The Problem with Christians

[Esquilax]

I don't see where the article talks about the function of the optic nerve in a single celled organism with a light patch and no brain. I would also like to know how the millions of neurons that are spread out in multiple nuclei in humans came to exist.

So you're just going to do that thing where you keep lobbing problems at me until you reach the one I can't answer easily, and then plug your god into the gap, is that it? At the point at which we're talking about light sensitive cells we aren't talking about the optic nerve, but about its ancestor structure, a nerve string that causes the organism to be able to react to input from the light sensitive cells. The point is that you've got an analogue of the optic nerve at that point which causes the "eye" to be functional which is simple enough to mutate in, yet has the potential for change and additional complexity. Ditto with neurons: they evolved from simpler analogues, in this case from electrical signalling cells from a function in single celled life forms.

The definition of science,

"Science is a systematic enterprise that creates, builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science

The developments from light patch to fully formed eye are presented as fact and yet no one observed these changes when they are alleged to have happened, and unless I am mistaken, there are no tests proving that all of these developments happened as reported. There are still organisms alive today with light patches/eyespots so how do we know absolutely that these became the eye? Isn't it all just speculation?

I will respond to the rest of this post later.

Science is an inherently probabilistic field, but it's not fair to call its results speculation: yes, nobody directly observed these changes happening, but it'd be childish to demand only that sort of evidence and nothing more, not to mention massive special pleading. You ask about how we "absolutely" know something, which indicates a lack of understanding of the basic, probabilistic nature of science, because we don't absolutely know, nor are we required to. We infer that eyespots evolved into the eye in the same way we infer a relationship between Samotherium and modern Giraffes: through data and observation. Is it perfect? No, and nobody has ever claimed it was. Is it the best possible conclusion we can come to at the time, based on the evidence available to us? Yes. Yes it is. As I pointed out in my post on Samotherium, there's nothing stopping you from asserting a dissenting conclusion based solely on the possibility that the evidence-based conclusion could be wrong, but I don't know why you would ever do that.

You are aware, mind you, that at the core of the observations and tests involved in this issue is the well established observation that evolution happens, and that common ancestry tends to match what we observe in nature, yes? I mean, you do know that large swathes of modern biology are predicated on those two conclusions, and that many of the products of modern biology would not work as described unless evolution were a thing that happens, right? Science that begins from the position that evolution occurs works, and that wouldn't be the case unless the position were true. That's a nice little meta-observation right there.