I understand organic chemistry beyond the lay-level, but won't presume to know something I don't.
Whether God initiated the big bang and then prodded RNA into formation or mapped out DNA for each 'kind' of animal is irrelevant; what is in front of my eyes is wondrous complexity the likes of which causes my neurons to percolate.
The idea that everything exists because of random chance and 'just because' flies in the face of my life experience and reason. Not to mention the intention I see in all things, each filling in a gap, each depending on the other.
Could 1,000 monkeys type a coherent book given eternity. Nope.
What you see is called an ecosystem. And it fits so nicely because it killed all the parts that didn't fit. Nature isn't cute and cuddly like that. It's violent. Very violent. And if you are not the ideal creature to fill the niche you try to carve out, you will be destroyed without mercy.
It is in fact your supposition that monkeys cannot type the book that is the core of the whole problem. Given eternity, it is impossible that the thousand monkeys, or even one,
wouldn't produce a coherent book. In fact, you could pick a specific book, and the odds of the monkeys producing it would be 100%. You are proposing an infinite sample size of a finite probability. No matter how improbable, it is guaranteed to happen.
Everything does not exist because of "random chance and 'just because'". It's much more complicated than that. Each individual event was random chance, but the repercussions of each event were anything but random. Systems that work survived, while ones that didn't disappeared. Non-biological systems, too. Not just living matter, but even on the atomic level this is true. Molecules without a stable structure fell apart and those that were stable filled up the universe. And those successful systems affected the probabilities of future events. Hydrogen filled the universe, and so things that are assisted by hydrogen are more likely to survive. And the process just keeps going and going.
The reason that intelligent creation and the current understanding of physics and biology are at odds is not because science disproves god. It's because we now know enough about how objects interact and change that god is not necessary to make it work. Nothing says that god didn't have a hand in it, such as designing the original parameters of the universe, but we know exactly how everything after the first moment of the universe's existence happened. If god is there, then he did not alter the way the universe works after that initial moment.
So, god as creator of the universe is not impossible. Very improbable, though. The biblical creation story is. The creationist movement is primarily about the latter, not the former. That is why it's a steaming pile a manure.
The reason god is improbable, by the way, stems from the same logic as the previous point. God is unnecessary to the equation, and nature really doesn't contain much that's unnecessary. And it constantly strives to trim away things that aren't needed. The very nature of existence seems to indicate that unnecessary things don't belong. Therefore, nature is contradictory to an unnecessary god as an essential part of it. Even if god created the universe, that universe is antithetical to having god as a part of it.
In addition, since a lack of god's direct intervention in the events of the universe can be proven, that means we have no knowledge of god at all. For example, miracles in scripture are shown to have completely mundane causes and are not results of divine intervention. We can't actually encounter this being on its own level, so we only know it by its actions on our level. And since there haven't been any, we cannot possibly know the nature of god. Belief systems centered around this god, about whom we know absolutely nothing, cannot be attributed to what this being actually desires.
It's actually even more complex than you think, because none of it relies on magic. That's pretty boggling to the neurons.
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I don't write forum posts, I write theses... :tongue4: