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| Geocentric orbits of Mercury, Venus and the Sun. |
The scientific consensus today is that everything in the universe--including life--is the product of natural forces. (Never mind the incoherence of natural forces being the product of natural forces!) We are told that everything has been adequately explained by materialistic mechanisms and therefore a supernatural entity such as God is not needed.
"Evolution" is the new buzzword: evolution of lifeforms, of stars, of planets... pretty much everything came into being by some form of "evolution". It is professional suicide for an academic not to accept evolution. Because of this, it has now become generally accepted that chaos will naturally organize itself into functional systems - no questions asked. But this 'evolution premise' is just a story tacked on over the top of everything. It has no real explanatory power because it doesn't fit the evidence. Instead, the evidence is forced to fit the premise.
This is why the Tree of Life has become such a convoluted mess. Genetics and enhanced microscopy have revealed striking similarities literally all over the tree. Many, many, many previously assumed 'unrelated' organisms have been found to share some similar genetic sequences. For instance, despite being far down in two separate and distinct lineages, sqids and humans have similar genetics related to their eyes. Because evidence must be forced into the 'evolution premise', but this particular pairing is so distant, they had to explain it by something called 'convergent evolution,' which is defined as "the process where unrelated species independently evolve similar traits as a result of adapting to similar environments or ecological niches". The evolution god works in mysterious ways!
So many findings are impossible to explain via the traditional 'genetic mutation/natural selection' formula that things like convergent evolution, endosymbiosis (where one species takes up residence in another and eventually becomes part of it,) and horizontal gene transfer (where DNA or RNA are transferred from one species to another,) are fast becoming the catch-all evolutionary mechanisms.
The Tree of Life is beginning to look a lot like the geocentric orbit charts!
Wrong Premise = Wrong Results.
It is for precisely this reason that science is so often confused by new information as it comes in. If the universe and life are designed, then it's going to be really hard to explain how they came to be without reference to a designer. Trying to explain Nature purely by natural causes is a lot like trying to explain machines purely by mechanical causes.
Imagine explaining the evolution of the automobile purely by mechanical causes!
"That's called an engine, Billy. You see, pistons and cylinders evolved from tin cans and buckets, which were eventually coupled with a fuel source that evolved from a lantern. This then, through the magic of evolution, became the internal combustion engine we have today."
As silly as that sounds, it's not far off from the explanations of how living things evolve via natural causes. Things that are similar came from a 'common ancestor' and were then honed by magical forces into whatever they are today. There is rarely any discussion of intermediates and their functionality, it is just assumed that evolution is an all-powerful force that works all of that out on its own. How do we get from there to here? Well natural selection, obviously. Tin cans, buckets and lanterns become engines because engines are much more advantageous to the machine than tin cans, buckets and lanterns. Case closed. Move on.
And, planets, moons and stars don't even need natural selection! You just smash enough rocks or elements together over enough time and you get planets, moons and stars. We've never seen it happen but it obviously did because, well, the alternative is unthinkable.
Here are a couple of real world examples.
Complex life forms existed 1.5 billion years earlier than previously believed, study finds
What do they do when something doesn't fit? They make it fit, then create a story about how it all makes sense. In this study, they found that complex life forms "evolved" 1.5 billion years too early, but then died out. The explanation? A "two-step" evolution of complex life on Earth. In other words, in order to fit the wrong premise, complex life must have evolved twice! Notice that they don't even blink at the possibility, either. Evolution from molecular chaos to complex living systems is so accepted now that they don't question if it could realistically happen once, much less twice!
Tiny bright objects discovered at dawn of universe baffle scientists
Before super telescopes, like Hubble and James Webb, it was easy to believe that galaxies, stars, solar systems, planets, moons, and etc., were gradually formed over billions of years. It fit. It made sense. But now that these new telescopes are seeing way back, almost to the beginning of time, we are finding that many of these things were fully formed way before they should have been. From the linked article:
"Not only did the team confirm that the objects were indeed galaxies near the beginning of time, but they also found evidence of surprisingly large supermassive black holes and a surprisingly old population of stars.
"'It’s very confusing,' said Joel Leja, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State and co-author on both papers. 'You can make this uncomfortably fit in our current model of the universe, but only if we evoke some exotic, insanely rapid formation at the beginning of time. This is, without a doubt, the most peculiar and interesting set of objects I've seen in my career.'"
The sad thing is that an "exotic, insanely rapid formation at the beginning of time" is exactly what happened! We're staring directly into the mind of God, and ascribing his works to some mysterious magical force that mindlessly creates such things!
Wrong Premise = Wrong Results.
So what's the right premise?
1) The material universe was created.
2) Creation took place in stages and involved the sudden appearance of fully formed entities.
3) After the initial creation, all created objects became subject to decay and tend toward disorder.
With that said, I'd like to offer some predictions:
Prediction #1. All origin/evolutionary timelines will be pushed back to earlier dates. Scientists will constantly be forced to "rethink" these timelines as new discoveries will show that things were "more advanced" or "developed sooner" than previously thought.
Prediction #2. All evidence will fit with the sudden emergence of fully formed entities (planets, stars, galaxies, lifeforms, etc.)
Prediction #3. Evidence will become increasingly difficult to fit into evolutionary frameworks.
Prediction #4. Genetics and other microbiological features will eventually cause the tree of life to become so confused that it will no longer be useful.
Prediction #5. There will never be a workable, step-by-step, model for the origin of the first self-replicating lifeform. All such models will break down upon close examination.
Prediction #6. There will never be a workable, step-by-step, model for the evolution of significant new biological features. All such models will break down upon close examination.
Prediction #7. There will be attempts using AI to generate models for #s 5 and 6, but they will all fail unless there are excessive allowances for 'happy accidents' - so much so that man-made designs could be successfully modeled as occurring naturally using the same parameters.
