Why do people beleive evolution?

Question

i was sittin in science class (at a christain school) and we were learnin about lyk the stomach and lyk the path of food and air and blood and all and recently we learned about the eye and there is just so many amazing things and i just wonder, what kind of person would beleive that all of this just "appeared" out of no where or that there was just a big BOOM and it was just all magically there... think about it

Answer 1

Concerning the debate going on about intelligent design and evolution: is it possible that the final answer about which of these two seemingly opposite ideas is correct could simply be yes?

With one position firmly held by the believers and the other just as fearlessly defended by the non-believers, if you happen to be in a position somewhere near the middle, it does not look all that complex. From this position, you wonder why either-or has to be the answer.

If you believe that some higher being created the universe by intelligent design, what more elegant and intelligent design could there have been than a self-regulating system that continually checks its own errors and makes its own corrections in mid-stream as an integral part of the process.

This all seems quite logical to me although it probably won’t satisfy the believers because they are afraid to see any truth other than the one they have been told to believe in. Inversely it certainly won’t satisfy the non-believers because it leaves them stuck with a god that they are so obviously terrified of.

To sum up this view from the center, it might be most easily be explained by saying perhaps the designer was intelligent. Problem is, the designer was likely so intelligent that those seeking to prove that it is intelligently designed may be incapable of ever understand it well enough to see it for the elegant self regulating design that it has always been.

The nonbelievers will be similarly handicapped due to the internal terror the have about the idea that there may be a God. Neither side being able to leave their entrenched position for fear they may have to admit they were wrong. While the rest of us stand by trying to figure out what all the fuss is about. Personally I don’t think anyone is wrong, I just feel both sides are about half right.

Love and blessings
don

Answer 2

Your questions imply that you believe that God created those things....but you ignore that according to your belief GOD just appeared out of nowhere....or...even more fantasical..."always was and always will be"

Also, eyes and digestive systems didn't just appear out of nowhere. They evolved over billions of years. First there was a one celled organism...then as they reproduced, some of them changed so that they could move toward the sun (like many house plants do)....those ones were better off and more likely to reproduce that the ones that couldnt find the sun.... so... the trait got stronger...larger and larger portions of the cell were devoted to finding the sun.... eventually, the cells that were too devoted to finding the sun now had a disadvantage...because they werent finding enough...i dunno...say water....so, the right balance is struck....eventually more complicated organisms occured due to random mutations....similar pressures drove the development of eyes.....and stomaches..

as for the BANG..... Thats what YOU believe:

001:003 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
001:004 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the
light from the darkness.
001:005 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called
Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
001:006 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the
waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
001:007 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were
under the firmament from the waters which were above the
firmament: and it was so.
001:008 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the
morning were the second day.
001:009 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered
together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it
was so.

That is entirely consistent with the Big Bang... except for the Day count....and if Genisis is correct, why did it take 6 days? Seems like 20 minutes would have been enough time...why go through the stages, why not say Let there be Adam and Eve...and bypass all that other stuff?

Answer 3

None of it just magically appeared. The evolution of specialized organs in living creatures body took tens of millions of years. That is a time span so long that it is unimaginable.

A little analogy is this. Ask your parents if when they were our your age, they could have foreseen computers as powerful as we have today, cars that get 45 miles per gallon or the fact that the US would be attacked on its own soil as happened in 9/11?

The passage of time mean things change and the passage of a lot of time mean things charge a lot.

Lets look at it another way. If there is no evolution then what is the explanation of the existence of all those millions and millions of fossils? What about the fact that the worlds best and most competent scientists all agree on the relative ages of those fossils? What about the fact that for more and more animals we have a complete transitional record from reptile to modern animal (birds for instance via a transitional creature called archeopteryx- thousands of fossils exist)?

In fact when challenged none of the people who believe in creationism are able provide a story of creation that fits with the observable facts.

At the present time evolution does not need any more proving but creationism does.

I realize that you have a system of beliefs that doesn't allow for change and that nothing anyone is going to say and no amount of hard evidence is going to change your mind. That's a shame because being inflexible generally sets us up to fail in life.

Answer 4

Well, there wasn't - from an evolutionary perspective a situation where Monday there was nothing and Tuesday you had blue whales.

It started very simply with something like slime mold and TIME, lots and lots of TIME, eventually some of the slime mold became sensitive to light, in the way your hand is sensitive to light , you can feel it on one side of your hand when sunlight strikes it. Eventually, those places where light could be sensed ended up being more important or advantageous when they were near the "top" of an organism that "tended" to organize itself "top up".

That crude sense of up and down was enough to get the ball rolling, soon the idea of an organism with a top and bottom was replaced by one with a front and back and sides.

The best explaination - without invoking "a miracle" is evolution.

It's not to say that a God or a Monolith (ala 2001/2010) or some other creatures DIDN'T create us, it's just we don't have a Monolith or any other hard evidence to suggest anything other than evolution is at work.

For example, what happens to the Christian faith if lets suppose for a moment that archaeologists find a large black monolith in the Eastern Rift Valley of Tanzania or Kenya, and it's dated to 5 million years ago. What could any of us say? What would happen to faith? How does the scripture hold together if we found - for instance - some proof of alien life, or had to include an ambassadorial position for the representatives from Alpha Centauri at the UN. If the Earth was asked to become a member in some interstellar version of the United Nations or something?

Evangelical Christians (in particular) pick a very narrow interpretation of a particular set of the Bible and stick to it. Which at a certain level is tenacious and in a way admirable for that tenacity however, when presented with facts to the contrary I would rather not have to contort my religion to fit the facts at hand. In that way, Evolution is a fact, Darwin's theory could have just as easily been Wallace's theory or Mendel's theory, for it's part wouldn't change too much.

It still explains what we see, and when the "theory" is complete should be able to reasonably predict a series of possible outcomes from a series of specific events. What Evangelical Christians are in the position of is having to be completely in denial of basic mathematics.

At this time, mankind is not particularly good at mathematics, and particularly the branches the evolutionarily related branches of mathematics (Dynamic theory, evolutionary programming, Markov modelling, discrete mathematics etc)
These branches of mathematics are brand new, and are being developed and worked on only within the last 70-100 years or so. Mathematicians are already very close to working on predictive models of complex systems, (evolution is an example of a complex system), so eventually mankind will be smart enough to predict with some degree of certainty what a particular evolutionary change should effect.

WORSE for fundamentalists is that the very simple and powerful nature of evolution as described by Darwin, are actually quite helpful in solving many of these complex systems problems and may in fact be part and parcel to solving some of these predictive problems will be to use evolutionarily based models.

Furthermore, the genetics are compelling, we have over 80% of our genetics in common with every other living thing on the planet, that evidence is compelling. Its compelling from the perspective that each individual organism (except twins/clones) is unique but also just a little different, put those "little differences" together and you get - the vast variety of life.

You want something to ponder - ponder this, how is it that a series of farmers and sheppards from approximately 2500BC, got it in their head that there was an Adam and an Eve. Great story, compelling narative, wonderful moral tale, and very similar to several dozen other creation myths. Here's the punch line, if there is one to be had. How come, the geneticists doing work on family lineages and whatnot did a "longitudinal" survey, to see just how "old" mankind is.

Do you know what they found, what we would consider Mankind is somewhere between 70,000 and 80,000 years old, but that's not the funny part.

The funny part is that they "found" an Adam and an Eve. Eve lived in East Africa some 150,000 years ago, Adam lived in central Africa about 70,000 years ago. They never knew one another,but we are , all of us related to two individuals some 60 thousand years apart from one another.

I think that should give everyone a little something to ponder.

Answer 5

Well there are a lot of holes in the whole scientific theory of how everything was created, but it's not nearly like there was a bang and we appeared- but to learn everything that came between and why and how there could be a bang is an enormously large and long theory- and much of it makes sense after you learn all the reasons- some of it doesn't make sense and may be changed in 40 years to something better- but be assured that creation theories are just as complicated as creation itself, and that why in science class you never really understand it- they don't have time to teach it (it would take years- not days). But learning it doesn't change the role of God, if anything studying science cases you to reexamine what you were making the bible say verses what it really says- like, the bible says the are no dinosaurs (like people use to say- believing that dinosaurs can't exist)- verse, the bible didn't write about dinosaurs like it didn't write about a lot of things. -there are a lot of things about the bible we presume, and sometimes we only notice these things when we're challenged by them- science can challenge.

Answer 6

Imagine if someone were to read your diary in 1000 years. They wouldn't understand half of what was written, and they would misinterpret a lot!

