After seeing flaws in Christianity itself I'm slowly leaving it, but I'm not really going into atheism...Darwin was an Agnostic, same for Einstein. That's why I changed my icon to "Seeker". I don't know what to believe anymore. I don't know much about evolution and the explosion, so if someone could explain it to me in a simple way.
I'll do my best. I have a thread, "Ask a Physicist anything", where such questions can be asked, if you don't want to make more threads.
Evolution is the observation that species change over time. The mechanism for this is natural variation between parent and offspring - siblings and parents all look similar, but not alike (excepting identical twins). This is because of the random combination of the mother and father's genetics, plus novel genetics from random mutation.
This variation means some offspring are lucky and stand a better chance at surviving their environment - maybe it's getting permanently colder, and so elephants born with thicker fat or more hair can survive the colder environment better. Since they survive better, they breed more, so future generations eventually all have these beneficial mutations.
Conversely, harmful mutations (in the example above, thinner fur or less hair) would make the individual less able to reproduce, so those mutations would quickly hit dead ends and be removed from the gene pool.
Over the generations, then, good genetic variations are kept in the gene pool while bad genetic variations are removed, altering the whole species step by step.
If a population splits in two, each has its own gene pool which varies from then on. Over time, the two pools become so different that individuals in one can no longer breed with individuals in the other - the pools are two distinct species.
1. How can nothing create the universe.
We don't know.
Unsatisfying? Tell me about it
But that's the truth. What we
do know is that the universe has been expanding for 13.5 billion years, and 13.5 billion years ago everything was much closer and denser. But at such high energies, we don't know how things behaved, so we can't rewind the clock any further. This point is called the Big Bang, and though it is often touted as the
start of time and the universe, it's really just the current limit of human understanding - we simply don't know what went on back then, so we can't rewind events to go any further back. Perhaps the universe
did begin then, perhaps it began
trillions of years before, or perhaps it's eternal, or cyclic.
Nevertheless, the question of why there's something rather than nothing is interesting, and quantum mechanics gives us some insights. For instance, it may be that, in the absence of physical laws, there's nothing to say the universe
can't pop into existence - and so, it did. More than that, innumerable universes could pop into existence via the same trick. Eventually, one lucky universe would have just the right conditions to allow the natural formation of life - i.e., our universe.
But as interesting as that idea is, it's ultimately speculation, which loops back to my original answer: we don't know. No one knows.
2. Since the magnetosphere of the Earth is very young, how could there even be advanced life, because the magnetosphere protects us from solar radiation?
Well, the magnetosphere
isn't young - it's been with the Earth for as long as there's been an 'Earth'. The magnetosphere periodically flips, as seen in ice core samples and other observations, but it's not a recent phenomenon.
'Missing link' is a misnomer born from inaccurate coverage of scientific topics. Better coverage has meant this term is largely no longer heard (you're the first person I've heard use it in a long time), and a more accurate term is 'transitional form' (though that, too has is problems). The truth is that
all creatures, living and dead, are transitions or links between their ancestors and their descendants.
But some are more interesting than others, those creatures on the cusp of some transition (
Tiktaalik on the cusp of walking on land,
Archaeopteryx on the cusp of flight, etc).
But whatever we call these 'in-between' things, the fossil record is replete with them (apologies for the large images):
