Creation of Life: No God Need Apply
The following video features five “questions for the atheist.” Each is based on a common fallacy or misconception on the part of theists. Let’s take a look at the arguments made, and where they fail. This was originally intended to be one post, but each of the five sections turned out to be long enough for its own post.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTYe_V2hOZ4
5. Can nature generate complex organisms when previously there was none?
Yes. Through evolution. Yet again, he drags in an irrelevant topic (evolution versus creationism) into the discussion.
The speaker asks “where else does [the development of life] take place in our universe.” The answer is potentially in many places, since very little of the actual universe has been observed to this detail. But he misses the fact that in most of the universe, the conditions simply are not right for the development of life in the first place, much less complex life, much less intelligent life. So the “contingencies” (in his words) are not there.
He makes the fantastic declaration that the atheist believes that “nature is blind; everything else is designed intelligently.” Everything else? Nature is everything else! Almost everything in existence is nature, and only a few things (relatively speaking) are man-made. He finds it amazing that undirected, uncoordinated processes can occur in nature, but I find it amazing that he even says this. Is he not aware of a myriad number of such processes, the most important being the undirected, uncoordinated joining and organization of protons, neutrons, electrons and atoms? Clearly, undirected processes in nature are not only possible, they are the norm and they have been occurring continuously for eons.
Indeed, when it comes to the development of life from inanimate matter, given what we know about the natural, uncoordinated processes of the world, it is entirely expected–not surprising–that it should arise through an undirected process. It is, however, surprising and ludicrous and even disturbing from the perspective of a creationist, which is why they so often make this argument from outrage.
“So what you’re saying is, time and chance, plus something coming out of nothing, morality evolving–and then suddenly we’re here.”
No, no and no. Wrong on all 3 counts. As I mentioned previously, evolution is not about “time and chance.” No one believes that “something came from nothing” (except the theists, of course, who believe that God created the world ex nihilo, ”out of nothing”). And clearly humans did not “suddenly appear”–it took millions of years. The notion of things “suddenly appearing” is yet another common misconception and straw man used by creationists to make evolution seem ludicrous. All it really does is show their total ignorance of the theory and the argument.
Atheism, secularism and evolution remain safe after this speaker has finished.
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