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Dave in Lake Villa wrote:
Could someone please tell me how Evolutionists/Atheists respond to these please ? Thanks.
1. Nothing produced something which then exploded its matter and out of that came personality, abstract thoughts, rationale, intuition, love, hate, discernment and even believe in a personal Creator.
You appear to be asking about the Big Bang. Firstly, this has nothing to do with the theory of evolution by natural selection: the universe was not created through a process of natural selection, but by the laws of physics.
For example, if I kick a ball, it keeps going in the same direction until something (a wall; gravity; friction; etc) changes its path. Similarly, if you set a star moving in a particular direction, it will keep going until it collides with another star or its path is changed by the gravity of some massive object. Simple laws of physics: testable, observable, widely accepted as fact.
Tracing the ball’s path backwards, you find my foot. Tracing the universe’s path backwards, you find an initial expansion. (Though widely referred to as the Big Bang, the event that created the universe is thought to be more like a balloon inflating than a bomb exploding.) One expects that there was something that caused this expansion. However, as it occurred before the existence of the universe, it’s unlikely that any traces of it can be found within the universe. So we will probably never be sure what caused the Big Bang.
It could have been caused by a catastrophic event that destroyed a previous universe; or perhaps it’s a minor and rather unimportant event in a “parent universe” which contains this universe. Whatever created it doesn’t seem to have any effect on our day-to-day lives, though it’s certainly an interesting philosophical question.
2. Non living matter and chemicals gave rise to life complete with a DNA molecule which for the (alleged) first Cell had enough information in it pertaining to blueprint messages , to equal an entire set of encyclopedias. All without intelligent intervention.
I don’t think many people would argue that this statement is true. It is likely that the first living organisms used much simpler mechanisms to store and pass down genetic information. RNA is a good candidate; it’s a chain of fairly uninspiring amino acids: adenine, guanine, cytosine, and uracil.
I would imagine that at some point, after several million years of life forms (or, some might argue, at this point mere proteins) reproducing (or under the “chemicals” terminology, catalysing and reacting), a molecule of thymine slipped in and took the place of a uracil molecule.
Now thymine bonds well with adenine, which may have caused a single-strand RNA-like molecule to pair up with another, forming a double helix.
These early forms of DNA certainly didn’t store information “equal an entire set of encyclopedias”, but probably only coded for a few dozen genes: enough genes to make a few protein molecules.
But through accidents such as the one described above, life evolved over millions of years, and now has much more complex DNA.
The human genome contains around 3 billion base pairs. Modelling this as computer memory, using base-4 bits instead of binary (as there are 4 bases in DNA), this is equivalent to about 6 GB of storage space.
Project Gutenberg’s effort to reproduce the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica has so far only released one volume: “A to Androphagi” which is about 8 MB uncompressed. Given that the entire set includes 28 volumes, one can estimate the size of the encyclopaedia as being roughly 250 MB, which should fit into the storage provided by the human genome about 24 times over!
3. ‘Naturalism’ without the slightest inkling of intelligence or will, gave us the scientifically proven Anthropic Constants and Parameters numbering 133 (so far discovered) which are all needed simultaneously, so earth can survive and allow humans to live on the planet. www.reasons.org. These 133 just happened to be introduced into the Universe and just happened to be introduced all together at the same time… quite ‘naturally’ over lots and lots of time.
I’m not 100% sure what you’re trying to get at here, though I think it might be answered by an explanation of the anthropic principle.
There is a constant referred to as G which defines the strength of gravity in the universe. G is seemingly an arbitrary number, not dependent on anything else. If G were a bit higher, the universe would have crushed itself into a burning hot fireball under the intense weight of its own gravity. If G were a bit lower, stars and planets wouldn’t have clumped themselves together, and the universe would be a big cloud of dust and gas.
So for planets to exist, and thus for life to evolve and in particular, intelligent life to evolve, G must be “just right” (like Goldilocks and the porridge). Some people take this as a sign of an intelligent creator.
However, the anthropic principle reverses the argument. It says, that given that we are alive, then G must be just right. If G wasn’t just right, then we wouldn’t be here to ponder about it. So when we think about G, it should be hardly surprising that G is just right.
Using the same principle, I wouldn’t exist if my parents had never met. They wouldn’t exist if their respective sets of parents had never met. And none of my grandparents would exists if their parents hadn’t met. So going back just 3 generations, that’s eight great-grandparents. Out of a worldwide population of over a billion, what are the chances that those eight people should form those four couples, eventually resulting in my birth. The chances were miniscule. But it happened; I exist. If it hadn’t happened, then I wouldn’t be here to think about it, so it should come as no surprise to me that it did happen.
Or to think of it another way, the chances of a winning the lottery are tiny — millions to one. If I was a reporter interviewing a lottery winner, should I try to convince them that it’s impossible that they won the lottery, because the chances of them winning are millions to one?
Unlikely events do sometimes happen, but we only wonder about them afterwards if they’ve happened.
The universe being habitable by us was very unlikely, but we’re only able to wonder about it because it worked out that way.