Such it is with the Bible. A lone individual can not possibly fathom what the authors are saying without first studying the culture of the times and looking at other sources for help.

During the Reformation, it became nonsensically popular to interpret the Bible on one's own, free from anyone guiding your interpretation.

So now we have a whole large group of people who believe that God himself wrote the Bible and that it is absolutely necessary for your salvation to believe that evolution is evil.

It's all so silly. Take, for example, what you said. Did they really teach you that only the successful changes happened? That's a lie. All kinds of changes happened. They are called mutations. The unsuccessful ones resulted in miscarriages
or deaths. They weren't as successful at breeding and surviving. The WINNERS in this battle of the mutatations are what we see today.

I teach at a catholic school, where we teach evolution AND scriptures and we understand that the two are not mutually exclusive things to believe. If you understand that God was behind evolution, there's nothing horrible in believing in it at all.

Sure we came "came from monkeys". But it was the first monkeys that were made with souls, and in the image and likeness of God, that were "Adam and Eve".

Answer 7

think about it. how could something so not complex just all of a sudden be changed into something so amazing as the human body? have you ever felt God? i mean, really been so into a state of worship that you literally felt something inside your soul?
and by the way, there was no big boom. GOD made it all. you go to a christian school so you should know more about this than me. I attend church about 5-6 times a week, and I like it. You go to school to learn about this stuff every day. Where is your faith? (in Jesus’ words) email me a [e-mail]

Answer 8

I was a research Scientist and am now a Christian Minister @ Drexel University.

This is my take on evolution(simplified):

1. Genetic mutations lead to changes in individuals and populations. True
2. These Genetic mutations have a cumulative effect over time drastically changing species. Questionable
3. The slow drastic changes over eons have produced all life on earth from a single original organism. Unable to be evaluated at all

1. I have genetically changed bacteria in the laboratory. I have seen it come about naturally on its own so that an entire population of bacteria is no longer compatible with the original strain.
2. To evaluate the true of statement number two this what we need. We need a stepwise hypothesis of genetic mutational change for the addition of information which produces a molecular machine that was not present in a previous generation. If mutations lead to changes show me specific point mutational possibilities that have lead to the development of some molecular machine. I have not seen anything like this and am holding my opinion until something of this nature is presented.

3. There is no scientific, molecular, genetic hypothesis for any part of macro-evolution. Until there is number three is completely irrelevant. To say that genetic mutations produce variability and then that variability leads to change over time is nice but I need to see specific genetic mutations that have led to specific variability that has led to specific change. I can not evaluate evolution until the hypotheses are actually matched up to the theory. It isn't that there is no evidence for macro-evolution. There isn't even a hypothesis of macro-evolution which can be evaluated on an evidentiary basis.

Answer 9

That is a matter of faith. And that is ok. Big Boom theory is like the explanation of what a God could do or did. Or it could have happened for reasons that have no reason or explanations. I have thought about that most of my life, I think most every human has, some accept what is, some keep looking for why it is.
I respect others beliefs and I do not impose my thoughts or beliefs on others.
Freedom was kewl, once.

Answer 10

Your logic reminds me of the movie “The Gods Must Be Crazy,” a native in the Kalahari Desert encounters technology for the first time--in the shape of a Coke bottle. I found this to be very amusing, but I also began to see parallels between his thought process, and that of the modern day Theist. Both are using CAVEMAN LOGIC to explain their world. I fail to see the difference between “hmm, bottle fall from sky, must be gods” and “hmm, trees, butterflies, complex human organs prove the existence of god.”

In both of these cases, someone is simply replacing one unknown for another unknown, but proving nothing!

Not only can God not be proven, but I will also go so far as to say that God can be disproved. It is impossible for something to be all knowing and all good. If you are aware that something bad is going to happen, and you allow it to happen anyway, then you cannot be all good. If God created everything, then he also created evil. It is also impossible to be all-powerful; can God create a rock that even he himself cannot move?

I would have thought that as man became more knowledgeable and logical that he would have pushed aside his caveman beliefs, but it seems to be just the opposite.

A clear line of fossils now traces the transition between whales and hoofed mammals, between reptiles and mammals, between dinosaurs and birds, between apes and humans. The fossil evidence of evolution between major forms is compelling. Nothing just "appeared" out of no where, evolutionary changes take place over eons....sorry.