aussie4god said:
- Where did the space for the universe come from?
- Where did matter come from?
- Where did the laws of the universe come from (gravity, inertia, etc.)?
- How did matter get so perfectly organized?
- Where did the energy come from to do all the organizing?
- When, where, why, and how did life come from non-living matter?
- When, where, why, and how did life learn to reproduce itself?
- With what did the first cell capable of sexual reproduction reproduce?
- Why would any plant or animal want to reproduce more of its kind since this would only make more mouths to feed and decrease the chances of survival? (Does the individual have a drive to surviv e, or the species? How do you explain this?)
- How can mutations (recombining of the genetic code) create any new, improved varieties? (Recombining English letters will never produce Chinese books.)
- Is it possible that similarities in design between different animals prove a common Creator instead of a common ancestor?
- Natural selection only works with the genetic information available and tends only to keep a species stable. How would you explain the increasing complexity in the genetic code that must have occurred if evolution were true?
1. The universe includes space and time. Without both there is no universe there is only a singularity which we don't know and probably cannot know what it looked like.
2. Matter comes from energy. The sum of all energy in the universe is very close to zero. In some hypothesies the energy for the entire universe was borowed from other regions like for instance a wave in the sea. At times the sea can by +/- 10 meters but on average it is always at sea level. Also since there is no concrete scientic explaination "we don't know" is a very good scientific way to answer this question. Philosophically you can say that Goddidit.
3. The laws arise from our descriptions it is very possible that all laws have always been there and are hardwired. Philosophically you can say that is how God wanted nature to act.
4. The afforementioned laws mean that matter will behave the way it did.
5. It comes from the energy that the system has and will always have. The entropy of the system is constantly rising but that does not mean that the entropy everywhere has to rise uniformly. What we see is pockets of "organised" matter in a "sea" of dust, gas and chaos. As time goes on if there is no Big Crunch those pockets will keep gaining entropy until the universe spends all the available energy for work ending in a dead state of infinite entropy.
6. When is approximately 4000 million years ago. Where we don't know. Why has two levels, it happened because the laws of nature (chemistry) made sure that it would happen if the right ingredients were found at a certain place. The second level is why the laws of nature functioned the way they did? This is pointless to be discussed in a scientific context, e.g. why does the oxygen colour our sky blue and not green? How is an interesting question take your pick there are many hypothesies out there some scientific some philosophical. Did you know that one hypothesis for abiogenesis is clay theory? It has even been accepted as possible by Dawkins the big bad atheist.
7. Life did not learn to reproduce itself. Reproduction is a major function of life. It is a very basic definition of what life does. If it cannot reproduce itself it is probably a rock or a piece of dung.
8. Can you spell hermaphrodite? Many plants and animals can reproduce sexually with themselves. Also many bacteria are capable of both sexual reproduction and asexual reproduction. So the sort answer: With itself.
9. What happens if a plant or animal does not want to reproduce? It has less mouths to feed (many animals and plants do not care for their young) and then what? It dies, its evolution stops and the genes that made it not care about its reproduction die with it. Is it so much of a surprise that most species are preoccupied with mainly two things?
9b. The drive to survive: Both the species as a collection of individuals and the individuals themselves want to reproduce and survive. There are different mechanisms used if you want to focus on that make a new thread.
10. Recombining, adding and removing letters (mutations do that too) and scrapping the versions that are not going anywhere (natural selection) can make a translated Nietzsche book into the KJV. The languages must be the same DNA/RNA recombination always wields DNA/RNA strings and never a hammer.
11. Possible yes. But that designer is pretty
incompetent. (The song is very funny)
12. Mutations add more and more genetic base pairs and generate more variation as a species reproduces. Natural selection ensures that only the good changes survive. Natural selection is a by-product of the environment a species occupies as the envirnement changes so does the selective pressure. Also do not forget that as prey becomes better at avoiding predators, predators become better at catching prey. This is due to mutations, when one beneficial mutation gives the edge on a species we usually see another one in its enemy that doesn't mean that those mutations wouldn't happen but they would not have become so popular if selective pressure was not that great. If the enemy doesn't get a beneficial mutation to counter the first then it will follow the majority of species that ever lived on this planet to a special place called extinction and probably a museum.
Edit to add: The where did matter, space, the universe come from questions can be answered with Goddidit. But as Carl Sagan and myriad others point out this begs the question: Where did God come from? If you say that God is eternal then why not save a step and conclude that matter, space, the universe is eternal? Take it, chew it and tell me the answer.
(I'll get back to this properly when I'm done with class.)
