Does "God" Exist?

[Kieron]

Most of the people who have posted on this thread have claimed to be agnostic. Jacob seems to be the only one supporting that claim.

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How can inteligent life just randomly exist all by its self? The odds would be VERY VERY high. There has to be a god.

Well, it didn't just randomly exist all by itself.

I attempted to do some math to figure out how many organisms would ever have lived on the Earth and how many beneficial mutations they would have had in total, but I'm afraid the algebra was too complex for me, because the numbers I ended up with were either less than the amount of people currently living in China or an insanely large amount more than the number of atoms in the Universe, and I'm pretty certain neither of them are correct answers.

So instead of trying to do that, let me try to use logic. I'm much better at logic than math.

3 and a half billion years ago, at which it is universally agreed among scientists that there was life on Earth (it could have been sooner), there was organic matter and water covering the planet. There were volcanoes and meteors crashing into the world, bringing more material, and heating and mixing up what was already there. In addition, those volcanoes created static electricity in their ash clouds, creating monster lightning storms, and the tidal pull of the moon was also much stronger.

All it takes is just once have the right amino acids in the right place at the right time in over half a billion years (that's 1,825,000,000 modern days!) for lightning to strike a heated pool in the shadow of a volcano to have a self-reproducing molecule of RNA form.

This RNA will be exposed to the same fury of the elements that created it, and plenty of it will mutate and decay into unusable forms that are broken back down into amino acids without the ability to reproduce itself. But eventually all it takes is one molecule of RNA to shift into a more stable form of molecule, known as DNA, make itself a sealed container, and you have the first single-celled organism.

This first cell can then reproduce much more successfully than the exposed molecules, but the process is not perfect. There will still be common mutations. These mutations will destroy many creatures, but a few will find an advantage.

There were plenty of things that, had they not happened, would have prevented intelligent life as we know it from forming. Early Earth's atmosphere was methane. It was the photosynthesis of early bacteria that converted the atmosphere to oxygen, which can be broken down to get much more energy more efficiently than using sunlight and water. At some point, inside the cell wall another wall appeared to protect the DNA and keep it separate from the other goings-on in the cell and this became a nucleus. Some cell with a nucleus ate a cell without a nucleus, and these eaten cells became mitochondria and chloroplasts, which are in just about every multicellular organism today to help them get energy. A huge extinction occurred about 500 million years ago or so, I forget the exact time period, killing 90% of all life forms then existing, killing off many of the varied, exotic species. Most of the more familiar ones, including reptiles, survived. These reptiles then dominated the planet for several hundred million years in the Mesozoic Era as dinosaurs. Warm-blooded mammals evolved, but were kept tiny by the monstrous dinosaurs. When the dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, mammals survived, and then became the dominant group of animals.

Primates evolved from these mammals, and the thumb was their huge advantage. In humans, a detrimental mutation occurred in the jaw -- human beings have much, much less jaw muscle than a gorilla or chimpanzee. However, this lack of jaw muscle made room for much larger brains. These larger brains and thumbs are the biggest reason why we have taken over the world instead of, for example, dolphins. Eventually we developed language and tools and fire, and this led directly to all other "intelligent" features of humans, such as agriculture and writing.


These are an awful lot of unlikely happenings, but how exactly do you fit a God into it? Did he manipulate the amino acids into the first molecule of RNA, and then manipulate the molecules of RNA into DNA, and then the DNA into cells, then the cells into large creatures, and then from there on out? We have proof that all this happened. But why would God, who is supposedly omnipotent and all-powerful, go through all this trouble over all this time? It's taken 3.5 billion years to go from DNA to homo sapiens. If a god was involved, especially one such as described in the Bible, he could have done it a lot more simply and quickly.


The power of intelligence is something altogether. Whether there's something in the works there, neither I nor anyone else I'm aware of can say for sure. But once you accept that intelligence can exist, whether or not a God is involved, it doesn't seem that a God was involved in getting us to it.

Of course, I've said in the past that logic and religion are like cheesecake and pizza. You can eat one one day and the other the next, you can have one for lunch and one for dinner, you can have one for dinner and the other for dessert, but no sane person can eat both at the same time and come out thinking he's had a fine meal.

In other words, if you want to believe firmly in your religion as your scriptures say, that's fine, but all those scriptures were written in the same time as people thought the world was flat, that giants and trolls and mermaids existed, that lead plates made for fine dining and that the Earth was the center of the entire Universe.

You should know, that is all just a theory. There is no evidence backing up the world is 3 1/2 billion years old, as we don't have time machines to know.