Evidence is in the eye of the beholder. Some folks can look at a tree or a puppy and see that as sufficient evidence of a Supreme Being.
They see validation of that notion, but not evidence. "Evidence" has a very specific meaning.
Indeed, the more you examine the natural world closely, and see things like the human retina (which is inside-out), the fact that living organisms share traits and even DNA with other organisms, and so on, the more you see evidence that there is not a master plan or architect.
There are several problems that get in the way of our ability to understand the physical world--problems which a person must carefully guard against if he or she is to be able to understand what 'evidence' really is.
The first and by far the biggest is
confirmation bias--the natural tendency of human beings to see only what confirms their own ideas and conceptions, and not see things which tend not to confirm those ideas.
The second is hyperactive pattern matching. Human brains are extraordinarily good at finding patterns; it's what they're optimized for. We are so good at finding patterns that we tend to see patterns even where none exist at all.
The third is in misunderstanding correlation. Correlation does not demonstrate a cause and effect relationship, but our brains are extremely well optimized for believing that it does, because it has kept our ancestors alive. If I eat a food and then I get sick, that is NOT evidence that the food made me sick; but my ancestors who believed that it was tended not to eat food after they felt sick, so they were more likely to survive--and pass on genes for brains that see correlation as proof of causation.
The fourth is
promiscuous teleology]--the tendency of human beings to look for "purpose" in things. Small children will believe things like "rocks have sharp edges so that animals can scratch their backs on them;" as adults, we make the same error in more subtle ways.
The fifth is the human tendency to propose an idea, and then search for evidence to support the idea. We are storytelling animals; we tell ourselves little stories all the time, all day long, to help explain the world to us. Those stories can become like Rulyard Kipling's 'just so' stories--"the dog brought fire to man by stealing it from the gods in his mouth, and that's why dogs can't talk. Their mouths were burned by the fire." So the observation that dogs can't talk becomes seen as 'evidence' that man got fire when our faithful companion the dog stole it from the gods and brought it to us. Creationists, particularly Young Earth Creationists, are especially prone to seeing this sort of 'evidence'.
For me, the fact that i (or you) can *think* about and intelligently discuss (speculate on?) these existential matters is "evidence" enough that there's a lot more going on here than just random atoms and subatomic particles converging after some Big Bang.
Of course, there is a lot of front-loading on that statement. There idea that there must be more going on is promiscuous teleology; the idea that it's random is a misunderstanding of selective adaptation (the initial processes of the first and most primitive forms of life may have been random, but natural selection is an inherently
nonrandom process).
They can put together individual living cells from scratch, but not a cockroach. Yet. That's just an engineering challenge, though. We know that it is possible to make living things from non-living things,
Actually , that's news to me. Gotta link?
Many. There's an entire field associated with it; it's called
synthetic biology. The most interesting part of synthetic biology, to me, is engineering synthetic biology, which is the process of creating living organisms from scratch. MIT has an entire
synthetic biology program, and there are [url= http://syntheticbiology.org/]trade organizations[/url] dedicated to it. Dr. Craig Ventnor, the biologist responsible for spearheading the sequencing of the human genome, was the first person to use synthetic biology to
create a complete bacterium from scratch starting with only the component chemicals; other synthetic biologists start with living cells, or parts of living cells, and then reprogram them by hand-coding pieces of DNA that instruct the cells (or parts of the cells) to
act as counters or other circuits.
and at this point even someone in a reasonably well-equipped college molecular biology lab can do it as his thesis project. The rest is just tailoring the cells and assembling them in the right order. It'll happen.
Seems to me if they're starting with a cell, then "someone" ELSE has already done the magical part. Heck, give me a mustard seed and i'll turn it into a tree in a few years. MAGIC! [that's why i sterilized the building and only furnished raw elements and energy.]
Dr. Ventnor started with a handful of chemicals--simple amino acids, a collection of proteins, and hand-coded DNA. Does that count?
But I'm actually talking about something a little different. When i talk about faith, I'm talking about things that are not supported by evidence and for which no evidence can ever exist. If you talk to ten people who give you ten completely different, utterly incompatible faith-based beliefs (there is a single invisible man in the sky who created everything; no, there are hundreds of invisible entities who created the universe; no, there are three all-powerful invisible entities who made the world happen; no, the world was created by an animistic, self-aware force that exists in everything; and so on, and so on), which do you believe?
As i said one post back: believe whatever
you want... after all, this is the land of the free here. If you enjoy living a faithless life then enjoy. [so long as it doesn't harm the other visitors on this planet.]
The problem with subscribing to faith-based cosmological systems without evidence is that they lead, when they come into competition, to all sorts of reprehensible acts of atrocity.
There is no way for them not to, in fact. If you propagate a belief system which says "this belief system is inspired directly by the creator of the universe; the creator of the universe writes books; and the creator of the universe has specified one right way to live," then it is absolutely inevitable that some people who accept that belief system will commit acts of atrocity against people who do not.
All of them? That's not possible; they contradict each other. The one you were told to believe when you were a child? If so, what separates them from belief in Santa Claus? What benefit do you get from believing any of them?
Who knows? There may be roughly 12 billion *different* answers to that question too. None of which will (necessarily) do you (or me) any good. The real answer to that is whatever you (or i) decide for ourselves.
I say the "real" answer is the one that most closely matches the physical world. I also say that the physical world is not subject to belief; if you believe that there is a leprechaun in the garden, but there is not, your belief won't cause one to be there.
Look: if there is a Supreme Being, and you were him... would you go around to everyone announcing yourself and answering all their questions? No way. Folks would be scared $#!+less. Free will would fall prey to (involuntary) subservience. We'd all be robots. Mysteries are far more interesting (in this case), and a better test of one's true character.
God wins.
If I were a supreme being, and I wanted people to believe in me, and I planned to torture people who did not believe in me for all eternity, then I'd be a pretty crappy divine being if I didn't announce myself! Only a reprehensible being of appalling evil would do such a thing.
