I think you should show your working.

Why not? Let's pretend I do -- now what?

Let's pretend for the moment that God did preplan everything. Is there a follow up here?

If he pre planed everything then he is evil, history proves it.

So people who believe in God and evolution at the same time basically are saying, "God guided evolution. Religion and evolution don't contradict."

I'm claiming these people either don't understand how evolution works or they don't seriously believe God could guide evolution. When God made the first cell, he couldn't have known whether or not intelligent beings would ever come about. He couldn't have known whether or not we'd have three heads and have our hands growing out of the sides of all our heads.

If a mutation 3.5 billion years ago never created the one freak bacteria that could do photosynthesis, the Earth right now would probably still only have microorganisms and be unchanged from what it looked like 3.5 billion years ago. Whether or not that one rare mutation that allowed for photosynthesis came about is pure chance.

I guess people in this topic like Stu are claiming evolution is not really random. Well, that's not evolution. Evolution requires mutations, which are random, and the definition of random is unguided.

The only explanation is if God controlled every tiny thing in the world until humans arrived, and the random mutations weren't actually random after all. Random didn't exist before humans. Then the second humans arrived he completely stopped intervening.

What would the world look like if there were billions and billions of molecular events happening, all being decided by some over-arching intelligence such that, as a group, they confirmed to statistical models of some random distribution even though each individual occurence was actually determined by an act of will? Would anyone not privvy to those decisions be able to distinguish between that world and one where they happened at random?

I dont see why 'without guidance' is an essential feature of TOE. I do see that 'unpredictable' is. How do you feel the TOE is invalidated if all the individual DNA copying errors and so forth were in fact determined according to a directed plan, in such a fashion as to ensure they conformed to some statistical distribution, unpredictable without access to the directing agent?

Or continued intervening in the exact same fashion - ie undetectably.

i'm guessing that they're not arguing that god decides which DNA bases are mutated and what they're mutated to (or at least i'd like to think they don't actually believe this). trying to fit the two beliefs together, i could only come up with random dna mutation was put in place by a divine power (someway, somehow), then the divine power does the occasional change to the environment or whatever, and allows for the right random mutation to be selected for. pretty sure some historical physicist, meteorologist, gealogist, would be happy to say how unlikely that is though. but at least it eliminates the non-random dna mutation thing.

Response to this is what I said before:

If a mutation 3.5 billion years ago never created the one freak bacteria that could do photosynthesis, the Earth right now would probably still only have microorganisms and be unchanged from what it looked like 3.5 billion years ago. Whether or not that one rare mutation that allowed for photosynthesis came about is pure chance.

Sure God can control whether the mutant lives or dies by controlling the environment, but he can't control whether the random mutation arises in the first place.

How do you know this? What experiment can you do today that differentiates between the photosynthesis mutation occuring by chance or design?

Pretty sure a designer who condemns trillions of animals to self canibilise each other in the most horrific and painful ways for untold numbers of generations is not a wise designer to follow.

There was an experiment with 6 lines of bacteria. The experiment spanned ~20 years I believe. The 6 bacteria started out identical, from the same species. The point of the experiment was to see if and how they evolve. The conditions in each line was the exact same. They were "naturally selected" because there was a limiting amount of glucose (food) in each petri dish. Every day a portion of each bacteria colony was "frozen" so they could be used later for reference (freezing them doesn't kill them. They can be unfrozen later and continue on like nothing happened). Every day, the bacteria would be moved to a new plate.

Every day, the bacteria population in each line would shoot up, then stable out at its carrying capacity. This carrying capacity was the same for all bacteria for a long long time.

After many hundreds of thousands of generations, I believe 10 years, one of the six bacteria lines suddenly had a HUGE jump in carrying capacity. It turns out they had a mutation that allowed them to feed on another substance in the petri dish medium besides glucose. The mutants were selected for and now, for every generation afterwards, this line of bacteria had a much larger population and carrying capacity than the rest of the bacteria lines. And nothing in the environment for them changed.

While this isn't a photosynthesis mutation, it is a mutation that is pretty drastic. 3.5 billion years ago, a cell didn't just instantly evolve photosynthetic abilities. It was probably a chemical mutation like what I described above that eventually led to photosynthesis.

I am aware of these kinds of experiments. I am a scientist and have managed industrial R&D for over 25 years. I have seen such directed evolution techniques used to create genes for specific chemical transformations on several projects that I have lead.

What we are discussing is a specific event that occurred billions of years ago. You have asserted that it "must" be random. The fact is you are making that an assumption based on other events that you have observed that are random. You have not demonstrated that the one specific event was random.

Consider this situation: you play poker all evening with another person. You are pretty much even for the entire experience except for one huge hand. On that hand you got a king high straight flush and he got a royal flush. It was the single biggest pot of the evening and his win put him up by a large amount at the end.

