[Ledgem]

Originally Posted by Cub-Sama

However this is all matter of belief and opinion so if you don't want to believe then I can't change your opinion and you cannot change mind so in the end we have to agree to disagree. To add to that you are all much older than me and have a lot more knowledge than me and for all I know you might be an expert at philosophy etc...

Very impressive... perhaps my standards have been lowering lately, but I'm very impressed not only by your reasoning abilities, but by that last statement of respect and humility.

On the topic that you've mentioned, it's hard to say where everything came from. On one hand, I (as a scientist) do not buy the argument that "life evolved from nothing through evolution." Evolution makes a whole lot of sense (and there's an abundance of evidence for it at this point), but why did things come about? People like to claim that things that replicated themselves simply continued to do so, and over time they built up in complexity because that guaranteed their ability to replicate over everything else. Yet replication - life itself - requires energy. All forms of life, all processes of life, revert to the lowest energy level as they possibly can. It's an effort to expend as little energy as possible while gaining as much energy as possible (which also makes sense), but why should life have existed in the first place? Why did certain chemical processes build up and attempt to subvert others?

Then again, it's almost impossible for us to comprehend what can happen on the scale of time that the Earth has existed. It's a concept known as "deep time," if you're interested in evolutionary biology. We have no innate sense about it, and comprehending the changes that can take place are also very difficult. It seems impossible for something like a single-celled organism to evolve over the course of thousands of years, but there were many more than that involved in the formation of life. Beyond single thousands of years, I find it difficult to comprehend the span of time. This may be the reason for my skepticism.

Given how wonderfully life operates, and how beautiful life systems are in their mechanisms, it's also very difficult to imagine that such things came about by random chance. Or perhaps, just as we view and appreciate a work of art and revel in knowing that it has a creator, many of us would like to credit someone or something for the artwork that is life. Of course, if life were not as efficient or well-put together ("designed") as it is, it likely would not exist in the first place. Knowing how evolution works, combined with the idea of deep time, it's quite possible that everything could have arisen from random chance.

I'm not an evolutionary biologist - my training area is immunology. Interestingly, an immunology journal club of mine recently chose "evolutionary biology" as a topic. Even within immunology you can find the concepts of evolution at work. I'd expected it to be relatively boring, yet our first paper was an example of convergent evolution - that is, an example of an immune system that operates and is set up very similarly to how ours (and those of other mammals) does, but the specific mechanisms that govern it are rather different, indicating that it forked away from ours very early on...