Guilty_Biscuit wrote:So you defend the belief in Creationism by saying Science has not and can not disprove God so Creationism is an acceptable belief. This is not the case because there is a lot of evidence backing an alternate theory called Evolution, hence, in the absence of evidence for Creationism one is compelled to accept Evolution. To disregard the evidence and instead will yourself to believe in the Creator is possible but it is not a defendable position.
So far we seem agreed that we cannot disprove god / a creator so both random evolution and creationism can be left on the table as theories of how it all happened (at least as far as life on earth goes).
It is also important to note that evolution doesn't disprove the roll of a creator, it just shows a possible mechanism for the 'evolution' of life forms either after a random accident made life or else a creator started life.
I would also venture to say there don't seem to be many other theories we can currently explore as alternatives to these two. Either life on earth is the result of random chance causing chemicals to attain some form of life or else a creative force was the origin of life. From there things either remained static, showed some forms of adaptation or they evolved to form new species (depending on your theory).
If we can disprove either theory then that leaves only one theory on the table (at least until we come up with another theory or a modification to the disproved theory). According to Occums Razor and scientific method, if we disprove a theory at one point then the theory needs to be scrapped or else re-worked to include viable answers to cover the disproved area.
So ... the chicken and the egg. It is an old riddle or conundrum but a good one to talk about.
If there was a creator, it is possible that an egg was created before a chicken, or a chicken created to lay an egg. Either way works. Using a creator to explain how it could have happened is simple, logical (if we presume there was a creator or could have been a creator - and after all that was premise one wasn't it.) and just leaves the unanswerable question (unless the creator told us) of which exactly was first. It also reduces the conundrum to a, "Who cares ... it doesn't matter anyway" type question, much the same as asking which side of the hamburger did the first Macdonalds hamburger grill on? Left or right, top or bottom? Who cares. It got grilled.
However, under evolution, this question is completely unanswerable because which ever way you dice it, it cannot work.
Lets start by scrapping the idea that an egg was laid without a chicken. That is a patently stupid thing to believe in unless we want to acknowledge a metaphysical creator (thus blowing pure random evolution out of the water).
So a chicken came first, or at least in evolutionary terms, a chicken evolved out of something else first. And then one day it changed enough to decide it wanted to lay an egg (or one week, year, millenium, million years ...).
So the question becomes, is it evolutionarily possible for a chicken to evolve enough to lay an egg? Already I can hear someone going, Wrong!!! the chicken was an egg laying animal that evolved into a chicken so it always laid eggs. I'm happy to concede that might have happened - for a chicken. But, at some point, some animal had to be the first animal to lay an egg. There had to, according to evolutionary theory, be some point where cell groups stopped splitting to form new versions of what ever animal they were and got it together long enough to lay the first egg.
So for the sake of simplicity, lets pretend it was a chicken (after all science has to make some assumptions somewhere
). The assumption it was a chicken is wrong but the analogy of a chicken laying its first egg stands as a useful tool to provide a shared common metaphor to discuss how the first egg got laid.
So the first chicken (or what ever) decided to lay the first egg. Great.
It grunts, it groans and out its rear end (or what ever it used) pops an embryo. Bugger!!! The embryo (which is the fertilised yolk part of the egg) promptly goes splot on the ground, breaks apart, gets stepped on, dehydrates and generally fails to survive.
OK .. thinks the chicken (via the mechanism of evolution) I need something to protect my baby yolk. And so the chicken evolves an egg shell making mechanism inside itself. To cut a long story shorter I am not even going to try to figure out how it got the yolk to be inside the shell when it was first made by the chicken - I'll just presume it was.
So the chicken grunts, it groans and out its rear end drops a yolk neatly packaged in an egg shell. Unfortunately for the yolk the egg shell was hard. The yolk bounced and jostled inside the shell and eventually ... bugger ... it was nothing but omelet again.
By now you get the drift or where i am headed with this. To cut this story shorter let me describe the rest more succinctly.
The egg needed to evolve a form of cushioning inside it to protect the yolk.
To stop the yolk from starving the the egg needed to include a food source built into it. To stop the yolk from running out of air the shell had to be porous enough to permit air in, water tight enough to stop dehydration killing the yolk, strong enough not to break and flexible enough to let the chickens rear end extrude the egg without it getting a hernia in the process.
Now that the yolk has air, food, shelter and is water proof there are a few other problems.
