I am unable to fully explain my birth and existence through evolution alone. I become little aware of the immense beauty and complexity in the natural world and space and feel that there must be God. HN, how have you confronted and answered that question.
Read more science books and then you can fully explain it!
One of the best arguments that there is no God is exactly that beauty and complexity. It's only complex in a certain type of way, an evolutionary type of way.
No animal has jet boots, or fusion power, or laser beam eyes, or the billions of really useful, but impossible/really, really hard to evolve features. There's no design. There's no plan. There's only evolution baby!
You'll have to make do with some generalizations though, trying to go into the detail of every single thing is probably beyond what can be read in a single human's life time now.
Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is pretty good start, or Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins, which is a book about how science makes nature even more beautiful by explaining it, not less.
“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.” - Heisenberg
It doesn’t matter whether I’m atheist or not, but to state that you can fully explain - well - any process of the universe is simply naive. There are areas we know many things about, but biology itself has an enormous amount of accidental complexity, (which is often brought up by atheists as a criticism of design) for example many many signal path ways that do fundamentally the same thing, but differently. Compared to that, spaghetti codes have good architecture.
Whether God exists or not is imo orthogonal to the complexity of the world around us.
Interestingly, no, it isn't fully explained as of today. Schopenhauer's quote of "Any foolish boy can stamp on a beetle, but all the professors in the world cannot make a beetle" is still true today.
No, starting from beetle eggs does not count. They point is no one knows how to start from the inert chemicals that make up a beetle and cause them to assemble into a living beetle. More generally, abiogenesis has not been cracked.
Perhaps, but we also know today that a God doesn't pull the Sun up every day, no Goddess blows on the Sea to make the tides, no God gets angry and explodes mountains, and there's no Goddess painting the ceiling of the world with stars.
We do, however, know pretty much roughly how a beetle grows, how cells and DNA work, cell division, hell, even atoms, and their constituents. Even if we can't replicate it 100% yet.
Is your God one of hundreds of thousands that have been forgotten? Or do you just happen to follow one of the modern trendy ones? Is it Thor? Athena? Xerxes? Why is yours so special compared to the 99,999 that have been discarded?
First of all, I though we are past the time where attacking other’s beliefs is acceptable.
Second, have you ever heard of this thing called philosophy? It is not useless to think about the word in an abstract way - without necessary relevance to the physical world. Like, what IS math?
By the way, I do not approve of those believer that go against science, since I think belief and actual reality can go hand-in-hand, and even with God, or perhaps because of Him, one can appreciate the beauty of sciences.
I respect beliefs that aren't pushed on someone. For example, I have a working idea of the universe with regards to sprituality that involves neither science nor religion. I don't push that belief on others, I only offer it when my opinion is asked, and I discuss it with an open mind towards the idea that I might be completely wrong. That type of belief should absolutely be respected.
If we start from a primitive prokaryote, we pretty much nailed it. However, there's no experimentally verified theory of going from organic molecules to life.
I'm Christian, and I believe in evolution, the big bang, old earth.. They're not contradictory. There are actually a lot of Christians who believe in those things. CS Lewis believed in an old earth while also believing in God.
I usually try avoid religious debates on HN though.
Belief has nothing to do with forming and testing hypotheses. You don't "believe" in evolution or the big bang or an old earth. Scientific inquiry 101.
And sure, I get your overall point. I was Christian until age 26. I worked two years as a missionary in a foreign country, 90hr weeks, no pay, for my Christian beliefs. What "God" meant to everyone I encountered throughout that time, before, and after, is/was always a bit different. Ultimately we create our own personal God, and what that means can be compatible with honest and rigorous scientific inquiry. But you have to throw out large portions of the bible and accept that it's largely a work of art and useful fiction, and I will place $1000 down on a bet that the vast majority of "Christians" would bristle at such ideas.
