Aye. You caught me at a point, a rare one indeed, actually, where I am fairly patient. My patience is a fickle thing and oftentimes lacking. If it even exists at all.
The common misconception is that there seems to be "no point" to change and evolution. But au contraire! Think of it like a biological arms race. Among the very few constants in the universe are destruction, and the progression of time. An organism will want to survive as long as possible, no matter its level of intellect. This is the basic principle of life; the desire to want to keep living, because without life, there is nothing. If this were represented as a mathematical equivalent, sentience and sapience, like what we humans have, would be the calculaic theorum, the blackboard-consuming equation that even the professor isn't quite sure the answer he put is entirely correct, and this basic concept of life wanting to live is 1. Not plus or minus...just...1. It is the first step above nothing and therefore where life begins. Now, evolution is just the process of adaptation to better cope with the environment, to better survive it, and eventually comes competition between the organisms that survived the basic challenge of environment. You then have active competition, which fosters far more need for adaptation. Far more organisms die out in this stage, but the ones that survive continue to advance, fighting their arms race. Those that fall behind die off, those that survive become ever more advanced and specialized.
One of the most amusingly shortsighted things that people say to this is "that seems far too unbelievable that against all odds everything just so happened to result in us." Indeed, it might seem that way, but you have to understand that the odds of ANYTHING being born is a tremendous victory against the odds. A single human being's birth resulting in that person becoming who and what they are is essentially defeating odds 1:100,000,000,000,000,000+ if you consider all the environmental, physical, and emotional inputs. The universe is essentially almost random chance. And if things had happened ever so slightly differently in the past, well...we might not even be here. Consider the Burgess Shale. [If you do not know, look it up; it's a tremendous archaeological find that basically shows that if one particular primordial creature had died off 145,000,000 years ago, humanity would not be around today]
Truth be told we beat long odds with everything we do every day. No need to attribute this to a higher power other than the universe itself; it's natural that we should beat those odds. Someone has to win the lottery eventually, after all, same goes for us.
When you really sit down and think about stuff like this, it starts to make a lot of sense. Look up educational resources online from biological research institutes [try to avoid ones that openly proclaim a connection to ANY kind of religious institution as they tend to have a bias; no worries, no genuine research institute will ever claim affiliation with any atheist communities even if they all were atheists themselves, REAL scientists have a higher calling than their own emotional desires Wiki: ], and if I may, I would suggest looking up Into The Universe With Stephen Hawking. It's on Netflix, if you have it, or you can look it up on the Discovery channel or youtube. Professor Hawking does a wonderful job of concisely and accurately explaining the concept of the beginning of the universe and admits the points where human knowledge and understanding comes up short for the time being, and he does it with a cheerfulness you can only really find from someone who is thrilled with the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of the pursuit itself.
If you find yourself questioning your beliefs, trust me when I say, it'll be a terrifying experience at first, but if you don't run back to the shelter of faith and instead decide to poke your head out a bit further to look around at the universe in all its genuine majesty, trust me as well when I say that the woefully limited imaginations of pre-medieval men will never compare to what science has to offer. It'll be like taking your first sip of of a ripened vintage wine after a lifetime of drinking kool-aid; the taste may at first be unpleasant at its implications but keep an open mind and take a few more sips and you begin to appreciate the depth of the flavor.
Me and my analogies...
The common misconception is that there seems to be "no point" to change and evolution. But au contraire! Think of it like a biological arms race. Among the very few constants in the universe are destruction, and the progression of time. An organism will want to survive as long as possible, no matter its level of intellect. This is the basic principle of life; the desire to want to keep living, because without life, there is nothing. If this were represented as a mathematical equivalent, sentience and sapience, like what we humans have, would be the calculaic theorum, the blackboard-consuming equation that even the professor isn't quite sure the answer he put is entirely correct, and this basic concept of life wanting to live is 1. Not plus or minus...just...1. It is the first step above nothing and therefore where life begins. Now, evolution is just the process of adaptation to better cope with the environment, to better survive it, and eventually comes competition between the organisms that survived the basic challenge of environment. You then have active competition, which fosters far more need for adaptation. Far more organisms die out in this stage, but the ones that survive continue to advance, fighting their arms race. Those that fall behind die off, those that survive become ever more advanced and specialized.
One of the most amusingly shortsighted things that people say to this is "that seems far too unbelievable that against all odds everything just so happened to result in us." Indeed, it might seem that way, but you have to understand that the odds of ANYTHING being born is a tremendous victory against the odds. A single human being's birth resulting in that person becoming who and what they are is essentially defeating odds 1:100,000,000,000,000,000+ if you consider all the environmental, physical, and emotional inputs. The universe is essentially almost random chance. And if things had happened ever so slightly differently in the past, well...we might not even be here. Consider the Burgess Shale. [If you do not know, look it up; it's a tremendous archaeological find that basically shows that if one particular primordial creature had died off 145,000,000 years ago, humanity would not be around today]
Truth be told we beat long odds with everything we do every day. No need to attribute this to a higher power other than the universe itself; it's natural that we should beat those odds. Someone has to win the lottery eventually, after all, same goes for us.
When you really sit down and think about stuff like this, it starts to make a lot of sense. Look up educational resources online from biological research institutes [try to avoid ones that openly proclaim a connection to ANY kind of religious institution as they tend to have a bias; no worries, no genuine research institute will ever claim affiliation with any atheist communities even if they all were atheists themselves, REAL scientists have a higher calling than their own emotional desires Wiki: ], and if I may, I would suggest looking up Into The Universe With Stephen Hawking. It's on Netflix, if you have it, or you can look it up on the Discovery channel or youtube. Professor Hawking does a wonderful job of concisely and accurately explaining the concept of the beginning of the universe and admits the points where human knowledge and understanding comes up short for the time being, and he does it with a cheerfulness you can only really find from someone who is thrilled with the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of the pursuit itself.
If you find yourself questioning your beliefs, trust me when I say, it'll be a terrifying experience at first, but if you don't run back to the shelter of faith and instead decide to poke your head out a bit further to look around at the universe in all its genuine majesty, trust me as well when I say that the woefully limited imaginations of pre-medieval men will never compare to what science has to offer. It'll be like taking your first sip of of a ripened vintage wine after a lifetime of drinking kool-aid; the taste may at first be unpleasant at its implications but keep an open mind and take a few more sips and you begin to appreciate the depth of the flavor.
Me and my analogies...
