuck a designer that left that bug in the system and shipped it. How is it the designer's fault if (for example) humans decide to build and detonate nuclear weapons, the fallout is blown across oceans and/or continents and precipitates into water supplies which then manifests as childhood cancers 25 years later (unbeknownst to the citizens)? That's not a "bug", that's just a natural consequence of physics and physical interactions of matter. Rinse and repeat with lead and other compounds which unknowingly are contaminating our environment and causing childhood cancers to happen in the aggregate?

oldstrangers 4y ago

How is an infinite universe that's been painstakingly engineered by an infinitely omnipotent being less mindboggling than evolutionary biology?

dctoedt 4y ago
Agreed. From the late Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne KBE FRS — a noted Cambridge particle physicist, turned late-call Church of England priest [0]: "Early on, an Anglican clergyman, Charles Kingsley, stated powerfully the right way to think theologically about evolution. He said that God could no doubt have brought into being a ready-made world, but in fact the Creator had done something cleverer than that in making ‘a creation that could make itself’." [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Polkinghorne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Polkinghorne [1] https://www.questioningchristian.org/2006/03/the_continuing_.html https://www.questioningchristian.org/2006/03/the_continuing_... (Emphasis added.)

HybridCurve 4y ago

Conway's game of life is a good example of how complex behavior can evolve from systems with a simple set of rules. Molecular dynamics follow a more complex set of rules at a much more rapid rate. This combined with the fact those interactions have been happening for billions of years in parallel at such a massive scale does not make it surprising that persistent and self replicating patterns emerge. On a large enough scale, even improbable events become likely.

umvi 4y ago
> This combined with the fact those interactions have been happening for billions of years in parallel at such a massive scale does not make it surprising that persistent and self replicating patterns emerge. On a large enough scale, even improbable events become likely. I don't think anyone has proven the scales necessary for life to happen by chance. What you have done is worked off the base assumption that abiogenesis happened accidentally and therefore the time and scale needed to do so is the age and scale of the observable universe. Under the infinite monkeys theorem the works of Shakespeare will eventually be produced, but we are not working with infinite time and resources here. We are working with "just" 9 billion years and "just" 100 billion galaxies, which, for abiogenesis seems pretty short especially considering what % of planets have zero chance for life due to their composition and star proximity. How many billions of years of compute time across how many parallel computers do you think it would take Conway's game of life with random RNG seeds to simulate itself (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8)? Regardless of your answer, I still find it more likely Conway's game of life simulating itself points to an intelligent force of some sort having iteratively created it.