Ask the Atheist

Thanks for your response. I'd like to expand on my question but have to work now. I will write after work in the very early a.m.

I guess what I was really getting at is if the beginning of life was just happenstance, where did the drive come from? -Thinking way back to the start ... it just doesn't make sense to me that something that just spontaneously occurred would have any drive whatsoever. Any theories on this? Thx.

Thinking back to the start, there was no drive at all. There weren't any brains, let alone motivations. The first self-replicating organisms, essentially the first things we would recognise as alive, consumed their sustenance and reproduced involuntarily. Eating and breeding were built-in functions. They couldn't not do them. What use would "drive" have been?

As they developed into more complex organisms, any variations which did not have these life-sustaining functions built in simply died. Only those who kept themselves (and/or each other) alive became ancestors, and passed on their automatic skills.

Once animal brains developed above pure involuntary actions and stimulus-and-response, animals were presented for the first time with choices: do this and that and therefore live, or don't. Again, those which chose not to do the essential things tended not to survive. Over hundreds of thousands of generations, those who made the right choices won out so many times that those choices were bred in as almost automatic. They became instincts, and the rest is history.

Yeah, it is hard to find people who are willing to re-examine their own arguments, let alone beliefs, to advance a discussion. Most folks are just waiting for everyone else to accept that they're right.

It's unfortunate that you haven't found science books you liked. As books easy for non-scientists to read, I recommend the new book Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin, or Richard Dawkins' older books The Blind Watchmaker, The Selfish Gene and The Ancestor's Tale.

It's not simply time that creates complexity, it's opportunity. On Earth before life, the air, the ground and the water threw together molecules of every kind countless times. Chemicals have a chance to react every time they touch, so countless billions of combinations got a chance. Some stuck together, and of those, some kept reacting once they had combined. Of this group, a very, VERY small percentage had the tools to make copies of themselves. These groupings, possibly just one grouping in the whole world, produced the first self-replicating organisms.

So you see, nature had no intent; it wasn't trying to create anything in particular. It just tried everything at once, and at least one attempt gave an interesting result.

Once the first self-replicator was off and running, its offspring were suddenly in competition with each other. If any of them was even slightly different, its offspring would have the same change and it might confer either an advantage or a disadvantage when it came to survival. That's how natural selection works.

Features evolved, without fail, because they occurred naturally and then helped somehow. Brains are the obvious one: if you can think then you can be more careful than something which can't think. If you can think better than something, you can outsmart it. At every stage, more brainpower is an asset when all other things are equal.

The evolution of emotions is harder to visualise, but you can easily see the survival value of simple emotions like fear and love. You run away from things that might kill you, you protect your beloved family and procreation (sex) makes you happy. Pick a more complex emotion yourself, Celia, and see if you can think how it might help someone have a longer life, or more children. Tell me if you get stuck on one.

Before the separation of the sexes, and before sex itself, organisms reproduced by cell division and essentially cloned themselves. This meant that the only genetic changes occurred through mutation. The initial separation was likely some simple transaction where two similar organisms exchanged genetic material directly. Its advantage is that genetic change could now also occur through recombination, and evolution could proceed much faster. Sexual creatures out-evolved asexual creatures, and for example developed resistance to diseases more quickly.

We don't know the exact circumstances under which the first life emerged, so we're not sure where to look in the present day to see whether it's still happening. Chances are that the circumstances planetwide have changed too much in the last 3.5 billion years, and it won't occur naturally on Earth again. However there's still a chance that it could be recreated in a laboratory. Scientists who've tried have had some minor successes producing the precursors of life, like amino acids.

We have indeed observed evolution since the start of human history, and even in our own lifetimes. Look up "observed speciation" for some examples. In our own family tree it's currently about 100,000 years between new species so we're unlikely to detect significant changes in ourselves, but in species with shorter lifespans and generations (e.g. insects) the changes are much quicker.

Going off the topic of evolution, I used to think there was a god because I saw a set of meaningful coincidences in my life. Then I did the math and realised that although the chance of each coincidence is small, the chance that a coincidence of some sort will happen at any given time is tremendous. It's like the lottery: it's unlikely that any particular ticket will win, but very likely that there'll be one or more winning tickets somewhere.

Beyond that, I never heard or felt God when I prayed sincerely (I was raised Catholic), and I knew that people worshipped many other gods with no more evidence than I had. Once I had explained the coincidences, there was no more reason for me to believe.

Once I realised I was an atheist, I went looking for all the other arguments in favour of gods in case I'd missed something important. I've answered most of them on this site (start with the "Great Big Arguments" series). In short, none of the apologetic has changed my mind, and in each case I can tell you exactly why.

It was a bit long, wasn't it? Sorry, but there was a lot to get through.

Yes, there are those who uphold science in every way and still see the hand of a god in it. Ken Miller is one of those, and his book Finding Darwin's God is a great introduction to evolution for religious people.

People like this tend to have believed before they became scientists. Rather than finding a reason why their god is necessary, they find ways in which he is compatible with science. Miller for instance thinks that the Christian God started evolution as the means to design the creatures He wanted. There's no way to prove that wrong, but there's also no need for it to have happened. Natural selection is such a straightforward process that it would have occurred without any help at all, as soon as resources ran low for the early lifeforms.

I don't think it's really about personality type. I think that maintaining religious belief without corrupting one's view of science requires intelligence coupled with some prior religious indoctrination, and likely a state of cognitive dissonance. (Look that up, it's an interesting subject.)

Talk to you again soon.