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A few questions for atheists...

AirPo

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Here's the last question. It's a "why" question so I won't be surprised to see a variety of answers. It's also obviously an essay question, so knock yourselves out. Thanks.

Question 4: After evolving for hundreds of millions of years, why does a life form start to degenerate just after birth only to destroy itself in a short period of time?
It was unfortunate enough to have a harmful mutation.
 
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Loudmouth

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Question 4: After evolving for hundreds of millions of years, why does a life form start to degenerate just after birth only to destroy itself in a short period of time?

In many situations (but not all), long life spans are less fit than short life spans. When parents compete with offspring, this slows the emergence of fitter phenotypes in the population as a whole. Populations with quick turnover of individuals can outcompete populations that are stagnant and less dynamic.

Also, no individual has been evolving for hundreds of millions of years. Individuals don't evolve. Populations evolve.
 
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Loudmouth

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Question 3: Do you believe that following the initial spark of life, that homeostasis took over from there?

No. You need more than just homeostasis for life. You also need replication.

Also, a "spark" connotes a sudden emergence of life. That may not be the case.
 
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Loudmouth

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The Miller-Urey experiment was a failure.

Miller and Urey set out to prove that complex organic molecules could emerge from simple chemicals in an environment like that of the early Earth. The experiment was a stunning success.

The problem is in Darwins time, they thought that a cell was as sophisticated as a ping pong.

The problem is that none of the cells you are pointing to are said to be the product of abiogenesis.
 
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klutedavid

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I'd like to ask the atheists here a few questions, one at a time, and get your responses to them. I have no "agenda" or big buildup to a "gotcha" at the end, I would just like your responses to each of the questions in this thread if you don't mind. I won't be arguing/debating what you say; they're just questions. Ok? Let's start...

Question 1: Do you believe that there was a chance merging of organic materials necessary at just the right time, circumstance, and environment to produce a living entity?
Hello Dysert.

Given that the scientific understanding of the origin of the universe was the Big Bang. The universe
in the first instance was a sterile environment, life definitely cannot occur in any sterile environment.
There seems to be a serious flaw in the scientific explanation.
 
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Cute Tink

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Here's the last question. It's a "why" question so I won't be surprised to see a variety of answers. It's also obviously an essay question, so knock yourselves out. Thanks.

Question 4: After evolving for hundreds of millions of years, why does a life form start to degenerate just after birth only to destroy itself in a short period of time?

In general the idea would be that "evolving" doesn't mean that all life forms become better and better or longer lived with each generation. Individuals are born with slightly different genetics than their parents and with that comes uncertainty, along with some chance of harmful mutation that can render an individual weaker or less suited to their environment.
 
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Astrophile

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Here's the last question. It's a "why" question so I won't be surprised to see a variety of answers. It's also obviously an essay question, so knock yourselves out. Thanks.

Question 4: After evolving for hundreds of millions of years, why does a life form start to degenerate just after birth only to destroy itself in a short period of time?

These are all questions for biologists, not for atheists. A Christian biologist would be better able to answer them than an atheist with no biological qualifications.
 
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Loudmouth

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These are all questions for biologists, not for atheists. A Christian biologist would be better able to answer them than an atheist with no biological qualifications.

It might be educational when dysert sees that the answers given by atheists happen to match those given by biologists who also happen to be Christians.
 
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Gene2memE

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Hello Dysert.

Given that the scientific understanding of the origin of the universe was the Big Bang. The universe
in the first instance was a sterile environment, life definitely cannot occur in any sterile environment.
There seems to be a serious flaw in the scientific explanation.

What forms the basis of organic chemistry?
What are organic compounds made of?
 
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essentialsaltes

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Question 4: After evolving for hundreds of millions of years, why does a life form start to degenerate just after birth only to destroy itself in a short period of time?

There seem to be a lot of problems with your question.

For the most part, living things don't destroy themselves.

One celled organisms may not even die, as the fission into more and more copies. Some copies die, and the rest go on. "symmetrically dividing bacteria and yeast can be biologically immortal under ideal growing conditions."

Living things don't start 'degenerating' from birth. The process from infant to adult is not one of degeneration.

Even if we overlook all of that, it's fair to respond, "Why shouldn't they?"
 
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FrumiousBandersnatch

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Sorry to be late to the party - the traffic was terrible...
Question 1: Do you believe that there was a chance merging of organic materials necessary at just the right time, circumstance, and environment to produce a living entity?
If you call a simple replicator (e.g. a molecule that can copy itself) a 'living entity', then yes. But there's a considerable distance between the earliest replicating molecules and what the man on the Clapham omnibus might call a 'living entity' that they gave rise to. The boundaries and definition of life are debatable and uncertain, for example, the hoary old question - are viruses alive?
 
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FrumiousBandersnatch

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Question 2: Do you believe in the existence of some form of intelligence that controls homeostasis in organisms?
No; some homeostatic processes are sufficiently complex, flexible, and adaptable that some might say the process itself is 'clever' or 'has some intelligence' (just as they might say that a car's control system is intelligent enough to counter a skid, or can intelligently follow the car in front), but there's no intelligent entity in control.
 
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FrumiousBandersnatch

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I'll go further, and state than anyone who answers 'no' to that question is demonstrably wrong, because of the way you phrased it. "a chance". Anyone who says there is not 'a chance' of this being the case is saying it absolutely definitely did not happen.
That's not quite what was said - which was "a chance merging", not "a chance of merging"... Meaning that the merging was a chance event.

Just sayin'...
 
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FrumiousBandersnatch

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Question 3: Do you believe that following the initial spark of life, that homeostasis took over from there?
That's not a coherent question; there is no 'spark' of life. Simple homeostasis probably would not have developed until the replicator was encapsulated in a vesicle, to constitute a primitive cell with an internal environment to be regulated; but it's not clear at what stage this would occur - there are a number of competing hypotheses.
 
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FrumiousBandersnatch

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The theory of abiogenesis is ongoing. The Miller-Urey experiment was a failure. Next method: Bashing 2 rocks together in hopes a worm will form.
Lol! It's moved on a fair bit from there. There are deep rock hypotheses, clay hypotheses, oceanic vent hypotheses, ocean spume hypotheses, etc., etc. There's whole areas of study into RNA replicators ('RNA World') and their precursors ('Pre-RNA World'). Self-assembly of RNA chains and other polynucleotides has been demonstrated; there's all kinds of stuff going on.
 
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