Snakes and creation.

[SemperFiDawg]

Don't know why I was thinking about this, but you take the Diamondback. Those designs are a perfectly symmetrical geometric 'diamond'.

and then

repeating bands..........in the same sequence.

I look at these two little examples and think, "How can anyone believe this just.......happened.

 

[Mars]

Or the bombardier beetle.

There are millions of great examples God's creation. The human brain being one of the most amazing

 

[furtaker]

Or the bombardier beetle.View attachment 1103266

There are millions of great examples God's creation. The human brain being one of the most amazing

And the human eye.

 

[oldfella1962]

"Snakes and Creation" sounds like the name of a folk singing duo!
Speaking of snakes & creation, let's take something from Genesis that confuses me:
when the serpent tricked Adam & Eve he was forever cursed to crawl on his belly eating dust. Fair enough, but how did the serpent get around before he was forced to crawl? Haven't serpents always crawled?

 

[oldfella1962]

Or the bombardier beetle.View attachment 1103266

There are millions of great examples God's creation. The human brain being one of the most amazing

the next time you start getting too gassy, you can just blame it on a bombardier beetle infestation!

 

[RegularJoe]

I look at these two little examples and think, "How can anyone believe this just.......happened.

Would belief in it 'just happening' require any faith?

 

[oldfella1962]

Would belief in it 'just happening' require any faith?

good question! IMHO just because the universe is incredibly complex and amazing that doesn't necessarily mean it has to be planned out ahead of time. We as humans just don't understand all the processes & mechanisms that make the universe tick.

Fire seemed like something supernatural to early hominids. Then they figured out how to make & harness fire and the "supernatural" moved to something else beyond their comprehension. When they figured that new thing out, the supernatural moved further away. No human can ever know the reasons for everything, but that doesn't mean all humans have the need to assume that a higher consciousness is behind whatever they don't understand.

 

[SemperFiDawg]

"Snakes and Creation" sounds like the name of a folk singing duo!
Speaking of snakes & creation, let's take something from Genesis that confuses me:
when the serpent tricked Adam & Eve he was forever cursed to crawl on his belly eating dust. Fair enough, but how did the serpent get around before he was forced to crawl? Haven't serpents always crawled?

Uber

 

[bullethead]

Has anyone ever heard of evolution where species adapt to their needs in order to survive? It takes a very long time for it to happen. Evolution is a process. It doesn't just happen or happen quickly.

 

[Ruger#3]

Has anyone ever heard of evolution where species adapt to their needs in order to survive? It takes a very long time for it to happen. Evolution is a process. It doesn't just happen or happen quickly.

Comorants of Galapagos have gone flightless. They swim and catch food in the shallows so have no need of wings living on these remote islands. They have been flightless for the time of their discovery. They do have stubby wings matching any other bird’s construct.

 

[WaltL1]

Don't know why I was thinking about this, but you take the Diamondback. Those designs are a perfectly symmetrical geometric 'diamond'.

and then

repeating bands..........in the same sequence.

I look at these two little examples and think, "How can anyone believe this just.......happened.

What about animals etc. with non symmetrical shapes or non repeating color bands or of only one color..... did they just..... happen? Or?
Wouldnt they be a counter point to your observation? Different god made those? The Christian god wasnt feeling very artistic with them? Ran out of crayons?

Experts now recognize that coloration patterns and common mnemonics which people use to identify the deadly coral snake are occasionally inconsistent. While any North American snake exhibiting the coral snake's color banding pattern will almost certainly in fact be a coral snake (with one exception), there are coral snakes in other parts of the world which are colored differently.

Inconsistent? Colored differently? How could that be? Are they the Atheists of the coral snake world?

 

[RegularJoe]

....We as humans just don't understand all the processes & mechanisms that make the universe tick....

: ) 4 sure.

 

[ambush80]

Would belief in it 'just happening' require any faith?

Not if it's a hypothesis.

 

[ambush80]

What about animals etc. with non symmetrical shapes or non repeating color bands or of only one color..... did they just..... happen? Or?
Wouldnt they be a counter point to your observation? Different god made those? The Christian god wasnt feeling very artistic with them? Ran out of crayons?

