The Reasons why "Just Following Jesus" Doesn't work

[Redbeard The Pink]

Not every animal cares deeply about the survival of their offspring, but in humans this tendency is likely also the result of evolution. Beings that don't produce a lot of offspring at once tend to be very protective of their young, and this is likely because beings with low birth rates who didn't protect their young didn't survive as a species. Spiders don't have to care for their babies because there are so many; statistics says that at least a few will survive, even though they're so tiny and edible. Humans, on the other hand, most often have only one baby at a time, which means we would have died off if we hadn't tended toward caring for our babies. The tendency to survive long enough to replicate itself seems to be an innate quality of life that doesn't even require a consciousness to function. Survival even at the microscopic level takes some work, so things that don't work toward survival don't achieve it. Awareness is simply an evolved quality that makes the survival of certain species more likely. The need for survival predates the need for awareness; not all levels of life require awareness to survive.

Again this is not an attack but evolution seems to be like a magic word for grand leaps of development in an organism life. I don't know if you ascribe to this but how does a collection of atoms 1) produce life and 2) how does this collection of atoms produce a self aware organism? Where is this in the process of evolution and how did this start to happen?

There are few if any grand leaps in evolution. It is by definition a process that describes painstakingly slow change over massive periods of time. Creatures never just up and give birth to a new species. They will always produce new members of the same species that are a little different than its parent(s), and after many generations the differences become so great that the newer creatures can't produce viable offspring with their ancestors or cousins (which is when the organisms become classified as different species from each other).

1) The process by which non-living molecules and matter form into living matter is called abiogenesis, and there's currently not a thorough explanation of it. That being said, we do have a rudimentary understanding of some of the processes that it likely demands (such as the forming of organic compounds from non-organic matter and the forming of basic proteins from those organic compounds). Under lab conditions designed to simulate earlier stages in Earth's development, scientists have caused the formation of various basic proteins and proto-cells. We're probably within 50 to 100 years of understanding abiogenesis completely, and that's probably a conservative estimate. We're very close.

2)As organisms advance and develop more complex systems, eventually we get the arrival of senses and the need to process information from them. As the sensory information processing systems evolve over generations, self-awareness gradually develops as a side-product and potentially as a survival mechanism for creatures that are able to think. Self-awareness, in other words, is a highly evolved function in creatures with a nervous system.