Did he cheat? Certainly all of the other hands appeared random. But what does that tell you about that one event?

All animals use the same basic genetic system and have the same "codes". It's the same from humans all the way to micro-organisms. It's only different for the prokaryotes, who have "rings" rather than strands of DNA. But we understand the mechanism of mutations and DNA transcription and how that leads to proteins very well.

We understand how it works and the fact that ALL living species on earth, 100% of them, use the exact same system (except prokaryotes, whose system is slightly different like I said above) means our common ancestor had this system. And as we know it, mutations are random, period. There's no reason to think it was any different from our ancestor 3.8 billion years ago. In bacteria today, mutations are random, and these are the exact same organisms that lived 3.8 billion years ago.

Also keep in mind it was another .8 billion years before photosynthesis evolved. That's a long time, and many mutations (all random and similar to the bacteria experiment mutation I described) were probably required. Hell, maybe two simultaneous mutations were required to lead to photosynthesis.

All of the other poker hands were random. Did he cheat?

All of your arguments simply state that it is possible that photosynthesis was a random event. They do not prove that it was a random event.

I'm not sure where you're trying to go with this...Him making a royal flush is pure chance.

Neo-darwinism, something 99%+ of the scientific community accepts as true, states mutations in evolution are random. If you disagree that mutations are random, then you don't believe in evolution.

And RLK, I'm assuming mutations in bacteria 3.8 billion years ago were random because today mutations are random in these same organisms, so you're right. But using past experience to find truth in the present is how all truth is find. You accept that gravity is real right? Well, that's because you have experience dropping something and seeing it fall. It's happened 100,000,000 times out of 100,000,000 in your life, so there's no reason to think the next time you drop something it won't fall to the ground.

No it wasn't. The truth is he cheated once to hit you hard and then played straight the rest of the time so that you would think it was pure chance.

You are right that I expect the apple to fall. As a scientist I accept evolution as a random process. As a scientist I understand that the simplest explanation for photosynthesis is some mutation or combination of mutations that resulted in the capability in some primitive organism. The thing you must learn is to differentiate between the simplest theory accepted due to Occam's Razor and truth. It is a mistake I have seen scientists make throughout my career. I have seen it cause very costly mistakes.

This is not really a debate. I am trying to help you understand something that is very important.

You're talking about a human being, capable of cheating, while I'm talking about a scientific law. Do you agree that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old? All scientists do, and many different fields of science all arrive at close to the same approximation, using different methods, of the age of the Earth.

One method is radioactive dating of igneous rocks. The oldest was found in Canada btw. We are assuming that the half life of Carbon 14 was the same billions of years ago as it is now. You're suggesting this isn't a safe assumption? Why then do other methods give a same approximation as using Carbon's half life as a molecular clock to measure the age of the Earth?

So you're suggesting that God changed the laws of genetic mutation sometime before we humans arrived huh? Like I said earlier, IMO this is the only possible way for evolution and God to both be true at the same time. But why didn't he change anything else, like gravity? And why have we NEVER seen him change any scientific laws during our life? Why didn't we all wake up one day, and find that gravity suddenly changed from causing objects to fall at 9.81m/s^2 to 5 m/s^2? Maybe he could do something like this (changing gravity for a day) to prevent an asteroid from hitting Earth or somethign.

It was an analogy to show that an individual event cannot necessarily be demonstrated to be random or designed. Also, what scientific "law" are you talking about? We were discussing a theory, and only that.

I am not sure why you are changing the subject, but ok. Of course I agree that the Earth is probably 4.5 billion years old. At least that is the most reasonable conclusion to be drawn from the evidence. Of course, the Earth could have been created 10,000 years ago as long as the creator took pains to include radioactive isotopes in the correct levels to be consistent with a 4.5 billion year age.

You have this wrong. The half-life of carbon-14 is about 5000 years and is useless for dating anything older than 50,000 years because the level drops too low to be accurately measureable. C-14 is primarily used for dating archeological artifacts as long as they were made from once living materials, like paper or wooden remnants. It does not work on rocks. I have used it to verify that samples of refined products were made from natural sources and not from petrochemicals. This is the second major error of scientific fact that you have made itt. Perhaps you might consider learning some science before you start lecturing PhD scientists about it.

By the way, the utility of C-14 data is somewhat uncertain but not because of concerns about the half-life of C-14. It actually requires that the cosmic ray flux on the earth be the same as current levels during the period being examined. In fact, if you tried to use it on an artifact from 1960, it would fail badly. Do you know why?

Again, there really is not a "law" of genetic mutation. And it would not require a change of laws, just an intervention on one or two occasions. Just like the cheating dealer. He does not have to alter the principles of statistics to deceive you. He need only manipulate the deck once to profit.

Divine Intervention ladies and gentlemen. Where have we heard this before?