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.
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.