But yeah, best to stay away from discussions of religion with anyone except your closest friends. Even then it's usually ill advised unless you have hours to sift through the nuance and are very good communicators.
> You don't "believe" in evolution or the big bang or an old earth. Scientific inquiry 101.
"Believe" is absolutely the right word; most of us don't have the time, inclination, or ability to perform the scientific method required to demonstrate evolution, big bang, or old earth. Outside of a very small number of people, the overwhelming majority of us are taking it on faith that these theories are correct.
Depends how you define your "Christians." Wikipedia mentions 53.6% of Brits as Christian but as Brit I think I can safely say most of those don't take the bible seriously. Or Christ for that matter.
Yes, I would say that is the case in the eu too. Where I am now, the majority of people are supposed to be catholic, but besides a handful of people, no one cares. And of that handful, the ones I have spoken to, do not believe either, they just consider it tradition; on Sunday they like the social interaction during and after church which involves drinking spirits with coffee.
To play the devil's advocate, suppose we show that organic life can spontaneously emerge from basic building blocks under certain conditions. Even then, there's a chance that those conditions were not present on Earth when life appeared here. It might be the case that a God had to artificially create them. And the first life was here billions of years ago, chances are we can't ever be sure.
I don’t see how the existence of God should be denied by science. In a never ending effort, science will ultimately explain God.
We all are able to take that little step inside our consciousness, trusting our innermost ancestral intuition and logic... to be grateful and humble in front of whatever is behind this universe.
I've read some books on evolution, many about philosophy and religion, and I find it all fascinating, but I didn't completely escape that feeling that it's not enough...
But, instead of saying "these explanations aren't satisfying, there must be a god behind these misteries", my position is "these beautiful explanations aren't completely satisfying, I'm left with some uncomfortable questions, and that's just part of being a human being".
I've been a devout catholic, I've been a kinda-skeptical non-denominational christian, I've been a staunch atheist and a buddhist-leaning agnostic... and I've never felt that I could find perfect answers. Some uncomfortable questioning will always be there, and it's better to try to make your peace with it before trying to solve it.
Trying to solve it is also fine, but not the complete answer.
The best answer is "we don't know until we do", so the best thing to do is to throw out any pseudoscience (name it god, budda, UFO's, chemtrails or the Bigfoot) to the trash until there's enough scientifical proof of it.
Beliefs are not solely there to explain the “unexplainable”, you forgot the human part of it.
I agree that explaining what we don’t know with God is, well.. not explaining it.
But if the said believer is not blinded by the charlatany branch of his/her religion (in case of Christianity there are many such, and many are absolutely fine with sciences), then I don’t see no evil.
For some people it is calming to know that their loved ones “can’t” inexplicably die in every moment in an accident, that perhaps someone is watching over them - and many other, fundamental human innate cravings that want a God. (Which of course begs the question of isn’t God just a projection)
>For some people it is calming to know that their loved ones “can’t” inexplicably die in every moment.
Same issue. Life is neither fair or unfair, it just is. There's no good or back luck per se, just events ongoing.
It sucks, I know, but thanks to science and trying to understand how the Universe works, we invented the seat belt, for example.
Or automatic braking systems for car. And yet, no magic or praying involved. Just lots of hard work.
You can stay quiet and do nothing, or you can have a better understanding of your surrondings to avoid the less accidents, the better.
The world may be rational, the human mind is definitely not (even when we believe so) - for some people, believing in a higher entity helps. And they can work harder because of it, or simply have better mental health.
Also, many scientists were/is religious, so let it be a personal choice, up until it doesn’t hurt others.
What about non-experimental questions, like how did life form? There is useful research regarding these questions with great, educated guesses on the unknowable parts - is it not science?
Also, nitpick but it would be absurd to call ‘religion’ not real. Like, one of the most fundamental organizations in the previous centuries is something I would not call non-existent. Whether God exists or not is a different, philosophical question - and to a degree it is similar to the how did life start on Earth question, with hypotheses that can’t necessarily be verified.
