One of the best arguments that there is no God is exactly that beauty and complexity. It's only complex in a certain type of way, an evolutionary type of way.
No animal has jet boots, or fusion power, or laser beam eyes, or the billions of really useful, but impossible/really, really hard to evolve features. There's no design. There's no plan. There's only evolution baby!
You'll have to make do with some generalizations though, trying to go into the detail of every single thing is probably beyond what can be read in a single human's life time now.
Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is pretty good start, or Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins, which is a book about how science makes nature even more beautiful by explaining it, not less.
It doesn’t matter whether I’m atheist or not, but to state that you can fully explain - well - any process of the universe is simply naive. There are areas we know many things about, but biology itself has an enormous amount of accidental complexity, (which is often brought up by atheists as a criticism of design) for example many many signal path ways that do fundamentally the same thing, but differently. Compared to that, spaghetti codes have good architecture.
Whether God exists or not is imo orthogonal to the complexity of the world around us.
No, starting from beetle eggs does not count. They point is no one knows how to start from the inert chemicals that make up a beetle and cause them to assemble into a living beetle. More generally, abiogenesis has not been cracked.
We do, however, know pretty much roughly how a beetle grows, how cells and DNA work, cell division, hell, even atoms, and their constituents. Even if we can't replicate it 100% yet.
Is your God one of hundreds of thousands that have been forgotten? Or do you just happen to follow one of the modern trendy ones? Is it Thor? Athena? Xerxes? Why is yours so special compared to the 99,999 that have been discarded?
There have been succesfull experiments with xeno-pregnancies aka interspecific pregnancy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interspecific_pregnancy#:~:tex....
With current technology, we very much do indeed experiment with DNA of animals.
As for making DNA from raw materials, that is what DNA printers to. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_gene_synthesis
Second, have you ever heard of this thing called philosophy? It is not useless to think about the word in an abstract way - without necessary relevance to the physical world. Like, what IS math?
By the way, I do not approve of those believer that go against science, since I think belief and actual reality can go hand-in-hand, and even with God, or perhaps because of Him, one can appreciate the beauty of sciences.
I'll respect you, not your beliefs.
>what IS math?
Relations between proportions. There's no magic.
Also, Science never can't go side by side with superstition. Ever.
Math is not that easy. How does something like eg. Group Theory fits into this “definition”? And yet, it is useful to the real world.
Superstition is not religion.
I usually try avoid religious debates on HN though.
And sure, I get your overall point. I was Christian until age 26. I worked two years as a missionary in a foreign country, 90hr weeks, no pay, for my Christian beliefs. What "God" meant to everyone I encountered throughout that time, before, and after, is/was always a bit different. Ultimately we create our own personal God, and what that means can be compatible with honest and rigorous scientific inquiry. But you have to throw out large portions of the bible and accept that it's largely a work of art and useful fiction, and I will place $1000 down on a bet that the vast majority of "Christians" would bristle at such ideas.
But yeah, best to stay away from discussions of religion with anyone except your closest friends. Even then it's usually ill advised unless you have hours to sift through the nuance and are very good communicators.
"Believe" is absolutely the right word; most of us don't have the time, inclination, or ability to perform the scientific method required to demonstrate evolution, big bang, or old earth. Outside of a very small number of people, the overwhelming majority of us are taking it on faith that these theories are correct.
We all are able to take that little step inside our consciousness, trusting our innermost ancestral intuition and logic... to be grateful and humble in front of whatever is behind this universe.
I've read some books on evolution, many about philosophy and religion, and I find it all fascinating, but I didn't completely escape that feeling that it's not enough...
But, instead of saying "these explanations aren't satisfying, there must be a god behind these misteries", my position is "these beautiful explanations aren't completely satisfying, I'm left with some uncomfortable questions, and that's just part of being a human being".
I've been a devout catholic, I've been a kinda-skeptical non-denominational christian, I've been a staunch atheist and a buddhist-leaning agnostic... and I've never felt that I could find perfect answers. Some uncomfortable questioning will always be there, and it's better to try to make your peace with it before trying to solve it.
Trying to solve it is also fine, but not the complete answer.
Everything else is babblery and charlatanery.
I agree that explaining what we don’t know with God is, well.. not explaining it. But if the said believer is not blinded by the charlatany branch of his/her religion (in case of Christianity there are many such, and many are absolutely fine with sciences), then I don’t see no evil. For some people it is calming to know that their loved ones “can’t” inexplicably die in every moment in an accident, that perhaps someone is watching over them - and many other, fundamental human innate cravings that want a God. (Which of course begs the question of isn’t God just a projection)
Yet that clause won't make any religion correct.
>For some people it is calming to know that their loved ones “can’t” inexplicably die in every moment.
Same issue. Life is neither fair or unfair, it just is. There's no good or back luck per se, just events ongoing.
It sucks, I know, but thanks to science and trying to understand how the Universe works, we invented the seat belt, for example. Or automatic braking systems for car. And yet, no magic or praying involved. Just lots of hard work. You can stay quiet and do nothing, or you can have a better understanding of your surrondings to avoid the less accidents, the better.
Also, many scientists were/is religious, so let it be a personal choice, up until it doesn’t hurt others.
That's a fallacy, that won't make a religion real. Neither a paper. Just proofs and replication.
Also, nitpick but it would be absurd to call ‘religion’ not real. Like, one of the most fundamental organizations in the previous centuries is something I would not call non-existent. Whether God exists or not is a different, philosophical question - and to a degree it is similar to the how did life start on Earth question, with hypotheses that can’t necessarily be verified.
How does that logically follow? To me that is clearly just a projection of the human concept of a "creator", a person who makes things (like a house, a fire, or a website), onto the universe. I see no reason to project my human experiences and ideas onto something as vast as the universe. Whatever is "out there" or "beyond" is by definition something that far exceeds our comprehension, our human concepts. If you want to call that "god", so be it, but I don't see how that's anything more than just a placeholder for something we can't reach.
We can, on the other hand, gradually understand more and more of the laws and properties of the universe itself, and how those work together to create the phenomena we find in the universe. All those gaps in the subset of phenomena that we can observe, I am confident that we are at least theoretically capable of understanding.
As an aside, we can't communicate very well with the smartest animals, so we don't know how much they can understand. It could be more than most of us think.
I conclude that God is the origin of everything. this is something you can't prove or disprove with Science. Some might argue it's not worth thinking about, but it comes down to the individual whether they want to think about it or not.
If God is a 'being', an entity, it can be more than one, and has to have it's own origin story.
But man, our universe sure is weird. On a fundamental level. I think people under-model just how strange our universe is. Even things like Pi. Why does Pi equal Pi? What an unlikely number to define something fundamental about the universe itself. Or take the logistic map [0]. I mean, what? Why is our universe this way? Or Euler's Identity (e^(pi*i) = -1). Why e? Why pi? I get that the math works, why does the universe need those values for the math to work?
Pi is just the ratio between the diameter and all the points to the same distance from another point, in base 10.
As simple as it gets. Circle = infinite points, thus Pi = infinite decimals.
There's no magic.
Well, it has to be equal to something, right?
Why would it be the case? 1+1=3 because God exists? And thus your conclusion is false.
Those can explain how life evolves once it already exists. And there's no argument about that, we know many laws governing those processes, from molecular to population-scale models.
However, nobody was able to show that life can emerge from non-living matter.