Once the yolk has grown to a certain size it needs to grow an egg tooth to let it break out of the shell. It then needs to loose that egg tooth so it can dig in the ground with its beak for worms and other food.
The chicken needs to learn to turn the egg, warm the egg and protect the egg - all by trial and error as it had no inborn knowledge to teach it how to do that and no creator to code the knowledge in it and no previous egg laying chicken to learn from.
I'll stop here, although there are a number of other things we would need to get in order for the egg making thing to work correctly.
According to evolution, the first egg layer slowly adapted / mutated from another species or else was a sudden mutation from one species into another (which could lay eggs).
For the first egg to happen a significant number of mutations needed to happen simultaeneously. While there is the possibilty that maybe one or two of the above adaptations or evolutionary happenings might have been able to happen in some order the reality is that the majority had to happen at exactly the same time for the first egg laying animal to have had a chance of surviving.
These mutations would have to be in the internal body of the existing species in order to allow egg laying to happen (as well as fertilization and the carrying of an egg internally). Mutations would also have to happen in the body of the first egg born off spring to allow it to survive in the egg long enough to hatch, to allow it to break out and hatch.
Mutations or significant changes in the behaviors of the first egg-laying parent would also have to be present (turning an egg, protecting an egg, warming an egg, not stepping on an egg...)
Evolution tells us change happens slowly, over time and that change happens incrementally. For the first egg to be successfully laid these changes would have had to happen all at once, inside of one generation.
So if they happened at once in one generation we are looking at a huge mutation of a single animal. That animal, the new egg laying species, would be completely incompatible for breeding purposes with any other animal of its old species. It would die out for lack of mates.
Furthermore the behaviors exhibited by egg laying species rely on changes in behavior (such as nesting in one spot making it easier prey, not walking away to get food for long periods of time else the egg would get cold...) which would be counter productive to the survival of the species unless all the knowledge and behaviors allowing it to survive were picked up in one go.
Any one of the behaviors on its own (denial of food, loss of mobility...) would most likely cause the animal to die or get picked off by predators. They, on their own without a group social structure supporting them, are behaviors away from survival ... which goes against evolutionary theory.
To believe that the first egg could be laid would happen by random chance requires the belief that a massive amount of mutations happened simultaneously to more than one individual of the parent species and along with those physical / genetic changes came radical behavioral changes and along with the behavioral changes came changes in the off spring allowing it to survive as a member of the new egg laying species.
I haven't mentioned the changes in diet which are required for egg laying, the changes in home building, mating behaviors and a number of other things which would all need to happen simultaneously for the first egg to happen.
In science the simplest explanation should normally be held as the true explanation. According to the razor, if a theory is flawed at any one point it must be reworked or discarded.
Unless there is a terribly self evident truth as to how all the above happened in one hit, the most likely (statistically speaking) is that some outside force / intelligence (whom I refer to as a creator) must have guided or designed the first egg laying animal, both in its internal physiology, parenting behaviors, social habits, diet, environment and in-egg physiology / behaviors.
Any other explanation is far less logical. Taking a creative force out of the equation, the first egg laying scenario cannot be supported by evolutionary theory as it stands. Slow mutation or adaptation over time is not viable. It was either an all or nothing effort.
I know the first egg was probably not a shelled chickens egg (or birds egg) but even a less complex egg such as a frogs egg, fish egg, repltiles egg still requires most of the things mentioned above to happen and where it doesn't require one of the above requirements, it has a few more requirements of its own.
Some examples include:
- The anchoring of water born eggs so they don't wash away.
- Fish fertilisation habits had to change (unless the first onanist was a fish who happened to spray where a female onanist had already dropped her eggs
.
- Reptiles learning to bury eggs in warm places and not eating their off spring
In short, evolution cannot explain how an egg laying animal could have successfully evolved. The most simple and logical answer has to be an outside guiding force or influence. Either that or has someone else got a new theory of evolution that can explain all this?
Summary - Two major theories exist, evolution and creationism (as well as combos of them both such as ID). One can explain simply the chicken and the egg theory, the other cannot in its present form. So far this scientific proof seems to favour creationism as a theory of how it might have started.
)....unless most of what science believes to be true is ultimately disproven and replaced by a different model that does not have these hang-ups. Quantum theory is supported by so very much data that I think it's probably right. Thus I'm left with the conclusion that we probably have to be happy with a finite understanding of a universe with nfinite complexity.
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