Inconsistent? Colored differently? How could that be? Are they the Atheists of the coral snake world?

The odds of the lottery coming out 1,2,3,4,5,6 are the same as any other combination of numbers. It's only interesting because we have imposed meaning on the order of those numbers. They're just random shapes on ping pong balls.

If they used letters, imagine what they might spell. Imagine what people would make of it.

 

[oldfella1962]

Comorants of Galapagos have gone flightless. They swim and catch food in the shallows so have no need of wings living on these remote islands. They have been flightless for the time of their discovery. They do have stubby wings matching any other bird’s construct.

basically "use it or lose it". They still might have the genes that would allow them to grow normal wings, but those genes aren't "expressed" because there's no more need for them to be. Nature doesn't waste energy.

That said research is showing that many species of living things - to include humans - have a lot of genes available that could be expressed & engaged (or repressed and go unused) but the environmental demand hasn't yet been put upon these genes, or a demand has lessened.

So in a nutshell nearly every living species has within it the potential to adapt & evolve a very wide variety of adaptations to environmental changes over a long enough time span. IMHO this explains why we have such an incredible (seemingly redundant) variety of different species that are almost exactly the same but with very slight variations.

Dozens of species of willow trees for example, all coming from a few or even a single species long ago. Species that evolved relatively recently are genetically very "close but no cigar" so they can naturally (occasionally) hybridize, normally producing a sterile tree.

But a willow tree will never hybridize with pine tree because genetically they are not even in the same ballpark genetically. And a pike and a musky can hybridize and produce a sterile "tiger musky" because they are genetically close. A pike and a catfish will never hybridize because they are just too different.

My point is evolution is real no matter whether we accept it or not and we can provide examples right here and now. That said perhaps evolution is "gods way" of ensuring that life in general can exist under a constantly changing environment. But the bible and other religious documents & guides certainly don't even so much as hint at such a mechanism because they were written by humans thousands of years ago when the scientific database/mindset was almost non-existent.

Some might say that the bible seems to be scientifically nonsensical because humans wouldn't have been able to understand anything complex anyway.
I disagree with that idea. Humans would indeed be able to grasp (if god had told them) the concept of the world being round and not flat, that the world is huge and contains millions of different species beyond camels, donkeys and rabbits and they had enough math skills to grasp that all these species would not fit on a wooden boat that - by the way - would be too big to even be seaworthy for more than ten minutes let alone weeks/months.

IMHO the bible is nonsensical to modern societies because the stories were told & written down by humans, for humans, at the level of understanding of the times in that region of the world.

 

[Ruger#3]

Anyone that has witnessed a mammal birth seeing a life move from nurtured by the female, clear it’s lungs of fluid and in an instant is air breathing and doesn’t see God’s hand is blind.

 

[bullethead]

Clouds that look like an animal, state, country or literally "something " or patterns in toast that look like a Westernized Jesus must all be by design and the artistic capabilities of a higher artist that wants to reveal itself to humans through visual recognition.
Or
The human mind has evolved to recognize patterns and shapes as a means of survival and the mind will assimilate a shape with a familiar shape to us that is already "recorded" in our memory.
Snakes had patterns which looked like geometric shapes long before humans coined the phrase.

 

[NCHillbilly]

Uber

You win the internets today.

 

[WaltL1]

Anyone that has witnessed a mammal birth seeing a life move from nurtured by the female, clear it’s lungs of fluid and in an instant is air breathing and doesn’t see God’s hand is blind.

So far in just this short thread we have geometric shapes = God, repeating colors = God, Beetles with gas = God, mammal birth = God.....
What do they all have in common?
If you believe in the Christian God and the Bible story... you see the Christian God.
Of course, if you believe in a different god, or no god... you dont.
Funny how that works.

 

[bullethead]

Anyone that has witnessed a mammal birth seeing a life move from nurtured by the female, clear it’s lungs of fluid and in an instant is air breathing and doesn’t see God’s hand is blind.

So if someone sees a different God's hand they are also correct?
Seeing something magnificent and something that is not easily understood gets a "god did it assumption"......why?