wouldn't that be like a tornado going through a junk yard and building an airplane?
It is just simply absurd!
2007-12-12 04:46:28 · 12 answers · asked by Anonymous in Society & Culture ➔ Religion & Spirituality
Not at all. It is more like saying that water in the atmosphere can form complex crystals (snowflakes) without any help at all.
2007-12-12 04:51:59 · answer #1 · answered by Anonymous · 2⤊ 0⤋
Not at all, science does not say the world was created like that. No aspect of science even comes close to that. If science said that, I would agree it would be absurd.
However, there is very strong evidence in physics, biology, chemistry and even in the social sciences that there isn't a designer.
What someone has done has confused you with the distinction between a stochastic process and a random process. Let me provide you with an example to clarify.
Let's pretend you went home to visit an old family friend and there was a tree you played in as a child. You go up on one of the branches. The bough bends but does not break. You are happy you haven't grown that heavy over the years. Looking across the yard, you see a cat slowly stalking a bird. Unbeknown to the cat, there is a dog nearby that just noticed there was cat in his yard. The dog barks, the cat runs, the dog chases the cat across the yard to your tree. The cat climbs the tree and runs out onto your limb overweighting the bough, as it happens.
You hear the cracking sound, the bough breaks, you and the cat fall on the dog, killing the dog.
Was any of that random, absolutely not. All of it was the predictable result of deterministic behavior. Could you predict it, no you couldn't because the chain of events could not have been known ahead of time or you would have never sat on the branch, nor would the dog have been exactly under the branch.
That is a stochastic process, it was a deterministic process that cannot be predicted ahead of time.
The second issue that you are missing, and this happens to be my area of research, is that you are not understanding statistical distributions.
Most people experience the world in a somewhat static manner and as such, we have internalized the "normal" or Gaussian distribution in our thinking. Things way out in the tail of the distribution is experienced by us as weird, scary or exciting. Unfortunately, when studying changing systems over time, that are statically normal, the appropriate distribution is the Cauchy distribution, or if there are regressors the Levy Alpha Stable Skew distribution.
These have fat tails, they are experienced as "weird," they also happen all the time. Systems evolve in this wild distribution rather than the static one we experience over very short periods of time. You can go from a bacteria to a human and it won't even be weird or unexpected, provided you have stochastic processes in the middle.
If I viewed the world in static rather than dynamic terms, I doubt I could accept evolution on statistical grounds, but as I do not and as a scientist I can see the evidence and gather it myself, I have no problems with it.
The problem with the designer idea is that it goes against the observable facts and requires a belief system that is contrary to what we know about how the world works.
2007-12-12 13:32:47 · answer #2 · answered by OPM 7 · 0⤊ 1⤋
"wouldn't that be like a tornado going through a junk yard and building an airplane?"
Obviously not.
You could save a lot of money by getting rid of your computer and internet connection and just wearing a sign around your neck that says "I don't know anything about science, and I enjoy making a fool of myself in public".
Give it a thought - you'll accomplish what you're already accomplishing, at far less cost.
2007-12-12 12:50:09 · answer #3 · answered by Anonymous · 7⤊ 1⤋
How about a tornado going through a junkyard and building an intelligent creator?
2007-12-12 12:50:39 · answer #4 · answered by . 7 · 4⤊ 1⤋
Absurd is saying everything that is created has to have a creator but yet the creator that created everything doesn't and was a spontaneous entity that just happened.
2007-12-12 13:02:30 · answer #5 · answered by calmlikeatimebomb 6 · 0⤊ 1⤋
Yes, that's exactly the analogy that's commonly used. And indeed, statistically, it's very unlikely.
It's just less unlikely than ascribing it all to an invisible, intangible, all powerful guy with very unclear origins.
2007-12-12 12:50:41 · answer #6 · answered by Anonymous · 2⤊ 1⤋
It's absurd that you believe in a mystic man in the sky who made everything and will then proceed to condemn over half of his creation to a Hell for not believing in him.
2007-12-12 12:50:14 · answer #7 · answered by ultraviolet1127 4 · 4⤊ 1⤋
"strawman alert"
*drink*
your analogy doesn't fit, sorry...
is it possible that out of hundreds of billions of stars (suns) that there might be a couple that are suitable to contain life?
Is it possible that after some period of time that nucleic acids might form on one of these planets? the rest is simple natural laws....it isn't that big of a leap, really...
we aren't airplanes, do airplanes reproduce?
2007-12-12 12:51:02 · answer #8 · answered by Anonymous · 4⤊ 1⤋
If you wanted an answer to this scenario, it can easily be found. Since you just want people to tell you how right you are, I have no other response other than to say ignorance is bliss.
2007-12-12 12:52:31 · answer #9 · answered by Anonymous · 2⤊ 1⤋
Saying there is a creator is like me growing mold in my fridge and expecting it to praise and worship me.
2007-12-12 12:51:23 · answer #10 · answered by queen of snarky-yack again 4 · 3⤊ 1⤋