DreamSlayer said:
Original question: Where did God come from?
This is easily answered. We live in a universe of cause and effect. Ignore evolution and creationism for a second and understand that both rely on one thing:
Something must exist infinitely, for anything to exist at all.
Either matter has always existed, and thus through "chance" led us here, or God has always existed, and willed us here.
Your third option is, Something came from Nothing.
It's cause and effect. You must have a first cause in your chain. God is the first cause, or the big bang is the first cause. Once again, for either to to have happened, God or Matter must have always just existed.
Picture a line of dominoes. You can see they have fallen down. If you trace this line without end or beginning where is the first domino that fell? the line must have an original domino that fell over, or the rest would never have fallen.
(maybe that wasn't as easy as I thought)
Who said that a god had to be the first domino? We could use Occam's razor to remove that and have the first domino being the existence of the universe or whatever realm the universe may be in that they are now working on in hypotheses.
Second: Evolution.
Your quote ended with "[it is] sure to happen if opportunity is unlimited."
Lets roll dice for a second. Lets pretend that sponteneous life is a 6. I need a 6 for life to occur. What are my chances of rolling a 6? one in six 1:6. I don't get a 6 my first roll, darn. I roll again. What are my chances of rolling a 6? the same.
If I roll infinitely what are the odds of never rolling a 6? greater than zero?
So, I guess I'm just confused by his argument.
For sponteneous life to happen, only one 6 would be enough. Rolling the die many times would have the amount of 6's approach 1/6 of the number of rolls. If there are many many rolls, there could still be many 6's.
And there are limitations. Specific tempuratures, specific chemicals, specific amino acids, protien molecules, specific order these have to go in etc. Those are only the limitations for life to exist. The problem isn't with one event occuring. It's the combination of all the events occuring in sequence. Opportunity is not unlimited.
Opportunity seems to be large because of the vastness of space, giving enough rooms for many stars and planets.
I'd say that some of the chances of those things happening somewhere on Earth wasn't too small because Earth is big place with plenty of room for many molecules. If there was a n chance of something happening, there would be about n/m instances of it happening where m is the number of all of the events considered. If m is very large, as allowed by Earth having lots of room for many such events, n, the number of of the events that helped to lead to life, would still be large.
Many of those events from the squence happens many times, so the above applies too. The universe is big enough for many planets. The Earth is big enough for many molecules and living things. So enough things, m, happen, for each consideration in the squence, from planets to living things, for n, the number of "successes" to be large. It's like tossing a die a million times. About 160 to 170 thousand of them should be 6's.
If physics was different, maybe our type of life might not exist, but the different physics could allow for other types of life.
Here is a page on other possible biochemistries that might be possible in our universe. The ones that look interesting to me are the P-N and ammonia-water chemistries. If physics was tweaked to allow P and N to be created by stars in suitable ratios, maybe it could be more workable. In our Universe, ammonia-water based life could be possible on Titan in the Saturn system.
I'll add a quote from
here.
Replication Rules are not random in the sense that, say, Heisenberg's Principle of Uncertainty or quantum mechanics is sometimes supposed to show the fundamental randomness of reality. They are merely random with respect to natural selection. Natural selection is not random: it is the determinate result of sorting processes according to relative fitness. It is stochastic, in the sense that better engineered features can fail for reasons of probability (they may meet accidents unrelated to their fitness), but that poses no greater threat to the scientific nature of evolution than it does for, say, subatomic physics or information theory.
What this means is that the environment, chemistry and physics restrict what different things are possible. The randomness is within that set, not scary and bad chaos with no restrictions.
Oh well, that doesn't matter. It was evolution I wanted to comment on. It's late, I will make this quick. MUTATION. Happens all the time. Name one beneficial mutation. Just one. The kind of evolution you are supporting requires beneficial mutations. Name one.
[Hint - Sickle Cell Anemia is not a beneficial mutation.]
The sickle cell anemia mutation does have some benefits.
Here, it says:
Since the gene is incompletely recessive, carriers have a few sickle red blood cells at all times, not enough to cause symptoms, but enough to give resistance to malaria. Because of this, heterozygotes have a higher fitness than either of the homozygotes. This is known as heterozygote advantage.
Beneficial mutations would include mutations that happen to undo harmful mutations. Some mutations are also neutral. Multiple codons are used for the same amino acids, like AAA and AAG both coding for lysine. Changing AAA into AAG won't matter.
One beneficial mutation would be the insertion of the genetic information used to splice genes for use in B and T cells in the immune system to make antibodies.
Another one would be the mutation that copied and changed the gene for either the red or green cones' photopigment into the other one on the X chromosome, giving us 3 types of cones, instead of 2 like dogs have.