What I am reading is: "the [universe] is so large and complex, and I feel that it is beautiful, therefore there must be some entity that created it"
How does that logically follow? To me that is clearly just a projection of the human concept of a "creator", a person who makes things (like a house, a fire, or a website), onto the universe. I see no reason to project my human experiences and ideas onto something as vast as the universe. Whatever is "out there" or "beyond" is by definition something that far exceeds our comprehension, our human concepts. If you want to call that "god", so be it, but I don't see how that's anything more than just a placeholder for something we can't reach.
We can, on the other hand, gradually understand more and more of the laws and properties of the universe itself, and how those work together to create the phenomena we find in the universe. All those gaps in the subset of phenomena that we can observe, I am confident that we are at least theoretically capable of understanding.
Humans understand these things because they are persons. Where did their personhood come from if not another person? How personhood can arise out of non-personhood is unexplained.
"Personhood" seems a very arbitrary (and not at all clearly defined) qualification here. "Understanding" arises from thinking, not from "personhood". And surely, there are non-person minds that understand less complex things. That they can evolve to achieve person-caliber capabilities incrementally and over long periods of time is well-accepted.
As an aside, we can't communicate very well with the smartest animals, so we don't know how much they can understand. It could be more than most of us think.
That's merely your conclusion. Others (like me) understand God as a being that was not created. Being Created contradicts Divinity. It's like asking "Who killed Newton's wife" when Newton, in fact, had no wife.
I conclude that God is the origin of everything. this is something you can't prove or disprove with Science. Some might argue it's not worth thinking about, but it comes down to the individual whether they want to think about it or not.
I get the stellar opposite reaction. One look at evolution, the terror of it, the inhumanity, and I'm convinced there is no higher power. At least none a human being should pray to.
I haven't. I think people are too afraid to say "I don't know".
But man, our universe sure is weird. On a fundamental level. I think people under-model just how strange our universe is. Even things like Pi. Why does Pi equal Pi? What an unlikely number to define something fundamental about the universe itself. Or take the logistic map [0]. I mean, what? Why is our universe this way? Or Euler's Identity (e^(pi*i) = -1). Why e? Why pi? I get that the math works, why does the universe need those values for the math to work?
Does pi (math) exist at all is perhaps the more interesting question. Or that why can seemingly ‘random’ rules we made up be applied to the real world. Especially when it comes to infinity.
With you 100% on the totally human reaction. Which interestingly covers awe and perhaps even bordering on worship, if I’m recognizing the reaction - one of the reasons biology is queen of the sciences IMHO. However, is it correct to say that what is being witnessed is evolution? Seems to not match up with evolutionary theory in any of it’s current definitions that I’m familiar with.
Think of life as a huge legacy system. It's incredibly complex, yet many of the systems are on the brink of exploding. DNA code is a mess: remnants of retroviruses, non-functional pseudogenes, the expression patterns are incredibly hard to understand. If a God was building the life around us, I'd imagine it to be much more tidy. You know, God being all-mighty and all.
Well, it is known from the formal logic that one can deduce anything based on a false assumption. One can explain anything based on the God hypothesis. Therefore the hypothesis is wrong.
I believe it’s a cornerstone of rational thinking to be able to accept that I don’t know something. To, when confronted with something like this, think only “I don’t understand that”, not “I don’t understand that, therefore I’m going to assume my guess about it is right.”
> These books should help you understand the science behind life's existence
Those can explain how life evolves once it already exists. And there's no argument about that, we know many laws governing those processes, from molecular to population-scale models.
However, nobody was able to show that life can emerge from non-living matter.
My current working idea is that the universe itself is conscious, and that life is merely a small chunk of that consciousness attached to physical flesh. I have no evidence of this, of course, just merely gut feelings. Everything is viewed and understood through the human filter, even our own existence itself. That human filter has no frame of reference for what could be before or after.
