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Originally Posted by mr dave
i'm just curious now.
what do the faithless here actually believe in? how do they explain the unknown elements of their existence?
i think we can all agree bashing something because you don't believe in it is incredibly childish. so... what do the non-believers believe in? i don't want a list of what they 'don't' believe in, or what they think is stupid about other people's beliefs. i want to see if any of them have actually developed a unique personal belief.
seems to me if someone truly didn't believe in anything spiritual they would see other spiritual beliefs as a waste of time and energy; something worthless of attention, as opposed to a target for their criticisms (or are those cover ups for their own fears of a blind faith?)
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I believe there was a universe with stuff flying about, that stuff got together here and there because of attraction, that formed large stars where gravity was so strong it compressed matter into the elements we have today like iron which go together to make up molecules.
On the early earth, such molecules got together over and over again by chance and with lightning strikes and other interesting physical phenomenons, you got amino acids and other organic molecules such as the building blocks for nucleic acids. This works in a lab setting, so we "know" theoretically that this could happen and likely did happen back then (see the
Miller/Urey experiment). Nucleic acids and amino acids are what make up ribonucleic acids (RNAs), deoxyribonucleic acids (DNA) and proteins respectively.
In order for people to grasp my next point, one has to understand something simple about evolution. Many things (f.ex growing salt crystals) are able to replicate themselves. If you have something which replicates itself and it needs a limited resource to do so, then it will necessarily compete with it's copies for those resources. It's simple cause and consequence. You can imagine that if resources are plenty, these would keep replicating themselves until there were a lot of them. If these replicators are then susceptible to change in a way that either makes them better at this competition or worse, then they are subject to what we call evolution. Those who are better at competing - for example because they utilize resources and replicate more efficiently - will do better in the competition and outcompete those who do worse. Evolution is just a natural cause and consequence that leads to an ongoing "improvement" or adaptation.
Although I'm not sure exactly how they got together (they likely did many times over), the building blocks were there to make both RNAs and DNAs which are both replicators. Sometimes these molecules change or "mutate" because of random chance such as by simple background radiation from space or because of errors in replication. In other words, they could improve. Also, they were competing for limited resources and as such became subject to an ongoing evolution.
At first, they were probably naked and would "live" in tiny cracks or something else to shelter their chemical processes from the outside. At some point, a cellular wall have appeared in some (bacterias) while others developed a protein capsule (viruses). Bacteria engulfing other bacteria (endosymbiosis) led to the first eukaryotes which would then give rise to algae, fungi, plants and eventually animals.
The endosymbiosis theory has a lot of weight because there's a lot of evidence for it such as the existence of remnants of cellular nucleuses inside organelles such as algae chloroplasts.
Sorry if I'm a bit technical, but this is roughly how I believe we came to be .. millions and millions of years down the line
I think it's wrong to conclude that people who believe this or other scientific ideas are not capable of spiritualism, though. That seems a little arrogant.