We Humans on the Ancient Earth

The human line hails from humble origins. An unsurprising fact, since most life does. The rise of humanity from a lemur-like creature to an ape-like creature to an upright-walker to today’s humans is a remarkable story, one far more imaginative, universal, ancient, and more solidly based in fact and observation than any religion. If God were to have a way to create life, evolution would be a far more amazing and beautiful way to do it than making things instantly appear as they are. Evolution gives living things a history, an ancient and glorious heritage.

The Earth is a greater thing than us. It has been around for 4.5 billion years, and has been teeming with live for 3.5 billion years of that. The Paleozoic era alone is 325 million years long (570 - 245 million years ago), and is even divided into seven smaller periods, each lasting from 30 to 70 million years (thumbnail the image right to view it larger). To really think about and comprehend these numbers bewilders me. Each period in Earth’s history sees further development in living things, with scores of brand new species and scores of extinctions from the previous period. The relatively rapid change that evolution is capable of guarantees a great amount of variation, increasing with time. As Carl Sagan once said, evolution “makes life more beautiful as the aeons pass.”

Using the theory of evolution and comparative anatomy, our picture of hominid evolution is quite complete. The “missing link” is no longer missing. Those claiming a lack of transitional fossils in evolution need only look at our own hominid tree (and other very complete transitions like those of horses, whales, and tetrapods) to see a smooth progression from ape-like species into more human-like species over a period of 6 - 7.8 million years.

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When we look at nature - at plants, animals, fish - we see beauty. The evidence shows us that all this beauty evolved over time, over billions of years. The overwhelming ancientness of life places us as a very young and fledgling line. After all, the first known civilization of humans was Sumer, dating back to 5400 BC, and only 10,000 years ago all humans on the planet were hunter-gatherers. These are very small lengths of time compared to even the smallest period in the Paleozoic, a mind-blowing 30 million years. In fact, the entire hominid line has only been around for about 0.2% of the history of life. Humans may be the first life with higher intelligence, but we are demonstrably not the reason for the Earth’s existence.

This fact however does not make our existence meaningless. The same beauty that we see in nature is also present in us: we came about in the same way. We are part of life’s grand story, and we are special in our intelligence, imagination, and drive. To be part of nature, not just an observer of it, is enthralling, fascinating, and, dare I say it, mystifying.

- Evan

Life: Complex and Clumsy

Many proponents of intelligent design (ID) claim that life is too complex to be the result of natural processes, and therefore must’ve been designed. To this argument I have the following responses:

1) Even if the complexity of life were unexplainable by evolution, it wouldn't give evidence of design.
2) Complexity is not the same as design. There are simple things that are designed and complex things that arise naturally (cave formations, weather patterns).
3) In known designs, innovations that occur in one product quickly get incorporated into others, but in eukaryotic life, innovations stay confined to one lineage.
4) In design, form follows function. Yet life shows examples of different forms with the same function (differing wings of birds, bats, insects, and pterodactyls), as well as similar basic forms with different function (same bone patterns in human hand, whale flipper, dog paw, and bat wing). This shows that life lacks a plan; there are no optimal specifications for living processes and structures.
5) Life is indeed complex, but doesn’t design aim for simplicity?
6) In almost all designs, the manufacturing process is separate from the design itself. Living things replicate themselves.
7) Life is wasteful. Many organisms do not get to reproduce, and most fertilized eggs die before growing much. Good design would minimize this waste.
8) Life itself shows poor design. There are parts that were jury-rigged out of other parts that were used for another purpose. The result is a form that is functional but is not optimal (many organisms have parts that are not even functional!). This is what we would expect from evolution, not from intelligent design.
9) Evolution itself can be considered a design process, and the complexity and arrangement we see in life is much closer to what we would expect from an evolutionary, accumulative design process than a purposeful, intelligent designer.
10) Some systems, like a cell or the human body, are irreducibly complex, meaning that if you remove one certain part, the whole system fails. But contrary to creationist argument, irreducible complexity shows a lack of design. For the designer’s purpose of keeping the creature alive, you would not want systems that would fail if any one part fails. You would want a robust system.
11) If complexity in life indicates a designer, then what about non-living things? Rocks and lava aren’t complex. Neither are solar systems and galaxies. These things are simply collections of matter mindlessly following natural laws. If complexity and purposefulness truly indicate a designer, does simplicity and purposelessness indicate no designer?
12) There are several evolutionary mechanisms that can result in irreducible complexity: deletion of parts, addition of multiple parts (sometimes accidental replication of entire systems), change in function, and gradual modification of parts. These observed mechanisms make irreducible complexity completely plausible.

Claiming intelligent design of the universe based off of life’s complexity and functionality has no ground to stand on. Combine that with the complete lack of evidence, predictions, and scientific research that ID has generated, it is safe to say that ID is a belief based on religious theology, not on evidence.

- Evan

Three Misconceptions

Over my many years observing the atheist vs. theist debates on the internet and on television, I have heard many statements involving misconceptions about either scientific theories or about atheists themselves.

1. “Atheists believe in nothing.”

Atheists believe in nothing supernatural, and still look at the world with a sense of wonder, still experience love and emotions, still have ethics, and still strongly believe that the universe and the life in it has value. Atheists are real people, and the phrase “atheists believe in nothing” treats them like they are inhuman scoundrels. There is a different term for believing in nothing, and it is called nihilism.

If you think that disbelief in the supernatural makes the world worthless, you are essentially saying that the world, in and of itself, is not good enough. You believe that it needs something more; you cannot be happy with it as it is. If this is what you believe, then I think you are taking it all for granted. As an inhabitant of this planet, you really have a lot to be thankful for.

2. “Atheists think that everything came from nothing.”

This statement stems from a misconception of the big bang theory. If you look at the trajectories of all the galaxies in the universe, then rewind time, everything was in the same miniscule point 14 billion years ago. No one knows what happened before that. Anything mentioned before that point is pure speculation. Also, the big bang was not an explosion of matter in an already-existing infinite space. It was an expansion of the universe (matter, space, and time), as if the entire universe were an inflating balloon.

3. “I didn’t come from a monkey!”

Evolutionary biologists agree! Humans did not descend from apes, but instead are related to them, like distant cousins. Humans and apes are modern animals, and share a common ancestor from millions of years ago, an ancestor that was neither human nor ape. This one species diverged into two separate lines, one leading to the apes of today, and one leading to humans.

- Evan