Q&A: Necessity of Evolution
Necessity of Evolution
Question
The Rabbi claims that evolution had a low probability of occurring, yet in practice it did occur, which supposedly lends greater support to the explanation that God created the world, etc. My question is: what exactly is the necessity here? Isn’t this begging the question? After all, if there is a God, then everything can have a supernatural explanation, and there is no need to arrive at evolutionary processes in order to explain it.
Answer
I didn’t understand the question. Natural explanations are meant to describe what happens. They have no connection to metaphysics.
Discussion on Answer
Scientifically, people speak of the world existing for billions of years, and of those, many millions of years of evolution (probably over a billion).
I’ll try anyway… is there any evidence or support for this? Or is this just a theory that is most convenient as an alternative to the existence of God (seemingly), but there is no solid evidence that this really happened millions of years ago. Thanks.
This is a very well-founded theory. I don’t see this as the place to give a science course. The material is available in books and online, and you can read about it.
The truth is that there is quite a bit of evidence that contradicts evolutionary predictions. For example: we find identical genes in distant species but not in closely related ones, or fossils that appear out of the proper order, etc.
The question is whether there is any necessity to say that evolution took place millions of years ago. I understood from the Rabbi that yes.