Quote Originally Posted by forwonderbear
yes, biogenesis is the problem: biogenesis means life only comes from life. but all "laws" aside, the hard part of macro-evo is the "amino acid soup" idea. once evolutionists take their theories back to the part of "genesis" you still have tremendous problems with a living organism arriving out of innanimate parts.
Well, what do you expect? No matter how you look at it, deliberate creation or not, it must have been an extremely complex chemical process that happened about 3.5 billion years ago. We have no traces of exactly how the first cell came about; all the evidence has been destroyed by billions of years of decay and erosion. I have a hard time believing that just because it must have been really complex and because we have hardly any evidence of what exactly went on, that it had to have been purposefully created by a cosmic supergenius. Intelligence is the most complex thing we know of, the result of the tremendous complexity of the human brain, which has been shaped by millions of years of Darwinian natural selection. This complexity is the very thing we are seeking to explain. I can't see the explanatory power of the idea that something as complex and intricate as intelligence (and not just any intelligence, an infinite intelligence!) just popped out of nowhere for no reason. It just makes the problem of where complexity came from that much more baffling.
but forget about that: what about where even that innanimate MATTER came from? scientists talk about the big bang. but the problem there is that there had to be SOMETHING there to "bang" in the first place. scientists call this moment the singularity. but no one will talk about what happened before the singularity. where did that tiny piece of matter come from?
Well, there's always going to be the problem of "why is there something instead of nothing?" Nobody's been able to find a satisfactory answer to that question, and I doubt anybody ever will. We just have to accept that the universe exists, and we don't know why since there's no surviving evidence of what (if anything) happened "before" the Big Bang. Some have even argued that such a question can't even meaningfully be asked, likening it to asking what is beyond the edge of the universe.
now, you of course would have the same problem with god. where did god come from? my point is in the end either you have eternal god (living being) or eternal matter (eternal matter). my point is in the end it's not more "scientific" to believe there is "no god". in the end you have to take on faith where EXISTANCE came from in the first place.
Take on faith? The scientific answer would be "we don't know what, if anything, caused the universe to exist, because there's no conclusive evidence". Saying "although there's no evidence, I know for a fact that it was Jehovah/Allah/Vishnu/whatever that created the universe" is fundamentally anti-scientific. The scientific method rests on accepting only what the evidence points to, and taking that only as provisional truth, a working theory that is always open to change or even complete rejection in the light of new evidence. There is nothing scientific about having faith in that for which there is no evidence. There is something scientific about asking for evidence that a proposition is true, however, and ignoring hypotheses that are non-falsifiable.
there are many parts of evolutionary science that i find very valid: survival of the fitest/genetic change through selective breading etc.

i am a christian, and i will also not say i have scientific proof of god. i admit readily that i believe in god on faith, not because it has been proven to me.
Good. I hate when people try to "prove" that God exists with material evidence. It just doesn't work, and you can hardly ever get them to see the flaws in their logic.
i do however feel god's influence everywhere, but once again this is subjective of course
Yeah, I remember when I used to feel "God" too, until I realized I could create the same tingly sensation by listening to Pink Floyd alone in a dark room. It's all in how you interpret the feeling.
btw: i love science. i'm a biology/neurobiology student and i find scientific learning fascinating, of course especially living things (bios=life; ology=study)

blah blah good luck to y'all and peace!
Have a good one.